The Seven Habits Read online

  So I get to the little brick wall on the other side of the waterfall and I get this idea in the back of my mind. A way I can help that poor little girl, and maybe everyone else at the same time, man. The future is malleable, man. Things can be changed if you’ve got the balls to see it through. I was positive of that.

  So I kinda lean against the wall with the spray of water splashing against the back of my neck and I watch this chick, man. I mean, I really study her, ya know? I see how she drags the items across the scanner and stuffs them into the open mouths of the plastic bags like a mama bird feeding her chicks. I watch as she keeps mopping her brow with the sleeve of her shirt, fanning herself with her hand when she can catch a moment. I keep picturing all those nasty little bastards surgin’ through her bloodstream, eating away at her humanity, slowly changing her into a harbinger of death.

  I’m not a psycho, ya know? I’m wrestling with myself. I’m thinking she’s got a family, dude. She’s someone’s daughter. There are people out there who fuckin’ love her. And this other part of my mind? It just sees a biochemical playground, a spawning ground. It stares at her the way you’d look at a maggoty slab of meat when you were expecting steak. And those scientists are just knocking on the door of my mansion—hey, mister, wanna buy some brownies?

  You know what really made the decision for me? It wasn’t even Ocean, if you can believe that. Nah, man, it was all these people around me. It was the harried looking mother running after the kid in the blue overalls. It was the teenagers makin’ out in front of Dark Desires without a care in the world. The janitor emptying trashcans. The rent-a-pig giving me the hairy eyeball from over by the escalators.

  I looked around and all I saw were these decaying carcasses, man. These rotters, to use Ocean’s word for it, pushing their strollers and laughing in small groups while an orange balloon slowly drifted toward the ceiling. They were all dead, each and every one of them. And they had families too, right? They had people who loved them as well.

  So right then and there, I decided to shell out the cash and buy every fuckin’ box of brownies being pushed at me. I’ll take them all.

  But I had to be sure, you know? I didn’t want to condemn this shop girl just because she maybe had a glandular issue. Or a touch of the summer flu. No, if I was gonna do this thing I had to be absolutely certain.

  There are seven signs, man, and before I did anything drastic, I needed to make damn sure she had each and every fuckin’ one

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ocean was surprisingly relaxed as she stood with her eyes closed, breathing in short gasps so she would inhale as little of their stink as necessary. She heard the rotters’ footsteps scraping against the asphalt, could imagine flakes of decayed skin drifting to the street like a blizzard of scabs. She could picture their hands reaching out for her; bony fingertips like ivory claws jutting through flesh that seemed to be perpetually sloughing off the cord-like mass of muscle, their teeth, yellow and brown and fuzzy with mold, whispered promises of infection and death in the rasp of gas over vocal chords.

  But at the same time she could feel the rays of the sun warming her arms and face. There was just the hint of a breeze, enough to rustle her hair in a way that took her back to a time when everything had been simpler. The ruined city and the rotters who roamed it had always painted her view of life, they were just as much part of her reality as the clouds in the sky. But things had been better back then… hadn’t they?

  Her hand thrust into the loose pocket her mother had sewn onto her top and she ran her fingers along the smooth, glass belly of a pig.

  It wouldn’t be long now.

  She had to cherish these few remaining minutes. To truly experience all the things she’d been too distracted by hunger and fear to appreciate.

  How good it felt to breathe… .

  The rhythm of her heart… .

  Even the sound of her voice, so small and otherwise insignificant in the relative quiet of the afternoon. “I’m so sorry, Mama.”

  She listened.

  She waited.

  She lived. If only for a few seconds more.

  A savage cry echoed off the crumbling buildings and Ocean’s eyes snapped open as her body jolted with shock. The rotters closest to her were turning away, as if the introduction of this new sound held greater promise than the silent girl before them. Through the gaps between their bodies, she could see something moving, nothing more than a dark blur, really. Now that the echoed shout was fading, she was aware of another sound. It was a dull thud and sharp whack merged into a single noise, preceded time and time again by a swish that reminded her, somehow, of the toy Daddy had made her when she was very small.

  He’d taken what he’d called fan blades from one of the cars and attached them to a metal rod. When the wind blew hard enough, the flat vanes would start to spin and the sound they made was very similar to this one.

  As she watched the rotters move toward the source of the sound, Ocean saw a head tumble into the air. It almost seemed to rotate in slow motion as it arced skyward; she had ample time to notice how the face looked like it had been chewed away at some point in the past.

  Then she saw him, spinning like a tornado of rage, kicking back the rotters closest to him with leaps and growls, a whirlwind of constant motion and violence. In either hand, he held the curved blade of a sickle. For the most part, the metal was pitted and flaked with rust, but the inner edges had been honed to perfection and gleamed as brightly as the reflection of the sun on a car’s mirror.

  Surrounding him in a vortex of carnage were arms and legs, slabs of flesh cleaved from torsos, splinters of brittle bone, fingers, chins… and, of course, heads. Those heads fell like a grisly rain, trailing the thick, black blood of the rotters in their wake and bouncing across the street like pebbles that had been dropped from the hand of a giant.

  Within seconds, there was only this strange man with his dark hair and clothes, standing within a ring of dismembered body parts, breathing heavily as he switched the sickles so that they were both clutched in a single fist. With his other hand, he reached toward her, his blue eyes seemed to flare with passion as he spoke.

  “Come with me if you want to live.”

  Ocean had been so caught up in the man’s flurry of destruction that she had entirely forgotten the rotters who were creeping up behind her. The man’s gravelly voice seemed to pull her away from the edge of a precipice, as the reality of the situation hit her with an almost physical force and everything around her was thrown back into sharp focus.

  She felt a hand tentatively grabbing at the back of her blouse and she leapt forward with a shriek, reaching out at the same time. The man’s hand enveloped her own with it’s roughly calloused palm, and he yanked her forward so hard that pain exploded through her shoulder.

  Then they were running. He moved through the rubble of the streets like the deer had before they’d been hunted to extinction—bobbing, weaving, leaping over piles of debris, his long hair fluttering in the displaced air. She stumbled and scrambled, trying her best to match his pace and to keep from tripping over her own feet. In her mind, she saw her hand slipping out of his as she tumbled to the ground, and he just kept running until he was nothing more than a tiny speck in the distance, leaving her panting, waiting for the rotters to claim her as their own.

  Her lungs felt as if they were on fire, the muscles in her legs quivered and ached, yet somehow she managed to hang on to that firm hand; somehow she found the fortitude to keep running, to keep up with her savior.

  The unfamiliar streets passed in a blur, yet Ocean got the impression that this man’s trajectory wasn’t as random as it first appeared. He moved with the quiet confidence of someone who knew exactly where he was going, precisely were to turn in the circuitous route they were taking.

  As if in reply to this thought, his voice boomed out. “Corduroy! I’ve got a breather!”

  Ocean, feeling she could barely draw in enough breath to support life, was shocked at how s
moothly the words flowed from this stranger. If she hadn’t been with him every step of the way, she never would have guessed that he’d been running for blocks.

  In response to his call, the street was filled with a metallic, grating sound. About half a block away, one of the metal disks that were embedded every so often throughout the city, seemed to levitate above the ground. As they drew closer, Ocean was able to make out the hands that lifted it into the air, and shoved it to the side, where it dropped with a loud clang. By then they were standing directly in front of it.

  Before her feet, Ocean saw a perfectly round, perfectly dark hole. She could vaguely sense something moving down there and assumed it was who the man had called Corduroy.

  “Down, down, down!”

  The stranger’s tone left no room for argument. Taking a deep breath, Ocean jumped into the hole feet first and braced herself for the shock of impact. She’d expected something hard and cold, but instead crashed into the warm, fleshy mass of the man who’d removed the manhole cover. He grunted and fell to the ground with a thump.

  “What the fuck?”

  Ocean scrambled to her feet and tried to apologize, but could only gasp for air. She leaned forward with her hands on her knees, gulping her lungs full of the cool, damp air. She glanced up to see the sickle man descending down the side of the wall, but light streaming in from the hole blinded her with its glare. She was able to squint just enough to make out the metal rings embedded into the concrete. A ladder? There had been a damn ladder?

  The man with the dark hair cupped his hand beneath her chin, tilting her head back so she was looking into his eyes. He pursed his lips and raised a finger to them before taking her hand again.

  The one called Corduroy glared at her through the semi-darkness; she returned his gaze just long enough to realize that his face was twisted with dark burns. It was so bad that, had she saw him in any other circumstance, she would have assumed he was a rotter. One of his eyebrows looked as if it had melted over his eye, causing a permanent squint, and she thought he looked older than the man who’d come to her rescue.

  He climbed up the rungs, the sound of metal scraping over asphalt again assaulted her ears. After that they were plunged into a darkness more complete than any Ocean had ever known.

  She felt the man’s now familiar hand take hers again, wondering briefly why it caused her stomach to feel as if every fly she’d ever eaten had suddenly come to life to flutter around in her belly. He was leading her again, deeper into the darkness this time, and at a much slower pace.

  She could hear Corduroy behind her, his footsteps light and quick, and a dripping sound from somewhere far away. The entire place smelled old and musty and she began to wonder if she’d really died back there on the streets. Perhaps this man and his companion were actually angels, and even now, were leading her through the lightless void of death. They’d gone underground which of course meant she was going to Hell, but that was exactly what she deserved wasn’t it? After what she’d done to her mother…

  She stretched her free hand into the gloom, needing to feel something solid, something real. Her fingers brushed over what felt like coarse stone, damp as the morning dew. Excitement drove away the pangs of remorse and guilt. She wanted to lean out and lick the cool beads of moisture from the wall until her tongue was raw and bloody.

  “There’s water where we’re going.” The man’s whisper echoed in the darkness. It was funny how he seemed to know exactly what she was thinking, exactly what she needed… There was that strange fluttery feeling again, and why did her face and chest suddenly feel so warm?

  “Food. Clean clothes. It’s not much further. But we have to stay perfectly quiet from here on out. Understand?”

  She nodded her head quickly and then mentally scolded herself. Why was she being so foolish? He couldn’t see her any more than she could…

  “Good. Shhhhh.”

  After a while, Ocean’s eyes began to adjust to the darkness. She could make out the walls of the tunnel she was walking through; it was strange how she’d seen those disks in the streets every day of her life, and it had never occurred to her—not once—that there could actually be something down below.

  What of this man? Now that she actually had time to think, she realized he wasn’t like anyone she’d ever met. He was tall, strong—the sleeves of his shirt practically rippled with muscle when he moved. He was more like the way people used to be. Back before the Food Wars her father had sometimes told her about…

  Oh God, what must he think of me? She was a walking skeleton, only one step removed from the rotters he’d saved her from. Her hair was sparse and thin, not all full and silky like his, she was caked with filth and she suspected that she probably smelled bad as she looked.

  For some reason, these thoughts made her eyes burn with tears and she heard her Mama’s voice say, in the back of her mind: wasted water. That made it even worse. She wanted to slip away from the man’s grasp, to run so deep within these tunnels that he’d never be able to find her.

  She wanted to curl up on a bed of dry leaves, and simply waste away.

  He squeezed her hand gently and she was pulled along on a current that roiled with emotion. Everything had been so simple the day before. Life was hard, but at least it had made sense. Now, it seemed as if she had slipped into a bizarre dream where her heart and conscience fought one another in a battle for dominance. They exchanged blows so rapidly that it physically felt as if the world were spinning around her. She didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, to praise her good fortune or damn herself.

  None of this would have happened if Mama were still alive. She’d be laying in her room, perhaps playing with her collection of glass animals as she thought about her father; she’d wonder where the next meal would come from, how she would manage to find some clean water to ease the burning in her throat.

  Instead, here she was, with the promise of food, of drink, of something other than the grimy rags that wrapped her wasted frame, and her mother was still back there, staring up with eyes that would never see again.

  Ocean stopped as suddenly as if she’d been turned to stone; her stomach twisted into painful knots that seemed to climb into her chest and wrap around her heart. She pulled her hand away from the stranger, hugging herself as she doubled over. She squeezed her eyes shut so tightly that the tears which had been threatening to fall were forced out, and she began to shiver with delayed shock.

  Mama is dead, truly and really dead. There was a tire iron sticking out of the side of her shattered skull and her blood was everywhere; on the ground, in her hair, on her clothes. Oh Jesus, Mama’s blood is on my clothes, and what if that means her ghost is here too, what have I done, Good Lord, what have I done? My own mother, I killed…

  The stranger’s breath was warm in her ear and she felt herself pulled into his arms. He hugged her just like her Daddy used to, allowing her to bury her face into his chest as he stroked her hair and whispering the entire time. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay. You’re safe now. You’re safe…”

  She didn’t want to cry. Not in front of him, of all people. She tried to suck all the pain back inside her, to store it away in some dark and secret place within her soul. That only caused a low moan to tremble out of her throat, and she pressed herself even more tightly against the reassuring solidity of the man’s chest.

  “That’s okay. Let it out, let it all out. That’s a good girl.”

  It took a while, but eventually she composed herself. She wiped away the tears and snot with the hem of her shirt, trying to look anywhere but into his eyes when he asked if she was sure she was okay. She wanted to show him that she could be strong, too, that she wasn’t just some frightened little girl who’d foolishly wandered into a pack of rotters. They walked on in silence, with him leading her by the hand once more, and she taking in every detail of the journey. Every so often, they’d pass little rectangles of light, shining down from up near the ceiling. She knew what they were, of course. A
fter heavy rains, she and her mother used to hold cans inside them, to collect the water that flowed down into the darkness. Even with that experience, she’d never thought to ask where the water they couldn’t catch went.

  As they scurried through the tunnels and past the drains, she sometimes caught glimpses of feet. More like silhouettes, really; there wasn’t much daylight left on the surface and detail was washed out in the coming shadows. She knew instinctively what they were: rotters. And here they were, passing right underneath them… she’d had to cover her mouth to keep from giggling the first time this thought had bubbled up in her mind.

  After what seemed an eternity of walking, Ocean become aware of a faint scent drifting though the darkened tunnel. The aroma immediately set off a rumbling in her stomach so loud that Corduroy must have heard it, for he started chuckling behind her. The smell was maddening and her mouth began to water as it grew in strength. They were cooking. Cooking meat. How long had it been since she’d had hot food? Six, seven moons maybe? She remembered losing the flint and how angry her mother had been with her. She spent days searching on hands and knees for that little stone, but it seemed the earth had opened up and swallowed it whole. From that point on, meat—when they were fortunate enough to find it—was raw and bloody.

  “Just about there,” the stranger said. “In time for dinner, too.”

  He wasn’t whispering anymore and Ocean had forgotten how

  rich and deep his voice was; and now his words caused tiny shivers to tingle along her spine.

  “I’ll need to introduce you, of course. What’s your name, darlin’?”

  She couldn’t suppress the grin that spread across her face.

  “Ocean.”

  “Well, now… I think that’s just about the prettiest name I ever heard.”

  Ocean felt like hiding her face within her hands and giggling but managed to resist the impulse.

  “I’m Gauge. Corduroy, you’ve met already. There’s two more of us, Levi and Pebble. I think you’ll like Levi. She’s a little older than you, of course, but she’s a sweetheart.”