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  Starry Night

  Rhonda Parrish

  Poise and Pen Publishing

  Copyright © 2017 by Rhonda Parrish

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Poise and Pen Publishing

  Edmonton, Alberta

  www.poiseandpen.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Book Layout based on ‘Spark’ © 2014 BookDesignTemplates.com

  Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com

  Starry Night/ Rhonda Parrish. -- 1st ed.

  ISBN 978-1-988233-37-6

  Starry Night

  The window’s teeth were jagged and dirty, and she had no desire to feel their bite. Yet she leaned out, rested her head between their fangs and stared up into the night sky. Smoke filled her lungs, stretching and burning, but she held it in while she gazed at the stars. As she exhaled, the smoke circled around her like a black hole with her at the very center, then it drifted away taking all her pain, sorrow, and anger with it and leaving a mellow warmth that filled her every cell.

  There.

  There it was.

  The feeling she spent all day, every day, seeking.

  She sat up long enough to take another pull from her pipe, and when she exhaled once more it slipped from her slack fingers to rest on the dirty floor at her side.

  The stars above her shone brighter, and one plummeted to earth while she tracked its blaze of brilliance across the sky. The apocalypse had done one thing for her—it had put out most of the lights, and brightened the stars. It had taken a lot of things from her, but not this. Not them.

  They’d come to Canada from a country she knew only through the stories of her parents. Her mother’s tales were of hardship, her father’s of patriotism. He’d come to work at the university, but when cutbacks eliminated his job he’d accepted a new one at the planetarium. He called it the Odysium. “It hasn’t been called that since before we came here Dad,” she’d said to him once. “It’s the Telus World of Science now.”

  “Not to me,” he’d said. “To me it’s still about the adventure. The journey.”

  They’d spent nights in the middle of Westmount School’s sports field, laying on their backs staring through the light pollution at the bowl of stars which surrounded them. He’d shown her all the constellations, pointed out planets and satellites until her mother had come, hot chocolate in hand, to coax them back indoors.

  It was the love her father had for the stars, for adventure, that had encouraged her to go to university to study astronomy. Just like him.

  But that was before the bombs fell…

  Morning came, as it usually did, far too early. As awareness of the present crept back into her mind, she stretched, her limbs heavy and cold, and reached for her pipe. Empty. What had been left smoked away while she drifted in a haze of drugs and memories.

  She pushed off the mountain of blankets which had formed her nest for the night, stumbled through the chore of foraging breakfast and prepared herself for work. Even now, after the end of the world, she still had to work.

  The club was dark and quiet when she arrived. The real action—the real profit—came at night, but she had a need that couldn’t wait that long. She could feel it clawing at her brain, whispering inside her skull. She needed a fix, and the only way to get that was to earn it.

  Miss Bee ran The Hive. The only brothel and club in what was left of the city. It was funny that even now, with society crumbled to kipple all around them, there was still demand for whores and strippers.

  The club was filthy, unheated and lighted with lanterns. The music came courtesy of a stereo system powered by a hand crank and a series of bulky bouncer-types took shifts turning it around and around and around.

  They called her China Doll, which was about as creative as she could expect from people who named their place The Hive because it was run by a someone named Bee. If they’d let her chose a name she’d have called herself Debris, because that’s what she was. A bit of space debris caught first in one orbit, then spun off to another. Her family. The bombs. The drugs. Tossed to and fro like detritus in the blackness of space. And every time her need became too great and her supply to short, she’d gyrate and grind against the nasty pole on the stage, making eye contact with the marks in sniffer’s row to try and coax the credits from their fingers, entice them to a private dance or sit on their laps while they bought her drinks.

  Her parents would have been mortified had they lived to see it, but they didn’t. The Wasting took them long before the worst happened to the world. It was a blessing, really, she told herself at night when the grief threatened to overwhelm her, then the shards of glass in her window began to look like a doorway, a twisted blessing. This new world was not one her parents could survive in, a society where might made right and no one was healthy. Where she could demand top dollar for people to see her tits because they were still miraculously perky, though her ribcage looked like a xylophone beneath her skin.

  She ignored the stranger’s fingers as they crept up her thigh toward her g-string, tossed back her hair and laughed at his uncreative come-ons, his lame propositions. If she could just get this one into the back room, give him a dance, get him off, then she could slip off to see Tyrone.

  Lately Ty’s attentions toward her had shifted, become personal instead of commercial. She played off it, leading him on just enough to get discounts on her Bite, to talk him into fronting her some when goods were scarce to come by and she couldn’t pay his usual price, used him to boost her ego up when she needed to feel good about herself and what her life had become.

  Once she was finished with this stranger, and if she talked Tyrone into a discount, she should have enough credits to get hooked up, manage a fix before she had to work the night shift.

  “Come on, sugar,” she whispered, pressing her breasts against the man’s arm. “Let’s go somewhere a little more... intimate.”

  The sweat which covered her had as much to do with withdrawal as it did exertion from her set. The final set of the night. The fix she’d had in the afternoon had worn off already, faster than usual. Tyrone called his dope Bite but lately it didn’t seem to have much. Still, it was hard enough to find anyone who was cooking anything these days, so she’d take what she could get.

  Clutching her stomach she stumbled out the back door of The Hive. She wasn’t going to be able to make it back to her flop before she lit up. No way. The cramps were too bad, her nest too far away.

  The alley was dark and empty. She ducked into a doorway and spilled all the rest of the Bite she had into the bowl of her pipe. Her purple-stained finger shook as she tamped it down, and her whole body vibrated with need as she sparked the lighter.

  She leaned back against the hard brick wall, letting the smoke carry her up with it to the stars where they whirled and danced. Nothing to hold them down. No gravity. No emotion. Nothing. Just freedom and space.

  Awareness didn’t return to her slowly like waking from a dream, it pounced on her like one of the wild dogs that roamed the streets in packs, grabbing her by the throat and shaking.

  The smell of gasoline assailed her nostrils so fiercely she could taste it in the back of her throat even as her eyes watered from the fumes. Her head swam from them as much as from the lack of Bite in her system and the world rumbled around her, rocking back and forth like when she was a kid and would fall a
sleep in the back seat of her Dad’s sedan.

  Her eyes jumped open and she sat upright, smacking her head into something hard. Something, judging by the hollow dong sound that accompanied the pain in her skull, made of metal. “Fuck,” she swore, and her tongue felt like it was wrapped in a woolen sock. “Fuck,” she said again, sinking back into a prone position even as the rumbling slowed and eventually stopped.

  “Good morning, Papillon,” Tyrone said, his Quebecois accent distinctive and familiar. “Don’t knock over those jerry cans behind you. We’re going to need that gas.”

  His voice soothed some of her fears, allowed her to slow the whirlwind of questions in her mind long enough to single one out and give voice to it, “Where am I?”

  “I call it Rex,” he said proudly, and as her eyes adjusted to the dark she could see that she was surrounded on three sides by jerry cans of gasoline and on the forth a pair of uncomfortable-looking seats, one of which Ty was in, peering around it to see her. The vehicle’s interior was completely made of metal and the roof had a hatch just like a submarine, or a tank. The front windshield was very tank-like as well. A nearly solid sheet of metal with only a thin slit perhaps three inches high for Ty to see through. “You know, like the dinosaur?”

  “Why?” she paused, shook her head a little then started again, “Why am I in it?”

  “It’s not safe here. I’m taking you somewhere safe.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “Shhh,” he said. “You don’t know what you want. Too many drugs. Too many drugs.”

  “Too many drugs? You’re the one who sold them to me!”

  “Yes, well...” he turned around, and pushed the button for the ignition once more. “Well, we all make mistakes. I’m going to make this one better.”

  The sound of Rex’s engines firing up once more overwhelmed her protests, and soon the cramps in her belly silenced them as she curled up into a ball and begged, not for answers, but for the Bite which would give her relief.

  She didn’t know how when unconsciousness claimed her, offering sweet relief from the agony of withdrawal, nor how long she was out. When she woke her wrists were tied together, her ankles as well. It wasn’t painful, but panic flared, hot as a dying star, inside her belly. “Let me go!” she screamed, flailing about as much as her bindings would allow. “Let me go! Let me go!”

  “Hush, Papillon. Hush. I won’t hurt you,” his voice so calm, so reasonable-sounding clashed with the conflicting sensations and emotions pinballing about inside her. “I just didn’t want you to hurt yourself. Withdrawal… well, it’s going to be a bitch. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Just give me a taste, Tyrone,” she begged. “Just a little taste, enough to ease the pain.”

  “I can’t, Papillon,” he said, his voice calm, regretful.

  He kept talking, chatting as though it were just another day. The spaces between his words were filled with the barking and snapping of what must be a huge pack of dogs outside. One of the many which roamed the streets, attacking anything which moved.

  It was surreal, lying in the back of this wheeled tank, her wrists and ankles bound while Ty drove and acted like they were going for a joyride. Slowly, her fear subsided. It was like this was happening to another version of her and she was only observing, not directly involved. It might be, she decided, at least in part because Ty sounded so calm, so sane. And he’d never hurt her before.

  Then the pain came again—it had been there the whole time, a hollow ache in her belly, a coldness in her limbs, but suddenly it reared up, like a dragon woken from rest. Liquid fire coursed through her veins while an icy fist pounded into her belly.

  “I’m sorry, Papillon. So sorry…” She thought she could hear tears in his voice, but the pain was too intense for her to tell, or to care.

  She wanted to claw his eyes out. Why was he doing this to her? Torturing her? He’d been the one to get her hooked on the Bite and now he was keeping it from her. Why? Just to watch her squirm?

  Outside a muffled thud was accompanied by the yipe of a dog, then Rex’s driver side lifted up and dropped back down.

  I know how you feel, doggy, she thought. I know how you feel…

  “I think I could walk faster than this,” she said through chapped lips.

  “Not safely,” Ty said without even looking over his shoulder at her. “Rex will protect us.”

  “From what?”

  “From everything. The dogs. The people. The Wasting.”

  “Nothing protects from the Wasting. Nothing but luck.”

  “Rex does. Its walls are lined with lead. That’ll keep the radiation out.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere safe, where you can see the stars you talk ‘bout so much.”

  “I don’t want to go somewhere safe, I just want a fix. Please, Tyrone, just a little bit. It hurts so much. So much.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Rex rumbled and shook, and she swallowed down vomit again and again. Then it slowed and, blessedly, stopped.

  “Don’t say anything,” Ty said, voice urgent. “Not a word.”

  Then he was up and out of the vehicle, and through the open top hatch she could hear him talking with someone. Negotiating. Irrationally her mind went back to the fairy tale her mother used to read her, about the Three Billy Goats Gruff.

  “…what’s in it?”

  “Nothin’ for you,” Tyrone’s voice was steady, cold. “Just take the Bite an’ let me pass.”

  “We outnumber you, boy. If we want we can take it and yer Bite. Show some respect.”

  “If you do anything to me, who is gonna cook for you, eh? Think about it.”

  You could ask him to answer a riddle, she thought, and smiled a little, just before another wave of nausea slammed into her and pulled her down into its depths.

  She was oblivious to the rest of the interactions, lost in the roiling of her stomach, the bile that filled her mouth, but then Tyrone was back in the driver’s seat and they were rumbling forward again.

  Trip trop, trip trop…

  “It’s not coming to an end,” she said. The conversation helped distract her from the cold which chewed at her joints, the shivering she couldn’t control and the feeling of ants crawling over her skin. “The world, it’s not coming to an end. It’s already ended.”

  “There are still people, we can rebuild—” Ty answered calmly, using the giant gear shift to change gears as Rex rolled down the street.

  “No, we can’t rebuild. How can we rebuild?” her teeth chattered together, chewing off the ends of the words, filling them with a vitriol she hadn’t known she felt. “We’re too busy digging out little kingdoms. Redd Alert controls the bridge and a third of the city, White Boy Posse holds another third and no one dares go in the rest for fear of the Wasting. How is that rebuilding?”

  “We’re surviving—”

  “Ahh, surviving. You turn survivors into addicts to help them deal while we scavenge off the corpse of the world. That’s your rebuilding?”

  Ty said nothing, and they rode in silence for a time. She looked through the slit in the windshield at the blasted buildings which loomed over them as they crawled down the street, the broken bones of a beast long dead but not yet buried.

  “I was content, like a vulture, to keep pecking away for the rest of my days but then... then there was you. I couldn’t leave you to rot like the rest of them. Not you. Not my little Papillon—”

  She’d known about his growing feelings for her, exploited them even. She’d thought eventually she might need to put out, to make good on all the unspoken promises she made with the wiggle of her hips or the way she leaned over his desk, but she’d never thought he’d resort to kidnapping.

  “If you untie me we could have a good—”

  “Don’t finish that sentence,” he growled, and it was the first time she sensed a real threat from his words, from the situation. “Don’t finish that sentence. You will not be a whore any longer.
You will not. I’m taking you away from all that. To somewhere pure. Safe.”

  “I’m not a whore!” she snapped reflexively. And she wasn’t. Technically. She never really fucked a man for money. She danced for them, she danced on them, she masturbated on stage while they watched and flung food, batteries and credits her way, but she’d never fucked them. Never.

  That was her line.

  Her father always said that every man had a line, a line that if they crossed would make them no better than a beast. That was her line and she’d never crossed it.

  She wondered where Ty’s line was.

  Then her world shrunk into a vortex of misery as comets of pain shot from her fingertips up her arms, from there to her chest and down into her legs. Again and again. Her mind swirled from the pain, and when it stopped she realized Tyrone had been talking the whole time.

  “…she wanted me to move here, to stay. I never would. I knew I couldn’t leave Montreal forever, but I didn’t tell her that. Didn’t… I let her think I’d stay, because I wanted to spend my time in Alberta fucking her, not fighting with her.” Tyrone looked over his shoulder at her, his eyes like dark holes. “She went to the mall that day, shopping for clothes for me. Clothes for job interviews. I stayed at her house, napping while she shopped. Then the bombs fell and one hit West Edmonton Mall dead on. Dead. On.”

  Tyrone was standing over her as she woke. She was lying on the ground, hard packed earth with the sun blazing overhead, and Tyrone leaning over her, his eyes full of concern. She frowned, trying to piece together what was happening when it all came back to her.

  “Are you okay?” he said, as she pushed herself up into a seated position. Her hands were no longer tied. Nor were her ankles. Her head swam as she sat up, and she slumped back down to the ground again.