Lycan Fallout (Book 2): Fall of Man (10 page)

“Insanity is comforting to you? Just check my leg.” I sat up to look, observing where the Lycan had chewed still looked plenty raw. The wound was pretty big, almost the same size and color of a large steak open for display in a butcher shop, and that was only the part I could see. Most of the damage had been done to the back of my leg.

Mathieu carefully removed the wooden sticks he had tied to either side of my leg.

I kept my teeth gritted and my face scrunched waiting for the balls-smashing pain to follow. It was more of a glancing blow by a large insect rather than a full-on kick by a pro NFL kicker type of pain. I guess more of a discomfort than anything else.

“The puncture wounds have almost cleared up,” Mathieu was talking to himself, something I’m sure he was practiced in. He now switched his attention to me. “The skin has knitted back together nicely. The muscle had been pulled away from the bone all along the top of your femur. It was all I could do to stuff what belonged in your leg back in place before I threw in some stitches.”

“You stitched me up? Where is the string?” I was looking for it.

“I took it out last night. You were healing so fast I figured I’d better get it out of there before your skin grew over it. It was the setting of your leg that was the tricky part. By the time I got you back here, it was barely hanging on. I think if I’d twisted it back and forth one more time it would have come off.”

“Umm, thank you for not doing that.”

“You’d lost a lot of blood, and I needed to get your leg in place and close you up as quickly as possible. Even in your catatonic state, you nearly took my head off when I tried to touch your injury. I’m sorry, but I’d had to chain your arms down while I worked on you.”

“Don’t worry about it. I don’t even remember. Glad to see I didn’t decapitate you. I guess we’d both be long gone by now.”

With one hand, he pressed down on the top of my thigh; with his other, he pushed against the side of my knee. That…well, that fucking hurt, and I let him know in no uncertain terms what I thought of that particular test. He apologized, although I’m not sure if he knew what half of the things I called him even were. He may have repealed his conciliatory words, if he had.

He was shaking his head. “It’s amazing…this healing power you possess.”

“It has its bonuses. I’m no longer lactose intolerant.”

“Sounds serious.”

“Could be if you were down wind after a big ice cream cone.”

His eyebrows were furrowed as he looked at me.

“Forget it. Not nearly as much fun when the other person doesn’t really know what you’re talking about.”

This was another indicator of what Tommy had been talking about when he said vampires hit a wall after a thousand or so years. It wasn’t that they would die; it’s that they would seek ways to die. Civilization would move so far past where they’d originated that they would feel even more alienated than they already were. Made sense, as Mathieu had no idea about the cultural references of which I spoke. I couldn’t bring up anything I’d ever read or seen in the movies or television, because none of it would make sense. Even though the ‘right now’ was technologically behind where I came from, we were still worlds apart.

“You alright?”

I told him I was fine. I did not want to dwell on the fact that I was nearly as alone in this world as he was. The only one I could relate to was Azile, and if I never saw her again, I’m not sure if I’d shed a tear. I was holding her directly responsible for Tommy’s death, whether she was truly culpable or not.

“It is nearly time for dinner, but I’m unsure of what you eat.” He hesitated.

“What do you have?”

“Salted venison and goat.”

“Salted like jerky?”

“Not quite as thin and cured, but yes.”

“Either…both are fine.”

Mathieu chatted me up almost the entire night. It seemed that he was enjoying the company as much as I was loathing it. He was a nice enough person, it’s just that I had more in common with the haunted hallways of this building than I did with him. Then it all changed in the blink of an eye when he spoke next.

“Do you like beer?”

“Excuse me?”

“Beer. Do you like it?”

“You’re not saying deer or bear like the animal, right?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, maybe they didn’t have beer back where you’re from. It’s an ale type beverage made with hops and—”

“I know what beer is. Now, I want to be REAL clear on this part. Are you asking if I like it in the abstract, or because you quite possibly have some?”

Mathieu smiled. “I’ll be right back.”

“You are really going to leave me hanging here without answering the question? What kind of cruel man are you?” I flipped him the finger.

He flipped it back. “I do not know what it means, but by your tone, I will take it to mean something similar to this.” He showed me the entire palm of his left hand as if he were stopping traffic.

“That’s bad?” I asked.

“Could get you killed in most communities.”

“Might have to keep that in mind.”

The ten minutes he was gone took forever. I felt like a kid whose mom promised him a trip to the toy store if he behaved while she did her regular errands at the grocery store, shoe store, and worst of all, the yarn store. Ever been a six-year-old boy and have to wander around the fucking aisles of a yarn store? Not too much more could be done to a youngster to create more boredom than that. It’s not my fault all those rolls of yarn came undone. How did I know by pulling them all behind me they would unravel? Never did get that GI Joe action figure with the Kung-Fu grip she’d promised. It was only eight rolls of yarn, Mom!

I heard a sound that was much like if a giant rat had got his toe stuck in a closing door. The squealing was approaching, at first I laughed off my errant assumption, but the closer it got the more my imagination began to take off. It wasn’t like this world couldn’t yield that type of monster. What would rodent teeth look like on a six-foot rat? I think I’d rather face a Lycan.

I craned my neck so I could see a bit down the hallway, seeing nothing at first. Then, the edge of a metal table, a gurney actually, appeared. Sitting atop of it was a barrel; a glorious oaken cask, and pushing the loudly protesting rolling table was a grinning Mathieu.

“What’s in the barrel, Mathieu?” I was grinning as well. It was infectious.

“This one just became ready a few days ago.”

“This one? How many do you have, and how many gallons does this thing hold?” It was roughly the size of a quarter keg (or what we used to call pony kegs when I was kid).

“Five gallons.”

“You…” I almost choked out a sob. “You have five gallons of beer in there?” Right now I wouldn’t have cared if it came out the dark coffee color of a stout.

“I call this Titanee Amber Ale. Hand me your mug.”

I tossed my fish fecal water on the ground and happily handed it to him as he poured an almost clear, reddish liquid into my cup. I could only stare at it in disbelief as he handed the nearly brimming mug back.

“Aren’t you going to try it?” he asked excitedly.

“You need to pour yourself some. There’s a custom I need to show you.”

He looked slightly perplexed, but that didn’t stop him from doing as I said.

“Okay, we lightly touch our glasses together like this.” There was a clinking noise as I gently brought our mugs together. I wanted to make sure none of the precious liquid fell to the floor. “Then we say, ‘Cheers’ and drink.”

“Cheers and drink!” he repeated enthusiastically as he tipped his mug up.

“Well, you don’t say, ‘and drink’, but whatever.” I tipped my mug up as well.

There was a hint of the residual fish water for just a moment before the effervescent bubbling of carbonated beer ran across my palate. The taste was, by leaps and bounds, better than anything I’d tasted in this day and age, and would have easily stacked up to anything when beer was more readily available. Nice initial clean taste with just a hint of after-bite—crisp might have been a good word.

“How?” I finally asked after coming up for air. I was now working on my third mug full.

“Never much liked the taste of mead. There are these small booklets down here. They used to call them magazines, you know those?”

“I know those.”

“Well, I noticed they had all these pages devoted to this beer beverage, none for mead by the way. So I did more investigating. Some talked about how they were made from the finest wheat, barleys, and hops. I just started experimenting. Had a bunch of time on my hands. Took me five years to get this one right.”

“Worth every fucking second,” I assured him.

He went into detail about the fermenting process, I listened because he was so passionate about it, and it was hard not to share in it with him. I berated myself in the background. I’d had over a century and done nothing to reinvent my old beverage. In five years, he’d produced a taste that breweries would have clamored for.

As we polished that small keg off that night, I told him all about when and where I’d come from. He’d had to stop me on numerous occasions for clarification and to express his disbelief. I’d assured him it was all true, even the part about jet packs.
My story, I’d tell it my way, plus I was drunker than a skunk that had found a barrel of fermented apples.
We’d become friends that night. We’d both let our guards down and let the other in behind the walls we’d both been building for years. Not sure which of us needed it more.

“What happened that brought us back to this?” Mathieu had not looked up from his glass as he swept his hand back and forth.

I’m sure he meant the outside world as it was now and not the building we found ourselves in. “The pursuit of power, I guess. Man’s seemingly innate need to dominate over others. Weird…from as small a group as three or as large as three billion, someone needs to show that they are in charge. Why is that? Beer me.” I held out my cup.

“Without a hierarchy, there is anarchy,” he burped out.

“You just make that shit up?”

He smiled right before falling off his chair. He did pull off an amazing display of athleticism when he didn’t spill a drop of beer. We laughed more that night than both of us had in fair number of our accumulated lifetimes; which, when you really kind of think about it, is not all that surprising. Not many people who still have a semblance of sanity laugh like loons when they are by themselves. That is strictly an emotion reserved for crowds—or at least two people, in this case.

When the cask came up dry, Mathieu excused himself to get another one. Came out something like, and I’m paraphrasing, because I don’t know which one of him said it, “More beer, be back.” I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to see him again that night when he bounced off the wall next to the opening.

“Excuse me,” he told the structure.

It was a good thing he passed out somewhere. I was having a hard enough time holding on to my improvised bed as it was. I was still grinning when I awoke, then I realized I had a hangover that rivaled anything I’d previously encountered in my extended years, so I laid there until the worst of it passed. My true moment of panic came when I realized the press of some, err, necessities came to the fore. I had to piss like a racehorse—any horse I suppose, as I don’t think racehorses cornered that market. I debated about using my mug, but it would soon be overflowing. Then I thought of the chamber pot Mathieu had given me. That wasn’t going to work either. Two more drops of condensation, and it would be spilling out. In fact, moving it was going to put someone in a precarious situation.

“Now or never, I suppose.” The press of my bladder overcame my fear of the pain I was about to inflict on myself. I looked over to the cask gurney, wondering if I could ride it like a gondola. I didn’t have a paddle, though. I had the bittersweet memory of BT in his hospital bed back at Camp Custer moving his over to me in an attempt to strike me for some offending remark I’d made about him.

“Miss you, brother,” I said just as I touched the tip of my feet down onto the cool concrete.

A tingle of pain shot out from my thigh. This was only going to get exponentially worse as I put more weight on it. I was right, up to a point, as the pain capped off at somewhere between a bee sting and someone smashing a whiffle ball bat against my leg, and every variation in between. It hurt, but it certainly wasn’t debilitating. My next problem became ‘where the fuck do I go?’ I was hunched over, because, to stand up would put more pressure on an already bloated organ. I couldn’t even look around properly as I shuffled out the doorway.

I had been completely unprepared for how big this place was. The corridor I found myself in curved off to the left. There wasn’t much in it save a couch that looked like Nixon may have sat in it and one passed out Mathieu. I thought about waking him up so he could point me in the right direction, but if I could spare him even ten minutes of this dreadful feeling of excessive drink pay back, I would do it. I came around the first bend in the hallway to realize there was another one.

“It’s a damn circle. I’m going to end up back where I came from.” I was a half a second away from opening a doorway that lined the corner and doing what needed to be done, hoping that my guilt would dry up before Mathieu would notice I’d debased his building. My needs were immediately forgotten when I saw a sign. This wasn’t Titani as my drinking buddy called it. It was Titan I, Missile Silo 246.