The Bird is the Werd
Samuel Clemens Robichaux sat on the scratchy old sofa picking at the metallic threads in the upholstery. He’d lived with Paw-Paw on the houseboat for three years now, and no longer noticed the relentless tug of the Mississippi’s currents at the anchor.
“Do you think the river’s clean enough to fish?” he asked.
“Not so many bodies comin’ down these days, but beaucoup barrels and such,” Paw-Paw said. “Could be full of chemicals.”
A nearly featherless old parrot in a large cage by the window squawked loudly, had done so for hours. The parrot had no name; Paw-Paw had found him, or her, cage and all, on the roof of an abandoned house at the river’s edge.
“I’M THE BIRD! I’M THE BIRD! WHAT’S THE WORD?”
“Can’t he say anything else, Paw-Paw?”
A few feet away in the kitchen area, Paw-Paw made lunch by opening a can of tuna. He shouted over the bird’s verbal assault.
“You know the old bastard can say plenty. He must’ve heard that on the radio. Now he won’t say nothin’ else.”
“But what does it mean?”
“Damned if I know.”
Later, while Paw-Paw napped, Sam left the houseboat and paddled the canoe toward a line of water oaks growing on the levee. The canoe entered a gap in the levee and crossed over into the French Quarter canal system. Paw-Paw had told him the history.
“Long before you was born, the godfather of all storms come up the river—the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain shook hands for good, and the Big Easy just rolled over and died.”
The Mississippi River flowed through this big swamp now called Lake Muddy. The population consisted of river people, those born to it, like Paw-Paw, and those who’d adapted to the lifestyle. “The low country ain’t no country at all,” Paw-Paw often said.
The canoe slipped into the Esplanade Canal, floating a couple of feet below the second-floor level of the old Spanish-style buildings. An eerie sight, the water-city, but he no longer noticed. Dank vapors smelling of rot hung in the early evening air. The mosquitos, big as butterflies, drove him crazy, but the homemade repellent Paw-Paw brewed from castor oil and apple vinegar worked fine. Rosemary bushes burned in a little stove kept the houseboat clear of the pests.
At thirteen and of slight build, he looked a bit younger. This allowed him to pass unnoticed by gangs of roof kids or anyone else who might want to mess with a teenager. He also kept a machete at hand in the bottom of the boat, and wisely avoided anyone who smiled at him.
Snakes, rats, and roaches ruled the canals, once the streets of the former city. Most people shot any snake they saw, and they saw plenty. Others frowned on this because snakes—preferred over rats as a source of protein—kept the rat population under control. Either way, you ate rat meat. Gators lurked everywhere too, and most folks in southern Louisiana had a taste for gator meat, but they were much harder to kill than rats and snakes. Paw-Paw always said, “As long as you get them before they get you, cohabitation is fine.”
Mid-block on St. Ann, a bluish cloud wafted past his head. He usually held his breath when passing smokers of any sort, but he hadn’t noticed the kids sitting in the third story window above him, and he’d inhaled some of the blue smoke. He stopped, grabbed an iron balcony railing, and for a second he thought he saw a blue woman approaching, feet skimming across the dirty water. He took a deep breath and cleared his head of the disgusting stuff. The kids laughed as he paddled away. He’d come for some chips and a soda, and now he’d inhaled God-knew-what.
The hum of generators announced a shopping opportunity, and he tied up to the rusty railing of a second-floor balcony, climbed over and entered a small grocery. He went to the cooler and grabbed a large bottle of soda and a bag of chips from a disturbingly empty shelf. Last time he asked, the cashier said the steamboat that delivered supplies hadn’t shown for over a month.
He got into the checkout line. A catchy commercial song, something about “the word” blared from a radio. The words to the song were the same the old lice-ridden parrot had repeated. It attracted the attention of two guys in front of him. They seemed excited about it.
“That is the word, my friend. I heard it’s the best. Got to get myself some of that shit!”
“You say?”
“I say!”
The two bumped elbows, something hip people had done since Splats had made people fear touching.
He paid for his snacks, a monthly treat, with one quarter of a gold coin, thanks to Paw-Paw’s lifetime habit of collecting them.
On the way home he paddled swiftly past the building where the kids camped. They traveled by rooftop, makeshift pulleys and ladders breaching the narrow alleys. Much as he mourned his former life, he might have ended up like those kids, like hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, who had no family left at all.
He loved Paw-Paw, but he missed Mama and Daddy terribly. He missed his old life on the shady streets of Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he’d lived until, first his daddy and then his mama had passed.
#
Three years ago, the Irish Disease had killed much of the world’s population, along with many animals. Most people called it “Splats” because the infected person’s brains turned to mush and they dropped dead where they stood, their skulls cracking like eggs when they hit the ground. They said a man named Brian McLaney had caught this bug in a bat cave somewhere in South America and spread it all over. The survivors had declared themselves immune, but no one knew for sure because viruses often mutated.
Then just ten years old, he waited with hundreds of other frightened, sick, and panicking kids at the Vicksburg Children’s Rescue Center for two weeks until Paw-Paw showed. The old man’s wild blue eyes and the swatch of thick white hair that stuck up in all directions had frightened him. He remembered the feel of Paw-Paw’s scratchy, grizzled face as they hugged, and how he’d cried like a baby. He thought Paw-Paw had cried, too.
“It’s gonna be all right, boy,” Paw-Paw said and took his hand. “Let’s get you outta this Hellhole.”
“You don’t have a car?” Sam asked when they arrived at a dock on the Mississippi River, and he had his first look at the weathered houseboat. “You came upriver in this?”
“Right. And now we’re goin’ back down together. It’s just you and me from now on, red top,” he said, patting Sam’s head. “You sure take after your paw—hair like a brush fire.”
“What happened to your truck?” He remembered an ancient Ford pickup, red and rusty, but dependable.
“When your Maw-Maw died, I traded the house on the bayou, my fishing boat, and that old truck for this here floatin’ palace.” Paw-Paw winked at him.
#
The how and the why mattered little now, and the memories of his old life gradually faded. Once, he’d felt lucky being immune, but no longer. Boredom stalked him every day, and he even missed school. He’d read the few books Paw-Paw owned, and they couldn’t afford to buy more. The flooding and extreme humidity made paper books rare, and the same dampness messed with all the tech gadgets. They had no hand-held and no one left to call. They had no TV and no WI-FI, so he listened to the radio, but the only station sucked.
He slowed at the wide waterway once called Canal Street, where the skeletal remains of skyscrapers that had housed both families and businesses held court over the waters. A drowning rat tried to climb into the canoe and he smashed it with the paddle. What would his namesake say about all of this, and how would even Huck Finn navigate these waters?
He passed a bar, saw a big vid screen through the window and stopped. Although the one remaining broadcast channel operated by the government showed only reruns, old movies, and cartoons, he hoped for some news about the only item of importance—the virus. Paw-Paw said they didn’t dare tell the real news anymore, but he hoped for some hint that things in general might improve.
He tied the canoe to a drainpipe, climbed in the window and stood in a dark corner. The screen lit the weathered faces turned to it.
A red box jiggled on the screen. Holographic letters W-E-R-D danced and changed colors on the package. Patrons shouted at the barkeep and he turned up the volume even though captions moved across the bottom of the screen.
“WERD, WERD, WERD! WERD IS THE WORD! WERD, WERD, WERD!”
It was the same song from the radio, about some product called “WERD,” not “WORD,” as he’d thought. The bar patrons seemed unduly excited at this, but he did a mental shrug and went home.
The next day Paw-Paw brought home one of the red WERD boxes. He opened it, then punched a pill out of a foil pack.
“What is it, Paw-Paw?”
“It’s the cure.”
“The cure for Splats? I thought that was over. I thought we were immune.”
Paw-Paw’s face kind of twisted. Sam thought he’d say something more, but he popped the pill into his mouth and swallowed.
“Got to get some shuteye. Goodnight, boy.”
Paw-Paw patted him on the shoulder, the old man’s version of a goodnight kiss, and went into the bedroom and closed the door. Sam made his bed on the sofa, got under the quilt, and turned off the lamp. In the dark he said,
“What’s the Werd?”
“Shuteye,” the parrot said.
“Shut up!” Sam said.
The bird did.
Thick clouds blew in from the west and the radio predicted several days of severe storms, so he winched the anchor and Paw-Paw started the motor. Fuel was precious and used only for such emergencies. They sheltered the houseboat on the down-river side of a beached tanker.
One stormy night, the squawking of the parrot and the rocking of the flat-bottomed houseboat woke him, and he got up to get a drink of water. Hail pounded the roof. The red box sat on the counter. Paw-Paw normally wouldn’t leave the pills out for him to find, but he opened it. The pills were white with a big, black X on one side. Only three of them remained. That meant Paw-Paw had taken two or three a night. Lightning switched on and off.
At sixty, Paw-Paw complained of the normal aches and pains associated with old people, but otherwise seemed healthy. Still, there was a deepening of the creases in Paw-Paw’s face, perhaps etched by worry, and now all this WERD-induced sleeping. He felt the tingly hand of fear touch his heart, and he smashed the pack of pills with his fist.
The next morning, while Paw-Paw inspected the solar panels on the boat’s roof for hail damage, he asked him what the pills did, and Paw-Paw sat and scratched his head, which meant: “Wait a minute, I’m thinking.”
“They take me back to when I was about your age, out on Bayou Teche. That’s when I met your Maw-Maw. Best time of my life.”
“But it’s not real, Paw-Paw.”
“I know that, boy, but it’s better than real. Better than this real. I guess I’ve let you down, but I’m old and tired. This is your world now, such as it is, and I’m sorry for that.”
He didn’t like his Paw-Paw talking that way, and he lay in the dark a long time that night before he slept. Paw-Paw acted like he didn’t care about him anymore. That wasn’t true, but he sensed Paw-Paw had let go of something, and it chilled him.
One hot, still morning, he and Paw-Paw set out in the canoe in search of supplies. They carried an old radio, a pair of rubber boots, and a hunting knife for barter, plus a small amount of coin. Paw-Paw also carried a loaded shotgun in case of trouble. He’d heard tell of a large cache of goods in a place called the Garden District, but after paddling for an hour, they found only decrepit gables, pointed crumbling rooftops, and church steeples peeking from the endless mirror surface.
Sweating in the heat, they paddled northeast toward the old highway overpass where traders and dealers of anything worthwhile had set up shops. On the roof of a warehouse building, there was a new billboard that read “W E R D” in large red letters. Someone had altered it. It now read “WE R DEAD.”
“Look!”
“Just some punks. Pay it no mind, boy.”
He was going to ask what it meant, but just then a crude home-made barge with a rickety canvas roof passed a little too closely for comfort. On the barge, he saw several dirty young children who were tied up to the posts. Paw-Paw laid the shotgun on his lap in plain sight.
A seedy-looking, filthy man with bloodshot eyes paused his poling, and tipped his straw hat as they passed. He eyed the goods in the canoe.
“Got t’ keep ‘em tied, so as they don’t fall overboard,” he said, indicating the children.
He and Paw-Paw rowed a little faster.
“Don’t believe it for a minute, Sam.”
In late August, the temperature inside the houseboat was extreme despite a breeze on the river. He woke tangled in a sweaty sheet. Judging by the sun in the window, it was late morning. Quiet filled the small rooms of the houseboat. He stumbled to the bedroom and found Paw-Paw on the floor, his eyes staring at the ceiling. He went to his knees beside him. He felt for a pulse. Nothing.
“Why did you do this, Paw-Paw?” Beating his fists on the stilled chest, he cried angry, sad, scared tears. The older generation had made a mess of the world, and he’d just inherited it.
“How could you just give up and leave me? You said I should never give up.”
After a while, he closed Paw-Paw’s eyes, kissed the grizzled cheek, and pulled a sheet over the now untroubled face. He closed the bedroom door, and said, “I forgive you, Paw-Paw.”
In the kitchen, he opened the red box and stared at the pills, the Xs reminding him of creepy dolls with Xs for eyes, dead eyes. He popped one out and dropped it on his tongue, pausing only a second before swallowing. He lay on the sofa. He needed to escape. He needed…
The sun warmed his skin, and he floated on a rubber raft on the aqua blue water in the pool behind their house in Vicksburg. Opening one eye, he spotted Mama stretched out on the lounger reading a book, her tanned skin smooth with oil. Daddy cooked on the grill, wearing Bermuda shorts and a silly apron. The laughter of neighborhood kids playing nearby echoed between the houses.
“I’M THE BIRD! I’M THE BIRD! I’M THE WORD!”
“Shut up!”
He groped for a shoe and threw it. Wide awake, he sat up, shocked to see the inside of the houseboat. Damn. The pool, the sun, and Mama and Daddy had seemed so real, waking felt like losing them again.
He found another package of WERD in the kitchen drawer, and he took two of the pills. Several days passed in a mild fogginess and he lived only for the blue-water dreams of his past life, but he owed Paw-Paw a nice sendoff. He gently wrapped him in bed sheets and twine and dragged him across the floor, wincing when Paw-Paw’s head bumped the door frame. On deck, he repeated a snatch of half remembered prayer, and rolled the body overboard. “Now I lay you down to sleep…” It floated downstream.
He tried to maintain the boat as Paw-Paw had. He checked the rainwater tank, now used only for drinking water as washing clothes and bathing were done in the river. He emptied the slop bucket and cleaned the solar panels. He didn’t bother with the engine, as fuel of any sort couldn’t be found.
For several weeks, he kept to himself, afraid to venture out. He depended on the pills more and more. If he became addicted, it didn’t matter, because without them he’d go crazy. When he ran out of food, he loaded the canoe and headed for the shore.
In the Quarter, floating corpses clogged the canals. “WE R DEAD” in neon spray paint glared from the sides of buildings. The shops were closed. Kids no longer perched on the rooftops. No other craft cruised the canals. Silence clung between the buildings like melting wax; it made his ears ring.
He ventured farther afield with trade goods—a toaster, a couple of books, and a coil of copper wire—to procure food, water, and more pills, but found little. Lately, he’d turned to scavenging. He found an old warehouse that appeared untouched—no broken windows above the water line, that he saw. Tethering the canoe to a second-floor window, he broke it with a crowbar and climbed in, taking a flickering flashlight, a nylon backpack, and the machete.
Seen in the half-light coming through the dirty windows, the cavernous room appeared empty, but he noticed a door ajar on the end wall to his left, about twenty-five yards in. The place stank of ammonia. Pigeons cooed and fluttered in the rafters. Their droppings covered the floor. He stepped carefully.
A much more pungent odor arose at the door. He knew it, as did anyone alive during the plague. He entered a deep blackness, and stood for a moment, the smothering silence like being underwater. He flicked on the flashlight. In a small room he discovered a dried, mummified body, likely a victim of Splats. He stopped and tied his t-shirt around his nose and mouth and avoided gagging by moving quickly. He passed through a warren of rooms with no windows, the beam of the flashlight revealing more bodies. Rats had been at them.
In a kitchen, he found some canned goods. He sat the flashlight on the counter, put his shirt back on, and stuffed the backpack with the cans and a box of salt. A rattling sound came from a pile of trash by the door, and he turned his head slowly. Two red eyes, then four, then six, peered at him from the darkness. Rats.
He pretended calm, estimated the distance to the door at six feet, while more rats moved into the room. He zipped the backpack, and slowly put his arms through the straps, never taking his eyes off the rats. He slipped the machete from his belt.
Emboldened by hunger, the rats crept closer. They were huge, about ten pounds each, and their eyes seemed knowing, aware. They could see in the dark. They were calculating his demise, some moving to the left and some to the right. They were herding him.
His spine froze with fear, and he thought he’d be unable to move. Holding the flashlight in his left hand, he lunged for the door. He felt a nip at a heel and ran. At the door to the next room, more rats waited for him. Sweat ran into his eyes. He blindly swung the machete in an arc as he ran, sliced, bloody rat parts flying everywhere. When he reached the main room, nearly out of breath, hope rallied him, but he glanced back. Hundreds of rats poured through the door, flowing like a dirty grey river.
He slipped and fell face down in the thick coating of bird droppings a few yards from the window. The rats overcame him, covered him, biting, clawing. A rasping scream came from deep inside him. Rats chewed through his clothes, ripping off pieces of flesh. One bit off the tip of his pinky finger. Screaming until hoarse, he let go of the machete and covered his face. When a rat bit his ear, he rolled over and sat up, slipping his arms from the backpack. Somehow, he got to his knees. He refused to die as rat food. His screams became a rallying call. He struggled to stand, and several rats clung to him, their teeth sunk into his clothes and his flesh. Standing at last, he skated and faltered on the slippery bird droppings as he crossed the room. He reached the window, and he threw himself out over the canoe into the filthy water.
He came up gasping with some rats still attached to his legs. He kicked and finally they let go. They popped to the surface, making awful chittering sounds. One clawed its way up his back and sunk its teeth into his shoulder. He ignored the pain and swam to the canoe and climbed in, then untied the canoe and paddled away. One or two had fallen in and he flung them out. The rats still inside clawed at the wall, climbing over each other to get to him, pushing the frontrunners into the water. He wrenched the rat from his back, ripping off more flesh. He cried, then cursed himself for acting like a baby.
At the houseboat, he removed his blood and guano-soaked clothes and threw them overboard. He must clean his body, now so marbled with wounds it resembled beefsteak. He had no antiseptic, so he stood on deck and poured a bottle of diluted household bleach over the bites, screaming all the while. The fumes made him gag. He jumped overboard.
Wrapped in a towel, smelling of bleach, he sat on the sofa. The parrot lay dead on the bottom of the cage. He’d forgotten to feed it or give it water. Maybe the last bird on earth, and he’d let the poor bastard die.
Angry tears gushed down his cheeks, stinging his wounds. He missed his Paw-Paw more than imaginable. They’d had a special bond, strong, born out of love and desperation in equal parts.
With a t-shirt tied around his head to stop the bleeding from his ear, he stepped on deck late that afternoon, the sun at his back, liquid gold rippling on the water. No birds or insects hovered and chirped; only Old Muddy’s rhythmic slaps sounded against the boat. He felt old—older than anyone that still lived, as ancient as the water flowing over the land. The city on the crescent was at last done. He raised the anchor with the wench and the current took the boat. A tiny dot moving on the largest water basin on earth, the boat headed toward the Gulf of Mexico.
He went inside and swallowed the last of the pills, and the world began to melt.
Paw-Paw had said the world belonged to him now, and that included the future. He might start a new life somewhere, a new dream, perhaps find a family who needed a boy. He imagined a mama more suited to life from those days long past—a mama who was a little more comfortable than his, a little thicker in the waist, and a great cook. He even dreamed of her husband, a fisherman, and their life together on the river as a family.
Through the night, the boat carried him south on winding muddy water dreams.
“Do you think the river’s clean enough to fish?” he asked.
“Not so many bodies comin’ down these days, but beaucoup barrels and such,” Paw-Paw said. “Could be full of chemicals.”
A nearly featherless old parrot in a large cage by the window squawked loudly, had done so for hours. The parrot had no name; Paw-Paw had found him, or her, cage and all, on the roof of an abandoned house at the river’s edge.
“I’M THE BIRD! I’M THE BIRD! WHAT’S THE WORD?”
“Can’t he say anything else, Paw-Paw?”
A few feet away in the kitchen area, Paw-Paw made lunch by opening a can of tuna. He shouted over the bird’s verbal assault.
“You know the old bastard can say plenty. He must’ve heard that on the radio. Now he won’t say nothin’ else.”
“But what does it mean?”
“Damned if I know.”
Later, while Paw-Paw napped, Sam left the houseboat and paddled the canoe toward a line of water oaks growing on the levee. The canoe entered a gap in the levee and crossed over into the French Quarter canal system. Paw-Paw had told him the history.
“Long before you was born, the godfather of all storms come up the river—the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain shook hands for good, and the Big Easy just rolled over and died.”
The Mississippi River flowed through this big swamp now called Lake Muddy. The population consisted of river people, those born to it, like Paw-Paw, and those who’d adapted to the lifestyle. “The low country ain’t no country at all,” Paw-Paw often said.
The canoe slipped into the Esplanade Canal, floating a couple of feet below the second-floor level of the old Spanish-style buildings. An eerie sight, the water-city, but he no longer noticed. Dank vapors smelling of rot hung in the early evening air. The mosquitos, big as butterflies, drove him crazy, but the homemade repellent Paw-Paw brewed from castor oil and apple vinegar worked fine. Rosemary bushes burned in a little stove kept the houseboat clear of the pests.
At thirteen and of slight build, he looked a bit younger. This allowed him to pass unnoticed by gangs of roof kids or anyone else who might want to mess with a teenager. He also kept a machete at hand in the bottom of the boat, and wisely avoided anyone who smiled at him.
Snakes, rats, and roaches ruled the canals, once the streets of the former city. Most people shot any snake they saw, and they saw plenty. Others frowned on this because snakes—preferred over rats as a source of protein—kept the rat population under control. Either way, you ate rat meat. Gators lurked everywhere too, and most folks in southern Louisiana had a taste for gator meat, but they were much harder to kill than rats and snakes. Paw-Paw always said, “As long as you get them before they get you, cohabitation is fine.”
Mid-block on St. Ann, a bluish cloud wafted past his head. He usually held his breath when passing smokers of any sort, but he hadn’t noticed the kids sitting in the third story window above him, and he’d inhaled some of the blue smoke. He stopped, grabbed an iron balcony railing, and for a second he thought he saw a blue woman approaching, feet skimming across the dirty water. He took a deep breath and cleared his head of the disgusting stuff. The kids laughed as he paddled away. He’d come for some chips and a soda, and now he’d inhaled God-knew-what.
The hum of generators announced a shopping opportunity, and he tied up to the rusty railing of a second-floor balcony, climbed over and entered a small grocery. He went to the cooler and grabbed a large bottle of soda and a bag of chips from a disturbingly empty shelf. Last time he asked, the cashier said the steamboat that delivered supplies hadn’t shown for over a month.
He got into the checkout line. A catchy commercial song, something about “the word” blared from a radio. The words to the song were the same the old lice-ridden parrot had repeated. It attracted the attention of two guys in front of him. They seemed excited about it.
“That is the word, my friend. I heard it’s the best. Got to get myself some of that shit!”
“You say?”
“I say!”
The two bumped elbows, something hip people had done since Splats had made people fear touching.
He paid for his snacks, a monthly treat, with one quarter of a gold coin, thanks to Paw-Paw’s lifetime habit of collecting them.
On the way home he paddled swiftly past the building where the kids camped. They traveled by rooftop, makeshift pulleys and ladders breaching the narrow alleys. Much as he mourned his former life, he might have ended up like those kids, like hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, who had no family left at all.
He loved Paw-Paw, but he missed Mama and Daddy terribly. He missed his old life on the shady streets of Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he’d lived until, first his daddy and then his mama had passed.
#
Three years ago, the Irish Disease had killed much of the world’s population, along with many animals. Most people called it “Splats” because the infected person’s brains turned to mush and they dropped dead where they stood, their skulls cracking like eggs when they hit the ground. They said a man named Brian McLaney had caught this bug in a bat cave somewhere in South America and spread it all over. The survivors had declared themselves immune, but no one knew for sure because viruses often mutated.
Then just ten years old, he waited with hundreds of other frightened, sick, and panicking kids at the Vicksburg Children’s Rescue Center for two weeks until Paw-Paw showed. The old man’s wild blue eyes and the swatch of thick white hair that stuck up in all directions had frightened him. He remembered the feel of Paw-Paw’s scratchy, grizzled face as they hugged, and how he’d cried like a baby. He thought Paw-Paw had cried, too.
“It’s gonna be all right, boy,” Paw-Paw said and took his hand. “Let’s get you outta this Hellhole.”
“You don’t have a car?” Sam asked when they arrived at a dock on the Mississippi River, and he had his first look at the weathered houseboat. “You came upriver in this?”
“Right. And now we’re goin’ back down together. It’s just you and me from now on, red top,” he said, patting Sam’s head. “You sure take after your paw—hair like a brush fire.”
“What happened to your truck?” He remembered an ancient Ford pickup, red and rusty, but dependable.
“When your Maw-Maw died, I traded the house on the bayou, my fishing boat, and that old truck for this here floatin’ palace.” Paw-Paw winked at him.
#
The how and the why mattered little now, and the memories of his old life gradually faded. Once, he’d felt lucky being immune, but no longer. Boredom stalked him every day, and he even missed school. He’d read the few books Paw-Paw owned, and they couldn’t afford to buy more. The flooding and extreme humidity made paper books rare, and the same dampness messed with all the tech gadgets. They had no hand-held and no one left to call. They had no TV and no WI-FI, so he listened to the radio, but the only station sucked.
He slowed at the wide waterway once called Canal Street, where the skeletal remains of skyscrapers that had housed both families and businesses held court over the waters. A drowning rat tried to climb into the canoe and he smashed it with the paddle. What would his namesake say about all of this, and how would even Huck Finn navigate these waters?
He passed a bar, saw a big vid screen through the window and stopped. Although the one remaining broadcast channel operated by the government showed only reruns, old movies, and cartoons, he hoped for some news about the only item of importance—the virus. Paw-Paw said they didn’t dare tell the real news anymore, but he hoped for some hint that things in general might improve.
He tied the canoe to a drainpipe, climbed in the window and stood in a dark corner. The screen lit the weathered faces turned to it.
A red box jiggled on the screen. Holographic letters W-E-R-D danced and changed colors on the package. Patrons shouted at the barkeep and he turned up the volume even though captions moved across the bottom of the screen.
“WERD, WERD, WERD! WERD IS THE WORD! WERD, WERD, WERD!”
It was the same song from the radio, about some product called “WERD,” not “WORD,” as he’d thought. The bar patrons seemed unduly excited at this, but he did a mental shrug and went home.
The next day Paw-Paw brought home one of the red WERD boxes. He opened it, then punched a pill out of a foil pack.
“What is it, Paw-Paw?”
“It’s the cure.”
“The cure for Splats? I thought that was over. I thought we were immune.”
Paw-Paw’s face kind of twisted. Sam thought he’d say something more, but he popped the pill into his mouth and swallowed.
“Got to get some shuteye. Goodnight, boy.”
Paw-Paw patted him on the shoulder, the old man’s version of a goodnight kiss, and went into the bedroom and closed the door. Sam made his bed on the sofa, got under the quilt, and turned off the lamp. In the dark he said,
“What’s the Werd?”
“Shuteye,” the parrot said.
“Shut up!” Sam said.
The bird did.
Thick clouds blew in from the west and the radio predicted several days of severe storms, so he winched the anchor and Paw-Paw started the motor. Fuel was precious and used only for such emergencies. They sheltered the houseboat on the down-river side of a beached tanker.
One stormy night, the squawking of the parrot and the rocking of the flat-bottomed houseboat woke him, and he got up to get a drink of water. Hail pounded the roof. The red box sat on the counter. Paw-Paw normally wouldn’t leave the pills out for him to find, but he opened it. The pills were white with a big, black X on one side. Only three of them remained. That meant Paw-Paw had taken two or three a night. Lightning switched on and off.
At sixty, Paw-Paw complained of the normal aches and pains associated with old people, but otherwise seemed healthy. Still, there was a deepening of the creases in Paw-Paw’s face, perhaps etched by worry, and now all this WERD-induced sleeping. He felt the tingly hand of fear touch his heart, and he smashed the pack of pills with his fist.
The next morning, while Paw-Paw inspected the solar panels on the boat’s roof for hail damage, he asked him what the pills did, and Paw-Paw sat and scratched his head, which meant: “Wait a minute, I’m thinking.”
“They take me back to when I was about your age, out on Bayou Teche. That’s when I met your Maw-Maw. Best time of my life.”
“But it’s not real, Paw-Paw.”
“I know that, boy, but it’s better than real. Better than this real. I guess I’ve let you down, but I’m old and tired. This is your world now, such as it is, and I’m sorry for that.”
He didn’t like his Paw-Paw talking that way, and he lay in the dark a long time that night before he slept. Paw-Paw acted like he didn’t care about him anymore. That wasn’t true, but he sensed Paw-Paw had let go of something, and it chilled him.
One hot, still morning, he and Paw-Paw set out in the canoe in search of supplies. They carried an old radio, a pair of rubber boots, and a hunting knife for barter, plus a small amount of coin. Paw-Paw also carried a loaded shotgun in case of trouble. He’d heard tell of a large cache of goods in a place called the Garden District, but after paddling for an hour, they found only decrepit gables, pointed crumbling rooftops, and church steeples peeking from the endless mirror surface.
Sweating in the heat, they paddled northeast toward the old highway overpass where traders and dealers of anything worthwhile had set up shops. On the roof of a warehouse building, there was a new billboard that read “W E R D” in large red letters. Someone had altered it. It now read “WE R DEAD.”
“Look!”
“Just some punks. Pay it no mind, boy.”
He was going to ask what it meant, but just then a crude home-made barge with a rickety canvas roof passed a little too closely for comfort. On the barge, he saw several dirty young children who were tied up to the posts. Paw-Paw laid the shotgun on his lap in plain sight.
A seedy-looking, filthy man with bloodshot eyes paused his poling, and tipped his straw hat as they passed. He eyed the goods in the canoe.
“Got t’ keep ‘em tied, so as they don’t fall overboard,” he said, indicating the children.
He and Paw-Paw rowed a little faster.
“Don’t believe it for a minute, Sam.”
In late August, the temperature inside the houseboat was extreme despite a breeze on the river. He woke tangled in a sweaty sheet. Judging by the sun in the window, it was late morning. Quiet filled the small rooms of the houseboat. He stumbled to the bedroom and found Paw-Paw on the floor, his eyes staring at the ceiling. He went to his knees beside him. He felt for a pulse. Nothing.
“Why did you do this, Paw-Paw?” Beating his fists on the stilled chest, he cried angry, sad, scared tears. The older generation had made a mess of the world, and he’d just inherited it.
“How could you just give up and leave me? You said I should never give up.”
After a while, he closed Paw-Paw’s eyes, kissed the grizzled cheek, and pulled a sheet over the now untroubled face. He closed the bedroom door, and said, “I forgive you, Paw-Paw.”
In the kitchen, he opened the red box and stared at the pills, the Xs reminding him of creepy dolls with Xs for eyes, dead eyes. He popped one out and dropped it on his tongue, pausing only a second before swallowing. He lay on the sofa. He needed to escape. He needed…
The sun warmed his skin, and he floated on a rubber raft on the aqua blue water in the pool behind their house in Vicksburg. Opening one eye, he spotted Mama stretched out on the lounger reading a book, her tanned skin smooth with oil. Daddy cooked on the grill, wearing Bermuda shorts and a silly apron. The laughter of neighborhood kids playing nearby echoed between the houses.
“I’M THE BIRD! I’M THE BIRD! I’M THE WORD!”
“Shut up!”
He groped for a shoe and threw it. Wide awake, he sat up, shocked to see the inside of the houseboat. Damn. The pool, the sun, and Mama and Daddy had seemed so real, waking felt like losing them again.
He found another package of WERD in the kitchen drawer, and he took two of the pills. Several days passed in a mild fogginess and he lived only for the blue-water dreams of his past life, but he owed Paw-Paw a nice sendoff. He gently wrapped him in bed sheets and twine and dragged him across the floor, wincing when Paw-Paw’s head bumped the door frame. On deck, he repeated a snatch of half remembered prayer, and rolled the body overboard. “Now I lay you down to sleep…” It floated downstream.
He tried to maintain the boat as Paw-Paw had. He checked the rainwater tank, now used only for drinking water as washing clothes and bathing were done in the river. He emptied the slop bucket and cleaned the solar panels. He didn’t bother with the engine, as fuel of any sort couldn’t be found.
For several weeks, he kept to himself, afraid to venture out. He depended on the pills more and more. If he became addicted, it didn’t matter, because without them he’d go crazy. When he ran out of food, he loaded the canoe and headed for the shore.
In the Quarter, floating corpses clogged the canals. “WE R DEAD” in neon spray paint glared from the sides of buildings. The shops were closed. Kids no longer perched on the rooftops. No other craft cruised the canals. Silence clung between the buildings like melting wax; it made his ears ring.
He ventured farther afield with trade goods—a toaster, a couple of books, and a coil of copper wire—to procure food, water, and more pills, but found little. Lately, he’d turned to scavenging. He found an old warehouse that appeared untouched—no broken windows above the water line, that he saw. Tethering the canoe to a second-floor window, he broke it with a crowbar and climbed in, taking a flickering flashlight, a nylon backpack, and the machete.
Seen in the half-light coming through the dirty windows, the cavernous room appeared empty, but he noticed a door ajar on the end wall to his left, about twenty-five yards in. The place stank of ammonia. Pigeons cooed and fluttered in the rafters. Their droppings covered the floor. He stepped carefully.
A much more pungent odor arose at the door. He knew it, as did anyone alive during the plague. He entered a deep blackness, and stood for a moment, the smothering silence like being underwater. He flicked on the flashlight. In a small room he discovered a dried, mummified body, likely a victim of Splats. He stopped and tied his t-shirt around his nose and mouth and avoided gagging by moving quickly. He passed through a warren of rooms with no windows, the beam of the flashlight revealing more bodies. Rats had been at them.
In a kitchen, he found some canned goods. He sat the flashlight on the counter, put his shirt back on, and stuffed the backpack with the cans and a box of salt. A rattling sound came from a pile of trash by the door, and he turned his head slowly. Two red eyes, then four, then six, peered at him from the darkness. Rats.
He pretended calm, estimated the distance to the door at six feet, while more rats moved into the room. He zipped the backpack, and slowly put his arms through the straps, never taking his eyes off the rats. He slipped the machete from his belt.
Emboldened by hunger, the rats crept closer. They were huge, about ten pounds each, and their eyes seemed knowing, aware. They could see in the dark. They were calculating his demise, some moving to the left and some to the right. They were herding him.
His spine froze with fear, and he thought he’d be unable to move. Holding the flashlight in his left hand, he lunged for the door. He felt a nip at a heel and ran. At the door to the next room, more rats waited for him. Sweat ran into his eyes. He blindly swung the machete in an arc as he ran, sliced, bloody rat parts flying everywhere. When he reached the main room, nearly out of breath, hope rallied him, but he glanced back. Hundreds of rats poured through the door, flowing like a dirty grey river.
He slipped and fell face down in the thick coating of bird droppings a few yards from the window. The rats overcame him, covered him, biting, clawing. A rasping scream came from deep inside him. Rats chewed through his clothes, ripping off pieces of flesh. One bit off the tip of his pinky finger. Screaming until hoarse, he let go of the machete and covered his face. When a rat bit his ear, he rolled over and sat up, slipping his arms from the backpack. Somehow, he got to his knees. He refused to die as rat food. His screams became a rallying call. He struggled to stand, and several rats clung to him, their teeth sunk into his clothes and his flesh. Standing at last, he skated and faltered on the slippery bird droppings as he crossed the room. He reached the window, and he threw himself out over the canoe into the filthy water.
He came up gasping with some rats still attached to his legs. He kicked and finally they let go. They popped to the surface, making awful chittering sounds. One clawed its way up his back and sunk its teeth into his shoulder. He ignored the pain and swam to the canoe and climbed in, then untied the canoe and paddled away. One or two had fallen in and he flung them out. The rats still inside clawed at the wall, climbing over each other to get to him, pushing the frontrunners into the water. He wrenched the rat from his back, ripping off more flesh. He cried, then cursed himself for acting like a baby.
At the houseboat, he removed his blood and guano-soaked clothes and threw them overboard. He must clean his body, now so marbled with wounds it resembled beefsteak. He had no antiseptic, so he stood on deck and poured a bottle of diluted household bleach over the bites, screaming all the while. The fumes made him gag. He jumped overboard.
Wrapped in a towel, smelling of bleach, he sat on the sofa. The parrot lay dead on the bottom of the cage. He’d forgotten to feed it or give it water. Maybe the last bird on earth, and he’d let the poor bastard die.
Angry tears gushed down his cheeks, stinging his wounds. He missed his Paw-Paw more than imaginable. They’d had a special bond, strong, born out of love and desperation in equal parts.
With a t-shirt tied around his head to stop the bleeding from his ear, he stepped on deck late that afternoon, the sun at his back, liquid gold rippling on the water. No birds or insects hovered and chirped; only Old Muddy’s rhythmic slaps sounded against the boat. He felt old—older than anyone that still lived, as ancient as the water flowing over the land. The city on the crescent was at last done. He raised the anchor with the wench and the current took the boat. A tiny dot moving on the largest water basin on earth, the boat headed toward the Gulf of Mexico.
He went inside and swallowed the last of the pills, and the world began to melt.
Paw-Paw had said the world belonged to him now, and that included the future. He might start a new life somewhere, a new dream, perhaps find a family who needed a boy. He imagined a mama more suited to life from those days long past—a mama who was a little more comfortable than his, a little thicker in the waist, and a great cook. He even dreamed of her husband, a fisherman, and their life together on the river as a family.
Through the night, the boat carried him south on winding muddy water dreams.
Copyright 2023. Dark Peninsula Press.
Published in: Negative Space 2: A Return to Survival Horror (2023)