Chris woke up next to Joey one morning and noticed that the air felt different. It was horribly, pressingly hot, and they were glued together with sticky sweat. They'd kicked the sheet off sometime in the night, and lay naked in the still, stifling air, panting like sick dogs. Joey was still asleep, but he looked sickly sallow, the strange, broken light painting his skin grey-yellow like old cheese. Chris shook his head, but it felt as if he'd been dreaming about violence, and was still walking with one foot in the nightmare.
He tore his skin off Joey's, quickly, like he'd tear off a band-aid, and rolled out of bed. Sweat ran in tickling trickles down his back, and the room smelled dank and musty, like long dead things slowly turning to jelly in damp crevices.
He padded into the hall and looked into the room just across. Justin was whimpering and mumbling in his sleep, twisting his head from side to side. He was naked, and his skin had the dull sheen of tarnished silver. The light coming through the dirty window seemed hungry and diseased, and there were unearthly shapes shifting and playing over Justin's body, like living tattoos. Lance lay still next to him, pale and so much like a corpse that Chris wanted to shake him to make sure he was still breathing. He didn't, just turned away and walked down the hall.
Before he had taken two steps on the creaking boards, he heard Justin's voice behind him, very clearly saying, "it's coming. It's coming," with a deep urgency that made Chris' skin crawl and shudder.
"Fucking freakshow," he muttered, just to hear his own voice. He hugged himself and realised that he was butt naked, hadn't even thought to pull on a pair of jeans. "Fuck," he said, but didn't bother turning back to get dressed.
The radio in the living room was quiet, perhaps for the first time in weeks. In fact, it wasn't just quiet, it was turned off, and JC was nowhere to be seen. His blanket and pillow were in an untidy head on the floor, as if he'd woken suddenly and thrown them off. He'd taken to sleeping on the sofa, leaving his room at the end of the hall to the rodents. Not that he ever actually slept, just lay in a half-raving stupor every once in a while for just long enough to regain basic brain functions. He'd started looking a little scary lately, almost manic, with dark, hollow eyes and trembling hands. Insane in a much more destructive way than Justin, who just whispered nonsense and drew strange, beautiful designs on the walls in crayon.
Chris walked through the quiet house, through the back door into the way station, and out the front door. And stopped, puzzled, because it suddenly occurred to him that it was light out, daylight, the sun high in the sky, and everyone was still asleep. It didn't feel like morning, it felt like late afternoon sliding into evening, and everyone was asleep.
Of course he couldn't remember for sure, but Chris had a feeling that he'd never had quite this much sex before in his life. Maybe it was because of the emptiness in his head; he was trying to fill the hollows with new memories. He and Joey spent a lot of time just sitting in the chairs outside the door, looking at the desert and the silent pumps and the tumbleweeds rolling lazily down the empty road, but that was just because they were drained and sore and wrung out from fucking like rabid weasels. They didn't have much to do out here anyway. JC and Lance were always bent over the radio like they were feeding off it, techno geeks in dirty, neglected clothes, their pupils growing larger and eating the colour from their eyes after days on end in the murky half-light of the living room. Justin wasn't much in the way of company, although he was amusing to watch when he got some idea into his addled head, like the time he decided to dance on the roof and Chris couldn't get Lance to climb up after him. Chris didn't like heights, but he didn't want to ask Joey. It wasn't Joey's business, and Chris didn't believe in delegating stuff unnecessarily. So he climbed and tried not to look down.
After he got Justin dragged down, kicking and screaming, he was pumped with adrenaline and zinging with energy, and he grabbed Joey by the scruff of his neck and pushed him into their room, kicked the door shut and said, "fuck me now or pay the price." Joey was obliging, and they were at it for hours, tirelessly, until every joint and muscle screamed in Chris' body, and Joey was slick and wet and panting like a steam engine.
Some nights, he woke up in the dark and rolled on top of Joey and kissed him breathless and awake, and sometimes it was as good as fucking to just make out like horny, confused teenagers in the creaky bed. Joey was large and soft and comfortable to lie on top of or under or next to, and he whispered endearments in Chris' ear and never mentioned Christina.
Justin and Lance's room was across the hall, and no one ever closed the doors, and sometimes they fucked to the sound of Justin moaning and whimpering, and the beds hit the walls in counterpoint. Once, just as Chris was coming, Justin screeched like a banshee and there was a crash of glass breaking, and Chris almost spit out his own heart, or that was what it felt like, because it was in his mouth, and he came like a fucking rocket launching, and then he crawled off the bed and ran, sweaty and naked and messy with all sorts of goop, into the hall. Justin lay on the floor by the bed, on his back, and the scattered slivers of a broken water glass had cut deep into his arms and back. The blood looked black and thick on the pale-worn wood of the floor.
"What the fuck are you doing?" Chris yelled at Lance, who was sitting in the bed with his hair sticking up in every direction.
"He fell," Lance said. Justin got up slowly, shaking his head.
"I fell," he mumbled, poking at his wounds, smearing the blood around on his skin.
"Jesus," Chris said. He was starting to get cold, standing here naked, with sweat drying on his back. "Try to keep him alive, Lance."
Lance just threw him an evil glance and got up and held Justin's hands away from his body. "Don't poke at them, Justin," he said sharply, "you'll make it worse."
Chris went back to Joey.
JC stood outside the door, his wild mane of hair flying in the wind. He was dressed in black, dusty jeans and a black shirt that Chris hadn't seen before. The .45 hung low on his hip. He looked like ... someone out of a ... something that was in the blank spot in Chris' memory. It tugged on his mind, though, and grew claws and tore at him. JC didn't move.
"Hey," Chris said, and then JC did move, snapped around and drew the gun in a fluid, practised move, so fast that Chris didn't even have time to put his hands up before he was looking down the barrel. "Hey!" he squeaked, and he saw, very clearly and in treacly slow motion, JC's finger tighten on the trigger.
JC's eyes cleared suddenly, and he blinked twice and shuddered. Reholstered the gun. "Chris," he said.
"Yeah. Jesus. What the fuck, man?" Chris muttered, "getting a little fucking jumpy, JC, you're gonna fucking kill someone--" and he realised he was babbling and cut it short.
"Something's different," JC said. His hair fluttered against his forehead, stuck in the sweat in places, stood up in places. It was getting really long. Everyone else kept theirs cut short, but JC seemed to like the lion style. Well, everyone but Justin, whose curls had passed the afro stage and now looked like an upside-down floor mop of tangled, dirty-golden corkscrews.
"The air," Chris said. "It's--"
"Humid," JC said. "That's just. Wrong." And there it was, the wrongness. The air was like a warm, wet blanket around them, pressing, damp, heavy with water. No more arid desert air that scorched the inside of your throat and made you taste dust five seconds after you'd had a glass of water. This was like breathing underwater, pulling in green-brown lake water with algae and humus and god-knows-what, like drowning in air.
"Wrong," Chris echoed, and noticed that even his own voice sounded different, as if the air carried it differently. Dull and flat and muted, like a piano played with the sordino depressed.
"I'm scared," JC said softly, miserably. The wind was picking up, bringing an odd smell on its wings. Rotting seaweed and fish and bird shit. An ocean smell, a bad ocean smell. The desert seemed unreal, as if the picture didn't match the soundtrack. There was a distant rumble growing, like waves breaking, or large buildings toppling over somewhere miles away.
"I'm gonna go make breakfast," Chris said, even though he wasn't hungry. He needed to do something or he'd just crumple and cry or start breaking things. His skin still wanted to crawl off his bones and slither away. It was hot, but he felt chilly and damp, with goosebumps springing up in knobbly little rows on his bare chest and belly.
"You're naked," JC pointed out suddenly.
"Your point?" Chris muttered and went back inside. JC didn't follow him.
When it got too boring to live, Chris tried to build things. Not the way JC built things, not little technical shit with wires and electricity and tiny components that looked like the innards of a very small cybernetic animal. No, he tried building, say, a doghouse. Not that they had a dog (something Joey was more than willing to point out, gleefully willing, in fact. "Shut up, or you're sleeping in it," Chris finally growled), but that shit didn't matter. A hammer and nails and a saw, and he was all set. Idleness made him antsy, and really, you couldn't have sex every second of the day, or drink beer forever. He built a dog house that ended up a little skewed, but fully functional, insofar as you can call a dog house functional. It was big enough to house a-- a. A very big dog, and how fucking annoying was it that he could remember what very big dogs looked like, but not what they were called? He could see it in front of him: sleekly muscular, standing in a rigid pose with sun gleaming off its sides. It had cropped ears and if it stood on its hind legs, it was taller than him.
Justin liked the doghouse, and actually crawled into it and fell asleep.
"Jesus, kid," Chris mumbled and watched him snore on blithely, curled around himself much like a dog. It must have been horrendously hot in that cramped little space, but Justin didn't seem to get hot anymore. He could sit in the sun for hours, and never even break a sweat. Sometimes Chris wondered if he was still human.
"He'll be okay," Joey said behind him, wrapping steady arms around him. The wind was coming in from the south, whipping up little bursts of stinging dust that stuck in the sweat on their arms and backs and made their eyes smart and their mouths dry.
"Will we?" Chris said before he could stop himself. "Fuck it, I'm getting a beer."
Two things happened while Chris was boiling water for coffee.
JC turned on the radio, and there were screaming voices coming out of it, screaming incoherently, and then gunshots and silence. Next, a familiar voice, Dacey's, yelled, "we're shutting it down! we're shutting this down now!" There was nothing after that.
The other thing was the crack and rolling echo of thunder. Chris almost dropped the cup he was holding, and he heard a thud of something hitting the floor out in the living room.
"What the hell?" JC yelled through the door.
"That was thunder--" Chris started, and then it crack-rumbled again, like a giant coughing just behind the mountains.
"But..." JC started, cut off, tried again, "But it's ... thunder."
The water boiled, and Chris made coffee. Instant, of course, but it was a lot better than no coffee at all.
Joey showed up, yawning and bed-haired. "What the hell's that racket?" he muttered, grabbing a cup and gulping down a couple of mouthfuls before even sitting down.
"Thunder," JC said. He looked skittish and tense. Chris thought he actually saw him rolling his eyes in the strange light.
"Shit, have you looked out the window?" Lance said, coming into the kitchen.
They all did, and the sky was turning green. There were rolling clouds, and the light was broken in green and brown and yellow, and the sky wasn't blue anymore.
"Am I crazy when I say it looks like a thunderstorm?" Chris said into the stunned silence.
Justin tiptoed in, impossibly pretty in a long, white silk bathrobe and his hair washed and combed and standing out around his head like a curly, golden halo. "Rain must fall, a little rain must fall, into every life a little rain must fall," he sang and swirled around, the robe floating around him like a cloud.
They all sat down around the table, drank coffee and watched the sky darkening to deep green and then gunmetal grey and finally black. The wind was tearing at the roof, banging doors in the outhouses, throwing sand against the windows.
Joey touched Chris' hand under the table, and then the rain hit.
The nights were cold and clear and dry out here. The sky arched endlessly over them, and the constellations were familiar but nameless. Chris was sometimes too restless to sleep, and he left Joey in the bed and went outside and stared at the sky for a while. Before the radio started filling his brain with nonsense syllables and secret codes and rows and rows of coordinates, JC would sometimes join him, lean back and look at the same stars. Sometimes, Chris thought, it seemed like JC wanted to talk. He never did, though, and Chris was almost afraid to ask. JC had secrets. It was written all over his pinched, bony face.
After Justin went batty, he was fascinated with the stars, too, and he would curl up with his head in Chris' lap and laugh and point at the stars and make up names for them. He named them for people Chris knew and people Chris thought he should know but didn't. "Those ones over there are the Backstreet Boys," Justin said and giggled gleefully, "they glower and pout and think they're cool."
"Sure, kid," Chris said, and felt a twisting in his guts and wondered if he was going to be sick. He looked up at the newly named Backstreet Boys constellation and tried to remember until his head felt like nothing but one big pounding headache. He had to push Justin aside and run off and vomit in a bush.
"We're all alone out here," Justin said when he got back.
"Yeah," Chris whispered with numb lips.
It rained for hours. The roof started leaking, and they placed out pots and pans and buckets under the drips. The cracks of thunder were ear-shattering, and they sat cowering in the living room sofa, all of them in a pile with their hands over their ears. Justin had buried his head in Lance's lap, and he was whimpering like a puppy.
The rain kept coming, and they fell asleep right there, to the sound of thunder and the roof rattling under the onslaught.
It was quiet when Chris woke up. He felt ... good. The air felt easy to breathe, fresh somehow. He disentangled himself from Joey and JC and walked over to look out the window.
The world was clean. He had to go outside to look, because it was hard to see everything though the window. The desert looked new and strange and shiny. There was no dust anywhere.
"It's not right," JC said, and Chris jumped.
"Jesus Christ, don't creep up on me," he said, but he was too overwhelmed to be pissy this morning.
"This is a desert," JC said insistently. "It's a desert for a reason. The mountains and ... I don't know, prevailing winds, the turning of the planet, I can't remember, but it shouldn't be... It shouldn't rain like that here."
"So? I'm happy, man. I can fucking breathe. Smell that? Fresh and nice."
"But it's not right. It feels like..." but he trailed off and refused to go on.
It only took a week for the desert to bloom. It was magic, Chris thought. Where did it all come from? There was a spring-green sheen to everything, and he just wanted to run out onto the plain and scream with joy.
JC looked at him with dark eyes, and Justin wouldn't go outside at all. Freaks, Chris thought, and went to see if Joey wanted to come with him.
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