Pause, then the bruise time

By Larry Koch

They call it the pause.

For a moment the world pauses, freezes in place. When it begins again, all but a handful of humans are dead. The few survivors of this cataclysmic mystery must first find each other and then work to create a new world in the ruins of the old.

They come from all walks of life in the previous world. And now, after the pause, and in what they will come to call the bruise time, they have to work together and learn to trust each other enough to stay alive.

But one among them holds a secret so terrible, a darkness so deep, that not even the pause could keep it from rising up into the new world.

And now, as they fight to find their way in the bruise time, this secret could mean the end of the new beginning for all of them.

A cross between The Stand and Dexter, "pause, then the bruise time" is a dark, sexy, violent and often comic exploration of the human will to survive and the deepest, darkest depths of the human heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Larry Koch
• Release date: Sep 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301034086

Book preview

Chapter 1.

For the first two minutes I didn't really notice anything different. That may sound odd, considering that the world as it was had effectively come to an end. But it's what happened. I was coming to the end of my shift and trying to balance my cash register. It was a nickel off, and I knew that I wasn't going to find the nickel in the coiled strips of printer tapes. I was going to dig a nickel out of my own pocket and drop it in the till, just like I always did. I suspect my boss, the fat bastard that owned the gas station I worked at, intentionally programmed the registers to show a shortage at the end of every shift. Anywhere from a nickel to a quarter. Over the course of a year, each employee probably put twenty bucks into the prick's pocket to avoid staying even five minutes past shift end to find the difference.

So I was behind the counter with my head down. There was nobody inside deciding on a drink from the cooler or carefully selecting lottery numbers at the small kiosk in back of the store. Nobody waiting to pay for gas or oil. Outside at the pump islands there was an older blond lady filling up a new Accord. Tim from the tire shop next door was standing outside his business talking on his cell phone, flicking ash from the end of his ever-present cigarette. On the far side of the pumps there was a police car and two cops standing near it looking toward the station. The cops actually seemed to be looking right at me through the glass.

That was the scene as it was when I looked down at the register printout.

I looked up. Blond lady was bent slightly at the rear of her car, head tilted, eyes fixed on the numbers on the pump. Tim with phone to his ear, flicking ash from his cigarette. Two cops by their car, staring at me I was sure of it.

Back to the printout. Damn nickel. One nickel out. I was tempted to stay this time, to completely tally the receipts from my shift and then present it all to the boss and demand he adjust the obviously malfunctioning register. Even as I thought this, my left hand snuck into my pocket and touched two quarters and a dime. Dime into the till, nickel of change into my pocket, and home in time for canned soup and a Simpson's repeat on The Comedy Network.

I looked up. Blond lady. Tim. Ash being flicked. Still being flicked. Two cops, heads pointed in my direction. I squinted. I looked closer at everything. Tim wasn't moving. Not at all. His mouth was open, caught in mid-word. The blond lady was as she had been, slightly bent, eyes on the pump numbers. The cops hadn’t so much as twitched since I’d last tried not to let them notice me noticing them.

I realized then that there was no sound. None at all. I looked over at the pump control panel. The numbers were locked. She'd pumped a little over seven dollars into the Accord. The fluorescent lights in the store weren't humming because they were off. The drink cooler was quiet, not buzzing faintly as it usually did.

It was all wrong. Deeply, fundamentally wrong. I felt the wrongness inside, not confined to a single area or organ but rippling almost gently across every part of me. A sense - a knowing - that everything had changed. Of course, if anyone had been around to ask me what was wrong, why was I looking so perplexed, why was I standing there with my thumb up my ass, all I would have been able to tell them would have been I don’t know. Because I didn’t know, I felt, and feeling won’t hold up in court.

But if you’re reading this, then you’ve got your own memory of how the first two minutes played out. Your own sense of how badly the world had skewed off balance. And I’d be willing to bet that if anyone had asked you in those first two minutes what was wrong, what’s up with the ass/ thumb combo, I don’t know is all you could have offered.

I put down my receipts and my pen. I kept my eyes alternately on Tim, the blond lady, and the cops. I went from behind the counter to the front door. I stopped there and watched them. They weren't moving. Not one of them. Not at all.

I looked past the pumps to the road. There were cars. Plenty of them. Just out of sight past Tim's tire shop was an intersection, and I could probably have convinced myself that they were all waiting for the light to turn. The light would have to be malfunctioning, in fact, because the red light line up never reached far back enough to be visible from the station.

Except that cars going the opposite direction were also stopped. I looked closer and could see people inside those cars. Some with a lazy hand on the wheel, head back, putting up with morning traffic. Others talking on cell phones. One lady with her neck bent so she could use the rear view mirror to apply lipstick.

They were all frozen.

I pushed the station door open and stepped into a silence so complete it frightened me in the same place that mastodons must have frightened my long ago ancestors. It was a primal feeling.

Hello? I called out to the blond lady. I took a step closer to her. Hello? Hey!

She didn't answer. I didn't know it then, but it would be over two weeks before I would hear another live human voice.

Chapter 2.

Nobody knows how it happened or why. Maybe nobody will ever know the answers to those questions. Not me, for certain. I'm not that sort of thinker. Maybe once I was capable of wrapping my mind around something so huge, but now I think about food and shelter and I try my hardest not to remember the way things were before the pause.

That's what we call it. The pause. Or is it The Pause, with capital letters to give it more weight? It doesn't really matter, I suppose, but I reckon it's simply the pause. It doesn't need any more weight than it already has because it changed the world. It ended the world, really, unless something happens to reverse where we are now. We. I wonder how many beating hearts we includes?

On June 7 at around nine in the morning, things just paused. The whole world was a frozen image on a huge TV screen. One moment people were walking and talking and driving and laughing and making money and making love and making pancakes. The very next moment, less time than it takes to blink, just about everybody on the planet paused. Frozen in place as they were when it happened. Mid-walk, mid-talk, mid-flapjack flip, mid-everything. The flapjacks froze in the air along with anything else that was up there when the world paused, and when things got going again they finished their flipping and landed wherever they landed. But the cook stood there with pan in hand, eyes on the spot in the air where the pancake had been at the moment of change. The blond lady never finished filling her tank. Tim never finished flicking the ash from his cigarette.

For the first few hours and days those of us that were still able to walk and talk and make pancakes if we so desired thought the others were literally frozen. Suspended animation like in the movies. But it was summer and the heat soon brought to my attention that these people were not suspended at all. They were dead, frozen right through and that meant no beating hearts to keep the blood flowing, no synapses firing, no lungs delivering oxygen to the body. No life. They started to rot within hours in the stifling summer heat. The air stank of decay, and the few of us that could smell it realized we were in some sort of mess.

A moment here to talk about my gag reflex. I inherited it from my father. To say it’s hair-trigger would be an understatement. I can probably best explain with a story. When I was little, five or so, my father and a neighbor went in together on half a cow. The intent was to save loads of cash by buying it whole, chopping it up in our basement, and stocking the freezer for winter.

So, one Saturday morning my father and our neighbor hauled this huge, brown-paper-wrapped slab into the house, both of them panting and grunting from the weight. My mother had laid newspaper down from the back door to the basement door, and they followed this trail of world events down into the cold of the cellar. I watched from a discreet distance, my mother having told me several times to stay out of the way. It was serious business.

I could hear them down there.

Hold on, dad said.

Ouch, the neighbor said.

Wait, dad said.

Ouch, the neighbor said.

Ow, shit, dad said.

Then quiet. The sound of paper being torn, the half cow being unwrapped. Deep breaths.

That smells, dad said.

I moved down the hallway to the open basement door. I couldn’t see them down there. I could only hear them.

This one? dad said.

Should do, the neighbor said.

Check the instructions, dad said.

Yeah, the neighbor said.

Quiet again for a moment. I crouched down on my haunches, listening. Mom was in the kitchen. I could hear her moving around.

Okay, dad said.

Okay then, the neighbor said.

I think, when there is an even remote chance that a five year old is within earshot of a cow being sawed into pieces there should be a fire in the hole type standard warning. Saw on the flesh! called out at a decent volume would do. Even Cover your ears! would do. But there isn’t that sort of standard. There should be, but there isn’t.

I heard a sound like scrik scrik scrik. A saw cutting into flesh and gristle and scraping across bone.

I heard my dad go urp. Then urp again. I knew that sound. It was the sound of gagging. I imagined the cow as the saw cut into it. In my mind’s eye I could see my dad retching, trying not to puke. The mental image was too much and I started to gag. I made a sound a lot like urgh.

My mom used to tell this story with laugh-tears in her eyes. She called it the Cow Barf Symphony.

Scrik, scrik, scrik.

Urp urp.

Urgh urgh.

Scrik scrik.

Urp.

Urgh.

Scrik. Urp. Urgh. Scrik. Urp. Urgh. Scrik urp urgh.

This went on until I heard from below;

Scrik scrik.

Urp.

Splat.

Jesus! the neighbor said. You got my shoes!

My stomach gave a mighty, rebellious heave and then my breakfast came rushing up and splashing onto the faded blue wooden stairs leading down into the basement.

John! my mother said, and none too kindly. Truthfully, I’ve left her part of the Cow Barf Symphony out until now. But between all the Urp’s and Urgh’s and Scrik scrik’s, every minute or so my mother would say John, come away from there before you make yourself sick and John, come outside with me and let your father work and, perhaps most firmly of all that she said, John, if you throw up I’m going to be very angry that you didn’t listen to me, do you understand?

My mother dragged me roughly away from the top of the stairs. My last fleeting glimpse into the basement was a brown shoe with my father’s vomit all over it being scraped with blood-smeared brown wrapping paper. Urgh!

So when I tell you that I spent the first few days after the pause alternating between puking and trying not to puke, you know I’m not just blowing smoke up your dress. The air in those first hundred hours or so was wet and thick with greasy decay. I imagined it as molecules of rot clinging to molecules of everything else, sneaking into every possible crack and cranny and crevice. No matter where I tried to catch a breath of air less foul, there it was.

I remembered Grade 10 science with Mrs. Thompson. She told us, in her high nasal whine of a voice, that smell is particulate. What that means is, when you smell something it’s because a microscopic piece of whatever you’re smelling has actually found it’s way into your nose.

Microscopic bits of dead people.

I puked in the bathroom. I puked in the kitchen. I puked when I opened the window and then again when I got myself under control and tried to close it again. I dry heaved when I had nothing in my stomach.

It wasn’t a very good time.

I don’t know if I got used to the smells or if they got less severe. By the afternoon of day three I puked less but still dry heaved a lot. By day four I was only dry heaving. Day five was a good day on the gag reflex front. Considering all that came afterward, all that I got used to after the end of the world, and considering also all that I was able to get used to before the pause, I think I probably just became accustomed to the smell and was able to breathe past it.

It took longer to get used to the view from my window, of the street full of rotting bodies.

If there were more of us, there might have been violence, looting, panic in the streets. But now, with time and knowledge between now and then, I know there weren’t enough people left to form a decent mob, let alone go on a looting rampage. Gathering food, water, fire wood and the assorted necessities for this new world was easy and safe. In my old neighborhood I had three mega-size grocery stores to plunder and no competition. In those days I rarely kept more food in my apartment than I needed.

Within a week, though, it became apparent that not just people had paused. Power was gone. Nothing left. Cars didn't start, clocks didn't run whether plugged into walls or with batteries in them, cell phones were dead. It all paused, you see? All of it, except for the few of us that remained to witness the end of things as they were and, hopefully, the beginning of something new. What that new something might be, I still have no idea. But the grocery store meats and other perishables… well, they perished. From that point on it was canned goods, bottled water, stuff like that. I suppose it's fortunate that the world paused when it did. The grocery stores I frequented carried a variety of fresh produce, meat, milk, all that sort of thing. But they also carried all the same things in cans or in powdered form. So, really, once the fresh stuff went south there was no need to worry.

Tell you the truth, in those first few weeks I didn't mind the pause at all. I didn't much care for the puking, as I’ve said. But even that I sort of got used to. It may sound cold to say something like that, but it's the truth. A human being can get used to just about anything, rotting bodies included. Before the pause I worked a job that often left me short for rent and groceries at the end of each month. After the pause there was no need for money and I never wanted for food. No landlord banging on my door on the first of the month demanding payment and no grocery store decisions on whether to spend my last few bucks on milk or bread. I didn't have to worry about balancing the register. That sucker was unbalanced for all time. Forever a nickel short.

I think my life before the pause had a lot to do with how I accepted the world afterward. I had few friends, a job I hated, a history of poor decisions and regrets. This was a chance to start new. Completely fresh. Except for the rotting bodies, this was a world I liked. The initial pause seemed to have been just that. Things that were working, things that were in motion when it happened, they all stopped. Some things never started up again. The power never came back on, for instance. Electricity at the flip of a switch remained a pre-pause thing. And most of the people, of course. They remained pre-pause as well. They were no longer even memories, most of them, because there were few enough survivors that entire social circles had been eliminated. But other things were working again. Replace the batteries in a flashlight and it would work again, as long as the batteries came from a new package. Try to simply switch batteries from one light to another and it didn't work.

Cars were odd. None of them worked, whether they’d been in motion when the pause happened or not. The ones that were moving and got paused stayed where they were. Gear shifts remained in drive or reverse, but the cars emerged from the end of the world still and unmoving. I suppose that was a good thing. If things had simply picked up where they left off after the pause, there would have been thousands of four-wheeled rockets colliding with dead hands at the controls. Bodies would have been ripped apart, torn to pieces, crushed in the wreckage. Better that they simply stopped and didn’t pick up again at full speed. The carnage would have been unbearable, I think. I had a picture in my head of wreck sites strewn with heads, arms, internal organs. Not something I necessarily wanted to witness.

I found a small TV with built in DVD player that ran on batteries. Found isn't really accurate, of course. It was on the shelf at Wal-Mart. But since everybody that might have tried to stop me taking it was dead, it also hardly seems right to say I stole it either. I acquired it. That'll have to do. That and a whole grocery cart full of DVDs that I pushed home, carefully winding my way through the cars and bodies. It worked fine, and I laid in a stock of batteries that would take months if not years to exhaust.

It never occurred to me to be hopeless. Maybe I should have been. Maybe not hopeless, but at least not as content with a dying or maybe completely dead world as I was. Maybe if I'd never allied myself with the other survivors I'd still be back at my little apartment with my canned goods and my battery operated entertainment system, watching DVD's and listening to music and reading books pilfered from the library two blocks down and one over. I know eventually the batteries would have run out and scavenging new ones would become impossible as they all split and leaked their acidic guts. And eventually I'd have seen all the DVD's I wanted to see and would resort to chick flicks and documentaries about dysfunctional families. And maybe I'd even get tired of corned beef from a can (but I doubt this as I have become something of a gourmet chef when it comes to canned goods and most times people aren't even aware today's can is the same as yesterday’s, just prepared differently).

Maybe all those things would have happened and I'd have been forced to face the reality of the pause and what it meant to humanity. But I might have had months, maybe even a year,