The Disappearing and Other Short Stories of the Macabre

By Gerald F. Heaney

This is a book of short stories the longest being The Disappearing followed by ten others. The Disappearing is a story of horrific disaster that takes place in the near future, a road map to what could come. All the stories range from the super natural to science fiction. In contrary to the generally dark theme Me and You and Baby Makes Three is told in a light hearted measure that ends with a twist,(of course.) These stories are best read in the light of day and not at night in a darkened room, suggested merely for your own safety.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Nov 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483474649

Gerald F. Heaney

Gerald Heaney has been writing for most of his adult life. His fondness for intrigue and the macabre has led him down some pretty dark corridors of time and space. He loves a story that ends in a twist as you will find in these stories within. He lives in a small town in Michigan with his wife Christine and his cat Shadow.

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HEANEY

Copyright © 2017 Gerald F. Heaney.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7465-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-7464-9 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 10/18/2017

A PACK OF CAMELS

The boss said I had two loads of flat coal to deliver to the Eastside Refinery before noon. I knew right then and there that my morning was in the toilet and that all that was left to be done was for someone to flush the rest of the day down to finish it off. Coal, you’ve gotta understand, started out as the back bone of the world’s heating needs. Then came oil, then gas and nuclear power. Then came the great wars and here I am jamming eight hours into four to get the black booty to market. Einstein once said that Before God we are all equally wise and equally foolish. Little did the old boy know how the last part of that statement would come into play in the twenty-first century. It was as if we couldn’t wait to blow each other up. Like an addiction, it bred on itself until every damn button in their arsenal of buttons that could be pushed was pushed. Whole countries just wiped off the map in one final sweep, and when the dust cleared all that was left were guys like me, half human, half nuts and bolts.

Hey don’t get me wrong, at least I’m top side and working; true I ain’t getting through any metal detectors without setting a world record in bells and whistles but the bottom line is I’m here to tell the story and considering the options that ain’t all bad.

About a month ago I started out on a day like any other day, or at least that’s what I thought at the time. My dog Ralph French kissed me farewell at the door of my one room shack down by an overpass where the expressways used to run through. I was making my way across the rubble that had become pretty much the general landscape when I came upon what looked like a pack of cigarettes buried in the debris. I stopped dead in my tracks with disbelief. Could it really be? I looked carefully around, side to side and back to front to see if anyone was watching me. Then I carefully looked up at the high tower where the cameras were mounted. I knew that they could see me; they saw every move that everyone made no matter how hard you tried to hide. I dared not reach down and retrieve it, not then, not in broad daylight. No, I decided I would wait until nightfall when I got off work and I was on my way home. That was my plan and I gotta tell you that waiting for it to take place equated to what seemed like the longest day of my life.

All that day I contemplated on what it would be like to have a smoke again; to watch as the silvery slivers of smoke drifted upwards. To enjoy once again the visual aspects of those ghostly tendrils disappearing as they reached the ceiling of my tiny shack. Of course my lungs would ache in delicious repentance of the blatant act against the State. The Good Guys of course would have my ass for sure if I was caught, oh yeah that’s what they call themselves now, at least in this part of the world, The Good Guys. In others they’re known as The Redeemers, or The Justifiers, but in the end it all amounts to the same thing.

I guess they probably did think of themselves as Good Guys in the beginning, just like any revolutionary does at first, gallant freedom fighters bound to make things right again. Things were going to be different this time for sure, that’s what they said. But of course they would have to clean things up; get rid of certain vices, certain unmentionables that caused the worldwide corruption that led to Armageddon and the fall of mankind. But that was long ago, now all that’s left is the need for coal, coal is everything, coal is the new savior. It’s scraped, dug, mined, shoveled, burned and everything else short of worshiped. The oil wells that once so dominated the world’s energy markets are either dried up or have remained contaminated from the limited nuclear war that was waged over them; which in turn led to nuclear power being outlawed by the Good Guys shortly after. Even the trees that once so lushly filled the forest were all but devastated, now all that is left is coal. Coal to heat with, to cook with, to power the equipment used to extract it, and the trucks needed to haul it. Coal had become once again the source of all energy and the Good Guys controlled every last chunk of it. They used it like a tool to manipulate, to influence and control the individual. Those that were fortunate had plenty, those that were not had little or none. Of course it was not supposed to go that way, not at all, and in the beginning it didn’t. There was a feeling of well-being abound and an abundance of fairness for a while but like all well intentioned human endeavors, corruption and greed seeped in and eventually won out in the end.

As for me, right now I could care less about my ration of coal from The Good Guys. The weather’s not that bad yet and I happen to know that somewhere out in the rubble lies a prize worth all the coal in Mozambique. Yeah it could very well be empty but due to its squared off edges it’s my guess that it’s not. It probably belonged to some poor sap that lived in the tenements that used to stand there. A tenement that once housed another type of pack, a pack of poor unfortunates that was no doubt in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The end of my shift came and all the way home I’m thinking about those Camels. About taking a nice long drag and not letting any bit of that cancer-causing agent escape my lungs, at least not until they had their fun. And then I’m thinking about the risk and whether that pack’s nothing more than a plant put there by the Righteous Police to catch a poor weak sucker like me. I’ve heard of such things from time to time. Of course it’s forbidden to talk too much about it, but everyone knows that The Good Guys leak out just enough scary info to keep the population in line. But what the hey, it don’t hurt none to dream a little, to maybe wish things could be a little different than they are.

I look up and see a camera that’s mounted on a pole to my left and think how it would be if there weren’t any damn cameras. How it would feel to be one of the unseen. I imagine myself walking up to a Dumpster and taking a leak just because I had to go, or better yet, just because I felt like it. I look around, as if someone is listening to my thoughts, I know they aren’t but I look anyway. Hey, just yesterday I heard through the grapevine that they executed a man and his family last week because they said he had arranged the vegetables in his street market in a somewhat seductive manner. They said he had a carrot standing up between two tomatoes. So me, thinking about a lousy pack of Camels, that in all probability is empty, might seem inconsequential to some, but considering a carrot and two tomatoes and what it cost that other poor sucker, I don’t think I’m so far out of line.

A week now I’ve been walking past that spot where I spotted the pack of Camels, sometimes varying my steps so as not to look too obvious. Each time I see the gleam of the wrapper or I should say what’s left of it I think, damn it! Today’s the day, but in the end I just walk by, cursing myself for being such a rotten coward. I could bend down and act as if I’m tying my shoe; I could leave one of them untied at work. Who’d be the wiser? But somehow I haven’t been able to muster up the nerve, not yet, and then I’ll say to myself that there’s always tomorrow.

I live in a shack but it ain’t bad, not as shacks go; I got an old Porta-John out back that I scrounged from a dumpsite nearby. The Good Guys provide plenty of candles so I’m never hurtin’ for light; I get my water from the general tap so I’m good there too. Life ain’t half bad considering, though I gotta admit it was a lot less stressful before I spotted those Camels. Yesterday on the way home I saw one of the wanderers walking right smack over the spot where my Camel pack’s partially buried. I stopped dead in my tracks and waited to see what he was going to do and sure enough that sucker put the brakes on right there atop my precious cargo. Did he see it? Or was it just a coincidence, him stopping in that particular spot. After a bit he moved on, but I knew right then and there that time was limited.

Week Three… I’ve been diligent. I keep an eye out for any wanderers that travel through the area best I can. I take a chance at least once a week and check out the site. But yesterday it started to snow and who knows what tomorrow’s going to bring.

Week Four… Temperature dropped like crazy, the demand for coal went through the roof in anticipation of what’s to come. The Good Guys got me working doubles damn near every day and it’s getting harder and harder to check on my prize, who knows, maybe it’s for the best.

Week Six…. Snowing every day now, damn shame, damn shame, guess I’ll have to wait till spring. Yeah that’s the ticket: spring, flowers blooming, buds bursting and me, sitting here in my shack smoking one of those Camels, watching the smoke disappearing before my very eyes.

The End

THE DISAPPEARING

Sometime in the future.

CHAPTER 1

Marvin Little closed his eyes and tried to remember what his life was like before the disappearing. In his mind’s eye he saw people, some fat, some skinny, tall and short, good looking and not so good looking. They were always in great numbers to start with, sometimes on the streets of a busy city, or at the State Fair where he liked to go with his wife Molly. He would examine the faces of the women as they passed by, too much makeup on this one, but not enough on the one behind. He’d watch the children perched atop skateboards as they’d race down the hill at the foot of his street and listen to their cries of excitement as they reached critical speed. Then turning he would laugh at a flock of young boys strutting down the avenue with their drooping pants pasted precariously to their hips and their shoulder sized juke-boxes blasting out tunes, too contemporary for his taste.

But always, before opening his eyes, he would see his Molly rocking lazily along on the front porch swing with him drinking beer and telling jokes that he picked up at work. He would dwell on Molly’s face until it began to blur and eventually fade away. Lately, to his horror, he noticed that the image was beginning to fade even faster, and he feared that in time he would not be able to remember it at all. All that remained of that grizzly morning was some dried up powder and an empty nightgown.

After wrestling himself from bed he stepped out into the chilly morning air allowing the front door screen to bang loudly behind him. Any noise, in this desert of silence that had become his world, was welcomed and sought after. He then walked to the edge of the top step, the cool air raising goose bumps on his near naked body and looked up and down the deserted street. In his gut he could feel the rumblings of built up gas about to escape, the aftermath of the can of Campbell’s beans he had eaten the night before. Hiking up his left leg he bared down until he excreted a long sonic blast, his odoriferous tribute to the rising sun.

Smell that! he shouted, I got plenty more where that came from. Why don’t you come right down and get a whiff, take it with ya, take me too while you’re at it, why not, ya took everyone else. His eyes filled with unwanted tears. You took Molly didn’t ya? Ya took the only thing that mattered to me in the whole world and ya left my sorry ass. Why me? he shouted out with odious contempt. Why did you go and do a thing like that. Why? Slowly sinking like a mortally wounded ship at sea to the steps below, he added, Why’d ya have to do it, you bastard, why?" His voice reduced to a low gargle as a mournful tear dripped off a mournful face to the skin of his bare leg below.

He sat, statue like, for what seemed an hour, but could have just as easily have been two, as time now had become a wholesale commodity. The tears that he had shed had long since dried atop the cheeks of his dark African American face. The clocks in his home, like all the rest of the things in his life had all stopped sometime back; he measured time now only by the rising and setting of the sun. The phone receiver on the wall dangled from its cradle like an umbilical cord that no one had bothered to cut. The two Samsung cell phones, one his, one his wife’s, sat on the table next to the couch, batteries dead, there half shells closed, waiting for a call that will never come.

At times he would laugh when he thought of how only a short while ago he had feared the inevitable coming of his and Molly’s old age; how each new line and wrinkle that he noticed meant that they were that much closer to the inescapable end. Now with each passing day he spent in this city, vacant of all that he held dear in life he prayed for that vary end that he once feared would come.

He had scavenged most of his vital needs for survival and stored them in the basement of his home. Whatever he wanted was free for the taking now but the things that he had acquired gave him little comfort. He stuck to the basic needs and paid no attention to the grandiose items that were there for the taking.

Once at the beginning of the disappearing while out on a hunt for possible survivors he had inadvertently driven by the Stanley house in the once affluent Indian Village. One of the wealthiest families in the city, the Stanley’s had the finest place on the East Side of Detroit. Old man Stanley, like Joe Kennedy, had made a ton of cash during the years that prohibition had been in effect clandestinely transporting whiskey across the river from Canada. Of course all that cash became legit once it was invested wisely in factories that produced armaments to supply the government needs at the onslaught of the Second World War.

Marvin had always admired the house with its plantation-like pillars supporting the gabled front entrance that was built in the Greek revivalist style of architecture. He had decided, why not check it out. Cautiously he had entered through the front leaving the expansive wooden door wide open as he quietly crept inside. With extreme trepidation he walked through the spacious rooms calling out to anyone that might be there. Nobody’s home, just like everywhere else, he’d thought frivolously, maybe they went out for a bite to eat. Yeah that’s it. I heard they got some damn good slop joints up there on the moon. Suddenly a wave of depression had gripped him and he had felt more alone than ever before. Snap out of it, he commanded, then had wistfully thought how nice it would be to live like the other half for a change and decided right then and there to move in.

After three days of shuffling, he had successfully transferred most of his goods and personal belongings from his old familiar home on Milwaukee Street to the Stanley place. There he neatly stored them away in two of the many ground floor rooms that had originally been used for the gathering of visiting guests. After settling in for the night, he discovered that the house had three large fireplaces and decided to build a fire in the one closest to the chopped wood alongside it. The temperature had been dropping at night as of late, autumn was upon him. The warmth and light from the glowing flames should have felt reassuring but feelings of trepidation persisted, overriding any sensation of comfort he might have derived from its quiet blaze, all that was left now was survival.

The flickering tongues of fire seemed to bring to life all manors of shadowy concerns. They danced menacingly on the walls and ceiling of the expansive richly decorated room. In the end what sleep he had gotten that night was derived from the front seat of his truck; his head propped up by one of the hundred dollar, genuine silk covered, down pillows he had taken from his intended bed. That morning he packed back up his things, leaving most of them behind and moved back into the familiarity of his home on Milwaukee Street where he and Molly had spent so much of their lives. At least there, he didn’t feel like a trespasser, like he did in the Stanley place, as he did in all of the homes and establishments that he had entered on various occasions. His Momma had taught him as a boy, stay clear of other people’s property lest you be invited, and that was a lesson he had figured was well learned but that was a million years ago and seemed, considering what had taken place, not much more than a fairytale.

A cool night breeze pushed itself through the screened window of Marvin’s bedroom. It swept across his fully clothed body and nudged the door beside his bed just enough to make it squeak. His senses registered the sound but he chose to ignore it as he did most things lately that did not involve the most vital of bodily functions. He had heard about depression and had always considered it to belong mostly to the whites. Us black folks, he would say to Molly, haven’t got time for those fancy high-falutin’ illnesses, not when there’s the business of putting food on the table. But lying there on his bed in the quickly fading light he knew without a doubt that depression wasn’t always a convenient reason for scoring a nest egg of designer drugs by middle class white folks.

Depression, he had come to discover was like a black hole in the center of a person’s spirit that sucks the soul dry of everything that makes a person who he or she is and one more thing he’d learned; it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with race or equality. Because depression is color blind, heartless, and makes itself at home in candidates who feel they’ve lost all hope. In that department Marvin Little was running a race in which there were no other contenders.

In the first months of the disappearing Marvin would react to each and every out of place noise, every clink and clank, things that went bump in the night. At times waking from a sound sleep he would call out, Who’s there? But no one ever answered. A stray wind unhinging the lid of an empty garbage can would have him prowling the alleyway dressed in nothing more than a pair of skivvies and an old robe. The emptiness of his predicament weighed on him like a giant anvil, crushing his will to go on, leaving him with less and less at the end of the day. Each day’s search for someone, anyone within the surrounding neighborhoods took him farther and farther away from his home on Milwaukee Street.

Cautious at first, he would knock on doors and call out, but in time he found himself just walking in as he learned to accept the futility of his lot. On one occasion while in a fit of rage induced by his inability to locate a particular brand of cigarette, he upturned practically the entire contents of a mom and pop convenience store, then upon exiting he calmly threw a lit pack of matches into a pile of upturned magazines. The store was a blaze in moments. He sat on the curb across the street from the very place he had often time’s shopped and took time to shoot the shit with Mel Wisner, its aged owner and friend whom he had helped with the painting of the place just two years earlier. His face buried in his hands he wept, looking up from time to time at the ongoing blaze, feeling the heat of guilt for what he’d done and likening it to the funeral piers of long ago.

The store burned into the night sending off plumes of black sooty smoke that could have been seen for miles around. Could have been, that is, if there had been any one left but him to have seen it. The man that walked back to his truck and drove the short distance to his home bore little resemblance to the one who had walked his Molly to Sunday services at Mt. Zion Baptist church a lifetime ago.

The straight cut of Marvin’s back, his proudest feature, now presented a man bent and broken, a man who’s will to survive was quickly running out. With the burning of Mel’s store he knew that his search for others had finally come to an end. How he would have delighted in hearing the sound of sirens announcing the arrival of a half a dozen fire engines beating a path to quell the fire’s sting. But the only sound to be heard was that of the last of the smoldering embers crackling in the quiet evening air.

As he twisted the