The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine Read Online Free

let’s get this
over with.
    “We’ll play for you.” Zaki One
holds up a flute. He runs up to stand beside his brother.
    “We’re the Three Ring Dragon,”
Miranda adds.
    They
grunt, lower the guns, and push aside a Geo Metro to let us in.
    “Welcome,” a girl says. She
smiles and for a second there’s someone home, but then she blinks and goes away
inside of herself.
    We walk up a little hill and
the first thing I notice is kids milling about in a grassy field. They look
skinny and tired. Beyond the grass sits a sprawling old hospital next to a
smokestack with something silvery balanced on top of it.
    When the kids see us, they get
up and shamble toward us. The band holds hands. Zaki Two has something sharp
embedded in his hand. I look down and see a piece of wire jammed into the flesh
between his thumb and pointer finger. I have two thoughts: that’s disgusting,
and that’s a really good idea.
    The kids come closer. Hundreds
of them. They smell nasty and look broken—but who doesn’t look bad these days?
They seem excited, almost agitated, to see us.
    “They’re a band,” one kid says.
    “All our batteries are dead,”
another adds.
    “Everything downloaded is gone.
We miss it,” a boy says.
    The kids nod and all lose
interest in us.
    “We miss a lot of things too,”
Miranda says. “It’s been hard, but we’ll be okay now?”
    “We’re keeping safe,” a girl
mutters. “Safe as a time bomb. What?”
    A boy scratches at an infected
cow brand burned into his forearm. The pain wakes him up a little. “Will you
play? We need you to play.”
    “We’ll play.”
     
    Pain helps. Music helps. Coffee
helps. Whole wheat bread, the sound of bells, and cranberry juice helps. So do
dogs and cats.
    Beer doesn’t. TV doesn’t.
Magazines and most books don’t. Talking helps, but it’s getting hard to talk
and not scream.
     
    Someone graffitied pictures of
wolves along the concrete walls of the hospital. Graffiti helps, especially if
it takes a while to figure out the lettering.
    “Maybe the wolves are the
problem,” I say. A couple years back they’d bitten a lot of people.
    “Nah, they’re extinct,” Zaki
One says.
    “Like us,” Miranda whispers.
She presses her hand against her collarbone and winces.
    “What’s that silver thing up on
the smokestack?” I ask to change the subject.
    We walk to it and see a big
metal dog cage lying perched on top of it. A girl in pink and white sits up
there. I can just make out her pout from the ground.
    Someone has done a half-ass job
of mortaring spiraled stairs up the smokestack. I climb them with Miranda. Zaki
stands watch below with folded arms. The stairs hold and we make it all the way
up.
    The caged girl is pretty in a
high-school popular kind of way. “I know you,” I say. “How do I know you?”
    Miranda hums a melody, and the
girl sits up and smiles. Her cage creaks and shifts. The bottom of her dress is
soot stained from the tendrils of smoke that rise from the smoldering
biohazards beneath.
    “You know my song.” She turns
her head from side to side, and it is like looking at an advertisement for
something I don’t want to buy.
    Miranda sings, “Baby I long for
you. I want you. Ooh. Aah.”
    The girl echoes the words.
Where Miranda’s voice hits every note with an easy precision, the girl’s
throaty voice grinds sex into everything.
    I know who she is: the tweeny
crooner, perfume huckster, pop princess of an empire long gone.
    Let her rot, I think as she
rises to her knees. The dog kennel is too low to let her stand. I see that
she’s had to stay very still to keep it from tottering off the smoke stack.
    “They’ve stopped feeding me.
They’ve forgotten about me, even though they launched this huge fucked-up
mission to rescue me,” she says. “They got jobs at the hotel I was staying in,
and after my show they smuggled me out in the service elevator with all this
talk about seizing the means of entertainment production and liberating