American Dreams | Book 1 | The Decline Read online

  “I think you’re going to get a D, maybe squeak by with C, on your assignment just for the sheer amount of words you’re putting on paper,” she replied, turning her head to look at me.

  “What? I think I’m doing a great job.” With the schools closed, we’d been forced into online learning. I was happy to not go onto campus, but my parents were pissed that they still had to pay close to forty grand for out-of-state tuition at the University of Texas for me to screw around with online classes. Hell, I could have transferred to some exclusively online school at this point and saved about thirty-five thousand.

  “Well, for starters, ‘this one sucks balls’ is probably going to get points taken off immediately,” she laughed, pointing at my screen. “Or a failing grade.”

  “It’s the first draft,” I replied. “Plus, the professor values honesty. It’s a journal not a paper.”

  “All you're doing is talking about current events. You might as well just take a transcript of every CNN broadcast and just copy/paste it to your journal. Your professor knows what the Crud is, and she’s living under quarantine conditions just like the rest of us. You’re not telling her anything she doesn’t already know.”

  “It’s a journaling exercise for Writing Comp,” I protested. “The assignment is to write about my feelings and describe my daily activities.” I glanced pointedly at her bare body before continuing. “I can’t go into the full-on details of my daily activities, so…”

  She stood and slapped me lightly on the side of the head just above my ear where the hair was already too long for my liking, but with the barber shops closed because of the quarantine, there was nothing I could do about it without a pair of shears—which I didn’t own.

  “I’m just sayin’,” she replied. “I get that it’s a journaling assignment, but you’re supposed to talk about your feelings, not about current events. You know, things like, ‘I love my girlfriend so much. She’s the most perfect person in the world. She does not get bitchy when she’s on her period.’ All the good stuff in your life.”

  “But my girlfriend does get bitchy when she’s on her period,” I countered, steeling myself against the slap that was sure to follow if I kept it up.

  She leaned down again, her breasts hanging perfectly and in line with my eyes. “I’m not on my period now.” She kissed me lightly on the lips, her tongue grazing against my skin. “Come on,” Cassandra ordered. “I want to fuck before you go to the grocery store.”

  Oh yeah, did I mention how lucky I was to be forced into spending every day stuck inside a tiny apartment with her? Because if that got lost in the translation, I’ll reiterate it for you: I am one lucky motherfucker.

  TWO

  I scratched idly at my crotch as I walked toward our neighborhood grocery store. In hindsight, I probably should have showered after Cassandra and I had sex, but I’d reasoned with myself that I was going out into the proverbial lions’ den and would need to be disinfected upon my return. Now as the dried fluids of our lovemaking flaked off and irritated my skin, I was second-guessing myself.

  We lived seven blocks from the nearest grocery store. It wasn’t far, so we’d decided when we first moved in that driving there, finding a parking spot at the store, and then driving back to try to find a parking spot outside the apartment just wasn’t worth it, so Cassandra and I purchased a little red Radio Flyer wagon with wooden rails to haul our groceries instead of trying to carry the bags for seven blocks. Despite the threat of the Crud, walking was better than playing parking roulette and it got me out of the apartment. Even with my bomb-ass girlfriend, whom I adored, I was going a little stir crazy.

  Walking to the store certainly had its drawbacks in our current situation. There’d been news stories online about people being robbed for their food supplies. There were even stories about masked individuals attacking businesses and destroying property on a whim. The city’s biometric scanning technology couldn’t identify someone wearing a mask and glasses, so the thugs took full advantage of the situation to run amok and no one thought anything was strange about them wearing bandanas and masks over their nose and mouth like Old West outlaws. It was insane. Wasn’t this America? Even more importantly, wasn’t this ‘Texas, by God’ to quote a famous outlaw from the state’s past?

  As I pulled the little metal wagon behind me, I wished for the thousandth time that I’d taken that concealed carry class that my dad had tried to sign me up for two years ago before I went to college. Then I’d be able to legally carry a pistol and could show my card to the National Guard assholes whose sole job was to harass everyday people trying to get groceries. As it was, though, I only had a three-inch folding blade in my pocket for any type of protection, which meant I could basically use it to cut the ropes after getting tied up and beaten by a gang with guns.

  The vibe in the city of Austin was weird—and not the “Keep Austin Weird” kind of vibe that every damn asshole here was proud of. It was probably the same everywhere, though. Everyone thought everyone else had the virus, so they distanced themselves from one another. At first, people would eye one another suspiciously over their homemade facemasks, stepping widely apart as they passed on the sidewalk. It evolved into an unintentional one-way sidewalk system, for the most part. Today, most of the traffic flowed in one direction on one side of the street and in the opposite direction on the other, helping people avoid the need to step apart from each other. Now, we all just sort of moved at the same speed to keep our distance and relied on our mutual distrust of one another to maintain the proper distance recommended by the CDC.

  As I walked toward the store, faces of children appeared at the windows of the apartments above the street. It must really suck to be a kid in times like this. When I was a kid growing up in Alabama, I could do whatever I wanted to on our farm and not come inside for hours on end. I imagined that’s how it probably was in the countryside still. But no, I’d had to be a rebel and break my poor old man’s heart by becoming a Longhorn. He was a diehard Crimson Tide fan, but I hated the “Roll Tide!” attitude back home. When the opportunity presented itself to play football at UT, I grabbed it by the horns—pun intended.

  Then, I shattered my right ankle during the second game of my freshman year, including a compound fracture of both my tibia and fibula. It was a gnarly break, broadcast on national television. My suffering even got turned into an internet meme that made its rounds for a couple of weeks. The university was great during the ordeal. UT paid for my surgeries and I went through rehab with the university’s physical trainers. The bones in my leg healed fine, but my ankle never worked properly. After another surgery and months of additional rehab, I still couldn’t move side-to-side like my position as a linebacker required. The shifting of weight laterally was agony on my entire leg.

  Once the doctor said I’d never play football again, I lost my scholarship and the medical assistance dried up. I was invested in the University of Texas at that point though, not to mention my relationship with Cassandra, so I decided to stay in Austin. Too bad we hadn’t been visiting my parents when martial law and the mandatory quarantine went into effect. They were in the country, far from any city, and the quarantine didn’t affect them in the slightest.

  The wagon jerked back hard as it bumped into something and I glanced behind me. I’d hit a part of the sidewalk that had broken and raised up. I didn’t even notice it as I walked over it. I grunted pulling the wagon up and over the broken concrete and continued on, not wanting to disrupt the flow of the sidewalk as everyone tried to maintain their distance from each other, and yet still get to where they were going.

  The wagon squeaked loudly and the front wheels pulled to the left—something it distinctly had not done before I hit that chunk of sidewalk. Just my luck. I tried to see what was the matter with it as I walked, but to be honest, I didn’t really know what I was looking at. I may have grown up on a farm, but my dad was the one with all the mechanical skills, he just used me for the manual labor.

  I turn
ed into the grocery store parking lot and pulled the little wagon up near the cart return cage where I figured I’d be safe from cars or an irate soccer mom who couldn’t find any toilet paper. Yeah, every time there’s a natural disaster nowadays, toilet paper has been added to the time-honored supply list of bread, milk, and meat for people to grab up and buy every single bit of it. Hoarders gonna hoard and all that.

  I flipped the wagon over and spun one of the wheels, cursing as I did so. I’d forgotten to pull on my bright-ass yellow latex dishwashing gloves. The things looked ridiculous as hell, but the CDC had told us time and again that the virus could live on different surfaces for extended periods of time. Concrete, like the sidewalk, was in the sixteen hour range and being outdoors only reduced the stability of the virus by a couple of hours. All that meant to me was that I’d potentially just fucked up.

  I held my “contaminated” hand in the air almost comically to ensure that I didn’t touch anything, reaching into my right pocket with my left hand to retrieve the bottle of hand sanitizer there. I flipped the cap, squirted a liberal amount of the solution into my right palm and shoved the bottle back into my pocked. Then I rubbed my hands together for at least double the amount of time the CDC recommended.

  Finally satisfied that I wasn’t going to contaminate myself, I slid my fingers into the dishwashing gloves, pulling the material all the way to my elbows. Then began to work on the wagon once more.

  In the end, it was useless. The axle was bent, causing one of the wheels to wobble erratically when I spun it. I’d have to try to beat it out with a hammer or something—oh, that’s right! I’m a fucking moron and don’t own a toolbox, let alone a hammer. Maybe the end of a baseball bat or something would work.

  I dragged my ghetto wagon toward the store and got at the end of the long line waiting to enter through the automatic sliding doors. Each time the doors opened, a rush of cool air filled the immediate area and I held my breath on instinct. I was seventh in line, so I figured I probably had about ten or fifteen minutes to kill while I waited my turn to go in. I took off the gloves and my phone was in my hand immediately, watching the latest round of drone wars since all the sports I normally watched were cancelled.

  The grocery stores had changed since I was a kid during the previous global pandemic. The old days of barely having wide enough aisles for two carts to pass one another had proved to be one of the places where the illness was spread since everyone had to eat and that’s where asymptomatic carriers did the most damage. The government’s answer was to mandate that all aisles were at least a full eight-feet wide to allow the social distancing to continue. Newer stores were designed with the requirement in mind, but older stores had to remove entire rows of shelving and get creative with their stocking to carry all the products needed. My grocery store in downtown Austin was built in the 1960s, so it was one of the ones that had been retrofitted. Even eight or nine years later, I could still see where the shelves had originally been. You can’t wipe away sixty years of abuse in just a few recent ones.

  Each time a shopper went inside, the line shuffled forward. Then I was next in line and one of the store security guards passed a thermometer over my forehead. He wiped off the probe with an anti-bacterial wipe as he told me I could enter. I nodded and headed directly to the fresh produce section, then on to the meat and dairy departments before bothering with the shelf stable stuff. It was a little bit backward since it exposed the cold foods to room temperature longer, but we were two months into this quarantine gig. I knew from experience that the stuff in boxes and cans, you know, the stuff from the big food manufacturers, were restocked at a higher rate than the fresh food from more local sources. There was enough of the shelf-stable food to go around, but fresh produce, meat, and milk were precious commodities that tended to sell out quickly.

  Employees and guards watched every aisle. There’d always been a rash of stupid internet challenge videos where douchebags fucked with food, like taking the lid off of ice cream containers and licking the top layer before putting it back in the freezer, or spitting into bottles of juice then putting them back on the shelf, but it seemed like it had gotten way worse during the last two crazy months. The latest one I saw was where people were using syringes to inject chemicals like bleach and other household cleaners into fruit and vegetables. Talk about fucked up, but the anonymity brought about by the mandatory masks emboldened the dickheads. Plus, anything for social media likes, right?

  I actually didn’t mind going grocery shopping before the Crud. So many of my friends hated it and would avoid it at all costs, but I liked being able to pick my food and read the labels. That was before all this though, now I hated it. From the employees to the shoppers, everyone was distrustful of one another. We stared over the rim of our masks at nearby shoppers, perpetually on guard, fearful that they’d cough or touch their face, then touch the products. Getting food these days was a pretty shitty experience.

  In all, I spent about thirty minutes in the store. It was long enough for my skin to crawl as I imagined thousands of little Crud buggies moving along my body. The return trip to Cassandra and my apartment was uneventful, except for the damn wagon’s wobbly wheel that would lock up and drag about every three feet. Good times.

  When I got home, it was another exercise in frustration and decontamination as everything slowly warmed in the November air. Each item had to come out of its packaging as Cassandra brought it inside to place the refrigerated items on the kitchen counter to be disinfected once everything was inside and the dry goods went to sit in what we called the quarantine corner. It was doubly frustrating because we had a third floor apartment, so I had to wait on her to run everything up and down the stairs. We’d learned early on that ice cream wasn’t going to survive the ordeal.

  By the time we were finished getting everything in the house, both of us had a thin sheen of sweat. Me, from standing in the sun on the sidewalk, and Cassandra from the forty or so sets of stair runs she’d just completed.

  “This sucks,” I muttered as I set the wagon I’d carried up the stairs down on the linoleum by our front door and kicked off my shoes.

  “Get in the shower. Now,” my lovely girlfriend ordered. She had a no-tolerance attitude about everything Crud related. Hell, I even had to get our mail with my rubber gloves on.

  “You need help?” I asked, gesturing toward the pile of refrigerated items on the counter with my chin.

  “I got it. Make sure you take everything off and leave it there in the entryway for twenty-four hours.”

  There was scientific evidence that the Crud could live on any surface for at least twenty-four hours, with a lot of conflicting advice about whether that was correct, so we erred on the side of caution and let everything that went outside of the apartment sit in the quarantine corner for a day or so before cleaning it up.

  The shower was nice and hot. In my mind, I pictured Cassandra sneaking in and joining me, wrapping her arms around me from behind while I had my eyes closed washing my hair… But she didn’t, even after I waited an extra two or three minutes under the showerhead to lure her into the bathroom. Dammit.

  I put on my daily apocalypse uniform of basketball shorts with no underwear and a cotton t-shirt. It was impossible to remember if today was Tuesday or if it was Saturday. The days all ran together. We couldn’t go out to eat or meet friends at the bar. There was no weekend barbecue to look forward to. Sports were cancelled for the season once again. Television was all on-demand programming, so you didn’t have to wait for your favorite show to air on a specific night, the networks just released everything all at once so people could binge watch an entire season, then bitch about how long it was taking for the next season to drop. Hell, the days of the week didn’t even matter to our schoolwork because our online classes uploaded prerecorded video lectures and issued assignments with due dates, which were also pretty meaningless at this point.

  Every day was Groundhog Day. Wash, rinse, repeat. As I stood in our little apartm
ent, watching Cassandra’s ass sway back and forth while she disinfected the wagon, I wished for some excitement. For anything different.

  But no. Nothing changed. It was the same every damn day. I had to finish writing my journal exercise for English Comp. Life in quarantine sucked.

  THREE

  “Where was I?” I said aloud to myself as I stared at my computer screen.

  “You were sucking balls,” Cassandra called from the kitchen.

  “No. I said, ‘This sucks balls.’ I did not say that I sucked balls.”

  “There was a whole lot of ball-sucking going on.”

  My mind flashed to our lovemaking before I’d gone to the store earlier in the day and a goofy smile crossed my lips. There had been a lot of ball-sucking going on.

  “Focus,” I mumbled, trying to bring my mind back to the assignment. It was due tomorrow morning and I needed to write at least another page and a half, double-spaced, to meet the minimum standard for the journal. It wasn’t that much writing, but if I kept getting distracted, I wouldn’t finish it.

  I considered Cassandra’s feedback from earlier. I had basically just vomited up a lot of random information about the Crud that everyone already knew, but if I erased that, then I’d pretty much be starting from scratch—something I absolutely did not want to do because I thought journaling was stupid. It was something that weirdo goth freaks did in between contemplating suicide and shooting up the mall.

  I was a jock. Well, I had been a jock. My ankle could no longer take the sudden shifts of weight and changing directions of movement that football required, and that sucked, but I was still in the gym every day. Okay, during quarantine, I did a lot of plyometrics and body weight movements in the apartment—and a lot of hip thrusts to keep Cassandra satisfied—but I was still in prime shape. I was not the kind of guy who kept a journal.