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Mark LaFlamme

The May Editor's Pick Story is by Mark LaFlamme

Please feel free to email Mark at: m.laflamme@myfairpoint.net

mark laflamme

THE VILLAGE STORE AT THE END OF THE WORLD
by Mark LaFlamme

It was two days after the world ended when the old van rumbled up Route 4, coming from the south. It was still a mile off but I could hear the Chevy groaning and sputtering like an old dog with a gastric problem. Royston Daigle’s rig.

My eyes blinked open and my mind swam up from sleep. It was the first sign there had been that I was not the only one left alive.

I sat in my rocker near the beer coolers, right where I’d been since climbing out of the basement. Right where I planned to spend the rest of my days.

After a minute or two, the van shuttered to a stop near the gas pumps, its green snout splattered with mud and bug guts. A moment later, the bell above the door jangled and in stumbled Royston Daigle, a lean man with gray grizzle on his cheeks and a flannel shirt half tucked into his jeans.

It didn’t take an apocalypse to reduce Royston to the grubbiness of a homeless man. He looked that way every day I’d known him.

He stood just beyond the chips rack, eyes trying to look everywhere at once. I was sitting in shadow away from sunlight slanting through the door. It took his eyes a few moments to find me. When they did, Royston jumped like he had been goosed with a hair brush.

“Bert! Holy Jesus! You made it!”

It was hard to tell if he was happy or disappointed.

“Guess I did. You got Janey with you?”

Royston nodded. I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.

“And Stevie, yup. I got ‘em right down into the root cellar soon as we started hearing about what happened over in Europe. Had that sucker nailed down pretty good. When we came up, everyone was dead. I mean everyone, Bert. Terrible shit to look at. Not burned but sort of…roasted. There’s blackened birds all over the place and dead dogs with the hair burned off ‘em. You been out?”

I had not been out. My closest neighbors were a quarter mile away. They were a yuppie couple from Boston trying to make a go at farming. I didn’t expect them to be alive. It had happened too fast. Yuppie couples from Boston are not known for the survival instinct.

“Haven’t been anywhere,” I told Royston. “I’m good where I am.”
He nodded as if he understood perfectly. He was still looking everywhere. He glanced outside to check on his family. He shot looks up and down the aisles stocked with food. He looked beyond me at the beer cooler.

“We’re heading up to Canada, see if there might be something left up there. In case it was…I don’t know. Political or something.”

He looked at me hard when he said it. Almost pleading. He wanted me to tell him that, sure. Canada runs a clean country. Maybe they were spared. Maybe the big pulse or wave or whatever the hell it was had passed right by our brothers to the north.

I didn’t say anything.

Outside, a horn blared. Royston jumped and spun like an alley cat. He trotted back to the door and began making wild hand gestures toward his wife outside. It was comical to watch, like an argument between mutes.

Then he scampered back.

“Say Bert,” he said, Adam’s apple going crazy again. “I wasn’t coming in here to rip off your place or nothing like that. I figured you were long gone by now. You know...”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

He scratched the back of his head and tried to grin a little. Back before the world ended, he was a chimney sweep. Made a killing at it, too. Which made the clunky van that much more inexplicable.

“Water,” he said finally. “I really just wanted to grab some bottles of water. The taps went out when that thing rolled over us. Totally shot. I hadn’t counted on that. Figure we can pick up water here and there on our way north, but it would be nice to have some... You know. Just in case.”

“Sure,” I said. “Plenty in the cooler. Grab an armload. Might be a couple gallon jugs in there, too.”

He didn’t move toward the cooler right away.

“Doesn’t feel right taking your product.”

“Just take what you need, Roy. Beer’s good enough for me.”

He nodded as though he understood that, as well. His eyes cut to the right of my chair where I had stacked three cases of Schlitz. Next to those was a case of Vienna sausages and a few bags of pork rinds. Draped over the arm of the chair was a bandolier stuffed with rounds of double ought buck.

I’m a man who’s serious about his beer.

Royston gathered two gallons of water and a dozen single bottles. He carried them out to the van and came back inside, panting and sweating. It was hot out there. It was April, but I got the feeling that calendar months didn’t mean much anymore.

“Say, Bert. I see you got plenty of soup on the shelves. I don’t suppose...”

I let him take a dozen cans. His boy was nine but ate like a horse. I didn’t like the thought of the kid starving on the long, and potentially strange journey north.

When Royston was done gathering the goods, he stood in front of me with the paper bag stuffed under one arm. He was still breathing hard and he looked scared. But his voice was even when he spoke.

“You know, you’re welcome to come with us,” he said.

“Nope. Pretty comfortable right here. I got beer and Vienna sausages. Figure that’s all I’ll need.”

Another understanding nod. He looked relieved.

“Glad you got your asshole canon, anyway,” he said.

It’s a Mossberg 12 gauge, loaded and pumped. It lay across my lap like a sleeping pet.

“Yuh,” I said. “I expect there might be a few assholes left in the world.”

Turns out I was right about that.

*****

I wish I could tell you how the world ended. I don’t know if anybody figured it out before the shit hit the fan. There wasn’t much time for figuring.

In the crazy hours after Europe went dark, there was talk that maybe a solar flare had blasted through the magnetic field and fried whatever was out there. That would do it, I guess. But it didn’t seem like the answer.

Europe had gone first, that was one thing. Everyone on the continent seemed to disappear like words erased from a chalkboard. Just…gone. The world was buzzing with communication one moment and then the next, there was a big, black silence from that side of the planet.

Africa went a half hour later. Then Greenland and then the eastern edge of South America. Our brave leaders didn’t even try to address their people. Whatever doom was rolling across the planet was rolling as a wave from east to west and it was coming fast.

Some of us figured that out for ourselves and went to ground. Not many, though. There really wasn’t much time at all.

Before the news crews fled and the satellites came crashing down, there were talking heads on TV who insisted something had gone wrong at the super collider in Switzerland. Black holes or exotic particles, that kind of thing. I don’t believe a black hole was part of this. The planet still being largely intact and all.

But particles? Sure. I can buy that. Scientists have been tinkering over their heads for decades. They constructed billion dollar facilities where they could monkey with things they didn’t understand. They tried to tease out the secrets of the universe and maybe they brought forth some cosmic cannibal, instead. Some high energy monster that took about six hours to disinfect the world of almost all its life forms.

When it came, the world seemed to throb for two solid days. I was hunkered down in the basement for the duration and I could hear it—could feel it in my bones and in my teeth—buzzing like a wall of electricity that just kept coming and coming.

I kind of wonder how many people got safely underground only to go mad with the incessant hum of ruination.

Just before it ended, the bulk head doors above me began to rattle and shake as though some great beast was jumping up and down on them. The two-by-four I had used to secure it snapped with a sound like lightning. A pinkish mist crept through the crevices between the doors and it floated over the top half of the stairs like a fog. That glowing mist was like a living thing, buzzing and crackling as it crawled deeper into the basement. The roar was deafening and the roots of every tooth in my mouth began to ache. If it had lasted longer than it did, I might have put a gun in my mouth and ended it all right there.

But after five minutes, maybe less, the mist drew away. The buzzing ebbed and then was gone entirely—so suddenly and completely gone that the silence that replaced it was like a blow to the head.

It was over, just like that. The world was done. Whatever had been caught above ground was dead and I figure that was damn near everything. There might be a million people scattered across the country.

I wasn’t fretting one way or another. I had no plans to scrape and claw forever to survive in this weird afterworld. Maybe I’d be around long enough to see how things were going to come out. Maybe not. I had beer and Vienna sausages and I figured that would be enough to hold me.

Turns out I was right about that, too.

The first asshole came into the store five days after the world ended.

I heard the car stereo before I heard anything else; the thumping of bass and the buzz of window glass approaching its shatter point. That sound was a precursor to trouble back in the days when the world was still alive. No reason to believe it would be different now.

The kid came busting ass through the door like he’d been thrown into it. The bell above clanged fast and sharp, like a startled bird. The kid came in whooping, sliding across the tiles in stocking feet. His hip bumped into a display and sent a few cans of Pringles bouncing across the floor.

You know him, I’m sure you do. He’s the one with the baseball cap on sideways. The baggy jeans barely hanging on to the hips. The gold chains hanging over an oversized basketball jersey. That attitude three times bigger than he is.

Yeah. That one.

“Fuck all!” the kid said when he saw me. His skin was pale and covered with red sores. A meth head, I thought. Or maybe just some punk who didn’t eat right.

“Scared the shit out of me, old man.”

I placed him at about nineteen years old.

“You ought to slow down when you come through a door,” I said. “Never know what’s going to be on the other side.”

He was smirking at me. It was the later part of afternoon and the sun was no longer gracing the door. I couldn’t see all of him, but I could see that smirk.

“Are you my mother?” he said. “You my momma here to teach me manners?”

“Nope. Just a little lesson that might help keep you alive,” I said, rocking in my chair. “You know. Now that your posse is all gone.”

His smile went away. I was glad to see it. He stood there in front of me squinting and scowling. He probably came up from Lewiston where he’d been a small time hood. Had to run in packs because he was a scrawny thing who wouldn’t last long in a fist fight. Probably carried knives everywhere he went. Now that they were available, he probably had a gun somewhere. Maybe a lot of guns.

I was tiring of him, this ugly remnant from the world that was.

“You want to limp away from the beer cooler, old fuck?” he said, trying to get the smile back on. “Or do you need me to wheel you around like a cripple?”

“Beer’s mine,” I said. “Just like everything else in here.”

He squinted some more. The smile was coming back. He was looking at my face, at the gun in my lap, at my hands resting easily on the arms of the chair.

Oh, don’t do it, kid, I thought. I don’t like you, but I don’t want to shoot you, either.

I thought about delivering that message out loud. But then the kid went for it.

He came forward all at once, lunging like a cat after a bird. If he’d had sneakers on, he might have had me. But his stockings slipped on the floor and for a moment, it was like he was running in place.

I had the Mossberg up a second later. Back when there were birds, I used to hunt them. Used to shoot a little skeet, too. Before the kid was done slipping and sliding on his socks, the barrel was up and aimed at his chest.

I thought he might see that and give it up. But he just kept coming, so I shot him.

The slugs didn’t so much pierce his chest as blow it apart. The shot ripped into his sternum and for a grisly moment, I could see daylight on the other side. His arms went up and out and his feet left the floor. He sailed across the store and slammed into the wall next to the door. The backside of him left a bloody stamp on that wall, right next to the rack where the maps and fishing supplies are displayed. He slid down the wall with a wet sound and fell in a dead heap on the floor.

One dirty sock hung off the end of his foot, but the cap stayed on his head.

I dragged him outside and across the street. I tumbled him down over the hill and into a field. If there were still coyotes around, they would have dragged him off in the night. I had a suspicion the coyotes were all gone.

I drove his car around the side of the store and parked it. It was a nice Camaro, cherry red. I left the keys in the ignition. If someone wanted the car, they were welcome to it.

*****

At night, the sky is beautiful strange. Everywhere you look, it’s a flickering fire of red and yellow, green and purple. Northern lights come to visit the southern, eastern and western skies. It looks wrong but it’s beautiful. I wonder if it has something to do with the magnetic field.

It’s dark out here in the middle of nowhere. I used to be able to see the lights of Lewiston and Auburn from the front of the store but there are no lights anymore. Not artificial ones, anyway. Darkness has returned.

It’s quiet. There are no birds or crickets, no frogs or coons. There is no far away buzz of traffic. There is only the sound of the wind and the noises I make myself. I thought by staying here – by staying close to this place I’ve called home—that feeling of aloneness might not be so profound. But it is. The sense of it is heavy. I might be the only person in a hundred miles. Each night I am aware of that. It does strange things to a man, no matter how much Schlitz he drinks.

I’m sixty-four years old and I’ve owned this store for thirty years. It was Charlotte’s idea. She convinced me to quit my job at the railroad and have a go at small town business. She set it up just the way she liked, settled in and then died of stomach cancer.

She went quick. Not everybody with that kind of cancer does.

It’s called the Village Store but it actually sits between two villages. One is Steeple, the other is North Steeple. You better believe they are two different towns. The store sits on a long stretch of Route 4 that is dusty in the summertime, a treacherous mess of ice and snow in winter.

Business was good. Regulars came in for coffee and hunters’ breakfast in the morning. They came for pizza and groceries in the afternoon, beer and cigarettes at night. I sold a ton of gas and diesel. I made a good living. My house is attached to the store. I don’t plan to go in there again. Everything I need is right here. Beer and Vienna sausages. A nice fire in the woodstove at night and the Mossberg on my lap.

I’m just waiting to see how things come out, if there is anything more at all.

*****

A tribe of three came along four nights after the kid with the sideways hat.

They were two men and a woman, each middle aged, who drove up to the store in a Jeep Cherokee. Nice people. They each carried in a laundry basket and were prepared to start filling them when they spotted me in my chair.

One of the men screamed a little.

“Where are you from?” I asked them.

They stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the cash register. Both men were heavy, the woman was trim and might have been pretty ten years before. All of them were grimy and disheveled. It hadn’t been an easy way for them.

“Portland,” the woman answered me. Each of them was eyeing the shotgun in my lap.

“How are things down there?”

The man who had screamed answered me.
“Horrifying,” he said. “The only people who are left are savages. They’re running wild all over the place, firing off guns and blowing stuff up. All day and all night. Total barbarians. Don’t go to Portland.”

“Wasn’t planning to.”

Driving was difficult but not impossible, they said. There were cars all over the highways. Some were empty, others were tombs, their occupants boiled red and starting to stink. But in April, Maine highways were never jammed too full. They’d been able to drive around the messes.

They hadn’t found anyone at all in Lewiston. Same in Auburn, same in the small towns beyond it. They said one man had raced alongside them a few days before on Route 100, screaming out the windows of the sports car, but they had pulled over and let him pass.

“There are probably a few good people out there,” the woman said. “But they’re laying low.”

She had a cut on the back of her left hand. While she talked, she rubbed it absently. One of the men had an ugly scratch along his collar bone. Once sedentary people now fighting their way through North Armageddon.

“There’s some Bactine on the shelf behind you,” I said to them. “You’ll want to spray some on all your cuts and scrapes. Infection now will kill you.”

It was clear I wasn’t going to shoot them. They relaxed.

There was no communication in any form that they knew of. Nothing on the ham radio frequencies, nothing on the CB. There was no one to tell them what had happened or what they should do. The world had ended without explanation.

“We’ve seen a few cats,” the woman said. She was squirting Bactine on her cut. “No dogs. No birds or even any flies. I suppose cats know when to duck and cover more than most critters.”

She burst into tears. Both men snaked arms over her shoulders. She brought herself around soon enough and stood there sniffing, embarrassed.

I let them take what water was left in the coolers. They took loaves of bread that hadn’t gone moldy yet and some canned stuff. All the meat in the coolers was no good. Too much time had passed since the power went out. They took some Ritz crackers and some candy bars. I pointed them to the nine volt batteries and packages of steel wool. I explained how they could start a fire with just those two things.

They thanked me, said goodbye and headed north in the Jeep Cherokee.

*****

After Charlotte died, I came to suspect I would one day drink myself to death. Armageddon is not a bad time to do it. There are no well-meaning friends to try talking you down from the ledge. There is no pressure to be an upstanding fellow in the community and no reason to suck on mints to hide the beer on your breath in the early part of the afternoon.

Over the first week after the world ended, I drank about a half case a day. I replaced the empty ones with full ones from the cooler. It was piss warm but I’ve never minded it that way.

I was running out of Vienna sausage but that was okay. You can only eat so many of those things before you start to think about what you’re putting in your mouth.

I wasn’t sorry to see them go. I was getting sick of Vienna sausages.

*****

A pair of assholes happened by twelve days after the world ended.

They were big men with long hair and leather coats. They roared up on Harleys with modified pipes so that they sounded like industrial machines in hell. They came into the store with twin swaggers, like men who fancied themselves movie outlaws.

They didn’t seem surprised to see me.

The bigger of the two grinned at me. His hair was knotted in a pony tail and he had bad teeth. It didn’t take long for him to introduce himself as an asshole.

“We’ve come for your cigarettes and beer,” he said brightly. “Women too, if you got any.”

The asshole cackled and his friend guffawed. They spent a few moments punching each other in the shoulders.

“Nope,” I said to them. “Store’s closed.”

The bigger asshole nodded slightly and took a step closer.

“Then I guess,” he said, “that this ain’t a good day to be a storekeeper, my friend.”

He reached beneath the vest. I could see his fingers fumbling at the handle of a gun; a revolver, I noted in the slow motion way of adrenaline. Not a bad choice in weaponry for this kind of deal. Too bad he wasn’t a little bit quicker with it.

I brought the Mossberg up and shot him while his hand was still inside his vest. The blast ripped through his gut and a few pellets tore into asshole number two standing behind him. The first asshole fell to the floor, dead. The second was screaming like a woman and clutching his side. The pellets had ripped through leather and into a section of his pelvis.

“Fucker!” he screamed, looking at the blood on his hands. “Oh, fucker, fucker, fucker!”

I shot him high in the chest and knocked him back against the wall. A few of the maps fluttered down like bats coming down from a rafter. Asshole number two fell on top of asshole number one and both were still.

Messy. It took me half the afternoon to clean it up.

I brought the last of the water out from the walk in cooler. A group of four came by a few days later desperately needing some. I think it was five days after the bikers, though it might have been six.

This group was two men, a woman and a filthy, unspeaking child. I couldn’t tell if the child was a boy or a girl.

None of them talked very much. They were heading north on bicycles, though they didn’t seem to have any sort of tangible plan. They were walking zombies, with leaves in their hair and the hollow-eyed look of dreamers. They thanked me in a far off way when I filled their packs with water and canned food. I watched them leave and then wondered if anybody had been there at all.

I slept at odd hours, sometimes dozing when it was light outside and waking when it was dark. The all-beer diet made it hard to keep track of the days.

One dawn I awoke to find a woman standing in front of me. For a mad moment, I thought it was Charlotte, come to guide me to the hereafter or some sappy movie shit like that. But it wasn’t. It was just some crazy lady who stood in the silver light of morning, twirling her greasy hair and watching me.

“Can I take your order?” I said to her.

She giggled like a child and ran away. No water, no food, no anything. She was out the door while I was still getting my eyes opened. She ran into the field across the road.

*****

You always hear that survivors will ultimately band together again after a crisis of this magnitude. Frankly, I think that might be bullshit. A week after it all went to hell and you could already see survivors embracing their primitives selves.

I was never one to believe that man is essentially good. I think we’re animals who got blessed with big brains. We discovered electricity and baseboard heat, the Internet and cars that tell you where to go. We warmed things up and made things comfortable for ourselves. Take away that comfort and we’re beasts again. Even before the end came, the beast was starting to show through more and more. Our time had been coming.

That’s the way I saw it, anyway. Two weeks after the end of the world and I did not predict a comeback for the species of man. We were too destructive to last. Maybe the cats would take over, or some burrowing animal. Maybe some tentacled creature that lives in the deep ocean would rule the planet for the next million years.

At any rate, I was running out of the strength and desire to see how it would come out. The beer was running low. I ran out of Schlitz and started plowing through the Miller, Busch and Budweiser. The Vienna sausages were gone and I didn’t miss them. I moved on to Slim Jims and beef jerky.

I was tired. I didn’t want to see who would come through the door next. I didn’t want to make small talk or have to put a slug in another chest. The world had ended and it was somehow crass that people like me were still hanging around.

The beer was making me heavy and morose rather than relaxed and thoughtful. The idea of drinking myself to death had been romantic in a shabby way, perhaps. But it wasn’t realistic. Who wanted to die of slow poison while waiting for the next leg in the parade of walking dead to come by?

Not me. I had been ready to die thirty years ago when my wife departed. It was an insult to her that I remained here now, in this village store that was more hers than mine. It was an insult and it was pointless.

I had kept the revolver after dragging the dead bikers across the street. The chambers were full and the safety was off. I pressed the barrel against the underside of my chin. I closed my eyes. It was time to go.

I pulled the trigger.

And then my eyes blinked open and my mind swam up from sleep. I heard the old van rumbling up Route 4…that beat up Chevy groaning and sputtering like an old dog with a gastric problem.

A few minutes later, Royston Daigle was inside the store. There was gray grizzle on his cheeks and his flannel shirt was half untucked.

“Bert! Holy Jesus! You made it!”

Next to me sat three cases of Schlitz waiting to be drunk.

Three days later, the asshole kid with the sideway hat was back. Then it was three nice people in a Jeep Cherokee followed by two pricks on motorcycles.

I’ve seen them all many times and it’s always the same. I send them away with water and canned goods or shoot them and drag their bodies across the street. It always ends with the revolver under my chin. It always begins again with the old van coming up Route 4.

I don’t know how many times I’ve lived through those two weeks at the end of the world. Maybe a dozen, maybe a hundred. That is my eternity. The village store is my hell.

I’m so tired of Vienna sausages.

Mark LaFlamme is a crime reporter and columnist at the Sun Journal in Lewiston, Maine. He stays up until dawn, sleeps until noon and takes the week of Halloween off each year. His weekly column “Street Talk” has been named both Best in Maine and Best in New England.

In late 2004, he wrote his first novel WORUMBO, the tale of a young reporter with blossoming psychic abilities and government experiments with mind control at an abandoned Maine mill. A year later, he wrote and published THE PINK ROOM, the story of a leading physicist who attempts to use the science of string theory to bring his daughter back from the dead.

In 2006, Mark was named “Journalist of the Year” by the Maine Press Association. He is a Kansas City Royals fan living in Red Sox territory, a mark of an intrepid nature. He rides a dual sport motorcycle named El Mechon whom he loves like a wife.

In 2007, he published the baseball novelette ASTERICK: RED SOX 2086 and the novel VEGETATION, the tale of a man at war with the world of plants. In 2008 came DIRT: AN AMERICAN CAMPAIGN, the story of a man who makes off with the corpse of his dead wife and in doing so, nearly topples his father’s bid for the White House. Most recently, Mark published BOX OF LIES, a collection of short stories.

In spite of his chosen career, Mark LaFlamme has no plans to write a crime drama.

See all of Mark's books HERE

Box of Lies

Asterick

Dirt