Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

Jason glanced back to where Germaine stood at the stoop of the town office, wringing her gloves nervously. “Courage,” she mouthed at him. Then Jason stepped into the dark.

The pickle juice helped mask it, but the minute he crossed the threshold Jason could tell he was not alone in the store. The smell reminded him of his mama at the end, only sweeter, if sweet could make a fellow upchuck his breakfast.

Jason’s inclination was to stop breathing it, so he stood there still for a moment, breath caught in his throat. He held the lantern high and surveyed the room.

The Dempsey store was pretty big, with a ceiling maybe a dozen feet up and shelves running all the way up every wall. Free-standing shelves held blankets and clothing and made a dark little alcove in the back. And there was a long counter with a box for money and a little balance scale on it for folks that still liked to pay with metals. Jason could see everywhere but behind the counter and in that little cubbyhole in the back—and there were no bodies he could see. He worried about those other spots, though: behind the counter, behind the shelves. Anything could be in there, and he didn’t think it would be anything he wanted to see.

His lungs were burning, so he took a big gulping breath and that set him coughing—the air from the pickle juice stung fierce, and the smell was only worse for gulping it in. All right, Jason thought, no point dawdling. He set to work.

He got to the clothes and food cans first. Both were in the open, although he had to use the stepladder to get at a shirt and an overcoat that would fit him properly, they were so high up. He found himself a pair of new boots too—they were rawhide, but stained dark and etched with a swirling design, and were marked to cost three dollars. He also took a couple of blankets, because who knew what they’d need on the trail, and a folded sheet of canvas that he figured he could make into a tent if they needed it. He spent some time checking out the different cans of food and ended up taking a lot more than they needed.

Finally, there was nothing for it. He had to get ammunition: a box of cartridges for the Winchester, another box of bullets for Aunt Germaine’s revolver. And all of that was behind the counter.

Before he went, he took the sack and set it by the front doors. Then he got hold of the kerosene lamp, and made his way around the counter.

It was a bad enough sight there that Jason pulled down his mask and let go some breakfast.

When he was done, he didn’t bother putting the mask back up. He didn’t think the pickle juice would help him a bit, faced as he was with the befouled remains of a fellow Jason was pretty sure used to be Lionel Dempsey.

He guessed that more because of the clothes than anything else. The body still had its apron on, and the white shirt with the arm-bands on it. The little shopkeeper’s visor still dangled over the slick forehead. The body was sprawled along the floor. One hand held the leg of a wooden stool in a very determined grip, and Jason could imagine what had happened: Lionel had been sitting on his stool, waiting for a customer an afternoon back in February when none were coming. A spell came over him. He got dizzy enough that he fell off, and knocked the stool too. And thinking that it was just a little dizzy spell, he got the idea he could grab the stool, right it and use it to pull himself back up. And he got as far as grabbing it before he got too sick to move.

Because he didn’t have a boy or girl to watch over him, he would have died there of thirst and fever. And then because there was no one to do anything else, he stayed there on the floor of his general store, smelling up a bit until the fire in his stove went out, then freezing, and then, in the last couple days as the thaw came, thawing out himself.

Which point, the creatures got at him.

His face was a dark colour, and bits of the flesh were gone, revealing stuff of a blacker hue still underneath. One eyeball was mostly gone too, and the other stared up lidless and dried. To account for all that, Jason suspected mice or something like them had got at him, gnawing little holes in the half-froze flesh and feasting on the eyeball that was gone. And lately, judging from the things that moved where his lips drew from his teeth, and in that one empty eye socket, the maggots had hatched.

Jason wiped his mouth with the vinegary face mask and bent closer to look.