Page 12 of The End of the World As We Know It

“Shhhh! We don’t want them comin’ in here!” Talik whispered, still cupping his sister’s mouth. Her eyes were wide and wet with tears. The two huddled together below the edge of the window, listening to their neighbors’ screams and pleas for help.

They recognized several voices. One was Mrs. Sonya, the old lady who lived across the street and made homemade ice cream for all the kids on the block each summer, selling it for a nickel a scoop. It sounded like she was being murdered.

“No! Don’t hurt me no mo’! Y’all stop hittin’ me! I ain’t done nothin’! I ain’t done nothin’ to nobody! Come on, man. Stop! Stop! NOOOOO!!!” That was Nate Pratt, the big slow kid who lived just a few doors down. He was twenty-five, but still couldn’t count his change or tie his own shoes. Talik dared another peek out the window and saw Esther and Tamika kicking and punching poor Nate. Tamika had a big kitchen knife and was stabbing Nate in between kicks and punches as he begged for his life. Esther and Tamika were two hoodrats who were known to trade pussy for crack. It was not uncommon to see them walking around with busted lips and black eyes courtesy of some mean trick. It was also not uncommon to see people in the hood who’d been abused redirect their trauma onto someone weaker and more vulnerable than themselves. Talik watched in horror as Nate succumbed to their assault, collapsing in a puddle of his own blood and urine. Lawanda tried to look, but Talik pushed her back down.

“Don’t look. It’s bad. You don’t wanna see what’s goin’ on out there. Fools are goin’ crazy, killin’ everybody.” Talik watched for a little while longer, until he saw the Jamaican posse round the corner, opening up with a street sweeper and an Uzi, mowing down everyone in sight, rioters and innocent people alike. Even looking down from the second-floor window, Talik could tell they were all sick. Snottynoses, yellow eyes, coughing and sniffling, but still coming. Esther and Tamika, Moose and Diesel, Tonya, Nate, even the Jamaicans. They were all leaking streams of snot and coughing up big wads of yellow mucus. They looked as bad as Talik’s momma, but instead of staying home, lying in bed, and acquiescing to their imminent mortality, they’d chosen to hit the streets to settle old grudges and steal whatever they’d been coveting from their neighbors.

Talik pulled Lawanda down onto the floor and covered her with his body as bullets suddenly pierced the brick facade on the front of their house, blasting holes in the sheetrock, buzzing like angry hornets whizzing over their heads. Lawanda held her hands over her ears to dampen the sounds of gunfire and her own screams. Talik was screaming, too.

There was a firefight going on between the JBM and the Jamaicans right outside their door.The whole world is dying, and niggas is still tryin’ to kill each other, Talik thought. He wondered if the poor white and Puerto Rican neighborhoods were going through the same shit. He’d seen Kensington, Manayunk, and Fishtown on the news many times. From what he could tell, they were no better than G-Town when it came to poor folks killing poor folks. If people were murdering each other in his little neighborhood, they were probably doing it all over the city. The City of Brotherly Love had become the City of Bodily Harm.

The gunfire ended as abruptly as it had begun, and silence descended with the suddenness of a summer storm. The meaty metallic scent of blood and organs mixed with the burning sulfur of gun smoke and chalky sheetrock dust, irritating Talik’s eyes and tickling the back of his throat. He crawled off of his sister and checked her for wounds.

“You okay, sis? You hurt anywhere?”

Lawanda continued to sob as she shook her head no. “I’m okay. I didn’t get hit.”

Talik looked her over from head to toe until he was satisfied shewas uninjured, then he returned to the windowsill and risked another look down at the street. Bodies were everywhere. Some people had managed to hide behind cars or duck low enough to the ground to avoid getting hit, but they were few. Most folks had been mowed down right where they stood. Incredibly, Moose was still alive, though Diesel’s chest had been hollowed out with shotgun blasts. Esther, Tamika, Tonya, and Nate were all dead.

“Momma!” Lawanda called. Talik felt a twinge of shame. He had forgotten all about his mother. “Momma, you okay?” There was no answer. Talik joined in the call.

“Mom!” His voice sounded like a trumpet blast in the stillness left in the wake of the mini–gang war. Still there was no reply. Talik walked over to the door and put his ear to it. He closed his eyes and listened. At first, he heard nothing, then a familiar voice filled his ears, one he’d only heard before in his dreams. It wasn’t coming from the other side of the door but from his thoughts. Mother Abagail.

Run, child! Get out of there! The Walkin Dude is here. He’s got yo momma. The Walkin Dude has yo momma!

Talik leapt back away from the door, startled. He’d heard Mother Abagail’s voice as clearly as if she’d been standing beside him.

“Did you hear that?” he asked Lawanda.

She scowled and raised an eyebrow quizzically while wiping tears from her eyes.

“Hear what?” They both listened and all they could hear were the wails and moans of the injured on the street below, the screams and cries of their loved ones, and more gunfire and sirens in the distance. “They’s still killin’ people out there?”

Talik waived off her question. “Not that—that voice. It was Mother Abagail. Did you hear her?”

“Who’s Mother Abagail?” Lawanda asked, scowling even harder now.

“The old Black lady that sits on the porch of, like, this old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. I see her in my dreams sometimes.She tells me to sit on the porch beside her in this old wooden rocking chair. She pours me a glass of sweet tea. It’s sweet like Kool-Aid and cold as a slushie. I sit there beside her and she tells me things that’s gonna happen. She told me it wasn’t safe in this house. That we gotta leave. She wants us to go to Nebraska.”

Lawanda wiped away the last of her tears and coughed sheetrock dust from her lungs. Her perplexed expression remained. “You buggin’, bro. Why would I be seeing some old chick that you be dreamin’ ’bout?”

Talik shrugged. “I don’t know. Lots of people dream about her. Malcolm told me he saw her before he died.”

“And she said we need to go to Nebraska? How we supposed to get to Nebraska? Momma ain’t takin’ us to no Nebraska.” Lawanda was looking at him like he’d lost his fool mind.

“Never mind. Let’s just go check on Momma.”

Talik unlocked the bedroom door and crept out into the hallway. There were bullet holes in the walls. High-velocity rounds had not only penetrated the front exterior wall but had flown through the bedroom wall and into the hallway.

“Momma?” Lawanda said in a quiet voice, as if afraid to disturb the silence. Talik wondered if it was out of respect for the dead. They reached the top of the stairs and Talik heard his mother’s voice.

“I can’t. Don’t ask me to do that, Mr. Flagg. Them’s my babies. I can’t kill my own flesh. No. I won’t. I— Okay. Okay. No. I understand. I’ll do what needs doin’. I promise.”

Talik had started down the stairs, but froze midway down when he saw his mother pacing back and forth in the kitchen talking to no one. The phone was still on the hook. Her eyes had that weepy yellow look, pupils dilated like she’d just hit the crack pipe. She was bleeding. Her shirt was soaked red from below her left tit all the way down her pants leg. She’d been shot, but hardly seemed to notice. Her movements were herky-jerky as she paced the kitchen talking to herself. Talking about killing them. Finally, she stopped and turnedher head toward her children. Her gaze landed on Talik, went straight through him, then turned to Lawanda.

“Come here, kids,” she said, smiling while removing a big carving knife from the kitchen drawer. Talik began backing up the stairs, pushing his sister behind him. His mother walked toward the stairs, holding the knife out in front of her, smiling like a lunatic.

“Momma? What’s wrong, Momma? You ain’t gonna hurt us, is you?” She didn’t respond, just continued to smile as she walked closer to the stairs, to her kids. Talik looked beyond her at the front door, but it was too late to make a run for it now. They would never get past her. Going back up the stairs had been a mistake. He’d trapped them both.