Dead Boys by Gabriel Squailia Read Free Book Online Page B

then crawled on their hands and knees, he struggled to identify the cacophony. It was only when he’d tumbled through a tiny doorway and into a startling openness that he succeeded: it was the oceanic babbling of the human voice rebounding through a chamber as wide as a football field. Remington goggled as he stood, for the space between this gargantuan pub’s improvised pillars was so crammed with the dead that the taboo against physical contact had been abandoned. Skeletons in rags threw their arms around leathery corpses in top-hats and tails, tin cans and brass goblets clanking before a bar built from a shipwreck. Islands of battered furniture shone with the swill that dribbled from a thousand chins, and everyone Remington could see was either laughing, narrating, sobbing, or involved in some combination of the three. Leopold was greeted with fanfare as soon as the party stepped into the room, and when he emerged from the first round of greetings, he pressed a clay cup of swill into Remington’s hand. Remington poured it down his throat before Jacob noticed, and whatever happened from that point on involved so many strangers offering him so many drafts out of so many containers that he soon found himself with a drink in each hand and another clenched between his knees.
    “It’s bad enough that our guide is inebriated,” muttered Jacob, “but you—why, you’re but a child! To say nothing of the damage the swill is causing your untreated corpse. At least try to keep it on the inside of your body, Remington!”
    The woozy rush reminded Remington of something, from which he surmised that he had, at some point in his short life, been drunk, and that it must have felt more or less like this. “Didn’t it feel more or less like this?” he shouted at a girl with a face like a jack-o-lantern in late November. “Drinking did, didn’t it? When we were—”
    “Don’t say it,” she yelled. “Nobody cares what you used to be. This is better. Death is better. Swill is the best.”
    “Swill is the best !” hollered Remington, tossing back his plastic cup. When he looked up from the stamp at its bottom the girl was gone, and in her place loomed a pile of broken chairs so tall and precarious that it must have taken hours to stack. Looking down again, he found an overflowing coconut-shell in the place of his plastic cup, then lost himself to laughter.
    Time was gone. Time was meaningless. He was standing in the midst of the crowd, swaying, directionless, leaning on the shoulders of Adam and Eve.
    Consciousness surged in and out of him. He poured drinks into the open necks of the headless. They danced on a splintered table amidst the howls of strangers. Performing for a woman whose lips had melted away, he stuffed his hand through the back of his throat and shook her hand through his open mouth. She bought him a drink and he tossed it back so hard it splashed through the back of his head. “Thar she blows!” the woman squealed.
    A child stood on a bar, his skin covered with extravagant mold like the peel of an ancient banana. He was laughing and filling cups from a gourd made of a human stomach. When all were full he poured the rest down his throat and tossed the gourd to the bartender. How old was the child? If he died forty years ago, and he was eight when he died, did that make him eight or forty-eight? Did the years get crammed into his tiny limbs, or would he be a child forever?
    “Pardon me. Excuse me. Hiya! Sorry to interrupt, but do you know where we are?” Remington said to the man beside him.
    “The Alley of the Shadow.”
    “Do you know Leopold?”
    “Yes. Have a drink.”
    “Yes.”
    “Have a seat.”
    “Yes.”
    “Yes,” said a bespectacled corpse perched at a well-populated table piled high with moldy encyclopedias, “time is the problem, yes, and we’re in this mess because we have nothing but time, because the Magnate said from behind his mask, ‘Our time is infinite, now what shall we do