Read PostApoc for Free Online Page B

show? Besides, Cam points out, the power cuts in and out anyway. No one’s got a rein on it no matter what you use it for.
    Me and Aimee stare hard at the few kids out here: a girl with silver eyes and a face so freckled it looks tan. Her mouth is small and hard and the spiked dog collar around her neck is too loose. The two guys she’s with could be the same person: shaved heads, complexion made of paste. I don’t know any of them. If they know we’re checking them out they don’t act like it. Don’t even look at us. They adjust their weight every few seconds. Dusty plastic capsules crunch under their heels. The sound of snail shells.
    Grayline. Another mumble from Cam. Keeping his voice low, he tells us that people want to know how to get it, what it is. The story is that grayline’s a drug made from the shake of magic mushrooms and the ashes of the dead. That crematoriums have been pillaged to make it. Cam adds cryptically, “I know where to get some.”
    Me and Aimee used to know where to get everything but now we’re behind, relying on Cam more than we’d like to. Unlike Trevor’s, Cam’s eyes hold a hardness that betrays any softening expressions in his face. Aimee says one of her half-brothers knew Cam for a while, that he had a reputation for paranoia and the ability to go from calm to vicious with nothing more than a glance from across the room. Twice now I’ve heard Cam talk about how he spent his sixteenth birthday in jail for beating the crap out of another kid for reasons that are only ever vaguely explained.
    We hover around him anyway, waiting on his word.
    â€œCan you tell us where?” Aimee asks, but Cam just shakes his head, enjoying this power he has. Instead of saying anything, he unrolls his fist and holds three capsules up, one for each of us. We break them open, pour the grayline on our tongues like Cam shows us, and wait for the show to start.
    Aimee offers the last drag of her cigarette. Another thing that probably won’t last much longer. Every pack we’ve been given has been stale. Probably old smokes that were sitting around in some warehouse for years. No point in complaining. Soon we’ll forget what fresh cigarettes taste like. I kill the smoke, drop it, put it out with the toe of my boot. A green sticker in the shape of a star is stuck to the sidewalk. One of its glittering points is peeling upwards, reaching for sky.
    Inside Cam disappears and Trevor comes up to us right away, his hair in his eyes and his face too close to mine. The toes of his shoes jam into the front of my boots. He holds his hand up to us the way people offer food to an animal.
    He asks if we want some more. I look to Aimee to answer but she’s already reaching in, helping herself, so I do the same, not mentioning that I can already feel Cam’s dose working through me.
    â€œThanks,” we say, cracking the plastic caps open and pouring the contents onto our tongues. In our mouths, it cakes into a dry dust, doesn’t work itself into paste but instead goes down like grit. Saliva glands pump liquid but it only spreads the granules high up into my gums.
    This must be what death tastes like. Trevor just nods, watches us work it all down our throats as he brushes hair back from his forehead with his whole hand. Trevor’s t-shirt is slit below the armpit, thin cotton fighting long underarm hairs.
    Grayline. I would have thought it was just sand if it wasn’t for the physical click, distinct and muscular, a strobe light through my arms and legs. Across the room a couple of people are putting up missing persons posters: friends and parents, a couple of cousins. The words are written in red nail polish, faded marker, black electrical tape. I wonder how many posters it took before the ink ran out of those people’s pens.
    Each rectangle that gets stuck to the wall throbs out towards me as I pass by, puffing out paper bellies to show me