Free PostApoc by Liz Worth

splash of grape. It’s been so long since I’ve had a drink with this much sugar, even this small amount. Granules of sweet crunch against my teeth. I know I’ll have a headache tomorrow but right now all I want is the extra few beats the vodka is kicking into my heart.
    Aimee’s moved off into the crowd and Tara’s turning to me to talk, touching me with every other word tonight. “Things find you,” she says, and I don’t know if she’s talking about me or about herself or about this place. Whichever it is, she’s right, and as the vodka hits the back of my neck with a rush of warmth I know there is nothing else we need to say.
    Cam’s hair is getting long, keeps getting in his eyes. It’s how I recognize him coming up behind Tara. He won’t take his hand off of her to brush the strands away. Tara’s hand glides over his eyebrow, tucks an angled tuft behind his right ear.
    â€œThanks,” he says, smiling without looking at me.
    He and Tara act like they slept together once, like they would do it again the way he’s distracted by the curve of her waist, his fingers pumping to underline a point. My eyes are on his collarbone; a chin could fit there, nose slipping under his jaw, eyelashes tickling the back of his ear. A shiver could pass between him and a girl then, if he’d let anyone be so close.
    â€œYou excited?” Tara asks him.
    â€œOf course,” Cam says. “I was made for these times.”
    I roll my eyes. Cam doesn’t know what it’s like to live through a lost identity. He hasn’t yet accepted that there will be no news stories about all this, no books in the aftermath, praising us survivors as heroes. There will be no after at all.
    Tara’s left hand pecks nervously at her right, pulls at a hangnail on her middle finger. She’s slipped her boots off to wrap and unwrap her toes around her Achilles tendons. She sees someone she thinks is familiar, opens her mouth as he walks by but it’s a false memory. She tells me she thought it was a guy she might have almost slept with this one time—kind of nice, kind of smart, but boring. “Boring boring boring,” she says, “an automatic write-off.” They got as close as forehead to forehead, staring and smiling at each other in pre-kiss state. Except his head had an extra layer of fat, enough padding that it felt like she was leaning her head against the heel of a hand instead of the smooth bone of a skull. “Still,” she says, “if it was now, I’d sleep with him, considering the circumstances.”
    Shit Kitten is three songs into its set. We stay sitting because this is where we feel the music the most, conducted through the floor. Aimee finds us, sits, too, because this how it gets into you, beats the shit out of you. It comes crawling up from the earth and simultaneously dives right into your heart head-on, hits your chest from top and bottom, fists a cardiac hole and then fucks your aorta, ventricles, pummels your blood. By the speaker is where the abuse happens, where you give yourself up for this, give yourself over to the music, to the music’s mind.
    There’s a tail coiled in my left side, burning above my pubic bone. It twitches, like an animal dreaming.
    Aimee asks, “You feeling okay?”
    The tip of the tail tickles my stomach into a slow flip. Tara offers me a drink from her cup. I shake my head, keep my mouth closed. Not that it really matters what goes in, what comes out, where it lands. Rattail used to keep a bucket in front of his mic stand for when he had to puke. His blood was made mostly of a mix of speed and mushrooms, alcohol and a dab of heroin that he said he used “here and there.” In Shit Kitten’s early days he said it was nerves, that he had to get so fucked up just to sing, his stomach knotting up under the crunch of his abdomen, the strain on his vocal chords pushing down so