© 1997, 2015  Tex Batmart

Our next door neighbors were dead. Our house was stolen. The alcohol upon our breath belonged to someone who didn’t even know that we existed. We toasted our dominion of the dead and abandoned over a bottle of Jose Cuervo. The smoke of clove cigarettes and Lucky Strikes lingered in the air, mixing with the stench of grief, and fear, and loss.

Lords of this World.

I glared at the cherry of my lit cigarette, furtively glancing about in the fading daylight of this springtime evening. Anyone happening to look this way would wind up spotting us for sure. I took another drag of my Lucky Strike, and dropped it to the saltwater-soaked ground, grinding it beneath my boot much as my ex-girlfriend had done to my heart not half a year before in lieu of giving me a present for my birthday. Exhaling as inconspicuously as I could manage, I listened for a moment, trying to gauge if anyone within earshot had been made the wiser, and decided to come to see what was going on, but other than the steady rhythm of the waves slamming into concrete just a couple of feet away, the entire beachfront boardwalk was silent. A few moments before, Bill had gone around the back of the vacant house which stood before me to see if could gain us entry without having to resort to the damaging of property, leaving me to stand guard for the attempt. I did my best to appear casual, as if I was only coincidentally pausing in my seaside stroll, taking in the beauty of Seattle which stood like a jewel on the other side of the Puget Sound.

I heard a click, and then the slow creak of disused hinges opening. Startled, I spun around to see the front door opened, and Bill beckoning me inside. I walked into our chosen palace, and saw that the house had been well-kept, that even the emergency crews who had forced out the family who had resided there when that unexpected mudslide tore through the early morning had been unable to prevent the touching, if ultimately futile gesture of the former occupants, who’d wrapped the furniture in plastic for that day sometime in the future, when it might be safe for them to return. But we all knew that day would never come. Their home would be just as they had left it, remaining forever as it was, if only in their memories, though they would never be allowed to set foot in it again. That was how we found everything in our first moments upon entry: perfectly preserved, the final moments of this tragedy recorded in the dust that had settled on sealed chairs and couches, and in the echoes of those chaotic screams of terror when their world came crashing down. A home no longer, this empty house sat silent and unchanging like a mausoleum, witness to the buried lives and loss of hopes and dreams.

It smelled of mud. In retrospect, I’m sure that obvious, but it’s not something we had been expecting. Perhaps we’d been counting on a more domestic scent, the distinctive odor of the family who’d last called this place their home. All we got, however, was the aroma of still-damp earth, pine sap, and that hint of mildew to which even well-attended homes in the Pacific Northwest are mercilessly subjected. We’d wanted the thrill of adventure in the face of opportunity, but all we’d gotten so far was the stink of mud, a pine tree through the downstairs bathroom, decay and ruin. No inherent glory in here for two seventeen year-old rebels hiding from the world, as they walked lightly through a red-tagged house. Instead, we chose to name ourselves Terracrats, and became Lords of this World. This was to be our domain. This was to be our place to live out the fantasy that the world could someday be different. This was poorly conceived and blatantly illegal.

I walked back to where Bill had managed to squeeze in through the gap torn through the wall by the thundering wave of mud, and an uprooted pine tree. Just a simple smash and grab job, I joked to myself to hold back the deepening shadows in the growing dark, struggling to maintain my youthful sense of invincibility in the face of my own mortality and the sheer force of Mother Nature on a bad day. Not like the quadruple homicide just one door down. Bill tapped me on the shoulder, and suggested that we check out the rest of the place before the night had fully come. He’d climbed beneath the tarp and shimmied along the pine’s trunk through an opening more suited to the thievery of elements than of man, just to let me in through the front door. I would have gone with him, but I was claustrophobic, and I didn’t really bend that way. I followed him up the stairs and into the main living space of our new home for the evening. Behind us, the sun had finally fallen beneath the hidden horizon, and the darkness began closing in around us.

“What the hell is this?” Bill asked, not more than a couple of feet in front of me.

“What?”

“Look at this- a couple of bottles of Monarch Vodka-” he began pulling the bottles out and setting them off to the side.

I snickered, “Sure, the cheap shit.”

“-a fifth of gin,” he squinted at the next bottle, “Looks like… a half a bottle of rum, maybe three-quarters of bottle of Cuervo, and… I think there’s like ten sips in here.” He handed me a rounded glass container, in the shape of something in between a hand grenade and imperial crown.

“What’s this?” I asked him, having never seen this type of booze before.

“Chambord,” he said. “Fancy liqueur. And it’s mine.”

“Fine, fine. Anything else?”

“Some homemade Kahlua, looks like, and a two-liter of Tonic Water. It’s kind of cute they left this mini-fridge plugged in. Hasn’t been power here for almost two months.”

“Don’t forget we’ve got those homebrewed beers out on the deck.”

We each grabbed a bottle and decided to explore, myself with the tequila, and Bill with the Chambord. By the light of our Bic lighters, we climbed the stairs again, in search of something worthy of our teenaged attention. Upstairs we found just a couple of bedrooms and a toilet which would never flush again, the water having been disconnected along with the power lines. But the view out through the window from the master bedroom was more than enough to give us pause, the city of Seattle shining like a firefly against the purple velvet of the night sky over the Puget Sound. We understood then, why these fools had spent the money that they had on a place like this. The Palace of the Lords was starting to look better. We sat down on the bed and began to talk about the things that only teenage boys could find important, like girls and music and how much we disliked the entire school experience. Every other anecdote was punctuated by a sip from the bottles in our hands, and soon the pretense dropped entirely, and our feelings began to show, not that we were really the macho types who held things in to begin with.

“Lords of this World,” we mumbled back and forth that night, as we talked about the present and dreamed about the future.

I told him about the pain of falling out of love, and he countered with how well things seemed to be going with his girlfriend. I told him about how I wanted to change the world with the words that were always spilling over and out of my pen, how I’d seen so many people who I knew would go on to never write again, and how I was already mourning the loss which their discarded gift would bring. We talked about Black Sabbath and Metallica. We spoke about the things which made us feel so viscerally alive that there were times we couldn’t bear to feel it any longer. And then I shared with him a story about our other friend named Rick.

If you liked what you’ve just read, please consider purchasing a copy of Terracrats when it is available for purchase!

-Tex