1 for Yes. 2 for No.
Darnell felt a flush of hope. The wire slid back into her mouth, as welcome as that suction tube from the dentist. More writing.
Can you read this?
Darnell tried to blink, but couldn’t. She screamed YES in her mind, felt like she could hear it in her cheeks. She yelled ONE. She yelled YES YES YES, and heard mostly gurgles. The doctor seemed agitated, anxious. Darnell worried she should have only tried yelling a single word. Maybe that’s what they were after. A length of paper was torn off. The doctor tried tossing it to the side, but it stuck to her rubber gloves. One of the men helped her. She pressed the marker back to the roll with that gentle, wavy line.
Is there anyone in there?
Darnell imagined taking a deep breath. It was more a pause of thought. She gathered her will, all her imagined strength, and tried to force it out all at once, to erupt in a mighty roar, all the screams she’d ever felt inside while sitting in her tub, clutching her shins, trying not to let Lewis hear her cry:
YEEEEESSSSS
There was a moment of stillness, a place that heartbeats used to fill. The other doctors came into view as they crowded around, as they bent over to peer at her. The marker squeaked against the glossy paper.
We want to help you.
Darnell felt a wave of anger rather than relief. Parts of her were missing, were sitting in plastic tubs and containers. Her wounds, the damage to her flesh, could still be felt. She felt exhausted from the effort of crying out. Her chest was empty in more ways than one. She was exhausted from the long death she was suffering, but Darnell summoned the last of her will.
KILL! she yelled, sensing that these people could hear, that the screams in her head were quiet words that leaked out their box and into the room; they emanated like some pale echo deep in her throat.
KILL ME! DIE DIE DIE DIE!
Like the gulls by the pier while Lewis cleaned fish:
DIE DIE DIE DIE!
The birds floating on the air, swooping for scraps, for flesh torn mindlessly from bone:
KILL KILL KILL KILL!
The doctor straightened. Darnell collapsed within herself, her consciousness drained, the animal within her taking over her limbs again, writhing against the bonds while doctors in puffy suits stood around, lips moving, conferring.
They were going to help her, she thought. Darnell had done it. She had made a connection, had reached out to another human being and made contact. She sobbed without moving, cried without shedding a tear. And when the paper appeared above her with the simple question: You wish you were dead? she could do little more than emit a soft gurgle, a dry croak, a whisper from her sturdy tomb.
The room fell deathly quiet. The cord was removed from her throat, the speaker scratching the table as it was pulled away, the little wires and itchy cups pulled from her skin, and Darnell thought they were going to do it, right then, somehow. She prayed they would bring mercy on her, that they would bring mercy upon them all.
47 • Lewis Lippman
A gray dawn broke over the destroyed encampment. Falling from the sky was what Kyle liked to call a “fighting snow.” It was those fat flakes that came down the size of silver dollars and laden with moisture. Lewis had seen them get palm-sized back home, even as big around as dinner plates. When a few inches of these flakes gathered, you could scoop up a snowball in your hand, give it a squeeze, and hurl away. With enough work, you could compress it down to a ball of ice that’d leave a bruise or dent a car.
It must’ve been snowing at night for so much to accumulate. Lewis hadn’t felt a thing. His skin was too numb to know anything was coming down at all. He did hear some crunching when he came to now and then, as he circled within the walls that had trapped the living. But in his groggy half-sleep he had figured the sound for more of the broken glass that littered the scene of yesterday’s fight.
It almost made him feel home again, seeing the snow as the sky brightened. It was the sort of day he loved to spend on the water, those early morning hours when the sea was flat as glass, when the only breeze was the one he made with the throttle, and when the sun didn’t rise so much as the clouds lightened from coal black to ash gray.
Home. Homer, Alaska.
No matter how badly he’d like to be there, Lewis knew he never would again. He was trapped. They were all trapped. High walls of steel, cars jumbled up, buses and dump trucks. There would be no call for stooping down and squeezing out of that block-sized arena. No way to the other side of that hastily constructed fence. Lewis had it worse than those damn Mexicans. All they had to do was scale a wall, crawl through some grass, go for a swim, and they were pretty much free to live wherever they wanted. They weren’t pinned like this.
Damn Mexicans.
Lewis couldn’t feel his feet. His shoes were soaked and frozen solid, his toes little cubes of ice. He would love to have wept for his feet, which must be ruined. Frostbitten. Falling apart. Probably worse than his arm, which hung open and gathered snow. His flesh was gray, two fingers bent backwards, and all he wanted was to go home. He wanted to see his kids. See Darnell. What the fuck had he done with his life?
Killed a bunch of fish. Made more money than he needed to. He could’ve stopped going out if he’d spent it smarter. If he’d invested. But it was always there for the taking, just a few nights out with his crew and he’d come back with enough to pay the bank, fill up with diesel, sit at the bar a few nights and check out asses and down beers.
Lewis couldn’t feel anything. Not his body. But he felt something else, something besides the regret. He felt sad for the way he used to get a kick out of seeing them Mexicans get rounded up. Goddamn, there was enough fishing out there to do. He made more than he needed. Enough to waste. What he shoulda done is spent more time with his family.
The snow was a few inches deep. Enough to cover the bodies scattered in the streets. Fires were burning out of control in the buildings overhead, survivors overrun by the undead who managed to worm inside. The remnants of this last bastion of humanity were rising in the form of gray smoke, billowing up to touch the sad sky, a stream of ash rising like a river to a broader sea.
The world below, meanwhile, was turning white, getting its skin back. And across the confines of that city block, there shuffled dark and grisly shapes. Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Asians, who knew what else. They were all starting to look the same to Lewis, anyway. Same deadened skin turning shades of pale gray, same collections of wounds, of gashes and cuts, same tattered clothes and scraps of fashion, just one river of tottering undead with their arms out, mouths open, eyes wide and unblinking, the snow dusting their hair and hiding their hurts.
One mass, Lewis thought. All the damn same. And goddamn, all he wanted was to go home, to be with his family. But he couldn’t. There was no river to cross, nothing to crawl through. He was more stuck than birthright, forced to live where his feet were pinned. He thought of all the fish he’d seen flapping on his deck, eyeing the scuppers, no chance in hell of ever getting over the side. He thought of all the times he’d felt that twinge, just a pause, to knock a fish with his boot, to send it back into the water to be with its family, but he never did. He was a man with a knife and metal gloves standing on that deck. And he never did.
Part VI
The Swooping Birds that Caught Her Eyes
48 • Jeffery Biggers
The jets were flying low. They rumbled down the Hudson, booms and echoes like thunderclaps amid the walls of glass and steel, and Jeffery was reminded of that September morning so long ago. He’d been a boy, cutting class because it was too beautiful outside, when he’d heard the roar of the jet overhead, a distant grumble, acrid smoke filling the air for days and days.
Most of the pack ignored the whine of the turbines, but it triggered a deep memory for Jeffery. It was the sound of deployment, the noise of good men and women ferried off to another life. It was stub-nosed C-130s and C-5As that left with children and came home mostly empty. Only the bags were full. Laid out on the deck. All black. The color of grief. Plastic zippered up tight.
His head lifted, some primal fear network still intact, still pulling the puppet’s strings. Navy gray slid across the brilliant blue, contrails of speed and the cool atmosphere streaking from wingtips. The lead jet was in a dive. Jeffery remembered jumping out of a plane a long time ago. He remembered thinking the chute wouldn’t open, that he would plummet to his death. He remembered calling his mom from camp, still breathless, her so proud of all the places he was going, the things he was doing.
He only told her about the good places. The good things.
The landing gear was open, hatch doors like little fins on the plane’s belly, clear as day. Nothing sticking out.
Jeffery remembered flying home—he remembered the party they threw. All his mom’s friends had crowded around. They grabbed his biceps and patted his stomach, squealed and told him how handsome he was, showed him their phones, pictures of their daughters.
He had smiled and eaten off his paper plate, standing up, telling himself to eat slow. No mortars would scream into the mess tent. He wouldn’t have to drop what he was doing and find his rifle. Smile and eat. A woman twice his age told him how pretty his eyes were. How the military done him good.
He had nodded, didn’t tell her what his eyes had seen. Five miles driving a jeep, an arm in his lap, a friend laid out in the back seat, wondering all the while if they could put it back on. Ears still ringing, but the screams of anguish that would echo forever. Like that buzzing you get when you’re going deaf to a sound. Going deaf, but there it was anyway. And no digging could get it out.
They had patted his stomach and asked him how many sit-ups he could do. Was he going to college? Jeffery had wanted to lift his shirt and show them. Not his knotted muscles but the scars on top. The white fingers of flesh where the doctors had saved him. Look, his mom had the Purple Heart, the trophy of his wounds there over the mantel. Look. Because even she hadn’t seen. No more playing in the yard with his shirt off. Nothing to see here.
It wasn’t the landing gear that was open, Jeffery saw. This was a different plane. Something else nosed out of that hatch and dropped away, and he knew, with a horror that matched the last weeks of his life, he knew what they’d calculated.
It was a heavy bomb. It didn’t wiggle, didn’t succumb to the fickle air. There was no second-guessing its intent. A city in exchange for a continent. He remembered decisions like that. We’ll give up this town if it means winning the war. Level the streets so there’s no place to hide. A town for a country. Until there weren’t no towns left.
Turbines screamed as the pilot pulled away, a jet arcing up while a bomb slid across the blue sky. It fell forever. Jeffery’s body remained still, that monstrous side of him seeming to understand, to hear his thoughts. It was almost over.
When it disappeared behind the buildings, there was a silent pause, the fear of a dud, of nothing.
And then a flash of light shining through the streets and filling the sky, a billowing bubble of white rising up, a cascade of shattering glass and toppling steel.
Jeffery braced himself in that hollow head he’d been a prisoner in for too long. He watched the destruction roar faster than thought itself. He had but a moment, standing between towers of hope and despair in the shadow of his father’s work—a moment to be thankful that the end was near, that the fire would come to take him and his brothers as well.
49 • Michael Lane
Michael was going to hell. He could feel the inexorable flow downward, gravity and sin tugging on his heels, pulling him toward the center of the earth.
From the apartment to the streets, and now he was about to join the crush that flowed beneath them. He had crawled westward from his shithole neighborhood near the East River and into Tribeca. Neighborhoods that had been worlds apart now looked the same to him, all seen from pavement level. Cars lay scattered, abandoned in the middle of the street, doors left open, hazards blinking, obstacles it took forever to drag himself around. Newspapers tumbled across the pavement like flightless birds to attack his face. They spread themselves across the wrought iron gates and fences that protected walk-ups from the infected sidewalks. They gathered against the gutters in origami nests until a brave soul—the sports page or classifieds—tore off and flapped to freedom.
Shopping bags had better luck. Except for those caught on coils of razor wire, they fluttered up on the breeze like jellyfish pulsing through the air, torn handles hanging like tentacles and stingers.
Michael had pulled himself along for days. He couldn’t remember why he was doing this, but couldn’t seem to stop. It reminded him of a former life, getting up and doing things that made no sense, hating himself, hating his routine, the eternal disgust, and no ability to break free.
He used his palms to lift himself. Pushing down and then bending his elbows made him flop forward a few inches. There was hardly any pause before he did it again. Over and over. The flesh from both hands had been ripped away. Bone made clacking sounds on the pavement. Several of his fingers were bent back and pointed unnaturally toward the sky.
Groups of walkers passed him by now and then. They all grunted and groaned to some degree, weak sounds of agony from those dragging a broken leg or suffering a gaping wound. It was the accordion squeeze of organs like great bellows, wheezing and rattling as they chased down anyone still clinging and surviving, anyone with meat still worth taking.
A pregnant woman in a tattered green dress had made an especial racket. Her groans rose above the others, a noise among the inhuman sounds that stood out for being … human. Michael had watched her as she passed him by, the back of her dress torn open, her underwear riding up, half of her ass hanging out, skinny everywhere except for that bulge of a belly.
He had lost contact with the woman after a block or so. She had drifted uptown on some scent Michael couldn’t nose, moving faster with her waddling stagger than he could ever hope to on his belly. He had followed a different scent, one that pulled jostling masses down flights of stairs, into a station, nearer to hell with every painful pull and lunge forward.