City of Beasts

by Corrie Wang

“Look,” Sway says with what seems like sympathy. “If I had to suggest a starting point, you could go see the mob. Rage has his hand in pretty much everything in Buffalo.”

  Far below, we hear the sound of glass breaking. Su and I rush to look outside. Three massive, well-maintained black E-SUVs are all parked at varying angles on the street. Doors open, engines idling. Meanwhile, the beasts from the smiley-face truck are getting to their feet and seem to be debating whether to follow the new beasts inside or leave.

  “How did these ones find us?” Su asks.

  “See those little black boxes on the traffic lights and on the corner of the building across the street?” When I nod, Sway cups a hand to its mouth and shouts, “They’re called cameras.”

  “You mean yours work?”

  Sway snorts. “Yep, and that means the mayor’s patrol saw your conspicuous, trench coat–wearing selves the second you rolled up. Anyway, nice meeting you. Thank you for not killing me. Good luck with dying.”

  Just as its hand touches the doorknob, I call out, “Five thousand dollars.”

  I know instantly from the way its head rocks back that this is a huge sum of money. But how was I supposed to know? Unlike the beasts, fees use a point system for commerce. It only goes up to a hundred. Sway spins back toward us in one fluid movement.

  “What now?” it asks.

  “All you have to do is show us where Rage is, and I’ll give you five thousand dollars.”

  “I’m not sure what Matricula Rhodes teaches you in history class, but over here, we all learned that while everyone else was hoarding food immediately after the Night, Fortitude Packer and his boys spent an entire month emptying banks in case the government ever came back. No one except the mayor has that kind of cash anymore.”

  A few floors below I faintly hear someone shout, “Clear!”

  I lift my pant leg. Tied to my ankle are fifty of the hundred-dollar bills that I skimmed from Liyan’s hidden mattress hoard. I have another fifty secured to my other leg right above Baby Bear. Sway’s nostrils flare like the money is fresh-baked bread and it can smell it.

  Suddenly, it comes at me. One hand extended.

  I quickly swipe its leg. Next second, it’s on the floor with Su’s hatchet leveled at its neck.

  “Okay.” It winces and laughs. “Let’s not shake on it. I must be bumping crazy, but you nags got yourself a deal.”

  “Clear.”

  As Sway pulls a crowbar from its pack and pries off the lock on a supply closet that’s down the hall from Cutter’s apartment, Su and I run ahead in the dark toward the next stairwell, then double back on our tracks in the dust. It doesn’t take my exceptional hearing to know that the beasts from the E-SUVs are now on the fourth-floor landing. It’s like no one ever taught them the word stealth. No sooner are we all inside the closet with the door shut than we hear footsteps and the sounds of heavy boots kicking in doors.

  “Got something here, Risk,” a beast shouts.

  “Risk?” Sway whispers. “He’s not mayor’s patrol. He’s mob. That was fast.”

  “If Risk is mob, shouldn’t we go talk to it?” I ask.

  Sway shakes its head. “There’s different kinds of mobsters. Some are more socialized than others. Risk is the kind that doesn’t ‘do’ talking. He more does murdering.”

  “Oh, I really do not like this,” Su groans, pacing.

  Sway shushes us as a cacophony of voices and radios crackle right outside our door. Then a beast hollers, “Downstairs! Downstairs!”

  Footsteps pound past the closet. Then it gets quiet again. After a few minutes, Su turns on a crank flashlight, and we all warily eye one another. In this tiny space, filled with more upcycling-worthy items than all the closets on Grand Island, the air crackles with Sway’s presence. I can practically see Su’s brain working. She was expecting carnivorous mutants that solely wanted to jump our bones, and instead we’re met with this fast-talking mess of right angles that, thanks to the haircut, kind of looks like her. For the past five years, I’d been trying to convince her that maybe beasts weren’t so different from us. Now, given everything we’ve seen, I’m not entirely sure which of us is right.

  “So, are y’all sisters?” it asks.

  My left foot is only an inch away from its right; they’re almost touching. It clears its throat. I jerk my foot away. Su continues to stare straight ahead. But I can’t bear the awkward lingering silence. I mean, it asked a question. It’s rude not to answer.

  “No. We’re cohabitators. Her mother and my grandmother were friends and chose to live together after the divide. My mother lives with us, too.”

  Su elbows me. “It doesn’t need to know all that.”

  Sway snorts. “Yeah. Stop telling me such valuable information. Hey, everybody. These nags live with her grandma.”

  Su’s grip tightens on her hatchet handle. “Mouthy, scrawny beast.”

  “Aggressive, thick-skulled nag,” Sway replies.

  “What’s a nag?” I ask.

  “It’s what the older norms call you.” Sway licks its thumb and wipes a minuscule speck of dirt off its sneaker. “Nag means to annoy or irritate with persistent faultfinding. And apparently it also used to mean an old, useless horse. By the way, men don’t wear what you’re wearing.”

  Men. The way it—he—speaks is so fascinating. Him. His. He. Not it. Su had advocated for calling Twofer they. Majesty had insisted on it. But I’d always simply thought of Twofer as a she, same as everybody else on Grand Island.

  “We only had dated information to work with,” I reply.

  In all actuality, we had no information to work with. Fees cleared and burned any evidence of beasts in our first few years on the island while they were consolidating all the remaining goods. Massive bonfire marks still charred almost every street. Sure, some of our mothers kept things back, hidden away in attics and storage totes—contraband magazines, fiction books, and photos of passed loved ones—but otherwise fees had completely bleached beasts from the fabric of our lives.

  “It’s not the information’s age. Norms never wore what you’re wearing. You look like an old Dress Me app set to Joke Mode. Or like you stepped out of an old Dick for Hire episode. No, no, I’ve got it. It’s like you scavenged bodies that had been trying not to freeze to death.”

  Su’s head whips toward me. “Don’t even tell me…”

  “Ew,” I say.

  Maybe the two bodies were no longer in the house we moved into, but Liyan must have stripped them before she burned them. These were their clothes I found in the hall closet. Su pounds me one in the shoulder and it hurts. A lot. No delicate breeze will ever blow me or anyone in our year over, but I am a dainty (albeit lethal) seedpod compared to Su. Plus, she’s wearing her gardening gloves with the license plate strips sewn into the knuckles.

  “Here.” Sway digs around in his bag and pulls out jackets and shirts that are a hundred times less warm than the ones we’re wearing. “This will help a little. At least for any cameras you walk past, because no norm your age would be caught dead in those.”

  “You just so happen to have two full sets of clothes on you?” Su says.

  “You don’t?” Sway replies, then slaps a hand over his eyes when I start to lift my shirt.

  “Glori!” Su yanks the closet door open and tosses Sway out. She slams it shut behind him. “You can’t be fee-like around them. Stop acting so…”

  “Like myself?” I fill in.

  “Exactly.” She nods.

  “You think a beast that normal might have Twofer?” I whisper hopefully as we change.

  A pitying look is my only reply.

  To avoid the cameras, we exit out the back of the building.

  Ducking down, we follow Sway and race across the street.

  “The subway line used to end at University Station, but ten thousand people came here after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. Then a few years later, those twin tsunamis hit Japan. By the time the arctic shelf fell off, Buffalo was awash�
��Ha! get it?—with coastal and island refugees. All those apartments over there went up and the city decided to extend the subway tunnel out to the river. This was right when Buffalo was picked to be the next smart city and all that grant money poured in, which means something actually got built here in a timely fashion.” He laughs, like he made a joke. “Or, you know, at least half built. Since the tunnel doesn’t need any power to stay merely coolish in the freezing months and only warmish in the heat months, it’s pretty prime real estate.”

  We’ve stopped in front of a brick building with glass entrance doors that are needlessly chained considering all the glass is missing. Neat white lettering next to the shattered doors reads: NIAGARA RIVER STATION. Bloodred kanji cuts through the words.

  怒り

  Ikari.

  Rage.

  How very not subtle.

  “Voilà,” Sway says. “I present to you the mob. Just follow the tunnel. Once you get to the red lights, you’re there. You can’t miss Rage. He’s the size of a two-car garage.” He holds out his palm. “That will be five thousand dollars.”

  Su smacks his hand away.

  “Don’t give him a nickel. You could have pointed us here.”

  Sway shrugs. “You said all I had to do was show you where Rage was. And now I did.”

  Suddenly, I can see individual snowflakes and how dirty my hands are and that the very outside of Sway’s irises are indigo rather than black or brown. We are bathed in light. For a moment, I only think how marvelous it is to see perfectly clearly at night. Then I notice that a happy face is illuminating Su’s chest.

  Then I hear the music.

  EEEEEE-DUNDUNDUNDUN-EEEEEE-DUNDUNDUNDUN-EEEEEE…

  “Oh waste,” Su says.

  The truck is parked a half block back. The engine revs. That music cannot be helping their headaches any. The driver floors the accelerator, and the truck’s tires spin on the fresh snow. A moment later, it’s careening toward us. Sway dives in through the glassless door, Su a half beat behind. I duck in, barely with my feet pulled through, when a mound of snow is pushed in after me. Sway jogs three paces down the stairs as Su and I fall into defensive stances. But outside, the beasts continue to plow more snow against the door. They’re barricading us in.

  “Cowards,” Su spits.

  “No.” Sway groans. “Smart.”

  For the first time, his chatty, easy facade falls away. He looks genuinely upset.

  “They’re forcing us into the tunnels?” I ask, and he nods. “Why?”

  “They’re betting what’s up ahead will kill you for them.”

  “There are no other ways out of here?” Su asks.

  “Nowhere viable before you get to Rage.”

  Su slaps Sway in the chest as she passes him and heads down the subway stairs.

  “Welcome back aboard,” she says.

  “I’ll lead you there. But as soon as we get to the mob, I’m out. Y’all are tourists, but I have to live here. Generally, I make a habit of not putting my neck on the line. I happen to dislike when it’s horizontally spraying blood.”

  Chipped orange-and-red tiles decorate the walls around us, along with framed pre-Night advertisements that are faded but otherwise intact. In one, a beast stands in front of a high-rise with the words: COME HOME TO THE PLEASANT TOWERS. SECURE. SUSTAINABLE. FUN! Another shows a mixed family—fees and beasts—sitting down to eat a meal of Farm Safe Goods, both “delicious and or-genic.”

  I can’t help but stop and stare. Nowhere back home can I think of a single place that depicts beasts and fees together. I’d always thought this was because cohabitating had been awful and thus fees scrubbed out all reminders of it. But…

  “These fees look happy,” I say to Su.

  “They must be drugged.”

  “Everything all right back there?” Sway calls over his shoulder.

  “Hardly,” I say.

  “Ha!”

  We follow Sway out onto the subway platform. Since it’s the start of the line, there’s only one direction to choose. We need to go right. Right into a gaping maw of darkness. The smell, even from here, is atrocious. Waste mixed with unwashed feet mixed with festering decay. This is what beasts consider an optimal place to live?

  Vaulting off the platform, Su executes a somersault midair and lands on the tracks. I can’t help myself. When I jump down, I do two somersaults.

  She rolls her eyes but then grins. “Touché.”

  When we glance back at Sway à la Top that, he just stands there with his jaw dropped open, as if running leaps wasn’t first-grade material. I wonder if he’s joking, but then instead of following our leads, he walks the entire length of the subway platform to a set of stairs.

  “Tell me I haven’t been doing two hundred squat thrusts a day for nothing all these years,” Su says. “They can’t all be this weak, right?”

  “You want them to be stronger?” I ask, then call out to Sway, “Take your time!”

  “That’s a twelve-foot jump. Some of us value our knees.”

  At the mouth of the tunnel, Sway takes a solar-charged headlamp from his pack. If it’s anything like the ones Su and I pull from ours, the light will stay strong for about five minutes before fading to a glow barely more illuminating than a freshly lit match. With these as our only sight aids, we enter pitch-blackness.

  “I’ll take first scout,” Su says. “Best to stay quiet back here.”

  She gives me a meaningful look, then silently runs up ahead.

  When we can no longer see her headlamp, Sway says, “She, like, your bodyguard?”

  I’m surprised he’s picked up on it, but I shake my head. “Older cohabitator syndrome, I guess. She’s always been that way. I’m also a little smaller than most fees my age, so…”

  “Why?” Sway asks. “How old are you?”

  This time I flat-out lie, “Nineteen.”

  We’re told never to reveal that we’re part of the Miracles, aka the last group of fees born after Nuclear Night. Sway snorts with disbelief, but then must realize I’m serious and drops it.

  “Now that Lumber Jane’s gone,” Sway says, “you know I have to ask about him.”

  “Twofer?”

  Sway nods. “Are there more like him?”

  “No. He’s the only one.”

  I was in Majesty’s bedroom when Two Five was born, so I witnessed it firsthand. My mother didn’t give birth to a beast. She gave birth to a regular old baby. Only its vagina was pushed out instead of pushed in.

  Liyan laughed when I pointed this out. “Beasts have penises. You know this.”

  “Well, we didn’t know they looked like that,” Su said for me.

  When I questioned Grand Mati, she was more serious. “It’s not that they look like beasts, Spark Plug. It’s that throughout the entire history of the world, they have acted like them. Not all of them. And not all the time. But enough. Especially after the Night. And since the world has reset itself and we can now choose how to make our lives, we have chosen to be done with them.”

  Sway waits for me to continue. I dutifully tell him the lie Su and I prepared, about the fee from Canada, coming in a boat with a baby. How we thought that was why she was still fertile. Canada was farther away from any direct detonations. How she died shortly after. Late into the dark hours on the day Twofer was born, my grand told me all the survivors of the Night knew sterility was an effect of radiation. The last few broadcasting news sources had said as much before they went off the air. Grand said in Buffalo, once Fortitude’s shaky government was up and running, he elected her to run fertility tests on the remaining fees. Although she never told him, she cut the study short after more and more of the results came back negative.

  “Imagine,” she said, “the life a fertile fee was destined for in that environment.”

  Which meant Majesty probably wasn’t the only fertile fee.

  It was the only time we spoke of it.

  “And Matricula Rhodes knew about this?” Sway continues. “I
mean, of course she did. She knows about everything over there, right? And she let him stay? And no one thought to tell the mayor?”

  Grand always teased me that I lied like I sewed: sloppily and unjoyfully. It was partly why I never returned to school with Su after Twofer was born. It was hard enough seeing fees at the gym or at my grand’s labs. Two Five was a secret I’d never be able to keep.

  Well, that and I didn’t want to leave him home alone with Majesty.

  My headlamp goes out. A moment later Sway’s does, too. I must not have lied convincingly. Why does he still have so many questions?

  “Why tell anyone?” I say into the darkness as I wait for my eyes to adjust. “We weren’t even sure if he would survive.”

  That part was true. Still, we gave the baby a citizen number—2584-0612—but no name. And when it became clear Majesty wouldn’t be taking care of her baby, I tentatively washed, clothed, and fed it. I was there for its first smile, first laugh, and first steps. It was me who answered its first proper question: “Why’s a bird called bird and not cat?” I taught it the names of the stars we could see and the planets we couldn’t. I cuddled it at night when it had nightmares and made it take naps when it balled its hands into fists and got cranky.

  Out of the murk, another subway stop appears up on our right. Fine living room furniture is neatly arranged on the platform. A couch, end tables, ottomans. A nonworking chandelier even hangs from the ceiling. Strange. Even stranger, barbed wire blocks off the exit. Yet in the very faint ambient platform light, I’m more interested in who’s next to me. Sway has small ears and a freckle right below his left eye, and his teeth still seem to be in good shape.

  “Staring,” Sway says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re staring. At me.” My cheeks get warm and tingly with embarrassment, but he just barrels on about Twofer. “But he did survive. What if more nags are fertile? We could have been making babies this whole time. I mean, with your consent. Naturally. Okay, yeah. I guess I can see why you wouldn’t tell us. But how come your family kept him?”

  “We were the ones who found the fee,” I stammer.