by Burgy, P. J.
“Well, grab on. Come on, get on my back.” He bent down.
“Now I know you’re kidding.”
“No, really. Grab on.” He offered his back again.
Hesitating for a moment, she fastened herself as best she could to his back, wrapping her legs around his middle and her arms around his neck. “Don’t drop me, okay?”
He started up the chain, Kara clinging to him. It was with ease that he ascended, gloved hand over gloved hand, feet kicking ever so slightly in the air as he pulled them up higher and higher.
Around halfway up, she made the mistake of looking down and regretted it as soon as she saw how far they were from the ground. It occurred to her that the highest she had ever been was in a tree, and that was far closer to the ground than where she was now. She squeezed him, holding on tighter.
“Don’t be afraid. I’ve got you," he said.
“I’m the one holding onto you,” she hissed.
“If you fall, I’ll catch you, I promise.”
“I don’t want to fall,” she whispered, shutting her eyes tightly.
“There’s no steps leading up, no structures to climb. I found this a few years ago. I’m glad to see it’s still here,” he stated.
“You weren’t sure?”
“I felt like it would be,” he answered her.
“And if it wasn’t?” She grimaced, jaw clenched.
“Oh, I’d have found something else.”
They reached the top and he crawled onto the platform. He backed up, facing the open side of the room, looking out over the city. Then, he gave her a little shake and she dropped off of him, landing on her feet.
He hoisted up the thick chain, all one hundred feet of it, and piled it on the platform. It was anchored to some of the steel beams that were exposed to the elements and she swallowed thickly as she watched him lifting that all up with no trouble at all. That was heavy duty chain, over a hundred feet of it. He slapped his hands together a few times when he was done.
When she looked around, she saw a door frame and peered around inside of the building. It had been left empty, just the bare drywall. Some of the upper stories had caved in about halfway down the hall and she saw light sneaking in from the breaks in the walls and ceiling. Tarps shuddered in the breeze, covering large windows. She walked out into the hall carefully, checking her footing, before he moved by her and ushered her into a room directly across, the walls intact.
There was enough light filtering in through the hall windows and cracks in the walls outside that she could see him in there, moving, but it was otherwise dark. He was gathering up what looked to be piles of clothing and bunching them up together. He stopped when he saw her shadow cast over him, and he took off his helmet, tilting his head to the side.
Showing his teeth in an anxious little smile, he coughed and patted the makeshift bedding he'd assembled for her. “You, uh, you probably don’t want to lie down on these. I’m sorry.”
“I’m good with the floor.” She had a seat against the wall where she could watch him. She shrugged when she saw his brows knit. “I’m good.”
“I can go back down, see if I can find you something-” he began.
“Let’s just bunker down for the night, Russ,” she said. “I’ve slept on worse.”
He accepted her guarantee and curled up on his side, watching her. The sun was setting, and she could see the low light reflecting off of his eyes, eerie, like an animal's in the darkness. She nodded off after lying down on her side, head on her arm, and felt sleep creep in behind her eyes.
Kara awoke to the sound of the storm, hearing the water as it cascaded down through the holes in the roof out in the hall. Thunder rolled, the pattering rain coming in waves. She could hear the tarps fluttering in the wind out in the hall, brief flashes of light sneaking in from the broiling storm outside.
For a moment she saw him on his back, sprawled out. Another streak of lightning revealed the same image to her. She found it odd how he could sleep through something as loud as a storm with his extraordinary hearing. Another flash in the sky, another glimpse of the sleeping Russell. He looked out for the count, lips parted, head back, arms out, legs parted with one knee bent up in the air.
She felt the waves of exhaustion tugging at her eyelids and she stretched a little on the floor. It occurred to her to use her ugly vest as a pillow, so she took it off and lay it on the floor. It was better than her arm, but not by much.
She thought to herself in the night, listening to the storm and the rain. Tired thoughts. Dreamy thoughts. Wandering and strange thoughts. She considered his face and wondered what color his eyes had been before his pupils expanded into big, black pits. She wondered if he’d been tan, or if he’d been a pale skinned sort of fellow. Had he been fat? Maybe more out of shape, pudgy. No. Russell seemed like the kind of guy that took care of himself to a certain extent, but Kara couldn’t imagine him pushing a barbell up like Gencho and grunting like a pig every time he strained.
He made a gagging sound and she tensed. The stench of hit her.
She heard him cursing under his breath.
Without thinking, she reached for the flashlight, turned on the red lens, and saw that he’d gotten sick on the floor. He was in the process of grabbing for something beside him.
He tossed a rag to the side after wiping his face clean.
She couldn’t help but stare at him. In the red light, he almost looked… normal. He knew that she was looking at him, she could tell by the way he shifted where he sat, his posture straightening.
He locked eyes with her. “What?”
She shrugged. “Just looking at you.”
“Why?”
“Am I not supposed to?” she asked.
He broke eye contact and lied down on his side facing her, his gaze drifting off. He took up a fetal position. “You seem to be making a habit of staring at me.”
The image of his smile passed through her mind, a recent memory, only a few hours earlier now. He didn’t look like the same man and she frowned. “If you’re hungry, Russell, you can go eat.”
“Do you think I’m disgusting?” he asked her.
“What? No.”
He met her eyes again, briefly, then he stared at his gloved hands, flexing his fingers, curling them in like claws. “It’s always the flesh. That’s what I remember. Faces and names from my childhood come and go, like ghosts. I try to reach out and grab them, but they always slip through my fingers. I can’t remember my mother’s name. I had a dog named Oscar. I think he was a big dog, with dark brown fur. I might have had a sister, I think. I can see her, but I don’t know who she was. I shouldn’t have made it. I shouldn’t have been allowed to be. I did terrible things when I turned, Kara. You asked me if I’ve ever… I did. I did, when I wasn’t myself. I shouldn’t be alive. The fever should have killed me, but it didn’t, and the virus didn’t even have the mercy to burn my brain away to nothing. It left enough of me. And now, here I am.”
She swallowed, clearing her throat. “I’m sorry.”
“Do you know why I decided to help you?” he asked, rolling onto his back. He stared up at the ceiling, his knees bent, his feet on the floor, his hands on his lower stomach.
“No.”
“I would tell you, but I don’t think you’d understand.”
“Try me.”
“I’ve met a lot of people out here. I didn’t try to,” he told her. “Most of them were slobbering fever casualties. Some were like you, the healthy among the sick, passing through or scavenging. In the early days of the infection, there were people showing symptoms, forced out of their shelters, wandering in the streets and crying out for help. I remember coming out at dusk, quieting them, leading them somewhere safe where they could die peacefully. If they turned, I broke their necks. I figured it would have been worse to let them run, or in some horrible twist, start to become aware again. Like me.”
“Do you wish you’d died?”
He turned his head, eyes on her. �
�You know I do.”
“Yeah, well,” she said. “Why don’t you just, I don’t know, end it? ...I can’t think of a better way to put it.”
He laughed, head turning away, tilting back, his grin wide and showing off all of his teeth right back to the molars. His eyes closed, the laugh shaking his body as he restrained himself to keep his voice low. He crossed his left leg over his right knee, bobbing his boot in the air. “Oh, because I’m a coward, that’s why. A yellow-bellied scaredy-cat.”
“I didn’t think you’d be afraid to die,” she stated.
“Then you’d be wrong.”
“You afraid there’ll be nothing?”
“The opposite,” he told her. “I’m afraid of what’s waiting for me, for what I’ve done. I am a murderer, and a coward. What Hell will be waiting for me? But maybe there's time yet to change that, some sort of, I don't know, penance?”
“Is that the real reason you're helping me?” She studied him with her eyes. In the red light, he looked frozen, and she puzzled at the way he stared off. “I’m your ticket to Heaven, am I?”
He turned to look at her again, and he smiled. “We all have our motives.”
She smirked, shaking her head. “It doesn’t matter to me, as long as you get me where I’m going. I don’t believe in any of that stuff, to be honest. It’s all just make believe, stories that people told one another so they’d all behave. So men could control other men. That’s all.”
“I didn’t used to believe in it, or maybe I did and I don’t remember," he said, his voice low, his lips parted to show teeth. When he stared at her, his brows knit. “When you’ve seen what I’ve seen, been through it, you start to consider the possibility that there is something out there, something in here. Inside of us. I’ve seen it. This thing inside me.”
“A soul?”
“A demon.”
“Now you're talking like Father Isaac,” she said, “Look, Russ, if you’re going to Hell for killing some people, I’ll see you there because so have I. But look, there’s a difference. My father told me that you don’t kill a man unless you don’t have any other choice. If it comes down to him or you, you kill him. Killing isn’t murder. You didn’t murder anyone.”
He gazed at the ceiling. “I’ve murdered many people, Kara.”
“Who? Who did you murder? Wailers? The Purgers?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “That was self-defense ad you know it. There’s no reason to feel bad for saving your own skin. I've done it. I've walked away from dead Red Brethren, and a burning Salvation. I did what I had to do, and I survived.”
His eyes closed and he rolled over onto his side again, facing away from her this time. She frowned as she watched him curl up into a fetal position, hugging himself. His breathing was audible. Resisting the urge to crawl over to him, she sighed and checked on the flashlight.
She didn’t want to run out the battery, but she also wanted to watch him for a little while longer, at least until their conversation had concluded. His silence spoke of that time approaching. A ragged breath escaped him.
“Russ?”
“You’re the first person I’ve talked to, really talked to, in a long time,” he whispered. He swallowed thickly, his face hidden from her as she tried to get a look at him. “And when I grabbed your hand, it was the first time in years that I'd actually touched someone else. Touched, but not... killed, I mean.”
“Yeah?”
“With gloves on, though...”
Her eyelids grew heavy. “Still counts, I think.”
He exhaled. “You don’t think I’m a demon?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Thank you," he said.
She turned the flashlight off. The room turned pitch black, and Kara curled up on her side on the floor, trying to get comfortable. “I think you’re a cool dude, Rusty.”
He chuckled. Then, he made a sick sound, muffled, and she heard the scuffling of his boots on the floor. She rushed to grab the flashlight, turning it on to shine red across the room. He was gone. Out in the corridor somewhere she heard him belching and gagging. She frowned. He was cursing, clearing his throat, spitting. She could smell the bile and her nose scrunched reflexively.
He was making such awful noises out there in the dark, like he was choking. She swallowed and stood up, taking the flashlight with her to go check on him out in the corridor. “Russ?”
His voice came from a distance, sound wet and raw. “Don’t.”
She backed off, returning to the room, and found herself on the floor again. She turned off the red light and sighed, eyes closing.
Kara woke up, startled by the sensation of something wet on her face, and saw a pale light filtering in through the open walls outside. A leak had formed in the roof above her and some rainwater dripped down, a few drops of which had hit her cheek. She moved away, sitting up, rubbing the wet spot dry. Tired, but awake now, she yawned.
Her eyes scanned the room. She was alone.
The shadows looked more severe than she remembered from the night before. She heard the rain outside, softer now, and the gurgle of the runoff from the overnight downpour trickling through the walls around her. She stood up, stretching, and gathered herself, adjusting her belt and checking to make sure she had her things in order.
Outside of the room, out in the dusty hallway where the walls opened up to the world, she found herself awestruck at the scenic city scape. The sky was filled with stars, the passing rain clouds growing thin and wispy. The moon was huge and bright, casting an unearthly yet calming glow on the towers of rust and broken glass below. This high up, Kara felt a swooning in her stomach, and took a step back from the ledge. She hadn’t been that close, but she felt safer keeping a good distance. It was easy to get overwhelmed at the view, after all.
The smell of fresh rain and sweet, sickly bile met her nose and she frowned, shining her light down the hall as her attention was torn from the beautiful view of the city. She could see the patches of tarry vomit on the dry floor, leading toward the far end of the corridor. Under the sound of the rain and the tiny, whispering waterfalls in the bones of the building, she could hear something else, something unsettling. Something that made her skin crawl. A memory scraped against the back of her mind with thin, skeletal fingers, the crunching noise echoing from many yards away reminding her of a dark, damp place and the snapping of bones.
Maybe it hadn’t just been the rain on her face that had woken her up, Kara thought to herself as she began to make her way, very quietly, down the hall. Curiosity nagged at her while apprehension warned her. This was a bad idea and she knew that she would find something at the end of the hall. She knew it would be awful and that she should stop. And yet, she continued on.
The crunching sound grew louder the further she went, and she shined her light back and forth, looking for the source of the noise. Rivulets of water cascaded down to the floor through the collapsed ceiling, a huge puddle at her feet. The moonlight grew dimmer here, where the walls appeared again, and she paused before traversing the pool of rainwater. She reached the end of the hall, saw that she could go left or right, and chose to go left, where the sound was coming from. And there he was. She found herself frozen at the sight of him; he wasn’t wearing any clothes.
She saw him first, and then the little broken feathery bodies scattered around him. What she assumed to be his clothing was thrown into a messy pile a few feet away, his boots standing up straight, his helmet beside them.
For a split second, she was unsure if it was Russell and not just some other Infected that had gotten in and climbed up to their floor. She readied herself to run. He seemed oblivious to her presence, deeply invested in chewing on a pigeon, crouched on his powerful thighs. The blood looked black in the red light. She recognized his face but didn’t see Russell at all. When he did realize she was there, he dropped the bird and regarded her with black, dreamy eyes.
“I’m sorry. I-” She backed away, raising her free hand from her hip. “Sorry.”
He made a low noise at her and she watched him pick the bird back up and continue to pull it apart with his teeth. He’d turned to the side, possessively cradling his meal and giving her a suspicious sideways glance. He made another sound at her, like a growl.
“Russ, okay. I’m gonna go,” she said.
He crunched on the bird bones and then looked at her again, head tilting. She saw the flash of recognition in his eyes, and he appeared to be coming out of his trance. It was a quick transition, his facial expression going from distant to horrified in the span of only a few seconds. He dropped the bird again, looking at his hands, and immediately covered himself. “Ah, ah!”
She looked away, pointing her flashlight down the way she’d come. She took in a ragged breath and pivoted, taking a few steps toward the junction. “Yeah, I’m sorry. Sorry. I just thought… I don’t know what I thought. …Wow.”
“Kara, I’m sorry, I, this is…”
“No, no, it's cool, yeah. That was my bad, actually. Heard a noise, and, well, sorry.” She coughed, keeping her eyes averted as she heard him clonking around and scrambling behind her in the shadows.
“I, I don’t even know how…”
“I wasn’t going to ask why you were naked,” she said.
“I guess I didn’t want to get blood on my clothes.” He sounded less than thrilled and cleared his throat.
“Ah, I’m going to head back and try to get a few more hours in before dawn.” Her nervous smile widened. “Though, after what I’ve seen, who knows if I’ll be able to.”
“I’ve already apologized.”
“I didn't see anything that I regret getting a look at.” She sneaked a look back at him, smirking, and then walked away, back to the junction, making a right to head back.
“Wait, what?”
She stared up at the ceiling, having relocated from her previous spot to avoid the leak, and thought to herself, quietly studying the way the shadows stuck to the walls as she tried to force herself to fall asleep. The moon was out in full force, the clouds dispersed and the rain gone.
As she lay there on the floor she heard a soft sound and glanced over to the open door frame to see Russell there, dressed, hair wet and slicked back. They regarded one another for a moment and then he took a few steps in.