by Isaac Marion
Nora is a good shot. She has excellent spatial recognition and eye-hand coordination, making her naturally talented with guns. But she is not a killer. She is not a war vet, she is not trained by the Army or National Guard or even local militias. The art of murder is not embedded in her muscle memory and she is not immune to shock. So when this drooling wreck of rotting flesh surges toward her, she doesn’t calmly fire a round into its frontal lobe and walk away. She screams like a teenage girl and empties all seven rounds into its chest.
She doesn’t have time to pull out her hatchet. The bullets slow the corpse about as much as paintballs. Its fingertips swipe for her face. She stumbles backward and trips, falls on her butt, kicks hard at the corpse’s ankle and feels it snap like brittle plastic. The corpse topples onto its side and Nora scrambles to her feet, sprints to her brother and stands protectively in front of him while the corpse staggers upright. It takes two steps toward her with its loose, floppy foot dragging against the pavement, then stops, looks down at the broken foot, steps on it with the other, and heaves. Its foot tears off like a stubborn shoe. The corpse advances, stumping forward on its bare tibia like a peg leg.
Nora has seen all she can handle. Without premeditation or planning, she grabs Addis’s wrist and runs back toward downtown Seattle, not because there is shelter or food or ammo there, but because it’s downhill. She manages one final glance toward the motel. The Dead woman is giving slow pursuit, but the man hasn’t moved. He stands where Nora left him, just watching her go.
The tall man has been cheated. Some of the information he bartered for is false. He knows that he is in a North American forest and that there should be things like wolves and bears and deer in it but instead there are strange things that shouldn’t be here or anywhere. Floating eyes and trees that breathe and snakes with silky blue fur. He does not know where to send his complaints. He does not know how he’ll ever get a grasp on this world if it keeps changing.
He has been walking in the dark for six hours. His mind is losing what little rigidity it had, melting into mercury and oozing through the cracks. The brute in his belly is in a panic, screaming at him over and over, and he is growing weary of its ranting.
~ aly anTAKE GET STEAL HAVE FILL
Shut up! he finally snaps. I can’t do it until you tell me what it is! So shut up!
To his surprise, the brute shuts up. The man walks onward, his mind ringing in the sudden silence. And then, in a sour grumble, as if pried out of a pouting child, a specific imperative finally emerges:
Eat.
The man stops walking and slaps a palm over his face. That was it? Eat? He remembers eating. He even remembers some foods. Steak. Sushi. Sashimi… Eating is easy.
Why did you dance around it so long?
The brute is silent.
Still in disbelief, the man begins foraging. He finds a huckleberry bush and pops a handful of the plump red globes in his mouth. He bites down, expecting juicy sweetness—and feels the sensation of biting into a dead moth. The juice tastes like attic dust. The texture is dry and flaky, despite how the berries feel in his hands. He spits them out and stares with horror at the pulpy mess on his shirt.
The brute smirks.
He searches until he finds some wild mushrooms and shoves one in his mouth. Although he can feel its fleshy softness in his fingers, his mouth tells him he’s crunching into a ball of dead wasps. He spits it out with a moan.
The brute laughs.
The cloud of hands mobilizes again, darting deeper into the forest, and a rich new scent pulses back to him through the cloud. Blood. Flesh. He follows it into a small clearing and discovers the source: a young deer hobbling through the underbrush, blood pouring from its claw-raked haunches.
This? he asks the brute, and the response is a mumbled, slightly sarcastic maybe.
The deer’s dark, round eyes regard him with desperation. Part of him recoils from the impulses surging into his hands and teeth, but that part is no longer in charge. He seizes the deer and bites into its neck.
Blood pours down his throat. He rips out big chunks of meat and his mouth plays no tricks on him. The meat tastes like meat. The blood tastes like blood, salty and metallic. But when it hits his stomach, there is no spreading warmth of satiety. He drops the deer and stands up, waiting for it, but when his stomach finally responds, it’s not the answer he expected. A dark rush of wrenching, twisting hunger knifes into him, as if he’s suddenly minutes from starvation.
Eyes bulging, he leans over and vomits.
Wrong! the brute giggles into his ears. Wrong wrong wrong.
He vomits until it feels like his stomach will twist inside out, then stands over the deer gasping and shuddering. What do you want? Tell me!
Eat, the brute purrs, retreating back into the shadows, as if the answers to all questions are contained in this single word.
The cloud of hands drifts toward an opening in the trees, beckoning him with long, curling fingers, and he follows. He squints as he emerges from the graveyard musk of the forest into crisp air and blinding light. He is on a hill overlooking a valley, and there is something amazing in this valley. Towering rectangles of concrete and glass. A tangled web of streets winding through houses and businesses and banks and bars.
City.
andalign="left">All these words return to him at once, conjuring a wild spray of images. People swarming in shopping malls, flashing plastic cards, putting paint on their faces and metal things on their fingers. People sleeping in alleys, sticking bottles in their mouths and metal things in their arms. People naked in beds, kissing. People naked in showers, crying. A man pouring gasoline on a leather couch. A man in a tie screaming into a radio. A blonde woman touching the man’s face, then dying beside a river.
THERE, the brute shouts, interrupting his daydream, and the images fade. GO. TAKE. EAT.
The cloud of hands surges down into the city like a squid on the hunt. With his head bowed, the man goes where he’s led.
“Are we going back to the Space Needle?” Addis asks when the motel has vanished from sight and they have recovered some composure.
“No.”
“Why are we going over this bridge again?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Surprise. Big sister doesn’t know everything.”
Silence.
“Maybe we should go up there.” He points east, toward a distant hill topped by three radio towers.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you want to go places for no reason, just keep following me. You get to be our new leader when you come up with a plan.”
“Maybe there’s people up there. Look at all the houses.”
Nora considers the plateau of palatial Colonials, balconies and roof decks, stunning water views. That must be where all Seattle’s money used to go. Surely those estates have good enough security to keep out a few shambling corpses.
“Okay,” Nora says, shrugging. “Let’s go find Bill Gates’s house.”
“Who’s Bill Gates?”
“A super rich guy.”
“What’s ‘rich’ mean?”
Nora opens her mouth to answer, then chuckles, pondering the vocabulary of future generations.
“Nothing, Addy,” she says. “Nothing much.”
• • •
When they reach the bottom of the highway hill, she looks back to see how far they’ve come and notices two figures in the distance, cresting the peak. They are so far away they’d be invisible except that they are the only things in her entire field of vision that are moving. She can’t make out any details of their faces or features, but one of them is much taller than the other and the short one is limping severely, as if missing a foot, perhaps.
So they travel together on their little murder spree. Boney and Clyde. How cute.
“Those things are following us,” Nora tells Addis as they exit the highway and start heading east, toward the t
rio of radio towers that tops the hill like a tiara. “We need to find more bullets.”
“I’m really hungry,” Addis says.
“Did you finish your leftovers?”
“Yeah.”
“Check mine.”
He unzips her backpack and digs around in
Nora frowns at it. “Is that all I saved?”
“Yeah.”
“God. What a fatty.”
Addis opens it and squeezes a clump of tofu into his mouth. He offers the bag to her and she starts to take it, then looks at her brother’s face. His cheekbones.
“You have it,” she says. “I’m not hungry.”
Her stomach chooses that moment to growl ferociously.
“Are too,” Addis says.
“Okay I’m lying. But you’re a growing boy and I’m just a lazy old teenager. You eat it.”
“Do you think there’s food in those houses?”
“Probably. Hopefully.”
He relents. He squeezes out another precious helping of tofu and cold margarine and they keep walking.
They pass a small Airstream trailer turned on its side, napkins and plastic forks spewed out into the street. A menu Sharpied onto its steel panels advertises grass-fed burgers on locally baked brioche, but the stench emanating from it advertises maggots.
“Cheeseburgers,” Addis points out.
“Yummy.”
Addis sighs and digs his face into the Ziploc, licking out the last of the tofu.
“We’ll look for food as soon as we get safe,” Nora says. “Bullets before burgers.”
He gives her an accusatory glare that’s somewhat undermined by the globs of margarine in his eyebrows. “Are you gonna kill them next time?”
“I’m at least gonna kill the lady one.”
“Why not the man?”
“I don’t know. I’ll probably kill him too. But he’s a little different.”
“Because he didn’t try to eat us?”
“Maybe.”
“Why didn’t he?”
Nora doesn’t answer right away. She is in good shape, but the hill is steep and stealing her breath. “Remember when we stayed with Auntie Shirley on our way out here?”
He watches the pavement under his feet. “Yes.”
“Remember how when she got bitten, she just stood in the kitchen all day, washing the dishes over and over?”
“Yes.”
“And she didn’t try to eat Mom until three days later?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes when people turn into…‘zombies’ or whatever…it takes a while for them to figure out what they’re supposed to do. Maybe their personalities don’t disappear right away, so at first they’re just confused, and they don’t know who they are or what’s happening to them.”
Addis is quiet for a while, digesting this. “So why is that one following us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe ’cause his girlfriend wants to eat us. Or maybe just ’cause I was the last person he saw before he died.”
Addis smiles. “Maybe he likes you.”
“Maybe the girl likes you.”
His smile vanishes.
• • •
By the time they reach the hill’s main thoroughfare, Broadway Ave, the sun is on its way down. Nora realizes they must have slept a lot later than she intended. She can’t remember if they ever actually slept the night before. The days of scheduled meals and bed meway down. times feel like ancient myths. She struggles to remember the color of her mother’s eyes.
They have entered a neighborhood that looks like it was once vibrant. Colorful storefronts with artful graffiti, concert posters smothering every pole, and dozens of stylishly dressed corpses littering the streets, their scooped-out skulls brimming with rainwater.
Nora opens her mouth to tell Addis not to look at them, then realizes how absurd that is. She lets him quietly absorb the massacre, hoping he will somehow process all his horrible experiences without too much damage. That he will find a way to bathe in poison without letting it inside.
“Look!” he says, pointing toward the park on the other side of the street. “A swimming pool!”
The park is huge, and may once have been beautiful. Rolling hills of grass, now overgrown with weeds. Tall, elegant lamp posts, now rusted. Its towering central fountain still produces a trickling stream where it must have once cascaded. The stream flows into a shallow pool less than a foot deep and fully accessible, none of the usual municipal railings and warnings, as if the city actually wanted people to play in it. Perhaps that headless couple holding hands in the bus stop used to sit on the benches here and watch their toddlers splash. Perhaps the college kids now feeding flies in the street used to get drunk and lie on their backs in this pool late at night, staring up at the stars, dreaming big dreams for themselves and for each other. Nora is going to cry again. This fucking city. This fucking world. When will she harden to it?
She watches Addis peel off his shoes and socks, sweaty and filthy, spotted red from bleeding blisters. She watches him cool his feet in the algae-slimed water. She wants to join him—she is drenched in sweat and the summer air seems to ripple around her in little pulses—but she needs to stay ready. They are not safe.
“Oh! Fuck!” she gasps as Addis palms a huge spray of water down the front of her tank-top. Addis almost falls over laughing.
“You asshole!” she snaps, but she can’t hide the smile on her face and Addis keeps laughing. She whips off her shoes and runs into the pool. Addis squeals and flees. Nora kicks water at his back as he hops out of the pool and sprints off into the shaggy grass.
“Hey!” Nora shouts. “Come back!”
“Can’t catch me!” he giggles, and keeps running. Nora can see in the blurring speed of his feet that he’s beyond her discipline. The feeling of running barefoot in a field of grass, tendons flexed tight, feet bouncing off the ground like springs. Like running on a beach.
She lets him run. He won’t get far; he’s going in circles. She tries not to think about the precious calories he’s burning right now, maybe a whole meal’s worth. If they can’t spare the energy for a brief sprint in a park, they might as well go join the corpses on Broadway.
She hears a low growl behind her. Not a groan, not a moan, not a shout or a war cry; none of the sounds she’s used to hearing when something wants to kill her. Just a wet, rattling growl, like seashore rocks tumbling in the undertow. She turns around. A wolf is staring at her from under a nearby picnic table. Its eyes are ice blue. Like her mother’s, she suddenly recalls.
It creeps slowly from under the table, eyes fixed on hers. A big Canadian timber wolf, thin and desperate, fur caked in mud, too weary to bother cleaning itself anymore. Another phantasm pulled from the dying world’s fever dreams. Next will be dragons. Vampires. Devils. Ghosts. By the time the last human being—and there will be a last one, if only for a moment—realizes she is alozes time tne, the world will be nothing but the sum of her nightmares. Why should reality hold together with no minds left to force it?
Nora reaches for her hatchet and the wolf snarls as if it knows what a hatchet is. She glances right and sees Addis watching from a distant knoll, frozen with terror. She glances left and sees two more wolves slinking out from the trees near the edge of the park, leafy shadows stretching toward her as the sun sinks to the rooftops. Is this really how she’s going to die? In a world with so many options for exit, wandering a ruined city with no food or medicine, surrounded by murderers and the hungry Dead, she’s going to be killed by wolves?
And yet it fits. It’s appropriate. If the Library of Congress can be destroyed by arson, the Louvre by mold and neglect, if all the cultural accomplishments of ten thousand years on this planet can be erased by a few decades of carelessness, why shouldn’t this young American be devoured by wild animals in the middle of a city park?
Her bare feet dip into the warm water of the wading pool. Her back bumps against the fountain and she feels the thin trickle of regu
rgitated rainwater flowing down her spine. The wolves circle in, grinning.
The big man steps around the fountain and stands between her and the wolves. He groans loudly at them and it almost sounds like a word, but too hoarse to understand.
The nearest wolf leaps at him. It’s no doubt aiming for his throat, but his throat is nearly six feet high so it gets a mouthful of his t-shirt instead. He grabs the animal and strangles it, or maybe breaks its neck—it takes only a few seconds for the wolf to go limp. The other two bite into his legs. He reaches down, seizes them by the scruff of the neck, and hammers their heads into the concrete until their yelps go quiet. Everything goes quiet. The big man, his bald head gleaming gray in the evening light, looks at the dead predators at his feet. He looks at Nora.
Nora runs.
“Did you see that?” Addis squeals when she comes to a stop next to him on the hill.
“Uh, no. I was watching the sunset.”
“It was just like in Beauty and the Beast!”
The man picks up one of the wolves, sniffs it, tears off a leg and rips out a bite of the hot muscle, chews for a moment, then casually vomits into the fountain.
“Yeah…” Nora mumbles. “Kind of.”
The man drops the wolf and looks up at Nora. There is plenty of distance between them and plenty of directions for her to run, so she stays put for now, waiting to see what he does. But he doesn’t do anything. He just stands there, looking at her.
“Why’d you do that?” she shouts.
He doesn’t react. She glances around, making sure his girlfriend can’t spring any more horror-movie shock-entrances on her, maybe popping out of a garbage can this time since there are no doors nearby.
“Stop following us, okay? Leave us alone!”
A sound gurgles in his throat and passes through his lips. It’s faint and he’s far away, but this time she’s sure it was a word.
“Did you hear him?” she asks Addis. “Did he just say something?”
Addis is squinting at the man, a queer expression on his face. “I think he said ‘please.’”