He pulls up alongside her and says, “Can I give you a ride, ma’am?” His voice sounds hollow and foreign inside the gas mask.
“No,” she says without looking at him. The wind rises and leaves shiver.
“Can I help you carry that bag then?”
She turns away from him and cries over her shoulder. “It’s mine. Don’t touch it.”
He is getting out of his car at this point, walking toward her. “You look like you could use some—”
She drops the bag of rice and it hits the cement with a thud. “I said it’s mine—it’s mine—it’s mine!” With the final mine, she claws at his outstretched hand and the skin along the back of it comes away in curls like a clumsily peeled apple.
“Ouch! Jesus, lady.”
She hoists up the bag of rice and continues to hobble home.
He returns to the squad car and slathers the wound with ointment, then wraps it in gauze from the first aid kit. Peach in, green out—that’s what he keeps saying to himself—peach in, green out. He has always taken pride in his ability to act. At least in his mind, which is like a scroll of blank comic panels. He could walk a few steps forward and sketch in a scene where, maybe, he speared to death a tentacled monster or carried in his arms a buxom woman. Somewhere, in a panel in the far distance, he is galloping on a white horse. Or standing on top of a building, silhouetted by the moon, cape flapping.
But now the panels seem torn and pitted and the drawings he imagines upon them are done sloppily in crayon.
His radio is silent. The police station is empty except for a dead man in a holding cell, his cheek glued to a bloody pool of vomit. No one asks Hank to do anything so he doesn’t do anything, doesn’t protest the looting, doesn’t investigate the intermittent gunfire. Instead he drives to his cabin in the woods to hide.
At a time when everyone should stay home—that’s what the television says, before the channels give way to static, “Stay home”—people instead go to church. At Saint Cecilia’s and at Trinity Lutheran and at the United Methodist, people wander in and out throughout the day. The services and vigils are ongoing. The candles are burned down to bubbling nubs of wax. Everyone wears their masks, but the masks don’t help. They breathe one another’s breath and they bring their hands together in prayer and they sing, how sweet the sound, until the coughing overwhelms them and they hunch over and fall to their knees in awful genuflection.
Sara’s fridge is nearly empty. Her cupboard too. She cuts the moldy rind off a brick of cheddar and eats its untouched heart. She eats the olives her mother used for martinis even though she hates their bitter taste. And then she lies in her bed, the bed with the balloons tied to its four posts, where she always feels safest. When she was eighteen she painted the ceiling a pale blue scattered with fluffy white clouds. She does not imagine it as the sky outside her house, but another sky, another world, where the sun shines and she rules with mercy from a castle with towers fluttering with pennants and walls decorated with the scales of all the dragons she has slain.
The mural gives her such a sense of space, of outward possibility. The balloons will take her there, away.
Dogs roam in packs. They race in and out of abandoned houses, burrowing through the trash and cupboards unmolested, gnawing on the bloated corpses found hunched over dining room tables and floating in bathtubs full of cold, rank water. The dogs sleep on couches and on beds, their bodies piled together, fat and filthy. Their howls fill the night like an air-raid siren. One day, Sara wanders outside, climbing up the porches of her neighbors’ houses to ring doorbells, calling out, “Anybody?” Her father was part of a regional softball team and she carries his bat with her, imagining it as her sword, Oathmaker.
There is nothing left in her kitchen now but a half sleeve of rice cakes and few mucky knife swipes of peanut butter in a jar. She does not feel sad. She feels completely blank.
The day is windy. Newspapers flutter. Beer cans rattle. Sara wanders into the park and climbs onto a swing and absently kicks her legs. This is where the dogs find her. There are ten of them. Labradors and boxers and Dobermans and German shepherds, even a golden-doodle. They slink toward her with their ears and tails flattened.
She stands from the swing and snatches up the softball bat and tightens her grip and brings it to her shoulder and says, like a teary prayer, “I am the knight and you are the dragons.”
Hank sits on his porch with his Glock in his lap. He is certain someone will come. When he least expects it, when his back is turned, someone will come creeping out of the woods to pry the lock off his door or rip the mask from his face. He startles often at his shadow, his reflection in the mirror, a stranger in a gas mask. To stay awake he chews NoDoz and sucks on coffee beans and drinks cans of warm Mountain Dew. Sometimes he isn’t sure whether he is awake or asleep or somewhere in between, the world warping along the edges. He is certain only about sitting still, waiting, and watching for endless hours. This is his tower. He will defend his tower.
His vision of the world is limited to a half acre of meadow, the woods surrounding it, and the red cinder driveway that cuts through them both. He watches the clouds and he watches their shadows shift and ooze across the ground. Every now and then, in the near distance, he hears a shotgun blast or a dog bark or a car race along the highway. Once, he hears someone screaming—whether at someone else or at the universe.
Days pass slowly, but not as slowly as nights, when the shadows play tricks with his mind and the stars seem to him like the vanishing atoms of the earth as it crumbles to pieces and floats away. He glances often at his watch, waiting for what, he doesn’t know. Time has already run out. For the world. And for any chance of redemption on his part. He is pathetic. The fact that few are left to witness his cowardice is at least comforting. He’s not a knight, not a gunslinger, not a kung fu master or spandex-clad metahuman. He’s the cat on a limb they rescue. The child crying, “Help,” from a flame-filled building. The princess in the tower.
He sings to himself quietly, but he can remember only fragments of lyrics, so he slips from one song to another like somebody cycling through radio stations. Christmas carols he knows. For a while, all he sings are Christmas carols.
The air grows cold. The days grow short. The ragweed and the sagebrush grow brittle. The pine trees shake off their brown needles. Mornings, the trees and the grass sparkle with frost. The sky is a dark blue tangled with cirrus clouds that resemble a torn-up spiderweb. Halloween passes without anyone knowing it, though in the seeming spirit of the season all wear their masks, the wolfman peering from a kitchen window, Frankenstein’s monster digging a grave in his backyard, Dracula sitting behind the wheel of a pickup that drives up and down streets, looking for signs of life.
The power goes out. One minute refrigerators are humming, stereos playing, lamps glowing, and the next, they go dark and silent. Those who are still alive bring matches to Sternos and spark on their propane grills to cook. The growl of chainsaws fills the air as some take down the trees along the curbs, in the parks, sectioning them up into logs they can split into firewood to stay warm. So many homes have black Xs spray-painted across their doors, the hieroglyphs of the infected, most of whom are already dead. All the store windows have been broken by the bricks of looters, and in the evening the glass catches the last of the dying sunlight and winks red.
Sara has lost twenty pounds. For breakfast she has two crackers and some water. She needs to venture out again, to get food, wood, supplies for the coming winter. She still has bite and scratch marks reddening her body from the dogs, but she fought them off and it makes her feel a little braver now. She fetches her softball bat—Oathmaker—and pulls open her garage door and there they are. Maybe twenty of them. The figures are wearing masks, and they are scattered across the driveway and the lawn and the sidewalks and the street, as still as statues.
She feels her expression shift, along with her heart, as she feels confusion and then recognition and then horror. A trembling runs throu
gh her body and her voice when she says, “What do you want?”
They don’t know what they have come for—except to lash out at something—but maybe seeing her now makes them realize she isn’t what they are looking for after all.
“The world’s starting over and you have a choice,” she says, and she’s proud of the steel in her voice. “You get to choose what you’ll be. I’m going to choose hope. I hope you will too.”
Slowly she pulls down the garage door. None of the masked figures make a move to stop her.
Up in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains there is a cave a hundred yards deep. Several families gather their rifles and sleeping bags and fill their backpacks with matches and food and clothes for all seasons and hike there to wait out the sickness. They choose the cave because it is isolated, easily defended, and maybe they choose it, too, because they feel already as though they are slipping back in history, to a simpler time dedicated to the gathering of food and the warding off of danger. They make a fire the first night and with the cinders of it draw upon the basalt walls pictures of bodies lying all about with black Xs for eyes, a cipher for future generations to behold and puzzle over.
It is colder in the cave than they imagined, and on the third day, one of their party sneaks down to the town for blankets and coats, and by the time he returns he is coughing and soon they are all dead.
A hard rain comes. It falls through broken windows and soaks carpets. It dimples the fresh earth of the graves dug all over town. At Sara’s house, it tongues its way under a loose shingle and seeps through the insulation and the ceiling beneath it to form a damp circle that sags downward. Her skyscape mural—the illusion of another world—is ruined.
She paces her room, running her hands through her hair and chewing her fingernails down to nubs, feeling starved and alone, utterly alone, trapped as if in the dungeon of the evil sorcerer. It is something she has fantasized about before, something she has written about in her stories. In one of them she gnaws off her finger and uses the bone to pick the lock and then hurls the sorcerer from a window as lightning crackles from his hands. In another she writes a note in blood and tucks it under the wing of a raven who flies it to the giant bears who live in the Dire Forest and they come charging across the plains and burrow beneath the castle and into her cell and they splinter the door and overthrow the sorcerer and feast on his magical flesh and take on his powers and she becomes their queen, the queen of the bears.
But things are not so easy or so fun here in River Falls. Every time she tries to leave her house she’s attacked. She might as well be guarded by wraiths or surrounded by enchanted brambles. She’s always read her way out of this world. Her story will not end happily ever after unless she authors it herself.
She pulls up a chair to her desk and rips a page from a composition booklet. She grips a pen in her hand so tightly her knuckles go white. “I’m alive and I’m alone,” she writes and then stops the pen. What else can she share? What else is there? Her mind is slower than it used to be, walled off from interaction, any activity outside of peering out the window, talking to herself. “I’m not sick.” She underlines this twice. “Sometimes I wish I were, but I’m not. If you’re alive, if you’re reading this, maybe you know what I mean. I don’t need you to rescue me—I’m not looking for heroes—but I sure could use some company. Because this is a lonely battle. Come find me.” She lists her address. She signs her name. And she finishes the note the way she has finished every story she has ever written. “Happily ever after?” That’s what she writes along the bottom, the way some would write “Regards” or “All the best” or “Love,” only followed by a question mark. There are so many shadows in the world—and so little light ahead—but writing this makes her feel a little better, hopeful.
She rolls up the sheet of paper like a scroll, tapes it shut. She then stands from the desk and selects from one of the bedposts the balloon that will most likely catch someone’s attention, a red balloon shaped like a heart. She bought it at Walgreens. It is a few weeks old and flaccid, but it will have to do. To its string she tapes the note several times over.
She goes down the hall to the living room and peers through the curtains for a minute—watching the wind shake the pine tree growing along the curb—before trusting the street to be empty. She opens the door and steps out onto the porch.
She holds out the balloon and scrunches shut her eyes and makes a wish—and lets go.
Once, when he was a boy, Hank found a bald eagle shot dead in the woods. He couldn’t imagine anyone shooting an eagle, but there it was, a hole blasted through its middle, its feathers scorched, one of its wings still outstretched with the hope of flight. He spent a lot of time in the woods—imagining pinecones into grenades, firing slingshots at jackrabbits, hammering together forts from lumber stolen from construction sites—and he would run across the eagle often. Ants and flies stripped it of its guts and muscle. Its feathers faded and moldered and came loose, lost to the rain and wind, so that there was only the skeleton. Mud and crabgrass filled its hollows and eventually took it over entirely so that in time Hank was unable to make out any sign of it. He figured that was how he would end up, how people would end up, erased completely. The world would move on. He has never felt smaller, less substantial. He doesn’t even bother with his breathing exercises anymore. There is no peach to breathe in. The whole world has gone green.
Just then he sees something. Something red. It floats along the tree line, rising with an updraft, clearing the branches that threaten to snatch it. A crosscurrent knocks it toward the meadow that surrounds his cabin, toward his porch, where it comes twisting, bullied by the wind, dropping suddenly toward him. He sets down his pistol and rips off his gas mask. He is smiling. He is holding out his arms.
One moment the balloon seems to jerk upward, and the next, he is—impossibly—grabbing it by the string. It is as if time skips. He pulls the balloon against his body, nearly crushing it in a hug. He looks at the balloon, and then at the sky, and then at the balloon, and laughs.
He looks around, startled by the sound, so alien. It takes him a moment to spot the note. It is only after he unpeels it, after he reads the message, after a smile splits his face and fresh laughter escapes his throat, that the possibility of a future begins to open back up for him, that he begins to think maybe, just maybe, he can set off for town, with his pistol ready and his eyes narrowed for danger. He can escape his tower. He can seek out this Sara. And maybe, together, they can be brave. They can find hope.
Suicide Woods
Once a month, we shrug on our backpacks and follow Mr. Engel along the trails stitching the four hundred acres of firs and hemlocks and cedars in Forest Park, which everyone calls Suicide Woods. This is on the outskirts of Portland, in the Tualatin Mountains, and within its canyons we have learned to traverse a series of switchbacks, to drop out of sunlight and into shadow. The honk and grumble of the city are replaced by the rush of Balch Creek. The wind never stops blowing here, damp and cool, shivering the branches and hushing our ears. When we talk, we whisper.
At night, some say, ghosts hang like rags in the trees. But even in the daytime we find bodies so often that Mr. Engel seems to have them marked on a map. They lie in beds of moss. They dangle from branches. We find them alone and together, clothed and naked.
The forest is so thick that weeks can pass before the dead are discovered. We leave the trails and hike ten feet apart, parting the sword ferns with walking sticks, peering into blackberry brambles. When we hear the angry buzz of flies or the crack of a gunshot, when we see vultures roosting, when we come upon a face as pale as a mushroom gaping from the undergrowth, we clump together and circle the body and hold hands and cry.
Mr. Engel says it’s good to cry. He says that it’s like lancing a boil, that it gets out the poisons stewing inside us. He says we need to face our emotions, and that’s why he takes us here, to share with us the reality of death—the bloated faces, the soiled underwear, the skin t
he shade of a green-black thunderhead. He tries so hard. He wants to make us better.
There are ten or twelve or fifteen of us, our number ever fluctuating, because one of us might be in the hospital or in rehab or curled up in a corner clutching a tattered doll. Or one of us could very well be dead. Death is always a possibility. That’s what unites us. That’s what drew us to Mr. Engel’s website—and later his home, where he hosts his weekly meetings. In all of us there is a want to drink antifreeze, to dive in front of a semi, to bring butcher knives to our wrists.
Mr. Engel wears Chuck Taylors, tight black jeans with the hems rolled up, skull T-shirts, thrift store cardigans. He dresses like he’s in his twenties, but his lined face and spotted hands might indicate he’s in his sixties. “Sadness ages you,” he says, and he is right; though our ages vary from nineteen to seventy-two, we all suffer from the bent faces and collapsed postures of the elderly.
His wrists carry white lines on them. We are all similarly marked. There is Jean, whose neck healed crookedly after she hanged herself. There is Sam, his skull dented and bald-patched from the bullet still seeded deep in his brain. There is Denver, who makes a sound like gargling when she talks, as though she never coughed up all the pondwater she tried to drown herself in. Cara has thin, gray teeth from all the times she’s puked up pills, and Mason looks like many pieces of gum chewed up and spit out from the time he took a gasoline shower and torched himself with a lit cig. It is not as easy to die as you think.
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