by James, Guy
Senna and Alan traveled to Virginia, the journey taking weeks, and found the settlement that Alan remembered. It was called New Crozet. Looking at it from outside the perimeter, Senna took to it right away. It was the right size, and appeared to be made largely of farmland. They could farm a plot of land together, as they had often talked about, and live a peaceful life, maybe even have a family, if they were lucky.
They were let in after the townspeople accepted their credentials as genuine. Settlements were typically wary of new members, but Senna and Alan, experienced as they were from their service on the reclamation crews, were the kind of new members every settlement wanted.
If the worst happened and the virus got in, or if the risk of the virus getting in rose to a higher level than usual, skilled spotters and cleaners could come in useful. They were allowed to choose from a number of empty houses—the town was nowhere near capacity, but it was Senna who chose where they would live, and she hadn’t picked a house at all.
The spot she picked was some distance from the bulk of the town, uncomfortably close to the perimeter for most of the other townspeople. It was a great magnolia tree that Senna had fallen in love with there, and that had made her want to live in that remote spot. There was a dilapidated farmhouse thrown in with the tree, as well as a barn with most of its roof fallen in and a shed with no door.
It was a fixer-upper, that was for sure, and it had given Senna and Alan plenty of physical labor to fill their days while they worked to make the place livable. It kept them busy for the greater part of two years, working together and bickering and falling more deeply in love. The repairs took so long because the couple was meticulously working the land too, planting and growing crops at Senna’s direction.
That was nine years ago, and their life together had only grown better, their connection deeper: more passionate and more soulful at the same time.
Alan went back to the closet where the laptop was stowed and took a small tin from one of the duffel’s pockets. The tin was small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, its outside dusty and mottled. He thought it may have once held breath mints, but any markings that had been on the outside of the little container were worn away by time. He opened the tin.
Inside was a carefully folded rectangle of wax paper. Through the overlapping layers of the paper, a muted orange something stared up at Alan expectantly. The beginning of an elfish grin elbowed its way onto his face, and then he was smiling down at the treasure in complete delight. It wasn’t so much what was inside the box, but what he was going to do with it.
Inside the wax paper was a small mound of powdered cinnamon. The cinnamon was old and stale and its fragrance was almost completely gone, but it was a treasure in Alan’s world. He was going to give the cinnamon to Senna tomorrow, after the market, and he was going to ask her to be his wife.
Being married meant little now, but he wanted to make the gesture all the same. Tom Preston could officiate the ceremony, assuming Senna said yes. And why shouldn’t she? Their life would be no different, Alan knew, but the idea of posing the question to Senna made him senselessly joyful.
He closed the tin and put it back in its hiding place. A smirk remained on his face, and accompanied him to bed, into which he stole as quietly as he could to avoid disturbing Senna. She didn’t wake.
Cinnamon on his mind, the corners of Alan’s lips were still curled upward in an elfish half-grin when he fell asleep.
60
The air was thick with snowflakes and the odor of decay. There was a man sitting on an overturned crate, under the cover of a canopy set up on poles in front of a liquor store. The smell was pressing toward Alan, as if the man were projecting it at him through the falling snow.
The liquor store’s interior was dark save for the wild flickering of a thick candle, whose flame was fighting a losing battle against a deepening pool of molten wax. The light’s erratic movement was illuminating bottles of various shapes and shades of clarity, not one of which was full to its top, but apparently all of which were for sale. The man under the canopy had his legs tucked under him, and he was balancing himself on the crate with one hand gripping a canopy pole.
Grinning at Alan now, the man was showing toothless gums that were half-spoiled ground beef, a mixture of brown and pink and the lovely shades in between. His lips were a patchwork of dark scabs and blood: exactly what you’d expect to accent that mouth that not even the most understanding mother could love.
Alan was walking in a half-daze through the streets, foreign streets. He was in Moscow, of all places, and the Russian one at that.
Moments earlier, he’d left the Red Square behind him. Though he’d never been to Russia, he’d watched enough documentaries to recognize the Red Square. Alan had always wanted to travel more, but work had always come first. Now, he didn’t have to fight any more work-life balance battles, as the apocalypse had effectively canceled all of his travel plans, abstract though they’d been.
He now found himself in a narrow back alley that was lined with small houses and shops on either side. The window displays were bare and covered with uniform layers of dust that had obviously staked their claims a long time ago.
What do they sell in these shops? Alan wondered. He couldn’t see any goods on display anywhere. He began to toy with the idea of pushing the door of one of the shops open and wandering inside, to, at the very least, get out of the cold, even if it meant a showdown with a Russian store keep.
He’d picked out the least intimidating looking store and had begun to crunch a pattern in the snow toward it when he heard someone speak in a familiar voice.
“You can’t give that to me. It’s from a different time. It’s old and faded, and we’re different now. You’re different now. I’m different now.”
The words were in Russian, and even though Alan didn’t speak the language, he’d understood it all somehow. He placed the voice. It was Senna’s.
“No,” Alan said, his voice uncharacteristically plaintive, “wait. I found it and dug it up, I saved it. If it’s still here, we’re not different. We’re the same. Please.”
“Maybe you’re the same, but I’m not. I’m different now.”
He whirled and slipped on the icy pavement. He fell on his side and took the brunt of the impact with his hip, and followed up with the point of his elbow. The pain was sharp, an uncomfortable contrast to the cold numbness of his extremities.
Ignoring the pain, he sat up and searched the street for Senna. She wasn’t there. No one was, except the man on the crate, whose grin had broadened, straining his cracked and bloody lips.
Alan wanted to disagree with her. He did disagree with her. They weren’t different. The world had certainly changed, but they hadn’t.
They would go on. They had to go on. That was why the world had put them together in the first place.
His eyes found the storefront that he’d picked out earlier, before her voice was heard on the bony tundra of Mother Russia’s back. There was a drawing of a samovar on the shop’s sign, and he’d taken it to mean that he might be able to find something hot to drink inside, to help him thaw out some, if that was still possible after the length of his exposure.
After getting his frozen legs moving, he managed to tuck them under him and take his weight. He stood, and though his strength was sapped, he felt a deeper exhaustion in his soul.
The snow was growing more daring in its tumbles, reaching for more, spreading outward, and as Alan watched it, he felt a twinge of loneliness. There was solitude here, emptiness.
It was an inescapable past into which he’d ventured, though he knew that no one should dwell in such a place. In spite of this knowledge, he pressed forward through the cartwheeling snow, toward the man sitting on the crate, and the nondescript liquor storefront behind him. The shop with the samovar sign was just past the liquor store, but it seemed less and less there the closer Alan got, like the samovar and the façade it was drawn on were trying to vanish into the crowd of shops
surrounding it.
The man on the crate was rotting from the inside out, a victim of Desomorphine, the street drug Krokodil. This thought installed itself in Alan’s mind as if he’d put it there himself.
Is he a victim, Alan wondered, or a disciple? That too, was a thought that just flashed into existence, both its origin and meaning unclear.
The man’s eyes were a piercing blue, framed by a scatter of purple hemorrhages. Alan was pulled forward, closer and closer, until he was standing within a foot of the crate. The stench here was unbearable, tugging nausea out of hiding in Alan’s gut.
On top of the urge to vomit, he was hit by an overwhelming desire to kneel, to prostrate himself before the man on the crate, but he resisted, and remained standing where he was, staring into eyes that seemed to promise only one thing: a prolonged agony followed by the swindle of a death without peace.
61
Alan spoke first. “You’re patient zero, aren’t you?”
“No,” the man said. The single, heavily-accented word echoed through the alley, the force of its message rattling the snowflakes in their orchestrated somersaults.
Alan took a step backward as the flicker that had been playing on the liquor bottles stopped, the flame finally drowned by the rising pool of molten wax. He felt the chill of the charred wick, cocooned in a cooling mold, never to burn again.
“I am not,” the man said. He untucked his legs and Alan saw the work of the Krok. The man’s left leg ended above the knee, and his right leg ended mid-shin.
The terminus of the right leg was covered by the pinned folds of a pant leg, but the stump of thigh that was the remains of his left leg was an exposed collection of open sores, red, and blue, and green, and filled with pus. Two of the sores were framing broken pustules that were oozing a yellow-green fluid even in the bitter cold.
Alan made his mouth into a thin line, and, after a failed attempt to will his half-frozen nostrils to close from the inside, put a hand up to his nose to cover it.
The man grinned, as if pleased by the discomfort he’d been able to draw out.
The cold was clawing mightily at Alan’s hand, and in spite of the smell, he decided it would be better to tuck his hand back into his coat. How had he come here without gloves?
“Who are you?” Alan asked.
The man’s eyes shone with blue fire as he spoke. “I am you. And you are me. In different places. In different times.” He paused for a moment. “Do you understand?”
Alan shook his head.
The man let out a disappointed grunt. “Most people never do.”
Alan had only begun to think about backing away when the man grabbed his arm, stopping him. Looking down, Alan saw that he was being gripped by a hand that looked more like a crab’s pincer than a human hand.
The index, middle, and ring fingers were gone. Some of the pinky and thumb were left, the nails gone, the fingertips eaten by decay. The middle three knuckles were gone, too. The man was holding Alan with what was left of his two fingers, and with the crease of grizzled meat in the middle of what had once been a hand.
“Most people never do,” the man repeated, “until they try this.” With his other hand, which was relatively whole and missing only a thumb, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small packet. It was a dirty and worn thing that he offered up to Alan.
Alan tried to shake himself free of the man’s grip but couldn’t. He took the man’s forearm with his hands and tried to get away, but the man’s strength didn’t yield.
“Take it,” the man said. “See what it is like to truly live.”
“No.”
The man snorted. “No?” He opened his mouth wide and laughed, offering a too-candid glimpse into his decaying oral cavity. “What makes you think you have a choice?”
The snow grew thicker, the flurries seeming to be disproportionately attracted to the place where Alan was standing.
The man’s face became fierce, and he began to pull Alan in with an improbable Russian strength, as if he were a being of rusted cast iron, subject to a weakness that couldn’t be exploited.
While he pulled Alan inward, he raised the hand with the packet to Alan’s face. The packet opened, unwrapping itself, and within it was the street drug Krokodil, the crocodile, the eater of men, the flesh-stealer.
The substance rose up from the wax paper and formed the top half of a miniature crocodile. It had scales that resembled charred wood and that formed, sank back into flatness, and then formed themselves again as the thing was reaching upward.
There isn’t enough meat for the monster to build itself, Alan thought. It needs more. It needs meat.
It was moving closer to his face. Its jaws opened, parting the dark-scaled snout. Alan’s eyes went wide, more in confusion than fear.
Inside the mouth was a revolving helix, each of its strands a different color, showing Alan more colors than he thought could exist.
The creature was approaching faster now, and he couldn’t see if the man was still there. His eyes were locked on the beast’s mouth and he was hurtling toward it, into it. There was a blast of uncontrolled acceleration, like someone had floored the gas pedal and taken their hands off the steering wheel at the same time.
And, just as the thing was about to take him, just before it could, a smell wafted over to him, and at that moment, repression wasn’t bliss, it wasn’t good for anything then, because he could smell Allie’s burning flesh, the cooking meat of a woman who’d been dead for less than an hour…and it smelled good, good enough to make his mouth water.
He hadn’t dared to look around at the rest of the rec-crew then, for fear of what he might see in their eyes, and for fear of what they might see in his. He tried to block the sounds out, too, but as still as they’d been forced to be while the zombies passed by, it had been quiet enough to hear the rumbling stomachs around him, and his own.
All their reactions, his included, were a product of hunger, but that didn’t change the fact that it had taken a good amount of restraint to keep from jumping into the fire pit and pulling strands of moist, still-cooking flesh—human flesh—and having a medium-well day of it. He’d understood all the men in the warehouse then, had understood all of it, and he was no better than any of them, no better than cannibal Chris or his buddies who’d gone along.
He was just as bad, but probably worse for passing judgment. He was a fucking animal, and would never be anything more, just a repulsive, starved animal, like the rest of them.
Alan woke gasping for breath. The chest and armpits of his shirt were soaked with sweat. He sat up, took the shirt off like a thing that was contaminated, and glanced guiltily at Senna.
Relieved to see that she was fast asleep, and no longer remembering what he felt guilty about, he wiped his sweaty neck and face with the shirt and threw it aside. Then he tried to recall the happiness the cinnamon had inspired, but he couldn’t find the feeling again.
Instead, he had the distinct sense of groping for something in the dark, something that he’d lost and couldn’t reclaim. As badly as he needed to give Senna the cinnamon tomorrow, as much as he wanted to make the gesture of proposing, to make their life ‘official’ or to satisfy his own nostalgia or whatever it was, he’d never get the chance.
He sank into a restless sleep, in which dreams featuring Krokodil—that dancing swindler made of rot and maleficence—continued to assail him until morning.
62
Thirty-eight hours before the outbreak, somewhere, someone had almost published a news article connecting the two…the two items in question being Krokodil and the virus that was kind enough to turn people into flesh-hungry zombies, except that the virus hadn’t quite reached that point yet.
The someone was a reporter named Virginia Nelda-Ann Lloyd, called Ginny by her high school peers—because they certainly weren’t her friends—and in the years before the outbreak by no one at all, because she did freelance work from home and rarely ventured beyond her front stoop, making sure n
ot to go out there when the mailman or FedEx or UPS guy was dropping something off.
The somewhere was BFN, also known as Bum-Fucking-Nowhere, Illinois. The town did have a real name, Balleston, but it was only on the small maps, the kind you could get at gas stations in and around Balleston, and only there and only if you were lucky, because people who’d actually heard of the place were from there, and they had no need of maps of the slice of BFN in question so there were very few such maps to start with, and outsiders who were driving through—usually by accident—tried very hard not to stop, holding it in until a potty break somewhere, anywhere, else, so the maps weren’t exactly high on the local gas station restocking priorities list.
The term that most accurately described Ginny Lloyd was mousy. What would’ve been her baby face was interrupted by a too-pointy nose, hidden behind large, round-framed glasses, and framed by unmanaged, shoulder-length dark brown hair.
When she ate she nibbled, and when she drank, the sips she took were so tiny that they appeared to be nibbles too. She dressed in greys and browns and kept mostly to herself, avoiding people if at all possible.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like people—she loved them, in fact—but it was that she got so nervous around strangers that her heart would pound and her hands would get clammy and sometimes, if the place where she found herself was crowded enough and required her interaction with the other moving, breathing denizens of the world, the human ones, she’d have a panic attack.
Drugs were likely to help, she knew—she’d gotten enough of that from her pharmaceutical-pushing ex-therapists and from the panic and anxiety chat forums she perused online—but she didn’t believe in putting chemicals like that into her body. The way she saw it, the potential side effects of the drugs outweighed their benefits, especially when the side effects featured death.