by Isaac Marion
“She got all ‘pure’ after she started dating that Kelvin kid, but man, for a year or so she was ripe fruit.” His exhalations form a haze of smoke that stings my dry eyes. “A hundred bucks won’t even buy a pack of cigarettes anymore, but it sure went a long way with that bitch.”
I lunge forward and crack his head into the wall. It’s easy, I just palm his face and thrust forward like a shot putter, punching the wall with the back of his skull. I don’t know if I’ve killed him and I don’t care. When his friend tries to grab me I do the exact same to him, two big dents in the Orchard’s aluminum siding. Both men slump to the ground. I wobble my way down the stairs and out onto the catwalk. Some kids leaning on the support cables smoking joints stare at me as I shove past them. Excuse me, I try to say, but I can’t seem to find the syllables. I slide down the four apartment floors and lurch out onto Fairy Street or Tinkerbell Street or whatever the fuck it’s called. I just need to get away from all these people for a minute, collect my thoughts. I’m so hungry. God, I’m starving.
After a few minutes of wandering, I’m completely lost and disoriented. A light rain is falling and I’m alone on some dark narrow street. The asphalt glitters black and wet under the crooked streetlamps. Up ahead, two guards converse in a rain-flecked cone of light, grunting to each other with the affected toughness of scared boys straining to be men.
“. . . out in Corridor 2 all last week, pouring foundations. We’re less than a mile away from Goldman Dome but we’ve barely got a fuckin’ crew anymore. Grigio keeps pulling guys off Construction and dumping ’em into Security.”
“What about the Goldman crew? How’s their end coming?”
“Goldman is shit. They’re barely out their front door. I’ve been hearing the merger’s in bad shape anyway, thanks to Grigio’s bad diplomacy. Starting to wonder if he even wants the mergers anymore, the way he handled Corridor 1. Wouldn’t surprise me if he arranged the collapse himself.”
“You know that’s bullshit. Don’t be spreading that story around.”
“Yeah, well, either way, Construction’s gone to shit since Kelvin got squished. We’re just digging holes and filling ’em in.”
“I’d still rather be out building something than playing rent-a-cop in here all night. You get any action out there?”
“Just a couple of Fleshies wandering out of the woods. Pop, pop, game over.”
“No Boneys?”
“Haven’t seen one of them in at least a year. They stick to their hives nowadays. Fuckin’ bullshit.”
“What, you like running into those things?”
“Hell of a lot more fun than Fleshies. Fuckers can move.”
“Fun? Are you shitting me? Those things are wrong; I don’t even like touching ’em with my bullets.”
“Is that why your hit rate’s one in twenty?”
“Doesn’t even seem like they’re human remains anymore, you know? They’re like aliens or something. Creeps the shit out of me.”
“Yeah well that’s probably ’cause you’re a pussy.”
“Fuck you. I’m going to take a leak.”
The guard disappears into the dark. His partner stands in the spotlight, pulling his parka tighter as the rain comes down. I’m still walking. I’m not interested in these men; I’m looking for a quiet corner where I can close my eyes and gather myself. But as I approach the light, the guard notices me, and I realize there’s a problem. I’m drunk. My carefully studied gait has been replaced by an unsteady stagger. I lumber forward, my head lolling from side to side.
I look like . . . exactly what I am.
“Halt!” the guard shouts.
I halt.
He moves toward me a little. “Step into the light, please, sir.”
I step into the light, standing on the very edge of the yellow circle. I try to stand as straight as I can, as motionless as I can. Then I realize something else. The rain is dripping off my hair. The rain is running down my face. The rain is washing away my makeup, revealing the pale gray flesh underneath. I stumble back a step, slightly out of the lamplight.
The guard is about five feet away from me. His hand is on his gun. He moves closer and peers at me through slitted eyes. “Have you been drinking alcohol tonight, sir?”
I open my mouth to say, No, sir, absolutely not, just a few glasses of delicious and heart-healthy grapefruit juice with my good friend Julie Cabernet. But the words evade me. My tongue is thick and dead in my mouth, and all that comes out is, “Uhhhnnn . . .”
“What the fuck—” The guard’s eyes flash wide, he whips out his flashlight and shines it into my gray-streaked face, and I have no choice. I leap out of the shadows and pounce on him, knocking his gun aside and biting down on his throat. His life force rushes into my starved body and brain, soothing the agony of my hideous cravings. I start to tear into him, chewing deltoids and tender abdominals while the blood still pulses through them—but then I stop.
Julie stands in the bedroom doorway, watching me with a tentative smile.
I shut my eyes and grit my teeth.
No.
I drop the body to the ground and back away from it. I can no longer hide behind my ignorance. I know now that I have a choice, and I choose to change no matter what the cost. If I’m a thriving branch on the Tree of Death, I’ll drop my leaves. If I have to starve myself to kill its twisted roots, I will.
The fetus in my stomach kicks, and I hear Perry’s voice, gentle and reassuring. You won’t starve, R. In my short life I made so many choices just because I thought they were required, but my dad was right: there’s no rule book for the world. It’s in our heads, our collective human hive-mind. If there are rules, we’re the ones making them. We can change them whenever we want to.
I spit out the meat in my mouth and wipe the blood off my face. Perry kicks me in the gut again and I vomit. I lean over and purge myself of everything. The meat, the blood, the vodka. As soon as I straighten up and wipe my mouth, I’m sober. The fuzz is gone. My head is clear as a glossy new record.
The guard’s body begins to twitch back to life. His shoulders slowly rise, dragging the rest of his limp parts with them, as if he’s being pinched and pulled upward by unseen fingers. I need to kill him. I know I need to kill him, but I can’t do it. After the vow I’ve just made, the thought of tearing into this man again and tasting his still-warm blood leaves me paralyzed with horror. He shudders and retches, choking and clawing the dirt, straining and dry-heaving, his eyes bulging wide as the gray sludge of new death slithers into them. A wet, wretched groan escapes his mouth, and it’s too much for me. I turn and run. Even in my bravest moment, I am a coward.
• • •
The rain is in full force. My feet splash in the streets and spatter mud on my freshly washed clothes. My hair hangs in my face like seaweed. In front of a big aluminum building with a plywood cross on the roof, I kneel in a puddle and splash water on my face. I wash my mouth out with dirty gutter runoff and spit until I can’t taste anything. That holy wooden “t” looms overhead, and I wonder if the Lord might ever find cause to approve of me, wherever and whatever he is.
Have you met him yet, Perry? Is he alive and well? Tell me he’s not just the mouth of the sky. Tell me there’s more looking down on us than that empty blue skull.
Perry doesn’t answer. I accept the silence. I get off my knees and I keep running.
Avoiding streetlights, I make my way back to Julie’s house. I curl up against the wall, finding some shelter from the balcony overhead, and I wait there while the rain pounds the house’s metal roof. After what seems like hours, I hear the girls’ voices in the distance, but this time their rhythms stir no joy in me. The dance is a dirge, the music is minor.
They run toward the front door, Nora with her denim jacket pulled over her head, Julie with the hood of her red sweatshirt cinched tight on her face. Nora reaches the door first and rushes inside. Julie stops. I don’t know if she sees me in the dark or just smells the fruity stench of my body
spray, but something draws her to look around the corner of the house. She sees me huddled in the dark like a lost puppy. She ambles over slowly, her hands stuffed into her sweatshirt pockets. She crouches down and peeks out at me through the narrow opening of her hood. “You okay?” she says.
I nod dishonestly.
She sits next to me on the small patch of dry ground and leans against the house. She takes off her hood and lifts the wool beanie underneath to brush wet hair out of her eyes, then pulls it back down. “You scared me. You just disappeared.”
I look at her miserably, but I don’t say anything.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?”
I shake my head.
“Did you, um . . . did you knock out Tim and Matt?”
I nod.
A smile of embarrassed pleasure creeps onto her face, as if I’ve just given her an overlarge bouquet of roses or written her a bad love song. “That was . . . sweet,” she says, holding back a giggle. A minute passes. She touches my knee. “We had fun today, didn’t we? Despite a few sticky moments?”
I can’t smile, but I nod.
“I’m a little buzzed. You?”
I shake my head.
“Too bad. It’s fun.” Her smile deepens and her eyes become faraway. “You know I had my first drink when I was eight?” There is just a faint slur in her voice. “My dad was a big wine buff and him and Mom used to throw tasting parties whenever Dad was between wars. They’d bring all their friends over and pop a prized vintage and get pretty well toasted. I’d sit there in the middle of the couch taking little sips off the half glass I was allowed and just laugh at all the silly grownups getting sillier. Rosy would get so flushed! One glass and he looked like Santa Claus. He and Dad arm-wrestled on the coffee table once and broke a lamp. It was . . . so great.”
She starts doodling in the dirt with one finger. Her smile is wistful, aimed at no one. “Things weren’t always so grim, you know? Dad has his moments, and even when the world fell apart we still had some fun. We’d take little family salvage trips and pick up the most crazy wines you can imagine. Thousand-dollar bottles of ’97 Dom Romanée-Conti just rolling around on the floors of abandoned cellars.” She chuckles to herself. “Dad would have absolutely lost his shit over those back in the day. By the time we moved here he was kinda . . . muted. But God, we drank some outrageous stuff.”
I’m watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don’t deserve them. Her warm memories. I’d like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.
“And then Mom ran off.” She pulls her finger out of the dirt, inspecting her work. She has drawn a house. A quaint little cottage with a smoke cloud in the chimney, a benevolent sun smiling down on the roof. “Dad thought she must have been drunk, hence the booze ban, but I saw her, and she wasn’t. She was very sober.”
She is still smiling, as if this is all just easy nostalgia, but the smile is cold now, lifeless.
“She came into my room that night and just looked at me for a while. I pretended I was asleep. Then right as I was about to pop up and yell ‘boo’ . . . she walked out. I didn’t get to say anything.”
She reaches a hand down to wipe away her drawing, but I touch her wrist. I look at her and shake my head. She regards me silently for a moment. Then she scoots around to face me and grins, inches from my face.
“R,” she says, “if I kiss you, will I die?”
Her eyes are steady. She’s barely drunk.
“You said I won’t, right? I won’t get infected? Because I really feel like kissing you.” She fidgets. “And even if you do pass something to me, maybe it wouldn’t be all bad. I mean, you’re different now, right? You’re not a zombie. You’re . . . something new.” Her face is very close. Her smile turns serious. “Well, R?”
I look into her eyes, splashing in their icy waters like a shipwrecked sailor grasping for the raft. But there is no raft.
“Julie,” I say. “I need . . . to show you something.”
She cocks her head with gentle curiosity. “What?”
I stand up. I take her hand and start walking.
The night is still except for the primeval hiss of the rain. It drenches the dirt and slicks the asphalt, liquefying the shadows into shiny black ink. I stick to the narrow backstreets and unlit alleys. Julie follows slightly behind me, staring at the side of my face.
“Where are we going?” she asks.
I pause at an intersection to retrace the maps of my stolen memories, calling up images of places I’ve never been, people I’ve never met. “Almost . . . there.”
A few more careful glances around corners, furtive dashes across intersections, and there it is. A five-story house looms ahead of us, tall, skinny, and gray like the rest of this skeletal city, its windows flickering yellow like wary eyes.
“What the hell, R?” Julie whispers, staring up at it. “This is . . .”
I pull her to the front door and we stand there in the shelter of the eaves, the roof rattling like military drums in the rain. “Can I . . . borrow your hat?” I ask without looking at her.
She doesn’t move for a moment, then she pulls it off and hands it to me. Overlong and floppy, dark blue wool with a red stripe . . .
Mrs. Rosso knitted this for Julie’s seventeenth birthday. Perry thought she looked like an elf in it and would start speaking to her in Tolkien tongues whenever she put it on. She called him the biggest nerd she’d ever met, and he agreed, while playfully kissing her throat and—
I pull the beanie low over my face and knock a slow waltz on the door, eyes glued to the ground like a shy child. The door opens a crack. A middle-aged woman in sweatpants looks out at us. Her face is puffy and heavily lined, dark bags under bloodshot eyes. “Miss Grigio?” she says.
Julie glances at me. “Hi, Mrs. Grau. Um . . .”
“What are you doing out? Is Nora with you? It’s after curfew.”
“I know, we . . . got a little lost on our way back from the Orchard. Nora’s staying at my house tonight but um . . . can we come in for a minute? I need to talk to the guys.”
I keep my head down as Mrs. Grau gives me a cursory appraisal. She opens the door for us with an annoyed sigh. “You can’t stay here, you know. This is a foster home, not a flophouse, and your friend here is too old for new residency.”
“I know, sorry, we’ll . . .” She glances at me again. “We’ll just be a minute.”
I can’t endure formalities right now. I brush past the woman and into the house. A toddler peeks around a bedroom door and Mrs. Grau glares at him. “What did I tell you?” she snaps, loud enough to wake the rest of the kids. “Back in bed right now.” The boy disappears into the shadows. I lead Julie up the staircase.
The second story is identical to the first, except there are rows of preadolescents sleeping on the floor on small mats. So many now. New foster homes pop up like processing plants as mothers and fathers disappear, chewed up and swallowed down by the plague. We step over a few tiny bodies on our way to the stairs, and a little girl grasps feebly at Julie’s ankle.
“I had a bad dream,” she whispers.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Julie whispers back. “You’re safe now, okay?”
The girl closes her eyes again. We climb the stairs. The third floor is still awake. Young teens and patch-beard semiadults sitting around on folding chairs, hunched over desks writing in booklets and flipping through manuals. Some kids snore on stacked bunks inside narrow bedrooms. All the doors are open except one.
A few older boys look up from their work, surprised. “Wow, hey Julie. How’s it going? You holding up okay?”
“Hey guys. I’m . . .” She trails off, and her ellipsis eventually forms a period. She looks at the closed door. She looks at me. Gripping her hand, I move forward and open the door, then shut it behind us.
The room is dark except for the faint yellow glow of streetlamps through th
e window. There is nothing in here but a plywood dresser and a stripped bed, with a few pictures of Julie taped to the ceiling above it. The air is stale and much colder than the rest of the house.
“R . . . ,” Julie says in a quivery, dangerous voice. “Why the fuck are we here?”
I finally turn to face her. In the yellow dimness, we look like actors in a silent sepia tragedy. “Julie,” I say. “That theory . . . about why we . . . eat the brain . . .”
She starts to shake her head.
“True.”
I look into her reddening eyes a moment longer, then kneel down and open the bottom drawer of the dresser. Inside, under piles of old stamps, a microscope, an army of pewter figurines, there is a stack of paper bound together with red yarn. I lift it out and hand it to Julie. In so many strange and twisted ways, I feel like the manuscript is mine. Like I’ve just handed her my own bloody heart on a platter. I am fully prepared for her to claw it to shreds.
She takes the manuscript. She unties the yarn. She stares at the cover page for a full minute, breathing shakily. Then she wipes her eyes and clears her throat.
“‘Red Teeth,’” she reads. “‘By Perry Kelvin.’” She glances down the page. “‘For Julie Cabernet, the only light left.’” She lowers the manuscript and looks away for a moment, trying to hide a spasm in her throat, then steels herself and turns the page to the first chapter. As she reads, a faint smile peeks through the tear tracks. “Wow,” she says, wiping a finger across her nose and sniffling. “It’s actually . . . kinda good. He used to write such dry and detached bullshit. This is . . . cheesy . . . but in a sweet way. More like how he really was.” She glances at the cover page again. “He started it less than a year ago. I had no idea he was still writing.” She flips to the last page. “It’s not finished. Cuts off in the middle of a sentence. ‘Outmanned and outgunned, certain of death, he kept fighting, because—’”
She rubs her thumbs into the paper, feeling its texture. She puts it near her face and inhales. Then she closes her eyes, closes the manuscript, and reties the yarn. She looks up at me. I am nearly a foot taller than her and probably sixty pounds heavier, but I feel small and featherweight. Like she could knock me down and crush me with a single whispered word.