by Isaac Marion
He merges into our crowd and M walks slowly back to me, shaking his head.
“What?” I ask.
“Can’t . . . go home.”
“Why not?”
“Boneys . . . going crazy. Coming in . . . from everywhere. Killing all who . . . differ.”
I look at the newcomer. What I at first took for severe decomposition is actually severe injury, countless bites and claw marks. Farther down the road, there are more like him. Some are on the freeway, some stumble through the mud and grass in the medians, a widely dispersed crowd of hundreds.
“Ones like us . . . trying to escape,” M continues. “And Boneys . . . chasing them.”
Just as he says this, as if cued by the sound of their name, Death’s publicists make their entrance. One, then two, then five and six spindly white shapes burst out of the distant trees and overtake two of the fleeing zombies. I watch the skeletons drag them down and hammer their heads against the pavement. I watch them stomp out their brains like so much rotten fruit. And I watch them multiply, rolling out of the trees and down the freeway slopes as far back as I can see, gathering on the road in a vast, clattering swarm.
“Oh fuck this . . . ,” Julie whispers.
“New plan?” M inquires with forced calm.
I stand there in a trance of indecision. I am back in Julie’s bedroom, lying next to her on a pile of her laundry, and she’s saying, There’s nowhere left, is there? And I am grimly shaking my head, telling her that the entire world is now covered in death. In the back of my awareness I can hear the rumble of SUVs, a lot more than four, barreling down Main Street to snuff me out and drag Julie back to their concrete tomb, embalm her like a princess and lay her down for eternity in some fluorescent-lit ossuary.
So here we are. Trapped in the gap between the cradle and the grave, no longer able to fit in either.
“New plan!” M says, jolting me out of my reverie. “Go into . . . city.”
“Why the hell would we go in there?” Julie says.
“Lead Boneys in. Let Living . . . clean up.”
“Wrong,” she snaps at him. “Security doesn’t discriminate between Boneys and Fleshies. They’ll wipe you all out equally.”
“We’ll . . . hide,” M says. He points down the freeway slope to a wide valley of rambler homes and grassy roundabouts gone to seed. It’s the northern extremity of the suburbs where Julie and I nested for a night, once upon a time in a mildewed fairy tale.
“What, just hide out and hope Security and the skeletons deal with each other?”
M nods.
Julie pauses for two seconds. “That’s a terrible plan, but okay, let’s go.” She turns to run, but M puts his hand on her shoulder. She claws it off and whirls on him. “What are you doing? Don’t fucking touch me!”
“You . . . go with R,” M says.
“What?” I ask him, perking to attention, and he fixes his dry gray eyes on me as he strains for language.
“We draw them . . . this way. You take her . . . that way.”
“Excuse me?” Julie squeaks. “He’s not ‘taking me’ anywhere, why the fuck would we split up?”
M points to a bruised and bleeding gash on her arm, then the cut on her cheek. “Because you’re . . . fragile,” he says in a surprisingly tender voice. “And . . . important.”
Julie looks at M. She says nothing. She and I have somehow found ourselves outside the rim of the crowd, and everyone is watching us. The Boneys are close enough now for us to hear them. The scraping of their brittle feet and the low, warbling hum of whatever dark energy powers them. The shadowblack marrow seething in their bones.
I nod to M and he nods back. I take Julie’s hand. She resists briefly, keeping her eyes on the crowd, then she turns and looks at me, and we run. M and the others disappear from view as we scramble down the embankment and dash into the crumbled downtown streets. The old ghosts in my head rise from their sleep and run alongside us, eagerly cheering us on.
Something unknown to us, something we’ve never seen. Memory can’t overtake the present; history has its limits. Are we all just Dark Age doctors, swearing by our leeches? We crave a greater science. We want to be proven wrong.
• • •
Within minutes we hear the battle. Machine-gun fire that echoes down the narrow canyons of the streets. Muffled explosions that thump in our chests like distant bass music. The occasional shriek of a Boney, so shrill and piercing it conducts across the distance like electricity through water.
“Should we hide out in one of those?” Julie asks, pointing out a few brick and steel towers. “Just wait it out?”
I nod but I hesitate in the street. I don’t know why I hesitate. What else is there now but hiding?
Julie runs to the nearest building. She tries the door. “Locked.” She crosses the street to an apartment complex. “Locked.” She approaches an old brownstone and rattles the door. “This might—” A window shatters above her; a skeleton scuttles down the wall like a spider and drops onto her back. I sprint across the street and grab the creature by the spine to wrench it off of her, but its pointy fingers are digging into her flesh like barbs. With both hands I grip its skull and strain against it as it tries to bury its teeth in her neck. Despite its withered neck tendons, the thing is unbelievably strong. Its jaws snap, inching toward her.
“Against . . . wall!” I grunt at Julie. She stumbles backward and slams the skeleton against the brick. Its strength falters just long enough for me to twist its head away from her and bash it against the window ledge. The skull cracks. The eyeless face squeezed between my palms seems to look right at me. And although its expression is a permanent grin, I can hear its outraged screams in my head:
STOP. STOP. WE ARE THE SUM OF EVERYTHING.
I bash it against the brick again. The skull cracks wider and the creature’s grip on Julie weakens.
YOU WILL BECOME US. WE WILL WIN. ALWAYS HAVE, ALWAYS W—
I wrench the thing to the pavement and ram my shoe through its face. The bones clatter to rest. The hum goes quiet.
I’m about to grab Julie and force my way through the brownstone’s rickety door when something happens that I don’t understand. The skull under my foot twitches, and as the crushed brain disintegrates, the jaw falls open and releases a wretched, mournful call like an injured bird. It sounds nothing like the bone hum or the horn roar or the skeleton’s screaming voice, and I wonder with horror if this is the human being it once was, the last gasp of its freeze-dried soul dissolving into the void. The hairs on my neck stand up. Julie shivers. And as if in response to this plaintive wail, a sound begins to rise in the distant streets. A scrabbling clatter from all directions, a circle of noise tightening in on where we stand. I catch a flicker of motion in the corner of my eye and I look up. The windows of all the buildings are filled with hollow faces. Their naked teeth grin through the glass, leering down like a nightmare jury.
“What is happening?” Julie pleads, exhaustion washing over her face.
I don’t want to answer. I’m worried that she is near the brink, and the answer I have is not hopeful. But looking up at the self-satisfied skulls behind those windows, I see no other conclusion. “I think they want . . . us,” I say. “You and me. They know . . . who we are.”
“Who are we?”
“Ones who . . . started it.”
“Are you shitting me?” she explodes, her eyes darting down the streets as the marching clatter gets louder. “Are you telling me these things hold grudges? They’re going to hunt us down because we accidentally started a little scuffle in their stupid haunted-house airport?”
Julie, Julie, Perry whispers inside my head. I can hear him smiling. Look at me, babe. Look at R’s face and read it there. It’s not a grudge. These creatures are far too pragmatic to care about revenge. They’re onto you. It’s not because you started this scuffle, it’s because they know you’re going to finish it.
Julie’s look of panic freezes in sudden comprehension. “Oh
my God,” she whispers.
I nod.
“They’re afraid of us?”
“Yes.”
She considers this a moment, then nods rapidly and looks at the ground, chewing her lip, eyes flicking back and forth. “Okay,” she says. “Okay, okay, yes, I’ve got it. Come on.”
She grabs my hand and runs. Directly toward the sound of the oncoming mob.
“What are . . . you doing?” I pant as I run behind her.
“This is Main Street,” she says. “This is where Dad’s troop met me when I drove home. Right around that corner should be . . .”
It’s there. The old red Mercedes, parked halfway into the street, just sitting there waiting for us like a faithful chauffeur. And three blocks ahead: the Boneys’ front line, pouring into the street and racing toward us with single-minded purpose. We jump into the car, Julie starts it, and we make a screeching U-turn, weaving in and out of the abandoned vehicles that litter the street—the city’s final traffic jam. The Boneys rush in behind us, loping forward with the relentless commitment of the Reaper himself, but we’re losing them.
“Where are . . . we going?” I ask as the potholed pavement rattles my jaw.
“Back to the stadium.”
I look at her with wide eyes. “What?”
“If the skeletons are after us, specifically us, then they’ll chase us there, right? They’ll give up on the rest of your people and come after us. We can lead them right to the gates.”
“And . . . then what?”
“We hide inside while Security takes care of them. There’s no way they’re going to breach the stadium walls, unless they can fly or something.” She glances at me. “They can’t fly, can they?”
I look ahead through the windshield, gripping the dash as Julie careens through the ruined streets at extremely unsafe speeds. “Back to . . . the stadium,” I repeat.
“I know what you’re thinking. It sounds like suicide for you, going back, but I think we can get away with it.”
“How? Your dad—”
“My dad wants to kill you, I know. He’s just . . . he can’t see things anymore. But I think Rosy can. I’ve known him since I was a kid; he’s practically my grandpa, and he’s not blind, no matter what he looks like in those glasses. I’m pretty sure he gets what’s going on.”
Having lost the Boneys in the tangled side streets, we circle back around to Main, slipping through an unfinished section of Corridor 1. Inside the concrete walls, the street is swept clean of cars and debris, pointing toward the stadium straight as a runway. Julie drops into low gear and accelerates until the antique engine rattles. The stadium roof rises on the horizon, rearing up like some monolithic beast. Climb into my mouth, it teases. Come on, kids, don’t mind the teeth.
With certain death rattling behind us, we fly through the heart of the city toward death slightly less certain. Soon we hear an all-too-familiar sound. The rev of big engines and the popcorn of gunfire, but close now, no longer muffled by distance. As the corridor walls dissolve into collapsed concrete and bent rebar frames, the view opens up, and Julie and I stare in horror.
Citi Stadium is already under siege. As if anticipating our plan, separate streams of Boneys are rushing toward the walls from other parts of the city, leaping over cars and scrambling on all fours like skeletal cats. Bullets and bombs blow out storefronts and topple traffic lights as Security does its job, but the skeletons are replenishing from every direction, needing no help from the group advancing behind us. My mind flashes back to the last time I was in this car. Frank and Ava joyriding through their Golden Age romance, a warm bubble of blossoms and birdsong and smiling eyes in Technicolor blue. Was this fiery hellscape there all along, swirling just outside our bubble? These swarms of demons clawing to get in?
This is wrong. It’s all wrong. I stare at the growing horde as if I’ve never seen a walking corpse before. Where are they all coming from? With everything I thought I knew about our decomposition process, there is no accounting for these numbers. It usually takes years for us to fully shed our flesh. Even if they’re answering some call to arms and pouring in from nearby cities . . . there just shouldn’t be this many.
Is this the new face of the plague? Stronger, crueler, gaining traction and speed? Is the hole in the hourglass widening?
Julie looks at me with fresh fear in her eyes. “Do you think . . . ?”
“Don’t,” I tell her. “Just keep going. Too late . . . to change plans.”
She keeps going. She swerves around grenade craters, bounces over curbs, drives on the sidewalk and crashes into pedestrian Boneys like a reeling drunk. Elegant Mercey is starting to look like a crumpled roadside tragedy.
“There!” she shouts suddenly. “That’s him!” She revs toward the gate, blaring on the horn. As we get closer I recognize Colonel Rosso standing at the main doors, calling out orders from behind a blockade of armored Suburbans. Julie skids to a stop in front of the trucks and jumps out of the car. “Rosy!” she yelps as she runs toward the doors with me just behind. “Let us in let us in!”
The soldiers raise their rifles, looking at me and then at Rosso. I prepare myself for the bullet that will enter my brain and put an end to all this. But Rosso waves a hand at them. They lower their weapons. We run to the doors and the soldiers close their circle around us, taking aim at our pursuers.
“Miss Cabernet,” Rosso says, perplexed. “You saved the world already?”
“Not quite,” she pants. “Ran into some snags.”
“I see that,” he says, surveying the army of dirty yellow bones flooding in through the remains of the corridor.
“You guys can handle them, right?”
“I think so.” He watches as his men take down the first wave, then fumble to reload before the next one crashes. “I hope so.” He starts to pull open the massive door, then stops and looks at me. “Is what your father said true?” he asks Julie in a very calm voice. “Is this boy what I think he is?”
“Let us in, Rosy. He’s my friend.”
“Did he kill the guard?”
Julie takes his veiny hand and squeezes it. “Rosy. Please. Please trust me right now.”
With his other hand on the door, Rosso stares at me, his squinty eyes unreadable. I stare back. Silently, he opens the door a crack and steps aside. Julie pecks him on the cheek and slips in through the gap. I hesitate at the threshold. The colonel and I regard each other for a moment. Then I give him a nod, he returns it slowly, and I follow Julie inside.
• • •
Once again we are skulking through the rat-maze streets of the stadium, fugitives no matter where we go. Julie speed-walks, scanning street signs, making decisive turns. Her breath sounds tight but she doesn’t stop for her inhaler. Bloody and dirty, clothes torn and lungs wheezing, she and I have never been a better match.
“Where are . . . you going?” I ask.
She points at the Jumbotron. A picture of Nora’s face is blinking on the screen with a sequence of words:
NORA GREENE
ARMED ASSAULT
ARREST ON SIGHT
“We’re going to need her,” Julie says. “Whatever happens next, I want to make sure she’s with us, not locked in the locker rooms.”
I look up at Nora’s huge, pixelated face. Her cheerful grin seems incongruous on a wanted poster. “Is that why . . . we came back?” I ask the back of Julie’s head. “For her?”
“Fifty-fifty.”
A faint smile creeps onto my face. “You have . . . plans,” I say in my best attempt at an insinuating tone. “Not just . . . keeping safe.”
“I really thought I was finished with this place,” she says without slowing down, and leaves it at that.
We stick to the stadium’s edges, following the wall around the perimeter. Anchored to the concrete above us, the thick steel support cables twang like sci-fi lasers as the buildings sway and creak in the breeze. The muddy streets are empty. Security forces are probably all outside dealing with the
Boneys, while the civilians huddle in their flimsy homes waiting for it to be over. The early evening sky is hazy orange, with high-altitude clouds rippling past the sun. It would be almost peaceful if not for the armies outside, sending their argument through the walls like inconsiderate neighbors.
“I have an idea where she might be,” Julie says as she leads us through a dark doorway. “We used to hang out in the walls a lot when we were younger. We’d sit in the VIP rooms and pretend we were celebrities or something. The world was mostly over by then, so it was fun imagining we still mattered.”
We ascend several long flights of stairs into an upper level. Most of the doors appear sealed off, but Julie doesn’t bother with any of them. She finds a narrow gap in the wall that’s been covered over with plastic sheeting, and we squeeze in through a girl-sized tear.
We are in what appears to be the stadium’s luxury skybox. Expensive leather chairs lie on their sides around cracked glass tables. Silver snack trays offer clumps of dry mold. On the bar, tumblers wait next to purses like patient boyfriends, unaware that their dates are never coming back from the bathroom.
Nora is sitting in front of the huge viewing window that angles out over the stadium’s distant floor. She takes a sip from the bottle of wine in her hand and gives us a big smile. “Look,” she says, pointing at the Jumbotron flashing her face. “I’m on TV.”
Julie runs over to her and hugs her, spilling a little wine in the process. “You’re okay?”
“Sure. Why’d you come back?”
“Have you picked up what’s going on outside?”
A distant grenade-blast punctuates the question.
“Lots of skeletons?”
“Yeah. They chased me and R here. They’re hunting us.”
Nora waves at me. “Hi, R.”
“Hi.”
“Want some wine? It’s an ’86 Mouton Rothschild. I’d describe it as yummy, with notes of fucking delicious.”
“No thanks.”