Now he knew the truth.
The truth was it didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter because, whether Kassel was real or not, whether Victor was going there or not, Meatloaf was here, crawling like a snake, humiliated, shut out, the one kid who didn’t get an invitation to the party.
After all, hadn’t he seen it in Jenny’s face when he helped her in the forest? That look of fear, suspicion, loathing? And speaking of Jenny, why had she run off if not to escape the hideous monster that had imprisoned her?
“Stop,” he groaned, pressing his hands to his head. His skull was throbbing from the kicks it had taken, but a worse pain came from within his head, from the fight going on there, the tug-of-war between Oswald and Meatloaf. Tears of helplessness and rage filled his eyes, and he wiped angrily at them with the heels of his hands.
“I was supposed to be chosen!” he shouted as loud as he could. “I was supposed to be somebody! I was—” A sharp pain in his ribs stole his breath away before he could say more.
“What does it matter?” he murmured, lying back on the asphalt as the wind ruffled the newspaper. If the wind wanted that forgery, the wind could have it. Meatloaf - or Oswald, or whoever he was - had no intention to do anything in his life again, not to take a step, not to pursue some mirage, not to ask a thing of the universe.
Islands of cloud hung frozen in the sky. The western light of a dying sun traced these clouds in orange, while the rest of the sky remained blue and purple. Meatloaf wondered why he had not stopped to notice the sky more often. It was beautiful, yes, but more importantly it was infinite. And beyond it lay stars without number, planets far larger than the pebble on which he rested, an inky emptiness so deep that a person could go mad just contemplating it.
Too bad that train has already left the station, he thought, knowing the fault lines surfacing within his mind. They had been appearing for years now, maybe since he was born, but now the gaps were widening. Soon he would find himself stranded on one side or the other, unable to see across or unite the two parts again.
But that was okay because the sky was vast, the sun was an orb of fire, and the night was coming—a night that would never surrender to dawn.
Chapter 24
When Dante felt the first set of chills, he ignored them. He was cold. A long day was behind him. His body had every right to be out of sorts.
That was what he told himself.
Scarlett was giving the Cliff Notes version of a tour. A single door stood between them and the hallway with the talking bear (Just hug your bear and remember how much we love you). The stairwell itself looked as if it had been struck by artillery—the roof sheared away, leaving a heap of concrete and sharp metal and dust. The dust was everywhere. The rubble created a ramp leading right up to the roof of the hospital.
“Please tell me we’re almost there,” Victor said to Scarlett in a low voice. He had reason to lower his voice. After all, the zombie-man might still be out in the hall.
Moonlight lit Scarlett’s hair, highlighting the side of her face. Her face was drawn, almost haggard, and Dante glanced at Victor to see he looked no better. How many hours had they threaded their way through the city? How many close encounters with other survivors who may or may not have tried to kill them if given the chance?
The world was a strange place, Dante realized, full of walking nightmares. Or maybe the nightmares had been there all along, just waiting to crawl out from under the bed.
“Just on the roof,” Scarlett answered.
“And what’s below?” Victor asked, nodding to the stairs that plunged into moonless darkness. Dante was not sure he wanted to know what was down there. In fact, he was quite sure something was lurking down there, ready to grab his legs and pull him through a crack in the wall, trapping him there so that its young could feed on his body.
Or so that it could lay eggs inside him.
He shivered.
“Down there?” Scarlett asked. She cocked her head. “It might be easier for me to show you.”
“I think I’ll stay up here,” Dante said.
Victor slapped his shoulder. “Come on, what’s the worst we could find? Rats? A few corpses?”
Dante managed a weak smile. He was worried about worse things—things that slipped in and out of his conscious thoughts like snakes in murky water, always surfacing the moment he forgot about them. Sometimes Walker’s face appeared. Sometimes, with a vivid flash, he saw himself riding a horse on a black night, surrounded by other riders with ghoulish masks on their faces—they were the Nazgul, and they were bringing him to Mordor. He told himself these ideas were just the combination of an over-active imagination and the stresses of their journey. There was no reason to be concerned.
“You’re not really going to chicken out, are you?” Victor asked.
Dante tried to smile again. He suspected that, under bright lights, Victor and Scarlett would have noticed how false the smile was, the muscles too tight, a persistent tic developing beneath his eye.
But it was dark and they didn’t notice. That made it easier to lie.
___
Scarlett led the way down the stairs, pausing now and then to sweep the flashlight behind her so the brothers could see a broken step or a chunk of concrete. Dante clutched the metal rail hard, hard enough that his knuckles were probably showing white. He felt a little unsteady. Maybe it was fatigue—ordinary, excusable fatigue.
A few landings down, they reached the basement of the hospital and Dante understood the strange bloop sound he’d heard from the other side of the door. Scarlett was standing at the edge of a pond. The stairs below her vanished beneath oily, brackish water that seemed to swallow up the beam of the flashlight. As the light scanned the surface of the water, Dante noticed shapes moving underneath.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Victor said, rubbing the stubble on his chin. “A fish farm in the basement of a hospital.”
Dante watched the shapes, seeing not fish but the tentacles of a monster drifting lazily back and forth, back and forth, a hypnotic rhythm to draw you in, pull you to the edge of the water where the tentacles would suddenly burst out and wrap around your limbs.
Why, he wondered, were the most dangerous things always the most fascinating?
“Are they safe to eat?” Victor asked.
Scarlett shrugged. “I ate them all the time, back when I used to live here. They never troubled my stomach.”
Yes, Dante thought, but what if those tentacles are growing inside you right now?
He shuddered again and told himself to stop thinking like that. He just needed a good long sleep to cure his mind. That was all. He would feel better in the morning.
When they had taken their fill of the flooded basement (which didn’t take long, given the smell), Scarlett led the brothers back up the stairwell.
“Keep low,” she whispered as they reached the pile of rubble leading up to the roof. “Your shadows will stand out against the skyline if you’re not careful. I’ve been shot at a time or two.”
Charming, Dante thought.
He took his time climbing. He wedged his rebar cane between chunks of concrete and pulled himself up, a mountain climber nearly at the end of his strength. Scarlett and Victor were no more than shadows ahead of him. At one point he paused, thinking back to the hospital corridors they had navigated, the signs they had seen and not seen. A thought took shape in his mind. He told himself, once again, he would feel better in the morning.
The roof was only four or five stories high. Had they been downtown among the skyscrapers, giants of glass and dark metal that gleamed faintly in the distance, they would have seen little of the city. Here, however, most of the buildings were low-rise condominiums, restaurant chains, offices, suburban neighborhoods. On and on they went, waves of ruin, dead shells of a world that was, a society once colored by the blare of car horns and the boom of stereos and the smell of fried chicken and greasy burgers and heavy pancakes wafting through the air.
N
ow there was no color. Everything was gray.
Dante knew this place. He had lived not far from here in a cheap apartment with a few friends, planning to take a break from life for a while. He’d moved in shortly after his mother’s funeral. He’d moved out when Victor broke through the door, threw him over his shoulder, and carried him out to the car idling in the parking lot.
No suitcase, no bags, no farewell to the two roommates he left behind. “Roommates” was the best he could say for them. He hardly remembered their names, so effectively had the drugs erased his memory.
He imagined he was one of the lucky few to have escaped when he did. But what happened to everyone else?
“Where is everyone?” he asked.
Scarlett and Victor turned back. Victor’s forehead creased, a look of concern on his face, but this was important. This was one of those questions that would eat you from the inside if you tried to swallow it.
Ever since going to the cabin, all he had concerned himself with was his and Victor’s survival. Sure, he had played with theories about what was going on in the rest of the country. But that was just a way to pass the time. He had never really cared, never really stopped to absorb the full meaning of how different the world had become.
Scarlett stepped toward him. The flashlight was off—they didn’t need it now that they had the moonlight. She stopped beside him and stared across the city, saying nothing for a few moments, as if paying a respectful silence to the dead and lost.
“Gone,” she answered quietly. “Some packed their things as soon as the reports showed up on the news. Left for whatever places they thought wouldn’t be affected—the Midwest, the Deep South, the Caribbean. Places where you didn’t have to worry about New England winters.”
“But some must have stayed,” Dante answered. “Thousands, hundreds of thousands.”
“Millions,” she answered. And the way she said it was enough, the word swallowed by the enormous silence surrounding them. The missing millions. Where had they gone? How many had died in their homes, been trampled to death by hungry mobs, succumbed to diseases they could no longer medicate? It didn’t have to be this way. Humanity didn’t have to turn on itself, ensuring its own demise.
But it had. Mankind’s greatest enemy had been colonizing the planet for thousands of years.
“So what happens now?” Dante murmured.
“Now we survive,” Victor said. “We can’t do anything for millions of people, but we can help each other.”
Dante wanted his brother to be wrong. He wanted to hear there was a way he could help undo all the damage, rebuild what had been torn down. But how? What could one person do in the face of such a catastrophe? He might as well try to heal a forest from the effects of a wildfire.
“Besides,” Victor added, “it can’t be as deserted as it appears. Don’t forget that hunter we crossed.”
“We shouldn’t linger here,” Scarlett said, gently.
Dante nodded. The city was like a huge graveyard, every building a tombstone. He turned his back on it, shivering in the cold night wind, and followed Victor and Scarlett across the rooftop.
Chapter 25
Scarlett’s former home was a makeshift tunnel in the midst of a block of AC units and skylights. Tarps and sheets of plywood provided barriers to the wind, rain, and curious eyes. Oddities discovered in her explorations gave character to the tunnel, compensating for the lack of furniture: boots and piles of clothing, jewelry, empty prescription bottles, fire extinguishers.
Some of the items had clearly been scavenged from the hospital. Many others, however, revealed how much farther she had traveled: empty boxes of ammunition, fishing rods and lures, stacks of paper and office supplies (Dante thought he spied a weathered diary as the flashlight crossed the room), novelty items like old records and coin collections.
“I wasn’t a pack rat before,” Scarlett said as the brothers gazed around her old home. “This was just a way to stay alive.” This seemed like an important distinction for her. She met their eyes until they both nodded.
Nobody seemed particularly interested in talking, so long had the day been. Instead they turned in for the night with a plan to be up early on the morrow. Each of them took a stack of hospital blankets (some white, others sky blue or salmon or, worst of all, mustard yellow) and settled down.
Half an hour later, Dante lay staring up at the semi-transparent tarp above him that rippled in the night wind. He should have been tired—bone-tired, ready to sleep for a week straight. His body was sore enough, especially his swollen ankle, but his mind just kept on turning, turning, full of dusty cobwebs and half-formed thoughts and instinctual urges he tried to ignore.
He remembered the first time he ever got drunk. He was in Spain at the tail-end of his globe-trotting adventure, surrounded by fellow-adventurers, drifters, dreamers. There was a looseness to their company, a comfort almost like the familiarity of seeing old friends.
He drank to relax and forget how soon the fun would be over. He had drunk alcohol plenty of times before, but never been drunk. It was a threshold. On the other side of that threshold were all the mistakes alcohol could lead a person to commit: abusing someone they loved, sleeping with someone they didn’t love, getting in a car accident on their way to buy another case of beer.
So when Dante decided he wanted to go as far as this train would take him, welcoming the oblivion he had heard so much about, he watched for some sign to tip him off that he was no longer himself. He waited to hear himself say something that would be so out of character, he would know it was the drink talking.
The sign never came.
It occurred to him, two days later when his mind was clear again, that alcohol didn’t change who you were. It just peeled back a few layers. The ugly things were already there inside you, waiting to be brought out.
As Dante lay awake on the roof, warm in a cocoon of blankets, he wondered what things were inside him—what betrayals, what acts of violence. Was he the starry-eyed dreamer who’d set out to discover everything the world had to offer, or was he the used-up junkie desperate to run the clock as quickly and thoughtlessly as possible?
Was it possible he was both? Did he have a choice in the matter, or were they both inside him, hidden beneath the layers other people saw, waiting for the right circumstances to bring one or the other out?
He listened to Victor’s deep, slightly nasal breathing. Steady, rhythmic. Dante could not hear Scarlett, but he supposed she was probably asleep by now. He told himself if he lay there for another ten or fifteen minutes, the next time he opened his eyes it would be morning.
Another half hour passed. He tossed, he turned, but the gatekeeper of sleep would not admit him.
Eventually he rolled the blankets off his body and rose, wincing as his knee popped. Neither Victor nor Scarlett stirred. The wind masked Dante’s movements as he slung the Winchester around his neck, crossed to the other side of the tunnel, and loomed over Scarlett, watching her breathe.
Can we trust her? he thought.
The question came and went like a leaf caught in an eddying wind, spinning in circles down the street. In another life, perhaps, he would have trusted her on impulse because she tried so little to win their trust. But the horsemen who had kidnapped him had also planted a seed of distrust in the soft soil of his heart, a fast-growing weed that threatened to choke out the life around it.
Even his own brother, in the course of telling his story, had revealed he was not the person Dante had believed him to be. If Dante could be hoodwinked by someone he thought he knew so well, what reason did he have to trust a total stranger like Scarlett?
Dante pressed a hand to the side of his head. He knew he was not thinking clearly, hadn’t been since…when? Since the kidnapping? Perhaps. That was close to the mark, at least. Something had happened along the journey, an event whose effects he still felt.
Dante bent…slowly…keeping his eyes on Scarlett’s…and slipped his hand inside the coat bundled besid
e Scarlett’s head. The flashlight was standing only a foot away on the roof, a silent sentry. Dante took that as well.
You’ve done it now, he thought. But no, that wasn’t right. He could still put the key back and no one would be the wiser. Nothing was set in stone yet.
Thinking these thoughts, trying to ignore the pain throbbing in his temple, he moved away from Scarlett and toward the open rooftop. He had left his cane by his bed. The click of the metal might have given him away, and besides that he would not have a free hand to carry it.
Crossing the rooftop was easy. Descending the heap of rubble was not. Several times the pain in his ankle caused him to bend down and pause, his hand on a chunk of concrete. The swelling had gone down a little (which surprised him, considering the events of the day), but the pain was still there, an uncomfortable ache that made him want to strike his ankle against the ground out of spite.
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