by Cole, Olivia
One by one the Minkers start to yip; the teenage girl snuffles and is the first to take a step toward Asics, who hasn’t yet found the sense to start running again. This time Tasha tries as hard as she can not to make a scenario…what if he thought it was just his wife, or just his boss? He might have gone streaking out onto the street, thinking that if he could just find a cop…
And then he ran into this friendly group. (Well, he did find a cop…) It’s not just your wife, dude, Tasha thinks.
The guy finally takes off, his shoes pounding on the concrete. He continues running north on Broadway, away from his original pursuer and now also away from the pack. The middle-aged jogger lady ambles gamely after him, the rest of the group in pursuit. None of them run, exactly, but the lady in the sports bra is clipping along and is quickly out of sight of Tasha’s dumpster. Tasha leans back and breathes out through her nose. Alone again. Safe. Safe-ish. Her breath is magnified in the metal box she crouches in—it’s almost like she has company, the ragged echo indicating that the shadow friend is as scared as she is.
“It’s okay,” she tells the dark.
She raises the lid a centimeter, ready at any moment to feel the tearing of dull white teeth against her skin. Nothing. Even the alarm of the Post had stopped wailing, though she hadn’t noticed when. The sounds of the Minkers had seemed much louder. There’s no sign of the pack of them and the Asics guy. She hadn’t heard any screams, so she hopes that means the guy got away. Then again, he might have been the strong, silent type.
She raises the lid higher and, straining her triceps, drags herself out of the dumpster with an unattractive grunt that she’s glad no one is around to hear. The area outside the Post is deserted—it’s as if the whole scene had been a vivid hallucination.
“Jesus Christ…” Tasha says out loud, now that the danger has passed.
“Lord God,” says a voice, and Tasha almost screams before she remembers she sounds like a man when she does, and instead clamps her jaws shut, biting her tongue in the process.
She looks around, and sees no one. No one in the Post, no one on the street. The voice had sounded so close, but after spinning around several times Tasha still sees no one.
“Hello…?”
“Hiiii…..” says the voice, extending the word before it dissolves into a sigh.
Tasha realizes, feeling stupid, that it’s coming from the other dumpster. Readying the Wusthof—although she hasn’t yet known a Minker to speak—she creeps over to the hiding place beside her own and cautiously raises the lid. Tasha has cut open a few necks in the past six days, but she isn’t prepared for what’s in the dumpster.
Sprawled at the bottom is a girl a few years younger than Tasha, her yellow sundress stained almost entirely red with blood. The entire floor of the dumpster is inches deep in it. One hand clutches her throat, the other is draped loosely across her abdomen. She is staring at the metal wall, unfocused and half-smiling. Beside her, dead, is a guy her age. His neck is bloody too, his fluids contributing to the pool they both rest in.
“How long have you been here?” Tasha asks. She doesn’t know what else to say.
The girl shifts her head to the side. The angle in which she’s slumped won’t allow her to look up at Tasha; she twists her neck awkwardly to peer up at her sideways, like a bird or a snake. She has the large plaintive eyes of a Cocker Spaniel.
“Couple hours. Days. I don’t know.”
They stare at each other in silence. Tasha opens her mouth then closes it. She looks at the body of the man. So does the girl.
“My boyfriend. He bit me. Kept biting me. Not just here,” she moves her neck. “On my arms too. My stomach.”
Tasha nods.
“He kept biting me.”
Tasha bites her lip. The girl sets her jaw, but her eyes well up with tears.
“I ran away. Thought I could get away. But he followed me outside. When I got here there was a cop standing on the corner. I was afraid he would arrest Ronnie.”
She stops and sniffles, tries to move her shoulders up higher on the wall, but she can’t.
“I crawled in the dumpster. Ronnie followed me. Started biting my ankle. I crawled all the way in and so did he. I found a piece of glass in here and kept stabbing him. It cut me up too. He bit me a couple more times. When I cut his neck he stopped. He’s dead.”
She looks at Ronnie.
“He’s dead. The cop didn’t even turn around. He was just walking in circles. All the cops…they all have it.”
“I saw the cop too,” Tasha offers. She has nothing else to give.
They stare at each other. After a moment, the girl says,
“You got a gun?”
Tasha doesn’t know anyone with a gun. Only policemen are allowed them.
“No. Just this.” She shows the knife.
“Something about the neck…”
“I know.”
“Ronnie just kept biting me…”
“You’re not the only one.”
The girl dies, her eyes on Ronnie.
Tasha wants to run away, and she wants to stay. She wants to set the dumpster on fire. She wants to dig a hole for the girl in the yellow dress. She wants to pray; to lie down and sleep; to walk in the rain; to plant a garden. She wants Dinah. She wants her mother, her sister.
At the thought of her sister, she lifts her head from where she had leaned it against the dumpster. She needs to know if there is a letter. She takes one last look at the shell of the girl in yellow and slowly closes the lid.
Turning away, she trudges toward the Post, looking at the ground, the swirls and patterns in the gravel dust where the pack of Minkers had been gathered. She hopes the Asics guy had a plan. Maybe he was leading them toward a trap, she thinks unconvincingly. Maybe everyone had a plan. She sure didn’t.
Nearing the door to the Post, she looks up from the gravelly ground and her breath catches in her throat. Not two feet ahead, standing just inside the doorway, is a Minker, its blue Post uniform bloodied all down the front like a trail of unbelievably red spaghetti sauce. Tasha freezes, but the thing just gapes forward, its gaze dull. The breaking glass had drawn it to the door, Tasha thinks, but maybe it’s too stupid to realize nothing stands in its way anymore. It doesn’t seem to see Tasha at all.
Tasha waves.
“Um…hi,” she says, “hello there, hey.” She snaps her fingers.
Nothing.
She takes a tentative step forward, her knife ready. The Minker stares off into a nonexistent horizon, the crinkle between its eyebrows softly irritated. Tasha is right on top of it now, despite the warnings in her head of curiosity and the many cats it has killed. But nothing. The Minker is blind to her. It’s bizarre.
Tasha darts her eyes down at the ground, not wanting to be taken by surprise. Along with some other debris, there’s a fist-sized piece of concrete by her shoe, leftover from the unfinished construction. Taking a slow step back, she bends quickly, snatching it up, then stands ready. Her caution is unnecessary—the Minker doesn’t move. Tasha cocks her arm back and throws the rock into the Post. It sails over the head of the Minker and lands with a clatter ten feet beyond the entrance.
It’s like a magic word.
The Minker’s head snaps to its right and it turns sluggishly to the sound, soft growls emanating from its throat, the crease between the eyebrows deepening into a furious abyss. Tasha watches with her mouth open as the Minker ambles toward the rock Tasha had thrown, leaving Tasha standing in the doorway like a ghost.
“What the…?”
Tasha doesn’t know what to make of it, but either way, if there’s a letter, it’s inside the Post. If the Minker doesn’t want to come out—even for easy prey—then Tasha will have to go in with it. She steps inside.
The Minker turns immediately as if Tasha has tripped a wire, its eyes zeroing in on her and narrowing. The barks rise and it starts toward her, arms half-raised.
“Oh, now you’re ready,” Tasha almost laughs. “What t
he hell?”
She meets the Post worker halfway, her knife poised to stab. Farther back in the office she can see the creature’s former co-worker, the nearly dry blood pooled around her forming an almost perfect circle. Poor lady—she didn’t know what hit her. Tasha stabs the Minker in the neck but it’s not quite on the mark. The grabbing hands snatch at Tasha’s chest and shoulder, but the fingers have nails, not claws, and Tasha doesn’t feel it. Another stab results in a spark and the Chip is sputtering, the Minker sinking to the ground, its growls growing weaker. A moment later it’s dead and Tasha is alone in the Post with two bodies.
She’s still confused. Why the hell didn’t it come out of the Post? Surely it could see its pack, chasing off the guy in the Asics. She turns back to look at the door. Had someone rigged it to keep Minkers inside? She doesn’t see any fancy contraption on the jamb anyplace, yet it had stood there like a statue until Tasha stepped into its realm. Something to tell Dinah, she thinks, but first she needs to get what she came for. Stepping over the body of the Minker, she goes into the enclave to her right, its walls lined with silver doors to the multitude of small boxes.
She goes to 1129. It’s her box, and the cannibal moths in her belly begin their chewing. She dreads the white envelope she prays she’ll find: she dreads the spidery script of her sister and the stains on the edges of the paper from hands writing after gardening with no soap in between. She dreads mention of the little orange-and-red house, and what has become of it. She dreads news about the Nation, news about the States, news about doctors and germs and Chips. She dreads news. But more than news, she dreads no news: to open up the box now, and see no letter…well, it would mean the end. If no letter now, then there will be no more letters written in black ink; no more stacks of paper piling up under the bed; no more loopy L for Leona.
Tasha enters 1004—her mother’s birthday—on the little keypad above the number 1129 and waits for the click that comes before the box snaps open.
Nothing.
She does it again, firmly pressing the numbers with her index finger, and waits. Again. And again, nothing. She looks up at the ceiling, realizes the overhead lights aren’t what illuminate the room: it’s sunlight, coming in through the large windows.
Tasha almost laughs. No electricity.
The knowledge robs her lungs and she sits, her back against the row of steel boxes. The fog of silence that had enveloped her when she closed the dumpster on the girl in yellow envelopes her again, makes its way down her throat. Leona might be above her in the box. Without a letter, how will she know? There’s no more Post—she’d have to go to California for confirmation of her sister’s existence, and with no planes or lightrail…it’s impossible. Why the fuck did the Post have to try and get fancy with the whole keypad entry thing? What was wrong with a key? She remembers asking the manager at the branch when she paid for her box.
“Well, you might lose a key, but you don’t generally lose your mind, do you?” He had chuckled a Bel-Air laugh that signaled he told the same joke at least once a day, and never got tired of it. Tasha had snapped back,
“Guess that’s not an amnesia-friendly policy, huh? Guess that’s not a policy that caters to the numerically challenged?”
He had gotten flustered then. “Ahem, well, in case of…forgetfulness, power failure, or other emergencies, all of our employees’ thumbs are fitted with a master print, so, ahem, you will have access whenever you need it.”
Bingo.
Tasha looks over at the dead Post worker on the floor. Not the Minker—she doesn’t want to go near it again—but the woman who is already missing an arm. Tasha doesn’t see it anywhere.
The woman is heavy, but not as heavy as Brian, and Tasha had had to pull him farther, as well as pick him up. This woman, “Janice”—she too wears a nametag—is 130 pounds at most, wearing Chanel perfume, and the slippery tile floor lends itself well to Tasha’s mission. As she pulls Janice toward 1129, she tries not to notice the Rorschachian trail of blood left behind. At first Tasha had considered just severing the woman’s thumb, carrying it to the box like a bloody key, but something about the nametag, the already missing arm, and the Chanel changed her mind. She wonders why the woman is dead, Chipless. New, perhaps? Or perhaps some sordid past made her ineligible, government job or not: you could never tell with MINK.
Once at 1129, Tasha pulls Janice’s remaining arm upwards toward the box, trying to maneuver the thumb against the little black square beside the dial pad. She aligns them, and waits. The click.
Tasha sets Janice’s arm gingerly down across her chest, hoping it’s comfortable, then opens the box.
There are two letters. One is a collection notice from the bank. The other is from Leona.
Chapter 10
“Dinah?”
Tasha has made it home and is kneeling outside Dinah’s door. She’s called her friend’s name three or four times and is now crouched with her face against the hallway carpet, trying to see under the door. She hears nothing, sees nothing.
“Dinah?” She doesn’t want to knock on the door: the bathroom, Dinah has told her, is close by and Tasha doesn’t want to alert Dale. Instead she stands and walks quickly to her own apartment, unlocking her door and entering like a shadow. Maybe Dinah is leaning out the window.
She takes off her backpack, leaving it on the floor inside the front door, and hurries into the bedroom. She opens the window with one quick pull and sticks her head out. No Dinah. She decides to tap on the wall.
“Dinah,” she calls softly through the thin barrier, “Dinah, are you okay?”
A rustling sound rewards her efforts.
“Dinah?”
“Hey, I’m here,” comes Dinah’s voice, soft and dragging. “I’m here.”
“Are you okay?”
“I was sleeping.”
“But you’re okay?”
“I’m….okay.”
“I made it to the Post. I have a letter.”
Dinah’s voice tightens.
“From your sister?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say? Did she know anything?” Dinah says quickly, intensely.
“I haven’t read it yet. I wanted to wait ‘til I got back here with you.”
“Read it!”
“Come to the window, I’ll read it to you.”
“You can read it here.”
“But…why?” Tasha is confused. “I won’t have to whisper as much if we go to the window.”
“I just, you know, I just woke up.”
Her voice is strange. It sounds scooped out, thin.
“Dinah? What’s wrong? Are you sick?”
“No, no, not sick.”
“Come to the window.”
Tasha stands without waiting for a response and goes to the window, leaning out. A moment later, she sees Dinah’s head appear, just a piece of it.
“Hey,” she says casually.
“Hey…” says Tasha.
They stare at each other.
“Dinah, what the fuck are you doing?”
The sun is setting, and Dinah’s forehead has fallen into shadow. Tasha realizes how much she has relied on her friend’s eyebrows for her expression. Right now, she can’t tell at all.
“Something happened.”
“What? What happened?”
Tasha thinks immediately of the child they had seen the day before, whose death has lingered around the edges of Tasha’s consciousness since she woke. Had someone else appeared on the street below? Another act of brutality that Dinah, in her cage, had been forced to bear witness to?
“Dinah,” says Tasha, when nothing is said, “what happened?”
“I tried to get the keys,” says Dinah simply, her voice low enough to make her hard to hear. “I tried to get the keys while you were gone.”
“What?” Tasha’s heart becomes a sparrow, its wings brushing her lungs and causing her to breathe shallowly. “Did you get them? Why are you still in there? Are you alright?”
“Are you alright?”
“I…”
“Are you alright?”
“He bit me. But I’m fine.”
Tasha squeezes her eyes shut.
“Where did he bite you? Where?”
“My shoulder. It’s not bad.”
“Have you cleaned it? They say humans’ mouths are dirtier than dogs’ and—”
“All the bandages and stuff are in the bathroom with him.”
“Christ. Hold on.”
Tasha leaves the window and goes into her own bathroom where she yanks open the medicine cabinet. The cosmetics pouch, housing her mascara, sits there on the shelf beckoning her. She half considers putting another coat of mascara on to calm her nerves, give her some steadiness. But instead she grabs the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. It’s all she has.
Back at the window, she looks Dinah in her eyes. One of them—the one still healing from the bruise—is shadowed by the setting sun.
“You have to catch this,” says Tasha. “It’s the only stuff I have and you need to get something on the bite as soon as possible.”
“Okay,” says Dinah, nodding. “I’m ready.”
Tasha had gauged the distance when she had tossed the beans, and she underhands the peroxide now, gritting her teeth. Like anything important, it hangs in space for a moment before landing firmly in Dinah’s outstretched palms.
“Whew,” says Dinah, and Tasha’s not sure if she means it to be funny or if she means it.
“Pour it on your shoulder,” says Tasha. “Now.”
She hears her mother in her voice and cringes from it, missing her. Tasha wishes she could be in Dinah’s apartment. She’s dressed enough dog bites in her life to handle a Dale bite. Fucking Dale. She wants to punch him in the face.