Lee is lying on her left flank against the door, her shoulder pressing against the cobbled road through the void where the driver-side window used to be. There are chips of tempered glass on her arm, on her hands. Her face. Studding her hair. When she shifts positions, the pieces pour brightly off of her body.
The windshield is hanging loosely in its frame, and she can hear the fossa slavering, circling, outside. She pops the seatbelt and reaches behind her for the handgun. Watching the square of open sky above her where the passenger window has been broken out.
She takes the safety off; there is already a round chambered. She takes the duffel from the floor and starts to climb toward the light streaming from overhead.
When she reaches the passenger window, she aims the handgun skyward through the opening and pulls the trigger. There is a loud report, echoing—it may not be enough volume to clear out the fossa entirely, but it may be enough to create a perimeter, to give herself some breathing room. She pushes through the opening and immediately sights the landscape with the gun, sweeping every direction, turning her body, targeting, and she sees that most of the fossa are scattering. Running full-tilt toward the park fountain.
She doesn’t wait. She shoulders the duffel and climbs through the opening and vaults over. Gun in hand. She hits the ground hard, going to her knees, but she stands right away and she starts to run. Sprinting down the center of the roadway. She glances back over her shoulder, and she can see that a few of the retreating fossa have circled around to watch from a safe distance, but the sight of her fleeing sparks something in them, renewing their resolve, and they start to give chase.
They’re running her down. Loping over the cobblestones, devouring the distance between them. It’s easy for these demons—they could be experiencing this entire event as nothing but good clean fun for all she knows. Mouths open, tails high. The space is closing. She isn’t going to last long at this pace.
Up ahead she can see the palm-lined promenade that leads to the hotel. The white walls, the black iron gate. Half a mile. Her arms are pumping and the duffel is swinging side-to-side on her back.
At five hundred yards from the gates she can hear their panting, their clawed footfalls, behind her. She isn’t going to make it in time. She comes upon a fallen liana palm, thick-trunked, laid out across the roadway, and she vaults it. When she touches down on the other side, she immediately swings the gun around and crouches into a firing stance, wrist resting on the trunk, and she sights the closest one. Wiry and long-limbed—a juvenile, probably. She squeezes the trigger, and there is a high-pitched squall as the fossa falls, skidding, rolling over, coming to rest about ten yards from her position. She sights the next one and fires but misses, and she tries again but they’re coming at her too quickly. Six, maybe seven of them. She gets to her feet and starts firing wildly. Two more of them go down before she runs out of rounds, and then they’re upon her.
One of the fossa, thick and barrel-chested, leaps onto the fallen trunk and stands, watching. The others join soon after that—three more of them, smaller than the first. Thin and lanky and sleek-black. Low, throaty growls are coming from all of them. Lips pulled back to flaunt the canine teeth.
Lee backs up slowly but doesn’t run, and she keeps her eyes focused down on the road in front of the palm. I am not your challenger but I am not your prey either. She turns the empty handgun around to grip it by the barrel, club-like, and then she carefully unslings the duffel and wraps the end of the long shoulder strap around her other hand. She stands still and waits.
Without any warning, the largest of the group leaps off the trunk and charges her. It closes the distance between them almost instantly. She swings the duffel and it connects with the fossa’s skull, and although the impact is light—the bag doesn’t carry enough weight to do any sort of damage—it’s enough to make the thing stand down. It pauses and starts pawing its ear as though something is lodged there, and Lee starts to back up, swinging the bag from side to side, back and forth, warding.
As she retreats, they begin to follow, all four of them. Stalking slowly, fanning out across the road, trying to flank her. She keeps swinging the bag, backing up the promenade toward the gate, glancing over her shoulder for alignment, and when she makes it past the tall bulwarks on either side of the wall, she hurries to throw the heavy gate closed, blocking off the road. Once the latch is secured, she watches the fossa for a moment through the gaps between the black iron billets.
chapter seventeen
Lee makes her way across the Lavelha grounds to the Makoa. Past the accumulation of bodies—the sheer number, the loss immeasurable. She keeps her eyes focused forward, and as soon as she reaches the tower she scans the facade from a sheltered position behind tree cover. Incredibly, the structure of the building itself has barely changed since she last saw it three months prior; somehow it’s remained virtually untouched by the surrounding ruin.
When she feels ready enough, she pulls the mask over her mouth and nose and smoothes it down. She secures the duffel in the understory of the woods where she can find it again, then she steps out of the trees and slowly approaches a west-facing service entrance, a simple unmarked white door with a keyed twist knob.
She doesn’t hesitate. She tries the knob and it’s unlocked, just as she was told it would be, so she opens the door and strides through. The child told her to act as though she belongs there, to walk in knowingly. It’s not unusual for the bad man to take a new girl, the child said. Just don’t let him lay eyes on you. And if any of the other girls ask you for your name, remember, always, you have no name. You are Hanna, that’s all. Only Hanna.
Lee enters a darkened hallway lit only by a line of blue lights embedded at intervals along the baseboards, both sides—the kind of lights that are meant to guide you to an exit when the power fails. The walls and the floors are made of unfinished grey concrete, and there are naked bulbs strung along the ceiling, fixtureless and blackened. Everything is industrial-looking, especially in the near dark. When she walks forward her footfalls echo, and her heart is beating with enough pressure that her pulse makes an audible clicking sound in her throat, like a metal valve opening and closing, rhythmic.
She makes her way through. Passing nondescript doors, unpainted fiberboard composite, all of them closed. Supply closets or pump rooms or electrical breaker panels or maybe the endpoint of a multi-floor trash chute, maybe laundry, who knows. She walks to the end of the hall and finds another closed door with a posted sign marking it as a stairwell—she opens the door, enters, and starts to climb. The child told her that if her husband is still living, he will be confined somewhere on the fourth floor.
Lee ascends. Her cadence is measured, unhurried. I belong here, in this building; this is a chore I am doing because I was assigned to do it. I am a part of this. She pauses at every landing to listen for a moment through the heavy fire door before continuing upward.
At some point between the second and third landings she picks up on the sound of someone else’s footfalls in the stairwell, someone above her position. The sound of a stranger’s descent toward her. She doesn’t stop or turn back, as much as she wants to; instead, she keeps climbing, taking steps at the same steady pace.
At the third-floor landing Lee encounters a woman carrying a tall white bucket in each hand. Seedy blonde hair, a washed-out pinafore dress. The child told her about this woman, the one with the paint buckets: she called her the Feeder. From what the child said, the Feeder was supposed to be finished with her feedings early in the day, long before now.
The Feeder stops her descent when she sees Lee. She stands on the last step under the cold blue outage lighting.
“Who are you,” the Feeder asks, and the tone she uses is challenging, aggressive. She has the same slurred diction as the child.
Lee is ready for the question. “I am no one,” she answers.
“No one.”
“No one. Nothing. I am Hanna,” Lee says. She mumbles out the words, intentiona
lly running them together, and when she speaks, her head is slightly bowed. She makes no eye contact.
“You’re a new one,” says the Feeder.
“Yes.”
“When did you come?” The tone hasn’t softened. Everything is delivered with an edge.
“This morning. Early,” Lee says. She clears her throat. She isn’t used to the sound of her own voice filtered through the dust mask.
There’s silence between them. Lee can feel the woman’s eyes fixed on her, boring in.
“Why are you here,” asks the Feeder.
“Here?”
“Up here.” The Feeder gestures to the stairwell.
“He sent me,” she says. “To help. If you need it.”
“No. He didn’t do that.”
Lee starts nodding. “I wouldn’t be here without his word.”
The woman sets both buckets down on the landing. “Come on, then. We’ll go see him together.”
This isn’t working. The Feeder starts walking toward her.
On instinct, Lee steps backward and snatches at the hem of her dress, hitching it up over her hips, and she pulls out the handgun. She levels it, aiming at the woman’s face.
The gun is empty, but the sight of it is enough to make the woman stop short.
“Pick those up,” Lee says.
The woman turns her head and looks at the buckets.
“Do it,” Lee says.
The woman stares at her for a moment, then goes back to the buckets and takes one in each hand.
“Turn around.”
The woman does. Now she is facing upstairs, the way she came. “What the hell are you doing,” the woman asks.
“Don’t talk. We’re going upstairs. Go.” Lee grinds the gun muzzle into the woman’s back and pushes her forward.
They climb together. Lee takes the gun away from the woman’s spine but she keeps it close by. Every few seconds, the woman turns her head to one side, trying to look back.
As they approach the fourth floor, the woman says, “What do you want?” and her tone has shifted toward concern, toward worry, which is a good thing.
“You brought a man here recently,” Lee says. “To this building. Take me to him.”
“A man?”
Lee steps forward and grinds the muzzle into the nape of the woman’s neck, parting her hair with it. “Take me to him.” Lee presses hard, twisting. Digging in. She’s lost nearly all of her closely-held restraint.
“Okay. Okay, yes.”
“Goddamn right, yes,” Lee says. “Go.”
They come to the fourth level, and the woman leads Lee down the hall to around the midpoint. The same hall someone may have walked down once upon a time to fetch ice from a machine, back when machines made things for you. They stop at a closed door mantled with different locks, a ghastly assortment of them. A Master padlock and a hasp, a notched privacy chain. A long bike cable running from the panel to the wall. The woman is standing a foot in front of Lee, facing it all, motionless.
“This is it?” Lee asks.
The woman pauses. After a time she nods.
Lee stares at the door—allowing herself to take in the absolute barbarity of the creation, the sheer will that must have been required to transform a luxury suite into a prison cell, especially now, with resources being at a premium.
“This is what you did,” Lee says quietly, almost to herself. She is shaking her head. “This is what you took the time to do.”
The woman doesn’t say anything in response. She just faces forward, holding both buckets with straight arms.
Lee takes one step and leans in toward the jamb, keeping the muzzle trained on the woman’s neck. “Baby, it’s me,” she says through the door. “It’s me. I’m coming in.”
Lee waits. After a few moments of silence she steps back, still listening for a response, but she hears nothing.
Lee uses the gun to push the woman forward. “Open it,” Lee says.
“I can’t.”
“Do it,” Lee says. “I’m telling you. Open that door.”
“Listen to me. I can’t,” she says.
And without thinking, Lee lifts up the gun and brings the grip stock down sharply onto the woman’s scalp at the back of the crown, hard enough to split the thin flesh open, to draw immediate blood. The paint buckets drop to the carpet, and the woman cradles her head with both hands. After a time she goes down on one knee, then both.
No one speaks. Lee is breathing deeply, trying to calm herself, to maintain some semblance of focus. The woman stays where she is, alternating between probing the wound and bringing her hand around to check the extent of the bleeding, the output.
“The man was your husband,” the woman says after a while. It’s less a question than a statement of plain fact.
“Is. Not was.”
The woman nods slowly. “I respect that it still matters to you,” she says. “That it means something. In this world, especially, being what it is.” She pauses and checks the bleeding again. “But I’m here to tell you: you can go ahead and walk away from this now. Head high. Without a lick of guilt about doing it. Just walk. There’s still time.”
“Get up,” Lee says.
“I won’t say a word to anyone. That I saw you, I mean.”
“You will,” Lee says. “I know that you will. But we’ll be gone already. Now get up.”
The woman remains on her knees, facing the door. She tries turning her head to establish some form of meaningful eye contact, but Lee presses the gun muzzle hard into her cheek above the mask-line, pushing her face forward, focusing her on the task. The woman raises her hands up feebly in a staged show of surrender, some kind of false appeal.
“You want to take him out of here,” the woman says. “I understand. But listen to me: there’s nothing left to take. He’s gone.”
Lee moves the gun back slightly, removing it from the woman’s cheek. “What the hell does that mean, gone?”
“Sick gone,” the woman says. “He lost himself to it. All the way. Gone.” She makes a zip-whistle sound with her mouth.
Lee doesn’t respond. The woman tries turning her head again, and this time Lee doesn’t stop her—they make eye contact. Her watery blue irises over the graying fabric. The woman says, “You had to know he had it in him. You had to know that.”
“Get up. Now,” Lee says. “Look at the door, not me.”
The woman turns away. She shakes her head sadly, and then she lets out an affected sigh and gets to her feet. As she does, she keeps her fingers on the wound.
“Listen,” the woman says. “Please. He fought against it, but it’s over. He’s crossed the line you don’t come back from. And if you’ve survived out here for this long, you know what line I mean. So just walk away. You did all you can do. You honored him.”
“Open the door,” Lee says.
The woman abruptly turns to face her. “I told you: I can’t. You wouldn’t want me to.”
“Turn around,” Lee says. “Turn around, now.”
The woman does; she faces the door again.
“Open the goddamn door.”
The woman hesitates. “They’re sick,” she says. “They can’t be out here.”
Lee stares at the back of the woman’s head. The blood caking, matting her lank, straw hair.
“You put him in with the rest of them,” Lee says.
The woman doesn’t say anything.
“Is that what you did? You locked him in with them?”
“It wasn’t me. I don’t get to decide.”
Lee is about to raise the handgun and use it on the woman again, to hammer her down, but then she stops. She listens. There is the sound of movement—a writhing—on the other side of the door.
There isn’t time for any of this.
“Give me the keys,” Lee says.
The woman lifts her hands weakly again. “I don’t have them. I was going back downstairs for them.”
Lee shakes her head. Christ, Jesus, help me. S
he takes a step forward and starts running her palm along the woman’s sides, her legs, keeping the gun muzzle in contact, always, but there’s nothing. The keys aren’t there. Lee straightens.
“Open the buckets,” she says.
The woman turns her head slightly. “What?”
Lee doesn’t answer. She straight-kicks the woman in the back of one knee, buckling the limb, and the woman falls.
“Open the buckets,” Lee says. “Both.”
Wincing, gripping the leg, the woman struggles to go up onto her knees. She grasps one of the buckets with both hands and she hoicks off its thick white lid. She lets it fall and then she turns and does the same to the other. When she finishes, Lee leans forward and glances inside—there is a stew of bone and entrails and blood in each, exactly what the child said there would be.
“Cover yourself,” Lee says, and when the woman doesn’t budge, she says, “Reach in there and put it on. All over.”
The woman hesitates, staring straight ahead at the door, but after a short time she turns and gingerly dips two wavering fingers into the bucket on her left and starts daubing her forehead, painting underneath her eyes. The tears are visible.
As the woman works, Lee watches, urging her on, barking out orders, but after a short time she decides that she can’t wait any longer and she lifts up one of the buckets herself. She holds it over the woman and turns it upside down, letting the contents stream directly onto her—her head, her back, her legs—engulfing her. Spattering everything, including her own dress. The woman instinctively goes fetal onto the carpet. Gasping for air through the wet mask. As the woman lies at her feet, Lee picks up the other bucket and repeats.
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