The Feed

by Nick Clark Windo

  The crunch and boom as they climb echoes into the evening. They pass under vast rain-darkened billboards. At dusk they drop down underneath the crust and they eat, and sleep, and hold each other for warmth as their breath condenses on the windows. Skeletons watch them from some of the wrecks. Most of them are empty.

  The next morning they pass rancid sewage plains and warehouses that dwarf them. A sign welcoming them to the city suggests they drive carefully, except the R and the V have been blown away by bullets, changing the hospitality of the message.

  Soon they are in the suburbs, and the smell of rotting reaches a peak as the road is swallowed between the vaulted malls. Domiciles curve around them like so many giant suds. The road rises up on massive legs and beneath it, between the stanchions, are the remains of older buildings. The previous centuries’ places. A lot of the newer domes are smoke-blackened from the inside. Others house a darkened fuzz of moss. Many, most, are cracked like eggshells. Creepers grow out, birds fly in, and there, way down on the ground, a pack of huge dogs waits in line. One by one they prowl through a car-sized smash in a wall. And out flows that smell, like the thick and rancid odor from a putrefying wound. It sits heavily like a layer of fat on everything, greasing their faces, seemingly making even the road surface slippery.

  They continue as the super-road rises and the stench gets lighter with height. Before them the city spreads: conglomerations of smooth-sided buildings, glinting like glassy hills. In the far distance, toward the river, the famous buildings of the older city emerge from the water. Shards of glass. Cross-anointed cupolas that, in centuries past, had been the must-see sights. Sylene clings on to the barricaded edge of the road, the wind catching her hair. Unearthly silence surrounds them.

  “So here it is,” she says. “This was one of the vistas we had up on our screens.”

  They camp on top of the next super-road, where the pegs won’t penetrate, the tarmac being clear of soil up this high. They position the tent between cars to shelter themselves from the wind. The sun is setting, melting into the city’s distant reaches. It makes the buildings to the east look like they’re on fire. That was where their house was, Tom thinks, but he can’t quite remember enough to pin it down, its location lost with his habits and GPSmaps of the past. Then the stars come out and the city, empty, is peaceful below them. In the darkness the destruction is veiled. It is the quiet of winter country nights, but here surrounded by glass and concrete and air. There are noises, carried on the breeze. Dogs, birds, and at one point something cascading: a colossal sound as a building settles at last, giving up the ghost. Tom wakes halfway through the night and sees a fire in the distance, on another super-road, floating.

  “Is this how you imagined it?”

  They curve around an off-ramp, walking past spindly streetlights, a putrid and gaping underpass descending to their right.

  “Are you joking? None of it is how I imagined it. The city. The world. The people we’ve seen.”

  “What’s different about the people?”

  They join another super-road, the translucent barriers melding together at the junction in midair. Blank posters line the sides, lines of nothing but regular quickcodes.

  “You’re all different colors.”

  Tom snorts back a laugh. “You can’t say that!”

  “By the time it gets to us, we’re all a golden-browny mix.”

  “Sylene . . .”

  Tom takes her arm, cutting her laughter off. Ahead, coming around a car, is the stocky form of an animal. With a low, square jaw and muscled ridges on its shoulders, this dog ducks as soon as it sees them, stretching its legs into the ground. It reveals its teeth. Its eyes flare darkly. Saliva strands between its lips as it unleashes a massive gulping bark.

  “Get behind me, Sylene!”

  Tom pushes her back as the dog approaches. Snarling, legs quivering, when it growls the sound vibrates in Tom’s guts. It finds purchase and lunges, and he, dodging, manages a kick on the side of its head. It barks and lunges again, teeth rancid and sharp, and smashes against him with its snout. Its eyes are crazed, pure black, nothing emotional there. He swipes with an arm, kicks out again, and lands a lucky blow on its mouth. It yelps, surprised, and recoils, then skulks away down the road, snarling, growling, padding sideways, never taking its gaze away.

  Tom carries a pipe now, the exhaust of a car. The road drops, narrowing from three clogged thoroughfares to one as it enters an older zone. The stream of solidified cars is continuous: wedged two abreast in the single lanes, mounted on the pavements. At ground level, they enter streets where disorder rules: the devastation is random, it seems. Sometimes single houses are gutted while their neighbors appear pristine. Walls have crumbled into the road and entire blocks have been razed. Scraps of building point up like blackened broken teeth. One mound of rubble is mixed with twisted metal. A plane? A satellite? Something hurled down from the sky. Everywhere the trees are unruly, their branches grown too low, too wide, freed and controlled no more. Grass sprays up between the paving slabs. Down here on the ground, away from the super-roads, everywhere Tom looks lie bones. Some still snag tendrils of fabric, or maybe it’s matter, but most are sun-stripped clean. Sometimes there are recognizable configurations: two attaching at a knee; a rib cage like a spider; vertebrae with the jawbone attached. Pieces of people discarded like toys.

  He realizes he is walking alone.

  Sylene stands between rows of cars whose tires have sagged and split. To one side of the road is a line of old houses. The doors are all unhinged. The gutters have burst. One house has been blackened by an explosion, the windows of the cars blown out. On the other side are the rusted railings of a park. A tree has crushed the seesaw. Its roots are still embedded and its branches grab the slide. Only birds now sit on the rusty-chained swings. Tom goes back to her. Tears flow freely down her face, and her hands, raised to her mouth, are shaking.

  “We didn’t mean to do this,” she sobs, the tears stranding between her lips. “This isn’t what we meant at all.”

  Tom takes her in his arms and she buries her face.

  “Well . . . I don’t think we meant to destroy the world either,” he tells her, and her shaking sobs stop for a second before they start again, louder and unrestrained.

  It’s like they walk through the rings in a tree, the city around them aging. A super-road stretches far above them, but the residential area they reach is one of the oldest of the city. Instead of curving glass or the concrete behemoths they have seen before, these houses are centuries old. Tom climbs some steps at random, the asphalt cracked and frozen-flowing down. The ornamentations and window frames are streaked brown, the windows fuzzy with dust.

  “We’re nearly at the tower,” he says, “but let’s stay here for tonight.” He tuts and points at a panel by the door. “A BioLock. We’ll leave this one for the archaeologists.” He steps over the small wall dividing this set of steps from the next house and examines the front door, running his hands along the frame. “Looks good . . . Wait here. I’ll do a quick scout.”

  He descends the stairs and turns down a few more at the side of a small front garden. At the bottom is another door. He smashes one of its panes with a brick, reaches through, and twists the latch. Pushes through the silken cobwebs. A short, dark corridor leads into a kitchen, where the air is damp, like a tomb, but the room is shockingly peaceful. All the chairs are upright. It’s like life. His old world. If he could forget everything that’s happened in between. The memory of Bea clutches him, terrified, desperate not to be let go. And he feels nauseated. Should they stay here for the night or push on toward the tower? Its summit, his family’s homeHub, where Bea’s memories, he prays, are waiting.

  Shaking, he glances into the next room: a dining room with glass doors looks onto an overwhelmed garden. Again, everything intact. Leaning on the walls as he climbs, on the next floor he finds a living room with a gray three-piece suite. The floors are carpeted with burlap. He pushes his knuckles into the fir
m weave. They’d had carpets exactly like it in their house. He goes to a wall that looks bare, but yes, he can feel the stretch of a thinscreen just where they’d had theirs. Atoms thin and translucent; no archaeologist will be finding this piece of tech. There are two bedrooms upstairs where theirs had been. Had they all really lived the same way? Hadn’t it seemed strange at the time?

  Tom stands at a window as the last of the day’s light catches the side of the frame. Sylene, arms across her stomach, woolly-hatted, looks up and down the road. A quiet late-autumn evening. If only none of this had happened. He goes back downstairs, his boots clumping on the floor, and puts his head outside.

  “It’s nice,” he says. “With some modest refurbishment, it could be our dream home.”

  In the cupboards, there is very little that hasn’t rotted or rusted through. Some brown sauce and a tin of fava beans, colorless but seemingly edible. Tom opens their last sealed Tupperware and they shovel the beans with biscuits and splash them with the sauce. Framed posters line the walls. At the end of the table is a high chair, its plastic seat covered with mold that spreads along the straps. Tom notices that Sylene’s gaze keeps returning to it.

  “Is this how you lived?” she asks.

  He turns to the window. Not far off, and not too far away, though he can’t quite get his bearings. They had a kitchen in the same place, and exposed brickwork too. Kate had refused any quickcoded artworks, so they’d had real posters on the walls. To buy them would have cost a fortune, but these were heirlooms, she’d said, from when her parents were young. Plays and films they’d seen. Concerts they’d gone to. Antiquated public events they described in detail to their children. They were dubious about Tom having them, but they were delighted their daughter liked them.

  “Not exactly the same, but similar.”

  “It’s like a museum.” Sylene laughs and shakes her head in wonder. “I like it!”

  They lick their plates clean. Tom takes them to the sink and twists the tap, from which nothing comes, of course. He did it, he justifies to himself, to feel some routine, some familiarity with what was once before; not because he forgot. Sylene clears her throat behind him.

  “It’s a girl, I think, Tom.”

  He puts the plates down and turns. Leans back against the sink. “How do you know?”

  Sylene looks at the high chair, her hands on her stomach. “It doesn’t feel like a boy.”

  “What will we call her?”

  Sylene doesn’t respond, so he sits and reaches his hands toward her.

  “Sylene?”

  She gives a very brief shrug. She doesn’t take her eyes off the high chair. “It depends on who she looks like.”

  He wakes just after dawn. He has barely slept. All night he heard noises: scratching, movements. Ghosts in the house, he had thought while he was still murkily asleep. How many ghosts must there be around them? Protecting their homes, haunting the streets. When he had managed to sleep more, the dreams had been confused. Nothing had been stable. A house, his and Kate’s, with flooded foundations; having to hide some things there—books, he thought, grabbing the dream before it evaporated, as posters floated past on the tide; he was suddenly in a very tall building he no longer knew, but he knew he was being watched. Gas building up, wherever he was, waiting for the spark to ignite it.

  He goes downstairs, leaving Sylene asleep, and puts the smeared dishes back in their cupboard. Sparse light comes through the plant-clotted doors in the dining room. He picks up a paper photograph in an old-fashioned frame, leaving a crevice in the dust on the shelf. Parents, children, grandparents, sitting on a bench. A dog lying on the grass. A cat half leaving the frame. The youngest child pointing after it. There’s a small, colorful slide on the lawn.

  Black leaves and strange tendrils suction onto the garden doors, and he turns the handle, pushes the door open an inch, then harder, tearing the ivy away. Years of untending have left the garden wild. The top of a plastic slide emerges from recently grown bushes. A fence running along the side of the garden is smothered with roses. He wades into the undergrowth and, yes, finds it: a mossy bench, soft, cracked, and buried deep in the grass. How long ago was that family here? The dog is more likely to be alive than them. And today he will find Bea.

  A knocking brings Tom up. He looks up at the house for Sylene, but its windows are cobwebbed and empty. The tapping again. He looks to the house next door and sees a figure in a window, no cobwebs, the glass wiped clean. Its hair is long, matted, and gray. Its cheeks sag. As the figure leans forward, even from this distance he sees its eyes are pale, like the irises have been bleached, before its breath fogs the glass. It ducks to see him again. A smile twitches its lips and it waves at him tentatively. Tom lifts a hand and waves back, and it smiles fully now, this creature, revealing black and broken teeth, and a clip in its lower lip that shows brown gums. It points at him, and smiles, and then lowers a hand to its stomach. A dirty tongue protrudes from its mouth and draws slowly around its blackened lips. Then it jabs a finger at him, eyes flaring wide, and disappears from the window.

  Tom stands for heart-lurching seconds, and then he is jumping the grasses back to the house in an instant. As he races toward the doors, he notices that the next-door garden is tamer than this one. There is netting there, hung between two trees, with a slowly flapping bird caught in it. Back inside, he scrabbles to lock the doors—watching the fence to see if anything scales over it—and then he heaves the table toward them, slides chairs across the floor wildly as he runs into the corridor. He hears one of them—or something—smash the glass behind him.

  “Sylene!” Tom crashes into walls running up the stairs. “Sylene! Get up, we have to get out of here!” He grabs the bags and forces their stuff in as she hurries out of bed, pulling on her clothes, collecting her things. Then there is a noise.

  Tom holds up his hand.

  It sounds like something is being dragged across the floor in the house next door. Then there is a scratching, scrabbling sound that spreads rapidly out across the wall.

  Tom doesn’t know what to do. There’s nothing he knows, no experience he’s had, that can help him deal with this. This house. That thing. A human animal. They’ve worked so hard to get here, and now his hope burns away as fear scalds through his body. He points at Sylene’s boots, at the bags, at the door, and gestures downstairs, shaking. As they creep from the room, something heavy is hurled against the wall. The entire floor shakes, and they jump. Then a cascade of footsteps tramples the staircase next door. He doesn’t think. He grabs Sylene’s arm and they run, his legs jarring on the stairs, his arms smacking the walls as he wrestles his rucksack on.

  It’s dark downstairs, and cold. Is there a breeze coming in? As Tom goes past the dining room, he hears, he thinks, the open doors banging. They dash into the kitchen. Empty. The table undisturbed. Back down the little corridor, and a thin chill draft slides through the pane he’d smashed for entry. Quickly, quietly, his heart choking his throat, he ducks outside and peers around at the main steps above them. Nothing. He scans the windows of the house next door. Nothing there either but dust, cobwebs, and shadows. He waves at Sylene, who climbs up behind him, her hands on her stomach, effortful, pale-faced, very scared. Tom maneuvers her through the gate and takes her hand, and they run as quickly as Sylene can manage past the empty-looking houses and seemingly abandoned cars.

  Gardens have claimed the streets. Weeds push the paving stones awry. As they approach a corner, Tom slows, pushes Sylene ahead again, and squints back along the pavement. Small puffs of cloud hang high in the sky. It’s a bright day. No one follows them down the street. He breathes out in relief, but as he turns, he sees from the corner of his eye Sylene’s head jerk sideways, and in a moment’s realization that comes as she stumbles and collapses, he knows he saw a flash of something smack into her head. He ducks, adrenaline rising like bile before he is even conscious that the next rock is spinning at him. It smashes into a car. Another hurtles past his ear, and then there
is one for his face.

  Sound is sharper than ever, and the colors pop. All this precision and yet everything wavers moltenly as he sees a figure leap upon Sylene. She stirs, woozy, and then struggles as the creature, this tendon-thin, rapacious thing, squats stilly on her thighs. This person, this human animal.

  Tom knows he should be moving, but his thoughts and his body detach. His sight swims and he feels strangely calm. He watches as the creature claws at her face, her arms, her belly, and tries to tear her clothes, and through the flashing of limbs he sees Sylene’s face, which is Kate’s, twisted in terror and screaming, and with that hat and her skin cold, face flushed, she looks like Bea, he sees Bea’s face, and her cries reverberate, shocking his mind.

  The thing pulls a blade and Tom lurches up as the knife swipes down. There’s a collision and a fall and his face cracks into the ground. Stunned again, he feels the thing’s head beneath him and he punches it hard, hard, again. Something scalds through his arm and he twists and pummels wildly. The thing beneath him scrabbles, its movements too quick, and they roll across the pavement, Tom clinging to the figure in a brutal, shaking hug. The blade rushes again and Tom blocks it with his arm. He kneels on the creature, wrestles with its arms, grabbing for its clawlike hands. It’s panting rancid breath straight into his face, its eyes widened in excitement.

  The blade stabs Tom’s shoulder, hot and clean, and he hits it away with his fist. His skin is sliced to the knuckle, but he grabs the creature’s hand and punches its stomach, punches its chest, thumps the hard hip bones with his elbow. He smacks its spine and the ridged ripples of its ribs. He tries to twist around so he can thump its face, its grimacing face with its cloven lip, but this person—bloodshot, ravaged, hard to think it was ever a human—this thing bites his arm with broken teeth and the blade is back in his face. It scores his chest, nearing his eyes, catching his brow with a swipe, but he blocks it again with his palm—he catches it and holds the blade, despite the pain as it sinks into his flesh and hot blood runs down his wrist. His arm shakes as he screams. He punches the creature’s forearm, smashes and smacks the bone, waiting for a crack that doesn’t come, so he bites until a saggy lump of flesh comes loose and his mouth floods full of warm and salty blood and the knife falls finally free. He snatches it and embeds it in the flesh. He swipes it out and through its throat, and stabs its chest, clipping a rib. Its stomach splits open as the metal tears right through, and he’s stabbing down to the ground. The figure flaps beneath him.