There were footsteps behind her. Lindy tensed but didn’t turn. She’d found that money had a way of behaving like a tsunami: once it began concentrating in one place, everyone swore it would trickle down into the local economy, but it didn’t. Instead, it pulled itself out, one dollar and one dime at a time, leaving people starving and desperate. Poverty didn’t make people cruel. Money did, she sometimes thought. And hunger could make anyone a monster.
She walked all the way home, ten blocks of after-midnight streets and silence, and the footsteps were with her almost to the end.
* * *
The next night, it all repeated itself. The corpse of the Financial District sat glittering in the sunset, like a beautiful, expertly embalmed movie star preparing for her final audience, and Lindy sat alone in the store, her chin cupped in her hand, watching the monitors for signs that she was actually going to earn her paycheck for a change. Technically, she earned it just by showing up, not shoplifting, and not stealing anything from the register when she had the opportunity, but technicalities didn’t make her feel good about her work ethic. She wanted to work. She wanted to engage. And she wanted to stay in this job until it went away, no matter how incompatible that was with everything else that she desired. Sometimes humanity was a complicated thing to hold onto.
The bell over the door rang twice over the course of her shift, both times when there was no one on the monitors and everything about the store said that she was alone. Again, the footsteps followed her home, through a night gone chilly with despair.
On the third night, the door actually opened. Lindy took her chin out of her hand and sat up straight, watching as Mr. Wallace, the owner, came into view. He was in his eighties, and when she’d taken the job, he had walked like a much younger man, chest puffed out with a pride that she had envied, even as she’d scurried behind him, trying to memorize the ins and outs of the store in a single training session. Now he shuffled, shoulders bowed, head low, eyes red with either drinking or crying or some combination of the two. He didn’t normally come to the shop in the evening unless there was some sort of emergency.
Oh, no, thought Lindy, with dull resignation. Aloud, she said, “Hello, sir.”
“Lindy, isn’t it?” He walked in her direction. “You’ve been a good employee. No one has a bad word to say about you, not even some of my regulars who, well… they haven’t had good things to say about many of the people who’ve worked here. People can get set in their ways, you understand, when they spend too much time in one place. I suppose that’s why change is so important. We need to… go new places, do new things, if we want to keep growing.”
Lindy’s heart sank. “The rent went up again, didn’t it?”
His smile was mirthless. “By sixty percent. The lease allows it, if the increase brings the unit into alignment with comparable local properties.”
The only comparable local properties were the ones nestled in the bodies of the high-rises, the chains and the franchise outlets, which sold the same things, and were technically the same type of store. Only technically. Worlds could rise and fall on a technicality.
“How long do we have?”
“I can keep the doors open until the end of the month. Maybe a few months longer, if I want to cannibalize my retirement fund.”
Lindy looked at him and couldn’t imagine that he’d have much of a retirement fund to cannibalize. “Maybe it’s best if we don’t draw it out,” she said, as gently as she could.
Mr. Wallace looked at her with tears in his eyes, and nodded. “That was my thought as well. I just… I can’t bear to let this old girl go. She’s been with me for sixty years, did you know that? I kept these doors open through earthquakes, civil unrest, rain like you wouldn’t believe, and all so the people who live around here would know they could always get a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk at a fair price, no matter how bad things got. But no one lives around here anymore. The homeless folks can’t afford to pay a fair price—they take what they can get from the dumpsters, and they buy fast food with the money they beg for, because a cheeseburger is a better deal than a bunch of bread that’s going to go off before you have a chance to eat it all. The suits don’t shop in places like mine. I should have been smart enough to get out months ago.”
Maybe that was true. Lindy still shook her head and said, “I think staying was the right thing to do.”
“I’ll understand if you need to quit. Finding a new job can’t be easy.”
“It’s not,” she admitted. “But I like this one. If you don’t mind, I’ll stick it out until we close.”
Mr. Wallace smiled at her, looking quietly, profoundly relieved. “If you’re sure.”
She wasn’t, but how could she tell him that? She was losing a boring dead-end job. He was losing his livelihood, and sixty years of toil. It didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem fair. Something like this shouldn’t have been happening to someone like him, who had never done anything wrong. Sadly, right and wrong had never had much to say when it came to this sort of thing.
“Thank you, Lindy,” he said, and left, and Lindy was alone again.
That night, the footsteps followed almost to her door.
* * *
Zack quit on the fourth night. He had already been gone when Lindy showed up for her shift; she found the door locked and the lights on, which would have frustrated any customers who actually wanted to buy something. When she let herself in, she found a third thing: Zack’s note of resignation taped to the register, where she’d be sure to see it. Lindy yanked it down with a muttered curse, crumpling it into a ball and throwing it into the corner. Let it be forgotten. Everything else was going to be.
There’d been some hope that business might pick up when people realized another neighborhood institution was about to disappear. Maybe that would have worked before everything else had closed and vanished, but here, now, there was no one left to come. The aisles stayed empty and the shelves stayed full. Lindy wondered what would happen to the stock when the doors closed for the last time. It wasn’t like Mr. Wallace was selling the place to a new owner who really wanted a convenience store: the doors would be locked, the windows would be soaped over, and one day the wrecking ball would come crashing through, and the day after that the high-rise would start going up.
It would be easy to start shoplifting, just take home sacks of soda and snack cakes and stale Saltines. Mr. Wallace probably wasn’t checking the security tapes anymore, and even if he was, what was he going to do? Fire her? She was already working on borrowed time.
Lindy sighed and shifted positions at the counter. Maybe he’d let her give all the food that was left on the day they closed to the local homeless population. Do a good deed and spit in the face of the Financial District at the same time. The rising rents were closing shelters and shutting down halfway houses every day, but the suits who worked in those shiny new buildings still got angry about the “homeless problem” in the city, as if all those inconvenient people should have just disappeared as soon as something important started happening.
The bell above the door chimed. Lindy raised her head and frowned. There was no one there. There was never anyone there.
That night, she locked up, dropped the key into her pocket, and turned away, feeling like it was the last time, even though they had another two weeks of openings and closings to go before the doors were shut forever. She turned to glare at the glittering towers of the Financial District with real hatred.
“This is all your fault,” she told them, and they didn’t hear her, and they didn’t care. But she felt better for having said it out loud, putting the words out into the world, where there was a slim chance that they might make a difference.
Turning on her heel, Lindy began the long walk home.
The band of decay surrounding the Financial District had spread again, blighting another half-block of local business and Mom-and-Pop stores. Homeless people dressed in gray and brown—it didn’t matter what color their clothes wer
e in the beginning; they always wound up gray and brown—slept in recessed doorways, backs pressed against retractable grates, their worldly possessions cradled in their arms. It wouldn’t be long before the police started coming down this block too, rousing the homeless, telling them to move along and find another place to sleep.
Three of the local shelters had closed in the last six months. There was no other place. But still the cops said move along, move along; mustn’t offend the delicate sensibilities of the ones who pay the bills and keep the lights on. They would rather have a beautiful tomb than a living city.
The graffiti had gotten even more vulgar and even angrier over the past few weeks. FUCK THE RICH was still there, but it had been joined by MAKE CAPITALIST BACON and SQUEAL PIGGIES SQUEAL and other, far more graphic suggestions about what could be done to take back the city for the people who had built it, loved it, and were now losing it, one block at a time. Lindy’s eyes skirted over the walls, and she shivered, even though the night was warm. None of the violence on the walls was directed at her, but that didn’t make it any more reassuring. She had been walking these streets all her life. She’d never felt unsafe until the gentrification came and stirred up all the silt that had been lying, silent and still, at the bottom of things.
It was almost a comfort when the footsteps started up behind her, like they did every night, escorting her through the dark. And as she did every night, she looked back, trying to see who was trailing her. Maybe it was another late-shift worker, making their way home through the gloom, needing a friend as much as she did. Maybe it was a serial killer, looking for their next victim. Whoever owned those footsteps, she couldn’t see them. Frowning to herself, Lindy turned to face forward—
—and nearly ran straight into a brick wall. She took a stumbling step back, staring at the graffitied image of a headless businessman, complete with spurting cartoon blood. The caption READ BANKERS GET WHAT THEY DESERVE— WITH INTEREST!
She must have made a wrong turn. There wasn’t supposed to be a wall there, and the image was faded enough that it had obviously been there for weeks; something new would have been brighter, fresher, with the distinct chemical smell of fresh spray paint. She must have made a wrong turn. She took another step back, unwilling to put the image to her back until there was some space between her and the wall, and turned around, to face a street she had never seen before.
It was a part of her city: the architecture was correct, the patterns in the stones, the construction of the buildings. There was a certain symmetry to a healthy city, and hers had been healthy, once, before the cold rot of revitalization set in; walls grew in predictable ways, bricks were laid according to local fashions. This was her city. It couldn’t be anything else. She could even see the skeleton spires of the Financial District in the distance, like obelisks standing guard at the mouth of a graveyard. Those, at least, looked familiar. But this…
The sidewalks were cracked and pitted, even further down the road to complete disrepair than the ones she walked along every night. The businesses were shuttered, some with broken windows, all with empty displays. Not one of them looked as if it had been opened in the last five years. Several had plywood nailed over their doorways, like sheets pulled over the faces of the dead. There was graffiti there as well, suggesting more things that could be done to the invading rich. Lindy tore her eyes away.
How could she have gone so far wrong? It made no sense at all. This was the route she always took, the way she always walked… but here she was, on an unfamiliar street, where nothing moved, nothing walked, nothing seemed to breathe. Heart hitching in her chest, she began walking briskly back the way she had come, scanning constantly for something familiar. The spires of the Financial District would be her lighthouse, guiding her back to her home ground. She could start again. She could find the right path, and leave this blighted, broken neighborhood behind.
The footsteps started up again as soon as she started moving. Lindy stopped, balling her hands into fists at her sides. The footsteps stopped at the same time.
“Who are you?” she demanded, harshly, her voice sounding loud and tinny in her own ears. “Why are you following me? Do you know… do you know how to get back to the store?”
There was no response. Lindy closed her eyes, counted to four, and turned to look behind herself.
Again, the street was gone. Again, there was a wall, this one blazoned with the image of a woman in a stylish lilac business suit, slit from throat to navel, with worms squirming out of the cavernous gash that had been her torso. It was almost photorealistic. Lindy slapped a hand over her mouth, trying to swallow back the hot tide of vomit that threatened to rise up and overwhelm her. This wasn’t possible. This couldn’t be happening. Walls didn’t just suddenly appear.
Lindy whirled, focusing on the distant spires of the Financial District. For the first time, that sterile corpse of a neighborhood looked like something more than gentrification. It looked like safety.
Eyes on the skyline, Lindy began to run.
Running down a pitted, broken sidewalk was dangerous even when she was watching her feet. With no attention left for where she was going, it was only a matter of time before her foot hooked on a thin place in the pavement and she went sprawling, landing hard, her chin and elbow both slamming into the concrete. Pain flared up, followed by blackness, and everything was gone.
* * *
Lindy woke to find herself lying on her back, looking up at a sky bright with stars. The taste of blood was in her mouth. She tried to sit up. Her body refused to listen. She made a small whimpering sound, and a face appeared in her frame of vision, leaning forward and looking at her with cold, concrete-colored eyes. It was androgynous, fine-boned, topped with a mop of shaggy hair the color of dust on windowsills. Lindy blinked. The face blinked back.
“Are you who’s been following me?” she asked, in a whisper.
“Who’s been following me,” said the stranger.
“Please,” said Lindy.
“Please,” said the stranger, almost gently. It reached out a long-fingered hand and caressed her cheek.
Its skin felt like brick walls and empty rooms. Lindy sat up with a gasp, whipping around to face the stranger, and was somehow dully unsurprised to find that there was no one there. The sidewalk was empty. The buildings around her had broken windows and empty doorways, their walls ripe with poisonous graffiti. The Financial District still glittered in the distance, as far away as ever, an unreachable oasis of sterile, empty streets and silence. Lindy clambered to her feet, feeling the new tenderness in her joints, and started walking.
The footsteps started up behind her immediately. She did not look back.
What felt like hours later, she was still walking, and the Financial District was no closer, and the footsteps were still there. The graffiti around her was continuing to worsen, becoming more graphic and more terrifying every time she dared to look. A few times, she’d seen what she thought might be her face, rendered in spray paint and marker and agony. She hadn’t taken the time to find out for sure. She was too afraid of what she’d find.
The sun had to rise eventually. The buses had to start running, or some midnight janitor had to finish their shift and emerge onto the street where she could see them, and go to them, and be saved. The world worked, and as long as she could count on that, she was going to make it home.
Her feet were starting to hurt. Her head ached from where she’d hit it when she fell. She was hungry, and tired, and somehow, the idea that the world worked was getting harder and harder to hold onto. None of this made sense, and all of this made sense, and it was never going to end.
Finally she stopped, head hanging, arms going limp by her sides.
“Why me?” she asked. “I didn’t do anything. I stayed as long as I could. I’ve never done anything to hurt you.”
“Hurt you,” said the voice from before, next to her ear.
Lindy didn’t lift her head. She knew that there would be nothing th
ere for her to see if she did. “I stayed,” she said. “Shouldn’t that count for something?”
“Hurt you,” said the voice again.
A dog will bite its master if it’s in enough pain; sickness can drive even the sweetest creatures to violence and cruelty. Lindy loved her city as she had loved little in her life. That was why she’d always put her faith in it, always believed it would treat her well. That was why she’d stayed, even as gentrification and revitalization sunk into its bones like a cancer, killing its flesh and replacing it with sterile desolation. It was no wonder that the city was beginning to lash out, to bite, to devour what it couldn’t bear to live without.
“Please,” said Lindy again.
“Hurt you,” said the voice of the dying city, and pulled her close, and she said nothing more.
* * *
The next morning, when Mr. Wallace came to open the store, he found a new piece of graffiti scrawled across the window, paint clinging to glass like a veil. It was a portrait of a girl who looked like one of his employees, her mouth open in a silent scream, her palms toward the viewer, like she was trying to break through into three-dimensional space. Like she was trying to break free.
He looked at it for a moment, drinking it in, before he shook his head and unlocked the door, stepping inside. On the next block, the corpse of the Financial District slowly woke and lumbered back into terrible vitality, looking out with blind and mirrored eyes at the city dying all around it.
THE CRACK
by
NICK CUTTER
My son will not stop crying.
I’m lying in bed. The red numbers on the digital clock read 3:09 AM. My kid is screaming.
He’s been at it three hours tonight. It’s been the same every night since we put him in the nursery. He screams himself to sleep when we put him down, then wakes up in the witching hours for another round. His screams possess a tempo; they crest and ebb and taper to sniffling sobs, then to whimpery moans and just when you think he’s cried himself to sleep, there he goes again at a lung-splintering octave. I’ve come to realize that those lulls are only rest periods, where he’s recharging his batteries to launch into another fit. He never cheats us, always gives full measure.
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