by J. Thorn
Bill waved. Craig stared at nothing. Raymond opened the front door. Fog wisped from the ocean, slicking the rails along the porch steps. On the way to his car, Raymond had to fight to keep from running. He drove downhill at a crawl, lights blooming the fog, imagining his brakes would fail at every stop. He parked at the esplanade and took the ramp to the beach where he watched the breakers until his shoulders quit shaking.
"Where have you been?" Mia said when he stepped through the door. She grinned from the recliner, lit only by the pale blue light of the television. "It's past midnight."
"The boss kept me late."
"Hunting the undead? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"No," he said. "But I may have seen a few get made."
She grinned again, mistaking it for a joke. As he stood silent, she covered her elbows with her palms. "What are you talking about?"
"We just needed money so bad."
"What happened?"
He closed his eyes. "I don't want to tell you. But if I don't, that will it easier for me to make the same mistakes again."
He gave her the broad strokes—the inadvertent drug-dealing, their plan to extricate themselves, the chaos in LA and then in the mansion in Palos Verdes. Confessing felt like a breeze through his body, like the events he described had happened to someone else.
After he finished, Mia stared at her hands for several seconds. "But you didn't kill anyone?"
He shook his head hard enough to dislodge a tooth. "No. Of course not. I was just there."
"That's crazy. That's crazy, Raymond."
"Should I have done something to stop them?"
"What could you have done?"
"Gone to the police. Or quit going in to Murckle's before it got that crazy. We could have picked up and driven to Albuquerque. I could have done a million things different."
She sniffled, steepling her fingers over the soft point of her nose. "It's different when you're living it, isn't it? I think it's a lot easier to know what you should have done after it's happened."
"Yeah," he said: but wasn't that just another excuse? He felt better, though, like he always did when he spoke up, when he confronted feelings and doubts; he always felt stronger, capable of grappling any problem; if nothing else, of resolving to do better next time. And Mia, she still loved him. She stared at the TV a minute before unpausing it. A cartoon kid made a fart joke.
She glanced at Raymond. "You know what I read today about how it got its name? The Panhandler?"
"What's that?"
"It nickel-and-dimes you. Drop by drop—your blood, I mean. Once it's weakened you far enough..." She spread her hands in front of her in a gushing motion.
He told her he needed to go to bed, but he thought maybe that was how you lost yourself, too: bit by bit, by nickels and dimes, until one day you look inside and there's nothing left at all. But money, you could always earn more. If you lost what was inside, could you save it back up?
* * *
Like his long night at Murckle's, the end of the world came too fast to know what to do.
The city burned. Raymond and Mia stayed indoors, curtains drawn, and followed the news on their laptops. When that grew exhausting they watched horror movies over the Xbox with the lights turned off and the sound low enough to hear footsteps in the driveway. When they went to bed Raymond placed the revolver in the dresser and locked the bedroom door. Sirens dopplered down the PCH night and day.
Ambulances and cop cars came to their formerly quiet street as well, double parking in front of Cape Cod manors and haciendoid mansions while the paramedics gathered up the bodies and piled them in back.
Raymond's email overflowed with mass-mailed funeral notices, with scared and sentimental goodbyes from friends he hadn't seen since high school, with strange, fevered queries from total strangers. At first he read each one; later, he skimmed; later yet, he deleted them unread. Mia's parents pleaded for them to come back to Washington, but nonessential flights had been grounded to try to limit the spread of the disease. Trying to drive the thousand-plus miles struck Raymond as beyond suicidal.
Anyway, it looked like there might be hope. The power stayed on. The water stayed on. The garbage collectors missed their pickup, which Raymond was glad for; he pulled the empty juice and soda bottles from the recycling and filled them with water and stored them in the basement. He and Mia began rationing food, shifting most of their meat to the freezer and eating crumbled bacon over rice they fried in the bacon grease. On the news, reports of cures shriveled away, replaced by increasingly vague international death counts presented with little commentary and by federal advice to stay indoors, minimize contact with the infected, and to report household deaths immediately.
"I don't think it's going to get better," Mia said softly during the end credits of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge.
"I don't know, I'd say the credits are a big step up from the rest of the movie."
"Not that." She sat in the recliner with her knees to her chest, eyes bright in the TV-washed darkness, staring at the wall as if a cryptic threat were written on the dirty pink paint they'd never gotten around to redoing. "The world."
"Oh. That." He leaned forward, shoulders hunched, room tilting. "Just the world we know, right? Not the Earth itself."
She drummed her bare feet against the floor. "Yep. Still there."
"And so are we."
Mia smiled through the shadows. "Don't say that's all that matters."
"Isn't it?"
"Will life be worth living without ice cream?"
"Who says it's the end of ice cream? We'll still have cows. We'll still have snow." He stood, crossed to his laptop. "Guess we'd better start downloading survival guides before the internet disappears, huh?"
"See if there's anything about how to sew tires into coats."
He smiled. The days passed same and strange; locked in the house, he could almost pretend he was in the midst of a long weekend, happily isolated, with and wanting no one but his wife.
The moment they made plans, that illusion was shattered. They decided they would wait for the Panhandler to die down, only leaving the house to forage when they were down to a few days' food. They'd take the car, grab canned food, water, pasta, rice, and anything else that could be cooked simply over a fire or in boiling water. Longer-term, they'd find out whether any of their neighbors were still alive and in residence. Try to find walkie-talkies, as many batteries as they could carry, establish some sort of neighborhood watch. Keep the radio tuned to emergency channels. Put together a couple survival packs and be ready to move in minutes if things got worse.
The sirens thinned day by day. Within a week, they stopped altogether.
Raymond woke one night to the beeping keen of the smoke detector. He burst from bed and grabbed the revolver; but it was useless against the smoke and fire beyond the door.
10
Walt knifed feet-first into the water. An icy fist closed over his head. The cold of the water crushed him, clamping his muscles; he gasped, plastering his palm across his mouth and nose. He thrashed his feet but couldn't tell which way was up. His head throbbed. He burst from the water just before his lungs began to sear.
Behind him, the ferry's slow bulk drifted away, engines gurgling and rumbling and burbling. Walt slipped below a wave, gasped, and kicked out of his shoes. They sank unseen into the sea. Wonderful: shoeless in Manhattan. If he didn't die by drowning, he'd die of gangrenous AIDS-feet.
Paddling, he forced his shallow pants into long, regular breaths. Muscle by muscle, he willed himself to relax. He started kicking for the dark towers of the city.
Shouts carried over the water behind him. A minute later, the searchlight of a small vessel bobbed on the water just past the ferry terminal. Walt laughed bitterly. The docks of Brooklyn looked a zillion miles away. He swung right anyway, angling away from the direct line between the ferry and the boat dispatched to track him down, pacing his kicks. He'd always been a strong swimmer
, taking lessons at the country club when he was five, then transitioning to a beach rat a few years later, talking his parents into driving him to the shore every weekend he could. Things changed in his late teens when a mounting dread of the creatures lurking beneath the foamy waves drove him back to their backyard pool. He hadn't been over his head in a lake, river, or ocean since he was 19.
The bay yawned beneath him, a miles-wide mouth of cold black water.
The ferry chortled into the distance. Walt swam on, salt in his mouth, limbs clumsied by the cold. His neck strained from tipping back his chin. His loose shirt billowed in the swells, caressing him like a supple, grasping hand. The scattered lights of Brooklyn waited. How far? A mile? A mile he could walk in 15 minutes. How long would it take him to swim? Half an hour? Was that another way of saying he might have as little as thirty minutes to live? Like a man out of a precognitive sci-fi story, he knew more or less the precise time he would die, but the information was totally useless. He wasn't in position to make the most of his dwindling minutes by hopping on a roller coaster or the classiest hooker in the yellow pages. He would spend his final minutes swimming, skin frozen while his muscles and lungs burned, salt dripping in his eyes, pitched by swells.
Roughly halfway to shore, he was certain he wouldn't make it. His arms felt like overcooked ramen. He couldn't catch his breath. Salt seeped down his nose into his throat, sickening and thirsting.
He kicked and stroked and swam. He swam until his arms and legs seemed like the property of another body. He swam until he couldn't think of anything besides keeping his head above the waves, of riding the inward ebb of the current, of inhaling when the water dropped away and exhaling when its icy hold clambered up his neck to his mouth.
He swam.
And with the pilings rising and falling from the water some three hundred yards away, he decided he'd come too far to die. Maybe the hypothermia would get him shivering on the docks. Maybe he'd be eaten by rats or starving survivors. But he wouldn't drown. Not with Brooklyn so close. Drowning now would only prove what he already knew: jumping from the ferry had been the stupidest idea of his life.
He kicked and paddled, nose blowing bubbles in the waves. In the moonlight, a dark, tilted slab stood on narrow wooden pilings a few feet above the water; beside it, a tall steel dock rose twenty feet above the soft waves, skeletal and pitted. He pushed for the slab. His muscles felt like ten thousand ants withering in a fire. His breath gushed out of him in ragged huffs. The pilings swung close enough to bash his brains out. He reached out, plunging beneath the water as he lifted his arms, and grabbed the slippery wood. Splinters and barnacles shredded his palms, a dull burn beside the total pain of his body. He hugged himself to the piling and rested there in the motionless cold until he found the strength to lift his arms above his head. The plank above him groaned under his weight. Arms shaking like they were ready to fall apart, he hauled himself up to the platform's lip, wormed his weight over its edge, and flopped onto a pile of loose, fish-stinking boards. He shivered there for a while.
A breeze swept goosebumps across his skin. The night wasn't that cold—if he hadn't been carrying 900 gallons of seawater in and on his skin, he could have survived in a light jacket—but he felt like he would die if he stayed there and slept. A narrow gangway led to an ocean-rotted wooden ladder up the side of the metal dock. He yanked on the rung above his head. It held. He climbed hand over hand, resting both feet on each rung before moving on. Rust clogged his nostrils. Corroded metal rods projected from the dock's rectangular frame. At the top, Walt crawled across the gappy planks to a crumbling factory. Glassless windows stared dumbly out to sea.
He walked inside to a grimy concrete platform. His shirt was wet. He needed to be not-wet. He peeled his shirt off, shivering hard enough to snap his neck. On his bare stomach, his closed knife wound was hot and pink and ticked by stitches. Walt grabbed the shirt at its hem and strained, trying to tear it in half, but his biceps quivered like a scared dog. He took the hem in his teeth and yanked. It gave way with a wet rip.
He stuck a foot inside each sleeve and knotted the sopping fabric around his ankles. They weren't good shoes. In fact, they were shit. Cold, wet shit that threatened to fall off his feet just a few steps into the dark factory. He reknotted them and shuffled on. On a dusty shelf, he found a pile of burlap sacks. The corners shredded easily. He stuck his arms through the holes and crouched down in a ball until he stopped shaking.
The front doors were held by a heavy iron chain. He swung his legs out a window and dropped down to the street.
Graffitied, rust-colored factories flanked a wide, weedy street. Walt ducked through a hole clipped through the chain link fence, scratching his ribs on a sharp wire. He straightened, gritting his teeth. A dog trotted down the street, nails clicking, tags jingling. It had been days since the world stopped working. Had the pet tasted blood yet?
Down the block, Walt opened a newspaper dispenser and stuffed his burlap shirt with wadded pages of the Village Voice. Metal shutters sealed the corner bodega. He swore, dropped to the gutter, and scooped his palm into the stagnant, cool water there. It tasted like dirt and sweetness and life. He allowed himself three palms full, then gargled out the last of the salt.
He walked on. Smelled decay and bad meat. A lumpy, blanketed body sprawled from the stoop of an apartment. Brown blood crusted the top step. The paint around the door handle had been scraped down to the wood. Walt lifted the burlap over his nose and untied the dead man's running shoes. He smelled death, sour and rotting and hot as a sleeping baby. When Walt pulled the second shoe free, a glistening tube of foot-skin gave way with a wet slurp.
He scrabbled back and vomited into the street.
The right shoe fit. The left, he couldn't squeeze over his heel. He tied his shirt back over his unshod foot and limped on.
He hadn't had much of a plan till then—"Don't drown or freeze to death," yes, but given that was high on everyone's daily goals, he didn't think that counted. He was somewhere on the western shore of Brooklyn. The bridge into Manhattan would be a few miles north; his apartment a couple miles further up from that. He knew there was an R-train around here somewhere. With luck, it would still be operational, and he could ride into the Village, grab his stuff out of the apartment, take another train up into the Bronx, and start the long march west. With no luck, or rather the standard of luck to which he'd become accustomed in the last few weeks, he'd have to hoof it the whole way.
He didn't know if he could handle that just now. He'd made it the few blocks from the docks on a cocktail of I-almost-died adrenaline and the need to get moving and warm. He could feel the weakness, though, the worn-out tremor of his calves and thighs. He'd need to rest soon. Somewhere warm. Somewhere with clean water.
Thin clouds skeined the sky above the silent streets. Drapes flapped from open windows. Black gum spots stained the sidewalks. The cars clung to their parking spots, motionless, forgotten. If Walt had come from another time, he might have mistaken them for cramped metal huts.
Beneath a raised highway, Walt could actually hear the traffic light click from red to green. His shirt-shoe squished across the asphalt with wet, irregular tracks. He walked past a VFW, a sporting goods store, a Greek cafe, one- and two-story storefronts with hand-lettered signs and exhaust-grayed paint. He didn't know where he was. Without the towers of Manhattan to guide him or the Citibank skyscraper rising in blue glass loneliness from the middle of Queens, he could have wandered away into Long Island.
There was a logic to New York, though, one that ran deeper than its numbered grid. Live there for a few years and every neighborhood starts to feel familiar. Walt may not have known precisely where he was going; the wrong turn, and he could easily stumble into a block of weedy lots, blank brick walls kudzued by old graffiti, and suspicious-eyed locals who looked teleported straight out of Soviet Russia. But soon enough, Walt would get where he was going. At times, the city felt like a dreaming giant. Walk through its mind for long
enough, and it starts to tell you where to go.
He spotted the subway station two blocks later. The marine green rails, the black board with the bright yellow alphabet of the routes, the hole in the sidewalk to the platforms that, under normal circumstances, smelled pleasantly of laundry and unpleasantly of urine.
Now it smelled like death.
Walt waited at the top of the steps for the better part of a minute. Faint, buzzing light illuminated the grimy steps. He didn't know what he was waiting for: the rumble of a train, the crank of a turnstile, or maybe just a wise vagrant to pass by, roll his prophet-bright eyes, and warn him to move on. Finally, it came to him. A weapon. You don't descend into dark underground places without a weapon. He glanced down the street. A few spindly trees bordered by tight black iron fences. Wire trash can chained to the traffic light. Hamburger wrapper. More gum stains. Parking signs. A shuttered fried chicken joint. Out front, a green sandwich board resting on its side, white chalk lunch specials half-erased. He shuffled over, grabbed one of its legs, and yanked. He gave his three-foot club a swing, lashing the air, enjoying the hiss. Would probably break the first time it hit anything of person-level density. Still. Better than nothing.
The handrail along the stairs was greasy with humidity and the ongoing touch of thousands of passengers. Crunchy, rusty stains tracked a thick line down the center of the stairs. The stench had been gaggable at street level, but halfway down, he had to draw his burlap shirt over his nose again. It didn't help. He breathed shallowly through his mouth, burlap scratching his lips. The glass of the token booth was spiderwebbed with cracks. A fluorescent bulb buzzed, casting flickering pale light over the concrete and turnstiles. If he'd had the energy, he would have jumped them just for kicks; instead, he scuffed along through the wide-open metal-banded door to the platform.
The air was still and close and hot, so thick with stink it felt like it would coat his skin and stick inside his throat. Flies whined. He swallowed down warm bile. Something rustled in the mud and puddles along the dimly gleaming tracks. Walt raised his stick and edged out onto the platform. To his left, fat black bags mounded the platform to shoulder height.