by Hugh Howey
Page 2
Michael staggered toward the open window and sobbed inwardly for his mother. The new hunger inside him swelled and grew until it drowned out even the urge for a fix. Even that.
His hands were still sticky from the cat, still matted with fur, his stomach lurching around the foulness he’d consumed, the ropes of guts, the sinew and muscle, the dark pouch that had slid down his throat, the purple sacs, all the shit he’d been able to name long enough to pass a goddamned biology test years ago, now just one revolting taste after another.
All this was on his breath and in his mind as Michael fell upon his still and defenseless mother.
Withdrawing in horror, curling up in his former skull, tucking his imaginary knees against his chest, he tried his damnedest not to watch. He tried his damnedest not to taste. But teeth and tongue fell into soft flesh, and his mother didn’t stir, didn’t move a muscle. She just sat there, warm and still alive, the bag hanging from her chair overfull, her body wasting away, even though he knew—with horror he fucking knew—that she was still in there.
She was in there and trapped, suffering with him.
She had known.
She had known when he’d hit her, when he had slapped her face in frustration. Fuck, it was years ago. Years ago, but he’d done it. And all those times he’d shouted at her, shook her shoulders, told her to wake the fuck up . . . she had known. Every time he had aimed her chair at the window before crawling out to smoke a joint, she had watched. She’d been forced to witness while he shot up on the sill, had been forced to sit there, unblinking, every time he collapsed in her old bed, gloriously high, the room reeking of her piss and shit.
Fuck.
Michael Lane had devoured his mother’s soul in a feast of years, had done it while she sat, paralyzed, made to endure. He’d done that, a morsel at a time, not knowing he was doing it at all.
And now her body faintly rocked, her wide eyes and expressionless face lolling as he consumed the rest of her, as Michael’s mad cravings ripped his mother’s shell apart to get at what little inside still remained.
5 • Gloria
Every day undead brought new discoveries, new horrors to learn and accept. It was how prison must’ve felt for Carl, Gloria decided. She could only imagine. Her husband would never talk about it, would never allow her to visit, and so she spent her lonely nights imagining. Picturing what he was going through. She decided it was a lot like this.
First fears were naïve, fears of never seeing family again, agony over luxuries lost, thinking of the places you couldn’t go, things you couldn’t eat, walls you couldn’t climb. But more basic freedoms soon drown these out. There’s the unnatural horror of not being able to walk in a straight line, of not being able to get out of a tight cell—
Jail cell. Human cell. Gloria felt like an embryo trapped in a womb. She saw what her brain saw, but her thinking was removed from the action. She was strapped to a bunk, inmates all around her, new horrors to learn at every turn.
Prison must be like this, she thought. First, you concern yourself with freedoms lost. But soon, new worries take precedence. She had gone from fearing for her safety to fearing for others’. From the horror of being bitten to the horror of eating others. There was the pain of hunger—but the agony of a feed, of seeing what she did to others, was far worse.
She imagined what Carl had gone through those first days locked away. She had always thought he’d be missing her, couldn’t understand why he didn’t take her calls, allow her to visit, even write back. It was because he’d had other things to fear. Maybe something as simple as taking a shower. Or the daily badgering from some sadistic guard or inmate. Gloria didn’t have to imagine any longer how a person might have to learn to become worse just to fit in—she knew. She knew what it was like to become something worse, all the while wondering if everyone around her was doing the same, being something they weren’t.
This was just like prison, she decided. This was her solitary confinement, her mute holding cell, walls of her own flesh tailored as tightly as humanly possible.
What she wouldn’t give for one good scream, for one glorious wail, one bone-trembling blast from cold and terrified lungs. But even this was a freedom snatched away from her—the most basic of freedoms gone. She couldn’t even complain. Couldn’t shout. The gurgles and groans that dribbled out, leaked from the hole in her smile, were the best that she could manage. It was all any of them could manage. Around her, stumbling through the streets, there was this chorus of stifled screams—a hellish and chilling choir. It was just one more horror to learn about her new life in prison, one more fact to get used to and to accept.
Gloria listened to the sounds she made, and her thoughts strayed from Carl and drifted to her grandfather. She could hear in her own rattling exhalations his dying voice. She could hear his groans and gurgles from that miserable and drawn-out death of his.
It had started small, with him forgetting things. And just as the family learned to cope with his blank stares and his groping for the right word, they had to worry about him wandering off. And as they got used to penning him up like a rooster, he started falling, banging his head on furniture, breaking his wrist. The bleeding in his brain from the fall in the driveway didn’t help. Not enough. As bad as that day was for the family, it was only the beginning. Years later, Gloria would look back on those early struggles and wish he’d struck his head harder. She would wish that he didn’t have to live and see what he would eventually become.
This was easier to admit now that she was beyond death herself, now that she was whatever she had turned into, now that she could wish a similar fate on herself. All these discoveries felt much the same, this coping with a new reality that gradually got worse and worse. It was a lot like prison, she imagined. A lot like hospital beds. A lot like life, in many ways. Youthful vigor becomes more rot than wisdom. Hopeful optimism is battered by harsh reality. Health and understanding seem to intersect in one’s forties, the one peaking as the other begins its slow ascent. Maybe you’ll know one day what you should’ve taken the time to appreciate. Maybe it’ll be when your knees start popping, when your hands no longer work like they should. It probably won’t be any sooner.
Gloria began to appreciate all she once had somewhere between 2nd Avenue and 3rd. It was a week ago, during her first feed, while tasting human flesh. Burying her head in some dead man’s abdomen, she’d had this spark of awareness that all the bullshit fears of her former life were nothing. Worries over money, over Carl, her grandmother, over not having kids of her own, never once thinking how amazing it was to breathe and not feel the cool air flowing through one’s cheek and hammering sensitive teeth, never once going outside to walk in whatever direction she chose, just because she could.
There were things she could now admit. Like wanting her grandfather dead because it affected her routine, because it meant guilt-ridden visits to that nasty hospital. She never gave much thought to him being inside there, terrified, dizzy, all alone. Not until somewhere between 2nd Avenue and 3rd when she’d felt it, too. Not until this sudden awakening that here was her eternity, eating those who themselves were starving, shuffling after gaunt survivors as they sprinted terrified through the streets, often alone, hoping to find sanctuary or company, armed with guns or sticks or nothing at all.
This was her life, roaming the city day and night while these startled fish flapped through shallowing streams, while the living ran out of water, while they swam from the sharks and tumbled into nets.
Gloria remembered her first feed, that older man, and how her thoughts back then had also turned to her grandfather. There she was, killing a man, and wishing she wasn’t. Wishing she could stop. The irony struck her there in the middle of that intersection, the years of keeping her grandfather alive, saving him over and over, and wishing she hadn’t.
The shadows of Manhattan stretched across its wide streets. One of Gloria’s shoes was gone;
she didn’t remember when or how. It’d probably happened at night. Here was another prison discovery, another thing to learn about life behind bars. It was the fitful, waking sleep. Never quite asleep, though. Always moving. Always standing or crawling. There was no stop to anything anymore. It was hell eternal. It was hospital beds and reruns and fucking remote controls always out of reach—
Gloria’s stomach churned. The sleep wasn’t the worst part. Oh, not even the worst part. That would be the bowel movements. The same had been true of her grandfather. It had come in stages. Innocently enough, at first. A nice man in blue work pants on his knees in the bathroom installing handles by the toilet. He had spoken of his own grandmother. He told Gloria about these new bathtubs with little doors for getting in and out. Made it safer. Said the seals on them leaked sometimes, but it was worth it. Finding a puddle on the tile was better than finding a loved one with a broken hip, right? He said this with a smile, wiping his forehead with his sleeve, tightening that last screw on the handle and insisting Gloria look into them. Gloria had said she would.
Her grandfather barely had time to test that handle. He moved to bedpans and sponges before she or her sister got the chance to look into those bathtubs with their leaky doors. It happened so fast, his downhill slide. It went on forever and seemed to happen so fast. One moment, a stranger is installing a handle by his toilet. The next moment, the strongest and ablest man she had ever known is found sleeping in his own shit.
So fast.
The old washing machine broke down during those weeks. They cycled through a few sets of bed sheets, trying to keep up. The next step had been bags and tubes, dignity restored with plastic contraptions, family members wrinkling their noses, even those whose diapers he had long ago changed. They couldn’t stomach what he had once endured. Their mighty old grandfather was now mucking up their routines.
Gloria’s stomach churned, returning her to the here and now. The bowel movements were the worst, something to dread. The undead, like the barely living, they had no dignity. They ate their fellow man. They shat like birds on the wing. The guts of others spilled from tattered dresses. Gloria saw it all day ahead of her: the stained pants and the rivers of gore streaming out the cuffs. She could feel it coming in her own body, the horror brewing, cramps in her bowels as though her intestines were tying themselves in knots. And then the evacuation, the indignity, the hotness down her legs, clothes crusted fast to chapped and undead skin, a bare foot slipping in it, no memory of where that shoe went.
It wasn’t a touch they put in the movies, Gloria thought. It wasn’t something you thought about while that nice man was tugging on a silver bar by the toilet, testing the bolts, cleaning up after a job well done, gathering his tools. We can get through this, you think to yourself. The whole family tells themselves this. They can get through it. This is before the washing machine breaks down. This is before your brother breaks down. This is when you think you can handle the pain because you fool yourself into thinking it’ll be brief. This is when they’re locking your husband away for a few short years, putting an innocent man behind bars, and you tell yourself you can handle him being gone for a little while. This is before he succumbs to whatever that hell is like, before he’s innocent no more, when you’re lying in bed at night no longer fearing that he’s cheating on you with some harlot, but that he’s done other, unspeakable, horrible things.
This is before the years stretch out into what feels like a forever. When sick men refuse to die. When innocent men find something to be guilty of. When years jumble together like water beading up on glass.
Gloria thought of the men in her life she had lost while another man passed through her guts. She shambled on, foul and reeking, a single day’s horror stretching out like the wide avenue before her, no end in sight, no more fooling herself, no more thinking: I can take this.
6 • Jennifer Shaw
New York had long been a city of hurry. Even the tourists couldn’t relax when they came on vacation. Jennifer watched them fly from one must-see to another, packing in shows, walking until their feet and backs hurt, always terrified they’d miss one more sight. Few could simply sit in a park and feed the birds. And yet, that was all any of them did anymore. Tourists strewn throughout the parks, feeding the birds until their bones showed. Resting.
The only thing that came in a hurry anymore was the sunsets. The light dwindled to the west without warning, impossibly tall buildings catching the last of the rays, shadows creeping up their gaunt faces and stretched necks until the sky turned the color of blood and finally the deep black of death.
This was when the misery of the shuffle grew impossibly worse. Jennifer found she couldn’t sleep, didn’t even know what that would mean anymore. Her body roamed eternal, her mind trapped. Entire city blocks would go by like sleepy miles on a long drive. She would snap alert and wonder how she got there, have a brief moment of panic like waking to a dead limb, fighting to control some horribly numb part of herself, all to no avail. That surge of adrenaline would soon subside as chemicals both useless and impotent faded into her dead flesh. These responses were only good for rattling her poor nerves. They were old ghosts of her former self, shaking useless and haunting chains.
The air grew cool with the setting sun, and Jennifer remembered those interminable drives across Long Island to see her parents, pushing herself late into the night after a long day of work. With the radio blaring and the windows down, her thoughts would tune out while her body cruised on auto. Coming to miles later, she would glance in the rearview mirror and marvel at turns she’d steered around with absolutely no awareness of them.
The walks at night were like those drives. Every grueling and frigid night since that boy bit her arm was like a dozen of those long drives. From sundown to sunup, the fitful non-sleep of scents and sounds, an occasional feed, the sad company of the groaning and jostling shuffle.