by Hugh Howey
Page 3
The cold of looming winter made it even easier to drift in and out. The chill worked itself deep into her bones, attacking her skin where it was bare. An early encounter with a handful of survivors had shredded her shirt, leaving it hanging from her belt in bloody tatters. Her thin bra offered little comfort. At night, her nipples grew sore from staying hardened so long. It was as if some parts of her were still alive, but only the parts that could add to her suffering.
When she was most miserable—in the dead of night with her nipples aching—her thoughts turned to the boy who had bitten her. And invariably from there, she thought of the young man she had days later bitten in turn. Like her, the young man she had attacked managed to get away. It felt like the thing to do when it was happening. You’re threatened, hormones and chemicals serve their purpose, instilling you with fear, and so your body wants to yank loose and flee.
But now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was like a dog’s bite, where pulling just made it worse. She’d watched an older man’s eyes go dim during a feed, once. Enough of him had been eaten that he didn’t have time to turn. There wasn’t enough to come back. Jennifer had seen the last of that man’s life leave his body, had felt him go perfectly still, and was beginning to count men like him among the lucky.
There was a desperate need to shiver, but she couldn’t. It was worse than an itch she couldn’t reach, a crippling form of paralysis. The sunset came like a switch flicked, the temperature plummeting, and Jennifer imagined wrapping her arms around her body, tried to will her hands to adjust the remains of her shredded shirt—
Instead, she trudged along, frozen and freezing, unable to move and unable to stop.
There were others among the shuffle who had it even worse. She felt horrible for the half-naked members, for those who looked as though they’d been bitten in their sleep and had somehow startled awake and managed to get away. They walked barefoot through the streets of broken glass and left smears of foul-smelling blood behind them.
Sights like these gradually faded as darkness fell across the city streets, smothering them like a heavy blanket. There hadn’t been power in the tall buildings for over a week, and with the moon in full wane, the nighttime became a mass of shifting dead beneath a glittering sprinkle of stars. Bodies bumped against Jennifer, some of them still sticky from a feed the shuffle had shared earlier that day. What had been revolting the first few nights was now something different. A knock against her neighbor was the only touch she knew. If it wasn’t this, it was the frantic clawing from a woman dying on the sidewalk, eyes wide with fear, shrieks turning to gurgles as Jennifer devoured her from belly to neck. It was a small thing, these bumps in the night. Small, but then it was the only.
The shuffle moved through the pitch black streets by scent and by feel, groans escaping from the most miserable among them. Evidence of survivors became more apparent after dark. The living stirred in the tall buildings with the bob and weave of flashlights, or the orangish flicker of fires that burned where fires should never be. Jennifer remembered her days of surviving. She remembered the black ring of char on carpets and expensive hardwoods as folders full of projects that seemed so dire weeks ago were tossed on as fuel for warmth. There were others up there doing today what weeks ago she had done. How safe did they think they were? How secure? The attack could come at any time for them. She knew. From out of nowhere, BAM! And then the running, the metallic taste of fear and the hollow and cool rasp of desperate lungs, the danger around every corner, new allies split up and separated, friends becoming monsters, sitting in a stall in a men’s restroom, heels tucked up on the seat, growing numb. Shivering, back when she could.
Jennifer sniffed the air and saw the glitter of a fire high up in the heavens. What was life like for the living up there? Had it changed? Were people still subsisting on vending machine scraps? Food running low? Fights breaking out as fear and hunger took hold? She remembered how lonely it had felt. Anyone she had cared about or known had been stripped away from her, gone. She was left surviving with strangers. Getting to know people the next cubicle down. But they hadn’t been as alone as they’d imagined. The hallways and floors of sameness had gradually become infested with small shuffles. Jennifer remembered running. She remembered the boy who bit her. If she had known, she would have just laid down and waited for her own eyes to dim, for her soul to escape.
The lights from a helicopter drifted among the stars, faintly blinking. They had grown fewer in recent days. Jennifer had hoped they would become more abundant. She had imagined them bringing supplies back in the time when she’d known hope. She had dreamed of them coming to haul away the living. Someone had said they’d seen this happen the first day or two. But those were private helicopters or ones with television station numbers on the side. The hunter green and black helicopters had soon replaced these, and they now hovered warily and only at a distance. They did nothing. And gone were the days of hope.
Now, when Jennifer saw a helicopter, she didn’t imagine it bringing supplies. She pictured instead a man inside with a long gun trained across her shuffle. Shoot, she would plead to this young soldier. Do it. It comforted her to imagine the warmth of a red dot on the center of her forehead. She would silently scream and wave imagined limbs while she prayed for the bullet—but it never came. The helicopters simply hovered and watched, and Jennifer imagined they had their reasons. Maybe the members of the shuffle were still considered citizens. Hadn’t there been a controversy once? Some woman with a man’s name who had captivated America? A woman mostly gone, obviously not able to do anything but suffer, and yet that’s all they would allow her to do.
Terry, right? What finally happened to her? Jennifer couldn’t remember. The story had gone on too long for her to care.
Maybe it would be the same for her and the shuffle. Maybe the soldiers had orders to observe, nothing more. Maybe the politicians were meeting in chambers somewhere and dithering. Maybe the rest of America was glued to its televisions, watching in amazement, the elderly covering their mouths in shock, the young calling their friends and making jokes, saying how cool this shit was, could you believe it?
The helicopter lights moved against stars impossibly far away. All the lights were far away and out of reach. Jennifer remembered what a boyfriend had once told her about the stars, how they could be long gone but still shining. They could have burned out a thousand years ago, and their light would just now be reaching Earth. Gone and yet still there. Dead and seen at the same time.
Trash rustled in the darkness and stirred against Jennifer’s ankles. There was no one left to come and sweep it away. It flew out from busted windows when the wind gusted. It gathered against the stoops and in the gutters. There was the smell of a fire somewhere, the distant whisper of conspiring flames, and Jennifer wondered what the rest of the world was doing. Were they succumbing to the same disease as her shuffle? Or did they watch, glued to their televisions once again as her city burned, as it all came crumbling down into streets of staggering ruin? Was this nothing more than another story for gaping jaws and wide eyes? Or would the soldiers in those faraway helicopters and the politicians in their chambers find some way to shut it down, to turn it off, to do anything more for her than change the fucking channel—?
7 • Michael Lane
Michael ate his mother until his stomach burst. He could feel it rupture, could feel the organ stretch to bloating as he ate and kept on eating—and then it popped. His insides seemed to rearrange themselves as hastily swallowed mouthfuls of her flesh sagged down inside his own guts. Small bits of sinew and fat remained stuck between his teeth like roast beef.
One craving had been sated. Michael thought again of the little black kit on top of the fridge, the spoon with its heat-warped patina, a plastic orange lighter low on fluid, a needle that had dipped into his arm a thousand times, depositing its nectar like a honeybee, leaving him there on the sofa, head lolling in rapture, his mother drooli
ng on herself in the next room as she filled a clear bag with frothing yellow piss.
From the neck up, she still looked the same. She was just as dead to him, just as eerily alive. Eyes open, she stared at an empty patch of floor. Her jaw was slack, her lips parted, as if she might finally say something, might finally snap out of it and fucking say something.
Michael felt the strain of her flesh inside his belly. The cat and his mother felt heavy in his abdomen, taut from taking in too much. Greedy. Always greedy.
He moved away from her, numb and disgusted with himself. Her chest stood open. Blood dripped from Michael’s face, and contented grunts came from somewhere. Before him, his mother’s belly was a gory pit, her ribs like pink fingers, like two open hands cradling nothing. Michael imagined crawling inside those glistening palms. He felt himself shrinking down, time zipping backwards, until he could fit inside her belly, could pull the flaps of loose skin over him like a blanket and return to the womb in which he had gestated. Maybe he could be born again, not like those assholes at NA but really born again. He wouldn’t be a monster this time. He’d be someone who takes care of his mother. Someone who takes better care of himself.
A scent from the streets wafted in and filled the decrepit apartment, nicotine-stained curtains flapping in the breeze. Michael turned, his nose following the smell of the living, his guts full of his mother’s guts but already thinking of the next fix. One more bite, like that bee sinking its stinger into his arm, filling him with its nectar.
He stood and staggered toward the window. He craved a cigarette. Michael always craved a smoke after a meal. A clay pot on the sill used to hold flowers when his sister was still coming around, before she’d given up on the two of them. Now it was mounded with crushed butts, filters stained muddy brown with tar, trails of ash everywhere.
Knocking over the pot, he clumsily groped through the open window and fell head-first onto the landing. His shoulder slammed painfully into the steel grating, and his overfull belly sloshed sickeningly. Michael could taste the bile and blood come partway up his throat before sinking back down. Almost reflexively, he righted himself, arms waving for balance, grunts and groans that were not his leaking past bloody lips.
Here was Michael’s sanctuary, high above the streets. Here was where he sat between soaring highs, filling himself with deep inhalations of smoke to choke down the numb lows. Here was where he suffered the broad and empty valleys between his life’s feeble peaks, so few in number.
Years suddenly felt like mere days. The past had piled up without him noticing. Maybe it was from living the same day over and over: cashing government checks, never enough to properly care for her, way more than was needed to improperly care for her, making deals with the leftovers, getting high, drifting off through the roof and into the clouds while his mom sat quietly in the next room.
Years and years that felt like days. It was all the same day. The same craving every moment, the itching urge, the temporary relief, the guilt and self-loathing, burning cigarettes down to the butt on the fire escape, peering through the glass where the flashing cherry lit up his reflection, his mother in the room beyond, locked in her chair, her back turned, forced to stare glassy-eyed at an empty corner of the room rather than out the window she loved, because Michael couldn’t take being seen by her some days, the days when he feared she was still in there, when he suspected the doctors knew what the fuck they were talking about.
He caught a final glimpse of what was left of his mother before lurching down the steep stairs, falling as much as walking, tumbling one flight at a time toward the pavement far below. A car alarm wailed in the distance. Some undead and directionless thing like himself had likely staggered into it, not watching where it was going.
Michael wondered how that was possible, for any of them not to see where they were going. He spiraled down the old fire escape, metal clanging, bouncing off the rails that guided him in one direction only: around and around.
Circles. As tidy and looping as the days were short. How could any of them not see where they were going? They’d been going around and around in tiny circles, had been for years, years that sat heavy in the gut of the living. And this was what made stomachs turn: the weight of all that time wasted. It was the seconds and minutes and hours, the true nectar of life, gorged on hungrily and thoughtlessly, forever indigestible, everyone hungry for more.
8 • Gloria
The wildlife was oblivious to all but the spoils. The human world was dead, but Gloria saw that theirs was still gloriously alive. The pigeons had multiplied. They gathered in noisy flocks and fully claimed a city long held on lease. Swooping in thunderous packs, wings like the sound of flags flapping in a breeze, they followed the bounty of trash that drifted everywhere. They picked at the scattered bones bleaching in the October sun. They stirred reluctantly when the dead intruded and hopped around on fragile legs, picking at the scraps. They exploded upward in fear only of the dogs.
The dogs were newly wild. They were still in the process of returning to their lurking, primal states. When they fought over scraps—tugging at a boot until the leg came away from the hip—Gloria saw herself in them. Many of them jangled with the baubles of ownership. A few dragged ruined leashes through the scrap heap humanity had left behind. They howled in the distance or from within buildings and fenced lots. They growled and snarled at each other, fur matted and hackles up. They scratched and bit at their flanks, their own infestations to deal with. Gloria hated seeing the dogs. Many of the poor creatures looked as though they wouldn’t last another day or two. Others would probably thrive.
This was the end of the world, that’s what she was privy to. She thought of her brother and sister, thought of Carl in prison upstate, and wondered if their world was ending as well. Maybe not. Not yet. Maybe this island was a wound the rest of America would cauterize and survive. Just a nick, perhaps. Either way, here was a glimpse of the inevitable. The world could stagger on a bit, but here was an early view of the looming fate of mankind.