by Hugh Howey
Page 5
Hesitating a moment, his balance unsure, Michael felt a twinge of control, a sliver of time when desire and deed overlapped, when he found his body doing what he perfectly wished. Just a moment, like a broken clock that twice a day tells the proper time, and then Michael Lane threw a leg ahead of himself. He limped forward, despite his wishes. He merged, blending, joining the others.
11 • Gloria
There were good moments. Somehow, there were moments less miserable than others. The group Gloria had fallen in with might splinter in the swirling breeze, and a small troop would find itself rambling through a park beneath the twittering birds, the air midday warm and the taste of human flesh mostly gone from her mouth.
Even there, in the end of times, when God had taken the righteous from the earth and had left her behind, there were moments less miserable than others.
Central Park brought one such respite. It stood like an oasis, a perfectly rectangular eruption of nature in the center of that mad island with its spikes and spines of concrete and steel. The greenery beckoned. It invited her in with the scent of hidden survivors, this weak smell of fear among the earthy tang of mulch and the mint and spice of untamed plants.
Gloria’s small group of bloodstained stragglers splintered among the benches and bushes. Deeper within, a large rock wall confounded a few, the trees dividing the pack like fingers running through tangled hair. The city disappeared, just as the park’s designers must’ve intended. Gloria thought of all those who came here to escape the bustle and noise. Now they came to be surrounded by things alive, to take leave of all the death in the streets, perhaps to find wild mushrooms, trap wildlife, scrounge for food.
Through the mulch and tall weeds, through the last grasses of fall, Gloria trudged deeper. She came to one of the park’s many bodies of water, a pond scattered with unmanned boats steered only by the breeze. Gloria watched, mesmerized, while one of the monsters ahead of her steered into the water. The young man sank to his knees, his arms flailing, before tipping forward. He made a splash, writhed for a moment, then disappeared. A duck coasted on the swell he made, its tail twitching in brief annoyance.
Gloria never stopped moving. She continued along the pond’s edge, wondering what would happen to that man. Would he remain there beneath the water, the shadows of ducks blotting the sun? For how long? Forever? Or would he float to the surface? Or would his flailing arms learn to swim?
The ripples he’d made faded as Gloria’s feet carried her along the rocky shoreline. Trees denuded of most of their leaves reflected in the mirrored surface, tall buildings rising up beyond, one of the buildings on fire and belching dark smoke, the nostrils of a fierce beast. Gloria imagined the man walking along the bottom of the lake, no bubbles leaking out, the depths down there freezing and dark as ink.
Would he die? Was that still possible? Was it possible for her?
She felt afraid for her feet. Concentrating on the breeze, on the smells, Gloria felt fear anew. If the scents wavered, she could be the one splashing in, the one throwing up concentric swells. The thought of the dark and deep, the bitingly cold, it was worse than her fear of a feed. But there was also something like hope there on that shoreline. Maybe there was an end, a completion to what God had begun.
The breeze stirred. It swam like a nearly visible serpent through the trees. Gloria spotted a woman walking through the woods, dragging her leg. The dead were everywhere, fanning out, sniffing and listening, and Gloria prayed:
Dear God, please forgive me. Whatever I’ve done, please forgive me. Take me, God, with the others. Please don’t leave me here.
She tried to think of some forgotten offense, some reason to have been left behind. God knew everything about her. What could she add? How could she feel more sorry?
Please don’t leave me here, Lord.
Her shoes crunched through the gravel by the edge of the pond. She imagined herself veering to the side and walking out across the waters, ripples spreading out from her footsteps, and then her soul rising up through the clouds as a grand mistake was corrected. There would be apologies and explanations. Maybe she would discover that this was her penance. She thought of her mother’s rosary beads, the quiet prayer she was always whispering, and maybe Gloria had been damned by her father’s church, by being raised a Protestant. Maybe it was that Carl’s sins in prison were great enough to damn them both.
She shook such thoughts from her head. How many extra days would she suffer in her damnable state for thinking such things? And how many more days for feeling this fear rather than true guilt? And more days heaped on for worrying about that? And that? And so on and forever—
A smell distracted her. It came from the woods, the drift of meat. Gloria’s feet chose to put distance between the rest of her and the water’s edge. She bumped into a low wrought-iron fence once, twice, before finding the gap that led into the deeper woods. There, through the crunching leaves and scattering of squirrels, a group of her kind had formed, a cluster of the damned. They milled about the base of a tree, arms in the air, rotting noses lifted high.
Gloria looked. She saw the dangling shoes. And then the swinging legs. There was a scabbed knee with a dried trickle of delicious red running down a shin. There were arms wrapped around a mother, who was wedged between the great divide of the tree’s largest boughs, fifteen or more feet off the ground. And over the grunts and struggles of the tottering dead rained the whispers of a parent who did not seem to know that those below could still hear, still understand:
“Shhh. It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. ”
Lies, Gloria thought, joining the others. She stared heavenward. The woman smoothed the young girl’s hair, consoling her. She looked ten or eleven, but starvation took years as well as pounds. The mother peered down, cheeks gaunt, and watched the new arrivals. Gloria felt horrible for these two. Gloria was starving.
The child sobbed. Her feet kicked out of agitation. Or maybe those frail legs had grown so used to running the past weeks that they couldn’t stop moving. While they wheeled the air, Gloria circled the tree, her eyes locked on that limb, the smell of the living intoxicatingly near and impossibly far. Here was the manna of her desire, craving it even as she feared it, causing her to wonder, with the hellishness of all that she’d seen and the ungodly predicament of mother and child, not how the two of them had gotten up on that limb and what would become of them, but what Gloria had done to deserve to be there, to be left wandering in circles on that lowly, cursed, and unholy ground.
12 • Michael Lane
Michael balanced on a flopping leg, a limb like a prosthetic, kicking his unfeeling foot forward as split bone bore down on split bone. He moved slowly in this teetering fashion toward the end of the garbage strewn alley behind his apartment building. A handful of undead just like him shuffled past. There was a smell of the living, the smell of meat, new smells instantly understood. Unless these odors had always been there, and now his locked-in state made him newly sensitive to them. Or perhaps not sensitive to them—maybe he had simply become dead to everything else.
Wavering in the street on his busted legs, the air swirling around him, Michael saw that all of New York now resembled his apartment. There was trash everywhere. Cars lay scattered like some god-child had been playing with them before losing interest, before becoming distracted. Several were wrecked, hoods bent, glass everywhere. It was close to noon, and the buildings stood tall without shadow. The pavement held that mild warmness in the middle of a fall day, that brief respite before the chill set back in with the night.
How long since Michael had been bitten? How long since he’d used? It felt like a week ago that there’d been a banging on the door. It had to be the Chinese food, about two goddamn hours too late. Or maybe the bitch down the hall with the rock she owed him.
It’d been neither. A grotesque monster, some kind of a prank, but a bite on his wrist anyway.
Michael could sti
ll hear the slammed door, the slobbering noises and the bangs on the walls.
That thing could smell him. It was after him the way he’d gone after the cat, the way he’d gone after his mother.
Michael’s stomach was at a boil. He felt clammy and cool. There was a stench in the air, a new reek across a city rife with them, and he suspected he contributed to the foulness.
How long since he’d been bitten?
Michael felt his insides shiver from something like withdrawals, but different. Another itch he couldn’t scratch, a new urge wafting on the air along with the smoke from various fires. Several blocks away he could see more monsters like him, like that fucked-up asshole at the door who bit him. They were staggering after one smell, but there was some other scent closer by—
Someone shouted. A person. Someone with lips and a tongue that obeyed the urge to speak.
“Stay!”
Michael wobbled in place. The pain flowed from the broken bones and soothed all his discomforts. Behind him, three men moved from car to car. Wrapped in rags and carrying guns, they looked like terrorists, like those jihad fucks, whatever they were called.
Two guns swung up from behind a yellow cab. The third person moved to another car, trained his gun as well, hissed something, and one of the men moved. They were leapfrogging across the street. Michael could barely smell them. He smelled a hint of something else. Something powerful that he was dead to, so it barely leaked through. He was bad at this, naming flower smells. Those books he had to read in college, always jasmine and honeysuckle and clover and some shit that meant nothing to him. It was one of those smells.
It felt good to move toward the men, to limp at them. The pain in his leg beat the ever-living shit out of the pain in his head. Goddamn, that was something. The pains he’d lived with all his life, and they were pussies to something as simple as balancing on a shattered leg. How about that. People broke legs all the goddamn time. And here he thought his private hell was something special.
The men played leapfrog. Michael tried to keep up. They raised rag-wrapped fists to each other, made hand signals, trained their barrels. They kept an eye on Michael, watching him struggle with his legs, arms jerking for balance, a distant groan dribbling past his lips as he tried to yell at them, to ask them who the fuck they were. Not military, he didn’t think. Just people getting by.
They were almost to the corner of the street, moving slowly and methodically, weeks of practice. One of them worked on a door, the other two watching him. Maybe it’d been Stray they’d yelled earlier, not Stay. Made more sense. They must know Michael couldn’t stay. Couldn’t control shit. He was a loner away from the herd, a straggler, a new arrival to whatever this was, this sickness throughout the city.
One of the men laughed at something, and his neighbor joined in. They were laughing at him, these men in rags. Their barrels shook with humor.
The man by the door hissed at them to shut up, but the others continued to quietly laugh. And Michael saw himself the way he sometimes did when he got high: His mind leapt out of his body and zoomed away until it could peer down at his shell, see his place in the cosmos, see how others might see him, not passed out on the floor or the couch this time, needle still embedded in his arm, dipped in a blue river, just dangling there. Not in the bathroom, throwing up in the shower, on himself, the water having run cold an hour ago. He was in the streets, cars scattered, some shit on fire somewhere, jerking his arms so he didn’t tip over, propped on one busted leg and another that was mangled.
The world lurched to the side with awareness of just what kind of shit he was in, that this was real. His stomach strained against his jeans, felt tight and bloated. Something warm ran down his legs, the taste in his mouth foul, fur and flesh caught in his teeth.
Michael pissed himself. The barrels shivered with laughter.
And Michael had this sudden sense that other people were people like him. Like he used to be. That was him behind the car, joking with a friend, peering down that barrel, wrapped in rags soaked in perfume, playing like characters in a video game. That was him making fun of a sick fuck who couldn’t even stagger down the street without looking a fool. That was his sister over there, hair curling out of those rags, one of her boyfriends busting into a supermarket, doing the cool shit of surviving, of living, rather than locked away in some fleshy cocoon, some goddamn filthy apartment.
Someone raised a fist. Michael knew that meant they were about to move. More leapfrogging. The door to the building swung open, a mummy’s arm waving the others his way.
One of the jokesters turned and jogged toward the supermarket, clover or honeysuckle or some shit stirring in the air. Michael shuffled down the middle of the street, a patch of open pavement, a man in rags pointing a gun at him from behind a cab and laughing.
“What?” Michael wanted to shout. “Who the fuck are you? You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve been through. ”
The two friends by the door hissed at him to come. The man behind the cab raised his fist, and then his hand returned to the gun, steadied it as the barrel lowered, Michael getting closer by the inch.
Laughter. And then it stopped for a moment. The barrel did as well.
A thunderclap. A roar. A flash and a geyser of smoke.
And the only leg Michael had left, the only thing he could prop himself on—this was taken from him as well. Hot steel chewed through the better of his two knees like a charging dog. Michael’s leg shattered. His leg was blown clear away.
He hovered there a moment before the fall, the echo of the gunshot screaming down New York’s perfect canyons, and then, wobbling on split bone and no bone at all, Michael crashed helplessly toward the pavement. Above him somewhere, off to one side, howling laughter erupted before disappearing into the city’s steel walls—and there he went with his friends, rushing inside for good times, for laughing times, for the plunder and play, the life he thought he was living even as he pissed it all away.