by Hugh Howey
Page 6
13 • Jennifer Shaw
Jennifer found herself in the middle of the shuffle. Along the edge, one had a better view of the world. You could get a sense of where the group was heading, whom they were after, see survivors making a dash or boarding up windows. In the middle, all you saw were your decaying neighbors, a menagerie of wounds and disgustingness, up-close horrors like a Google image search of festering pus.
Moving along in the middle of a large shuffle also meant never knowing where the victims of a feed came from. You never saw how they began. There would be a distant smell of fear, the gurgling sounds of hungry rage, an excited quickening of the pace, some tottering stampede.
If the living put up a fight—and Jennifer always prayed they would—the fallen members of her shuffle would appear on the pavement with their heads bashed in or blown away. Sometimes their arms and legs would still be moving, clutching and kicking at the feet sliding by, tripping up their fellow undead.
The latest feed began like so many others: a scream and the smell of someone surrounded, the raw odor of a living person who knows that death is upon them, the starving snarls of anticipation.
Jennifer found herself hurrying with the rest of the shuffle, many of the limps growing exaggerated, rotten heads bobbing up and down. There were no lucky zombies to trip over along the way. No souls spared the waking nightmare. No gunshots, the promise and hope of a stray bullet. The victim of this feed wasn’t the result of a group fight, just someone who had gotten in the way. Had stumbled or had become cornered. A shriek while they were still able, and then the maddening smell of blood and meat released into the air.
Part of Jennifer hoped the meat was gone before she got there. She was most happy when the other half of her mind, the mad half, was starved and weak. She would rather starve, rather feel empty inside, suffer the gnaw of her gut, than watch herself eat.
This, unfortunately, was not one of those times. Jennifer swam through the shuffle until she came upon a mother with her son, neither swift enough to get away. Maybe the boy had fallen, tripped, and the mother did what any mother would: made the mistake of going back for him.
Despite her revulsion, Jennifer fell beside the fat man with the flopping ear and began to feed. She tried to look away, to look anywhere else, but her body was locked rigid and wide-eyed on the still-warm flesh, on the purple ropes that came unknotted from the woman’s belly. The young boy was torn in two. The mother’s face jerked, mouth open, eyes unblinking, staring up at the clouds overhead. This was what the world had become.
A warm and tangy taste filled Jennifer’s mouth, blood running down her throat, down her chin, the feeling in some dark recess of her soul like a flash of guilt-ridden joy, this radiance of a hunger sated, emotions from the black side of her bleeding over into what little of her old self remained.
Her hands pawed through the woman’s remains, dozens of other hands fighting, teeth gnashing, a leg dragged away by several others, the flesh between pulling apart like Silly Putty before snapping. Jennifer was forced to witness it all. To smell it and consume it.
She bit into a length of intestine, raw shit in her mouth, and still could not physically gag, could only recoil emotionally. She tried reciting the alphabet backwards, tried singing long forgotten songs in her mind. She repeated the first few lines of the Canterbury Tales, but what was stronger than this? What mental effort or childhood game could silence the gluttonous undead, could overpower the stench of an opened body, the taste of human waste?
The rear of the shuffle crowded in, jostling her, rubbing up against her flesh, fighting for scraps. Jennifer urged these competitors forward. Eat, eat, she cried to herself. They were all that she pulled for. Her own body was the enemy.
She and the fat man fought over an unidentifiable scrap. He was larger—and won. Jennifer watched the red prize spill from the open wound on his neck, empty and yellowed teeth chomping on nothing, a satisfied vigor in his dead limbs.
And the awful truth, the glaring obviousness of it all finally struck her. Jennifer’s gaze met the fat man’s, their eyes locking for a moment, and she saw, somehow, through that soulless window and into the mind beyond. Past this blood-smeared face, the happy chewing, the twitching arms, was a frightened man. Trapped. Terrified. Imprisoned like a passenger in that roaming form, looking out like a frightened child between cracked blinds at the scary world beyond.
It wasn’t just her.
And with an explosion of clarity the entire shuffle came to life around her. She thought of the thousands of trapped souls scrambling for sanity, clutching their private pasts, forced to watch what they’d all become. And the crushing blow of this was like a bat to Jennifer’s head. There was a man in that fat face with its hideous wound. A man like her who remembered this city, remembered what they used to be. Jennifer wanted to call out, to wave, but didn’t know how. And she wondered if he knew she was in this body of hers, watching him, knowing him. Was he scared of her? How bad were her own wounds? What did he see?
She couldn’t know.
And in the same instant that Jennifer Shaw realized she wasn’t alone, she felt it more powerfully than ever before. They were all alone. All in their individual hells. No escape, no hope, no control. No way of even saying to each other: I see you in there.
14 • Gloria
It sounded like hands digging in buckets of popcorn, like Velcro pressed together and ripped back apart, all those fingernails gouging and scrambling against the bark of the tree. Gloria jostled with the pack beneath the limb. Mother and daughter sat above, quietly crying and whispering false hopes, cornered like cats by a pack of dogs.
There was no escape, Gloria saw. For the past few hours, she had studied the predicament of the two women, and there was no escape. Not for any of them. This was what frightened her the most: The left-behind souls scrambling at the trunk were just as trapped as the starving couple in the tree. And a steady trickle of the blood-crusted meat-eaters was shambling through the woods to cluster beneath that limb. It was like ants spilling down a slippery funnel they couldn’t get back out of. They were all trapped, every one. They would be until those women on that limb starved to death or lost their balance, until they were either consumed or their meat rotted in death and stopped smelling like sweet succor.
This was not a problem Gloria had foreseen. The living simply did not do this, they didn’t hover almost within reach, neither running nor dying. They survived or they were consumed. They got away or they passed through the guts of the damned. One side or the other won, never a stalemate.
Not a stalemate, Gloria thought. Purgatory. Trapped in the in-between. They were a lot like Gloria in that way, and she wondered what they had done to deserve this. Something, obviously. The Lord was just, all sins accounted for. They had all done something to be trapped there.
Hours went by, thinking such circular thoughts. Gloria circled that tree, which she thought was an oak. She bumped into the others and took her turn scratching the rough bark. She clawed at the air and groaned at the nothing, secretly privy to the voiced fears and panicked whispers that drifted down from above.
And Gloria prayed for deliverance. She thought of that shoreline she had walked down hours before and wondered if turning toward the water, toward the thing she feared in that moment, may not have been the better choice. Wasn’t this her lot? Her life? Was this the lesson God was attempting to hammer home?
Gloria kicked through the dry leaves and mulled over the times she’d felt both trapped and safe. Trapped in marriage, even after the baby was taken from her, even after her husband was locked away. The sin of divorce was that frigid lake, and so she circled Carl for years and years, pawing at the empty space around her.
A job she hated, turning over rooms, making bed after bed, picking up scattered towels and restocking stolen toiletries. Every day, tiptoeing through wrecks that looked more like robberies than a night’s stay, dealing
with creepy men who put signs out for service, but were still in there, sometimes a towel around their waists, pretending to be startled, sometimes wearing nothing at all. Men sent by the devil to harass her, tell her she was pretty when she knew better, offer her money for unspeakable things.
A job she hated, but change was the other way. Applications and learning something new were the icy deep.
The city was a funnel. Gloria looked around her, something she secretly did on the subway. All different colors, different backgrounds, all the accents. Ants drawn to honey, but they can’t get away from the city. They land with their parents or bring their own children, get that first job, learn to drive a cab or flip a room, and never leave.
This was her sin, Gloria thought. God had given her command of her feet and had set her on the shore of life, and she had chosen to live the least. She had always chosen to avoid her fears, had shrunk from the daunting and the risky. And what had her Savior done? Had he walked away from the challenge, or had he strolled across the water knowing he would not sink?
Gloria let out a frustrated gurgle, a prayer to Saint Anthony, the liberator of prisoners:
Tear down my prison walls. Break the chains that hold me captive. Make me free with the freedom Christ has won for me. Amen.
She prayed to Saint Leonard, the patron Saint of captives, slaves, and all those held against their will:
Pray for those like me in prison, St. Leonard. For those forgotten in prison, pray for them. Amen.
Gloria prayed for herself, for her own plights. She prayed for someone to grant her the courage. She prayed for deliverance, for rescue, for something to break her free of the cycle in which she’d long been trapped. She prayed that she could do it all over again, that she might head west and live in a small town, find a different job, a good man, try once more to start a family, to have a child or two or four. She prayed and prayed the same prayers, her words running out, forming small loops, memorized verse, begging and begging for release as she circled that tree, bumping into so many others, but giving little thought to them at all.
15 • Michael Lane
Michael’s balancing act came to an end, his good leg chewed away by the shotgun blast. He tipped forward, stumbling on the flopping lower half of his shin, which bent and twisted until his foot was pointing backward. His face struck the pavement, his discombobulated arms fluttering uselessly by his side, too uncoordinated to break his fall.
He waited for death. He waited for unconsciousness. His sister was there, bending down, reaching out a hand to him—but it was the fever of sobriety. It was a construct of the pain.
Screams came out as gurgles, bloody drool dripping onto the pavement, a flashback to a thousand nights spent hugging a toilet, the taste of bile in one’s mouth, the smell of urine, realizing he’d wetted himself in his stupor.
A new low. This was always his thought, every weekend in college getting smashed and regretting it, every Monday morning hung over in class, promising he’d never do it again. By Thursday, such promises were forgotten. By Saturday, he hated himself once more.
Michael’s limbs stirred. He screamed internally as hot steel was pressed to a dozen unnatural joints in his legs. His dumb physical self was trying to stand. His unthinking body was telling the rest of him, a friend who knew better, that he was good enough to walk.
Propped up on his arms, he felt the ravenous puppeteer that had a hold of his will command his legs forward, foot twisting unnaturally, the sensation of his skin being tugged as it was the only thing holding him together.
Several times, his body tried to get his mangled feet beneath him. Each time was a new height of sensation, bones like shattered glass grinding together, the crunch and pop of thin shards giving way, a dull roar reaching his ears that he vaguely recognized as his own voice. He was unable, even, to mercifully pass out.
Eventually, his drunken body learned what the brain could not tell it: walking was out. It would never happen again.
Michael lay still a moment, appreciating the end of the struggle, the throbs and electricity soaring and coursing through his body. This could be the end. Please, let this be the end. There would be no more regrets. No chance at anything regrettable. Come for me, darkness! he screamed in his mind. And he could hear it. He could hear that reading voice that used to pop in his mind when he was forced to stare at books, that ability for the talking side of his brain to send signals over to the hearing side.
Fucking die! he yelled to himself. He yelled it so loudly that he could hear it in his mouth, in the depths of his throat, like a swallowed whisper.
He thought of his sister. His mother, whom he carried inside of him. He was losing it, but this time to clarity. He laughed madly and silently at the thought of his mother carrying him inside her belly, and now she was inside his, a mystical torus, a fucking Möbius strip of mother and son in each other’s guts.
What if he’d never die?
There was a scraping sound nearby. Michael’s sideways view of the world was momentarily full of dragging feet, and then a yellow cab, pavement, and a building where survivors must be laughing and raiding, scrambling for food, popping another shell into a shotgun.
Passing minutes. Dragging feet. The undead surrounded him, and then moved on. They were summoned perhaps by the blast that took his good leg or by the smell of the living, a smell that lingered somewhere beyond the persistent pain—
More scraping. The world lurched forward. Michael spilled out of his agony-filled haze and realized he was moving. Something was dragging him along.
And then he felt it. His arms reaching out, fingernails finding the rough nicks in the city streets, fingernails bending backward and breaking as he hauled himself forward, fingernails dragging him along after the others.
No.
Fuck no, Michael screamed.
Oh, fucking no dear God please fucking kill me now, he yelled.
And nobody heard him. All that remained was the scraping noise, hands clawing at the pavement, a body learning to adjust itself to this new and crippling low as it figured out how to move, how to go out and seek ever new and deeper valleys in which to crawl.