Halfway across the room.
Into the opposite wall. Eden slams a wooden table propped against it and falls through two stretcher supports. They shatter, splinter, tear through clothing and skin. Her chin falls to her chest, eyes closed. Her arms dangle at her sides and her back slouches through wood’s fresh serrated cleft.
Atlas opens his palm to her hanging head, cobweb hair and porcelain face, and, pulse rattling his bones, walks forward. His shoe scuffs something; that something rasps stone. He stops. He looks down.
A small knife, angled edge, checker plated handle—a scalpel lies by his foot. He crouches and picks it up. He strangles its grip. His teeth clamp on an earthquake that webs through his hand and dampens his blade saline. He glares into Eden. His blade would glide well behind her gullet.
“Don’t,” Gene whispers.
His tremors freeze.
“Please.”
Brows tensed, Atlas turns around and meets Gene’s stare. He opens his mouth.
Her frown deepens; a wet streak gleams beneath her eye. Atlas closes his mouth. The scalpel slips through his fingers and clinks an echo as it settles on the floor.
“Genesis,” Samuel points at Gene, then jabs his thumb at the door, “exodus.”
She and Atlas look to Samuel, who stands holding his side, biting a grimace. He glances once or twice at Eden; spotlessness embodied sinks deeply into the woodchips tangling her hair, her angelic visage surfacing in sleep. Breath in gasps, Samuel rips his eyes from room’s fringe and gestures impatiently to his onlookers, before clutching his stiletto-printed hand.
Atlas jogs back to Gene and slides a hand under her shoulder. Cringing, she sits up.
“Your arm.” She gawks at Atlas’s dried gash. “Oh, dear. Are you—” She looks again to Samuel, his bruised jaw, torn pant leg. “Good heaven. Oh, dear heaven.”
“Gene, cease this mumbling and stretch your arm around my neck.”
She grabs his shoulder, drapes her elbow around his nape, bends her knees. Atlas yanks his sleeve over his gash and then scoops Gene’s legs into the curve of his arm, her most prominent burns facing upward, where his arms don’t touch. Still, she peeps protest.
“Wha’ the crap, Jeeves?”
Atlas stops. “Have you any brain trauma?”
“Can’t pick me up. Nope.” She budges her head side to side. “Mm-mm.”
“My name is Atlas of Taurus and you are Genesis Walker of the female gender and human race, twenty-two full cycles aged—” He strains his back as he unbends his knees and lifts Gene into the air; his upper arms smolder and shoulders tug against their sockets. “N-neglecter of English grammar and average cognitive processer.”
“Huh?”
“Below average.”
Atlas sways backward against forward’s pull, Gene hanging by his neck, her eyes rolling this way and that, feet dangling off his arm. He heaves his legs to bend and unbend as he shuffles, turns toward the door. He stomps. Each footfall shatters his balance, weakens his weakness, and rends his injuries. Gene whimpers when his stomach brushes her side. She squeezes her eyes shut; he swallows a groan.
Samuel stands up straight and releases the groan Atlas pushed down his own throat. Atlas frowns.
“To amend—” Slowing his steps, he exhales and eyes Samuel. “Are you all right?”
“Divine. Move it.”
They lumber to the door Samuel pulls open. Trailing after Samuel, Atlas and Gene ascend tunnel’s half-manmade, half-natural ramp and squint for the spill of caged light through mist that swirls a chill, that would’ve raised arm bumps before their veins pulsed fire. Atlas blinks away the flashes of Eden’s heavy head, her mobile heart within an immobile chest, beat, beat, beating new blood to new wounds to new cells to further life.
Gene mumbles.
Atlas leans into her bobbing head and steadies the shake in his voice. “Yes?”
“How—”
“The key—” Samuel spins around and limps backward. He smirks. “It was in her bra, like always. Eden’s gotta step up her game.”
Gene contorts her face.
Atlas’s brow furrows. “Where was her ‘bra’?”
“Think it through, Attie.”
Samuel veers around a corner and Atlas jerks Gene with him. She cries out; Atlas holds his breath. His vision grays, head swings. A mound of cement two steps from the corner, its highlight blushing somber yellow, catches his toe. He stumbles. Samuel and Gene go rigid, but Atlas pushes his elbow off the wall, grips Gene’s shirt and pants, shifting his arms, and trudges ahead of Samuel, whose pause gives allowance. Samuel says “left” and “right” and Atlas leads, trembling through three, four, twelve corridors past crumbling connections and rhythmic lightbulbs of peripheral vision’s pulsating whirlpools that brand former images into Atlas’s head ten steps behind. All blends. He grows nauseous. But, without command, his feet accelerate.
Woodgrain peeks from behind stone: one slab of a series coated with ash. Samuel speaks. Atlas turns before Samuel’s “turn” registers. He squints up a familiar stairway, the first couple stone platforms preceding mahogany, bluer, softer light at their apex, and clasps Gene’s back, pulls her in, ducks his head. He lifts his foot. He throws it onto the first step. His heel skids on soot.
He slips.
Atlas twists and jerks Gene’s head into his neck, his head over hers. He falls. His shoulder scrapes the wall and his back slams the ground, his spine popping. Gene thuds against him, who thuds stone with an aftershock that loops another thud. She gasps. Her gasp morphs to a groan and Atlas echoes her. He clenches his core but his back glues to the rock beneath it, arms detached, mind dictating and muscles ignoring. He aches.
“—on. Get up.”
Gene rolls off Atlas and Samuel pulls her onto her feet. Atlas grabs the staircase’s bottom step, where his heel streaked ash; he pushes off it and stands.
He reaches for Gene. She shakes her head.
Samuel prods them up the staircase. “Sideran, not Superman. Move it.”
Atlas grabs Gene’s far arm, Samuel pressing his forefingers into each of their backs, and they stagger up the stairs. Their banging creaks the floor. They enter the Elisium manor and pass its embroidered wing chairs, vaulted ceilings, engraved end tables, and antique paintings. White ash churns black soot gray and dances in Atlas’s, Gene’s, and Samuel’s lungs. Gene slows. She slouches into Atlas and flutters her red, puffed eyelids.
They burst from lobby’s stained-glass door and into the halved clearing. They slow. It’s night. Vision reaches seven or eight meters ahead and then gives to black, a stillness chilling Atlas’s blood and raising his neck hair at last. Airborne dust clusters in every pore.
The crinkling bend of grass under ash’s blanket cuts through walls of sound insulation. It wasn’t Atlas’s foot that compressed the turf. Nor Gene’s, Samuel’s. It came from beyond sight’s stretch.
Atlas steps and fire whizzes past his ear. Its flash dissolves into darkness. He freezes and Gene sways.
“Run,” Samuel yells.
Atlas looks Gene up and down.
Samuel shoves Atlas’s shoulder and, his left leg wobbling, sprints into the mist. Air bursts from Atlas’s mouth. He grabs Gene’s hand, presses a foot into ground, and flings himself forward. He runs through Samuel’s footprints.
Gene stops whimpering, her feet drumming. Atlas swings his free arm back and forth, slices the soot cloud into tapered segments, and clear air breaks to sight: they trod a widening lane three-fourths of the opening long, six—seven Accenda flanking their path, running down its outskirts. Samuel’s bobbing shoulders eclipse the far trees. Heat brushes Atlas’s neck. He grabs it; fire blasts his finger and swells his knuckle. He bites through his grunt, drops his hand, and, tugging Gene with him, lowers his head under the flames ballooning over it.
Throbbing thunder rumbles their path. Three more Accenda beat tripled steps into the earth one meter behind Gene’s hand swung backward. Their huffing tickles Atlas’s spi
ne. Their strides crescendo. Booming speeds. Blackened evergreens cup their tips overhead and mount sky too ashen for oxygen sufficient; a flame stream past Atlas’s nose, the flickering of its gradients harmonized to footfalls centimeters behind, consumes oxygen’s last.
Samuel jumps into the first trees. Atlas chokes. Gene’s legs buckle.
They collapse into Samuel’s back. A scarlet light explodes within them and fire pours out their ears for deafness that tatters the beating of heels, bursts of breath.
Atlas forgets to count.
His hip hits cement and his shoulder: brick. He blinks until light and its seared black spots recede to a fence not far from his feet. He slumps against a ruddy brick wall, ivy cushioning his clammy scalp, their vines stretched halfway across a rectangular area, to the fence, where they intertwine with its chain links.
Samuel pants. Atlas does harder. They hack up their inhales and wheeze out ash flecks. But to Atlas’s right looms nothing but quiet. He turns:
Gene lies against the wall, her eyes closed, left leg folded underneath her. She leans on Atlas.
He grabs her. “Gene.”
She hums a noise and he exhales.
“Samuel—” Atlas rests his head against brick. “Whe—where—”
Samuel coughs. “Someone’s backyard.”
He follows the brick wall up, up into a chimney and a couple shaded windows. The moon reflects in them. Across from the residence, a street lies behind the diamond faces in fence’s metal, beams of lamplight streaking potholes and garbage bins and branches and alleyways wide enough for children. Most of the structures merge into one mass, no space between them, walls shared. They break only for occasional paved crevices. The roads—paths squeeze between fences and greenery tangled up crumbling brick with little frontal dimension: each house another cube painted in earth tones.
“Mexican War Streets. Yes,” gasping, Samuel motions to the road, “that’s the real name. We’re in Pittsburgh. You’re welcome.”
“Streets of War? Wh—” Atlas looks at him. “Why? Gene needs to be placed in the Curative Estate or—or some—”
“Hospital? Denim’s town would’ve been obvi, like Adam Sandler films, so I brought us here in—instead. Ravens can’t glimpse this ground from way up. There’s a hospital not a mile from here.”
“You cared if we were near Gene’s home,” Atlas says.
Samuel gestures to Gene. “We gonna keep sitting here?”
Atlas bends over her and whispers, “Gene? Are you well?”
She coughs once. And shudders back to shallow wheezing.
Straining his hamstrings, Atlas kneels, turns toward her, and slides his arms under her body. He lifts. As he stands, the soreness in his muscles hides behind lethargy. Gene’s toes brush ivy, her head hanging heavily over his arm, chin peaked and the sheet of her hair swaying under her backbent neck. Samuel pushes open the fence gate. He leads Atlas around the corner and across a narrow sidewalk, moonlight duplicating leaves’ quivering shapes upon it, those that join and divorce dips of shadow between cement slabs. Atlas grinds his teeth.
“Samuel, if we are walking, I—I can’t—”
“I know you’re a limp noodle, silly. We’re not walking there.”
Samuel shoves his hands into his jacket pockets and points his chin to the breeze, looking off the slivers of highlights of branches overtaking sky. Atlas looks at Gene’s side. It expands and contracts with the whistle through her mouth. She crinkles her eyelids and pinches his neck between slippery fingers until her grip falls to his tunic collar and there dangles.
Atlas curls his heavier arm upward and Gene shifts into his chest. Her heart palpitates. Atlas feels it; his follows suit.
“No, no, I’m sorry, sir. It was my fault.”
He snaps up his head and slows his walk. Samuel, a few meters ahead, stands before a figure—an old man smoothing his dress shirt. Samuel pats the man’s arm, laughs, and sidesteps him.
The man smiles and speaks.
“Yeah? Huge Steelers fan,” Samuel jabs a thumb at himself, “right here. Huge. Haven’t missed a game in fifteen mon—years. Number seven? Huge, huge fan.”
The man replies.
“I better leave you to it and go get that eyeglass prescription. Maybe I’ll stop falling on my face too.” Samuel twirls a finger at his under-eye bags. “Don’t let your wife keep you up too late.”
They shake hands and the grinning man walks past Samuel, down the sidewalk. Atlas recoils into darkness. The man passes Atlas without a glance in his direction.
Samuel turns around and glares, a poisonous glint in his eye, into the man’s back until it’s out of sight.
“What.” Samuel faces Atlas. “A scumbag.”
Atlas scowls. He hobbles from the black.
Samuel raises his hand and a set of keys hangs from his forefinger. Car keys. He jerks his head to the vehicle parked on the roadside: sleek, deep silver, tinted windows, gleaming grille between slim headlights.
“The walker’s?” Atlas asks.
A bounce in Samuel’s step defies injury as he strides the few paces toward the vehicle, running his hand over its hood. He presses a button attached to the key ring. The car’s headlights flash and beep; Atlas jolts.
And breathes out. “You’re a parasite.”
Samuel slides behind the wheel and Atlas walks into his pupils’ black stains. He shifts Gene’s legs up his arm and, stretching, crouching, prodding it with his knee until it stops swinging, opens the vehicle’s back door. He lays Gene down on leather seating, bends her legs till her feet plant, and gets in on the other side. He lifts her head onto his leg; she moans.
Twisting the key in the ignition, Samuel roars the engine to life and slams his foot on the gas. He skids the vehicle from the curb and, shadows dancing across the windshield, down the alley.
“Drive,” Atlas says. “Drive quickly.”
Samuel stares at the road. “Naw, I’m gonna take my time.”
Atlas hyperventilates.
“Attie, that was a joke. Calm down.”
“Calm down? You calm down.”
“I am calm.”
“Why, in this horrendous dimension, are you calm? I beg of you, panic.”
“Make up your mind, crankycakes.”
“Hold your tongue and drive.”
Samuel lifts a hand to nothing and grimaces with an open mouth. Atlas mutters to himself. He sweeps the bangs from Gene’s eyes and his thumb brushes her forehead: too warm. His eyes dart around the vehicle’s inside, to the seats, the doors, the vents on the dashboard.
“Samuel,” Atlas glares into the rearview mirror, “do walkers’ bodies heal without outside inducement? Is it unusually hot? She’s unusually hot. What can I do?”
“Imagine Hillary Clinton in a burrito suit and you’ll be all right.”
“Et tu cogita digitos meos urgentes in oculos tuos.”
“Huh?”
“And there is the confusion I feel every instance you open your mouth.”
“Chill.” Samuel exhales. “That’s what you do. We’re almost there. She’s going to be fine.”
He swings the vehicle right, then left and out of the alleys onto a smoother, wider road. A beige building hoists fifteen of its stories above surrounding structures and streetlamps and the line of parallel-parked cars that end at the towering building’s block. Atlas holds Gene’s arm and slips a couple of his fingers through the brittle serration of a charred hole in her sleeve. He touches skin, its red bumps. He forces feeling past the pounding of his own pulse and to the flutter beneath blisters. A sign on the intersection’s corner reads “Allegheny General Hospital.”
Samuel turns for it.
XXII
Worth the Effort
The wrapper crinkles and pops and slides past hurried fingers. And again.
Its noise weaves with chattering walkers in pastel blues and greens behind a counter off the wide hall and outsounds the click of a three-finger-thick door, one of a series. A
couple fluorescent ceiling rectangles hum several meters from the waiting area, the other dozen shut off. Though the ceiling rectangles’ spray condenses around the hall, Atlas hears it: the light that crawls through shadow, up maroon chair linen, into his ears, and wrestles with crack, crack, crackling—
“Samuel.” Atlas stares at him.
Samuel’s hands freeze. They tremble. Shaking from head to toe, Samuel lowers the bar of walker sustenance, orange wrapper, bold lettering, and the crinkling stops.
Atlas grabs the bar out of Samuel’s hand, pinches the serrated plastic off the top end, and pulls. The wrapper tears in two, a brown, rectangular solid peeking from it.
Samuel gawks. “How’d you do that?”
“Such is how Gene has done it.”
Grabbing it back, Samuel bites off half the bar and chews. His eyes widen. Atlas frowns at vinyl flooring.
“Peanuh buh-er.” Samuel bursts a muffled laugh. “Tha’s what it is.”
Atlas stares down.
“Peanut butter and,” Samuel swallows, “chocolate. I get it now. See?” He shoves the wrapper into Atlas’s face. “Look. Limited edition. I have to steal all of these tomorrow. It’s like readily available sex and drugs but not a nun’ll talk you out of it.” Blinking his eyes closed upon exhale, he takes another bite. “You’re missin’ out, Attie.”
Atlas looks up. He glares across the aisle of lounge seats. The bare off-white past Samuel’s ear strikes images of Curative Estate operating rooms through his retinas. He looks down.
“Heaven, hades, and hush puppies. I am starving and not much for those.” Samuel nods to the nurses. “Not that they’re not assimilation worthy. Do you know how many times I’ve urinated?”
“Three instances,” Atlas buries his face with his hands, “in the past six hours, as you declared ten minutes ago.”
Samuel lifts the remnants of his bar and winces. He clutches his shoulder and Atlas drops his hands.
“What is it?”
“I feel like roadkill. Haven’t had a bruise last this long in my life—or a few dozen of them. My metabolism’s Fat Albert on Benadryl. Before you voice your bigotry, no, sheepsicle, assimilation isn’t actually just for kicks.” Samuel kneads his temple with a finger, his green eyes black under his hand’s shadow. “It’s food and water and healing sleep for us, an assimilation flame an irreplicable conduit. I’ve heard stories of Accenda going cold turkey and their crap symptoms but,” he shrugs and cringes, “nobody I knew made it past a month. Accenda are resilient. An assimilation fast can last a good while without too many problems. Longer than humans can go without food.”
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 27