Wounds, page 9
I join him at the window. “I want to go down there,” I say, putting my fingers against the glass. “I want another chance.”
“It’s not for you anymore,” Wormcake says. “It’s not for me, either. It’s for them.”
He tugs at the false mouth on his skull, snapping the tethers, and tosses it to the floor. The tongue lolls like some yanked organ, and the flies cover it greedily. Maybe he believes that if he can no longer articulate his grief, he won’t feel it anymore.
Maybe he’s right.
He removes the fly-spangled meat from my hands and takes a deep bite. He offers it to me: a benediction. I recognize the kindness in it. I accept and take a bite of my own. This is the world we’ve made. Tears flood my eyes, and he touches my cheek with his bony hand.
Then he replaces the meat onto the altar and assumes his place on his knees beside it. He lays his head by the buzzing meat. I take the pickax and place the hard point of it against the skull, where all the poisons of the world have gathered, have slowed him, have weighed him to the earth. I hold the point there to fix it in my mind, and then I lift the ax over my head.
“Empty your pockets,” I say.
Below us a gate opens, and the children pour out at a dead run. There goes the angry girl. There goes the weepy, buzz-cut kid. Arms and legs pumping, clothes flapping like banners in the wind. They’re in the middle of the pack when the monsters are released. They have a chance.
They just barely have a chance.
The Maw
1.
Mix was about ready to ditch the weird old bastard. Too slow, too clumsy, too loud. Not even a block into Hollow City and already they’d captured the attention of one of the Wagoneers, and in her experience you could almost clap your hands in front of their faces and they wouldn’t know it. Experience, though, that was the key word. She had it and he didn’t, and it was probably going to get him killed. She’d be goddamned if she’d let it get her killed too.
She pulled him into an alcove and they waited quietly until the creature had passed, pushing its dreadful wheelbarrow.
“You need to rest?” she said.
“No, I don’t need to rest,” he snapped. “Keep going.”
Mix was seventeen years old, and anybody on the far side of fifty seemed inexcusably ancient to her, but she reckoned this man to be pretty old even by that standard. He was spry enough to walk through streets cluttered with the debris of long abandonment without too much difficulty, but she could see the strain in his face, the sheen of sweat on his forehead. And a respectable pace for an old man was still just a fraction of the speed she preferred to move at while in Hollow City. She’d been stupid to take his money, but she’d always been a stupid girl. Just ask anybody.
They turned a corner and the last checkpoint—a small wooden shack with a lantern gleaming in a window—disappeared from view. It might as well have been a hundred miles away. The buildings hulked into the cloudy sky around them, windows shattered and bellied with darkness. The doors of little shops gaped like open mouths. Glass pebbled the sidewalk. Rags of newspapers, torn and scattered clothing, and tangles of bloody meat lay strewn across the pavement. Cars lined the sidewalks in their final repose. Life still prospered here, to be sure: rats, roaches, feral cats and dogs; she’d even seen a mother bear and her train of cubs once, moving through the ruined neighborhood like a fragment of a better dream. The place seethed with it. But there weren’t any people anymore. At least, not in the way she used to think of people.
“Dear God,” the man said, and she stopped. He shuffled into the middle of the street, shoulders slouched, his face slack as a dead man’s. His eyes roved over the place, taking it all in. He looked frail, and lonely, and scared; which, she supposed, was exactly what he was. He reminded her of her parents in their last days, staring in befuddlement as the world changed around them, becoming this new and terrible thing. “Look what you’ve done,” her father had said. As if she had somehow called this upon them herself.
She followed him, took his elbow, and pulled him back into the relative shadow of the sidewalk. “Hard to believe this is all just a few blocks away from where you live, huh?”
He swallowed, nodded.
“But listen to me, okay? You gotta listen to me, and do what I say. No walking out in the middle of the street. We stay quiet, we keep moving, we don’t draw attention. Don’t think I won’t leave your ass if you get us in trouble. Do you understand me?”
He disengaged his elbow from her hand. At least he had the decency to look embarrassed. “Sorry,” he said. “This is just my first time seeing it since I left. At the time it was just, it was . . . it was just chaos. Everything was so confused.”
“Yeah, I get it.” She didn’t want to hear his story. Everybody had one. Tragedy gets boring after a while.
Hollow City was not a city at all, but a series of city blocks that used to be part of the Fleming and South Kensington neighborhoods, and had acquired its own peculiar identity over the last few months. Its informal name came from its emptiness: each building a shell, scoured of human life, whether through evacuation or the attentions of the Surgeons. The atmosphere had long turned an ashy gray, as though under perpetual cloud cover, even around the city beyond the afflicted neighborhood. Elsewhere in the city, lamps burned day and night; but not in here. Electricity had been cut off weeks ago. Nevertheless, light still swelled from isolated pockets, as though furnaces were being stoked to facilitate some awful labor transpiring beyond the sight of any who might venture in.
She had lived less than half a mile from here; she’d walked past it once, believing she’d feel nothing. But the echoes of that loveless place still lingered there. Whatever misery her parents had nurtured over the years, turning against each other and against their own child, still whispered to her from those broken windows.
When the change came here, it was like a benediction.
“There’s things coming up that’re gonna be hard to see,” she said. “You ready for that?”
The old man looked disgusted. “I don’t need to be lectured on what’s hard to see by a child,” he said. “You have no idea what I’ve seen.”
“Yeah, well, whatever. Just don’t freak out. And hustle it up.”
Mix did not want to be here after the sun went down. She figured they had five good hours. Plenty of time for the old bastard to find who he was looking for, or—more likely—realize there was no one left to find.
They continued along the sidewalk, walking quickly but quietly. The rhythmic squeaking of unoiled wheels came from around a corner ahead, accompanied by the sound of several small voices holding a single high note in unison, like a miniature boys’ choir. Mix put out her hand to stop him. He must not have been paying attention, because he walked right into her before stuttering to a halt. She felt the thinness of his chest, the sparrowlike brittleness of his bones. Guilt welled up from some long-buried spring in her gut: She had no business bringing him here on his maniacal errand. (Stupid girl, her father would have said. Stupid work for a stupid girl.) It was doomed, and he was doomed right along with it. She should have told him no. Another client would have come along eventually. Except that fewer and fewer people were paying to be escorted through Hollow City, and those who were tended to be adrenaline junkies, who were likely to get you killed, or—worse—religious nuts and artists, who felt entitled to bear witness to what was happening here due to some perceived calling. It was a species of narcissism that offended her on an obscure, inarticulate level. A few weeks ago she had guided a poet out to the center of the place and almost slipped away while he scribbled furiously, self-importantly, in his notebook. The temptation was stronger than she would have believed possible; she’d fantasized about how long she’d hear him calling out for her before the Surgeons stopped his tongue for good, or turned it to other purposes.
She didn’t leave the poet, but she learned that there was an animal living inside her, something that celebrated when nature did its work upon the weak. She came to value that animal. She knew it would keep her alive.
This sudden guilt, then, was both unexpected and unwelcome. She waited for it to subside.
The prow of a wheelbarrow emerged from beyond the corner of the building, followed by its laden body, the wooden wheels turning in slow, wobbling rotations. The barrow was filled with gray, hacked torsos, some sprouting both arms, most with less, but all still wearing their heads, eyes rolled back to reveal the whites with little exploded capillaries standing in bright contrast to the gray pallor, each mouth rounded into an ellipse from which emitted that single, perfect note, as heartbreakingly beautiful as anything heard in one of God’s cathedrals. Then the Wagoneer hove into view, its naked body blackened and wasted, comprised of just enough gristle and bone to render it ambulatory. The skin on its face was shrunken around its skull, and a withered crown of long black hair rustled like straw in the breeze. It turned its head, and for the second time that day they found themselves speared into place by a Wagoneer’s stare. This one actually stopped its movement and leaned closer, as if committing their faces to memory, or transferring the sight of them via some infernal channel to a more distant intelligence.
Her gaze still fixed on the Wagoneer, Mix reached behind and grabbed the old man’s wrist. “We have to run,” she said.
2.
The dog was gone. Carlos realized it at once, and gravity took him, a feeling of aging so sudden and so complete that he half expected to die right there. He looked at the kitchen floor and wondered if he would hurt himself in the fall. Instead, he pulled a chair away from the table and collapsed into it. A great sadness welled up, turning in his chest, too big to be voiced. It threatened to break him in half.
Maria had been with him for fifteen years. She was a scruffy tan mutt, her muzzle gray and her eyes rheumy. They were walking life’s last mile together. Carlos had never married; he’d become so acclimated to his loneliness that eventually the very idea of human companionship just made him antsy and tired. It was not as though he’d had to fight for his independence; his demeanor had grown cold and mean as he aged, not from any ill feeling toward other people, but simply from an unwillingness to endure their eccentricities. He had a theory that people warped as they aged, like old records left out in the sun, and unless you did it together and warped in conformity to each other, you eventually became incapable of aligning with anybody else.
Well, he’d grown old with Maria, that grand old dame, and she was all he needed or wanted.
When the ground first started to shake in Fleming, and the nights started filling with the screams of neighbors and strangers alike, he and Maria had huddled together in his apartment. He’d kept his baseball bat clutched in his thin, spotted hands while Maria bristled and growled at his side. She’d always been a gentle dog, frightened by visitors, scurrying under the bed at a loud knock, but now she had found a core of steel within herself and she stood between him and the door, her lips peeled from her yellowed teeth, prepared to hurl her frail old body against whatever might come through it. That, even more than the screaming outside, convinced him that whatever was out there was something to fear.
On the second night, the door was kicked in and bright lights sprayed into his apartment, the commanding voices of men piling into the room like something physical. Maria’s whole body shook and snapped with fear and rage, her own hoarse barking pushing back at them, but when Carlos realized they were an evacuation team, he wrapped his arms around his dog and held her tight, whispering in her ear. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay, little mama, calm down, calm down.”
And she did, though she still trembled. The police, one of them sobbing unashamedly, loaded them both into a van parked at the bottom of the apartment building, not giving him any grief about taking the dog, thank God. He cast a quick glance down the street before a hand shoved him inside with a few of his terrified neighbors, huddled in their pajamas, and slammed the door behind him. What he saw was impossible. A man, eight feet tall or more, skinny as a handful of sticks, crossing a street only a block away with eerie, doe-like grace. He was a shape in the sodium lights, featureless and indistinct, like a child’s drawing of a nightmare. He was stretching what looked like thin, bloody parchment from one streetlight to another; suspended from one end of the parchment was a human arm, flexing at the elbow again and again, like an animal in distress.
He looked at his neighbors, but he didn’t know any of their names. They weren’t talking, anyway.
Then the van surged to life, moving with ferocious speed to a location only a mile distant, behind a battery of checkpoints and blockades, and rings of armed officers.
Carlos and his dog were provided with a small apartment—even smaller than the one they’d been living in—in tenement housing, with as many of the other residents of the besieged neighborhood as could be evacuated. The building was overcrowded, and over the ensuing months the existing residents received these newcomers with a gamut of reactions, ranging from sympathy to resentment to outright anger. The refugees responded to their new hosts in kind.
No one knew exactly what was happening in South Kensington and Fleming. Rumors spread that a tribe of kids, homeless or in gangs or God knows what, had started charging people to go in looking for people or items of value left behind, or sometimes even chaperoning people to their old homes. Though some minor effort had been made to quell these activities, the little industry managed to thrive. It disgusted Carlos; someone was always ready to make a dollar, no matter what the circumstance.
It was thanks to those kids, though, that news bled back of the old neighborhood transformed, stalked by weird figures pushing wheelbarrows or hauling huge carts of human wreckage, strange music drifting from empty streets, the tall figures—Surgeons, they came to be called—knitting people together in grotesque configurations. Buildings were empty, some completely hollowed out, as though cored from within, leaving nothing but their outer shells. The kids sneaking back inside started calling it Hollow City, and the name stuck. Which was just one more thing Carlos hated. The old neighborhoods had names. There were histories there, lives had been lived there. They didn’t deserve some stupid comic book tag. They had belonged to humanity once.
A gray pallor hung over the place, slowly expanding until most of the surrounding city was covered. Carlos believed it was responsible for the way people acclimated too quickly to the transformation of the old neighborhoods. Apathy took root like a weed. Police kept up the blockades, but they were indifferently manned, and the kids’ scouting efforts grew in proportion. The army never came in. No one in the tenements knew whether or not they were even called. There was nothing about this on the news. It was as though the city suffered its own private nightmare, which would continue unobserved until it could wake up and talk about it, or until it died in its sleep.
Carlos was resigned to let it play out in the background. He was nothing if not adaptive, and it did not take long for him to accept his reduced surroundings. It was noisy, chaotic, the walls were thin, but these things had been true of his old apartment, too. Sound was a comfort to him; he might not have friends, but his spirit was eased by the human commotion. He would have died there, as close to contentment as he might get, if only Maria had stayed with him.
He knew Maria was gone almost instantly, well before he hobbled out of bed and saw the apartment door ajar. He could feel her absence, like a pocket of airlessness. He suspected immediately that she’d gone back to her old home. What he didn’t know was why. Was there something there that called her? Was she confused? Did the place mean more to her than he did? Her absence almost felt like a betrayal, like a spade digging into his heart.
But she was Maria. He would go and get her. He would bring her home.
~ ~ ~
Everything had gone lax at the border to the old neighborhood. The checkpoints seemed to be devoid of the police altogether; only these kids now, living in makeshift shacks, sleeping on mattresses harvested from local housing or perhaps from the afflicted area, living out of boxes and suitcases and school backpacks.
It took a while to find anybody willing to give him the time of day. He knew they considered him too risky: old, slow, fragile. But eventually he found one who would: a girl with a shaved head, dressed in a dark blue hoodie and jeans, who called herself Mix. Ridiculous name; why did they do that? Why couldn’t they just be who they were? She considered the three crumpled twenties he offered her and accepted them with poor grace. She turned her back to him, reaching into a box she kept by her sleeping bag and jamming a backpack with bottles of water, a first aid kit, and what appeared to be a folded knife. She interrogated him as she packed.
“What are we looking for?”
“Maria,” he said.
She stopped, turned and stared at him with something like contempt. “You know she’s dead, right?”
“No. I don’t know that at all.”
“Do you know anything about what’s going on in there?”
He flashed back to the tall man—one of the Surgeons, he supposed—stretching the twitching human parchment between streetlights. “Sure,” he said. “It’s Hell.”
“Who knows what the fuck it is, but there’s no one left alive in there. At least, no one that can be saved.”
A swell of impatience threatened to overwhelm him. He would go in alone if he had to. What he would not do was stand here being condescended to by an infant. “Should I find someone else to take me?”
“No, I’ll do it. But you have to follow my rules, okay? Stay quiet and stay moving. Keep to the sidewalks at all times, and close to the walls when you can. They mostly ignore stragglers, unless they’re traveling in big groups or making some kinda scene. If one of them notices you, stay still. Usually they just move on.”
“What if they don’t?”
“Then I make it up on the fly. And you do exactly what I fucking say.” She waited until he acknowledged this before continuing. “And whenever we realize this Maria or whoever is dead, we get the fuck out again. Like, immediately.”
