Larry Gabler lay there, gasping, bleeding. At seventy-two, he was Abe’s junior by eleven years, but at the moment he could have given Methuselah a run for his money.
“You gotta get home to Ruthie,” he wheezed as sweat glossed his waxy face.
“Yeah, yeah,” Abe said, pouring himself a stiff one from the bottle in his desk. The radio droned the barely cogent reportage of nerve-wracked correspondents attempting to articulate what was happening throughout the five boroughs-not to mention the entire globe. Abe took a tentative sip of the whisky, then downed it as he sauntered over to the window to catch an eyeful of uncorked chaos below. As he peered down, three taxis collided, the driver of one bursting through his windshield like a meat torpedo. People were jostling, shoving, climbing all over each other, every man for himself, the hell with the rest. The sounds of screams and random gunfire echoed in the darkening canyon of office buildings, the sun ducked for cover beyond Jersey to the west. Mixed in with the usual filth in the gathered curbside snowdrifts was a new hue: deep red, and plenty of it, like big, bloody snow cones.
“Oh yeah, I can’t wait to get down into all that,” Abe said.
The stray who’d brought Larry limping in cowered, nearly catatonic, on the other end of the waiting room’s lumpy sofa. She was a good-looking young Puerto Rican, maybe in her early to mid twenties. Maybe Dominican. Abe couldn’t tell. Young was young, old was old, Hispanic was Hispanic. Larry let out a chalky groan, farted loudly, and slumped forward, chin on chest, blood oozing from his nostrils.
“I think your friend is dead,” the Latin girl murmured.
“He was dead when he came in,” Abe replied. “I could smell it all over him. You get to my age and death’s one of the few things you can recognize easy.”
Abe looked at the blood-soaked material around Larry’s chewed up calf, the slacks shredded. He downed another shot of whisky and made for the door.
“Where you going?” asked the girl.
“I gotta pay Menachem Bender a visit.”
“Who?”
Without explaining, Abe left the office of Cutie-Pie Infant Wear and hastened down the hall to Menachem Bender Men’s Big & Tall to pay a visit. Abe tried the door. Locked.
“Bender, you in there?” He pounded a few times, rattling the pebbled glass with Bender’s name and logo painted upon it. “Bender, c’mon! It’s me, Abe Fogelhut! You in there?” No answer. Abe cased the hall, then elbowed the loose pane out of the frame, the glass crashing to the linoleum beneath. Taking care not to cut himself, he opened the door, experiencing the giddy thrill of breaking into his neighbor’s business as well as a jolt of bowel-tightening fear. “Bender!”
Nothing.
Abe gave the unlit room a quick once over, then stepped in, flicking on the overhead fluorescents, which buzzed in protest. A cursory look at Bender’s books made clear Cutie-Pie wasn’t the only outfit in the garment trade to have a lousy last quarter. “Oy,” Abe sighed. “My condolences.” Abe stepped around the desk toward the storeroom, nearly tripping over Bender’s body, a.38 clenched in his white-knuckled hand. Bits of skull and brain matter flecked the adjacent wall and floor. Abe raised a hand to his mouth and then lowered it, realizing he was going to neither scream nor throw up. He just shook his head and opened the stockroom, repeating his previous sympathies. Turning on the light, he allowed himself to smile.
“Perfect,” he said, eyeing stacks of unsold winter wear for enormous outdoorsmen.
Moments later, he returned to Cutie-Pie to find Larry hunched over the Latina, violently munching on her entrails. The contents of Abe’s stomach disgorged, searing his throat. Larry didn’t even look away from his still-twitching repast as Abe, grateful he’d retrieved the revolver from Bender, emptied the cylinder into his undead partner. The fifth shot removed the top of Larry’s skull and he collapsed onto the girl’s remains. Abe spat bile onto the floor, took a gulp straight from the bottle of Cutty Sark, swished it around, then spat again.
“Okay,” he said, affecting as much calm as possible. “Okay.”
He wiped his mouth with his hankie, took a box cutter and sliced open one of the myriad boxes of his unsold stock of Baby Sof’ Suit® infant winter onesies. “Okay,” he said, “time to redeem yourselves.”
Five-foot-five Abe, with his thirty-inch waist, stepped into an XXXL pair of Bender’s Breathable Sub-zero Shield®Sooper-System™ Weather Bibs, a double-insulated hunting overall for fatties who like traipsing off into the wilderness to shoot helpless critters. Leaving the bib down, Abe began stuffing onesies down the pants, padding himself from the ankles up. When he’d reached maximum density he pulled up the bib, heaved on the matching camouflage parka, and stuffed in more onesies. With the hood cinched tight around his scarf and a pair of snow goggles, Abe resembled Santa Claus geared up for combat.
“Okay,” he said again, this time muffled, “let’s go home.”
Flat on his back, Dabney lay awake in the open, the sky above him a slab of starless slate. No clouds differentiated the opaque murk that hung above, but it wasn’t a rich blackness, either. It was grayed out, lifeless. Stars would be nice. Maybe the moon. Something. Instead there was nothing, nada, zip. How could that be? Maybe his eyes were going. Beneath him the silver-painted tar paper was lumpy and hot, still retaining the heat of the day. He felt the texture with his thick fingers, creased and peeling, much like his own skin, which was sunburnt from spending all his time up here on the roof. Let the others rot in their apartments, he figured. I’d rather rot in full sight of God.
Dabney touched his forehead and plucked a strip of his peeling skin away and pressed it onto his tongue, tasting his own acrid saltiness on the paper-thin jerky substitute. He let the rind sit there for a while, building up sufficient saliva to swallow it. He knew this was disgusting behavior, but so what? He was doing a self test of what senses he could stimulate. Taste: check. Touch: check. Sight: negative. Hearing? All was quiet above and below so Dabney forced an acidic burp. Check. Smell?
Smell.
Smell had taken a beating in recent months, not that smell had ever been his favorite. The nullification of smell was sort of a blessing, given the circumstances. So, three out of five, for the time being. Morning would come and sight would soon return to the roster.
Four out of five.
Not bad.
“Jesus, even a little air movement would be an improvement. Movement. Improvement. A breeze through the trees would please as it rolled over my knees like a disease or honey from bees and it would ease my… my… Fuck. Lost it.”
With the rhyming game over, Karl rolled over on his side; the mattress where he’d been lying was damp with perspiration. Moisture he could ill afford to lose. Karl stared at the wall, or at least in the direction of the wall. It was so dark he couldn’t see it, but it was there, a thin layer of protection between him and them. And he wasn’t even thinking about the big them. The capital T them. He was just thinking about the them that constituted the others in the building. His neighbors.
All the windows of apartment 5B were open but you’d never know it, the air was so still it felt like a vacuum. Karl inhaled deeply through his nose, some buildup within the nasal passage creating a high-pitched whistling noise. He breathed in, out, in, out, changing the tempo, attempting to negate his insomnia by nose whistling some half forgotten pop tune, the melody of which had come unbidden from the depths of his subconscious. What was that tune? Now he began to hum it, a ditty sans lyrics. But there were lyrics. He knew that much. This was killing him now. The more he hummed, stretching out the notes, the less the words came into focus. This was killing him. Well, not really. But it wasn’t helping.
Weighing, like, a hundred or so pounds was killing him.
Being dehydrated was killing him.
Not sleeping was killing him.
The earworm was merely aggravating.
With internal creaks and pops belying his actual age of twenty-eight, Karl swung his legs over the side of the bed and touched his toes to the bare wooden floorboards, which were as warm as everything else. What kind of world was this where even the floor was tepid? Floors were supposed to be cool to the touch. Even in summer.
Before stepping from the bed, Karl groped at his night table for matches. Though he was loathe to strike one and add to the heat even a little, he was more averse to stubbing his toes or tripping over something. After living in this apartment for the last few years you’d think he’d know the lay of the land, even blind. But he didn’t. His sweaty palm found the book of matches and Karl snapped one into life, the brightness singeing his eyes for a moment as they adjusted to this pinprick of light in the absolute dark. The small dancing light found the blackened wick of one of the candles, which sputtered to life, creating a pool of comforting incandescence.
Karl had lots of candles, gifts from his mother, aunts, grandma, and past girlfriends. Even female coworkers-Secret Santa crap. What was it with women and candles? He’d gotten them as gifts, pretended he’d appreciated them, then thrown them all in a box in his closet. Now he was grateful for them-except the scented ones. He’d learned that lesson the hard way. The fresh, fruity, cinnamony, flowery aromas reawakened his dormant sense of smell, unfamiliar odors rousing the olfactory receptors, which in turn refreshed the revulsion from the overwhelming tang of rot outside. It had only taken one Apples ’n’ Spice candle to teach him his lesson. He’d lit the wick, basked for a moment in the delicious bouquet, and then puked from a crushing whiff of the ceaseless alfresco parade of putrescence.
So, unscented.
In the light Karl could make out the trappings of his bedroom. The posters on the wall-Kiss, Slipknot, Metallica, Judas Priest, Ozzy, Motörhead, Korn-reassured him, though none of those bands was responsible for the rogue melody assailing his brain at the moment. What was it? Familiar yet unfamiliar. It was sort of pretty in an annoying kind of way.
Karl’s eyes roved to The Wall of Beauty, a veritable tapestry of pinups, centerfolds, magazine clippings, and most personally gratifying (and now, in retrospect, most painfully sentimental), Polaroids from the good old days when he was “getting some” and could occasionally convince his conquests to pose for him in the raw. When things had been different he’d been discreet and kept these pix salted away in a private place, but now? Now they were on permanent display.
Karl got up from the bed and shuffled over to the wall. The flickering candlelight made the images seem to writhe. Though there was some mild twitching south of his personal equator, it was insufficient for the purpose of autoeroticism. Eroticism! What a joke. Is there anything less erotic than jacking off before an altar of two-dimensional representations of nubile flesh? Of any flesh? In this case, dead flesh? All dead. At least Karl assumed they were all dead. So, did whacking to these beauties’ images constitute virtual necrophilia? Back in the day, one of Karl’s fave porn starlets offed herself. Consequently, his massive cache of videos in which she’d appeared became anathema to his libido. He gave the tapes away to a friend less burdened by… what would that be? Sentiment? Conscience? Ethics? Empathy? Plain old decency?
Decency seemed an antiquated concept. So when he could work up the energy these days, he spanked to dead ladies. Were there any other kind?
Karl ran his fingertips over some favorite images. Long of leg, wide of hip, narrow of waist, all with come-hither eyes. His prize was the Polaroid of Dawn-Anne McCarthy, his junior high crush. He’d run into her years after they’d graduated, on line at a store here in the city. Her disdain for him in junior high had vanished and for a few dazzling weeks they’d fulfilled every last one of his adolescent fantasies about her, and several his pubescent mind had been too inexperienced to even conjure.
Until he’d blown it, of course.
“You were the best, baby,” Karl said, touching the tip of his index finger to the flossy hub of Dawn’s sex. He exhaled with conspicuous melancholy, not that there was anyone to notice or lend comfort. “You were my Everest.”
Karl flushed with embarrassment at his floridity, then looked up at the ceiling and considered going up to the roof. Maybe it was cooler up there. Maybe there was some air up there. Then he considered Dabney and reconsidered, slunk back to bed, blew out the candle, and curled up on his side on the edge, in an attempt to avoid the damp spot.
Which was warm.
“You asleep?”
Across the hall, in 5A, Ruth Fogelhut poked her husband of forty-six years in his xylophone ribs with her chicken claw of a hand, her hard, pointed fingers raking his translucent epidermis and leaving behind scarlet trails-not that either could see them in the dark.
“Who sleeps around here? Especially…” Pause for a brief dry-throated coughing fit. “… with you torturing me all through the night. Sleep? What is this thing you call sleep? I should be so lucky to sleep. Even a nightmare is preferable to your constant mutchering.”
“You don’t have to be so unpleasant, Abraham.”
“Is that supposed to chasten me, ‘Abraham’? What, I’m a five-year-old and saying my whole name is a scold I’ll abide? Abe, Abraham, call me whatever you like. Call me Ishmael, for all I care. Sleep. Sleep’s a sweet memory.”
“I’ll call you a shit, how’s about that?”
In the blackness, Abe smiled in triumph. In all her years, Ruth was never one for cursing. It was beneath her, such vulgarity. Swearing was for the common folk, the hoi polloi. But take away amenities like food, running water, electricity, hygiene, etc., and even Emily Post might call you a cocksucker at dinner.
“I’m sorry, Abe. Abe, is that better?” Ruth’s voice was croaky and plaintive. It sounded like it was coming from something not quite human, something rattle boned and cotton mouthed. Something mummified and meager. Oh wait, it was. Ruth, once a breathtaking, slightly Rubenesque ringer for a young Ruby Keeler was now a crinkly sack of bones, nearly bald, with craters like eggcups holding her dulled, gummy, gray eyes.
“Abe’s fine,” Abe mouthed, almost silently. Why raise one’s voice? Gone were competing noises, like traffic and planes roaring across the sky. Gone were the cries of children, or mugging victims, or brawlers from the bar catercornered from their apartment. Gone were the ghetto cruisers with their booming systems, the bass so deep you could feel it in your colon. Gone were the nightly aural assaults from the garbage trucks, the thunderous growl of the crusher mechanism, the clash and clang of the emptied cans being slammed back to the pavement, the inarticulate badinage of the sanitation workers. Who’d think you’d miss that crap? “Abe’s fine,” Abe repeated, as much to reassure himself as Ruth. It felt better to talk about himself in the third person, made him think of himself as not quite real. Reality sucked. Abe’s not fine, he thought. Who the hell is fine nowadays?
“I can’t sleep.”
“Really?” Abe said, the sarcasm creeping back, edging out his miserable attempt at tenderness. “You could knock me over with a feather.” The fact was, you could knock either of them over with a feather, and not a particularly large feather at that. Two skeletons with a soupçon of withered meat held together by decrepit membrane lying side by side in a dilapidated sarcophagus.
One flight down, on the fourth landing, ear pressed against the door of 4B, Ellen Swenson clasped a hand over her mouth, suppressing the urge to call out to her husband, Mike, who dozed sporadically in their apartment, behind their currently unlocked door. Ellen had left her left flip-flop wedged between the door and the jamb and tiptoed across the narrow hall to eavesdrop. Mike didn’t believe her assertions about their neighbors, the jocks-the former jocks, at any rate. They were regular guys. Beer guzzlers. Hockey players. Bullies. Republicans. Regular guys, for crying out loud. Guy’s guys. Because they were so surface, to Ellen they also were something of a mystery. Mike’s argument, by way of Freud, was that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but Ellen didn’t buy it. With empty apartments still available, why’d they choose to live together when they arrived here? She didn’t just accept things at face value.
She had her theory, she needed proof and this gave her something to do when insomnia hit, which was almost invariably every night, especially since nights became interminable. No light, no entertainment, no conventional diversions. So Ellen made her own fun. As a girl she’d been a fan of Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, and even Scooby-Doo, so this meddling kid would tumble the jocks’ game if it killed her. If it didn’t, the boredom might.
The plus of a nearly silent world was that sound traveled. Sometimes that was a minus, but not right now. They must be in the living room, Ellen surmised. They sounded close. Really close. Like, right by the door. But sound had a way of tricking you in the absolute dark. All she wanted was to hear something incriminating. Something to lord over Mike, to prove she was right.
“I don’t even know why I listen to you, Mallon,” came Eddie’s voice. Eddie, Ellen figured, was the alpha dog. He barked louder, seemed scarier. He was the one Ellen feared. Pasty, ginger Dave just kind of annoyed her. “You’re wrong about everything.”
“Dude, you need to take it easy on the water.”
“Vaffanculo, dude. Don’t mother hen me.” Eddie slammed the jug down on the counter to emphasize his dominance-case closed. “Fuckin’ twerps across the hall,” he spat. “Fuckin’ Swensons!”
At the sound of her name, Ellen stiffened.
“We should just beat the shit out of Mike and take his woman. Make her our sex slave. Only two fuckin’ women in here-”
“What about Gerri?”
“Only two fuckin’ women in here and one’s like ninety and the other’s married and monogamous. Fuckin’ monogamous! What kinda selfish outmoded shit is that, anyways? Don’t the Jews share everything on those kibbutz things? This is like that now, yo. This here. I’m tellin’ you, bro, it ain’t right.”
“Hey, chill out,” Dave scolded in a hushed voice. “Sound carries, you know?”
“I don’t give a shit,” Eddie boomed. “Let her hear. Let ’em both hear. Hey, Swenson, I’m gunnin’ for your woman, bitch!”
At that, Ellen’s insides felt like they were imploding. It wasn’t funny anymore. Though neither Dave nor Eddie were the strapping behemoths they once were, both still were formidable. Mike and she wouldn’t stand a chance against them in a physical confrontation. Sex slave. As she began to tremble, Eddie let out a burst of loud, bellicose laughter.
“I’m just fucking around, Dave. Chill.”
Chill, indeed. Even in the stultifying heat, Ellen’s skin erupted in goose pimples, sweat turning cool on her forehead. Like a silent movie blind man she extended her arms and groped back toward her apartment door, slipped in and triple locked it in case Eddie wasn’t “just fucking around.”
Alan massaged his temples, removing his glasses, which were streaked and stained with sweat and skin oil. His “T-zone” was working overtime, his eyebrows smearing translucent patterns onto the lenses. Candles flickered, adding to the already oppressive temperature, but what was he supposed to do if he couldn’t sleep, just lie there and stare into the tenebrous void? He wasn’t in the mood to draw, so reading was the only thing left to do since television and the Internet became extinct. All his batteries were dead, so no more Walkman or iPod. Music was becoming but a sweet memory, along with regular meals, luxuriously long showers, movies… hell, everything.
Alan kept rubbing, feeling his pulse throbbing away just under the gauzy layer of dermis stretched over his skull. He contemplated dipping into his dwindling supply of store-brand ibuprofen, acetaminophen, or aspirin. Eyestrain. His mother always warned him about ruining his eyes by reading in inadequate light. She also warned him about sitting too close to the TV, but that advice was now moot. He wanted to keep reading. This was a good book, a real page-turner. His father used to lecture him about wasting his mind on junk. He’d urged Alan to read the classics, to broaden himself, to refine his mind. But Alan persisted in reading potboilers. Alan liked escapism when things were still good. Now escapism was his only luxury. His collection of sci-fi and crime paperbacks was worth its weight in gold. Scratch that; gold wasn’t worth anything any more. It was better than gold. Sorry, Dad. Maybe Chaucer or Dickens or Goethe or Balzac or Sartre or whomever would have made me a better person. Hard to say. But right now I’ll take my fantasy, thank you very much.
Horror, on the other hand, he left to molder on the shelf.
The pain in his temples encroached into the middle of his head, meeting at the bridge of his nose, the beat incessant, insistent, insufferable. He switched from massaging the sides of his head to working between the eyes. He was going to have to stop reading and sink into the insomnious darkness. He really didn’t want to medicate himself. Alan licked his fingertips and pinched out the candles.
He slumped back onto his mattress. His face itched, still unused to being so thickly bearded; he had not mastered the art of the dry shave. Naked, sweaty, furry, blind until sunup, head pounding, and dry heaving from the fetor. Alan depressed the button on his digital watch. The red LED display announced it was 3:27 in the morning. Sunrise was about two hours away. An eternity. As Alan scratched and convulsed he drifted off, the only person in the building actually asleep.
One flight down, situated above the boarded-up abandoned Phnom Penh Laundromat, apartments 2A and 2B were vacant. No one wanted to live that close to the street, and 2B housed bad memories.
Blackness was ebbing. The room began to take on a dark, sickly bluish-lavender tint, like the walls were bruised, heralding the start of a new day. Ellen lay on her side, facing away from the twin windows beside the bed, watching the wall change color. The purple drained away, replaced by jaundiced ochre, which as brightness increased lost pigmentation. Finally the normal drab off-white hue solidified, the glaringly bright sunlight accentuating every imperfection in the wall’s surface-each crack, each patch of Spackle under the substandard paint job. The wall was scarred beneath the paint, reminding Ellen of her former boss, a woman with an unfortunate complexion who’d applied way too much base in a sad effort to mask what imperfections lay beneath. Instead all she did was draw attention to each pit on her acne-ravaged face, a hopeless topography of dermatological strife. Too much makeup was the female equivalent of the shoddy toupee. Whenever Ellen had seen a man wearing an obvious rug-and most of them were pretty damned glaring-she always figured no one really liked or loved him, because no one wouldallow her husband or good friend go out in public looking that foolish.
The wall was pitted, a trifle buckled, somewhat bulgy in the middle. Their building was old, almost a hundred, but still settling. A couple years back she’d read in New York magazine that her block was right near a fault line. Maybe the earth would one day just start to shimmy and shake and swallow them all up. Better the earth than those things.
As hot as it was at night, it would be worse during the day, but at least she could see-not that seeing was much of a blessing. At night her field of vision was a wash of pitch black, unless she lit a candle. She could remember herself the way she was before. She could imagine some meat on her bones, some tone in her muscles. Hell, she could nostalgically remember some rolls of fat that she’d wished would go away. At night. During the day she could really absorb how awful she and everyone else looked. It had gotten so bad that your archetypal Auschwitz inmate would look at the residents of 1620 York Avenue and say, “Damn, those are some unhealthily skinny-looking motherfuckers.”
Or sentiments to that effect.
Ellen poked Mike in a furrow between his ribs until, with effort, his eyelids separated, revealing red-rimmed, yellowed, mucilaginous eyeballs. His mouth, a thin, wide, desiccated trench while sleeping, clenched and unclenched, lines radiating in parched spokes from his dull gray lips, which back in the day were red and full and the most kissable in the world. His mouth, as it attempted to form his first words on the day, pursed like the shriveled sphincter it was, lost in curly beard growth. Ellen still kissed that puckered bunghole of a mouth, but now it was perfunctory, a sad nod to past romantic glory.
“What?” Mike’s voice was Gobi hoarse.
“I think we need to bar the door better. Like, push some furniture up against it to make it impenetrable.”
With considerable effort, Mike sat up and rubbed crumbs from his eyes and nose.
“Why?” he croaked. “You think the amblers are going to get up here? They haven’t since that one time and I think it’s pretty well-”
“Not the amblers. Dave and Eddie. I heard them talking last night and-”
Mike gave her a sour look.
“Oh, what?” she said, folding her arms across her slatted chest, her breasts drooping like withered cutlets. Not the supple breasts of a successful twenty-seven-year-old Upper East Side urban-professional mom. They were more like the breasts seen in a magazine spread on depredation in Ethiopia or Somalia or some other godawful place-the kind of breasts that play landing field to legions of flies and their owners don’t even notice. These ruined teats had fed their child. They’d been large and full and life sustaining. They’d been ample and erotic. They’d been real ego boosters. Now they were depleted paps.
You’re no longer a mom when your child is dead-your former child.
Everything was former.
“You’re crazy,” Mike managed. “If they’d heard you out there, who knows what they would have done to you?”
Ellen had a pretty good idea, based on Eddie’s brief but memorable rant last night. She didn’t think they were above rape; if those jock assholes were slightly less malnourished she’d live in serious fear of them. Especially Eddie. Her assumption they’d gone the way of Fudgy McPacker might not be as watertight as she’d thought, and losing the comfort she took from the notion they’d been focusing their brutish carnality on each other didn’t improve her spirits.
“Anyway, promise me you’ll never do anything stupid like that again.”
“It wasn’t stupid, Mike.”
“Okay, not stupid. Uh, foolhardy. Ill-advised. Perilous.”
“It’s like you actually care.”
“I…” Mike began to sputter like an Evinrude. “What the… I… Of course I… What kind of way is this to start the day?”
Ellen shrugged and stepped off the bed, drifting toward the kitchen. “You want some water?” she asked Mike, whose face twitched apoplectically. He blinked a few times, then nodded, and she left the bedroom. Let him stew, she thought. She had no reason to torment him, but it killed time. Besides, it would give her something to apologize for later. The hours had to be filled with something, so why not a little domestic turbulence? Sex took too much energy, and besides they were both so thin and kindlinglike it just wasn’t fun any more. Bones ricocheting off bones, loose skin flapping around, bad smells. But it also passed some time and sometimes that was enough. They’d read all their books and magazines. Neither had any talent worth pursuing. Mike had been into photography, but that was no longer an option. She wrote bad poetry back in the day, but now why bother? What would she write about, the death of everything? Been done and done and done to death.
In the kitchen, Ellen poured half a glass from a 16.9-ounce bottle of Kirkland Signature Premium Water. But the water was far from premium. It was rain water. Ellen couldn’t remember how old the bottle was. They filled a whole case of them last rain. Ellen traipsed back into the bedroom where Mike now stood by the window staring straight across the alley at the neighboring building, not ten feet away. The windows there were stripped of any coverings and all were dark, bereft of life. There used to be noisy neighbors. Directly across from them there was this Latin couple who’d blast salsa music at all hours of the day and night. They’d openly do drugs by their windows, smoking pot, doing lines. Once, the man spotted Mike peeping at them and made a finger gun and mouthed, “Pop, pop, pop,” then winked and flashed a gold-accented toothy grin.
Mike leaned out the window and peered down into the alley. Stragglers who’d broken off from the herd shuffled back and forth, having breached the gate that someone in a panic must have left unlocked. Mike cleared his throat and a couple looked up, their dulled eyes twitching in recognition of something delicious. One let out a faint but audible gasp and began to limp in Mike’s direction.
“Be careful,” Ellen said as Mike leaned out further, bent at the midriff.
“It’s like you actually care,” Mike threw back at her, but when he did so, he smiled.
Ellen sidled up to her husband and put her hand on his back, feeling guilty about pushing his buttons, especially so early in the day. She could have at least waited until after their scant breakfast.
“I brought your water,” Ellen said, holding up the small juice glass, an old jelly jar with Huckleberry Hound on it.
Mike lifted his hands off the window ledge and straightened at the waist, eager to drink, unmindful of the window frame. His head slammed into the sash and his feet lost purchase on the smooth floorboards, thrusting his upper portion forward. Ellen dropped the glass and grabbed for Mike, her hands moist with perspiration, muscles neutered by malnutrition. She made contact with his left bicep but it slipped away. He pitched forward, his bony, naked ass slamming against the sash as his legs pinwheeled by her astonished face. An inarticulate screech was the only sound she could manage as her husband fell out the window.
Swallowing hard, she rushed to the other window, the one with the fire escape. It was possible he’d survived, that they could rescue him. She pushed the curtains aside to reveal the folding security gate and stared at the padlock like she’d never seen it before. The gate had been there from the previous tenant, a model not approved by the fire department. The combination. She couldn’t remember it. Mike had it somewhere.
His laptop.
His dead, useless, worthless laptop.
Now the blood in her veins seemed to slow. She dragged her feet across the floor toward the open window Mike fell through. She didn’t want to look, but desire was not a factor. She poked her head out, her posture exactly aping that of Mike’s mere moments ago. In the alley below, Mike lay splayed on his back, his spindly arms and legs arranged almost comically about him. From her vantage point he looked like a human swastika, legs bent in a cartoonish running position. His face stared straight up and they made eye contact. He wasn’t dead. Ellen’s mouth opened and closed but no sounds came out. She wanted to shout something comforting; some final thought Mike could take with him. “I brought your water,” seemed entirely deficient.
The zombies advanced on Mike, shambling forward. Ellen’s teeth began to chatter and Mike’s eyes implored her to say something. Anything. With effort she managed to mouth, “I love you,” but mute. Please let him die before they reach him. Please.
A small pool of blood was forming beneath Mike’s head, and Ellen noticed his neck was at an odd angle. A four-story fall. His neck was broken. He was paralyzed. Please let him be numb all over. Please at least spare him the pain. Mike’s eyes began to swim and lose focus. Let him lose consciousness. The first of his defilers stooped over and dropped to its knees, baring its teeth. At least Ellen couldn’t see its face, but she knew what it looked like. Cadaverous, leathery skin, yellow as a dead plucked chicken, translucent enough to display dull plum-tinted veins, blackened gums receded all the way, teeth huge, eyes glazed-if it even had any.
A shriek echoed through the alley as they tore into Mike, picking the meager flesh off his bones with those horrible teeth, digging their jagged nails in, peeling him. Ellen was locked in position-sympathy paralysis. She wanted to close her eyes but was unable. She watched at they dismembered Mike. With ingenerate knack, one scored perforations around Mike’s left shoulder with its teeth then jerked the arm clean off and began to devour it, ripping the meat off the bones. Another disemboweled Mike, unintentionally inviting several others to mooch off the uncoiling spoils. Bestial growls accompanied the feeding frenzy, the things poking at each other, scrabbling, circling like hyenas. More stumbled into the alley from the side street, attracted by the noise, the scent of fresh blood. Soon all she could see were their backs hunched over the spot on which Mike lay. Her nails dug into the brick beneath the ledge, grinding them down, a rudimentary no-frills manicure. Tears blurred her vision.
“I brought your water,” she said again, her voice thinner than she was.
“Ellen,” a voice cried out from below. “Don’t look at this! Pull your head inside!”
Was Mike trying to spare her? That was so Mike of him, always trying to protect her feelings, even now. She was sorry she couldn’t oblige, though. She was vapor locked. Sorry, Mike. Sorry about everything.
By the time her temporary immobilization eased, all that was left of dear, sweet Mike was a dark crimson stain on the pavement and some picked-clean bones. Ellen wrested her fingers from the mortar, contemplated jumping, reconsidered, and slumped to the floor, hugging herself, taking no solace from her bony limbs and digits.
Former mother.
Now former wife.
Next door she heard Eddie bellow something unintelligible. But his tone, as always, was ugly and portended trouble.
And now she was alone.
“Open the door, Ellen!” Alan implored.
He’d raced up the stairs and now pounded on the door of 4A. This was excitement no one needed or wanted, least of all him, but he couldn’t just sit in his apartment and pretend it hadn’t happened. He’d heard the howl from the alley and had looked down in time to see Mike’s head come off, a sight he hoped Ellen had been spared from her vantage point, but probably not. He’d looked up from the alley’s floor and seen Ellen perched at her windowsill, eyes like saucers swimming in roomy sockets. Ellen didn’t seem to hear him. He’d pled for her to look away. Instead she’d watched her husband transform from significant other to outdoor buffet. And it wasn’t even eight in the morning.
“Ellen, come on!” Alan cried. “Open the door! Please, Ellen!”
Across the narrow hall the door to 4B opened and Eddie appeared, standing in the doorway in his boxers, which hung too low beneath his diminished waist. “What’s the fuckin’ ruckus?” he said, just oozing compassion.
“Mike…,” Alan began, then stopped himself. Eddie’d find out soon enough, but why tip the hand? If he and Dave were unaware of Mike’s demise, why let them know? They’d just up the harassment ante on Ellen.
“What about Mike?” Eddie said, raising an eyebrow.
“Nothing. I just need to talk to Ellen.”
“What for?”
“Jesus, Eddie, whyn’t you mind your business? You’re like a hausfrau looking for gossip. I swear; if we still had power you’d be sitting on the couch watching your stories.”
“I’ve got no problem busting your fuckin’ lip open, wiseass,” Eddie growled, wagging a finger. “Just you remember that. Seriously.”
“Uh-huh. That’s great,” yawned Alan, indifferent.
“You just better hope I never bulk up again, faggot.”
Alan smirked. “I count on it.”
And with that, Eddie slammed the door shut. Once upon a time Eddie had spooked Alan, but that was fifty or so pounds ago. Now they were both in the same weight class. Fact was Alan had a little more meat on him than Eddie because he’d been better at squirreling away, much better. Not that Eddie needed to be privy to that info. Alan tried the doorknob again, rattling it. Locked, of course. Who’d keep an unlocked door, especially with those goons next door? After several minutes, the clack of multiple dead bolts unlocking came from the other side of the door and it opened a crack, revealing Ellen’s gaunt shell-shocked face.
“I don’t know what to say,” Alan said, feeling stupid for having said it.
“Come in, Al.” Ellen opened the door wider and stepped aside, which seemed a formality considering she was too attenuated to block his entrance. She wore a pale-pink tank top that accentuated her lankness, her neck cords so pronounced Alan fought the insane temptation to strum them.
“I saw what happened. When you didn’t answer the door I was afraid you’d done something to yourself.”
Ellen just stared at Alan, eyes glassy with grief. She plopped herself down on a wooden dining chair and Alan could hear the bones in her ass knock against the hard surface. The sound made him wince, but she didn’t notice. After a few hushed seconds passed, Alan pulled out a chair at the table and joined her, seating himself slowly, carefully, mindful of the hard-on-hard dynamic. No one had padding any more. “The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin’ ” days were over.
Ellen’s arms hung limp at her sides, her wrists grazing the lower rim of the seat of the chair. So many hard angles. Alan had lusted after Ellen when she and Mike moved in six years ago. That was before she’d been a mother-not that women who’d had kids weren’t still sexy, but motherhood was a sacred institution. Wasn’t it? Was anything sacred anymore? Anyway, this wasn’t a booty call. Ellen had no booty. Her ass had been so perfect, a flared, ripe pear. What was Alan thinking?
That was crazy.
Now more than ever each life was precious. Mike had been precious to Ellen, even though they bickered. Alan heard them. Alan’s thoughts were jumbled. He’d liked Mike well enough. Mike was a good neighbor. They’d even hung out together a few times, back in the days before. Hanging out after didn’t count, because choice was no longer a factor. Alan slapped himself across the face, snapping himself out of this unproductive internal loop, the sound stirring Ellen from her torpor.
“What did you do that for?” she asked, somewhat horrified.
“Sorry, my mind was kind of malfunctioning. Nothing to be concerned about. I’m here for you, Ellen. Sorry. Won’t happen again.”
“No, it’s okay. It was just kind of weird is all. But it kind of helped, in a way. Seeing you slap yourself was odd enough to wake me back up.” She paused for a few long beats, then added, “Mike’s dead, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. I saw. I was calling up to you, trying to get you not to look. I don’t know if you heard me.”
“Ohhhhh,” Ellen said, a faint smile playing on her drained lips. “That was you. I thought it was Mike. I wasn’t thinking too straight. That was really considerate of you. Thank you.”
Ellen looked and sounded far away, which might be for the best. Though Alan knew they were dead, he’d been spared having to witness any of his loved ones being devoured. Strangers, sure. By the dozens. But family? Mercifully no. As Ellen evinced the thousand-yard stare, Alan’s eyes roved about the kitchen. Pretty bare, like everyone’s. His eyes drifted over each surface, eventually finding their way back to his vacant hostess. He tried to envision her fleshy past self. He’d done her portrait a few times in pastel, pencil, even ink, so her face was pretty well ingrained in his psyche, but it was hard to conjure and superimpose on this bloodless husk. He’d wanted her to pose nude, but Ellen thought that would make Mike jealous, even if it was strictly business, no hanky-panky. What the hell was the point of being an artist if you couldn’t get chicks to pose in the buff? Alan had wondered. There are no other career-specific perks. Alan had suggested that he document her pregnancy with some tasteful nudes, but again the answer was no, even though she’d thought it a good idea at first. That was a real pity. Her breasts had gone from admirable to astounding during those months, and then stayed that way for quite a while. He’d never seen her nude back when that would have been a thrilling experience. Now he routinely saw her in various states of undress and it was tragic.
With the merciful exception of the Fogelhuts, most of the residents had adopted a slightly more “progressive” version of permanent casual Friday. Their building, 1620 York Avenue, was a “clothing optional” residence. Maybe it was hypocrisy or maybe it was modesty-which seemed so passé-but Alan kept his clothes on when dealing with his neighbors. It’s not like he strutted around like Dapper Dan, wearing a suit and tie, but he kept his shorts and T-shirt on. Let the others sashay around in the raw.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked, attempting to stay grounded in the now.
“Huh? Oh, no, no. Just stay with me.”
“Okay, as long as you need.”
“No, I mean stay with me. Stay in the apartment. Move in with me.”
Alan looked at her face, trying to glean how serious she was. Serious as a heart attack, as the old axiom went. Once upon a time that would have been the answer to his prayers, but now?
“Move in?”
“Move in. I don’t want to be alone, especially with those two Neanderthals next door. Listen, I loved Mike, Mike loved me, but these, I dunno, these are savage times. I can’t think about what’s prim and proper and what will the neighbors say? ‘Look, that whore’s shacking up with someone new already.’ Who would think that, except those creeps across the hall? Can you imagine what my life will be like if they think I’m-Christ, I can’t even say it. Available? Oh, Jesus. Fuck that. Mourning and starving are all most of us do, anyway. It’s not like you have to move your shit up here, but stay with me. Sleep in the same room. We don’t have to even sleep in the same bed if you’re not comfortable with that. There’s a foldout couch in the living room, but…”
Ellen rambled on, the stream of words blurring. Alan became aware that she was gripping his wrist, hard, her thin fingers clenched together like a vice. They went all the way around his wrist now. That was disturbing. Alan Zotz and Ellen Swenson, he mused. Once upon a time he might have wanted to carve that on a tree, with a big “4E” under it. But what could he say? This was a cocktail of unmitigated grief and panic and adrenaline. When she calmed down she’d probably want him to move back out. This was temporary. Life was temporary. They’d all starve to death pretty soon, anyway.
Might as well go out one of the good guys.
Karl knocked on the door to the roof, not wanting to intrude on Dabney-at least not without Dabney’s concrete approval. After a few more tentative taps, Dabney called out a brusque, “Whattaya want?”
“It’s me, Karl. Permission to come above?”
Dabney half scowled and half chuckled at Karl’s unfailing dorkiness. He appreciated Karl’s respect for his personal space, but this was the roof for Christ’s sake. He didn’t own it. If Karl wanted to come up-if anyone wanted to-who was Dabney to say no? Though he seldom used it for shelter, Dabney had set up a shabby lean-to of corrugated aluminum and loose brick. When it rained he’d sleep under it, allowing the buckshot-on-metal clatter to lull him to sleep. It had been weeks since it rained last. Nonetheless, strewn about the roof were various containers for collecting water: garbage cans, buckets, plastic drawers, and file boxes. And a few planters with failed attempts at vegetable farming, all dead before they yielded anything edible.
Karl stepped out onto the blindingly bright tar paper; the sun was blazing full tilt to the east. He wished he’d brought sunglasses and sandals but didn’t want to go back down just to come back up. Instead he squinted and winced, scorching his eyes and toasting his feet. Karl nodded at Dabney, who returned the acknowledgment before resuming his post on the lip on the roof, belly down on a mottled canvas tarp, head hung over the edge. Beside him was a pile of chunks of brick culled from the neighboring buildings, the roofs of which were all adjoined, separated by low walls which Dabney periodically demolished and raided for recreational target practice. The only constructive use the residents of 1620 had found for masonry-part of a renovation project that never got past the supply stage-was walling up the interior front entrance with cinder blocks, fortifying what the harried contingent of National Guardsmen had hastily thrown up to bar entry to their building. Up and down the block, doorways both residential and commercial were boarded up with rusting slabs of corrugated sheet metal. FEMA had done a bang-up job of sealing everyone in and abandoning them. Now many of the fortifications were shearing away, the elements having corroded the substandard no-bid bolts.
Karl walked over to where Dabney lay and squatted next to him, looking over the edge from a safe distance. Heights and Karl didn’t cozy up. Besides, the view was torment. Directly across the avenue from them was the linchpin of their collective woe, a tantalizing siren that beckoned, but one they could never answer: the Food City Supermarket. Behind its boarded-up façade, they imagined, lay a cornucopia of uneaten, unspoiled canned goods, bottled water, batteries that still had juice in them, you name it. Sure, the produce and meat had gone bad, but there was likely an embarrassment of provisions in there, all hopelessly out of reach. Sandwiched between the east and west sides of York Avenue, as far as the eye could see in both directions, north and south, was a sea of doddering bodies, all with but a single purpose: eat anyone stupid enough to venture from the safety of his or her home. Karl had witnessed it many a time.
Food City was situated in a big steel-and-glass apartment building, the only truly modern high-rise for blocks. Next door to the supermarket, its entrance raised and bordered by a small enclave of benches and shrubs, was a bank. Above the supermarket was a shallow inset area-maybe five feet deep, eight feet high, the full width of the market-that allowed the air-conditioning units to vent. Right above that were the windows of the first tier of dwellings, permanently sealed, like newfangled hotels and office buildings.
All up and down the avenue, as the status quo grew worse and worse, either lots were drawn or people went nuts or whatever, but folks made countless attempts from the neighboring buildings to gain entrance to Food City. Karl had observed what in other circumstances might have been comical stabs at it all go awry-real life Wile E. Coyote-style maneuvers. Several jokers driven mad with desperation tried the Tarzan thing, throwing a line out from a high window, lassoing a streetlamp, swinging, falling. Unlike Tarzan, though, they’d all ended up being torn to shreds, their final resting place the guts of those undead things down there.
Some had attempted a different approach, still from above, casting a line from their windows or roofs down to the streetlamp right in front of the market. They’d anchored the ropes like a clothesline, then shimmied across the street, only to find themselves stranded above the sidewalk, still with ten feet between them and the air-conditioning alcove. Even then, what would they have done? There was no way in from there unless you knew how to dismantle an industrial air-conditioning unit. These were regular citizens, not special ops personnel trained in breeching bulwarks. So they either shimmied back into their shelters, or dropped to the pavement and were devoured.
Some aspirant swashbucklers slapped together homemade armor. Egged on by their hungry neighbors, they’d either lowered themselves to the sidewalk from windows or fire escapes, or even more imprudently breached from within their blockaded front doors, which inevitably led to an unstoppable tsunami of zombies surging into their dwellings, costing all within their lives. The ones with enough foresight to reseal the entranceway usually didn’t make it ten feet from their homes before the horde picked them clean. One did get as far as the entrance to the supermarket, and even managed to detach the moldering sheet metal, but the doors had been automatic. No power; no way in. He’d pounded on them as much in exasperated fury and disbelief as in attempt to actually infiltrate the emporium. His makeshift armor just made the zombies work a little harder for their meal, but like a boiled lobster, the shell came off and they enjoyed the tender bounty within.
Now, because of one of Dabney’s brick tosses, the supermarket doors gaped open, the pavement glittering with fragments of safety glass, taunting everyone.
And the avenue might as well be a thousand miles wide.
“Watch this,” Dabney said, selecting a chunk of brick from the pile. He hefted it once or twice in his palm, getting the feel for it, then lobbed it down into the crowd. It disappeared amid the shoulder-to-shoulder multitude of shuffling cadavers.
“Fuck,” Dabney spat in annoyance. He picked another nugget from the stack and this time took aim. “That one,” he said, not specifying which one, which would have been difficult to do anyway. Which one, the rotting one? The ugly one? The one with the bad skin? The one with its skin peeling off? With the exception of their clothing and hair, to Karl they all looked the same. It was a good thing there were no rules of political correctness regarding the undead. “They all look alike, huh?” Karl imagined someone saying, in that shrill, strident, bygone PC tone. Just what the world would need: zombie special interest groups. People for the Ethical Treatment of Zombies-PETZ.
Karl smirked at the notion.
Dabney launched the missile and this time it slammed down on the skull of a bald zombie. Even from the roof they could hear the crunch as it penetrated bone and punctured what lay beneath. Brain? Only in name. The thing collapsed amidst its fellows, one less head bobbing aimlessly in the ocean of bodies. Dabney and Karl high-fived. This was one of those enjoyable, rare male-bonding moments.
“Wanna have a go?” Dabney said, jerking a thumb at the brick pile.
“Yeah? Why not,” Karl said. He chose a slab of jagged slate and stood up. Dabney maintained his horizontal position on the tarpaulin.
“Flat ones don’t throw as good,” Dabney said, but Karl didn’t intend to pitch it like a ball. He cocked his arm, pressed the slab against his chest, then swung out his arm, a light flick of the wrist sending the wedge spiraling like a Frisbee into the crowd, where it sliced off the side of a female zombie’s face with a juicy thwack. She didn’t hit the dust like the one Dabney clobbered, but she let out an satisfying yowl and thrust both her hands up to the gaping wound.
“Damn,” Dabney said, his tone reverential. “I never would’ve thunk to throw like that. I always go for the solids, but that was pretty sweet. Nice goin’, kid.”
Karl basked in the praise. As the runt of the building he always felt nothing was expected of him but failure. This was a defining moment, scoring approbation from John Dabney, resident loner. In a city full of vacant apartments, Dabney chose to live on the roof. The others barely acknowledged his presence, but Karl found him fascinating. Dabney held onto his role as iconoclast. Dabney was… cool.
“It’s only a matter of time, you know,” Dabney said, eyes hooded.
“What?”
“This. This here’s a waiting game. Look at those misbegotten things.” He pointed down at the street dwellers. “They’re same as us, only different. Maybe they’re reanimated flesh, I dunno, whatever it is. But they’re not from Mars and they ain’t made of plastic. Look at ’em. I mean really look.”
“It’s hard from up here.”
Dabney shot Karl a scowl. “Don’t be so damn literal. They’re fallin’ apart, same as us. They don’t eat each other. How long can they keep truckin’ around on empty? We know we’re gonna die if we don’t eat, but I figure so will they, eventually. I’d like to live to see it happen. I’d like to set my feet down on pavement again, even if ain’t exactly gonna be tiptoeing through tulips.”
“Me too.”
“It’s a waiting game and nobody knows how it’s gonna play out, but play out it will. It has to. Things rot. They’re rotten as hell. Their hides might be tanned as shoe leather, but mark my words, they’ll fall. It’s nature.”
“I suppose.”
Dabney frowned.
“All this talk’s makin’ me hungry. You want something to eat?” Dabney said. Karl’s stomach growled in anticipation of food. He had stuff stashed in his crib, but an offer of food from Dabney augured something mysterious and tantalizing. What did Dabney keep in his private stash? “Yeah, you do,” Dabney answered, lifting himself from the tarp. He strode across the roof to a sooty, bungedup metal contraption fashioned from salvaged commercial exhaust ducting. He bent down and opened a crudely hinged door he’d cut out of the cylindrical appliance. “It’s a smoker I made,” he said, by way of explanation.
“A smoker?” Karl repeated.
“Like a smokehouse. For smoking meat. Last I checked, refrigeration went the way of the dodo, right? So, smoked meat.”
“Meat?” Karl gasped. He was salivating.
“Meat. Jerky. You got a beef with vermin jerky? I got rodent jerky and pigeon jerky. Doesn’t sound so appealing when you know what it is, but it’s not so bad. Wanna try it?”
Dabney reached into the box and pulled out a thin, fluted strip of dusky matter and offered it to Karl. He smiled. Jerky. Karl thought of the old Jerky Boys pranks. Was this a prank? It didn’t seem like Dabney was the type. Karl accepted the barklike sliver and tentatively raised it to his nose, taking a sniff. Instantly his mouth began to water and with no further hesitation he took a bite-manna from heaven. Karl almost began to cry but stopped himself. That would be unmanly and he didn’t want to seem so in front of Dabney. Not today. Not after impressing him. The meat was salty and dense and tough, but the flavor sent him back to his college days when he’d subsisted on mac ’n’ sleaze and bags of teriyaki jerky from the 7-Eleven.
“Enjoy that,” Dabney said. “Won’t be much more, I don’t think.”
Karl’s heart almost broke at the thought. “What? Why? Why not?”
“Haven’t seen any critters around in the last week or so. None airborne, none skulking around on the ground. No squirrels, no rats, no mice. Sure as hell no cats. Anyway, I think what I’ve got in there is the last of it. The bottomless empty is right around the corner. After that, we are all well and truly screwed.”
That was a helluva pronouncement. Karl studied the older man’s leathery puss-peeling, brown, raw, not unlike the jerky he was consuming. If they started dying in the building would they mimic the behavior of those things on the street? Would this turn into some Manhattan version of the Donner party? Of the Andean soccer team incident? Karl flashed on the movie Cannibal! The Musical, the comedy about the Alferd Packer, which didn’t seem so funny anymore. He thought about Jeffrey Dahmer and Andrei Chikatilo and Ed Gein. Wasn’t Idi Amin a cannibal? Oh fuck that, Karl thought. I’d rather die. I’d rather feed myself to those things than eat a human being. You have to hold onto who you are. Life isn’t that precious. At least not any more it isn’t. Maybe those sons of bitches ate each other because there were still things to live for. Their circumstances had been way different. Packer and the Donners and those soccer players had a world ahead of them.
Dabney eyeballed Karl’s twitching face, sensing his thought process.
“You know what one of those Uruguayan footballers had to say when they picked him up?” Dabney asked, his voice neutral. “It’s a quote I remember because it seemed so fucked-up at the time. Now, I don’t know how I feel about it. The kid was talking about how they’d cooked their teammates. He described the meat as, ‘softer than beef but with much the same taste.’ It’s animal nature to survive. Man’s an animal. To survive, folks adapt. Whattaya think of that?”
Karl doubled over and puked up the jerky. When he finished retching he remained bent over, hands gripping his knees to keep from toppling over, thick ropes of bilious saliva drooping from his twitching lower lip.
“Last time I offer you any chow,” Dabney said.
Eyes stinging, Karl glared at the lumpy puddle between his legs, his face broiling with shame. Whatever cred he’d established he’d just pissed down his leg. He’d reverted to Karl the Puss-no more, impossible to be less. He felt anger coursing through his wracked body. Anger at himself, anger at Dabney, anger at everything.
“If you had food this whole time,” he bleated, revolted by his wheedling tone, “why didn’t you share with us?”
Dabney sighed, not angry. Seemingly bored with the question. “Because I sing hard for my supper. No one ever stopped you from hunting and gathering. I don’t own the roof. You want food, show some damn initiative. Don’t come whining at me because you’re a bunch of spoiled Upper East Side ninnies. Grow some hair.”
Karl straightened up and made to leave.
“Clean your mess up before you go, kid. I might not own the roof, but it’s still my turf. Don’t be leaving your mess here.”
Karl opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, but he couldn’t access any words that might redeem the moment. Dabney cocked his head like a wary dog and closed one eye in warning, shaking his head in silent rebuke. The gesture said, DON’T SAY A WORD. Karl looked around for a towel, saw none, then looked back at Dabney, who offered nothing but the stern authoritarian glower of someone about to lose his cool.
“What do I clean it with?”
Dabney pulled a rag out of his back pocket and tossed it to Karl, the motion reminiscent of that old Coke commercial with Mean Joe Green tossing the kid his sweaty game jersey. Karl thought a joke might help, and when he caught it he said, “Thanks, Mean Joe,” instantly regretting it.
Dabney turned away and resumed his vigil at the edge of the roof.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Karl chanted as he mopped up his puke.
“That Zotz better watch his mouth is all I’m sayin’,” Eddie said, stomping around the kitchen.
“Let it go, dude,” Dave said. “It’s no biggie.”
“It is a biggie. It is. It’s fuckin’ huge. First he gets lippy like, what, he wants a piece of me? He thinks he can handle The Comet all of a sudden? Like suddenly he’s a big man? He’s a little pussy, that little bitch. I’d stuff his fuckin’ crayons and paintbrushes up his ass if I didn’t think he’d fuckin’ love it.”
“Just chill, Eddie. Come on, seriously, you’re gonna give yourself an embolism or something. Park it and chill.”
Eddie paced a couple more times, then grudgingly heeded Dave’s counsel, taking a seat on an ottoman. He clenched and unclenched his fists, kneading his thighs, swallowing his lower lip. He threw his head back, the veins bulging on the sides of his neck, his Adam’s apple jutting out like a walnut. His nostrils flared like a horse’s as he exhaled over and over, sweat pouring off him. Dave watched Eddie attempting to decompress, to defuse. Ever since they’d met in high school they’d been inseparable buds, Dave the calm one, Eddie the hothead.
“The Comet” had been Eddie’s hockey handle-hokey, but apt. He’d been an awesome center whose speed and ferocity earned him an athletic scholarship to Rutgers. Dave had been goalie but he’d often kept his eye more on Eddie than the puck. Eddie tossed bodies around like they were nothing, which to him they were. It was magnificent to behold. Unfortunately he spent as much time in the penalty box as on the ice. Too much high-sticking. Too much hooking. Too much fighting in general. Too much blood on the ice.
Dave came over and ran his fingers through Eddie’s hair, petting him, trying to soothe him.
“Don’t do that,” Eddie snapped. “What’re you doing? I don’t need that shit, man.” He stood up, vibrating with barely contained rage. “You can’t do shit like that to me!”
Dave looked at his roomie, incredulous.
“I’m a little confused, Ed,” Dave said.
“What? What? What’s to be confused about? I don’t want you fuckin’ touching me all girly like that.”
“But we…”
“That’s not about… fuck, what’s the word?”
“Tenderness?”
“Exactly!” Eddie said, his face split in both triumph and disgust. “That’s exactly it! Tenderness. Tenderness is for women and fags. We’re not fags, Dave. We just have to let off some steam once in a while. Nothing wrong with that. Sex and tenderness have nothing to do with each other. You think all those guys in prison are fags? Hell, no, dude. They just do what they gotta do. Adaptation isn’t conversion, okay? You think they trawl for dick once they get sprung? Bullshit! They head straight for the punani! You need to remember that shit, bro.”
Yeah, but we’re not getting sprung, Dave thought. This is all there is.
“Whatever,” Dave said, and left the room.
“What’s the matter, is it your time of the month?” Eddie said. With that he erupted in laughter.
Dave stepped into the foyer and paced a few times, then opened the front door and stepped into the unlit common hall. This was the world now. A staircase leading up from the walled-up street entrance, the larger square landing of the second floor, the flights of stairs connecting each level, the narrow landings, the roofs, period. The entire rest of the planet was off limits. Why does Eddie have to be so nasty, Dave wondered. We’re all under pressure. We’re all in the same boat around here, not like he’s the only one who’s suffering, the only one who’s hungry, the only one who’s afraid.
Dave trudged downstairs to the sealed-up foyer. In the pitch dark he pressed his back against the almost-cool cinder blocks, girding himself for physical punishment. Better to not dwell on Eddie and his foul moods and fouler humor. That kind of shit had been funny in the locker room before and after a game, but now it cut deeper, seemed uglier. In the dark, Dave calmed down and collected himself. “Work it off,” he said, then inhaled and exhaled deeply several times. Midway through a half-assed stretch his elbow touched something clammy and fleshy and he let out a very womanish screech.
“Work what off?” came the drab, croaky response.
“Jesus,” Dave barked, “don’t do that. Hey, who is that? Who the hell hangs out in the dark? You trying to give someone a freakin’ heart attack?”
“Work what off?” The croaky voice was neither masculine nor feminine. It reminded Dave of the possessed girl’s in The Exorcist. The question was posed without any urgency or even curiosity. It sounded mechanical. That’s what made it so disturbing.
“Jesus Christ. Gerri.”
With his heart audibly thudding in his chest Dave began jogging up the stairs, taking each landing, then the next flight, and so on, up to the roof door. When he got there he hesitated for a moment, then gave it a loud rap with his knuckles and threw it open. Dabney was there, sitting in the shade of the stairwell, reading a battered paperback.
“Yo, John, mind if I do some laps?”
“Knock yourself out, kid,” Dabney said, returning his attention to the book he’d borrowed from Alan. As Dave began to jog north, Dabney added, “But not literally. I don’t wanna have to haul your carcass downstairs.” Then he chuckled. Same joke, different day. Different day that might as well be the same, for all intents and purposes.
Goddamn Gerri Leibowitz, Dave thought. Eddie had dubbed their old neighbor The Wandering Jewess, a haggish woman with an explosion of ratty grayish brown hair radiating from her seemingly vacant head. Sometimes she was stark naked, sometimes she wore a thin housecoat, and always she toted around the withered carcass of her dead Yorkshire terrier, cradling it like a baby. She had no fixed abode, sometimes sleeping in the neighboring building from whence she’d originated, sometimes in the halls, sometimes the roof-though not Dabney’s. He didn’t cotton to her at all. Gerri would occasionally spend a night or two in one of 1620’s vacant apartments.
Though comprised of all the fleshly ingredients, in essence she was a ghost.
Dave and Eddie had come over from three buildings north, when that building was breached. The zombies had flooded in and made short work of the residents on the lower floors. Dave and Eddie escaped, just barely. Since then, the rooftop door to the stairwell of that building was solidly blocked. No one could forecast which building Gerri would materialize in from day to day. Didn’t much care, either, but she was a perpetually unnerving presence.
Dave built up enough speed to use the short walls dividing the roofs as hurdles. The sun lashed his bare back and sweat poured off him like a race horse. This was stupid. He knew this was stupid. Who was he trying to keep in shape for? Himself? The end was nigh, as the Bible thumpers put it. Why even attempt to stay fit? He was a rail, each muscle, each tendon, each ligament, each vein and artery stood out in sharp relief. He was a walking-jogging to be more precise-anatomical chart. This wasn’t definition. This was depletion. Everyone in the building had a six-pack.
Six-pack.
Just the phrase made Dave want to bawl. How sweet would a six-pack be right about now? Some tasty ice-cold beer? As perspiration beaded and ran down his hairless chest, Dave imagined himself a tall, amber bottle of Bud, his sweat sexy commercial-style condensation on a flagon of his favorite brew. And began to cry.
“This’ll pass. You watch.”
“I dunno,” Dave said, then took a swig off his Stella Artois. Eddie and he sat side by side at the bar, both watching the muted television suspended over the liquor shelf. Since both sets were tuned to FOX there was no need for sound, the text tickers scrawling across the screen covering the major points in bullet form. Dave’s stomach was double knotted and the beer wasn’t helping. He drank it anyway.
“You dunno,” Eddie sneered. “Have a little faith. The government’ll take care of it.”
“That’s funny, coming from you, Mr. Libertarian.”
“Hey, I’m what you call a social libertarian. I just don’t want no one tellin’ me who I can and can’t screw, what I can and can’t drink, or if I wanna smoke a doob or do a bump I gotta go to jail for that shit. The government should keep its nose outta my private fuckin’ business, know what I’m sayin’?”
“But they can bail us out when bad shit happens, huh?”
“Catastrophic disaster shit? That’s right. That’s their fuckin’ jobs, bro’. Our tax dollars at work. Send in the fuckin’ Marines.”
Dave was about to point out that they didn’t have any Marines left to send in any more, but bit his tongue and took another mouthful of beer. Most of our troops were still abroad, the National Guard was spread thinner than an Olsen twin and chaos was erupting everywhere. Footage of cities on fire-entire American cities-filled the wide screen monitors. Dave was accustomed-indifferent, even-to seeing foreign cities ablaze, but American ones? It was bad enough when the towers came down, but this was epic. Presently, footage of St. Louis in flames was splashed across the screen, the visibly shaken anchorwoman-he’d heard they were called “spray-heads” in the news biz-mouthing silently. He could lip-read enough to catch the gist, and the worry was creasing her copious makeup. It had been the same all day: an epidemic of violence and cannibalism. Ridiculous sounding, but there it was.
“This is your WMDs,” Eddie said. “Right there, in HD. This is some chemical shit the sand niggers cooked up in some fuckin’ cave. Our guys’ll come up with the antidote and then we’ll get payback.”
“Where’d you get that from?” Dave asked.
Eddie pointed at the ticker. Dave wasn’t so sanguine about the source of this mayhem, nor about getting revenge. According to the news-and on this point there seemed to be no dissenting views-the state of affairs was global. What was happening here in New York was happening in Paris and Tehran and Madrid and Hong Kong and so forth. Still, the cause was up for conjecture and debate and people needed to assign blame. What good was a crisis if you couldn’t say, “It’s so-and-so’s fault”?
From outside the bar the assortment of unsettling noises grew louder. A concussion rocked the small building, spilling Eddie’s beer in his lap.
“Fuck this shit.”
“I think we should head home,” Dave suggested, not wanting his mounting terror to show too much. Eddie looked at his emptied mug and wet lap and rose from his stool without a word.
The twosome hesitated at the door. An SUV plowed down some pedestrians in a mad attempt to beat the light, sending bodies flying through the air, one thudding against the plate glass window, adding a red smear to the pink neon glow.
“Jesus!” Dave shrieked.
The bartender, an old school drink slinger with a permanent scowl, grabbed his keys and a sawed-off shotgun from under the bar.
“I let you out you’re out for good,” he said. “I ain’t lettin’ ya back in, no matter what I see happenin’ out there. You’re on your own.”
“Uh-huh,” Eddie said.
“I’m serious.” He turned to face the others at the bar. “Anyone else wanna leave, now’s the time. After these two, you stay until they says otherwise an’ that’s it. Lockdown time at Casey’s.”
A couple of other patrons polished off their drinks and plodded over to the door, reluctant to put the barkeep’s edict to the test. The rest stayed put, watching the televisions, gorging on chicken wings. Eddie and Dave locked eyes and like they’d done before matches, punched each other on the shoulders.
“You ready for this shit?” Eddie said, uncertainty tingeing his voice.
“No,” Dave said, opting for honesty.
“You’ll be all right.” Eddie smiled. “You’re with me.”
“Awright,” the bartender said. He undid the lock and pushed open the door a hair. “Get out, quick.” As an afterthought he added, “An’ good luck.” Then he pulled the door shut and locked it behind them. Eddie and Dave lived across the avenue and halfway up the block, but that short distance looked like an uphill battle, even though it was downhill. Dave looked south and saw black smoke rising from various unseen fires. The body that had hit the window lay dead a few feet away, its head collapsed from the double impact. A military troop transport rumbled up York Avenue with little regard for the foot traffic that surged around it in blind panic.
“See?” Eddie beamed, “Here comes the fuckin’ cavalry!”
The vehicle roared by and Dave and Eddie saw bloodied bodies affixed to the sides, scratching at the armored plating. The bodies looked broken but agitated. A man clung to the side, his head facing away from the truck, twisted one hundred and eighty degrees the wrong way. Drool and blood hung in long swaying loops from his shattered jaw. As the truck passed, Dave and Eddie gaped as they saw the troops inside being attacked and consumed by similar assailants. With another, “Fuck this shit,” Eddie took off in the wake of the truck, which momentarily cleared a path. Dave followed, slipping once or twice on fresh blood that leaked from the vehicle. They were more like Custer’s cavalry, with York Avenue as Little Bighorn and the infected as the Sioux and Cheyenne.
As Eddie fished for his keys at the front door to their building a freshly reanimated little girl, no more than five or six, sprang up and attempted to bite his forearm through his thick leather coat. Eddie knew this kid. Not by name, but he’d seen her and her mom in Carl Schurz Park. Her mom was a bona fide MILF and he’d always slowed his jog to get an eyeful of her cleavage. The kid had been cute, too, though more than once he’d seen her pitching a fit for ice cream or cookies. Now the kid’s blood-streaked face was contorted into a parody of childish greed, and human meat was all she craved. One eye bulged from its socket, the white showing all the way around the iris.
Without a moment’s hesitation Eddie punched her square in the face, shattering the small skull within. She dropped to the pavement, disoriented but not motionless. Twitching, she rocked herself side to side, like an upside-down turtle.
“Fuckin’ cuntlet!” Eddie bellowed, examining the bite marks. Assured he was uninjured, he raised his foot and stomped on her head, splattering bone and brain onto the sidewalk. Dave froze a few feet shy of the episode, raising his hands to his mouth. Eddie unlocked the vestibule door and with great impatience shouted, “You in or out, Dave?”
Dave sidestepped the stain that used to be a little girl and, once safely inside the entrance hall, puked. He then looked helplessly at Eddie, who was examining his bare forearm. A little discoloration from the bite was evident, but that was all.
“If that little cunt didn’t still have her milk teeth I might be in trouble,” Eddie said, brow creased as he mulled this over. “Seriously. That was close.”
“Yeah,” Dave said, wiping his mouth.
Their neighbor, Gerri, stood at the top of the steps, looking bedazzled. As they stepped past her onto the second floor landing she pointed at the vomit.
“You can’t leave that there. It’s unsanitary.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Eddie grumbled.
Gerri’s Yorkie, Cuppy, skittered down the stairs and began lapping up Dave’s sick.
“Sorry,” Dave murmured. “I’ll get it later.”
“Do something, you piles of pus.”
Even before things got as bad as they’d gotten, Abe Fogelhut knew the drill. He was eighty-three years old, the TV and radio were shot, he’d never been much of a reader-except for the occasional paper, and even there it was strictly the Post or the News, never the hoity-toity bleeding-heart Times-so he did what old people do: he sat by the window and watched the world putrefy, counting off the minutes until the final letdown. If he had any balls he’d have hurried the process up. Why forestall the inevitable?
Because as lousy as this life was, this was all you got.
The final reward was finality, period. Except these days it wasn’t, so death had lost some of its appeal.
So Abe did what he did. Today, much like the day before, and the day before, and the day before that. He’d arranged his frail, emaciated body into a semblance of comfort in the threadbare upholstered chair, parted the dingy chintz curtains, opened the dusty venetian blinds and took his position as eyewitness to nothing. The throng milled about-same old, same old. Nothing ever changed. Even the ache in Abe’s empty belly had quieted to a dull numbness. He’d actually welcome the sharpness of the hunger pangs, but you can get used to anything. And that was the problem. He was used to the way things were.
With some effort, Abe opened the window, leaned his head out a little, worked up some glutinous saliva and spat into the mindless crowd directly beneath his fifth-floor dwelling. The thick, pasty blob plopped onto one thing’s noggin and the schmuck didn’t even have the decency to notice, to become outraged or even annoyed. They never reacted. Abe sighed with resignation and eased back from the window, repositioning himself in his seat. “This is what it comes down to,” he muttered. “This is what passes for entertainment in this hollow semblance of a world. Feh.” He mashed his head back into the cushion and clamped his eyes shut, grinding his already nubbin teeth, taking shallow breaths. “What’s the point?” he moaned. “What’s the goddamn point?”
“What’s the point of what?”
“Exactly.”
Ruth shuffled into the room, her slippers shushing against the worn carpeting. He kept his eyes shut. She was unbearable to look at. The skin under her sharp jaw was a loose curtain, whatever nasty business lurked beneath barely hidden by her translucent epidermis. Abe could avoid looking at himself. He didn’t bother with mirrors any more, not since he stopped shaving. His whiskers had itched at first, but they concealed the sins of his lank flesh so they earned their keep. Plus, why waste water these days? For the sake of vanity? Vanity was outmoded folly, even in light of the facial hair. Abe smelled like the old parchment he resembled, his skin felt like membranous cheap leather. He’d stopped changing clothes on a daily basis weeks ago. Why bother? He’d stopped bathing before that, except to wipe a damp sponge in a desultory manner under his pits and over his balls and ass.
But to see Ruth in the same situation was intolerable. She’d always taken such pride in her appearance. She had been vain, back when vanity wasn’t such a futile pursuit. Now she looked like a wizened mummy sheathed loosely in drab Kmart dressing. If Abe had anything in his belly to vomit up upon seeing her, he would, as a eulogy to her former beauty.
“What’s the point of what?” Ruth repeated.
“Of anything. Of everything. Of answering that question.”
“Then what’s the point of asking it every day?”
“Exactly. Exactly so.”
“I hate talking to you when your eyes are closed,” Ruth complained.
“I hate talking to you when my eyes are open.”
Weeks ago that rejoinder might have brought tears to Ruth’s eyes, but she knew what Abe meant, and if she had any more tears to cry she still might shed a few, but she was dry as the Sahara. Abe listened to Ruth hobble back out of the living room and gradually opened his eyes again to stare out the window. Though Jewish in name, he’d always been an atheist, and nothing he’d ever seen or experienced dissuaded him from that. This was it. This was all you got. So, he’d live as long as possible, and when the time came that he keeled over in his chair from starvation and dehydration, at least he’d be able to say to himself that he’d ridden it out.
Whatever that’s worth.
It wasn’t like he didn’t envy the dumb bastards who had faith. They were the lucky ones. They just assumed, even in light of the nonstop reality show outside, that when you died your soul departed for a better place. Those ambling piles of rot out there were just empty husks.
In the kitchen, Ruth foraged in the cupboard. They still had a few tiny provisions, most provided by the generosity of their neighbors, but those would soon be depleted. There was a box of melba toast, some peanut butter, a can of lima beans, a can of SpaghettiOs and an individual stick of Slim Jim beef whatever-it-is. There were also three plastic gallon jugs of water. The pipes were as arid as she was, so they no longer bothered to test the faucet. All it did was groan, and if she wanted to hear that noise she’d stay in the living room and listen to Abe.
Unlike her husband, Ruth’s faith had come back to her, and that was before things had turned to shit. Around the time of her mother’s death, Ruth had renewed her bond to Judaism, which had caused much consternation in her husband, who thought she was cured of that foolishness.
When Ruth turned sixty-six, her mother, Ida, ninety-two and more vegetable than animal, finally gave up the ghost. At the time of her death, Ida’s age and weight were the same; she was bedridden, had virtually no brain function and, if this was possible, looked worse than Ruth looked currently. Prior to her actual demise, bits of Ida had predeceased her in the form of amputated limbs gone sour from gangrene due to poor circulation.
At the time it had put Abe in the mind of an old World War II joke about a captive American in a German POW camp who is on work duty fixing the roof in the rain. He slips while mending a hole and catches his leg on a rusty nail. He ends up losing the leg and requests that the guard send it back to the States to be buried. The guard is sympathetic and honors the request. The same POW is back on work detail and fixing another roof hole when the same thing happens. He loses the other leg and makes the same request, which is also honored. The POW, now legless, is on work detail in the lumber mill. He is feeding planks through a table saw and loses an arm. He makes the same request to have the limb sent back to the States for burial. This time the guard denies the appeal. “But why?” the POW asks. “Because,” the guard says, “the commandant thinks you are attempting to escape, piece by piece.”
That joke lost its appeal as old lady Ida escaped piece by piece from the Golden Acres Assisted Living Facility of Maspeth four times-plus she’d gone blind from diabetes, was incontinent, lost the power of speech, didn’t know who the hell she was, where she was, if she was. And as one terrible thing after another befell Ida, Ruth began going to the local temple to make her peace with God. By the time Ida mercifully kicked the bucket-no mean feat considering she had no feet-Ruth was very active in the temple and Abe was very alienated from his wife. They lived together, but apart. It would have bothered him more if he was still sexually attracted to her, but that part of their relationship had “escaped” long ago. He’d watched Ida’s nightmarish living putrefaction and thought to himself many times, There is no God. Ida had never been his favorite person, but no one should have to go through what she did before snuffing it. He wouldn’t wish that on Hitler.
Well, maybe Hitler.
And Stalin.
But that’s about it.
From outside, a guttural yawp burst the bubble of silence and Abe heaved himself to the window in time to watch the spectacle blossom below. This was new: one of the pus bags had sunk his teeth into another, much to his victim’s consternation. As the aggressor tore out a chunk of the other’s rotting flesh, both uttered unutterably foul noises, setting off a wave of restlessness through the normally torpid crowd. The antagonist choked down the chunk of fetid flesh, quaked a little, then vomited it back up. A spastic skirmish ensued.
“You gotta see this!” Abe shouted. “Hey, honey…,” old habits die hard, “… these sons of bitches have finally started in on each other!” Abe clapped his hands in delight. “They’re evolving! Soon the miserable bastards will be at each other’s throats, just like regular people!” Abe began laughing and coughing simultaneously.
“What’s so great about that?” Ruth said.
Abe caught his breath, sighed, and squinted at Ruth. “You really know how to suck the joy out of the moment.”
“How is that joyful? What is joyful about those things attacking each other? It’s horrible. They’re horrible.”
“Irony is lost on you, Ruth. You never could handle it. It’s funny to me, see, because in spite of all the terrible things you could say about those sacks of waste out there, they always seem to get along, even if it’s completely mindless. But now they’re pushing and shoving. Even dead and reanimated we’re hardwired for odium. Even those brain-dead heaps of flesh eventually manifest hostility toward each other. It’s the human way to be inhuman.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“Just go away, Ruth. Let me enjoy this. Forget I said anything. Please.”
Abe poked his head back out the window.
Things were back to normal. No pushing. No shoving. No turbulence. Just the usual vegetable parade. He mashed his head into the upholstery and, eyes shut, pondered the quiet. Once upon a time he’d have cherished such silence but not now. He missed the sound of traffic. The buses that used to run along York, even their whining hydraulics.
Sitting there, eyes closed, a faint sound wafting past the discolored chintz oozed into Abe’s ears; one in addition to the brainless lowing of the shamblers. One that he couldn’t place, dull and echoey. With effort Abe disengaged from the chair and craned his head out, looking north-nada-then south-bingo! Something was plowing uptown through the crowd, weaving past abandoned vehicles left at jagged angles. As it approached the sound amplified. Thumping. “The hell?” Abe said to himself. It was moving at a decent clip. A car. No, taller. One of those mini-SUVs, only he couldn’t hear the roar of an engine over the wet thud of rickety bodies jouncing off its hard surfaces. Maybe a hybrid; they ran silent.
Abe wanted to shout to its pilot but there was no point; that machine wasn’t stopping for anything. But unless those things had learned how to drive, at least there was evidence of life beyond this sapped bunch. As it neared the building Abe got a good, albeit fleeting, look at the vehicle. The front end was a dark mass of blood-drenched concavities. Though he was pretty certain those things didn’t feel panic, it was clear they weren’t thrilled with becoming temporary hood ornaments as they were bounced up off the pavement, or ground up below.
As the small sport ute plowed northwards it hit the shell of a dead car masked by the crowd. The savage impact echoed through the canyon of buildings and again Abe witnessed a driver explode through his windshield. “Poor bastard,” Abe sighed, anticipating the crowd swarming on the mangled driver, ripping him to shreds as the entrée du jour. But they didn’t. An aperture opened in the crowd before the now-smoking wreck of his ride.
“What the hell?” Abe said, confounded.
The zombies were spreading out, away from the area where the driver’s body lay. Abe couldn’t see him, he was out of range and masked by the multitude, but there was no doubt they weren’t all swarming him. A bestial moaning came from that direction, making the hairs on Abe’s neck rise. “That’s new,” he gasped.
With reluctance, he tore himself away from the window as Ruth entered the room.
“What was that?” she cried.
“A crash,” he said. “A car. It crashed. I gotta see if anyone else is seeing this.”
As he left the apartment Ruth shuffled over to where he’d been for her own look. In the hall there was a commotion of voices. Abe heard Karl shout something about the roof and in spite of his protesting legs, he hied upstairs. As he neared the top few steps an explosion rocked the building and he gripped the handrail to avoid tumbling back down.
“My heart,” he sputtered.
When he stepped onto the tar paper he saw black smoke churning up from below. Energy spent, he shuffle-jogged the rest of the way, joining some of the other men at the edge of the roof.
“I didn’t think hybrids blew like that,” he panted.
“The car he hit did,” Karl clarified. “Anyway, why do you think it was a hybrid?”
“I didn’t hear the engine.”
“Engine was makin’ plenty of noise,” Dabney said. “You’re just a bit deaf, old-timer.”
Abe was about to protest, but Alan shouted, “Are you guys nuts? Who cares what kind of car that was? A person’s dead!”
“Yeah, and they weren’t eating him,” Karl added.
“Maybe,” Dabney said.
“I saw it, too,” Abe confirmed. “They were spreading out. It was weird.”
“Maybe they smelled some leaky gasoline,” Dabney countered. “Backed off ’cause they knew it was gonna blow.”
“That’s giving them an awful lot of credit,” Karl said.
“Animals know when trouble’s afoot,” Dabney said. “Thunderstorms and earthquakes. We don’t know dick about those things except they like eating us. They could have all kinds of animal cunning. Some heightened senses. They can smell blood.”
Hearing that, Alan thought about Mike and turned to go downstairs to check on Ellen, who’d popped an Ambien or two earlier and was out like a light. Just as well. Two fresh kills in rapid succession would be too much. As he passed back into the building the others continued to debate what they’d just witnessed.
“Too much excitement for one day,” he said to himself.
As he let himself back into Ellen’s apartment, Eddie and Dave tore out of theirs and Alan was grateful, at least, to have avoided them.
Alan stared across the queen-size mattress at Ellen, who slept peacefully. He didn’t know how to feel. When he’d come back in, through her Ambien-induced haze she’d burbled something dreamily at him, and before he knew it they’d been a tangle of naked limbs. Mike had died a scant few hours earlier. Died was the least of it. That made it seem peaceful-in their current predicament almost enviable. He’d been devoured, and here Alan lay, in Mike’s bed, perhaps even on Mike’s side-chances were that Ellen snoozed in her normal spot, so Alan was occupying a dead man’s very personal real estate. Talk about fate tossing him a live grenade.
Ellen’s body, even dissipated, still held attraction for Alan. Okay, it was a sort of hot emaciated-supermodel Buchenwald kind of sexiness, but she still had that certain indefinable something that put lead in Alan’s pencil. Thinking of pencils, Alan grabbed one and a scratch pad and began to sketch her.
Gone were the pleasing soft curves, but if he could get into an Egon Schiele state of mind he could do some good work. Some people found Schiele’s work erotic. Alan didn’t happen to be one of them, but one must adapt to the here and now. Ellen’s areolas and nipples were dusky, almost burgundy, in sharp contrast to her pale skin. Her wasted breasts pooled on her chest, flattened empty sacs, yet he’d sucked on them like they dispensed the antidote. Unlike the others, Ellen steered clear of the roof and had gotten paler and paler in the weeks past. The triangular patch of black pubic hair stood out in sharp relief against her ashy skin, thick and matted with sweat and the commingled fluids of their lovemaking.
It didn’t feel like love. It had felt desperate, rapacious, panic stricken, violent. It had also been the first pleasurable expenditure of energy Alan could remember since everything turned rotten. Even with their bones grinding together it was the fulfillment of a bygone wet dream. Fee! Fi! Fo! Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he ’live, or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread, Alan remembered from childhood. What the hell kind of fucked-up thing is that to teach a kid? Grind his bones to make my bread? What kind of bread is that? And now the things out there wanted to do the same basic thing, only skip the carbs. We’ll just eat you alive, thanks all the same.
Alan’s drawing was not turning out the way he wanted. Ellen looked twisted and knotty, her contours convex where they oughtn’t be, concave likewise. Her tangle of brunette curls a greasy amorphous blob, obscuring her face save for one closed eyelid tinted dark as a shiner. She looked as if she’d been elongated on the rack like some accused heretic during the Inquisition. His pencil said Ticonderoga but it might as well have read Torquemada by the way it rendered Alan’s fluky new girlfriend. The First Grand Inquisitor of Spain would have been proud to reduce a human being to Ellen’s pitiful status-all in a day’s work in the name of the Lord. The problem with the drawing was that it was perfect. It looked just like her.
Ellen didn’t need to see this. Alan crumpled the drawing and tossed it out the window, where it landed right on the blood-smeared spot on which Mike had met his fate. What would Goya do? Alan wondered. The phrase reminded Alan of those WWJD bumper stickers and T-shirts and friendship bracelets and whatever else they emblazoned that catchphrase on. What Would Jesus Do? Well, from the looks of things, he’d abandon his precious flock and let them rot. Good thing Alan didn’t believe in that nonsense or he’d be pretty disenchanted with the Almighty.
Back to Goya and an artist’s duty. Though he did plenty of pretty canvases, ol’ Francisco didn’t shy away from capturing ugliness. Alan thought of Goya’s painting, Saturn Devouring One of his Sons. In it, the mythological giant grips the partially dismembered naked body of one of his sons, the giant’s eyes insane with paranoia and perhaps a tinge of grief as he gnaws off his progeny’s head. Alan had plenty of firsthand experience seeing bodies being dismembered-and documenting them. In his apartment he had several walls covered top to bottom with drawings and paintings he’d done of the mob outside, both individual and group studies. He was the Audubon of the undead-keeper of the visual record of humanity’s demise.
But for whom?
Who would look at these renderings? The likelihood of future generations was pretty much nil. Time travelers? Space aliens? No, this was art for art’s sake. Like the need to breathe and eat, Alan had discovered he was predisposed to do art. He’d always wondered how pure his drive was. Did he merely create in order to impress others? He’d mostly done work for print. Now there was no audience. For a while he thought he’d only do art if there were remuneration upon completion. What a price to pay to confirm one’s dedication. His apartment was a gallery devoted to but a single theme: THE END. Pencil drawings, pastels, pen and ink, a few water-colors, which strictly speaking weren’t done with water. Not with their water shortage. He used urine, which worked out fine. The yellow pigment added authenticity to the subject matter. At least he could work in oils. Plus, the thinner got him a bit high.
So art still had its little dividends.
And he’d bagged the model of his dreams.
Who now stirred.
“Mmmmm,” she purred. “Hello.”
Speaking of high, Ellen looked a trifle baked. He wondered how many Ambiens had she’d taken, then choked back the notion that she’d maybe tried to join Mike. Her eyes swam in their hollows, unfocused. As she blinked herself back to cognizance she looked confused, rabbity.
“You’re not Mike. What are you doing here?” Her query was accusatory. She shook her head, attempting to reengage her brain. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Mike’s dead. Mike’s dead now. Alan. I’m sorry.” She attempted a smile, but her mouth made the wrong shape. “What a day, huh?” A failed attempt at mirth employing the frowsy cadence of a secretary at the water cooler.
“Yeah,” Alan mumbled.
“What’s that smell?” she said, wrinkling her nose.
“Uh, a fire outside. I’ll tell you about it later.”
“A fire?” she repeated, eyes still glassy.
“Yeah. It’ll keep.”
Ellen eased closer to Alan on the rumpled bedclothes and pressed her head against his bare chest. She draped her arms around him. He yearned for his monastic apartment.
“So,” she whispered, “are you moving in or not?”
An entreaty.
An invitation.
A trap.
____________________
With the pretext of needing some things from his pad, Alan disengaged from Ellen and fled her constricting lair. With nimble assurances he edged out into the common hall and left her standing in her kitchen. At the cessation of the multiple clicks of her dead bolts engaging, the door across the hall swung open and there stood Eddie, looking wry and malevolent with a fishing rod in his hand.
“You don’t waste any time, do you?” he leered. “Y’know, I always figured you for queer, but I doff my lid to you, Zotz. You got right in there like a champ and got the booty. Hats off, bud.”
“What are you…?”
“Don’t play dumb, champ.” Waggling the fishing rod to make his point, Eddie held up Alan’s smoothed-out crumpled drawing of Ellen. “I did a little fishing in Lake Swenson.” He turned the drawing over, its back flecked with bloodstains.
Alan stared at his handiwork in disbelief. “With everything going on outside you rescued that drawing from the alley? Are you fucking insane?”
“Car crashes are a dime a dozen,” Eddie said, grinning, “but art is forever.”
“Car crashes are a dime a-” Alan shook his head like a wet dog trying to make sense of that statement. “What? Name the last time you saw a car driving by.”
“Been ages. But it didn’t do us any good, did it? Anyway, other sounds were of more interest. Ellen never moaned like that with Mikey boy, I can tell you. Even back in the day.”
Alan shoved Eddie into his apartment and closed the door behind them.
“Jesus Christ, Eddie. She might hear you,” Alan said, jabbing his finger into Eddie’s ditchlike sternum.
“Everyone hears everyone, Casanova. Sound travels. Especially when you’re bangin’ a screamer. She was making so much noise I thought she was gettin’ eaten alive. I guess maybe she was, actually.” Eddie smirked. With a plastic magnetic banana he affixed the drawing to his refrigerator door, admiring it. “Not like the old days, though, huh? Back in the day Ellen had some boasty titties. Well, you make do with what you’ve got, right? Don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good enough.”
“Look, don’t make a big thing of this, okay?” Alan said, hating the vaguely inveigling tone in his voice. “Ellen has enough on her plate…”
“None of us have enough on our plates,” Eddie interrupted.
“I meant figuratively. Jesus. Anyway, this is just a temporary thing. I’m just trying to…”
“Get your dick wet. I understand. Dude, if there’s anyone in the building who’s on your wavelength it’s yours truly. That sensitive artist shit worked its hoodoo. I get it. Some chicks dig jocks, some dig nerds. I should’ve known Ellen was a nerd whore. Just look no further than the late Mikey Swenson. What was his racket? Computers?”
Mike had worked in the IT department at an investment brokerage down on Wall Street, so point to the observant jock.
“Look, just keep it on the DL, all right? Let the woman grieve in peace.”
Eddie sniggered. “Okay. On one condition.”
Alan sagged. “Name it.”
“Keep the nudie art comin’. I want you to keep me supplied with fresh whacking material. I don’t know why I didn’t think to tap you sooner, what with all other resources being nonexistent. Not like I can log onto Bang Bus any more.”
“You want me to do porno art of Ellen for you?” Alan gaped.
“Not just Ellen. And not the way she looks now. I’ll come up with some scenarios for you to do up for me. Okay? Okay. Now get the fuck outta my apartment.”
Alan traipsed downstairs and fell onto his bed in a daze. This was what prison must be like. Alan had always wondered if he could endure incarceration-especially long term. He figured his only survival skill would be doing pervy fantasy art for the other inmates. The rapists would want rape fantasies. The murderers would want murder fantasies. The hyphenates would want hybridized fantasies, one from column A, three from column B, and so on. And now a blackmailing ex-jock was leaning on Alan for post-apocalyptic pinups.
What would Vargas do?
“She’s turning blue, Mike. She’s turning fucking blue! You have to do something!”
“What am I supposed to do, Ellie? What? Go to the Duane Reade? Call a doctor?”
Ellen held Emily, barely a year old, and watched her tiny mouth open and close like a fish out of water. She’d wrung every drop of nutrition from her mother and the coffers were nearly bare. Ellen hated rationing, but what else was there to do? Mike was right, what could he do? Go out there? Sure, only to never return. Baby in tow, she tromped over to the front windows and radiated hatred at the undead things in the street below, milling about as ever, even in the freezing rain. She threw open the sash and leaned out, sleet stinging her face. She shielded Emily, pressing the small head against her depleted bosom.
“Fuck you all!” Ellen shrieked. “Fuck each and every one of you goddamned parasitic motherfuckers!”
Emily started to cry.
“What are you doing?” Mike bleated as he hastened to the window, grabbing his wife’s arm. “You could drop her.”
“And what, Mike? What? She’d be taken days before her time? Maybe I’d be doing her a favor. Look at this fucking world we’ve got here. And look at this family. A balls-less dad and a worthless mom with sand in her tits. She’s gonna fucking starve, Mike. Starve. So will we, ultimately, but Emily’s got no reserves. She’s wasting away. And blue.”
“ ‘Balls-less’?” her husband peeped.
“That’s what you got from all that? Brilliant.”
Over the prickly clatter of sleet the zombies heard the commotion above and stared up at the scene of domestic turmoil, hunger being the only urge left to animate their lifeless eyes. Ellen looked away from Mike back at the throng. She could win this bunch over in a second if she’d just fling herself and the petite hors d’oeuvre in the organic-cotton sling down to them. The lunch crowd would go wild, then move on. She remembered how the world had gaped in stupefaction and revulsion as Michael Jackson dangled his infant son out a hotel window. The multitude below, with their caved-in faces and bleached skin, reminded her of Wacko Jacko, but she was the one dangling the baby.
She slumped against the wall beneath the window and joined Emily in tears. Mike closed the sash and crouched down to comfort his girls, but his touch and gentle tone brought none. They were disconsolate and he was, truth be told, balls-less. But who wouldn’t be? Was it balls-less or just common sense to not leave the building? How could he? Ellen and Emily’s wailing grew louder, amplified by Mike’s sense of worthlessness. He rose and left the room to get some water for Ellen, but by the time he reached the kitchen, forgot his reason for being there, opened the front door and stepped into the common hall, his own expression as absent as those normally worn by the zombies.
“Quite a racket they’re raising,” Abe said, gesturing into the door, which hung ajar.
“Huh?” Mike said, his thoughts muddled. He blinked and focused on his neighbors, Abe and Paolo, the good-looking South American from 2B. “Oh, yes. Rough day.”
“Aren’t they all?” Abe said, earning earnest nods from both younger men.
“Indeed,” Paolo added. “These are dark days.”
Feeling the need to talk to people who presumably wouldn’t scream at him, Mike joined in, though he wasn’t feeling very conversational. “They’re hungry, Ellen and the baby. Hungry and tired. And frustrated. Ellen wanted me to go out and get supplies, but that’s not going to happen.”
“And that, my friend, is the difference between your generation and mine,” Abe scoffed. “If I had a starving child you can bet your last goddamn cent I’d be out the door trying to provide for her, damn the consequences.”
“Easy for you to say-,” Mike started, but Abe cut him off.
“Damn right it’s easy for me to say. As I recall you were home when this all began. Me, I hadda schlep all the way from the garment district to get home. I braved all kinds of madness to get home to my frightened little wifey. Granted, if I’d had some foresight I’d have stopped at the grocers before coming in, but hind-sight’s twenty-twenty.”
“It was different then,” Mike stammered. He’d really thought other men would commiserate with him over female troubles; bad to worse.
“Different! Feh. There were those lousy zombies all over then and they’re all over now. What, you think they weren’t chowing down on everyone in sight that day? Eighty-three years of age, I managed to get myself home intact. If any of you young men-,” the word curdled in Abe’s mouth, “-had any cojones you’d go out and do what I did. Show the same resourcefulness and-”
Mike was tiring of having his gonads impugned and was about to protest-albeit weakly-when Paolo chimed in, his machismo also under attack.
“I have the cojones, Abraham,” Paolo spat, pique scoring his rugged features.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“You challenge me? You saying I don’t have the cojones of an old man?”
Abe chuckled. “I sure as hell hope you don’t have a pair like mine.”
Paolo’s expression softened as Abe winked at him.
“These are dark days,” Paolo repeated, a bitter smile sneaking past his anger onto his lips.
“Amen,” Abe agreed. The sound of the crying, which hadn’t abated, brought the three men back to the matter at hand. “Regardless-and I don’t want to get into a shouting match-but the fact remains that there is a woman and a child who need sustenance and it’s a man’s job to provide.”
Mike’s face flushed. Sitting at computer consoles for the last decade hadn’t exactly toughened him up or primed him for hunter-gatherer mode. Men of Abe’s generation were built differently. They were shaped and hardened by war. Abe was a vet of World War II. Mike’s only combat experience involved button mashing on a game controller. Countless hours spent on World of Warcraft and Call of Duty didn’t count. He nudged the door open an inch to look in on Ellie and Em. Though the volume had decreased, both were in a bad way. And Ellie had said Em was blue and meant it literally. The apartment could be warmer and even though they were all wearing layers, they were cold in the damp chill.
“That baby needs to eat,” Paolo said, voice steely.
“I know, I know,” Mike replied, eyeing his shoes.
“If you are not enough a man to go, I will.”
“Now wait a minute-”
“Abraham is right,” Paolo said, in his formal, mild accent. “He is an old man and he made it here. He’s told us many, many, many times of his perilous journey. We were lucky, you and I and some of the others, to be here already, but he and John came late. And they suffered.”
Mike was about to assert that they’d all suffered, but point taken. Abe had walked the walk. As an old man was wont to do, he’d recounted his trek often-maybe even embellished a little-but scrawny old Abe Fogelhut had bested all the “young bucks.”
“My gear is down in the locker,” Abe said, but Paolo waved him off.
“I do not need hand-me-downs, señor.”
Paolo about-faced and trundled down to his apartment.
“What? I insulted him?” Abe scoffed.
“You insulted both of us.”
“Shaming isn’t the same thing. A little shame is a good thing.”
“If you say so.”
From their respective windows the residents of 1620 watched Paolo make it halfway across the avenue before being overwhelmed and consumed in his insufficient version of Abe’s improvised survival gear.
Abe retired his heroic saga.
A week later, Emily died.
Mike manned up enough to dispose of the petite corpse, sparing Ellen the details. He hoped the wrappings were sufficient to keep the creatures from eating her. But then again, they only seemed to go for live flesh.
Did that count as a blessing?
Karl stood by his open window, looking out across York Avenue. Between the zombies and the abandoned cars, including today’s fresh one, the street was so packed you couldn’t see the pavement, but Karl knew it was sticky as a movie theater floor in the glory days of Times Square. The street below, however, was shellacked with immeasurable quantities of blood. With the fire having burned itself out, the only noise was the hum of flies and the occasional grunt or moan.
Karl often wished he’d been old enough to enjoy the myriad adult entertainment palaces that had operated freely in the days before “America’s Mayor,” Rudy Giuliani, had cleaned up the city. It was getting harder and harder to remember “important” figures from the days before the pandemic. Giuliani had been on a mission: to make the city safer and more antiseptic for its citizenry, but mainly for the tourists. New York had endured decades’ worth of bad image, fostered by both fact and distortions in the media. America overall had a skewed conception of the Big Apple: graffiti-streaked, litter-strewn, oozing with degenerates of every ilk who were ready to ply their vile talents on wholesome, unsuspecting visitors.
Karl had relocated to New York from Ohio for the express purpose of being plied vilely, but it never happened. Like a nomad in the desert he’d followed a dreamy ignis fatuus of chimerical pendulous bosoms swaying to throbbing disco beats. By the time Karl got to Fun City, however, Times Square no longer resembled the one captured by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Paul Morrissey, or even Frank Henenlotter. This Ohio boy had wanted Taxi Driver, Forty Deuce, and Basket Case.
Instead he got The Lion King.
Karl got a job, an apartment, and an education in reality versus illusion. And shortly thereafter it all went south. People started dying and coming back and eating each other and the rest was history. Who was to blame? No one knew, or at least no one was saying.
“Thanks, Mean Joe,” Karl spat, a vicious parrot tormenting himself. “Thanks, Mean Joe. Thanks, Mean Joe. Oh yeah, Dabney’s really going to welcome me up there again. Beyond thinking that I’m the biggest douche in the world, now he probably thinks I’m a racist. Thanks, Mean Joe. What else is he going to think? Stupid dumb stupid-head! Of course some hick from the hinterlands is going to be a cracker redneck racist. I’m just fulfilling my genetic-slash-socioeconomic obligation.”
Karl continued to glare at the graceless meat puppets stumbling around beneath his window, more vegetable than animal. Meat. Vegetables. Karl’s stomach growled. He wished he had more of Dabney’s vermin jerky. Rat. Pigeon. Squirrel. Whatever it was, it was good. The way they meandered down there, individual forms swallowed by the massiveness of the crowd, Karl could cross his eyes slightly and blur the overlapping double image. Meat. Vegetables. The surface pulsated like stew burbling in a boundless Crock-Pot. Meat. Vegetables. His life had been reduced to a sad homage to those cartoons where starving castaways on a desert island pictured each other as anthropomorphized hot dogs and steaks and hamburgers. Karl’s stomach lurched and he cursed himself for having purged Dabney’s vittles.
The shadows were beginning to deepen as the sun started setting. Soon the oppressive darkness would spread, drowning everything in pitch black, and another seemingly endless night would begin. Another reason Karl had been seduced by the city was that like heights, the dark was not one of his favorite things. When Karl had first moved here, he loved the fact that the streetlights kept the city bright all night long. Now it was country dark.
Back in Rushsylvania, Ohio-a tiny blip in the already bliplike Logan County-it got so dark at night you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face after a certain hour. There had been streetlamps outside, but they didn’t saturate everything with that pervasive sodium-vapor lambency that city lights did. For most of his childhood Karl slept with a night-light, much to his father’s chagrin. A night-light was a crutch, and Manfred Stempler wasn’t raising any cripples, emotional or otherwise. Manfred got the bright idea to go camping in Hocking Hills State Park. Nine-year-old Karl had been dead set against it, preferring to stay home and watch late movies under his blanket on his eleven-inch black-and-white TV.
“Manfred Stempler is not raising a sissy,” had been his dear papa’s response.
So off they went. Could his father spring for one of the cottages in the park? No way. That wouldn’t be “roughing it.” A tent was pitched, a campfire was made, and with as much detachment as a spooked nine-year-old could muster, Karl observed his older brother, Gunter, and their father enjoy themselves in the great outdoors. “Is this so bad?” his father kept asking, and though Karl’s shaking head said, “No, no, no,” his eyes held a different answer. When the last traces of daylight ebbed away, swallowed by the earth and foliage, the campfire’s light seemed pitiful and inadequate. The woods made noises. Karl wasn’t a superstitious kid, so he didn’t believe in monsters-which in light of the current state of affairs was kind of funny-but there were things creeping about, rustling the leaves, crunching the soil, which unsettled Karl.
Small oases of light had dotted the periphery from nearby RVs, accompanied by the purr of generators and the occasional drunken whoop, but it felt like the surface of Mars to Karl. Just because someone is born in the country doesn’t mean he’s not a city boy by nature. At home he’d secreted away a prized single from destructive Gunter and evangelical “all contemporary music is the devil” Manfred: David Lee Roth’s “Yankee Rose.” Roth was Manfred’s worst nightmare: a sex-charged metropolitan hedonistic Jew in showbiz, put on this Earth to lead impressionable youths-like his sonny boy-down the primrose path to Hell. Karl would listen in secret to Diamond Dave rhapsodize, “Show me your bright lights, and your city lights, all right!”
That had been 1986.
And Karl started planning his run from Logan from then on.
New York City was to be his Yankee Rose, resplendent in bright lights, city lights.
Even with its Lugosily ghoulish name, Rushsylvania-population just shy of six hundred-boasted a nearly 100 percent white populace, all good Christian folk. Everyone was pink and fair-haired. His father-Big Manfred-was very active at Rushsylvania Church of Christ on East Mill, epicenter of nowhere. Every Sunday Manfred escorted Karl, Gunter, and their mom, Josephine, into the bland house of worship. White faces upraised praising their lily-white version of Jesus, all soft, mousy brown hair and blue eyes, very European, very not Middle Eastern-very, extremely, super not Semitic.
If Christ had been portrayed in art as he actually looked in life, Christianity never would have caught on. All those generations of European artists westernized the Christ to conform to standards suited to their parishioners’ predilections-early market research. A Yasir Arafat-looking spokesmodel wouldn’t have put asses on the pews. Pushing the Christ was all about marketing and demographics. But tell that to Big Manny.
And then count on the beating of your life.
For all the times his father whipped out the Bible-and occasionally whipped him with it-Karl couldn’t remember a single time Big Manfred cracked it open. He wasn’t even sure his father could read. But it had made a compelling prop, thick of girth and bound in chipped oxblood leather.
Karl remembered the Lord’s Supper service on Sunday mornings-an odd time for supper, but why quibble over details when illogic reigns supreme? The bread, representing Christ’s body, cups of juice, representing Christ’s blood, passed out to all. Those who believed in Christ as their personal savior were invited to eat the bread and drink the juice that was dispensed. What a ghoulish practice. Though Karl didn’t miss that old-time religion, he could go for some of that body and blood right about now. A big heaping helping of Nabisco Body of Christ. Yum. Blessedly bland bites in every box. He looked at the zombies on York. Mindless, conformist, primed to eat bodies and drink blood.
The sun was almost gone for the day. Five stories below, the seething stew turned a deep burnt umber. Accompanied by a chorus of growls from his abdomen, Karl stalked over to his bed and willed himself to sleep, intoning a sacred hymn.
“She’s a vision from coast to coast, sea to shining sea…”
The deeper Ellen slept the harder she pressed herself into Alan’s hollows, her spine folded against his sunken abdomen, the top of her head resting on the manubrium of his sternum. They were “His” and “Hers” anatomical dolls, spooned for easy storage. Or burial. Both were so skeletal they could easily fit together in a standard coffin, with room to spare. And yet her presence was comforting. Alan hadn’t expected that. Now back in her apartment, he found the sound of her breathing, though a touch raspy, soothing. At night, beyond the depth of the darkness, the city was chillingly quiet. Even the buzz of the flies abated at nightfall. It was the kind of thought Alan only entertained at night, but he wondered if flies slept.
Somewhere out there, almost imperceptibly, a wind chime occasionally tinkled, a New Age death knell. It meant that somewhere there was a breeze, but that somewhere wasn’t here. After a few moments the tinkling abated. To suffer insomnia, as Alan often did, was like a wakeful coma, sensory deprivation with no restorative benefits. At least summer nights were relatively short. If anyone were still alive once winter arrived-a very unlikely prospect-the nights would be unendurable.
Slick with her perspiration, Alan’s fingertips traced Ellen’s chest, down along her lower abdomen, into her thicket of pubes. He let his hand rest there, cupping her bony mons veneris. Where there should be a rise of fatty flesh there was just taut skin on bone. Alan had liked his women waxed or clean shaven, but now pubic hair was a desirable trait. With no padding, anything to reduce potentially hazardous friction was a good thing. Knocking boots was now knocking bones. He remembered those psychedelic posters of skeletons in various sexual positions, cheesy stoner Kama Sutra astrological home décor.
Back in Forest Hills, where Alan had grown up, he had a downstairs neighbor who was the quintessential Deadhead. This guy, Lazlo, traveled all over to hear the Dead warble the same tunes over and over. He had what seemed like thousands of bootleg concert cassettes salted away in chronological order in file cabinets. He grew his own weed. He had a big Jew-fro and wispy teenage mustache. He made his own batik T-shirts. Alan wondered if Lazlo was still alive, and if so, what were his feelings on current affairs? Were the dead outside grateful?
That seemed like such a stoner musing.
Lazlo had the zodiacal humping skeletons poster. And R. Crumb’s “Stoned Agin!” The rest were Dead posters by various artists of varying quality.
It was strange not sleeping in his own bed. He was used to lying awake all night downstairs in his place. If he got out of bed he could navigate in the dark. Though the layout of Ellen’s apartment was identical to his, the furniture placement was different. He couldn’t get up and just instinctively move from point A to point B without lighting a candle, not that there was anyplace to go.
But what if he needed to relieve himself?
That did it. Just the thought made his urethra tingle. Pissing seemed like such a waste of fluid, but was still necessary. The more he thought about it, the hotter Ellen’s bony backside burned against his groin, trapping heat, preventing fleeting succor. The less he drank the more it stung to urinate, but it had to be done, even if it felt like passing acid. His insides rumbled with discomfort, the sensation of pins and needles inside his penis magnifying with each passing moment. He had to uncouple from Ellen and take a leak. It was that or piss on her ass, which was not an option-he didn’t know her that well.
Easing away, Alan’s crotch slowly broke free of Ellen’s rear end with a moist shluck. She made some sleepy mouth noises, smacking her lips, then rolled onto her stomach. Free of contact, Alan maneuvered off the bed, stumbling slightly, as this mattress was farther from the ground than his, then patted the air in front of him, blindly making for the nearest window, not lifting his feet off the ground, shuffle-walking.
Several muted toe stubs later he reached the wall and felt along it. The moon was out and the faintest amount of bluish light outlined the window frame. As he edged to the right he remembered that this was the window Mike had fallen from. Why tempt fate? he thought, edging along to the window with the fire escape. As in most New York apartments, a sturdy window gate barricaded this portal, but beyond the gate the window was open and Alan positioned his penis between bars and let fly. The spattering ricocheted off the cast iron stairs, amplified by the all-consuming silence.
Ellen awoke, excited. “Is it raining? Mike? I mean, Alan?”
“No, no. Sorry I woke you. It’s only… I was taking a leak. Sorry.”
“Oh. Oh. It’s okay. I just thought… Rain would be wonderful, though, wouldn’t it? It’s been so long. What, like a month, maybe?”
“Almost. It’s been dry, that’s for sure.” Mundane chat about the weather. The more things change…
“Yeah. Remember how they used to have water shortages,” Ellen continued, “and they’d tell you not to shower for more than five minutes or to not water your lawn in the suburbs. ‘Don’t wash your cars,’ they’d say. Or, ‘kids, don’t run the fire hydrants! Not during a water shortage!’ Those assholes didn’t know what a water shortage is.” Though the words were sharp there was no bitterness in Ellen’s tone. She sounded wistful. “You coming back to bed?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Come back to bed and I’ll suck your cock.”
How could those words, cribbed from every hackneyed porno movie ever made, sound so melancholic and uninviting? Alan’s penis, still scorched on the insides from the caustic urine, twitched in expectation. Even now it wanted to do the thinking. No amount of this is wrong from the brain could dissuade the little head from wishing to be ministered to. The corpora cavernosa began to fill with blood. Maybe it will help you sleep, his penis signaled. Come on, we’re all on the same team. You can’t fool me with this self-righteous “gotta do the right thing” hooey. Get me into that mouth and we’ll finally get some much-needed rest. Do it.
“Come back to bed, Alan.” And he did.
Ellen lay next to Alan, the sour taste of his ejaculate lingering in her dry mouth. It had been a while since she’d fellated Mike, so she couldn’t compare offhand, but it had never been about taste or texture or any criteria she’d applied to other comestibles. But maybe that would change with Alan. Even rawboned, Alan’s cock was thicker and firmer than Mike’s. And wasn’t spooge a source of protein? Protein was hard to come by.
These are the thoughts of a lunatic, Ellen chided internally. My husband is dead. The father of my dead child, Mike, with his bad posture and small, thin penis is dead. Chunks of him are resting in the alimentary canals of walking corpses that still linger beneath my window. His bones are still in full view from the window. I did nothing. I could have gone up to the roof and gotten bricks from John to drop on the heads of the guilty. I did nothing. My baby died. I did nothing. I’m not a wife. I’m not a mother. I have no career by which to define myself.
“I am nothing,” she said aloud.
Alan slept soundly. Good. She’d done some small amount of good. Now it was Ellen’s turn to leave the bed, only she knew the lay of the land and made a beeline for the front door, unlocking it. She stepped onto the landing. She could hear Eddie berating Dave behind their front door, but only his tone registered, the dull roar of an underdeveloped mind purging. In the unbroken darkness she plotted the course upward toward the roof without incident. It was only as she stepped onto the tar paper and felt a soft, wonderful breeze across her clammy skin that she remembered she was completely naked. Whatever. She closed her eyes and basked in the gentle caress of the faint airflow.
Though the sky was cloudy there was sufficient moonlight to see their roof, the tarnished reflective silver paint creating an eerie network of geometric outlines to follow. The other roofs, topped in traditional black tar paper, were invisible. It was like she was marooned on a trapezoidal island floating six stories above the ground.
Ellen padded across the rooftop and stood at the lip of the slight incline that led to the roof’s west-facing edge. The pitch of the acclivity was maybe thirty degrees or less, wheelchair accessible should someone confined to such a chair wish to roll themselves off the roof to their doom. She was sure that was not the intent of the slope. And besides, the only way up to the roof was the stairs. There was no wall on the York-side end of the roof, just a faint rise of decorative cornice, then a straight drop. A fall from here might do the trick.
No, she didn’t want to join Mike.
Ellen lay on her back, staring up at the moon’s pitted face, almost full, but not quite. The air movement felt both invigorating and soothing. It was the middle of July and she wondered if any of them would live to see the fall. And those things on the street, how long would they continue to shamble around? How many survivors were there in Manhattan, or the outer boroughs? Were there other naked women lying on rooftops in the vicinity, staring up at the moon? Or clothed ones? Or men? Or children? If so, was that a comforting thought? What was comforting? That Alan was sleeping in her bed? She wanted Alan there so she wouldn’t have to be alone, yet here she was on the roof. Dabney didn’t count.
She used to define herself, like zillions of other people, by what she did for a living. Her career. Now her career was living to see the next day, for no discernable reason other than just to do it. Now she was defined by her sex. She and ancient Ruth were the only two females in the building-maybe the world. Gerri, the floating wild card, didn’t count. She came and went by and large unnoticed.
“Gettin’ a moon tan?” came a deep voice from the dark. Dabney.
Whether modesty was démodé or not Ellen felt the flush of embarrassment. It wasn’t like Dabney could see much, but her nudity made her feel vulnerable. Ellen shook her head. Like she was anything to look at-a flimsy rack of bones held together by a pallid veneer of skin, her slack abdominal skin lightly puckered by a petite frowning cesarean scar. What a fox. She didn’t see much of John, not being a habitué of the roof, but he still seemed formidable. At least that was her mental picture.
“S’okay,” Dabney said, his voice a baritone purr. “Moon rays don’t do any harm. Sun’ll just give you cancer, not that it much matters. What’s cancer gonna do? Shave a few precious days, maybe hours, off your life?”
“I think I should be going,” Ellen said.
“Not on my account, I hope. Only visitors I get up here are the fellas. Nice to hear a sweet voice. One lacking testosterone.”
“Oh.” Ellen didn’t know what else to say.
“How’s your lesser half?” Dabney asked.
“Huh?”
“Your lesser half. I’m just joshing. Mike. How’s Mike? He hasn’t paid me a visit in a while.”
“Mike’s dead.”
A faint breeze filled the awkward silence. Dry leaves rustled in the corners of the roof.
“When did this happen?”
“This morning.”
“I didn’t know. I’m sorry. With everything on the avenue, nobody said anything. How did it… I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry.”
“It’s okay. Mike fell out the window. I think he broke his neck. He just lay there as they ate him. He was still alive. But not anymore. Just like my baby.”
Dabney leaned against the stairwell housing, where he’d been all along, wondering if it was possible to suck all the air out of a room outdoors.
Answer: YES.
“You’re wasting candles,” Ruth scolded.
“I want to read.”
“In this light? You’ll ruin your eyes. Besides, since when are you a reader all of a sudden?”
“Since there’s nothing on television last I checked. Since I can’t sleep and I’m tired of inspecting the insides of my eyelids. It’s never too late to better yourself, right? So consider me bettering by the second.”
“Ucch. All right, but do you really need four candles burning?”
“You want I should get eyestrain? You’ve got me talking like a peasant.”
“That’s my fault?”
“You used to say I didn’t read enough, that reading would better me. So here I am, reading, and now it’s ‘don’t read, you’ll ruin your eyes.’ You’re talking out both sides of your mouth, and with your teeth out it’s particularly repulsive.”
“Why are you so cruel?”
“It’s all I have left. Feh. You need your beauty sleep, fine. I’ll adjourn to the sitting room, your majesty.”
A clap of rainless thunder taunted them as Abe grabbed the platter on which the candles were arranged and left the room. Tsuris he did not need. He’d borrowed a couple of books from the kid in 3A, some cockamamie science-fiction chozzerai, but it was diverting enough. The writer, a fellow named Philip K. Dick, seemed bent on doling out as much torture as possible to his characters. Abe enjoyed others suffering even worse than he. At least Abe knew where the hell he was-he was situated in his misery. The poor schmuck in Dick’s book didn’t know whether he was coming or going; his reality kept shifting on him. What a lousy predicament. It was a riot.
Another sequence of rolling thunder followed him down the hall. “So rain already,” he griped. “Enough with the foreplay.”
Mixed in with the thunder were other sounds. A crash followed by the peppering of ruptured safety glass on pavement. That accompanied by the plaint of countless zombies.
“The natives are restless,” Abe said with a smirk. “It’s a regular hootenanny out there.”
In the bedroom, Ruth stared into the void. Abe wasn’t always easy to deal with, but at least he wasn’t always such a bastard, either. She’d been spoiled, she realized, by all his years away at work. She’d kept a few jobs here and there in her younger days, but they were usually part-time and often for relatives. Sure it was nepotism, but for such lousy pay, who’d make a fuss? She worked a little at a travel agency (Uncle Judah); a printing plant (cousin Sol); a catering hall (cousin Moshe); a small-time talent agency (cousin Tobias). When Abe came along she became a full-time housewife, then an overtime mother. Three children she’d raised, almost single-handedly.
That wasn’t a job?
Abe made her feel like she was living the pampered life of a queen because she didn’t have to schlep to an official place of work. Sure, Abe brought home the bacon-all right, not bacon; they kept kosher, give or take-but Ruth slaved, too. And for the meager allowance Abe doled out? It was indentured servitude. Even when they got along she’d prayed for liberation. Where was her own personal Moses to lead her to the Promised Land? Three children, and God only knows where they were or what their fates were. Was it too much to ask of God to at least know? Were Miriam, Hannah, and David even among the living? In her head she thought it possible, but in her heart, and more persuasively in her gut, she doubted it. So that meant the grandchildren were gone, too.
When God doled out the punishment he really laid it on thick, but she believed.
Ruth believed because of the absoluteness of the fate of mankind. The scientists had their theories, back in the first few weeks, before the television and the radio were kaput, but the theories didn’t hold much water. Biotoxins. Germ warfare. Terrorism. Advanced mutated Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Anthropoid spongiform encephalopathy.
No.
This was the work of a vengeful god. This was the work of a god who’d had enough, and who could blame Him? People had been doing terrible things ever since they arrived on the scene, but in just the span of her lifetime it went from not so good to bad to worse to unimaginable. Politicians got slimier and greedier and less trustworthy. Wars weren’t waged for noble causes, they were pecuniary agendas. The younger generations kept getting stupider and more selfish and less humane. Popular culture was all in the toilet. Bad language was rampant. Overt pornographic imagery had infiltrated regular television-Ruth didn’t know from cable firsthand, but from what she’d heard it had been the telecast version of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Craziness.
Gone were any kind of values one could hold dear. The people of her generation were shunned by society. The only ones who cared at all about them were the politicians, and that was only because the older generation still got out and voted. So, politicians and the pharmaceutical companies. Everyone else just was biding their time waiting for all the seniors to drop dead and vacate apartments like this one. Geriatrics and gentrification didn’t often cozy up. But that was just a personal beef. Donald Trump and his ilk didn’t erect the real estate that mattered. The Tower of Babel had been built again, at least metaphorically, and this time God was playing for keeps.
God had had enough of his naughty children.
Death was near, Ruth felt. Abe would be in for a rude surprise when he found out his soul would continue to exist even after his mortal form didn’t. In the next world-Olam HaEmet: “the World of Truth”-he’d have to answer for all his bile when they played back his life for him. Abe wasn’t a bad person-mean, maybe, but not evil-but his lack of faith would surely not be looked on with favor. Gehenom awaited Abe. It wasn’t hell, and he could move on, but he’d have to do some serious soul-searching-literally-to purify his untidy soul.
The depiction of the afterlife wasn’t explicit in the Torah. That’s where the goyim had it made. It was so black and white. They got scary fire and brimstone if they were bad or the Pearly Gates and Paradise if they were good. The Torah was more enigmatic. As a good Jew you were supposed to focus on your role in this, the material world. An eternal reward was a vague but effective motivator to stay on the correct path. All Ruth knew was that the soul went on for eternity and that was good enough for her. She just hoped that Abe would get his act together and make peace with God so they could link up in this nebulous afterlife.
And the children and grandkids.
And maybe Cary Grant.
Sure he was treyf, but oof.
Abe held the book close to the candle, straining to read the small print. Though he enjoyed Dick kicking the crap out of his poor deluded bozos in their subterranean Martian hovels, drugged to the gills with their little Perky Pat doll setups, the pain in his eyeballs negated the pleasure. Besides, he was actually envious of these fictional characters. Sure they’d been forcibly evicted to live on Mars-which was a complete crudhole-but at least they could get bombed out of their gourds and have these collective fantasy trips courtesy of some kooky hallucinogenic drug called Can-D. Or was it Chew-Z? It was both. Whatever. It was a crazy book, but Abe found himself embroiled in its labyrinthine plot. Dick was a nut, but an imaginative nut.
He put the book down and closed his eyes and rubbed them-hard. With spots and tiny patterns of organic hieroglyphs swimming on his orbits, Abe sat back in the chair by the window and enjoyed the fireworks. Abe rubbed some more, even though it was supposedly bad for you. When he pulled his hands away and opened his eyes again, flashes of light joined the spots and indecipherable microscopic pictographs. A distant clap of thunder echoed throughout the dead city, followed by a chorus of idiot groans from the undead. Abe blinked and pretended he was crocked on Dick’s wonderdrugs.
“I’m on Mars,” he whispered. “I’m in my hovel. Where’s my dolly?”
As the spots and runes melted away Abe realized the light wasn’t self-induced. Lightning? No, this flash of light cut right across his ceiling. From below. What the hell? Abe manually uncrossed his sleeping legs, flung himself out of his chair and hobbled on limbs of pins and needles toward the window. Just as he hung his head out a swath of light was cutting across the tops of all the cabbage-heads, forging south-a flashlight beam!
“Jesus H. Christ! Jesus H. Christ!” Abe gasped. He ducked his head back in and shouted, “Ruth! Hey! Ruth!” Another small thunderclap swallowed his thin voice. “God damn it! Ruuuuuth!”
“What? What is it already?” Ruth screeched from the bedroom. “You’ll wake everyone!”
“Good! Come in here! Quick!”
“What is it?”
“Come in here!”
Abe was trembling all over. He leaned back out the window and shouted at the departing beam of light. As it receded down York the horde seemed to spread out before it, creating a path.
“Hey, wait!” he shouted, his frail voice swallowed by another burst of thunder. In his ferment he launched into a convulsive coughing fit, his watery eyes following the light until it disappeared from sight. Now his coughing tears mixed with tears of despair.
“What’s the commotion?” Ruth whined. Though she was shrouded in darkness Abe could picture her bitter, disbelieving face. “What’re you dragging me out of bed for?” Her mental image of Cary Grant faded into nothingness.
“There was a light out there!” Abe said, gesturing at the street below, wiping his eyes.
“A light.”
“A light, for Christ’s sake. A light! A light!”
“Abe, it’s thundering out there. Ever hear of a little thing called lightning?”
“It wasn’t lightning. It came from down there! Down there! Not up there! Down!”
Ruth sighed the sigh of a long-suffering martyr and waddled back to the bedroom, leaving Abe wondering if he’d dreamt the whole episode, his mind suggestible to the transcendental literary powers of Can-D.
Or Chew-Z.
“They’re beautiful in a hideous kind of way,” Ellen said, admiring Alan’s studies of the undead. A week had passed since their coupling and Alan had invited her to his studio to see his work. No one else in the building had been permitted into his sanctum sanctorum. “My God, there are so many of them.”
“And no two alike,” Alan said. “Just like snowflakes.”
“Not quite,” Ellen frowned.
“Fingerprints?”
“That’s a bit closer. It’s like you’re cataloguing them.”
“I guess I am. Passes the time. Cave paintings of the future.”
Ellen’s eyes roved over the dizzying cavalcade of renderings. Beyond their technical excellence, Alan had captured something she hadn’t stopped to consider about the things outside: their innate humanness. Those things weren’t always things. They had been Homo sapiens. Alan’s meticulous artwork, while unsentimental, betrayed an element of latent humanity in the subject matter. The tilt of a head, the softness of a brow, the turn of a mouth, all reminded her that these empty vessels once had inner lives. They’d been friends and neighbors.
“I’m amazed at how unbiased these are,” Ellen marveled.
“They don’t hate us. They didn’t ask to be what they are.”
Ellen fingered the edge of a pastel of an armless male zombie with half its face missing. It had no pants and its penis was gone, but not its scrotum and testicles. She scanned the other images. Males, females, all dismembered in various ways. Not a single one was intact. How had she never noticed that before? She hastened to the window. Resting on the sill was a pair of binoculars, which she snatched up. Though they were packed together down there, she confirmed what Alan’s drawings portrayed; not a single one of them was complete. On some the damage was more evident than others-whole missing limbs were easy to spot-but all were mutilated beyond the general rot. It made sense. Most had been savaged when they were still people. They’d died and been resurrected.
Missing ears, noses, jaws, chunks of shoulder, gaping gashes, hollowed out cavities where their bellies should be. She noticed that many were nude, their clothes having either fallen off or been forcibly torn away. Some trailed lengths of dehydrated intestine, which others stepped on. Several had cutaways through which their withered internal organs could be seen, just like those “Visible Man” model kits her kid brother made, only less pristine. The legless pulled themselves along with their arms, almost lost in the crowd, trod on by the others, but they kept on. Ellen looked back at the wall of Alan’s portraits, trying to match ones there with the crowd below.
“It’s like a Bosch painting out there,” she said, sounding dazed.
“Bosch was an amateur. The Black Death was a stroll in the park. Those pussies had it cushy.” Alan smiled at Ellen.
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Too dark?”
“No, too vulgar. You sound like a more cultured version of Eddie.”
“Gotcha. Ecch. Okay, I’ll refrain from the cussing. But seriously, the ninnies-is that okay?” Ellen nodded. “The ninnies of the fourteenth century had it good compared to us. But what we’ve got going on is a logical extension. Rats and fleas spread the bubonic plague. See, rats infected with the disease were brought to Europe through trade with the east. At least that’s the theory I remember. Fleas on the rats transmitted the disease to people. I mean those weren’t exactly hygienic times. Open sewers, people shitting out their windows-excuse me, relieving themselves. Just like us, right? The plague spread like wildfire. The symptoms were obvious to anyone with eyes. You’d get these buboes, which were swollen lymph nodes. Along with your high fever you got delirium. The lungs became infected and an airborne version spread from person to person through coughing, sneezing, or just talking. Maybe this whole mess started with fleas or rats. Who knows? I’m sorry, this isn’t history class.”
“No, it’s interesting.”
It wasn’t really, but it passed the time. Ellen had never been much of a history buff, but Alan was smart and men liked to hear themselves talk, so why not indulge him? Alan plucked a thick volume off his bookshelf and gestured with it, the book a prop to lend credence to his thesis. Subconsciously, he’d pat the book after each sentence, punctuating his thoughts, drumming them in. He might have made a fine teacher, Ellen thought, but school had never been her favorite place.
“Is the test gonna be essay or multiple choice?” she said, smiling.
“I’m sorry, should I stop?”
“No, I’m just kidding.” Not.
“Nature’s been trying to wipe humans off the face of the Earth for centuries,” Alan continued. “The influenza pandemic at the end of World War I? Once it got going it knocked off about twenty-five to thirty million around the world. Maybe more. And quick, too. It came and went in a single year. Remember that SARS nonsense? All those little gauze masks people were running around with? Everyone looked like Michael Jackson for a couple of months? Same thing during the influenza epidemic. You could get fined for ignoring flu ordinances. So many folks were croaking there was a shortage of coffins, morticians, and gravediggers. Over time I think AIDS would have surpassed influenza, but it was all a rehearsal for this. This is the one that humanity doesn’t make a comeback from.”
Ellen just stared out the window. “No, I don’t suppose so. But maybe.”
Alan smiled and shook his head. That there was even the slightest room for optimism boggled his mind. He felt a small pang of envy. And then a larger pang of hunger. He stepped out of the room and into the kitchen, his departure unnoticed by Ellen, who seemed in a sort of trance. Maybe his little death diatribe was ill advised. Ellen didn’t come down for a dissertation. Whatever. What was done was done. Alan couldn’t unsay it. He opened a cabinet and took down a can of pork and beans and fished the can opener out of his cutlery drawer. After licking every atom of sustenance off the lid he scooped out two equal portions onto plates, then used the can opener again to remove the can’s bottom, which he also licked clean. He then got out his metal clippers and cut the can from top to bottom and carefully unfurled the cylinder, making sure not to cut himself. He tongued the exposed insides of the can, leaving them gleaming.
“Waste not, want not” went the old saw.
When he returned to the living room, which he used as his studio, Ellen was lying on the floor, eyes closed. At first Alan thought all that death talk finished her off, but he saw her rib cage rise with each soundless breath. Had she fainted?
“Ellen?”
“Mmmm?”
“Want something to eat?”
Ellen propped herself up and nodded, looking dreamy. Looking spaced out. She remained seated on the floor as she accepted the dish of beans and they ate in silence, slowly. No one wolfed down food but the zombies anymore. When they’d finished cleaning their plates, Alan took them back into the kitchen. Washing up was a thing of the past. He wiped the plates with the hem of his shorts. That was as good as it got, cleanliness-wise. Take that, Board of Health.
When he returned, Ellen was on his couch with her back to him, nude, her body arranged in an undernourished homage to the classic Ingres canvas, “Grande Odalisque.” She’d even wrapped a towel around her head and held a flyswatter where Ingres’s model held a feathered fan.
“Want to immortalize something alive?” she asked. “Barely, but still.”
Alan thought about the drawing of her he’d inadequately disposed of and his malignant arrangement with Eddie. If only he’d burned it. This wasn’t about the drawing, anyway. It was about protecting Ellen from Eddie’s vicious gossip. And was Ellen ready to see a truthful depiction of herself? That was the bigger issue. Alan had tossed away that drawing because he thought it would hurt her. How should he proceed? Whenever he’d done portraits of, let’s say, aesthetically challenged people he knew, he always embellished a little, flattered where possible while maintaining sufficient fealty to the model. He’d hand over the art and the subject always seemed pleased. But Ellen, damaged as she was, would likely see through such a chivalrous ruse. Better just to portray what was.
“Okay,” Alan said, picking a pad and terra-cotta Conté crayon off the floor.
“Don’t you want to paint me?” Ellen asked.
“Uh. A drawing would be quicker.”
“You have someplace else you need to be?”
“Good point.”
Alan opened his paint box, a sturdy wooden one that had belonged to his grandfather. He kept his brushes bristle up in a mason jar nearby and selected a hogs hair filbert and a hogs hair round to lay in the basic structure in thinned burnt sienna. He already had a primed canvas stapled to a lapboard. Proper stretchers were a sweet memory. The canvas, with its dry bluish-gray layer of wash, was on the smallish side but would have to do, like everything else in short supply. Alan never wanted to be a miniaturist, but so be it.
As Alan sketched Ellen’s basic form in small but confident strokes, he really studied her body. It was about 10:30 in the morning; the light in the room was somewhat diffuse as the sun was still at the east end of the apartment. By the time the sun hung over York, casting direct light into the room, he had the basic form blocked in. The light would be strong for a couple of hours. As the illumination grew stronger, so did the highlights on Ellen’s body, sweat glinting on each raised vertebra, each dorsal rib, her raised hipbone. Though emaciated, the essence of her former loveliness was still evident. Lighting made such a difference. Maybe this painting could be both flattering and honest.
“Can I have a glass of water?” Ellen asked, breaking what Alan realized had been several hours of total silence.
“Ooh! Ooh! There, across the street. Something’s happening over there at the Food City! I saw somebody go into the market. Someone’s stealing our food. Well, not our food, but you know what I mean!”
“It was bound to happen,” Ruth said.
“What? A food thief? You bet your sweet bippy! I keep vigil, nothing gets past me!”
“No, no, no, not the alleged food thief.”
“Alleged? Then what? What? What was bound to happen?” Abe turned away from his post at the window and glared at his wife.
“Losing your marbles. Senility. Dementia. Whatever you want to call it. You spend all day staring out the window and you’re bound to start seeing things.”
“I’m not seeing things,” Abe sputtered.
“Exactly. You’re not seeing things because there’s nothing to see. Like the lights in the sky the other night.”
“Not the sky, the ground.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There was some kind of fracas.”
“Fracas,” Ruth repeated.
“A brouhaha.”
Ruth just stared, her mouth pursed. Abe dabbed his sweaty forehead, wiping a trickle of stinging saltiness from the corner of his eye. He blinked a few times and looked back out the window. Nothing was any different than usual. The host of rotting cabbages was muddling en masse in perfect, unbroken harmony.
“I just thought I saw… Ah, nuts.”
Abe looked again, his eye drifting to Food City.
“Aha!” he shouted. “Aha! There!” He pointed at the doors, the glass of one was broken. “There! The door’s busted. I heard that. I heard a crash. So there!”
“So?” Ruth said, unmoved. “They broke a window. Wonderful. In addition to eating us they’re vandals now. I’m thrilled. And now the supermarket’s full of them. I can see why you’re cheering.”
“They just mill around,” Abe said. “They don’t break windows.”
“They did,” Ruth said.
“I don’t think so,” Abe said.
But didn’t know if he believed it.
“I wish I had me a gun,” Dabney said as he lobbed a half brick from his perch. “And bullets,” he added. “Lots of bullets. I don’t want this to be one of them tricky ‘Monkey’s Paw’ wishes where you get a little of this but none of that and it works out bad. A gun and lotsa bullets and maybe a scope for aiming. This brick throwing shit’s all well and good if you’re a fucking caveman, but damn.”
Karl, who had risked Dabney’s scorn and come up to the roof, sat nearby, handing chunks to Dabney, like an old-time cannoneer supplying his gunner. He’d mind his p’s and q’s today. No repetitions of the “Mean Joe Green” incident, as he’d come to think of it.
“Another thing would be nice about having a scope would be I could really see the damage I inflicted,” Dabney continued. “From up here it’s too small. I wanna see the heads pop. I wanna see the chunks spatter up, the bits of bone and brain. I wanna know that I’ve put ’em down for good. Sometimes I think I see ’em get up again and there’s no way I can hit the same ones twice. I don’t have that kind of aim, least not freehand. But with a nice rifle? Shit, heads would be poppin’, son.”
“Yeah, that’d be cool.”
“You humoring me?”
“No. I think it would be totally cool.”
Karl didn’t think it was that cool, but why make waves? Rifles and scopes reminded him too much of Big Manfred, who’d been as devout a hunter as he’d been a Christian. “Hey, Bambi, have a little of this,” had been his oft-repeated jibe when “thinning the herd.” “Hunting whitetail” sounded like one of the triple-X titles Karl had yearned to see on the marquees of the Deuce, but he’d kept that to himself. Big Manfred wouldn’t have seen the humor. The same went for “buck fever,” which sounded like gay porn. Big Manfred definitely wouldn’t have found that the least bit amusing. Guns. Bullets. A scope. The truth is, Karl thought if you’re going to make a wish, why not just wish none of this had ever happened in the first place?
Dabney lofted another hunk into the crowd and it dropped between bodies. He clucked in disapproval, then turned away from the cornice, massaging his bicep, sweat spilling off him. Above, the sky was clear and bright and in other circumstances would be lovely to behold. Dabney lay on his back on the tarp and closed his eyes, shielding them with a large hand, wishing for rain. The clouds that roved the sky from time to time were a sadistic tease. Karl studied the older-but not old-man. He was still, in relative terms, beefy. When Dabney had shown up he’d weighed in at close to three hundred pounds so even now he looked formidable.
Karl’s attention drifted over to Dabney’s smokehouse. Was there still meat inside? Karl wondered if he should ask. Didn’t he deserve a second chance? Could he risk sneaking up when Dabney was asleep? No, that would be a bad idea. Lined up along the low wall on the southern side of the roof were Ruth’s flowerboxes. With seeds she’d collected from the last fresh vegetables-cucumbers, green peppers, peas, and tomatoes-she’d attempted to grow food for the building; a noble effort that never made it. Small spindly tendrils had poked out of the soil, but the lack of rain and the oppressive heat baked them before they’d blossomed.
Dabney rolled back onto his belly, then hoisted himself to his knees, crawled to the edge of the roof and looked straight down.
“You know how frustrating it is looking down there every day and seeing the top of my truck taunting me?” Dabney said. “Every day. Least those motherfuckers could do is turn it over, but they got no strength it seems. Just numbers. Turn it all the way over, onto its back like a turtle. Then I wouldn’t see it no more.”
Jutting out into the street at a forty-five degree angle languished the van Dabney had plowed into the building seven months earlier. Painted on the pale blue roof in black was the legend, DABNEY LOCKSMITH & ALARM, then smaller, SERVING ALL FIVE BOROUGHS SINCE 1979, followed by his phone number in really big purple numerals. The front end was crumpled, the small hood popped open, revealing a blackened engine block. The back doors hung open, jostled every few moments by figures that passed by or through them. No doubt sun-shy zombies squatted within.
“It mocks me. Reminds me I didn’t make it home.”
“Home is where the heart is,” Karl ventured.
“You say some stupid-ass nonsense, son,” Dabney said, but he was smiling.
“I know.”
“My van and that goddamn supermarket. Ain’t that a bitch?”
“Yup.”
Eddie and Dave, back when they’d been brawny, had hoisted Dabney from the roof of his van as the zombies groped for him. It was the first and last altruistic act either of them had committed, and even then, Eddie had needed lots of persuasion. “That nigger’ll just eat all our food,” he’d complained. “I mean look at him. He’s a fuckin’ house. He’ll probably rape all the women, even the old bitch. Niggers don’t care, man. Pussy is pussy to their kind.” The old “project your sin onto others and disparage them for it” routine. Talk about calling the kettle black. Ever since the rescue, Dabney was merely “that nigger on the roof,” as far as Eddie was concerned, though he’d never have the temerity to utter those words within earshot of Dabney, lest he end up pitched down to the congregation as a tasty morsel. Not that Karl would object. Eddie was every jock asshole that’d terrorized Karl over the years, all rolled into one.
He reminded Karl of his dear old papa.
Big Manfred was a sportsman.
Big Manfred was a bigot.
Big Manfred hated almost everything Karl held dear.
“I miss my music,” Karl squawked.
“Where’d that come from?” Dabney turned from his perch and looked at the slight young man. This normally placid little white boy was shivering with agitation, eyes popped wide and despairing. The right corner of his mouth was twitching.
“What kind of life is this? What are we doing with ourselves? We’re biding our time until we just shrivel up and die!” Karl’s voice was stretched almost as thin as his small body, but there was vitality in his anguish. He sprang up and, fists clenched at his sides, glared up at the sky. “What is this? What the fuck is this?” He waved his arms around, gesticulating at nothing and everything. “What? What? What is this? What is the point? What’s the fucking point?”
He began to hyperventilate.
Dabney rose and stepped toward him, unsure of what to do. Talk to him? Tackle him? Give him a hug? Karl’s face was pulled taut, like his skull was trying to escape its fragile prison of skin and muscle. Dabney reached out and Karl slapped away his hand, then punched Dabney in the mouth.
The force of the blow surprised them both.
Karl sidestepped Dabney and walked in measured, deliberate steps up the rise toward the edge. Dabney massaged his jaw and watched. He wasn’t mad at Karl. If anything, he was a bit spooked by the sudden change in his visitor. Karl stood right on the lip of the drop and stared straight ahead.
“Are you happy?” he asked the air in front of him. If the question was meant for Dabney, it didn’t sound that way. “I’m not.”
“No one’s happy, son. Listen, Karl, step away from there. I mean toward me. Back away from there. Not forward. Don’t jump.”
“Don’t jump.”
“Right. Don’t jump.”
“You ever see that old cop show, Dragnet? Or any old cop show, for that matter? There always was an episode where some kid would try LSD, or sometimes even just pot, and he’d be up on the roof of the local high school or church or wherever. He’d be some square from Central Casting’s notion of a hippie or beatnik. Or sometimes he or she would be ‘the good kid who’s fallen in with the bad crowd.’ And there this twenty-five-year-old high school student would be, saying things like, ‘I can fly, man. I can fly. I just know I can,’ and Joe Friday or some other stiff in a fedora and skinny tie would be trying to talk the kid down, but not off the roof. ‘Don’t do it, son, you’re having a bad trip.’ Yeah.
“I don’t want to jump. I don’t want to fall. My balance is fine. I used to play games like this as a kid. I’d pretend that I was way up high, only I’d be down on the sidewalk, walking along the thin edge of the curb. If a breeze came and unsettled my balance, if my footing got away from me and I dropped to the asphalt, in my mind I’d fallen into a bottomless chasm. There’s no breeze. I’m challenging God to knock me off this roof. Bring a wind. Sweep me away. I’m not worried. My dad always said ‘God is in the details,’ and I believe that. Because look at this world of ours. Seems like God’s missing the big picture, don’t you think?”
“I thought it was ‘The devil is in the details.’ ”
“No. That’s wrong. That’s a variation. What’s funny is that we’re not quite sure who to attribute the quote to. The consensus goes with Flaubert, but some say Michelangelo. Others go with the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, or Aby Warburg.”
“How come you know this shit?”
“It’s called retaining trivia. Maybe someone would be kind and call it knowledge, but it’s not. It’s trivia. It’s why I would have made a great ‘Lifeline’ on Millionaire. It’s why I kicked ass at Trivial Pursuit. I can throw facts at you and quotes and all kinds of shit. But it’s all meaningless.”
“It’s not meaningless.”
“Yeah, right. Keep telling yourself that. Every Sunday my dad dragged us all to church, but you know what? In spite of that, I still believe in God. They taught us that God made man in His image, and that makes perfect sense. Man is a petty, awful creature. So, from that I deduce God is the pettiest and most awful creature in the universe. We’re God Lite. Are we being punished or did God just get bored and come up with a way to wipe us all out and have some fun watching the carnage in the bargain? Who watches NASCAR for the racing? People watch for the chance to see someone blown to smithereens-several someones if they’re lucky. I know that’s not an original observation, but it’s true. God’s watching this sick show and laughing His ass off.
“I’m rambling.”
Karl stepped back from the ledge and headed for the stairwell. As he opened the door he turned to Dabney.
“Sorry about the jaw.”
The door closed behind him and Dabney just stood and looked into the empty space Karl had just occupied at the ledge. He felt tired all over. Two roofs away he saw Gerri staring off into space like one of the things.
Maybe it all was meaningless in the end.
“Is that what I look like to you or is this what I actually look like?”
Ellen stood at the easel admiring Alan’s immortalization of her in oils. With tiny orangey highlights on her back from the interior candles and her extremities rim lit from the light spilling from outdoors, she actually looked radiant. All but she was softly deemphasized, warmly enveloped in rich shadow. The pose was Ingres but the painting was pure Rembrandt, its understanding of chiaroscuro complete and accomplished.
“Alan, it’s remarkable.”
Ellen recalled ads in her ladies’ supermarket magazines for a syrupy hack named Thomas Kinkade, so-called “Painter of Light™,” that self-appointed appellation rendered in precious curlicues. With his squinty little eyes and fey mustache, Kinkade embodied American kitsch at its worst: cloying, banal, and tacky. Alan was a genuine painter of light-and dark. Though the figure on the small canvas was gaunt, it radiated eroticism. The sweaty pinpricks of light drew attention to the sharp contours, but somehow didn’t detract from the innate femininity of the subject. The subject. Ellen. Herself.
In all her years she’d never been captured so vividly. There were probably thousands of photographs of her, maybe even some good ones, but they all fell short. They were surpassingly two-dimensional. This representation didn’t just lie there, and even though it was a portrait of her present condition, it had life.
“May I have this?”
Alan hadn’t considered his attachment to this painting. While he painted he sort of zoned out, focused on technique and execution, but now that it was done he could stand back and judge the work. It was good. The best he’d done in…
Ever.
He knew it was good because even with things the way they were he was reticent to give it away. In his gallery of death he’d managed to create a single image that was, of all things, both tragic and optimistic. Ellen could see Alan was debating inside his head. For the first time in months she felt like she wanted something that wasn’t just a staple. But maybe this was a staple; one she’d forgotten a woman needs. This fed her sense of self. This fed her vanity. How long had it been since she’d applied makeup or thought about her body as anything other than a rundown, withering collection of deprived tissue? Alan had painted a twiggy but eminently fuckable woman, and that woman was her. Twiggy. Ellen’s mind raced back to the waifish ’60s icon. Small tits perched on a rack of bone-Keane-eyed and shaggable.
“Yeah, of course,” Alan said. It seemed like an eternity of deliberation, but only a few moments passed.
“I’ll cherish this,” Ellen said. “I didn’t think I was capable of cherishing anymore. Or coveting. But I couldn’t bear to not have this painting. And besides, you’ll get to be with it every remaining day we have. Mi casa es su casa, remember?”
“Uh-huh.”
As Ellen reached for the artwork Alan stepped between her and the canvas.
“Wait a little while. Oils take forever to dry. I can’t just pluck it off the board without wrecking it.”
“I’ll take the board.”
“I need the board to paint on.”
“Are you reneging?” Ellen’s expression was puzzlement with a hint of dander.
“No, not at all. Just let it dry a while longer. I’ll bring it up later. Or tomorrow.”
“You’re sure you’re not reneging, because…” There was an edge to her voice.
“No, no. I swear,” Alan said. “I don’t want to mess it up or tear it. Later. Scout’s honor.”
As Ellen went up the stairs, touching the wall to guide her, she felt a curious combo of up-till-now dormant emotions. She felt flattered, acquisitive, manipulative, feminine. She’d already manipulated Alan into cohabitating with her. Isn’t that what she’d done? Fresh on the heels of Mike’s demise she’d played on Alan’s compassion and hoodwinked him into her tender, needy trap. And it felt good. At first she’d felt she’d been pathetic, but now, in light of Alan’s painting, she retroactively amended that take. She’d used her feminine wiles. She beamed. She still had feminine wiles. She’d seduced him. Maybe it was with shock, grief, and tears, but he’d taken the bait.
She still had it.
And there were hoops for Alan to jump through before they all collapsed into nothingness.
“Here,” Alan said, handing Eddie a dashed off, slightly altered pastel copy of the painting. In it Ellen was more robust, her buttocks rounder, her spine less protruding.
“Pfff,” Eddie sniffed, his disdain slap-in-the-face obvious.
“What’s wrong with it?” Alan sighed.
“It’s too nice.”
“Nice?”
“What’s the word? Tasteful. How’s The Comet supposed to get his jerk on with something like this? I want you to draw me humping the shit out of her.”
“No. Nuh-uh. No can do.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s totally disgusting. Listen, this is too high school for me, okay? I used to con my way out of schoolyard beatings by drawing naked girlies for jackasses like you, but forget it. What’re you gonna do, take my lunch money?”
“I’ll beat the shit…”
Alan arched an eyebrow.
“I’ll spread the word that that whore is spreading for you like Velveeta. You think she wants to hear that shit, the widow lady in her hour of grief?”
As Eddie smirked in triumph, Alan’s indignance slackened to indifference.
“You know what?” Alan said. “Whatever. Do whatever you want. I did you a nice piece of work and you didn’t like it. I used to get paid good money for art like that. The one aspect of the apocalypse I kind of dig is assuming all those unappreciative art directors are dead. I’d hand in a beautiful piece of art and they’d either grunt approval or pick it apart. I don’t need bad reviews from a scrawny ape. You know what else? You can tell whoever you want that Ellen guzzles my cock morning, noon, and night. Tell them whatever you want. Make up any kind of deranged shit your feeble mind can come up with. Who cares? Be a gossipy little bitch. Everyone knows your ‘secret,’ so why should I protect Ellen’s? She’s a big girl. It’s the end of the world, Eddie. No one cares who’s diddling who. No one even cares that you fuck Dave, or vice versa, or whatever.”
“That’s a fuckin’ lie!” Eddie growled. “The Comet don’t play that!”
Laughing, Alan snatched the drawing from Eddie’s table and walked out the door.
“The Comet. What a retard.”
“Oy, my sciatica,” Abe muttered, rubbing his thighs at the top of the stairs to the roof. He unlatched and pushed open the door and stepped onto the puckered surface. The bubbles in the tar paper reminded him of pizza, with its enticing puffed-up, reddish orange surface, peaks and valleys of sauce and cheese. Up the block from his office in the Shtemlo Building was a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria that made the best sauce-not too sweet, not too bitter. Perfect. The Punchinellos who worked there were torn straight from the pages of an Italian joke book, stereotypes all-bushy eyebrows and mustaches, arms hairy as apes’, speaking in Dese’a, dems’a, and dose’a spumoni-Inglese. For twenty-two years Abe had gotten pizza there and never knew their names. That was New York for you. Intimate anonymity. You could see the same people day in and day out and never know a damned thing about them.
“You know the latch was closed.”
“Yeah,” Dabney said. “I forget who was up here last, but sometimes I get locked out. S’alright. Not like I come down anyway. Knees bugging you, Abe?”
“Knees, back, everything. Bursitis, arthritis, a little bronchitis, you name it. I’m an old Jew. Everything hurts. What doesn’t hurt doesn’t work.”
Dabney laughed. “Don’t have to be Jewish for that shit.”
“Oh yeah? So what hurts you, Mr. Non-Jew?”
“No, I don’t want to have that conversation. I’d rather keep this on the upbeat tip, if it’s all the same. Whyn’tchoo come on over and park your narrow behind?”
“Suits me.” Abe, clutching Alan’s Phil Dick paperback, stepped over to the shady spot where Dabney sat, his back against a low wall. With some difficulty Abe took a seat on that wall, the top of which was capped with curved tile. “I can’t sit on the floor like that. I’d never get up again.” He propped open the book and slipped on his smudgy reading glasses. Dabney took the cue and fished out his own book and was about to read when Abe slapped the paperback closed and said, “How can it never rain and be so goddamned humid? It’s getting maybe a little gray on the horizon, do you think? Or am I crazy?”
“No, there’s some gray. Could just be haze.”
“Haze. Yes. Yes. No cars and we still got smog.” He trailed off. “What are you reading?”
Dabney held up a copy of Time Out of Joint, by Philip K. Dick. Abe showed Dabney his borrowed copy of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. They both smiled.
“Courtesy of that Zotz kid, am I right?” asked Abe.
“You are correct.”
“I think maybe that’s all that kid has is Dick.”
“No, that would be those meatheads in 4B and C. They got all the dick they can handle.”
The two men laughed.
“I don’t know who those schmucks think they’re fooling keeping separate apartments. You can hear their mishegoss whenever they get up to it. When I was in the service we had some fellas like them: straight laced and hard as nails on the outside. Guys with the pictures of femmes fatale of the big screen and so on. But they didn’t fool anyone. Once they were safely away from home, they were off to the races. You know that’s why New York and San Francisco are, um, were knee deep in faygelehs, right? All these fellas come home and they’ve got a choice: go home to Podunk and step back in the closet, or stay in the port town and make a new life. They chose wisely, I think.”
“So you think it’s okay to be homosexual?”
“I don’t care one way or the other. Never did, so long as their attentions weren’t on me. I had a few make goo-goo eyes at me; that I didn’t care for. But live and let live, I say. And now, what difference does any of it make? People are going to expend energy on carnality come what may, and use the available outlets-or inlets. Whichever. I’ll tell you, the best thing about getting old was that my libido, which controlled me all my post-adolescent life, finally died. Too bad it came right along with all this mess. I never got to enjoy my belated Age of Reason. And the hell with Viagra. Viagra’s only good if you’ve got a young honey waiting in your bed. No pill in the world could make me want to shtup the pill I’m married to.” Dabney snickered. “Yeah, easy for you to laugh. That woman is no picnic.” After a reflective pause, Abe looked up and, rubbing his knees, said, “I need to take my constitutional. Want to join me?”
Dabney helped Abe up off the wall and the two men strolled the roof. After two circuits of their building, Abe suggested they walk to the end of the row, assuring his companion he could make it over the walls. Dabney was in no mood to carry Abe back home. He liked the old geezer but would just as soon spare himself the piggyback routine. When they reached the north end of the line, Abe needed to sit down again. There was a rusty folding chair near the two oxidized bicycles permanently bonded to a metal guardrail. With their tires rotted away and everything glazed in a multihued orange patina, they looked more like modern art than defunct transportation. Abe was huffing and puffing like he’d run the marathon. Twice.
Dabney looked at Abe, who sat there panting, hands gripping his quaking knees. Though the geezer’s face looked all right-partly because it was enshrouded in beard-his hands were cadaverous, the skin like yellowed tracing paper speckled with liver spots. His fingertips came to disturbing points, the skin so close to the bone it barely masked it. A drop hit Dabney’s nose and he wiped it away with annoyance.
A drop?
A drop!
Annoyance transformed to rapture, his eyes shooting up from the old man to the sky above, which was thick with dark gray clouds. Another drop plopped right in his eye and Dabney’s grin was so broad he feared his face might halve itself. More drops began to pelt the two men. Abe stopped rubbing and looked up in disbelief. Within the minute a downpour was dousing the two men, who clasped each other around the biceps and jigged. After a few waltzing rotations Abe broke free and began to unbutton his shirt. “Modesty be damned,” he cried.
“Damn straight,” agreed Dabney.
Both men peeled off their clinging duds and basked in the refreshing deluge.
“We have to tell the others!” Abe said, eyes wide.
“I’ll do it. I can get to the building faster than you, old timer.”
Dabney raced across the rooftops doing the low hurdles in record time, the water streaming down his naked body. When he reached the stairwell he threw open the door only to be greeted by a scream. He stepped back and there stood Ellen and Alan, both clutching stacked containers to collect water.
“I’m sorry,” Ellen said. “I didn’t mean to scream. You just surprised me. I’m not used to having a naked man greet me on the roof.”
“S’alright,” Dabney said, stepping out of the way.
They quickly arranged the assortment of pots and cans, which joined the garbage cans, buckets, plastic drawers, and file boxes already there, then stripped nude and joined Dabney in the aqueous bacchanal. Alan handed Dabney a bar of soap.
“You don’t miss a trick,” he said, accepting it gladly.
Dave appeared at the door, followed by Karl, who had escorted Ruth upstairs. Straightaway everyone was naked, except Ruth, who looked away in embarrassment.
“Where’s Abe?” she moaned.
“Oh shit,” Dabney snorted, midlather. “I’ll go get him.” Trailing suds, Dabney tore ass across the roofs. When he got there, Abe was sitting in a concavity full of water, like a shallow tub, kicking his feet like a toddler in a wading pool. Dabney tossed the soap into the basin and soon Abe was lathering up, his eyes closed in euphoria.
“You forget the simplest of pleasures when you’re denied everything,” Abe said. “Bathing. Being wet. It’s marvelous.”
“Ruth was wondering where you were. She’s up on our roof.”
“Is she naked?” Abe gasped, his beatitude shaken.
“No.”
“Oh thank God. No one needs to see that, least of all me.”
“It would be kind of a buzzkill.”
Four rooftops over, the tempest orgy continued. For the first time in months laughter was the dominant sound-that and the roar of torrential rainfall. Karl and Dave had erections, but neither thought of sex. They were just pleasure boners from the sheer joy of being wet. The cloudburst was luscious. Karl and Dave were splashing each other with bucketsful of water. Their bodies, virtually hairless except for rain-matted pubes and armpit patches, glistened in the diffuse light. Ellen looked at Alan’s hairy body, his thin chest carpeted in wet black fur. Even dissipated, his was a man’s body. The others were boys’, not that that was a bad thing. Even Dave looked enticing. Eddie was the one who really frightened and offended her.
She was delighted he wasn’t present, but his absence was peculiar. Still, her answer for now: who cares? His loss.
Safely on the other side of the stairwell housing, Ruth tilted her head up and let the cataract wash over her cataracts. She’d been scheduled to have phacoemulsification the week after martial law was declared. Now she was stuck with cloudy vision of a cloudy sky. She pulled some matted strands of hair away from her eyes, her fingers straying up her forehead, which seemed to go all the way to the back of her head. Maybe it was better she couldn’t see that well. In her mind she could still picture herself as she was. Abe, too.
“Hey,” Abe said, making Ruth flinch.
“Oh, you scared me.” Even with muzzy vision she could see he was starkers. “Ucch, Abraham. Even you?”
“Even me what?”
“With the nakedness. Isn’t it bad enough those youngsters are doing it? And the colored? From them I expect it, but you? Oy, there’s no fool like an old fool.”
“Even in the rain you manage to rain on a parade. Uncanny. Suit yourself.”
Abe joined the others as they clasped hands and gamboled around.
“This feels so… pagan,” Karl cried with glee.
The others agreed and Karl basked in the moment. Big Manfred would vomit if he ever saw his son cavorting like this: naked, turgid, wanton. After a while the rain subsided to a light drizzle and various moans of disappointment rose from the group. The air actually smelled fresh. Dabney trotted over to his customary perch, lay on his belly in a deep puddle, and peered down. The horde hemming in his wrecked van was soggier than usual, but otherwise unaffected by the rain. They stumbled and jostled same as ever. Seeing his van always made his stomach ache. Dabney looked away, not wanting to dampen his spirits. A rainbow spread over the buildings to the west.
It was so corny he couldn’t believe it.
“Come on, man, move that shit!”
Dabney leaned on his horn again, knowing full well it was an act of futility. Traffic was snarled in every direction. He’d decided to take the FDR, but what a mistake that had been. After a few hours he managed to exit onto York Avenue. His home, a two-bedroom apartment on the twelfth floor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Houses on 110th Street and Lenox Avenue, awaited, his terrified wife, Bernice, holed up therein with three guns-all of which were legal-and sufficient ammo, if not skill, to protect herself. Already, within hours of the crisis’s advent, looting and street violence were rampant. Road rage was devolving into something worse, every face of every driver and passenger in every vehicle transformed by primordial fear. This wasn’t merely anxiety. Even panic would be a step toward calm.
The sidewalk traffic wasn’t any better. Dabney looked out the side windows and saw donnybrooks everywhere. Store windows were being smashed both accidentally and on purpose. Some just gave when too many bodies pressed up against them, causing explosions of cubed glass, like geysers of diamonds. Mixed in with the hysterical humans were these new bloodthirsty monstrosities. Across the hood of a car jutting diagonally half in and half out of its space a woman was being disemboweled and devoured by a trio of dead-eyed freaks, her fluids splashing onto the asphalt. Dabney fought the urge to open his door and try to help. Help what? She was dead. And if what they were saying was true-and he believed his own eyes, so yes, it was-whatever was left of her when the threesome were done eating would get up and join them. A quartet. Now multiply that over and over, ad infinitum. All up and down the avenue similar scenes were happening.
And no one stopped to help.
The few cops that remained were looking out for their own welfare, and Dabney couldn’t blame them. Pop-pops erupted from all over, some of the bullets downing the cannibals, others ricocheting off hard surfaces. A slug pinged off a lamppost and put a dime-size crater into Dabney’s windshield, small fissures radiating from it. Dabney took a hand off the steering wheel and pressed a finger to the spot, feeling cool air passing through a tiny hole. He hoped the integrity of the windscreen would maintain. Just long enough. He had to get home. He fished out his cell phone again and tried to call, but nothing doing. All circuits were tied up. Please try again. There was nothing to do but keep pushing northwest.
Something heavy slammed onto his roof and Dabney felt as if his blood stopped circulating for a moment and a vacuum formed in his lungs. A body rolled down his windshield and under all the noise of chaos he heard that twinkly crackle of the glass straining under the body’s weight. If the windshield broke, those crazies would get in and get him. With mere inches between his and the next vehicle, Dabney accelerated, then reversed, bumping both cars to his front and rear. The body rolled off his hood, its smashed face casting a dead glare his way as it dropped out of sight under the van. The door of the car to his front flew open and the incensed driver starting walking back toward Dabney, slapping a five-cell Maglite flashlight against his open palm. Dabney couldn’t believe it. In the eye of the shitstorm this moron was going to give him grief about a tiny bumper thump.
“What the fuck, dude?” the guy said, glaring at Dabney. No one was in his right mind. No one. Dabney checked his door locks.
As the guy neared, another blood-drenched cannibal scrambled over a motionless car and sank his teeth into the Maglite guy’s throat. Dabney’s mind raced even as all around him remained stationary. His thoughts came rapid fire: Okay, now that asshole’s definitely not moving. His car is stuck in my way. Can’t reverse. Can’t move forward. He was gonna kill me. In all this, he was gonna kill me. I gotta get home. Look at this shit. On the sidewalk it’s more spread out. I’m near a hydrant. There’s a gap. I’m near a hydrant. That guy was gonna kill me. But now he’s dead. I gotta get home.
Dabney bit his lip hard, then yanked the steering wheel hard to the right and bulled his van past the hydrant onto the sidewalk. Fuck it, he thought. Everyone out here is gonna die, anyway. There was little to contradict that thought, but even as he rationalized his decision to mount the sidewalk and plow through the pedestrian pandemonium he couldn’t help but vacillate between I’m committing vehicular manslaughter big time, and I’m performing euthanasia on an epic scale. There really was a fine line between mercy killing and mass murder. And did it count as murder if they came back to life? Dabney could lose sleep over that ethical conundrum later, if he lived that long.
Bumps, thumps, screams, and percussive squelchy crunching sounds were the soundtrack to his trek north, his shallow hood being battered and spattered. As his windshield wipers strained against the profusion of blood and viscera, a stream began to leak through the small aperture. Bodies bounced off the front grille. After fifteen protracted minutes he ran out of wiper fluid and the blood began to congeal, even as it was slicked back and forth. Visibility was nearly nil.
“God dammit,” Dabney keened. “God dammit.”
Tears flowed down his round cheeks. This was wrong. Everything about this was wrong and fucked-up. What was he thinking? He’d left the house to install locks and window gates. Panic was good for sales and of late sales had been slow. He needed the year-end business. He shook his head. How had he let this happen? All kinds of folks-mostly white and willing to pay extra for rapid emergency service-had phoned. He smelled cash. But for what? Greed was a sin, sure, but stupidity should be the eighth deadly sin, because it was going to get him killed.
Traffic ahead actually eased a bit. He could see patches of gray-black asphalt through the havoc. He hit the accelerator and surged forward for a few glorious, optimistic seconds and then WHAM! A westbound Volvo sprang forth from the side street and spun Dabney’s van. His blood-caked windshield imploded, covering him in wet fragments of safety glass. Unseeing and startled, his foot slammed down on the gas and his truck plowed into the front of a building, the engine sputtering and then silent.
With both ears ringing, Dabney wiped the blood, sweat, and tears from his eyes and saw a large confederacy of cannibals coming at his vehicle. The accident had smeared several all over the pavement, but there were so many. More than he’d seen anywhere else. These weren’t cannibals. These things weren’t human. They looked human, but they weren’t. Not any more. Some had been gutted and dismembered but here they came nonetheless, dripping gore and spilled innards. People didn’t do that. The news was right.
These things were dead but still moving around.
And hungry.
He tried starting the engine again. No use. He looked at his crumpled hood and saw steam jetting out. He had moments before the ravenous mass outside reached his van. He clambered out onto the hood and climbed onto his roof.
Over the tinny roar in his ears he heard voices. Though the front of the building he’d crashed into was boarded up, there were people calling out from the windows above.
Hands reached down.
He was saved.
And getting home was no longer an option.
“Hey, where’s Eddie?” Dave asked.
Ellen was flabbergasted. “You don’t know where he is?”
“No. I haven’t seen him today. I can’t believe he missed the rain.”
“That is pretty odd,” Alan said, glad the ape hadn’t been there to ruin it.
“Now I’m worried,” Dave said, looking it. “I knocked on his door on the way up. I just assumed he’d follow and once I got up here I got all jazzed and forgot about him.”
Without dressing, Dave went back into the building and ran down to Eddie’s door, which was unlocked. He stepped into the apartment and called out a couple of times, going from room to room, leaving puddles. Eddie wasn’t there. He then tried his place with the same result. On each landing he pounded doors and called Eddie’s name to no avail. He wasn’t around. The elation from the rain dance burned off quickly as worry set in.
“He’s not in the building,” Dave said as he stepped back onto the roof. The others were all there, except Ruth who’d hobbled back to her apartment in disgust. Abe still sat naked on a low wall, basking in the waning precipitation. After being distracted for a moment by how long and low the old man’s testicles hung, Dave stalked off in search of his comrade, unsurprised that no one offered to help.
Working his way north, the first building Dave tried was the one directly next door. Dave gave the stairwell door a few yanks but it remained locked tight, the norm since they’d thrown together this tattered kibbutz. The next building the stairwell door was unlocked and blackness waited within. Dave poked his head in, reticent to venture into the strange building. Maybe it wasn’t as secure as theirs. Who knew? It all depended on how well the slapdash exterior fortifications had held up and if the former occupants of the building had bolstered them from within. No, if the zombies had gotten in they’d have made their way to the roof by now. In the back of his mind Dave remembered the front door was secure, but that gloom yawned like a hungry mouth. Maybe just Gerri lurked down in the dark. The Wandering Jewess’s absence at the rain party didn’t disturb Dave at all. She was a ghost; what did ghosts need with rain?
“Hello?” Dave called. “Eddie? You there?”
No answer.
“Eddie?” Dave shouted. The sound reverberated off the walls. Dave was in no mood to go spelunking in an unfamiliar building. Not naked. He wondered if he should go back for his clothes. It had stopped raining and like the moisture on his body, his jollity was evaporating. Any dampness now was fresh perspiration. After a few more tries, Dave gave up and moved on to the next building, which was the one he and Eddie had resided in previously. Maybe Eddie had gotten homesick or something. Maybe he needed something they’d left behind. Eddie did periodically make trips over there to mine their old digs for abandoned artifacts. The stairwell door was blocked, as ever, but he pounded on it a few times anyway, to no avail.
Holding the handrail because of the wetness, Dave stepped onto the fire escape and carefully walked down to the top floor. Both windows were closed and locked, gated inside. He went down to the next landing and tried the left window. It had no gate but was locked. The right one was locked and gated. According to Eddie, gates were for pussies. “I’m not paying to live in a cage,” he’d declared. “Faggots wanna live like zoo animals, that’s their problem. I’d like to see some nigger come through our window and try to steal our stuff. I’d Luima the shit out of him. Literally!” Then he’d laugh and glare at their unprotected window as if willing someone to breach it. That was then, of course. With the zombies, everyone kept their gates locked, even though the likelihood of one getting up a fire escape was pretty negligible.
On the next landing the right window was gated, but the left-theirs-slid open, vulnerable as ever. About a year earlier he and Eddie had crouched in silence out here, stifling giggles as Eddie videoed the couple next door doing it. It wasn’t that they were that great looking, but it was still exciting. Eddie would play that tape often; he called it his “hunting trophy.” Dave stepped into the dark apartment. The sky had turned colorless but was bright, so his eyes adjusted quickly.
“Eddie?” Dave called again.
“Don’t come in here,” a husky voice responded.
“Eddie?” Dave ignored the admonition and raced into the apartment, tripping over a pile on the floor. His knees hit the bare floorboards hard and he yelped in pain, then rolled onto his side to massage the injured joints. Both were abraded and wet with blood. He clenched his eyes shut as he rubbed them, stars swimming inside his closed lids. “Ouch, Jesus.”
“I told you not to come in here.” It was Eddie’s voice, but he sounded different.
When Dave opened his eyes he looked directly into another pair, only these looked glassy with indifference. He blinked a few times, then jerked bolt upright and scooted backward away from the unblinking visage.
“Gerri!” he yawped.
Though dim, there was sufficient light to see that Gerri was dead, yet still she clutched the husk of her late Yorkie.
“What happened to Gerri?” Dave whispered.
“I did.”
“Whattaya mean, Eddie? What happened here?” Dave stood up and looked down at Gerri’s body. It was folded in half at the waist and pearly gelatinous spume speckled her rangy bare buttocks. One of her flaplike teats spilled out of her torn housecoat. Her neck was twisted at an unnatural angle and blood leaked from both nostrils and the corner of her mouth. Purple hand-shaped bruises clasped her shoulders. Dave looked up from the cadaver at Eddie, who from the waist down was bare, blood smeared on his hands and across his groin.
“Why don’t you have your pants on, Eddie?”
“You’re one to talk.” Eddie said.
“What did you do, Eddie?” Dave asked. It was a formality. It was obvious what he’d done.
“I was wandering around, y’know, burnin’ off some rage. I decided to visit the old crib, grab some copies of Sports Illustrated-like that one with the chick with the seashells on her boobs-and anyhow, who’s sittin’ on our old couch but the Wandering Jewess. Some rat was bitin’ on her ankle and she’s just sittin’ there, so I stomped the little fucker. See?” He pointed at its furry remains. “So I ask her if she’s okay, right? I tried a little, what was your special word? Tenderness. Anyway, one thing led to another. Listen, with a harpoon of cum built up you don’t think so straight, bro. Pussy is pussy. I needed to get it in there and this bitch was all there was. Zotz is bonin’ the merry widow, D. Doesn’t leave much for the rest of us swingin’ dicks.”
“Was it consensual?”
“Guy does one year prelaw and he thinks he’s Alan Dershowitz.”
“Jesus Christ, Eddie.”
“Hey, least she died with a smile on her face.”
On Gerri’s dead face was a rictus grin nobody in his or her right mind would describe as a smile.
“Oh, Eddie.”
“Hey, hey, hey. Don’t take that tone with me. The Comet needed to get his freak on with some genuine la fica, okay? You jealous? That what this is? You know, fuck this bitch, all right? I put it to her good and she didn’t make a peep. No struggle, nothing. So, yeah, I guess it was consensual. She didn’t complain a bit. Least she could’ve done was moan or something. Shown some appreciation. Like anyone ever paid her any mind. She should be fuckin’ flattered The Comet paid her withered snatch a visit.”
Dave was about to say something when Gerri sat up and let out a noise that shrank his balls-something between a hiss, a growl, and the toilet backing up. Her head jerked on its shattered neck, the jaw opening and closing, tongue lolling. A small amount of blood and bile spurted out and she was up on her feet.
“Fuck, that was quick!” Eddie shouted. “Oh fuck man, fuck!”
Nude or not, Dave knew something had to be done before she got her bearings-fresh ones moved fast. He grabbed an elephant-foot umbrella stand near the doorway and smashed Gerri in the face, snapping her head backwards. The sickening sound of her top vertebrae shattering lurched the meager contents of Dave’s stomach into his mouth, but he tamped it down and swallowed, hammering her back. Even with her head resting against her upper back and hanging upside down she kept uttering foul bestial grunts, blood-thickened saliva oozing down into her flaring nostrils. With her head on the wrong way Gerri groped blindly and Dave pummeled her with the stand, which spilled umbrellas with each blow. How many umbrellas were in the damned thing? Big ones and small ones fell to the floor, which was also now drenched in Gerri’s various leaking fluids.
Finally he drew back the elephant foot and rammed her in the chest, sending her toppling back toward the rear windows. Steering her spastic body wasn’t easy, but after several more strategically aimed blows she crashed through the window and plummeted to the ground in the alley that had claimed Mike Swenson. Dave looked out the window and saw Gerri twitch a few times, then stand and limp off to merge with the other brainless things shuffling around down there. Satisfied she wouldn’t be joining them again, Dave dropped the battering ram and slumped to the floor.
“Wish you’d been that hardcore on the ice, bro,” Eddie said.
“Yeah, thanks for all your help.”
“Hey, The Comet’s impressed, buddy. I’m giving you props. That was awesome.”
“Yeah. Just leave me alone, okay?”
“Fine. Whatever. Just tryin’ to give a compliment is all, bro. No need to get all menstrual and shit. The Comet’s outta here.”
Eddie pulled on his shorts and left through the front door as Dave retched onto the floor, his spew mixing with Gerri’s congealing blood.
The Comet.
The Rapist.
The Murderer.
Dave felt like one of those battered wives on COPS. The ones who kept telling the arresting officers-often through split lips and sporting impressive shiners-how their men were really good men. “He’s a good man, officer! He’s a good father, officer! I love him, officer!” On went the cuffs and these scumbag deadbeat drunken pieces of white trash would get thrown in the backs of the cruisers looking glad for the vacation away from the wife and kids. The patrol car would drift away from the double-wide and poor beaten wifey, with her missing front teeth and eye swollen shut, would bawl at the absence of her man.
Dave knew just how those dopey broads felt.
“God dammit, stop bitin’ on me.”
Two days after the rain the mosquitoes came, spawned in pools of still water. The tenacity of some life-forms was incredible. Dabney refused to leave his spot, but the bites were a stiff price to pay for the hour or so of jubilation. He sat in his lean-to and swatted at the pesky bloodsuckers, swearing under his breath. After a while he couldn’t bear to sit still any more and got up and walked to his perch. Though the sun hadn’t fully set-and when it had the skeeters would really get to their deviltry-it was too dark to see whether the undead were being fed upon, too. The thought made Dabney’s mind race. If fleas and such could spread plague, if bugs bit on the zombies, then bit on a human, could that spread the contagion or whatever it was? Dabney thought about the West Nile virus and how the city had trucks drive around spraying poison through areas beset with mosquitoes. The only result he could recall was lowered birth weights in the areas the insecticide had been deployed.
West Nile was another so-called medical emergency that the local media had blown all out of proportion. Fear was always a powerful ally to keep people tuned in. Look out, West Nile will get you, like it was some kind of microscopic boogeyman. A few old folks got ushered into the afterlife minutes before their time by West Nile, but that was about all. Still it panicked the city and suburbs several seasons in a row.
Malaria.
That was another story. Dabney had done some time working freighters in his youth and had traveled through some places rife with malaria-Haiti, Panama, and bits of Southeast Asia. He’d seen locals, but more frighteningly shipmates come down with it. One by one the crew of his last ship was afflicted. Fever, the shakes, head and muscle aches, tiredness. Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Anemia and jaundice. In the most extreme cases kidney failure, seizures, mental confusion, coma, and death. The skeeters spread malaria around like a whore spreads ass-amongst other things.
Maybe, unlike yellow fever and malaria, zombification wasn’t transmitted through mosquito saliva. Studies had disproved that AIDS could be spread through mosquitoes, so that was of some comfort. It was bad enough to get turned into one of those shambling sacks of meat from getting attacked by one, but to have it happen through a bug bite seemed so wrong. Here’s hoping zombie fever is more like AIDS, Dabney thought.
“Jesus God,” he sighed. “This is what passes for optimism these days.”
Dabney stepped over to his smoker and retrieved a small sliver of whatever-it-was jerky. There wasn’t much left. Dabney hadn’t eaten anything but his homemade charqui and the occasional can of okra or peas in weeks. Wasn’t this that Atkins diet? It was funny how the white folks in the building had donated their okra and black-eyed peas to him, kind of like a canned goods drive consisting purely of donated Purina Nigger Chow-well intentioned, but racist all the same. Why’d they have this stuff in the first place? Martha Stewart or someone on the cooking channel must’ve inspired them to buy these “exotic” ingredients, but then they chickened out when it came to actually eating them. Give ’em to the darkie; they eat anything. Dabney smirked because there was some truth to that. He recalled holiday trips to rural Tennessee, eating his Aunt Zena’s chitlins and bear-liver loaf. That was some crazy shit. Or chitlins with hog maws. Shit, anything with chitlins was pretty fierce, especially drowned in hot sauce. Neck bones, backbones. Black folks had to be resourceful in their cooking; recipes formulated by dirt-poor bastards making do with what the white folks considered garbage.
And now, at the end of the road for humanity, Dabney was chewing on vermin jerky.
The more things change…
“I don’t even know why the fuck you’re worried. Who’s gonna care? And if they did, what would they do, call the cops? Stop sweatin’ it, bro.”
Dave had been freaking ever since the Wandering Jewess met her fate and it was getting on The Comet’s nerves, big time. Granted, her lickety-split resurrection was a tad harrowing, but shit happens, you deal. That was Eddie’s personal philosophy. If pussy wasn’t available, you made do. But if it presented itself, detours were made to be taken, even if they were skanky and gross.
“Seriously, bro, you’re wearing me out with all your pacing around. Relax.”
“I can’t. You killed her, dude. Then I re-killed her. How fucked up is that?”
“No, no, no. That was fuckin’ awesome. You were just like, bam-bam-bam, workin’ her over with that fuckin’ elephant hoof.” Eddie laughed as he conjured the image. “That was awesome!”
“It wasn’t awesome, it was disgusting. It was fuckin’ horrific.”
“Dude, whatever. You wanna be a wet blanket, go ahead on, but don’t harsh my mellow. I thought it was the bomb, bro. For the umpty-millionth time, Dave: no one cares. No one even knows she’s missing. She was a ghost even before I ghosted her. Look, she was barely there, anyway. She was just a creepy shadow lurking in the dark.”
Dave stopped pacing and considered Eddie’s words.
“Listen,” Eddie continued, slapping away a mosquito, “I don’t want you to waste any more time on this. Think of it this way, she died in the service of makin’ your bro feel better, like a skeezed-out dehydrated Laura Nightingale.”
“Florence Nightingale.”
“Whatever. She saved a life. Two lives.”
“How do you figure?”
“I was ready to kill Zotz, so she saved his life, not that that’s that good of a thing, but fuck it, man, she helped me get the lead out and fuck it, it was an accident, anyway. It’s not like I meant to perish her scrawny ass. She just kinda broke is all. Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…”
“I’m made of tougher stuff,” Dave said.
Eddie smiled and slapped Dave on the back. “That’s the boy. It was a ‘tragic’ mishap,” Eddie smirked, framing his face in air-quotes. “Simple as that.”
“Well, that’s the last of it,” Karl said, staring into his empty cupboard. Not a morsel of food was left. In the last week he’d nursed each scrap in his coffers; now all he had to chew on was air. His stomach growled and he punched it hard. “Shut up,” he growled back. The kitchenette swam as his eyes teared up, hard edges wavering in lachrymosity. His knees felt flaccid but he willed himself to stay on his feet for fear if he hit the linoleum he’d never rise again. “This is so weak,” he moaned. Was there anyone he could hit up for nourishment? Even the experts at rationing were down to fumes. The end was closing in, all righty.
He stepped out into the hall and at the top of his lungs shouted, “Tenants meeting! Tenants meeting! All convene in the hall, please! Tenants meeting!”
What could it hurt?
The first to answer the call was Eddie with a curt, “The fuck do you want, runt?” Dave followed Eddie into the hall, hopping as he cinched up a pair of sweatpants. It made Karl think of couples he’d known who’d pick up the phone during sex, then sound annoyed. Why’d they pick up in the first place?
Ruth stepped onto the landing across the hall and blinked at Karl. Though he stood only five foot five-and-a-half, he still towered over Mrs. Fogelhut, the only person in the building significantly smaller than he. It was her only endearing quality. “What’s the hubbub?” she asked in her grating way.
Joining Eddie and Dave on the fourth floor landing were Alan and Ellen, both of whom emerged from her apartment. Eddie had mentioned Ellen had shacked up with the artist. Karl’s mouth drew into a thin jealous slit. Artists always get the chicks, he thought bitterly. Then he mentally kicked himself for such a puerile thought.
“What’s going on?” Ellen asked, looking up at Karl, who clung to the banister for balance. He felt woozy from nerves and hunger, but though he wasn’t a fan of public speaking he was even less an admirer of starvation. “Yeah, what’s up, Karl?” Alan added. The range of expressions varied from concern (Ellen), to puzzlement (Alan), to annoyance (Eddie), to indifference (Dave), and finally incomprehension (Ruth). Abe and Dabney weren’t present, but Karl felt satisfied with the brisk turnout. At least he still had his pipes. He hadn’t planned out his spiel, but he knew he should choose his words carefully. Eloquence might be the only armament in his arsenal. Feeling all the eyes burning into his fragile form he looked down, took a deep breath, and cleared his throat.
“Get the fuck on with it,” Eddie snarled.
“I’m hungry,” Karl peeped.
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Eddie spat. “Like you’re the only one jonesing for chow. Don’t be pullin’ that shit,” he said wagging a threatening finger at Karl. “Next time you call a meeting make it your funeral, you whiny little bitch.”
“Except for the miserable mosquitoes, we’re all hungry, Mr. Stempler,” Ruth echoed, stepping back into her apartment.
Karl hung his head, braced for the final rejections.
“You all out?” Alan said, his face evincing the pained look of a man about to do the decent thing even though he didn’t want to. Karl nodded, shame coloring his bleached-out features. Like an ashen Rod Roddy, Alan waved the little guy over with a halfhearted, “Come on down.”
“Not much left,” Alan said, gesturing at Ellen and his combined provisions. “But what’s ours is yours, right?” Ellen nodded. Karl’s shoulders began to heave up and down as he tried to stifle tears, but failed. He began to keen like a baby, collapsing to the hard kitchen floor with a rickety kerplop. Once a mother, always a mother, Ellen’s maternal instinct kicked in and soon she was cradling Karl’s oversize noggin in her lap, absorbing his plentiful tears with her thin cotton summer dress. Though the touch of another human being, especially a female one, was of some comfort, Karl tasted every flavor of humiliation a person could as he sobbed into Ellen’s flat stomach. Ellen joined Karl, and soon both were wailing. Alan stood there not knowing what to do, flapping his arms at his sides.
“I, uh. I’ll make us something to eat,” he said. “Yeah, uh. That’s what I’ll do.”
As the two entwined figures on the floor filled the air with grief, Alan arranged three small plates of melba toast, turkey jerky, and dried fruit of undetermined classification. All that remained was some uncooked pasta, a few cans of chicken broth, tomato paste, artichoke hearts, a half jar of olives with pimentos, and some stale zwieback from when Ellen’s baby had begun to teethe. That and the water jugs was all there was. Maybe they could stretch it for a week or two, but after that, hello starvation. August was just a couple of days away. Alan wasn’t about to blub like his two companions, but one tear escaped as the absolute hopelessness of their situation sank in. Autumn was his favorite season. Too bad he’d miss it.
Abe finished yet another Dick book, Time Out of Joint, and stuffed it between his scrawny thigh and the armrest of his chair. This one was less tripped-out than Three Stigmata, but still pretty wacky. In it, the main character discovers things aren’t quite as they seem. A soft drink stand replaced by a slip of paper that reads: SOFT DRINK STAND. The mundane tilted on its ear. Things spiral off in a Dickian direction from that moment on. Illusion or whatever, Abe could use a soft drink right about now. Although it was the second day of August and a faltering breeze actually paid intermittent visits, it was still hot as hell and a frosty grape Nehi would sure hit the spot. Did they even make Nehi anymore? The quick answer was that no one made anything any more, but recently. Did they make it as of days, weeks, or months before Armageddon arrived? Just the thought of a sweating twelve-ounce longneck of that carbonated purple nectar put a nostalgic smile on his face.
Abe inched his chair a bit closer to the open window and leaned out, watching the throng.
“I’m sick of this show,” he grumbled. “Don’t they ever show anything but reruns? How’s about another NASCAR smash-up? Do something new, you cabbage-heads! Anything!”
As Abe’s shouting grew louder a handful of the undead lackadaisically raised their heads and looked up. A noseless one moaned as it made eye contact with Abe, but there was no further reaction. Abe snatched the paperback from where it was nestled and hurled it out the window, beaning the one missing its schnoz.
“How ya like them apples?” Abe bellowed, then winced as he realized he’d pitched Zotz’s book. “Ah, shit.” End times or not, Abe figured it was a crappy thing to not return something he’d borrowed. “Ah, fuggit,” Abe mumbled, chuckling at the word. “Here’s to you, Norman,” he said, standing up and unzipping his fly. A deep amber stream of piss scorched its way out as Abe grimaced and pivoted his creaky hips side to side, raining on as many of those undead piles of pus as possible. “Fug all you fugging sons of bitches!” As the last stinging droplet leaked from his urethra, Abe’s eyes went wide, and not from the stinging. Something very odd was unfolding below, and this time it wasn’t some murky nighttime phantasm. This was happening in broad daylight.
From the south a tiny figure cut north through the multitude, parting it as Moses had the Red Sea. As the lone figure moved forward the undead closed ranks behind it, sealing the temporary divide. Was this some machete-wielding maniac on a death trip? If so, how’d he last this long? Body armor? What? Abe squinted and fished his smudgy glasses out of his breast pocket. The figure was a block south, still too small to make out, but even from here it was obvious that no violence was occurring. This individual brandished no weapon. He just seemed to be strolling through the crowd, unmolested. Maybe this was some mirage. It was broiling hot, as per. Abe took off his glasses and wiped them as clean as possible.
The figure made slow progress, but this was happening. This was no delusion.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” Abe shouted. “Hey, up here!”
No reaction.
Abe kept shouting, loud as he could. Still the figure forged ahead, but never looked up. With all his shouting, where was Ruth? Ignoring him, most likely, convinced he was the old man who cried wolf. Fug her. Abe tried hollering a few more times without luck. He tried to move but was petrified by the sheer anomalousness of what was happening. The figure was now half a block south and Abe still couldn’t make out its gender or age. The zombies pulled back from it, some letting out foul noises of displeasure. The figure seemed completely unperturbed, walking placid as a Zen monk.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” Abe shouted again. “Hey, up here! Please!”
As the figure neared their building, Abe could see it was a woman. No. Not a woman, a girl, maybe in her teens. From the fifth floor it was hard to tell, but she was young, that much he could see, and dressed in black even in this heat-a black tank top, at any rate. He could only see her from the waist up, the cabbage-heads blocking his view somewhat. He had to tell the others but as she came fully into focus, Abe’s mouth dried up and stopped working. With Herculean effort, Abe uprooted himself to leave the room. He staggered into the kitchen and took a swig from the water bottle. Mouth lubricated, he ventured into the hall and after a few inaudible croaks managed to yell, “Help! Help! Help! Everyone come quick! Help!”
Once again Eddie was the first to answer the call. Since he’d not been interrupted midthrust, he was only slightly hostile. “What the fuck’s all the noise, old man?”
“There’s a person outside!”
“Another maniac pullin’ a Dale Earnhardt? I woulda heard that.”
“You missed it last time. Anyway, no! A girl. Just a person! No car!”
“Yeah, right.”
Karl stepped onto the landing as Abe repeated his last thought. “What?” Karl stammered. “What person? What’re you talking about?”
Ellen and Alan joined the others, as did Dave. Ruth was a no-show.
“For the love of Mike, come to my apartment, quick! She’s out there! Quick!”
“It’s a woman?” Karl asked, dazed.
“Whattaya mean ‘Mike’? Mike is dead, old man,” Eddie said. “He’s out there walkin’ around? Hey, Matlock, Mike was a heap of bones and gristle last I heard.” Looking over at Ellen, Eddie added an insincere, “No offense.”
“It’s a figure of speech,” Abe shouted. “Anyway, just look out the windows!”
“This is bullshit. Grandpa Munster’s popped his cork.”
“Listen, you pea-brained gorilla, I saw what I saw and if you don’t believe me, fine! Go chase yourself! But everyone else please, please, please come see!”
“If you weren’t so old…,” Eddie began, but all ignored his half uttered half threat and followed Abe into his apartment. When they crowded around the two front windows all was normal, just the usual Undead Sea. Abe poked his head out and looked up and down the avenue. Nothing. Ruth shuffled in and groaned in exasperation.
“It’s bad enough you drag me into your lunacy,” she lamented, “but the others? Leave them alone, Abraham.”
“Did I imagine that car? Was that just some phantom hallucination? No, it wasn’t, was it?” Abe twitched with emotion. He’d seen her! She was there moments ago. “You were all too slow,” he grumbled. “She was there, I swear it! She was there. She must’ve gone inside someplace.”
The others stayed by the windows for a few more minutes, then began to file out of the Fogelhut’s apartment. Alan gave Abe’s shoulder a squeeze and said, “It’s okay, Abe. No harm, no foul.”
“Fuck you, ‘no harm, no foul.’ Don’t you condescend to me. I saw what I saw and if you had any brains you’d help me draw her attention. Maybe she was deaf, because I raised a ruckus and she didn’t even notice. She was cutting through that crowd down there like a shark. It was like a zipper opening and closing, the way they got out of her way then closed ranks after she passed. I’m telling you, it happened.”
“Okay, I believe you.” Alan turned to Ellen, who hovered by the door near a mortified Ruth, and said, “I’ll be down in a few. I just want to give Abe the benefit of the doubt.”
“Again with the patronizing,” Abe groused. “Fine, whatever. Let those putzes do as they will. Show some sense and give your benefit of the doubt.” The last sentiment came out curdled, but Alan didn’t mind. Each manned a window and watched the street. Ruth shuffled back into the bedroom and closed the door, fed up with Abe’s figments. After about fifteen minutes Abe himself began to doubt what he’d seen. He mopped his sweaty brow with a heinously discolored hankie, his features collapsing in sorrow and embarrassment.
“Maybe I am losing my marbles,” he said in a hushed tone.
“Who isn’t?” Alan allowed, hoping it didn’t sound condescending.
Alan stepped away from the window and as if on cue the girl emerged from Food City, a shopping bag in each hand, which she placed on the ground to adjust something in her ears. Headphones! She was wearing headphones!
“There! There!” Abe shrieked, spinning Alan around. Alan’s jaw nearly hit the floor. As the girl stood before the supermarket, the undead backed away, moaning and hissing. They gave a wide berth and she stepped into the street, aimed south. Abe sputtered, “She can’t hear ’cause she’s got one of those Walkman thingies!”
Alan tore out of the apartment and into the hall. He ran down to four and pounded each door, all the while shouting, “Abe’s right! Get down to the second floor, Abe’s right!”
Others rapidly joined Alan in vacant 2A, Abe kvetching, “Sure, him they believe.”
Everyone crowded by the windows screaming at the tops of their lungs as the figure, now patently obviously a young woman, began to head south.
“We can’t let her get away,” Ellen squeaked.
Redoubling their efforts they shrieked raw-throated, over and over, “Help us! Help us! Help us!”
With her back turned away from 1620, the girl stopped and plucked an earbud out, head cocked like a dog hearing an unfamiliar noise. Seizing the moment they upped their clamor, shrieking, “We’re here! We’re here! We’re here!” like a nightmare version of the wee folk in Horton Hears a Who. The girl looked this way and that, but didn’t turn around. As she was about to replace the earbud she turned and saw them. She saw them! With their hearts almost escaping their chests, everyone let out a collective gasp, then began waving their arms in a frenzy. As the girl walked toward the building the zombies all recoiled from her, their noises of reproof stomach turning. The girl moved leisurely, like she didn’t have a care in the world. Now that they’d gotten her attention they watched her approach in silent awe. Without a doubt this was the most extraordinary thing any of them had ever seen. Ever.
When she was right below them, the zombies spread out around her, she the pupil, the exposed street the sclera of the eye she’d opened in the crowd. She looked straight at them and plucked both buds out of her ears. Even through the low din of zombie protestations they could hear the tinny ratta-tat-tat of loud percussive music piping from the tiny speakers of her headphones.
“What’s up?” she asked in the tone of someone just running into an old acquaintance. Her nonchalance turned every person by the windows into one big goose bump, hairs rising on necks and arms, Adam’s apples bobbing in quandary. Maybe Abe’s derangement had affected them all, because no one in this world or the next had ever displayed such placidity, least of all in a circumstance like this.
Not even Jesus.
“We need your help,” Ellen managed, forcing out each word like a fist-sized chunk.
“Uh-huh. Okay.” Big pause. The girl stuck a finger in her ear and jiggled it. “Whattaya want?”
“For starters, we’re starving.”
“Uh-huh.”
And with that she turned around and headed back into Food City, the zombies after a few beats closing the zipper. Everyone stood by the windows, immobilized and mute. On York the scene coalesced into its usual monotonous norm, no breaks in the rotting mob, no sign anything different had ever occurred. Ellen blinked herself out of her stupor and whispered a faint, “Did we just see what we just saw?”