Startled upward. Broke the kiss: “It looks like the Angel is about to fall on us,” she said.
Her boyfriend laughed. “Yes, and you make the earth move for me.” But the statue’s head jostled against wisps of cloud on black sky, and sharp screech of bronze protest on stone mixed with its swift stiff pivot and fall, a sick blast of cold on Huguette’s face as the huge dark head fell with a meaty thud upon Louis-Phillipe’s back. She heard a crack of bone, felt him press against her as if urged into the earth by a slab-hand. He swore from the pain, crying, a scared child. The square of the angel’s base had stayed on its pedestal as though hinged on one side. A dark form wangled out from behind the squarish base, seemingly loath to show itself. Mute, muscular, all shadow as if a shamed retard. Had the dumb thing pushed the statue? But that’d have taken ten strong men. “Help us,” she said, “please.”
The shadow-head turned as if alerted to something. A crack like an icicle separating from an eave; then another more distant, then a series closer in, invisible houses in every direction letting ice crack and fall but never land. A vision came to her, pinned there: the sprung latches of meat lockers opening in the earth.
Then the stench came on, writhing in ravels along the snow, twisted lanyards of decay and rot. Two more bobbing heads joined their shy tormentor-savior, moved past him, a draw for him to follow; and then the moon lit them so that if Louis-Phillipe’s crushing weight had not prevented her, she would have screamed. One found his left arm and arced it upward slowly so that Louis-Phillipe’s coat wrinkled in elephant shift and his arm snapped free of its ball joint, skin tearing like an uncooked turkey leg but with blood in his cries; while it was still partway attached, the thing sank its teeth into his hand.
Another knelt, grabbing her boyfriend’s long hair so that his anguished face came away from her breast. The thing peered close at her, then the head craned to peer at Louis-Phillipe, and slowly it came in to sink a kiss deep into his cheek, tearing away flesh and beard like the marshmallow batting on a Sno-Ball; but what was exposed was not dark cake, but something wet and red, tongue fluttering in a shuddering mouth. Blood fell steaming on her, then cooled, chilling.
Sirens rose in the distance.
The two turned at the sound, mouths closed upon meat.
Huguette could almost see the wheels turning: memory, the walking trove, a surround of life. They haltingly joined others, dark nightmarish shapes of stench staggering down the slope.
Louis-Phillipe breathed his last. She tried to tug free, worried they might return or that other new-hatched monstrosities would pause to feed on her, but all her attempts came to nothing but pointless exertion. The winter air touched her, touched her, kept touching her.
“You have heard, perhaps, that I died, that by some miracle of resurrection I was restored to life.”
My God, thought Travis, he’s going to say it. It was one thing to see him up this close, a veneer of shockingly beautiful holiness animating his corpse as it maintained a mindful hold over a dynamo of mindless need behind; it was quite another to hear the man confess it aloud.
“I did not resurrect,” Apadravya said, slight headbob like a dummy on a stick, eyes in useless blink. “Nor have I been restored to life.” Laura’s grip tightened and some tight fear let escape a far faint air-brake from her lips. “Those of you who have touched me understand. Those whose eyes are brought close know what I am: I died. I was put in the ground. I came out of the ground. I remain dead.”
Anyone else had said such a thing, a ripple of laughs would have swept the hall. Instead, a brief murmur fanned the air, punched the gut of elation and left it foundering in dismay.
Swami Apadravya did not lie—it had been alien to him in life; it was so now. Hackles stood at the back of Travis’s neck, a feeling both harrowing and fulfilling.
“I am the first of many,” he told them. “Others will come, and soon—others mired in samsara during their lives who will therefore be subject to unthinking appetites when they return. This eventuality cannot be prepared for, and yet you must prepare. Many in this room will be turned by them and will turn others. That is why I begin satsang in my beloved Montreal and carry it throughout this continent and beyond if I am able. It has not been given to me, the knowledge of when this upheaval will begin; but it will be soon, and I am here to witness and warn.”
Travis was filled with dread. He’d seen a news photo once that had brought a similar horror: the close-up shot of a man’s face, the caption saying that so-and-so watched helpless as his family and all his worldly goods burned up in the trapped inferno of his home. Travis flashed on his parents down in Florida, his brothers in Colorado and New York, Laura and Jenny and Marcie. What if it was starting right now? What if the streets were teeming right now, an army of corpses with the same thick hunger (but unchecked) he read now in Apadravya’s eyes, pushing their way through his door, attacking Marcie and the baby?
Marcie reared back at the pungency of the stench, an oh-no sounding in her head: too close in the room, window shut tight, space heater roaring, and the sting of ammonia wrinkling the air. Flooding the room with light, she rushed to the baby.
No movement. No blinkback of brightness. Just stillness and a bloody froth coming from Jenny’s nostrils and mouth.
Panic rising, Marcie scooped up the lifeless child, sog to the sleepsuit, and hurried her to the changing table. A box of tissues, whip-whip-whip, three in her hand, wiping the froth away, gentle but quick. Then her mouth went to the baby’s nose and mouth, grasping at vague CPR memories. A sour taste there. Think! What was different about CPR on an infant.
You could blow out their lungs if you tried too hard. But how much was hard enough? Dead hand lay on baby Jenny’s chest, its tiny fingernails tinged with blue. “Come on, come on,” she pleaded, then back into mouth-to-mouth, preventing herself the luxury of sobbing, damage to the brain with each moment it missed oxygen, fingering the tiny cold palm.
Then came an abrupt clamp on her fingers. And before she could straighten to assess, the baby-head jerked up to her departing mouth and sank sudden ferret teeth deep into her lower lip, vicious and wild. The eyes were pooled and open and dead, but the teeth chewed and stung and the hand squeezed her fingers in a deathgrip and wouldn’t be shaken loose. Her lip felt as if it had been snagged in a sewing machine gone out of control.
Behind her, a tremendous startle of shattering glass as she turned herself and her nemesis about to feel grave-stench and winter chill and to see (double disbelief, was she half-mad already and had she now gone completely over the edge?) what lurching horrors had ushered them in.
Marcie snapped on the overhead light and ran to the bassinet, an oh-no heating her thoughts as surely as the space heater was overheating the room. She’d read about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome a few years back, realizing now, with a why-didn’t-I-see-it rising inside, how prime a candidate lit le Jenny had been.
Blinking back the brightness. Listless, sopping, but okay.
Lifting her free of the miasma of ammonia, carrying her to the changing table, Marcie comforted, “There there, little Jenny. We’ll get you out of these wet things, give you warm dry diapers, open the window a tiny bit, I don’t care what crap your mommy gives me for it, you and me, we know what’s best for baby, don’t we?” The sleepsuit felt like an unwrung washcloth. She draped it over the wicker basket for non-stinky refuse, noting it would need a rinse in the kitchen sink when she was done here. Ruffle-soaked plastic pants joined them. Then the diaper, a damp runway of streaked brown as she unpinned and hourglassed it open: free it came, and she diaper-wiped the baby’s bottom until it was clean enough for tickle cream; then a fresh new one efficiently pinned, and a t-shirt, and the green oversized sleepsuit, a lecture at once serious and funny bubbling in her head to deliver when Travis and Laura came home.