“This is my dear Aysha,” said the guru. “And this is our son.”“He died this afternoon, Rajib.” The woman’s voice, unamplified and thrown upstage, only carried a few rows, but Travis and Laura were close enough to hear. “You can bring him back. You’ve been there. You have the power, I know you do.”“Oh my Aysha,” said the holy man, and the way he said it touched Travis to the heart, “I have no such powers nor would I want them. He is well quit of the world. It were best he did not come back.”
Travis saw a shaving of slush fall from her boot-heel onto the carpet. She swayed forward and laid the dead boy in the guru’s lap. Then she knelt wordlessly, raising her hands in prayer.
Apadravya watched her. A sleeved left arm prevented the boy from twirling senselessly off his lap. He raised his right hand, training his attention on the child as his dead fingers rested on dead eyelids, thumb and pinkie upon the hinges of the boy’s jawbone.
The eyelids eased open. Travis saw that. Glisten of dark pupils, motionless and glazed. Then the swami’s hand cupped to one side of the neck, and at once the small body convulsed violently, the nostrils flared and subsided, the limbs flexed.
He came to as one sick and enfeebled, fixed on the dead eyes of his savior, whined for his mother, who crushed him in an embrace that seemed never ending. Sweep of murmur ran through the crowd.
And that’s when the guru lost it entirely and leaped upon mother and child in a feeding frenzy so swift and so voracious it froze Travis and Laura in their seats even as it parabola’d them in hot freshets of blood.
Apadravya’s dead fingers rested on the boy’s face for what seemed an eternity. Then they came away, relaxed to a curve, as the holy man shook his head.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Laura warmed into her husband’s ear. Not really, he thought. Just weirded out was all she was.
“Me too, hon,” he said, but his eyes were riveted on the woman as she came forward and wept over the boy, still on the guru’s lap. Compassion but not commiseration stood in the holy man’s eyes, a light hand falling on his wife’s shoulder.
Then it happened. At first, Travis thought it might be simple gravity, the turn of the boy’s hand—or a brush past it by Apadravya’s hand. But then it rose and gripped the woman’s arm, and the boy’s face was up and kissing his mother, her shuddering in amazement. And then they turned as, stumbling, she rose out of obscurity: There was blood between them, slick and new, her beige sweater red-icicled about the neck and her neck now below the ruin of her face a clutch-mouthed feast for her son.
The yoga teacher had risen and come forward, thinking clearly to separate them. But as soon as he laid his hand on the boy, it turned from its fallen mother and clung, an activated magnet, to him. Tar baby. He backpedaled. Too late. The bloodmasked dead boy was working its bloody way up the off-white cotton of his thigh.
Famished. An aching gape of hunger. Then, eyes in a scudded night opening. Dark lean-to. She peeled off from it, turning to rise, coat shrugged away and one thick numb gash bandoleered across her bloody front. Woozy thrumble, a catch on tombstone, neither cold nor hot at issue, but a hole into infinitude where her belly used to be. Mounded plots, spear-crunched under boot, slope gradual into black wink-gleam below. She led; she followed. A thing caromed against her, tumbled her groundward, scented her, stumbled on. She rose, followed sirens, lights, and a sear of cars scouring along Côte des Neiges. Down the mountain, down, down. Hunger flared.
Her journey was long.
It happened so fast. He and Laura sat stunned, eyes on the besieged yoga instructor, who fell under the chomp of the dead boy onstage in a bloody heap. They didn’t see his corpse-mother in one motion rise and fall upon the man sitting alone in the front row. His seat wrenched. Laura leaped up and Travis followed her leftward, shoving at the backs of those blocking the way: there was rude and there was necessary. Behind, the gutted yoga instructor rose to follow the toddler to the edge of the stage and over. The swami—one panicked look toward him sitting there with his legs crossed—was undergoing a titanic struggle and it was clear to Travis that his gentler side was losing. A woman screamed in the far aisle, and a high-pitched man shouted, “Keep your hands off mmmmrrrrh—!”
They gained the aisle. Travis glanced behind. The front-row guy was pulling himself up, bloody half-hands on his seatback. Red wattles drooped from one cheek. Jesus, why had they sat so near? The aisle ahead was jammed with panic: people shoved, fallen. To the right, a steel door with a bright red Emergency Exit sign, clogged with clever folks possessed by the same brilliant idea.
“This way,” said Travis, gambling on the side stairs to the stage. He shotgunned up them, reaching back a hand to Laura, pulling her free of the missed grasp of a newly risen ghoul. Ahead, the holy man was uncrossing his legs, a look of terrible conviction flaring upon his face. They veered left, past black hanging curtains, counting on some stage exit. Ropes and pulleys. A sound board. There it was, the way out. They took it. Stumbled down icy stairs into a dim-lit alley, Rue Mackay ahead if he was clear on where they were. They raced past dumpsters, light-pooled doorways, rounding northward out of the alley onto Mackay and straight into a moving crowd of hungry corpses, hands on Laura, hands on him, and then the cold crunch of teeth inevitable, biting deep.
Out the stage door, instinct shot his hand out to his wife.
“What?” she said, frantic. “This way,” said Travis and veered her rightward, down the alley away from Mackay, toward Bishop. Felt safer. Halfway in, past snow-crusted dumpsters, he glimpsed backward a mass of shamblers moving past the far alley-end. “Don’t look back,” he said, panic tight there, and Laura hunched her shoulders and quickened her pace to match his. Broke free of the alley’s grasp, a clear breath on Bishop, then past the Musée des Beaux-Arts and scurrying along Sherbrooke, eyes sharp, past Montagne, one more block to Drummond—crazy as it was, if a taxi had come along, he’d have hailed it—turned north, home plate, their building in sight. A few blocks away, Travis heard a brake-squeal, impact of metal on metal, horns flaring up inside the confused weave of sirens that had followed them home.
A large man was heading south toward them, confusion in his walk. “He’s too close,” Laura said. “Run,” Travis urged, and they did. He was poised to cut them off, blood glistening on his bald head. “Wait!” he shouted, a living man; “back there!” pointing in horror. “Sorry, can’t help you. We’ll call the police,” Travis said, stunned that he and Laura kept walking, diagonaling across the dusted lawn to their apartment door.
They might be dooming the sorry son-of-a-bitch. No matter.
Couldn’t get involved, no need for the inconvenience. Jesus, couldn’t he tell they had their own problems? Anyway, Travis really would call the cops, not that he expected they needed calling.
Closed the sucker out. He turned away from the front door, dismayed. “We should have—” Laura said and he told her he knew. He fumbled his keys, tried the wrong one, it was strange Marcie didn’t come to the door, found it, gave it a turn, heard the click, and felt the knob wrenched out of his grasp from within.
His eyelids eased open. Travis saw that. Glisten of dark pupils, motionless and glazed. It amazed him, a dead toddler—for of that there could be no doubt—assuming the skin tone and motion and sleepy disorientation of a living breathing three-year-old.
Laura gasped beside him. “Let’s get out of here.”
“But why—?”
“I’ll explain outside.” She was already rising. The woman’s face was wet with joy, her arms flung madly around her son.