Chiang wondered how long this would last, how long before everyone died for good. She ran that last day over and over in her head. School had been cancelled suddenly, parents arriving for their children, people running in the streets. Only, they hadn’t been screaming. That scared her the most, the wide eyes and slack jaws of the adults hurrying away with their children in their arms. In the movies, they were always screaming as loudly as they could while a Chinese version of Godzilla crushed buildings beneath its scaly feet. Instead, there had been silence, which was unnerving because it wasn’t right. The people simply scattered, legs hurrying, no time for screams at all.
Or maybe they didn’t want to draw attention. The sick were already in the streets. It was difficult to see them, for they moved slowly. They didn’t stand out. Not until you bumped into them, looking for your parents, fighting the crowds to get home, when a kind stranger takes your hand, bends down to see if you need help, and bites off your fingers.
Chiang made another lap of the shop. She had never been so hungry before. Even waiting until the last customer was served before her mother made something in the back had never been this bad. Nothing had. She’d lost count of the days spent circling the shop, but it had been three since she’d had anything to eat. Three days with the hunger driving her mad, the feeling of her insides turning out.
A newspaper fluttered by outside and pressed itself to the glass. It was like a tourist, peeping in. Headlines from those last days were spread across its face—news of an outbreak entirely under control. Until it wasn’t. Chiang wondered what was happening in China. She thought of her school teacher and all her friends and wondered what had happened to them. As the people passed, she looked for anyone she knew, but they were all tourists.
The newspaper flapped away on the breeze. Where it had pressed, Chinese characters painted with a young and unsure hand could be seen against the fading backlight of another counted day. The characters were supposed to say:
Outside, it would have read this way. To the tourists, of course, it meant nothing. Just part of the backdrop that lent Chinatown its authenticity. For locals, however, it promised something: healthy ingredients and traditional medicines. Eternal life.
Chiang had laughed when she’d first seen it from the inside. After she had drawn it for the third time, washing off each attempt with a bucket of water and a rag as she attempted to satisfy her mother’s exacting standards, she saw what it meant in reverse. From the inside, the brush strokes were backwards. It looked more like:
A stranger life. Life as a stranger. A girl growing up in a home away from home, people she didn’t know peering through the glass, taking pictures of and pointing at the delicacies hanging in the window. It was funny how that worked out. Like the characters knew all along that this was coming. A secret only they were privy to.
Chiang laughed in her mind. It was the only place she could laugh or cry anymore. She wanted out. She wanted to run, to skip and shout and scream, but knotted chains hung from the doors of the little shop. Her parents had locked her inside with them, had locked away their one precious girl while she grew sicker and sicker, and they worried more and more.
The sun slanted through the window, casting shadows of words in reverse, and little motes of dust dipped and swirled like fairies with a life of their own. There were two chairs of ornate wood tipped on their sides, catching the sun. The flesh up past the knees might sate Chiang’s painful hunger, but she could circle and circle and wave her arms and never reach any more. She had eaten all that she could. She was powerfully hungry and all alone, and meat hung in the window of her parents’ shop.
20 • Dennis Newland
“It’s the end of the fucking world,” Matt had told Dennis, holding out a smoking roach, the day before they’d made a run at the grocery store, the day before Dennis had been bit.
They were still in that office building where they’d been rationing candy bars. They’d just killed a group of survivors eerily similar to their own foursome, another pair of couples thrown together by the nightmare of the world. This other group had been surviving noisily one floor above, carrying on, acting like maniacs. After a long discussion about whether to bring trouble or wait for it to come to them, Dennis and Matt had opted for the latter. They convinced Lisa and Sarah that it was best, that this other group would bring death upon them all. And so they rehearsed and checked their gear and went on the offensive for the very first time.
“It’s like that episode of Seinfeld,” Sarah had joked, sizing up the two young couples they’d murdered in their sleep. She thought they looked like them. It took some explaining before any of the rest of them got the joke. Sarah was the only one who watched old sitcoms. And besides: nothing much was funny after you’d shot a living person, not while you were digging through their pockets and the bodies were still warm.
Matt was the one who’d discovered the stash. Later that night, he’d held out that roach, the ember fading, telling Dennis to take a hit, that it’d be good for him, that it was the end of the fucking world and to stop being such a pussy.
Dennis had passed. He always did. He mumbled something about asthma, his old and entirely made-up excuse to not smoke. Matt had shrugged and had given life to that ember with a noisy intake of air.
Dennis had no problem lying to friends. He was used to keeping secrets, was skilled at keeping things from others. The sticky wound beneath his sleeve was just the latest. Later that night, while their cubicle fortress filled with smoke, Dennis had found an empty cubicle down the endless row. He had shuffled through the scattered supplies and loose paper like snowdrifts from some weeks-old panic and made himself comfortable in quiet solitude.
He didn’t know how to explain to his new friends what getting stoned felt like to him. Hell, he’d been with Lisa for years and had never even told her. He was pretty sure it was a singular reaction, that everyone else must feel something different, but to him getting stoned was a scary place, not a soothing one.
The first time he’d smoked up, he was convinced he would die. The high had lasted for hours, for most of the damn day. He remembered standing in Lisa’s kitchen, the cabinet open, hand on the knob, looking at an assortment of glasses. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. Must’ve teleported from the living room. The TV and the laughter from his friends were faraway sounds. He was disconnected from everything.
Later, sitting under a cold shower, praying impatiently for the numbness that had crawled into his veins to crawl the fuck back out, he had watched the hair on his legs wave as the water rained down from the faucet. The hair stirred like the seaweed at the breaker’s edge on Far Rockaway, like small arms pushing out of his skin and trying to get his attention, trying to wiggle free. A million dead things buried alive and working to escape their epidermal graves.
Dennis had become terrified that he would always be like that. The pot had permanently dumbed him. Hours later, lying perfectly still on the bathroom floor, his thoughts had begun to clear. He could analyze what had gone wrong. But summoning his thoughts seemed to make his flesh melt away, his body go perfectly numb. And if he tried to move, the opposite happened. He could feel again, but now he couldn’t think.