Groups of walkers passed him by now and then. They all grunted and groaned to some degree, weak sounds of agony from those dragging a broken leg or suffering a gaping wound. It was the accordion squeeze of organs like great bellows, wheezing and rattling as they chased down anyone still clinging and surviving, anyone with meat still worth taking.
A pregnant woman in a tattered green dress had made an especial racket. Her groans rose above the others, a noise among the inhuman sounds that stood out for being… human. Michael had watched her as she passed him by, the back of her dress torn open, her underwear riding up, half of her ass hanging out, skinny everywhere except for that bulge of a belly.
He had lost contact with the woman after a block or so. She had drifted uptown on some scent Michael couldn’t nose, moving faster with her waddling stagger than he could ever hope to on his belly. He had followed a different scent, one that pulled jostling masses down flights of stairs, into a station, nearer to hell with every painful pull and lunge forward.
And it wasn’t his addiction taking him there. He didn’t think any god would punish a man for being happy, for victimless crimes. No, he was on this inexorable crawl into the pits of hell for all the things his addiction made him forsake. It wasn’t eating his mother, the smear of her trailing behind him for blocks and city blocks, leaking out his cuffs in oozing trickles… it was the way he’d cared for her all the years before.
Michael finally understood this as he reached those subway steps and began dragging himself down, another finger popping up to point at the heavens. He finally understood as he slid on his belly and the birds swooped down, as flames rushed down the streets, his torment and fiery hell not eternal at all.
50 • Gloria
The darkness had a smell. It was the wet of rot, of cool air trapped and festering, the odor of mud, of standing water, accumulated waste, and damp fur. Piercing it all was the intoxicating scent of cooked flesh, a zombie perhaps who had fallen on the third rail back when it still had power. An impenetrable cluster of gnashing mouths worked on the remains of this accident in pure desperation. Hunger had driven those who’d stumbled underground to eat what on the surface would be less tempting. Gloria and the rest of the blind and groping column passed these pathetic souls by and followed the sounds of rats.
Their squeaking filled the dark subway tunnel. It reminded Gloria of birthday parties as a kid. It was the chirp of balloons rubbing together, short outbursts from tiny lungs, a jittery stampede beneath this much slower, plodding, and rotting one.
There were so many. Running over her feet, stepping on them, crushing some, them biting back with sharp and fearful teeth. Her blind legs marched forward, oblivious to the pain. Gloria’s head simply remained full of her silent screams, her prayers, other repeated nonsense, loops of songs from a far-gone life, all roaring noiselessly in the hemispheres of her small mind as her feet carried her along.
She could hear the others walking with her, the squish of dozens of feet in the mud and garbage, their wheezing and rattling, their miserable pleas. This grotesque and invisible mass trudged downward into the darkness. Water dripped from overhead, occasionally striking her scalp. Every nerve was heightened by the pitch black. There were splashes ahead that warned her of the flood, and the scents that drew them in began to grow weak.
Gloria bumped into those who circled back. The gathering seemed to mix aimlessly in the darkness, trapped by the eddy of odors. She was one of the few who followed a slender tendril onward, into the flooded tunnel that sloped down and down.
Her feet hit the water, ankles covered, then her calves, knees, thighs—and still her dumb body forged ahead, following a scent and then just the memory of a scent. Rats swam alongside, their tiny claws pawing at her, scampering up her back and around her neck, riding her shoulders, little teeth sampling her rotting flesh.
Deeper. Splashes in the darkness as others waded in different directions. All confused, now. Just moving in order to move. A tunnel sloping ever downward, no train station in what felt like forever, and Gloria knew what part of the line she was on. This was the way. Forward, forward, she urged the man at the tiller. Go.
The water was freezing. It numbed all her hurts, soothed the craziness spreading in her brain. Even that organ would rot, she had discovered. It would go last, some part of this disease, some obsession that forsook everything but the memory of a life lived, gave up the body to save the ghost. But it was going, too. Memories and dreams fading, thoughts coming out of sequence. She was stuck in that morning haze where the nonsensical made sense for but a moment, just awake enough to realize things weren’t clear.
Her shoulders sank beneath the waters. Rats clung to her face and tangled in her hair, little feet tearing at her lips and scratching on her teeth, higher and higher up their sinking raft, until she was fully under and they paddled away.
Gloria came up a while later with the slope. Below the East River, she suspected. The Blue Line was flooding. Or flooded on purpose. She rarely came this way. This was the train to Brooklyn and beyond. This was the tunnel that cut beneath the earth and popped up on the other side. The rats squealed with delight as they returned to dry land. They chased between her ruined feet and scampered over the dead tracks and the wet garbage. Foul water leaked out of Gloria’s mouth, out of the hole in her cheek, and she didn’t care. She was in the morning shower, nothing about the world yet making sense, not quite awake yet, not quite dead.
There was a soft breeze ahead. Rising. She bumped shoulders with another, a reminder that there were people in these bodies just like her. The darkness faded as distant daylight scattered down the tunnel. Black became gray became the barest of hoary gold. The smell of the living carried on the sinking air. Rats twittered, agitated, and ran forward, an army of scouts, the presages of death and plague, the scavengers of rot and ruin.
Gloria was one of the horde to make it through. Bumping and jostling. They scampered over a wall of rubble, hands and knees, sharp rock, the roof of the tunnel bumping their heads, forcing them on their bellies, crawling and pulling toward the smell—and then an arc of bright light growing, approaching, until she could see the lurching bodies ahead of her, could make out familiar forms, soaked and rat-nicked and still moving.
The sunlight hit Gloria’s skin as she emerged on the elevated platform, and it felt good. It would feel good until the smell of baking, decayed flesh returned. It would feel good until it didn’t.
There was a train standing dead on the tracks ahead, stopped at a station. Nobody moving. An elevated rail a few stories above the rooftops. Gloria shuffled toward the train and the station, the smell of a place where people had lived rising up from the streets, driving her forward. Behind her, there was the rumble of jets, the silent whistle of swooping birds, the rise of new and strange suns to the west where suns should not rise at all, and a wound cauterized, but much too late. A wound sealed shut like a cancerous tumor, but not before it had spread to the liver, deep to the marrow, working its way at the very last to the most necessary organ of them all—
But that was for others to say. Gloria smiled. She staggered away from the city that held her dreams and contained her past, a hole in her cheek the size of an apple.
About the Author
Ten years after that horrible day, I returned with my wife to the very spot where I stood as the second plane hit. My heart goes out to all across the globe who were affected by the events of that day. When I fly over New York now, I still see a gaping wound. I see her missing teeth. But she seems to be stitching together much as we do. This book is about her and my love for a one-time home.