Please don’t leave me here, Lord.
Her shoes crunched through the gravel by the edge of the pond. She imagined herself veering to the side and walking out across the waters, ripples spreading out from her footsteps, and then her soul rising up through the clouds as a grand mistake was corrected. There would be apologies and explanations. Maybe she would discover that this was her penance. She thought of her mother’s rosary beads, the quiet prayer she was always whispering, and maybe Gloria had been damned by her father’s church, by being raised a Protestant. Maybe it was that Carl’s sins in prison were great enough to damn them both.
She shook such thoughts from her head. How many extra days would she suffer in her damnable state for thinking such things? And how many more days for feeling this fear rather than true guilt? And more days heaped on for worrying about that? And that? And so on and forever—
A smell distracted her. It came from the woods, the drift of meat. Gloria’s feet chose to put distance between the rest of her and the water’s edge. She bumped into a low wrought-iron fence once, twice, before finding the gap that led into the deeper woods. There, through the crunching leaves and scattering of squirrels, a group of her kind had formed, a cluster of the damned. They milled about the base of a tree, arms in the air, rotting noses lifted high.
Gloria looked. She saw the dangling shoes. And then the swinging legs. There was a scabbed knee with a dried trickle of delicious red running down a shin. There were arms wrapped around a mother, who was wedged between the great divide of the tree’s largest boughs, fifteen or more feet off the ground. And over the grunts and struggles of the tottering dead rained the whispers of a parent who did not seem to know that those below could still hear, still understand:
“Shhh. It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”
Lies, Gloria thought, joining the others. She stared heavenward. The woman smoothed the young girl’s hair, consoling her. She looked ten or eleven, but starvation took years as well as pounds. The mother peered down, cheeks gaunt, and watched the new arrivals. Gloria felt horrible for these two. Gloria was starving.
The child sobbed. Her feet kicked out of agitation. Or maybe those frail legs had grown so used to running the past weeks that they couldn’t stop moving. While they wheeled the air, Gloria circled the tree, her eyes locked on that limb, the smell of the living intoxicatingly near and impossibly far. Here was the manna of her desire, craving it even as she feared it, causing her to wonder, with the hellishness of all that she’d seen and the ungodly predicament of mother and child, not how the two of them had gotten up on that limb and what would become of them, but what Gloria had done to deserve to be there, to be left wandering in circles on that lowly, cursed, and unholy ground.
12 • Michael Lane
Michael balanced on a flopping leg, a limb like a prosthetic, kicking his unfeeling foot forward as split bone bore down on split bone. He moved slowly in this teetering fashion toward the end of the garbage strewn alley behind his apartment building. A handful of undead just like him shuffled past. There was a smell of the living, the smell of meat, new smells instantly understood. Unless these odors had always been there, and now his locked-in state made him newly sensitive to them. Or perhaps not sensitive to them—maybe he had simply become dead to everything else.
Wavering in the street on his busted legs, the air swirling around him, Michael saw that all of New York now resembled his apartment. There was trash everywhere. Cars lay scattered like some god-child had been playing with them before losing interest, before becoming distracted. Several were wrecked, hoods bent, glass everywhere. It was close to noon, and the buildings stood tall without shadow. The pavement held that mild warmness in the middle of a fall day, that brief respite before the chill set back in with the night.
How long since Michael had been bitten? How long since he’d used? It felt like a week ago that there’d been a banging on the door. It had to be the Chinese food, about two goddamn hours too late. Or maybe the bitch down the hall with the rock she owed him.
It’d been neither. A grotesque monster, some kind of a prank, but a bite on his wrist anyway.
Michael could still hear the slammed door, the slobbering noises and the bangs on the walls.
That thing could smell him. It was after him the way he’d gone after the cat, the way he’d gone after his mother.
Michael’s stomach was at a boil. He felt clammy and cool. There was a stench in the air, a new reek across a city rife with them, and he suspected he contributed to the foulness.
How long since he’d been bitten?
Michael felt his insides shiver from something like withdrawals, but different. Another itch he couldn’t scratch, a new urge wafting on the air along with the smoke from various fires. Several blocks away he could see more monsters like him, like that fucked-up asshole at the door who bit him. They were staggering after one smell, but there was some other scent closer by—
Someone shouted. A person. Someone with lips and a tongue that obeyed the urge to speak.
“Stay!”
Michael wobbled in place. The pain flowed from the broken bones and soothed all his discomforts. Behind him, three men moved from car to car. Wrapped in rags and carrying guns, they looked like terrorists, like those jihad fucks, whatever they were called.
Two guns swung up from behind a yellow cab. The third person moved to another car, trained his gun as well, hissed something, and one of the men moved. They were leapfrogging across the street. Michael could barely smell them. He smelled a hint of something else. Something powerful that he was dead to, so it barely leaked through. He was bad at this, naming flower smells. Those books he had to read in college, always jasmine and honeysuckle and clover and some shit that meant nothing to him. It was one of those smells.
It felt good to move toward the men, to limp at them. The pain in his leg beat the ever-living shit out of the pain in his head. Goddamn, that was something. The pains he’d lived with all his life, and they were pussies to something as simple as balancing on a shattered leg. How about that. People broke legs all the goddamn time. And here he thought his private hell was something special.
The men played leapfrog. Michael tried to keep up. They raised rag-wrapped fists to each other, made hand signals, trained their barrels. They kept an eye on Michael, watching him struggle with his legs, arms jerking for balance, a distant groan dribbling past his lips as he tried to yell at them, to ask them who the fuck they were. Not military, he didn’t think. Just people getting by.
They were almost to the corner of the street, moving slowly and methodically, weeks of practice. One of them worked on a door, the other two watching him. Maybe it’d been Stray they’d yelled earlier, not Stay. Made more sense. They must know Michael couldn’t stay. Couldn’t control shit. He was a loner away from the herd, a straggler, a new arrival to whatever this was, this sickness throughout the city.
One of the men laughed at something, and his neighbor joined in. They were laughing at him, these men in rags. Their barrels shook with humor.
The man by the door hissed at them to shut up, but the others continued to quietly laugh. And Michael saw himself the way he sometimes did when he got high: His mind leapt out of his body and zoomed away until it could peer down at his shell, see his place in the cosmos, see how others might see him, not passed out on the floor or the couch this time, needle still embedded in his arm, dipped in a blue river, just dangling there. Not in the bathroom, throwing up in the shower, on himself, the water having run cold an hour ago. He was in the streets, cars scattered, some shit on fire somewhere, jerking his arms so he didn’t tip over, propped on one busted leg and another that was mangled.