The starving infected paws at the bodies of dead enforcers. Jumps up and down on one. Looks at me. I don’t move.
I can smell something. I can smell it. Its smell clinging to me. But no, that’s wrong. It’s me I smell. My own dying. Not as potent, but it’s only a matter of time. The smell that comes out of its gullet is in my own now. Rotting inside.
To emphasize the point, the Vyrus pours hot lead down the middle of my bones and sets me shaking. The starving jumps up and down higher, points at me, opens its mouth, and I’d swear it fucking laughs. Delighted to see someone else in pain.
Then the screams and gunfire beyond the door raise in volume as it is pushed open again and I’m no longer the center of attention.
– Joe, ya fooker!
I’m off the floor.
– Hurley, watch out.
Half through the door, struggling to pull it wide enough to fit his massive frame, the starving is on him. And Hurley, not close to starving himself, his smell is all wrong, and he puts up a fight. A sudden obstacle, the starving tries to kill him. I’m crawling up the stairs, watching, unable not to watch. Hurley’s arm reaching through the blur of the starving’s whirling limbs as it tries to rend him. Like a man reaching slow into a barrel of thrashing eels. Until Hurley has its neck, and squeezes, and slams the head against the door that still has him pinned between monsters. The head is dented, crushed, spilling down the door. Its arms and legs still windmill. Hurley jerks it back and forth, harder, harder, and the head comes off and he tosses the body aside and it flops and gets to its feet, runs into a wall, falls down, legs churning the air.
Through the blood congealed on his face and in his eyes, Hurley looks up at me, where I’m almost at the door at the top of the stairs.
– A word wit ya, Joe, when ya got a sec.
He looks back into the shit storm in the basement.
– Terry! Here an now, Terry boy!
The heat has run out of my bones and I’m out the door at the top and making for the main stairwell. More dead enforcers about. A second to spare, I pick up a gun. It feels useless in my hand, but I keep it anyway.
Bottom of the stairs, I look up.
Starvings on the stairs.
Misery trying to die.
Turning their heads to look at me as I come into view.
Down the hall is the front door. A short walk out of madness. More enforcers out there? Probably. Ordered to snatch anyone who comes out of the building? Probably. And so what. Them I might kill with a couple well-placed bullets. Here in the asylum, Hurley is the only safe bet to get out alive. And he’s trying to kill me.
– C’mon, Joe, tis just a little chat I’m looking fer! An Terry would like a word as well I tink!
I push the door closed. Look for something to block it with, but there are no trucks handy that I can park in front of it.
The starving closest to me on the stairs pulls itself onto the banister and scuttles down it a half flight closer.
I take a step toward the front of the building.
Hurley will be up here in a second. I should leave. No one can tell me I shouldn’t be gone from here and taking my shots on the street. Everything is dead here anyway.
Except Amanda. And Chubby’s daughter. And her baby.
Maybe.
I close my eye for one heartbeat. Picture Evie. Telling her I was too late. The kids were dead, them and their baby. I tried but I was too late. I really tried.
I open my eye.
My girl, I’ve lied to her too many times. She knows what it looks like when I pull that shit.
So I start slow up the stairs.
The time I died, I starved to death. Went one step further than these sad pieces of work. Went to the place the Enclave go. Differences. Enclave go there willfully, exercise some kind of discipline, do it in a warehouse of like-minded crazies. All of them holding one another’s hands as they go through it. When I went, I just went. Starved and beat, I tilted, heart stopped, air froze in my lungs, brain blacked. And the Vyrus brought me back. Like a built-in heart shock and a stab of adrenaline between the eyes. These, they’ve been dragged to this stage. Amanda feeding them what she could, until she realized she didn’t have enough to really keep them alive. Until they crossed over in her brain and became more valuable like this than like people. Until the idea of someone being better off dead didn’t make sense to her work.
Long-starved like Enclave, but without the training to cope. Not quite as far gone as I was when I slipped, but just as unhappy to be there. They know they can’t eat me. But that doesn’t mean that killing me wouldn’t make them feel better. Or just make them feel something other than their own bodies eating themselves.
Half-up the first flight, the one squatting on the banister huffs. Tongue stuck out like it’s testing the air for humidity. Or for the taste of blood that isn’t infected.
Coated in a thick layer of sewer sludge, enforcer blood, monster slime and the dead Vyrus stink starting to rise from my pores, I set its teeth to chattering. A high tone in its throat, crying alley cat. It shifts up the banister, staying with me. Not sure what the fuck to do at all. Looking tempted to go at me just to resolve the confusion.
The others above are starting to rock back and forth, one rising and walking down and up the same three steps, flickering. Another, higher up, poking its head over the third-floor landing, keeps slapping its own face. Regular sharp smacks that are like a metronome set against irregular bursts of gunfire fading below me.
The one pacing me pulls up, lifts it face, croaks, shakes its head into a blur, freezes, and huddles into itself, eyes closing, seeming to fall asleep clutching its perch on the banister.
New gunfire breaks out in the basement stairwell behind the closed door, and its eyes open and it looks down and even as the door is opening and Hurley comes through with one arm wrapped around Terry, it has let go of the banister and dropped itself at them. The others suddenly flee, swarming down the stairs, focused on something loud and fast and violent and much warmer than me. Something that at least appears to be food. Something to at least satiate a hunger for hunting.
Hurley’s curses echo up the stairwell behind my running heels, his precise choice of words drowned out by the crack of his.45, punctuated by the occasional meaty whap of a dumdum round mushrooming as it hits flesh, underscored by the chatter of Terry’s AK-47.
I’m not looking down to see who will come out on top. I’m too busy looking at the steps in front of me, trying to find each one at the far end of the tunnel that my eye has retreated into. I’m at a distance to my own body, operating it by remote control, but feeling every thrum of pain that vibrates the string tied to the pain knotted in my forehead.
I’m trying to climb without falling.
I’m trying to remember this pain from years back. Did I feel this then? How long before dying did I feel this? Will I die soon? If I do, will I stay dead this time?
Please, asks a part of me that I instantly disown, please can I stay dead this time?
No, I answer. Evie wouldn’t like that. Or maybe she would. I don’t really know. But if she wants me dead she can tell me herself. If I’m there to hear it, I might just oblige her.
I want to look up and see how many more stairs to the top, but I think I’d fall back down to the bottom where the sound of Hurley and Terry’s guns has stopped. Out of bullets or out of things to shoot at? Not my problem. Stairs are my problem.
Climb.
Climb, motherfucker.
And don’t die.
If you die, it will come and take you away. If you die, the black cold will come and suck you into its heart and you’ll be ice forever. If you die, the Wraith inside will come out and be you.
I don’t believe it’s true, but I fear it all the same.
I don’t want to be a monster. Not for real. I want to know what I do in this world. I want to know who I hurt. I want my dead to have faces I remember. I want to know what I’ve done and the price of it all. I know I’ll never have what I want. I know I’ll never be where I want. I know I’ll never hold who I want to hold. Just that when all doubt is gone and there’s no trick left I can play on myself to make me believe that maybe I’ll get her in the end, I want to remember everything I did along the way, and know that there had to be an accounting. And her saying no is the price.