Since we forget everything in the end, I’m only guessing that they talk about killing her. They’re spurring each other on to vengeance. They speak of honor, respect, principles, the right thing. Then they start the car and drive off. At no point do the soldiers show any sign of having noticed them, as if this ghostly street were a busy thoroughfare.
In the following scene Julie and young Reynolds are walking over a bridge. Where can we find a taxi? the boy wonders. Julie announces that she can’t walk any further. On the other side of the bridge is a phone booth. Wait for me here, says young Reynolds, and runs off toward the booth, only to find that there’s no phonebook and that the receiver has been ripped out. Looking back, he sees that Julie has climbed onto the balustrade of the bridge. He shouts, Julie, don’t! and starts running. But Julie jumps and her body disappears into the water, although it soon floats to the surface and is swept away by the current, face down. The colonel’s son goes down a stairway to the river. The water is very shallow: a foot, three feet at the deepest. The river has man-made banks and even the bed has been paved. A homeless black man, hidden among some concrete pillars down the river, is watching young Reynolds. The boy’s search brings him near this man, who tells him to give up, the girl is dead. No, says the colonel’s son, no, and goes on searching, closely followed by the black guy.
When young Reynolds finds her, the girl is floating in a pool. Julie, Julie, calls her young lover, and the girl, who has been face down in the water for who knows how many minutes, coughs and calls his name. All my fucking life I’ve never seen anything like that, says the black guy.
Just then, the Mexicans appear (the verb to appear will appear often in this story), fifty yards away. They’ve gotten out of their car and are looking on; one is sitting on the hood, another leaning against a fender, and the girl is up on the roof; only the wounded guy is still inside, watching or trying to watch them through the window. The Mexicans make menacing gestures and threaten them with a litany of punishments, tortures and humiliations. This is getting nasty, says the black guy. Follow me. They enter the city’s system of sewers. The Mexicans follow them. But the labyrinth of tunnels is sufficiently complicated for the black guy and the young couple to lose their pursuers. Finally they reach a refuge that’s almost as welcoming as a nightclub. This is my place, says the black guy. Then he tells them the story of his life. The jobs he’s had to do. The constant presence of the police. The hardbitten life of a North American working man in the twentieth or twenty-first century. My muscles couldn’t take any more, says the black guy.
His place isn’t bad. He has a bed, where they lay Julie down, and books, which, so he says, he’s picked up over the years in the sewers. Self-help books and books about the revolution and books on technical subjects, like how to repair a lawn mower. There’s also a kind of bathroom, with a primitive shower. This water’s always clean, says the black guy. A stream of crystal-clear water falls continually from a hole in the ceiling. We all build our places with whatever we can find, he explains. Then he picks up an iron bar and says that they can rest; he’ll go out and keep watch.
It’s always night in the sewers, but that night, the last night of peace, is particularly strange. The boy falls asleep in a shabby armchair after making love with Julie. The black guy falls asleep too, mumbling incomprehensibly. The girl is the only one who doesn’t feel sleepy, and she goes into other rooms, because her appetite has begun to rage again. But with a difference: now Julie knows that self-inflicted pain can be a substitute for food. So we see her sticking needles in her face and piercing her nipples with wires.
At this point the Mexicans reappear and easily overpower first the black guy, then the son of Colonel Reynolds. They look for the girl. They shout threats. If she doesn’t come out of her hiding place, they’ll kill the black guy and her boyfriend. Then a door opens and Julie appears. She has changed a lot. She has become the indisputable queen of piercing. The leader of the Mexicans (the biggest guy) finds her attractive. The sick Mexican is lying on the ground, begging them to take him to a hospital. The Mexican girl is comforting him, but her eyes are fixed on the new Julie. The other Mexican is holding the colonel’s son, who is screaming like a man possessed; the possibility (or the strong probability) that Julie will be raped is more than he can bear. The black guy is lying unconscious on the ground.
Julie and the Mexican go into in a room and shut the door. No, Julie, no, no, no, sobs young Reynolds. The Mexican’s voice can be heard through the door: That’s it, baby. C’mon, let’s get that off. Holy shit! You really do like those hooks, don’t you? Kneel down baby, yeah, that’s it, that’s it. Lift up your ass, perfect, oh yeah. And more stuff like that until suddenly he starts yelling, and there are blows, as if someone was getting kicked, or thrown against a wall, then picked up and thrown against the opposite wall, and then the yelling stops and there’s only the sound of biting and chewing, until the door opens and Julie appears again with her lips (and in fact the whole of her face) smeared with blood, holding the Mexican’s head in one hand.
Which makes the other Mexican go crazy; he pulls out a pistol, goes up to Julie and empties it into her, but of course the bullets don’t harm her at all, and she laughs contentedly before grabbing the guy’s shirt, pulling him toward her and tearing his throat open with a single bite. Young Reynolds and the black guy, who has recovered consciousness, are gaping at the scene. The Mexican girl, however, has the presence of mind to try to escape, but Julie catches her as she’s climbing a metal stairway that leads to the mouth of the upper sewer. The girl kicks and curses furiously, but then, yielding to Julie’s greater strength, she lets go and falls. Don’t do it, Julie, the colonel’s son has just enough time to say, before his sweetheart’s teeth destroy the face of the Mexican girl. Then Julie extracts her victim’s heart and eats it.
At this point, a voice says: So you think you’ve won, you whore. Julie turns around and what we see is the last Mexican, now fully transformed into a zombie. The two of them begin to fight. Julie is helped by the black guy and her boyfriend and for a few seconds it looks like she’s going to win. But Julie’s victims pick themselves up and join in the fight, and zombies, it seems, are ten times stronger than normal humans, which means that the fight inevitably begins to go the Mexicans’ way. So our three heroes flee. The black guy takes them to a room. They barricade the door. The black guy tells them to go; he’ll try, God knows how, to stop the zombies. Julie and young Reynolds don’t have to be told twice, and go off to another room. At one point in their flight, Julie looks her boyfriend in the eye and asks him, just with her gaze or maybe with words, I can’t remember now, how he can still love her. Young Reynolds replies by kissing her on the cheek, then he wipes his lips and kisses her on the mouth. I love you, he says, I love you more than ever.
Then they hear a yell and they know that the black guy is gone. There’s no way out of the room where they’ve taken refuge; it’s full of old furniture piled up chaotically, but with passages between; it’s like a labyrinth of the transient, of things without the will to last. I have to leave you, says Julie. Young Reynolds doesn’t know what she means. Only when Julie uses her extraordinary strength to throw him under some armchairs and broken-down washing machines and faulty or obsolete television sets does he understand that the girl is prepared to sacrifice herself for him. He hardly has time to react. Julie goes out and fights and loses and the Mexican zombies are coming for him. With tears streaming down his face, young Reynolds tries to make himself invisible, curling up into a ball of flesh under the pile of junk.