The man under the cloth is a certified giant. At least six foot five, probably two hundred-fifty pounds of the kind of hard bulk that looks like fat until you see it flex. He is bald except for some light stubble on the sides of his head, which expands into a beard surrounding big, soft lips. But what Nora notices most is the gaping hole in his stomach, slowly saturating his white t-shirt. It appears to be a gunshot wound, but it has been sliced open with two crude, crisscrossing incisions. A steak knife lies on the floor next to him, as well as two bloody dinner forks. Someone was trying to perform surgery using dinnerware for a scalpel and clamps.
“Hey,” she says. “What happened? Who shot you?”
The man’s pale blue eyes fixate on her, dilating unsteadily. He opens his mouth, but all that comes out is a croak. He makes a vague waving motion and closes his eyes as if to say, Doesn’t matter.
Nora lowers her voice. “Are they still here?”
He faintly shakes his head, eyes still closed.
“Who tried to take the bullet out? Is someone else with you?”
His eyes open. His hand moves like he’s trying to point somewhere, but he can’t summon the strength. He moves his lips on his next exhalation, and Nora hears the outline of a word, perhaps a name, but it’s too faint. A ghost. He closes his eyes again. Tears glint in the corners.
Nora feels her stomach clenching. She stares at the hole in his belly, its ragged edges and dark center, a well of blood leading down into his inner depths. A wave of nausea sweeps through her; drops of perspiration pop out on her forehead.
“Listen,” she says, “I’m not…I don’t know how to…” She gingerly touches the edge of the wound. The sliced flaps of skin spread apart and she shudders. “I don’t know what to do.”
The man’s head moves slightly. Nora would like to think it’s a nod. That he understands. His eyes roll into his head, then return to hers, still dilating. He is drenched in sweat.
Nora glances back at Addis. He is standing in the doorway, wringing his hands in front of his crotch and biting his lip.
He wasn’t wrong. They did the right thing. But they shouldn’t have.
She touches the man’s fiery forehead. “I’m sorry.”
He holds her gaze for a moment longer, then closes his eyes. A long, slow breath comes out of him and doesn’t come back.
Nora stands up. “Addis, wait outside for a sec. I need to do something.”
“Is he dead?”
“Yeah. Wait outside.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to do something.”
Addis looks at the hatchet clenched in her hand. His lips tremble a little and he backs out of the room.
Nora stands over the man, staring at his shiny bald head. She has never done this before. Her mind moves ahead to the sensations that will vibrate up her arms through the hatchet when it cracks the skull and sinks into the dense, rubbery tissues inside. She raises the hatchet. She shuts her eyes. The toilet stall behind her creaks open and something groans and Nora screams and runs. She doesn’t turn around to see what’s there, she just runs. She grabs her brother’s hand and drags him down the hall at a full sprint. Standing in the elevator pounding the “door close” button, she sees movement reflected in the restaurant’s windows and hears a ragged howl, low and guttural but distinctl Sbutves y female. Then the doors slide shut, and they descend.
• • •
Addis is crying. Nora can’t believe he still cries so easily after all the things they’ve been through. He cried when his mother dragged them out of bed and hid them in the bathroom while their father killed a looter with a crowbar. He cried when their apartment and the rest of Little Ethiopia went up in flames, his snot smearing against the window of the family Geo. He cried all the way from D.C. to Louisiana and then again when he saw New Orleans, yelling at his mother that the Bible said God would never again destroy the earth with a flood. He cried when his father said God is a liar.
Crying. Expelling grief from the body in the form of saltwater. What’s its purpose? How did it evolve, and why are humans the only creatures on Earth that do it? Nora wonders how many years it takes to dry up that messy urge.
“It’s okay, Addy,” she says as the elevator settles on the ground floor. “We’re okay.”
His sniffles don’t completely subside until the Space Needle is hidden behind buildings far in the distance.
“What was that?” he finally asks as they trek north on Highway 99, the first words out of his mouth in thirty minutes.
“Guess,” she says.
He doesn’t.
They cross the Aurora Bridge just as the sun disappears behind the western mountains. Nora stops, although she knows she shouldn’t. They are standing on a narrow sidewalk hundreds of feet above what was once a busy waterway, now a graveyard for sunken and sinking boats, million-dollar yachts floating on their sides, palaces for king crabs.
“Where are we going?” Addis asks.
“I’m not sure.”
He pauses to think about this. “How far are we gonna have to walk?”
“I don’t know. Probably a million miles.”
He sags against the railing. “Can we go find somewhere to sleep? I’m really tired.”
Nora watches the last red glow of the sunset glitter on the water. Just before the sky goes completely dark, she catches movement out of the corner of her eye and glances back the way they came. On the edge of the hill, just before the bridge leaps out over the chasm, she sees a silhouette. A big silhouette of a big man, standing in the street and swaying slightly.
“Yeah,” she mumbles. “Let’s go.”
The cloud of hands has grown so large and strong it has begun to feel like an extra sense. Some warped hybrid of sight and smell and intuition. The tall man feels it reaching through the forest, its wispy fingers brushing through ferns and poking under rocks, seeking whatever it seeks. He struggles to ignore its constant moaning, which has begun to form words but is still too simple to be understood.
Get. Take. Fill.
He tries to distract himself by remembering more things. What is your name? Nothing. How old are you? Nothing. He hesitates before his next question. Who was the woman by the river? Something surges up from his core, a surprise heave of emotional vomit, but he gags it back down. Her name was—the weight in your hand, the trigger—
GUNS CAN KILL YOU! YOUR BRAIN I Vbutvee wS IMPORTANT! DO NOT GET SHOT IN THE HEAD!
He is deeply relieved when this second voice interrupts. Its simple information is much easier to process than that terrifying eruption of feeling.
What you did—all the people you—
FIND OTHER THINGS LIKE YOU! THEY CAN HELP YOU GET THINGS YOU WANT!
And so a strange bartering session begins in his mind. He gives up the grief he felt upon seeing the woman and remembers what guns do and that he should avoid people who have them. He hands over the aching desire to see his mother again and receives the knowledge that he will be safer if he can find a group to join. It seems a very fair bargain.
A jolt ripples through the cloud of hands and his eyes snap open wide. His new sense has found something. The hands have reached very far, perhaps miles, and touched something that arouses them. They stretch off into the darkness of the woods, sending pulses of excitement back to him like morse code.
Come. Follow. Take.
He obeys.
His muscles, which begin to cool and stiffen any time he stands still, become supple again with whatever unknown energy drives them, and he walks at a brisk pace. The forest grows darker as he nears its heart. He glimpses strange things from the corner of his eyes: crystalline frogs and birds that glow, doors in the dirt and cyclones of bones, but he doesn’t stop to wonder at these things. He has traded wonder for hunger. He follows the brute.
The sun sets faster than it used to. Nora is almost sure of this. It plummets like a glob of wax in a lava lamp, so rapidly she swears she can trace its motion, and she wonders if the eart
h has sped up. If perhaps somehow, all the bombs pummeling its crust have actually increased its spin. A ridiculous thought, but she still raises her walking pace. It’s unfair to Addis’s little legs, but he doesn’t complain. He maintains a half-run to keep up.
“Why don’t we find a car?” he pants.
“Dad never showed me how to hotwire.”
“What if somebody left their keys?”
“Those ones are probably all gone by now. But keep an eye out.”
Addis abruptly stops and turns around. “What was that?”
Nora didn’t actually hear it, so she feels okay saying, “Nothing. Probably boats knocking against each other. Come on.”
They pass several motels on their way up the hill, but a bed isn’t much use if you can’t sleep, and she knows she won’t be able to tonight without a gun under her pillow. She pushes forward, scanning the shopfront windows.
“Why aren’t we stopping?” Addis says after keeping quiet for an impressive ten minutes.
“We need guns.”
“But I’m tired.”
“There are things out there that don’t get tired. We need guns.”
Addis sighs.
“Tell you what, A.D.D. If we find a lot of bullets, I’ll let you shoot the next thing we need to shoot.”
Addis smiles.
The neighborhood gets seedier as they move north. Pawn shops, smoke shops, dark alleys littered with condoms and syringes. This is encouraging. The “bad neighborhoods” of yesterday are the survival buffets of ^butveeys ltoday, full of guns and drugs and all the other equipment necessary for living the low life. No neighborhood built for prosperity has any place in the new era—no one needs parks or cafes or fitness centers, much less schools or libraries. What’s useful now is the infrastructure of the underworld, with its triple-bolted doors and barred windows, its hidden passages and plentiful supplies of vice. The slums and ghettos had the right idea all along. They were just ahead of their time.
“There!” Addis says, pointing wildly at a storefront.
Nora stops and stares at it. A lovingly painted plywood sign, declaring in thousand-point font:
GUNS
She chuckles to herself. She almost walked past it.
• • •
Naturally, a cache this obvious has been thoroughly looted, but they search anyway. The display cases are empty, the ammo boxes are gone. There are more than a few puddles of dried blood on the floor and walls, but no bodies. Whoever made this mess was careless. Everyone living in these times knows the most important rule of conservation: if you have to kill someone, make sure they stay dead. It may be a losing battle, the math may be against the Living, but diligence in this one area will at least slow down the spread of the plague. Responsible murder is the new recycling.
“This is the worst gun store ever,” Addis says, scanning row after empty row.
“Pretend you’re a looter. What places would you check last?”
“What are looters like?”
“I don’t know, hungry? Scared?”
“Okay. That’s easy.”
“So you run into this place, you’re hungry and scared, maybe you shoot some people…what do you do next?”
“Well…” A little smile blooms on his face as he gets into character. Nora realizes this is inappropriate make-believe to play with a seven-year-old, and for a moment she feels bad. But only a moment.
Addis runs around the store aiming an invisible pistol, making blam sounds near all the blood pools and taking little grabs at the empty shelves. Then he turns to deliver his findings.
“I’d grab all the ones off the shelves first. Then the stuff in the cases. All the stuff that’s right in front, ‘cause I’d be scared to go into any back rooms or corners.”
“Well I already checked the back room…”
“What if I was the owner of the shop?” His eyes widen with inspiration. “I bet I’d be even more scared then!”
“Okay, what if you were the owner?”
“I’d put guns in secret spots all over the store. So I could grab one no matter where I was.”
Nora checks the cash register. Its drawer is open, empty. She checks the shelves under it. Empty.
“But if there was lots of shooting all the time,” Addis continues like a scientist explaining his breakthrough theorem, “I’d probably be hiding on the floor a lot.”
Nora shrugs and lies down on the floor behind the cash register, playing along. “Oh shit,” she laughs. She grabs the Colt .45 taped to the cabinet molding and jumps up, aiming it at an imaginary target.
“Blam,” she says.
Addis grins with huge, Christmas-morning eyes.
Nora checks the magazine. Full.
ret c="lhriI love you, Addis Greene,” she says. “Let’s go find somewhere to sleep.”
• • •
When choosing their lodging, they ignore all the feeble enticements on the billboards. Fragmented advertisements with letters either missing or added by vandals.
CLEAN & QUI T
FREE INTERNmEnT
MONTHLY RA p ES
They base their choice solely on the thickness of the window bars.
Not wanting to damage their room’s lock, Nora kicks in the office door instead, finds the key for the room furthest from the street, and enters the civilized way. Once inside, she locks the doorknob, latches the chain, hooks the hook, turns the deadbolt, the mortice, and the night-latch.
This is a good motel.
A scan of the room brings a grim smile to her face. Peeling beige wallpaper. Dark orange carpet with wall-to-wall stains. Teal bedspread with a pink floral pattern. She tries the light switch but isn’t surprised when nothing happens. Businesses in areas like this probably only bought gas generators, leaving the solar and hydrogen stuff to the downtown folk. As a general rule, she doesn’t expect to find electricity anywhere she can’t find art galleries.
The moment she feels satisfied with the room’s security, a wave of exhaustion washes over her. She plops down on the bed next to Addis and stares out the window into the darkness. After a while she feels Addis looking at her. She senses another round of questions building in him.
“What, Addy,” she mumbles.
He doesn’t answer. She notices a slight tremble in his chin.
“What’s wrong?” she asks more gently.
“Mom and Dad…” he says. “Where did they go?”
Her lips press into a thin line. “I don’t know.”
“Why aren’t we looking for them?”
She hesitates, but she’s too tired to protect him anymore. She lets it out in a breath. “Because they’re not looking for us.”
Addis’s eyes focus on something far away. Nora braces herself, hoping he’s still young enough to accept this and move on the way he does with a skinned knee or a bee sting. A good, hard cry, then back to playing, though the pain is still there.
“They’re mean,” he mumbles, glowering at the sheets.
Nora takes a deep breath. “Yeah, they are. But Addy?” She puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay that they’re mean. You don’t have to feel bad about it.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause you’re smart and you’re cool, and Mom and Dad are just people. Same as Auntie Shirley, Kevin, anyone. Just because they made us doesn’t mean they are us. We’re smarter and cooler than them, and we don’t have to let what they do decide how we feel.”
He looks at the floor, doesn’t answer.
Nora raises an eyebrow at him. “At least…I’m smart and cool. Aren’t you smart and cool?”
He lets out a heavy sigh. “Yeah.”
“I thought so.”
“I’m super smart and super cool.”
“I knew it.” She raises a palm. He slaps it weakly. “You ready for bed?”
Instead of answering, he craw crine rls under the covers and curls into a ball with his back to her. Five minutes later, he’s snoring. She sits there for a while, watchin
g his breaths rise and fall under that hideous teal blanket. How much longer will simple logic and guidance-counselor pep talks be able to numb his wounds? Or hers, for that matter?
She slips under the blankets and stares at the mildewed ceiling. Despite her urgent exhaustion, her eyes won’t close. Then sometime around midnight, she glances out the window and sees a man watching her through the bars.
For Addis’s sake she stifles her scream. Biting her lip, her whole body shaking, she gets up and snaps the curtains shut. She stands there a moment, just breathing. She checks all the locks and turns in a slow circle, making sure there are no other doors or possible access points to the room. There aren’t. And the door, in addition to its six different locks, has steel hinges as thick as her thumb. The owner of this motel must have been an avid reader of the signs of the times. The room is a vault.
Clutching the Colt, she pulls the curtains back for one last peek. The man is still there. His eyes, now pewter gray instead of sky blue, slowly track over to meet hers. Other than the desaturation of his irises and skin, he hasn’t changed physically. He hasn’t begun to rot. But it’s astonishing how different he looks. He’s not quite empty, his eyes still show a dim light of awareness, but whoever he was before, he is no longer. His face fits him like a cheap Halloween mask.
Nora knows she should shoot him right now, tell Addis the bang was just another of his nightmares and soothe him back to sleep, but she decides to leave it till morning. The man could throw rocks through the window, maybe shove a piece of wood through the bars if he’s unusually motivated, but there really isn’t much he can do to hurt them through those narrow gaps. And she has to admit, violence seems to be the last thing on his mind, if he has such a thing anymore. He’s just standing there, hands limp at his sides, looking at her. If she had to take a guess at reading his expression, she would say he looks…lost.
She shuts the curtain and climbs back in bed. She doesn’t put the gun under her pillow as planned. She keeps it tight in her hand, safety off, polished steel cold against her thigh.