by Corrie Wang
“Clever swan,” Rage calmly says as behind us a mobster stabs a norm in the eye with a spoon and yanks cash from his hand. “Only you aren’t a swan, are you?”
“No, you dirty subpar species. I’m a fee.”
The words have the desired effect. Rage drops me like I’m scalding hot and backs away. I grab Su’s wrist and yank her into the writhing crowd. Rage is on his portable just as quick.
“Watashi no mise ni wa josei ga imasu. Koko ni kite kudasai.”
“He’s calling backup.”
My eyes roam the tunnel as we hurry farther into it. There are three clear options.
Go back. Go forward. Or take the subway platform outside.
“It’s like trying to decide how we’ll not die the longest,” I say.
“Outside will have more escape routes,” Su says, then adds, “I can’t believe you told that beast you’re a fee.”
“I think he already knew. And I didn’t see you chopping off limbs to help me.”
As we hurry toward the subway platform, a wiry mobster ducks out from a stall and cuts us off. He whistles at Rage, who whistles back, then the wiry one strolls toward us, an anticipatory hitch in his step. A jagged scar slashes across his face and mouth, so when he smiles, his lips pull apart vertically to reveal crooked, rotting teeth.
“Gross,” I say, because I can’t help it and it’s true.
“Hellos to you, too, little flower,” he lisps. “My name’s Jackal. What’s yours?”
“Glori,” I say as Su simultaneously says, “It’s Kiss My Ass.”
She glances at me. “Geez, Glor.”
“Why, you’re both even sweeter than Rage said,” Jackal lisps, then announces loudly, “Mob calls these two.”
Just like that, the tunnel thoroughfare clears. Where males had stood, there are now dropped soup bowls, still-burning cigarettes, and empty spaces. Some of the norms make a beeline for the outside, clutching our cash to their chest. The rest hover against the walls to watch. Like this is sport.
Ahead of us, two mobsters slide out from behind a set of tables loaded with bags of cigarettes. They’re only a little older than us, but their eyes are as lifeless as a dead body. One has a sharp-toothed fish tattooed over his entire face. The other a skull. Both are hoisting heavy chains. They block the south end of the tunnel. Jackal, the subway exit. Rage blocks the north, simply standing in the middle of the tracks, arms crossed, waiting for the others to get us. There is no escape. Jackal watches me realize this and laughs. It is exactly the laugh that Liyan gave the beasts of her campfire stories, high-pitched and malevolent.
Su and I go back-to-back, dropping into our defensive stances, knees bent, hands loosely up. Jackal does a sidestep dance over toward us, shimmying his shoulders.
“Don’t come any closer,” I say.
“Or what, sweetheart?” He grins.
“Or we’ll hurt you.” I twirl Baby Bear.
“Is that so? With your widdle knife?”
“Yes. My grandma says honesty is the only acceptable form of communication.”
“Like it couldn’t tell,” Su mumbles.
Jackal throws his head back and belts out more laughter. Seconds later, he hits the ground hard when I drop into a roll and knock him off his feet. Before he can get up, I have a foot on his throat. I press down with all my weight. Su holds her hatchet out to the two males with chains.
“I warned you,” I say.
But then Su drops her hatchet and holds her hands up in the air.
“What are you doing?” I hiss.
She nods at Jackal in horror. When I look at him, I see why.
Jackal’s holding a gun. And it’s aimed at my head. If I wasn’t cutting off his air, I know he’d be spewing that awful laugh again. Instead his split lips part, and I get his widest of teeth-exposing smiles. Click goes some kind of mechanism on his gun.
Shocked, I say, “Those are banned.”
“Oui, but only on Grand Island, sweetheart.”
“Oh, waste.”
I fling Baby Bear.
But not before Jackal pulls the trigger.
The sound of the gunshot inside the tunnel is like a solitary car alarm honking on an uninhabited street. Wrong and eerie and creepy as waste. The force of the bullet striking my arm knocks me off Jackal and onto my butt. My ears pulse from the noise. My left bicep feels like someone dragged a blisteringly hot iron from my elbow up to my shoulder. Blood runs down my arm, drips out my jacket cuff. Gritting my teeth, I grip the wound, then force myself to my feet. Jackal is rolling on the ground shrieking, Baby Bear run through his wrist.
Rage shouts, “Take them alive!”
But Jackal isn’t listening. Still screaming, he aims his gun at my chest. Suddenly, a moped flies down the subway stairs, vaults off the platform, and lands right next to us. The back tire spins the bike around, kicking up debris and soot.
It’s Sway.
He smashes Jackal in the face with a helmet. Teeth spray into the air like that time Two Five tripped and every last kernel of popped corn flew from his bowl.
No more screaming. Jackal’s out cold.
“What are you doing?” Su shouts. “I thought you left.”
“What are you doing?” he shouts back. “I told you to be chill.”
I point at Jackal. “I stabbed him,” I say, still utterly shocked by the fact.
“He probably deserved it seeing as he shot you. Did you see that jump I took?”
“Maybe let’s get out of here,” Su shouts, then screams and swings her hatchet as the cook mobster comes at her with two cleavers.
“Glori, look out!” Sway yells.
The mobsters with chains are sprinting at me, their eyes still dead.
They must sense this won’t end well for them.
Forgetting my wound, I run at them, Mama Bear and Slim drawn. Seconds later, their chains are on the ground, and they both have deep slashes across their brachial arteries at the crooks of their arms. The tunnel floor is splashed with their blood. It’s thick and viscous, and the smell fills my nostrils like hot garbage. My stomach somersaults.
“Glori, hop on the bike,” Sway says.
Rage is coming toward me. Two normal fee strides for his one.
But I can’t move.
“I don’t know what to do with my knives.”
They are coated in blood. I don’t want to wear them or put them in my pack. I barely want to hold them. Whenever I practiced beast counter-attack moves with our EMS, they always wore padding and I fought with sticks or wooden spoons. This isn’t like practice at all. Across the way, Su has no such qualms. I’m the better fighter, yet her conscience isn’t hobbling her. She’s already taken down three more beasts.
“Wipe them on Jackal and go,” she shouts.
I do as I’m told, only pausing to yank Baby Bear free from Jackal’s wrist. It makes a wet slurping sound that is identical to Liyan eating noodles. I’m officially ruined on ramen for life.
“Beast, take Glori. I’m right behind you,” Su adds.
“Boto wa wasurenai,” Rage’s voice booms after us.
“I don’t even want to know what he’s saying,” Sway shouts as I straddle the seat behind him.
“He’s roughly saying the mob doesn’t forget.”
“Fantastic. Of course you speak Japanese.”
“It’s an eighth of our population’s first language. You don’t?”
“Are you seriously lecturing me right now?”
Driving over the railroad ties makes pain flash through my arm like heat lightning searing the summer skies. I must black out for a second, because when I open my eyes, the glow from the red lights is gone and we’re swerving around a cluster of white stones that are arranged across the tracks. I’m nearly thrown from the moped and let out a surprised cry.
“It’s safer if you hold around my waist,” Sway shouts.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I shout.
“You not falling off? I’m kinda fi
fty-fifty on the idea.”
I look back over my shoulder. Su is sprinting after us, about sixty yards back. We swerve around another pile of white-and-gray stones. Maybe it’s a pain-induced hallucination, but I could swear one of the stones had teeth.
“Was that a pile of skulls?” I ask as my eyelids flutter.
“Uh-huh. It means the Charleston refugees are up ahead. They decamp down here every winter. They’re total babies about the cold.”
Tiny white dots cloud my vision. They’re almost as pretty as the mob’s lights, though a lot more hallucinatory. Suddenly, smooth wood planks are set out over the subway tracks, making an actual road. As soon as Sway drives up a homemade on-ramp, and the moped goes silent, then glides to a stop.
“No, no, no. This is a very bad time to be breaking down.”
He taps the bike’s electric gauge, then hops off and fiddles with the engine wires. I slide off and do a little two-step on wobbly feet. Ten paces ahead of us is another subway platform. In the faint gloom from the upstairs windows, I can make out another pile of skulls in the road.
“I don’t hear any pursuit.”
Sway shakes his head. “It’s not the mob I’m worried about anymore. They’d never risk coming this far in. The Charlestonians require a toll to pass through here.”
“So why don’t we pay it?”
“Do you have an extra hand lying around?”
“The toll is a hand?” I ask, my vision blurring.
“Well, it prevents you from coming this way, doesn’t it? Bumping electric mopeds. Easy to steal, useless to drive. I thought this one had more charge. I had a backup plan, but… No, no, no,” Sway says as the tunnel flips, and I’m forced to sit down. “No local stops.”
But then Su is there. Immediately, she rips off her jacket sleeve and ties up my arm.
“Are you crazy?” Sway cries. “That’s Gucci!”
Suddenly, a birdcall echoes through the tunnel. It’s coming from about thirty feet up and on the left. A second later, another bird replies even farther down. Birds! Since birds were as badly affected by the Night as humans—cataracts, small brains, sterility—I’ve only ever seen photos of most species. Not including all the crows that somehow managed to survive.
“How wonderful,” I murmur.
But then shadowy figures slink out from the dark tunnel.
At first there are three.
Then five.
Then ten.
And then there are too many to count.
“Glor,” Su says in awe. “I don’t think they’re all beasts.”
She’s right. While most of them have immense face hair that reaches down their chest, a few are entirely face-hair-free. But more telling is the shape of their bodies in the old pre-Night fitted coats they wear. The Charlestonians’ brutality now makes sense—why hide in subway tunnels and exact gruesome tolls unless you had something invaluable to protect?
Su laughs and waves her hands over her head, walking forward. “Hello!”
“What are you doing?” Sway calls, panicked.
“Some of them are fee,” Su says. “They’ll help us.”
Suddenly, a brick strikes her in the shoulder. Another smashes into the moped. Just as a Charlestonian roars, “Attack!” a bright floodlight illuminates the tunnel. We and they cringe and shrink in the blinding light.
“Hey, Holy City goits,” a voice calls from up on the subway platform. “Sorry. I’m a little late. I was deep in a Snuggie-and-Denzel marathon when the call came, but those are my friends, and this box of fresh veggies plus this automatic weapon say it’s in your best interest to let them leave here fully intact. I’d fire a warning shot for effect, but I don’t want to waste the bullets. So trust me, okay?”
Behind the floodlight, a lean male holds a gun that’s half the size of his body. He kicks a box over to the edge of the platform. Two Charlestonian males come forward to take the produce, but I can’t take my eyes from the three fees behind them. Though filthy, they seem healthy enough.
Grand said not every fee crossed with them at the divide. Some had sons or husbands. Some simply favored their survival chances with the beasts. Determined, Su again runs forward. To save them or be embraced by them, I can’t tell. But a beast steps out and blocks her, hefting a two-by-four with nails driven into it.
“Back the hell off,” he growls.
“Maverick,” I hear a fee behind him say. “I think that’s a girl.”
“No. That’s a ghost, Charity. We don’t mourn or help ghosts.”
Without a single backward glance, they leave us. Matricula Rhodes has a saying, all fees for one or no fees at all. These fees have chosen a side and it isn’t ours. Su lets out an anguished cry and looks at me with brimming eyes. She thought all our problems were solved. Now not only are we still mired in them, we’re not even a little better off.
I go to pull her into a hug, but before I can, the new beast levels his gun on us.
I put my hands up in the air, my vision cutting out as I raise the wounded one.
“Comma.” Sway sighs. “Don’t you dare.”
“You SOS’d me—in a snowstorm. That gives me every right to dare.”
Swinging the gun around to Sway, the male pulls the trigger.
A steady stream of water squirts Sway in the chest.
“Great.” Sway throws his hands up. “Now I’m gonna catch a cold.”
And maybe it’s relief or maybe it’s the blood loss or maybe it’s that we almost died three times in about as many hours, but that’s when I vomit on Sway’s feet, then pass out cold.
“What’s the difference between a beast and a fee?” I ask my grand.
She is sitting outside on the back porch, surrounded by her usual assortment of portables, all with varying degrees of charge. I’m dreaming. I know that immediately. Not only because it’s suddenly the hot months, but because there are cows in the yard behind our house and I’ve only ever seen those in Twofer’s picture books. Never mind these cows are purple.
But my relief at seeing my Grand Mati feels very real.
Her face lights up when she looks at me, and she immediately puts her work aside. “That sounds like the setup for a joke.”
“I’m serious. Because it’s not so obvious to me that there is a difference.”
This conversation happened. In waking life. Many times, in many different ways. But this one specifically so that I know in another moment, Grand will get up, stretch, and motion toward the pitcher of sun tea that lives on the back porch in the hot months.
She does.
“Glori,” Grand warns as she sets my tea beside me. In my dream it is the exact shade of blood that coated my clothes after I slashed the two mobsters. “We’ve been over this.”
Yes. Fine. We couldn’t send him over because the beasts might guess some of us were fertile. Yet keeping him was a double standard that might jeopardize everything we’d been striving to build. Still I didn’t see why, a year later, we couldn’t figure out how to integrate him.
“Matricula Rhodes always talks about how we’re creating a new world. Why can’t fees accept Twofer like they accept Lovie or Harmony? A fee with different sex parts?”
Suddenly, as it did that night, the screen door whines open and slaps shut. Only now all the ambient light gets sucked out of the air. In the pitch-blackness, I suddenly have the weight of Twofer in my arms. I hold him tighter, as I did that night, when Majesty sidled out onto the porch.
“Save yourself the resentment and tell her the truth, Mother,” my own mother says.
When I was growing up, Majesty’s voice went up and down the scales with a vivacious musicality. After she was snatched, it always played the same flat note. In my mind, my mother existed as a pair of opposites. There was the Majesty from before she was taken. And the one from after.
Her skin, like crepe paper dusted with ash, suddenly glows luminescent.
“What truth is that, Maj?” Grand Mati asks.
“The truth,” Ma
jesty says, so quietly that Grand and I both lean forward, “is that even when there were appropriate amounts of food and water and beautiful things in the world, like the color green, beasts were power-obsessed, narcissistic, philandering monsters. The truth is that Nuclear Night did not change them as much as it freed them and all their most primal urges.”
“But maybe Two Five is different,” I say, cradling and shushing him so his little toddler ears won’t hear her hateful words.
“And maybe tomorrow I will wake up a cat.”
Majesty steps into the backyard grass, and suddenly a swing is beside her. The same type as at the island’s old amusement park. The ones she likes to sit on, twisting the chains around and around until it seems they might snap. This is how she’s spent a large portion of every day for the last six months. Just silently twisting.
“Glori,” she continues, “do you know why we do not talk about the beasts or our history with them? Because they are not worth the breath. We do not live with the beasts because we are finally free. And we do not tell you about the beasts because you can never fully know how evil they were and we hope you never have to. This is much bigger than that.” By that she means Two Five. “This is about power. With no males, for the first time in history, our power is finally our own.”
Suddenly, we’re standing in the kitchen. Majesty is in the doorway wearing a cat mask, as realistic as the ones Two Five’s snatchers had on.
“I saw you,” she says.
It’s the morning after I rode Twofer into the neighborhood. This is what she said. It’s the first words, never mind complete sentence, she’s spoken in months. Twofer’s no longer in my arms but out in the yard catching crickets for dinner just as he was that morning.
“Hi!” I hear him say as I fill our water glasses from a jug by the sink.
I try to peer out the window, but Majesty steps in my way.
“I saw you. On your bike. You took it into town.”
“Please don’t tell Grand.” I try to get around her. “No one else saw. I’m positive. It’s just that Twofer had a bad day yesterday and… I think it’s going a little crazy out here.”
“Aren’t we all?” my mother asks, the cat lips lifting up ever so slightly.
