City of Beasts

by Corrie Wang

  “Adele,” I whisper.

  He nods. “Originally Bob Dylan sang this song. But I like this version better.” He wipes dust off the record player lid. Swipes the dust on his pants. “Glori? I know this probably isn’t the time or place, but will you maybe dance with me?”

  He holds out a hand. I bite my lip, then take it. After a confusing second of figuring out where our hands go, we settle for each other’s back, like a hug.

  When the evening shadows and the stars appear,

  And there is no one there to dry your tears.

  I could hold you for a million years,

  To make you feel my love.

  Fees slow-dance all the time. Since Su is taller, I usually rest my head on her chest. But Sway stays back, looking into my eyes. We rock back and forth. Finally, I rest my head on his shoulder. And then in this deserted house, in the middle of nowhere, we stop dancing and instead simply hold on to each other. It is loose at first. But my grip gets tighter as I think of how starved Comma was for affection. How Reason told his jokes with a glare, guarding against no one laughing at them. I think about Twofer and how he would cuddle into my side every night, play with my fingers and give them all names. But mainly, as I feel my eyes fill with tears, I cling to Sway because I cannot imagine a life without this clumsy yet gentle, sweet yet loud, silly yet amazing male in it.

  Ever so quietly, under his breath, Sway sings parts of the last verse. “I could make you happy, make your dreams come true… go to the ends of this Earth with you.”

  “To make you feel my love,” I murmur.

  He does not have a good singing voice, yet it is the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard. When the song ends, I pull away only to find that Sway’s eyes are wet, too. He wipes at them with the hem of his sleeve, then takes a wad of cash from his back pocket.

  “I’d like to make a donation to the Rescue Two Five Fund.” Its rubber-banded with the same blue band I had bound it with. He puts the money in my hand, then taps my nose. “Boop.”

  “Boop,” I repeat, staring at the cash. “Sway?”

  He laughs. “Yes, Glori?”

  “Matricula Rhodes is my grandmother.”

  “I knew you had to be someone,” Sway says. “But I didn’t know you were someone. Oh man. I don’t feel so good.”

  Dropping to his knees, he grabs a wastepaper basket and vomits into it, waving me off. The study is filling with early dawn light and precariously tilts when I drop the money in his pack. My urge to vomit is so strong, it could beat Su in an arm-wrestling competition. I will never, ever, ever drink alcohol again.

  “Now we’re even,” I say. “We’ve both seen each other throw up.”

  “For us to be even”—Sway retches—“I need to dump this on your best pair of shoes.”

  “Do you want to talk about what I just told you?”

  “Honestly, Glor?” He spits into the garbage can. “What’s there to say?”

  “How about I go get us some water.”

  “Perfect.” Then he calls after me, “Basement.”

  When I open the basement door, I take an immediate step backward. It’s like opening a bag of vegetables that decomposed in the hot sun. I look back into the living room and consider calling Sway. But there’s no need for us both to experience the shock of whatever’s down there. And to be honest, he wouldn’t be much help anyway. I find a tiny pen flashlight on the top step and click it on.

  The stairs creak beneath me. I pull my sweater up over my nose.

  Regardless of the early morning light upstairs, the basement is still almost pitch-black. Yet I see the male as soon as I’m off the last step. He’s sitting in a chair in the corner, as if he’s waiting for me. The air is filled with a persistent buzzing. My flashlight catches him in the face. I aim it away.

  “Whoops, sorry. Hello, Rugged?”

  The male in the chair moves.

  Slowly.

  Sickly.

  “Are you okay? Rugged? Ma’am?”

  I inch closer, shuffling forward one foot at a time, the flashlight illuminating my feet. Rugged must have sat down to fold laundry and couldn’t get back up. He must be so very sick. When I’m only a half step away, I reach out to shake his shoulder. His flesh moves beneath my hand. But not in a natural way. It’s writhing.

  I jump back.

  “Name your scary, Glori,” I whisper. “This is Rugged. He’s like Comma’s mama.”

  I lean closer and nudge him in the chest. Rugged’s head drops forward. The buzzing reaches a fever pitch as a swarm of insects fly into my face. Something white and wet falls from his mouth and lands squirming on his lap. I slap a shaking hand over my mouth. It barely kills the scream on my lips. A curtained window is above the washing machine. I yank down the cloth to be sure.

  Yes, Rugged is definitely dead.

  I fling open the lid to the washing machine and vomit into it.

  When I’ve completely emptied my stomach, I glance back at Rugged. It’s the first fresh dead body I’ve ever seen, and it’s so much worse than the skeletal ones. It’s almost like he could open his eyes and talk to me. There is a box of plastic bags on the shelves next to the stairs. Taking two, I cover my hands, hold my breath, and gently inspect his body, trying to decipher if his death was natural. He’s handsome, like Comma. Rugged must have elected to have Comma. He looks like his actual birth parent.

  I don’t see any wounds, but this is no natural death.

  Rugged’s body is covered in red sores.

  Like those rats in the lab. Like Chia’s security chief, Stetson. And maybe it’s because Sway and I were just talking about the pyre Su and I built, but the sores remind me of the itchy red splotches that fees broke out in so long ago. How our lab techs thought it originated from Twinkie and Radio finding that skeleton in the house by the river. How it came from the house’s contaminated pent-up air.

  “Glori? You down there? What is that smell?”

  I jump back. My foot kicks an empty paint can, and it clatters around the basement. The flies covering Rugged swarm again in agitation. Sway is at the top of the stairs.

  “Don’t come down here.” Biting my knuckle, I manage to say, “Um, jars of fruit fell off the shelves and are rotting. It’ll make you sick again.”

  Blindly, I put cans of food in my pack and grab a few bottles of water. Taking a blanket from a stack on top of the dryer, I cover Rugged with it, then I hurry up the stairs and guide Sway to the door.

  “What did you say Rugged did again? He has such good supplies.”

  “Promise you won’t get judge-y? He’s Chia’s security designer. He blows things up.”

  “Only beasts would keep destroying things at the end of the world.”

  “Ha! Told you. Judge-y. Bump. My mouth tastes like I drank the runoff at the bottom of a garbage can. But, like, hot.”

  Sway scribbles a note on a pad next to the front door, then locks up behind us. Neither gesture is really necessary anymore. Maybe it wasn’t only Matricula who was losing her inner circle. Somebody was covering all their bases.

  No wonder Muerte told us to run.

  In the creamy pink-and-gray dawn, we can see the Fortress from Rugged’s front porch. Sheathed in gunmetal-gray solar tiles, its oil slick exterior rises above the dead tree branches, at least ten stories tall and equally wide. It looks like a massive firebox. But one of the good ones. The kind you can’t crack open with an old safety pin.

  “The grounds of the Fortress used to be a country club,” Sway says. “That’s a place where wealthy people went to play golf. But when all the environmental refugees started pouring in, a Taiwanese billionaire bought up the land and all these surrounding houses and began building one of those luxury end-of-the-world compounds. Unfortunately, it was only half-ready when the actual end of the world struck.”

  “I hate when that happens.”

  Sway snorts a laugh. “Rugged never let us go near it. Sometimes Comma and I would sneak out in the middle of the night, see truck
s pulling up and leaving again. But we never got close enough to see what they were unloading.”

  The temperature is at least twenty degrees warmer than yesterday and hot steam evaporates off the road. The sun is coming up steadily now. But it gets caught behind the towering Fortress and casts a dark shadow over us. Without discussing it, we hold hands. Three streets later, the houses fall away and we are met by rolling fields. The grass is so tall it’s above our heads.

  “This was the old golf course,” Sway says.

  No wonder Sway was so sure where the corpse-road vehicles were headed. Cars are stalled bumper to bumper, some driven off the road, others badly smashed. Luckily, these have no bodies inside. In fact, all the cars are empty for as far as I can see. Which, you know, is far.

  “Were they always empty like this?”

  “I dunno.” He hitches up his pack. “Com and I were never brave enough to come this far in.”

  Feeling too exposed on the road, we cut through the grass. The thin blades wick our hands and faces, leaving little tracks of blood. We emerge only ten feet from the front entrance.

  “Gasp,” Sway says.

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  All the cars crash right into the front of the Fortress in a massive fifty-car pileup. A monster truck with enormous tractor tires crushes the first two cars in line and still manages to be the worse for wear. A spiked security gate skewers its hood while bullet holes pepper the windshield. I look up at the Fortress’s windows. Any one of them would have offered a near-perfect straight shot onto the masses below.

  “This place was supposed to protect people.”

  “These cars go back for miles, Glor,” Sway says. “If they let all of them in, they would have been out of supplies in weeks, not years. You can’t always protect everyone.”

  Sway’s words ring so close to my grand’s rationale for leaving the SymSac male fetuses back at the labs all those years ago that it feels like déjà vu. And I can’t help thinking, Shouldn’t you at least try? But then I see it. Parked on a dirt utility road that intersects with the main one is a Prius E that looks exactly like the one from Reason’s traffic footage. I open the back door, breathe on the window. In the condensation from my breath, the faint outline of a child’s drawing appears.

  “He’s here,” Sway says.

  It’s obvious from the awe in his voice how little he thought he would be.

  Yet he came anyway.

  “Sway, Rugged was the smell at the house. He was dead. In the basement.”

  Sway shuts his eyes. Sucks in his lips. After a few beats, he says, “Did it look accidental?”

  “It looked like he caught some kind of disease. Like those rats back at the lab.”

  Sway’s mouth works like he has many things he’d like to say but doesn’t. Rugged raised him. He was the only parent Sway knew. He sniffs a few times. Wipes his eyes. Then nods, like, Okay, ready. That’s the thing about the world we live in, nothing is shocking for long.

  And everyone dies.

  Behind the monster truck and security gate, the front entrance has been boarded up with plywood and metal siding. But there’s a thick steel door next to it that’s open a half inch. When I push on it, warm, dry air gusts out, like we’re unlocking a long-buried tomb.

  I glance at Sway. “I’m scared.”

  “Nah, almost done now,” he says.

  He squeezes my hand. I squeeze back. We go inside.

  As if an end-of-the-world bunker couldn’t be anything but dark and intimidating, every surface in the lobby of the Fortress—the floors, the walls, the ceiling—is shiny black marble shot through with fissure lines of gold. Or maybe they planned to have potted plants and fancy crystal chandeliers, but the world blew itself up before the decorator arrived.

  At the far end of the room, up on a black marble dais behind a black marble reception desk, sits a male in a well-fitted entirely dove-gray suit. It is hard to tell if he is young or old as his hair is exactly the same shade of gray as everything else on his person. The only exception to his monochromatic color scheme is his bright red–framed glasses, which I can’t help thinking Comma would love. His skin is a jaundiced yellow. Someone’s been in this room way too long.

  “Hi there,” Sway calls.

  The gray male looks up and smiles. Or, it’s like he’s heard what a smile is and this is his best imitation. He sets down a gold pen. From what I can see, there is no paper on his desk. He stifles a cough, then clears this throat.

  “Ah yes, welcome. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  And then the door slams shut behind us.

  As if we weren’t thoroughly trapped enough, an impenetrable blast door slides down over the Fortress’s impenetrable outer door. Yet Sway pounds on the steel like his slim fists might have an effect when a nuclear bomb wouldn’t. Working a different kind of steel, I pull out Mama Bear. The gray male lets out a light cough of disappointment.

  “We’ve come for Two Five,” I say.

  “Who?” he asks mildly.

  “The little boy,” Sway says. “We know he’s here. The car that brought him is dumped out front. We’re prepared to trade for him.”

  He tosses his pack toward the dais. Books, records, and cash tumble out. The gray male peers over his desk at it.

  “My, my, that is tempting.” Suppressing another cough, he picks up his gold pen and twirls it between his fingers. “Did you know that prior to the Night, the Fortress was slated to be the most technologically progressive building in the entire world? Our solar cells are so advanced they can run the entire building for two weeks of overcast days before systems start shutting down. We have more audio and digital files in our cloud than the Library of Congress had. Our heat-sensing technology picked you two up a mile away. So while your rucksack of secondhand items is surely impressive, forgive me if I do not find it appealing.”

  “What do you find appealing?” I ask.

  Holding a handkerchief to his mouth, the gray male adjusts his red frames, points his gold pen at Sway, then swirls it like a wand and points it at me. He smiles.

  “New walk-ins never hurt.” Slightly louder than before, the gray male says, “Security.”

  Behind him, the black marbled wall instantly slides open. Two guards emerge. Both are dressed entirely in tan and look like they store rocks under their uniforms. One carries a Taser, the other a dart gun. As if doing nothing more urgent than crossing the street, they move on us.

  “Come any closer and I’ll hurt you,” I say.

  “I don’t know why you bother warning people,” Sway says as Taser comes at me.

  “Because I keep hoping it might actually deter them.”

  As Taser reaches for me, I slice his thigh with Mama Bear. He goes down screaming. The other guard fires his dart gun. Sway throws his arms over his head and makes a thin warbling sound. I dodge the tiny missiles, trying to find an opening to attack. Before I can make my move, one of the darts strikes Sway in the forearm.

  “Glori,” he murmurs.

  Next second, his body topples sideways. His cheek strikes the floor so hard I hear his teeth crack on the marble. Blood pools around his face.

  The guard and I look at each other. Both surprised. Then I charge.

  “Get him,” the gray male coughs.

  I tuck and roll as three rapid-fire darts sail past me. I grab one out of the air. Dodging behind him, I twist the guard’s arm up behind his back. Growling, he tries to stomp on my foot, then smash my face with the back of his head, but he’s so big and predictable, I see each move coming as if in slow motion. A moment later, he is facedown on the marble tile with a dart sticking out of his neck.

  Two more guards come out.

  “Get him,” the gray male repeats, then adds, “Now.”

  I am only five feet away from him. If I can grab him and create some kind of hostage situation, maybe we can get Two Five and get out of here alive. I dodge another dart, then launch myself over the desk. My hands ar
e on the lapels of the gray male’s suit when something clips on to my shoulder. There’s a clicking sound. Suddenly, it feels like every nerve in my body is being rubbed with coarse flaming sandpaper.

  “That’s enough.” The gray male stands. “We don’t need him swallowing his tongue.”

  Through blurry vision, I watch a guard carry Sway out, slung over his shoulder like he’s nothing but a wet blanket to be hung out to dry. Blood runs out his mouth and ear. With drool spilling uncontrollably from my own mouth, I reach for my calf. For Baby Bear.

  “This one will need a lot of work.” The gray male sighs.

  Then he takes the Taser from the guard and presses the button until I no longer see or feel, or care to see or feel, anything at all.

  I wake on my stomach and peer out one eye. I’m in a bedroom that is barely longer than it is wide. Next to my bed is a compact metal nightstand. Past that, there’s a plain metal desk and chair. There are no windows. Not that the room needs to be brighter. Every detail in here is shockingly well illuminated. The walls are literally glowing with blinding white light. I have no idea how long I’ve been out.

  Considering the gray male’s speech about the state-of-the-art nature of the Fortress, I’d expected the rooms to be enormous, plush like Comma and Sway’s loft. But this is a narrow, claustrophobia-inducing room. It is also a mirror image of itself. Which means that on the other side of the room is another desk and nightstand and a flimsy metal-framed bed with a bare mattress, its footboard almost touching mine. And on that bed, staring at me through thick, round tortoiseshell glasses, is either the youngest-looking seventeen-year-old male I’ve ever met, or it’s a twelve-ish-year-old boy.

  Nearly a foot shorter than me, he has wiry, close-cropped black curly hair, round cheeks, and a sour expression. Shielding my eyes against the light, I look above me for a hologram projector, because this boy should not—cannot—exist. Twofer is the last child.