The Hanging Wives of New England

by Ellis Brightwell

  An eerie howling from the nearby woods prompted me to take her advice.

  “It’s just a wolf,” she said. “You’ve already used up your quota of fairy tale creatures.”

  I adjusted the starched collar of her dress shirt as she walked. Her shoulders slackened.

  “You smell like jasmine,” I said and scrunched up my nose.

  “That’s my name. Liling. ‘The scent of jasmine.’ How do you know what jasmine smells like, anyways?”

  “My aunt Margaret owns a flower shop. I take the kids there on Valentine’s Day.”

  “Well, tell your auntie I might stop by some time to pick up flowers for her niece. If I feel like it. Is that your friend up there on the roof with the carbine?”

  “What’s a carbine?”

  A loud blast sent a projectile ricocheting off the mailbox to our right. I scampered onto the sidewalk and hid behind the squat tower of blue metal. Lily stood out in the open and fired a single shot in response.

  “Fuck you!” she shouted.

  I took the radio from my belt loop and twisted the knob.

  “Deputy Williams?” I said. “Linda? Can you stop shooting at us?”

  “Shannon?” came the static-garbled reply. “Shannon, I told you not to come back here. This area is off limits.”

  “I need to ask you about the fog,” I said. “Is that what’s infecting people and making them attack each other?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, but that’s not a conversation we’re going to have. You and your hot-tempered friend will have to take an alternate route. Leave the radio on the street. We’ll pick it up after you’ve evacuated.”

  “You wouldn’t really shoot us, would you?”

  “I wouldn’t, but we’ve taken in some folks who have more enthusiasm than training. Williams out.”

  Lily snatched the radio out of my hand and hurled it at the police station. It landed on the pavement, breaking open a plastic compartment. A pair of batteries tumbled into the snow.

  “I bet we’ll receive a warmer reception at the fire station,” she said. “Let’s cut through the alleys.”

  We walked sideways between old brick buildings and tramped past snow-covered yards ringed with white picket fences. On the back stoop of a blue house splattered red, two men with bloodied hands and messy faces ripped intestines from the stomach of an eyeless woman with no lower jaw. Lily gave me a gentle push between my shoulders.

  “Focus,” she whispered. “Food. Water. Ammunition. You want to stay here, those are the things we need to make that happen.”

  “Do you think the firemen will know what’s going on?” I whispered.

  “I don’t think anyone does.”

  “So why are you staying?”

  “I guess I’d like to know why I had to shoot my boyfriend.”

  “Was it as difficult as shooting my husband?”

  “Derek and I weren’t married. We had only been dating for three weeks. If you think I’m a horrible person for shooting hostile attackers who were already dead, you go right ahead and hate me. I’ll be over there in the fire station since they were kind enough to leave the garage door open for us.”

  Without another word, Lily dashed across the street. Her heels struck against the cobblestone with the weight of a horse’s hooves, drawing the attention of ragged forms who sat slumped against storefronts and lamp posts. They groaned as they rose to their feet. I mirrored Lily’s heel prints in the light snow and skittered to a stop on polished concrete inside a red-bricked, three story building. She lifted a heavy-duty chain from its hook and let the thick loops slide through her palms with muted grunts. The garage door lurched down to the floor. Soft light streamed in through oval-ended panes just above our heads.

  “You’d better hope they don’t come banging on this door,” she said. “You could have helped me, you know.”

  “I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Understatement of the year. So, can we talk?”

  “About what?”

  “About what the hell your problem is.”

  “I don’t have a problem. You’re not going to shoot me, are you?”

  “What? No. Jesus Christ, Shannon. You’re the last person I’d shoot. I mean, I wouldn’t shoot you at all.”

  “You told Ted you were out of bullets, but you fired one at the police station. What about now?”

  “I told Ted that just in case he got cocky and pulled some shit. Now I really am out.”

  “Why does a receptionist have a gun in the first place?”

  “It’s standard operating procedure at a multinational corporation with strong ties to the military industry. Even the janitor puts in time on the firing range.”

  “What exactly does your company do?”

  “We carry out contracts with other multinational entities. Top secret government stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the kind of stuff they don’t tell receptionists about.”

  “They just give them guns.”

  “I’m the first person anyone sees when they walk in the building. If they do something that makes me stand up from my desk, they get to see my gun. After that, they have about five seconds to decide whether they really want to fuck with me. Most of them come to the quite reasonable conclusion that a security escort out of the building is the correct choice.”

  “I didn’t know Rick worked for that kind of company.”

  “He doesn’t. Security’s pretty good about keeping ‘civilians’ out. We’re very compartmentalized. Nobody knows anything they don’t need to in order to do their jobs, which means a lot of people don’t know shit. Most of those get promoted to management. Shh.”

  Lily held her finger up to her lips and peered up at the plaster ceiling. Wooden beams somewhere inside the brick building creaked. Metal made pinging sounds against the pipes in the walls. Lily motioned toward a stairway in the back of the garage.

  “Let’s go upstairs and look for supplies,” she said. “Keep an eye out for anyone who looks mostly dead. We’ll need to make them all the way dead.”

  On a workbench beneath an array of wall-mounted tools lay an axe. Lily hefted its handle and set it against my palm. The heavy blade fell and grazed the inseam of my pants beside my shin. Lily stooped down, flipped it upright, and held it out to me.

  “You need to be able to defend yourself,” she said. “Hold it closer to the head if you have to.”

  “It’s too heavy,” I said.

  “It’ll get a lot lighter when one of those things is coming right at you.”

  “What if he’s standing next to you? What if I miss and end up hurting you?”

  “How old are you, Shannon?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “And I’m twenty-three. But if that’s the way you want to be about it, I guess I can be the one to look after you. You think you can listen to me when I tell you to do something?”

  “You think you can stop calling me ‘Mom’ and flirting with me like you’re still in high school?”

  “What flirting? I’m just trying to be friendly.”

  “That’s what the boys at my son’s high school say when I pick up Jason for his doctor’s appointments. You should hear the things they call me. ‘Mom’ isn’t one of them.”

  Lily closed her eyes and sighed.

  “The office is a sausage factory,” she said. “The conversations there are boring and predictable. When I’m done working, I go home and unwind with a movie until I fall asleep. Unless I’m on a date with Derek. That’s my life in a nutshell, day in, day out. You… you just seem like the kind of person I’d get along with. But I’ll try to be more of an asshole from now on.”

  She stomped her heels up mesh-patterned, metal steps that looked like they would wreak havoc on bare feet. The idling firemen on the second floor certainly hadn’t forgotten to wear their protective boots, though their faces betrayed an alarming disregard for the prevailing standards of bone structure. Lily swung her heavy-bla
ded axe into the forehead of the nearest firefighter, sending black blood and gray matter trickling down his face. My stomach clenched and forced dry heaves from my throat that sounded like a dog barking.

  “Do you have croup?” said Lily. She pulled her axe from a mush-filled skull. “A crowbar would have been better. This thing is going to get stuck. Oh, this is not good.”

  From the open doors on our left and right shuffled trios of firefighters in blue shirts and suspender-hoisted work pants. The staircase we had just ascended shook with the weight of three men. Where in the world had they come from?

  “I’m sorry,” said Lily. “I was pissed off at you and stomped up the steps and woke all these sleeping beauties up from their slumber. I don’t hate you.”

  She stepped next to me to whisper something in my ear but kissed me on the cheek instead.

  “There’s an axe on the wall behind you,” she said. “Just swing it at their legs and I’ll do the messy stuff. Okay? Shannon?”

  I didn’t think I could split people open and watch their blood and guts fall all over the floor and splatter all over my shirt. Even if they were already dead. Lily swung her axe into one man’s head and kicked another in the stomach.

  “There’s an access door in the ceiling,” she said. “Jump up and grab the handle to bring the ladder down. You run up it while I keep them off you. Don’t look at me like that. Just go.”

  My daughter still lay somewhere on the second floor of our house clutching her favorite rainbow rug. I couldn’t leave Lily like that. I took the axe from the wall behind me and swung it into the chest of a dead man who was about to grab Lily’s shoulders. He expectorated gushing, black filth that burned into the carpet behind Lily’s feet. I swung again at the dead man in front of her, splattering my pink sweater with scarlet blood that was warm but did not burn. I dropped my axe, jumped up, and pulled down on the red handle as hard as I could. A gray ladder slid down onto the torso of the man I had just felled. His upright co-workers almost had us surrounded.

  “You first, Mom,” Lily said.

  I raced up the steps into a dimly lit room and held my hand down to Lily. She jumped up and grabbed my wrist, her heels flailing up the ladder rungs as a mass of spindly arms grabbed at her calves and ankles. I hoisted her up onto the floorboards, kicked the ladder from its hinges, and slammed the trap door shut. Lily checked her legs.

  “No bites,” she said.

  I hugged her despite the blood stains on her shirt. She hadn’t even broken a sweat. Muted sunlight streaming in through window blinds cast a soft glow on a door marked SUPPLIES.

  “Rock, paper, scissors to see who says hello to the sergeant at arms inside?” she said.

  “You know how my daughter wins our games of rock, paper, scissors?” I said.

  “How?”

  “She gives me the finger.”

  Lily’s smile showed me her toothpaste-white teeth.

  “Her own mother?” she said.

  “She’s got a wry sense of humor. You’d like her.”

  “I bet I would. You don’t need to give me the finger, though. I’ll go first.”

  Lily eased open the door with her empty gun drawn. She slipped inside, looked around, and waved me into a cramped room with an oven, a little counter, a refrigerator, and two dining tables. I joined her at the stove, where she pried the lid off a large, silver cooking pot.

  “Spaghetti,” she said. “Parmesan and thyme.”

  Lily’s dress shirt was so soiled with viscera that the security badge on her shirt pocket was nothing more than a rectangle of vermilion plastic.

  “Yeah, I wasn’t hungry, either,” she said. She opened the refrigerator and passed me a fistful of chocolate protein bars. “These should be good for a while. Everything else in here is going to spoil. These windows are great for lighting, though. My uncle’s a professional photographer. I’ve seen some pretty interesting venues. There was one couple in Oklahoma who got all dressed up to get married at a high school football game and…”

  She sunk down onto the floor and started breathing hard.

  “That sucked,” she said. I knelt down with her. “That really, really sucked. I was just trying to protect you. I didn’t want to see you get hurt. I don’t ever want to see you get hurt.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “From now on, I’ll take your advice. Here, I’ll get the chocolate bars.”

  I stuffed the silver-wrapped protein bars into a long-strapped bag on the kitchen counter and slung it over my shoulder. Lily embraced me as I helped her to her feet. She kept her arm around me as I walked her over to the streetside window. Out on the bridge over the river stood vehicles bearing the same logo as Rick’s office building.

  “Are those your co-workers?” I said.

  Lily polished her glasses on the unbloodied hem of my sweater and peered through the fog-clouded window pane.

  “That’s Yamata, all right,” she said. “Looks like they’re blockading the highway access road.”

  “So there’s no way out of town.”

  “Apart from the boat we didn’t take, no.”

  “Do you think they can tell us what’s going on?”

  “They never tell me anything unless they’re drunk and want something.”

  “Would they make an exception given the circumstances?”

  “I’m guessing they’d be even more tight-lipped than usual but, hey, what the hell. If it makes you happy, let’s go down there and talk to those pucker-cheeked rent-a-cops.”

  Lily kicked open the door behind the dining tables. Outside, a staircase descended to the pavement. The street was as empty as Lily’s gun, but she held her weapon like she expected to be ambushed. She plodded down the mesh-patterned, metal stairs with nervous steps that shook the railing. When I steadied her with my arms, she got a lot quieter.

  6

  Bridge

  Lily’s heels skidded on black ice beneath a thickening layer of whirling feather-flakes. Wispy, gray clouds shrouded the sun’s pallid light, imbuing the cold and lifeless contours of the city’s outskirts with an unearthly, shadowy glow. The third time Lily slipped, I came penguin-shuffling up beside her with my hands in my pockets and offered her my elbow. She took it.

  “We’re far enough above the fog that your eight-headed sea serpent friend shouldn’t be able to reach us,” she said. She blew frosty air between her lips. “I should have worn my sweater today. Seems like it’s dropped ten degrees in the past ten minutes.”

  Concrete barriers and orange traffic pylons stood in a chess-like array around sinister, black vehicles with tinted windows. The sentinels standing watch among them carried military rifles like Deputy Williams had done at the police station. A husky man in a black body suit, black helmet, and very black sunglasses addressed me using words that sounded like English.

  “What did you ask us?” I said.

  “Civvies,” said his skinny friend.

  “Can’t let you through here,” he said. His gun’s red laser pointer traced circles in the snow around our feet. “Nothing in or out.”

  “You’re not military,” said Lily. “You don’t have the authority. Who the hell duct tapes laser pointers to their guns?”

  “We’re armed just like you,” he said. “What’s your call sign?”

  “Shut up with that crap,” said Lily. “I’m with Yamata, just like you. My friend needs to—I need to talk to someone about what’s going on in Queensport.”

  “That your ID badge covered in blood?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Lily said. “You want to check it?”

  “I’m good. I’ll take that mess on your shirt as proof of identification. Security clearance, however…”

  “Does that even matter? We’ve got a giant octopus out there smashing concrete piers into pieces.”

  “We saw that guy. I’ve got a hundred bucks on him splitting this bridge in half. A million that we’re on it when he does.”

  “You won’t be around to pay it, and I won’t be aro
und to cash in,” said his friend.

  “You can talk to Agent Ford up ahead at the checkpoint and ask him whether classified information gets declassified when the powers that be shit their pants. My guess is he’ll very politely talk your head off.”

  “Better than chewing it off,” said Lily.

  “Leave the bag here,” he said.

  I slung the pack carrying our protein bars into the snow and followed Lily through a modest maze of concrete barriers to the bridge’s midpoint. There, a more substantial labyrinth of parked cars, metal barrels, and stacked sandbags hindered further progress. In front of an armored van with its rear doors open stood a man with close-cropped hair wearing sharp, black attire. He towered over a woman in similar hues who wore her reddish-brown hair in a ponytail. Their high-collared shirts bore stiff lapels that displayed the same red symbol as the one on the side of their black van. The man looked up from the tablet cradled in his companion’s arm and strode forward to meet us.

  “Do you know Rick Hayes?” I asked him.

  “Shannon, stop doing that,” Lily muttered.

  “I’m afraid I have no knowledge of anyone by that name,” he said, “nor have I been informed of the significance of your presence.”

  “Good grief,” said his companion. She skipped to his side. “I’m Agent Lively. That’s Agent Ford. He’s pleased to meet you even if he won’t admit it.”

  “I’m Shannon. That’s Lily.”

  “Judging by your appearance,” Ford said, “I presume you’ve become acquainted with the local population and their newly acquired behaviors. If you’d like, I can have our men guide you past the perimeter, though I must warn you that we have no intelligence on the status of individuals who venture outside the containment zone.”

  “What he means to say is that the only dead people we’ve seen are the townies,” said Lively.

  “Townies?” said Lily. “What are you, fresh out of college?”

  “Dean’s List four years in a row,” said Lively. “So, do you need an escort?”

  “We’re not leaving,” I said.

  Ford raised an eyebrow.