The Damned

by Andrew Pyper

  At the time, I assumed Ash was only a secondary reason that explained why my father pulled away from his family. There was work, I thought. The diminishing sales of Made in America cars adding pressure to the upper-floor guys like my dad, looking for costs that might be cut, aware that their own jobs might be among them. Not to mention his wife’s drinking, his cowering son, the whole midlife trap. But none of that pushed him to make a second home—his true home, however solitary—on the forty-second floor of GM’s world headquarters in the Renaissance Center. That was Ash.

  And Ash knew it.

  That’s where I have to go now. Up there behind the smoked glass of the tallest tower, the one that holds the blue letters for the whole underworld to see. It was where she longed to be more than anywhere else—not in our father’s workplace, but with him, a partner to his secret thoughts, a daughter he would put his arm around and introduce as such instead of standing apart from her and letting his wife be the one to say her name aloud.

  A COUPLE BLOCKS ON, WOODWARD opens up into the semicircle of Grand Circus Park. The windows of the buildings—the Broderick, the Kales—now close enough to see as a thousand opportunities for someone to look down at me. Me, the sole walker making his way past the patches of earth where trees once grew, the Edison Fountain now a rust-stained crater.

  A light.

  White and electric and strong, coming out from behind a parking facility on Broadway. Flying thirty feet above the ground.

  A dragon.

  This is the thought that comes first.

  A beast of the air.

  For a second the brightness falls directly on me and I’m blinded by it, held motionless like a forest animal crossing the road before it’s struck.

  When the light is thrown elsewhere I see it’s followed by other, duller squares of illumination. Which makes it more snake than dragon. One that’s ingested hundreds of humans, their faces looking out from along its length.

  The People Mover monorail. Vacant in the living Detroit. Packed tight here.

  The train glides into the Grand Circus station a couple stories over the sidewalk. The doors open.

  Nobody gets off any of the cars. It is their place. Circling downtown, taking on new passengers from time to time—I watch one, a woman who drops her shopping bags on the platform and gets on—but none disembarking. With the passing of time there will only be more strangers to squeeze against, less air to breathe.

  The doors close and the train starts away. Rounds southward again toward the river and is gone.

  I’m expecting the appearance of the People Mover to lure others out from the shadows, but the plaza remains empty. But as I continue south, I’m more certain of being observed. The century-old office blocks of downtown, once the architectural pride of the nation and now little more than brick shells, leaning toward me as I walk. Trying to hear my thoughts.

  And what would they hear if they could?

  I’m coming for you. And when I find you, you’re not going to like it.

  It’s only me trying to convince myself. Pushing the fear away with words.

  It doesn’t come close to working.

  At the corner of Woodward and Grand River, I stop in front of the smashed-out window of Eastern Wig & Hair. I remember it from when I was a kid: the smooth plastic heads arranged on tiered displays, all wearing different curls and beehives and ponytails. On the rare occasions I walked this strip with my mother, I’d ask if I could “look at the heads,” and she would bring me here, never asking what interested me about them. If she had, I would have said they looked like Ash to me. Not individually, but collectively. Sculpted faces adorned with different looks, different moods, different appeals.

  The heads are still here, though the wigs they wear are filthy and balding. Behind the tiered display stand four female mannequins. A couple missing arms. All white. Alabaster ghouls.

  I start on again.

  But not before one of them moves.

  When I check back to confirm it, I see that they’re all moving now. And that they’re not mannequins.

  They fix their eyes on me.

  I spin around too fast. Nearly lose my balance, recovering by diving forward and hoping my feet can catch up. The four of them twenty feet behind.

  Cut right a block on and find myself on the street beyond the outfield wall of the ballpark. The lights still on.

  If there’s a way in, there may be somewhere to hide.

  I duck into the nearest gate. Dance sideways through the turnstile, past the overturned concessions to the closest archway and out onto the concrete deck at the top of the rows of seats. Some of them occupied, I see now. Maybe a few hundred dotted throughout the stadium designed to accommodate forty thousand. All of them watching the events on the field.

  I have to step forward and take a seat in the back row to see.

  The white baselines and foul boundaries mostly obscured by dust, the grass brown. Only the pitcher’s mound recognizably remains. A circle of pocked earth like an anthill.

  There’s a game going on. But it’s not a baseball game.

  People running. A quick count puts them at six. Some injured, dragging broken legs or holding hands against open wounds. As they try to find a place to hide in the wide-open diamond, they step around the bodies of the already fallen. One man halved so that one part lies in the left outfield, the other in the right.

  At first I can’t see what they run from. Then I do.

  Red Eyes steps out from where home plate used to be. Lopes after the closest prey, a barefoot woman in a sweat suit. Brings its teeth down on her head, snaps her neck, and drops her.

  Some of the people in the stands clap, a sparse and echoing pock-pock-pock, but most remain still in their seats. Watching the monster start after the man with the broken leg who is now pathetically scratching at the outfield wall.

  I bend as low as I can and make my way along the row.

  A shriek from the field.

  Pock-pock-pock . . .

  At the next aisle, I start up.

  But Red Eyes hears. Swings around. Spots me.

  It bounds across the field and leaps into the stands. Jumping off the backs of seats. A few sections over and slowed by the uneven surface, but coming fast nevertheless.

  I run down the ramp and out through the gates. At Madison, a half block on, I check over my shoulder. See the tiger come out of the gates and spot me right away. Digs in and comes hard.

  The floating lights appear again. The People Mover, coming in toward the Broadway station. The stairs up to the platform another twenty yards on.

  I take them at a run, propelled up the first flight without feeling the steps under my feet. The second flight is the opposite: the steps doubled in height, both hands grabbing at the railing, hauling me up.

  Above, the train stops at the platform. The doors slide open.

  Wait for me.

  Red Eyes slams into the base of the stairs. Squeezes through the frame and starts up. Its claws scratching at the concrete steps like knives on slate.

  I make the platform. The train’s brakes hiss as they’re released. The cars filled with the dead looking out at me. Witnessing my dash for the doors, now sliding closed.

  44

  * * *

  It almost works.

  I’m halfway in when the doors catch me at the shoulder, sandwiching me down the spine. A second later, they open automatically. It gives me time to jam myself in.

  It also gives the tiger time to burst out of the stairwell.

  The doors close again. The train eases away as the creature skids on the platform, bumping against the side of my car. It considers leaping on top, but decides against it. Watches the train travel south. Its tail flicking in irritation.

  It takes a second to find me through the window in the door. When it does its whole body stiffens. The mouth opens and its tongue comes out, polishing the length of its lower teeth. Then it starts down the stairs.

  Not in defeat. Coming afte
r the train.

  The cars roll slightly as they pick up to their sluggish maximum speed.

  Go, you piece of shit. Go! GO!

  Wishing doesn’t make the shattered buildings and bombed-out parking lots pass any quicker. And I can’t spot Red Eyes on the streets below, either.

  For the first time since I boarded I turn away from the glass and meet eyes with my fellow passengers. All of their eyes. Because they’re looking at nothing but me.

  A big guy toward the rear of the car with a bandana wrapped around a head missing both its ears muscles toward me, squeezing through the crowd. Others who are closer—a young woman wearing broken glasses, a teenaged boy with half his body clothed, the other black from burns—pressing in as well. A hundred in this car alone. Strangers locked in their own looping regrets and with nothing in common aside from having this circling of Detroit’s financial district be their place in the After. Until I joined them.

  I turn my back to them. It doesn’t stop them from crushing in. And instead of keeping my elbows out and trying to hold the ground I have, I slip back into them.

  Because the train is stopping at the Greektown station. The doors about to open. If I’m next to them I’ll spill out and they won’t let me back on.

  The passengers don’t seem to be expecting my voluntary backstep into their arms. They hold me up without putting their hands on me, as if I’m a carrier of disease.

  The doors open. None get on, none get off. The doors close.

  That’s when the big guy with the missing ears finally reaches me.

  He starts by trying to dig the eyes out of my head. One hand grabbing my hair and the other planted on my face, the thumb working for the leverage required to gouge in.

  My scream startles them. Even the bandana guy pauses a moment to shake his head. It doesn’t seem he’d be able to hear anything with those ear holes of his, but my voice reaches him. Not that it inspires any pity. Seconds later, he’s at me again. His callused thumb pumping at the air in front of me.

  This time, I don’t let him get my hair. He takes out his frustration by punching me in the face. It seems to lighten his mood. Something like a smile moves his lips around.

  Then he punches me again.

  A glance out the windows shows the train making the corner that leads into the Renaissance Center station. My stop.

  The doors only four feet away. But three rows of passengers between me and them.

  I time it so that I crouch down and start plowing through just as the train eases to a stop. When I hit the ones between me and the doors they fall back into the ones behind them, some giving way as a result.

  None of them shout or snarl or speak. It occurs to me as I break free of them and the doors close behind me that, for the whole time I was on the train, none made a single sound.

  Except for me. My shouts. My blood-spitting breaths.

  Which is all there is to hear in this place, too.

  A concrete hallway the width of Woodward Avenue that leads to the Ren Cen’s main atrium. On the walls, forty-foot-long photos of GM cars and trucks from over the years. A Sierra overlooking the Grand Canyon, a Corvette zipping across salt flats, a Cadillac emptying its tanned, tartan-slacked passengers at the front doors of a golf clubhouse. Images that have all been stabbed and slashed and smeared as if attacked by monkeys armed with knitting needles.

  I remember this place when it was the future.

  My father introduced it this way whenever we drove by, whenever the towers were pointed out by a rare visitor to our home or if he spotted them during the intro to the suppertime news.

  “That’s the future, right there,” he’d say, with a hint of bitterness, as though with his pride came the anticlimax of knowing it wouldn’t get any better than this, that his employer, his city, his driving-around-for-the-hell-of-it America had nowhere to go but into more and more acute realizations of how little time it had left.

  To me, the Ren Cen looked like the future, too, though a cartoon version of it, the cylindrical, reflective structures like something a champagne glass spaceship would putter toward on The Jetsons. That was from the exterior. On the inside, it left a similar impression to the one I have now: too wide, too hard, too easily aged. Something built to be ahead of its time, which doomed it to be a monument to obsolescence.

  After a time, the hallway slopes up and feeds into the atrium. An immense open space that, through a shattered window on the far opposite side, offers a glimpse of the frozen river, gray and snowless. From the level I’m on, the atrium plunges down to a concrete floor a hundred feet below. I take a look over the side. Before rearing back from vertigo I glimpse what’s left of the display laid out on the basement exhibition floor: a scale model of Detroit made out of unpainted metal, CITY OF STEEL spelled out in a circle around it. The baseball stadium wide as a toilet bowl. The downtown buildings tall as a man.

  Once the waves have subsided from my vision, I scan the space for a way up. Other than the stairs (wherever they might be), only one: the white column on the opposite side, an artery of elevator shafts rising up seventy-three stories.

  Little chance the elevators would still be running. But it’s worth a check.

  I take a second to judge which is the best way—right or left—to get to where they are. The atrium is structured as a series of tiered balconies circling the building’s core, multiple viewpoints from which employees and visitors were meant to admire the showroom of product, cars and trucks sitting on floating islands. I’m surprised to see that some of them are still here. A Chevy Volt furry with dust beneath a SOMEBODY HAS TO BE FIRST banner. Somewhat closer, a minivan directly across the abyss on the right even has passengers inside. A family. Dad behind the wheel, Mom next to him staring at the horizon, brother and sister visible through the open side door playing lifeless video games in the bench seat behind. Realistic wax statues fixed in expressions of middle-class boredom, the faraway stares and private thoughts of an interminable road trip.

  They turn at the roar before I do.

  The dad now slapping at the wheel, pumping the gas. The mom urging him on by saying the same thing, though not out loud—a Harry! or Hurry!—that I can lip-read. Trying to get the thing to move.

  When it sees me, the beast roars again.

  Red Eyes pauses at the bottom of the slope I’d just made my way up, a hundred feet away. Panting from the chase. The tail thrashing against the hallway’s ceiling.

  This time, it doesn’t wait. Neither do I.

  I head right. If I make it to the minivan I can close the doors, barricade myself inside the Dodge Caravan along with the terrified Mid-westerners who probably died trapped in one and now call it their afterlife home.

  Not that it will stop the tiger from ripping the roof off and flaying all five of us.

  Not that I’ll make it halfway there in the first place.

  The monster bursts onto the concourse. I can hear its claws slide on the sheer, polished floor as it makes the turn. Bounds after me.

  There are no exits or doors between me and the minivan. The only way out is over the side of the chest-high parapet to the floor below.

  I try to scream but the cold steals it away the moment it passes my lips. Only the tiger is permitted a voice here, this close to the river, this close to the end of everything.

  It’s why, when I feel it, I say nothing.

  A bubble of warmth I run through, brief and inexplicable as a pocket of heat that strokes your skin when swimming in a lake. It stops me. Not its strangeness, but the sensation it leaves me with. A wallop of thoughts and emotions, swirling and unreadable. The mark of the human.

  A presence here that wasn’t here a moment ago. Not meant to be here. One that, like me, has made the journey in the name of another.

  45

  * * *

  The boy stands between me and the tiger.

  Eddie’s back to the beast, eyes on mine, at once finding strength in me and lending me strength of his own.

&nbs
p; It’s not the sight of him that returns his name to me. It’s the memory of what he means, the commitment to something other than the self, the ungovernable mess love leaves behind.

  I see the boy and I remember being alive.

  Eddie knows the tiger will reach him in the next second or two, that it sees him and is deviating its course a single stride in order to strike him down, but he doesn’t move. He has come here for this. He will let the beast take the moment required to cut him in half so that I might have a moment more.

  Eddie!

  I don’t make a sound no matter how wide I open my mouth, no matter how hard I push the name out of me.

  He climbs up onto the edge of the balustrade. It forces the tiger to skid hard to the left to reach him. The great back legs pushing the head up to sink its teeth into the boy when he jumps.

  It could be a slip, a miscalculation, an accident that has an unimaginable result.

  Except it isn’t.

  Eddie pushes himself off into the atrium’s empty space just as the beast lunges at him. Its front-loaded weight carries the creature forward, the jaws still snatching as it, too, tumbles over the side.

  For a sliver of time they are both suspended. The tiger awkward and flailing against the inevitability of its fall. Eddie still. Arms and legs extended as if ready to be met by water.

  Then they’re gone.

  I rush to look over the side but it takes a while to get there. The nightmare slow motion that stretches out the most terrible revelations.

  It takes a further moment to figure out the puzzle on the floor below.

  Red Eyes is there. The tiger’s body twisted in a way that makes it look like two or three tigers atop one another, one head visible, looking up. Dead. It’s not the fall that’s killed it, it’s Detroit. The model CITY OF STEEL’s towers speared through its rib cage, its neck. The enormous skull spilling its contents out after being smashed open on the miniature office buildings of Woodward Avenue.