“Come out, come out wherever you are,” one of them sings.
Mitzy tugs on my sleeve and I shrug it off. “It’s okay,” I whisper.
I see a pale face peering up at me from the ground and I flinch, but I recover quickly, reassured that he can’t see me. Nevertheless, he’s spotted our hiding place. Mitzy takes my hand and gives it a gentle pull, but I’m only marginally aware of it. There’s a screech of metal on metal below as the ladder is deployed, and I know we’re in trouble.
I turn to Mitzy, ready to get her moving while we still have time to escape, but she’s not looking at me. Her eyes are riveted to the darkness behind us. She’s so still—statuesque and afraid.
Outside, the fire escape clangs and rattles. I need no further inspiration to make a run for it, but Mitzy isn’t moving—except for her hand, which has begun to progressively clinch over my own like a tiny vice.
Then I see it. Ahead is an open door, the edge of which is only just illuminated by the light of the window. And just beyond, the highlights of a figure slowly resolve from blackness—and extending from his hands, the barrel of a shotgun is leveled at my chest.
“Please,” Mitzy mutters, and I’m not sure if she’s begging for mercy or for me to do something.
I take a tentative step forward and the gun becomes more rigidly fastened on me.
“Don’t,” says a man’s gravelly voice. “Turn around and go back out the same way you came in.”
I want to cry out that we couldn’t even if we wanted to—and believe me, with that gun trained on me, I want to—yet even as the words are forming on my lips, the window behind me shatters and glass showers into the room. Instinctively, I drape my body across Mitzy, who has instinctively curled into a ball on the floor with her hands protectively latticed over her head. The subsequent shotgun blast is deafening to the point that whatever sound remains in its wake is so quiet by comparison that I can’t hear it. A man topples into me from behind and collapses to the floor, spewing blood from a gaping wound. I can imagine the sounds of his suffering, but all I hear is a single, high-pitched tone that seems to originate inside my own head.
I feel Mitzy heaving breaths and tensing underneath me, and it takes several seconds to realize she’s screaming. The sound grows from a faint ringing in my ears to a shrill, visceral wail of fear. With the painted glass gone, the room is flooded with the morning sun.
Shrouded in sun kisses, the person on the floor is revealed to be a kid—maybe fifteen or sixteen—and his time in this life is counting down to mere seconds. Black, arterial blood is gouting from his mouth in weakening coughs, forming a ghastly puddle on the carpeted floor. Outside, shouts volley up and down the scaffolding as this boy’s peers abandon him to live another day.
Mitzy is no longer screaming; she’s crying softly, seizing with sobs that seem to rattle from the pipes of her wounded soul.
“Please,” I say to the man, to the reaper and his fiery bludgeon of death. “We’re leaving.” I show my empty hands and plead with my eyes. He steps into the room and at once the hellish killer is transformed by light into a short, stout man in his seventies. He pokes the kid on the floor with the barrel of his gun, but the teenager’s gone, his essence pooled around him on the carpet.
The shotgun sags in the old man’s arthritic grasp, and he unleashes a throaty whimper.
“Mother of God, what’s this world coming to?” he whispers. “Just a boy.”
When he looks into my eyes, I notice his are gray, like melted pewter. They strobe between dismay and tired acceptance. He’s a survivor. And like me, he’s not necessarily at peace with the price of living. “What’re you two after?” he asks. I’m tempted to lie, to say we were merely chased up here by those little gangsters. But as simple as this task sounds, as I look into those old eyes that are swishing like an angry sea, I know I’m not capable of deceiving him.
“There’s a pawn shop downstairs,” I say. “We were trying to find a safe way in there.”
“What for?”
“We need to protect ourselves.” Motioning to his shotgun with my chin, I add: “Seemed like a good place to pick up one of those.”
The man sucks at his bottom lip in a toothless grimace of contemplation. “You won’t find any in there,” he says. “People been lootin’ it like crazy for a while, and what little was left got cleared out not a half hour ago.”
Mitzy rises tentatively from the floor, her hair twinkling with bits of broken glass. Her cheeks are wet and splotched with pink, but she’s already recovering. She’s a survivor, too.
“Can you help us?” she asks. Her voice is brittle and childlike, and it pokes at my heart to hear it so vulnerable. “Please?”
His name is Truman, and—first impressions aside—he represents a dying breed of gentleman. He serves us lunch prepared over an old army stove powered by a little propane canister. I can’t even tell you what we’re eating—he’s mixed tablets together in such a way that all the flavors coalesce into a single aftertaste that no person should ever have to experience. With that said, Mitzy and I haven’t eaten since last night and are grateful to have something in our stomachs, however pungent.
“Haven’t seen many of you around,” Truman confesses. “Good people, I mean.”
“Where is everyone?”
“Most folks made a mad dash for the quarantine camps when this all started.”
Quarantine camps? I wonder if there’s any hope to be found in them. Apparently, my expression asks this very question, even if my voice is too reluctant.
“Believe me,” he warns with a bitter cackle. “You don’t want anything to do with those, son.”
“Why not?”
“Word was, they scrubbed you down and burned your clothes. If you survived the next forty-eight hours without one them dang plants sprouting out of your butt, you got to stay.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“Yeah, but that ain’t how things went down.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was there. Me and my wife.”
Mitzy pipes in with, “You have a wife?”
Truman looks at her sharply, then flicks his gaze toward the window. “That place killed her.”
“How?”
“Anytime you get a bunch of people together, sickness gets passed around like a bottle. My wife was so busy trying to help people, she didn’t realize she was sick.” Truman shakes his head and swallows. “She was always like that, my sweet girl. Sometimes I wish she’d been different—because then maybe she might’ve come out of that place alive. That’s the score nowadays, in case you haven’t figured it out yet.” He looks bitterly at me, and then at Mitzy. “You gotta look out for number one, cause ain’t no one else gonna do it for you.”
I’m startled by the appearance of this coldness, yet I understand it completely. “Truman, why are you helping us?”
He doesn’t answer right away. Poking at his half-eaten food, his face is a mask of regret. Finally, he sets his bowl down with a restrained clatter.
“Because that little girl right there,” he says, nodding to Mitzy, “reminds me of my wife as a young lady. And because it’s what my Mildred would’ve wanted.”
“I guess things might’ve gone down pretty differently if I’d left her at home, huh?”
“You can bet your last credit on that.”
After we’ve eaten, Truman takes us downstairs to his store, which has been utterly dismantled. If he’s at all torn up about it, he hides it well. He kicks aside the crumbs of his career as if they meant nothing; I guess that without his wife, it is all truly meaningless now.
Just as he predicted, the last of his arms has been plucked and all that’s left is meaningless memorabilia from a time when people cared about jewelry and musical instruments and antique power tools. He looks at me with a sheepish smile and says, “How about a nice ring for your lady, there?” My eyebrows shoot up.
“A ring?”
“Well, she ain�
��t wearing one. Might as well make an honest woman out of her. May never get another chance.”
I turn to Mitzy and she’s gone pink, avoiding my eyes. I allow my gaze to linger until she finally relinquishes and returns a look. The corners of her mouth curl slightly, and I have to laugh.
“What’ya say, Mitzy? Wanna get hitched?”
She rolls her eyes, but she’s grinning. “The ring alone doesn’t seal the deal, Romeo.”
“She’s right,” admits Truman.
I turn to him and with a disingenuous frown, demand, “Whose side are you on, old man?”
He laughs. It’s a warm sound that reminds me of Arthur and Stewart, and Tim and every man I’ve ever known enough to care about.
“I ain’t picking sides, son,” he chuckles. Turning to Mitzy, he says, “Seems like you can probably forgo some of the formality, don’t you think? I’m licensed to marry, though, see?” He points at the front door, where painted in pseudo-embossed font are the words Notary Public.
“Yeah, right. Every girl’s dream wedding, in a ransacked pawn shop with no friends or family or dress or anything.”
“Better than nothing, right?” I offer.
Mitzy looks at me like I’m in real trouble, but there’s a spark in her eyes and a smile that she can’t quite keep on the leash. She taps her foot on the floor and sighs. Her grin softens, losing its edge against some thought that has saddened her.
“Not without Mrs. Grace.”
Growing up, I used to think Chicago was monikered the Windy City because of the fierce winds that scour boulevards year-round. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I learned it was actually a stab at the local politicians back in the eighteen hundreds, who were reputed to be full of hot air. The thing is, on days like today, you can easily take it literally.
We’re all holed up inside today—me, my new bride, Mrs. Grace, and Truman—with the shades drawn, faces wrapped like terrorists with bandanas against any unseen drafts. With every gust, the wind fills the air with pink clouds of spores. Until today, I’d all but forgotten about them, but now I’m reminded of just how dire our circumstances are.
Truman agreed to accompany us here to marry us, and now that he’s fulfilled that purpose, he’s eager to return home. I can tell he’s not comfortable here; his hands are wrapped so firmly around his shotgun that his knuckles have gone white like the knobs of unwrapped bones. Our upstairs neighbors have worked their way down and are at work in the halls, kicking in doors and pillaging their way toward our apartment.
We could hide, and indeed, I did my best to plead a case in favor of it. But even as I defended the idea, I realized that the space is too sparsely furnished to hide with much effectiveness, and it provides no protection from anyone with enough brunt to force his way in. It’s a small apartment—two small bedrooms with no closet between them, a hall bathroom, a kitchen that opens into the living room. But for a linen closet in the hallway, there isn’t a single crevice large enough to accommodate a person—much less four.
So here we sit, like fish in a barrel.
I found a knife in the kitchen, and I’m holding it in one hand now, my other squeezing Mitzy’s with as much reassurance as I can muster. But I’m not fooling anyone. Any moment, that door is going to barge in and we’ll be overwhelmed by the violence of people who have not only survived in the absence of order, but have found joy in exploring their unbound proclivities. Until this very moment, it escaped me how reliant we had become on our NanoPrints, not only for access to information, but for the reigning in of our animalistic urges. Our minds have been weakened by the constant crutch of our implants, and with them gone, our thoughts are free to roam into sickly lands.
Outside, the spores of blood plants swirl about, seeking a bare patch to take root, whether it be on earth, structure, or flesh; those bizarre entities destroy everything in their paths, killing in order to thrive. And when a sharp rap resounds on our door, followed by a stout kick, it’s now clear that, for all its horror, this is the new formula for life. At its core, there’s no love or loyalty in animal survival.
And despite what I’ve always believed to be true, humans haven’t necessarily broken that mold.
On the fourth kick, the doorjamb finally gives and the door rips open with enough force that its knob is buried into the drywall. Mrs. Grace cries out, and I wish I could do something to calm her.
In spill four men dressed in piecemealed outfits, scavenged from bits of clothing that were never meant to coordinate with each other. In front is an absolute bull of a human being with a thick moustache and beard. He looks like a wilderness man, except that in the wilderness, such people live off the land rather than their fellow man.
“Well, looky what we got here,” he says. He has a guttural voice, like he’s got a bit of phlegm in his throat that needs to be coughed out. He glances around the room, soaking us all in. His eyes come to a stop on Mitzy, and suddenly his hairy face splits in a maniacal grin; even with her face masked, her beauty cannot be belied.
Oh, God help me.
The hulk of a man takes a step toward her, poking at her with a pistol, and though I know he’ll kill me, I rise to intervene, brandishing my puny knife like a child’s toy. When the blast comes, I’m surprised at how little it hurts—until the man slumps to the floor at my feet, and I see Truman standing nearby, his shotgun trailing a plume of smoke. Half-standing, drenched in the blood of an ogre, I reach down and snatch the pistol from his hand, even as he twitches and groans his way toward death. My shoulder stings and I know I’ve been wounded, but it’s minor.
“Who’s next?” Truman growls. There are no takers. Just as quickly as they came, they are gone—leaving behind their dying leader like the cowards they are. Mitzy is weeping and I hold her until she regains her composure. Truman sees to Mrs. Grace, whose kerchief has fallen away, revealing a mouth frozen in a silent scream. Her eyes bounce from the intruder to Truman and back again. I can imagine what she’s thinking: All this death—do we really have to kill to survive?
“I’m terribly sorry,” he mutters. “I had to do it.” Mrs. Grace looks at him with horror staining her gaze and says nothing.
“You saved our lives,” I say. I realize as I say it that I’m really speaking for Mrs. Grace’s benefit, so that she’ll understand that regardless of how disgusting it was to witness, this man’s death was a tradeoff for her life—and not only did he give it willingly, he demanded that we act rashly.
With our door obliterated, what little sense of safety we enjoyed is gone. We’re afraid to merely relocate to another room, yet we can’t leave the building for the spore-laden wind.
It’s then that we hear the planes.
Outside, while the blood plants rule at ground level, the military rules the air. The planes are too numerous to track; each is a fat-bellied beast trailing rivulets of white, which almost immediately diffuse into a sagging fog. For nearly an hour, they circle the city, drizzling their payload over every square inch of real estate. As we peek out our window, I notice we’re not the only bystanders. I see darkened shapes in windows across the street—there must be twenty or more—and though I should perhaps feel some comfort in knowing that there are other survivors, that we’re not completely alone in this mess—all I can think of is the dead man on our floor. I guess I’d rather that we were alone, if it came with some assurance of safety from others.
Mrs. Grace has been increasingly distant since the onset of the plague, yet she’s fixed her attention even more inward in the last hour, and I can’t help but wonder if she’ll ever come back out again. Mitzy is stroking the elderly woman’s thin hair, whispering encouragement into her ear. But it goes unnoticed.
I’ve resolved to drag our intruder into the hallway, where at least we won’t have to look at him. I’ve heard the term dead weight before; until now, it never really registered that mass can change with death. On my own, I can’t budge him. Mitzy and Truman join the cause, and we soon get him out of the apartment. The f
loor where he died is soaked with gore, though; it’s still an improvement, but if my stomach is flopping with disgust, it’s probably safe to assume that the others will be likewise afflicted.
Mitzy finds an old welcome mat in the hallway and tosses it over the mess. I laugh at the irony—welcome to your death, it seems to say—but the humor of this is lost on the others. Fortunately, I’m allowed to act out of turn in these conditions—we all are. So when Mitzy drags me into the back bedroom where the drapes are still pulled and begins to kiss me like there’s no tomorrow, I don’t hold it against her. Because for all I know? There is no tomorrow.
And besides, we’re married now.
It’s getting dark, and I’m spooning on the couch with Mitzy. Truman is sawing logs in a nearby chair, and Mrs. Grace hasn’t moved an inch.
At dawn, Mitzy is the first to wake. When she does, she shakes me violently.
“Wake up!” she yelps frantically. “She’s gone!”
I do my best to process this statement, which isn’t easy to do when climbing up the slick walls of sleep. She’s right, I see. Truman is rubbing his eyes, wondering what all the fuss is about. It takes only a second for him to understand what’s happened, too—that Mrs. Grace has left us.
Mitzy checks the bathroom as I peek into the hallway. Both are lifeless. At once, my new bride begins to cry. As a man, this is like kryptonite on its own—but combined with my own grief and a dangerously primal need to protect those I care about? It’s just too much. These people are all I have left in this world, and I feel that I’ve let my guard down, to the detriment of someone I made a commitment to protect.
The Pedestal Page 33
