by Lex Thomas
One foot in front of the other. He moved his arms and legs mechanically, like they were pistons with set paths. He kept his eye focused on each steel cross brace as he grabbed ahold of them. The wind blew the heat right out of his fingers. When David reached the halfway mark of his climb, he could feel the crane’s sway. One misplaced hand, one lean too far to counter the wind, and he’d take a fall that would end him. He looked up the arm. The zigzag ladder ahead looked like nightmare train tracks extending into the clouds. The wind lashed out at him. He hugged close to the crane, wanting to catch as little wind as possible. He looked at the ground and his stomach bobbed up and down like it was suspended from rubber bands. David knew he couldn’t rest too long or the idea of quitting would needle into his brain and slowly leach away his resolve. He took a breath and kept climbing. He refused to look down until, finally, he was there, at the top.
David crooked his elbow around one of the cross braces, and unzipped his bag enough to pull the gas mask out of it. He squeezed it over his head and his first inhale felt like he was sipping peanut butter through a straw. He realized that he had no idea when he would be taking this mask off again. He was locking his head into a jail cell. He lingered there at the peak, trying to regulate his breath, feeling the pull of the filter, like he was at the foothills of emphysema.
The quad waited for him below. The dirt scarred from countless battles. The quad looked almost foreign from this vantage point. The days when he’d fought for food on that gouged dirt down there seemed deep in the past. David made the transition to the cable. A hundred feet of steel wobbled in slow motion between his legs. There was no going back now.
David slid down the line in short bursts, never letting himself drop more than three feet before clamping his legs and fists tight again. The cable swung and twisted in the wind. Rain slapped his face. Near the bottom, he let his grip go loose, and he zipped down the cable, certain that he was making the worst decision of his short life.
David’s feet hit the quad.
He pissed a little bit. He was sure he could feel the virus all around him, coating the skin of his neck and wrists. Fear crushed in on him. David’s breathing went hyperactive. He sucked in breaths harder than the mask would allow. His stomach vacuumed.
David forced himself to relax. Gradually, as he began to draw in longer breaths, the air came easier, and his heart quit having a fit.
He headed for the elevator.
10
THE FIRST THING LUCY WAS AWARE OF WAS pain. Blades of it, skewering her through her side. Then more pain. Stings and aches all over her front. She was lying on a rough, uneven surface. The air smelled like gasoline and feces.
Lucy popped her eyes open and saw that she was in the corner of a room full of rubble, where water streamed down the cracked walls and dripped from the sagging ceiling. She lay on a pile of book bags.
There were other people in the room with her. Burnouts. A boy with long white hair that hung in front of his face sat crumpled against the wall, seemingly unconscious, with a damp piece of yellowed cloth in his limp hand. A lanky girl, with long stretched-out legs and a nose like a beak, lay on his lap, eyes half closed, drool spilling off her lower lip, with her hand down the front of her unbuttoned pants. A boy, with shiny burn scars where most of his scalp should have been, was splayed out on the floor, hand down his sweatpants, masturbating to the sight of the passed-out, tall girl. Lucy jerked her gaze elsewhere.
In another corner, a boy in a Santa hat pissed into a wide-mouth plastic water jug full of shit. He was standing like Godzilla amid a city of other water bottles on the floor, all half full with a brown soup of urine and feces. Each bottle had a latex glove rubber banded to the mouth. Some of the gloves were empty and limp, but most were in various degrees of inflation. There were other kids in the room too, mostly passed out. Dead, sunken eyes in ghastly faces. Greasy snarls of gray hair. Unwashed skin. Stringy muscles stretched over their bones.
They all looked hungry. Especially the three that Lucy had suddenly realized were eyeing her. Two boys and a girl. The bigger boy wore a dead teacher’s suit. The smaller boy wore only sneakers, black gloves, and white briefs that were gray with filth. The girl had dreads. All three were getting to their feet. They walked toward her.
Lucy tried to stand up and she got dizzy. Pressure pounded in her head and she had to lean against the wall to not fall over. The big guy in the dead teacher’s suit motioned to the other two, and they each ran to a doorway. They were blocking the exits. The boy in his underwear twitched as he clapped his hands together in quick, joyous little bursts. The girl spun in a circle and choked herself with both hands.
Lucy tried to call out to the big one in the suit as he walked toward her. No! she wanted to scream, but her voice was only a rasp. He mimicked her, his white gumball eyes blasting open as he yawned a silent scream. Branched veins pulsed in his neck and down his forehead. His movements were slow, but his whole body shook with tension. Lucy hurt, her stomach, her hips, her chest, her face, and her soul. She knew she didn’t have enough strength to contend with him.
She pushed off the wall and tried to slip past him, but something jerked on her ankle and stopped her short. She looked down to find a black nylon cord tied tightly to her ankle. The cord’s other end extended through a hole in the wall and knotted around a plumbing pipe. Next to the hole, a piece of toilet paper was stuck to the wall, and written on it in the worst handwriting Lucy had ever seen were the words Be Back Soon. There was a lopsided heart drawn next to the message.
Lucy whipped her head back to see the suit still stomping toward her. She formed her fingers into claws and raised them up, ready to plunge them into his eyes.
A boy wearing a dress over jeans ran into the room, past the girl in the doorway, and shoved the boy in the suit to the ground.
“Stay away from my stuff!” the boy in the dress screamed down at him.
The boy in the suit scurried back, holding his shoulder and grumbling. The boy in the dress turned to Lucy and came walking over. Again, she was sure she was going to die, until he walked past her and picked up a plastic V8 bottle that was one-third full of yellowish liquid. He shook it over his head and bellowed at the others, “Mine!”
When he seemed satisfied that the others weren’t going to try and steal his bottle anymore, the boy in the dress calmed down. He knelt down at Lucy’s side with an entirely different energy. His eyes looked worried, and his movements were gentle.
His dress was a satiny slip that once could’ve been a light lilac, but now was blackened like a mechanic’s rag. One of the straps was broken and that side hung down, exposing his tiny dark nipple. He had a frame as skinny as a shaved rabbit’s, and his skin was covered in red rashes.
He tried to touch her knee and she jerked away. He frowned a little and pulled a sharpened letter opener out of his pocket. Lucy formed her fingers into claws again. The boy cut the cord around her ankle and put the blade away, setting her free. As he was leaning forward to do it, a glittering gold necklace swung forward that hung around his neck.
Her necklace.
She remembered him. This was the boy from the ruins who had tried to steal her necklace when the Loners were smuggling David out of the school. The chemical-huffing boy who’d said the necklace had belonged to his mother. The broken boy who had confessed that he had escaped the lab that had created the virus, and then tried to hide from the military in this school. The boy who had infected them all.
“Dey scare you?” he said. His voice was scratchy and full of hiss like an old record, his vowels elongated by a strong Southern drawl. “Real sorry ’bout them.”
Lucy stared at the necklace at rest on his pale flesh. It had been a token of Will’s love for her. She was sorry she’d ever let it go, but it didn’t matter now. What she needed to do was get out of here.
“I have to go,” she croaked, and tucked her legs underneath her to stand. Just the intention to move hurt.
He nodded. “Back to y
our plant room?”
Lucy stared at the boy. The room felt colder and smaller, and he seemed bigger, more dangerous than ever. She swallowed to wet the gravel in her throat.
“What plant room?”
He smiled and revealed a set of teeth like a crumbling housing project.
“Where you live, silly.”
“How do you …”
“I watch you.”
Lucy backed up.
“What do you mean, ‘you watch me’?” she said.
He waved his hands back and forth. “Don’t be scared. Hold on. Just wait here a second. Don’t leave.”
The boy bounded out of the room. Lucy looked around. The Burnout in his underwear had walked away from the other doorway. He was slapping the wall with a heavy metal chain and laughing. The one in the suit was making out with the dread-headed girl. If Lucy was going to run, it had to be now. She pressed her back against the corner of the room and pushed up with her legs. Every inch up brought a new level of pain until she had to stop. Her knees bent inward and knocking, her arms splayed and hunting for some crack to hold on to.
The boy in the dress ran back into the room, and Lucy sunk back down with a sob. He had her scuffed garbage bag in one hand, and Minnie, the hydrangea flower, in the other. The boy sat at the foot of Lucy’s backpack-pile bed. He plopped the garbage bag down between his legs and proceeded to pull out all her stuff.
“You don’t have to leave,” he said with that same big, rotten smile. “I fetched all your things, see?”
Lucy stared at her pathetic pile of things and how the boy was touching them.
“It ain’t safe for you out there,” he went on.
“I can take care of myself,” Lucy mustered.
He nodded as if he agreed with her completely. “You’re all fucked up though. From your fall.”
Fall. Lucy remembered looking down on that pit of trash. Then, a shove and the panic of having nothing under her. Someone had pushed her.
“You,” Lucy said. “Why did you push me?”
The boy shook his head. “No, no. Not me. I’d never. You must’a slipped or somethin’. I’d never.”
She wondered if he’d done anything to her while she was asleep.
“How you gonna get food all fucked up?”
“I—”
He slapped his bony chest. “I can feed you. You’re safe here.”
She wanted to say no, but at that moment she realized with great clarity how much she craved to be taken care of.
“Why would you want to do that?” she said.
His voice rose slightly. “You gave me back my momma’s necklace.” He clutched the pendant at the end of the necklace. “You’re a good person. I want to be your friend.”
She could see ghosts in his eyes. She could see the weight of everything he was responsible for and how he was being crushed underneath it every second. She could see why he huffed himself into a stupor every day. She wouldn’t want to be him either.
From out of his own sack he took a can of tuna, a can opener, and a set of plastic silverware in a cellophane bag. He opened the can and handed it up to her.
“You should eat. And rest. You took a bad fall.”
She wanted to rest. She wanted to lie down for a month. The tin of tuna in her hand made her belly rumble. Lucy began to wonder if that was more than a craving, if it wasn’t the baby, as tiny as it had to be, crying out to her, telling her it needed food. Lucy’s free hand moved to her belly, and she felt a rushing sense of relief that it was the one place on her body where there was no pain. Only warmth. And she began to cry.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Naw, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said. He began to mutter it.
She didn’t know what he was talking about. She wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to her child. Her baby was okay. She couldn’t explain it; she just knew it with total certainty. This baby inside her was the one good thing she had left, and she would do whatever it took to stay alive.
Lucy ate. The pleasure in her mouth and stomach numbed the pain elsewhere, and her brain began to work a little better. She took in the room, the boy, and the Burnouts with a new frame of mind. Maybe she could milk some more food out of the kid. As long as he was around, the others seemed content to lay off. Even if she got out of the ruins, this boy knew where she lived. She’d have to find somewhere new. She could stay in David and Will’s old elevator home for a while, but how long could she keep making that jump from the top of the elevator to the maintenance ladder without putting the baby at risk? She didn’t even want to do it once.
The boy took his jug of yellowness that he’d protected so fiercely before and dribbled some of the liquid into a rag. He covered his nose and mouth with the damp cloth and took a deep inhale. His eyes unfocused. His hand dropped and the rag tumbled out of it. The tension in his face and in his muscles melted away. His fidgeting stopped, and his mouth drifted open. There was a vacancy on his face, like all brain activity had stopped.
After a little while he drifted back to reality and snuck a glance at her.
“So what, you sit around and sniff glue all day?” Lucy said through a tuna-clogged mouth.
He laughed. It made his teeth stick out. He reached for his jug and tried to pat it, but missed. His dreamy smile faded and his face grew gravely serious.
“Naw, the glue’s all gone,” he said. “The chemicals from the science labs are gone. Most of the markers are dried out.” There was sorrow in his voice, like these were tragic facts. “Every once in a blue moon you’ll find a can of hair spray, or roach killer, that some kid asked the parents for, some aerosol somethin’, but those are getting real tough to find now.” He brightened. “Never figured I’d have gasoline though. Like it was sent from God up in heaven.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“That motorcycle. Boy, that sucker was loud, wadn’t it? I hunted it down to the quad. When I got there, dat fuckin’-sorry, dat Gates kid, he was dead when I got there, and the bike was still runnin’, and I seen you, in the distance, stumblin’ into one of the halls. I had a tube and I siphoned that gas real quick, ’fore anyone else come. I can still taste it.”
The boy turned to Lucy with big, hazy eyes.
“I followed you home,” he said, his voice lilting and far away. “Didn’t want nothing more to happen to you. You’re so good.”
Lucy looked down. How long had he been trying to protect her from the shadows? It freaked her out.
The boy managed to get his fingers around the jug handle and he shook it. The gas sloshed against the plastic.
“Gotta make this last, or it’s back to stinkers,” he said.
“What are stinkers?” Lucy was scared to know.
The boy pointed to the bottles of sewage with the rubber gloves on top.
“That’s a drug?” Lucy said, aghast.
He nodded. “They get stashed on windowsills in the quad. Sun cooks the crap up inside and all them fumes make the gloves puff out.”
Lucy looked at the bottles in disbelief.
“I never tasted nothing worse in my life, but one suck offa that glove, and whoo … you go someplace else, boy. You see people too.”
“That’s disgusting.”
The smile faded from his face.
“I know, but … it’s worth it sometimes,” he said. He looked at her with clearer eyes than before. “It’s the only way I get to talk to Momma.”
Lucy put the empty tuna can on the ground, and touched her belly with both hands.
“I’m going,” she said. She didn’t have to wait this decision out. The baby told her what to do.
The boy struggled to pull himself up and fought his gasoline high with a couple of slaps to his head. Lucy leaned forward and pushed all her belongings and the hydrangea back into the garbage bag.
“You sure?” he said. His face was in a panic.
Lucy felt a chill wash through her. Would he try to stop her? The pain she felt standing up
was obstacle enough.
“Yeah,” Lucy said.
She shuffled past him, toward one of the crumbling doorways. With each step, she prayed that her rejection wouldn’t cause him to flip out. Would he get mean and sic the others on her? Would he come up from behind and snake his ropy arms around her neck? She could imagine the dirty satin of his slip rubbing against the back of her neck as he choked her unconscious and tied her up again.
Lucy reached the doorway and took a deep breath.
Cramps knifed her in the side again and she doubled over. The boy ran to her, but she pushed him back with a solid shove. She didn’t look back, she lifted herself upright, and hobbled away from the room.
The fall into the trash had only made the old injuries from her battle with Gates worse. Her body hurt two times over. And her mind hurt from how many times the rug had been pulled out from under her. But her heart hurt most of all. She missed Will. She missed Belinda. She missed having friends. She missed David existing. The world had seemed brighter when he was alive.
She kept shuffling forward, even though she had no idea what her destination was. From back in the room, she heard the boy call out to her.
“I didn’t tell you my name. They call me Bile.”
She slogged into a sopping wet hall. He shouted one more thing, but it was very quiet because she had already traveled far.
“I’ll always be here for you,” he said.
11
SWEAT POOLED INSIDE DAVID’S MASK. IT splashed up as he jogged down the hall, occasionally wetting his lips. The mask was torturous. It itched anywhere the rubber pressed against his skin. He was dying to dig a finger under the lining and scratch, but that would have been the last thing he ever did.
The virus was everywhere. He was wading through clouds of invisible poison, and he couldn’t help but feel that it had a mind of its own, that it was searching for a loose seam to slither through so it could swim down to the pink flesh of his lungs and feast.
David had a hoodie on under his jacket, and the hood covered his gas mask and his face underneath it fairly well. As long as no one looked too close. But if they did, and they saw his eye patch, he had no idea what would happen. He used to be famous here.
