Nigh

by Zachary Leeman

  People were distant from one another, each floating around like they were their own islands in a big sea, never able to connect or touch.

  I began walking again, each breath bigger and broader, the air feeling crisp and good in my lungs. When it finally got dark, I stopped walking again.

  I thought about finding a place to sleep or making my way to the old neighborhood, but those ideas didn’t sit right in my gut. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the brochure that read, “FREE ZONE.” I crumpled it between my hands and threw it to the ground and decided to keep on walking. It felt so damn good to just be walking.

  299 days left

  Not much time passes before a chill begins travelling endlessly across my body and I can’t sleep.

  A sensation pushes itself to the forefront of my mind and it’s new and tempting — I feel like quitting.

  I’d never quit anything in my life. My father’s boiling immigrant blood runs through my veins. Quitting for him was for cowards, rich people and kids from parents with no backbone or self-respect.

  The man spent forty years driving a cab and dealt with untold amounts of racism and prejudice and resistance but he never quit. He never even spoke of quitting and he instilled into me the idea that quitting was simply something you couldn’t do.

  Even with my father’s voice on constant rotation in my head now, I still feel like quitting.

  “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” I hear Tommy say. He’s kneeling over the body while I stand within stepping distance of the front door. Fantasies of leaving, of simply walking away caress my heart and nearly get rid of the chill before I find myself kneeling in the corner and examining the wall decoration the man left behind.

  Are a moment I hear, “Jesus Christ!” from another room. I look next to me and Tommy is gone. I begin walking to the other room before Tommy stops me, zipping out of it with his hand covering his mouth.

  “Kids are in there,” he says. I look back to the man in the corner while Tommy relieves his insides behind me.

  I wonder for a moment why he didn’t do it in the other room, with the kid. The man decides to take his own life after ending his kids’ and then he comes in here to die alone.

  “Good luck,” I hear from behind me. I snap my attention to the doorway and see the back of Tommy’s head as he leaves. I turn back to the mess of a man, alone and dead in the corner. I feel like quitting.

  Twenty-four bodies run their way through my hands before I’m called back to the hospital for a “meeting.” When I arrive, I stiffly walk to a group of ten or so in a circle, illuminated under a flickering street lamp. They are all circled around our boss, a pudgy and short man named Jesse.

  My feet are on fire and tight, so I stop a little way away from the group and lean myself against a cement wall.

  I light a cigarette and watch as people grumble and pace about. Letting the smoke take hold of me feels good, like I’m cleansing out the last few days of my life. It takes a moment before I realize I’m standing next to the hospital’s overflowing dumpster and I can’t even smell it.

  “Everybody,” Jessie begins, his voice cracking a little at the end, “look around you. This is half of us. The rest have quit or I can’t get ahold of them. I know you’re all wondering what’s going on, considering the circumstances … I am too. I don’t have answers. I know you guys have been out there awhile, but the governor himself has requested that all hospitals be calling in all personnel to deal with the unusually high number of emergencies,” Jessie begins trailing off as two from the group turn and disappear into the night’s shadows. I want to follow them, but I’m too fucking tired. Instead, I welcome another bit of crackling smoke into my lungs.

  “We still need you,” he continues, making no attempt to cover the desperation peppering his voice, “We’re a skeleton crew, but we have a responsibility until we know —”

  “Fuck this!” a tall man named Tobey screams before leaving.

  Jessie asks if anyone else wants to go and another person I don’t recognize disappears. The rest of us go inside and eat sandwiches and apples in silence and then we are kicked back to the road, some of us assigned solo vehicles. Jessie tells us to “prioritize” calls and do the best we can, whatever the fuck that all means.

  I walk back to my truck in a fog, wondering what Tommy is doing in those exact moments. He’d once joked that our job was a lot of cleanup. I was surprised he hadn’t gotten a kick out of that part of the job now overtaking the rest.

  My father had told me that his own father, a man I’d never met, was a janitor for fifty-two years. He said the man wiped up vomit, piss and shit day after day, on his knees, so his son could do better than he did. My father brought himself to America, humping a cab with the same thoughts of familial betterment running through his head.

  The engine turns over and I smile to myself, lighting another cigarette. If only the old man could see me now. All that work to see his only son bring the family full circle back around. I step on the gas and head into the city to clean up the mess.

  There’s something like sixty over the next twenty-four hours. I clean up what I can, help who I can. Most of the them are too big for me to even bother with. What really begins to surprise me is the thoroughness to the deaths.

  I’d often noted at parties — much to the dismay of my few girlfriends — the amusing fact that most suicides I see don’t work. Deep down, most people don’t really want the act to succeed. They want a second chance somewhere down the line, no matter how ugly it may be. That, or they’re just too subconsciously fearful of that next step into the unknown.

  Through that fear or suppressed hope, they end up paralyzed, with half a face, a vegetable, with a stomach that needs pumping, or disfigured from jumping from too small a height.

  In all the wreckage left in the wake of The News, I only find a handful of survivors. The efficiency in the deaths is surprising and quite impressive.

  On and on it goes. I drive and drive and clean up and clean up and deliver and deliver and drive and drive. On and on.

  After a while, I’m not sure who exactly I’m even working for. No shifts. No rotations. People come and go. The calls still come in and a skeleton crew keeps working, lost in a daze. Sleep becomes an impossible task.

  The number of calls dwindles after a month or so. Murders go up. Suicides tick down. I think most just don’t call us anymore.

  “Look what I did,” one woman tells me, and I don’t know whether her voice is littered with pride or shame. She fights for breath and repeats herself again and again. “Look what I did. Look what I did.”

  Swimming around her are the contents of what constitutes a human being. Ropey, slippery strands of intestines, ripped bits of meat spilled out into a hodgepodge, of which her lips and words are just another part. My hand grabs hers and I listen and watch as she dies.

  In the final moments before her stammering goes silent and her animal fight for breath fades, I see what she wants me to look at. I see what she did. It’s difficult to identify for a moment in the mess before me, but I see it soon enough.

  I’m more shocked by the fact that I don’t immediately look away in revulsion than by her actual act.

  The cross around my neck begins to burn against my skin later that day and I throw it into a gutter somewhere.

  No investigations. No questions. A state of emergency is called in most states. The Nation Guard and Army begin policing streets. It takes two months for things to reach a level of sustainable hysteria. The Free Zones have something to do with it, I think.

  There are still calls. I’m one of four trucks in the city. I mostly work and try to sleep, my mind never having the capacity to handle much else.

  Even Jessie disappears. I hear someone say he’s moved out of the country. I stop paying attention to what people say and the radio and the television after a while because none of it matters.

  My damn father, I often think cursing the man. He’s somewhere in
side of me, pushing me mindlessly forward, drowning me in a well of bodies and blood and shit and piss.

  I begin to see them everywhere — the bodies. The pooling bits of blood, the chunky, meaty heads, the puffy faces, the pooling red. When I pretend to sleep at the hospital, I see them. In the corner. On the ceiling. Next to me. Holding me. I know they are not really there, but I can’t stop them from coming in.

  When it starts to seem fruitless sitting in dark rooms pretending to rest, I begin taking breaks at a bar I’d been to maybe twice in my life. The first time I go, I’m surprised to see only a handful of silent people spread throughout, the bartender staring off into the nothingness of the grain of peeling wood keeping the place together. The only time he moves or shows any signs of life is when you order something.

  The sign out front flickers until one day it just goes out. I often wonder, sitting there, whether the place is even real. It’s perplexing to think it would be left alone, but here it stands. Me and these silent souls drowning away in its belly.

  It takes more and more to keep the voices and the faces at bay. They sit with me at the bar. They never order anything. A little girl who was thrown off an apartment building by her mother visits me a lot. She’s nice because she smiles a lot, the best she can anyway, considering the gruesome outcome of everything.

  The rest stare at me with deadness. No smiles. They just look, as if waiting for me to do something. With each harsh swallow, they get a little foggier until eventually I can’t tell the difference between them and everyone else. It takes more and more, but I keep going.

  I’m tired and heavy and dying and the bitterness helps me swim.

  One night I’m there, the little girl by my side, her face as mangled and split as ever. Still she smiles, half her jaw dangling and broken, but still she smiles. I know I need to be at work in a couple hours, which has me drinking more than usual. The liquid, whiskey specifically, carves its way through my insides and I feel every swishing movement it makes, every slice it takes, and it feels real and it feels good.

  I drink and then drink some more. Eventually, it doesn’t matter if the dead man behind the bar is pouring whiskey or anything else. I drink it all, taste be damned — effect being the only desire. I look to the girl, her hair pasted to the skinless side of her face. She gives another small smile. I think she starts humming, but it’s probably just me. I do my best to smile back at her.

  When my stomach begins twisting and bloating, I know it’s time to leave. Everything is dizzying and spinning. I puke outside the bar and see a bit more clearly, but not much. I look around for the girl, and realize she’s probably left. I start walking to the hospital where I’ve left my truck, a half mile walk I’ve made more times than I care to remember, stumbling from one shithole to another — the only two shitholes left in the world for me to crawl into.

  When I make it to the bridge connecting both my worlds, I clasp the railing to balance myself. It takes a few moments to adjust my eyes to the night sky. Ahead, a shadow makes itself out on the edge of the railing. I think maybe it’s another dead person, a ghost, but I walk a few steps closer, the railing guiding my hand, and see it’s a woman, shaking, crying. Her nightgown flows in the biting wind and catches the moon and flickers bits of sparkling light my way.

  She leans forward, only her fingers gripping the steel bar behind her. Her eyes float downward and mine follow. The water is choppy and vicious and loud tonight. I look away, feeling my stomach churn at the crisp, cutting image of the water, the movements of it too quick and unpredictable for my shaky senses to get a grasp onto. The echoing sounds of her tears reach me, intercut with the rushing water below. My throat is dry. My hands are wet. My mind is unusually silent.

  I close my eyes for a harsh beat as I lean back against the railing, and then open them. They’re there. They’re all there. Standing in front of me. Together. Their familiar dead looks are scratched across their faces, varying degrees of missing flesh from chunky, bloody wounds. The only one my eyes can’t find in the army is the smiling girl.

  I turn my attention back to the woman so I don’t need to keep looking at them. Her face is still downward, her tears jumping to the water below. I look back to the group behind me. The ones who jumped. They’re the worst of the bunch. Split heads, mangled arms and legs, some ended up as nothing more than pools of blood seeping from shattered bodies that turn out to be no stronger than glass at the right height.

  My eyes flutter back to the water. I’ve only dealt with two water jumpers. One was found days after he jumped, washed to the shore, bloated, his face smooth and purple and stretched. I saw another in the hospital. He lived. His face and body were cruel versions of what once was, like something captured out of a funhouse mirror.

  My eyes round their way through the crowd again, hunting for the smiling girl, but she is nowhere to be found. I shift back to the woman, her head adjusted toward me now. We are separated by darkness and the night’s shadow and perhaps twenty feet of distance, but her eyes grab and hold onto mine. They are sad and distant and beautiful and I see them as if she were right in front of me.

  I’m motionless, our eyes holding each other for what feels like far too long. She continues looking, her eyes swimming in mine and I want her to stop. Before I rip my eyes away, I know it. I know she will jump. I know there is a desperation buried in the green of her eyes that quietly wants me to do something, anything. I know there is also a fighting determination in her that will win out. I know she will jump.

  The faces in the dead army in front of me are unchanged. I begin to turn to the woman again, but stop myself. Maybe I can save her. Maybe I can’t. I haven’t saved anybody in a long time.

  I turn and feel my feet pushing across the pavement. The dead follow me, all of them.

  I’m nearly off the bridge when the splash pierces the air. It’s cruel and loud and the sound scrapes its way across every inch of my skin and boils my insides. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before, a swift and thunderous swallowing of flesh and bone.

  I stop in my tracks, blackness overtaking me, the sound refusing to become memory.

  I open myself to the world again to see her standing in front of me. She is dripping wet and she makes her way behind me and joins the rest of the group. I want to turn around to see the smiling girl, but I know in my bones that she will still not be there.

  I continue walking, listening to the sound repeat itself over and over in my mind. I go back to the bar, house a couple more drinks and then walk across the bridge to work to clean up again.

  101 days left

  He liked the way his knuckles smelled when they started to bleed. He always had. He liked the crunch that rippled through the air when bone hit bone. He liked watching the gargling and spitting when a man was choking on his own blood, croaking and fighting for just a little more of whatever had pushed him in the first place.

  It hadn’t always been like this. The details were different. Before there was some semblance of organization and rules. Money. Life. Cameras. Wife. Kids. The circumstances had been altered drastically, but he found it comforting that the feeling deep in his gut that had always fueled him did not falter or waver. It remained unchanged in the face of everything.

  When it started, it was specific. A boiling rage that was a fire begging, pleading to be fed. Then it became an amorphous thing constantly moving through him, uncontrollable and unidentifiable, a hungry itch that ripped and clawed until it was unleashed.

  The ragged wall of brick scraped across his fingers, tempting him, caressing him. He wanted to unload on it, release what was quickly building inside, but the shaking of the floor and the sounds of screaming and hollering ricocheting through the air reminded him what he was holding it all back for. He closed his eyes and let the vibrations work their way into his hands, electrifying him for what was to come, the feast he was about to have.

  “Thirty seconds.” He didn’t look to see who had said it. All that mattered was that it was said
. Thirty seconds until the chain around his neck was cut and he could breathe again.

  The crowd roared and shook, the sounds dancing all around him.

  They weren’t like they once were. They were animals now, the hunger in their eyes as clear as that of the people he was fighting.

  He stepped back and took a few short swings into the air and then again, faster this time and then faster until he could feel his heart get warmer and his skin tingle.

  “Time,” said a shadow at the door. He followed the shadow, the noises growing into a cacophony.

  He made his way through them, eyes forward, target-locked on what lay ahead. He was so fucking hungry. In the opening stood the other man. His eyes were animal, his body shaking, ready to be cut loose. As he watched the man shake about, his eyes scratching at their sockets, the sounds around them drowned slowly until they were only a hum.

  When the loud bang signified it was time, he watched as the man ran at him, careless, out of control. When the man was an arm’s length away, he lunged forward and hit him as quick and hard as he could. The man nearly toppled over. He took the opportunity to grab the back of the man’s head, dumbly sporting long locks of hair, and held it in place until his knee crunched his nose, the cracking sound piercing and then echoing through the air. Letting go, he watched as his opponent fell to the ground with no resistance.

  He lunged himself over the man and again and again, he made his knuckles bleed and cry in pain, good pain, the kind of pain that makes you feel more alive than anything else, makes you feel invincible.

  He could have stopped. Some would probably say he should have stopped, but this was a different time and his hunger had heightened needs. Again and again, he dropped his fists against the bloody soup the man’s face had become until his arms tired and could take no more.

  Lying back, his heart thumping against his ribs, the noises of the crowd came back in full force. They were louder now, wilder. He moved his eyes around. Their eyes looked ready to explode out of their heads. They flailed and screamed, not knowing how to release whatever was inside of them.