by Cole, Olivia
“Oh god, Dale hears it,” Dinah moans.
Tasha can hear Dale begin to snuffle in the apartment next door, whining savagely at the bathroom door.
“Dinah, he can’t get out, can he? Dinah?”
“N-no….not unless I open the door. Unless he breaks the door. Unless he breaks the door and comes out that way. Are they strong? Is he strong enough to do that?”
“I don’t know—I don’t know.”
Upstairs the crying has gotten louder and Tasha shrinks against the wall. The knife is on the bed next to her and she grabs it, as if whatever is upstairs might come crashing through the ceiling.
“Oh god,” Dinah whimpers. “Someone is going to die. There’s someone up there and they’re going to die.”
“They might escape. They might kill it. They might kill it and escape.” Tasha feels frantic.
There’s a scrabbling on the floor above, a door slamming. More crying, more words in a tongue Tasha can’t understand. Tasha can feel every footstep in her bones. There’s a crash—someone, Dinah or Tasha, screams a small scream. The voice upstairs is wailing. Tasha is gripping the knife so hard her hands have gone pale. She hears the window upstairs open, the familiar grating clank of the shitty old panes. A flurry of screamed prayers.
“The window, Dinah! The window!”
Tasha looks just as the body flies past her vision. She jumps so hard she almost cuts her arm on the knife. She’s standing on the bed, not remembering when she stood up. Her whole body is quivering.
She leaps from the bed and is at the window in a few steps, abandoning the knife. She yanks the window open, chipping off more pink nail polish in the process, and looks down. Twenty stories below, she can see the form of the jumper splayed like a splash of paint. She hadn’t known if it was a man or a woman. Just 21E, her former neighbor, now dead.
“Tasha, look out!”
Tasha slams her elbow on the window frame as she jerks her body back inside, just before another body falls from the window above. She hears it barking as it blows past her window, so close her hair moves with its wind. A moment later, the distant, dull sound of the body striking the pavement. Now it is silent: no footsteps; no barking; no crying; no prayers.
“Tasha.”
Tasha approaches the window again timidly. She looks down—two splashes of paint twenty stories below, decorating Berwyn Avenue with red. The Minker—the moron—had gone straight out after its prey, and ended up right beside its quarry. Up here, Tasha looks to her left, a few yards over, where there is someone: someone living. It’s Dinah. She is brown like Tasha but with short, straight hair and a soft face. She has a black eye that is mostly healed, a few burst capillaries in the white of it remaining. She looks afraid, her brows far up on her forehead, still recovering from shock. But her face is relaxing as Tasha meets her gaze, and the woman manages a small smile.
“Holy shit,” she says. “Hi.”
Chapter 5
The morning of the Change was the classic scene of oblivion: the heedless bumbler wandering distractedly out into a world that has gone, overnight, from her comfortable home turf to a wild country; wonderland turned wilderness by meteor, plague, or monster. In this case, of course, it was monster.
Tasha had woken up before her alarm to the sounds of her neighbors fighting. Nothing new. She vaguely remembered them starting earlier, when she had covered her head with her pillow and slept on. By the time 6:22 had rolled around, they had been at it for hours and she considered calling the police. Although the woman had stopped screaming at that point and she could just hear the guttural sounds of the boyfriend, who Tasha had seen before and mentally likened to a Neanderthal anyway. Maybe they were having sex; she couldn’t tell from all his grunting. It sounded almost like he was barking but Tasha hadn’t thought much of it other than vague revulsion: some people were into roleplaying, she had thought, and then went about her morning routine of hair straightening and mascara-applying. She thought she could hear the guy across the hall yelling too. He wasn’t generally the type to have shouting matches with his wife, but everyone had bad days.
Crisping her hair, she looked out the window at the muted world of Sheridan Road. There appeared to be a person lying in the grass by the Volamu from what she could make out from this high up. Trashed, most likely. Dude…on a Wednesday morning? He was worse than Gina. She’d turned away to brush her teeth.
She put on the Apiary uniform, remembering at once how much she disliked it, the clammy feeling the material lent the skin, like pulling a rubber glove over one’s thighs. She snapped the material at the shoulders to cover her bra straps, wriggled to pull it down over her butt, was relieved that it still fit. Cara fired girls for weight gain all the time. These were the things that Tasha worried about on the morning of the Change. She stared at her face in the mirror, a face that, as make-up was added, was like Rorschach’s mask; constantly shifting and mutating into new faces, new masks. She imagined it was like Pangaea, masses drifting through the ocean into something only barely recognizable from what it once was. The pieces would fit, a nose lines up with an eye, but it would be jagged, hypothetical. Was it ever really a face? She had a small pimple on her temple.
She flat-ironed her hair. She put on her platform boots, the white monkey hat. She glimpsed her nail beds and recoiled from the doorknob to retrieve her nail file. She sprayed on perfume. She walked out the door.
In the lobby there had been another mirror, another reflection to check. Down the hall by the supply closet was her doorman, Brian. He stood with his back to her, doing nothing, swaying as if drunk.
“Good morning,” Tasha called, a little stiffly. No knowledge of plague, meteor, monster; no suspicion. Brian hadn’t answered, of course. He just swayed. She assumed he was drunk on the job.
“Good morning?” she said again.
He ignored her.
Fine. Dick.
Those were her thoughts.
He was just starting to turn around to face her as she headed toward the front of the lobby. He sounded like he was humming, growling. Tasha barely noticed.
Crossing the dim lobby, she heard the dull clicks of her Apiary boots against the bare tile floor. She had stopped at the table in the center of the room where they laid the dailies to pick up a tabloid, but several of the issues were stuck together. Her hand grazed something wet.
“What the hell?”
She peered at her hand in the low light. What the fuck was that? Red. Blood?
“Oh, awesome,” she said to no one. “Somebody bleeds all over the papers and doesn’t even clean it up. Cool.” She used the paper she picked up to wipe her fingers. She had briefly wondered if she might be able to get AIDS from touching someone else’s blood. At that moment, it was the worst thing she could imagine.
She had whipped out her hand sanitizer as she headed for the door—Guaranteed to Destroy All Risk, the label read. All risk. She had examined her fingers for traces of blood and was reminded of her cuticles. She fished the nail file out of her rubbery uniform pocket. It was silver and pointed.
Outside, the day had felt like May ought to feel. The clear air had lifted her spirits. She forgotten her raucous neighbors; she pushed aside the thoughts of her parents’ collapsing lungs; the pimple on her temple. She filed her nails, allowing herself to feel hopeful. Today she’d get her job back. In a few months she’d have MINK. After that, she’d get the Chip. And then everything would be fine. Everything would be just fine.
“So you thought…we were just fighting,” Dinah says softly.
They’re leaning out the windows now, as they have been on and off since the day before with the jumper. They look out at the sky—anywhere but below, where there are the many shapes of the dead. They’d both felt foolish upon “discovering” that they could talk face to face by leaning out the windows: it had taken them five days to remember that windows could be for more than closing out the world.
“Yeah…” says Tasha. She hadn’t wanted to talk about
this, but Dinah wanted to hear about the Change. Her experience with it had been limited to the skirmish with Dale that Tasha had overheard. Tasha doesn’t say so, but she’s sure many other Chicagoans shared the same experience—and she doubts many of them survived.
“Did you hear us fight all the time?” Dinah is looking at Tasha now, but Tasha keeps her eyes on the clouds. Their marble pattern is like a permanent, silent storm, lacking only in rain.
“Yeah,” Tasha says after hesitating. “Yeah. I heard him yell at you. And stuff. I heard you go in the bathroom and lock the door. I heard him try to break it down. Then I would hear him leave and lock the door behind him. But I didn’t know you didn’t have keys.”
Now Dinah looks away. She is absent-mindedly fingering the remnants of her black eye.
“Yeah, no keys for Dinah,” she says quietly. “He told me if I could go a month without making him mad, then he’d give me one key. Another month, the second key. Another month, the third key.”
“But?”
Dinah laughs a short, hard laugh, finally swinging her eyes onto Tasha’s face, staring at her frankly.
“But everything makes Dale mad.”
They’re silent again. A bird whizzes by them and they both jump, afraid that another body has fallen from the sky, a Minker chasing it down to the pavement like a kamikaze Pegasus. Eventually Dinah sighs and said,
“So what happened after you left the building?”
Chapter 6: The Change
Tasha had been busily shaping her nails with the nail file, head down and eyes on her fingers. Cars mostly extinct, the L debarked, Chicagoans like islands floating along their commutes—the silence wasn’t an immediate giveaway. But the dead woman lying across the sidewalk was.
Tasha almost stepped on her. Lost in her cuticles, bracing herself against the stiff wind coming off the lake at her back, she didn’t see the woman’s body until she was almost on top of it. The red high heels were what brought her attention up from her hands.
“Gucci,” she said, before she realized the woman had been murdered. Then, “Jesus Christ.” Then louder, “Jesus Christ—!”
The stilettos weren’t the only red: the woman’s chest and abdomen were a mess of torn cotton and flesh. Tasha stumbled backwards, her back up against one of the dogwoods. It wasn’t until then that she screamed. She had only seen bodies in caskets, arranged quietly and politely in the polished wooden frame, their eyes closed in something like serenity. This woman in her red high heels was too broken, too colorful: her eyes, like her mouth, were wide open, the skyscrapers reflected in her irises. Tasha had whipped out her Glass in an instant and called 911. It rang busy.
“Busy?” she said incredulously, then screamed it, “Busy!”
Her voice echoed off the buildings and came back to her sounding small and young. She called 911 again. Busy. When she looked around for help she saw the other bodies. One was a few yards away on the Volamu, sprawled across the moving tread but stuck. His body jerked gently up and down as the track purred underneath him, too softly to budge him and send his body zipping toward the L. His empty face was turned toward Tasha, and she gaped at him. He gaped back.
Suddenly they were everywhere; she just hadn’t noticed them before. Looking back the way she came, she saw that she had passed a dead man in the grass between the Volamu and the sidewalk. He was facedown, arms at his sides, his legs straight. Tasha clapped her hands over her mouth. She had never been a screamer, not even in horror movies when Gina would grab her to make her jump. But now she couldn’t stop: the sounds rose in her throat like bile; unnatural, hoarse sounds that scrabbled up the esophagus to her mouth. It occurred to her that she sounded like a man mocking a screaming woman, so she stopped and rubbed her throat, leaning more heavily against the tree.
A second or two passed before she realized that what she rested her head against had more give than the trunk of a tree would typically offer. She took a step forward and glared at the dead woman’s red Gucci pumps.
“Fuck,” she said. Turning around, she kept her eyes on the ground. She was breathing heavily to keep from hurling. “Fuck.”
She looked into the tree. Plaid. A plaid shirt. A hand. An arm. She looked away. That was enough.
“Fuck.”
There was a dead man in the tree. Or a woman. She couldn’t tell; plaid was in this season, His and Hers. She didn’t want to look. He or she had climbed into the tree to get away. Lot of good it did. To get away from what?
A sound from the open window of one of the garden-level apartments caught Tasha’s attention. It was a scraping noise, like a manhole being pulled from its socket in the street. She inched over to the nearest apartment building where she thought the sound was coming from. The closer she got, the more she could hear; not just the scraping but a low moaning too.
“Is someone hurt?” she called cautiously. “911 isn’t working. Are you okay?”
The moaning stopped abruptly, as did the scraping.
“Are you okay?” Tasha called again. She was almost at the low window. It was open—just the screen between her and whatever was making the sound. She reached the screen and peered in. “Is someone hurt?”
A kid, a boy, probably eight or nine, stared up at her from the floor of what appeared to be a basement or storage room. The window was well off the ground and he couldn’t quite reach.
“Hey,” Tasha said, surprised, “are you okay?”
The boy took a step back so he could see her without craning his neck. His eyes were red-rimmed, but his skin had a healthy glowing tan. He didn’t answer, just glared at her with something like anger on his face; his eyebrows knitted together, hard lines on either side of his mouth. (She didn’t know why he looked so mad, with a tan like that.) His eyes, though, were glazed. He looked at her as if he didn’t quite know what she was, what world she came from. He looked high.
“Are your parents here?” Tasha asked, crouching down to see him better. Maybe his parents were with him, also in need of ambulances. “There are some people out here who are hurt.”
Hurt.
The boy had opened his mouth. He emitted a short, clipped exclamation: a sound, not a word; somewhere between a bark and a grunt, delivered from the throat. It startled Tasha so much that she cried out.
At her small cry, the boy made the sound again, and seemed to grow excited, though the irate expression remained on his young features. Then began the moaning that had drawn Tasha over in the first place; a pleading animal sound he emitted as he jumped up and down trying to find a hold on the windowsill, his feet scrabbling on the wall inside. Each time he got close, his knuckles collided with the screen in the window, bumping the top corner out of its groove. This close, the scraping sound raised gooseflesh on Tasha’s arms.
“What the fu—?”
The boy’s fingers found a hold. He hung for a moment, still doing his grotesque moaning. After pausing to pant, he scrabbled his way up so that his elbows held him up on the ledge. His face was only a foot or so away from Tasha when he bared his teeth.
They were ordinary human teeth; not all of them were even permanent yet. But the red pieces of some substance between them put a dragon in Tasha’s stomach that chewed the lining like bubblegum: something wasn’t right. She stared at the child from where she crouched, so near him. His moaning had stopped, replaced by a sweating silence.
Then he snapped his teeth—the sound was terrible—and lunged forward against the screen, his head butting into it. The screen grated again and the metal bent slightly. Tasha thought she screamed, but instead she kicked him in the face through the metal mesh. Her size-seven foot, encased in a platform-boot, connected squarely with his forehead. Teeth still bared but eyebrows momentarily separated in shock, he plummeted backwards out of Tasha’s sight. There was a thud as his body hit the floor.
Silence. After a moment, against her better judgment, Tasha approached the screen again and peered down into the dim light. The room was mostly empty: just a few steel
crates along the walls and a couple built-in shelves. Who knows what the kid was doing there, or how he got in, but he was now sprawled on his back on the concrete floor, a circle of blood moving outward from his small head. Tasha thought about it—still too terrified to feel remorse—and she figured a five-and-a-half-foot or so drop, with direct connection between skull and concrete, would be more than enough to put a crack the size of a crater down the back of an eight-year-old’s head.
Tasha was just trying to convince herself to cry, scream, something, when the kid stirred. He stirred and then sat up. He’d lost an incredible amount of blood: a lot of it stained what Tasha now saw was a SpongeBob t-shirt. “Vintage,” Tasha thought as the kid stood up.
She had stared at him, disbelieving. He seemed confused, but didn’t appear to be in pain or unsteady on his feet. He turned his head to look at the pool of his blood, and it was in that moment that Tasha glimpsed the gaping hole in the back of the kid’s skull. More shocking than the wound itself was the fact that it was knitting itself back together, black and red clots moving like animated spider webs across the cavity, the blood seeping slower and slower as the hole miraculously ceased to exist. A flashing red light caught Tasha’s attention and she tore her gaze away from what was now just blood-soaked hair. Her eyes rested on the side of the boy’s neck, where a red light flashed rhythmically through the flesh.
The boy’s eyes were on her again. He walked through the blood on the concrete floor and approached the window once more, leaving crimson footprints behind him that were blackish in the weak light. He grunted as he began jumping again, the grating sound resuming as the screen began scraping against its frame.
She had run then, using every curse she knew, screaming the words in a flurry of Tourette’s and terror. She leaped over the dead woman in Gucci, ran past the tree with the dead person in plaid, ran without looking at the man bumping softly on the Volamu and the man whose face was buried in grass. The Volamu hummed alongside her in the opposite direction, toward the red high heels and the boy with the flat eyes.
