Lewis tried to remember days on the docks, smoking
cigarettes, watching fat tourists from the Dakotas bend the finger piers as
they crowded onto whale-spotting boats. He tried to remember it again without
him glaring, without the sneers and jokes to Kyle and the others. In his mind,
he took another glorious drag from that smoke before flicking it into the sea
with a sputtering hiss. He tried to travel back there, to pretend the little
globules of yellow fat sucked out of his palms were caviar and that the rats
burrowing in among his knees to feed alongside him were little fish, nosing up
to the surface, eating the chum from the guts of strangers, and that this time
he wouldn’t turn and smile and judge anymore.
40 • Darnell Lippman
Darnell had hoped and prayed from the moment she was
attacked that someone would come for her. But not like this. This wasn’t a
rescue. It was the hand of some angry god reaching down from the clouds and
plucking her off the ground. She was discarded fruit, all of them were. Nasty
fruit fallen from a tree and riddled with worms, and now they have come to
choose the rotten among the rotten.
They lured them into their trap with blood. Blood and
something else. Darnell thought of her husband chumming for sharks off Spit
Point. She knew what these people were doing, and still it worked. It was like
that cartoon she’d clipped for Lewis, the one with a fish commenting on a hook
before going for the bait. It knew, and still it went. It had no choice. There
was only the hunger.
This wasn’t the first trap they’d set. She’d seen them try
before, the helicopters swooping in among the same low buildings, the same
alleys. Whatever they’d used the first time didn’t work. The smell wasn’t
right. Darnell wondered if it was animal blood at first, or human blood with
the life melted out of it, maybe with the soul evaporated. That first time, she
could smell the copper in the air, but it didn’t move her feet. It wasn’t the
same.
They came back the next day with something different; her
group could smell it. Their shuffling went from aimless to concerted action as
they spilled into the baited alley, the
thwump-thwump-thwump
of the
fishermen hovering in helicopters overhead, a rotor like an outboard, the hook
both visible and irresistible.
Darnell and the others bit. The alley tightened between a
set of rusty green dumpsters. She was near the front, crowding against the
pawing others, the groans and grunts filling the narrow space between the
buildings with an eerie roar. One of the dumpsters squealed as the crush of
undead pressed hard enough to jar its wheels. Those alongside her kicked
through trash, waving their arms after the fetid odor, a long rope like a line
with a sinker and bobber dangling down between the brick walls.
They could see it. Darnell knew everyone else could see the
lure as well. And still, they went after.
The alley forked where it met the crumbling wall of the
building along its back. The sun was low, the shadows deep, and the smell was
everywhere. It trailed off in both directions, further dividing the narrow
stream of disfigured and disgusting animals.
Darnell was being culled from the herd. She felt the panic
of a hook sinking into her lip, the lonely fear of being left to drown. Where
was Lewis? She wept silently and tearlessly, powerfully alone, wishing he were
there, but she hadn’t seen his hat for days.
She hurried at the front of the group that veered left,
following the smell of blood and the smell of something else as well. It was a
heady odor she’d nosed from a man with a split skull, a feed from a week ago.
The smell of brains.
Onward, deeper into the alley,
thwump-thwump-thwump
from the propeller above her. Darnell imagined it was Lewis. He was here to
catch her, to lift her out of her misery and into his reeking boat, to wrap her
in a blanket and tell her that he loved her, to make her feel safe.
She and three others were standing on the net when it rose
up from the camouflage of newspapers and soggy cardboard. The man beside her
with the broken leg was caught on the edge. As the net cinched tight, he
tumbled out, his foot catching in one of the square holes, grunts from the rest
of them as they were pressed together and lifted skyward.
The man with the broken leg wiggled free and tumbled with a
sick crunch to the pavement. Darnell and the other two were packed gill to gill
in the tight net. There was a sinking feeling in her stomach as they rose
higher. The man beside her made a gurgling sound. He was chewing the rope, the
air so laden with the scent of blood and brains that Darnell feared one of the
monsters would begin to chew on her. Or that she might turn on them.
Fortunately, she was too pinned to do so. Instead, she
watched through a hole in the net as the rooftops of the low buildings came
into view and as the helicopter pulled them up into the low rays of the setting
sun. The city below seemed to shrink. The cars scattered everywhere became
toys, the people moving amongst them like clumsy insects. The totality of the
horror loomed below, smoke drifting from fires, a bus turned on its side,
something moving within. The helicopter angled out over one of the rivers that
framed the city on either side—Darnell didn’t know their names, couldn’t tell
which direction they were flying. The net drifted behind on its long strand of
cable, the air numbingly cold. She saw a bridge she recognized from postcards,
the stone arches like something on a church. It was a landmark, a distinctly
New York monument, and it was in ruin. The center half was gone, tangles of
broad cables dangling toward the icy waters, piers of pavement laced with iron
bars that jutted out like mangled limbs.
The two other bridges she could see were the same, the
middles blown to bits. The island had been cast off. Darnell thought of all the
mornings she’d brought coffee down to the dock, chatted with Lewis while he’d
loaded the boat, then tossed him his lines. She would stand there, watching him
chug out toward the inlet, her hands smelling like the fishy ropes, the steam dissipating
from her rapidly cooling mug.
The net spun lazily beneath the helicopter, the earth
seeming to revolve on its axis below. One of the creatures pinned beside her
gnawed on her arm, the scent of blood still in the net. Darnell could feel the
bites but could not move. She watched, frozen and numb in more ways than one,
as a loathsome spit of land drifted away, and knew that this time her fears
would be confirmed. Darnell Lippman knew she would never see her husband again.
41 • Lewis Lippman
Healing was the strangest of things. His stricken condition
gave Lewis time to ponder the basic stuff, stuff you never thought about. Like
healing. When you got down to it, healing was far stranger than what he did
now. What he was doing now seemed natural.
This
was how things should
be. Not because it was better or preferable, but because it just made more
sense.
There was a gash on Lewis’s forearm from swimming through a
pile of wrecked cars to get at a survivor. And now, with his hands out in front
of him as he staggered along, he was able to study the wound, able to see the
white bone where it lay exposed between the torn flesh. Strands of what he
thought was muscle hung out in cables and ropes. It was like the insides of
every fish he’d caught, but it was him. And this made more sense, that things
were cut and they stayed cut. How much stranger was the notion that they could
knit back together, that wounds could disappear?
It was like those lizards that lost their tails and grew
them back. These were mutant abilities taken for granted, abilities no less
strange than the closing of a nick. His friend Kyle had that scar on his leg
from his long-lining days, that nasty length of white tissue bumped up along
his knee from where the hook got him and wouldn’t let go. How was that normal,
a body knowing what part of itself it was supposed to be? Knowing how to grow
across and stitch to its neighbor, and then knowing when to stop? He knew
people who had complained about their scars, about this miraculous gift. It never
occurred to them that their wound could just as easily hang open.
There was a white cord of tendon dangling from Lewis’s arm,
and this was how things were meant to be. A man would be careful if he knew
ahead of time that wounds didn’t grow back. People would act different, think
twice. No more bumbling about with arms flailing, not looking where they were
going.
Lewis rarely looked where he was going. He tried to remember
the first time he’d yelled at his wife. It’d been back before they’d gotten
married, but just a time or two. Hadn’t really lit into her until later. There
was the time she’d wrecked the truck, said it was a patch of black ice, but
he’d let her have it anyway. Never struck her, but she recoiled just the same.
Made him feel like shit, the way she flinched from his words. Pissed him off
even more for her to make him feel that way.
“It’s just a scratch,” she’d tried to tell him.
A scratch. In a thing that don’t heal, he could see that
now. Another scratch, and the wound is open. Emotions don’t know how to stitch
back the way flesh could. How do you go to a person, your wife of two decades,
and tell her you want to start over again? How do you say, “Forget everything
we’ve got together. Forget the kids and the fights and all the good times, too.
I take it all back.” How do you do that? It ain’t a lizard’s tail, those years.
It ain’t something you walk away from and start over.
A gash is what it becomes. And then a stump, until you can’t
feel it anymore. Until there’s just an itch where things used to be, a phantom
love you feel silly for recalling. Now it’s someone who takes care of the kids,
does the dishes, talks your head off when you get back from being on the water
a few days. Now it’s just someone you live with. It’s excuses to get away so
you can meet the boys at the bar. It’s inconvenient phone calls in the winter
when she’s visiting her sister in Anchorage, too scared to walk out of the
grocery store and across the parking lot in the dark. That was a wound, that
one. Yelling at her for being afraid. Yelling at her to keep up all the time.
Yelling at her for being scared of the crowds in the city.
Goddamn, he missed her. Why didn’t he ever tell her that?
Those long nights on the water with the decks slippery and lit up from the
flood lights, Kyle telling a joke, and all Lewis wanted was to get home to a
hot meal, to their bed, to a hug and her joking that if his neck smelled any
more like fish he’d have gills.
And he’d feel it for a little while, that joy of being home,
but never say it. Little cells of thought that didn’t know how to reach out to
the other side and start pulling back together. A tongue for lashing but not
for stitching.
He missed her terribly now that he felt this fear of the
crowd, the helplessness that she must’ve felt. And he had yelled at her for it,
for being afraid. All he’d had to say was that it was gonna be okay, but he’d
made it worse instead. It was easier to imagine, now, how the world must’ve
seemed to her. The fear of not being in control. The fear of being lost all the
time. Lewis no longer had any idea where he was—all the blocks looked the same
to him. He had no map, no chart, no points of reference. The first time he’d
popped up from a subway station, back before all the madness began, he’d felt
the first tickle of this, of not knowing where he was. You pop up and you can’t
see the horizon. Just tall buildings on all sides, no feeling of where east or
west was, no idea which way to start out, all turned around from winding down a
flight of stairs in one part of the city, riding that train somewhere, and then
winding his way back up. Dizzy, and he couldn’t ask anyone, couldn’t do that,
not in front of her. It was scary, feeling that for the first time. Completely
and utterly lost.
Darnell must’ve felt like that a lot.
It was getting colder every day, and Lewis wondered if the
pain would eventually get so great that he wouldn’t feel anything anymore.
Enough wounds, and you just go numb. He hoped that happened soon. He was just
glad it wasn’t August with all that heat. The smell and the torture would be
worse in August. Maybe he would still be alive and around then and he’d find
out. But he hoped not. He’d rather be buried in the snow come winter, cover
these wounds up. That was the thing about a scratch or a gash: sometimes there
weren’t no healing from them at all. Sometimes you had to hope for them to get
worse and worse until the mechanisms shut down, until you couldn’t feel
nothing. That was easier, somehow. Easier than doing the unnatural thing—than
doing whatever it took to stitch a wound back to how it was before.
42 • Darnell Lippman
She thought the helicopter would take them far away, would
whisk them out over the river to the forest of low buildings and those
red-and-white factory smokestacks beyond. But the net swayed to the side as the
helicopter banked low over the water. And pinned to the rough twine of the net,
a man chewing on her arm, the scent of blood in the cool air, Darnell peered
through the holes of her confinement and spotted the thing they were aiming
for.
It was a pair of barges strapped together, the kind that
pushed through Homer Sound with tugs chugging at their stern. Orange rust, like
lacy adornment, decorated the barges. Taut cables stretched from the corners of
their metal decks out to the rock-shrouded legs of one of the ruined bridges.
The river flowed angrily against the contraption, upset at this intrusion along
its surface. On one side, the water pushed and frothed in a white mustache.
Eddies and curls of water danced and spun along the calmer side, the river
racing and turbulent and chilly.