They drifted down toward the combined decks of the two
barges, and Darnell saw the small sheds dotting their surface. They looked like
the containers from ships, the backs of tractor trailers, or those little
temporary classrooms the middle school bought because it couldn’t afford
anything else. Plastic tubes ran between the containers, the wind from the
props causing them to shimmer and whip about. It was a hastily constructed
place, this metal island set in the roiling waters. A good sign, Darnell
thought. The ruined bridges and this rusted place were good signs. They didn’t
want the horror to spread, which maybe meant that it hadn’t.
Her thoughts drifted to one of Lewis’s favorite TV shows as
the helicopter made its slow descent. It was a show about the men and women who
worked border control down south, a terribly long way from Alaska. She
remembered how those men would round up people at night with goggles that
turned the world green, that made eyeballs shine like headlamps in the tall
grass. They rounded them up and treated them something like this, something
less than human but not quite animal.
She remembered dark-skinned immigrants with plastic straps
around their wrists. They were shoved into vans by men with guns so big they
rested them on their shoulders. These men chewed toothpicks and wore shades and
smiled and talked into the cameras. Lewis loved these men, even though they lived
and worked a terribly long way from Alaska. “Keeping the country clean,” he’d
said, finishing another beer and crushing the tin with his fist.
The net of writhing monsters landed harshly on the wet and
rusty decks, right beside a large white ‘H’ painted in the middle of a big
circle. Darnell couldn’t feel her own skin from the frigid ride, couldn’t tell
if the man pinned beside her was still biting her arm or not.
People in plastic suits came at them warily with long poles
and hooks. They tugged the nets loose with these tools, and the helicopter made
thwumping sounds as the rotor kept spinning. A man in a shiny helmet peered
through the helicopter’s window toward the net, gloved hand on the glass. As
soon as they got the net free, the rotor grew more angry, and the helicopter
lifted away.
Darnell’s nose was frozen stiff, and the men with the poles
were completely covered, but she could still catch a faint whiff of the living
on them. Her ghastly neighbors could, too. Their ragged breath fogged the air
with hungry grunts. Darnell suspected something different was wrong with these
other two, that the locals, the New Yorkers who’d gotten sick, had lost their
minds more fully. It never occurred to her that they were as trapped as she, or
that any of them might be tourists as well, or that her breath was also
clouding the air and filling it with inhuman sounds. In her mind, it was just
she who was out of place and alone. Everyone else was different.
The men in the suits sure treated them the same. They used
poles like for wrangling rabid dogs and hooked their limbs. One suited figure
snagged Darnell’s wrist, another dropped a loop around her neck. She watched as
they tried to snare the arm of her neighbor, but he had no hand to catch it on,
so the loop kept sliding off his black and mangled wrist. Muffled shouts and
pointing from the men in the yellow suits, and they managed to tighten the loop
over his elbow.
The three of them were half-dragged across the steel deck,
slippery with sea salt and ice. Darnell’s feet tangled in the net imbued with
someone’s blood and brains. She fought against these men, but not of her own
accord. She was precisely the animal they were treating her like.
Darnell remembered being
not sick
. She wanted to tell
them, tell them she remembered being petrified that she might catch it, holding
her breath, cowering in a department store, wondering where Lewis had gotten
to, why he wasn’t answering his cell phone. This wasn’t her. She wasn’t like
this.
Any slack in the poles, and her long gray fingernails swiped
at their masked faces, an inhuman power wrestling against the sticks, a croak
of a scream dribbling out. They pulled her through an inflated arch and into
one of the trailers, one not connected to the rest. Loud fans whirred, more cool
air on thawing flesh, the tingle of frost-nipped skin, the half-numb of an
Alaskan night spent camping out too early—too eagerly—in the spring. Darnell
snapped at one of the men in the suits. This was not like her at all.
Glass rooms for each of them. More rooms in the trailer as
well, but all empty. They were the first. There were drains in the floor,
gurneys with straps, chains bolted to the walls with metal plates. The men held
Darnell with their sticks and loops of wire, the one around her neck causing her
to gurgle, the pain very real as her flesh thawed.
She was pinned against the wall, the skin of the trailer
booming as her elbow slammed into it with animal strength. One of the men,
visor fogged with effort or nerves, stepped forward and secured her ankle with
a pole. As she snapped at him, she saw that her net-mates were getting similar
treatment beyond the glass. All the workers pulled, lifting her into the air, a
fresh catch flopping on the end of a line. It felt like they would rip her body
apart, pulling her in all directions like that. She was moved over the gurney,
hovered there, and then was settled down. Cool against her back. Each limb was
pinned with the sticks until they could work the straps tight. Darnell wrestled
against the pinch on her wrists and ankles. If she had a pulse—she wasn’t sure
if she did or didn’t—surely it would be cut off. The straps were too tight.
They released her and withdrew their poles, and Darnell
bucked against her restraints. She was a monster in a film, a horrible movie,
her view through the screen the wrong way.
A groan leaked out as she tried to form the words. She
really concentrated this time, did her best to yell out that she was a person
inside there, that she was a real person and not an animal. She wasn’t like the
others caught in the net with her; she was different, still alive.
She tried to form these words, but they remained loud
thoughts. Silent screams. All that emerged were roars and spit. She arched her
back and banged on the gurney just like the monsters in the other rooms, but
she wasn’t like them. Images from a TV show her husband used to watch flooded
back. She wasn’t like these people at all.
43 • Lewis Lippman
Lewis was lost. He had no idea what street he was on or
which part of town he was in. But he knew he’d finally found what they were all
looking for, the source of this alluring odor drifting through the air: It was
meat, holed up in the middle of a massive intersection the size of a city
block. The smell oozed through and over a barrier wall of cars and trucks,
tantalizing but nearly drowned out as he got closer by the reek of the undead
pressed all around. There was a bus, one of the big flat-fronted kind that rose
high as an overpass and brought whale-watchers from Anchorage. It had been
parked sideways, nose crushed against an old brick facade, a dump truck shoved
against its rear.
Lewis’s group melded with the many others that were already
there, a fucking jamboree of zombies. They all milled around, groaning like a
bunch of drunks, like goddamn stoned hippies waiting for a show to start. They
crowded at each other’s backs, all hoping to be near the stage.
Lewis rode a surge through the crowd. A woman pressed
against him, her lower jaw missing, tongue dangling down like a necktie, eyes
wide with fear. Her gurgles had a unique ring to them. She disappeared,
replaced by the sight of a tall man who must’ve been one of the first to go. A
patch of hair on his scalp and ribbons of flesh stretched across his cheek were
almost all that remained on his skull. His eyes were comically wide, much too
round. Maggots the size of peanuts dotted his neck.
So many stages of decay, so many people, but not people
anymore. Lewis was pushed forward by the crowds at his back. Some of those
ahead were shambling the other direction as if disappointed the show wouldn’t
start. It was hard to smell the living meat from the middle of the crowd; the
change in scents created eddies of undead, a swirling of rotting bodies like by
the fish cleaning station at slack tide.
Lewis made it to the front and found himself pressed against
the bus. There were smears there from those who came before, a clump of hair
and a bit of flesh. He felt something like a gag reflex in his mind, but his
body made no response. It was searching after the smell of meat.
Gunshots rang out from above. He had heard potshots the day
before as he closed in on the area, wondered what they were shooting at. If
anyone in the crowd took a hit, he couldn’t see. There were others at his back
trying to take his place, and Lewis found himself shoved to the side along the
length of the bus. He could imagine himself swirling like this forever until he
looked like the man with the maggots on his neck. Another shot from what
sounded like a high caliber rifle. That was another possibility, another way
out. He tried to gurgle louder, to make himself a target, to seem especially
threatening. He thought of a movie he’d seen once with monsters like him in it,
had laughed while they trudged forward in a stupor getting their heads blown
off, and now it occurred to him that maybe they were begging for it. Maybe they
were trying to hold perfectly still.
Stupid thoughts. Just a movie. Actors. They hadn’t been
thinking shit other than when the next smoke break was coming or hitting those
tables of food. Fuck, Lewis couldn’t stop thinking about food and cigarettes.
He banged his knee on something, something hard. One of those luggage
compartments had come open, had been knocked loose.
There was a smell. Lewis fell to the ground, sniffing.
Others joined him. They could go even closer to the stage, he realized. They
could go
under
it.
He crawled inside the compartment, over a cardboard box
wrapped in tape and past a duffel bag. A few suitcases crowded a dark corner,
the other side of the compartment shut tight.
Lewis banged against it. Others pressed up behind him, knees
ringing on steel, heads hitting the roof, dark and cramped and slamming against
this other door, wondering if it might pop loose as well.
44 • Darnell Lippman
They left Darnell alone on the gurney with her thoughts.
When her head twisted to the side, she could see them working on one of the
others in the adjoining room. They crowded around while the monster thrashed,
back arching and knees kicking, men in rubber suits trying to hold it still
while doctors went to work.
She didn’t see it all. Her eyes roamed, following the smells
coming through the loose joints and cracks of the place. It looked hastily put
together. It reminded her of Lewis’s boat with its rough scars of metal where
he used those bright torches to join plates together. The glass was glued in
with something like that 5200 stuff. She knew from the clothes he ruined.
“What’s this?” She would scratch at the hardened crust on his blue jeans.
“Fifty-two-hundred,” he’d say. Always 5200. Funny the things she remembered.
The barge didn’t sway much, not that she could tell. It was
anchored by those taut cables and the stiff current. It had to be a good sign,
this quarantine. They were trying. There were people out there trying
something. The non-infected were doing more than running away or fighting back.
And the bridges, that had to be good, too. Darnell thought so. There were so
many others to think about. The kids, her parents, all her friends back home.
They would be watching TV and calling the authorities, letting them know she
and Lewis were in the city, that their cell phones were going straight to voice
mail, that they needed help.
Help is here
, Darnell thought.
Help is coming.
They finished what they were doing to the monster in the
next room, and then they came for her, five of them in yellow rubber suits, the
same material as Lewis’s knee-high fishing boots. They had hoods built into the
suits with plastic visors the size of lunchboxes. Two men with wrinkled brows
stood over her and held her shoulders. Darnell felt herself lunge after them,
teeth clacking, and she wanted to apologize for this behavior the way her
sister was forever apologizing for her yipping dogs. “It isn’t their fault,”
Gladys would say. “They’re just being dogs.”
An older woman leaned over, wisps of gray hair framing a
face of concentration or worry, hard to tell which. She had old eyes with
crow’s feet at the corners and directed the others, her voice muffled by the
plastic but her lips moving. She pointed with her thick gloves while machines
were arranged, more tools laid out. Darnell’s body twisted and strained against
the straps pinning her into place. It was as if the monster side of her knew
better than she did what was about to happen. It was as if it were more afraid
than she.
They tightened the straps to keep her from yanking about.
She could barely move. It felt wonderful to be pinned perfectly still like
that—her limbs could no longer betray her. They would see, now that she was
calm, they would see in her eyes that she was okay, that she was more terrified
than they were.
Her clothes were cut off, nasty scraps of fabric peeled away
and preserved like they were unwrapping a gosh-darned mummy. Swabs on her skin,
placed into baggies. A long stick shoved between her teeth and her gums, bagged
up as well.
Yes, take your samples
, Darnell thought.
Make me
better
.
She was thinking this as the swabs and the wooden sticks
were put away. A black bundle was placed on the steel table. Plastic canisters
like Tupperware were arranged. Someone began to draw on her, began to probe her
skin and tap on her chest with stiffened fingers. Darnell pleaded with her
eyes—she tried to let them know she was in there. She tried to speak, all to no
avail.