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,
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.
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
