there, when he suspected the doctors knew what the fuck they were talking about.
He caught a final glimpse of what was left of his mother before lurching down the steep stairs, falling as much as walking, tumbling one flight at a time toward the pavement far below. A car alarm wailed in the distance. Some undead and directionless thing like himself had likely staggered into it, not watching where it was going.
Michael wondered how that was possible, for any of them not to see where they were going. He spiraled down the old fire escape, metal clanging, bouncing off the rails that guided him in one direction only: around and around.
Circles. As tidy and looping as the days were short. How could any of them not see where they were going? They’d been going around and around in tiny circles, had been for years, years that sat heavy in the gut of the living. And this was what made stomachs turn: the weight of all that time wasted. It was the seconds and minutes and hours, the true nectar of life, gorged on hungrily and thoughtlessly, forever indigestible, everyone hungry for more.
8 • Gloria
The wildlife was oblivious to all but the spoils. The human world was dead, but Gloria saw that theirs was still gloriously alive. The pigeons had multiplied. They gathered in noisy flocks and fully claimed a city long held on lease. Swooping in thunderous packs, wings like the sound of flags flapping in a breeze, they followed the bounty of trash that drifted everywhere. They picked at the scattered bones bleaching in the October sun. They stirred reluctantly when the dead intruded and hopped around on fragile legs, picking at the scraps. They exploded upward in fear only of the dogs.
The dogs were newly wild. They were still in the process of returning to their lurking, primal states. When they fought over scraps—tugging at a boot until the leg came away from the hip—Gloria saw herself in them. Many of them jangled with the baubles of ownership. A few dragged ruined leashes through the scrap heap humanity had left behind. They howled in the distance or from within buildings and fenced lots. They growled and snarled at each other, fur matted and hackles up. They scratched and bit at their flanks, their own infestations to deal with. Gloria hated seeing the dogs. Many of the poor creatures looked as though they wouldn’t last another day or two. Others would probably thrive.
This was the end of the world, that’s what she was privy to. She thought of her brother and sister, thought of Carl in prison upstate, and wondered if their world was ending as well. Maybe not. Not yet. Maybe this island was a wound the rest of America would cauterize and survive. Just a nick, perhaps. Either way, here was a glimpse of the inevitable. The world could stagger on a bit, but here was an early view of the looming fate of mankind.
Gloria remembered classes she had taken in college. She had majored in English, but never got far enough to take the classes she wanted to take. It was all the pre-requisites before dropping out, before trying to make it as a dancer on Broadway, eventually resigning herself to waiting tables, partying, marrying the first guy who knocked her up, staying with him even after the pregnancy failed, even after he was locked away. Before all that, there had been a pre-req, a geology class. She had learned a bunch about rocks and volcanoes, couldn’t remember what else. All she came away with was an appreciation of time, for the vast eons that stretched out in both directions.
The dogs and the birds and the rats owned this city. The cockroaches and the gnats and the maggots. Gloria stumbled down the streets toward the hope of another meal and was witness to Armageddon. And it was more peaceful than she imagined. The time stretched out and was filled with life being busy
Ahead of her rose a barricade of cars. A bus parked across the curb, not by accident. The smell came from the other side, people alive. A pocket of survivors. An oasis of ripe flesh. The barricade rose like the Rockies, blocking out ideas of time stretching off forever. There was this thing to consider. The band of undead pressed against the overlapped cars, and an alarm rang out, a car alarm. Clever if done on purpose, a ring of cars that would sound an alarm when the dead came calling.
Gloria crowded in with the rest. She bumped against the bus, waved her arms at the bright smells in the air that seemed to tinge everything pink and shiny. There were people on the other side. Living people. She was one of the animals fenced out. Gloria knew this, knew what she was, what side of the fence she lived on. And she saw that the end of the world was not quite yet. Some were still trying, banding together, building a fortress of buses and cars in the middle of a crumbling city. Fires crackled, the smell of cooked pigeons, maybe dog, maybe something else.
Gloria sniffed the air, taking it all in, feeling that vast stretch of time soaring out to either side of her, knowing this was but a slice, and that the ruin would come to all else. The end of things. And her kind would hasten it, whether they wanted to or not.
9 • Jennifer Shaw
Jennifer’s shuffle, which had grown to three dozen since yesterday, made its way across 59th. The promise of living flesh continued to drift north on a breeze steered by glass-walled canyons. It smelled like dozens of survivors, so many that their fear mixed and blended until they couldn’t be told apart. Curiosity as much as hunger seemed to drive the shuffle south. As if any reason were needed for limbs long out of control.
Stepping from the curb, her arms out to steady her diminished sense of balance, Jennifer realized she never came this way anymore, not since she was a kid. The shuffle slid around the cars in the street, startling a flock of birds, and Jennifer felt herself cross an imaginary boundary she didn’t even know existed, a separation of two worlds delimited by city blocks and a strip of pavement.
The world she left behind was the one she knew as an adult, living and working on the Upper East Side. And here, the width of a paved river away, Sutton Place, the world of her youth. From one island to another with a few steps. She never came this way anymore.
There was a park on the corner she recognized, a park she knew well. There was a puppy she and her sister had begged for. When the two of them both wanted a thing that badly, they were rarely refused, even when their parents knew better. Likewise, when the two of them disagreed, a stalemate of rare violence formed. She and her sister got the puppy because their wishes overlapped. It remained nameless, referred to simply as “Puppy,” because they could not agree on anything more proper.
Jennifer couldn’t remember the name she had lobbied for, though it seemed a matter of life and death at the time. All she remembered was how fast it grew. Until it was bigger than they were. Until its name made less and less sense. There, in that park, she and her sister had strained against the leash while Puppy dragged them from tree to tree, chasing squirrels. The allure wore off quickly, as Puppy outgrew its cuteness. She and her sister had realized how much work was involved, that their parents were right, and gradually the dog became their mother’s. Which meant their mother didn’t have to be alone when she left the rest of them behind.
The view of her childhood park was lost as Jennifer crowded against the person in front of her. It was the same obese man she’d fallen behind a block earlier. She tried not to look. The man’s ear and a flap of his cheek hung down from where he’d been attacked. When he turned and sniffed the air with his rotting stump of a nose, she was forced to see his grisly molars, his tobacco-stained teeth, right through his open cheek. Flies had taken up residence in his wound and flew about lazily in the cool air, buzzing his head like some great nest, some fleshy hive. Jennifer imagined they would lay eggs in his flesh. The maggots would come soon for him—she’d seen them writhe on others. She wondered how long before she felt them inside her as well.
Ahead of the man was the woman with no eyes in the bright purple dress. She had been a part of the shuffle for five days. Or was it six? Jennifer had lost count. She was envious of this woman. She could see her walking with both arms out, hands tangled up in the clothes and hair of others, her face a blood-caked mess. While she shuffled along blindly in her purple dress, Jennifer longed to switch places. She imagined the games she could play if the world were black. The sounds of car alarms and the crackling of fires might pierce her imaginary travels, but she
