couple boys downstairs. They’re saying that Shelly’s on the list. On that fucking list. You know what that means.”
That meant somebody had ratted us out, told the health department that Shelly was dying. Probably the hospital. Radiation sickness coupled with cholera…it was only a matter of time. The clean-up workers would come for her or at least demand proof that she was still breathing.
The trucks were getting closer.
“Thanks, Bill,” I said, shutting the door.
Time to move.
Cradling Shelly in my arms and making sure the corridor was empty, I slipped downstairs using the back steps. Out in the alley, I carried her around the rear of the building and cut through the little field back there. I was sweating, shaking, feeling like some convict who had just gone over the wall at Sing Sing. Shelly hardly weighed anything. I could have run for miles with her. I was almost across the field when somebody shouted: “There! There he is!”
They were coming and I was running.
Men with flashlights were entering the field. I cut through a little thicket, snagging Shelly’s shroud on blackberry thorns. I fought my way through, hands and face scratched. I fell only once but got right up again, kept going. When I made it out of the thicket, white-suited men were converging and trucks with spotlights were coming up the street.
I was trapped.
I started this way and that, but it was no good. The trucks were bearing down and the men with flashlights were closing in through the thicket. They were everywhere. Nowhere to run. It was perfectly surreal and completely unreal. The men chasing me. The flashlights. The trucks. The stink of death from the gutters. The stagnant mist creeping in off the river. The stars overhead blotted out by a dirty smudge of black smoke rising from the body pits outside the city where they burned the corpses.
I made a mad dash out into the street and one of the trucks nearly ran me down. Warning shots were fired, bullets zipping around. Spotlights found me and held me, blinding me there on the wet pavement.
A truck rolled to a stop and four men in white containment suits that were not so white anymore took hold of me while I fought and clawed and screamed. They stank of corpse-slime. I shouted at them and took a rifle butt to the temple that sent me sprawling. I was out for a moment or two after that, then I got back up again, fought my way through a tangle of men, hitting and being hit, knocking them aside in my wild flight. When I got around the back of the truck, I saw Shelly up there atop a moldering heap of corpses. Her shroud had burst, one chalk-white arm hanging out. I could smell the putrescence and hear the buzzing meat flies. Some of the corpses were rotten and green, writhing with worms.
Shelly. Oh dear God. Shelly.
The men grabbed at me, but I went loco. I hit and kicked and got free.
They fell back, not wanting to rupture their dirty suits. I jumped up amongst the carrion and nobody came after me. I was sweating and bleeding, head pounding like a drum, mind filled with shadows and screaming voices. It was insane, totally insane, but I just couldn’t let Shelly be up there. Not with the others, not with those dead ones. And there were dozens and dozens of them in the back of the dump truck. Just a great shivering mass of carrion infested with crawling and squirming things. As I tried to climb up there my hands sank through spongy bellies that let out clouds of gagging yellow corpse gas. Out of my mind with grief, I crawled and clawed through a noisome sea of putrefaction. My fingers penetrated pulpy faces, scraping over skulls for purchase.
And then scant inches from Shelly’s shroud…I collapsed.
Revolted, sickened, just beside myself, all the energy ran out of me. I slid down that heap of corpses, face netted with buzzing flies, rank meat packed beneath my fingernails.
“You ready to come down now, son?” one of the men asked.
I slid out of the back and they knocked me to the pavement, kicking the shit out of me until I lost consciousness. When I woke, a few hours later, I was lying in the grass where they’d thrown me. A dog was licking the filth from my fingers. My breath was fuming out in cold white clouds, the face of the moon above stained with a black trail of smoke from the ever-blazing body pits.
This is what it had come to.
God bless America.
5
All I wanted after that was to be alone, to brood and break down in private with a bottle of whiskey in one hand, but Bill Hermes found me and wouldn’t let that happen.
“She’s dead now,” he said. “Shelly’s gone and she’s at peace. Don’t profane her memory by destroying yourself.”
Sage advice. I knew it made perfect sense just as I knew I would not follow it. All I wanted now was destruction, cool white oblivion. Maybe Bill sensed that too, because he boiled water on his woodstove and drew a bath and made me clean up. And when that was done, he made me some food. It was canned like everything else these days, but at least it was something to put in my stomach.
As I ate, picking at corned beef hash and powdered eggs, he watched me. Watched me very closely. He pulled a Winston out of a crumpled red pack, snapped off the filter and lit up, blowing smoke out of his nostrils. And never once did he take his eyes off of me.
“Well, go ahead, Bill,” I said. “You got something to say, so say it.”
He chuckled. “I’m thinking it’s time you pack up your old kit bag and move on. Nothing here for you now. City’s getting worse by the day. Get out. Get out into the country where a man has a chance.”
“We lived here. This was our neighborhood.”
“That’s all past now, son. Nothing but memories. Get out for chrissake. Get out now.”
“You coming?”
“For what? Ain’t nothing out there for me. I’m too damn old to start again.”
I set my fork down. “Nothing here but memories for you, too, Bill.”
“When you get my age,” he said, blowing out a cloud of smoke, “there ain’t much else.”
He turned away and looked out the curtains to the streets below. Just shook his head. “Goddamn cesspool, Rick. That’s what. Been wanting to get out for a long time. Would’ve, too, if Ellen hadn’t loved it here so much. She grew up two streets away. Even after she passed…I don’t know…something held me.”
“Something’s holding me, too.”
“Bullshit.” Bill coughed into his hand and for maybe the first time, I noticed how blotchy his face looked. A funny yellow sheen to it. “Bullshit, I say. You need to go before it gets worse. Right goddamn now, Rick. I’m too old to go with you. You pull an old tree up by the roots, its dies. But a young one…you can replant it and it’ll bear leaf. You following me?”
I was. “I’ll think it over.”
Bill looked like he was about to read me the riot act, but then the wind went out of him and he broke into a coughing fit. The cigarette fell from his fingers and he held himself up by the countertop.
I was on my feet. “Bill…”
He waved me away. “I’m all right. Just old. Just smoking too much for too long. That’s all.”
But I wasn’t believing that. The coughing. The weakness. The blotchy face. No, this was something else entirely. And he had it good.
“Rick, get the hell out,” he said, pulling himself up, standing erect with great exertion that left him gasping. “Ellen and I…oh, Jesus in heaven…we loved you and Shelly to death. Never had kids of our own. Always thought if we did, they might be like you two. So do an old man a favor and get out of the city.”
“Bill, I…”
“Please, Rick.”
There was no doubt about it at all then: Bill Hermes had radiation sickness.
A week later he was dead.
