Pariah

Another small thunderclap swallowed his thin voice. “God damn it! Ruuuuuth!”

“What? What is it already?” Ruth screeched from the bedroom. “You’ll wake everyone!”

“Good! Come in here! Quick!”

“What is it?”

“Come in here!”

Abe was trembling all over. He leaned back out the window and shouted at the departing beam of light. As it receded down York the horde seemed to spread out before it, creating a path.

“Hey, wait!” he shouted, his frail voice swallowed by another burst of thunder. In his ferment he launched into a convulsive coughing fit, his watery eyes following the light until it disappeared from sight. Now his coughing tears mixed with tears of despair.

“What’s the commotion?” Ruth whined. Though she was shrouded in darkness Abe could picture her bitter, disbelieving face. “What’re you dragging me out of bed for?” Her mental image of Cary Grant faded into nothingness.

“There was a light out there!” Abe said, gesturing at the street below, wiping his eyes.

“A light.”

“A light, for Christ’s sake. A light! A light!”

“Abe, it’s thundering out there. Ever hear of a little thing called lightning?”

“It wasn’t lightning. It came from down there! Down there! Not up there! Down!”

Ruth sighed the sigh of a long-suffering martyr and waddled back to the bedroom, leaving Abe wondering if he’d dreamt the whole episode, his mind suggestible to the transcendental literary powers of Can-D.

Or Chew-Z.

13

“They’re beautiful in a hideous kind of way,” Ellen said, admiring Alan’s studies of the undead. A week had passed since their coupling and Alan had invited her to his studio to see his work. No one else in the building had been permitted into his sanctum sanctorum. “My God, there are so many of them.”

“And no two alike,” Alan said. “Just like snowflakes.”

“Not quite,” Ellen frowned.

“Fingerprints?”

“That’s a bit closer. It’s like you’re cataloguing them.”

“I guess I am. Passes the time. Cave paintings of the future.”

Ellen’s eyes roved over the dizzying cavalcade of renderings. Beyond their technical excellence, Alan had captured something she hadn’t stopped to consider about the things outside: their innate humanness. Those things weren’t always things. They had been Homo sapiens. Alan’s meticulous artwork, while unsentimental, betrayed an element of latent humanity in the subject matter. The tilt of a head, the softness of a brow, the turn of a mouth, all reminded her that these empty vessels once had inner lives. They’d been friends and neighbors.

“I’m amazed at how unbiased these are,” Ellen marveled.

“They don’t hate us. They didn’t ask to be what they are.”

Ellen fingered the edge of a pastel of an armless male zombie with half its face missing. It had no pants and its penis was gone, but not its scrotum and testicles. She scanned the other images. Males, females, all dismembered in various ways. Not a single one was intact. How had she never noticed that before? She hastened to the window. Resting on the sill was a pair of binoculars, which she snatched up. Though they were packed together down there, she confirmed what Alan’s drawings portrayed; not a single one of them was complete. On some the damage was more evident than others-whole missing limbs were easy to spot-but all were mutilated beyond the general rot. It made sense. Most had been savaged when they were still people. They’d died and been resurrected.

Missing ears, noses, jaws, chunks of shoulder, gaping gashes, hollowed out cavities where their bellies should be. She noticed that many were nude, their clothes having either fallen off or been forcibly torn away. Some trailed lengths of dehydrated intestine, which others stepped on. Several had cutaways through which their withered internal organs could be seen, just like those “Visible Man” model kits her kid brother made, only less pristine. The legless pulled themselves along with their arms, almost lost in the crowd, trod on by the others, but they kept on. Ellen looked back at the wall of Alan’s portraits, trying to match ones there with the crowd below.

“It’s like a Bosch painting out there,” she said, sounding dazed.

“Bosch was an amateur. The Black Death was a stroll in the park. Those pussies had it cushy.” Alan smiled at Ellen.

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Too dark?”

“No, too vulgar. You sound like a more cultured version of Eddie.”

“Gotcha. Ecch. Okay, I’ll refrain from the cussing. But seriously, the ninnies-is that okay?” Ellen nodded. “The ninnies of the fourteenth century had it good compared to us. But what we’ve got going on is a logical extension. Rats and fleas spread the bubonic plague. See, rats infected with the disease were brought to Europe through trade with the east. At least that’s the theory I remember. Fleas on the rats transmitted the disease to people. I mean those weren’t exactly hygienic times. Open sewers, people shitting out their windows-excuse me, relieving themselves. Just like us, right? The plague spread like wildfire. The symptoms were obvious to anyone with eyes. You’d get these buboes, which were swollen lymph nodes. Along with your high fever you got delirium. The lungs became infected and an airborne version spread from person to person through coughing, sneezing, or just talking. Maybe this whole mess started with fleas or rats. Who knows? I’m sorry, this isn’t history class.”

“No, it’s interesting.”

It wasn’t really, but it passed the time. Ellen had never been much of a history buff, but Alan was smart and men liked to hear themselves talk, so why not indulge him? Alan plucked a thick volume off his bookshelf and gestured with it, the book a prop to lend credence to his thesis. Subconsciously, he’d pat the book after each sentence, punctuating his thoughts, drumming them in. He might have made a fine teacher, Ellen thought, but school had never been her favorite place.

“Is the test gonna be essay or multiple choice?” she said, smiling.

“I’m sorry, should I stop?”

“No, I’m just kidding.” Not.

“Nature’s been trying to wipe humans off the face of the Earth for centuries,” Alan continued. “The influenza pandemic at the end of World War I? Once it got going it knocked off about twenty-five to thirty million around the world. Maybe more. And quick, too. It came and went in a single year. Remember that SARS nonsense? All those little gauze masks people were running around with? Everyone looked like Michael Jackson for a couple of months? Same thing during the influenza epidemic. You could get fined for ignoring flu ordinances. So many folks were croaking there was a shortage of coffins, morticians, and gravediggers. Over time I think AIDS would have surpassed influenza, but it was all a rehearsal for this. This is the one that humanity doesn’t make a comeback from.”

Ellen just stared out the window. “No, I don’t suppose so. But maybe.”

Alan smiled and shook his head. That there was even the slightest room for optimism boggled his mind. He felt a small pang of envy. And then a larger pang of hunger. He stepped out of the room and into the kitchen, his departure unnoticed by Ellen, who seemed in a sort of trance. Maybe his little death diatribe was ill advised. Ellen didn’t come down for a dissertation. Whatever. What was done was done. Alan couldn’t unsay it. He opened a cabinet and took down a can of pork and beans and fished the can opener out of his cutlery drawer. After licking every atom of sustenance off the lid he scooped out two equal portions onto plates, then used the can opener again to remove the can’s bottom, which he also licked clean. He then got out his metal clippers and cut the can