Pariah

She was delighted he wasn’t present, but his absence was peculiar. Still, her answer for now: who cares? His loss.

Safely on the other side of the stairwell housing, Ruth tilted her head up and let the cataract wash over her cataracts. She’d been scheduled to have phacoemulsification the week after martial law was declared. Now she was stuck with cloudy vision of a cloudy sky. She pulled some matted strands of hair away from her eyes, her fingers straying up her forehead, which seemed to go all the way to the back of her head. Maybe it was better she couldn’t see that well. In her mind she could still picture herself as she was. Abe, too.

“Hey,” Abe said, making Ruth flinch.

“Oh, you scared me.” Even with muzzy vision she could see he was starkers. “Ucch, Abraham. Even you?”

“Even me what?”

“With the nakedness. Isn’t it bad enough those youngsters are doing it? And the colored? From them I expect it, but you? Oy, there’s no fool like an old fool.”

“Even in the rain you manage to rain on a parade. Uncanny. Suit yourself.”

Abe joined the others as they clasped hands and gamboled around.

“This feels so… pagan,” Karl cried with glee.

The others agreed and Karl basked in the moment. Big Manfred would vomit if he ever saw his son cavorting like this: naked, turgid, wanton. After a while the rain subsided to a light drizzle and various moans of disappointment rose from the group. The air actually smelled fresh. Dabney trotted over to his customary perch, lay on his belly in a deep puddle, and peered down. The horde hemming in his wrecked van was soggier than usual, but otherwise unaffected by the rain. They stumbled and jostled same as ever. Seeing his van always made his stomach ache. Dabney looked away, not wanting to dampen his spirits. A rainbow spread over the buildings to the west.

It was so corny he couldn’t believe it.

February, Then

“Come on, man, move that shit!”

Dabney leaned on his horn again, knowing full well it was an act of futility. Traffic was snarled in every direction. He’d decided to take the FDR, but what a mistake that had been. After a few hours he managed to exit onto York Avenue. His home, a two-bedroom apartment on the twelfth floor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Houses on 110th Street and Lenox Avenue, awaited, his terrified wife, Bernice, holed up therein with three guns-all of which were legal-and sufficient ammo, if not skill, to protect herself. Already, within hours of the crisis’s advent, looting and street violence were rampant. Road rage was devolving into something worse, every face of every driver and passenger in every vehicle transformed by primordial fear. This wasn’t merely anxiety. Even panic would be a step toward calm.

The sidewalk traffic wasn’t any better. Dabney looked out the side windows and saw donnybrooks everywhere. Store windows were being smashed both accidentally and on purpose. Some just gave when too many bodies pressed up against them, causing explosions of cubed glass, like geysers of diamonds. Mixed in with the hysterical humans were these new bloodthirsty monstrosities. Across the hood of a car jutting diagonally half in and half out of its space a woman was being disemboweled and devoured by a trio of dead-eyed freaks, her fluids splashing onto the asphalt. Dabney fought the urge to open his door and try to help. Help what? She was dead. And if what they were saying was true-and he believed his own eyes, so yes, it was-whatever was left of her when the threesome were done eating would get up and join them. A quartet. Now multiply that over and over, ad infinitum. All up and down the avenue similar scenes were happening.

And no one stopped to help.

The few cops that remained were looking out for their own welfare, and Dabney couldn’t blame them. Pop- pops erupted from all over, some of the bullets downing the cannibals, others ricocheting off hard surfaces. A slug pinged off a lamppost and put a dime-size crater into Dabney’s windshield, small fissures radiating from it. Dabney took a hand off the steering wheel and pressed a finger to the spot, feeling cool air passing through a tiny hole. He hoped the integrity of the windscreen would maintain. Just long enough. He had to get home. He fished out his cell phone again and tried to call, but nothing doing. All circuits were tied up. Please try again. There was nothing to do but keep pushing northwest.

Something heavy slammed onto his roof and Dabney felt as if his blood stopped circulating for a moment and a vacuum formed in his lungs. A body rolled down his windshield and under all the noise of chaos he heard that twinkly crackle of the glass straining under the body’s weight. If the windshield broke, those crazies would get in and get him. With mere inches between his and the next vehicle, Dabney accelerated, then reversed, bumping both cars to his front and rear. The body rolled off his hood, its smashed face casting a dead glare his way as it dropped out of sight under the van. The door of the car to his front flew open and the incensed driver starting walking back toward Dabney, slapping a five-cell Maglite flashlight against his open palm. Dabney couldn’t believe it. In the eye of the shitstorm this moron was going to give him grief about a tiny bumper thump.

“What the fuck, dude?” the guy said, glaring at Dabney. No one was in his right mind. No one. Dabney checked his door locks.

As the guy neared, another blood-drenched cannibal scrambled over a motionless car and sank his teeth into the Maglite guy’s throat. Dabney’s mind raced even as all around him remained stationary. His thoughts came rapid fire: Okay, now that asshole’s definitely not moving. His car is stuck in my way. Can’t reverse. Can’t move forward. He was gonna kill me. In all this, he was gonna kill me. I gotta get home. Look at this shit. On the sidewalk it’s more spread out. I’m near a hydrant. There’s a gap. I’m near a hydrant. That guy was gonna kill me. But now he’s dead. I gotta get home.

Dabney bit his lip hard, then yanked the steering wheel hard to the right and bulled his van past the hydrant onto the sidewalk. Fuck it, he thought. Everyone out here is gonna die, anyway. There was little to contradict that thought, but even as he rationalized his decision to mount the sidewalk and plow through the pedestrian pandemonium he couldn’t help but vacillate between I’m committing vehicular manslaughter big time, and I’m performing euthanasia on an epic scale. There really was a fine line between mercy killing and mass murder. And did it count as murder if they came back to life? Dabney could lose sleep over that ethical conundrum later, if he lived that long.

Bumps, thumps, screams, and percussive squelchy crunching sounds were the soundtrack to his trek north, his shallow hood being battered and spattered. As his windshield wipers strained against the profusion of blood and viscera, a stream began to leak through the small aperture. Bodies bounced off the front grille. After fifteen protracted minutes he ran out of wiper fluid and the blood began to congeal, even as it was slicked back and forth. Visibility was nearly nil.

“God dammit,” Dabney keened. “God dammit.”

Tears flowed down his round cheeks. This was wrong. Everything about this was wrong and fucked-up. What was he thinking? He’d left the house to install locks and window gates. Panic was good for sales and of late sales had been slow. He needed the year-end business. He shook his head. How had he let this happen? All kinds of folks-mostly white and willing to pay extra for rapid emergency service-had phoned. He smelled cash. But for what? Greed was a sin, sure, but stupidity should be the eighth deadly sin, because it was going to get him killed.

Traffic ahead actually eased a bit. He could see patches of gray-black asphalt through the havoc. He hit the accelerator and surged forward for a few glorious, optimistic seconds and then WHAM! A westbound Volvo sprang forth from the side street and spun Dabney’s van. His blood-caked windshield imploded, covering him in wet fragments of safety glass. Unseeing and startled, his foot slammed down on the gas and his truck plowed into the front of a building, the engine sputtering and then silent.

With both ears ringing, Dabney wiped the blood, sweat, and tears from his eyes and saw a large confederacy of cannibals coming at his vehicle. The accident had smeared several all over the pavement, but there were so many. More than he’d seen anywhere else. These weren’t cannibals. These things weren’t human. They looked human, but they weren’t. Not any more. Some had been gutted and dismembered but here they came nonetheless, dripping gore and spilled innards. People didn’t do that. The news was right.