The Killing Floor

large, sweaty hand, and Jean shook it. They agreed to have breakfast at the cafe around the corner, and discuss her impressions of his work.

As they’d left the building, a policeman shot a woman sprinting, dropping her to the asphalt. The gunshot electrified them. The cop screamed, waving them back inside, as more howling figures appeared. Before Jean knew what was happening, she was back inside the gallery and Gary was pulling down the metal gates to cover the windows.

The police officer’s pistol had cracked several more times as Gary darted back inside and locked the door, his eyes bulging and his chest heaving, babbling about crazy people in the street. Whatever he’d seen outside, it had terrified him.

Gary did not have a radio or television in the gallery, but they’d had their cell phones, and both Prendergast and Jean had iPad computers. They spent the day surfing and sharing information. They finished the orange juice and champagne, getting drunk and treating the whole thing as an adventure. In a few days, the government would resolve the crisis, they believed, and then they would have a great story to tell when it was over.

Jean had slept on the floor curled into a ball, using her purse as a pillow, and woke up starving in the middle of the night. She hadn’t eaten all day, and she felt weak and nauseous. After an hour of pressing her fist against her stomach to try to quell the growls and pangs of hunger, she fell back asleep.

The next day, the street belonged to the crazies, cutting them off from the outside world. Things appeared to be getting worse by the hour. They felt lightheaded and jittery. Their blood sugar levels were crashing. The room stank of bad breath. They drank as much water as they could, and spent hours checking the Internet and talking through their options, each of which led back to staying put inside the gallery doing nothing. As the day wore on, Jean became unable to focus on what she was reading. All she could think about was food. Every time they opened the door, screaming maniacs charged them. They were trapped. For hours, they sat in a fearful silence.

“Maybe we could talk about your impressions of my work,” Prendergast had offered.

Jean had actually appreciated the request. Anything to pass the time.

“I don’t like your paintings,” she’d said. In fact, she was terrified she was going to die surrounded by them, and Prendergast’s Iron Eagle, an art deco portrait of an angry stylized war bird surrounded by light beams, would be the last thing she saw. “Sorry, Ricky, but I don’t.”

That was five days ago, before the power went out, before they began to die.

“My work is a complete rejection of post modernism, offering one truth,” Prendergast said.

They had argued for most of that time, but now Jean just moaned. Her body had burned through what little fat remained on her rail thin body, and had begun eating itself to recover proteins it needed to keep her heart and brain and nervous system functioning.

She could not believe how empty she felt. She’d once thought art could change the world. Now thoughts of food occupied every horizon of thought, left room for nothing else. Everything important in her life before the epidemic now struck her as pointless next to food.

“One truth,” Prendergast repeated, “but one that is painful to look at.”

Jean opened her mouth. Her tongue felt like it was covered in moss. Her breath smelled sour.

“Okay,” she whispered. “I like them. I like your paintings. I will write a good review.”

Prendergast lay silent, and then said, “Thank you.”

For what, the capitulation or the argument that took his mind off his contracting stomach, she wasn’t sure. In the ensuring silence, she fell into darkness.

When she awoke, Gary and Prendergast were gone and the gallery smelled like burning meat, overwhelming the open sewer shit smell emanating from the bathroom with its dead plumbing. Her salivary glands squirted, flooding her mouth, and she wondered if this were a mirage—a bitter manifestation of her starvation.

“Gary,” she hissed. If this was a sign of the end, she didn’t want to go alone. She gathered her strength and screamed, “Gary, please!”

He emerged from his office smiling and knelt on the floor next to her. She had a hard time seeing him; her vision had gone blurry.

He unclenched his fist and showed her a sliver of steak cupped in his palm.

“Eat,” he said.

Jean swiped the warm meat from his hand and jammed it into her mouth, swallowing it almost whole. It was amazing. Nothing she’d ever eaten, in fact, had ever tasted so good. It had tasted like God. She licked her fingers and cried.

“I have more food, but you have to go slow,” Gary told her. “I know how hungry you are, but you have to take it slow, okay?”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

“I chose you,” he said enigmatically. He smelled like smoke.

“How did you get it?”

“After you fell asleep, I went outside to check things out. The crazy people were gone. So Prendergast and I scavenged around the neighborhood and found a butcher shop with some meat in a cooler that was still good for eating. I dug the hibachi grill out of storage; we used to cook shrimp out back for parties. I got it set up in my office. I’m trying to vent the smoke out the window.”

Jean felt alarmed Prendergast was eating it all. “Where is he?”

Gary’s smile turned into a hard line. “Ricky didn’t make it, Jean. We weren’t alone out there. Some of those people were around.”

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I know he was your friend.” Faced with the prospect of survival, she now regretted compromising her artistic principles by conceding the argument and saying she liked his work.

“Yes, he was. Thanks for that. Listen, the steaks are going to burn. I’ll be back in a bit. You stay here, okay? Don’t move. I’ll bring you more food in just a minute.”

Jean lay on the floor for some time breathing in the odors of roasting meat and moaning with need. Wisps of barbecue smoke drifted in the air like spirits. Burned, medium rare, raw—she didn’t care, as long as she got to eat it. Now she started to panic Gary was going to eat it all, leaving her with nothing. He didn’t understand; she had to eat. She had to eat now.

She raised herself to her knees, gasping for breath and feeling dizzy, and gained her feet. The floor looked very far away. Then she started walking toward the office, her mouth filling with saliva again.

Jean opened the door, squinting to see better, and gasped.

Gary stood at the barbecue shrouded in cooking smoke, his mouth open in surprise. The room was dim and smoky, but she could see, plain as day, a plate of steaming brown steaks lying on a silver serving tray, the one he used to serve champagne to guests for small showings to important buyers. Two champagne flutes stood filled with water.

He had scavenged a feast for her. This food would bring her back to life.

For a moment, she thought she’d seen something else, something evil and impossible, a trick of the gloomy daylight filtering through the smoke. She thought she’d seen a chopped up carcass hanging from hooks used to mount large and heavy artworks. It’d looked like the body of a naked obese man hung upside down with his head, feet and hands cut off, gutted and bled out, the blood and organs dumped into a large plastic garbage can beneath the body.

Then she blinked, and it was gone.

“You weren’t supposed to see this,” Gary shouted, his voice edged with panic.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, leaning against the doorframe. She couldn’t take her eyes off the steaks. “It’s so beautiful.”

That night, Gary crawled to where she lay, hiked up her Chanel skirt and entered her. Jean put her arms around him, smacking her lips and thinking about her next meal. He had little energy; it was over fast. Afterwards, while they slept huddled on the floor, the carcass invaded her dreams. The pale carcass of a man, chopped and gutted, mounted on the wall like slaughtered cattle. Like an obscene piece of art, provocative and visceral.

Prendergast would have loved it.

Dr. Price