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He never got there, of course, to where the smoke was coming from. The crowds heading south bumped into the much different crowds fleeing north. This is what reminded him of that day eleven years ago, what looked the same between the island getting hit and bit. The people staggering north back then had been pale, skin white like ghosts, even the brothers and sisters. They looked like the dead, their eyes these dark and unblinking circles. They pawed at their own faces, groaning, holding shoulders to see where they were going, just like the undead did now.
Jeffery remembered how they cried and moaned, how they fell in the streets, shaking. People were hugging whoever was there, was closest, didn’t matter. Jeffery remembered that. It didn’t matter.
A cop had told him to get lost. He picked Jeffery out of the downtown crowd, could tell that he was different, didn’t belong. Jeffery’s skin glistened with sweat from the long run, his eyes wide with curiosity, wide with all he hadn’t seen. They were different than the look from those who had.
“My daddy’s down there,” he tried to tell the cop.
“Then your dad’s in a world of hurt,” the officer had said.
Jeffery had been pissed. It was a shitty thing to say. But he realized later that the cop was just like him. There was no blanket of ash on that man, no desire to hug a stranger. He hadn’t seen. Hadn’t seen a thing. Was just reacting. Drafted into a war, not asked.
His father, Jeffery would learn, was not in a world of hurt. He was helping that world. The ferry had run back and forth across those cold September waters for much of the morning, people piling aboard from the seawall like an army of the undead, more and more of them, always coming, crowding aboard pale as ghosts and shaking like grocery bags caught on a clothesline. And Jeffery’s dad, hands rough from handling ropes all those long years, had been there, pulling those people aboard.
27 • Jeffery Biggers
The dumpster lurched as the dead knocked against it, and Jeffery nearly fell on his ass. He steadied himself and held the extended aluminum pole with both hands, leaving him with only his jutting elbows for balance. More bangs, and the dumpster slid a few inches, tired wheels groaning, the hollow metal resounding beneath him.
It was working. Holy shit, it was working!
Jeffery spread his feet, his knuckles pale as he gripped that cool aluminum pole, his arms shaking from the strain of holding the thing out as far as he could.
They’d done this in boot camp, he remembered. It was a form of punishment. Made them hold their rifles by the barrels, parallel to the ground, the heavy butts dipping toward the earth. Joints and muscles would scream while the drill sergeant came around and rested his pasty hands on the stocks, pressing them down.
The dumpster moved again. The baby wailed. Beneath it, dozens of hands pawed at the air like drunken fans at a concert, like kids lining a parade, hoping for someone on a float to throw them candy.
The thing they craved swung from one of those yuppie backpacks. It was looped over the crusty paint roller, the pole bending under the strain. The alley had collected a mob. Some stood waving beneath the kid. Others crowded from the far side—and the dumpster shifted.
Jeffery laughed and shuffled his feet on the unsteady plastic lid. It was fucking working. If he got out of this shit, he’d have a helluva story for the next group he bumped into. He was already retelling it as the dumpster moved a few more inches, the casters squealing as they worked free. The body of the metal container rang with the angry bangs of scrambling arms and legs trying to get up from the other side. The ones on the near side weren’t trying to climb at all, just fixating on the little feet wheeling in the air over their heads. One crowd pushed and the other did nothing, and the dumpster moved.
A hand got close to the screaming kid, a tall fucker. Jeffery bit his lip and steadied the pole. Goddamn, this was wrong. But it weren’t like he was throwing the kid over their heads and making a dash. Hell, he didn’t have to risk his neck to be down there in the first place.
The dumpster moved quite a bit, the kid swinging in its harness, Jeffery letting go with one hand and swinging his free arm for balance. He used the kid like bait to guide some of the chompers between the dumpster and the brick wall behind him. They followed like sheep. As they crowded in and scrambled for the prize, the dumpster really moved. It lurched away from the building, and more of them filed into place. Too damn easy. Too predictable.
He swung the kid around and steered the biggest crush of foul undead toward the other side of the alley, getting the hang of it. There was an urge to glance up at his audience above, the boy in the window, to shout out that he was gonna be okay, but there was so much to concentrate on. He switched hands and gave his other one a shake, fingers tingling. The plastic lid buckled some more. Jeffery had a thought of falling through, of losing his platform. The paranoia that’d built up over weeks of running told him this would happen next. The worst shit possible would always happen next. And there would be a goddam chomper in the dumpster, lying in wait. He shook this thought away. That’s not how this was going down. He was already telling the story to the next group, telling them how near he’d come from having his bones picked clean. He was gonna make it.
A few inches at a time, the dumpster crept across the alley. More of the fuckers squeezed in around the wrecked van, joining the pack. Jeffery worried it would be too many, that the crush would get so dense that the dumpster would simply stop moving. He was already out in the center of the alley, an island in a shark-infested sea. Man, this would be a story. He laughed with nerves, the metallic taste of adrenaline on his tongue, thinking of all the times he’d been shot at and how he thought it’d make for a good story back home. Fuck, he shoulda re-upped. Another tour, and he’d be safer over there than he was now.
One of the undead managed to get its armpits up on the lip of the dumpster, scrambling over some of those that’d fallen down. Jeffery kicked him in the head. He tried to keep toward the edges of the lid where it was more solid, but hands were brushing his boots. Shit, this was tenuous. Tightroping this motherfucker. Six feet away from the nearest window. Four feet. Almost three feet, when his plan hit a snag. The bastards on that side of the dumpster wouldn’t clear out. They were like a bumper, a wall, blocking progress.
He shifted hands again and tried urging them out with the kicking and screaming kid, but more took their place from the other side. Jeffery was fucked. He looked back at the kid in the window, needing to see some other living soul, and the boy’s wide eyes and slack mouth confirmed his own fears: well and truly fucked.
He pulled the kid back in. The chompers were piling up, banging into the dumpster from all sides. Soon they would start forming ramps and making their way to the top. Jeffery pictured them crashing through the lid with him, banging on the insides of the reeking container, being eaten away at from all sides, him and the baby, mixing in the same guts.
Fuck. Fuck.
He loosened the backpack from the end of the painting handle and worked his arms through the straps. “C’mon, kid,” he breathed. The groans and the stench were everywhere. This was it. This was it. He twisted the knobs on the handle again and extended it all the way, really cinched them down tight. Another fucker was up to her armpits, face caked in blood, a real hungry one. Jeffery stepped away and concentrated on the window. “C’mon, kid. ” He speared the glass with the handle, punching it through panes set in place in the 50s, maybe earlier. Several more pokes and the window was busted up good. He used the pole to slap the glass out of the frame—thank God they didn’t have them damn bars on them—and kicked the bitch in the head who was biting after his boots. Fuck. Fuck. Chomper slobber on his goddamn boots.
The thin strips of wood that formed a grid between the panes of glass were all that was left. Like an empty game of tic-tac-toe. No breaking them with the painting stick, but how sturdy could they be? Jeffery pulled the stick back, used it to push a chomper’s fo
rehead away, the thing snarling angrily at being toyed with by its food. The plastic lid faintly buckled. The banging and groaning were like drums reaching some sort of crescendo. Even the kid had fallen quiet, maybe for being pressed back against a body, maybe just fuckin’ exhausted, maybe sensing what Jeffery was sensing: that the end was well fucking nigh.
He ran along the edge of the lid to keep it from collapsing, ran past the waving and groping hands, trying not to trip over them, and threw himself through the void, over the heads, jumping like a kid again, back when he liked to pretend the ground was lava.
He crashed halfway through the wooden slats. They snapped by his shoulders and arms, his waist catching on the window, feet scrambling. An old wound on his stomach lanced out with a pain so sudden and sharp that he nearly fainted. It felt like one of the slats had fucking pierced him, but it was just a deep bruise that would never heal, a former injury being struck again.
Hands fell on his calves. One of his boots was torn off as he tried to pull himself inside, damn things screaming and moaning and his body on fire with a thousand aches.
Jeffery scrambled through the busted window, one boot on, another off. He laughed and whooped. He jumped around a disgusting living room torn up by scavengers, the baby hollerin’ on his back, its voice going up and down as it rode the sickening roller coaster of Jeffery’s elation.
With a loud hack and coughing noise, and then a splatter of nasty warmness against his neck, the kid lost the last meal it would ever get from its mother. Jeffery didn’t give a shit. He laughed at this, knowing it was the perfect punch line to the goddamn most unbelievable bullshit story anyone in this living nightmare would ever share with another wide-eyed and doubting soul.
He limped around on his one boot, laughing. Limping. The aches wore off from holding that painting stick so far out, from smashing through the goddamn window. Limping. Looking down. Blood on the filthy carpet, blood on his sock.
“No,” Jeffery muttered. “Oh, fuck, fuck, no. ” He hopped to the sofa with its stuffing erupting like pearly white guts.
“Fuck me, no. C’mon, kid. C’mon. ”
Jeffery sat down and tore off his sock, hand shaking. His bladder felt near to burst with diet coke. No. Not after all that. No fucking way.
The sock came away easy, the blood not nearly begun to set, not an old wound like he’d hoped, not a scab ripped open like he prayed it was.
“Oh, fuck, kid. ”
Jeffery worked at the buckles on the yuppie pack. He pulled the infant around and laid him gently on his back amid the disgorged white furniture innards. He had no idea how old the child was, always got that wrong whenever he guessed. It coulda been born yesterday. Could be three months. No fuckin’ clue.
He studied the wound. Saw the bite marks, the torn flesh. Knives in the kitchen, probably. He could saw through the thing, hack through the bone. But he’d heard from that one group that it didn’t work. They said their one-armed friend was still out there somewhere, clacking at the air with his teeth. It’d been no good at all to cut his arm off.
The kid looked at him with something like worry, with his little nose and raised brow. There were angry bangs and groans from the alley heard through the smashed window. The infant had those big eyes babies have, those little pink lips all puckered up, asking for their next meal. Just like Jeffery and all the survivors, just like that alley full of chompers, everyone was always looking for their next meal.
Jeffery studied the little guy, the kid who was supposed to’ve been his ticket out of there. A one-way ride on one of them helicopters, always the helicopters comin’ to pull him out of the deep shit. Just one more ride, that’s all he wanted. Come and get me. Save me from my own goddamn country. Here’s the red smoke right fuckin’ here. Here’s me waving my rifle, barrel pointed right back at me, motherfuckers, just like you taught. Here I am. Come and get me.
Jeffery looked down at his foot, dripping blood.
They already had, he figured. They’d already got him fucking good.
28 • Jeffery Biggers
Jeffery could still feel that original wound, but he no longer limped. He walked just as unsteadily on both legs. And what control he could exert over where they took him seemed to come from resignation. That’s how he could somewhat operate his body. The less he struggled, the more say he had in where he went. He could steer by thinking about a place, by leaning into the walls of his own self—not aggressively, that didn’t work—but just a gradual lean, like guiding a bowling ball after it had already left his hand. It reminded Jeffery of the Buddhists he’d read about, their fascination with water, how it flowed to fill any vessel, how it moved around a pier rather than put up a fight and try and bash through it.
It was one of his dad’s books, a ratty paperback passed to him on the stoop, a book he’d never finished. His old man was always bringing him worn books with chipped edges and broken spines that smelled of wet rope and low tide. He said he read them while the ferry was waiting on passengers. Jeffery never asked where his father got the books, always assumed he stole them from those racks of dollar paperbacks crazy white bookstore owners left on the sidewalk like a temptation. He tended to assume the worst about his old man. It was hard not to, growing up in a nest with his momma’s hate—all those vile thoughts regurgitated and forced down Jeffery’s open beak.
Most of the books his father gave him went in the trash. He would try and read them, try and sell them, but they rarely took to him or were taken up by others. The only book his old man ever gave him that he read cover to cover was the one on sculpture. It was a guilty pleasure, that book. Not sure what the draw was, and Jeffery had never told anyone about it. His father had brought it one day to show Jeffery where he worked. There was a picture of two sculptures by the water, two towers. The Pylons, the book called them. They sat on the edge of the Hudson right there at the World Trade Center where his father’s boat docked six times a day.