Breakers

  * * *

  "Get up. Hey, Stitches. Time to get up and go home."

  Walt shook his head. Something tugged his nose, pinching. He pawed at his face. A strong hand grabbed his wrist.

  "Let me take care of that for you. Don't want you losing any more blood."

  The pressure on his nose increased, then disappeared. Something pinched his forearm instead. A black guy in scrubs stood beside his bed, winding thin clear tubes with strange, sharp smells of plastic and antiseptic.

  "Can you walk? The answer better be yes."

  "I'm in a hospital?"

  "For the next five minutes, maybe."

  Walt eased upright. "What kind of hospital wakes a stabbing victim up to kick him into the street?"

  "One with two thousand sick people hacking their guts across the parking lot."

  He leaned forward, wincing at the stitches tugging his stomach. "Am I...in trouble? Police-wise?"

  The nurse pushed out his lower lip. "Officer came by a couple days ago, but you were out. Now they're a little busy with the fire up in Midtown to give a damn about whatever earned you a knife in the belly."

  "Which hurts exactly as bad as you'd think getting stabbed hurts. At least give me some painkillers. The sick people don't need painkillers, do they?"

  "Just a bed and someplace to die."

  Walt laughed. The nurse didn't. "You're serious."

  "Kid, if you're not sick yet, the last place you want to be is a hospital."

  "You're talking like we're all going to be wearing tires and spikes by next Tuesday."

  "All I know is I haven't seen one person bounce back." The nurse peeled back his sheet. "Get dressed. I'll get you those pills."

  Walt had to lean across a chair to pull on his pants without stretching his stitches. The nurse opened the door, flipped him a rattling bottle, and gestured him out. As soon as Walt shuffled into the hall, the nurse rolled a second bed into his room. Walt went to the drinking fountain and swallowed a pill.

  Patients in gowns slept on benches and coughed from chairs, dabbing blood from their lips. The air stunk of copper and warm raw meat. Walt hobbled to the receptionist, holding his stomach with one hand while he signed out with the other.

  "I don't have any insurance."

  She gazed at him over her glasses. "Then it's a good thing you didn't get stabbed a week ago. Get out of here."

  He ran a hand through his greasy hair. "Since when could you walk out of a hospital without paying a pound of flesh?"

  "Feds have suspended hospital billing until the Panhandler's finished," she explained, obviously not for the first time.

  "Panhandler? Like a homeless guy?"

  She snorted. "You been in a coma or something?"

  "Maybe?"

  "They traced it back to some wheat farmer in the Idaho panhandle. Thus—"

  "Idaho doesn't have a panhandle. It's vertically oriented. More like a bottle neck."

  "What are you, a cartographer? Just pretend somebody's holding the pan down by their side."

  The front doors flew open, disgorging a pair of paramedics wheeling in a young girl vomiting blood onto the white tile. The receptionist stood, yelling questions; the medics yelled back.

  Walt hobbled for the door. Vanessa was dead.

  Ambulances clogged the front drive, lights whirling in the dusk. A queue of cabs let out coughing passengers who stood on the sidewalks, swaying, until a panting nurse emerged from a side door to escort them inside. Dozens of tents bivouacked the parking lot, overseen by dark-eyed doctors and a small patrol of soldiers in camo and gas masks. Walt got out his discharge papers. Nobody bothered to ask.

  A block from the hospital, the firehose of traffic reduced to a drippy faucet. He crossed Second Avenue without breaking his slow stride. The sidewalks glittered under his feet. Metal bars shuttered storefronts on both sides of the street. Faraway laughter echoed between the towers. Walt limped down the stairs to the 28th St. 6-train. Two young guys waited on the opposite platform. His was empty besides a dead woman and a tacky pool of blood.

  A breeze blew down the tunnel, carrying the scent of cold wet laundry. At least the trains were still running.

  Home, first thing he did was get in front of a mirror and tug up his shirt. Three inch-long sets of stitches tracked the left side of his stomach, looking sickeningly like ingrown hairs, but deliberately placed, as if he'd been plowed and seeded. He let his shirt fall back into place.

  Online, he learned he'd missed Vanessa's funeral. Google alerted him to the death of the Reverend Frank Phillips, 72, infamous picketer of soldiers' funerals, dead of the Panhandler virus. MSNBC.com estimated the American death toll in the hundreds of thousands, with more by the minute. Millions worldwide. His mom had left five messages on his phone. She and his dad were sick.

  She didn't answer his call. He stuffed some clothes in a backpack, washed a hydrocodone down with some whiskey, and caught the subway up to Grand Central, where he bought a ticket to Long Island. A towering black cloud rose from Midtown, spilling out over the Upper Bay. His fellow passengers—a dozen or so, three of whom, like him, showed no sign of the cough or watery, bloodshot eyes that formed the virus' early symptoms—watched in silence, detraining one by one in the quiet Island townships. He got off in Medford a little after eleven. His mom still wasn't answering her phone.

  Though he'd quit a few months back, he bought a pack of Camels at a Shell station that, by the look of it, was the only open store on the street. On his way to the exit, he turned around and bought three packs more. After so long, the smoke tasted ashy and bitter. The way nonsmokers smell it. His head went tingly and light. If he hadn't had to slow down to keep his balance during the head rush, he would have tripped over the body sprawled on the sidewalk.

  Walt crossed to the far sidewalk. Crickets chirped tentatively from dark lawns. TV screens threw pale flickers on closed curtains. A dog whined from behind a chain link fence. The windows of its house were black. Walt crossed the yard, dew dampening his Converse, and knelt in front of the small black dog, which waved its thick tail and battered at the fence with heavy white paws. He fed it Bugles from the bag he'd brought with him and scratched its ears. He barely felt his stitches; his breathing felt good. He told the dog it was good. He drank from his pint of whiskey, glass glinting in the darkness. The base of his throat burned but his stomach felt warm.

  "Good dog."

  The dog whined, licking his hand as hard as if he'd been swimming through butter. He had another drink. He was delaying. He stood, stomach tugging, and walked on.

  He let himself inside. His parents' house smelled the same as his apartment the night he'd come home from work. His mom was a bloody thing in her bed. He found his dad crusted to the wheel of his Jaguar. The car was off and the tank was still a quarter full; probably, he'd died of the virus instead of exhaust.

  Walt took the money his dad kept above the bookshelf, found a butcher knife and a steak knife, then gathered up the bottle of scotch his dad had been saving since Walt had been born. He sat down on the front porch and had a drink from the scotch and lit another cigarette. Once he'd smoked it to the butt, he called the police and walked back to the train station. He fell asleep watching cartoons on his apartment couch.

  While everything else began to shut down—schools, local governments, Taco Bell, commercial airlines, the borders—television stayed strong. Amidst Wile E. Coyote and Marvin the Martian blowing themselves up, Walt heard sirens, gunshots, screams. While Stimpy gave Ren a sponge bath, Walt smelled smoke and tear gas and burning meat. When the news informed him an estimated 35 million Americans had died, that an estimated 90% of the remaining populace showed signs of infection, with similar incidence rates worldwide, Walt got up, roamed the apartment, and reread Vanessa's letter.

  At least she'd never actually broken up with him.

  Maybe she'd never intended to. He had no way of knowing. Maybe she'd written it to see how it would feel, to see if she believed it. Vanessa wa
s gone now. The letter, her rehearsals with Mark (had he died, too? Walt hoped so, that hard-abbed prick), Walt's hopes for another day with her like their day in Central Park, those were nothing but lost possibilities, could-have-beens rendered moot by an invader too small to see. Walt sat down on the bare box spring that had held the mattress where Vanessa had died. He didn't see a future where the rest of mankind didn't die with her. Whatever Obama said, with three quarters of a billion dead just three weeks after the first case and with no cure in sight, Walt figured an average cricket match would outlast civilized society. But the Panhandler didn't just mean the extinction of people. It meant the extinction of dreams.

  Walt had wanted to write books. He'd never finished one, had never seen his works go to print where they'd shout This is how I feel. If you feel like me, that means we're not alone. He supposed it wouldn't matter soon. Soon, people wouldn't be using books to find understanding. They'd be using them for kindling.

  His parents had been talking about retiring soon. Scaling back, at least, to pilot their balloons on trips of their own, challenging records, touching down in Greek islands where the seas were as green as skinned avocados. They'd died having worked their whole lives. And honestly enjoyed it, by and large. But they'd wanted, expected, and deserved more.

  Vanessa had wanted to move to Los Angeles, to see if she could make the leap from stage to screen. She'd never made it out. He supposed he was partly to blame: whenever she brought it up, he said little and changed the subject readily, not wanting to leave the city that had become his home, fearful that removed from his environment, adrift among the millionaires and fakers of LA's shallow social seas, he would lose her to a producer in a Mercedes, a confident fellow actor-on-the-up. What was so great about the place, anyway? Along with Woody Allen's arguments, which were irrefutable, weren't they coughing up blood and bleeding out their eyes the same in LA as they were in New York? All the sea breezes and sunny weather in the world couldn't combat that. Vanessa's letter had once again declared her intent to move there. What had she expected? To be carried into town by a parade, delivered at the feet of Steven Spielberg, and be cast on the spot as the lead in The Woman So Beautiful All the World Loved Her Forever? Delusions. Delusions and ignorance, most of it willful. The second time she'd brought it up, maybe he should have agreed to go with her, just to prove there was nothing magical about the place, that plenty of people more talented than either of them had failed and starved there on the edge of the Pacific, that it doesn't matter where you are, all that matters is who.

  But she was dead now. The dinosaurs had all died, too, along with their dinosaur dreams. A world capable of such genocidal indifference didn't deserve its own existence. Walt wanted to watch it wither, to crumble into shit and dirt, fertilizer for a future that would one day crumble itself.

  He decided to walk to Los Angeles. He intended to die along the way.

  7