Pariah (5 page)

Ellen rambled on, the stream of words blurring. Alan became aware that she was gripping his wrist, hard, her thin fingers clenched together like a vice. They went all the way around his wrist now. That was disturbing.
Alan Zotz and Ellen Swenson
, he mused. Once upon a time he might have wanted to carve that on a tree, with a big “4E” under it. But what could he say? This was a cocktail of
unmitigated grief and panic and adrenaline. When she calmed down she’d probably want him to move back out. This was temporary. Life was temporary. They’d all starve to death pretty soon, anyway.

Might as well go out one of the good guys.

Karl knocked on the door to the roof, not wanting to intrude on Dabney—at least not without Dabney’s concrete approval. After a few more tentative taps, Dabney called out a brusque, “Whattaya want?”

“It’s me, Karl. Permission to come above?”

Dabney half scowled and half chuckled at Karl’s unfailing dorkiness. He appreciated Karl’s respect for his personal space, but this was the roof for Christ’s sake. He didn’t own it. If Karl wanted to come up—if
anyone
wanted to—who was Dabney to say no? Though he seldom used it for shelter, Dabney had set up a shabby lean-to of corrugated aluminum and loose brick. When it rained he’d sleep under it, allowing the buckshot-on-metal clatter to lull him to sleep. It had been weeks since it rained last. Nonetheless, strewn about the roof were various containers for collecting water: garbage cans, buckets, plastic drawers, and file boxes. And a few planters with failed attempts at vegetable farming, all dead before they yielded anything edible.

Karl stepped out onto the blindingly bright tar paper; the sun was blazing full tilt to the east. He wished he’d brought sunglasses and sandals but didn’t want to go back down just to come back up. Instead he squinted and winced, scorching his eyes and toasting his feet. Karl nodded at Dabney, who returned the acknowledgment before resuming his post on the lip on the roof, belly down on a mottled canvas tarp, head hung over the edge. Beside him was a pile of chunks of brick culled from the neighboring buildings, the roofs of which were all adjoined, separated by low walls which Dabney periodically demolished and raided for recreational target practice. The only constructive use the residents of 1620 had found for masonry—part of a renovation project that never got past the supply stage—was walling up the interior front entrance with cinder blocks, fortifying what the harried contingent of National Guardsmen had hastily thrown up to bar entry to their building. Up and down the block, doorways both residential and commercial were boarded up with rusting slabs of corrugated sheet metal. FEMA had done a bang-up job of sealing everyone in and abandoning them. Now many of the fortifications were shearing away, the elements having corroded the substandard no-bid bolts.

Karl walked over to where Dabney lay and squatted next to him, looking over the edge from a safe distance. Heights and Karl didn’t cozy up. Besides, the view was torment. Directly across the avenue from them was the linchpin of their collective woe, a tantalizing siren that beckoned, but one they could never answer: the Food City Supermarket. Behind its boarded-up façade, they imagined, lay a cornucopia of uneaten, unspoiled canned goods, bottled water, batteries that still had juice in them, you name it. Sure, the produce and meat had gone bad, but there was likely an embarrassment of provisions in there, all hopelessly out of reach. Sandwiched between the east and west sides of York Avenue, as far as the eye could see in both
directions, north and south, was a sea of doddering bodies, all with but a single purpose: eat anyone stupid enough to venture from the safety of his or her home. Karl had witnessed it many a time.

Food City was situated in a big steel-and-glass apartment building, the only truly modern high-rise for blocks. Next door to the supermarket, its entrance raised and bordered by a small enclave of benches and shrubs, was a bank. Above the supermarket was a shallow inset area—maybe five feet deep, eight feet high, the full width of the market—that allowed the air-conditioning units to vent. Right above that were the windows of the first tier of dwellings, permanently sealed, like newfangled hotels and office buildings.

All up and down the avenue, as the status quo grew worse and worse, either lots were drawn or people went nuts or whatever, but folks made countless attempts from the neighboring buildings to gain entrance to Food City. Karl had observed what in other circumstances might have been comical stabs at it all go awry—real life Wile E. Coyote-style maneuvers. Several jokers driven mad with desperation tried the Tarzan thing, throwing a line out from a high window, lassoing a streetlamp, swinging, falling. Unlike Tarzan, though, they’d all ended up being torn to shreds, their final resting place the guts of those undead things down there.

Some had attempted a different approach, still from above, casting a line from their windows or roofs down to the streetlamp right in front of the market. They’d anchored the ropes like a clothesline, then shimmied across the street, only to find themselves stranded above the sidewalk, still with ten feet between them and the air-conditioning alcove. Even then, what would they have done? There was no way in from there unless you knew how to dismantle an industrial air-conditioning unit. These were regular citizens, not special ops personnel trained in breeching bulwarks. So they either shimmied back into their shelters, or dropped to the pavement and were devoured.

Some aspirant swashbucklers slapped together homemade armor. Egged on by their hungry neighbors, they’d either lowered themselves to the sidewalk from windows or fire escapes, or even more imprudently breached from within their blockaded front doors, which inevitably led to an unstoppable tsunami of zombies surging into their dwellings, costing all within their lives. The ones with enough foresight to reseal the entranceway usually didn’t make it ten feet from their homes before the horde picked them clean. One did get as far as the entrance to the supermarket, and even managed to detach the moldering sheet metal, but the doors had been automatic. No power; no way in. He’d pounded on them as much in exasperated fury and disbelief as in attempt to actually infiltrate the emporium. His makeshift armor just made the zombies work a little harder for their meal, but like a boiled lobster, the shell came off and they enjoyed the tender bounty within.

Now, because of one of Dabney’s brick tosses, the supermarket doors gaped open, the pavement glittering with fragments of safety glass, taunting everyone.

And the avenue might as well be a thousand miles wide.

“Watch this,” Dabney said, selecting a chunk of brick from the pile. He hefted it once or twice in his palm, getting the feel for it, then lobbed it down into the crowd. It disappeared amid the shoulder-to-shoulder multitude of shuffling cadavers.

“Fuck,” Dabney spat in annoyance. He picked another nugget from the stack and this time took aim. “That one,” he said, not specifying which one, which would have been difficult to do anyway. Which one, the rotting one? The ugly one? The one with the bad skin? The one with its skin peeling off? With the exception of their clothing and hair, to Karl they all looked the same. It was a good thing there were no rules of political correctness regarding the undead. “They all look alike, huh?” Karl imagined someone saying, in that shrill, strident, bygone PC tone. Just what the world would
need: zombie special interest groups. People for the Ethical Treatment of Zombies—PETZ.

Karl smirked at the notion.

Dabney launched the missile and this time it slammed down on the skull of a bald zombie. Even from the roof they could hear the crunch as it penetrated bone and punctured what lay beneath. Brain? Only in name. The thing collapsed amidst its fellows, one less head bobbing aimlessly in the ocean of bodies. Dabney and Karl high-fived. This was one of those enjoyable, rare male-bonding moments.

“Wanna have a go?” Dabney said, jerking a thumb at the brick pile.

“Yeah? Why not,” Karl said. He chose a slab of jagged slate and stood up. Dabney maintained his horizontal position on the tarpaulin.

“Flat ones don’t throw as good,” Dabney said, but Karl didn’t intend to pitch it like a ball. He cocked his arm, pressed the slab against his chest, then swung out his arm, a light flick of the wrist sending the wedge spiraling like a Frisbee into the crowd, where it sliced off the side of a female zombie’s face with a juicy thwack. She didn’t hit the dust like the one Dabney clobbered, but she let out an satisfying yowl and thrust both her hands up to the gaping wound.

“Damn,” Dabney said, his tone reverential. “I never would’ve thunk to throw like that. I always go for the solids, but that was pretty sweet. Nice goin’, kid.”

Karl basked in the praise. As the runt of the building he always felt nothing was expected of him but failure. This was a defining moment, scoring approbation from John Dabney, resident loner. In a city full of vacant apartments, Dabney chose to live on the roof. The others barely acknowledged his presence, but Karl found him fascinating. Dabney held onto his role as iconoclast. Dabney was . . . cool.

“It’s only a matter of time, you know,” Dabney said, eyes hooded.

“What?”

“This. This here’s a waiting game. Look at those misbegotten things.” He pointed down at the street dwellers. “They’re same as us, only different. Maybe they’re reanimated flesh, I dunno, whatever it is. But they’re not from Mars and they ain’t made of plastic. Look at ’em. I mean really look.”

“It’s hard from up here.”

Dabney shot Karl a scowl. “Don’t be so damn literal. They’re fallin’ apart, same as us. They don’t eat each other. How long can they keep truckin’ around on empty? We know we’re gonna die if we don’t eat, but I figure so will they, eventually. I’d like to live to see it happen. I’d like to set my feet down on pavement again, even if ain’t exactly gonna be tiptoeing through tulips.”

“Me too.”

“It’s a waiting game and nobody knows how it’s gonna play out, but play out it will. It has to. Things rot. They’re rotten as hell. Their hides might be tanned as shoe leather, but mark my words, they’ll fall. It’s nature.”

“I suppose.”

Dabney frowned.

“All this talk’s makin’ me hungry. You want something to eat?” Dabney said. Karl’s stomach growled in anticipation of food. He had stuff stashed in his crib, but an offer of food from Dabney augured something mysterious and tantalizing. What did Dabney keep in his private stash? “Yeah, you do,” Dabney answered, lifting himself from the tarp. He strode across the roof to a sooty, bungedup metal contraption fashioned from salvaged commercial exhaust ducting. He bent down and opened a crudely hinged door he’d cut out of the cylindrical appliance. “It’s a smoker I made,” he said, by way of explanation.

“A smoker?” Karl repeated.

“Like a smokehouse. For smoking meat. Last I checked, refrigeration went the way of the dodo, right? So, smoked meat.”

“Meat?” Karl gasped. He was salivating.

“Meat. Jerky. You got a beef with vermin jerky? I got rodent jerky and pigeon jerky. Doesn’t sound so appealing when you know what it is, but it’s not so bad. Wanna try it?”

Dabney reached into the box and pulled out a thin, fluted strip of dusky matter and offered it to Karl. He smiled. Jerky. Karl thought of the old Jerky Boys pranks. Was this a prank? It didn’t seem like Dabney was the type. Karl accepted the barklike sliver and tentatively raised it to his nose, taking a sniff. Instantly his mouth began to water and with no further hesitation he took a bite—manna from heaven. Karl almost began to cry but stopped himself. That would be unmanly and he didn’t want to seem so in front of Dabney. Not today. Not after impressing him. The meat was salty and dense and tough, but the flavor sent him back to his college days when he’d subsisted on mac ’n’ sleaze and bags of teriyaki jerky from the 7-Eleven.

“Enjoy that,” Dabney said. “Won’t be much more, I don’t think.”

Karl’s heart almost broke at the thought. “What? Why? Why not?”

“Haven’t seen any critters around in the last week or so. None airborne, none skulking around on the ground. No squirrels, no rats, no mice. Sure as hell no cats. Anyway, I think what I’ve got in there is the last of it. The bottomless empty is right around the corner. After that, we are all well and truly screwed.”

That was a helluva pronouncement. Karl studied the older man’s leathery puss—peeling, brown, raw, not unlike the jerky he was consuming. If they started dying in the building would they mimic the behavior of those things on the street? Would this turn into some Manhattan version of the Donner party? Of the Andean soccer team
incident? Karl flashed on the movie
Cannibal! The Musical,
the comedy about the Alferd Packer, which didn’t seem so funny anymore. He thought about Jeffrey Dahmer and Andrei Chikatilo and Ed Gein. Wasn’t Idi Amin a cannibal?
Oh fuck that
, Karl thought.
I’d rather die. I’d rather feed myself to those things than eat a human being. You have to hold onto who you are. Life isn’t
that
precious. At least not any more it isn’t. Maybe those sons of bitches ate each other because there were still things to live for. Their circumstances had been way different. Packer and the Donners and those soccer players had a world ahead of them
.

Dabney eyeballed Karl’s twitching face, sensing his thought process.

“You know what one of those Uruguayan footballers had to say when they picked him up?” Dabney asked, his voice neutral. “It’s a quote I remember because it seemed so fucked-up at the time. Now, I don’t know how I feel about it. The kid was talking about how they’d cooked their teammates. He described the meat as, ‘softer than beef but with much the same taste.’ It’s animal nature to survive. Man’s an animal. To survive, folks adapt. Whattaya think of that?”