Survivor (13 page)

I
n a panic, I banged on the glass door. The sun was really shining now, blinding, and squinting against the reflected white light sapped at the energy I thought I had. My head was spinning and I could feel droplets of sweat running down my temples. I heard a sound behind me and was relieved to see Caleb staring out at me through one of his black paper peepholes. He unlocked the door, all smiles, and gave me a big bear hug as I stood there.

“What happened?” I asked, pointing at the carnage, evidence of a fight out here at his doors. Was I leading Chasers and danger to my friends?

“They came last night,” he said, looking at the fresh debris matter-of-factly.

“How many?” I asked, looking around me. No bodies, no sign of Chasers or anyone else—but no doubt, there were fresh footprints and marks out here, shattered bits of broken . . . something.

“Enough,” he said. It was as if the matter was closed. “You all right, buddy? You don't look so great.”

“I'm okay.” I crouched down to examine the blood more closely. “So, how did they get in?”

He shrugged, scratched at the back of his head. He seemed so calm when I was so tense.

“Just after dark there was knocking at the door. I thought it was you.”

“They knocked?”

“Yep,” he said “Stupid . . . I opened the door without checking.”

I swallowed hard, trying to catch my breath.

“Four of them, the kind with the dried blood welcome sign around their mouths,” he continued, miming the ghoulish clown face with a finger motion around his lips. He stopped and followed my gaze; I was looking at his bandaged hand. “This? Oh, it's nothing. They rushed me, I managed to get the doors closed, and they would have bashed through if I hadn't run upstairs and pelted them with pots and pans and crockery. Then the riot gun when they moved out onto the street.”

“Holy crap . . .”

“Yeah,” he said. “Freaky thing is how they knew I was in here; I wasn't followed, I'm sure of it.”

“So . . . what? They remembered you being here?”

“None have ever seen me come in here,” he replied.

“Maybe they tracked your prints?”

“I'd been careful, and it'd snowed over. You know, I think it could have been those who followed us the other day.”

“Serious?”

“Serious. I can't think of any others who have come here, seen me in here. Told you they're getting smarter.” He was peeved. “So what are you doing here, Jesse, are you coming in or what?”

“Yeah, listen,” I said. But I started to choke before I could continue. My throat was so dry and I felt hot all of a sudden. I moved away and leaned on a crashed car and coughed until I felt myself calming down, then looked through the windscreen and saw a frozen family of corpses staring back at me through long-dead eyes.

 

 

When my eyes opened all I could see was a dim light.

I felt dizzy and my head throbbed.

“Jesse?”

I turned my head to the right. Caleb was on a seat by the couch where I lay. He sat there, a bottle of water in one hand, his face concerned.

“Hey, Caleb . . .” I said, hoarse. I had something to say to him, something to ask, something urgent, but I couldn't place it. I tried to sit up, but it made me nauseous and my world went spinning.

“Here, buddy,” Caleb said, holding the bottle to my mouth. I sipped slowly—two, three mouthfuls—then he took the water away. My breaths were deep and long, measures against the panic that was rising within me for no apparent reason.

“How you feel?”

“Sick,” I replied. I looked at him through half-closed eyes. “How did I—What happened?”

“You collapsed in the street out front,” he said. “Knocked your head on a car on the way down to terra firma.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You've been out for a while. I was worried.”

My head was heavy and I was so tired I couldn't even sit up straight.

“You look like crap,” Caleb said.

I was glad Caleb was there to drag me in.
We're in this together, and we came together for a reason. We've found one another amidst all this.

“Here,” he said, rifling through some orange prescription bottles and presenting a couple of pills in his palm, “take these.”

Taking those pills was the last thing I remember before falling asleep.

I
opened my eyes and rolled to my side. I was hot, laid up on the couch, covered with a couple of heavy quilts, and weary, but there was something niggling away at the back of my mind. I stretched out to try to wake up, and kicked the covers off. Caleb sat next to me, writing in a book. I liked being here with him, but I could not shake the feeling that I had to be someplace else, that there was something urgent that had to be done . . . I just could not summon what it was.

“Hey, welcome back, buddy,” Caleb said, looking at me.

I smiled sleepily.

“I've been talking to you all night while you slept,” he said. “Hear any of it?”

I didn't answer, my world in a drowsy fog.

“Gotta say, you're a good listener; helped me figure some stuff out with my story.”

“Story?” I asked, my voice raspy.

“Yeah, this is what I was talking about,” Caleb said, showing me his notebook. It appeared to be some kind of graphic novel, evidently an epic judging by the size of the pad. “
Very
much a work in progress.”

The cover seemed familiar: a cool but spooky emblem had been drawn in black ink on the gray-green card and it looked like a world that had burned, leaving a skeleton frame within, and there was a winged shield wrapped around the equator, all filled in solid with black. Was that winged shield protecting the world or attacking it?

“My villains are cannibals,” Caleb explained, flicking though some pages. “That's just part of it, though. But they prey on people, hunt them, target them for all sorts of different reasons. Course, this is still concept artwork, but close to what I think it needs.”

“Looks good.” It really did. The illustrations were black and white but they were detailed, set out in a simple nine-grid layout against a backdrop that looked like near-future New York, emerging from the other side of all this mess. I thought about outside, about banging on Caleb's door and feeling sick, about fainting.

“These are inspiration,” he said, showing me some open art books he had splayed before him on the floor. They featured vivid color pictures and they were spooky as hell, yet I couldn't help thinking perhaps my new friend was really more inspired by what had happened to this city in the last fortnight than the work of past masters.

“This one here is my favorite:
Raft of the Medusa
by Théodore Géricault.”

The double-page color image depicted a handmade life raft covered with the dead and dying, with some survivors sitting among and standing on top of them.

“It's . . . amazing,” I said.

“Yeah,” Caleb replied. “The picture, it was a French shipwreck in 1816, and the artist would visit the survivors in hospital to sketch and paint accurately—I mean, he even built a scale model of the raft. And he—and I'm serious—he kept a severed
head
on his studio's roof to sketch a corpse head! It's . . . sorry, I could talk about that painting for hours. I mean, even the way it's
composed
. . .”

I nodded, feeling a bit put off by his story and the scenes it conjured before me. They were creepily similar to what had been going on around us but in a sense there was something even more real about it than reality. Maybe it was the knock to the head. Maybe it was the pills Caleb had given me.

Maybe my lingering doubts about what was real and what was in my imagination hadn't gone away completely. Memories were all I had of some things—the memory of a happy family before mum left home was one I clung to. I wanted to get rid of some of them, of course—the bad memories—and I thought I could do that if I left 30 Rock. But that would mean surrendering all the good ones, too. Then again, I'd realized that even the most embarrassing ones or shameful ones—which I would have given anything to take back—were to be cherished. But perhaps the
lesson learned
—as if it were the title of one of Dave's books—was that none of them could be trusted. Or none of them was mine to control.

I stared at one of the other paintings, but found it hard to focus. There were some images from the Sistine Chapel that I'd seen with my grandmother when I was ten. They had been moving to me then, but they were haunting now; a reminder not only of perpetual gloom, but the reality of it.

“Why the hell cannibals?” I asked, feeling sick by the thought of it—too close to what was all around us now. “Couldn't you have some mutant space monster?”

“And what, copout with some giant squid coming in at the third act, destroying the city?”

“It'd do. It'd be better. It could still work as an allegory.”

“Yeah, well I'm not running from this idea because of what's going down all around us,” he said. “Since I was a kid, I've thought about this. And believe me, beyond all this Chaser crap, cannibalism has been around us—remember the news reports of that creep in Europe who advertised in a newspaper for someone to eat?”

I remembered that. It had really happened.

“Someone actually replied to the ad, right?” Caleb tapped the table. “There's good reason why they say that truth is stranger than fiction. My grandpa used to scare us with stories about a guy he worked with—another reporter at the
New York Times
—who had tried cannibalism out. I guess it stuck with me ever since, and when I started thinking about this book . . . it was something I wanted to write about, explore why it had stayed in my mind. Besides, what more evil a thing could I make up than something that was true?”

“People might not want to read this kind of thing anymore.”

“I'm exploring this in my own way, looking for some answers, and to me that's art,” he said. “Besides, my good guys will show you how the others can be beaten.”

“And your heroes do what, exactly?” I asked, feeling slightly beaten myself. “Turn the bad guys into level five vegans?”

“Ha! No, but I might steal that line,” he said. “They fight this underworld group—but it's hard, because these cannibals walk among us.”

“Feeding on the weaker masses . . .”

“Yeah.”

“And what, that's their secret? That they get power from whoever they eat?”

“There's more to it than that, but yeah. They have a litany of secrets that they live by, cannibalism being just one of them.” He packed away his ink pens.

I looked up at the ceiling, my head floating on the pillow.

“But your good guys don't just go in and karate them about I hope?”

“Hell, no!” Caleb replied. “The better the evil, antagonistic force, the better the good guys—they've all in some way seen and felt the exhilaration of violence, and were distraught by the human consequences. That's why they were selected to defend humanity.”

“Well . . . it sounds pretty cool, pretty solid,” I said. Cool and solid. Was it? What was I doing here, anyway? My memory came, short and sharp; a knife, in and out:
I had not slept last night,
but why? I looked at my watch: it was now the afternoon.

Was I just tired? There was more to this memory. Voices had woken me in the night—no, noises. I'd woken and gone out someplace cold, someplace old . . . the zoo! And slowly, my foggy mind began to clear, bit by bit. The girls were safe, they were together, but why had I left them?