Her prayers had changed over the course of days. At first, she had prayed for it to end, to wake up in that filthy and cramped hotel they’d paid too much for, or to wake up in her home or on a plane. Later, she’d prayed for her soul to go away, for it to leak out her nose or ears and drift up to heaven, to fly away from all the bad her body had done. Now she simply prayed for the cool nighttime, the numbness, the brief interludes of not knowing where she was, what she was doing.
She prayed for the snow.
She thought it would be colder in October in New York, but it had been warm everywhere. A warm year. Not much snow, even back home. And snow made everything look whole. It was the flesh of the soil, the epidermis of Alaska. It turned brown like decay in the sun. But there was no snow in New York City. No flesh. No gleaming white skin to cover the asphalt bones, the gristle in the gutters, the stained underbelly of Manhattan. All that remained was the rot, the putrid browns and the ash charcoals of an Alaskan thaw. And a green hat floating on it like a patch of kelp in Coal Bay, a spot of life among the dead, a remembrance of hope, a symbol of her sorrow, something to pretend she was following.
Anything. Anything but the scent of the terrified and hidden living, clinging to the dark corners for one more day, watching with hope that same sunrise Darnell Lippman sensed with utter dread, a day of hoping not to be eaten, a day of dreading to be fed.
39 • Lewis Lippman
The fat lay in golden layers beneath the skin. It was like roe, stored away amid the deep organs and the bright muscle. The color of butter and the texture of firm cottage cheese, it came away easily and went down hungrily.
Lewis pawed into the woman’s steaming abdomen. He made happy, wet smacking sounds and slurped raw fat down his throat. It was as glorious as it was vile. He ate and ate, squishy fists of the stuff oozing through his fingers, his belly straining against a belt he couldn’t command his hands to loosen, his distended flesh pinched tight against his blue jeans like a bloated fish that’d been pulled behind his boat for miles.
His bladder and bowels released while he ate. They went at the same time to make more room—and his blue jeans, already caked to his skin, filled with gore. He felt all this, tasted all this. He knelt over the morbidly obese woman they’d caught running through the streets, screaming her fool head off, and he made her fat his fat.
And as Lewis Lippman wallowed in the woman’s meat, slurping her golden goodness, he thought about how he’d always hated fat people. And now, how he couldn’t get enough.
It was a matter of will, he’d always thought. He hated them for that, for being weak. Why couldn’t they just stop?
Lewis remembered giving them dirty looks in the marina. He would fire up a cigarette and glare at the waddling tourists who tottered down a finger pier into one of the whale-spotting boats. The docks would groan and shift on the Styrofoam floats as they went.
He even said something once in the Chinese restaurant where he and the boys often went for the lunch buffet. He watched as a man well over three hundred pounds grabbed his dirty plate, squeezed out of the booth, and went to attack his seconds or thirds.
“Don’tcha think you’ve had enough?” he grumbled, just loud enough for the man and his fat family to hear. Kyle and the others laughed, even though Kyle was lugging around a few extra pounds himself. But nothing gross, not like this.
Flashing back to the gruesome present, Lewis watched himself as he dug sideways under the woman’s skin. Here was that feller from the buffet that day. No telling them apart from their insides like this. He scooped the fat with his hands, tearing it away from the skin and the meat below, like cleaning a fish.
Lewis used to shock the tourists he took out in his boat by cutting off a piece of a fresh catch and popping it in his mouth. He’d offer them a chunk on the end of his fillet knife and take pleasure in the way they recoiled from him. Once they were out on the sea with him and Kyle, they were stuck. Hauling in the fish they’d dreamed of catching—that they’d paid good money to catch—Lewis would watch them as the seas picked up and they turned a hundred shades of green. He’d delight in their sickness, watch them turn up their noses to the smell when the belly of a nice big jack was opened like a purse, his knife the zipper, the ripe contents sliding toward feet picked off the deck in a hurry.
It was fun, that, having them trapped out there, the sea roiling the lunches in their landlubbing guts, the smell of fish innards that Lewis had become inured to crowding their noses with a ripe stench. He and the others would turn and smile as their fares lost it over the gunwale. Crowds of little fish would come to the surface and chew the lost breakfasts of strangers from Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas.
And now Lewis was the passenger, the one shitting himself at sea, this concrete sea. A world he’d dreamed of seeing, that he’d fantasized about from a distance, Times Square with all those crowds as the ball dropped, as the date changed for the East Coast well ahead of the great big nothing that happened in Coal Bay.
He was the tourist, now. He was trapped in this skull of his, watching the guts spill, smelling the horror, feeling sick and being unable to vomit. He was the man growing bloated like a fish dragged on the end of a line, the man with his plate, bending over seconds and thirds. No willpower. No willpower in the world was enough.
Lewis tried to remember days on the docks, smoking cigarettes, watching fat tourists from the Dakotas bend the finger piers as they crowded onto whale-spotting boats. He tried to remember it again without him glaring, without the sneers and jokes to Kyle and the others. In his mind, he took another glorious drag from that smoke before flicking it into the sea with a sputtering hiss. He tried to travel back there, to pretend the little globules of yellow fat sucked out of his palms were caviar and that the rats burrowing in among his knees to feed alongside him were little fish, nosing up to the surface, eating the chum from the guts of strangers, and that this time he wouldn’t turn and smile and judge anymore.
40 • Darnell Lippman
Darnell had hoped and prayed from the moment she was attacked that someone would come for her. But not like this. This wasn’t a rescue. It was the hand of some angry god reaching down from the clouds and plucking her off the ground. She was discarded fruit, all of them were. Nasty fruit fallen from a tree and riddled with worms, and now they have come to choose the rotten among the rotten.
They lured them into their trap with blood. Blood and something else. Darnell thought of her husband chumming for sharks off Spit Point. She knew what these people were doing, and still it worked. It was like that cartoon she’d clipped for Lewis, the one with a fish commenting on a hook before going for the bait. It knew, and still it went. It had no choice. There was only the hunger.
This wasn’t the first trap they’d set. She’d seen them try before, the helicopters swooping in among the same low buildings, the same alleys. Whatever they’d used the first time didn’t work. The smell wasn’t right. Darnell wondered if it was animal blood at first, or human blood with the life melted out of it, maybe with the soul evaporated. That first time, she could smell the copper in the air, but it didn’t move her feet. It wasn’t the same.
They came back the next day with something different; her group could smell it. Their shuffling went from aimless to concerted action as they spilled into the baited alley, the thwump-thwump-thwump of the fishermen hovering in helicopters overhead, a rotor like an outboard, the hook both visible and irresistible.
Darnell and the others bit. The alley tightened between a set of rusty green dumpsters. She was near the front, crowding against the pawing others, the groans and grunts filling the narrow space between the buildings with an eerie roar. One of the dumpsters squealed as the crush of undead pressed hard enough to jar its wheels. Those alongside her kicked through trash, waving their arms after the fetid odor, a long rope like a line with a sinker and bobber dangling down between the brick walls.
They could see it. Darnell knew everyone else could see the lure as well. And still, they went after.
The alley forked where it met the crumbling wall of the building along its back. The sun was low, the shadows deep, and the smell was everywhere. It trailed off in both directions, further dividing the narrow stream of disfigured and disgusting animals.
Darnell was being culled from the herd. She felt the panic of a hook sinking into her lip, the lonely fear of being left to drown. Where was Lewis? She wept silently and tearlessly, powerfully alone, wishing he were there, but she hadn’t seen his hat for days.
She hurried at the front of the group that veered left, following the smell of blood and the smell of something else as well. It was a heady odor she’d nosed from a man with a split skull, a feed from a week ago. The smell of brains.
Onward, deeper into the alley, thwump-thwump-thwump from the propeller above her. Darnell imagined it was Lewis. He was here to catch her, to lift her out of her misery and into his reeking boat, to wrap her in a blanket and tell her that he loved her, to make her feel safe.
She and three others were standing on the net when it rose up from the camouflage of newspapers and soggy cardboard. The man beside her with the broken leg was caught on the edge. As the net cinched tight, he tumbled out, his foot catching in one of the square holes, grunts from the rest of them as they were pressed together and lifted skyward.
The man with the broken leg wiggled free and tumbled with a sick crunch to the pavement. Darnell and the other two were packed gill to gill in the tight net. There was a sinking feeling in her stomach as they rose higher. The man beside her made a gurgling sound. He was chewing the rope, the air so laden with the scent of blood and brains that Darnell feared one of the monsters would begin to chew on her. Or that she might turn on them.
Fortunately, she was too pinned to do so. Instead, she watched through a hole in the net as the rooftops of the low buildings came into view and as the helicopter pulled them up into the low rays of the setting sun. The city below seemed to shrink. The cars scattered everywhere became toys, the people moving amongst them like clumsy insects. The totality of the horror loomed below, smoke drifting from fires, a bus turned on its side, something moving within. The helicopter angled out over one of the rivers that framed the city on either side—Darnell didn’t know their names, couldn’t tell which direction they were flying. The net drifted behind on its long strand of cable, the air numbingly cold. She saw a bridge she recognized from postcards, the stone arches like something on a church. It was a landmark, a distinctly New York monument, and it was in ruin. The center half was gone, tangles of broad cables dangling toward the icy waters, piers of pavement laced with iron bars that jutted out like mangled limbs.
The two other bridges she could see were the same, the middles blown to bits. The island had been cast off. Darnell thought of all the mornings she’d brought coffee down to the dock, chatted with Lewis while he’d loaded the boat, then tossed him his lines. She would stand there, watching him chug out toward the inlet, her hands smelling like the fishy ropes, the steam dissipating from her rapidly cooling mug.
The net spun lazily beneath the helicopter, the earth seeming to revolve on its axis below. One of the creatures pinned beside her gnawed on her arm, the scent of blood still in the net. Darnell could feel the bites but could not move. She watched, frozen and numb in more ways than one, as a loathsome spit of land drifted away, and knew that this time her fears would be confirmed. Darnell Lippman knew she would never see her husband again.
41 • Lewis Lippman
Healing was the strangest of things. His stricken condition gave Lewis time to ponder the basic stuff, stuff you never thought about. Like healing. When you got down to it, healing was far stranger than what he did now. What he was doing now seemed natural. This was how things should be. Not because it was better or preferable, but because it just made more sense.
There was a gash on Lewis’s forearm from swimming through a pile of wrecked cars to get at a survivor. And now, with his hands out in front of him as he staggered along, he was able to study the wound, able to see the white bone where it lay exposed between the torn flesh. Strands of what he thought was muscle hung out in cables and ropes. It was like the insides of every fish he’d caught, but it was him. And this made more sense, that things were cut and they stayed cut. How much stranger was the notion that they could knit back together, that wounds could disappear?
It was like those lizards that lost their tails and grew them back. These were mutant abilities taken for granted, abilities no less strange than the closing of a nick. His friend Kyle had that scar on his leg from his long-lining days, that nasty length of white tissue bumped up along his knee from where the hook got him and wouldn’t let go. How was that normal, a body knowing what part of itself it was supposed to be? Knowing how to grow across and stitch to its neighbor, and then knowing when to stop? He knew people who had complained about their scars, about this miraculous gift. It never occurred to them that their wound could just as easily hang open.
There was a white cord of tendon dangling from Lewis’s arm, and this was how things were meant to be. A man would be careful if he knew ahead of time that wounds didn’t grow back. People would act different, think twice. No more bumbling about with arms flailing, not looking where they were going.
Lewis rarely looked where he was going. He tried to remember the first time he’d yelled at his wife. It’d been back before they’d gotten married, but just a time or two. Hadn’t really lit into her until later. There was the time she’d wrecked the truck, said it was a patch of black ice, but he’d let her have it anyway. Never struck her, but she recoiled just the same. Made him feel like shit, the way she flinched from his words. Pissed him off even more for her to make him feel that way.