“I don’t see why not.”
“You think the stadium will be empty? Last I heard from the station, it’d been set up as a base of operations. There are cops, feds, FEMAs, and every other authority abbreviation you can pronounce up there. It’ll be like trying to break into a police station.”
“Then I guess I won’t knock. BellSouth Park isn’t that big, but it’s big enough to have a million side entrances and exits—especially if you’re willing to climb. And I, for one, am willing to climb.”
The baseball park wasn’t terribly far away; in Chattanooga’s downtown area, nothing is. You’re working with maybe three or four square miles between the river and the ridges, so all the downtown buildings are clustered tight. The stadium is down by the river but on top of a hill like Becca’s apartment is—simultaneously closer to danger and higher up away from it.
We walked the way mostly in quiet, ducking under overhangs where it was easy and appropriate to do so, and staying out of the rain less than we would have preferred. But we were getting accustomed to it. You had to. You either got accustomed to it, or you went bananas.
So we stayed out of the rain when we could, and we walked through it when we had to.
“Do you smell that?” Nick asked, drawing up short and ducking beneath the overhang of an old retail store.
I slipped into the mosaic-floored entryway beside him. “Smell what?”
“Smoke. I smell smoke.”
Once he’d said it, then yes, I smelled it—faint and acrid. I peered out through the sprinkles and tried to tell if some of the felt-gray cloud cover held anything but humidity. “I smell it now. It’s not too bad. What do you think’s burning?”
“Not people,” he said, which was a weird thing for him to blurt out.
“No . . . not people. It’s not fleshy-smelling. Maybe some of those rioting gang-persons have taken torch to something.” Even as I said it, I sniffed for some hint—for that dirty-sweet taint of hair or skin. I didn’t detect any, but I failed to find its absence reassuring.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Nick asked, all seriousness and exhaustion. “It’s another couple of blocks, all uphill. And look down,” he added, flapping a hand at the street. “Here it comes. How high do you think it goes?”
I’d noticed a block back that yes, we were walking towards the risen water. It didn’t rise all of a sudden—sidewalks to open river—but it was slipping up on us nonetheless. The puddles were getting wider, the runoff was coming more steadily along the gutters, and at the end of the street before us there were no traffic lines, no curbs, and no sidewalks. It was all an oily black sheet of water.
“We gonna hike through that?”
“I don’t—no. No, we’ll go up a street, and over. Up the hill.”
“Delaying the inevitable.”
“We are really on the same page today,” I told him. “It’s starting to creep me out. But yeah, we’ll have to deal with it eventually. For now, though, we can hike. We’ll figure out the rest when we get there.”
I put my hand on the side of the building as if to pull myself around it and back into the street. Nick thrust an arm out and pulled me back. “Wait a second,” he ordered. He craned his head around the corner, then ducked back and urged me to do the same.
I did, because he looked like he meant it.
We retreated as far as we could, to the shallow darkness of the alcove. It wasn’t much of a hiding space, but we braced our backs against the old door and crouched until we were sitting there, jammed against each other.
I held my breath, but Nick was cooler than that. He narrowed his eyes and kept his fists tight. He must have ears like a parabolic microphone to have heard it so much sooner than I did—but there it was. An irregular scraping noise—something wet and dense, like a waterlogged tree being pulled over speed bumps.
It was breathing, or trying to.
Air was being dragged back and forth, in and out, of something big but broken. My ears tracked it off to our left, from the water’s edge. It was moving slowly but steadily, steps sloshing and squishing. Where it ran out of water, it stopped.
Nick stopped breathing then. His shoulder tensed beside mine until it could’ve burst through his sleeve.
A plopping swish, a leg turning in ankle-deep liquid. There. And stepping free onto denser ground. Very slow. Very uncertain. But very definite—coming free of the river’s overflow. And another step after it. Then the thing stalled and did not move, except to shift and squeeze back and forth, the cool, wet air playing over those rotted lungs.
“Stay there,” Nick whispered. He wasn’t talking to me, so I didn’t listen.
I stood up. He reached to pull me back down, but I didn’t let him. I shook off his hand and came free, out of the alcove.
There wasn’t any sun, but it was bright anyway. Everything was bright when you were as tired as I was, but it wasn’t just me. The white-gray sky was reflected everywhere, especially off the water-smoothed streets down the way. I squinted against the sky and against the rain, even though it barely fell and I barely felt it.
At the edge of the space where the city turned to swamp the creature was standing and staring at me, every bit as hard as I was staring at it.
It was tall, and black from head to toe—but by birth or by fire I couldn’t say. Everything was on the verge of peeling off: skin, clothes, hair. Pieces of it sloughed away while it stood there.
I looked to its eyes for some clue, but found none. It had nothing to see with, nothing to stare with—just black pits that might have been gouged out with a thumb. But I knew as surely as I knew my own name that it was watching me. And although it hadn’t enough face left to show anything but the horror of a toothy grimace, I knew that when it looked at me, it was displeased.
“What do you want?” I demanded, louder than I should have. It hit the street as a raspy shriek. “Tell me, and I’ll do what I can—I’m not like the rest of them. Tell me!”
It did not respond, except to laboriously raise one crooked knee and force its foot farther from the water. Towards me. Towards downtown, and the Read House, and the Choo-Choo, and every place else that still was dry.
“You think you’re making some kind of point?” I asked, and I knew it was a stupid question. It wasn’t making a point. It was making an escape—from the water, from the river. “You want to prove that you can walk free of the water? Then come for me, then. Come and get me if that’s what you’re going to do.”
Nick was out of the alcove then. He wrapped both arms around me and squeezed, and yanked. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Nothing—nothing! Look at it—look.”
“Yeah, look at it standing there, out of the goddamn water. The river won’t hold them forever. And you’re taunting it.”
I wrestled with him, trying to writhe out of his grip. I didn’t want to hurt him, but he wasn’t going to tell me what to do, either, so I drew back to land an elbow in his solar plexus—but instead he caught my elbow with one hand and spun me around. I didn’t know he had it in him.
“Look at it!” I shouted at him. “It can’t move yet, not well, not far! This is my chance to talk to it!”
“Fine!” he shouted back. “Talk all you like! But while you waste your breath, take a look around! It’s not alone.”
I tore myself out of his hands and gasped, because he was right.
One outside the lip of the water. One behind him. One back, and to his right. One kneeling on a bench, heaving and coughing. And there, under the clear plastic shelter of a bus stop, something smaller.
Something watching, in a different way—with eyes still left in a little head.
Its face was burned away, up one side as if it had been hit with a road flare.
“Little girl,” I wheezed.
“I told you so,” Nick said. “Don’t look at her. For Christ’s sake, don’t look at her.”
She already had me, though. I couldn’t look away. She wouldn’t let me.
The smell of smoke filled me, even though it wasn’t there on the street—it wasn’t there in the air. But it was inside her, and she was talking. I’d asked them to talk, and she was the only one who could answer.
“No,” I said, or I thought I said. It didn’t mean anything. It was only a general objection to the powerlessness of it all, to the helplessness and fear—and to the smoke. I couldn’t breathe. She wouldn’t let me.
Nick was saying something that I couldn’t understand. I felt his hands around my forearms, shaking me. He was stronger than I thought. Stronger than I gave him credit for.
It was hot. Terribly hot—ashes and charcoal. It stung my eyes and seared my sinuses. The church. They were burning the church. No—I’m still inside. I’m still inside. We aren’t all dead. Didn’t kill the rest of us.
How much do you think you can survive? she asked. If you live through the bullets, and they burn down the rest, how long will your heart keep beating?
“I don’t understand,” I moaned.
She didn’t either. It was part of her rage.
Nick was still screaming at me, but I couldn’t hear him. He was right there, in front of me, clasping my face in his hands, and I couldn’t see him.
I was lying down, hiding under a pew by the pastor’s podium. Everyone else was dead. Everyone else was lying between the aisles or on the platform, and two of them were thrown into the empty baptismal font. Their dead eyes opened and saw nothing. I was crying and biting my lips to keep them closed so I would say nothing.
I could see the horses outside the window. There were three of them, and three men arguing among themselves—and there were more I couldn’t see, but I could hear them talking. “Not the end of the world.” The end of the world. And through the windows came fire, even as the rain came down outside, slapping great drops against the stained glass picture of Jesus on the cross.