The Book of M. Peng Shepherd

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СКАЧАТЬ go past the doorway of most units, because the stench was too strong. The remains of whoever had lived in those were still inside. Ory cleared the first tower block and moved to the second. Fire, then flood damage. A gym where all the exercise machines resembled gleaming metal horses, posed mid-gallop. The vending machines played music, even though there had been no electricity for years. Elevator shafts gaped, doors jammed open.

      The third block still had a front door. Ory went much more slowly, encouraged. All the furniture, but no food, no clothes. One of the units reminded him a little of their own apartment, back in D.C.—if it was even still there. It had the same sort of classic modern style of Max’s that had impressed his parents when they’d come to visit. He checked the walls for hollow places, where something might have been hidden inside. In the bedrooms, he saw the names.

      In the early days, when there were more wedding guests still hiding with Ory and Max at Elk Cliffs Resort and they took more group trips down the mountain to brave Arlington, seeking supplies or information, he had seen them. Written on shelves in stores where the aisles had been picked clean, spray-painted onto the backs of buildings. People who still trusted others enough to talk whispered from the narrow mouths of alleys. Have you heard about the Stillmind? The One Who Gathers? They traded food for information, rallied curious crowds to make mass pilgrimages into the strange lands to see if they could find out more. Someone in this apartment had scrawled The One with a Middle but No Beginning in charcoal over where the bed should have been. Ory touched the tail of one smudged letter softly, powdering his fingertip in dark gray. Those few left with shadows were just the opposite, he thought. All beginning, no middle. Middle had become an ever-shifting, never-ending apocalypse.

      A soft crack broke the silent complex. Ory flinched, ducked instinctively to the floor before he’d breathed. His knife was out again.

      He counted to five. The sound had been dull, as if it had come from outside, some ways off. He peeked over the edge of an overturned dresser, toward the open wall that should have been a glass sliding door to a small back deck. There was some struggling grass, and another looming dead apartment tower beyond the sagging wooden fence.

      “Trees,” he said to himself. “Just trees.” The area was wildly overgrown. It reeked of rotting mulberries. When he looked closer at the ground, he could see the white ones that had dropped from overhead before they were ripe, like little pale maggots. “Keep going, Ory. Do the upstairs bedrooms,” he ordered himself. He pried his hand away from the hunting knife and crept down the hall toward the steps.

      He stayed away from the windows, half kneeling on the floor. His heart jumped as he peeled back the dirty carpet in the closet and found a section of wood floor had been cut into a tiny trapdoor—but someone else had already discovered it. Whatever had been in there, it was empty now. Ory left the carpet rolled and didn’t bother putting the door to the little hiding spot back. Save someone else the same letdown. If there was anyone left in the city. It had been so long, Ory had started to think he and Max might be the only two left in Arlington, maybe farther.

      He might be the only one, soon.

      The soft crack sounded again, and he threw himself to the floor. The animal part of the brain that built blueprints was racing, searching for an escape: there was a bed frame, but no mattress to hide under. A closet with no door. Window too high. To be upstairs was bad. Too far from a way out.

      Then a pealing scream, high-pitched, hysterical. Ory froze.

      He knew that sound.

      He was down the stairs, out the back door of the unit, into the grass, dashing toward the shriek in an instant.

      It was a rabbit, and that was its unmistakable dying cry.

      A fox or coyote would bolt, maybe drop its prey if he could get close enough. There had been no food in the apartments, but damn it if he was going to go home with nothing at all. He and Max would eat rabbit tonight, fresh, succulent meat that hadn’t been dried and salted and sitting in their cupboard for three months. If he could give Max the memory of a delicious, freshly cooked meal for as long as she had left, maybe that was worth more than five cans of tasteless, cold non-perishables, now or ever.

      Ory sprinted past the second row of apartment buildings to the back courtyard where the community pool was, hands already outstretched to spook an animal. But as soon as he rounded the corner, he stopped dead.

      “Oh, shit,” he finally managed. It came out like a squeak.

      Thirty feet ahead of him, gathered in a casual circle on the empty pool’s cool deck, was an entire crowd of people watching the one in the center take a rabbit out of a makeshift trap. They turned to him one by one, eyes calmly sliding from their prey to Ory cowering in the middle of the grass.

      “Oh, shit,” he repeated, dumbstruck.

      There were so many of them. He hadn’t seen so many people at once for so long. He hadn’t even seen a single other person but Max for at least a year.

      And they were all armed.

      Do something, he thought wildly. Some looked surprised, others amused. They were all healthy, all clean. Their hair looked washed, their clothes mended. There were no hollow cheeks, no bones jutting out. The men’s arms were nourished enough to have muscle. More muscle than his own. Run, Ory. Fucking run. But he couldn’t move. He just stood there staring at them all.

      The one in the center finally stood up. It was an older woman, with a worn face and graying hair shaved close to her skull. Ory watched, petrified, as she gently let go of the rabbit wriggling in her iron grip, as if it was nothing, as if there were still three grocery stores at every intersection, and didn’t even cast a glance after it as the terrified creature shot off into the weeds to safety. Silently, she stepped through the group to the front. Her eyes were hard-lined, mouth frowning. And now in her hands was a bolt-action hunting rifle, already cocked. Slowly she lifted the long dark barrel and pointed it at him.

      “You’re too late,” she said.

       ORLANDO ZHANG

      ORY STARED AT THE WOMAN IN SHOCK. AT THE WEATHERED hunting rifle swaying gently in her easy, sure grip. The muzzle hovered just south of his sternum.

      “You’re too late,” she repeated.

      Too late? Too late for what?

      “He’s gone,” another of them said, and spat.

      “He’s not gone, he’s got a shadow. Look.” The woman pointed at the ground behind Ory with the neck of her gun, like it had always been part of her arm. His shadow was huddled on the grass, a withered shape of terror.

      “Too late for what?” Ory finally managed. It had been so long since he’d talked to another person besides Max that it felt strange to speak to them, as if he’d forgotten what language was and accidentally made sounds that weren’t words. His hunting knife felt pitifully light on his belt now as he cowered.

      They all looked at one another, as if trying to decide what he’d meant by that.

      “To join us,” the man next to the woman with the gun said. The smoke from his homemade cigarette was bitter. “No seats left. The group’s already long been set.”

      “I—” Ory glanced nervously between them, trying to glean the man’s meaning from their faces.

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