He’s naked. Flecked with ice in the early morning chill, his intestines are hanging limply from the gash in his belly. What’s left of them anyway; they’ve been gnawed down to stubs. Maybe it was the rats. But the concrete’s in the middle of what looks like a path long worn smooth. You don’t get that with rats.
Even if they haven’t eaten him, they’ve still taken his head, driving a pig’s rock smashed skull into his spine instead. Where did they find a pig? Somehow it’s still got skin on it. It’s juicy, if greyer than it should be.
If it wasn’t for the burning sacred heart tattooed on his chest, we could pretend it’s not Ben and go home. Poor bastard. I’ve always had a soft spot for Ben, even if he tends to rush into things without thinking them through. Not sure I blame him, mind. If I still had a brother I’d have gone after him too. Ben’s brother Bob is a scavenger, and a wizard at cobbling together battered tech into something useful, but I thought even he knew better than to come into Toronto, at least this close to the Rupture. We’re way too close. The stink of it is like ammonia burning the back of my throat and its screaming’s already tearing at my ears.
But then we should’ve all known better than to stick around when shit hit the fan. We all had our reasons, and some were even valid. Mom was too sick to move, and the whole system had gone into meltdown trying to put a cordon around those first couple of blocks. We didn’t know it would get this bad, I keep telling myself. We couldn’t have known it would all go to hell in just a few days.
Still, now we’re fucked, though, it occurs to me as I look at him, not as fucked as poor Ben.
He must’ve had connections outside. One of the camp administrators, a shifty rat of a man called Dickens, sent us after him. Said we’d get triple rations, maybe even some cash. We never get that kind of pay, and we couldn’t very well say no to it, I tell myself as I lie on a ridge that was once an apartment building, probably one of the first ones the army pulled down to try and contain the spread before they built the containment walls. Somewhere off to the south a ship’s horn tears the quiet apart—the US has patrol boats guarding the lake and somebody must’ve been by the waterfront, looking like they were getting ready to break for the American side. They haven’t let anybody across since the very beginning.
Above, in the dwindling night, three bonebirds wheel slowly around each other. The Americans shoot them down every once in a while but by the time the pieces wash up on the lake shore they’re already rebuilding themselves. Only cremation works. Took us a long time to figure that out and now we don’t have enough fuel to keep it up. We don’t have much of anything. Not unless we forage in the ruins.
There’s retching to the right behind me, a sort of dry heaving you only get from a man who thinks he’s supposed to be tougher than this. ‘Let it out, Marco,’ I say, counting the tracks leading to and from the execution site. It had rained before the cold hit; looks like there’d been six of them, claws digging deep to help them over the terrain.
Marco dry heaves a couple more times, then the tang of stomach acid and dried rations hits me as he gives in. ‘Atta boy,’ I say. ‘You’ll feel better in a sec.’
‘Uhhuh,’ he says, coughing, then sloshing around water from that dented blue plastic bottle he always keeps tied to his waist. He’s nearly a foot taller than me, still with a bit of swagger though stooped a bit by age and years of fighting. He wipes the back of a gloved hand across his pencil thin lips, then scratches at his curly black hair while resting on his assault rifle. It still looks ridiculous in those long arms hanging off that narrow torso we got used to seeing on billboards and ads when he was modelling. There was more of him then, though.
‘You ever see anything like this?’ he asks.
‘No.’ I’ve seen butchery, bodies ripped to shreds with some of the pieces missing, but nothing like this. I wonder if monsters get bored.
‘Well, we found him,’ says Kennick, the khaki wearing low-slung guy who’s been following me around like a lost puppy ever since I saved him from one of the hate gangs, the Waterfront Boys or the Scribblers, though one’s as bad as another. ‘What do we do now?’
‘What do you think?’ I say, checking my assault rifle for the fifth time in as many minutes; it’s ready, I’m ready, and Ben, he’s as ready as he’ll ever be. ‘We need to cut him down and take him home. A job’s a job.’
‘And rations are rations,’ Kennick said, finishing the saying all us trackers use for the jobs that take us close to the Rupture. Every now and then the army, or somebody, sends a team or a drone out to keep an eye on it and we the trackers have to try to recover it. Rations is rations.
‘Do you think they’ll let us back in?’ Kennick’s scratching behind his ear and chewing his lip.
The Rupture’s singing tonight, a sort of off tune hum that gets you right beneath the skin. If we’re here too long, it’ll start peeling the skin back. And then who’d want to kiss us?
We haven’t been out long enough that it should matter but the administrators can be funny about things. It’s fine for them, with their hazmat suits and clean air and real coffee. They get to roll out through the walls and back to hot showers and real meat. We both know we won’t be allowed out through the containment walls. We were in the zone when they went up, too exposed for too long to be allowed out, and we’ll be dead and buried long before they come down. Or dead and... something else. The best we can hope for is only being a couple of days in quarantine, even if times moves differently in the containment zone, where hours can be days and days can be weeks. The worst is... worse.
I roll my shoulders and refuse to look at Kennick’s scrubbed red face. ‘We should be fine. If we’re quick.’ I twist my head to the right until my neck pops and some of the tightness melts away. Maybe if we do a good enough job often enough, they’ll get me a chiropractor. I still have dreams. ‘Come on. Let’s get him back.’
‘I dunno, man, I think we’re too late.’ Marco’s hanging back as Kennick and I nudge our way up and over, moving the brick and metal gently aside in case they’ve left something behind. ‘There’s ice on him. He’s been here too long.’
‘It’s the job, Marco. We don’t bring him back, we don’t get paid. We don’t get paid, we don’t eat.’
Marco grumbles then grunts and starts to follow before snapping ‘down’ and we all drop back behind the ridge. From the northeast, along the trails and roads that’d take me to Scarborough, if it still existed beyond a haunted ruin, rattles a figure about seven feet tall. The legs are stretched, gnarled things that almost fold under him with every stride; his black trousers are shredded enough to show he’s mostly bone and grey green muscle. He’s still wearing part of a paramedic’s jacket. He’s not a he, I remind myself. He’s a thing. That’s what they keep drilling into us back in camp.
The jacket’s frayed from use and singed from point-blank gunshots and a coned scalp rolls from side to side as, one leg longer than the other, the thing shudders forward.
It’s wearing Ben’s face.
It doesn’t fit him.
‘Jesus fuck,’ starts Marco before I can stop him, and the thing stops suddenly, cocking his head to one side and listening. Ben’s face bobs up and down as it sniffs the air.
Kennick tugs on my sleeve, then points with his chin when I look. Three more things, all misshapen and contorted from the infection, are coming up the track from the west—how did they get so close without us hearing them? They all stop at the edge of the clearing, doing the same head bob as they sniff left to right to find us.
The ammonia burn gets so bad I have to pull my collar over my nose. A few blocks north the Rupture’s song deepens and pulses. Is it laughing? It sounds like it’s laughing. I can almost hear a voice on the wind. It’s calling me.
On the weak breeze floats the stink of illness and decay from the things. Only one of the new three has a face to speak of, though half of it is missing. The other two have only dried scraps and patches over reanimated muscle and dirt burnt bone. One’s missing an eye where somebody’s shot it in the face. Movies always say headshots are the way to go. What do they know?
Still, sometimes you get lucky, before the illness can really take hold. You take a walk out in the dark, look at the stars, and blow your brains out. Maybe you don’t get back up. Maybe you were immune to the illness all along. I think about it at least once a week.
My gun’s already up. Marco’s shifting ever so gently, face set and grim as he gets the gun ready. Kennick’s fumbling slightly.
They’re on us before I get a shot off.
Four of the things have slid up behind us—why didn’t we hear them? How did they get so close without us even smelling them?
Doesn’t matter.
One of them, a monstrosity warped in what’s left of an army uniform, has Kennick by the head, lifting him eight feet in the air before cracking his skull like a boiled egg.
Another’s caught Marco in the leg with a finger longer than a butcher’s knife and just as sharp. Marco’s shooting wildly and the rubble explodes into shrapnel, catching me in the arms and the dead things all over but not slowing them down a beat. He pulls away and stumbles, screaming as the dagger finger sinks out of his leg and deep into his stomach.
Arms impossibly twisted and fluid have me in a vice grip, trapping my arms and dragging the gun from my hands, flinging it away into the gathering dawn. The smell... oh God, the smell, like sulphur and burnt piss that gets me even over the ammonia stink of the Rupture.
Not like this, I think. Don’t let me go out like this.
They’re already dragging Kennick over the ridge to the block, his boots trailing and scuffing. The leader, the one with Ben’s face, is hauling Ben’s body to the ground in pieces and mounting Kennick in its place. It gouges through Kennick’s chest, cracking his ribs and pulling the heart out in a steaming cloud. Snarling and gnashing it holds the dripping organ to the sky for a second until the bonebirds see it and come screeching down. As the thing sinks blackened teeth into the heart, the bonebirds tear Kennick’s skin away to get at the meat beneath.
Dear God, not us too.
The Rupture’s song deepens and widens, becoming almost solid until I have to scrunch my eyes shut against the pressure.
When they open again, we’re on the road, hemmed in by huge, crumbling dead things.
I can feel the song beneath me. It’s a sort of hum, one that travels up through the soles of your boots and into your bones. Life, life, life, it says in my ears. Come, come, come.
The sky was little past dawn when they butchered Kennick, though the itch in the back of my throat tells me we’ve been walking for at least a couple of hours—but when I find the dull sun behind the clouds the light’s all wrong, like it’s pushing toward night. Our breath steams around us but my face and hands are on fire. Marco’s flagging, arm wrapped tight to his stomach where they got him. Even if we could get back to the camps, he wouldn’t last long. They’d probably put him down the second they got a look at his face.
Most of the buildings look intact, if derelict, though here and there some have been torn down or are charred, crumbled remains. Somebody always tries to burn out an infection sooner or later. Still, you could nearly live here. No wonder Ben’s brother thought it was a good place to come foraging.
But then the road gets more and more clogged with debris—old cars, dumpsters, heavy furniture looted and dropped according to some design I can’t make out. Do the reanimated dead remember flashes of their past lives? The backs of my eyes throb.
We’re being herded down a narrow corridor made of neatly stacked broken building parts until we pop out, suddenly, into open land that must have been green and grassy once. Pine Hills cemetery, it has to be, though it’s not like I remember from those videos of the Rupture opening. It’s red and torn to pieces.
The leader, the one still wearing Ben’s face, prods us forward and we stumble over torn paths and broken headstones.
Marco moans as the air pulses.
Red roots strewn with black rot and thicker than oaks curl around the stones, leeching the colour from the grass and tunnelling down into the graves. They’re pulling up skulls and bones, little tendrils ferrying them back along to wherever they’ve started.
Two of the reanimated things break off from the group and thrust their hands into the nearest roots, which suck them in greedily as they kneel. They look like altar boys waiting for the priest to bless them.
‘What’re they gonna do to us?’ rasps Marco, and already the skin across his face is pulled tight as a drum, whatever fleshiness was left after years in the camps drained away to nothing. He’s dead but doesn’t know it. If I’d still had my gun, I would’ve tried to put him out of his misery. He’s not all the way gone. There’s still a chance.
Before I can answer he doubles over coughing, spitting out blood so black it’s almost solid. Sorry for getting you into this, I think, even if we all go this way sooner or later.
I’m not looking where I’m going and trip over a stray tendril. It lashes out at me as I fall, wrapping itself around my leg and squeezing so hard I’m sure it’s going to break the whole thing off. Until the air hisses and the thing with Ben’s face kicks it into submission, standing over me as I gather myself up.
‘Little help?’ I ask, and Ben’s face sort of flaps as the thing shifts around on those huge uneven legs. ‘That’s what I thought.’
Something’s cracked, a rib I think, but the hum in the air’s so heavy I can barely feel it as we get back to walking. It’s pushing through water, or against hands that are holding you back but gently, like they don’t really mean it.
Marco coughs and sighs, then smiles softly, a pale form of the smile that graced so many adverts and videos in the better times. I smile back even as I wince, then the light dies in his eyes like a switch has been turned off. The face twists and lips snarl, the jaw hanging loose as skin peels and bone cracks. I step back but there’s nowhere to go. The thing swings at me, arm stretching as it pops out of the shoulder joint and becomes wriggling, furious.
It cries out, a very Marco cry, a very Marco profanity escaping his lips as the colour returns to the eyes and he screams, and he’s Marco again, losing his mind at the thing he’s becoming. Can’t stop it now, I think, head sinking to my chest. It’s all so heavy.
We’re pulled and pushed along by hands and air alike, bonebirds crackling, cackling above us as Marco sobs, his voice wavering between something human and something not though he seems to have lost his words. When his eyes flick toward me, there is no recognition, just wide panic. ‘Fuck,’ I say, wrapping an arm around my injured stomach and feeling naked without my gun. Ten years ago I’d never even held one. Or was it twenty?
My nose and throat burn fiercely and then the Rupture stink lifts like a cloud blown away on a winter storm, replaced by jasmine and the faint hint of formaldehyde I remember from when we had to bury my grandmother. I never got to bury mom. The army took her away—I hope they burned her. I hope she’s not one of the shattered corpses being shuttled along the roots around me.
Two shuffling undead things rise suddenly from the ashen earth, still in the bullet blasted clothes they must have been buried in just before the army lost control of the city. As they free themselves from caked dirt, arm and leg bones break away from the tendrils until they snap roughly into place as fifth, sixth, seventh limbs. The things lumber away toward the northwest, heading for parts of Scarborough that must’ve been abandoned in the first weeks. Foraging, most likely, for whatever it is dead things forage. Jesus, is that why took Ben’s head? For spare parts?
Life, life, life, the song says on the wind. Come, come, come.
I don’t realise Marco’s stopped howling and moving until I bump into him and he snarls like a man wrestling a beast larger than himself. I can’t do anything. The air pressure changes; we’re at the Rupture.
I’m expecting a red and white rip in the air like we saw on the drone footage when it started. But they’ve been busy. Chunks of gravestones and memorials have been broken—even melted—into bricks and mounted into a broad arch, the rip now a screaming, glowing mouth that never shuts. The red roots pulse out as shards of bone and grave clothes creep toward it.
Marco wails and screams, then barks and growls like the thing with Ben’s face.
‘Sorry, buddy,’ I whisper. ‘Sorry I didn’t get you back.’
It’s gnawing on its own arm, tearing chunks of fast drying flesh away and leaving teeth embedded. The thing with Ben’s face grabs the creature by the back of a twisted neck and shoves it forward until the face hits the Rupture with a thunk like glass, squeezing it against the Rupture until the skull caves in with a meaty crunch.
The thing with Ben’s face howls, and the howl becomes a chorus as the dead all over the cemetery rattle and thrash as if in pain.
I’m grabbed by the hair, shoved until I’m only inches away from doom. This is it, I think.
The surface of the Rupture ripples then goes perfectly smooth, the light fading gently until I can almost see something on the other side. A hand holding a small metal device covered in switches and pulsing red lights.
The thick roots swirl around boots that shuffle from side to side.
The Rupture clears a little bit more and through the pearl sheen a face peers back at me.
My face.
But it’s not me.
Mirror eyes crawl up and down me, mirror lips parting and rearing up in pity and disgust and something approaching wonder.
The skin on the other side is mottled, dappled with pus and sores. Other faces drift in the background, all marked the same way and yet still people with names and feelings, maybe even still the dregs of hopes and dreams.
Mirror me talks over his shoulder and punches the air. Faces crowd in, half smiling, all grimy and worn. One of them might be Marco’s, hidden in a thicket of beard.
A hand much callused by weapons and hard living opens its palm and places it gently on the other side of the Rupture. There’s a thrum and a hum, and the song reaches a crescendo of LIFE LIFE LIFE before falling silent.
He hasn’t much longer, I realise. The pearl sheen washes away and I could step across if I wanted to. I don’t. Mirror me hesitates, one foot half an inch off the ground and leg creased in preparation to step. Yet he doesn’t. I don’t. The pus and wounds on his face are hiding his sick, grey skin and the strain of just staying upright.
A dozen faces behind him, all showing the same signs of life draining away.
Were they always sick? Or did they only get sick when their world hit ours? Or are we the ones who hit them?
The thick roots from our side stretch back into machines I don’t understand, machines of green moss that seem to have been grown rather than built. Bones from our side are lifted by tiny tendrils and pressed into the walls. The reds and blacks have become green and amber. As our bones disappear into the machines, cables throb, sending light and feeling down into ashen bodies slumped on the floor, like drips in some obscene hospital.
We’re keeping them alive. No—we’re keeping them on life support, nothing more.
They need something living, something real to come back from the brink. Our deaths have only delayed theirs.
Mirror me is watching me with one side of his mouth raised in a sad smile. I can hear him, or some whisper of him. Life, life, life.
He holds up his metal device, some sort of control panel out of a steampunk universe. Looking at me, nodding to both of us, he flicks the last switch on the top and the Rupture’s song blasts one last time.
He slides a thumb over a touchpad and the thing with Ben’s face pushes me forward just as mirror me steps into the Rupture.
There’s a pulse, and a dream, and agony, then silence.
