Nora opens her mouth to tell Addis not to look at them, then realizes how absurd that is. She lets him quietly absorb the massacre, hoping he will somehow process all his horrible experiences without too much damage. That he will find a way to bathe in poison without letting it inside.
“Look!” he says, pointing toward the park on the other side of the street. “A swimming pool!”
The park is huge, and may once have been beautiful. Rolling hills of grass, now overgrown with weeds. Tall, elegant lamp posts, now rusted. Its towering central fountain still produces a trickling stream where it must have once cascaded. The stream flows into a shallow pool less than a foot deep and fully accessible, none of the usual municipal railings and warnings, as if the city actually wanted people to play in it. Perhaps that headless couple holding hands in the bus stop used to sit on the benches here and watch their toddlers splash. Perhaps the college kids now feeding flies in the street used to get drunk and lie on their backs in this pool late at night, staring up at the stars, dreaming big dreams for themselves and for each other. Nora is going to cry again. This f**king city. This f**king world. When will she harden to it?
She watches Addis peel off his shoes and socks, sweaty and filthy, spotted red from bleeding blisters. She watches him cool his feet in the algae-slimed water. She wants to join him—she is drenched in sweat and the summer air seems to ripple around her in little pulses—but she needs to stay ready. They are not safe.
“Oh! Fuck!” she gasps as Addis palms a huge spray of water down the front of her tank-top. Addis almost falls over laughing.
“You ass**le!” she snaps, but she can’t hide the smile on her face and Addis keeps laughing. She whips off her shoes and runs into the pool. Addis squeals and flees. Nora kicks water at his back as he hops out of the pool and sprints off into the shaggy grass.
“Hey!” Nora shouts. “Come back!”
“Can’t catch me!” he giggles, and keeps running. Nora can see in the blurring speed of his feet that he’s beyond her discipline. The feeling of running barefoot in a field of grass, tendons flexed tight, feet bouncing off the ground like springs. Like running on a beach.
She lets him run. He won’t get far; he’s going in circles. She tries not to think about the precious calories he’s burning right now, maybe a whole meal’s worth. If they can’t spare the energy for a brief sprint in a park, they might as well go join the corpses on Broadway.
She hears a low growl behind her. Not a groan, not a moan, not a shout or a war cry; none of the sounds she’s used to hearing when something wants to kill her. Just a wet, rattling growl, like seashore rocks tumbling in the undertow. She turns around. A wolf is staring at her from under a nearby picnic table. Its eyes are ice blue. Like her mother’s, she suddenly recalls.
It creeps slowly from under the table, eyes fixed on hers. A big Canadian timber wolf, thin and desperate, fur caked in mud, too weary to bother cleaning itself anymore. Another phantasm pulled from the dying world’s fever dreams. Next will be dragons. Vampires. Devils. Ghosts. By the time the last human being—and there will be a last one, if only for a moment—realizes she is alozes time tne, the world will be nothing but the sum of her nightmares. Why should reality hold together with no minds left to force it?
Nora reaches for her hatchet and the wolf snarls as if it knows what a hatchet is. She glances right and sees Addis watching from a distant knoll, frozen with terror. She glances left and sees two more wolves slinking out from the trees near the edge of the park, leafy shadows stretching toward her as the sun sinks to the rooftops. Is this really how she’s going to die? In a world with so many options for exit, wandering a ruined city with no food or medicine, surrounded by murderers and the hungry Dead, she’s going to be killed by wolves?
And yet it fits. It’s appropriate. If the Library of Congress can be destroyed by arson, the Louvre by mold and neglect, if all the cultural accomplishments of ten thousand years on this planet can be erased by a few decades of carelessness, why shouldn’t this young American be devoured by wild animals in the middle of a city park?
Her bare feet dip into the warm water of the wading pool. Her back bumps against the fountain and she feels the thin trickle of regurgitated rainwater flowing down her spine. The wolves circle in, grinning.
The big man steps around the fountain and stands between her and the wolves. He groans loudly at them and it almost sounds like a word, but too hoarse to understand.
The nearest wolf leaps at him. It’s no doubt aiming for his throat, but his throat is nearly six feet high so it gets a mouthful of his t-shirt instead. He grabs the animal and strangles it, or maybe breaks its neck—it takes only a few seconds for the wolf to go limp. The other two bite into his legs. He reaches down, seizes them by the scruff of the neck, and hammers their heads into the concrete until their yelps go quiet. Everything goes quiet. The big man, his bald head gleaming gray in the evening light, looks at the dead predators at his feet. He looks at Nora.
Nora runs.
“Did you see that?” Addis squeals when she comes to a stop next to him on the hill.
“Uh, no. I was watching the sunset.”
“It was just like in Beauty and the Beast!”
The man picks up one of the wolves, sniffs it, tears off a leg and rips out a bite of the hot muscle, chews for a moment, then casually vomits into the fountain.
“Yeah…” Nora mumbles. “Kind of.”
The man drops the wolf and looks up at Nora. There is plenty of distance between them and plenty of directions for her to run, so she stays put for now, waiting to see what he does. But he doesn’t do anything. He just stands there, looking at her.