This is what you are and why you’re here. You are not a person. You are not even a wolf. You are nothing, and no city was ever built for you.
He looks up from his meal and sees the big man watching him through the book-fire’s flames. He understands that they will travel together now. They will look for other creatures like themselves and gather more and more so that they can eat more and more. And he understands that no matter how many they gather, even if they become a mob of thousands, each and every one of them will be alone.
The carnage thickens as Nora and her brother work their way up Pine Street. The bodies are so dense she has to walk with eyes to the ground to avoid tripping over them, or worse: stepping in them. Her earlier impulse to shield Addis from the sight of death feels even more absurd now. He picks his way through the corpses with practical care, as if they’re nothing more than fallen branches to be avoided. Is he indifferent to the dead? Does he make no connection between these husks and the living people he loves? Or is he simply too hungry to care?
Nora can feel her own hunger slowly consuming her loftier concerns, grinding layer after layer off the hierarchy of needs. The grand pyramid of a fully realized life eroded long ago into a practical trapezoid, and may soon collapse to the baseline of an animal.
“A police station!” Addis yelps, pointing to a blue and white building a few blocks up the hill. “Maybe there’s guns!”
Nora rouses herself from her bleak forecasting and pastes on a smile for her brother. “Maybe. Should we start our own police department?”
He grins.
“Want to be sheriff? I’ll be your deputy.”
“No, you have to start out as a regular officer and then maybe I’ll promote you.”
“Oh really? Do I have a lot of competition?” She points at a uniformed corpse slumped over a police motorcycle. “That guy, maybe?”
“That’s…Sergeant Smith. He’s our best guy, he’ll probably beat you.”
“I don’t know, he looks kinda lazy.”
Addis laughs.
“Sleeping on the job again, Smith?” she says in her best tough-chief growl and begins frisking the dead cop. “That does it! I want your badge on my desk, pronto!” She’s not surprised that his gun is gone—if he still had it, why would he be dead?—but she does find a few things of interest in his pockets. A magnetic keycard of some sort and a baggie of pot. She confiscates both and they approach the station entrance.
The door is locked, which is an auspicious sign. Most easily accessed areas are stripped of anything useful. The harder a place is to reach, the more likely reaching it will be worthwhile. Nora and Addis work together to lift an empty Seattle Times kiosk and ram it through the tempered-glass street windows.
Once inside the lobby, her hopes sink a little. The reception desk is bare and there are no posters or placards on the walls, as if the station closed down officially instead of being abandoned intact like most businesses these days. They roam through empty hallways and locker rooms, past ceramic-tiled holding cells smeared with graffiti in various mediums. The anarchy “A” drawn in blood. The Fire Church’s burning Earth drawn in ash. A gigantic f horown face drawn in what looks like vomit. This one strikes Nora as the most eloquent. It should replace the American flag and fly proudly over City Hall, the first raw honesty to touch that place in years.
“Why didn’t Dad take us here?” Addis asks as they dig through a pile of blue uniforms.
“Probably didn’t know where it was.”
“But he was a policeman. He should have known about it.”
“He should have a lot of things.”
“What if him and Mom came here? What if they took all the bullets and stuff already?”
“Addy, there are plenty of people for us to worry about without bringing Mom and Dad into it.”
“No there aren’t.”
“Well…maybe not here. But other places.”
“Why is everywhere always empty? Where do people go?”
“Some of them find shelter. Like skyscrapers or stadiums.”
“And the other ones die, right? Like all those people out in the road?”
She pauses. “Right.”
“Okay.”
He finds a riot helmet and crams it down over his springy hair. “Halt!” he orders in cop-voice, and Nora smiles through a sudden rush of bittersweet sadness that takes her a moment to understand. She feels ashamed when she realizes it’s nostalgia. She has already begun missing him.
“I like this place,” he says. “Maybe we should stay here tonight.”
Nora looks around the station, considering it. “We broke the window. Anything could come in here and get us.”
“We could lock ourselves in the jail!” He starts giggling halfway through this idea.
“We need a simple building we can lock from the inside and get out of easily if we have to. This place has too many places to get trapped in. Once we’re done in here, we’ll go find a house.”
“Aww,” he says with genuine disappointment, and Nora wonders if being in the police station feels like being with his father. She wonders if he remembers the time Ababa Germame—aka Bob Greene—showed his kids around the D.C. precinct when Nora was twelve and Addis was three. The man was so proud. He had worked so hard, overcome such odds. None of his friends from the neighborhood could believe he had made it through the academy, even in its drastically simplified mid-apocalyptic form. Neither could his wife, who mocked and resented every forward step he took. And maybe all that doubt finally convinced him, too, because it was less than a year before he decided his shift would be easier with some amphetamines in his veins and shot a teenager for flipping him off, ending his brief foray into the world of unbroken people living unbroken lives.