“I need some real clothes.”
The sky is a pale, dry blue like it always is now, even on perfect, cloudless afternoons. Smog, dust, airborne radiation; Julie doesn’t know what it is. But from old photos she knows the blue was deeper, once. Her father tells her it’s just a trick of photography, but she doesn’t believe him. She sees it in her dreams. Even when they’re nightmares.
Julie has had many nightmares in her short life. She is twelve, but she has seen death from more angles than her grandfather did in forty years of military service. She will grow up quickly. She will harden in places she shouldn’t and break apart in others, and she will bury both her parents before she’s old enough to buy beer. But even now she knows: this is living. She wolivrden in pln’t object to it or call it unfair, even though it is very, very, unfair. Life is only fair for the Dead, who get what they want because they want nothing. Julie wants everything, no matter how much it costs, and this is why she will change the world.
She watches the girl on the overpass shrinking into the distance. Their eyes meet across a river of cars. Just before the girl disappears, Julie drops something out the window.
• • •
“You’re not dead!”
The tall man watches the short girl stumble toward him on the street below, blood trickling down her chin and arms, bright red instead of black because she is alive. The brute is screaming again because there is another Living girl even closer to him, this one tall with black hair and brown skin and life that smells like liquor. The brute wants to take it and drink it, but the tall man is not moving. He hides behind a rusty truck, peering through its windows at the mystery unfolding in front of him. The tall girl is only a few yards away, but he ignores the commands throbbing in his hands and teeth and just watches the tiny blonde creature below.
She spits a mouthful of blood onto the asphalt and sucks in a lungful of air. “You’re not dead!” she shouts in a voice so very different from the melodic tones he heard in the forest yet in its own way beautiful, a broken sound of grief and desperate hope. Somehow these emotions ring clear to him despite his growing inability to feel them, and he wonders with some amazement why the girl is talking to him.
“Dead…” he croaks, slowly molding his tongue into the necessary shapes.
“You’re not dead!”
His eyes widen. He is more confused than the day he woke up near a river surrounded by corpses with a mind as dark as deep space. What does she mean? What is she trying to tell him? He knows he is not alive. If he were alive, everything would be different. If he were alive he would be sitting on a park bench with a mug of hot coffee reading his favorite dog-eared book for the tenth or twentieth time, glancing up now and then to watch the people stroll by, and the city would smile and lean in and whisper: That bench was shaped for your body. That book was written for your mind. This city was built for your life, and all these people were born to share it with you. You are part of this, Living man. Go live.
If he were alive, he would not be walking through a concrete graveyard with a crowd of corpses, looking for lives to erase.
So why does this girl insist he’s not dead? He knows she is wiser than him. He heard it in her singing. Can he somehow believe her? He is not alive, that much is clear, but he is walking. He does have eyes, unlike the big man’s shriveled girlfriend, who is barely distinguishable from all the person-shaped piles littering the streets. He hasn’t fully surrendered to rot.
“Not…dead?” he murmurs, pressing his face against the truck’s grimy glass.
“You can come with us!”
The girl’s father has her now, dragging her away, and the tall man feels a sting in his eyes. After all this time and all the things he’s given up, it seems there are still things he wants. The brute tries relentlessly to shove them aside, hammering down every desire that isn’t hunger, but they remain. And he finds, to his surprise, that he wants them to.
Behind him, he hears the scraping of dry bone on pavement. He leaves the tall girl on the bridge and intercepts the others as they emerge from an alleyway. The big man, the small boy, and five boyentiethcreaking skeletons, their withered bones humming with the strange darkness that drives them. They would have killed the boy. They would have gleefully devoured his brain, a tiny sun hot and dense with life. But they restrained themselves for one simple reason: they need him to help kill others. They need to grow their terrible family, to add more teeth to their mouth so that someday it can eat the world.
As they sniff the air in the direction of the overpass, the tall man feels something move inside him.
It is not the brute.
“Guns,” he wheezes.
They regard him blankly.
“Too…many guns.”
He starts walking away from the overpass and after a brief hesitation, dazzled by the decisiveness of his movements, the others follow him.
The big man walks alongside him, giving him a curious look. The tall man returns it, unblinking.
“Name?” he wheezes at the big man.
The big man considers this with a troubled expression, as if he’s been asked to do something unnatural. Finally, a hum builds between his lips. “Mmmm.”
The tall man nods. “Rrrrr.”
The big man nods. They keep walking.
They walk away from the tall girl on the bridge, away from the short girl and her family disappearing into the distance, away from this beautiful city and its silent condemnation. The tall man doesn’t know where they’re going and doesn’t care. He is spent. His mind is mercury again, its brief surge of humanity melting into an oily residue on its surface, and he no longer understands the feelings he felt in that strange moment on the overpass.