Not Flesh Nor Feathers

Outside and overhead there was at least one helicopter even before the elevator had time to return to us. We watched the digital numbers drop and cursed the seconds while the cars loaded and unloaded.



We cursed the moments as the refugees straggled past and the screaming all around us didn’t stop, only muffled itself to crying and shouting, which was no better but at least made it easier to hear—and easier to pass orders back and forth.



Harry found me again, down by the elevators.



He was panting, but still energized and ready to move bodies. “I heard there was some crazy woman stuffing people into elevators and sending them skyward. I figured it had to be you.”



“Thanks,” I said, handing a little fellow maybe three or four years old to a man I assumed was his father—but the man shook his head.



“Not mine,” he said.



“Whose? Who does this one belong to?” He was a red-haired imp with dirty freckles and a nose serving as a snot-faucet. He howled in my face as I held him up. “Who does this one belong to?”



Nobody answered, and everybody shrugged impatiently, because the elevator wasn’t rising and everyone wanted to get up, out above the water. The man I’d tried to pass the kid off on changed his mind and said, “Forget it, I’ll take him. I’ll keep him upstairs if I need to. Come here, little dude.”



The little dude screamed, but I foisted him off anyway. Next. Next. Whoever’s next. Get on board. Room for one more, no, not the wheelchair—not that much room. You’re first on next round, though, I swear to God.



“Ma’am?” Harry addressed the petulant-looking, ancient woman in the chair. “How about you and I take the long way around. It’ll be fast, and you’ll have to hang on, but I can push you up the ramps.”



“Up the ramps,” she repeated, and something about her eyes, and her reaction time, implied that maybe she wasn’t all there anymore. An Alzheimer’s patient? “But I just had a baby!”



“Not in the last sixty years she hasn’t,” somebody mumbled, but if the woman heard him, she didn’t argue with him.



“I’ll be careful,” Harry promised, then checked her all over to make sure she was all inside and not on the verge of toppling out at high foot-speed. Satisfied that she wouldn’t spill out at the first bump, he took hold of the rubber handles and began a hurried retreat towards the coiling car ramp.



I thought I heard her complaining, but then as he rounded the first turn her echoing, weedy voice dribbled down to the elevators. “Wheeee!”



Ping.



Elevator number two was open again. People began loading.



Nick appeared, with another parentless small child. “Someone said the parking garage, and oh, of course—it’s you.”



“You have any better ideas?”



“Not at the moment, no. Not any more good ideas, anyway. Hey, does this little girl belong to anyone here? She’s asking for Mommy and I can’t find anyone matching that description.”



“Bless her heart!” One of the grandmothers with three charges already put out her hands and took her. “Not one of mine, but if no one else claims her, she can ride with us.”



“Excellent,” he said as he handed her off.



“What did you mean by not any more good ideas?” I asked, holding the doors open with my leg and my butt. “You said that like you’d already cashed one in.”



“I did. Got on a cop’s cell phone to the TV station. The traffic reporter has his own chopper, and he’s on his way out here. The hospital only has the one, the cops don’t have any, and the feds haven’t yet figured out that they need more of them, that they need to start moving people instead of personnel.”



“You kick ass, man.”



“Tell me about it. He’ll be plucking people from the roof in ten or twenty minutes, tops. Probably less, if I know him.”



“Doesn’t he need some kind of FFA permissions?”



“Probably. That won’t stop him, though.”



A fresh pattering stomp of running feet and hollered orders went charging past the open area where the parking garage dumped onto Broad Street, and we all knew we were running out of time. On the upshot, we were running out of people, too.



On the downshot, the creatures were so close that I could hear them breathing again. I could hear them walking in that splashing shuffle, which slowed as it reached the edges of the water, but by this point the edges of the water were all around us and all over our feet, even there inside the garage.



And there was a crack of lightning followed almost immediately by an answering thunderclap.



“More fucking water” Nick swore, and nobody chastised him for saying it in front of old ladies and little kids.



And we were out of time, just like that.



The elevator numbers were sinking, and freezing, stopping and starting, but there were too many floors and we had maybe a dozen people left, huddled there. Together, we huddled, all of us and all of them—there was nothing else to do. The rest of them were hearing it too, the gagging, gasping, forced crush of air in the crumbled chests.



Not all of them knew what it was, though. Thank God.



Nick knew, and I knew. Nick had the good idea first. “This way,” he said quietly. We’d all gone quiet. We were all listening, trying to place the spot where the noise was coming from. “This way—back over here. Come on. One level up, we can walk it.”



“Is that where we’re going?” A small girl asked way, way too loud.



“Yes,” he whispered down at her. “Yes, that’s where we’re going, and we’re going there right now.” He looked up at me. “Out of sight might be the best we can do for now.”



“Yeah.” I hated to admit it but there wasn’t much choice. “Okay, yeah. You take them up there.”



“Oh, I don’t like the sound of that. . . .”



“Because I’m going that way.” I pointed out at the square of gray light where the parking garage hit Broad. “They’re slow. I’m fast. You do the math. Take these guys up and out, go farther than the vans if you think you can. It’s only what—eight or nine floors? Okay, get them up, at least one floor.”



“Eden,” he warned, and I ignored it.



I had to ignore it. There they were. Two of them. Knees first, into view, then off-balanced torsos, and with them came the dragging scrape of chains.



“Go!” I hissed at him, and the little girl with the big questions started to cry.



I took off. I dashed the thirty yards out into the light, into the open street right in front of the moving, wandering things. Only then did I realize that I was splashing too, and that the river was higher than I’d thought. In the garage it was harder to see, maybe; or maybe it was farther above street level than I thought.



But I was splashing, boots slapping one after the other through maybe three or four inches of navy-black water with a sheen on top like motor oil and a current of leaves, paper coffee cups, and a dead pigeon or two.



One of the things raised a hand at me, but there wasn’t much motive behind it. It was the equivalent of “I see you” and “Here I come” rolled into one. So slow. So stupid. So perfectly empty and knowing nothing at all, but there they were—walking. Moving. Breathing in jagged coughs. Seeing me, and recognizing that I was something to be chased. The teeth-rattling scrape of a rusted chain whipped through the low water with a heavy splatter, and its tail cracked against the bottom of a glass door, shattering it.



“Run, people,” I said out the side of my mouth.



“Eden!” It was Nick.



I didn’t listen to him, and I knew he was too preoccupied to chase me. “Get them upstairs. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”



The things were already shifting their forward paths, trying to turn to follow me instead of continuing on whatever course they’d been programmed for.



And there was the sound of those chains again. They were caught on wrists and cinched around waists. Dead hands gripped and swung the brownish links, which slid through the air and ripped messily through the water. Everything they struck broke and feel. A potted plant beside the main entrance, the brass concierge desk, the polished marble panels along the walls, all met the terrible snaking chains and were destroyed.



My back was to the elevators, and to the people there. “You promise?” Nick asked.



“I promise. Go. They won’t catch me.”



One of them groaned as if in protest, so I went ahead and challenged it. I took three long steps out into the light in front of them—directly in their path. Their wobbly, charred-wet heads swiveled jerkily to follow my movement.



“Come and get me then, if that’s what you want. Come on. Over here.” The water had reached mid-calf on me. They were not so slow here, in the street where the curbs held a few inches of water in the road.



They made a decision, if it could really be called that. I ought to say instead that they were distracted by the more immediate stimulus of my body’s motion, and they pursued me—mindless, quick, like a cat jumps after a bird flying past, even though a closed window separates it from the back yard.



Forward came the things, and faster—now that they’d been given a goal more interesting than “forward” alone. The biggest one hoisted his elbow and flipped his wrist, coiling a length of chain up and reaching back, as if he were preparing to strike.



“That’s right,” I said, backing up, and backing away from the parking garage. “Follow the bouncing brunette. Come to me. Come and get me.”



I had to turn around then, because they were coming approximately as fast as I could walk backwards. They were easy to track, though—tearing through the clotted water behind me they were about as quiet as a flock of angry ducks. I dashed and splashed forward and they came on my heels. They were smelly and loud, but not close enough, not yet.



I’d concocted a half-formed idea that all I really had to do was get them up out of the water. If they’d struggle their way up and out into the road, or onto the grass on the other side of Martin Luther King . . . if I could get them out onto land where they were weaker and slower, I might be able to—I didn’t know, really. Kick them out far enough to strand them, or assault them, or hack them up. With what, I didn’t know yet.