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“Not like this, maybe. But only because there have never been so many people living here. I mean, you can’t look around and say, ‘It isn’t that bad’ because obviously it is. But this—all of this, the people sleeping on the floor, and the police, and the helicopters flying overhead all the motherfucking time, and the lights flashing, and the windows breaking, all of this bullshit—this isn’t even half of it. It’s not even half of how bad it’s going to get when the river gets here. ”
It was hard not to be struck silent. Christ was a man prone to hyperbole, but even his vast store of exaggeration wasn’t sufficient to paint the scene.
“I’m talking about fucking zombies, man! Zombies!”
“And . . . now we’ve got to settle down for a little quiet
time, don’t we, Christ?” I said, pulling at the towel and pulling him closer to me with it. I wrapped one arm around him and put my mouth against his ear.
“Christ, dear, we believe you. We believe you. ”
“You do?” he asked, and he looked up at me with clouded blue eyes, and I thought there was no way in hell he could be thirty years old. He had to be fifteen under all that bravado. He had to be a boy. “You believe me?” He asked it again, and his eyes were watering.
“Yeah, we believe you. We do. We do. ”
I held on to him and let him rock back and forth against me, between me and Jamie, who lapped his arm over mine so we could hug him together. Nick looked like he felt left out, but he didn’t offer to join the pile and we didn’t invite him to.
“But,” I whispered down into that manky, wet, rat’s nest of vibrantly fake-colored hair, “right now everybody else doesn’t know yet. And right now, everybody else is trying very hard not to believe, and not to hear. Right now, it’s rumor. Right now, it’s scary shit being passed along from refugee to refugee. ”
His autistic rocking lurched itself into a nod.
“No one’s saying this ain’t a mess, and it ain’t bad, because we all know it is. We can look around and see it’s bad. And look—there are official-type people here. They’re getting out everyone they can, starting with the sick, and the families with kids, and with old people. It’s slow but steady. I’ve been watching it all night, starting at the Choo-Choo. It’s not perfect, but it’s working. ”
I lowered my voice even farther, and brought my lips even closer to his ear. “But if you keep yelling like this, you’re going to start a panic. ”
“And they ought to panic!” He started to rise, but Jamie and I forced him to stay down.
“No. No panic. Not yet—not while the real danger, as you put it, is still down by the river. Let them get the most vulnerable people up and out of the way. And then, when the panic comes—like we all know it’s going to—then we can all make a run for it, and we’ll all have better odds. Better to get the slow and weak ones out of the way now. ”
“Mercenary of you,” he growled.
“Let’s all be mercenary, if it’s like you say—and I believe it is. This time, under these circumstances, in this life-or-death situation, it’s good for everyone. If there’s going to be a stampede, fine. But the fewer in the herd, the better our chances are. ”
He was silent, except for the tiny rhythmic squish of his rocking in wet clothes. “All right,” he said. “All right. All for all and one for one. I can see that. I can make that work. ”
“Good,” I told him, rubbing at his shoulder.
“As per usual, Eden my darling,” Jamie said, patting me around Christ’s shoulder, “I can’t tell if you’re brilliant, or completely deranged. ”
Nick combined an eye roll and a sniff into a gently derisive facial gesture. “Hey cuddle pile, it’s starting to rain again. Let’s get inside if we can, eh?”
“Inside, sure, but not here. ” Christ perked up and looked nervous. “Not while the zombies are coming. ”
Nick offered him a hand, and despite the fact that both Jamie and I were ready to help him up, he took it. “No panicking the peasantry, remember?”
“I remember. But we can’t stay here, it’s too close. I mean, the river is just a couple of blocks that way. ” He pointed to the left, towards the aquarium at the end of Broad Street. From our vantage point we could barely see its outline, a sharp-edged structure made of glass with the emergency lights glowing green and yellow from within.
“Where should we go, then?” I asked him, but I could watch the tweaks and shadows of ambivalence working across his face.
He drew away from us and faced us, looking from one pair of eyes to the next. “What do you think, how far can the water really come up? It’s only a river. How far up can it go?”
None of us knew, so nobody answered. He went on talking his way up to a point that I could see coming a mile away.
“I think they’re stuck there, in the water. I’ve never seen them in water less deep than knee-high. They can’t leave the river, so they can’t go any farther than the river lets them. And if that’s right, then once the TVA gets the locks straightened out—once the rain stops—”
Even as he spoke, a crunching growl of thunder rumbled across the valley.
“Once the rain stops,” he went on, “down goes the water. And down go the zombies. ”
