The worms enter my belly and the nerves go dark. My nausea finally vanishes, along with everything else. I am disappearing.
“For your life. My life. Everything.” I release the tears. I need them to come out before they disappear too. “I can’t think of anything I’m not sorry for.”
Rosa stares at me for a moment, watching my eyes pool up. Then she spits blood in my face. “Fuck you, Atvist. Fuck your deathbed confession. You think you can be a monster your whole life, take everything you want, and then wipe your debt clean on your way out the door? Fuck you.”
The worms creep into my chest but seem to avoid my heart, leaving it to feel everything. I look down at the gun in my hand. “What if I don’t leave? What if I stay long enough to pay it back?”
She laughs through a ragged cough. “Pay it back? If you stay, you’re going to double it.”
“What if there’s some way—”
“There is no way. The plague makes good men into monsters. Imagine what it’d do with you.”
The worms seem to be in my throat now. My lungs. The urge to breathe is fading.
“Listen to me,” Rosa says. Her icy blue eyes lock on mine, tearing me away from my desperate fantasies. “You’re going to shoot me, and then you’re going to shoot yourself. Do it right now.”
The gun trembles in my hand.
Rosa’s glare isn’t just loathing; it’s disappointment. The embarrassed disgust of misplaced faith. “You were always so sure no one could ever love you.” She takes my hand and pushes the gun to her forehead. “Well, you’re finally right.” She squeezes my finger on the trigger.
I’m ready now. Oh God, I’m ready. I raise the blood-soaked gun to obey her final wishes, but as if following some primitive survival instinct, the worms rush into my arm and numb it. The gun sags against my hip.
I am almost gone. I am a head and a heart floating in space, surrounded by cold stars. And as my heart gives its final, frantic thump and disappears, I hear my thoughts like a loud voice, splitting away from this disintegrating mind to give one last command:
You will come back. You will find a way. You will repay what you stole and more.
? ? ?
Deep in some black void, drifting motionless like the shoals of trash around me, my legs twitch. My feet kick. I rise toward the light above me and thrust an arm out. I breach the surface and snatch a gasp of air. I shout. But my limbs are useless things. I sink again, as corpses do, my hands drifting limply above me.
Someone grabs them. Someone pulls me out of the water and onto something buoyant, and then I’m kneeling on hard pavement, coughing and gagging and breathing, and when I finally get enough air, I collapse and roll onto my back. The sky is dark. Her wet hair dances in the wind. There are tears in her eyes and her nose is bleeding, but she is smiling.
“R,” Julie says. “We’re not dead.”
THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE sways like a hammock as we run across it, clinging to the railing to keep from blowing off. I feel weightless and disoriented. I see familiar faces through the rain and spray, but I have lost all context. I am a man running in a storm next to a woman who saved me, and this is enough for now.
Once we’re across the bridge, Brooklyn’s old brownstones take the force out of the wind and I feel my weight return. Some of my awareness comes with it, and I realize our group is missing a piece.
“Where’s Tomsen?” I shout over the howling.
Julie is breathing hard and can’t seem to form words. She just shakes her head.
She is leading us somewhere; everyone follows a step behind as she darts through the streets and tunnels and parking lots of her old neighborhood, and then we emerge from a staircase onto the flat expanse of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Beyond the railing should be a tourist-trapping view of the New York skyline, but there is nothing. The rain has erased the city from reality, leaving only a gray void.
M kicks open the door of a souvenir shop and we stumble inside. He pushes the door shut and props a postcard kiosk against it and suddenly—silence. The wind howls and the rain rattles against the windows, but it’s a monastery compared to the chaos outside. I can hear myself breathing. It’s steady and rhythmic without my even thinking about it; a miracle. I hear the others, too, all different speeds and pitches, but Julie’s is the loudest, that dry wheeze so horribly corpselike. Her pack is gone, her jacket, her inhaler . . .
I take one of her hands and ease her down onto a bench. I rub her back as she struggles for air. “We’re okay,” I tell her. “We made it. You can let go.”
She clutches at her throat, eyes wide.
“Just think about air. How good it feels in your lungs. Soft and cool.” I take a slow breath and release it: a clean, perfect respiration like a lazy breeze. “Think about breathing. The pleasure of it. The privilege. You’re swallowing the sky.”