Audrey’s head tilts. Black fluid trickles down her chin.
Julie returns with a soiled lab coat and a long steel rod with a ring on the end. She wraps the coat around her mother, forcing her arms through the sleeves while her mother squirms. Once it’s buttoned up, hiding the grisly mess of her body, the appearance of humanity rushes back in. Just an overworked doctor in need of a shower.
The transformation seems to catch Julie off guard. Her stiff-lipped determination falters and the tears return as the creature in front of her suddenly becomes the woman from her memories. For a moment, I think even Audrey feels it. Recognition flickers over her face, the savagery softening into gentle astonishment. Then it passes and she starts hissing again.
Julie connects the ring on the end of the rod to a clamp on her mother’s collar. I suddenly understand her intent.
“Julie,” I say as she leads her mother by the neck like a rabid dog, the pole keeping her at a safe distance.
“What.” She exits the aisle and heads deeper into the university, toward the exit.
I follow her, avoiding eye contact with the pitiful prisoners writhing around us. Should we free them too? And then what? I hear the fallen guards’ walkies squawking. The voice of reinforcements, reinstatement, repetition. Whatever is happening here, it will keep happening until someone silences that voice. We can’t save everyone tonight.
I watch Audrey’s coat billowing freely through the gap in her side. We can’t save anyone tonight.
“What?” Julie says again, glancing back at me. “Say it.”
It sticks in my throat. No, her mother can never come back to her. Yes, it’s insanity to take her with us. And yes, of course we’re going to anyway. I’d be a monster to think otherwise.
“Nothing,” I say. “Let’s go.”
WE RACE DOWN THE STEPS of Wayne County College like kids on the last day of the semester, a cold echo of those carefree summer rituals. I can hear the sounds of long-dead students, can almost feel them shoving past me. The squeals of young beauties in cocoons of affirmation, half-formed pupae who seem a different species entirely from the woman at my side, despite somehow being the same age. I hear the bass from tricked-out cars, simian boys equating volume with virility; shoving, laughing, boasting, belittling—everyone testing everyone, clawing and pecking for position. I see and hear it all through a haze of time, a blur of overlaid moments as the city churns around me. Across the street from the college—literally next door—is the Mortuary Institute of Detroit. A block away is a dilapidated building whose sign reads PERRY FUNERAL HOME—I blink and rub my eyes, but it’s really there.
Am I awake? Julie asked me, and I answered with blithe confidence. That confidence is gone.
I take some distant comfort from my trail of plastic troops. I pretend that I’m a soldier in an army in a country with a leader, that I have clear orders and good reasons to follow them. I revel in this certainty for perhaps a dozen blocks, then the sun disappears and my army fades into the dark.
“Shit,” I say under my breath.
Julie’s stolen flashlight casts a narrow beam and it’s not long before we’ve lost the trail. Audrey follows her daughter in a mostly placid state, but Julie keeps a two-handed grip on the pole to control her occasional lunges, sometimes away from Julie, sometimes toward her. If we keep going like this, it’s only a matter of time before something slips.
Julie pulls the pistol out of her waistband and fires into the air in a distinctive rhythm: Bang. Bang-bang. Then she watches the sky and listens.
A few seconds later, from somewhere across the river: Bang. Bang-bang.
Relief floods Julie’s face, and I realize this grim fugue of determination has not completely buried her personality. She’s in there, just as scared as I am, imagining the horror of spending a night in this haunted graveyard of a city.
Using the river as a reference, we work our way back to the main street and find our bike waiting where we left it, with a note on the seat under a chunk of concrete:
WENT BACK TO PLANE
COME HOME CRAZY BITCH
We both look at Audrey, then the bike, then each other.
“You drive,” Julie says. “I’ll sit on the tail and pin her between us.”
Audrey grinds her teeth in a confused, simmering fury.
I don’t need words to explain the flaw in this plan. I point at Audrey’s mouth, then at my neck.
Julie thinks for a moment, then hands me Audrey’s pole and dives into a heap of automotive wreckage. She emerges holding a bullet-pierced motorcycle helmet, shakes the ancient skull out of it, and shoves the battered white globe over her mother’s head. “No biting, Mom.”
Audrey’s gunmetal eyes are wide and fierce in the helmet’s view window.