Necropolis (26 page)

He took his regular shortcut, past a block of peep shows. He hurried past the garish signs promising adult wonders within: “All Nude, all Norm!” Despite his raging hormones, he didn’t understand porn. It seemed so mechanical. And the close-ups were gross. Who wanted to look at pubes the size of redwoods?

The people who hung out here were twitchy and seedy. The whores loved teasing him. They’d muss his hair and say: “Hey honey, how about a poke! Your wanna poke?” And then cackle.
 

To his relief, the sidewalk was deserted today. But as he passed the alley between one building and the next, he paused.
 

Something was going on. A flutter of motion buried in the gloomy brick gauntlet. The space smelled foul, a toilet for the godsmackers and a place where the whores did business. He was risking getting his nose sliced off by sticking it into that murk. But someone
could
be in trouble. He took a few steps into the alley, squinting. The dimness resolved into two forms.

Two kids. No, wait… It was a kid, talking to… a reebie hooker. The whore was saying, “I did it myself. Easy money.”

“They’ll give me that much just to test their new medicine?” the kid said. “Is it safe?”

“C’mon, sweetie. Do you really care?”

The voice— A teenager, maybe fifteen, with a crop of white hair—

No! No, that was
impossible
!

Brian ran home as fast as his legs would take him. He locked his door, put the chair against it, and dove under the covers. He refused dinner than night. His mother was content to leave him alone as she cracked the seal on a fresh bottle of brandy.

In his darkness, Brian worked through what he’d witnessed. He’d seen that hooker before. She always wore this flapper’s dress with tassels that twirled as she strutted around in her Victorian ankle boots. Loretta. The other girls call her Loretta. Why in God’s name was his father talking to Loretta? He knew his parents had probably stopped having sex. But to go to a street whore— But what else could it be? To buy drugs? That was crazier than his dad buying sex.
 

Over the next couple hours, Brian’s confusion evolved into outrage. After all they’d done for him, all they’d endured on his behalf, his father was out there with street whores.
 

His fury was a creaking, many-branched thing.
 

Bastard!

***

His father never came home.

His mother reported his disappearance to the police. Reebs vanish every day, they said. If you hear anything concrete, call us. Otherwise, put his face on a milk carton.

Just like that, his dad was gone.

31

MAGGIE

F
or a couple weeks she watched Donner like a ghost would, incorporeal. She wasn’t used to feeling confused. To a smarty, action was usually a simple choice between probabilities.
 

But when Donner had died, she’d
felt
his absence. An empty space. It had made it hard to concentrate. Her colleagues had noticed. She’d laughed and brushed it off. Tried to ignore it. But the truth was, she’d been shaken to her core. She found herself replaying certain memories. The crooked way he smiled. The dime novel jokes at the bleakest moment. Before, she’d written the behaviors off as defense mechanisms. Now she missed them.

Donner’s recovery was slow. He’d been kept unconscious for the weeks necessary to repair his broken and burned body. Now he faced a slow climb back to normalcy.
 

He ate whatever he could. He created an exercise regime for himself in the basement—isometrics, lifting paint cans, boxes, anything not nailed down. And some kind of martial arts routine, endless moves, focusing his meager energy, throwing kicks and stabs. It was painful to watch the sweat pour from his emaciated form. At first he could hardly manage a couple push-ups, a few chin-ups on an overhead pipe. Then he’d collapse on the cement floor, cursing. But he kept at it, attacking his frailty with a determination that was frightening.
 

That she should find solace in remaining a phantom while he worked so single-mindedly on becoming more concrete was an irony that didn’t occur to her.

The young pastor of the Ender church above, Jonathan, was Donner’s only human contact. Maggie didn’t know Jonathan well, but he seemed gentle. After hours, the two men would stroll through the tiny garden in back. Donner often became passionate, waving his hands. Jonathan would nod, and sometimes laugh, and sometimes look very sad. Twice Donner broke down. Maggie envied their intimacy.

Among end-timers, Jonathan was revered. He was the pastor of the Church of the Holy Epicenter. No Ender church was as important. Situated in a two-story building on Chambers and North End Avenue, it was the former site of Maury’s Deli. Maury’s, with its homemade sauerkraut and towering corned beef sandwiches, had been a neighborhood favorite for decades, especially among the school crowd from nearby Stuveysant High. It had survived many things over the years—recessions, gentrification, terrorism—but it wasn’t until the Shift that it finally succumbed to its demise in the form of the religiously fanatic End-Timers.
 

No one really knew why the public singled out Maury’s as the Shift’s ground zero. Certainly the government never knew. Their vague report (see “SHIFT COMMISSION: REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT) stated that it was “likely that the effect began within a ten-block radius of Rockefeller Park.”
 

It was probably because the owner, Maurice Rosenberg, was regarded to have been the first person to revive. Whether folklore or truth, the story was as comic as it was horrible. He’d been run down in the street in front of his own deli—killed by an old woman who, courtesy of the vagaries of the Department of Motor Vehicles, still drove her Crown Victoria battle cruiser despite an acute case of senile dementia.
 

The neighborhood mourned Maury’s death.

The next day, however, Maury was back. He was reputed to have sat up on the mortician’s table and barked, “Helen, gimme two pounds of lox from the walk-in!” This was not confirmed. The mortician dropped dead at the sight and never came back.

So Maury’s Deli became the place where “God’s wrath was felt.” That God chose an agnostic Jew as the herald of that wrath didn’t matter much to believers.
 

Ender theology was diverse. As many as twenty-three distinct “denominations” were documented, all with varying dogmas. But some core tenets were shared by all: The Shift was a supernatural event, God’s punishment, and it heralded the End-Times. Depending on the Ender group, this would culminate in: Christ’s return, the advent of the Jewish Messiah, the triumph of Islam over the infidel, or universal Nirvana. Despite their Buddhist-looking robes and shaved heads, Jonathan’s denomination actually had more in common theologically with Orthodox Judaism.
 

The Shift didn’t kill the old religions outright. The resurrection motifs in many traditions helped keep a lot of panicked people in their pews. Christians, for instance, had many Biblical precedents. Oh, they had to reframe the pesky parts that no longer fit. For example, evangelicals stuttered a bit when the dead started rising
before
the Rapture. Where was the Antichrist? Armageddon? Those who’d hung their world on this detailed chronology were disturbed. Not to worry, came the purred response, followed by a thousand re-interpretations. The important thing was, get your affairs in order and send a check today! Many didn’t bite. The dead weren’t being raised in eternal heavenly bodies. They were walking around downtown looking for work.

For the atheists, the Shift was their trump card. The evidence was in, baby. The Shift was
real
, and it was science not God. The Universe was a series of random physical actions and reactions. But take heart, they said. Because if the Shift’s Author had really been supernatural, He was more than vengeful. He was plain crazy.

Other voices rose, radical voices, issued from minds that could not accept a random Universe. Society was corrupt and existing religions were blasphemy. It was their duty to destroy them, to serve God in his wrath. It was the same old war cry dressed in new duds—others had screwed things up, not us! Anyone who harbored hatred or fear was welcome, because the time had come to kick ass and take names in a brand new holy book.

It was surreal to see riots between Catholics and Enders, Jews and Enders, see dogma pitted against dogma, zealot against zealot, out in the streets with clubs and fists and guns. If the fence-straddlers had been undecided before, their distrust of religion was quickly cemented into permanence by these acts. Most people quietly backed away from anything with a mosque dome or church spire.

The first major domestic Ender terrorist action was the simultaneous destruction of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the main branch of the New York Public Library. The Pope was a pig, they screamed, and science was a graven idol. Surazal was quick to respond. The most virulent strains of the End-timers were wiped out in brutal attacks. The news channels were full of Blackhawk helicopters patrolling the streets. The churches that were spared were forced to take strict oaths of nonviolence. By the time the dust settled, the old denominations had withered into tiny, huddled enclaves, the radicals were underground, and watered-down, neutered churches like the Enders were all that was left of the new religions.

Now the Church of the Holy Epicenter looked more like an AA hall than a traditional sanctuary. No stained glass, golden statues, artwork or hymns. A simple podium, folding chairs, a leaky baptismal—that was it. There were still grooves in the linoleum where Maury’s deli cases had once sat. The only eternal thing here was the faint smell of pastrami.
 

32

JONATHAN

“W
ell, I don’t know about this separation and impermanence idea that Maggie was talking about,” Jonathan said slowly. “But I believe God sees our true hearts. It’s why he has so much forgiveness. Humans are so fragile, so lost, so misunderstanding.”

Donner clasped his hands beneath his lowered head. The garden was empty besides them.
 

“She was getting ready.”

“Elise?”

His voice was low. “I just couldn’t see it.”

“Because of the drinking,” Jonathan said.

“The drinking was just a symptom. She left me because I wasn’t able to grow up fast enough.” He looked at Jonathan with an anguish that shocked him. “How can a man be a hardened cop, live in those streets, do the things he has to do, and still be a child inside?”

“One has very little to do with the other. But what you’re saying, I think, is that had the murders not happened, you still would have lost her. Dead or alive, she’d have been gone. Hector took your lives, but not your marriage. You and Elise did that.”

Donner threw his fists open. “If Maggie is right, was that old man Hector even the same person as the kid who killed us forty years ago? Was I looking to extract my vengeance, in sense, on the wrong person?”

“Hector had to live with what he’d done his entire life. In my book, that’s hell. Maybe he’d already been punished enough.”

“Maybe we’ve all been punished enough.”

Jonathan moved next to Donner on the bench. “I think it’s time you let go of all the what-ifs and if-onlys. Acknowledge that you’re flawed like everyone else and that, for all your mistakes, you’re doing the best you can. Vow not to make the same mistakes and to stay committed to ‘growing up,’ as you put it.”

“What’s the point?”
 

 
“In my opinion, there’s only one thing worth doing in this life. The only thing that matters.”

“Father, if you say bingo, I may have to slug you.”

Jonathan laughed. “You didn’t become a cop for the paycheck, Donner. And you’re not one of those rageaholics who uses their badge as a license to hurt. You wanted to make a difference, to help people. You suffered through the job for a long time because of that. Okay, booze was a crappy coping mechanism. But there are people out there who still need you, Donner. They need your experience and your brains and your courage. And helping them in return may bring you the one thing you need most of all.”

“What’s that, Padre?”

“Hope.”

33

MAGGIE

F
inally, when Maggie couldn’t stand it any longer, she appeared to Donner. He was at a battered wood table, shoveling oatmeal into his face.

She flashed a grin. “Hey, baby. How’s tricks?” Meant to sound jaunty, it came out hollow as a campaign promise.
 

Donner looked up, his mouth full. “Maggie.”

“You look better,” she said.

He finished chewing. “Liar.”

“No, really.” She bobbed her head. “Be patient.”

“Where you been?”

“Oh, you know. Here and there.” She crossed her arms to suppress the urge to fidget. “The truth is, I thought you wouldn’t be so hot to see me.”

“Because you beat it from the lab?”
 

She looked away. Donner laid his spoon down on the table. Light bounced into her eyes from its silver handle. “I suppose I was, at first.” He looked her up and down, frankly appraising her hair, her features, her figure. She felt warm. “It’d be stupid to die with me,” he said. “You made the smart play.” But his voice was flat.