I WAKE TO sunlight.
My eyes open to the light and stare up into the pale blue expanse of the sky. There’s still smoke in the air, but it’s faint, a thin veneer of sepia on the few scattered clouds.
I move to sit up, expecting the usual creaking and knotting, the initial misery of my day—sore muscles, twisted up in a lack of sleep and reminding me what abuse I have in store for it again. Pleading with me to leave them alone, to rest, to die peacefully and be left to rot.
Not today.
I’m on hard ground. In the middle of a broken landscape of carved-out earth. Gravel and grey dirt. I’m surrounded by lagoons of milky white water and towering piles of darker soil. Ant-hill pyramids twenty-feet high.
I look around, clear-eyed and oddly calm.
I’m in a construction lot—the scraped earth where nature gives way to man—there’s a tall wire fence on one side of the lot, but the rest is bordered by trees and hills of grass. I’m somewhere near the river. I can smell it, forcing its way through the concrete, metal, and glass. I’m miles away from home.
I stand and brush the sand and dust from me, feeling taller, stronger, and calmer.
I realize that the one thing I don’t smell is the monkey stench that had been following me for weeks.
My hands are black with dirt and something sticky. Red.
Blood dried into hard shell gloves, cracking and pebbled with grime.
I breathe deep and long, enjoying the cool morning air free of downtown smells and the press of a thousand other people in my periphery. I kneel at one of the huge pools of rainwater, and I don’t recognize the face that stares back.
My face is a mask of red, two day stubble turning to a spiky beard, run through with the same sticky black as my hands. There’s a stranger’s eyes staring back at me. Still emerald green, but brilliant and gleaming. Clear and confident. No longer filled with fear and doubt and misery. This face is rugged—handsome even. I splash the water onto my face and scrub, washing my hands, my face, cupping the surprisingly cool and fresh water to my lips.
I shove my head under and come up laughing.
I feel . . . good.
I WALK UNTIL I recognize my surroundings, feeling new strength and surety in my legs. Every muscle in my body feels new and strong. People stare as I pass, ragged and terrible with my shirt and my pants filthy with old blood. It’s not my blood. I checked. Whatever happened to me in the night, it left its mark. Just not enough for me to remember, or care. I scratch at the scrub on my neck and feel the urge to run swell up in my new legs.
It starts as a jog across the beltline into Seventeenth Avenue, bouncing across in front of traffic, pouncing through cars locked in stasis, humming at stoplights, rumbling at the curbs. I bound into the crowd and break free, legs pumping harder, body moving quicker. My lungs are open, every part of me working as if I was made to run. The faster I run, the less I notice the world around me. The smells merge and disappear, the voices fade, the faces melt into a blur, and I’m sensing my way forward, dodging bodies and cars and turning corners by feel until I come roaring across First Avenue and that smell hits me like a wailing siren. The hot monkey stink. I trip once coming to the curb and barrel—shoulder first—into the endless brick tower of my own building, crumpling against the wall and slumping to my ass on the sidewalk.
It’s filling my nose now, so close. Closer than it’s ever been. I turn a wide nostril toward the alley, following it, seeking it out.
And there he is, down the alley, staring right at me. The monkey man. An unwashed animal wrapped up in dirty jeans and a leather vest. He’s smiling.
“Are you ok? That was a pretty hard landing. I think you’re bleeding.”
Another smell I knew all too well. I turn my head to stare up into her curious eyes. The redhead from the thirtieth floor. I flick my eyes back down the alley too late, and my stalker is gone.
“Hey. Are you ok?”
She’s wearing a purple sundress, and she has an armful of books and a leather purse clutched to her chest. Those long legs are bare to the thigh.
The scent of her blood is faint, stemmed with cotton, her time almost passed, but it still overpowers everything else around me. My eyes roll back as I breathe it in. Taste it. The taste of it is in my mouth, but stronger than before. There are terrible things flashing through my mind. Screaming and fear, and geysers of blood. The taste of flesh on my tongue. My stomach cramps at the thought of it. Hunger. Deep and terrible hunger.
She backs away as I get up from the ground, creeping forward, matching every step she takes.
The fear comes into her pretty blue eyes. Wide and pleading. She’s backing out into the sidewalk, people are passing us by, turning to look, but no one stops, no one utters a word. They all start backing away. I’m clearing a path between us. The blood is feeding me, drifting through my lungs, into my heart, pushing it harder, faster, the power of it pounding in my ears, rushing through my bones like lightning.
She turns to run. I can see it now, like a red trail behind her, flowing out like a line on a map.
She breaks for the intersection, ten steps ahead of me. She’s in the street, screaming now, the red is flowing like a river, forging a path between us. My eyes are locked on her legs. Those legs I want to tear apart, swallow whole, juicy and firm and full of life. I see it in my mind, gnawing on the bones beneath, feeling the soft sponge of the marrow in my teeth.
I pounce, launched like a rocket by new legs, through the air and flying. Powerful. Free.
Yellow fills my eyes. There is the sound of thunder. The force of the entire world screeching to a stop. A thousand screams. I am swatted into darkness. Her smell and her screams are fading. There is blood. New blood. My blood. I recognize that smell, but it’s fading too. Everything is fading. Everything is black.