Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (29 page)

As for the sounds, there’s lots of speculation, some of it pretty noisy itself. Are the sounds some new tactic to get rid of the orms? We in the corps have argued about that, most of us too scared to want to talk about it, or to want to hear it discussed; but (and it could be a pose) a few loudmouths insist on spouting daily assurances that the Sound, as they say it Capitalizedly, is the Newest Advance in our age. This might be convincing if they, the optimists, weren’t doing the mole act along with the rest of us, and running downstairs as fast as they can when the first sounds rumble in the distance every forsaken morning. They answer
collateral damage, possible risks, someone will tell us, never you mind
and the sun will come up sunny one day.

Today we got another report closer to home. An orm, a relative baby though thick as a man’s thigh, its dorsal fin tall as his waist, and its mane thick and coarse as cables. Just a block away, it was caught in the act of engorgement, two legs waving from its maw.

The story goes that a man in blue shot it with his harp-net. The orm’s tail wasn’t properly caught, and it smashed the guy’s stomach to pulp, but the mib had already called the orm squad. The person in the orm (unknown sex) was already a lost cause. That orm would feed a hundred New Yorkers, maybe plenty more from outside. That’s what Julio says because he saw someone who saw the squad load it into their omni. All just speculation on my part. I’m not a knower, and I don’t know anyone who is.

The sounds and craters are something else. The sounds come always at dawn. In them are elements of rumble, drag, shear, and I would imagine earthquake, all in one indefinability, just the sound to make you wake shaking from a dream, though this isn’t one. Correction: wasn’t one before. The real has exceeded dreams — former dreams, that is.

The sounds have patterned our waking. We all run down to the drypit (though none of us has slept enough) and huddle there feeling the building tremble (or is it just us?) till the day calms, relatively.

It’s still raining. We passed the forty days and forty nights mark long ago, thankfully longer ago than anyone in our corps cares to harp about. No one left amongst us is the quoting type. I don’t remember the last time the moon shone.

Two levels of underground carpark in our building are now nicely filled with water. So we don’t have that to worry about. Power could have been a problem but for our resident genius, an arrogant creep otherwise. Julio is the only person who can relate to the guy, but as long as Julio stays with us, we’re laughing. (Must keep Julio happy!)

Julio is a genius, too, but a different kind. He named us “The Indefatigables,” but that is really he. He found it in a book, he says, in his self-effacing way, but he is the one. I have never been able to figure him out. I thought perhaps it was love, and of who else but Angela Tux? But she left almost at the beginning and Julio stays. He says we give him purpose and that he loves the Brevant, and maybe we do and he does. I certainly must give him purpose, as I don’t think I could live without what he’s done for us.

The Indefatigables, properly the coop of the Brevant Building, “the corps” as we call ourselves, would be happy as clams these days (no irony intended) if we could only get more dirt. George Maxwell goes out for it instead of just wishing we had more. He went all the way to 51st Street yesterday to find a dirtboy with real dirt.

He was so upset he didn’t mind the danger, he said. I think that he was so upset he didn’t
think
of the danger. I’ve never sought a dirtboy. Too frightened of being killed for my seeds. George, though, is a big guy, played varsity at Yale (people say it’s still around, where the knowers are). George is one of those guys whose muscles get more tough with age, as does their stubbornness. We’ve got quite a collection here now in our little group, none as brave as George or useful as Julio, but we like to say
each has something to offer
. The building used to be filled with useless types — hysterical, catatonically morose, or verbally reminiscent, but they died out or disappeared. I’m proud and I admit, lucky, to be part of our corps now.

From Julio, the super, we hear rumors. He was the one who told us to fortify, though in the end, it was only him and George Maxwell who stuck broken glass and angle-edged picture frames and sharpened steel furniture bones into the outside wall, one man sticking, the other man guarding the sticker with a pitiful arsenal of sharpened steel. For the steel, it surprised us all how many of us had Van der Rohe chairs. I got mine at a ridiculously cheap price from a place in Trenton, though the delivery, by the time they were all installed in my apartment (I had to get three at the price) was ridiculous. I was glad to donate the chairs. They had always seemed to unwelcome my sitting in them, and gloat when I left them alone. Until the defenses project, I had never been able to part with them, but the prospect of them being torn asunder into ugly scrap gave me the best day I could remember in this age.

So few diversions. The Wall now, you’ll want to know about. Walls, really, I don’t rightly remember when. Sometime in the first years of the age. The orms were only part of the reason then, but the part that motivated public pronouncements on the Wall project. Where the orms came from, we’ll never know. Norwegian cruise ships were blamed for dumping the “freshets,” as the spawned babies are called, with the ballast, in both Miami and New York. The Norwegians protested, saying
these are not orms
, and anyway, theirs are mythical (though plenty of Norwegians disputed that). But the mayors and the President said “orms” in their announcements, and so that is what we’ve called them since. It doesn’t matter about the name anymore anyway, nor how they got here, nor to us, how far they have traveled inland. There are rumors that they reached the Great Lakes long ago, and the Mississippi, and that they can travel overland for many miles before they need water. We used to speculate, but as George pointed out, why? We’re probably the safest in the country because we protected first, and we have the most organized (not to mention mechanized) protection force in the country, as far as we know, and also we still have both wall-workers (we hear) and men in blue.

The Wall. The first place of building was the hardest: New York Harbor. Then the Wall encompassed more and more of the boroughs, then out to formerly exclusive burbs. The greatest achievement of mankind — it can be seen from outer space. It had massive public support, and became a focus of both civic pride and hope. I remember the feeling.

The Navy sonared the sea to bejesus, both the harbor enclosed by the wall, and out to three miles. Then the army electrified the Wall wherever it was land-based. We slept easy for it must have been close to a year.

Then the first orm was found
inside
. I remember the headlines in the old
New York Times
: “Mib loses fight to orm; Mayor vows to beef force.” Eleven feet long, it came up through a toilet in Flushing (yes, Flushing got in, though I don’t know why, but maybe it wasn’t Flushing, but they said so because it is funny, and let’s face it. Anything funny runs like a nose in November). By the time the orm was hacked to death with a broken plate glass window stuck to a love seat (by the wife, a weight-lifter, I remember, but again, I don’t know if this wasn’t any more true than Flushing) the orm had (supposedly) bitten through the middle of a tall and muscular dry-waller (but again, he could have been a flabby accountant). Whoever-it-was’s middle was found in the orm on occasion of the orm’s post-mortem (orms were not then eaten by anyone). The fact is, an orm killed in a safety zone.

A massive eradication campaign was launched to kill freshets within the Wall and anything that had gotten into the sewer system. The subway was sealed, the vent covers replaced by cement plugs.

There was maximum publicity for effort and minimum information of results. Then media stopped, as there was thought to be no further public benefit to be gained from it. The orms kept coming for a while and then, as far as we heard, died off. Julio says they never died off, which is why we and anyone else of wealth isn’t connected any more to the sewer or to any other municipal system (if indeed, there’s anything left).

In one respect we feel secure. Now neither people nor orms can climb our walls, nor gain entry through our two doors (our genius designed that protection).

“Be prepared” — our motto for when we do have to leave the Brevant. Each of us has to on a rostered basis, for at least a little time. George (the health nut) makes us. “You need the air,” he says. He doesn’t add,
You need gut-building
, but he could. Both muscles in the gut like George, and some of the guts that gave him the courage to fortify our building. Each of us has to deal with the dealers. That spreads the load. And sometimes, one of us doesn’t return. We all mourn the loss of the corps member and whatever it was that was lost as pay to the dealer. The most valuable pay is of course, seeds. Dealers being who they are, there are those who think only of a shot of energy — and they want meat.

Next to seeds, the next most valuable commodity for forward-thinkers, is dirt. The dirtboys are just that — boys, and dirty. They are the second fastest natural things in the city. They are the only ones who know where dirt is. Mibs kill them if they can corner them because dirtboys dig holes in the Wall to go outside to get dirt. That’s what’s said. I don’t know, but they carry the dirt in their clothes. They strip and you’ve got to put the dirt into your clothes. Tied-off pants and shirt arms are a giveaway, so there’s many ingenious ways that dirtboys hide their load. If we’re caught with dirt, we don’t get killed, but we do get drafted to volunteer. I’ve never known a volunteer. Part of Julio’s job is to keep us from being volunteers, and so far, the Brevant has been left alone. What we have that is valuable to the mib besides our seeds, I never know, but Julio does. He usually asks us for old electricals: a shaver, some extension cords, a bread-making machine — and we always give him the stuff. Someday maybe we won’t have the means to pay, but so far we do. Why the mib don’t just take what they want, I don’t know. Maybe they are designed to serve.

Lately I’ve been thinking of other things. Like these craters Julio told us about. Every crater open to the sky is a breeding ground, he says, and he also says it is a matter of time. Since the orms adapted to the electrification of the wall, the electricity had to be disconnected and sharp spikes mounted porcupine-style all over the wall. And this means that with rain, danger is increased, as the streets are slick and every pothole is a pool. An orm and you and water — and as soon as the orm feels your presence, your body will spit like a frozen freedom fry dropped into boiling oil.

The craters are the most recent crisis in our age. I’ve never seen a crater, but Julio has, blocks of them on the Grand Concourse in a stripe that is so fat it took away the Jerome Avenue El. Poe Park, he said, is now a
much
bigger park (and he laughed in a spine-crawling way), and that little house is gone, he said, which is too bad, but the El being gone makes a much nicer vista, he said. How a whole elevated “subway” could disappear along with all the buildings, we were trying to comprehend when he said it all made the neighborhood look much better, and he laughed again,
even with the craters
where all those stubby brick apartment houses had been.
Alexander’s final closing down sale finally finalized
, he chuckled, and then he nearly choked himself pointing to us and cracking up, doubled over like some comedy antique. It was rude of him to make a joke that only he understood. But then his happiness is infectious, and we all ended up laughing anyway. Julio has a way that can bring you out of your cares! He always looks on things in his own way. I wish I could, as I had nightmares for a week from that trip of his to the Bronx, especially the
where did everything go part
.

George saw a cleared area in Queens with lots of holes where basements were; and oddly, so did Fey, who once traveled further than anyone. Must have been his daydreaming that let him get that far, and luck that brought him home.

I could worry during my waking hours, but where would that get me? That sounds heroic, stoic maybe, but I can only worry about so much, and at the moment what I worry about — what keeps our whole corps awake at night, is this: Does anyone know about our sunflower?

The corps celebrated when this sunflower took — the only one of five precious seeds from George’s last (strictly illegal) seed expedition. (The only trade that is legal is to work for “food” as a volunteer. I can’t eat that “food” from what I hear of it, and I don’t want to sacrifice myself to the Wall any more than anyone with a smitter of choice left.). Perhaps these seeds came from the botanical gardens in the early days of the Transition. George assures us that, as he was assured, this sunflower plant will grow to have a flower with real, fertile seeds. Regardless of the pictures in books in the Brevant collection, we have to see those seeds to believe them, and then we have to see them make new seedlings. Our books are all
old
, bought way back when because they were old, even then, when seeds were seeds for the generations, and books with pictures were for collecting and not trying to get some information,
any crumb of useful information to live by.

Mrs. Wilberforce’s ancient poodle paid for the sunflower seeds, and we were lucky that that dealer was crazy with hunger, or he would have asked for the poodle
and
seeds in return.

Orm. You’d think it would have a nightmarish name, but it doesn’t need to. That horse-shaped head. The mane, its congealed, tangled mass; the gasping mouth, as wide as a garbage bin and fringed with triangular, razor teeth. The eyes of a shark, pitiless. A voracious appetite for flesh. Just to see it move is terrifying. The humping fleetness of it over walls, up brick, galloping across intersections once so clogged with people, buses, cars, honking yellow taxis. That was in the early days when there were pictures of them in the news. I’ve never seen an orm in real life.