Deaf, he barely heard their cries

(the railroad took his ears).

He muttered through the dentures,

(he never said much, anyway).

Sans ears, sans teeth,

he still had eyes

to watch as they shambled up his steps

and took the rest of him

in gulping bites.

The Distillery

The tenement had been a whiskey distillery before the war, but the immigrants poured from steamships, fresh meat from Ireland and Eastern Europe, and they needed housing. Factory rooms were divided, and walls of grey wood thrown together. One became two, two became four, until the building folded in upon itself and became a black maze, choked with the reeking flesh of the poor.

In his fifth floor apartment, Tommy held the small, mewling child in his rough hands. It was his baby—a little girl. Her mother was dead, lost during childbirth, and the small apartment reeked of blood and sweat. The smell blended with other odors—the stench of rot and disease, fever and death. With his daughter in his hands, Tommy’s throat constricted as his eyebrows squeezed together.

“You’ll be havin’ to run, Tommy-boy,” croaked the midwife, a diminutive wrinkle of a woman in a soiled dress. “I’m sure they heard your wife’s cries. They’ll smell the blood, the death, and be on her.”

“Not my Lillian,” he choked. “God, not her.”

“Tommy, for the baby, you’ll be havin’ to run.” The midwife took the infant from his awkward grasp and sponged her pink skin with a rag from a bucket, the water almost as dark as the floor although Tommy had lugged it from the courtyard pump not an hour ago.

Tommy’s face tightened, his eyes wet and lost. “I’ll fight the bastards ‘fore I let them take my Lillian.” Both hands, filthy with the week’s dirt and his wife’s blood, squeezed into stone-like fists. He ignored the hunger that gnawed at the fringe of his consciousness, imagining the man-things that even now crept toward his door.

Sounds echoed in the hallway, shaking through the very brick and wood around Tommy’s small apartment. They were coming. The quarantine held for nearly two weeks, and the survivors that were left in The Points were desperate. The city cast off the healthy as well as the diseased. They were the worst, the Grey Men, and they had come for Lilian’s body.

In the Distillery, it was too easy to forget one’s humanity.

“Tommy go, ‘fore tis too late. You know they’ll take the baby, too—she’s not a chance here. The convent at forty-third and fifth avenue, if you can get past the barricades.” The small woman shoved Tommy’s child, now swaddled tightly in a blanket, into his waiting arm. She took up her sewing shears—the pair she’d used to cut the baby’s umbilical cord—and pressed the handles into Tommy’s other hand. “Go, now—”

A sharp rapping shook the door on its hinges. Tommy, not much more than a child himself despite his thick, black hair and broad frame, clutched the infant to his chest and pushed the shears into the waistband of his pants.

Voices hissed on the other side of the door, muttering low and indistinct, planning and scheming, and the pounding started again. Tommy slipped into the space next to the door and looked back at the squashed woman who delivered his baby as Lillian died.

Thanks, he mouthed. She nodded.

With a heavy crack, the door buckled. A second battering tore the door from its hinges, and it swung inward. Two of them spilled in, their flesh faded as old linen, black veins breaking their faces into awkward jigsaws—victims of the fever become monsters. The Grey Men would have meat.

Only two, Tommy thought. Only two and they haven’t seen me.

“Where’s the dead one?” snarled a tall, balding man-thing with ragged remnants of a beard. His tongue lolled out and slipped over his cracked lips. “Move, woman.”

The midwife folded her arms and stepped in front of the mattress and Lillian’s body. Her eyes flicked to the door and Tommy, only for a moment, but a moment too long. The Grey Men turned their heads just as Tommy squeezed past into the dim hallway.

“What’s the bundle?” the bald ghoul muttered, his hand, raw and chapped, grasped toward Tommy.

Tommy tucked the infant under his arm and scurried into the black hallway. The quickest stairwell was to the right, but they spilled after him, blocking that route, so Tommy was committed to the left. He sprinted as well as he could, his heart clanging away in rhythm with his light footfalls. The fifth floor hallways were generally clear, never as cluttered as the stifled mess below. Occasional beams of amber gaslight or the pale glow of a lantern leaked under a door, but otherwise Tommy moved in darkness. He pulled up, knowing the end of the hallway and the stairs were just ahead.

Tommy listened. Only small voices, muffled in their rooms, broke the stillness. A sharp cry cracked through the dark, and then fell silent. The midwife was dead now. The Grey Men would kill when provoked. No heavy footsteps, though. They weren’t coming. Not yet. But the stairwell before him was smashed between the second and third floors. He faced the prospect of crossing the Distillery on a lower floor, through an unfamiliar hallway, to return to the opposite stairwell and escape.

He swallowed hard, glanced down at the sleeping child swaddled in the crook of his arm, and pushed open the stairwell door.

The heat caught him first, followed by the stench: the awful reek of fouled skin, diseased flesh, urine, and feces. The stairwells at either end of the Distillery seemed to be the incubating ground for every rotten odor in the place. His face, already damp from the rush through the hallway, broke out in more tiny beads of sweat, rivulets that skirted into his eyes and down his cheeks.

He started down, descending uneven steps through near darkness. If one were to find him there, open either door below, he would be trapped. Tommy brushed his damp face with the back of his free arm, and held his breath.

The fever had come without warning, burning through the Distillery and other tenements in The Points neighborhood, infecting all but a misfortunate few. The healthy became outcasts—those who had no place in the new order. Rushed barricades blocked neighborhoods such as The Points, crowded ghettos with citizens whose mouths spoke dozens of languages and whose skins reflected myriad hues between the faded milk-white of Tommy’s Lilian, to the sun-hardened leather of the Italians. Food became scarce after the barricades.

The baby, Lilian had said before labor, was a miracle. A precious gift born in a hive of human rot.

Tommy held the child close to his chest as his feet lit on the last landing before the stairwell became impassable. Third floor, he thought. The core of the Distillery. Hundreds of rooms above, hundreds below. A dark maze. He knew the trip through the heart of the building would be more perilous than his quick flight on the fifth floor. As those in the building sickened, they consolidated their numbers below, and the third floor corridor would be stifled with bodies.

He shrugged off a growing ache—the first sign that the fever had begun its work—and pressed through the doorway separating the humid stairwell and the nightmare hallway. At first, Tommy imagined the place was completely without light, but his eyes adjusted enough to make out misshapen lumps—bodies, surely—littering the narrow path. They were groaning, some asking for water, others food. Instinctively, he tightened the grip on his daughter chest.

God, let me get her to safety.

At the far end of the hallway a shadow moved. Two floors above, the door to the stairwell clicked shut. Tommy pressed the door closed on his level, compelled on by who—what—started down the stairs. He pushed his feet forward, forcing them into the empty spaces between shifting bodies. Twice he felt a damp, boney grip snatch at his legs. Tommy kept walking.