A Watty Award Winner, Trailblazer Category 2016
In 1896, dinosaurs started the infection that ended the world.
Carmen has lived her entire life in New York City, a city of opium and invention, of rotting tenements and marble mansions; a divided metr...
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Ladies' Mile, New York City
October 20, 1896
JENNIE TRIED to kill me. So I shot her through the throat, lodging a chipped lead bullet between her second and third cervical.
I snapped her neck. She stayed dead.
She was one of the new ones; on Friday, she'd have been with us two full weeks. Hyo-su and I, we met her the day we obtained the tenth floor of the Waldorf—an exhaustive adventure, too many cads. We found her in a hotel room with a boxed gown from Paris, and several lengths of steel boning pulled from a corset and bent into knives. Two months she'd been alone. The back stairs to the servant's corridors kept her supplied in tea biscuits from the hotel kitchens. She was thin as a ring finger and twice as used.
Now, she was gone.
I sat behind the perfume counter next to her body. A fine glitter of broken crystal and toothy glass spread out around us on the marble floor. Jennie crashed through quite a few tables to reach me. She'd turned so angry, so desolate and insatiable—
Hungry.
No.
Determined.
My nose was running, and I wiped it with the back of my wrist child-like. The frayed edges on my fingerless gloves tickled my skin; whiskers made from black cotton, sprouting from the seams. They reminded me of hugging. Of hugging Destino and his bristly, tan head. The single-shot pistol I always carried lashed to my boot, dangled, emptied, from my hand. There was something about the hammer when it clipped my chin that also reminded me of hugging. But hugging people. Not dogs. How many times had I hurt my chin on sharp collar bones and hard shoulders? Some humans weren't created to hold.
Jennie's forehead was still warm under my fingertips. But then again, they were ice, and I didn't want to touch her anymore. I draped my arms on my knees. Blood rippled from the hole in her throat. It pulsed slow and dark along the line of her neck, running behind her ear and onto the floor. A candy box display had toppled when she fell. Scattered jellied squares wallowed in her blood, now. The powdered sugar turned a light peach the longer they soaked.
"Lo siento," I said. Trite, but, what else could you say when you shoot someone after they're dead?
Outside, rain blurred the grimy front windows of Carron's Department Store. I'd seen a thousand New York storms. I knew the dirty water streaming from the carved eaves and sliding over the stenciled letters would rush off the sill and frolick in the gutter. But not even the much-needed downpour could cleanse the handprints tattooed on the glass. It was the same all over the city. Dried on the sidewalk and brownstone walls. In patches, streaks, and bursts.
Red. Red. Red.
It'd been so long since it rained.
I brushed Jennie's blonde hair from her cheek, (I didn't want to touch her) and watched the windows. Twilight leaked from the alleys between the buildings across the street. It'd reach us soon. Night folded around the city block, cloying. They way a mourning sheet suffocated a mirror.
