Bonedead

Thirty-Third (Part I)

THE RAIN stopped sometime in the early morning.

I'd gone stiff in every joint, sleeping on the Devil's backbone of a floor, and standing by the window gave me something else to think on. I didn't lift the curtains; I just crossed my arms and stared through the yellowed tatting at the street. The morning light was overbright and too gray, coloring everything in a single hue, like the Vitascopes—the moving pictures—that used to play in the warehouses on Bleeker Street. Time, unfolding and refolding for strangers at a "penny-a-turn".

Those people on film, they looked stiff too.

I couldn't shake my dreams.

Far below me, an emaciated carriage horse rooted through the gutter. On a normal day, in the Before, men with brooms roamed the boulevards; sweeping newspapers, manure, and stifled cigarettes out from under tramping feet. Now, the only White Wing to be had was half a corpse on the sidewalk.

There was garbage everywhere.

And the horse—

His dorsal stripe was a vivid black streak along the middle of his back, parting a sea of bones and taut skin. His tangled mane rolled in dirty, unkempt ropes down his neck and he still wore part of a harness. The collar and hame rested on his shoulders like a lifejacket, trailing broken tracers after him.

I leaned a shoulder against the window casing, feeling the cold, damp glass on my arms. The horse scraped his splayed toes on the cobblestones, striped forelegs quivering. At first, I thought it was exhaustion that caused him to tremble and shake, but no,

he was hunting.

It wasn't exhaustion that shook him. It was need.

A rat scurried out of hiding. A big, hump-backed brown rat with a tail naked as a newborn. I could see it from here as a blob, a stain on a stain. But I remembered my own encounter with its twin the night before, in Ladieswear. It leaped the curb as I watched, startled, trying to escape. Ears pinched flat to his skull, the horse sprung in pursuit. Back rounded. Mouth open. I could almost hear the frantic clatter of hooves on the sidewalk as he swooped in, his nostrils pulled at an ugly, sneered angle—

A splat of carmine punctured my dreary world. The horse tossed his head up, gulping the rat in one, hard, swallow. I watched it go—first a lump and then a slither—down down where it didn't belong in the first place.

He was infected.

The horse. Probably the rat, too. They were all infected, the animals.

No. Not all.

It felt that way sometimes. On the days when traveling three city blocks was more dangerous than nesting with 'rex eggs. But some animals and deinos had survived clean. Same as the people.

The raptor we'd eaten last night was an unafflicted. Dehydrated but clean. No knotted scabs or eyes milky as ice, glazed and empty. That's how the horse on the street looked—would look—if I got close enough.