It was the color of a thing that’d forgotten it was ever cream. A pallor, the white of old milk or a blind eye, gone gray and thin as a shroud. The checkered border, once red or blue, faded to a color somewhere between bruise and shadow. It’d been boiled too many times in water that was never quite clean. The ink didn’t fight it; the ink simply seeped into it and died there. Someone’s phone number trailed off into a smudge, as if the ghost writing had lost hope mid-digit. The tic-tac-toe was a draw nobody won. The coffee ring was a brown halo, preoccupation with the patience of years. Six hundred and seventy-eight days since the siege began and half of Boston was dead. The 1990 census had counted 574,283 living souls in the city proper. When the Red Cross pushed past the cordon, 240,000 ghosts were waiting. One word had been scratched out so hard the fabric was a little open wound, a tiny mouth that never finished its sentence.
The ink had bled into the weave like cold, miserable spring rain bled into a coat left on a bench.
Not the memories of hands, these folds. Just exhaustion. A permanent funk, shoulders slumping after a long shift. One corner was curled in on itself, shy as a dying leaf. A crease ran through it like a scar, a remnant of being crushed under a glass by someone who’d stared past it, through it, at nothing. The wrinkles were fine and deep, the kind that came from being crumpled and forgotten.
She tried one more fold, but her thumb slipped, and the crease disappeared like breath. Found herself stroking the frayed edge with a tenderness she hadn’t meant to give. The paper-thin fabric wouldn’t hold a crisp line. It sagged. The wing she tried to coax into existence just drooped, like a moth that’d drowned and died. The body refused to form; it remained a lump, a little huddled thing. She tried again, pressing the fold with her nail, but the crease was a ghost of itself, and the other side only puckered in a tired, collapsing sigh. Every tug made the ink-smears twist, not like pained mouths, but like closed eyes. It wouldn’t become a butterfly. It could only ever be a napkin that’d absorbed too much sorrow from too many hands, a little white flag of surrender.
A window in a room that’d forgotten how to breathe.
Single-paned, the glass old and faintly green at the edges, bottles dredged from the river. The wooden frame painted a color that was once white and was now a dingy, jaundiced cream, soft with rot in one corner where condensation wept down winter after winter and nobody wiped it away. The dust hadn’t arrived all at once. It’d settled over months, as Harvard Square emptied out, a fine gray pollen of neglect. Then the heat came, woolen and dripping on the canvas tents outside, pitched in a triage square. Truck after truck, stamped with the relief worker’s sign, descending into a cholera ward: merciless, stark, and smelling of sunbaked lime. An emergency camp thrown up in a starving city, scorching the dust and baking the rot and the dust began to change.
The dampness of human breath, the soul of old cooking steam, the skin-salt of hands that leaned on the sill and stared out at nothing: these things woke in the heat and mingled with the rest. Along the bottom ledge, where the glass met the rotting wood, it formed an ochre skin, thick as tracing paper, puckered here and there with tiny, dry bubbles. Higher up it thinned to a smear, a bloom of opacity that seemed to breathe on the pane. Where her own hand once wiped a crescent shape—a single, half-hearted swipe, long ago—the edge of the film was a raised ridge, a tiny cliff that caught the light.
Now the sun leaned in through that window, low and brutal, the kind of light that made the air itself feel sick. Struggling to get inside, the film held the sun like a cataract held a pupil. Turning it into a soft, septic glow, a slow seepage of dull gold. Motes, trapped in the film, didn’t dance but hung suspended, fossils in amber. The world outside—the bake of a too-hot street, a listless tree, a dog panting in the shade—rendered in the tones of an old photograph: sepia, blurred, unreal. No sharpness, no edge. Only a thickness, a membrane between the tavern and the world, as if the window itself had grown tired of looking and pulled a film across its eye. And in that light, she could see the grain of the film itself, a topography of neglect: whorls where that last wipe smeared the dust into a fingerprint universe, a drip-mark hardened into a translucent stalactite, the pale geography of disinterest. The heat pressed against the pane from both sides, and the film did not stir. It was cured, now. Permanent. The window, sweating on the inside, had sealed its own story under glass.
The sun didn’t fall on her back so much as settle there, another hand too tired to lift itself away. Pressing between her shoulder blades, where her spine bowed forward, where the slump was deepest. Stay down, came the silent command. Stay still. Light with a texture, a faint grit, as if the dust-film had somehow transferred itself to her skin, a second layer of neglect she couldn’t wipe off. Her shirt, thin and washed to near-transparency, stuck to the small of her back in a damp map of exhaustion. Heat pooled in the hollow of her spine, then trickled upward, vertebra by vertebra, a slow, liquid column of discouragement. Leeching out what little resolve remained and leaving behind a faint, salty trace of sweat that dried almost instantly to a tightness on her skin.
Leaving her inside the shell of an impostor, standing guard over a taproom that had nothing left to give. Because this wasn’t the real Green Dragon, the fierce old incubator of revolution down on Union Street. This was its plastic mirror-twin, the Lor to its Data, parked in the middle of Harvard Square like a stage set nobody bothered to strike. A cheerful sign, shipped free in cardboard from the purveyors in St. Louis, announced the plastic lie: Budweiser, King of Beers, straight from the source. She hadn’t seen beer since she was fifteen and the Founding Fathers’ watering hole had burned in 1854. Or perhaps it’d simply tired of standing and laid down in the road. Replaced with a warehouse of corrugated iron and grief, patched with tarp where the shelling found the roof. Phantom pewter, faint as a last exhale, silent voices in the dim.
The pain was her own held breath she never knew she was holding, a pressure in the chest, a word almost remembered, a name on the tip of the soul that refused to be spoken. The skin of centuries, thin as the film surrounding her, and she could feel the shape of someone pushing against it from the other side—a warmth, a weight, a question that had no voice—but her hand passed through and the membrane didn’t break, only trembled. Stilling again, leaving her clutching nothing but the ache of nearness, the bruise of almost. It was the moment before a bell rang, stretched into a lifetime. It was the dream where she opened her mouth and screamed and no sound came, except she was awake and the silence wasn’t hers, and the face she couldn’t reach was watching her from the other end of a table made of decades, and the distance between them was no wider than a finger, no thinner than a grave. It does not take a majority to prevail, the voice whispered. But rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.
She wanted her father back, to tell her what to do.
She wanted Sam Adams to tell her that he would not speak of liberty, liberty was a word that had been shouted by too many mouths, some of them belonging to the besiegers. That he would not speak of tyranny, because tyranny now wore too many uniforms to count, and some of them were scraps of what was once an army of the people. That he would not speak of the end of the world, because he had already lived through one end, and he knew: that the world was a thing that ended in pieces, exactly how it began. Setting down his tankard, regarding the water in the bottom, tasting of nothing but the pot—a flat, exhausted moisture that’d had the air boiled out of it, leaving scorched river silt and pennies. A gesture. A small thing. The clink of pewter on bone that made no sound.
The orphan with her rag, falling apart a little more each day.
She was seventeen, which meant she should’ve been surveilling the clearance racks for a prom dress that said elegant but not trying too hard and calculating exactly how much eyeliner was required to de-single herself before May. Prom was a tactical operation, and she’d been good at tactics. She’d also been good at biology, until biology became the study of how many days a human body could survive on one expired Power Bar and spite.
The schools turned into convalescent wards around day 364 of the siege—a convenience, really, since she’d already stopped going. Her junior year curriculum consisted of Advanced Palliative Care (no textbook, no morphine, participation mandatory), Pharmaceutical Scavenging 201 (the final exam was an empty pharmacy and a locked cabinet that had to believe you were worthy), and the seminar everyone called Conflict Resolution, which was just fighting Mr. Chen from two streets over for calories. Mr. Chen had been her Biology teacher. Then he was her sparring partner, a fifty-three-year-old man with yellowed eyes and a doctorate in plant genetics who fought like a cornered raccoon for a case of Vanilla Crisp that’d gone south before the siege even began. She won. She always won, because her knees were teenaged and his were not, and because she had learned to hit a man in the sternum with the heel of her hand without hesitating, a skill no prom committee had ever required. He’d called her a little shit. She’d called him a stubborn old bastard. Both were true. They’d split the case unevenly in her favor, and she’d carried the bars home like a corsage, twelve foil-wrapped bricks of compressed sawdust and vitamins that the human body rejected on principle.
Her grandmother couldn’t chew them. Oma Jeanette, who made Schwarzwäldertorte from scratch and covered their home in pen-and-ink visions of the Charles River, sat in a bed made of couch cushions and looked at the gray paste on the spoon with an expression so profoundly disgusted it could’ve soured milk. “It tastes like cardboard,” she’d whispered. “It is cardboard, Oma,” she’d replied, and for one brittle, beautiful second, her grandmother’s mouth twitched upward—a ghost of the old mischief, a flicker of the woman who’d once taught her how to cheat at blackjack and then reminded her that Jehovah frowned on face cards and then the moment passed, and the spoon went in, and the siege went on, and somewhere in the dark, Mr. Chen was probably eating his share and cursing her name while another dog somewhere in Cambridge went missing.
Silence was a substance, thick as the heat, filling the new and unimproved Green Dragon like stagnant exhaust. The highest layer was a faint, high-pitched hum—the tinnitus of an old refrigerator long dead, the phantom remains of their electrical grid. Beneath that, the sound of dust falling, which wasn’t a sound at all but a pressure on the ear, a microscopic settling that never stopped. And underneath, the deeper silence of the absent dogs, their panting and their clicking nails and their whines for scraps all extracted from the air, leaving a hole shaped exactly like a dog. The silence of the missing neighbors, whose voices once rubbed the walls smooth with gossip and complaint, now replaced by a hush that had its own echo, as if the air still held the shape of their last words.
The smoke had left its opinion on the walls long ago, a greasy charcoal opinion that no amount of scrubbing would revise. It was the signature of the night the Reich stopped besieging and started invading. The window opposite was a plywood eye, nailed shut and blinking splinters. Another sagged in its frame, holding its shattered weight the way a man held his own intestines—not well, not long, a wet glitter of glass teeth ready to drop at the next hard breath. The floorboards buckled, cupped, curled at the edges where rain had wandered in through the wounded roof and stayed for months, pooling on tables where food hadn’t been, warping the wood into little valleys and ridges that remembered the shape of water long after the water was gone.
The gouges were the worst. Shrapnel had come through one afternoon while the light was still good and the neighborhood still had dogs and hope, skittering across the tabletops like a flung handful of bad dice. The scars remained—shallow, splintered, pale in the center and dark at the lips. Zelda had tipped the nearest table onto its side. Crouching behind it, her spine pressed to the underside, feeling the slam and shudder of things that wanted to kill her knocking instead. It’d almost been enough. Mrs. Rodriguez had been on the other side of the table, or perhaps it was the wrong table, or perhaps there was a kind of math that did not forgive, because when the shrapnel stopped and the dust began its long, slow, uninterested drift downward, Mrs. Rodriguez was still there and also gone, her mouth a little open, a question she hadn’t asked still waiting on her tongue like a hostess who didn’t know the party was over. The table had shielded Zelda and failed Mrs. Rodriguez, and now both facts lived in the same grain of the same wood, and neither one could be scrubbed out.
She glanced at the bar, where Alex was bent over a chipped mug, pretending to scrub it clean the way they all pretended—that there was coffee to serve, that the rag wasn’t more hole than cloth, that the siege was a temporary inconvenience and not the slow, grinding erasure of everything they’d been. The mug was Red Cross-issue, a plain ceramic thing with a hairline crack running from rim to base, and he worked the rag into it with the focus of a man defusing a bomb, his lower lip caught between his teeth, a habit she’d noticed weeks ago and catalogued without meaning to. He was twenty-three, a nursing student who’d been three semesters from a diploma when the cordon closed and nursing became a word for holding the hands of the dying. The shaft of light found him through the one unbroken pane, illuminating features that belonged on a farm somewhere—broad, open, built for looking at horizons rather than at wounds. He had the kind of face that made you think of haylofts and early mornings and a mother who still wrote letters, though the mail had stopped coming twelve months ago. He’d have looked right at home behind a plow. Instead, he was here, scrubbing an empty mug in an empty tavern in an emptying city, and the light loved him for it, or pitied him, or simply fell where it fell without caring either way.
Outside, an Opel Blitz rumbled past. The sound came first as a vibration through the warped floorboards, then as a low, grinding roar that rattled the one good pane and set the plywood humming. Twelve soldiers in the rear cargo bed, rifles upright between their knees like extra passengers, their faces blank and young and sunburned. Two more in the driver’s cab: the driver, eyes fixed forward on a road that no longer led anywhere worth going, and a commander beside him, gaze equally straight, equally elsewhere. The soldiers in the back stared at their own knees, or at the boots of the man across from them, or at nothing at all, the thousand-yard stare of boys who’d been promised a short campaign and had stopped believing in short anything.
But one—one at the rear, near the tailgate, a boy with a face still soft at the jaw and a helmet that sat slightly too large, drowning his ears—one looked up. Noticed the tavern. Noticed the sign, the chipped green dragon curling in on itself. Noticed the dog. The dog that’d appeared two days ago from nowhere, from the same mysterious inventory of the apocalypse that supplied dust and silence and the occasional miracle. A scruffy, medium-sized thing with one ear that stood up and the other that flopped, trotting past the Opel Blitz as if it had an appointment. The soldier’s expression flickered—not quite surprise, not quite wonder, just the brief, involuntary unclenching of a face that’d forgotten it was allowed to feel anything but tired. He was wondering where it’d come from. Just like her. Just like everyone who’d seen the dog and immediately asked the same question, as if its origin might explain something, as if a dog with a provenance was less impossible than a dog without one.
He was probably eighteen, this soldier. Maybe nineteen if he’d lied about his age, but probably eighteen, because the Reich took them young and used them younger and the ones who made it past twenty developed a different kind of face, a harder kind, and this boy hadn’t grown his yet. He was from somewhere. Ludwigshafen am Rhein, maybe. Duisburg. Somewhere that made enlisting look good. Somewhere his mother was probably praying to a god who’d stopped answering, same as everyone’s. Waitressing was, after all, supposed to be Zelda’s after-school job—she’d circled the ad in the paper, back when there was a paper, evenings and weekends, no sharing of tips, base wage commensurate with experience—and soldiering was supposed to be his, a mandatory tour, a thing you did and then came home from and never spoke about. Neither of them had signed up for this. The Reich had put a rifle in his hands, and someone—God, fate, the last dregs of a sense of obligation—had put a rag in hers, and now they were both here, on opposite sides of a window that was more dust than glass, looking at a dog that had no business existing.
Landei had probably eaten the same breakfast she had. The thought arrived unbidden, absurd, and absolutely true. BP-5, the box announced. Compact Emergency Food. She’d read the label so many times she could recite it in her sleep, could probably recite it in German if someone asked, though no one had and no one would: Wheat flour, vegetable fat (palm), soy protein, sugar, malted barley, all supplemented with a premix of vitamins and minerals, all served in a convenient foil packet! This product is an all-vegetable product, the label continued, with the faint, bureaucratic pride of something that’d been designed by committee, containing no ingredients of animal origin. What a relief. What a profound and staggering relief to a population that also, coincidentally, had no cats.
And this bumpkin from nowhere was probably stockpiling them in his barracks—because the Red Cross was neutral! Huzzah! The foil-wrapped brick of last resort, its texture was the first insult. You tore open the packet—and the packet itself had opinions, a thick, crinkling foil that resisted the tear, that wanted you to work for it, that seemed to say, Are you sure? Have you considered just going hungry? Inside was a pale, dense rectangle the color of a Band-Aid that’d seen too much sun. It had a faintly dusty surface, too, as if the bar had been pressed into shape by a machine that was also losing hope. Run your finger across it and you’d feel a microscopic grit, the ghost of the wheat flour that hadn’t quite dissolved into the matrix, the soy protein that’d clumped into tiny, stubborn nodules of protest. The delightsome texture of something that’d been designed by a committee of nutritionists who had never once been asked to actually eat it.
Biting into it was a commitment. The bar did not yield to the tooth; it surrendered slowly, grudgingly, the way a frozen peat bog might surrender a mammoth. It fractured. It cleaved along fault lines you hadn’t noticed, sending a fine spray of dry, malty powder onto your tongue, where it immediately began absorbing every last molecule of moisture you possessed. The vegetable fat—from some distant equatorial somewhere that still had palm trees and hope—the vegetable fat had congealed into a waxy, resistant lump that coated the roof of your mouth and refused to leave, a thin, greasy film that tasted faintly of nothing and lingered like a houseguest who didn’t know the siege was on. The chewing was effortful, joyless, a workout for the jaw. You were not eating. You were negotiating.
The aftertaste was the final and most personal betrayal. It tasted of vitamins. Not the vitamins themselves—vitamins had no taste, that was the problem—but the experience was unmistakably medicinal, faintly metallic, as if you’d licked a doorknob in a hospital. The premix of minerals sat on your tongue like a nickel you’d forgotten you’d put there. And then came the thirst. The bar did not simply absorb water from your mouth; it seemed to borrow it, to promise it back later, a promise it would not keep. You’d reach for your canteen and drink and drink and the bar would sit in your stomach, heavy and expanding, a compact emergency brick of vegetable fat and false promises, and you would think, This product is an all-vegetable product. This product contains no ingredients of animal origin. This product is what’s for dinner, again, until someone shoots me or the cordon breaks or the dog comes back with a cow. It was the taste of the apocalypse and it made her want to laugh or scream or throw her own chipped mug at the wall, but the mug was one of six still remaining and the Opel Blitz had already rumbled past, taking the soldier and the dog and the question of where anything came from, leaving behind only the dust and the silence and the faint, fading smell of diesel.
The Occupation Authority, in its infinite and terrible wisdom, had decided the solution to Boston’s rat problem was…cats. This was, Zelda reflected, the most coherent strategic decision the Reich had made in months—not because it was good, but because it was comprehensible. You could draw it on a napkin, which someone probably had, because he probably couldn’t read. Rats bad, cats eat rats, bring cats. The kind of logic a child could follow, which made sense, because Generaloberst Kurt Bonnet, the evil gremlin commanding the 7th Heer, a man whose face looked like a fist wearing spectacles, had apparently exhausted his capacity for anything more sophisticated.
Four railcars. Four entire railcars of cats, requisitioned from un-blockaded states, packed in wooden crates and shipped east like furry, yowling conscripts. Operation Mausfalle, someone had called it, with the grim bureaucratic whimsy of people who knew they were being absurd and had decided to lean in. The cats arrived on Day 662, scrawny and furious and precious, distributed systematically across neighborhood ration points alongside the BP-5 and the water purification tablets. Thousands of starving citizens lined up with trembling hands, not for food, but for kittens. It would’ve been adorable if it weren’t so stupid. Actually, Zelda amended, it was still kind of adorable. The apocalypse had very few bright spots. You took them where you could.
Alex got a tom with one ear and a face like a retired prizefighter, and he named him George Washington. Sincere farm boy on the surface, but underneath, a little too pleased with the transgression, a little too aware of the camera that wasn’t actually there. Because Alex was the kind of adult male who still thought naming a cat after a Founding Father was a provocative act. He’d announced it with the particular pause of someone who expected a reaction—George. Washington. Then lingered in the silence afterward, a damp, expectant silence, the kind that was waiting for her to either swoon or scold or ideally both, to explode out of her jeans shrieking take me now, all that is man! She did not explode out of her jeans. She did not shriek. She stared at him for exactly one beat too long, her face smooth as a closed door, letting the silence stretch until it became uncomfortable, then unbearable, then—just as he opened his mouth to explain the joke—returned to wiping the table.
The cat was a good cat. The cat did not care what he was called. The cat had killed things in basements Alex would never see and did not need to perform his relationship to patriotism. But Alex, in a different time and a different world with a functioning society to resent and a campus literary magazine to turn down his submissions, would’ve absolutely had sheaves of essays about women who wouldn’t date him, and the opinions contained therein would’ve been nobody’s fault but the women’s, and the cat’s name would’ve been part of a larger, exhausting project of signaling that he was smarter than the mainstream, funnier than the mainstream, above it all. Here, in the dying tavern with the dust-film windows and the shelling all around them, he was just a man with a new orange friend and a grudge and a mug he was still pretending to scrub. Zelda liked him anyway, which annoyed her profoundly, because liking Alex felt like rooting for a damp firework.
Charlotte, Zelda’s older sister, had named their cat Zipper. Charlotte was twenty-one and moved through the world like a watercolor that’d been left out in the rain—soft-edged, slightly translucent, perpetually surprised to find herself still corporeal. She was the kind of ethereal artist who spoke to plants, forgot to eat for reasons other than siege rationing, and could spend an entire afternoon watching the light move across a cracked wall as if it were a film she’d been meaning to catch. The apocalypse, for Charlotte, was less a catastrophe and more a rude interruption of her inner life, like a fire alarm going off during a particularly good daydream. Zipper, she announced with the serene conviction of someone delivering a prophecy, represented a new spiritual companion. Zelda had watched her sister spend forty minutes trying to explain to the cat, in gentle, unhurried tones, that his chakra was blocked. The cat had licked its own ass. Both parties seemed satisfied with the exchange.
For Constance, their twat of a roommate, Zipper represented the very first thing she’d held in nearly two years that she did not explicitly intend to kill and eat. Constance had wept—she wept at everything, the cat, the sunrise, the memory of butter—and Charlotte had patted her shoulder with the absent, beatific kindness of someone who was also, simultaneously, composing a poem about tears in her head. Leaving Zelda—again, all of seventeen—holding them together while Constance bitched and Charlotte tried to align Zipper’s aura with the moon. Zelda who had not, at any point, expected to become either head of household or a footnote in a Reich memo about rodent abatement.
The feline transport columns—God, even the phrase was absurd, feline transport columns, like the cats had ranks and marching orders and a chain of command—reflected a second desperate realization by both the local municipal planners and the occupation’s idiotic leadership. The spring cleanup made Faces of Death look like Teletubbies, the spring thaw’s annual reminder that the dead didn’t bury themselves and the living weren’t doing much better. Bodies emerged from the retreating snow like mushrooms sprouting from wet logs: slowly, then all at once, one pale hand here, a boot with the foot still inside in it there, frozen finally softening into something worse than frozen. The smell rolled in behind them like a second weather system, wet and sweet and muscular, the kind of smell that didn’t just hit your nose but coated your throat, clung to the back of your tongue, made your spit taste like something you wanted to spit out. You learned to breathe through your mouth. You learned that breathing through your mouth was worse. You learned to breathe shallow, high in your chest, little sips of air that never quite filled your lungs, because anything deeper invited the smell home.
Crews worked in shifts because nobody could stomach more than a few hours. The bodies had to be moved by hand—gloved, double-gloved, the rubber slick and shining—and the bodies did not cooperate. A wrist would detach from its arm with a soft, apologetic suck. A torso would split along seams nobody had noticed, yielding a slurry of things Zelda did not name, could not name, had trained herself not to name. The lime pits were supposed to help with the smell, but the lime ran out faster than the bodies did, and the pits filled and filled and the bodies kept coming, a winter’s worth of hunger and shelling and disease and desperation, and when the pits were full they just dug new ones, and when those were full they started burning, and the smoke was a different smell entirely, acrid and greasy and somehow worse, because it meant you were breathing someone in.
And beneath it all, beneath the streets and the foundations and the places no one had been brave enough to enter since the siege began, the rats feasted. They’d had two winters to themselves, two winters of frozen bodies and uncollected garbage and relief shipments gnawed open before they reached the distribution points. The rats in the MBTA tunnels were the size of terriers. The rats in the sewers were bigger. They moved in packs, in swarms, a single slick mass of matted fur and yellow teeth and naked tails that slithered over itself like a living carpet. Zelda had seen one once, when she’d lifted a manhole cover on a dare or a death wish or just because she’d wanted to know what she was up against. The sound was what stayed with her: not squeaking, not scurrying, but a low, continuous, rustling whisper, as if the darkness itself were shifting its weight, waiting. The rats looked up at her with eyes like black glass beads. Pausing. Considering. And then they went back to eating, because she wasn’t a threat, because nothing was a threat, because the rats had inherited the underworld and they knew it and they looked, she could’ve sworn, almost smug.
Poor Zipper was too little to hunt. Of course he was. The one cat on all of Ash Street who was supposed to earn his keep, and he was the size of a shoe, with the hunting instincts of a decorative pillow. He sat by the baseboard grate and howled, a thin, reedy sound of profound feline outrage, while somewhere beneath the floorboards the rats laughed and laughed and multiplied. He pawed at the grate ineffectually, a gesture so optimistic and so utterly useless that it was almost poignant. He was terrible. He was the worst cat in the history of cats. He was, Zelda thought, watching him yowl at the unimpressed darkness, the perfect mascot for the whole doomed enterprise—brave, ridiculous, completely outmatched, and refusing, somehow, to stop trying.
So she hunted for him. Because of course she did. Because the God who’d abandoned them all had a sense of humor, and her role in it was apparently to be a rat procurement specialist for a cat that couldn’t tell the difference between a mouse and a dust bunny. She’d crawl around on the rug with a flashlight and a broom handle, trying to flush out something small enough for Zipper to murder, while the cat watched from the safety of Charlotte’s lap with an expression of benign interest. Yes, that expression said. Fetch me my quarry, giant hairless servant. I shall wait here, where it is warm.
She hated him. She loved him. He was terrible. She would die for him. And somewhere in the back of her mind, she imagined the boy from the Opel Blitz. Hans or Wolfgang or Dieter or Horst, licking his foil wrapper, and she hated him for it. And she also, inexplicably, wished him a second one.
And what now?
There’d been a time, during the siege, when the Green Dragon was packed. Not packed like a good Saturday night—packed like a lifeboat. Every chair taken, every table crowded, the air thick with bodies and breath and the low, scraping murmur of people trying not to panic out loud. They’d huddled together because huddling was all that was left, their whispers rising and falling like a tide that had nowhere to go. The stew had thinned to broth. The broth had thinned to rice. The rice had shrunk, portion by portion, until Zelda was bringing out nothing but water in chipped mugs and calling it dinner, and still they came. Because a place to sit was a place to be human, and a place to be human was a place to be less alone, and less alone was the closest thing to safe anyone had felt in months.
But that was before.
Before the Red Cross rolled in with their white trucks and their clipboards and their faint, bureaucratic air of people who’d read about suffering in a manual and were now seeing it in person. Before the film crews followed, cameras shouldered like grenade launchers, shooting B-roll of grateful civilians for the homefront—Look, Mutti, they’re smiling, they’re waving, they’re so glad we came. Before the checkpoints, materializing the moment the relief convoys did, because nothing said humanitarian intervention like bored men with rifles demanding to see your papers. She’d been stopped twice just trying to get to work. Twice. The same walk she’d made every day since she was fifteen, and now it required a permission slip. The soldiers—her saviors, she was told, her liberators—fished through her purse with the slow, heavy hands of men who had nothing better to do and no particular hurry to do it. They turned over her ration card. They read her name aloud, mispronouncing it. They asked if she was excited about the new shipments, the tinned meat, the vegetables! Excited. Wasn’t she excited? The Reich, in its infinite generosity, had manufactured the exact crisis they’d arrived to solve, and now they wanted her to register—just a quick form, nothing complicated—so her household could receive the better rations. The upgraded rations, theoretical chicken and sad potatoes. All for the low, low price of proving she wasn’t a Jew.
Well. She wasn’t.
She wasn’t even a Witness, not anymore. Not that she’d ever been a particularly good one, much to her father’s despair—she’d swapped the Watchtower for the backseat of a linebacker’s car somewhere around sophomore year, and Jehovah had not struck her down, which she took as confirmation that either He wasn’t paying attention or He had a sense of humor. He’d have to, she figured, to let the world get to this point. Wherever He’d gone, whatever celestial bunker He was riding out the Great Tribulation in, He could stay there. He could kick rocks. He could watch the film crews and the checkpoints and the salvation that cost only a signature, a little black mark on a form that said not one of them, see, she’s fine, she’s fine, just give her the potatoes.
She’d signed the form.
She’d signed the form, and the pen had scratched across the paper with a sound like a match striking, and the soldier had smiled and stamped something and handed her the potatoes and she’d carried them home and set them on the counter and looked at them for a long time. Potatoes. Nine of them, small and dirty and real. She’d boiled one that night and eaten it with nothing, not even salt, and it’d tasted like surrender, like a fist unclenching in her stomach, like the exact moment you realized you’d do anything, anything at all, to keep breathing. She hadn’t known that about herself before. It was not a comfortable thing to know. She imagined her father’s face if he’d seen her—her father, who’d spent every Thursday evening at the Kingdom Hall, who’d once grounded her for a week for lying about where she’d been, who’d looked at the world and seen a battlefield between good and evil and never once doubted which side he was on. He would’ve understood. That was the worst part. He would’ve understood, and he would’ve signed, too, and they would’ve sat together in the kitchen eating their surrender potatoes in the kind of silence that had no end.
Fuck off and die, Jehovah.
Now she was a Reich citizen. Or so her Kennkarte claimed, stamped and signed and folded into the back pocket of her Guess Pascals, soft at the creases from the number of times she’d pulled it out for men with guns who wanted to know what she was. German, apparently. German enough. The ankle-zips were brutal to get into, or had been, but nothing else held a silhouette like 14-ounce rigid denim and the photograph showed someone she didn’t recognize. Her face was a skull with a thin veneer of skin, the bones pushing through like furniture under dust covers, an expression that could’ve been surrender or could’ve been contempt; the soldiers never looked long enough to tell the difference.
She’d stood in line with everyone else and watched the clerk fill in the blanks and thought, for a wild, furious moment, about what Sam Adams would’ve said. Something about chains. Something about licking hands. Something that would’ve gotten him shot on the spot. Looking around now—at the bar, at the window, at the street outside where a medic in a Heer uniform sat on an abandoned crate—she wondered where it’d all gone. Not Cambridge itself, the thing that’d made them refuse to kneel. Her father had told her once, when she was small and still believed in heroes, that Boston was the cradle of something. Liberty. Defiance. The animating contest of freedom, whatever the hell that meant. He’d read her the whole quote from a book with a cracked spine, his voice rising on the good parts, and she’d listened because she loved him, and because he believed it, and because believing in things was what her father did best.
Well. Where was it now? Where was the animating contest? Where was the refusal to crouch down and lick the hands that fed you? She looked at the Green Dragon, this trash replica of a place that’d burned a hundred and forty years ago, and she tried to find the through-line—the thread that connected the men who’d plotted a revolution in a tavern to the sad handful who now sat in this one, sipping boiled water and waiting to die. It’d gone somewhere. It’d gone somewhere, and she didn’t know where, and the not-knowing felt like a door slamming shut inside her chest.
Her neighbors had given up. That was the truth, and she hated them for it, and she loved them anyway, and the hatred and the love sat in her stomach like two stones that would not digest. They’d been hungry too long. They’d been afraid too long. They’d watched their children die and their houses burn and their city turn into a charnel house, and when the Reich rolled in with clipboards and ration cards and a form that said prove you’re not a Jew, they’d signed it. They’d all signed it. Every last one of them, except the ones who were already dead. They’d crouched down. They’d licked the hands. They’d let their chains settle on their shoulders like a mantle, and they’d shuffled home with their not-quite-meat and their potatoes and their brand-new Kennkarten, and they’d told themselves it wasn’t surrender, it was survival, it was what you did when you had children to feed and parents to bury and no fight left in your blood.
Zelda had not surrendered.
She’d joined the White Rose, and most days that meant nothing more than carrying messages folded into the soles of her shoes, or memorizing the patrol schedules of the soldiers who walked Mass Ave with their rifles slung and their eyes half-closed, or sitting in a basement with a group of people who were also pretending they hadn’t given up, planning operations that never quite materialized. It was a small thing. It was a stupid, small, probably suicidal thing. But it was hers. It was the only thing she hadn’t signed away, the only part of her that was still seventeen and furious and alive, and when she looked at the ghosts in the dim—Sam Adams and his tankard, Paul Revere and his silent, spectral ride—she wanted to ask them: Did you know? Did you know how easy it was to lose? Did you know that liberty was a muscle that atrophied, a language you forgot how to speak, a fire that went out not with a roar but with a whimper, a signed form, a bowl of cardboard-tasting mash?
“And then we all started shitting ourselves,” she muttered.
The cholera didn’t arrive so much as surface, like something that’d been waiting all along beneath the frost line, biding its time until the city was sufficiently ruined to welcome it properly. After the Battle of Boston Harbor, the water treatment plant in Deer Island was a crater. The pipes that once carried clean water to half a million people were a mangled underground lacework of rust and sewage and things that’d crawled in to die. The Charles River, that sluggish brown ribbon that’d once hosted regattas and jogging paths, now received the city’s shit directly, untreated, unapologetic, a thick fecal current threading through the ice floes like a promise no one wanted kept. The camps—the sprawling, makeshift camps thrown up in the ruins of Fenway, the Common, the old MIT athletic fields—had no sanitation at all. They had trenches, which overflowed. They had buckets, which spilled. People washed their hands in puddles that’d already been used as toilets and called it clean. People drank from pumps that pulled water from aquifers laced with the dead. People did what people always did: they adapted, they survived, they ignored the taste.
On January 25, a Tuesday, a doctor at Mt. Auburn Hospital logged three cases of acute, watery diarrhea with rapid dehydration. By Wednesday, there were forty. By Friday, the word cholera was on everyone’s lips, a word that tasted of Dickensian slums, of old maps and older fears, a word that shouldn’t have belonged to 1994 but did, because the Reich had bombed Boston back into the Victorian era and the Victorians had been intimately acquainted with shit in the water. The bacteria moved faster than the doctors could count. It hit the camps first, sweeping through the close-packed bodies with the casual efficiency of a scythe. Within a week, the daily case count was in the thousands. Within two, the hospitals had stopped counting and started digging.
She watched it unfold from the window of the Green Dragon, which had become less a tavern and more a bunker with a bar. The street outside was a conveyor belt of the dying. People collapsed mid-step, their bodies simply deciding to stop, as if the instruction to keep living had been rescinded without warning. You could tell the cholera victims from the starving ones by the speed. Starvation was slow, a gradual fading, a thinning of the outline until one day the outline wasn’t there. Cholera was a mugging. A man could be walking, could be talking, could be laughing at something—and then his face would change, a flicker of surprise, as if he’d just remembered something important, and he’d sit down abruptly in the gutter and never stand up again. The dehydration turned people into parodies of themselves. Within hours, a face became a skull with a skin covering, the eyes sunken into purple hollows, the lips drawn back over teeth in a rictus that looked like a grin but wasn’t. The skin lost its spring; pinch it, and it stayed pinched, a little tent of flesh that forgot to snap back. The victims shrank. They literally shrank, their bodies consuming their own fluids, their blood thickening to sludge, their organs shutting down one by one like lights in a building after hours.
The streets became a museum of grotesque postures. An old woman curled around her shopping bag, the bag still clutched, the potatoes inside still good. A teenage boy propped against a mailbox, his eyes open and glassy, a line of vomit drying on his chin like a thought he’d failed to finish. A mother and child tangled together on the steps of a church, the child’s hand still in the mother’s, the mother’s mouth still open, still mid-prayer, still waiting for an answer that had not come. The worst were the ones who died on the toilets—the communal latrines, the buckets in the camps, the corners of alleyways—because cholera took your dignity before it took your life, and the last thing you did on earth was soil yourself in front of strangers. The smell was not the rich, sweet stench of decomposition. It was thinner, sourer, a high, sharp note of bile and shit and something metallic, something that might’ve been the blood breaking down inside the body before the body itself had quite given up. It was a smell that made your stomach clench and your throat close and your brain file a formal complaint with every other organ. People walked around with rags tied over their faces, and the rags did nothing. The smell got through. The smell got into your clothes, your hair, the back of your throat. You could taste other people’s deaths on your tongue when you swallowed.
The Reich, to its credit, responded with characteristic inefficiency and characteristic stupidity. First, they issued a boil-water advisory, as if anyone had fuel to boil water, as if anyone had pots that weren’t riddled with shrapnel holes. Then they set up chlorine distribution points, which worked beautifully until the chlorine ran out, which took approximately three days. Then they decided that the best way to contain the outbreak was to contain the people. On February 3, Generaloberst Bonnet—the Reich’s most sentient wart, who couldn’t organize a picnic without three committees and a requisition form—signed an order establishing a quarantine around the Greater Boston perimeter. Barbed wire went up. Checkpoints became barricades. Soldiers now pointed rifles at anyone trying to leave, and the message was clear: You will die, but you will die here, and you will do it quietly. The Red Cross was told that the cordon was now a disease control measure, that international observers were not welcome, that Boston would ride out the epidemic like a ship rode out a storm. The Heer did not send medicine. It sent more wire. Along with orders, stamped and signed, that the dead were to be buried in mass graves and the mass graves were to be covered in lime and the lime was to be reported on a biweekly basis, in triplicate, with proper notation. The bureaucracy of death was, Zelda learned, as robust as any other bureaucracy.
The lime pits filled. The mass graves grew. The bodies arrived at the collection points faster than the trucks could carry them away, and the trucks themselves began to smell, and the drivers—Reich soldiers, boys from Duisburg and Ludwigshafen and God knew where else—vomited over the sides of their cabs between loads. Some of them died, too. Cholera did not check papers. Cholera did not care about the uniform. It took the occupiers and the occupied with equal indifference, and the only difference was that the occupiers got better graves, because the Reich was sentimental about its own.
Zelda did not get sick.
She drank the same water, breathed the same air, touched the same bodies when she helped the neighbors carry their dead to the curb. She had no theory, no theology, no sense of having been chosen; the only lesson she could extract from this was that the universe was not fair, had never been fair, and would not start being fair just because she wanted it to. Charlotte didn’t get sick either, though Charlotte seemed to float through the epidemic like she floated through everything, untethered, half-here, painting watercolors of the Charles River even as the Charles River became a vector of death. Constance got sick and recovered, which meant Constance now had two things to weep about: the memory of butter, and the memory of the week she spent shitting herself in a bathtub. Alex got sick. Alex got sick, and Zelda sat with him because someone had to, and he looked up at her from the cot with his farm-boy face gaunt and gray and his lips cracked and bleeding, and he tried to make a joke. And the joke died halfway out of his mouth, and she held his hand, and she didn’t cry. Crying wasted water. Crying was for people who had water to waste. Crying was for a world that no longer existed, and she was living in this one, the one with the barbed wire and the lime pits and the smell that never went away, and somewhere in the back of an Opel Blitz, the boy from Duisburg was probably sad, and she would never know, and that not-knowing was, she decided, the truest form of grief the apocalypse had to offer.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Clinical notes on the Siege of Boston can be found here.
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