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Animals Die
(A Story from Games Dead People Play)
The letters curled like strange calligraphy in white and orange bubbles on the old brick wall as Martin stumbled, bleeding, with his partner toward the empty building. "Respect the old school" rose over them and danced before their dizzy eyes, "Find the beauty in ugliness" adorned the wall on the other side. They were in a gray, narrow corridor made by these two walls and filled with old boards and stagnant water. Past this corridor was the abandoned building, their only hope.
Martin held his Tec-9 in one hand loosely, he was down to his last clip and it hardly mattered anyway. With his other hand he held in his guts. His partner Thrift had a 9mm with six or seven rounds still good, he dragged a leg shattered by the state trooper's buckshot.
"Blood'll lead 'em here," said Martin, but Thrift didn't say a word. Of course the blood would lead them there, there was no hope really, just a last stand, a gunfight in the dark. They came to the door at the front of the huge black building, gaping like the cave that leads to the land of the dead. Martin thought of the mines of Moria in Tolkien's book, the deep mines with the dwarf halls and orcs and the horror waking up. It was crazy, thought Martin, that a man who read books should be stumbling with a bullet in his gut to die in an empty factory like any dirty animal. He had fucked up, to walk this road, but that was that and that was that. Animals die, that's what his mother said, animals die but a man has a spirit and he dies like a man. Martin knew he had chosen to live like an animal.
He swallowed the ghost of his mother's voice and entered the building, saw the great dark ceiling soaring up and held by metal pillars scoured by rust. Broken forklifts dotted the floor, a long concrete grayness broken up by stretches of old water and chemical scum. Far back, in the dark distance, he thought he saw a staircase.
"Let's make for that," he pointed, and Thrift nodded. If they could get to the upper floors they had a dog's chance, they could hear their hunters coming even if there was still no escape.
"Did you hear that?" asked Thrift, jerking his head around.
"Probably rats," said Martin. "Hope we don't get the plague." He giggled, a little desperate giggle, and stumbled on. He wanted to puke. His hands were wet, and he was so thirsty it made him want to lick them. But he could get no water from his own salt blood.
"Feels like the worst morning-after I ever had," he joked, and Thrift groaned. "Shut up about how it feels," he growled at Martin.
They started up the stairs. The boards creaked beneath them, and they had to stick out their hands to steady them going up, as if they were climbing a mountain. I climbed Mt. Katahdin once, thought Martin, yeah, I walked the knife-edge. That was the home of the spirit; that was the top of the world. This was the other. They were walking through black halls in the House of the Dead.
Martin reached the top, and Thrift stepped up but almost fell as the staircase broke beneath him. Martin grabbed his hands in panic and pulled him up, the boards on the stairs collapsed and fell away. Somewhere up above them was an echo like a voice, a faint warning.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah," said Thrift, "as okay as I can be when I'm dyin'. Let's get back in there."
"At least they won't come up by that way now."
They went through the door at the top of the stairs and deeper into the building. A faint light filtered through the windows from the rising moon, hinted at rooms where people used to work and flirt and spend their days. Empty now but for the smell of piss and the shuffling feet of two creatures going to Earth. Burrowing, as animals always do.
Or was there someone up there? Someone else who walked the dead corridors, heard them walk, watched them as they crawled in here to die?
Forget it, thought Martin. There's enough in this clip for them to taste it too. They went past old offices and dragged their feet through pools of old corrupted water.
"I gotta drink," said Thrift. "I gotta drink it, man." He stared down at one pool with giant eyes.
"Don't do it, Thrift. That water's bad. You can smell the chemicals. It's only gonna kill you."
"Doesn't matter," said Thrift. "Gonna die here, ain't we?" He bent to drink the water, but a spasm shook him. Vomit rolled out his mouth and over his chin, and into the water. Thrift sobbed, and started to cry.
"C'mon, buddy," said Martin, and grabbed him under the armpit. "Got to keep on moving. I'll find you some good water, man. I'll find it for you."
He pulled Thrift to his feet, and they moved along. In one room as they passed, Martin smelled the rotting smell of something dead, an animal or a man. Was this a place where gangsters came to die? Martin liked the idea, it reminded him of the elephants' graveyard. A secret place where gangsters came to die. A foretaste of hell.
He heard the sirens faintly in the night outside, the cops and troopers and the SWAT team who were running them down. That bank they hit had turned into an abattoir, a sick wet place with dead clerks and a dead guard and a dead kid and they themselves now knowing they were dying. Broken bodies scattered here and there, arms and legs not now how arms and legs were meant to be. It was funny how death mocked people like that, made bodies into empty sacks that somehow didn't look like men and women anymore, actually took away their humanness when it took away their life. Now Martin felt his human nature draining away, running down his fingers through the hole in his stomach. He guessed, if he thought about it, he deserved to die.
"Hang in there, Mart," said Thrift, who had noticed his eyes wandering. "We ain't done with the 187 yet. I'm not punching my clock 'til some other mother-fuckers join me."
"Yeah, Thrift," said Martin. "Yeah, I gotcha there. They gonna kill us. We gotta kill some more of them."
That was the law of the jungle, not kill or be killed, that was never really it. It was kill and be killed, trade it evenly with pain for pain. My people going to cry for me, your people going to cry for you.
They came to the end of the hall and saw another short staircase that led to the next floor. They heard the scurrying of rats, a sharp squeaking, and something else, some movement, some gathering.
"You goin' up there?" said Thrift. "Some people up there, I think. Some junkie shit."
"Fuck 'em," said Martin, raising his Tec-9. "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. Everybody is going to die tonight!"
"Yeah, sure, man," said Thrift, laughing a little, just a little. "Yeah, we're gonna kill 'em all."
They went up the stairs, while Thrift ground his teeth against the pain in his leg. The staircase held this time, they came through into the third floor. Another row of offices in the dim light of the moon. They saw no people, just a little gray shape that ran when it saw them.
"We're coming into the heart of it," said Martin, and Thrift didn't ask what he meant.
"I guess we're bad men now," said Thrift. "I guess we're stone cold hard men now. Killin' kids like that. Killin' women."
Even in the dark, Martin could see the sweat standing out on Thrift's face. Better to die than to live with this.
"We ain't hard men, Thrift," said Martin quietly, almost whispering. "All we was, was scared. They sprung it on us. We panicked. That was all."
The sirens were getting closer now, circling in.
"Let's knock out some windows," said Martin. "We gotta spray these fucks."
"Yeah," said Thrift, walking to a window that overlooked the empty lot outside. "No pity for the pigs." They smashed out some windows and knelt on the floor with their guns in their hands. Martin sighted down the barrel.
"Don't shoot till you see the whites of their eyes," he joked, and Thrift answered weakly, "I have not yet begun to fight!"
The cops came screaming in car after car after car after car, guided by the men on foot who had seen the trail of blood. Windows shattered and blew away as the Tec-9 came alive, men dove for cover as Thrift's nine blasted methodically at them in the night. They returned fire, bullets pocked the side of the building. But they didn't charge in.
"What's up with them?" asked Thrift. "Why ain't they comin' up?"
"Don't know," said Martin, "don't care. Keep killin'!" He pointed the Tec-9 and emptied the clip. In a moment, they were out of bullets. Silence fell on the whole scene. The nervous cops stared up at them with their guns at the ready, but no one fired. From the broken cars they could hear the wounded moan.
"They still ain't comin'," said Thrift, "and we got no bullets left. It's like they're waiting for something."
Then they heard the noise, and turned around and didn't scream. But they sucked in their breaths in a wet sigh. Because they were surrounded, completely surrounded by men and women who looked like the risen dead. They were homeless kids, those who slept in filth and lived in filth here in the old abandoned building. They were coming forward slowly, and some of them were whispering, muttering something.
"Respect the old school." Martin thought he heard them say. "Why don't you respect the old school."
Then the kids came in with hands already used to killing in the dark.
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