Billy and Nip returned wearing the sweet dark smell of gasoline. The milk jugs, no longer full of milk, added up to several dozen gallons total. They set the shopping cart aside and grabbed a second cart, which they loaded with canned and packaged foods, bottled water, hydrogen peroxide, and every size of battery the store had to offer. Then we went out into the fog, Nip behind my wheelchair and Billy pushing both carts with one hand on each handle.

The night had cooled, and the moon cast a frayed spotlight over the parking lot. We set off crunching across the broken glass.

"What's that?" said Billy.

We stopped. In the sudden quiet, the sound of moaning carried across the asphalt. Black forms took shape in the fog. They were as skinny as Ash's stick figures, and they were moving toward us."Help . . . please . . . help . . ."

The children.

"This way. Quick." Billy steered toward the strip of grass and sidewalk that lined the northern side of the parking lot. Once there he ran around the shopping carts and pulled them carefully down onto the street. Nip's breath came fast and hot in my ear. He told me to hold on. I didn't hold on. My body jerked as Bitchmaster dropped from the curb.

Fifty cracked yards of asphalt stood between us and the Road, where we'd left our van. The children moving across the parking were just a splinter of the main pack trudging north through Honaw, and if we didn't reach the intersection fast enough, we would be cut off. Then they would fall upon us, as one of them must have fallen upon Ash down at the school. As Aunt Sandy had fallen upon me. Not out of rage, or hunger, but desperation. Their shattered bones. Their twisted limbs. Their hopelessly beating hearts. They would come to us for relief, and they would dig and dig at our bodies until their anguish became ours, until the life inside us was blown down to its last tortured spark, and then we too would go wandering through the night, animated by our suffering, puppets of our own undying pain.

I knew this.

I expected this.

I didn't care.

At the intersection, the anti-theft locks clamped down on the tires of the shopping carts and made Billy crash over the handles.

"Mommmmmy . . . Mommmmmmmy."

Behind us the Road was crowded with stick figures, red crawling with black. The fog gave birth to more every second.

"It hurts . . . oh, it huuuuurts . . ."

Billy waved at Nip. "Take a cart. I can't shove both. Not like this."

"But—"

The 'but' was me, and Billy wasn't about to debate the issue. He grabbed Nip by the shirt and tore him away from Bitchmaster. Positioning himself between the two of us, he leaned over my wheelchair. "Listen, Joel, if you're in there. I drove back to your aunt's house for your aunt, not for you, and you're not getting another ride if you don't earn it. You're not making me give up my drinking water, my food. I'll stand right here if I have to. I'll stand here until they're here, and then I'll bail. I'll run and leave you three to scrap for yourselves against the whole goddamn horde of them. That's it. That's the choice. You push, or we all stay."

I looked down at my bloodied hands. I left them in my lap.

"Fine, you fuck. Fine."

A voice spoke behind me.

"Get your cart, Billy. I'll worry about Joel."

He raised his eyes to Ash, who had taken hold of Bitchmaster. "All right, Ghost Girl. That works for me."

We started uphill, Billy at the gasoline cart and Nip at the grocery cart. Both leaned their full weight into the handles, and both barely moved at all. The carts' locked tires grinded on the asphalt, and the squeals mixed with the moans of the crowd behind us. I sat back in my chair. I closed my eyes.

We reached the van a ragged, gasping bunch (except for me, of course). Nip let go of his cart and all but collapsed on the curb. Billy staggered past the trunk. In his hand was a gallon jug. In that jug a trace of milk floated like fog. He flipped open the lid, screwed the cap off the tank, and called out between breaths, "I need something to push down the catch."

"The what?"

"A stick! Get me a stick! Something!"

Nip scrambled into the muck of exploded planters on the sidewalk. He yanked on a rose bush and fell back holding a fully bloomed stem. The thorns snagged his fingers as he stripped off the leaves and bud. He ran it over to Billy, who broke the stem in two and shoved the thicker half down into the hole of the gas tank. I saw the stem bend. I waited for it to snap. It didn't.

Billy bit the cap off the milk jug and started pouring. "Load up the van. Hurry."

The stick figures were filling out, putting on flesh where they had flesh to put on. Voices wept over one another, sobbing, whimpering. "Help Mommy hurts Daddy so bad make it Mommy make it huurrrts."

There was just enough space between the van and curb for Ash to roll me to the van's back right door. She opened it and then left me there as she went to help Nip, who was busy chucking groceries into the trunk. I stared at the open door like it was a problem on a blackboard, an equation waiting to be solved. Could I? Did I want to?

No, I decided.

Not really.

But I did anyway. As the others worked frantically to prepare our escape, I pretended I was a person and I climbed up into the seat. The door I left open, though. That was out of my reach. So to speak.

Nip and Ash hauled the last of the water packages into the trunk and started on the fuel. The jugs sloshed and dribbled, and that sweet dark smell filled the van. It was fire, that smell. It was fire before the match is lit. Billy finished at the gas tank and joined in to help. He didn't look back as he worked. None of them did. If they had, I doubt they would have finished the job.

A boy emerged from the fog. He was our age, and handsome above the neck. Below that, his ribcage was opened like a cabinet. Inside sat empty and dripping shelves. He shuffled toward the van, heartless and no less alive for it than any of the others. The fog shifted behind him and a dozen more children came into sight, their wounds on wet display, their agony bared to the world.

Ash grabbed the last jug. "Get her started."

Billy jumped behind the wheel, the key already in his hand. The engine kicked and kicked and finally got to its feet. Nip dove into the seat next to mine. His eyes widened. He pointed through my open door and shouted, "Bitchmaster."

Ash froze. Her legs twitched like they wanted to run for the wheelchair, but her right hand reached up to close the trunk. That one second of conflict was all it took. The handsome boy wrapped his arms around her and the doors of his ribcage closed around her body, pulling her into him, enfolding her inside his hollow chest cavity. She screamed. Her one free arm flailed. Ten feet away and closing in, the other children began to lift their hands.

"Something's wrong," the boy moaned into her ear. "Something's wrong in me, and it hurts. It hurts so so so so so so bad."

Ash grabbed the trunk door and slammed it down into the boy's head. His chin jarred against her shoulder, and he bit into his tongue like it was bubble gum. She burst out of him with a splash of blood. The hinges of his ribcage tore, and he stumbled back into the closest shopping cart as Ash landed against the bumper. She reached up one last time and closed the trunk. Through the drippy rear window, I watched as a little boy wearing all blue clutched at her shirt. His bare shoulder socket gleamed in the brake lights.

"I have a boooobooooooo."

Ash hobbled along the van, the boy clinging onto her.

"Kiss it buh-buh-betterrrrrrrr."

She dragged Bitchmaster out of her way and in doing so knocked the boy's small body to the curb. I saw his face clearly for the first time. His cheeks still had their baby fat. Ash crawled across the front passenger seat and with her legs dangling out into the air, shouted, "Go."

The van lurched forward and my door swung shut. As the ride smoothed out, Ash dragged herself all the way in and closed hers, too. "I'm sorry, Joel," she said. "I'm so sorry."

I watched Bitchmaster roll downhill in the rearview mirror.

The chair became smaller and smaller until it lost itself in the crowd of children and the fog.

♫

Ash's house was dark inside. That suited me fine. I was dark inside, too. While the others unloaded the trunk, I climbed up the stairs to that darkness, going to it like a moth goes to light. "Now he decides to move," I heard Billy say. But that wasn't true. I didn't decide anything. My body did. It told my right hand to go here, my left hand to go there, and in a little while I was worming across her soft brown carpet on my stomach. The living room had shivered everything off its walls, and so had the hallway. Ash's family photographs lay one after another like breadcrumbs. I followed them. Most were in one piece, but a few had broken. A few more I broke myself because they were in my path. I cracked the glass over her brother's shadowed face and a sliver of feeling cut through me. It might have been pain. It might have been sadness. Whatever it was, I bled.

Halfway down the hall I stopped and lifted my eyes.

The outline of the trapdoor was invisible, but I knew it was there the same way I knew how to breathe.

Ash came down the hall with Colossus. "You want to go up?"

I kept staring at the ceiling.

"Okay." She pulled down the ladder. "Are you sure you can make it?"

I reached for the bottom rung. I reached for the second. On the third, the blood on my palm caused me to slip and fall.

"Joel! Are you all right?"

I reached for the bottom rung. I reached for the second. I made it past the third to the fourth, breathing saw blades. The gashes on my stomach and chest stretched. The bones in my arms sobbed. If I fell now there'd be no next try. If I fell now I wouldn't move again until tomorrow. I didn't fall. I pulled myself up rung by rung, my body burning like a candle flame. At the top I kept going, no pause, no break.

The drum set had tipped over along with the electric guitar, but the radio remained upright. It sat far back in the shadows, its face half hidden. I pushed the power button. Nothing happened. I pushed the power button. Nothing happened. The loft paled as Ash climbed through the trapdoor with Colossus.

"It's been plugged in for so long," she said, "I don't even know if it has batteries in it."

I kept pushing the power button.

Ash's voice softened. "Just hold on a sec, okay?"

She returned with AAs. As she squeezed behind the radio to put them in, I heard extra sets of hands and feet on the ladder. I was still pushing the power button. Finally it worked. The lights blinked awake. My heart was beating hard, and not from the climb.

The screen above the tuner read 153.4.

I reached for the volume dial. I turned it. The speakers crackled, but not with static.

With a lisp.

". . . thhhhh, oh it hurttthhhhh."

Leonard Higgins drew in a shuddering breath, and other voices filled the pause. Male voices. Female voices. Animal voices. Voices of the young and old and everything in between, all of them the same, stripped naked by suffering. They bled together. They gushed down red and hot. The lost voices of the lost channel. The voices of the dying. Trapped in one moment, one agonizing moment, for all of time.

I turned the dial to 153.5, to 153.6, 153.7, and on each station there were more. More. More. More. Hell wasn't a place. Hell was a state of mind, and it was broadcasting over Ash's radio.

"So many," she whispered. "So many."

I went on twisting the dial, searching the sea of tortured voices, until one of them called my name.

"Joooooel," moaned Aunt Sandy. "Jooooooooooooel."

____ ____

Author's Note:

Thank you for reading! If you're enjoying Poor Things, please consider hitting the vote button—it will help other readers find the story. Comments are always appreciated, too. Seriously, I love them.

Coming up on Tuesday . . . the beginning of the end. That's right. It's time for Act Three.