Empire (35 page)

    Location, location, location! Someone used to say.

    Postman drags his severed torso down the porch steps.

    For one hundred and five years, Postman has kept his route in the city. The route is something, the one thing, ingrained in Postman's soft brain, and in fact it has served him well. Still wearing his whisper-thin uniform, a few things sticking out here and there (arrow, stick, whatever catches him as he walks) he would walk the route, and on occasion, find meat wandering by.

    Meat hasn't come by in a long while though. Postman is old and dry and falling apart, and yesterday a crumbling brick wall tore his legs and groin from his waist.

    Postman is approaching something that he recognizes as an ending. There is no more meat in this city. No more meat will come to this city because there is nothing for them to take; the buildings are skeletons now, seared by the sun overhead.

    His bones are brittle. He realizes it is no longer important to remember locations. Synapses let go and fall, like broken bridges, into warm goo.

    Postman stops in the yard in front of Llewellyn House and lies in dead grass, knuckles scraping dirt, one milky eye studying bits of sunlight. No more. His hat slides over the exposed bone of his forehead, nudges the spot of brown flesh on his cheek.

    Another is coming down the road, toward Llewellyn House; coming north. Coming at a measured, healthy pace. His clothes and hair are soiled but his flesh seems robust; he has eaten well in recent days, this one, this other. He drags a tool over the asphalt; a shovel.

    This other kneels beside Postman and jams the shovel into his guts. Postman looks up with his one eye, watches quietly as he is dissected by handfuls, and pushed into the maw of the other. His uniform is opened and laid back, threadbare, the sun striking through its weathered fibers; His head is gently peeled, and then that eye is taken, with its tiny bit of moisture, and life, and it enters the jaws of the Omega.