A thought kept floating around my head, sometimes passing through it so that I had to acknowledge it: How long had it been since I’d eaten?

I’d eaten the mushrooms from the reagent section of the supply closet three days before I left the alchemy compound. I felt guilty about that. I hadn’t told anyone else or shared any of them.

I tried to convince myself I hadn’t shared because I was sure they had shared food without including me, but I couldn’t be sure of it. Not really.

I took the boiled bones of rats and birds from the pot and threw them in the compost. Yet twice I’d found some in the bottom of the pot, as if they had caught, killed, and eaten an animal without me.

They did put me on watch more than anyone else, but they said that was because I was of no use in the lab making firebombs. Which was true enough.

I had a bit of rat after that. It took me two mealless nights to make it across the Slums. I’d waited in the hallway outside Cook’s room for- for- for some time.

Then Wen had let me in and I eventually made the paste. The sack of wheat flour could have brought Cook gold during the last year, but I was willing to bet he used it only for the offerings. I imagined him cooking the small offerings in secret and smuggling them upstairs.

When I ate the paste I made from the flour, I knew that every small lumpy ball I ate was a bite a child wasn’t going to get. I was constantly hungry, trying to make sure everyone had a tiny bit of food, but never enough to satisfy their hunger. Even then I realized I might be feeding the soon-to-be-dead, though I never would have guessed it would have been all of them.

I shared it out of course, even to those who were sick. Just tiny little balls every day. Just something so our stomachs weren’t empty.

How long had that gone on? How long since it had run out?

When I started passing out, was that because of a lack of food? Was lightheadedness that caused me to go down the stairs on my rear a lack of food, or the sickness?

I paused for a moment remembering a lesson taught in the alchemy lab. That was a false- a false- I couldn’t remember the word, but it wasn’t right to assume the only choices were the ones you considered.

Likely it was a combination of hunger, sickness, and maybe bad air, or a curse on the city, or any manner of other thing.

When had I last passed out? Was that tonight, or was it the previous night?

I should eat the offering, I knew I should, but as I sipped at the water in the canteen I found I just wasn’t hungry. How long had it been since I slept?

I could hardly bring the canteen up to my lips.

I should do something with the bodies. I didn’t know what. But something. It didn’t seem right just leaving them for the flies.

I sat for a while before I realized I was so tired I wasn’t even thinking, just staring down the length of the attic at the moving shadows.

“Mules have to work to earn their stay,” I said.

It was what I used to say, in a different life, before I went to work on something I didn’t want to do.

I crawled to the hole on painful knees, and made my way down.

There was a crossbow somewhere in the room but it was heavy and likely covered in wet filth and flies. I slipped in the liquid that had seeped out of Cook, soaked his bed, and made its way onto the floor. I didn’t fall. Nor did I vomit from the smell.

Out in the hallway beyond Cook’s room I coughed again. This time the cough caught something in my chest on the way out. There were four chest wracking coughs out before I dropped to my hands and knees. I managed one panicked inhalation even as the pain in my knees commanded me to scream, before another series of coughs struck.

I woke to gentle light streaming into the hallway from the open door to my right.

I tried to stand but found I was still woozy. If I breathed in too deeply I started coughing so I kept my breathing shallow as I moved down the hallway. I got lightheaded at the top of the stairs, but after I caught my breath I moved down the stairs one at a time while sitting.

I wasn’t going to die coughing.

A crossbow bolt would be better. I’d just walk to the wall and let the guards do me in.

Except the guards on the wall had fire bombs as well as crossbow bolts.

I’d heard the screams of burning men when we used the fire bombs to keep people from attacking the alchemy compound. The screams had gone on for far too long. I’d seen the twisted forms of the burned bodies afterward.

I wasn’t risking the firebombs.

I stood in the doorway to the inn staring at the dead that littered the streets. The bodies moved, or seemed to.

Rats and birds and flies made them shiver and shudder. A stray dog darted across the street, tail tucked between it’s legs, muzzle brown with old blood.

When I’d fled the alchemy compound and crossed the Slums the streets were already speckled with the dead.

When the plague first started the dead were deposited on the side of streets for the Blackcoats to take away. Except, after a while, the guards didn’t let the Blackcoats take them outside to burn anymore.

There was a square where puppeteers and news criers would work. A building had burned down their long ago and never been rebuilt leaving the square to adapt to other uses. The Slums had taken to burning the dead there, for awhile.

The building next to the square had burned sometime during the plague. The open space larger when I’d come to it, the new space blackened with soot and the bones of the building as well as the cracked bones of the dead that had been tossed into the fires.

Other buildings had burned of course. During the first two weeks a new pillar of smoke rose above the slums every hour it seemed. So much so that the rain held it close to the ground and we could smell it even if we couldn’t see what was burning.

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On my way to Cook’s Inn there had been enough people raiding homes or stealing food from anyone they could that making it across town unmolested had been mostly dumb luck. I hadn’t understood how dangerous it was until I was almost to the bridge that crossed the Ice River separating the two sides of the Slums.

Three men raced across the bridge toward me, knives already in hand. One pitched forward then rolled on his side clawing at his back where a bolt stood out between his ribs. The other two took note but only glanced at him. Neither slowed. One paused as if he would head towards me but when the second man veered off so did he.

The downed man was still screaming and trying to get a hold of the crossbow bolt when the two men I hadn’t noticed caught up to him.

One of the pursuing men drove a shovel into the back of the man’s neck.

It took a few strikes until he went limp. Even before the man went still the other man was kneeling and searching the body. The man jerked the bolt out with a grunt, pulled the man shirt off and then began working on the man’s belt while the other man began pulling off the dead man’s boots.

Two more men had become visible at the opposite end of the bridge, though it was hard to pull my eyes away from the death and looting. I looked away long enough to see that one was carrying a long spear or polearm of some sort. The other was cradling a crossbow.

They seemed to be moving at a walk, as if two men were not pulling the still-warm boots off a corpse half way between us.

Except that when I glanced back the two men were more than halfway between us now.

The man with the shovel was walking toward me, and I knew I should run, but I couldn’t move.

It had been weeks since the plague started and we locked the doors. I’d seen the dead, but never a man die. I listened to the screams of the burning intruders, I saw the charred bodies afterward, but I didn’t throw the bombs or watch them die. Even the apprentices that died of the plague did so while I was out of the room.

The dead man’s companions were gone. The bridge wasn’t that wide. They must have passed me and I never even noticed.

I don’t know where those two went because I couldn’t take my eyes off the man with the shovel who continued to hold my gaze as he walked toward me.

It was the bolt that finally sent me running. It hit the building behind me and I turned my head to see the man with the crossbow cursing while the one with the spear began to jog.

I fled then.

I heard the man with the shovel call out. His pounding boots were all I could hear as I ran. My lungs strained and my body ached and there wasn’t even the smallest bit of effort or energy I held back. I ran and ran, turning when I reached the corners of buildings but not thinking to look over my shoulder until I made my third turn. The man with the shovel was no where to be seen.

I didn’t stop though, not until I was turning again. Then I came to a cursing stop, my feet sliding and my head whipping from side to side.

In my panic took four right turns and ended up staring at the same bridge, sprinting toward it in fact before I realized what I was doing. The street was still littered with the plague dead, but it was as if an illusionist had made a coin disappear.

The men with the weapons were gone. The dead man, still bleeding out on this side of the bridge was there, almost completely naked now. A small hole in his back and a gaping wound at the back of his neck were both slick with blood.

I didn’t stop to think, or consider. I needed over the bridge anyway and the path was clear. I ran, purposefully keeping my eyes off the recently dead man as my feet thundered past. As I crested the bridge I looked back, briefly, and saw someone standing in the street looking my way.

I put my head down and pushed. I ran and ran and ran. I turned here or there at random until suddenly the realization that I might be running into more armed men occurred to me.

I was anything but silent as I weaseled my way into the remains of a burned out building, worming into the rubble and trying to stop my loud sucking breaths from giving me away.

I was was so full of fear I could hardly move. I was starving, but wanted to vomit up the food I didn’t have. The grit and stink of charred wood almost covered the smell of the rotting dead.

Fear held me there in the embrace of building’s charred bones until nightfall when the stomach cramps started.

I started crawling, because that was all I could muster. After a while I removed my boots and socks. I had only a shirt and pants on.

Many of the bodies on the street were so attired, stripped of coat, hat, vest and boots.

By removing my boots I hoped to blend in with the discarded dead, to become just another looted body.

The disguise helped me on more than one occasion, though I was never examined or touched. There were no torches or lanterns. People sprinted then dropped into crouches to listen, then got up and sprinted again.

Most groups consisted of three or four men, only men. I didn’t notice the distinction as I crossed the contested streets, but I saw no children or women at that time.

I did see a group of twenty or so men that jogged across the street some distance away. It wasn’t the number of people that bothered me, so much as the dark shape in the middle that was stabbing something, perhaps a shovel, down into bodies in the street as they passed.

They were making sure that those lying on the street weren’t faking death, or so I assumed. Perhaps though they had already seen too much of what could happen to the dead and were not taking any chances.

I didn’t know exactly where the inn Cook lived at was. Although I grew up in the attic I didn’t even know the name of the inn. It had one, but like many businesses in the Slums the shingle hanging above the door only had a picture.

A painted ship with a red sail on a white cresting wave. The paint had flaked and fallen away over the years. The ship and waves were carved deep enough into the wood to make out though and the red of the sail was new enough to be almost solid color.

I had to crawl the last thousand paces on the street while the sun was up as I couldn’t find it in the dark.

Those last crawled thousand paces took roughly the same amount of time to cross as as reaching the bridge on foot had, yet I crossed a mere fraction of the distance.

I’d not slept a wink in the darkness. I’d seen dim groups clash in the street where neither side had anything worth killing for, and yet they fought, leaving their injured and dead behind. A scream peeled back the other noises for a moment in the middle of the night. But soon enough the animals all around began moving again.

The street smelled of death and rot and oddly enough, a sort of metallic smell, like smelling your hands after holding coins or cleaning metal pots.

I thought the killing in the darkness might be a symptom of the plague. Some of the children said things, words that didn’t line up or make sense. Perhaps adults went fully mad.

But now, after the coughing had caught in my own chest, I found myself understanding that madness better. It was better to clash in the night. Better to kill or be killed in a quick hot rush of blood, than it was to cough yourself to death while weeping red tears.

When I arrived at the inn I was crawling, hoping to stay hidden, hoping I’d find hope, food, a plan.

I didn’t hope Cook would know what to do, I knew he would.

Now I found myself staring at the Inn’s shingle and at the street.

I don’t hide.

I don’t even know if there was anyone left to hide from.

The sun was just now beginning to break over the mountains. I didn’t bother to stay to the edge of the street, instead walking down the center.

The streets were the same, the dead scattered about, the insects and animals feasting.

The smell, an almost physical thing you had to wade through seemed both stronger now, but more dispersed than it had in the attic.

Like the attic, I found myself seeing memories overlaid on the desolate reality of the street.

The sound of running water appeared at random as I passed buildings where the rooftop storage had overflowed or the stops or faucets inside were broken or burned. Water poured out of doors or over roof tops.

There was a section where the bodies were piled in such a way that they formed a wall of sorts and water running down the side of the building filled an ankle deep pool.

I saw no one on their feet, until I did. I paused when I saw the man. Fear rushing through me and burning away my resolve for a quick death.

I knew I was a coward. Just like I knew a quick death was better than a long one.

The man stood in the middle of a side street staring at the body near his feet. He didn’t move much, just sort of rocked back and forth as if filled with unending grief and disbelief. He wore a knit hat and a sailor’s smock.

His hands were empty but opened and closed without pattern.

He was on the other side of the street and didn’t look up at me when I passed. I paused for only a moment and then continued walking.

I wondered who the body was at his feet, or who he hoped it was not as he perhaps put off turning it over.