Warday

“Just a second,” Jenny says. She gives me the flashlight and produces a small hooked bar from a sling in her belt. “We have to do this fifty times a day.” She inserts the tool into my supposedly burglar-proof lock and in an instant the door swings open.

Sunlight floods the living room. It was always a bright apartment. After a moment my eyes get used to the light The first thing I see is the bulging, rotted ruin of our L — shaped couch, maroom with tan padding and foam jutting out The ceiling above it slopes far down into the room.

But it’s our apartment, very definitely. It hasn’t been looted.

The rosewood dining table still has a note stuck in the crack in the center. I take the brittle brown paper. Jam at the school, says Anne’s hasty scrawl My first impulse is to take the note. But then I find myself putting it back, as if our whole past might collapse if this last, critical rivet were pulled out.

I want to see the rest of the apartment. But when I start for the back, where the bedrooms and my office are, Jenny stops me.

“Hold it.” She nods toward the floor. “Spoor.”

“Spoor?”

“Animals have been in here.” She nods toward the fire escape. “Window.” She touches a brown bit of the dung with her toe. “Dry. Wish I knew what the hell dropped it.”

“Not a dog?”

She shakes her head. “They don’t come up this high. Big, though. Maybe a zoo animal. Some of them around. A few. All the way down here, s’funny. I wouldn’t expect it.”

Jenny has her revolver out.

“You think it’s still here?”

At first she doesn’t answer. When she moves toward the back rooms, I follow. I make a mental note that we can go down the fire escape if we have to. Jenny takes a deep breath. “Doesn’t smell like animals,” she says softly. I notice that she cocks the pistol.

In places the floor has a disturbing springy quality to it. If I jumped, I don’t doubt that I’d end up in the apartment below.

We reach Andrew’s room. There is his Apple computer on his desk, his bed forever unmade, his paintings on the walls, most of them rotted beyond recognition. His dresser has fallen apart.

There is a dried cowboy boot in the middle of the floor. As this room faces west and north, winter blows in here, and his bookshelf is a bulging, sodden ruin.

The room echoes with so many past voices, him and his friends, a thousand bedtime stories.

It is in my office, where I wrote The Hunger and Catmagic, that I see my first clear sign of the last desperate days of this city.

There is a can of Sterno on the floor, and three empty tins from the kitchen, their contents and even their paper labels long since eaten.

I wonder who was here. Could it have been our neighbors? What might have happened to them? Elizabeth, the model, tall and gentle, her face at the edge of unforgettable beauty. Roberto, full of laughter, a native of Italy, wine importer, friend of evenings. Until this moment I have not remembered them, and I feel guilty for it.

“Come here,” Jenny says. She is looking into the bathroom opposite my office, where I used to soak in the tub to ease the lower-back pain of a sedentary life.

Bones, jumbled, gnawed, skulls pocked and pitted, teeth grinning, bits of clothing adhering to gnarls of ligament.

I cannot help myself. I scream.

Jenny neither scolds nor laughs nor sympathizes. When I stop, she begins talking again. “Stay-behinds. You see ’em all over the place.”

“How did they die?”

“Every way you can imagine.” She flashes her light into the bathroom. “That vent. Probably brought in short-half-life dust, so they mighta gotten radsick. Or maybe they were scared to leave and they starved. That happened too. Or violence. Suicide. Take a coroner to tell you, and that I’m not.”

It is then that I see, standing in the door of our bedroom, the most enormous cat I have ever encountered. Its eyes meet mine and its ears go back. It crouches and hisses. “Damn,” Jenny says.

And then she pumps bullets into it until the head disappears into a red cloud of bone and blood. The creature slams across the room and then slumps to a tawny, blood-pumping heap on the floor.

“What the hell is that?” It looked like a cross between a blond Persian and a Manx, but four times as big as either.

“Damned if I know. Big cat.”

“Giant cat.”

“I’m gettin’ out of this hole, and so are you. You want to get killed, you can stay behind.” On the way out I see, lying on the floor of the living room, the china bud vase my mother gave Anne for one of her birthdays. I snatch it up as if it were a gold dollar and put it in my pocket.

Jenny won’t go near the fire escape, sowe return down the stairs. The dark behind us seems so dangerous that it is all Ican do not to run.

It will be a long time before I can think about that apartment again.

Interview Morgan Moore, Salvor