by Glenn Dungan
He is wiry and nude, sprawled between a tumbleweed of wires from a gutted EMP and a pond of lichen which repopulated this once full and vibrant place. Wisps of smoke rise from the crater and disappears into the air. Jack goes into the crater to check on the man. He puts his tattered parka over him to protect the mysterious visitor’s shame, as if this really mattered anymore.
“Is he an alien?” Cleo says, her voice muffled underneath the heavy scarf found in the deserted Macy’s, moments before the Butcher’s invaded the store front with their smocks of blood and cleavers.
“An alien?” Jack shakes his head, nudges the smoking man, “No. A man. From the sky?”
“So an angel,” Cleo says, looking down the avenues for any signs of predators.
It is not the packs of wolves that make her wary, nor the escaped apex predators, no longer sedated by human entrapment, that sometimes make their way from the Bronx Zoo enclosures or, rarely, from Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
“Enough talking,” Oleki says. He jumps into the crater, recovers from a stumble, and leans over the withered man, his large shadow combining with Jack’s to make an awkward six- armed beast. Oleki picks him up and the man falls wayside.
“Like spaghetti,” he says.
“What I’d do for some pasta,” Cleo sighs as she jumps from the top of a rust scabbed tank pointing directly down Broadway.
They walk the subway tunnels and back to Grand Central Station, Oleki not carrying the deer they had intended to hunt for tonight’s dinner but instead a naked man with skin so hot that he melts the snow gathered on Oleki’s broad shoulder.
They entered their camp using the agreed upon markings that are hard to find or interpret if you are not a part of the Midtown Blue, which is what Jack and the others refer to their hodgepodge of survivors. Jack waves away any disgruntlement from the masses who are too old or too young or need to stay and protect their abode from intruders.
Mr. Jones, his face partially obscured by licks of flame covering a missing ear, watches Oleki slump the skeleton onto the nearest mat. “We hardly have enough food to feed the rest of them, and you add another?”
“Quiet, Mr. Jones,” Jack says, “it’s that sort of preservationist attitude that got everyone here in the first place.”
“Logistics, pragmaticism,” Mr. Jones growls, to the echo of some of the others warming their hands by the meek dumpster fire, “the end of times is nigh.”
“The end of times is here, old man,” Cleo says, then turns to watch the frail visitor displayed on the cot. “Why did we take him in, anyway?”
All eyes on Jack now. He wants to give speech defending the honor of civility, of how it is important to help for the sake of helping, for at the end of civilization losing such empathy separates humans from the cannibals which now skirt most of Queens and Brooklyn, or the other competing scavenger tribes that have to ask themselves every day if they, in this barren wasteland of a destroyed metropolis, will have to succumb to eating each other, and with that point who are the savages then…?
But all Jack does is hold himself high and says, “A hunch. He came from a burst of light. That must mean something.”
//
The visitor does not stir for three days. Curled in a fetal position, the visitor looks more like a starved cat in the darkness. He looks more emaciated than even the hungriest in the Midtown Blues. People began to talk over their trash can fires, over the greasy and sinewy rat grease glazing over yellowed fingernails. They speak underneath their lanterns, a faint and lingering smell of plastic burning because all electronics had been reduced to a singular use of survival. It kills the environment, of course, but the world is already broken.
It is Cleo who finds him with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling where subways use to zoom across. Long gnarled fingers clutch a blanket to his chest, but he is not cold, only ashamed of his own nudity and shock. The look he gives Cleo extends far behind her, growing as word spreads along the shelter that the strange visitor / alien / angel / has awakened.
Jack pushes his way through the crowd, kneels with a cup of tea, places it in the visitor’s open palms. The crowd gazes on.
After a moment, the visitor spays with a raspy voice. “Thank you for bringing me here.”
“Where do you come from?” Jack asks.
“A blue light, that is all I know.”
“You do not remember anything else?” Cleo says.
The man shakes his head. He looks around, sees the exposed concrete rafters, the masses of people in tattered clothes. “Where are the lights? Why do you only use lanterns?”
Whispers surge through the crowd, at once asking if this man has seen electricity, the children enamored by the very mention of this possibility, for they have been raised in a world without it. Images of light switches, vehicles, air conditioning, the pleasant accommodations of life, invade the thoughts of those who can remember before the end of civilization, before the bombs, but now they are too hardened by the present that they believe the visitor to have some amnesia.
This does not stop Cleo from asking, “Do you come from a place where there is still electricity; where there is technology?”
The man says, “I come from nowhere, I think. It’s too dark here.”
“All we have are lanterns,” Jack says.
“No, there is a light switch. You have not tried it?”
“Nothing works, you fool,” Mr. Jones croaks from the back, “when the bombs fell and the tanks went in everything went black. No technology. Where have you been?”
The man opens his mouth to speak but no words are evoked. He shakes his head, almost forlornly, and instead says: “It really is dark in here. Can I turn on the lights? The switch is right over there.”
He struggles to his feet, little chicken wing arms threatening to crumble under the weight of his weak muscles, his bony shoulder blades. With the help of Jack and Cleo, he stands to his feet, shaking his knees like a baby fawn. Wrapped in an itchy blanket the color of rust, the man looks almost like a prophet. Almost. Once steadied, he walks to the light switch, half the crowd watching in awe, the other trying to get a glimpse of it all, their vision obscured by the chaotic whipping of the overhead lantern’s flames. The light switch has gone black and grey over time of disuse, a forgotten relic that has since been absorbed by the scenery and forgotten—easier to forget it is there than acknowledge it and lose hope…again…again…
The visitor places a knobby finger on the switch, ignores the protests of those who have turned their despair to bitterness, and flips the light ON, bathing the entire shelter in a miasma of bright yellow and gold, blinding in its radiance, dispelling any horror lurking in the shadows which until today thought to be permanent, a forever smudge against the landscape of this strange, wild, and forgotten civilization.
“That’s better,” the man says.
They have all been living in this shelter for ten years, and this is the first time most of them have seen the faces of their neighbors, their friends, their family. Even Mr. Jones, arrested because his veil of cynical bitterness has been taken off him so abruptly, cracks a childlike smile in wonderment, looking at the electricity coursing through the bulbs, yellow sabers of light carrying long into the tunnels. Children screech in joy, surprised as their newfound vision, blinking away the discomfort of adjusted eyes lurking in damp and darkness. The joy is too great, too mighty to ignore.
“Wow,” Jack says, looking at the bulbs, the illuminated spots in the corridors he had never thought he would see in totality. He goes to the visitor, looks at the switch, “That has not worked in a decade. How did you know it would turn on?”
“They just listen to me, is all.”
“Thank you,” Jack says.
“Thank you for sheltering me,” the visitor says, fighting against some tired, internal pain to form a smile.
Then, as if testing to see if a miracle can happen twice, Jack flicks the light switch OFF and the shelter bathes in an assault of black, illuminated now by the familiar and unwanted lanterns. People cry to return the light; children ask for the yellow. In the faint darkness there is even sounds of sniveling, of being in awe. Jack feels this too, this new wanting, this necessity, and decides he can no longer live without it, just like he has before the bombs, the ballistics. He flips the switch, feels the anticipation of light course through him, and finds that only a deft, vacant click emotes from the panel.
“More darkness,” Jack says, afraid he has ruined this for everyone.
He begins to swear at himself to drown the insults coming from the newly returned darkness. Within seconds the lights come back, and Jack wonders if there is a delay. Overlayed on his fingers is the strange visitor’s withered finger, one fingernail placed delicately on the ruined, cracked plastic. Jack catches eyes with the Electric Man, sees a sapphire glow fade from his irises as the energy courses through him, travels from his inner biology and out from his pores.
“They listen to me, is all. Machines.” The Electric Man says again.
And in the joyous light of their vision, blinded by awe at this strange god, the Midtown Blue’s can finally see in full yellow view the squalor they have been living in, the conditions that have beaten them at the very end of the world. How ugly, how hungry, and how afraid.
//
It starts small. First it is the lights in the shelters, then it is the electric heaters, plugged into outlets long forgotten or obscured. Then arrives hot plates, grills, even electric blankets. The once sedentary and musky particles of their underground shelter are soon replaced with grilled rat meat and the occasional wayward fawn from the Bronx. The Electric Man, as everyone calls him, is a pleasure to have around above it all. He eats meals with them, is patient with the children and even powers up some broken toys found in the ruins of buildings and forgotten brownstones. Still, he has no idea where he comes from, and soon people are wondering if this Electric Man is human at all. Overtime people stop asking where he is from or where he is going. He becomes as entrenched in the community, a fixture, like all the others who shamble in this underground sanctuary.
Ensconced in the pleasures of the Before World, Jack watches Oleki and Cleo arrive with a new catch, Oleki carrying a pelt of rabbits and Cleo with berries from the urban farming trade post in Union Square. Once they used salt to preserve meat and ate their perishables fast, but now Jack watches them put the food in freezers, wipe their hands off on clean linen from a recovered laundry machine. This is it, Jack thinks, this is a semblance of life from Before, the life that most children here do not remember.
The Electric Man is a little eccentric, but kind, and always gets up from his cot when asked to start a device. Otherwise, he sits in the corner, drinking tea, attempting to make sense of the world around him. He is particularly bonded with Jack, much to the dismay of the others who want to learn more of this oddity. Jack suspects it is because he is the one who had not left the Electric Man to die in Times Square. Underneath a canopy, flaps bellowing from a rickety air conditioning module, the Electric Man asks what became of this world, hoping to substitute the broken apocalyptic history of this world with the lack of his own.
For objects that use batteries, people have begun attaching jumper cables from the nodes to the Electric Man’s toes and fingers while he sleeps.
It is not until the Union Square Trading Post that the Electric Man’s powers adopt a more commercial, rather than domestic, application. Cleo and Oleki, freshly bathed with an electric hot water heater and with bellies full of fresh rabbit and potato soup, bring with them trinkets and devices to the hodgepodge of civilized traders from the rest of the city. The Bronx Bears, named for their domesticating of one of the bears who has escaped the Zoo encampments, brings pelts, fresh eggs, mottled wood from the defunct shelters. The Shellseas bring plants and vegetation from their great farm on the High Line Park, which have experienced another cycle of neglect/utilization. The Midtown Reds, scavengers like the Midtown Blues and their biggest competitor, bring object found in the high rises or raided in the department stores, fought for sometimes by the Blues themselves, usually by the unorganized cannibal clusters making their way from Brooklyn. The Trading Post is a sacred space, most akin to a church since all the churches have fallen from lack of activity or mortar shells.
Since the Midtown Reds are the biggest competitor for the Midtown Blues, Eiko and Oleki have a particular distaste for them. Their new cleanliness brings suspicious looks from the other clans, highlighting the general odor of the Reds themselves, who are stationed across with their own foldable, rickety table. Their wares include metal utensils, several rusty tools, tattered remains of army fatigues, no doubt pulled from a body. Usually, the Midtown Blues bring much of the same, but today Cleo, with a childish glint in her eyes, and the ever-serious Oleki not stopping her, brings out a battery powered blender, a stud finder, and objects plucked from the Electric Man after a night of charging on his toes and hands, like an apple taken from a tree.
The traders gawk and prod at the machines, uncomfortable with the now unfamiliar sounds of a blender’s whir, a portable charger activating the gurgle of a coffee machine. The Shellseas offer a whole bounty of potatoes and eggplants for an electric blanket alone. The Bronx Bears offer two animal pelts, as well as an entire swine when the creature matures, for a light switch with accompanying wires, not even caring that half of the twisting red and blue strings are frayed.
It is not long before someone asks where the Midtown Blues discovered working technology.
“Call it a trade secret,” Eiko says as Oleki holds open his arms to accept the crops and pelts.
Back in the bowels of Grand Central Station, the Midtown Blues are equipped with artifacts of leisure. As a gesture of good faith, Oleki hands one of the animal pelts to the Electric Man, who is putting band-aids on the indents of his toes and fingers where the jumper cables clamp into his sallow flesh like snake bites. Pretty soon, the Electric Man’s cot is moved away from the corner of the room and into a side room, a space for himself. As a sign of gratitude and good intent from the Electric Man, he invites the Midtown Blues to use what minimal room there is left in the damp and musty rectangle to charge more appliances while he sleeps or meditates.
What the Electric Man meditates on is unknown, but when he does the children can say they hear a slight buzz.
After another couple of Union Square Trading Posts events, Eiko and Oleki report to Jack that the other clan’s curiosity is turning into aggression. The prime culprits are the Midtown Reds, whose wares and trinkets are being suffocated in the whir of the technology they bring.
Mr. Jones, once an investment banker in the Old World, suggests they answer with a charging station to re-energize the inevitable malfunctioning of their battery powered hot plates and microwaves. Something about “planned obsolescence”.
About the Midtown Reds, Mr. Jones says, “Eat or be eaten.”
This does not dismay Jack and the others from putting up defenses around their underground camp. Before the Electric Man it was jersey barriers and stacked old office furniture. Seemingly overnight they have the set-up CCTVs, radio systems tapping into long dormant alpha and beta wavelengths. Someone found a set of tasers in the security guard armory at the other end of Grand Central and now they patrol the borders with vests and weaponized voltage.
The strain on the Electric Man is taxing, and during this transition to increase their defenses he is struggling to chew the fried pork chops made as a celebration for their newfound power. He spends the day in his quarters, attached to the many wires and clips that now sting onto his shoulder blades, cling for purchase at whatever fat is on his thigh. He drinks tea and sits, buzzing, his head resting on the concrete wall.
Jack comes to check on him and finds the Electric Man wincing, muscles tensing and untensing as electricity surges into the cameras, the light bulbs.
“Your sacrifice means the most to us, sir. You are helping us defend against those who might mean us harm.”
“I know, Jack, I know,” the Electric Man says. This is the first time he has used his name. “Do you remember where you are from?”
“Here, I suppose.”
“With the Midtown Blues,” Jack confirms.
Their paranoia is validated when their sensors picked up movement in some of the tunnels not two weeks later. Heat signatures detected a cavalcade of figures holding bats, air rifles, makeshift body armor built out of dislocated mannequins. They had not gotten far and are defeated by their own insolence; an unwary foot stepped onto an electrified fence blossoms an aroma of burnt hair and zapped flesh through the tunnels. This experience radicalized the search parties and defenders of the Midtown Blues, who now anticipate another threat, fearing the Reds will retaliate with more verve.
Illuminated halls allow vision into the kitchen of the shelter, which was once, in the Before, the lounge area for the workers in the subway station. Lights cast over revived hotplates, refrigerators that allow the scavenging party to free up their hands to partake in the military burden. Electricity coursed through the infrastructure of the camp, providing hot water heaters, lamps, even old movies. The great charger, the Electric Man, is decided to need a larger room, beyond his sleeping quarters.
In the name of defense, they asked him to charge up explosives; C-4, plastic bombs, trip wires It is time to expand, Jack says, to leave these tunnels.
//
By method proxy of border control, the Midtown Blue escape their hovel within the subterranean network of the station and slowly, like a hermit crab seeking larger shelter, stretched into the upper floors of Grand Central Station. Busted windows show missiles of light from the trajectory of past riots; broken crystals of Molotov Cocktails, the downward swing of a brick, metal cannisters of depleted gas bombs. Withered skyscrapers loom over the Station like dying trees; grey, bruised, and beaten.
To allow the Electric Man space to grow and charge their artillery, they station him in the center terminal of the station, underneath the celestial bodies painted on the wall in the Before, now covered with soot and smoke. They gut the seats and counters of where ticket sellers once spent their days and reinforced the container with stripped metal from the vacant vehicles sleeping in Midtown and the powerful glass from the highest skyscrapers. It is a costly effort to the get the latter materials, for Oleki has fallen from a great height after overextending his reach, becoming a squashed coagulated grape on Park Avenue. He did not die in vain.
The Electric Man is larger than any single one of them. The Electric Man is survival.
And such they lock the Electric Man into his padded room, fashion little slots in which the wires can trail in and out and anyone can come by and replace their batteries, their drills, their hair dryers without any recognition to the Electric Man. The chamber is impenetrable to mortar. Jack reasons that even if the opposing clans could take over the new Midtown Blue’s stronghold, they will not get the Electric Man. Jack does not trust others with him in fear they would abuse him.
Bathed in illumination once thought forgotten in this tiresome world, Grand Central Station has become a bastion of electric defense, dedicated to protecting what fuels its batteries. This does not stop the Midtown Reds, who try to flank the Station with bricks and axes. Their primitive technology is futile against the steel barriers enclosing the Station, an orchestra of asymmetrical warfare. Jack could not help but feel sorry for the other clans. Had Jack not been introduced to the horrors of the world: the cannibals and wild animals, the slow but steady and then all at once decline of humanity in both the moral and physical sense…Jack watches the Midtown Reds, fueled now not by anger of becoming primitives, but of survival. They are growing hungrier, unable to trade adequately in the markets. They are growing more desperate, and this too is validated when the first bullets start shooting into the Station, sending crystals along the dusty, trash scattered tiles, rivets of sudden, coin sized lights. Bullets are hard to come by. The Midtown Reds mean to throw everything at the Blues and take their Electric Man.
Armed with a pole grafted with tasers and a fragment of car door refashioned into a shield, Jack and the others wait as the Midtown Reds retreat, defeated and hungry, down the flanking streets, unable to penetrate their fortified abode. Behind them the terminal glows blue, the devices charge accordingly and swapped by the children. One of them brings some tea and stew and places it into a slot for the Electric Man, and from this distance a withered, shaking hand reaches into the tray like the claws of a squirrel.
A week later Cleo is bludgeoned to death with an electric coffee maker at the market. At first Jack demands justice from the dastardly Reds, but one of the survivors, screaming as an iron cauterizes his stump of a hand, claims the monsters to be both the Shellseas and the Bears.
“But we have always gotten along peacefully, kept to each other’s borders. Why would they spark violence? Our struggle with the Reds is our own, between us.”
“You fool,” Mr. Jones picks at his teeth with a pigeon bone, “because we have what they want.”
“The Electric Man.”
“Yes,” he tosses it into a bucket, warms his hands by an electric fire, the grease crackling his bony fingers, “and when we defeat the Reds, they fear they will be next.”
“Not if they provoke us,” Jack says, not realizing that he is clenching his fist, evoking the memories of the fallen Oleki and Cleo.
“Is that it?” Mr. Jones cocks an eyebrow, “Really, Jack?”
//
It is two weeks without incident and Jack and the Midtown Blues have had plenty of time to rebolster their defenses. They have built concrete structures after scavenging from deserted construction lots uptown, nearing the wildlands of the marshes that have encroached upon the grid-style streets. They find UV lights, surprisingly not broken, and start a garden near some of the platforms. The Electric Man buzzes in his containment, protected and alone. He never asks for tea or food, but he is provided with each several times a day to maintain his energy.
Once, he asks Jack personally how long he was meant to be in this container and Jack only answers a little longer. Later, the Electric Man asks if he could have a moment of reprieve; his arms are swollen from the corrosive pincers of the jumper cables and his muscles have not been exercised since being in this cramped capsule.
“Besides,” the Electric Man speaks with labor now, “everything is charged, has life.”
“But we do not know if you’ll be here tomorrow, or the next day,” Jack says, “we need to use your gifts while we can. A little longer. It’s for the greater good. There are savages out there.”
Speaking through the slot meant for trays of food, the Electric Man’s eyes glow faintly with blue as he catches eyes with Jack. “Are the savages hurting us, or are we hurting them?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are we aiding in their destruction? Are we the harbingers of it?” The Electric Man stirs, attempts to readjust his bones, detaches the pincers from a cable and reattaches it a joint up.
“With technology.”
“Yes,” Jack says plainly.
“Oh,” is all the Electric Man says.
“Get some rest, if you can,” Jack says, closing the slot and returning to the tunnels, his footsteps empty and retracing the ghosts of the multitudes of people coming and going, asking for directions, living their easy, luxurious lives.
The Midtown Blues are attacked by a triple phalanx a couple days later. A blast rumbles the foundation of the old terminal, dandruff clouds of soot and asbestos. The trader is right; all the Manhattan Tribes have bonded together. The Bronx Bears arrive with their animals, the Shellseas with their acids, the Midtown Reds a patchwork people, a dying race that is no more than sinews of muscle. A machine rumbles down the central highway, crushing abandoned and stripped vehicles in their path. The heavy growl and creak of a tank rumbles along, a ghost of its former champion self.
One of the sentries says, “How did they get a tank? They do not have the Electric Man.”
Mr. Jones, wrapped in a crusty blanket and warming his feet with an electric heater, says, “Tanks run on diesel. The question remains to be, however, if they could have scrounged any ammunition for that metal monstrosity.”
The tank explodes a fireball into the main doors of the Station, decimating most of the wooden foundations, melting through the first several layers out shelling. The force topples several scaffolds, the sounds of breaking bones snap the others already not paying attention to action. The opposing trifecta advances, the explosions of the Midtown Blue’s well-prepared C-4 and electric bombs signifying they intend to flank the Station.
Jack rushes to the front, protects the Electric Man’s capsule, raises an arm to shield from more falling sediment. The right flank has been torn through by the Bronx Bears and they are making their way through the tunnels with their torn boots, hoofs, and claws. Jack turns to the Electric Man, sees an aura of blue glow from within the ticket counter. Cables filter out like tentacles, clamping from his flesh to the explosives. He plucks one of the electric bombs and finds that it is empty. At first, he curses the technology for being unable to hold a charge, then he wonders himself if he has personally forgotten to clamp the outside end to the Electric Man’s bruised and flaking flesh. Then he thinks of the Electric Man and fears that he is dead.
Jack opens the slot and peers in, his face covered in grime, his feet struggling for purchase as another tank blast rattles the foundation. He sees the Electric Man, meditating. No clamps are biting into his flesh. Without the prying conductors his body is spotted with bruises and incisions, the skin of a leopard. At the Electric Man’s crossed legs Jack sees the jumper cables coiled like dead snakes, the metal heads rusted from battery acid.
“Did you take the clamps off?” Jack says.
The Electric Man opens his eyes, his lips hardly moving when he replies, “Yes.”
“Why?” A fury blossoms in Jack’s stomach, a surge of anger that he does not realize is invading him. The question of survival is focused on the Electric Man, not the clans which knock ever closer at their compound, but the oversight of this visitor. No, Jack thinks, he cannot be frustrated. This act is not intentional. Is it?
The Electric Man opens his palms, reveals little snake bites on his fingers, tiny scabs like freckles. “I will not participate in instruments of war.”
“War?” Jack says, hearing now the roars of battle as the Midtown Blues separate to combat the Bronx Bears, hoping that their knowledge of these tunnels once meant for trains into New Jersey and Pennsylvania would be enough to combat the sheer animalistic power of the Bears. Jack continues, “This is not war…it’s survival. Please. Charge the devices.”
“I shall do no such thing,” the Electric Man says, “this world I woke up into is broken and sad, but not without hope. But now…now I see there is no hope beyond my prison.”
“Prison?” Jack says, “Please, they are coming. We will die without your help. Charge the devices. How can we defend ourselves?”
“Without me,” the Electric Man says, “war has done you all enough without me. I shall not participate in your destruction or your victory.”
“You bastard,” Jack says, “we took you in. We gave you shelter.”
“Yes,” the Electric Man’s eyes are unwavering, tethered to Jacks. The roars of battle do not sway him, the bombardments of the tank do not frighten him. “And I gave you all light. See how you abused it.”
“You’re being vindicative. Please, we are going to die. Put the clamps back on. Charge our devices. Please.”
The Electric Man shakes his head as the front wall of the Grand Central Station is blown apart by another ballistic. Outposts fall, marble stairs crack and burst. Jack hears familiar cries of panic and pain, his found family, the Midtown Blues crumbling like a house of cards. Jack finds his gaze magnetized to the Electric Man’s, who’s nonplussed stare only salts the defiant attitude he has chosen now, at the brink of apocalypse, to maintain. It is not a smirk or tight-lipped taunt; Jack truly does believe that the Electric Man is not capable of these gestures so characteristic of this broken world. Still, in his eyes the Electric Man sits defiant as the other clans close in, safe in his metal capsule.
“Do something, Jack!” Someone calls out from the tunnels before twisting their vocal cords in pain, their guttural sounds dominated by the Seashell’s acids.
Jack watches his hand begin to tear at the metal shell holding the Electric Man. His fingers cannot adequately grip the bolts and instead he begins to whack the reinforced glass at first with his fist and then with whatever he can, grabbing hammers, paint cans, drained batteries that should have been energized. Beads of sweat fall from Jack’s brow, and his labor is keeping him focused as the Midtown Reds push into the grand foyer with their tank, the bestial shapes of the Bronx Bears to his left, and the acid wielding Shellsea botanists down the main concourse.
With a final, deft hit, Jack punctures a spiderweb of damage in the reinforced glass. His fingers are lacerated and hang at odd angles, but he does not care. With shaking hands and exposed bone, Jack reaches into the inside of the door and opens it, revealing the little cupboard of legroom that the Electric Man is stationed in. The Electric Man raises a forearm in defense as Jack pounces on his withered body, snapping his frail shins with Jack’s weight. His eyes are no longer defiant, but afraid. Jack understands this. He is afraid too.
Jack ignores the settling dust, hears at once the padding of feet as the three opposing clans coalesce in the foyer, witnessing a dying species of man attempting to cling to life. No more sounds of ballistics; no whistling of bullets or smashed arcs of brink into an icy crash. Only the sounds of rabid Jack, frothing, his fingers mangled and blossomed, attempting to grip the jumper cables with one hand while holding back the wispy Electric Man on his cot that is damp with bed sores. He clamps a jumper cable onto the Electric Man’s ribs and a lampshade shines into a pyramid of yellow. The Electric Man ungrips a clamp from his inner thigh and the buzz of a blender ceases its whir.
In the silence, only the screams of the Electric Man and Jack echo through the war torn Grand Central Station. Animal screams that provoke the Bronx Bear’s warbeasts, make even the most severe of the remaining Midtown Red’s wince. Someone notes that the battery is a man, just a man, and another says that the Midtown Blues are no more than the savages in Brooklyn, the last relic from the Before times, witnessing in real time an entire species’ s pathetic self- destruction.
Jack hears the commotion he is causing, lets the noise of chaos and violence settle in with him as the sole conductor. He hovers over the Electric Man, one carved hand at the throat-why the throat?-and the other in an attempt at a fist, dripping with blood. Jumper cables slither from the Electric Man. He stares vacantly at Jack, at the monster he has become. It has long since ceased being a battle of wills, now it is one of domination.
Jack begins to cry. “Why didn’t you save us?”
“There is no saving you,” the Electric Man says. His eyes close, open feebly.
Jack understands this look; it is one emitted by the dying. He feels the other clans closing in, ready to take him for torture or hopefully, a quick death, so long is the reign of the Midtown Blues. He looks over his shoulder, sees the clans gathered in the threshold, watching. They make no motion towards Jack, and he understands this, too… that he is too defeated for any retribution.
Jack falls off the Electric Man, puts his bloodied head in between his knees. The Electric Man wheezes. “I remember now.”
“Remember what?”
“My name,” the Electric Man says. His head lulls over. “My name is Brandon.”
The lightbulbs connected to the Electric Man fade into black. All the technology attached to him loses its verve, spinning absently to a deft halt. Jack stands over the dead Electric Man, and with as much humanity left of him, steps out from behind the ticket counter, holding onto whatever gristle of morality he can. The Electric Man looks like a child, crumpled and askew, and behind his shoulder Jack sees the mess he made of his body, of both their spirits, of a true murder.
He turns and looks down the barrel of a rifle, held by one of the last remaining Midtown Reds. All around them the lights of Grand Central Station, once so luminous and gold, begin to shut off like a department store at closing time. Jack takes a breath, looks at what he has built, and watches the lights go off one by one, thinking of how the Electric Man visited this damned world, and how none of it made any difference.
Glenn Dungan is currently based in Brooklyn, NYC. He exists within a Venn-diagram of urban design, sociology, and good stories. When not obsessing about one of those three, he can be found at a park drinking black coffee and listening to podcasts about murder. For more of his work, please see his website: whereisglennnow.com.