Free Interzone 251 by edited by Andy Cox Page A

surgeon stepped back. He would not.
    Turning his back once more on the surgeon, Simon limped across the fractured street, making his way around slabs of asphalt jutting from open craters. At the blasted doors of the building, he looked back to verify that the surgeon had not moved.
    “Don’t follow me,” Simon called.
    The surgeon raised a hand in acknowledgment, but if he said anything Simon didn’t hear. Discarding his rock, Simon stumbled up the first two flights in complete darkness. He stopped on the third only long enough to fish a candle from his pocket and light it with a match. Gaining the landing at the top floor, he pushed on the first door he found, which scraped the floorboards, but yielded to a shove. He forced the door shut behind him and shot the bolt, a rusted thing barely clinging to the rotten frame. Finally safe, Simon faced the interior of his new home with raised candle.
    The room was empty but for an overturned stool by the window. The cracked walls were smeared with filth. The reek of caged animals pervaded. Simon crossed a warped and complaining floor to the window, where he righted the stool and found that his candle fit perfectly into a puddle of hardened wax on the sill. He rubbed at the fractured glass with his sleeve, but could barely see the street through the smoky panes. In a corner, concealed by a castoff blanket, Simon found a book, a little box, and a picture in a frame of pewter. The box contained a stack of well-worn bills; the book had been written in a language he didn’t know; and the picture he carried to the window, tilting it into the diseased light.
    A young couple looked out at him: the man with bulging eyes and a pinched face, the woman light of hair and dark of eye. Simon propped them on the sill. In the back of the room he discovered a torn curtain, and behind it a tiled water-closet with broken pipes and a grime-encrusted tub.

    ***

    From the opposite side of the street, the surgeon watched the high window. The old man’s candle appeared, a single point of dim light in the bleak facade of the building. The surgeon did not take his eyes from the window until after the struggling sun had set. In the deepening twilight, movement near a mound of rubble caught his eye. He looked, and something furtive cringed from his gaze.
    “I already said, I won’t stop you,” the surgeon told it. There was no need to speak loudly; his voice carried well enough in the heavy air.
    Clutching a moth-eaten blanket around its head and shoulders, an emaciated figure emerged warily from behind the rubble. The surgeon saw its feet only, which seemed nothing more than muddy bone. Bent nearly double, and always keeping the surgeon within sight, it lurked from doorway to alley. The surgeon made no more to interfere when it paused at the stairwell, head raised as though tasting the air. Only after the thing had vanished into the well did the surgeon rise with a sigh and take up his bag.
    Climbing the stairs between the second and third floors, the surgeon heard the old man begin to scream somewhere above him. He paused to glance up the empty well, then continued on at a pace no more hurried than before. By the time he’d reached the third floor, the old man’s cries had escalated to a sickened fury. The erratic scuffing and angry barks of the old man’s struggle led the surgeon to a door on the upper floor. There on the landing he stopped to listen.
    The old man’s cries had slackened. From within came labored breathing and strangled huffing, the final, strained efforts of a desperate struggle. Heavy and slow, something pulled itself toward the door before being dragged back. There came a crack, sharp and sudden, followed immediately by a defeated groan. The surgeon tilted his head, listening intently. The old man was trying to speak, but his breathless garble was broken by short, tortured gasps and an irregular ripping. Brittle things were being wrenched, cracked, and cast aside. The surgeon