For having an unruly husband, Thomas has been taking her limbs from her one at a time. Cutting them off and feeding them to his children.

The c.o.c.kroach boys will do anything he tells them to do. They aren't human anymore. Just empty sh.e.l.ls. Insects. He commands them like an army. Faceless, soulless soldiers.

I can hear Thomas whispering to the boys: "Oh, Charlie and I were so close, so friendly. I can't believe he's gone. He was the only man here, you know? Now I have to wait for one of you to become a man. Who is the oldest? Paul? You will be a man in almost a year, won't you? That's not very long at all. You can be the new captain of the swim team. Oh, thank G.o.d I have you, Paul. Thank you G.o.d."

"Why don't you sleep with me anymore?" Alyxa asks me.

We are sitting on a ledge in the elevator shaft, a candle between us, far away from Thomas and his c.o.c.kroach boys, our feet dangling into the darkness.

"I mean you never even sleep next to me, let alone f.u.c.k me," she continues. "Why can't you be affectionate? You say you love me but won't lay a finger on me."

"I don't feel like it anymore," I tell her.

"You don't feel like making love with me?" she says. "You're the one who said the only thing left worth living for is s.e.x, you told me that living in the walls is pa.s.sionate, our flesh trapped closely together."

"I do love you, Alyxa," I tell her. "And the only reason I don't kill myself right now is because I want to be with you. I'm just bored with it, it's all we've been doing for the past three years. All day, every day. And I can't handle all those abortions. You say it provides food for us, but I just can't deal with it anymore."

"It's safer than eating the dead," Alyxa says. "I can't help but wonder if I'm going to catch the disease every time I take a bite of their flesh. With the abortions, I can actually eat in without worries. The idea that I'm eating my babies doesn't even bother me anymore. It seems almost natural."

"Our babies," I tell her.

"I don't know why you refuse to eat them."

She doesn't see my head shaking at her in the dark.

I let her screw me in the elevator shaft, digging her nails deep into my chest. Her dirty smells encase my body, cut into me like razors. I try not to breathe through my nose or mouth, trying to inhale through my eyes, ears, pores on the skin...

"Do you remember what the light looks like, what the sun looks like?" I ask Alyxa, her greasy head lying in my armpit.

"I don't remember these things."

"Sometimes I want to take a chance and go to the roof. Just to see the sun again."

"There's no sun anymore," Alyxa tells me, her eyes shifting to mine, glistening in the dark. "It disappeared when the dead came out of their graves."

"We don't know that for sure."

"It might as well be true," she says, kissing my gritty hand and licking some sweat away.

The dead man hanging from the ceiling has lost most of his meat. All the c.o.c.kroach boys scrabbling his flesh into their throats, their only form of communication being growls and snorts. Thomas says there isn't enough food to go around, so Alyxa and I have to go searching for beetles and rats. It's an exhausting job with little reward, but we like the idea of leaving the company of our twisted leader, escape into the walls.

"Is it time to kill ourselves yet?" Alyxa asks me.

"Not yet," I say. "I won't die until I see the daylight again."

"It's a sweet dream, but we both know it will never happen."

"It will happen," I tell her. "Someday."

She wraps her sweaty palm around my mouth and licks my ear.

"Let's kill ourselves now," she says. "Let's feed the zombies."

"Not yet," I say.

"Let's become zombies together," she says, a chuckling whisper. "Let's be undead flesh-eating corpses." Then a slitting sound close to my eardrum.

I scream in pain, blood gushes from the side of my head. I jerk to look at her, she's holding a lemon knife in one hand and my ear in the other.

"I'm a zombie," she says, folding the ear into her mouth and chewing.

I can hardly breathe from shock. She swallows my ear, licking her lips at me.

And she's just playing a game...

"I'm going to eat you," she screams out. "Let me taste more of you."

I stagger, holding the blood inside of my head.

"Get away," I scream.

She cuts me across the shoulder. I shriek, scrambling back, trying to get away. No room for agility when between the walls, especially for a man.

"Let me eat you," she screams. "I'll f.u.c.k you and eat you at the same time."

I lunge at her, grab her knife and bite her ear. My molars grind against it and tear it off, nearly choke on it. Blood rivers down her shoulder and her eyes widen. She howls at me, breaks free from my hold. I feel the blade enter my muscle and loose skin, cutting my arms and legs. Alyxa drops the knife, licking the blood, drinking pieces of my flesh into her mouth and chewing it free.

She sucks her severed ear from my lips and gulps, licking my forehead and laughing at herself.

"I'm never going to die," she tells me. "Help me die."

Thomas becoming more insane every day. He has started painting murals on the walls with a young boy's s.h.i.t. We have to go onto our elevator ledge to escape the smell. Our heads and my limbs all bandaged with a dead c.o.c.kroach boy's clothes. Alyxa becomes more and more ready to commit suicide, excited for it, depressed when she realizes she is not yet dead.

"Want to try getting to the parking lot?" I ask Alyxa and she smiles. "I don't want to die until I see daylight. I was thinking... maybe we should try to make it outside. Steal a car. You know, see how far we can get."

"There's no chance we can make it out of the building. We've tried before, remember?"

"That was years ago. There aren't as many of them as there used to be."

"It sounds good to me..." she says. "But I hope you realize we most likely won't get twenty feet outside these walls. I don't want you to be disappointed if you die before making it outside."

I throw bits of rock down the shaft. "I've thought about it all day long."

Alyxa is jealous when Mrs. Boontide pa.s.ses away.

She presses her fingers against the woman's dead face and curls the skin into odd expressions, making her look happy or sad or just warped. Flaying with her face like silly putty.

"It's weird," she tells me. "It feels fake."

She pulls my hand towards the skin but I resist.

"What's wrong with you?" she asks.

"I just don't want to touch her," I say.

"You'll eat her but you won't touch her skin?"

"I don't see what's so fun about playing with a dead woman's face," I say.

"You're becoming such a bore," she says.

"You're becoming another person," I say.

"When are we going to try the escape?" she asks.

She menstruates onto a plate for the c.o.c.kroach boys' dinner.

"Later," I say.

"You've been saying that for the past two days," she says.

"I'm not ready yet," I say. "I'm going to go without you," she says. "We'll go for it soon," I say. "I promise." Alyxa flicks at Mrs. Boontide's cheeks and nose. "I just want us to be dead..." she says.

I pick the maggots out of the old woman's wounds and swallow them without chewing.

"Come here," Thomas screams at Alyxa. "Take your clothes off and come to me."

We are lying in bed, half of the c.o.c.kroach boys are gone on a run, and Thomas has his wild twisty voice testing our obedience to him.

"Alyxa, my patience is a weak little thread. Come here quickly."

"I'm not going to f.u.c.k you," she tells him, calm and stern.

"Get over here!" his voice grinding into the back of his throat.

She stands and drops her clothes, her naked smells forcing me to look in the other direction. By the way she walks to him, I can tell she has her lemon knives hidden between her legs.

"After all this time, you now want to f.u.c.k me."

Thomas laughs. "I'm not going to f.u.c.k you," raises an eyebrow. "But Timmy here wants you to f.u.c.k him. He's been begging me to make you take his virginity for so long... I just can't refuse him anymore."

Alyxa chuckles. "You're joking."

This is no joke. I stand up.

The other two c.o.c.kroach boys lunge for me and tackle me to the ground, hard knees in the back of my neck, vision getting dizzy. The hole where my ear used to be opens up and spills blood onto the cement.

"I never joke, Alyxa," Thomas says. "You are a birthday present, from me to him. Please be a nice present and give yourself with a smile."

Thomas grabs hold of her shoulders and pushes her to the skinny boy in the corner. "Are you ready, Timmy? Beautiful little Timmy..."

The boy nods furiously and Alyxa struggles against Thomas.

Trying to hold her still, he says, "If you don't behave yourself, I will have to give presents to all the boys."

"You're sick," she says. "He's just a boy."

"Yes, that's why he wants you. He's going through that phase in his life. Only boys want women."

Alyxa slips to the ground and jerks her eyes at me. She is starting to tear. Thomas has overpowered her arms and she cannot reach the lemon knives she has hidden. I struggle to get off the ground, but the c.o.c.kroach boys bend my legs and arms back until they hear high-pitched squeals coming from me.

"Your man over there is not really a man," says Thomas. "I thought he was a man a long time ago, when I loved him. I wanted him so badly, but he rejected me. Because of you. That's when I realized he wasn't a man at all. Just a boy. No more than any of these teenagers we share the walls with. A little worthless boy. How can a man love a boy? Only women love boys."

He pulls my lover's arms, dragging her. "But some boys, like my Timmy and my Paul, have the ability to someday become men. Like caterpillars becoming b.u.t.terflies."

Thomas stops tugging on Alyxa, pausing to gaze into Timmy's eyes. The boy's goggles shine the fire light back into his leader's smile. They are frozen long enough for Alyxa to pull the lemon knives out of her secret places and stab Thomas in the inside of his leg.

A deep scream and Thomas is thrown to the ground, blood leaking down his legs.

The c.o.c.kroach boys leap from me and charge Alyxa, I catch one of their ankles, but his foot slips through. They move in silence, drawing sharp blades longer than Alyxa's, rise them high above her and then they pause. They are frozen in mid-strike.

"Don't move," Alyxa says, calmly.

I get up. Move to a better view. A lemon knife is at each of their throats, one of them is partially inside a boy's neck, just a twitch away from the jugular.

Thomas grabs a pipe from Timmy's feet and lifts it like a baseball bat.

"Drop it, Thomas," Alyxa tells him. "Or they'll both die right here in front of you."

"You wouldn't," Thomas puts the pipe down slowly. "They're only children."

"We're all children," Alyxa tells him, inching the blades deeper into their necks.

"Don't, please," Thomas cries.

His body folds into a ball. He screams, "Let them go now!"