This – this is what he had come so far for. This thing, this half-man half-changeling creature laying helplessly in bed was what Mitzi had risked his life for? Venturing into uncharted locations along the dreaded Broadway Boulevard? He needed escape, this was all unreal. He couldn’t look at the dying thing in front of him; the long bony arms somehow arranged Christ-like, so heavy though they were so thin nailed to the flimsy, soiled sheets. But he wasn’t Christian, no, he wasn’t anything. His nose was Jewish, without a doubt, and Mitzi figured his last name was that of a Jew’s anyways. But his head was swathed in a mass of blonde hair, and his jaw-line gave him the air of something Nordic. His eyes strangely slanted and stretched, revealing Asian roots. He was a meld of so many ethnicities, there was no qualifying this man; he was them all. But Katz – no, you couldn’t call him Katz anymore – was a wasted and withered swell of fleshy bone that resembled nothing in particular of a race but what is inherently part of every race: the carcass, the bare minimum, the very thing that even after death every race, color, ethnicity came down to: a collection of bones. It was sick, this whole place was sick.
The quilted man broke the silence: “So he is not dead, then?”
“No. He is not dead.” This revelation brought Matt back to the situation at hand: the recovery of Katz. Mitzi effortlessly scooped the bundle – sheets and all – into his arms and rushed him to the occupied stretcher in the back of the Mark III. A crowd had formed outside of Katz’s station. Along with the Pilgrims, Virgil and Dogbert, and the surviving native, there stood before the travelers at least one hundred and fifty homeless men. There were there to see their oppressor off – but they didn’t smile, they didn’t rejoice in his near-death, rather, they stood there amidst the decaying cityscape expressionless as always, each of them as torn and tattered as the next. They parted beneath the smiling decapitated heads looking in on everything, saying ‘I told you this day would come,’ as Mitzi whisked a dying fiend in his arms near their impassive faces. Some would reach out and try to touch the soiled linen, but most just stared onwards.
Meanwhile, Katz had livened and begun to open his eyes. The whites were yellow. Jaundice, Mitzi thought, that means liver failure. He is almost there. From some unknown force, the heap of wiry flesh fought back against Mitzi, clawing with unprecedented strength at the confining linens. Why would a man want to escape earnestly from his savior’s breast?
“Let me go you fool…” came a soft command from the suddenly animated bundle, “I must get back… let go.”
“Mr. Katz – we must take you back to head quarters – “ Mitzi tried to explain. The bundle was now violently trying to free itself, and becoming quite successful. Mitzi dropped to one knee – the man must have weighed no more than 120 pounds at must have been more than seven feet tall, but his drive was staggering. Katz’s nails grasped whatever was fixed into the ground: cement, re-barb, electrical cord, whatever he could clench. The fragile nails broke on any one of this, but he continued mercilessly.
“I must get back to my stores. There is much more to be had!”
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