Empire's End by David Dunwoody

remaining meat, spitting and
gnashing in a frenzy of blood.
    Eviscerato still wore his old suit, the
crimson vest and top hat, even his cane—a handy bludgeon—and he
hadn’t lost his showman swagger either. The dancer among the dead,
they’d called him. He still moved with a sort of grace uncommon in
thee dead. There were no memories of his former life, at least not
in his mind; but his muscles remembered that peculiar gait with
which he walked, and a certain instinct told him to smile grandly
in the face of a large crowd. So he often came at his victims with
an ear-to-ear grin, lipless and rotten, cane swinging in the
moonlight.
    They were animals, the lot of them; but
preserved in each member of Eviscerato’s circus was a sense of
identity. The Strongman and the Fakir and the Geek each knew his
place.
    And they all followed Eviscerato—who, in
turn, had been following the withdrawal, the human convoys heading
north. With those convoys long gone he pressed on, guided by am
intuition which told him that there was a great nest of living
flesh at the end of this long and bloody road.
    There, they would feast until their bellies
burst.
     

Tales from the Badlands / The Rat King
     
    The joke was that they called it Old New
York. Some people didn’t get it, some people didn’t know history
and didn’t care to know about the world before, and that was fine.
But for those looking for a little light in the world after, for a
little humor in the burnt-out labyrinth, the dust-swept
amphitheater of silence, the concrete-and-steel canyons of the dead
island—they called it Old New York and maybe cracked a smile.
    101 years or so out from the Year of the
Plague, the Last Day, End Time, Old New York was a sun-bleached
husk of a city. Nature had reclaimed what it wanted, but it had
left a lot of the skyscrapers and sewers and streets to themselves,
a decaying spectacle bespeaking an ancient fallen empire. The
skeletons of monolithic business enterprises and government
concerns loomed over ruptured veins of asphalt and seas of dirt and
glass. Loomed over nothing.
    “So what are we looking for?” asked Keane. He
was perched on a rusted-out hulk that had once been some piece of
construction equipment. It was now host to an ecosystem of plants
and insects that had infested its limbs and guts and built kingdoms
of their own. It was almost like a little hill, this so-called
“Caterpillar” entrenched in earth somewhere in the former
Manhattan.
    “Anything,” answered Alex, balancing his axe
on his right shoulder while trying to sort through the torches
under his left arm. “Anything we can use.”
    “Or eat?”
    “If you want to hunt, let’s hunt. I don’t
know if we’ll find anything edible in these streets, but let’s
hunt.”
    “Well, I am hungry.”
    “Why’d they only send three of us?” asked
Jarrett.
    “Because this is pointless. All of this,”
said Keane, gesturing to the ghost city around them, “and there
ain’t shit worth taking. Not anymore.”
    “At least it’s empty,” Jarrett said.
    “We don’t know that,” warned Alex.
    “If there are any rotters here, they’re
starved down to fuckin’ skin and bones. They gotta eat just like
us, and just like us, they don’t eat.” Keane held an aluminum bat,
a relic from a time when there was play. It was caked with rust,
and other things rust-colored, and he wielded it like an extension
of his arm. “All right. Look, Alex, we know this city’s been
stripped bare... If there’s anything here, it’s under.”
    “Under?”
    “Ol’ New York is supposed to have a whole
other city beneath it—train tunnels, sewers, basements and
connections that ain’t on any of our maps. There might be some real
worthwhile stuff down there. Stuff locked up even before Plague
Year. Hell, there could be a goldmine down there.”
    “We’re just looking for basic supplies—”
    “Yeah, I know,” Keane snapped. “We’re just
trying to get by. Make it to the next