Cerulean flinched. "What?"
Julio just looked at him. He still had his low, surly stare, but now there was real menace behind it. Cerulean's heart throbbed in his chest. There was something in Julio's tone that terrified him. A secret confidence.
"I would never do that."
Julio rose off the stool. "There's a lot you don't know, Robert, about our glorious apocalypse. I'm going to show you. And then you're going to help me bring it all down."
"I never will."
Julio looked at him, as if passing judgment, then dropped down out of the van and started to shut the doors.
"Wait!" Cerulean called. "At least tell me where we're going."
"Into the past," Julio answered, slamming the doors shut and plunging Cerulean back into darkness. "All the way to the beginning."
4. THE BEGINNING
Robert was alive.
It took him some time to realize it, coming up to consciousness through a haze of methadone fog. Pieces of the night before came back gradually; of watching the end of the world play out on live television as channel after channel went dark, as news anchors one after another suddenly stopped talking and their skin went deathly pale, as their eyes began to glow with a haunting inner light.
Zombies.
The wave of infection had raced around the world, starting somewhere in the Far East, China or Thailand, and never stopping. Whole countries fell silent one by one. Panic filled the Internet, broad emergency powers were declared, but none of it did a thing. Robert watched helpless as the infection front drew nearer, broached the Pacific followed by the Atlantic, then began chewing into America.
It broke over Memphis.
Facebook went silent. Twitter went silent. At the last he was alone, the only person sending out message after message in the global tweetstream, watching as his SOS messages rose up to the top of the trending lists and held position.
Nobody else in the world was tweeting.
Then came the sounds from above; his mother waking. He'd been trying to wake her up for hours already, but shouting brought on the migraines and he couldn't do it loud or for very long. Now though she was awake, thumping around upstairs without speaking. She'd reached the basement door, and he'd craned his neck to look up the stairs, waiting for the handle to turn.
Instead the thumping began. It didn't end until the end came.
He sat up in bed, rubbing his temples and remembering that the migraines were gone. Sometime in the middle of the night, around the time his mother had first turned, the weight of his demon pressing down had disappeared. He could move, think and feel free and clear.
And now he was alive.
It seemed impossible. He remembered his mother finally breaking through the basement door and charging the steps. He'd said goodbye to Amo on the phone, injected the methadone overdose and drifted away expecting to never wake up again, but now here he was.
It made no sense.
He pushed himself to a sitting position and scanned the dark basement, lit only by faint moonlight leaking in from the broken door above. He picked out his trophy cabinet, the sideboard, his wheelchair coated in dust in the corner, the stairs and…
It took him a moment to realize what he was seeing, and a moment longer to accept it was real. The floor was coated with bodies. His breath stopped in his throat. Just a day ago the demon would have swallowed him up in migraines to see something this outlandish. There were dozens of bodies filling the basement from wall to wall; curled around his dripstand and the legs of his bed like a floodtide, bodies and limbs interwoven like strange blocks in a game of Tetris, covering every inch of concrete floor like a human carpet.
Zombies in his room.
Panic hit, but hit softly, without the weight of the demon. He pushed out a quiet breath, pulled one in, and studied the bodies, trying to figure out some reason why they hadn't eaten him alive. He scanned their contours looking for his mother, wondering if she'd somehow fought them off, but in the dim light filtering down from above they all looked the same.
How was he alive?
He imagined this surge of the infected breaking their way in, charging down the stairs toward him, then just lying down on the floor. It didn't make sense.
Quietly he reached for the clock on his nightstand; it read 9:42pm. He'd been out for over twelve hours, mercifully short given how much methadone he'd taken. That was twelve hours during which they could have feasted on him, and hadn't.
His mind flashed back to his call with Amo; alone in New York, he'd been chased down to Manhattan and back by a horde of the infected. The dead. Robert had advised him to lay low, to get safe, then to find Lara. What advice would he give in this situation? Play dead? For how long?
Just then one of them moved. Robert froze. It was a larger figure in the middle, a man. One arm came up, the other. His torso bolted upright. Robert barely stopped a gasp from escaping as the man's eyes opened up to shine like white headlights. His head roamed like he was scenting the air. Robert became aware of the communal breath of the infected, rasping in and out like a single lung. He steeled himself for the inevitable.
Perhaps the methadone in his system had protected him; the scent of it had turned these zombies off. Now it was wearing off, and they were hungry, and…
The man turned to the stairs. He took a step, stumbling over other bodies, then another.
He wasn't coming? He wasn't hungry?
Robert just stared as his tottering silhouette went, disbelieving what he was seeing. This didn't happen in the movies. The man lurched and hit the steps and started up. Each footfall was a thud. Robert was entranced.
Then the floor of his basement came alive, with limbs uncurling and bodies pushing themselves to stand. Surely now they'd come. He squeezed in tight, silent breaths as they rose; moving crookedly, awkwardly, silently, though in a strange, almost balletic synchronization. They rose and their eyes opened and the light within illuminated his sad, gray cell of the last year, and as one they turned toward the stairs.
They didn't come for him.
He watched them go wordlessly, thumping up the stairs. He watched and barely breathed until the last of them trudged out of the basement they'd worked so hard to break into, leaving only silence behind. There was no hum of the AC running, no low buzz of his computer's fan, no drone of traffic in the street above; just silence.
It was surreal.
He let out a shaky breath. It felt like a dream. Had they ever even been in here? The door was still hanging off its hinges though. There was the occasional sound from above as they bumped off the walls on the way out.
This was real. He had no idea what it meant.
Seized by a sudden urge, he pulled the covers back to study his body in the moonlight. His guts weren't hanging out. His legs hadn't been bitten off at the knee. There wasn't a spot of blood anywhere; they hadn't even touched him.
Again he thought of Amo.
He leaned out over the edge of the bed; his cell phone was underneath, skittered out of reach when he'd dropped it. He peeled the covers all the way back to reveal his thin, wasted legs, and guided them nervelessly off the bed. No one else was coming, now, and with the demon gone, he could move.
Hehad to move. He gripped the bed-frame, took a deep breath and slithered off the edge. For a moment his atrophied grip faltered and he almost fell, but he managed to guide his weight into an untidy slump. Sweat popped up on his forehead despite the chill of the cement floor.
He gathered his phone; the battery was down but the bright screen was a welcome comfort. He clicked through to the last calls on Skype and tried to raise Amo again, but it didn't ring. He tried to get the Internet but the Wifi was dead. Likewise with the lights and the AC; the power had gone out some time in the day.
"Hello," he said softly, not sure who he was calling to. "Mom?"
No answer came.
His eyes went to the wheelchair. He looked to the stairs. His mother had never gotten round to having the elevator inst
alled; not with him bed-bound. He was going to have to crawl.
It was harder than he'd thought. He'd grown so weak, and the concrete floor swiftly bruised up his sallow elbows, but there was no time to waste now. Thoughts of Amo filled his mind. He was alone in New York; only Robert knew that. He had to help him. He knew well what kind of cost despair could bring.
He dressed quickly and tied a length of computer cable around the wheelchair. At he stairs he sat with his back facing them, put his palms on the bottom step and lifted. It was barely even a lift at all, nothing compared to arm-stands he used to do on the edge of the dive platform, but stil his arms shook and fresh sweat popped out on his forehead.
He made. He counted the rest. Only fourteen more.
By the top he was gasping, trembling all over and drenched in sweat. A few times he'd almost overbalanced and fallen, without any strength in his legs to resist. He didn't want to think about what the result of such a fall would be, so he didn't. Instead he peeled off his hoodie and lay back in the hall, looking out through the front door to the empty street.
It was dark out, and a light wind blew the trees across the road. A pale figure loped by at a jog, lighting its way with its eyes.
The wheelchair came up easily enough, reeled in step by bouncing step on the cord, until it sat in the hall beside him. He pushed it into the kitchen, where he used the table to pull himself up onto the chair's gray leather seat.
A baby step, Amo would have said. A baby victory.
He tried the wheels and they rolled smoothly. It felt good to move. At the door he looked out; the first few leaves of fall lay dappled across the asphalt, like splotches of blood on dark waters. The duplexes opposite were as still as sentinels, watching over him. None of the streetlights were lit.
There was no sign of his mother. He thought about calling for her but couldn't see the point. She was gone. Amo was not.
He dropped off the step and rolled down to the sidewalk. It didn't take long to find a car with the keys in the ignition and gas in the tank, a tricked-out silver BMW. He scavenged weedy yards for two whiffle bats, duct-taped them to the gas and the brake pedals, then manhandled the wheelchair into the back seat and himself into the front.
The engine revved and the high beams winked on to bathe the leaf-strewn street in sterile white light. In the rear-view mirror he could only see a few yards illuminated in his red brake lights. That was all that remained of Frayser, now, perhaps all that anyone would ever know, if this infection was permanent.
It didn't matter now. He remembered the terror in Amo's voice, despite which he'd offered to come save Robert from his basement cell. He could do no less, and pressed down on the gas.
5. NEW YORK
New York was on fire when he arrived, two days later.
All he saw the first night was the thin slice of America his headlights illuminated; shuttered shop fronts and the washed-out entrances to malls, dark alleys passing by like dry veins, parking lots that stretched away as endless silver-tinged deserts, their contours just discernible by the light of the moon, and long dark expanses of nothing in between towns, marking the outer edge of a wilderness that went on forever.
There was not a single electric light on anywhere, not in any of the tenement buildings in the little towns he rolled through, not on the I-40 toll booths or in roadside burger shacks, motels or bars. The roads were full of motionless cars, dropped like heavy metal hailstones from the sky. In places they had crashed into each other, forcing him to weave between them, telling a story of the infection's speed. Cubes of shattered glass lay sprayed like diamonds across the road. Cars had flipped onto their roofs after head-on collisions, the trajectories of which Robert would work through backwards as he passed.
Some were smoking still, reduced to skeletons of corroded white char. He breathed in the smell of ash and the chemical stink of burnt plastic seats and drove on.
There were infected people in pockets, wan pale figures emerging from the darkness and quickly receding behind. Many tried to follow him, running in his wake like glowing white dogs, though on clear stretches he sped away, leaving their pale figures to fade in the rear-view mirror.
Around 5am the first day he hit the edge of Nashville. He didn't feel hungry, though he was tired; a deep, bone-weary kind of exhaustion. For a year he'd barely moved, and now this. The odometer said he'd covered 212 miles. He rolled into a Big Eastern motel and switched the BMW off, dropping him into near complete darkness but for a few tiny lights on the dash. The engine ticked steadily as it began to cool.
He tilted the seat and laid back, then chewed on a single sandwich before giving it up as a lost cause; he wasn't even hungry. He drank a few gulps of water and closed his eyes.
When he woke it was steamy and hot in the car, and pale faces pressed against the windows on all sides like Halloween wallpaper. The white glow from their eyes lit the interior, and their synchronized breathing rocked the vehicle from left to right, like a lullaby.
He watched them for a time. They were all races, genders and ages, bleached back to the color of pale milk. This was what the end of the world looked like, but he didn't feel any sense of threat. He thought back to all the footage he'd seen through that first long night, when he'd never actually seen them attack.
"Hi," he said quietly, pressing one palm to the glass. Their eyes tracked the movement like paintings in a haunted house.
He put the car in reverse and backed up slowly. The ones in back shuffled awkwardly but gradually split to the sides, until the crowd thinned enough to allow the bright midday sun in.
Ahead of him lay clear highway. In back the infected throng filled the Big Eastern's parking lot, probably thousands strong and lapping closer as he watched. He didn't watch any longer and pushed down on the gas.
Nashville passed him by thirty minutes later, onto a barren stretch of I-40 where he stopped to refill the gas tank. A plane wreck south of Lebanon slowed him briefly, spread across I-40 like a great swatted fly, and he pushed through broken rows of seats and odd bits of twisted metal like a snowplow. At the eastern edge of Tennessee he took another nap, waking chilly and confused in the early morning of his second day, with more infected people around him like ghosts in the ruins of the world.
He crossed into Virginia after the dawn, passed Maryland around noon. The pale crowds were more numerous here, and he imagined all the East Coast cities emptying out like huge decanters. He finished the last stretch to New York in a kind of fugue, half-asleep at the wheel as dusk set in. He came in on I-78 through a warren of neighborhoods and little towns, following signs for Manhattan.
A bridge carried him over Newark Bay to Jersey City, where he zagged north and pulled over to the waterfront before the last vestige of light faded from the sky. There he sat gazing at the towering skyline of New York, all dark silhouettes against pink clouds, on fire.
A thick plume of greasy smoke rose up from near the Empire State Building, illuminated by a swathe of orange flames in the streets below. It set a deep fear burning in his belly, that something terrible had happened to Amo already.
* * *
Holland Tunnel was blocked a few hundred feet in and he couldn't get through. His headlights illuminated a butter-churn of vehicles all cramped and pressed together. If he'd had legs he could climb through easily. Perhaps even now he could try, but it would be madness to crawl over so much jagged metal and glass in the pitch black. He'd cut himself to ribbons and bleed out without even knowing it.
He reversed back out, halting at the water's edge. The Hudson flowed by uncaring, dark and fast. Already the pink of sunset was fading from the sky, though the flames still burned high on Manhattan Island, their light reflecting off the plumes of smoke and ash.
He studied a map of New York he'd picked up in a conveniene store; the George Washington Bridge was the closest, fifteen miles north. Chances were good it was just as clogged as the Holland Tunnel, but he didn't have a choice.
It took five hours. The b
uilt-up city roads were at most one or two lanes wide, with narrow curbs and buildings stacked right up to the sidewalk, offering no space to bypass all the cars, buses, semis and motorbikes lying around.
He tried to plow through but the BMW wasn't powerful enough to shove other vehicles out of the way, so he had to constantly backtrack, kept company by a growing swarm of zombie bodies. They pressed up to his glass whenever he stopped, growing thicker as the night went by, until at last at four in the morning they were so tightly pressed around him, wedged into an intersection somewhere in Union City, he could no longer move at all.
Pushing the gas just spun his tires, filling the car with the stink of burning rubber. He tried to pry a way free, but there were too many.
He was trapped.
* * *
He slept fitfully through the night, dreaming of Amo burning atop a pyre of bodies, just like the image in his comic. Some time after dawn the throng started to clear, and he eased the BMW through, rolling along streets bathed in warm mid-summer light. Soon enough he sat at the on-ramp to the George Washington Bridge, but it was just as crowded as Lincoln Tunnel.
He needed a bigger vehicle.
At the New Jersey Fire Department station he switched into a fire engine. It was a high haul to get into the seat, and pulling his chair up after him was tough. The key was in the ignition and sparked at his first try.
He picked up speed in the approach and charged the bridge like a battering ram.
CRUNCH
The engine plowed through for about fifty feet before its momentum died out, ramming vehicles to either side. The jolt of the seat belt across his chest felt good. He reversed and charged again, shearing cars against the bridge railings.
He forced his way over George Washington Bridge in a little over an hour, making landfall on Manhattan Island giddy with adrenaline. The infected were waiting for him, and he rolled on through, punching his way east along and south until he found the first signs of the last night's fire.
The Last Mayor Box Set 1 Page 46
