It was a blackened body near the corner of 3rd and East 112th street, deep in Harlem, lying in the middle of the road. The lights in its eyes had gone out, and a trail of ashy footsteps led away back down a street that looked otherwise normal: a parked taxi, a yellow fire hydrant, a row of brightly colored newspaper boxes. The display window of a clothes shop called Hartegan's featured a Daniel Boone-like figure wearing a top hat. Then there was this.
The smell wafted through the open window, and he rolled it up.
He drove on. Half a block further he found three more bodies, baked and half-melted onto the asphalt. They too had left ashy footsteps behind them.
"Oh, Amo," Robert mumbled. The roasted, greasy smell was in the cab with him now. He tied a kerchief around his mouth and stopped up the vents. He didn't want to go further, but didn't see any other choice.
Near East 110th street there was a silvery patch of seven or eight bodies, dissolved like slugs lying on salt, beginning a trail that expanded onward to fill out the road.
Robert stopped the engine. He couldn't drive on without crushing bodies under the wheels. They were everywhere; a multicolored soup of burnt flesh and bones, like bacteria beds in Yellowstone Park. There were peaks where bodies had heaped up and valleys between them. The stench was overwhelming in the cab. Flies beat at his windows like a droning black sandstorm.
"What did you do?" he whispered, again and again as though asking would take some of this horror away. This wasn't an accident; no ruptured gas mains would have caused this, no fallen planes. The only time he'd seen the infected gather like this, they'd been geathered around him.
Amo had done this.
His stomach wrung itself tight. Flies spat at the glass by his elbow like black popcorn. He saw his face in the rear-view mirror, the skin paled like an infected. Shock was eating into him. Maybe he was turning into one of them, to be burnt like the rest. Maybe Amo was already dead, burned to death with his victims.
Then there was a sound; far-off but stark.
BOOM
Robert twisted toward it but saw no sign of an explosion. Another came, then another, and though he didn't know for sure, each one sounded like Amo's name hammered onto the air.
BOOM
BOOM
BOOM
Feeling woolly and thick-tongued, he pulled the fire engine back, turned it on 110th and drove over to 7th Avenue, rolling down the windows to clear the foul taste of death from the cab. Starting south he heard the ratatatatat of automatic gunfire. Far ahead down the canyon of skyscrapers a tiny fireball plumed up.
"Stop, Amo," he whispered, and drove the fire engine on.
6. TIMES SQUARE
He found Amo at the edge of Times Square, standing atop a long white RV facing south and spraying bullets from a machine gun into the ranks of a horde of infected.
Robert stopped the fire engine at the intersection with West 48th Street a full block away and stared. The sound of the gun pummeled the air like a drill, mowing down line after line of stumbling bodies.
RATATATATATAT
He was killing them. It was Amo. He had his back turned but it was undeniably Amo; a hipsterish figure in khaki pants and a polo shirt just like his Deepcraft avatar, surrounded by the banality of Times Square's blank video screens. Now he was killing people in their hundreds.
It was horrific.
The infected rushed up at his RV like a tide and Amo killed them. His RV rooftop was walled with red ammo crates stacked two high, like sandbags in a machine gun nest, and he constantly ducked in and out of them to gather fresh munitions.
Bullet-ruptured bodies lay everywhere, forming a landscape of the dead that coated the road like a carpet all the way up to Robert on West 48th. In places there were sooty clearings where grenades or rockets must have exploded, cratering the asphalt and blasting bodies into bits. Blood ran over the yellow parking lines at the curbs and dripped silently down into drains.
His mouth was dry. The engine couldn't much further over the mounded bodies. This was worse than the fire, because it was happening right now, and Robert couldn't take his eyes off it. He couldn't hear anything but the ratatatatat of the gun, couldn't smell anything but the metallic stench of blood.
"Amo!" he shouted, but his voice was drowned beneath the thunder of automatic gunfire. Another fireball bloomed like a horrible flower a street away, biting bodies out of the tide.
He slammed down on the horn.
HOOOOOOOONK
It rang out but wasn't loud enough. The sound up on the RV with the bullets, infected and adrenaline had to be overwhelming. Robert leaned out of the window and shouted at the top of his voice, but Amo didn't turn.
He gunned the engine forward. Bodies flattened under its thick tires, skulls popped like watermelons. He leaned on the horn so he wouldn't have to hear bones crunch under the tires.
HOOOOOOONK
Soon it hit a drift of bodies so thick that it couldn't bull through. Robert tried rolling back and charging but couldn't get any momentum on the slippery asphalt; his front wheels just digging into bodies at the bottom of the heap.
Still Amo kept shooting; now Robert could feel the vibration rising up through the ground. He opened the door and lowered his useless legs down to the street. The wheelchair would be useless; he had to crawl.
His elbows came down in cold puddled blood. His hip was in it, his fingers were in it, his eyes stung with the bitter tang of ammonia and shivers ran down his back.
He began to crawl up a narrow valley in the heaped bodies. Amo's gunfire became a deep thrum in his belly. He rubbed tears from his eyes and kept on, clambering up arms and legs in a body heap which flexed under his weight. Broken hips twisted and torsos wheezed like bellows.
From atop the heap the landscape extended like a battlefield. He tumbled down bodies to the other side, crawling past infected people that were still half-alive, round a heap of them against a yellow school bus, over a rocket crater where the road was still warm.
RATATATATAT
The sound of gunfire grew and now he could smell the gunpowder in the air. Soon the RV was before him.
RATATATATAT, said Amo's guns, picking away at the trudging horde. BOOM, said his rocket launcher.
Robert pounded at the RV's side. He could barely reach above the wheels to hit the metal body. His shoulders trembled and his supporting hand slipped on the road, dropping him to smack his chin off a dead skull.
RATATATATAT
BOOM
RATATATATAT
He slid around the back of the RV looking for a way to climb on top; there was a ladder and he fumbled at the lower rungs but he didn't have the strength to pull himself up. He slithered back to the side.
"Amo!" he shouted, waving his arms and fighting to be heard above the roar of the gun. "Amo!"
Amo's face bobbed in profile above the ammo crate fort. His dark hair was swept back from a face grim with dark lines of smoke, sweat and gunpowder. He looked like a grizzled war veteran with a thousand yard stare, focused on a horizon point beyond the ocean of charging bodies, trying to shoot his way through them all. He looked like the last man alive after the apocalypse, given over to despair.
"Amo!" Robert shouted at the top of his lungs. "You don't need to do this! Stop, for God's sake, stop!"
The shooting stopped.
It took Robert a moment to recognize the emptiness in the air, like a vacuum sucking at his ears. He heard his own voice calling out and his own heart banging hard in the silence.
Amo had heard. He stood surveying the wasteland of the dead; bodies thrown everywhere, thousands or tens of thousands in callous piles, but the grim expression of defeat was now gone from his face. Now he looked faintly amused.
This was the Amo Robert remembered, who'd saved him in Deepcraft, who any minute would climb down and together they'd plan a way to move beyond. Robert sucked in a breath to shout and this time be heard. It wasn't too late.
"Amo!"
At the same time there was
one final BANG.
Fluid splashed across Robert's face. There was a thump from the RV as Amo's body dropped to the roof, and Robert stared at the fresh blood on his chest and hands. Realization hit and sucked the air out of his lungs. Amo had just shot himself in the head.
7. NUMB
He awoke in a ditch, shivering and looking up at a murky gray sky.
Clouds made shapes like kidneys and livers overhead. The sun was an eyeball and all the sky was blood; a delightful buffet for cannibals. From nearby he heard the indicator light of the fire engine still clicking. It hurt to turn his head but he looked and laughed. The engine was tilted into the ditch at a crazy angle with its fat red ass up in the air.
Everything had gone to shit.
He'd tried to climb the RV in Times Square, hoping to see Amo, perhaps to bury him, but he hadn't been able to. There weren't enough grips. His arms were too weak. He couldn't even do that much.
What was he now?
He surveyed his body, like a foreign land in the ditch. His shirt was gone and he was filthy after smearing brackish ditch water all over himself, trying to wipe away the blood. Now he stank of the ditch.
He barely remembered the hours after New York; a world of road signs, clouds and wandering gray bodies. He'd driven for as long as he could, until the engine ran out of gas and dived into the ditch. A perfect arm-stand, he thought. Triple flip with pike.
He looked up to the sky. The demon was up there somewhere, grinning down.
"This is what you wanted," he shouted up at the sky, spreading his arms. "I'm here, drowning in the shit. What now?"
* * *
He crawled.
The wheelchair was another world that he didn't want, and cars weren't for him any more either; he didn't deserve them. Instead he crawled into the night, tearing his knees and elbows on the asphalt, but he didn't care.
Amo was dead. The world was dead. Everything was falling apart.
He woke to dusty summer rain falling off him in splashes.
"You want to watch?" he called out to infected that crossed his path, always heading east to west, east to west. "Come on over. I'll dive for you too."
They came over and lay beside him, as if in sympathy, just like in Memphis. They didn't try to hurt him. Everythig Amo had done was unnecessary.
When he crawled, they walked along by his side. They were fair company. Once he found himself atop a small hill set back from the road, looking over the spewed wreck of a passenger jet. A cow was standing by one of the huge engines chewing the cud, while another cow lay on its side with its belly torn open and three infected hip deep inside it, eating.
"Draw that in your comic, Amo," he said. "That's the apocalypse for you."
He crawled on, and sometimes Amo crawled beside him.
"How many of them did I get?" Amo asked. "Was it a lot?"
"Millions," Robert whispered in reply. "All of them."
"Billions?" Amo asked hopefully.
Robert laughed. His throat was dry. How long was it since he'd drunk or eaten anything? Most of his pants had torn off, his shirt too. His fingers and elbows and knees were a mess of scratches and bruises. In moments of lucidity he wondered if he was dying, and dived deeper.
"How much further?" Amo asked by his side.
"Thirty-three feet," he answered, "two seconds of flight down to concrete."
Amo blurred into the demon by his side. They talked about girls; long rambling conversations that didn't make sense but just kept on going.
An infected person wandered at his side, its booted feet crunching on shattered glass.
"Where are you going?" he asked it.
Amo walked beside it with one arm over its shoulders and the other held behind his back, fingers crossed.
"I'm just pretending to be his friend," Amo whispered, winking. "I'll take him up the road then blow his head off when he isn't looking."
"Where's he going?" Robert asked. He blinked his dry eyes and looked back down the twisty highway. That was south. This was north, and the infected was headed north. Normally they went west.
On an impulse he grabbed its leg. It tripped flat on its face.
Amo laughed. "Good one. Now stave in his head."
Robert just held on. There was no reason for it, but he didn't want to let go. Perhaps he didn't want to be alone, not with Amo and his laughing, his violence and his madness. The infected man started to crawl, pushing with his legs and pulling with his arms, and Robert held on, so his body scraped along the ground in the infected's wake.
Amo laughed.
"Chariot of fire!" he crooned. "You're just like Ben Hur. Take it around the corner and win the giant golden eggs!"
Robert held on until his fingers gave out. It had felt good. Good to move, good to not be so completely alone.
"You can't be serious," Amo said, aghast. "Instead of me?"
"You're a mass-killer," Robert mumbled, "I can't-"
He scanned the detritus of a nearby car wreck. There was a spool of black rope and a piece of the back seat. They seemed like signs from above.
"Seriously?" Amo asked again.
He tied himself to the backseat like Odysseus to his mast. His weary arms wove lines round his body and the seat, wrapping himself like a fly in a spider's web. Then he waited for the infected to come.
A time later, it was raining. Thick drops fell on his body like heavy metal from a cauldron. Robert lassoed a passing band of infected. He roped two around the necks before the group was out of range. The ropes caught as they walked on, pulling them both over backwards. They got up and leaned forward and the lines tightened, the backseat jerked, scraped and moved.
Robert lay back and watched the clouds drifting by, while the rain fell and washed away the blood and muck, and his steeds bent smoothly to their role as chariot-pullers.
Amo was left behind, calling out, "Seriously?"
* * *
He slept through the countryside. The world was a blur of roads, bushes and towns. In the distance snowy mountains rose up. He saw a sign for Maine, the Pine Tree State. Hunger and thirst were like the distant cry of the demon, so deep inside, but he didn't really care.
He let himself grow weaker. There were bedsores on his thighs but they didn't matter. His body thinned out, his skin tone grew pale. Perhaps his eyes were glowing.
"Where are you going?" he asked his sled-pullers. His voice was a croak. His teeth were loose in his gums and his tongue felt obscenely dry, like a squirrel's tail that flicked around of its own accord.
Then they arrived.
8. MATTHEW
It was a mountain. The great bluish peak hung like a baseball cap atop the world. Of course, this was the new stairway to heaven. Robert hummed a few bars before he forgot the tune.
He twisted his wiry neck to take in the surrounding foothills. There was a curved road nearby but they weren't on it. They had emerged from a forest and were now scraping through a tilted field of low grasses and sweet purple wildflowers. Other gray wanderers traipsed across it.
With a great effort Robert hoisted himself to his elbows to look ahead. The foothills rose steeply out of the forest like waves, rising toward the stately sweep of the mountain's solid rock ridges. Way up ahead, at least three meadows and a scree-slide distant, there was a strange gray concrete block as big as a house standing in the middle of a grassy field, like a bizarre piece of modern art. Around it milled hundreds of the infected.
He blinked; dry lids rasping down then up.
Not hundreds, thousands. They looked like an ocean of gray buoying up a strange futuristic ship. The gray block was as tall as a duplex, but featureless with no windows or doors he could see; no markings beside a black ladder running up one side and a black antenna rising from its roof.
The infected were beating at its walls, and the sound of their flesh and bone smacking against solid concrete reminded him of Amo's slaughter. He could feel the thrum of their assault through the ground even this far away, and it carried
him back to New York.
His back gave out and he sagged onto the torn seat. Perhaps this was what it all came down to.
The chariot-sled drove on. He drifted in and out of consciousness, watching as faster members of the infected overtook them, as slower ones fell behind. There were more of them now; old women and young women, black folks and white folks and Asians, all turned gray and white-eyed.
They crossed the three meadows and the scree together. They pulled him over the blacktop road, until the throng folded him in. The sledge slowed as it bumped off the dead. Some of them got caught on the front and dragged along the sides.
"Get your own chariot," Robert mumbled at them, "this is mine."
One of them brushed his arm, and he looked at the stain of fresh blood there like it was something magical. Was Amo here too, continuining the slaughter? He looked up but he could barely see the sky anymore, there were so many bodies clustered like tightly-pressed trees; dead bodies that were dead and dead bodies that kept moving.
He saw bullet holes in flesh, just like in Times Square.
"Amo?" he called feebly, no longer certain about what he was seeing or where he was. "Is that you?"
One corpse had a bullet hole in its face, leaving a hollow, holy eye. Its throat had another hole. Someone stepped on his sledge beside his head.
"Hey," he mumbled.
The sled slowed to a trickle as the tide of their bodies thickened; swaying and pressing tighter. One of the infected stepped on his head. His nose crushed against the hard fabric and set off blooms of color and pain through his head. Then it was gone, climbing on and over.
Another stepped on his outstretched arm, trapping it against the seat's hard metal edge. He screamed, and a foot came down on his belly, driving any wind out. A foot came down on his shoulder and another on his chest, and then they were everywhere. His chariot-pullers were still inching him in deeper, and now it was almost solid dark overhead with gray bodies walking on him.
He was too weak to shake them off, too weak to wriggle away, too weak to scream. He was drowning in a gray ocean. His vision silvered and he thrashed, unable to free any part of himself as feet landed on his face and smothered his mouth, crushing his lips; feet landed on his legs and his groin, pressing him like grapes beneath them, squeezing him to mulch.
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