by Frank Tayell
“Boxes,” Chester said, playing his light from one to the next. “Plastic storage boxes.”
Stacked as neatly as the carriage’s seats would allow were row upon row of sealed plastic storage boxes. Some were opaque, some marked with the name of a packing company, while others were transparent, and obviously full.
Jay levered open the nearest of those. “Lime and chilli chips, anyone?” he asked, then dropped the bag. “Oh, this is more like it. Chocolate chip cookies,” he added.
“Pop them in your bag for later,” Chester said. “Then pop the lid back on the box.”
“We’re not taking it with us?” Jay asked.
“We don’t really need to,” Chester said. “And I don’t want to get weighed down until we know how we’re getting back to the coast.”
“But we’ll come back for it?” Jay asked.
“Maybe,” Chester said. “If it’s safe. The floodwater didn’t reach this far up the tunnel. Not yet, anyway. We need to find ourselves an exit, then find a safe route back to the ship, if we’re thinking of coming back here.”
“Remember that zombie with the chain around its neck, back before the road collapsed?” Sholto asked. “That store it was in had been stripped to the shelves. This must be where they were keeping all the food.”
“All the food?” Jay asked. “From all of New York? Then there have to be more trains ahead of us. I mean… this all looks edible, right?”
“Probably not all the food,” Chester said. “I reckon this is someone’s private stash. Some group who were looking for somewhere safe to store it. They collapsed the stairwells to keep it hidden.”
“There’s ketchup in this box,” Jay said, opening the lid of the next container along. “Nothing but jars of ketchup. Bet it came from a restaurant.”
“Grab me a bottle,” Sholto said. “For Luke. He was addicted to the stuff when we first met.”
Chester picked his way along the aisle as, behind him, Jay and Sholto looked inside the boxes.
“Rice in this one,” Jay said.
“And in this,” Sholto said.
“Hey, this is weird. It’s an energy bar, I think. Black text on a plain brownish wrapper, says it’s an oat and fruit fibre bar. One dollar.”
“Why’s that weird?” Sholto asked.
“The packaging is so plain,” Jay said. “And there’s no ingredients or anything.”
“Maybe it’s homemade.”
“There’s no manufacturer either. By law, you’d have to say, wouldn’t you? In America, I mean, because you’d have to in England.”
“How full is the box?” Chester asked as he reached the end of the carriage.
“Pretty full,” Jay said. “Mostly with cookies, except these three weird bars right at the top.”
Chester opened the box nearest him, and nearest the doors leading to the next carriage.
“This box is only three-quarters full,” Chester said. “Canned vegetables, and there’s definitely room for more.”
“So, you think they couldn’t find any more cans?” Jay asked.
“Could be,” Chester said. He opened the door and entered the next carriage. Again, it was full of boxes, but he didn’t open one until he was near the middle of the car. “Half empty,” he muttered. He shone his torch around the boxes, looking for an answer to the riddle that was only half-formed in his mind, and found it on the floor. A bootprint. Dry, but distinct, and unmistakably recent.
“I think we’ve overlooked the obvious,” he said. “There’s a footprint here. I think this is someone’s store cupboard. Someone who’s still using it. Someone alive.”
“More survivors?” Jay asked, following Chester into the carriage. “Maybe it’s the Canadians. We should find them, say hello.”
“It’s risky,” Sholto said. “We don’t know who they are, how many they are. Or where they are. Your call, Chester.”
“If this is their storeroom, then they must live right above us. It wouldn’t look good if we appear from down here. Better we find a way outside—”
Before he could finish talking, he heard the sound of metal being drawn back as a gate was dragged open.
“Lights off!” Sholto hissed. All three torches went dark. As quietly as they could, they padded their way back up the carriage, slipping through the door just before a new light reflected off the carriage’s dusty windows. Chester eased down low, barely daring to breathe, laying his hand on his holster, as images of Denmark flashed through his mind.
“I told you the stores were safe,” a voice said. Male and… It took Chester a moment to realise the accent was Irish.
“Worth checking,” another voice said. Again male, but this time American.
“It was just another building collapse,” the Irishman said.
“There’s been too many,” the American said. The light was getting closer. The men were just outside the carriage. If they came in, they would see the interlopers, and then… Chester didn’t want to think about it.
“Hey! What are you doing!” a third voice called, this one female, American.
Chester tensed, but it was the Irishman who answered.
“We were just checking the stores,” he said. “We saw the dust cloud. Another building’s collapsed.”
“That was streets away,” the woman said. “What, you think you’re quartermaster now?”
“We’re not stealing,” the American man said. “I swear it. We just wanted to check on the stores. We lose them, we starve.”
“No we won’t,” the woman said. “How exactly would a building collapsing on the street make a difference to what we’ve stored down here? But since you want to be useful, you can go finish emptying the latrines.”
“Never should have left Halifax,” the American man said.
“Never should have left Malin,” the Irishman said.
“You want to leave?” she asked. “Be my guest. Until then, clean out the john.”
Grumbling, they left. But only after the lights had gone out, and the metal gate had been grated back into place did Chester breathe out.
“Did you hear that?” Jay whispered. “He said he was from Halifax. It’s the Canadians.”
“There’s plenty of towns in America with that name,” Sholto said.
“The other bloke was Irish, wasn’t he?” Chester said. “And he said Malin, didn’t he?”
“Sounded something like that,” Sholto said. “But how many Malins are there in Ireland?”
“Fair point,” Chester said.
“We’re going to say hello, though, right?” Jay asked.
“Not us, and not today,” Chester said.
“It’s a job for Jonas, and maybe Siobhan,” Sholto said. “So let’s get out of here and go tell them.”
Eschewing the road most travelled, they continued through the train to the final carriage, where they climbed down onto the tracks. The door clunked loudly as Chester pushed it closed. He winced at the sound, but he couldn’t hear any noise from the platform. He could hear Jay and Sholto, walking along the tracks, and he could see their torchlight. Any pursuers would be able to do the same. But there was no escape behind, and so they went on, but only for a few hundred yards. Ahead, Sholto stopped, shining his flashlight on a two-foot-wide, six-foot-tall sheet of metal recessed into the tunnel wall.
“Door,” he whispered.
“No hinges,” Chester replied.
“Shh!” Jay hissed.
All three stood motionless, listening, their lights pointed down but letting off more than enough illumination to be seen. Far too much illumination, Chester decided. He reached into his pack and pulled out a small crowbar that, like his lock picks, he’d found to be just as useful since the outbreak as before. There was no way of peeling the sheet metal aside quietly, so he did it quickly.
Beyond, a jungle of cables hung from the roof. Buckled plastic conduits jagged from the walls. Was it a corridor, or was it an alcove? Even as he shone his torch through and beneath the loops of
fallen wires, Jay shoved his back.
“Hurry!” the young man hissed.
Chester quickly forced his way inside, pushing a path through the cables, turning off his torch when Jay did the same. Everything went dark, but not silent until Sholto pulled the metal grill back in place. Silence descended, but only for a few seconds.
“Would you really prefer cleaning the toilets?” the Irishman asked, his voice muffled, but as loud as his footsteps, crunching along the track outside.
“No way,” the American man said. “But the tunnel was fine ten minutes ago. We’re wasting our time having to check it again.”
“No,” the Irishman said. “She’s wasting our time because it’s not worth anything to her. But so what? Where else can we go? North? Or would you prefer heading to Vancouver?”
“Better than staying here after the food runs out.”
“If, not when,” the Irishman said.
That produced an odd snort of laughter, and then a reply, but it was too faint for Chester to hear. He closed his eyes, waiting for Jay or Sholto to say all was clear.
After another ten seconds, Sholto signalled the all-clear by turning on his torch and shining it at the jumble of debris further along the tunnel.
Taking that as his cue, Chester turned on his own light. As quietly as he could, he pushed a path beneath the fallen loops of cable, and around fractured plastic and the gnawed-sharp strands of metal they should have been shielding. He picked a path over buckled metal grills that lined the floor until, inch by deepening inch, they were covered by a drift of litter. Except this wasn’t rubble from a deliberate explosion, but the accumulated rubbish of a million commutes.
The corridor constricted to a claustrophobic one foot in width and five feet in height, forcing him to sidle through the ankle-high drifts. Calf high, and damp. Knee high and wet, squelching beneath his boots. He was about to give in to the fear-fed desire to turn back when his torch bounced off a wall ahead. Dead ahead, which implied a dead end. Except, no, there was a shadow. The tunnel bent at a right angle, opening up into a gloriously spacious void.
“What is this place?” Jay whispered as he followed Chester into the seven-foot-square chamber that stretched upward to a distant roof.
“A stairwell, I think,” Chester said, shining his light up the damp concrete walls.
“Or an unfinished elevator shaft,” Sholto said.
“So what do we do now?” Jay asked. “There’s no other way out.”
“Hang on,” Sholto said. “Turn off your flashlight and look up.”
Their lights went out. All three stared upward at a dim, orange oblong above, hardly bright enough to be called a beacon. Again, silence stretched.
“We climb up,” Chester said finally. He turned his torch back on, and swept it up the wall. “There, you see, and there.” He let his light hover over a series of gaps and holes, and finger-width ledges. “I’d call those hand-holds. Me first.”
Were they climbing towards daylight, or towards capture? Perhaps both, but better to get it over with. When Chester reached the pale oblong of light near the top of the wall, he found another corridor. Far shorter than the claustrophobic tunnel leading from the subway, after six feet it ended in a plate-metal and wire grill. The light came from beyond. He peered through the miniscule holes into a rectangular stairwell. Banister-ringed stairs hugged the walls, leaving a void in the middle, but he couldn’t see the source of the light. Only when the other two were in the corridor behind him did he force the grill aside.
“Look up,” Sholto whispered.
Trepidation rising, Chester did. His qualms vanished. Above the middle of the stairwell was a grubby, reinforced, and frosted window through which cold daylight drifted down.
“Up there’s our way out,” Sholto said.
From the inch-thick slime, the stairwell was clearly unused since the outbreak, while the graffiti coating the door at the top told them it hadn’t been opened for some time before then. Clearly they’d found some partially built section of the subway where a long-ago budget cut had prevented completion. But even the thick layer of rust couldn’t prevent Chester from forcing open the padlock.
As he pulled the door inward just far enough to look outside, Jay grabbed his arm. “Voices,” he signed, then pointed outside and to the left.
Chester froze, not daring to move lest his feet disturb the trash-carpet around his feet. Old instincts took over. They were engaged in a crime, albeit unwittingly. Trespassing rather than anything more sinister, but he didn’t want to find out what the punishment might be.
Two voices came within hearing, both deeply engaged in conversation.
“And I don’t want to go back to Kentucky,” the first voice said, a woman, American.
“If we can’t go north, we have to go south,” the second voice said. Male. American with a trace of the southern half of the twin continents.
“Or west,” the woman said.
The voices faded nearly as quickly as they appeared.
“Clear,” Jay whispered.
“Thaddeus, take the lead,” Chester said. “And we stay quiet until we’re safe.”
Sholto took out his compass, checked the needle, then grinned, pointing in the direction the two voices had come from. Quietly, they emerged onto the street.
Jay pointed at steam venting through a pipe in the side of the building opposite, but Chester pushed him on.
“Electricity,” Jay signed, pointing again.
Chester nodded. He didn’t need to hear the fan whirring to know these people had electric power. His nose had already informed him. Something sweet was cooking nearby, completely free of the acrid tang of smoke. What was missing, for now, were people, but this road was obviously a major thoroughfare, so he was grateful when Sholto led them down the first narrow alley they reached.
Gratitude was replaced by resignation when they reached the alley’s end. The opposite side of the street beyond was barricaded. To the south was a junction, and across it ran sheet metal, towering up to the second-storey windows of the buildings to which the sheets were attached. At ground level, girders and wooden beams were braced on the road, and against a pair of rusting juggernauts.
“Over there,” Sholto whispered, pointing to the north, where a similarly tall, though not as wide, barrier ran across an alley between a while-u-wait accountant and an all-you-can-gulp pancake barn. “The road’s been swept clear. I think that’s a path, maybe to a gate.”
“One last sprint,” Chester whispered. “Jay, can you hear anything?”
“Just music,” Jay whispered. “But it’s not close.”
“Then let’s get out of here,” Chester said.
There was a gate in the alley, made of thick metal and thicker bolts, but there were no padlocks. Ten seconds later, they were jogging along a laneway on the far side. When they reached a road, the jog turned to a cautiously fast walk. Another road, another alley, and another road, and with each turn they slowed until finally, Chester paused, looking back.
“That could have been a lot worse,” he said, walking again. “We’re heading to the coast?”
“More or less,” Sholto said. “How many do you think there were?”
“At least five we heard speaking,” Jay said. “Plus someone playing music. So six.”
“And someone was cooking,” Chester said. “But I’d say… I’d say I have no idea.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Sholto said. “Were they saying they were out of food, or not?”
“No idea about that, either,” Chester said. “But the chatter was about leaving, not about making improvements to their lives here, right?”
“Person,” Jay said. Ahead, a figure staggered down the street towards them. Except it wasn’t a person any more.
“It’s just a zombie,” Chester said. “Albeit in remarkably clean clothes. Black and white tracksuit. Calf-length boots. Thigh-long feather and fur coat. Must have dressed that way after the outbreak.”
“T
his is New York,” Sholto said.
“Fair point, but the clothing’s pretty clean.”
“Except where it’s covered in blood,” Jay said. “Like all down his front. It’s all blood.”
Chester had already unclipped his mace. He paced a few brisk yards ahead of the other two, giving himself space to swing. As he did, bringing the mace sweeping around in a mercifully quick blow, he saw the face, and saw someone who was, almost, still human.
“A couple of weeks since they were infected,” he said, looking down at the twice-dead corpse.
“So how’d they get infected?” Sholto asked. “I’m thinking of that zombie with the chain around its neck.”
“And I’m going to try not to,” Chester said, “at least not until we’re back on the ship. Hey, is that what I think it is?” He adjusted his glasses and pointed at a small diner on the other side of the street. “I think it is.”
“What?” Jay asked. “Oh, you mean the name?”
“What about it?”
“Robinson’s,” Jay said, pointing at the sign. “That was my dad’s name.”
“That’s not what I saw,” Chester said, walking over to the diner’s door. “Not exactly. Come on, best we stick together.”
“What is it?” Jay asked, following Chester.
“You’ll see,” Chester said. The door jangled as he pushed the door open. “Unlocked. Looks looted, though. But... yep, it’s real.”
“What?” Jay asked.
“That baseball bat, hanging on the wall,” Chester said. “Didn’t you say you’d dropped yours?”
“I’ll check the back,” Sholto said, as Chester peered at the Perspex case surrounding the bat.
“It’s screwed to the wall,” Chester said, drawing his bayonet. “But the brackets are too big for the screws. Standard oversight, that.” He levered, tugged, and lifted the box from the wall. “The back should slide back. Call it a late Christmas present.”
“Cool,” Jay said. “Hey, it’s got a signature. Jackie Robinson.”
“Was he famous?”
“Just a bit,” Jay said. “But I doubt it’s real.”
