by Nick Cole
The safe house down the street.
The supermarket beyond.
The roof of the supermarket above.
The run for the hospital.
The roof at the top of the hospital.
Did a helicopter come and get them, just like I had been rescued? Or was there no place to go after the roof? Was their helicopter hope nothing more than an unfounded wish?
By the time I’d gotten back to the train, the gunfire had increased to that of full-scale war. Explosions came fast and steady, and I thought of the case of grenades I’d seen the burly soldier carrying. Were they being lobbed down into the forest dark, beyond the searchlights, as the corpse people surged forward, mindless of explosive destruction?
I boarded the train and went to my breezeway.
Kyle watched the darkness beyond the lights of the station.
“I didn’t find any,” I mumbled on the subject of cigarettes.
Voices cried out, as a whistle, literally a train whistle, blew. We were leaving, and the sense of urgency was suddenly dire.
The pale and flickering tube lights of the station went off.
In the dark, the train began to push forward, picking up speed, the familiar clickety-clack returning.
It is a comforting sound.
It means we are moving.
We are not trapped and we can move away from this place. This means a lot to me now. It must also to the others on this train.
I could see flashes of gunfire in the streets of the dead town making a connect the dots game of light that arrived back at the football field and the helicopters whose turbines we could not hear above the noise of the train, as their blades slowly began to turn.
Were the corpse people crawling through the wire as these soldiers who’d set up our refueling point raced back through the streets, envying our moving train as it surged off into the dark.
“That’s okay.” Kyle handed me a cigarette from his shirt pocket. We smoked, watching the helicopters lift off from Any-Town, U.S.A., as huge explosions erupted in the night sky on the far side of town.
“Napalm trenches to keep ‘em back,” said Kyle.
The machineguns on top of the train began to chatter away, as the dead came rushing out of the forest darkness and up the small embankment leading to the tracks, grabbing for the train.
Other soldiers began to shoot out into the dark from behind the armored shutters of the train cars or from off other breezeways.
Kyle watched the night and I wondered what his story of survival was.
Was he someone’s Tom Hodges? Was there a message painted on the side of a house somewhere, written only to him? Was there someone waiting in a hospital or refugee camp for word of their Kyle?
Or was he waiting for someone to find him?
And me?
Was there a message in California for me on a hotel room wall written in marker pen or lipstick?
The terrible numbers indicate I shouldn’t engage in such helicopter wishes.
October 31st
In the laundry today. Too tired.
November 1st
I dreamt last night.
Alex.
I didn’t plan to be on this train. But here I am, heading toward California to find Alex after we get there.
If we make it.
Apparently there was another train that left before us. It departed Manhattan two weeks ago. No one has heard from their crew and complement after they arrived in Chicago. So now we’re taking the southern route. According to chatter, military talk, Atlanta’s our big unknown. Maybe it’s our “Chicago”. Then there’s New Orleans. The word on New Orleans is the Navy will secure a fuel depot just before we arrive. Or so that’s the plan one hears in the dining car.
Back to Alex. And California.
At what point in the Tower did I accept she was dead? This was the woman I was going to marry. I loved her.
I love her.
Maybe she left a message. Maybe somewhere in California is a message waiting for me. I know the name of the hotel where she was staying. She was there the last time I talked to her. She sounded distant. But I was distant too. I was going to make a million bucks that day. Same as every day.
Is there a message waiting for me in California?
I could go there and find it.
It’s something.
November 2nd
Three days after the end of the world started. That’s where my story really begins.
My story is nothing more than four incidents. Four incidents that I must live life with. Four incidents of shame.
My time in the Tower is summed up in these four terrible acts.
Four acts of shame...
It’s been three days since it all began.
Three days since those who fled the brokerage disappeared down stairwells and elevators not to re-emerge into the street which was already crawling with the sick. Those who remain, among whom are my little band of soon-to-not-be-survivors, my Ka-Tet, flee up the stairwell to the twentieth.
We leave the nineteenth floor when that wave of sickened, screaming, murderous, once-humans comes ripping through the stairwell door on the far side of the office. It’s only by accident that I and Carmichael, a natural leader, Kathy Henderson-Keil, a natural adversary, and Derek from IT, are standing near the stairwell door on the other side of the floor discussing what to do with the victims of Chas O’Neil, who was stark raving mad and whose body is now locked in his office, when that flood of drooling death crashes through our first feeble attempt at a barricade.
We have seen the streets below.
We have heard the last address of the President before the bunker he was sealed in pulled the plug on the outside world.
We’d just killed O’Neil and then locked up the three people he’d torn into, in the conference room. Later, when we looked in on them, through the all-too-thin glass, they were lying on the floor. They looked dead.
Just before the corpse flood, the conference room-ers began to get up and walk around.
We have stayed put. We have sealed ourselves in.
We have locked the doors.
Carmichael holds his bat.
Carmichael’s bat.
He always carries it on Monday mornings when we ramp up for the first day of the trading week.
Today he is carrying it for a different reason.
We have seen the bodies in the streets.
On this, the third day, those bodies come roaring through that door on the other side of the floor. We hear that whistling, screaming groan as cheap wood splinters and desks crash over like some giant bird thumping against the windows we once looked out upon our kingdom from.
We survivors have chosen to do what the President said we should do, seal ourselves in, and now we are doomed.
Unless you happen to be standing near the stairwell door on the far side of the floor, discussing what to do with those three corpses in the conference room. The corpses that are now walking around and thumping into the all-too-thin glass partition.
Carmichael raises his bat.
But as they come screaming forward, tearing at a Steve, dragging down a Dana, you know you must run.
And we do, through the stairwell door which we jam shut behind us with a loading dolly, and up to the twentieth.
I think it was a publishing house.
That is the first of my four shames.
That we fled, though there was no other option left to us.
I am ashamed of that.
Atlanta looms in my mind. The laundry will be closed tonight. All of us worked the day shift. Everyone knows something, something very bad, lies ahead of us on the train tracks, waiting for us.
Atlanta is the great unknown.
There is no reliable intelligence or data concerning Atlanta.
Even though it’s fall, the air is hot and sticky, as though the last days of this worst summer ever still refuse to say goodbye.
When it rains, will it wash all the dead back
into their graves and gutters?
The air is heavy and I have a feeling that something not good waits for us in Atlanta.
November 3rd
This is a record of what I saw in Atlanta.
I know I’m just journaling my feelings and trying to deal with what has become of my life, but I feel I have to put down in words written in a found journal, what I saw. One of the few surviving accounts of the Black Death from the Middle Ages was captured in the diary of some average guy. He didn’t know he was leaving the only surviving record of a Plague that wiped out two thirds of Europe. Maybe I’m that guy. Maybe this journal will be all that remains of humanity’s grand ambition of surviving our Plague. Maybe. But after Atlanta, I would say surviving this Plague is a very optimistic outlook at this point.
Chances are, we the crew of the train, are the first people to enter Atlanta since the outbreak two months ago.
The train was moving slowly, trying to keep noise to a minimum. All the soldiers were armed to the teeth. Kyle said they had orders not to fire unless the train was attacked directly.
From a distance, Atlanta seemed deserted. No major fires or damage. No smoke. But as we got close, the bloated bodies and clouds of black crows seemed everywhere.
The sick wandered through empty lots and fields in a meaningless and uncomprehending way.
Toward the main part of the city, we encountered a huge crowd of them stacked up against the base of an old bank. I’m talking a Super Bowl-sized crowd.
There must’ve been survivors inside.
I think everyone on the train thought, for a moment, “We should do something.” But what? What were we to do against roughly fifty-seven thousand of them?
The train picked up speed once the crowd began to tear itself away from the bank, chasing after us. Soon we were through Atlanta.
It’s not much of an account.
Sorry people two-hundred years from now, but words fail. Even for a man who dug out uncountable dead from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. Some things are just too much.
If I had to sum it all up for some future generation to understand, I would write this: It looked like a revolution had taken place, and nobody won.
November 4th
Middle of the night.
The train is bouncing its way into the Deep South. All day it has been cloudy, still, thick and hot. Kyle says it smells like hurricane weather.
Lots of excitement today.
I’d been sleeping. It was around two o’clock in the afternoon, when the train began braking hard. We’d done it before when we’d had to remove something that was blocking the tracks. Tension isn’t a strong enough word for those long minutes as we waited for whatever it was to be cleared. You feel exposed, waiting for them to come running out of the woods. But they haven’t. Not yet.
Today though, the train commander, General Pettigrew came over the loud speaker and announced, “Battle Stations.”
I don’t have a station, in battle that is. At least no one has told me I have one. So I threw on some pants and went out into the breezeway. Kyle was crouched down behind the sandbags that are stacked there, loading his shotgun. The other soldier, not a very friendly guy, watched the open field on the other side of the train.
On Kyle’s side, a small town waited along the tracks. One of those real Southern towns straight out of a movie, or a John Grisham novel. Just a main street, a town square, and a county courthouse.
There were about fifty of the sick stacked up against the courthouse with a few strays wandering aimlessly in the middle of the street. One was carrying a dead cat. I remember that. For a moment, they all paused. As if torn between what was in the courthouse and us on the train. Then one of the heavy machineguns up top began to fire.
There was a bare second where it seemed nothing happened. As if the machinegun were merely firing blanks to get the corpses’ attention. Then the dead were ripped to shreds as dark blood and exploding body parts began to paint the walls of the courthouse.
I lit a cigarette and smoked. Now that I write that down, I wonder if maybe that’s the reason I can’t sleep. Maybe that’s another thing I should add to my confessions of shame. A minor confession of shame along the way.
I felt nothing when I saw fifty people ripped to shreds by a heavy caliber machinegun.
But they’re not really people anymore.
And it was nothing like Call of Duty.
Down toward the front of the train, a bunch of soldiers exited, scrambling out across high, washed-out, yellow-green grass and up onto the county road running alongside the tracks. One of the sick came running out from behind a building and the lead soldier raised a pistol and dropped him in three shots.
“That’s Major Firestein,” said Kyle. “Looks like they’re going to try to get them people outta that courthouse.”
“Got three comin’ our way,” said the unfriendly soldier, watching the open field on the other side of the train.
“Command,” said Kyle into the walkie-talkie on his chest. “This is two-six. We’ve got contact. Right side, ‘bout two fifty out.”
The reply sounded as though it came from inside the bottom of an ice chest, on the back of a motorcycle, moving at eighty miles an hour. I didn’t understand it.
“Says not to engage until they’re right up on us,” Kyle tells the other soldier. “Ten meters.”
“He’s a damn liar,” mumbled the other.
The advance party had made it to the front of the courthouse steps. Then they turned and began to fire into the town. I couldn’t see what they were firing at.
The other soldier continued, “Major Firestein better git a move on. These three just got real interested. Two minutes tops.”
“Don’t fire, Atterly,” ordered Kyle. “Not until they get within ten meters. Those are our orders.”
“Those are your orders,” said Atterly.
Back at the courthouse, Major Firestein was shouting into the face of the barricaded door.
“They ain’t coming out,” mumbled Atterly.
“Just watch them zekes,” whispered Kyle.
“Ain’t doin’ nuthin’ but,” replied Atterly. “Still, they ain’t comin’ out.”
At first it didn’t look like anyone was willing to leave. The courthouse door refused to open, while Atterly called out the diminishing distances between the train and the three “zekes” crossing the open field.
The rumbling whine from the engine began to increase as though the engineer were adding motive power but holding onto the brakes. We lurched forward for a second, and it felt as though we might leave Major Firestein and company.
Suddenly the advance party turned and headed back across the parking lot toward the train, leaving the never opened county courthouse door.
Then the door opened and an emaciated woman came lurching out, stumbling toward the soldiers. The soldiers pointed their weapons at her, yelling for her to remain still. One of the soldiers went forward, and after a moment he gave a thumbs-up, and in the next they were quickly hustling her back across the dry grass and onto the train. They boarded somewhere up front, toward the engine. In the command car.
In the next moment the train was back underway, and for a short time it felt sunny and warm, the heat and humidity purging the poison tension that had accumulated under our skin in those long and taut moments as we’d watched the field and the courthouse door.
I looked back at the receding courthouse. As the train trundled away, quickly gaining speed, I watched as someone inside closed the courthouse door.
Could Alex be out there? Locked up in some county courthouse, waiting? It seems impossible. But today, Major Firestein rescued someone who was waiting for someone else to come along and rescue them.
Maybe the impossible is suddenly possible.
November 5th
I worked in the laundry all day. Then all night. I didn’t hear much about our new passenger. I’m too tired to write. I didn’t even think about Alex today. I just let i
t all go. In the breezeway, Kyle and I smoked one cigarette each in the dark with the rushing wind reminding us we were still alive. Before I left, it started to rain big fat wet drops.
Kyle said, “Night,” then, “New Orleans tomorrow. Be ready.”
For what?
November 6th
The wind picked up in the late morning. We were passing through low-lying bayou country, closing in on New Orleans. On board the train, everyone was quiet. Little conversation was made and truth be told, I came upon a lot of people staring out through the armored shutters as I passed by them along the rocking corridors of the train. Caught, they would return to cleaning weapons or whatever it was they were working on.
In the early afternoon, after lunch, a thin soup and stale crackers, I got called forward to the command car. I was a little nervous. It had to be either some violation of arcane military protocol, or a new job no one else wanted.
I got a new job.
General Pettigrew, a corpulent, red-faced, balding, muscle-bound type with a thick bull neck, called me into his office. He was sweating. That’s something brokers notice. There were others standing in the cramped corridor outside his office, signing papers, smoking, stealing glances out the armored shutters.
Inside the office, a converted sleeping compartment, General Pettigrew and Major Firestein welcomed me. Firestein is a pleasant and unassuming man, mild-mannered and slight. He isn’t the kind of guy most people expect too much of on Wall Street. But in my experience back on the Street, I found those guys could be the great white sharks you needed to watch out for, or do business with. I figured Firestein fell into that category.
“I hear you like to go walkabout?” opened Pettigrew in a sing-song tone I’d come to know all too well over the loudspeaker.
“Excuse me?” I asked. I wasn’t sure what he’d meant and I wondered if I’d done something wrong, committed some serious error. Was I about to be thrown off the train into a field full of... well... the not-so-dead?
