by Guy James
57th Street toward the Whole Foods Market.
She had gotten to Sheep Number Sixty-Three when Sheep Number Sixty-Three’s gait suddenly became irregular. It began to move its head and legs spasmodically, jerking in and out of line and at times stopping entirely.
The sheep behind Sheep Number Sixty-Three stopped moving, and the sheep in front of Sheep Number Sixty-Three walked some distance away, then turned around. The unfortunate, uncoordinated Sheep Number Sixty-Three bleated, or at least made an attempt at bleating, but the sound that came from Sheep Number Sixty-Three’s mouth was unusually shrill and wavering.
Sheep Number Sixty-Three staggered onward, faster and faster, until its fitful movements caught it up to within feet of the sheep ahead. It bleated again, and the sound was more shrill this time, and with the noise, blood began to run from Sheep Number Sixty-Three’s ears, eyes, nose and mouth. It ran in trickles at first. Then the trickles became rivulets, and then the rivulets became a constant spray that flew from Sheep Number Sixty-Three, covering some of the watching sheep in front of it with blood.
As the spray of blood from Sheep Number Sixty-Three’s mouth grew thicker, Lorie felt as if she were sinking deep into her bed and being smothered in the sheets. She began to flail her arms, and the bizarre sheep scene dissolved.
Lorie opened her eyes and sat up. The last image of the semi-waking nightmare was imprinted in her mind with indelible precision: Sheep Number Sixty-Three, in what looked like its final, fatal spasm, leaping toward the closest whole sheep, its bloody mouth open and poised to bite.
“Cannibal sheep,” Lorie said, rubbing her eyes, “really?”
They were zombie sheep, she thought, but she didn’t want to say that out loud.
She got up and went to the kitchen. She flipped the lights on and began to pace from one end of the kitchen to the other, grateful that the apartment was large enough that her insomnia wouldn’t wake Jane or Sven.
After glancing at the fruit on the counter and doing some contemplative snack-scrounging in the cupboards and refrigerator, Lorie decided that what she really needed was some more stew—with a lot of rice this time, to knock her out.
She opened the refrigerator and took hold of the stew pot. She lifted the pot out of the refrigerator, being careful not to disturb anything else on the stew pot’s crowded shelf, and managing only to unbalance a bottle of beet juice. She scowled at the wobbling beet juice bottle and said, “Beet juice...blech.” Jane was always trying to make her drink some, insisting that it was delicious and healthy...but to Lorie it was just, well, beet juice.
Lorie set the pot down on the stove and ladled out half a bowlful. Then she got the rice and put rice into the bowl until it was full to the brim. She took the bowlful to the sink, leaned against the granite countertop, and began to eat standing up.
From the corner of her eye, Lorie saw movement, and she looked up to see Ivan in the kitchen doorway. He padded over to Lorie, rubbed against her legs, and meowed.
Lorie ate another spoonful that was mostly rice and put the bowl down on the counter. She reached down and petted Ivan, then scratched his neck under his collar. He meowed and looked up at her.
“The stew’s too spicy for you, Ivan.”
Ivan meowed again.
“Oh, Ivan.”
Lorie picked up her bowl of stew again and was bringing a spoonful of stew-infused rice up to her mouth when she realized that something was missing. She set her bowl down on the edge of the sink and went and took out the packet of turkey jerky sticks that she and Sven had worked on at dinner. She took out a stick of jerky and used it to stir her stew, then slurped up the rest of the stew that was left.
Lorie tore a chunk from her turkey jerky stick. As she chewed the meat, she used her spoon to play with the spice remnants in the bottom of her bowl. She went on stirring the spices until she had arranged the ground paprika into a circle.
Ivan watched silently as Lorie stared into the bowl, her spoon poised over the blood red circle.
24
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, THURSDAY, JANUARY 20
6 TRAIN, NEW YORK, NEW YORK, SHORTLY AFTER THE EVENING RUSH
Mallory Lex nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, Mr. Saunders. I know exactly what you mean. I feel extremely at home in the subway system myself, extremely comfortable.” She cringed at the thought of what she had just said. She wiped the expression from her face as soon as she realized it was there, but too late.
“Is something the matter?” Mr. Saunders asked, furrowing his brow and narrowing his eyes at Mallory. “Are you in any pain?”
“Oh no,” Mallory said, “I’m fine…I…I’m just coming down with a bit of a head cold and I was about to sneeze. It’s passed now. So, tell me, if you don’t mind, where your love for the subway comes from.”
“From my upbringing in the city, of course,” Mr. Saunders said, adjusting his ascot. “As I have no doubt that you’ve perused the magazine articles about me, I’m sure that you know that I grew up in Sutton Place, in a family that was less than familiar with the New York City subway system…and even looked down on it, thought they were too good for it, if you can believe such arrogance.”
“Uh…” Mallory found herself at a loss for words—a rare occurrence.
“I know,” Mr. Saunders went on, “an understandable and endearing arrogance, but an unnecessary one all the same. I do not share such sentiments with my family. So, let’s move on to the topic at hand—the fantastic success of my bespoke blue jean company. To be frank, I—”
The overhead lights flickered.
“Oh my,” Mr. Saunders said. “Perhaps we are on the brink of a true subway adventure. How wonderfully exciting.”
“Perhaps...” Mallory said, hoping that they weren’t. She was already far beyond her subway adventure limit. To her right was Mr. Saunders, the eccentric clothing magnate, and to her left was a man holding a claw-marked fiddle in his lap. He was pulling at the strings with the fingers of his right hand while he nibbled on a palm-sized wedge of cheese that he had in his left. Bits of cheese fell on the fiddle in a pattern that seemed regular to Mallory, and she had thought that she was on the brink of predicting the next cheese crumb drop when the lights had flickered.
The man with the cheese and fiddle smelled, but neither of cheese nor old fiddle. He smelled like burnt plastic.
Mallory shook her head, thinking how absurd it was that the smell of the cheese was a relief compared to the other smells now assailing her in the subway car.
Mr. Saunders frowned. “You don’t seem to particularly enjoy the subway.” He looked down and began to undo and redo the cuffs of his jeans. “I can tell these things, you know. I’ve been in the service industries my whole life, in close contact with customers. I see everything that you’re feeling right now.”
An empty, plastic water bottle rolled toward Mr. Saunders’s feet and he caught it in between his burgundy loafers, crushing the plastic a little. “You seem very uncomfortable.” He held the plastic bottle in place with his shoes while he fixed the cuffs of his jeans so that they were even, ending two inches above each of Mr. Saunders’s bare and well-tanned ankles.
“I take...?” the man with the cheese and fiddle said, spraying saliva-moistened cheese dust all over Mallory’s coat as he reached for the plastic bottle.
An imperfection in the loudspeaker system—an imperfection that was common in the New York City subway system—whined a shrill, grating death rattle down at Mallory, piercing her psyche and lighting up her brain with thoughts of all the murders that she could commit…should commit, and the relief that they would bring from the whine’s endless, soul-rending taunt.
“Why of course,” Mr. Saunders said, and maneuvered the plastic bottle to the left with his feet. The man with the cheese and fiddle picked the bottle up while holding the cheese in his mouth, put the bottle on top of the fiddle, and took the cheese back in his hand.
The train let out a high-pitched squeal as it rounded a turn and Mallory tho
ught she heard something else that the squeal partially drowned out. It had sounded like a scream.
Suddenly, Mallory found herself overcome by a surrealistic distortion of the subway car she was traveling in. To Mallory’s left, the wedge of cheese that the man with the fiddle was holding looked stretched out and flattened, like it had melted, except that it was flat and round like a pancake. The man with the fiddle seemed not to notice. He was staring directly in front of him while strumming the fiddle strings with the fingers of one hand. He no longer had the plastic bottle that Mr. Saunders had given him, and Mallory couldn’t see where it had gone.
She followed the fiddle player’s gaze. He was staring at a woman in the seat opposite him. The woman was clutching a large Dunkin Donuts coffee cup in one hand and an overflowing handful of crumpled, sodden tissues in the other. The Dunkin Donuts coffee cup seemed to lose its shape as Mallory gazed at it, and to melt into the clump of tissues that the woman was holding. Mallory shook her head, confused and feeling increasingly frightened.
Food poisoning, she thought, remembering the sushi she had had for lunch. The sea urchin had been a mistake. It had to be food poisoning. She turned to Mr. Saunders to excuse herself and get off at the next stop, so that she didn’t ruin the interview any further in her current state. Mr. Saunders’s face had vanished behind the fabric of his ascot, which had lost its shape and grown out of control.
Something shifted in Mallory’s mind, and the ascot snapped back into shape, revealing Mr. Saunders’s concerned face behind it. He was saying something to her, but she couldn’t make out what it was. She focused on his lips, trying to read them, but she couldn’t stay focused on them long enough to figure out a single word. It was the sea urchin. Her mouth fell open, and she looked away, forgetting about Mr. Saunders and the interview.
Mallory’s body felt very odd, numb in a way, and her mind latched onto the numbness as being something important, as being something that she was supposed to react to in a practiced way. It was right there, just beyond the reach of her understanding, and she couldn’t get her mind to grasp what it was.
There was another high-pitched squeal, and it jarred Mallory back into clarity. It was their smell, the smell of the zombies, the smell of the infected. It was the smell of the virus. Of course it was. She had read all of the pamphlets and watched all of the videos, but this was the sort of thing that educational materials could not prepare a person for.
She understood all of that in an instant, and wrenched her bag open, knowing instinctively that this might be the last second of clarity in which she could put on her mask. This split-second would likely decide the outcome of her life.
Blocking out the chaos that was engulfing her, Mallory dug her hand into her bag and ripped out her mask, sending her belongings flying up into the air. As she was bringing the mask up to her face, she saw exaggerated, staggered movements in her peripheral vision—the infected, beginning their assault.
The mask was less than an inch away from her face.
Impact—the ear-splitting crash of metal against metal.
The force of the train collision sent Mallory and the other passengers traveling in her car tumbling toward the front of the train.
Trapped in the turning human heap, Mallory kept her grip on the mask firm. She was determined to survive.
When the bodies came to rest, Mallory freed herself from the pile and stood, tottering. She put the mask on, and, bloody and breathing in gasps, tried to get her bearings.
Moans erupted from all around her, and whether they came from the infected or the injured she couldn’t tell. Hands reached for her and she moved away from them, moving down the car toward the back of the train.
The lights flickered again, and Mallory felt disoriented. She didn’t understand which way she was moving, or if she was still moving at all. Something grabbed her foot and began to pull her toward a heap of people. Why were they in a heap? Why was there pulling? What was pulling?
As Mallory was pulled into the jumble of human bodies in which the virus was finding new hosts, her eyes focused just below the lenses of her mask, where she saw there was a thin gash in the plastic, suffered during the mask’s tumble with Mallory through the car.
The lights flickered again, and this time, rather than resuming a steady glow, continued to flicker at irregular intervals.
Mallory thought she could smell cheese. It was a familiar smell, somehow, but she didn’t understand what that meant, if anything.
Then she felt a dull pain in her shoulder. Several moments later, in the grip of the virus, she neither smelled nor felt anything at all.
25
SUTTON SQUARE, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Jane was standing bent over and panting, her hands resting on her knees. She needed a quick breather before she ran back to the apartment and cooked dinner.
She expected both Sven and Lorie to be late tonight, so she had plenty of time. Sven had given her a heads-up that he had a lot of paperwork to get through for the construction of public safe rooms that he and Melling were trying to push forward, and Lorie had said that she was staying after school to attend some club meetings.
Jane had taken the ground turkey out of the freezer early that morning, planning for it to be all the way thawed by the time she got back from her last run of the day—this one.
“I’m spoiling Lorie with all the turkey stew,” she said.
A cold wind blew in from the East River, stirring the bare branches of the trees that stood to Jane’s left. Jane straightened and walked into the wind. She went down the ramp into the small park that overlooked the river at the east end of
Sutton Square. The few benches in the park’s two levels were empty.
After Jane’s breathing had calmed, she walked down the stairs to the park’s lower level and did step-ups on one of the benches until she was winded again. She stopped and resumed her bent over position with her hands resting on her knees.
The wind picked up off the East River again, and this time it was strong enough that Jane had to lean forward to keep from being pushed backward. She straightened and walked toward the railing.
The water beneath her rippled violently.
Something was wrong.
Jane couldn’t grasp what it was right away, but she could feel that something wasn’t as it always was. She looked up at the Queensboro Bridge and noted an unusual silence there. There were cars on the bridge, but no noise came from them. She couldn’t make out any movement, either, but that was not necessarily unusual, given the traffic that sometimes held the city hostage. Why wasn’t there any angry honking though?
“Stop it,” she said to herself. “Nothing’s wrong. You just can’t hear the cars because of the wind. It’s drowning out the noise.”
She was facing the south side of the bridge, where there was no walkway, so there were no people to look for. She ran up the stairs and up the ramp until she was out of the park and facing the street of
Sutton Square.
Save for the howling of the wind, the street was quiet. Jane saw no people in
Sutton Square, and no cars moving around Sutton Place.
Jane’s mind flashed on something she had seen moments earlier, and she ran back down into the lower level of the park and stared at the East River, looking for anything that would refute the conclusion that her surroundings kept drawing her to.
She focused all of her attention on the yacht that floated on the east side of the river, close to Roosevelt Island. It was just floating there.
Jane scraped the limits of her memory and tried to remember if, during any of her runs, she had ever seen a yacht sit, unmoving, in this part of the river.
The wind picked up, and Jane was sure then that she had never, not once, seen a stationary yacht in this part of the river, or any stationary boat in this part of the river, for that matter.
“It still might not mean anything,” she said in a whisper. “It still might—”
A scream pierced the
wind’s incessant howl, pulling Jane backward in time and enveloping her in a feeling that she knew well, a feeling that she relived in her nightmares.
At top speed, Jane ran up and out of the small park. She stumbled and had to catch herself twice to keep from falling.
Sutton Square remained shrouded in stillness. Then a car appeared, moving north on Sutton Place, and Jane exhaled.
“Everything’s fine,” she said to herself. She could feel her heart beating out of control.
Tears formed at the corners of Jane’s eyes. “Everything’s fine?”
The wind picked up again, nudging her forward, toward
Sutton Place and away from the East River. She walked slowly, feeling a haze gather around her. Her fingernails felt odd all of a sudden, numb.
“You should…start making…dinner,” she mumbled. “Sven and Lorie…need to be fed. You’ve been…pushing yourself too hard. You just need…some…rest. All the…lactic acid…is…affecting your brain.”
Staggering now, Jane turned south on
Sutton Place and the tendrils of the viral haze lost their grip for a moment, slipping off of her.
Jane rubbed at her fingernails and her full awareness returned to her. Then she glimpsed a movement that she recognized.
The world reeled around her.
She reached forward with her hands, unsure whether the movement was to steady herself or in anticipation of a fall. She looked across the street, gritted her teeth, focused, and confirmed what she had seen.
The movement of Jane’s hand into and out of the pocket of her jogging suit was so violent that the new smart phone—Sven had insisted on getting smart phones for all of them—she meant to pull out burst from the pocket and fell several yards to her right, into the street.
Gaining control of herself, Jane dashed into the street, retrieved her smart phone and dialed Lorie’s number. She put the phone to her ear, pulled her gas mask free from its strap around her back, and put it on. She ran back to the apartment, which she knew would soon be tested by an eventuality that she had planned for, and had hoped with all of her heart would never happen.
