by Guy James
I made it, she thought. I can’t believe I got out of—
White hot pain detonated in her wrist. The pain was so great that she bent over and threw up in her mask, and then she was being pulled backward toward the mass in the corner, pulled by her destroyed wrist.
Jenny fought doggedly to get away.
The difficulty in breathing through the vomit in her mask and the immense pain in her wrist were eating away at her resolve, but she was focused on escape even if it meant leaving her arm behind.
She wasn’t going to be torn apart by zombies.
She wasn’t going to become one of them, a disgusting, inhuman creature.
She wasn’t—
And then it came, a sharp pain in her shoulder—the sharp pain that she had been trying to avoid. It didn’t hurt as badly as her wrist. In fact, now that Jenny thought about it, it didn’t really hurt at all. And her breathing eased. And her wrist no longer hurt. It felt good as new. She felt good as new.
The thrashing mass of infected accepted her, and took her in.
Her eyes stared up at the surveillance monitors. She could feel her mind retreating rapidly, like it was being plunged into a darkening abyss.
The last thing that she saw with any sliver of human comprehension was the screen in which she had seen Lorie earlier. The portion of lobby that it showed was empty. Lorie, along with the infected students who had been frozen behind her, were gone.
37
LOBBY, STUYVESANT HIGH SCHOOL, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
A multitude of muffled, echoing screams rose up from behind Lorie as she ran through the lobby toward the north side of the building, toward the auxiliary safe room.
An image of Jenny flashed in her mind, then was gone, wiped out by what Lorie saw taking place in front of the auxiliary safe room. She ground her body to a halt and reversed course until she was pressed against a wall, staring straight ahead.
Zombie students were jamming themselves into the narrow passageway that led to the safe room’s entrance. More and more came, and there was room for all of them. The auxiliary safe room was filling with zombies.
Lorie had half expected for this to happen in an outbreak. People always panicked and screwed up the best plans, that was true, but Lorie thought that there was more to it than that now. Everything had happened too quickly to react to. Where was the virus coming from this time? She guessed that it was a food contamination again. It had to be. Or could it be in the water? That was far worse…that…there would be no escape from.
Then the zombies who were piling into the passageway began to stiffen. Their movements slowed and reversed until a group of six was turning toward Lorie.
“I’ve made my appearance,” Lorie said. “Time to leave.”
Zombies were staggering and crawling toward Lorie from all directions now, moaning and reaching for her with their fetid hands and gnashing their teeth in anticipation. She wasn’t going to let them near her.
It was time for the final contingency plan—the one that was never supposed to become a reality, the one that meant a chance of survival only slightly better than certain death.
Lorie ran for the exit, careful to slow down when she passed recesses in the hallway.
Zombie students reacted to her as she passed them and turned to follow.
About twenty feet from the exit, Lorie stopped running and turned around. With her back to the doors that led to the Hudson River Greenway, she looked at her former classmates one last time. They produced mindless moans that increased in pitch as they drew closer. Their eyes were empty, sunken, and devoid of light, without any kind of understanding, or any understanding of kindness.
She let her gaze linger on the zombie students’ flesh. It was sallow and becoming rapidly more lined and pitted, rotting by the second. The image washed over Lorie and she focused on it, trying to remember every detail, to file every feeling associated with this moment away in that horrible repository of her mind that had grown large during the Virginia outbreak.
She made eye contact with one of the zombie students she recognized. It was a boy from her math class she had a crush on—she had had a crush on. He wasn’t human anymore. He was one of them now.
Lorie walked toward the boy and stared into his eyes. She was trying to see something there, anything, but it was all gone. She reached out, and, without taking her eyes from his dead, unseeing stare, pulled the fire alarm.
The zombies made no sign of hearing the alarm’s shrill cries.
Lorie turned, ran the rest of the way to the exit, and flung open the door. She fought through the bitter gust of wind that greeted her and stepped out of the building.
The wind slammed the door shut behind her.
38
SVEN, JANE, AND LORIE’S APARTMENT BUILDING,
SUTTON PLACE, NEW YORK
Jane braced herself against the handrail on the back wall of the elevator and took out her phone. Her hands trembled as she dialed Lorie’s number and brought the phone up to her ear. It went straight to voicemail. Jane cursed and was about to dial Sven’s number when the doors of the elevator opened at her floor.
She stuffed the phone back in her pocket, gritted her teeth, and gripped the hooked stick firmly with both hands. She wrapped her fingers around the stick repeatedly as she brought it forward, moving the stick beyond the threshold of the elevator and into the hallway.
The doors of the elevator began to close, then reversed course when they got to within a foot of the stick on either side.
The hallway remained quiet.
Jane leaned forward and stuck her head out of the elevator. She glanced in either direction.
The hallway was empty.
The path to her apartment was clear.
She ran down the hallway and tried to force the door to the apartment open. She rattled the handle in place, shaking the door in its frame, but it didn’t open.
“Jane,” she yelled at herself. “Doors still need keys, Jane, keys.”
She found her keys, opened the door and slammed it shut behind her. Then she locked the deadbolt and ran to the den.
There she woke up the computer that was always turned on and logged into the New York City Outbreak Readiness Public Forum.
Her face was getting hot in the mask, but she kept it on. The apartment was professionally sealed and had its own air filtration systems, but she wasn’t going to take any chances at this stage of the outbreak.
She scrolled through the website’s main page with frantic spins of the mouse wheel.
Nothing was posted about what was happening.
The last update was from a day earlier—an entry about long-lasting survival foods.
“Sven doesn’t know,” Jane said, and felt cold.
39
CITY HALL, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Sven’s head lay in the middle of a document on his desk, his light snores playing against the escalating howl of sirens outside.
On Sven’s desk, the green and blue notification lights on his smart phone were blinking at regular intervals. The wooden figurine of the man straining against the doors lay on its side next to the smart phone, beyond the reach of Sven’s unfurled fingers.
There were four low, misshapen stacks of documents arranged on the floor around Sven’s desk. Ivan was there, making his usual office circuit, lying down and crinkling the papers of a stack, rising, sauntering along his familiar path to the next stack, settling down in the next stack, and so on.
Today, Ivan wasn’t exactly sauntering as he usually did, and he was punctuating his office ritual with a behavior that was out of the ordinary: every time he finished crinkling the papers of two or three stacks, he ran over to Sven, whined, and pawed and nipped at Sven’s leg.
Each time that Ivan did this, Sven muttered something in his sleep, but didn’t wake up, and each time that Ivan failed to rouse Sven, Ivan returned, increasingly despondent, to his paper route.
It wasn’t that Ivan was cold—he actually liked the cold, as any
true Russian Blue should—and the bitter New York City winter wasn’t bothering him at all. He wasn’t hungry or thirsty, either, or at least he should not have been, because his water dish and food bowl, both of which sat in a corner of Sven’s office by the door, were comfortably full.
Huffing as he did so, Ivan settled in the papers of the stack that was closest to Sven, looked up at his master, and yowled.
The two machetes that hung from Sven’s belt swayed, tracing minuscule, almost imperceptible ellipses in the air with their sheathed points. The cat’s eyes found the points and followed them.
In his sleep, Sven was moving rapidly from dream sequence to dream sequence, each sequence more enervating than the last.
In the first dream sequence, Sven was reliving a nightmare that he had lived through—that of trying to buy a sweater at the flagship Uniqlo store on
Fifth Avenue.
He was standing in the middle of the store’s lobby, having just walked in from
Fifth Avenue through the great glass doors. He felt as if he were in an amusement park funhouse.
In his disorientation, Sven looked all around him for signs that would lead him to the men’s section. He saw none, and seeing no clothes that he associated with men in the lobby, he walked uncertainly to the escalator and stepped on.
There was a multitude of faces all around him as he traveled up into Uniqlo’s great gaping maw, the escalator serving as the store’s excruciatingly long tongue.
The faces that met Sven from the down escalator were all awestruck and happy. Sven turned around and looked down the escalator behind him, and the expressions on the faces there matched. No one wore the look of shock and confusion that he did.
Sven got off the escalator and found himself surrounded by more mirrors, mannequins, and awed tourists than he had ever encountered in his life. He spun around and around and walked about the floor, and, unable to find any men’s clothing, progressed to the next floor, and then the next floor after that.
Try as he might, Sven couldn’t find any men’s sweaters, even though he had been assured by his coworkers at City Hall that there were more sweaters at Uniqlo than anyone could ever need. He was sure the sweaters were there, but because there were no signs and he couldn’t figure out who the employees were, he was unable to find the right section of the store.
Feeling increasingly disoriented and out of place, Sven decided that he had had enough and that it was time for him to make his escape.
He tried to find the down escalator but couldn’t.
Instead, he found some sets of stairs.
He took the stairs down and then found himself stuck behind a row of mannequins.
That was when Sven saw the employees. They were on the other side of the mannequins, and they were all focused on Sven.
Feeling awkward, Sven turned all the way around looking for a way out, but he saw none. He turned back and peeked through the limbs of the mannequins, at the employees. They were still watching him, apparently intrigued by the situation and impatiently awaiting his next move.
Seeing no other way out, and becoming increasingly aggravated by a high-pitched, intermittent whine he heard in the background, Sven began to squeeze through the row of mannequins, jostling them as he sidestepped through.
The hand of the mannequin to Sven’s right got caught in Sven’s shirt and the mannequin began to tip over, but Sven caught it before the plastic person fell.
Embarrassed and feeling even more awkward, Sven unhooked the mannequin’s hand from his shirt and stepped all the way through the row of mannequins to the other side.
The employees on the other side of the row were staring at Sven. They were unmoving and open-mouthed.
Sven looked down and proceeded down the next set of stairs, but only after checking to make sure that the foot of these stairs was not likewise blocked by a row of groping mannequins.
He finally got to the lobby, and, with a growing sense of relief, pushed his way out of the store.
As Sven darted east across
Fifth Avenue, he vowed never to shop at Uniqlo again, or at least not without an escort who knew a thing or two about shopping in New York City.
He continued to move east until, abruptly, he was transported into the next dream sequence.
40
In the next sequence, Sven was sitting at his desk in City Hall. Mallory was sitting beside him, too close for comfort.
They were in the middle of an interview, and Mallory was flipping through her notes, looking for the question she wanted to ask him. Her arm kept brushing against his as she shuffled through her papers. She was pretending not to notice, and Sven kept trying to inch away from her, but whenever he did, she just slid her chair closer to his, closing the gap.
Ivan sat in the background while the interview wore on, acting more or less like a good cat, except that he was yowling at regular intervals.
Mallory seemed not to hear the cat, but Sven suspected that she did hear him, and that she was only pretending not to.
“I think,” Mallory said, with a devilish grin, the skin of her face distorted as if Sven were looking into a curved mirror, “it’s time you tell me about those.” She pointed to the machetes that hung from his belt. “And I don’t just mean why you sometimes wear them on either side and sometimes bound up together. I mean I want to know everything about them: where they came from, how they found you, what they made you do, what they’re making you do now...everything.”
Sven stared. “How they found me? What?”
Mallory laughed and her face returned to normal. “What? No. How you found them, of course.”
Ivan mewled and Sven looked over at him, concerned. Mallory still made no sign of having noticed the cat’s alarm.
“Oh,” Sven said, a frown on his face and his eyes still fixed on Ivan, “they were in the gun store that Jane and Lorie and I stopped at during the Virginia outbreak. We were getting supplies there, and I saw these in the display, and...” Sven narrowed his eyes at Ivan. “What is it?”
“What?” Mallory asked.
Ivan let out a pathetic mewl and followed it in quick succession with a long yowl. Mallory and Sven both winced.
“Something’s got him spooked,” Sven said. “Something...”
“I don’t think he likes me,” Mallory said. She pouted, sticking out her lower lip.
Sven looked at Mallory and quickly turned away.
“I’m sure it’s not that,” Sven said.
Inside the dream, his mind struggled to make a connection. It kept getting close, but couldn’t make it.
“So the knives were in the display...” Mallory said.
Sven looked at her. “Oh, right. Yeah, they were in the display, I picked them up, and they felt right. So I took them.”
“You know they’re cursed, don’t you, tarnished by the blood of numberless souls cut from this world in unrelenting butchery? The curse gives them life, pulsing through every atom of the machetes, relentless in its pursuit of spilled blood…moving you in the same direction.”
Sven felt as if he had been plunged headfirst into ice-cold water.
He slowly turned to face Mallory. She was distorted again, but it wasn’t just her face this time, it was all of her body. She seemed to quiver in and out of three dimensionality, a cascade of iridescent light bubbling from points on her skin whenever she moved.
Sven looked away again and lowered his head.
“I figured as much,” he said.
“Figured as much about what?”
“About the knives being cursed,” Sven said. “When I picked them up I saw things—visions, hallucinations, I don’t know. I’ve never felt anything like that. I guess it could’ve been the effects of the zombie odor, the smell the virus manufactures in its victims as some sort of trap...but, I’m not sure. I still dream about the things I saw, and in the dreams it’s as if I know that the machetes have a secret history, like they know things, and...”
Sven closed his eye
s and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “But I know that’s impossible. Things don’t have feelings or minds. They’re nothing more than inanimate objects. Sharp, inanimate objects. It’s just that...” Sven sighed. “I can’t get rid of them. I know it’s easy to rationalize as an attachment to the weapons that saved me. In fact that has to be what it is, but I can’t stop thinking that it’s not that at all. I can’t stop thinking that it’s something metaphysical. I can’t let the machetes out of my sight. No...the machetes won’t let me out of their sight. I always have to be in their immediate presence.
“If I have to take them off my body, it can only be for very short periods of time, and they always have to stay close.” Sven sighed again. “It’s insane, I know, but when I take them off and try to move away from them, I feel like I’m trying to rip away a part of myself. I guess travel by plane is permanently out of the question.” He tried to force a laugh out of his mouth, but it came out more like a squeak. “So we drive everywhere. Anyway, I’m allowed that bit of insanity, aren’t I? After the Virginia outbreak, I think all of us who survived, and even those who were never involved, are allowed a bit of insanity, to cope with it, to deal. Everyone needs to do it their own way, I think, and, this seems to be my way, even though I don’t understand it yet.
“Everyone should be allowed some insanity. Look at the reporters who are constantly asking me to give them the gory, disgusting details of the things I saw during the outbreak…of the things I did. How is that not a form of insanity, too? It’s like they want me to be on display, and like they want me to be screwed up by what I went through, and the more screwed up, the better. They’re always so suggestive with their questions. And they almost never ask me about outbreak preparedness, which is what they should be asking me about. All they want to hear about is blood and guts and how Charlottesville was transformed from a quaint college town to a hell hole spattered with desiccated human remains.”
Sven shook his head, surprised at himself for the monologue.
