by Guy James
He waited for Mallory to say something, to ask another question.
She didn’t.
Sven looked over, and she was gone, as if she had never been there in the first place.
Ivan let out a yowl so shrill that Sven had to cover his ears.
Sven reached down to reassure his cat.
The Russian Blue hissed, backed away from Sven’s outstretched hand, and ran away.
Sven’s dream sequence rebooted, and he found himself pushing his way through the lobby of Uniqlo as he stared up the steep escalators.
Sirens squealed over the store’s loudspeakers.
In the dream, Sven understood that the sirens had a Japanese accent, whatever that meant. That seemed like an important point.
In the waking world, one floor below Sven’s sleeping body, a mass of gnarled, decomposing hands shoved City Hall’s broad doors open.
41
HUDSON RIVER GREENWAY, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Lorie stared, glassy-eyed, at the stretch of Hudson River Greenway that lay in front of her. She took two steps backward and sank against the doors of Stuyvesant High School. Her hands opened and took in the cold of the doors’ surface. Her palms soaked in the cold, and she felt it permeate her body.
She kept scanning the park to her left, the running path in front of her, and the streets to her right, but she could find no trace of what she hoped to find there. There were no people, or sick people, or even sick people in the late stages of infection. There were only zombies.
She thought about trying to get in touch with Sven and Jane, but her phone was dead, and inside. Getting a phone off the body of one of the zombies was an option, but Lorie didn’t see much sense in that. What would the point of contacting Sven and Jane be? So that Lorie could tell them that the safe rooms had failed and that she was stranded on the West Side in the middle of the zombie apocalypse?
Lorie thought about that for a moment.
“This is the zombie apocalypse,” she said under her breath. “I bet this is happening everywhere, all over the country.” She was sure that if it was happening on this scale in New York City, then it had to be everywhere.
Lorie’s mind turned once more to contacting Sven and Jane. Sven’s general rule was to hold off on making contact until you get into a safe room, in other words: personal safety first.
“Rules are for breaking,” Lorie said.
She gazed at the surreal scene that was unfolding on the Hudson River Greenway, and then turned back to the doors of her high school.
She wrenched one of the doors open.
Gnarled hands shot out at her.
She released the door and let the wind slam it shut.
The edge of the door slammed into two pairs of decaying arms, breaking them in succession.
Lorie pulled the door open again, allowed the broken arms to regain some of their lost progress, and then let go again. The wind slammed the edge of the door into the broken arms, crushing them further.
Lorie pulled the door open again, and this time, held it open. A zombie student shambled out into the cold, and Lorie let go of the door.
The zombie’s destroyed arms hung useless at his sides, but his mouth worked in furious stops and starts as he approached Lorie.
She leaned into the wind and let the zombie draw closer.
Just before he was on top of her, she sidestepped, got around him, and stabbed him in the back of the head, her knife piercing his skull.
He collapsed in a heap at Lorie’s feet, the wind pushing him into the doors as he fell.
Lorie tugged the knife free and wiped it on the dead zombie’s cardigan. Then she searched his pockets and cursed. She searched them again, going more slowly this time. She cursed again.
Lorie used her knife to cut open the dead zombie’s backpack and rifled through the things in each compartment. She cursed again, straightened up, and shook her head.
“Of course he doesn’t have one,” she said. “That would’ve been too easy.”
Lorie glanced at the Greenway to make sure that the zombies were still a safe distance away from her. They were. She had some time.
Remembering something, Lorie knelt over the shredded backpack again.
From one of the torn compartments she removed a can of Coca-Cola.
The can featured two ice skating polar bears, one of whom was airborne, two-thirds of the way into a Triple Salchow. Each of the bears wore sunglasses, the pair on the airborne bear in the process of flying from the bear’s face.
“Jane wouldn’t approve,” Lorie said, stuffing the can into her backpack, “but desperate times call for—”
One of the high school’s doors burst open and crashed into Lorie’s side, throwing her from the top of the steps.
She broke her fall with a shoulder roll and got to her feet in an instant. The Krav Maga classes really were worth every penny, and she did spend every penny of her allowance on the classes and the fighting supplies that she needed.
Lorie spun to face Stuyvesant High School again.
A small horde had forced the doors open and had its undead glare set squarely on Lorie.
Without waiting for the first zombie of the horde to attempt to descend the stairs, Lorie turned north on the Greenway. The zombies of Stuyvesant High School had finally forced her out.
Lorie gritted her teeth and began to formulate a plan of attack.
The cold gnawed at her skin as she scanned the area and weighed the alternatives.
The zombies on the Greenway staggered amidst the flurries of snow as if it were all some Christmas farce, a cheap, low budget production that should have been called Undead X-Mas, or Zombies on Ice, or I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas with Flesh-Hungry Zombies.
But it was real, and Lorie was alone.
An odd thought rang out in her mind as she stood there assessing the situation around her: the shambling of inhuman, flesh-hungry, undead monsters up and down the Hudson River Greenway made the night beautiful…and in a way…perfect.
42
CITY HALL PARK, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
The American flag outside of City Hall billowed in the cold, evening wind.
Milt stood beside the flagpole, feeling his enormous trench coat inflate and deflate, as if it were inhaling and exhaling of the shifting wind. He grinned at the thought of his trench coat’s breathing, and reflected on the sequence of events that had brought him to the present.
Images clicked in rapid succession through Milt’s mind—isolated World of Warcraft triumphs, the glory of his pre-outbreak battle station, his first encounter with an evolver back when he categorized such beings as zombies, his first meeting with Sven and the others, killing the child, being thrown from the roof and taken, waking a transformed being, accepting and understanding the evolution, and seeding the winnowing that was now taking place all around him.
“The winnowing is upon you, dear humans.”
On his back Milt wore the self-made, hydrating contraption that kept him in the realm of the living—or in the realm of the half-living, or in whichever realm superior creatures such as he were catalogued.
Milt turned, and the contraption shifted, but he stayed firmly on his feet, because his great mass allowed him to achieve a degree of balance that lesser beings could not even begin to imagine.
Twitching with anticipation, Milt watched his evolvers thrust open the doors of City Hall.
“All is proceeding as planned,” he mumbled. “All will soon be moved forward, all the people into their proper placements in this world.”
A gust of wind blew ice-sharpened snowflakes into Milt’s face and forced him to take a half-step backward. His gaze faltered.
He regained his posture and refocused on the doors of City Hall.
As he stood and watched, Milt felt an unexpected spasm of uncertainty in the pit of his belly. He focused on the evolvers, willing them onward, and the spasm dissolved.
“This is the most auspicious bend in the river that is the world,
” he said. “The people of this world shall be transformed into a greatness that they cannot even now imagine...some of the people, anyway.”
The evolvers who now surrounded Milt in New York—the evolvers he had created—were unlike him, and Milt suspected that no matter how far the infection spread, no other being like him would ever be created again. Even if the virus took others to new heights of existence, as he hoped that it would, he was certain that no one would reach the summit that he had scaled, and that no one else had been catapulted anywhere near such a summit by virtue of the Virginia outbreak.
“I am unique,” Milt whispered into the wind. “There are no others such as Milt.”
43
A CABIN IN RURAL VIRGINIA
The vegan with the handlebar moustache bent over his kitchen island, one bare vegan foot in a tub of water. He was arranging meticulously sliced slivers of avocado on a plate, the center of which was artistically smeared with mashed sweet potato, taro, yucca, and jicama.
The flicker of candlelight that played on the vegan’s face, facial hair, the slivers of avocado, and mashed vegetables made the scene akin to that of a mad scientist hard at work in his lab, preparing the components of an experiment that would bring life to the inanimate.
Naturally, the vegan was only making himself dinner, and entertaining himself in the pursuit to the maximum extent possible. He knew that life—the life to which he had now been relegated—was about the little things. If one didn’t appreciate the little things, one was lost.
It wasn’t that bad, anyway…not really. So what if he had to have part of his body immersed in water at all times? He had much to be thankful for: he wasn’t paralyzed, or a sufferer of chronic fatigue, or an atheist.
There were always people with worse fates, and the vegan knew that every moment was a gift from God, even if one of the vegan’s gifts had been his transfiguration from full human to part human and part ghoul.
There was a purpose to it, the vegan knew, and ever since he had survived being tossed down to the ghouls from the roof of the Wegmans, he was more certain than ever that his grandmother had been right. Everything that happened was a part of God’s plan.
The vegan reached a guacamole-decorated finger up to the cross that hung from his neck and added green avocado hash marks to the gold of the cross. He had an important role to play in God’s plan now—more important than ever before.
His prior role of loading, transporting, and delivering avocados had been an important calling, considering that the avocado was without a doubt one of the holiest of fruits, but his current calling, the vegan knew, was something greater. He had survived his plunge to the ghouls’ death grip for a reason.
There was a role for him to play in this strange world, and though he didn’t yet know what that role would be, the vegan was patient. His grandmother had taught him to be patient, and the vegan was willing to wait until his dying day to find out, so long as God’s plan allowed for the vegan’s fulfillment of his allotted task in the final moments of his life.
Musing on this, the vegan wondered if he had moved beyond his dying day. Hadn’t he died when the ghouls got him? Who knew? It wasn’t as if there was a manual for such things.
Banishing the negativity that he caught gathering in around his brain, the vegan collected his wits and looked down at the animal-free feast he had prepared for himself. There he beheld the beauty and purity of nature’s bounty.
Speed.
Too much speed.
A wind-worn brick wall ahead of the vegan.
No stopping.
Impact.
It was the craving, raw and uncontrollable.
The vegan’s whole body began to shake in violent spasms as his mind filled with images of bloody human flesh, a delicacy far more scrumptious than any cruelty-free treat known to vegankind.
It could not be placated, could not be negotiated with. There was no escaping instinct. The fire was to be fed.
The vegan careened sideways, scraping the tub of water across the floor, then knocking it over and sending water across the length of the kitchen.
In a series of jerky movements, the vegan made it the short distance to the end of his kitchen island where he made four awkward grabs for the open pack of Lucky Strikes that lay sideways on the island’s light ceramic.
After what seemed like hours, with his mind and body trying to pull him outside to go hunting after some sublime scent, the vegan succeeded in retrieving and lighting a cigarette and jabbing it between his teeth.
“Come on Randy,” the vegan said after he had finished the cigarette and lit up a second. “What’s wrong with you? No manual? You can write a manual for yourself. How do you keep forgetting these things?”
Ever since he had woken up infected in the woods, the vegan’s chain-smoking tendencies had lessened to the point that he sometimes forgot about smoking. The problem with that was that if he did forget, and if he went too long without smoking, dancing gobbets of human flesh turned his mind red with blood, and his body became nearly uncontrollable in its cannibalistic urges.
He wasn’t like the ghouls that had infected him though, he knew that much. He kept his wits about him, and his faith. He knew that unlike the ghouls that had captured him and had tried to pull him into their camp, he wasn’t a mindless monster.
The vegan lit up a third cigarette before finishing the second and put it in his mouth. While he smoked the two cigarettes at the same time, he tore open a fresh pack of Luckies and laid the cigarettes out on a tray for easy access.
That was another thing. He had been forgetting to lay the cigarettes out so that they were easier to grab during one of his flesh-hunger fits. It wasn’t a thing to forget, and the vegan was surprised that after months of the same routine, he was slipping.
He shrugged, inhaled of the two cigarettes deep into his lungs, and chalked up his sloppiness to hunger—for guacamole and vegetables, not human flesh—and turned back to his platter.
The vegan righted the overturned water tub, refilled it, and dragged it up to the front of the couch where he planned to sit down with his dinner. He returned to the kitchen island, picked up the platter, and brought it out to the couch. He sat, putting the platter on his lap, and stuck both of his bare feet into the tub of water, rewetting the rolled-up bottoms of his fraying, discolored jeans.
Since his infection, the vegan had learned that as long as the dehydration was kept at bay and cigarettes were smoked at regular intervals, the disease could be kept under control. He knew that was what it was, after all, some kind of disease that turned people into ghouls. It wasn’t curable, not yet, but the vegan could live with that. As far as he was concerned, he was managing it just fine.
He sighed, pushed the irony of his hunger for human flesh out of his mind, and began to eat.
Minutes later, content, his stomach full of guacamole and assorted mashed tubers, the vegan allowed his eyelids to droop. His head began to nod, and his chin came to rest on his left shoulder.
With a peacefulness reserved for the righteous, the vegan drifted off into happy, fruit-picking dreams.
44
CITY HALL, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Ivan looked up at his master and tilted his head to one side, then to the other, then licked his paw and used it to clean his face and then he meowed his most annoying meow that even the people with the bad smell might hear but Sven didn’t move because he was sleeping because he was tired and he was always tired now but there wasn’t time to sleep right now and Ivan had to make Sven wake up because that was Ivan’s job and then Ivan’s eyes went to the points of the knives that were covered in something and he watched the points of the knives go round and round in little circles but they weren’t going anywhere and Ivan knew that the knives were bad for the people with the bad smell…the terrible, sickening smell that was everywhere now and Ivan couldn’t understand why Sven didn’t smell it and wake up because Ivan knew that it was time to wake up and use the knives against the people with
the bad smell because that was what the knives were for—to stop the bad death from spreading, and the people with the bad smell were coming and they were all around them now, but Sven was sleeping because Sven was tired and Ivan was hungry but maybe he wasn’t hungry because the people with the bad smell were coming and it wasn’t good to eat with the people with the bad smell around and Sven was still sleeping and then there was suddenly a stale, fusty odor in the air and Ivan hissed and remembered the odor from another place and time and remembered that it was the fat man’s smell but it was different now, too, mixed with the bad death and Ivan growled, and then Ivan’s ears went to points when he heard a noise outside the closed-in space where he was with Sven and then there was another noise made by someone who was scared and then there was more of the bad smell that was coming in through the windows and under the door and Ivan could smell its shape and see its wisps by their smell and they were getting closer to Sven and that was not good so Ivan meowed the most high-pitched meow he had ever meowed in his life and it hurt deep in Ivan’s throat but Sven still did not wake up.
45
DR. WESTREICH’S OFFICE,
57TH STREET AND LEXINGTON AVENUE, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Dr. Westreich groaned, exaggerating the sound so that it was abnormally loud. He hated when patients did this. He really hated it.
The good doctor got up from his desk and strode past the patient’s couch to the window.
Outside, snow fell in wide, rotating flurries. The snowflakes were large, and Dr. Westreich was reminded of how he would soon no longer have to treat any more patients. The goldmine inside Lorie’s brain would free him from the senseless monotony of extracting money from the flawed minds of yuppies, lucrative though the tedium was.
The stream of patients was unending, too, and Dr. Westreich had to remind himself that before he met Lorie, he was content with his career. Now, however, the promise of greater things had shifted his reference point, and he could not imagine the reference point ever regressing to its previous position. Even if he had been able to imagine it, he certainly was not going to allow it.
