by Guy James
“I’ve already posted it,” Jane said.
“Thanks. Has anything been posted about Stuyvesant?”
“No.”
“Jane,” Sven said. “Stay put, okay?”
Silence.
“Jane?”
“I know.”
“You can’t go after her in this. Not in Manhattan.”
“I know, Sven, but neither can you.”
“I won’t,” Sven said. “She’ll be okay.”
“What about you, can you get to the basement?”
Sven tried to tune out the noises that were growing louder around him. “Yes, it’s all clear here.”
“You should be a better liar by now, working for the mayor and all.”
“Just promise me you’ll stay in the apartment.”
“I—”
“What?” Sven said. “Jane, you’re cutting out. Promise me you won’t try anything crazy.”
“—I—you—”
“Jane?”
“I love you.”
The line went dead.
“I love you too,” he whispered.
He dialed his mom’s number next—she should’ve been at home in Brooklyn at this hour—but got no answer. She knew what to do in this situation. They’d gone over it a million times. Sven hoped that she was doing it. He could email her later, but right now, his own clock was ticking, and he knew it.
He went to the computer and checked the forum. Jane had posted the alert. He checked the system to make sure it had been transmitted to all the mobile devices that were registered with the forum. Everything seemed to be in order, except for the outbreak itself.
“She may have saved a lot of people by getting the alert out so early. And I was asleep. Asleep.”
In a fit of fury, Sven raised his fist over the keyboard, but then redirected his hand so that he pounded the desk beneath the keyboard, rather than the keyboard itself.
The figurine that Sven loved so much bounced off the desk.
Ivan meowed.
“We gotta get downstairs,” Sven said. “To wait it out…apart from Jane and Lorie…apart from Jane and Lorie.”
Sven pictured the City Hall basement that had been turned into a state-of-the-art safe room. He imagined staying there, while Jane was alone in the apartment, and Lorie was in the Stuyvesant safe room.
“As long as Lorie gets online, and Jane stays online, we can stay in touch…and it’ll be okay.” Sven looked down at his cat. “Right Ivan?”
Ivan looked up at his master. Sven saw the rapid rise and fall of Ivan’s chest. Growing increasingly disoriented, Sven sat down next to Ivan and petted his back.
“It’s gonna be okay. Just gotta do this one more time. Just gotta do this one more time…in New York.”
Ivan’s breathing didn’t settle. He looked Sven in the eye and yowled.
“You’re right,” Sven said. “It’s time to leave.”
Lightheadedness overcame Sven as he got to his feet. He knew it was the miasma of the infected. It was there, seeping into his office and locking him up. The most dangerous part of the virus, the most difficult to prepare for and avoid, the…
Ivan yowled.
Sven stumbled to the closet with as much coordination as he could muster while the room seemed to wobble around him.
From the closet he took the container that held his gas mask and replacement filters.
“Pride and joy of American gas masks,” he muttered hazily. “Made in Co—Col—Colorado.”
In his stupefied state, Sven didn’t hear the door rattle in its frame.
48
HUDSON RIVER GREENWAY, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Lorie felt the morbid excitement tightening its grip on her mind. She shook her head in an attempt to distance herself from the excitement, to be rational. It had little effect.
In a further attempt, Lorie looked to her left at the Hudson River and tried to imagine what New York had been like hundreds of years ago, long before the zombies had taken it for their own.
She tried to picture it in her mind—she had seen documentaries, after all—but couldn’t. Maybe it was because the zombies were getting dangerously close, or maybe it was because she didn’t much care for how New York used to look.
As drastic as the difference between New York City and Virginia was, Lorie loved her new home. She thought everything about it was perfect, even the often nauseating smells that emanated from the plentiful dark alleys and subway grates.
She had never been to a place with so much character, where the people were so strange and diverse...and rude. It was wonderfully new, and there was so much to do in the city that she felt like it would always feel knew...that she would always feel new there, and welcomed in her own strangeness.
The Hudson River was breathtakingly beautiful, and Lorie allowed herself one more fleeting glimpse as the zombies—both the zombie students behind her and the zombies of the Greenway ahead of her—drew nearer.
She savored the feeling of that moment, the rarity that the zombies were imparting to the beautiful river scene because they were forcing Lorie to look away from it and focus on them, and focus on defending herself from them.
She loved them then—the zombies. She knew that she always had, and that she always would.
If that made her insane, so be it. The zombies gave her a defined purpose. Their existence made her into what she was supposed to be, transported her to the state of existence in which she felt most alive.
The zombies were hers to conquer, and conquer them she would.
Squeezing the handle of the knife, Lorie rounded on the nearest zombie ahead of her on the Greenway. She could see a want in its dead eyes, a need, a hunger that paralleled hers in a way that no one else could understand. She knew that she was more like the zombies than Sven or Jane would ever allow themselves to imagine, and in killing the zombies, Lorie found an unrivaled peace, a calm, a purpose as she had never known before.
The knife cut through the air and broke through the flesh above the zombie’s left temple. The zombie collapsed in front of Lorie.
Lorie held the knife firm as the zombie fell, and the blade slid out from the zombie’s skull.
With the viscous liquid that now coated the knife glinting in the moonlight, Lorie bounded north on the Hudson River Greenway. She set her sights on the next nearest zombie, and, her knife drawn and teeth bared, advanced toward it.
As she advanced, Lorie saw an overlay in the peripheral vision of her mind’s eye. It existed only in the periphery, disappearing when Lorie tried to look directly at it.
Even as Lorie’s eyes were focused on the tall, hipster zombie in front of her, beyond him she was aware of a charted path superimposed on top of the Greenway. It was not a path around the horde but through it…the safest, most efficient path that kept Lorie away from the unlit fringes of the Greenway.
“Safer to work through the zombies you can see,” Lorie said, “than the ones you can’t.”
The wind picked up and pushed Lorie backward toward Stuyvesant, hurling frozen snow at her face.
The overlay that Lorie saw shifted, its points remaining connected, but meandering among and around the slow-moving zombies.
The cold air nipped at Lorie’s skin, adding to the sting of the frozen snowflakes.
With the whole of her peripheral vision, Lorie accepted the overlay.
Then she took a deep breath, and took off.
49
CITY HALL, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Sven donned the mask, and his mental clarity and physical coordination returned.
As expected, the substrates in the mask’s filter did react with whatever viral poison was in the air, and neutralized at least some of the poison’s harmful effects.
Sven straightened and glanced at Ivan.
A noise.
There was someone at the door.
“It’s stronger this time, isn’t it Ivan?”
Ivan looked up at Sven, his cat eyes wide.
�
��I can still feel the effects, even with the mask on.”
Ivan sat down in a pile of papers, evoking a nice series of crunching sounds.
Sven let a half-hearted smile travel across his face.
“They’re inside, aren’t they?”
Ivan looked up at Sven and yowled.
“And you were trying to warn me, to get me out in time.” Sven sighed. “And now there’s someone right outside my door.”
Sven leaned against the wall next to the closet. “How could I have been so careless?”
Sven picked up Ivan’s backpack carrier and scooped a cooperative Ivan into it. He slung the pack on and tightened the straps.
“Maybe they’re already in the basement.”
He dashed to the computer and checked the status of the basement safe room. No one had logged in to its computers. It remained unlocked.
“Not a good sign.”
Ivan meowed.
“Almost ready.”
The door shook in its frame again, more violently than before. The doorknob rattled.
Sven opened the drawer to his right. He took out his gun, made sure that it was loaded and walked to the door.
Ivan skittered inside the pack.
“I’m a much better shot than I used to be, Ivan. After all the practice with Jane and Harry courtesy of the NYPD, I can hit things at short distances now.”
Sven moved the gun from one hand to the other so that he could wipe his sweating hands on his suit jacket.
When the gun was back in his right hand, Sven put his left hand on the rattling doorknob.
Sven turned the knob, opened the door a crack, and stepped to the side, raising the gun as he moved.
For a moment the door remained motionless.
Then it flew open and a disoriented and bloody Harry Melling burst in.
The mayor slammed the door shut and slumped backward against it. He looked at Sven and his eyes said it all…his eyes and his torn neck.
“It’s over,” Harry said. “We tried, but it’s over.”
Harry sank down to the floor. He let the back of his head rest against the closed door. The grey streaks of Harry’s hair, which were now tinged with blood, left their mark on the wood.
When Harry tilted his head backward, Sven got a better look at Harry’s neck. There were multiple bite marks there, but the blood was barely flowing. Sven could see Harry’s blood pulsing rapidly in his veins, which were straining against the skin of his neck.
Drying blood caked the white of Harry’s shirt color. The knot of his dark blue tie was loosened and the top button of his shirt undone. His breathing was labored, but steady. His blue eyes, which usually sparkled, looked dim and faded, the whites bloodshot.
“It’s not your fault, you know,” Harry said. “It’s not anyone’s fault that we know of.” Harry coughed, wincing. “It happened much too fast. It didn’t happen anywhere near as fast as this in Virginia, did it?”
Sven shook his head.
“I didn’t think so,” Harry said. “That would’ve been hopeless. That would’ve been this.”
Ivan meowed from within the backpack.
“Hello Ivan the cat,” Harry said. He laughed, wincing again.
Ivan meowed.
Sven took a shallow breath, the first one since Harry had burst in. “This is my fault. The Containers were right. We all should’ve stayed in Virginia. We should never have—”
“Sven,” Harry said accusingly, “I don’t want to hear any of that out of you right now. These are my last moments, and I would like to spend them with the Sven who I came to know. The Sven who lived through the Virginia outbreak and who devoted his life to preparing others for the next one…” Harry shut his eyes. “Which came far too suddenly, and far too soon.”
Sven nodded and looked away.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Harry twitch. Sven looked back at Harry.
“Harry?” Sven said.
Another twitch.
“Mayor Melling?”
Harry was still.
Sven walked back to his desk, caught in uncertainty. There his gaze found the picture frame on his desk.
In the frame were two photographs. One was of Sven with Jane, Lorie, and Ivan after their move to New York. They were in Central Park, with Cleopatra’s Needle in the background. They were smiling.
The other photograph was of Sven with Lars. They were in the Charlottesville gym where Sven had been a personal trainer, wearing their man-tards, each giving a thumbs-up, female figure athletes flanking them, a dumbbell in each of the outstretched hands of Sven, Lars, and the figure athletes.
What he had lost, and what he had gained, side by side, framed together. Sven considered taking the pictures out of the frame and pocketing them. But he didn’t. He let the frame remain where it was, standing on the desk.
Ivan meowed.
“Yes,” Sven said. “We’re leaving…we’re leaving…but…”
Harry began to shake, rattling the door behind him.
“What is it coming from, Ivan? Where is the virus?”
Sven walked back to the door and raised the gun to Harry’s forehead.
Gritting his teeth, he saw it all—the neat bullet hole appearing close to the middle of Harry’s forehead, crouching down to close Harry’s eyes, laying him carefully on the floor so that he wasn’t propped up against the door in that awkward position, covering him with…with something.
He saw it all, but couldn’t pull the trigger. It would have been against Harry’s wishes. Harry believed the disease to be curable, reversible in some way, and he did not condone violence against the infected.
“You’re wrong,” Sven said, “but that’s your right.”
Staying as far out of Harry’s reach as possible, Sven opened the door enough to get through and strode out into the hallway.
He made way for the nearest stairs, turned a corner, and—
Infected.
Everywhere.
Remembering the inactive state of the basement safe room, Sven felt a chill run up his spine. “If I have to make a run for it, I’ll have to fight the cold on top of the...”
Sven gritted his teeth.
The infected were closing in from Sven’s left, still more than fifteen feet away. Most of the infected wore formal business attire. Their moans grew louder and more frantic as they staggered toward Sven.
Sven considered his options as fast as the fear in his mind would allow.
From what he could see, the infected were coming from one direction. He turned away from them, and chose to retreat.
He walked down the hallway, filling each of his steps with caution. Even if the mass of infected was mostly behind him, Sven was sure there would be loners in other parts of the building, and one wrong turn into one of the infected, one bite, was all that it would take to end the night early.
He passed his office.
The lights of City Hall flickered.
“This can't be serious,” Sven muttered. “It always just gets worse. It always—”
His foot caught on something and he tripped. He stopped his fall by landing on one knee, keeping himself from falling all the way to the floor.
He looked down and saw that he had tripped over a leg that was severed mid-thigh. There was a trail of blood from the torn flesh, leading down the hallway and around the corner.
Sven straightened, stood, and listened for a moment, straining to hear if there was any movement around the corner.
The lights flickered again, a series of unsettling electrical sounds as their accompaniment this time.
The message of the lights’ flicker and electrical drone was clear: time was running short.
Sven strode forward, turned the corner, and froze.
In front of him, a dozen or more of the infected were stumbling down the hallway toward him, several of them clutching torn human remains in their hands and teeth. The infected were between him and the stairwell—the final stairwell he could use given his current p
osition on this floor.
Hyperventilating and trying not to focus on the churning ice floes in his stomach, Sven took several steps backward.
As he backed into the wall at the corner of the hallway he saw that he now found himself in between two masses of advancing infected.
Ivan yowled, and Sven took care to keep his back off the wall to avoid hurting the cat.
“Poor Ivan,” Sven whispered.
No way out.
He emptied the gun into the advancing throngs, managing to drop four of the infected, and then threw the gun away. He had only had the one clip.
Sven tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry.
“Ivan,” Sven whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
As the moans of anticipation from the throngs of infected grew louder, the lights of City Hall flickered one last time, and went out.
50
In pitch darkness, breathing hard and trembling with fear, Sven grabbed for the flashlight in the bottom compartment of Ivan’s pack. He could feel Ivan clawing at the bottom compartment, too, as if they were playing a game.
Sven got the flashlight, turned it on, and swept its beam from side to side trying to find a way, any way, out of the closing vice of infected in which he now found himself.
But there was no way.
There was no way out.
There were more than a dozen of the infected coming at him from either direction, without significant breaks in either formation. Each mass of infected spanned the width of the hallway, and all the ways out of the building were past them.
Sven understood that his only chance was to try to get past one of the groups, maybe to battle through it somehow. But that was no chance at all, that was certain death. He wasn't fast enough. He knew he wasn't fast enough and he could see little more than shadows by the thin, solitary beam of his flashlight.
Ivan yowled and scratched fiercely at the inside of the pack.
Sven’s fear gripped him, clamping tighter around him in time with the closing of the infected vice.
He could feel his body freezing up. His breathing became shallow, and cold filled his body.
The flashlight dropped from Sven's paralyzed grip.
