by Guy James
He couldn't move, and felt himself sinking into a frozen, cavernous abyss that would soon be covered with thick, immovable sheets of ice.
The flashlight rolled away from Sven, toward the mass of infected to his left. The beam of the flashlight traveled across the wall, getting farther away from Sven, leaving him in increasing darkness.
Sven stood there, a numb lump of fear pressed against the wall. His mind didn't work. He couldn't think. He couldn't react. It felt worse than giving in.
The beam of the flashlight began to travel back along the wall the way that it had come.
The light inched toward Sven, spurred on by the uncoordinated shambling of undead feet. The moans of the infected grew louder as they neared their anticipated prey, which was becoming increasingly illuminated with each of their shambling steps.
Then Sven was in the flashlight's miniature spotlight.
An infected man in a grey Charles Tyrwhitt suit grabbed for him. He took hold of Sven’s left arm. Another infected man in a far inferior suit grabbed and found purchase in the left strap of Sven’s backpack.
Ivan cried.
That was too much.
The will to save Ivan—and himself, but mostly Ivan, who Sven knew he had no right to abandon in this situation—jarred Sven back into his body so fast that the first thing he saw and understood was a decapitated infected man in a grey Charles Tyrwhitt suit to his left, whose hand was latched onto Sven's left arm. The machetes were drawn and gripped in Sven's hands.
The feeling of the knives gripped in his palms and the sight of the headless infected man filled Sven with a hatred so raw and primitive that his vision turned red.
He sliced with the machetes, severing the hand that held his left arm.
He understood only one thing at that moment: that whether or not he would have a life beyond this hallway, he would fill the hallway with blood, and his tarnished soul would savor every drop.
With a feral roar that stretched the limits of expression, Sven leapt deeper into the throng that was now enveloping him, with no regard for the consequences.
The knives, his mind, his body, and the whole of his being had come together to form one perfect vehicle: a vehicle for dealing death.
The infected, they all wanted him to be as they were—walking putrefaction underneath occasionally-expensive business attire. But he would never be as they were, and nor would they be as they were now for much longer.
The flashlight spun and rolled, and the shadows on the wall behind Sven grew tall and narrow.
To the grey clumsily grabbing shapes were added incomprehensible flying forms, trailing undistinguishable tails, as if they were comet shadow puppets reenacted by skillful puppeteers.
The wet, rotten gobbets flew and fell all around Sven’s slicing form, and the hallway floor grew slick with the fetid emissions of rotten flesh.
Sven fought deeper into the throng, his mind letting in one dim thought—that the enemy around him was thinning. His body pulsed with an electric power, alive with the urge to inflict pain, take life, and savor the sight of destroyed bodies. Sven’s breath rasped through the filter of the mask as his instincts continued to pull him forward, into the destruction of monsters who had hours before been his support staff.
Ivan remained still in the backpack, save for the occasional tap of his paw against Sven’s back, punctuating a particularly impressive kill.
The beam of the flashlight steadied, and Sven felt resistance when he tried to move. The bottoms of his shoes seemed to be stuck to the floor.
Sven looked down, and saw that there was little floor visible.
Blood was everywhere, not slick like fresh human blood would have been, but desiccated. It pulled at Sven’s shoes, adding resistance to his movement through the throng.
Wait, was there still a throng? In the frenzy of bloodlust, Sven had lost track of what was happening. The clamoring of the infected in the hallway had been reduced to a twitching mass, confined to the floor.
Putrid parts that had once been the components of living beings were everywhere. Sven’s eyes took it all in and the faintest glimmer of a smile wandered across his face.
The fingers that had grabbed for him were connected to hands without forearms; teeth that had sought to tear him apart were strewn about the hall, some crawling down walls, inching down from the place where they had stuck. The teeth were the least obtrusive of the body parts that slid, sticking by thick, fetid blood to the walls.
Sven ducked into a stairwell and slammed the door shut behind him. He descended the single flight of stairs to the first floor, his way lit by emergency lighting strips.
Sven’s mind was coming back to him now, and he became aware of the ripping sounds his shoes made on the steps as he descended. It was the tearing of dried blood, trying to pull him back upstairs and into the hallway where he had massacred infected New Yorkers.
Some of their faces began to return to him, and he fought to block them out. He was sure one of them had been his personal assistant, who had been so caring in her efforts to keep Sven happy, fed, informed, and well-caffeinated throughout his workdays.
Stop it, Sven told himself, stop it, they weren’t people anymore, they weren’t those people.
When Sven reached the first floor landing, he froze. The sounds from beyond the stairwell door made him consider turning back and looking for a different way out, but that meant going back upstairs and revisiting the butchery. Maybe he was overreacting, maybe the moans were echoing and there weren’t all that many…
Sven crept to the stairwell door, flinching each time that his boots stuck to the floor and he had to tear them away.
He stopped in front of the door and put his hand on the knob.
The knob felt slick in his hand. He looked down at it and saw that there was no blood there, as he had feared. The slickness was from the sweat on his hand.
The moans from beyond the door grew louder, and it became harder for Sven to pretend that their strength could be the result of an echo. Still, he had to see what was behind the door. He had to make sure.
Sven held his breath as he began to turn the knob, fighting against the knob to keep its turning as silent as he could.
The knob seemed to keep turning and turning, without opening the door.
Sven exhaled, wiped his sweaty palm on his pants, and put his hand back on the knob.
He turned again, and his hand didn’t slip this time.
The door was flung open and Sven was thrown backward into the corner of the stairwell.
51
As Sven fell, he saw the shambling forms falling over each other to get through the door...to get to him.
Their working mouths and reaching hands were lit only by the emergency lighting strips, lit up as they entered the stairwell and growing dim as they got nearer to Sven.
Sven sprang to his feet, brushing against hands that grabbed at him and narrowly avoiding mouths that sought to tear the flesh from his bones.
He bolted back up the stairs on his hands and feet, falling over himself as he escaped. He cast a glance behind him as he turned the stairway corner. Even in the dim light he was able to make out an endless stream of churning, slow moving bodies flowing in from the first floor, into the stairwell, and up the stairs after him.
Back on his floor, Sven put his weight against the stairwell door and made sure that the latch caught. Then he groped his way through the darkness, picking his knees up high so that he wouldn’t fall on top of the infected he had killed earlier.
Sven searched for the glow of the flashlight that had guided his battle minutes earlier, but it was gone. He knew the layout of his floor well, and he knew that he could make it to the other stairwell that led from his floor if he only had darkness, and none of the infected, to contend with.
Groping his way along the wall, Sven rounded the corner and spotted a faint glimmer of light creeping under the other stairwell’s door. He began to move faster, hopeful at the sight and turning his
mind away from what he would do if the exit of this stairwell was overrun too.
Sven tried to control his breathing as he crept toward the door. His breathing came in gasps, and he knew that the ragged breathing was making him more agitated. He tried to calm himself, but he couldn’t.
Focusing on the stairwell door that was now his last hope, Sven caught his foot on something and fell. He broke his fall with his hands, which closed on thick liquid.
Dead hands grabbed at him and clung to his clothes.
Sven made himself stop fighting against the bodies, reminding himself that they were just that, bodies.
He stood, but was unable to breathe, his chest having locked up. He fought with his body to take in air and finally, after it seemed that he would suffocate, his neck and chest opened up, and the air came in.
He had to fight just as hard to keep from throwing up. As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t do that now, because that would mean ruining the mask, or taking it off and risking exposure to the airborne poison of the infected. He was sure that the hallway was full of a fatally incapacitating dose of the poison.
Cringing, Sven smeared the liquid that was on his hands on the walls, cleaning his hands as best as he could without wiping them on his clothes.
He began to move toward the stairwell, taking long, deliberate steps over and on top of the bodies on the floor, and balancing himself by keeping his hands on the wall.
He thought for a moment about the safe room in City Hall’s basement, assuming he could even make it there. He hadn’t seen a single uninfected person in the building so far, and the status indicators that he had checked on his computer pointed to the safe room having been overrun. If it had been a week later there would have been cameras installed in the safe room, and he would have known for sure.
In any event, Sven had to make it back to Jane. As far as he knew, she was all that was left for him in this world now.
Ivan meowed.
“I haven’t forgotten you, Ivan. You and Jane.”
A wave of nausea surfaced suddenly and Sven took a controlled breath to try to ease his stomach. It helped.
“God I hope Lorie is okay.”
Ivan meowed.
When Sven was in front of the stairwell door, he stopped and listened. Hearing nothing from beyond it, he opened the door and stepped inside. He descended the stairs, his boots making louder ripping sounds than they had in the first stairwell.
Before Sven got to the first floor landing, he heard what sounded like a body falling on the stairs above him.
“Hello?” he whispered. “Is someone up there?”
The sounds grew louder, and then their source appeared.
An infected woman rounded the corner, looking like she had fallen down the stairs. She was on the floor of the landing above him, crawling toward him.
Sven drew his machetes, walked up the stairs to the landing and hacked downward, sticking the knives deep into the infected woman’s upper back. Sven withdrew the knives from her flesh, raised them, and hacked downward again, then again, and again, until pieces of pulverized spine littered the landing.
Out of breath, Sven shook the pieces of flesh and spine from the blades of his knives, sheathed them, and listened for more sounds in the stairwell. He heard nothing, and resumed his descent to the first floor.
Sven paused in the first floor landing and listened. He heard no moans, so he cracked the door and peeked out into the hall.
White collar infected shambled up and down the hallway, dappled in the moonlight coming in through the first floor windows.
Not wanting to lose any more time inside City Hall, Sven burst into the first floor hallway and drew his machetes. He ran past wandering infected, hacking at some as he passed and pushing others out of his way.
Just as Sven saw the mass of infected that had blocked his exit from the other stairwell begin to turn and stagger toward him, he made it to a door and shoved his way through it.
Sven stumbled down some stairs and into the street. Snowflakes began to speckle the blood and chunks of rotten flesh that covered his clothing. He brushed a severed ear from his left forearm with a reflexive movement of his right hand. Then he staggered, dazed, to the curb.
Rotten blood dripped from the points of Sven’s machetes, tarnishing the New York City winter’s first coat of snow.
Through the falling beauty of geometrical snowflakes and the plastic eyelets of the mask, Sven’s gaze shone upon the young night, his eyes’ promise of merciless carnage unmistakable.
52
CITY HALL PARK, NEW YORK, NEW YORK, LATE EVENING, THURSDAY, JANUARY 20
An unwanted feeling washed over Milt as he watched a masked Sven stumble out from City Hall.
Standing under the cover of a tree’s ice-covered branches and removed from Sven’s line of sight, Milt felt the core of his being unsteadied by a sense of uncertainty. For the first time since he had traveled north into the cold, he trembled in the chill.
Milt’s cavernous body formed a heavy sigh, which Milt let escape slowly and quietly as he watched Sven. Sven looked so small now compared to his former self, gaunt even, and he was shaking all over, his body heaving. He seemed so sad, afraid, and weak. Milt backed away, retreating farther into the gloom of the tree cover and deeper into the gloom of his sudden despair. He felt another sigh begin to form within him. He stifled it.
“What if,” Milt whispered, “Sven…and Jane and Lorie…are not evolved by the virus as I have been, and as I believe they deserve to be? What shall come of all my great efforts then? What if I am destined to be the only one, destined to live a superior life, in solitude, the last intelligent creature of this plane?”
The frozen tip of a tree branch fell to the ground by Milt’s feet and the ice that had formed around the branch shattered. Milt looked down at it and frowned. “If I am to be allotted further solitude, then...” Milt’s frown deepened. “In any event, such states of being are not for me to question—to ponder, yes, but not to question. Even one such as me is not capable of foretelling events that have yet to occur; and such an impossible task is not within the role that fate has so auspiciously granted me. My role is to spread the evolution, widening the reach of the virus, but not to micro-engineer any of the particular aspects of such evolution, an admittedly impossible feat. The evolution is itself my master, and I am naught more than my master’s unassuming, though admittedly and obviously ingenious, servant.”
Milt looked up and resumed watching Sven.
“I can hardly believe,” Milt whispered, “that there was once a time, not so long ago, when I wanted revenge against this heartrending, pathetic creature, that I even believed said creature to be my nemesis. It is enough to look at how he stares with dumb horror at the evolvers who now overtake this island. His eyes tell of a complete ignorance of the great transformation that is unfolding around him.” Milt shook his head. “Such frailty…the only feeling I can now muster with respect to him is pity.” Milt considered kicking at a clump of ice next to the fallen branch tip. He wanted to kick the clump, to dislodge it from the snow that had accumulated around it, but he didn’t. He had to remain out of sight in this preliminary stage.
“All that bodybuilder bulk,” Milt whispered, “that I had once thought so stupid, that I had once gone so far as to resent, all gone. How I had relished those dark fantasies of the legions of my virus-infused humans making a feast of Sven’s musculature, peeling the flesh from his bones, sinew by sinew, strand by strand, picking him clean until he was naught more than the barest of bloody skeletons, to be put on a leash and led around, as an example of the definitive, unassailable superiority of the virus…my virus.” Milt shuddered. “My word, how misguided I was in my prior life. Thankfully, that time is in the past and the innards of the feelings of that time have rotted and decayed, leaving behind hollow shells colored only by dried, clinging scabs and hardened flecks of pus.”
Milt smiled weakly. “Quite eloquent…a turn of phrase fit for jotting d
own…but now is neither the time nor the place. I shall commit it to memory and summon it forth at a later date.” Milt closed his eyes, repeated the scabbed, pus-flecked phrase in his mind several times until he was sure that it had been etched with indelible precision into his brain matter, and reopened his eyes.
“He is so excruciatingly gaunt,” Milt whispered, as if he were holding a camera and narrating a wildlife documentary, “if only by comparison to his former self. The sharp features of the mask may as well be the bony structure of his face as I have seen it on television in the various interviews. He now walks about the world as a man of rather ordinary proportions, although, admittedly, he is still taller than most other human men.”
Milt mounted his robotic, wheeled steed and powered the Segway on. He rode in Sven’s direction and began to gain speed as he weaved among the stopped cars and staggering evolvers in the street, but was careful to slow down as he got closer. Milt set a course north of Sven’s position on Broadway and continued to decelerate. He didn’t want to risk a physical confrontation with Sven here, dazed as the man appeared to be, and given the terms on which they had last parted.
“Hail fellow, well met,” Milt called in his most courteous tone. “How are you on this fine, winter’s eve?”
53
Sven turned with slow and uncertain movements, like a man bewildered. Then, to Milt’s great surprise and horror, Sven’s face grew even more stupefied. The masked contingency planner emitted a ferocious growl.
Milt looked around, uncertain, and stopped the Segway behind a throng of infected, a safe distance away from Sven. Sven stood staring at Milt with a wild look in his eyes, a look that seemed to promise carnage of the most lurid sort.
“Sven,” Milt said, “why do you growl, and is it actually at me that you direct said growl…or at some other denizen of this marvelous, post-apocalyptic setting that we currently inhabit? Please confirm that it is the latter.”
