by Guy James
Other infected reclaimed the severed head, stopping its progress with their feet and reversing its course. The gathering groups of infected that were shambling toward Sven now had a decapitated head underfoot and were kicking it toward Sven like a soccer ball. The small movements of their feet massaged the soccer ball closer in a spasmodic finesse that looked as if it were the product of years of practice.
The frenetic shriek of emergency sirens seemed to grow louder, and the moans of the infected, more desperate.
A noise Sven had heard a moment before registered in his mind. There had been a crack—not a loud one, but Sven at once suspected what it had come from. He scanned the ground around him, looking for his phone. At first, he didn’t see it anywhere, but then he spotted it on the ground a few feet away. The smart phone lay in pieces.
Sven cursed, realizing that the broken phone meant an inability to use messaging and email, and that meant a decreased likelihood of reaching Jane. He still had his apocalypse phone, and he would try that as soon as he was in relative safety, but the circuits would likely be overwhelmed during the crisis.
He knew there was no time to consider that now; the infected were getting too close.
Sven glanced into the street. It would have been best to run around the infected and avoid confrontation, but the street was filled with cars whose drivers sat thrashing, their dark, shrunken eyeballs targeting Sven. A door could pop open, or a window somewhere might already be rolled down—the remnant of a failed attempt to flee—or infected may lurk in the darkness between the cars, crawling or lying on the ground, waiting for an unwitting Sven to—
He planted his feet firmly in the snow on the sidewalk and turned back to the enlarging throng of infected that was coming at him, a moving, moaning pack that brought with it a rotten, severed head.
Ivan scampered in the backpack and Sven cursed again. If only the apocalypse phone had not been deep within an inner compartment of the backpack, Sven could have already called Jane to warn her about Milt.
Sven considered taking the backpack off and digging through it, knowing that it would likely mean his death if he did. As he was thinking this over, an infected woman emerged from within the throng. Sven gasped, shocked at what he was seeing and alarmed that he had not noticed her before. The infected woman was pushing a black, hooded stroller.
After she emerged from the group of infected behind her, she aligned herself with the infected men who had the decapitated head underfoot.
Filled with revulsion, Sven looked around again. All the gaps in the closing circle of infected were gone.
Ivan began to press his paws against the inside of the backpack, kneading Sven’s back.
“Ivan,” Sven said. “Ivan… What a mess this is.”
Now desperate, Sven straightened, gritted his teeth, and searched for the weakest point in the aperture of infected that was squeezing shut around him.
Then he saw it clearly. There was always a weak spot. Here, it was through the infected woman with the stroller. Of course it was. Where else could it have been? Sven understood that if he was to have a chance of survival, he would have to take full advantage of this horrible opportunity.
Sven approached the stroller, the tension in his body increasing as he forced himself nearer.
“Through the woman, the group of four behind her, and you’re out of it. Come on.”
Ivan scampered in the backpack and hissed, sending a thin plume of steam out through the backpack’s mesh. Before it dispersed, the steam melted the outer edges of several icy snowflakes.
Sven, grateful for his loyal Russian Blue’s battle cry, let the image of what he was about to do take shape in his mind. Then he narrowed his eyes, and, tightening his grip on the machetes, charged.
57
HUDSON RIVER GREENWAY, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
A group of eight masked, panic-stricken students ran past Lorie. One of them, a boy in his swim trunks who Lorie guessed had been in the middle of swim team practice when he had been forced to make his escape, lost his balance next to Lorie and put a hand out to steady to himself. There was nothing there for his hand to grasp hold of. Lorie reacted and stepped forward, putting both of her own hands up and pushing against the boy’s hand. He regained his balance and got back to running in line behind the others.
The boy turned to look over his shoulder at Lorie as he made progress up the Greenway. His eyes were wide with terror, and Lorie saw that with his other hand he was clutching a cell phone to his chest as he ran. He was balancing it there with his knuckles. His hand was limp, and looked as if either it or the wrist it was connected to was broken.
“Wait,” Lorie yelled after him. “You… Wait.” She reached a hand out toward the boy, still feeling the pressure of the boy’s cold hand against her own. She stood there with her hand extended as if the gesture were something that could bring him back, and bring the whole group of them back. She knew that as frightened as they were, they stood little chance against the zombies. Their panic was making them uncoordinated, irrational.
The group kept running.
Lorie watched them head north on the Hudson River Greenway. The students tried to avoid the zombies on the path, but, as Lorie had expected, the zombies picked them off, one by one, scream by visceral scream, until only two remained. Lorie watched the two students who were left—one of them the boy in his swim trunks who she had helped to right on his course, continue running. They disappeared from sight just as the screams of their fallen comrades were overcome by the moans of the zombies who were devouring them. Then the howls of the wind grew louder, and drowned out the stomach-turning noises that the zombies were making.
Lorie set her jaw and curled her fingers contemplatively around the handle of her knife.
A scream pierced the night, originating somewhere within the walls of Stuyvesant High School. Lorie did not turn around. Instead, she fixed her gaze on two zombies that had picked off the first of the group of fleeing students. Lorie advanced toward them.
The zombies were tearing into the soft spot of the student’s belly just below the ribcage. Steam was rising up from the wound as if it were itself fleeing from the undead and could not escape quickly enough.
The zipper of the student’s cardigan was split open in the middle so that the zipper still held at the student’s neck and beltline. The hands of the zombies had torn right through the grey t-shirt that the student had on beneath the cardigan. The zombies were bent over the student’s intermittently twitching but otherwise limp body, inches from the railing beyond which the Hudson River whipped and rolled.
Rows of small icicles, like the teeth of a shark, hung from the brow of one of the zombies—a UPS delivery man. The clothes of the other zombie—by the looks of it a skater boy—were bloody and torn. The two looked relatively intact, for zombies. Lorie scanned their exposed flesh for a telltale bite wound that would have been the source of their exposures to the virus, but she saw none.
“Where is it coming from?”
Lorie turned around, confirming that the high school zombies behind her were still a safe distance away. She thought that it had been lucky that the outbreak had hit after school, but at a school like Stuyvesant, whose class sizes were so large and whose students were so committed to after school extracurricular activities, there had still been—by Lorie’s estimate—more than a hundred students and staff at the school when she had realized what was happening.
She turned back to the zombies who were elbows deep in eviscerating the cardigan-wearing student. Lorie didn’t understand this aspect of the virus. It didn’t make sense to her that the zombies would be so overly-aggressive sometimes as to destroy their prey rather than to spread the infection via a quick and relatively harmless bite that would leave their victims whole enough to spread the virus further. The eviscerated student did not look like he would be able to reanimate.
“It’s not perfect…” she said, “but I guess it doesn’t have to be.”
The skate
r boy zombie came equipped with a dangling keychain that hung down from the belt of his pants and swung back and forth at a level between his knees and ankles. It caught Lorie’s attention. She saw a great many keys at the end of the chain, and they were bloody, and…Lorie thought she could see a piece of flesh skewered at the end of a brass key.
She shook her head. “Looks about right.”
The UPS and skater zombies kept at their gory work and made no sign of noticing Lorie as she approached. She stopped when she was standing over them and stood there for a long moment, watching them rip the student’s guts free of his body, watching them rip the student free of his place within humanity.
She let the fury boil over inside her.
Then she struck.
58
Lorie roundhouse-kicked the skater boy zombie in the side of his head. The blow knocked the opposite side of his face into the frosted railing of the Greenway with a satisfying clang. An improbably long piece of intestine fell from his mouth and his chain swung outward in a violent arc. Lorie leaned backward to avoid the chain as the skater boy zombie’s head bounced off the railing. His knees bent and he fell backward, dazed. The severed length of intestine lay, steaming, at his feet.
The UPS zombie looked up from his abdominal handiwork. A length of bloody, steaming intestine hung from between his blood-stained teeth. It was thinner than the one that the skater boy zombie had had. It clung to the point of the UPS zombie’s chin and swung back and forth in front of his neck. He moaned and lurched toward Lorie, moving toward her on his knees, in an apparent craving for fresher flesh.
Without further hesitation, Lorie stabbed the knife through the UPS zombie’s right eye. His mouth slackened, opening slightly, but the intestine remained in his teeth. Lorie withdrew the knife and the zombie fell forward, dead.
Lorie’s gaze wandered to the disemboweled student. His gaping wound was no longer steaming. Lorie watched snow drift into the injury.
Lorie turned back to the UPS zombie’s body and pulled upward on his jacket, ripping it violently off of him, and breaking the deteriorating bones of his arms in the process. She took the jacket and draped it around the head of the skater boy zombie—who was now beginning to sit up.
With the jacket over his head, Lorie guided the zombie up and toward the railing. He flailed and tried to grab Lorie, setting his chain to whipping back and forth parallel to his body. Lorie avoided both his grasp and the chain as she pushed his body up against the railing.
“The water looks unfriendly,” she said, and shoved.
The skater boy zombie went over the railing. His flailing, somersaulting body broke the surface of the water with a large, inelegant splash. He sank, disappearing into the churning murk.
The jacket that Lorie had used to cover his head and protect herself from his bite floated up to the surface of the river. It began to move with the current.
Lorie watched the jacket for a few seconds and then turned around. She looked at the gutted body of the student again, and, feeling the rage settle to a level that could provide her with steady fuel, stomped on the student’s head. Her heel connected with the left side of the student’s chin. Lorie both heard and felt his neck break. She thought that he probably would not have reanimated, but now she could be sure.
She looked up and let her gaze travel north on the Greenway until her eyes came to rest on another student who had been taken down in her attempt to flee. Zombies were feasting on her body, ripping large chunks of flesh from her legs and neck.
It’s because they panicked, Lorie thought, the zombies are so far apart here, it’s because they panicked that they were caught.
Lorie turned and looked behind her at the closed doors that led back into Stuyvesant High School. The heavy doors shook, and Lorie knew that it was only a matter of time before the mass of undead, overachieving high school students was large enough to force its way out of the building and stagger onto the Greenway.
She watched the doors rattle, hoping to see another group of fleeing, uninfected students burst out of the school.
How did the first group get past the zombies at the door? she wondered. Probably lured the zombies away somehow, then got around them. To go through all that trouble, and…
Lorie sighed.
This time, she thought, I’ll get them to slow down, stop, and try to calm them down for a minute. They’ll stand a better chance then.
Lorie turned around again. She took in the current positions of the zombies on the Greenway. Her mental overlay revised itself, moving and flickering until it steadied to form a path that led safely through the maze of undead.
She stretched her quads, stretched her hamstrings, bounced up and down on the balls of her feet to limber up, and was about to take off when she spotted something. There was a rectangular bulge in the cardigan pocket of the dead student whose neck she had broken moments earlier.
The rectangular bulge was moving…vibrating. She could hear its electronic hum. The movement shook and dislodged the snow that was settling on the cardigan pocket.
She looked from the cardigan to the nearest approaching zombie, an elderly man whose long coat was partially shrugged off. It looked to be on the verge of falling but seemed—and Lorie guessed that it was—frozen in place.
Lorie looked from the elderly zombie back to the rectangular bulge.
There was still time.
She lunged forward and knelt over the cardigan pocket, unfastened its button and tore the smart phone free.
A blue notification light winked at her as she stood up, and, moving backward, brought the phone up to her face.
She pressed the phone’s power button and the screen lit up.
A square composed of nine dots stared up at her. The phone was locked by a pattern lock.
Lorie groaned.
“So much for the honor system,” she said, shaking her head.
She raised the phone over her head, locking her sights on a particularly murky spot on the surface of the Hudson, twisted her body to impart extra momentum to the throw…then stopped herself.
“Not so fast, Lorie,” she whispered to herself. “Everyone’s got the same two or three patterns they use.” She remembered how one of her friends claimed that she could figure out anyone’s pattern after a number of tries, and that apparently it was an easy thing to do.
She took another few steps backward, looked around her to make sure she had time to try this, then looked down and pressed the power key again.
The smart phone’s screen lit up.
The three-by-three square stared up at her again, but this time, she narrowed her eyes and stared back. The dots that made up the square weren’t dots in the technical sense, but were small white circles. Lorie found herself staring at the middles of the circles that were the dots.
A thick, shapely snowflake landed on the dot in the middle of the square. Lorie wiped it away with the back of her hand and blinked at the smudged screen of the smart phone.
“Everyone’s got the same two or three patterns,” Lorie repeated.
The elderly zombie who was gaining ground moaned. It was a dry and feeble noise, and Lorie thought it a pathetic contrast against the wind’s howl.
Lorie began by drawing three different triangles with her finger. Each one that she traced turned red and disappeared. She was about to trace another one when she remembered that if she traced too many, the phone would lock her out for a while, and she didn’t have time for that.
Another snowflake fell on the dot in the middle of the square. Lorie stared at it. It wasn’t as large or as shapely as its predecessor, but it had fallen in the same, exact spot.
59
“What are the odds of that?” Lorie muttered, and stared harder. She looked at the body of the boy to whom the smart phone belonged, and then back at the phone. The snowflake was melting.
Lorie tried an upside-down U pattern.
That didn’t work.
Lorie tried a C pattern.
That didn’t work.
Lorie shook her head, knowing that she was running out of tries and uncertain of how many tries remained.
The melting snowflake was expanding outward.
She tried one more pattern: a backward C.
The dots that she connected with her finger glowed a solid green, and the phone unlocked.
Lorie sighed and instantly tried to swipe down the notification bar at the top of the smart phone’s screen. It wouldn’t cooperate. Lorie looked at the tip of her finger, which was so cold that she could barely feel it at this point, and decided it was time to switch hands. She took the phone with her other hand and successfully swiped the notification bar down with her thumb.
It was as she had suspected: the boy had Sven’s app installed on his phone, and the app was now making the phone vibrate and blare alerts at regular intervals.
“So Sven did hit the alarm…but when?”
Lorie checked her surroundings again, and, noting that the approaching elderly zombie was gaining ground, took several more steps backward. The other zombies of the Greenway were either occupied with their captured prey, or too far off to be pursuing Lorie.
She tapped the app open. A post unfurled onto the whole of the phone’s display.
The outbreak alarm had been sounded. The alarm was comprised of an aggressive and relentless alert system designed to get a phone owner’s attention, and a set of instructions and links to further instructions. Lorie scrolled through the informational part of the alarm. There was nothing that was useful as far as the source of the virus or areas of particularly high infection density to avoid. Lorie remembered that Sven had wanted to add these pieces of information to the alarm, but she understood why they weren’t there. The source of the virus wasn’t known, and no one was in a position to report on zombie traffic at the moment, and Lorie wasn’t sure anyone would be, given the rapid and total nature of the outbreak.
