by Guy James
Lorie deactivated the alert system just as the phone began to vibrate and flash again. She looked at the alarm’s user history displayed on the bottom of the page and saw that it had been sounded by Jane.
“What about Sven?” she whispered.
Lorie knew three people who had the password that was needed to activate the alarm: Harry Melling, Sven, and Jane. There may have been others, but Lorie wasn’t sure.
Lorie tapped out of the alarm app and into the main page of the New York City Outbreak Readiness Public Forum. She rolled her eyes. The name of the forum annoyed her so much. It was too long and impossible to remember. Sven and Jane just didn’t get it. Lorie had let it go. On balance, it was a minor issue.
A post from Jane was there, pinned to the top of the page, corresponding to the alarm that she had hit, as were all the glaring outbreak notifications and a large number of posts from horrified New Yorkers, but there was nothing from Sven, no sign that he was alright.
The air suddenly felt colder, seeming to Lorie to fill with ice and bitterness.
She took another step backward, her legs trembling now.
The heel of her right foot caught on something and she tipped backward. Her hands opened, instinctively reaching for something to grasp, and the smart phone flew from her hands, in the direction of the cardigan pocket from which the phone had come.
From Lorie’s perspective, her fall developed in slow motion, and as she fell, minute details of her surroundings seemed to pop up at her as if they were pieces of a puzzle that could no longer contain themselves in the rigid structure to which they’d been confined.
A frozen glob of blood at the corner of the smart phone owner’s mouth cracked apart, the fissure forming off center.
Farther north on the Greenway, snowflakes met with a spray of blood that was erupting at irregular intervals from the mouth of a dying student.
From somewhere behind Lorie, a car horn peeped and died.
The smart phone was at its zenith now. Lorie watched it hang in place for a long moment, distorted by her intensely focused perception.
Then, the smart phone began its descent.
The cracked glob of blood at the corner of the smart phone owner’s mouth detached and began its own descent toward the frozen pavement.
Farther north on the Greenway, a small snowflake was consumed by a waning spray of blood. The snowflake melted.
Beyond the descending smart phone, Lorie saw the overlay—the route through the zombies that her mind had plotted for her—shift and shimmer as slow motion snowflakes glided through and around it.
Acceleration.
Lorie gritted her teeth and put her hands out to break her fall.
Impact, cold and hard, unwelcoming.
The smart phone clicked and clattered on the ice and packed snow.
Like a spring, Lorie was back on her feet in an instant.
She turned to assess the situation near Stuyvesant. A throng of undead had formed just outside the entrance, dashing Lorie’s hopes for any more escapee students. There were four zombies roaming away from the pack, as if they were the group’s feelers, sniffing around for prey.
Lorie turned around and picked up the smart phone, noticing that its screen had turned off.
A strong gust of wind pushed her eastward, away from the Hudson River, and she took a step sideways to keep her balance.
She jammed the phone into her pocket, took one final look at the perfect, floating overlay that led safely north through the zombies on the Greenway. She turned away from it and took off toward Stuyvesant, toward the throng of undead students.
60
CIVIC CENTER, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
The machetes spun and slashed through the air in quick succession, moving forward with the weight of Sven’s charge. The gleam of metal was absent, tarnished as the old blades were. Instead of reflecting from the blades, the flash of emergency vehicle lights and the muted glow of the moon reflected from Sven’s eyes, Ivan’s eyes through the mesh of the backpack, and the eyes of running, uninfected New Yorkers, who intermittently came into view before turning a corner and disappearing. The dim, rotting eyes of the infected absorbed the light, and let none of it back out.
Sven felt a slight tug of resistance as one of his machetes cut through the rotten neck of the infected woman pushing the stroller. Her head fell from her neck and landed at the feet of the infected men who had the other decapitated head at their feet. Now they had two brain matter-stuffed soccer balls to play with.
The machetes took over, pulling Sven onward and guiding him from one rotten head to the next. As the machetes did their work, Sven’s eyes took in the faces around him. They were young and old, male and female, rich and poor, but the variety ended there. All of the faces were sallow, rotten, and smeared with frozen blood and other, less discernible frozen, viral emissions. The machetes tore through faces and skulls, noses and cheeks, necks and vertebrae. The infected of the Civic Center fell around Sven, headless or partially so, the wet stumps that remained spewing a gelatinous fluid that solidified and froze.
In the midst of the martial maneuver that Sven’s mottled blades seemed to be planning, he found a way to glance into the stroller, his eyes expecting to find a new level of horror there.
It was empty.
Sven got a taste of relief at that, but it was brief, because the knives pulled him back into the fray, fully into it, both driven by it and driving it. Sven felt like he only needed to keep his foot pressed lightly on the gas and that would be all that it took to ride out the inertia of his will to survive, or of the knives’ will, or of whatever force’s will that was now pulling him forward with morbid effect.
A feeling that was foreign to Sven in this state—doubt—suddenly flooded into his mind as he hacked through the neck of another of the infected. It was one of the men who had been kicking the original decapitated head down the street. The knife lost momentum, pulled the wrong way by Sven’s uncertainty, but it had already gone far enough to sever the infected man’s spinal cord, and the infected man fell, sliding his neck off of the knife in his collapse.
What if I have nothing left after this? Sven thought as he watched the fetid body go limp. What if this is it, and I don’t have any fight left? What if I die out here, and Ivan—
Pain entered Sven’s world, just as suddenly as the uncertainty had, coloring his mind red with anguish. Something had gripped him by the elbow. He pulled his arm inward in an effort to free himself.
Focus, he thought, admonishing himself. Focus.
Sven pulled away, tucking his elbow into his body, and spun. One crunch and two snaps later, Sven was free, in a way. The hand that had gripped him continued to do so, but the arm that had connected the hand to the body had been torn off at the shoulder. It hung stiffly outward. A wiry mess of skin, muscle, and connective tissue at the end of the severed limb stood out, rigid and motionless in the cold air.
Sven completed his spin move with a stab of a machete, skewering the head of the infected man who he had just made armless.
As the man began to fall, Sven freed his machete and hacked twice at the foreign arm that stuck out from his own elbow. Realizing that was no use, Sven hit the clinging wrist with the butt of a machete until the hand was pried free. The arm fell to the ground and Sven continued to move through the throng.
Sven maneuvered through the narrowing space. He called on his focus once more and reconnected to the machetes. He let them and his instincts guide him through the softening spot in the throng—the spot that he was softening.
A few dozen swipes and many flying, putrid gobbets later, he had broken through the horde, and was in the clear.
Sven patted himself down with the butts of the machetes, confirming that he was in fact in one piece. He turned around and looked in disbelief at the broken net of infected through which he had just barreled.
The horde began to turn slowly in his direction, leaving their dismembered comrades behind.
Sve
n turned, glanced at the end of the block, and advanced, focusing on a pair of infected businessmen in matching Ferragamo winter coats. They locked their dead, black eyes on him and staggered in his direction. Their moans grew louder as the distance between Sven and them decreased. Sven’s footfalls crunched, packing the fresh snow and hastening the formation of the dense sheet of ice that would soon cover most of Manhattan’s pavement.
As if to confirm the impending transformation of New York City into an icy wonderland, one of the Ferragamo-clad infected lost his balance and began to topple, slipping sideways on the pavement. Sven watched this curiously, half-expecting the other man to help his stumbling friend. The other infected man did no such thing.
The cold air crept into Sven again. He knew that it was time to move while he still could. He focused on the pair of infected in front of him, confirmed there was not room to avoid a confrontation, and—
Ivan hissed, and, abruptly, Sven’s body went rigid, and his mind flooded with the recollection of a recurring dream that he had not been consciously aware of until that moment.
61
In the dream, an infected Mayor Melling was staggering toward Sven. The skin of Mayor Melling’s face and neck was flayed so that a large flap of skin beginning at his lower lip and ending at the base of his neck was stripped free and hung downward, covering most of his tie so perfectly that the strip of flesh looked as if it had been intended to be a tie. Tiny icicles clung to the red, coarse underside of the skin, threatening to fall as the infected mayor shambled.
The bottom of the flesh tie, which terminated with the mayor’s relocated lower lip, moved in and out of view as it slid under Harry’s suit jacket and then out again. The mayor’s white, perfectly-starched shirt was stained red with dried blood almost entirely, but small patches of white were visible on occasion when the wind flapped Harry’s suit jacket open.
When the flesh tie slid to the side, Sven could make out Harry’s actual tie. It was blue, with friendly, previously-white whales swimming on it. The whales were now colored crimson, as was the rest of the tie. Sven recognized the tie. It was one of a number of critter ties in Harry’s arsenal.
Sven was suddenly overcome by the urge to try to put the flesh tie back where it should have been, to reaffix the lower lip in its proper place, to get a replacement whale tie—Harry was sure to have another just like it—and make everything as it had been before. Harry could get better, grow a beard, and then the scars would be barely visible.
“Stop it,” Sven whispered. He put a hand to his head, like a man seeking to quell a headache might do. “These are Harry’s thoughts, not mine. There’s no cure.” He looked into Harry’s dull eyes. “You always wanted there to be one, believed there could be one, but there’s no cure. I’m sorry. There never will be. Not for you, not for the rest of New York or the country, not for anyone.”
A lump formed in Sven’s throat as he regarded the mayor, his boss…his former boss. Sven couldn’t keep his eyes from traveling up and down from the dirty white of Harry’s exposed lower jawbone to the coffee and tea-stained, gnashing teeth, which looked too long. Sven told himself that it was because of the way that the flesh had been ripped from Harry’s skull, but even then, the teeth…seemed so long. They gave the impression of pointing at Sven, even reaching for him, as Harry got closer.
When he was four or five lurching steps away from Sven, the infected mayor stopped abruptly, digging his toes into the fresh powder and sending a dual spray of snowflakes in Sven’s direction.
Harry raised an arm with creaking slowness and pointed at Sven.
“You,” Harry said, his voice grating, “have done this. You…have brought this plague upon us, upon all of us.”
Sven opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.
“You,” Harry said, reaching for Sven with his extended arm, “you….” A gurgling sound followed the words and Harry dry heaved.
Harry reached farther and his shoulder snapped. His arm swung down to his side, wobbled for a moment, and then sagged lower than it should have.
The retching subsided and Harry began again, “You are now the Mayor of the Damned. Get back to work on the Zombie Citizen Tax Abatement Executive Summary. You have missed too many deadlines on that piece of rubbish already. The zombies will wait no longer.”
Harry began to lurch toward Sven again. The dislocated arm swung at Harry’s side like a dead thing attached with flimsy string.
“Mayor of the Damned,” Harry rasped. “Mayor of the Damned. Mayor of the Damned. Mayor of the Damned. You—Mayor of the Damned. Damned. Mayor of the—”
Sven snapped out of the memory of the dream and was back in a jarringly unfamiliar, frozen city of infected…the city of the damned.
“What?” Sven said, under his breath. “Mayor of the Damned? Me?”
The bloody whales of Harry’s tie came swimming back into Sven’s mind and he flinched. Sven shook his head until the whales retreated into the murk. When they were gone, he looked around to get his bearings.
62
Large, ice-sharpened snowflakes whirled around Sven, stirred by a wind whose howl was drowning out a steady diminuendo of screams.
The two infected men in their matching Ferragamo coats had staggered closer, to within feet of Sven. The one who had slipped on the icy ground was alongside the other, having recovered while Sven’s mind was pulling him backward into a nightmare that he now realized had been recurring for weeks.
“Don’t get distracted,” Sven said. “Do not get distracted. Not now.”
Sven waited for the infected men to approach until they were positioned where he wanted them, then he lunged forward and stabbed upward with each of the machetes at the same time.
The blades went in under the infected businessmen’s chins and exited at the top of their heads. The two pairs of black eyes seemed to Sven to regain some of their human luster, and the infected businessmen’s bodies went limp.
Sven held them in place for a moment, their heads skewered on his machetes. Then he let the bodies topple sideways and withdrew his knives. He wiped the brain matter that stuck to the blades on the Ferragamo coats, admiring his handiwork as he added color to the fabric and the air did its work of freezing the brain matter in place.
He would do this until he took his last breath, but—Jane, Lorie, and Ivan flashed into his mind—first he had to make sure they were alright. They were his family now. And in an outbreak of this scale, Sven wasn’t about to let them fend for themselves, no matter how good they might be at it.
Moments later, Sven was inspecting the mottled blades that he was holding, wondering where he had received them and who he was. There were hands around him, reaching for something. Did they want to stroke the knives? If the price was right, he would let them. He needed money, didn’t he? Money made the world go round. That was what he needed, he decided, and—
Sven glimpsed clarity for an instant and spun away from the groping hands. He saw a door and lunged for it, ducking into a corner grocery store as he fumbled about in his mind for understanding. There were infected all around him, but where was he? Was it a dream? He felt sick, and cold, and there—
He turned back to the door, where the infected were now gathering, blocking his exit. They were beginning to press up against the door. The door opened outward, and their stumbling was pushing the door inward. They couldn’t get in, for the time being.
It certainly was not a dream. Understanding this, Sven retreated farther into the store, took off his backpack, and rummaged in it for a fresh filter.
Ivan silent-meowed up at him.
“Sorry, Ivan. Just…just a little bit longer.”
Sven replaced the filter in his mask. He took a few breaths and felt better.
“Maybe the other filter was no good? Maybe the mask isn’t on tight enough?”
He straightened and whirled on the refrigerators. He was parched, and the scratching in his throat, which he hadn’t noticed until now, was increasing
the discomfort of breathing through the mask.
Sven pulled his mask halfway off his face and worked himself up into a frenzy: reaching into refrigerators, opening water bottles, and downing their contents in wild gulps. When he had had enough to drink he turned back to the door.
The accumulation of infected that awaited him there responded when he turned, pulling the mask back on. They moaned louder and tried to reach for him through the closed door, bending and breaking their rotten fingers. The door’s rattling became louder.
Ivan skittered in the backpack.
“Yeah,” Sven said. “I think we’ve only got a few minutes left in here.”
Sven went to the back of the store. There he pulled on the handle of a door that looked like it led to a storage area. It squeaked at him, but didn’t give. He pulled again.
It squeaked at him again, shriller this time, but still didn’t give. He pulled with both hands and the metal of the handle dug into his cold palms. The handle began to give, but the door stayed in place. Sven stopped, not wanting to break off the handle.
He ran back to the refrigerators and peered into their depths, beyond the cartons of milk and orange juice and six packs of beer. He was looking for a stocking area behind the food products that he could crawl into after pulling out some shelves. In the stores that he was used to in Virginia, the stocking area behind the refrigerators would lead back into a stockroom, which, in normal places, would come equipped with a back door for the loading area.
But Sven wasn’t in Virginia anymore. It wasn’t that kind store, and it wasn’t that kind of refrigerator; it was stocked from the front, and at its back was solid, refrigerator wall. It wasn’t practical given New York City’s lack of square footage for a small grocery store to have the refrigeration units that Sven had gotten used to in Virginia.
