by Guy James
He had to try the door into the back again, or fight his way out the front entrance where the infected awaited him.
Sven braced his foot on the wall next to the door’s handle and pulled again. Something in the door or the wall adjacent to it creaked, but the door didn’t open. Sven thought he had heard another noise come from beyond the door, and a small part of his mind was considering this when he pulled again.
The door cracked, and the wood around the handle splintered and broke. Sven moved back, then kicked at the door where the wood had broken, forcing the handle through the door and destroying the area around the latch.
He looked at his handiwork, shrugged, took hold of a piece of wood still attached to the door and pulled. The door opened, revealing a narrow stockroom.
Sven stepped inside, feeling the relative cold of the stockroom compared to the grocery store’s main room. The floor was dirty, uncovered cement. Bits of packing material and shreds of cardboard were strewn about.
The high shelves to either side were brimming with cheap goods, and Sven was overcome by the feeling of being inside a trash compactor.
At the end of the room was a door.
Sven moved cautiously toward it. He was a third of the way down the length of the room when Ivan began to skitter inside the backpack.
“Ivan,” Sven whispered, “keep still.” He could feel Ivan’s claws scratching at the inside of the backpack against his back.
Ivan skittered more frantically.
“Ivan, what is it?”
An explosion of metal rang out behind him. He ducked, expecting to be hit by a flying piece of debris.
Nothing hit him, and he began to turn toward the noise, to prepare his mind to deal with the virus-driven problem that he was sure had joined him in the tiny box of a room that he was in.
He turned and drew his machetes. The draw was clumsy, and the blades of the machetes clanged against each other as Sven hefted them upright.
The infected were inside with him.
They pushed toward him, in a room so small as to be a fitting coffin.
63
HUDSON RIVER GREENWAY, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Lorie picked up speed as she ran toward the gathering of zombie students outside the north lobby doors of Stuyvesant High School.
Her sneakers slipped and slid on the frozen patches of ground, but there was a rhythm in that, a balance that she could find, and find it she did, so that the tiny slips were a coordinated part of her movement, a natural give and take that was as comfortable as the measured pumping of her arms.
The cold around her—Lorie could feel it invigorating her strides, as if the winter was sucking the energy from the world and imparting it to her.
Sven needed saving—it wasn’t the first time—and save him she would. She didn’t care if that meant that she would have to battle through all of the zombies in New York City to get to him. She would find him and get him somewhere safe and they would make it back to Jane somehow. After all they had been through together, she could not let any other reality come to pass.
One by one, the zombie students began to notice her. They turned toward her, reaching and moaning, and began their staggering pursuit.
Lorie was running on a path that led straight into their arms.
64
CIVIC CENTER, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Sven looked at the door he had destroyed to get into the stockroom. The infected pursuing him had overrun it and were now piling into the narrow stockroom, blocking Sven’s escape.
Suddenly, he found himself frozen in place and overcome by exhaustion, taking in the visual nature of what was going on around him for what seemed like the first time.
The faces of the infected entering the stockroom were a degree of horror that Sven hadn’t yet experienced. It wasn’t that the infected in Virginia or outside in the snow hadn’t looked horrible, because they had. It came down to a matter of temperature: the change in the degree of horror was literal.
Frozen shards of blood and pale yellow fluid hung on the loose, pallid skin of their faces. They shambled into the stockroom, their movement shaking the shards from their skin and coats, littering the floor with putrid, melting icicles.
At least outside, their leaking fluids had been frozen and immovable. Now they were flowing once more, and Sven could see the virus draining the vital liquids from their bodies. Sadness entered Sven’s world, along with remorse. The emotions weighed on top of the exhaustion he felt.
Sven backed away, glancing at his machetes and to his left and right at the narrow space that contained him. What he was looking for—an adrenalin surge—wasn’t there.
He squeezed the handles of his weapons, trying to wake himself up. He swept two boxes of generic frosted flakes cereal from the shelves to his left and flung them at the infected. The infected began to move faster, gaining ground on Sven. He cursed himself for entering such a narrow space, but even the self-loathing was half-hearted.
He retreated farther until his back was against the door. He groped for the knob. The approaching moans grew louder as he tried the knob, expecting to find it stuck. But the dirty, rusted knob did turn, and with no more than a light scrape of protest. Sven opened it a crack and turned to peer through the space.
Behind the door a throng of infected stumbled about in the snow. Beyond them, streetlamps lit up the falling snow, which fell on an expanse of infected New Yorkers that stretched as far as Sven could see.
The horde beyond the door clamored for Sven’s flesh the instant there was space for them, kicking slush at Sven with spasmodic movements of their feet. Sven put all of his weight against the door to keep them from piling in and pushing him into the mass of infected behind him.
Sven knew that if that happened it would spell the end, and he put every ounce of effort he could muster into pressing the door back against the throng.
As he fought to shut the door, his peripheral vision took in the progress of the infected behind him. They were getting closer, step by dragging step. If he couldn’t get the door to shut in a matter of seconds, it would be over.
With a heave fueled by desperation, his boots slipping against the stockroom floor, Sven pushed the infected back out of the opening, and a struggle of a different sort began, as nine scraggly infected arms were now jammed between the door’s edges and its frame.
The bodies had been forced back, but the limbs that poked through kept the door from shutting. Sven pushed against the door with his shoulder and hacked at the hands and forearms with a machete. The edge of the door dug into the appendages’ brittle bones, breaking them, and the machete littered the floor at Sven’s feet with dismembered digits, parts of hands, and cross sections of wrists.
Sven shut the door, turned back to the narrow stockroom, and the infected were on top of him. Their fetid breath was on his face. The shards of putrid blood and fluid that had been on their faces were gone, replaced by a sheen of a color and texture that Sven couldn’t describe in words. He pressed his back into the door he had shut and began to defend himself.
Fighting in the tight space was a challenge—Sven’s machetes kept catching on the stockpiled grocery items that lined the shelves to either side of him when he tried to strike sideways, so he was forced to hack at the approaching undead with a succession of downward cuts and forward stabs.
The infected walked into the hacking machetes. Sven chopped them up as they came, forming a pile at the back end of the stockroom around Sven. The pile was growing taller and threatening to swallow Sven whole. Then he saw his chance, and took it.
Sven braced himself against the shelved walls of the stockroom, knocking cans of sardines and tall boxes of oatmeal into the slashed heap of infected and infected parts. He took high, lunging steps over and through the pile, gritting his teeth as he went.
Cartilage crunched, bones snapped, and blood sprayed as he crushed what was beneath him, and then he was on the other side of the mound, face to face with the next wave of infected
who were making their way into the store after him.
He squeezed the machetes again, feeling as if he was seeking energy in them. He understood that he could not hold his ground against wave after wave of infected. There was no way that he could hold his ground against a whole city of the damned, whether he was any sort of mayor of the damned or not.
“This is it, Ivan,” Sven whispered. “I’m so sorry.” His eyes began to sting. “I’m so, so sorry.”
At that instant, with the mound of rotten flesh at his back and the main room of the store filling with infected, the machetes took over.
The room unbalanced, steadied, and grew quiet.
Where there had been no room to move before, now there was width to maneuver. Where there had been no offensive Sven could envision to fight his way out, he now saw three alternatives.
The knives pulled Sven forward, and an electric energy filled his body, rippling up and down his spine and burning his soul in a murderous flame.
The machetes danced elegant circles in the small space, and Sven let them lead, offering no resistance to their guidance. Heads and limbs flew and bodies fell, rotten blood painted the walls, and at the end of it, when Sven had battled through the store to the entrance, the infected that were gathered there hesitated.
At first, Sven wasn’t sure if he had hallucinated it or not.
“No,” Sven said, “I saw it… I saw them…recognize me.”
Sven thought that something in the virus’s programming had faltered at his approach. The infected…had shown fear.
“It doesn't matter,” he growled at himself. “Go!”
Sven burst from the store into the street.
Street-walking infected began to shamble toward him. He made short work of half a dozen, spattering the fresh snow outside the store with globules of gelatinous blood.
Panting, Sven began to advance into the throng, then stopped abruptly. The sight of what lay in front of him jolted him free of his bloodlust and the dark wonders that it granted. Lucidity returned to his mind in spasms, each spasm increasing his understanding that there was no way through the dense horde.
Spurred by that combination of impulse and panic called instinct, Sven turned and ran east, to where he could see a clearing.
He ran across Broadway, stamping the bloody imprint of his boots into the snow. From a distance, he was a running, masked figure, with pumping arms that held comically long blades.
From the machetes globs of diseased blood flew into the air and fell in arcs to either side of him. If an expert tracker had been around, one schooled in the fine art of tracking zombie hunters, the tracker would have found Sven easy prey.
65
GOVERNMENT RESEARCH FACILITY, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, U.S.A.
Dr. Zamirsky was frolicking through a verdant field, the muzzle of his ray gun resting on his shoulder. A broad smile lit up his face. The field was empty, but Dr. Zamirsky did not feel alone. Instead, he felt nature embracing him from every angle, thanking and congratulating him for all that he had done.
“You are welcome, world,” he whispered, “you are welcome.”
He skipped toward a wooded area at the edge of the field, leaping higher and higher until he felt the steady bounce of the ray gun on his shoulder. It was a feeling that Dr. Zamirsky found comforting. The heavy bounce of the gun’s muzzle was a reassuring pat from a tool that he considered to be his progeny. It was of a different species, of course, and not alive in the human sense, but it was a weapon, a tool, just as he was.
Movement in the distance.
Reaction, practiced but unrefined.
Dr. Zamirsky fell roughly to his knees and lay flat on the ground. Pain from the impact shot up his legs. He grinned and watched with pleasure as a tiny dust cloud rose up from the ground and gathered around his face. He had spotted his unsuspecting prey, and he intended to keep said prey unsuspecting.
No more than one hundred meters from Dr. Zamirsky, beyond the edge of the field, an undeniably human form moved among the trees. The series of primitive movements was unmistakable: the human was digging a hole…or perhaps he was filling it, but Dr. Zamirsky could not care less about such things. Whether the hole was in the process of being dug or filled was not important. What was important—the only thing that was important—was that the plodding human would soon be in the hole, assuming Dr. Zamirsky’s aim was true, of course.
Dr. Zamirsky looked into the ray gun’s telescopic sight and positioned the red crosshairs, except that they weren’t crosshairs but a small cross-section of a double helix, because that was the shape that Dr. Zamirsky liked to superimpose on his prey.
Grinning from ear to ear, Dr. Zamirsky fired. A shimmering laser streamed from the ray gun’s muzzle and hit its mark: the human’s belly.
A look of surprise—but not pain—bloomed on the human’s face and he looked up from his hole-digging. He looked around him, then down at his shirt where the laser beam had hit him.
There he saw the laser beam’s entry marked by a tiny circle of charred t-shirt. He pulled his shirt up with one hand and found a red pinpoint two inches above his belly button. He scratched his head while holding his shirt up and staring at the pinpoint.
The human’s face twisted into a mask of immense and remarkable confusion, then wilted into horror and incommunicable pain.
From the red pinpoint, a spider-web of cracks spread outward, weaving in and out of the human’s rapidly dehydrating skin.
The human touched a hand to his belly, which now looked like old parchment, opened his mouth, and screamed.
Before the scream could terminate, the traveling spider-web of cracks spread upward, circled the human’s neck, and entered his mouth. The desiccation consumed his body, and he was transformed into a personification of decay. He became that which he had always—
An alarm sounded, jarring Dr. Zamirsky out of his pleasant, human-annihilating reverie. The fabric of the dream reality around Dr. Zamirsky distorted and came apart in large misshapen strips that peeled off and vanished, shimmering, back into the good doctor’s mind until all that was left was the severely austere office in the research facility in which he spent the better portion of his waking life.
A fit of coughing overtook Dr. Zamirsky. His whole body shook with each spasm of coughing until, after some uncomfortable moments, he was able to get himself under control.
How nice it had been, he thought, not to cough during his daydream. And, how nice it had been to watch that puny, pathetic caveman destroyed. The look on the caveman’s face had been priceless. Dr. Zamirsky coughed, then grunted.
“This cough,” he said, “really is becoming a nuisance.”
He stood up abruptly, realizing what had woken him.
“If the audible alarm has sounded, and it has…it is now sounding…that means that the silent alarm has been sounding for forty-five minutes…”
Dr. Zamirsky checked and confirmed that was indeed the case. The tiny buzzing alarm inside the armband that he wore was vibrating frantically. It was a subtle vibration, one that would not be noticeable to anyone who found himself in the room with Dr. Zamirsky when the alarm went off, but it was a feeling that Dr. Zamirsky had trained himself to notice and respond to.
“How could I have failed to notice it?”
Still standing, he looked at his monitor and picked up a napkin that was folded neatly in half beneath his keyboard, at an equal distance from each end of the keyboard. He dabbed at the corners of his mouth and tucked the napkin back into its spot.
It dawned on him that he had become lost in the complex splendor of his dark thoughts, as he often did, for hours. He had forgotten the world around him and wandered free into a fantastic world empty of humans, or, as he saw it: the one perfect world.
He clicked away from the account balance that was on the screen, one of his several offshore accounts, each of which he liked to check no less than eight times a day.
Checking the account balances confirmed what Dr. Zamirsky alre
ady knew—that he had found his proper place in the world: his life’s calling, as it were.
The money that Dr. Zamirsky was paid to develop biological weapons was good. It was better than good, actually, much better. But he didn’t do it for the money, and he didn’t do it for the intellectual challenge that lay in the weapons’ development, either.
There was pleasure in the task, to be sure, and the cerebral stimulation was a welcome bonus, but the ultimate joy that Dr. Zamirsky found in his life’s work was that his weapons would be used, in his lifetime, to permanently change the landscape of the world. He was not one of those theoretical scientists whose discoveries were to be bottled and stored away for eternity. He had always refused to become that sort of base scientist. At that rate, Dr. Zamirsky believed, one might as well be a layperson.
Dr. Zamirsky was a creator, and he lived to see his creations unleashed. The money was nothing compared to the thrill of watching the weapons that had sprung from his mind depopulating the world.
That being said, he did believe that a true calling was one that not only allowed one to live out his passion, but also provided grotesque wealth as compensation. His bank balance, Dr. Zamirsky knew, was proof of divine placement in his field.
The alarm, though Dr. Zamirsky should have been aware of it earlier, was a great thing. It meant that he had come one step closer to his ideal of the one perfect world. The alarm meant that Desi had sprung to life once more—not that a virus could live of course—but it meant that Desi had found new hosts, new means of proliferating and going about the task of ridding the world of the disease that infected it.
The alarm also meant that Dr. Zamirsky had missed a catalyst—someone else who had been involved with the Charlottesville, Virginia infection. Or, if not a catalyst, Dr. Zamirsky may have missed a mutation, or a carrier. It wasn’t conceivable that Desi as he knew her could have traveled outside of Virginia on her own. By design and in her current iteration, she was incapable of travel outside of a human host.
