by Guy James
She ran even harder, watching and feeling the joints of the world flex around her path. The seam was taking her farther and farther away from City Hall, toward Chelsea, and it gave no sign of changing course. Lorie ran among the zombie throngs and scattered, lonely zombies, flowing through them so deftly that only the most aggressive of the zombies turned after her, but she was too far away from them by then.
Then Lorie heard a voice inside her head. It said: “Sven is dead.” She felt nothing at this. It came again: “Sven is dead…Jane too…and Ivan.” Her resolve remained steady. It came one more time: “Sven, Jane, and Ivan are dead, and they and your zombie mother are coming to take you away.” Lorie’s focus faltered.
The clarity with which she saw the path that she was running on weakened. The seam blinked on and off, flickered, and disappeared.
73
Lorie did not fall all the way backward into the former level of her consciousness, but she did fall from the higher rung on which she had been functioning, to a slightly lower level.
The jolt of the transition—like plunging into freezing water that screamed metallic scratching sounds at all who plunged into it—shocked Lorie to the point of utter, if only momentary, confusion.
She tripped once, caught herself, tripped again, and tried to right herself as she slowed down, but her inertia took the fumbles and magnified them. Lorie was going down hard, and she knew it.
The momentum of Lorie’s run, when combined with her struggle to right herself, turned her around and pulled her backward. She was slammed, back-first, into a railing.
Pain exploded in her upper back, searing and inconsolable.
Lorie’s lower half kept moving backward, pivoting around the railing, and her eyes caught a glimpse of what was about to happen to her.
In the forefront of Lorie’s altered mind, the memory of fear flashed a brilliant red.
The pain in her back burned hotter.
It was a twenty foot drop.
Her memory of fear flashed again.
Fifteen feet to the basement level entrance of the building to which the railing belonged.
Lorie made three attempts to stop her fall, all at the same time.
Her right hand shot upward, in an attempt to grab the railing. Her left hand shot outward, in an attempt to grab the curb at street level, and her right leg kicked at the wall below street level, in an attempt to find a foothold that could slow her fall.
The wall was made of old brick, and it was pocked and creviced, but Lorie’s foot found no purchase.
The palm and fingers of her left hand burned as they scraped against the snow and ice that covered the pavement, digging for something to grab. There was nothing.
Lorie’s grab at the railing was misaligned. She had done it blindly, and the back of her hand came in under the metal rail, too close to it, and on the wrong side. The nail of her middle finger caught on a metal snag on the railing and was torn off. Lorie barely noticed. Her eyes darted upward and took in the problem. She twisted her wrist so that her palm faced her, and, just as her hand was about to slip under the railing, she closed her pinky and ring finger around the rail and squeezed as hard as she could. She felt something in her wrist give way as it absorbed her downward momentum. She hung there for a moment by two fingers, swinging, before her fingers began to slip.
Taking full advantage of the reprieve she’d bought for herself, she wrapped the middle finger and forefinger of her right hand around the railing while bringing her left hand upward. The rail brushed against her hanging nail and the thin string of flesh that was holding the nail to Lorie’s finger tore. The nail fell and landed on Lorie left cheek, just below her eye, just as she grasped the railing firmly with her left hand.
“I am not falling here,” she said, remembering rage.
She shook her head to dislodge the nail from her face. It fell to the exposed basement level beneath her.
The burning in her back was nearly unbearable as she held on, summoning the recruitment of any and all muscle fibers that were still at her disposal.
The railing squealed and dipped away from the street, toward the drop.
“I am not—”
The railing dipped farther, and then broke in two rusted places close to the pavement. For a moment, Lorie felt as if she were hanging in place, suspended in midair. Then she dropped.
The left side of Lorie’s face smashed into the edge of the pavement where the street ended and the drop began. The gas mask broke, and the broken plastic tore into Lorie’s cheek. Pain ignited in her head, substantial, but smaller than the inferno in her back. Her hands opened, and she let go of the railing.
A short, reflexive cry escaped from Lorie’s lips.
She put her hands up to her face, protecting it, and fell, plunging below street level.
Her mind emerged from the freezing pool as she fell, and she understood that this was, in fact, the seam that she had been following. Falling here, among the zombies, sustaining serious injury if not dying, was her path. The force that now moved the world, she understood, took many forms, and her own mind could be one of them.
The icy ground of the basement level rushed up at her.
She fell faster.
The railing accelerated in its own fall, behind Lorie.
Lorie tried to right herself, to become vertical so that she could touch down with her feet and roll sideways, minimizing the impact and danger to her body.
She was too close to the ground for her maneuver to work.
Her right hip made contact with the ground first. The smart phone that she had jammed in her pocket—the one that she had forgotten about, had forgotten to even check to see if it still worked—crunched. The right side of her back hit the ground immediately after. And then her head was whipped backward against the ice.
Darkness engulfed her.
74
SUTTON PLACE, NEW YORK
Jane was positioned in front of her building, in a half-crouch. She was bracing her gun hand with her free hand, aiming.
She squeezed the trigger. A small hole appeared above the left eye of an infected man on the street. He fell, and the noise of the gunshot registered with the other infected who were staggering on the street. They began to reroute their shuffling steps toward Jane.
“Time for some target practice,” she said.
All of the infected in a two block radius were now flowing to her, as if her gunshot had punched a hole in a tub, which the infected, who were stagnant water only moments before, now had no choice but to flow toward.
They lurched in her direction—Jane could see three or four dozen—scraping and moaning, their frozen, cracking bodies animated by only one purpose.
From Jane’s perspective, their only purpose, their raison d’être, was the receipt of a perfectly-placed headshot.
“Sven and Lorie are on their way back,” she said, “and you’re all in the way.”
She wanted to laugh all of a sudden, and to feel the reverberation of the laughter inside her mask, but she held back, and pushed the strange urge from her mind.
Most of the infected she was taking down were old and rich. In those few moments of her shooting spree, Jane realized, she was receiving more attention from the well-to-do than she had in her whole life before then.
Her bullets entered through and around the eyes of each of the infected, and their bodies piled up around her, as if she had been building a barricade of corpses for herself the whole time. While she shot, she glanced over her shoulder at regular intervals to make sure that nothing would grab her from her building’s lobby. Nothing stirred behind her.
Dropping the infected, one by one, felt like progress. Some seized and gasped when they fell. Others collapsed without any death rattle at all. As they died, Jane’s subconscious mind grappled with the determination of which sort of death was a greater accomplishment. Before Jane’s subconscious reached a conclusion, it was interrupted when Jane emptied her gun for the fourth time and reached for he
r next clip.
“This is all like some dumb, horrible movie,” Jane said to herself, “like one of those apocalypse movies, like one of those viral plague apoc—”
Jane froze in place, her hand halfway into her pocket, seeking a replacement clip.
“The apocalypse phone.”
She gulped, and ran back into her building.
Inside, she again avoided looking into the receiving room, as she had on the way out. She went straight into the stairwell, bounded up the stairs two at a time until she was at her floor, and ran down the hallway to the apartment door.
A phone was ringing.
She fumbled the keys once while trying to open the door, dropping them. She cursed, retrieved the keys, successfully opened the door and burst in, leaving the door to drift shut behind her.
She could hear the tinny ring of a phone more clearly now. It sounded like it was coming from the den. It was the apocalypse phone. It had to be.
Jane ran into the den, the emptied Beretta 92FS at her side.
There should have been the sound of the door slamming, or at least the sound of the latch closing, but there was neither.
Jane saw it. It was the apocalypse phone.
The small flip phone was vibrating in small arcs on the desk, ringing and vibrating and ringing and vibrating and—
Jane snatched it up, opened it, and pressed it to her ear. Her mouth was almost too dry to speak.
“Hello?” she managed.
“Jane,” someone said. It sounded like Sven’s voice, but Jane wasn’t sure. It was a hollow voice, exhausted and coarse.
“Sven? Is that you? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. Jane, where are you? I’ve been trying to call. I haven’t been able to get through.”
She hesitated. “At the apartment. Where are you?”
“Jane,” Sven said, his tone firm and commanding, “listen to me. Milt is coming up there. I saw Milt, he’s here, he’s—”
“What?” Jane shook her head. “I’m not hearing you right.” The line wasn’t crystal clear, but it was passable. Jane thought that she had heard Sven say something about Milt, but that couldn’t be right. “Who’s coming?”
“Milt.”
There was no mistaking it then. Jane had heard Sven correctly. Her first thought was that air was getting in from outside, that she had been poisoned, and was now succumbing to the effects of the virus’s invisible, debilitating net.
“Milt,” Sven said again. It sounded like he was panting, like he was moving quickly. “I don’t know how, but he’s here. He’s back, and he’s infected. I think he had something to do with what’s happening now.”
“Infected? Had something to do with it? I don’t understand. Sven, none of that makes sense.”
“I know it doesn’t, but that’s what’s happening. He’s coming up there, for you. I need you to be ready for that.”
“Coming for me for what? For revenge?”
“I don’t know,” Sven said. “Probably. Maybe. But maybe not. He said he just wanted to talk. I don’t know what that means. I want you to be ready for him, but don’t kill him. I think he might have some information that we could use, something that might save lives.”
“You mean…where it’s coming from?”
“If he does know that, I hope we can get it out of him.”
“Why do you think he knows that?”
“I’m not sure. He’s back, after being infected in Virginia…he must know something.”
“I’ll be ready for him,” Jane said. “You can count on that.”
“Good. Be careful, Jane. I don’t know what he’s doing, but I’m guessing it’s not good. Be very careful.”
“I will. Sven, where are you? There’s nothing online from the City Hall basement, no indication that it’s up and running.”
“It’s not. I couldn’t get down there safely. It was… Jane, don’t worry. I’m coming uptown, to you. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’m gonna make it up there.”
“You’re outside?” Jane whispered. Her voice had become barely audible.
“What?”
“Where are you now, exactly?”
“I’m downtown, moving east. It’s okay. Well, it’s not okay, but I’m okay, and I’m moving. I’m gonna head north once I get to the east side of the island, like we talked about.”
Jane remembered the discussions they had all had together, about backup plans and backup plans to backup plans. What Sven was doing now, that was a backup plan to a backup plan: caught outside in an outbreak, on foot, in a blizzard.
“Jane, are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“I have to go. Get ready for Milt. Get ready now. Make sure you’re armed…heavily, but don’t kill him.”
“I am,” Jane said. “I am…and I won’t…unless I need to…”
“Jane, I’ll see you soo—” Sven was cut short. The line went dead.
Jane considered dialing him to try to reconnect, but she decided not to. He knew what he was doing, and she didn’t want to distract him from his life-threatening surroundings.
Jane heard the sound of a throat clearing.
She turned around, and there, standing in the middle of the living room as if he were in his own home, was Milt.
75
CIVIC CENTER, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Sven was jogging east, toward the Brooklyn Bridge. The freezing snow was pelting him as he ran.
He pocketed the phone, relieved that he had been able to reach Jane and warn her. His footfalls transitioned from sloshing to crunching as hard snow accumulated underfoot.
Sven had to exert more effort to stay balanced now that the pavement was icing over, and the added concentration that required helped to push thoughts of Milt, and Milt’s plans, from his mind.
Sven had gone over this particular emergency route countless times in his head. He had gone over it with Jane and Lorie too, and they’d all gone up and down it four times since their arrival in New York. He knew the way, but doing it in practice was one thing, and doing it in a virus-ridden city in the middle of a storm was another.
At the first large intersection that he came to, cars were pointed in every direction, set askew by their collisions with each other. Infected New Yorkers were writhing in the cars, and when Sven stopped at the intersection, the drivers and passengers turned to look at him.
They locked their hungry, desiccated eyes on him. They gnashed their teeth and snapped in his direction, faster and faster. They reached for Sven and moved toward him, trying to go through the materials of their cars, in an apparent misunderstanding of the laws of physics.
Ivan skittered and clawed at the inside of the backpack.
“You’re right,” Sven said, looking away from the trapped infected. “We should go.”
To his right, a car had hit a fire hydrant. The hydrant was knocked over. Water churned out of a torn, metal opening and spilled out onto the sidewalk, freezing into thin, brittle sheets of ice that broke apart as quickly as they formed. The smaller, broken ice sheets were building up around the curb.
Sven heard a moan. He turned, spotted the infected man who was the source of the outcry, and backed away toward the busted hydrant.
The infected man closed in. The blue snow jacket that he wore was torn around the collar, and blood oozed from his neck, forming gobs that clung to the front of the jacket. The infected man reached for Sven, swiping the bloody gobs from the jacket.
Sven stepped backward, and the infected man reached farther and stepped forward, placing his foot into the torn pipe of the fire hydrant. With his foot caught in the pipe, the infected man lurched and fell. Two cracks, in quick succession, emanated from within the pipe.
Then the infected man’s other foot slipped on ice, and the man was forced into a split.
Sven walked closer and saw that the infected man’s leg—the one that was in the broken hydrant—was broken below the knee, the fractured shin bone protruding from beneath t
he kneecap, and peeking out just over the broken pipe.
The man reached for Sven, causing himself to sink lower into the split.
There was another crack.
Sven cringed, walked closer, and stabbed the blade of a machete between the man’s teeth. The knife scraped and uprooted teeth until only the hilt remained visible.
The man stopped moving, and Sven pulled the machete out of his head. He shook torn, putrid flesh from the knife, littering the snow with an assortment of gobbets and teeth.
Sven glanced around him, took in the approaching throngs of infected, and dashed across the street, away from them. He jogged underneath the Brooklyn Bridge toward the East River. Ivan alternated between mewls and growls as Sven went.
Sven got to the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, the Hudson River Greenway’s eastern counterpart, and turned north. Thoughts of the distance he had to travel were bubbling up in his mind, thoughts of the distance just from the point where the Greenway became the East River Bikeway, still a long way from his final destination.
He shook his head and focused on his surroundings.
The Greenway appeared to be deserted.
Sven began to jog north alongside the East River.
The lights over the Greenway illuminated patches of Sven’s path, and he traveled from lit patch to lit patch, speeding up when he was in or near the light, and slowing down when he was in darkness.
Underneath the Williamsburg Bridge, when Sven was in a patch of darkness, he heard a telltale moan. He sped up, then stopped under the patch of light of the next lamp. There he turned around.
A figure flopped off a bench and began to crawl in Sven’s direction, moaning with an eagerness that was reserved to the infected.
The crawling, infected man dragged himself closer to the lighted patch in spasmodic fits of movement. In the illumination Sven made out a body in loose spandex that was torn ragged at the knees and elbows, revealing equally ripped and tattered decaying flesh. The spandex was dappled by shifting electric light, an effect created by the falling of snow in alternating flurries and gusts through the lamp’s rays.
