by Guy James
Kept alive now only by the moisture of the storm, the undead would need a new source of sustenance soon. The hiding survivors, many of whom had been caught off guard and now hid with little or no food or water, would offer the undead a chance at this sustenance when they emerged to search for their own nourishment. But, for now, they remained where they were, hidden, afraid, and in many cases, parched, starving, and half-frozen, having been forced to improvise a hiding spot that was less than ideal.
Some moments after the sun rose, in a high-rise adorned with scrolling advertisements that now only had the zombies to blink at, a finance lawyer checked his BlackBerry. There were a number of colorful emails from associates to partners, and from associates to clients, and from partners to clients, and from partners to partners, but not one of these emails had anything to do with any ongoing deal or litigation.
The lawyer let out a series of hysterical chuckles as he read through the emails.
Moans emanated toward him from every direction.
“Emanate,” he spat, chortling wildly. “Emanations and penumbras…emanations and penumbras…emanations of penumbras!”
He was by no means a constitutional lawyer, but the phrase returned to him then with new meaning, reinvigorated by the truth that it had always been intended to convey. It had always been about the coming zombie apocalypse. That was so clear now. The founding fathers, who New Yorkers knew for a fact to have skillfully hidden such emanations and penumbras in their drafting, had seen it coming.
“I should have taken Con Law II,” the lawyer muttered. He wiped at his chapped lips with the back of a forearm, then again with a crumpled deal document. “Then I would have been prepared for this. It’s all there. It’s all in the document. The zombies and how to fight them…all there. The implication! No! Not the implication. There, clear in the tendrils and shadows and shadows of tendrils and tendrils of shadows of tendrils.”
Lost in the miasma of the virus, he continued to chuckle hysterically, and, deep in that haze, he saw things as clearly as he had since he had started work at the firm: he should have taken that job in the middle of nowhere, he should have been a backwoods southern lawyer as the Reba McEntire song went, he should have lived.
He knew then that he should have had a backwoods southern wife who should have now been standing on their porch in her patched apron whose pockets were filled with shotgun shells, a loaded, oft-used shotgun held expertly in front of her, waiting for a zombie to show his rotten face on her—no, on their…marital property.
He knew then that he should have had a pair of backwoods southern children too. They should have been leaping about in their backwoods southern overalls, armed with backwoods southern pitchforks, making short work of any zombies around the marital property’s perimeter. Everyone knew that zombies were no match for overall-wearing children with hay-poking devices.
“Is it too cold for aprons and overalls in the South right now?” The lawyer shrugged and gurgled something indecipherable. The corner that he was huddled in and the deal documents that he had used to partially cover himself suddenly seemed as cold as ice.
“Penumbras of emanations!” he screamed, sure in that moment that that particular turn of the phrase was, and had always been, the intended one.
A mass of zombie lawyers—the emanations of penumbras and the penumbras of emanations—burst through the hapless lawyer’s office door. It was about time; they had spent most of the night trying to get in.
In a brief moment of clarity, he noted that most of his colleagues did not look much worse than they usually did, and that some even looked better, as if there was blood once again flowing through their pallid, constricted veins.
The clarity left him and he resumed his stupefied cowering among the deal documents that he had spent the late nights of the prior week, and weekend, drafting. The documents represented the largest deal of his life, the one that would pave his way into the mystical wonderland in which equity partners dwelt.
The crumpled papers were the summation of his being, of all that he had accomplished in the world.
A feverish grin made the short journey across his lips.
“Following notice thereof,” he yelped. “In connection therewith! Attached hereto! Hereto? Thereto? Whereto?” Suddenly, the young lawyer cringed. “Our client will agree to fifteen business days, adjusted by CPI. CPI? Yes, CPI. Time periods are preceded by dollar signs, therefore CPI adjustments are appropriate. Substantially in the form attached hereto, in connection therewith, following fifteen business days prior notice thereof, adjusted by CPI.” His eyes went wide and he grinned again. His haggard face looked to be on the verge of cracking. “Substantially, yes, as determined by our client, in our client’s reasonable discretion, which reasonability shall be determined by our client, in our client’s sole discretion. By their soul.” The lawyer’s face changed again. He sank his front teeth deep into the cracking, dry skin of his lower lip. Blood flowed into his mouth and down his chin. It was refreshing. “Sole discretion. Soul.”
“Don’t trust your soul to no,” he gurgled, “don’t trust your soul to no, to no—”
Reba McEntire’s, “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” began to play in the lawyer’s mind as his bosses and subordinates tore the flesh from his bones, staffing him on the only deal that was left: the zombie infestation. The song started in the middle.
Something snapped off—something that was supposed to have remained attached to the lawyer’s body, but at that point he had no understanding of such things. It could have been an arm, a leg, a nose, anything.
“Backwoods southern lawyer,” he mumbled, setting his bleeding lips to freer bleeding, and then all of the lights of the lawyer’s world, dim though they had been in his poorly illuminated cave of an office, went out.
90
CHELSEA, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Lorie was under water, holding her breath. Tendrils of seaweed wrapped around her legs as she walked on the bottom of the river, making her progress annoyingly slow. Lorie knew that she was walking on the bottom of the East River, and she knew that she had no way of knowing that, but she knew it all the same. She endeavored not to breathe, an act that she thought herself capable of even under the circumstances, because the polluted water of the East River was so toxic that a single inhalation would be deadly.
She walked, holding her breath and not missing the air, and brushed the seaweed from her legs every few steps as it tried to hold her back. Around her, the murk afforded little more than three feet of visibility.
Determined to reach her destination, Lorie kept her pace steady.
“What is my destination?” She gurgled to herself without slowing. “Where am I going?” Lorie watched the bubbles escape from her mouth, stream upward, and disappear. Her destination was there too, just beyond the murk, just out of reach of her recollection.
There was a way out—she was sure of that—a way to walk to the end of all of this, to survive, to remain. She just had to find it. It was out there somewhere, like an exit door whose exit sign was not illuminated, and if she kept walking, if she kept looking for it, she knew that she would find it.
Lorie suddenly noticed that there were no fish, and at that moment, she realized that she didn't have to take a breath, and that she hadn’t had to take a breath yet, even though she had been under water for a while. She began to wonder if she was dreaming, but she could only wonder about it for a brief amount, because immediately after she had that thought, something grabbed hold of her hair and pulled, jerking her head backward and igniting a searing hot pain in the back of her neck.
She reached backward and took hold of the base of her hair and pulled, relieving some of the strain. She turned slightly and saw an arm extending from the back of her head and disappearing into the murk so that she could see nothing past the shoulder. The underwater assailant wore a coat, so Lorie couldn't see his flesh to confirm that he was a zombie, but she was sure that he was. She was also sure that there were
only moments before his deteriorating jaws snapped out of the murk and sought her flesh.
Still gripping the base of her hair, Lorie twisted sharply away from the arm. She felt a slight loosening of the hold that the thing had on her, but then the pull came again, and Lorie found herself dragged backward, off her feet.
The murk seemed to envelop Lorie more as she was dragged backward through it. It seemed to be closing in on her. Her hands still holding the base of her hair, Lorie kicked her feet frantically in the water, trying to at least slow the backward drag. She pulled against the base of her hair in intermittent bursts, but it was useless without any leverage. By straining against her assailant, she was rapidly losing strength, and she realized that she had to conserve her energy and wait for the right moment to try to escape…and hope that the right moment would come. She stopped kicking, and, continuing to hold the base of her hair just enough so that the pull on her hair wasn’t too painful, let herself be dragged.
91
EAST RIVER, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Milt planted his feet deep in the muck that was the bottom of the East River and looked skyward. He peered through the murk but couldn’t make out the surface of the river or see beyond it.
“What distance has the water carried me?” he gurgled. “Sven, you scoundrel, you cannot be rid of me so simply. You cannot be rid of me at all.”
A school of fish, seeing Milt too late, tried to veer around him. Several tails smacked Milt in the face.
“Wretched species,” he gurgled. “Filthy, polluted things.”
Milt ran his hands over his body to confirm that he was intact. His hands stopped over his belly, from which the handle of one of Sven’s machetes protruded.
“A vile, plebeian weapon,” Milt gurgled. He grasped the machete’s handle firmly and pulled the blade out of his body. He stared at the weapon and looked for traces of his own blood on the blade, but it was impossible to make out details like that through the water’s murk. Milt was about to toss the machete away when he stopped himself.
Instead of throwing it aside, as he had almost done, he knelt down and stabbed the river floor with the machete, planting the long knife definitively in place. He stared at the blurry handle, content that it was a metaphorical grave marker for the buffoon-man who had wielded it, an omen of Sven’s coming fall.
“Will you even be able to function without it, Sven?” Milt gurgled. “Are you not, as Samson was before you, powerless without some outward display of potency? We shall see, presently enough. Quite presently.”
Milt stood and realized that he hadn’t had to take a breath yet, and that he didn’t really care for one, either. Unsurprised by the discovery of yet another advantage of his new and improved condition, Milt peered once more through the murk, trying to understand which way to go to return to the island of Manhattan.
The dark, cloudy water offered no aid to Milt, so he began to make swimming motions that were aimed at propelling his bulk upward to the surface, where he thought he would be able gain a better vantage point for spying which way led back to Manhattan. He didn’t move, and, growing angrier with every futile flap of his arms, went on trying until he heard a popping sound in his shoulder. He stopped then, realizing that he had tried enough, and began to walk.
He figured that he had a fifty percent chance of getting it right so long as he kept his route perpendicular to the river’s current. Milt chose a direction and began to trudge toward what he hoped was Manhattan. As he walked, he had to fight against the river’s current, which sought to knock him off course.
“If only I could remember which way this river flowed,” Milt gurgled, “I would be sure of my present path. Is it a river at all? Its abominable nature suggests a cesspool or tidal strait, accompanied by no regular flow at all.” He cursed himself for not noticing something as basic as the direction of the East River’s flow or possible lack thereof. “Do not allow yourself to become so caught up in the big picture that you fail to notice the little things. Evolutionary events may be won and lost at the level of minutiae. Do not, dear Miltimore, forget that Satan himself dwells within the details, and he seeks at every moment to subvert your glorious plan.” Milt wasn’t sure if he had just made up the expression about the significance of minutiae in evolutionary events, but he decided that he liked it, and that he would use it again, perhaps over tea with a newly-converted Sven, Jane, and Lorie, each of whom would sit at tea with the impervious etiquette of a Briton. Milt filed the expression away in his mind and continued to trudge on the polluted East River’s bottom. The sun’s rays, after battling the onslaught of the storm cover, gave up at a level three inches beneath the surface of the river, and didn’t reach Milt.
92
EAST RIVER GREENWAY, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
After groping about for what seemed like an eternity, Milt found and grasped a submerged rung of a ladder. It was rusty and deformed from the abuse that the East River had given it over the years and it tore into Milt’s palms, but he felt none of that, focused as he was on consummating his revenge. He climbed up until his head emerged from the water. He spat out a mouthful of river with a thoughtful look on his face. He looked around and couldn’t see where he was climbing to, so he turned and looked behind him. There the East River churned, and beyond it sat what Milt recognized, by its size, as Roosevelt Island...or some other island, but certainly not Manhattan. The beautiful underbelly of the Queensboro Bridge grinned down its usual morning grin at Milt, and he grinned back. It would have been rude not to.
He climbed the rest of the way up, feeling the murky water flow out of his wet, drooping clothes, and stepped over the head of the ladder and onto the gravel of a fenced lot that lay adjacent to the FDR Drive. Water continued to run from his clothes and body, and he tried to spit out some more river water, but found that there wasn’t enough liquid left in his mouth. Slightly perturbed by the thought of his perfect, modified body absorbing so much of the East River’s murk, he waddled to the barricade of the FDR Drive, trying to banish the disturbing thought from his mind by concentrating on his surroundings.
Milt stopped when he was at the barricade, putting an end to the slurping and sucking sounds his wet shoes were making. Water trickled from the sides of his shoes as he looked at the FDR Drive. Evolvers—Milt’s glorious virus-spreaders—wandered on the road, among a seemingly endless expanse of bumper-to-bumper traffic. From what Milt could tell, the engines of the cars that were sitting on the road in front of him were dead, but he thought he heard some distant rumblings. Maybe a few cars still had gas in them. Milt shrugged and looked at the cars with trapped evolvers inside them.
“I should grant you your freedom,” Milt said, “to roam and take in the nourishment that you so desperately desire...and deserve. But, alas, time is in short supply. Speaking of nourishment—” Milt looked up and down the rows of cars and into the cars in which he could see human forms, “—where are the humans?” Milt frowned, amused. “Are there none left? Is the war won so quickly?” Milt turned his back on the FDR Drive. “Pathetic, dribbling, slothful beasts. How could they have put up more of a fight? Maybe I should not have done it by contaminating the Coke. Perhaps that was too easy. Surely there is a plethora of misguided health enthusiasts here who do not partake in said nectar of life. Where do they now hide...assuming any remain?” The corners of Milt’s mouth turned up. “If any remain, they are no doubt cowering in a gymnasium at this very moment, huddling together and rationing their protein powders and creatine supplements. You should have eaten your carbs, you imprudent humans...now, you are lost.”
A clamoring drew Milt’s gaze. There was a mass of evolvers beyond the fence at the far end of the lot.
“Even while I am deep in contemplation they work to free me.”
Evolvers filled the lot adjacent to the one in which Milt found himself. The lots were separated by a fence whose gate was deteriorating from the evolver onslaught.
“They strive to right me on my righteous course.”
Confidence pounded in Milt’s chest and drove him to stride toward the fence. The water in his sneakers sloshed and slurped as he approached. The clatter of the fence grew more desperate.
The throng of evolvers in the adjacent field piled into the fence as Milt gained ground. They gripped the links with desiccated, partially frozen, partially flayed, broken fingers. They slammed their heads into the links and the metal tore the frozen skin from their obstinately vacuous faces.
“We will reclaim the world from those who have marginalized us,” Milt shouted to the evolvers as he approached, “from Sven and those like him.” He yelled at the top of his lungs and flailed his arms so that spurts of East River water flew from him in all directions as he spoke. The evolvers were receptive to his enthusiasm, and they pressed into the fence with greater violence, severing frozen fingers and ears and tips of noses on the chain links.
The snow grew thicker and bolstered Milt’s resolve. “Look at the snow,” he shouted. “Regard it carefully, for it strengthens us and makes us unstoppable. And if it should stop, do not fret, for I have a plan to deal with that eventuality…as I have for all eventualities.”
A frost-bitten tip of a nose flew through the air and landed at Milt’s feet with an icy click. Milt regarded it with a cool expression on his face, though he felt a slight inward cringe. He raised his head slowly and looked among the destroyed faces on the other side of the fence. He could not match the piece of nose that lay at his feet to its owner. There were too many nose-less candidates who stared back at him.
