The Last Safe Place: A Zombie Novella

by Rob W. Hart

  “Not my job, Sarge.”

  I get close to his face. “It is now.”

  The deputy shakes his head and goes to say something, clamps his mouth shut instead. “No,” I tell him. “Don’t hold back.”

  “After what he did to that kid, why don’t you just put a bullet in his head?”

  “He’s just another mouth to feed, right? He’s a threat to the island? Is that what they say when I’m not around?”

  Him not responding is answer enough.

  “He’s alive because I say he stays alive. And that’s all anyone needs to worry about. Now get up there and clean out the damn cage.”

  The deputy makes himself scarce. This won’t win me any friends. Neither will letting him out. That’ll be a fun conversation to have with Reginald.

  I’ll just have to do it at night when no one’s looking. Give him a kayak. We have two dozen, and no one would notice if one was missing. And even if I get caught, even if they throw me into his cell, it won’t matter, because June might finally be better. I’d die happy to see her healthy.

  *

  Doc and Sophia are at the dock to show me off. They both give me deep, long hugs, like it’s the last ones they’ll ever give me. It’s not as comforting as they think it is. Doc says, “Medicine, if you can manage.”

  I wink at him. “Don’t worry. I have a plan.”

  Sophia says, “Everything’s in place.”

  The moored ferries cast a shadow over us. I nod toward them. “You know the back room under Fort Jay where we keep the emergency stock of gas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Send a crew down to get the barrels up here. If things go south, I want to be able to gas these things up quick.”

  She salutes because she knows it annoys me, then dashes off.

  The rook has dragged a table to the middle of the roadway and laid out the gear. I pull on the elbow, forearm and neck guards cobbled together from SWAT armor and sports equipment. I strap on a harness, so I can hold my bat at my belt like a sword, pull on my old duty holster for the SIG. I get everything in place, tighten straps and shuffle things around until I can move comfortably.

  The rook hands me a lacrosse mask but I push it away. It obscures my vision, makes it hard to turn my head. I’ll take a little risk if it means better mobility.

  The rook is suited up nearly the same as I am. He’s not wearing a mask either. He’s got a shotgun tied over his back, a machete strapped to one leg, and a bundle of road flares wrapped to the other.

  We go over the plan. We’ll come in just north of the Javits Center, cut across to the fish store, and then to the library. That’s as much as we can figure. The rest we have to play by the crowds.

  The rook asks, “Do we really need to hit the library?”

  “Being able to make some educated guesses at how long these things are a threat would be helpful. Maybe we’ll learn something that’ll help us fight them. I don’t know. I don’t like not knowing.”

  “I miss Google.”

  I smack his padded shoulder. “We all miss Google, kid.”

  Reginald has his legs swung out, dangling above the green, dingy water. The rope ladder is out, leading down to the watercraft. Seating for three, so it should be enough for me and the rook and the weapons, and then whatever we can bring back.

  “All gassed up, Sarge,” he says, hoisting a roll of duct tape. “There are two backpacks in the storage compartment, in case you get enough supplies that you need something to carry them. Like I said, try to get back before nightfall.”

  “I’d love that, Reg. More than anything in the world, I’d love that. What’s the duct tape for?”

  “Crack in the frame. Shouldn’t be an issue.”

  I climb onto the watercraft and the rook straddles me. I sit there for a minute, touch the controls. Every time I get on I expect it to explode, or fall apart, or sink to the bottom. To revolt against me using it. But it’s an inanimate object and it doesn’t have a memory. Thankfully.

  Reginald calls down to us. “Everything all right?”

  I hit buttons and turn knobs until the thing roars to life. Reginald yells over the sound of the engine. “Have fun, fellas. Don’t be out too late.”

  “Fuck off, Reg.”

  “What?”

  So he can hear me, I yell, “Fuck off, Reg.”

  *

  The skyline looms before us, the sun shattering across a million windows.

  The rook holds onto my waist as we skim over the water. I hate open water. Always have. I don’t like not being able to see what’s beneath me, and wasn’t Jaws based on a true story?

  I concentrate on keeping the watercraft upright.

  The wind is picking up. There are clouds in the distance coming over New Jersey, and they don’t look good. Not surprising. Nothing good ever came out of New Jersey. Nothing except Bruce Springsteen.

  The wind rushing into my face is making my eyes water but the weather is pleasant and I hope the rain holds off. I hope we get there and back without dying. I hope June is comfortable right now. I hope my deal with a devil doesn’t screw me in the end. I hope.

  Something slaps against the outside of my left leg.

  I stop the watercraft, but given the momentum we move pretty far past where I felt it. I twist to look behind us. The water is white and turned up but that’s all there is. I look down at my pants leg and the hem is torn.

  The rook asks, “Sarge?”

  The pants must have gotten ripped on patrol. Nearly everything I own has at least one tear in it. So why is my heartbeat up?

  The thing I felt against my leg, it must have been water, kicked up and slapped against it. My pants are wet.

  Seeing a rotter on the island has made me antsy. The thing could have been in some storeroom that we missed and it wandered out, and the whole salt thing was nonsense. It wasn’t a scientific test.

  I’m overthinking things.

  Thinking is good. Overthinking is dangerous.

  The rook asks, “Sarge?” A little more urgent this time.

  “Nothing,” I tell him.

  2. THEN

  When the call came in I was out getting coffee.

  The coffee at the precinct tasted like crank case oil, and sometimes I needed that walk around the corner to clear my head. Since Dae-Hyun’s bodega closed I’d been stuck going to a chain coffee place, and they always had a problem getting my order right. I take my coffee black, which tends to confound them.

  That night it took three tries to get right, so I was already in a bad mood when I turned around and saw two rooks standing at the back of the line. A brick house of a black woman and a skinny white kid who thought he was handsome. They weren’t wearing their caps.

  When they saw me they saluted. Instead of returning it I chewed them out for not being in full uniform. They had the fear of god in them when the door swung closed behind me.

  After that I felt a little bad, so when they came out with their coffees they found me leaning on their squad car. I apologized for snapping, but I didn’t apologize too hard. Instead I gave the speech I was giving once a week by then: Being a cop used to be a noble profession, but New Yorkers didn’t respect us anymore, so we needed to be at our best at every moment.

  They seemed to get it. Neither of them looked like they were going to cry anymore, which was a positive thing. Their names were Jenkins and McBride.

  After I was done with the speech, the radio on McBride’s belt squawked. A bored dispatcher called it in. I remember it exactly. “10-34 at Apocalypse Lounge, East Third between A and B. Two EDPs reported on scene. Multiple buses requested.”

  Apocalypse was a hipster joint assembled out of rusted steel and scavenged furniture. The owner was a holdout from the bad old days. I liked him, and the bar never gave us trouble. It was an odd thing, getting a call of a disturbance there. The rooks excused themselves.

  There was an open homicide sitting on my desk, and for the past two nights some asshole had been sneakin
g up on girls and groping them before running off. I should have gone back to the squad room. Instead I climbed into the back of the car. I told them I didn’t want to get rusty, and McBride turned and smiled when I said that. Easier to get the rooks to respect you when you show them you’re willing to get the white gloves dirty.

  We rolled around the corner and came to a stop outside the bar. There was a big crowd spilling onto the street, an ambulance screaming a few blocks away. Probably sitting in traffic.

  There was another crowd at the far end of the street. A lot of people standing around, looking at something on the ground. I sent McBride to check it out. He jogged off, and Jenkins and I pushed our way toward the bar. We were the first on the scene.

  New Yorkers are pros when it comes to emergency situations, but these people were shell-shocked, like what they’d seen was too unsettling to process. A few people had some blood on them but no one appeared injured. There was no one running and no one yelling. They were just staring off into space, looking for someone to tell them what to do. I kept my hand closer to the holster than I normally would.

  We got to the door and Jenkins puked before we even crossed the threshold.

  There were five bodies, and so much blood you couldn’t tell the color of the floor. Some kind of whomp-whomp shit was blasting from the speakers and the bar was dark enough I couldn’t see all the way to the back. I told Jenkins to radio it in, then grabbed the nearest kid, asked him what happened. He stammered about the teeth, something about the teeth.

  I squatted next to the closest victim; a young woman in a sundress, her hair tied back in a ponytail, her neck torn into jagged, purple chunks. There was no more blood flowing from the wound. She was taking shallow little breaths, her eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling. Just as I reached for her neck to see if I could put things back in place, she went slack.

  She was a pretty girl. Too pretty and too young to die on the floor of a dive bar in Alphabet City.

  I pulled my gun and headed for the back, kids snapping to attention at the sight of a firearm. The music was blasting so loud it was making me dizzy. I reached over the bar for what looked like a digital music player so I could kill it, when a girl came running up the stairs, tripping over herself, her front plastered in blood. I gave up on cutting the music.

  I knew the layout of the bottom level. A bare brick room with a concrete floor, reserved for shows and movies. Two bathrooms. Pretty basic, and no place to hide.

  So I expected to see something when I got down there, but the floor was empty and both bathrooms were vacant, the doors ajar. I cased the basement, checked in the dark nooks and behind the bathroom doors. Nothing. Then I noticed that in one of the bathrooms there was a bookshelf built into the brick, swung out slightly from the wall.

  Behind the bookshelf was a big dark space. Black like ink. I fumbled for the flashlight strapped to my belt and when my hand slipped my heart paused, like maybe I wouldn’t have enough time to get it on. I thought I saw something move in the dark.

  When I got the narrow beam of light into the space the darkness retreated, revealed some empty paint cans and boxes and a heavy steel door. I slid into the space and put my ear up to it. The music was seeping through the ceiling so I couldn’t hear anything.

  I held out my gun and threw the door open.

  It was a small room with two couches and a wooden coffee table. A little ratty, but a sweet spot for a couple of kids looking to smoke some pot or do some blow or screw.

  What I found wasn’t drugs or sex.

  It was a guy straddling a girl, reaching into her stomach cavity and pulling out slippery strands of intestine, stuffing them into his mouth, black gore caked to his face. His eyes were thick and off-white, like spoiled milk.

  He looked up at me and paused, cocking his head fast from side to side, like he was trying to figure me out. A growl rumbled up from deep inside him. Someplace biblical.

  Before he even got to his feet I put two in his chest and one in his forehead. He went down and stayed there. I didn’t even need to get close to tell the girl was dead. There just wasn’t enough left.

  It took me a minute to remember where I was after that.

  Apocalypse. Basement. People eating each other. There were supposed to be two of these things. The other cops must have gotten here by now. What was going on upstairs? I was desperate to hold onto a straight thought but couldn’t zero in on anything. It was too much.

  Someone needed to get down here and clean this up and I needed to be away from it, as far away from it as physically possible, so I headed back out into the basement, and standing at the bottom of the stairs was the girl in the sundress.

  She had her back to me, but I knew it was her. The dress was plaid, blue and yellow and green and grey. And red, from the blood.

  Even with the pumping music she must have heard something, must have sensed me. She turned around, slow, her eyes the same spoiled-milk white. Her neck was still torn up but her mouth was rimmed with blood, like she’d just taken a bite out of something that bled a whole lot.

  She dove at me. I almost didn’t fire in time. Then I did, and she died for the second time that night.

  3. NOW

  The rook peeks around from the car he’s using for cover and holds up three fingers, then places one finger below his eye. Three rotters. I point to the ground. He shakes his head. They’re not close.

  I check the straps of the backpack, make sure everything is still secure.

  The Librarian was right. Fish antibiotics come in big white pill bottles with colorful labels, like children’s vitamins. Nearly every storefront on the block had been smashed, but at the fish store, the doors were still intact. Even unlocked.

  We checked that errand off the list nice and easy. Made me wonder how much longer until things got fucked. I’d seen this movie before. Something always ends up fucked.

  In total, we covered a half-mile since we docked. The streets were mostly empty. Avoiding the rotters was easy. The horde is thinner up here. Most of them are crowded at the waterfront facing the island.

  Spread out the way they are, I’m not too nervous. They’re not terribly dangerous, unless you get cornered by a couple of them. That’s the real trouble. What they lack in speed they make up for in strength. I once saw a rotter pull a man’s arm off like he was separating barbecued ribs.

  None of the rotters we’ve come across look anything like what I saw this morning. That could mean the armored variety is a random mutation. I don’t know if that's good or bad.

  The rook waves his hand to get my attention, points a finger away from him, down the block. They’re moving on. He crawls over to where I am, back up against an MTA bus, and says, “Clear. But I think I see some more down the block. What’s the plan?”

  I lean my head back, tap it against the white and blue bus. “I would love to drive this thing near the library, blow it to hell. They’ll be attracted to the noise and the smoke. Give us time to get in and out.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  “This thing has been sitting here for a long time. Battery is probably dead.”

  The rook looks up and down the block, then under the bus. He says, “Get inside and get ready to drive it. I know a little about engines. I might be able to get it started.”

  He disappears to the back and I push through the accordion door at the front. It’s one of the newer models—new when it came out—with the raised bucket seating in the back.

  I do a quick sweep, and by the time I get back to the front the rook is climbing aboard. He plops down in the driver’s seat. There’s a chain dangling from the ignition, with a mess of keys and a rabbit’s foot charm. As if none of this was ominous enough.

  The rook turns the key and the bus roars to life. He pounds on the wheel. I pat him on the shoulder and he hits me with a smile that tells me his father is probably dead.

  We cut up to Forty-Second Street, weaving around abandoned cars. There are more rotters than I’m comfortable with.
Their heads turn at the roar of the bus. I’m sure some of them are following after.

  The rook asks, “Now what?”

  “I jump out at the library. You drive down two blocks. Stick a flare in the gas tank. Get clear fast. Don’t die. Cut a long path around and hoof it back. Got it?”

  “Where do I go when I get there?”

  “As long as it’s clear, come in the front, by the lion statues.”

  The rook smiles but doesn’t take his attention from the road. In front of us there’s a rotter standing in the middle of the street, a man in a suit that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe. Used to, at least. The rook cuts the wheel and hits the rotter full on. It explodes across the front of the bus, leaving streaks of brown and red smeared on the windshield.

  *

  I’ve passed the library a million times. Never been inside, but I remember the steps, packed with tourists snapping pictures with the stone lions flanking the door. There’d be food vendors on the sidewalk and people crowded at the flimsy tables on the pavilion under the trees.

  I shouldn’t do it, shouldn’t stop, but I pause at the top of the stairs, just before the doors. Not to check for rotters. The area looks clear. I just want to look, down the cavernous blocks, at the empty windows and the bare sidewalks. All this time, and the echoes still haven’t faded. Like everyone ran around the corner and they’ll be back in just a second.

  I like to think there are still pockets of people hidden up in the buildings. Hunkered down in the Arsenal in Central Park or the Armory in Park Slope. This city has a surprising amount of fortified buildings. But after more than two years of watching, we have yet to see a single sign of life.

  The plague spread across the city like fire across a dry field. Between the reports from the survivors who reached our shore, and from our own scouting expeditions, we figure the city fell in a month. More than eight million people, dead or gone. The enormity of it makes my head reel.