The Last Safe Place: A Zombie Novella

by Rob W. Hart

  But in these fleeting little moments, seeing peace settled over what was once the biggest, loudest city in the world, it can be beautiful. If you can forget about everything else.

  The wind whistles at me through the empty trees dotting the plaza. Task at hand. The doors of the library are locked, but they’re big and wood with glass insets in the middle. I check over my shoulder to make sure it’s clear and smash one, climb through fast, hope nothing heard it.

  The lobby is a huge space that looks like it was built for a race taller and larger than humans. The white marble walls lend it a sterile, mausoleum-like quality, but that could be the circumstances.

  This could have been used for a refuge after the plague hit. I listen, don’t hear anything. Too much space for me to cover and secure. There are a dozen stanchions lying on the floor by the door. I pick two and drag them to where the lobby branches off into long, perpendicular hallways. I fling a stanchion down each. The crash of metal on stone reverberates through the building. Nothing stirs.

  There’s a folding table near the entrance covered with guides and fliers. I find a map, stuff it into my pocket, then take the stairs two at a time. At the top I find the display cases, just like the Librarian said, and a room lined with thick, black books that look like encyclopedias.

  Somewhere outside there’s a thump and the sound of an explosion. Need to get moving.

  The catalogues are embossed in gold, each one with letter combinations to show where they fall in the alphabet.

  Corpse decomposition. Seems like the most sensible place to start. I find the appropriate book, place it on a table, and flip it open. Each page is a grid of cards that look photocopied, some of them with handwriting, some of them typed. The pages are thin and there are a lot of them. It takes a while for me to find ‘CORPSES’. There’s a note that says, ‘see DEAD’.

  I push the book aside and go to the shelves, come back with another book. Flip through and find a listing for ‘DEAD, care and disposal’. Close, but not close enough.

  I get to the end of that section, find ‘DEAD, jurisprudence.’ No decomposition. This seemed like such a better idea ten minutes ago.

  Maybe I just didn’t ask the right question, and there’s something on the pages that’ll tell me where to go. I scan the cards, look for some sort of section number, because this stuff could all be grouped together. But there’s no common numbers, no directions to anything in the building. I pull out the map and try to cross reference, but everything is a gallery named after a person. Nothing is broken out by subject.

  I pick up the reference guide and toss it against the wall.

  There’s a sound from the lobby. I head to the balcony and find the rook climbing in through the door I broke. He hits the stairs and I meet him at the landing. He’s panting.

  “Put your arms above your head,” I tell him. “Your lungs will expand. Take in more air.”

  He nods, puts his hands up, and after a moment says, “We need to hurry. Bryant Park, fucking full of them.”

  “Did any of them follow you?”

  “Some of them saw me. We need to get gone. Did you find what you need?”

  I look through the huge, ornate window overlooking a vacant Fifth Avenue. “Not yet. The stacks are one floor up. Let’s check it out. If we don’t find anything in ten minutes we’re out.”

  The rook is hesitant, but he climbs the stairs after me. There are two reading rooms on either side. I tell him, “Take the one on the left. Sweep the room, look for medical reference. Holler if you find anything.”

  He runs off. I duck into the other room. It’s full of tables and reading lamps. Shelves lines the walls, covered with countless books. The light is dim, drifting in from windows set at the top of vaulted ceilings. I crouch down, check that there’s nothing on the floor, then make my way around.

  Literature, history, language. No medical reference.

  I concentrate on the spines of the books, running past the shelves, but all I can think about is the giant crowd of undead outside. If there’s a swarm, we have to get around them.

  As I reach the end of the shelves the rook comes through the door shaking his head. “Nothing.”

  I take out the map, try and make sense of it. There’s got to be something in this library, somewhere, with the answer.

  The rook puts his hand on my shoulder. “We have to go, Sarge.”

  I crumple up the map and toss it, tighten the backpack. We hit the stairs and head back down, both stopping cold when we hear grunts and breaking glass from the lobby. I wave my hand and we hit the floor, then I crawl across and he follows. When we’re on the balcony overlooking the entrance, I glance over.

  There’s a rotter climbing in through the door, a couple behind him. I get onto my knees and push myself up so I can see more.

  There’s maybe forty of them outside on the steps.

  I duck back down. The rook asks, “What now?”

  Opposite us, in the room with the research books, the volume I tossed is still sprawled out on the floor. At the back of the room there’s a door. I point to it. “Probably administrative offices. There’s a couple of exits to this building. We find another one. Where did you drive the bus?”

  “Down Fortieth.”

  “Then we go to the right, come out on Forty-Second.” The rook moves toward the door and I grab his arm, pull him back. “Head on a swivel. The only time I’ve lost men is when we’ve gone through a tight space.”

  The rook nods. I take a flare off his pants, pop the cap, strike it, and it roars to life in my hands, the flame so hot it singes my beard. I toss it into the air. There’s nothing to catch fire in the lobby and the light and sound should keep the rotters distracted for a few minutes.

  Heading into a tight space, I’ll take any advantage I can come up with.

  *

  The light that trickles in from outside has to stretch and reach around corners. It’s pale and dirty. The pools of shadow are black as voids.

  We trade off. One of us sweeps, the other backing him up. It’s slow work, but better to move safe and slow. When you’re bit, just minutes later, your body is racked in agony. Five minutes after that, you’re dead. Then you come back. None of it looks pleasant.

  And that’s only if the rotters leave enough that you can even come back.

  Twice we end up in the same bank of cubicles, but after that we make progress, bearing to the right side of the building. The kid is nervous but he’s trying to hide it. I give him credit. At that age, I would have crapped myself before we even got off the watercraft.

  In a low voice I ask, “How you holding up?”

  “I’m fine,” he says, lying. “They’re slow and dumb, right?”

  “One-on-one, they’re easiest thing in the world. Kill the brain, kill the rotter. Even two isn’t so bad. A third and I want to put some space between me and them. Any more than that, you run like a mother fucker.”

  He laughs. “How about five?”

  “‘Run like a mother fucker’ applies to everything four and above.”

  We stalk down a hallway, peeking into cubicles piled with stacks of paper and books, our footfalls muffled by the worn grey carpet. After a few moments of silence the rook asks, “So why didn’t we alert the island? Let everyone know what was going on?”

  Because I’ve got two separate communities on that island, and both of them hate each other. One side feels privileged because they’re doctors and carpenters and engineers. They act like without them, our little community would collapse. Which it would.

  On the other end of the island are the people who take care of the day-to-day, the ones who keep it clean and livable. Who empty the trash cans and tend to the water farm. They act like without them, our little community would collapse. Which it would.

  Tensions are high. Everyone is hungry. People are sick. With supplies low, everyone is looking at everyone else sideways, wondering if they’re getting a bigger share. And everyone wants a weapon, just in case.
/>
  All it takes is one idiot to fight his way into the armory looking for a gun, and the result will be just about the same as sticking a road flare in the gas tank of a bus.

  It’s a lot to explain, so I tell him, “Trying to avoid a panic.”

  He shakes his head at me. “I wish I had told my mom. What if more of them get on the island?”

  “Kid, we’re not sure what happened.”

  “Then why are we even here?”

  “We need to understand our enemy. Maybe this wasn’t my best idea, but it’s something. Otherwise I’m just sitting around waiting to die.”

  We move on, and in short order come across a staircase leading down. At the bottom of the stairs there’s a long hallway and a door, sunlight peeking through a small glass window. We jog over and there are rooms on either side filled with garbage cans. The smell is so thick I can feel it on my tongue.

  The kid looks out the small window set into the door. We can’t see much of the street because we’re in an alcove set back from the sidewalk, but it looks clear.

  He puts his hand on the doorknob. It turns. He looks up at me and nods, pulls the door open a crack. I take out the SIG. All we need is twenty feet of clear space. I can work with that.

  I tell the rook, “When we get out there, head straight for the water. Don’t look back. I’ll be behind you. Got it?”

  He nods. I check out the window again, step back, give the rook room to swing the door open.

  The smell grows more intense. Should garbage still smell after this long?

  No. It’s not the garbage that reeks, which becomes clear at the shuffling of feet and the flash of a body that slams into the rook.

  The rotter is a heavy woman in a tattered pantsuit. Her skin is ragged and torn, exposing a hole in her cheek that shows clear through to her teeth.

  She pushes him into the wall, screeching like a wounded animal. He’s got his arms into her chest, which is enough to keep her snapping jaw inches from his face. I aim the gun at her head but the bullet will go through her and into him, so I kick the woman in the back, try to draw her attention to me.

  She turns, milk-white eyes fixed on me, and the rook manages to slide out from under her, toward the open door. He tries to push himself to his feet, slips on something.

  And then he gets pulled through by something on the other side.

  He makes a sound close to a scream, except a lot more wet.

  *

  Shoot the woman in the head. Get the door shut. Something pushes from the other side. Stick the SIG through and fire until the clip is empty. The door closes. Down the hall. Nothing behind me. Up the stairs, to the other side. Through the office area. Back to the main corridor.

  A rotter made it up the stairs. Holster the gun, take out the bat, use the momentum. The head comes clean off, arcs high through the air, the body folding in on itself. Around the corner before the head hits the ground. Alone, but I can’t shake the feeling of hot breath on the back of my neck.

  Another door, another staircase, another hallway too dark for me to feel comfortable. No sounds. Breathing too hard, I can’t hear anything. Calm down. Shadows everywhere, shadows deep enough for things to hide in. Listen.

  Footsteps?

  Nothing.

  Just a big building making noises.

  Door at the end of the hallway. Sidewalk looks clear but that didn’t work last time. Wait. Listen. Crack the door. Nothing. This way is safe.

  He was a good kid. A good soldier. He was smart and enthusiastic. He was growing into his body and probably breaking some hearts among the teens that hang out on the swing set outside the apartment building. In a few months he would have been made a deputy and he would have earned it.

  The worst part is that I lied. I don’t actually know what his name was.

  *

  There are a few rotters on the street. Not so many I can’t handle it. Not nearly as many as there are on the other side of the building. I get moving, cutting wide paths around them.

  I wish I could go back, bring something back for his mom to bury. But it didn’t look like the rotters left much. A bike messenger was gnawing on a thick bone by the time I got the door secured.

  Take the guilt. Bury it deep. There’ll be plenty of time to hate yourself later.

  Twilight sets in. That band between day and night when the sky is too dark to see right, but light enough that my night vision won’t kick in. I check over my shoulder every dozen steps. There’s a handful of rotters skittering down the street after me. I’m well ahead of them, so I slow down and watch my step. Trip and blow an ankle and I’m dinner.

  I cut down Eighth Avenue because it looks clear. Halfway down the block I cross in front of a Barnes & Noble, the front windows smashed, the store ransacked. Who even needs books during the apocalypse?

  Oh, right.

  The block is empty. I lost the rotters when I turned the corner. The building has a few points I can exit from. Can’t hurt, just to check.

  *

  June would kill me if she saw me in here. She hated chains, always saying we should go to independent bookstores, support small businesses. I didn’t care either way—chains and indies both had employees who needed to eat. Not that I’m a big reader anyway.

  Just inside the window there’s a thick, heavy copy of the Bible lying on the floor. I take it and fling it toward the shadows in the back of the store. Nothing comes to kill me. No lightning to strike me down, either.

  It doesn’t take long to find the science section, and then a big medical reference book, bigger than a dictionary. Why not? I tuck it under my arm, and as I make my way toward the street, I see something move in my peripheral vision.

  I dive behind the register. They must have caught up. They don’t know I’m in here. Give them a couple of minutes, they’ll move on. From here I’ve got a clear view of the broken front windows, and if one of them comes in I can head for the back.

  The light is failing but there’s still enough to read by. I flip open the book, glancing from the pages to the front of the store. It takes a little while, some flipping between the glossary and the chapters, but I find a section related to corpses, then skim through the pages to a passage that grabs me. As I read, the bottom drops out of my stomach.

  Adipocere, also known as corpse, grave or mortuary wax. Formed by anaerobic bacterial hydrolysis—whatever—in fat tissue. It turns the tissue into a hardened cast. Formation is most likely to occur in wet, cold environments.

  Like the bottom of the harbor.

  I knew they were falling into the water. I always assumed they got stuck in the mud, maybe pulled by the current to that one spot under the Manhattan Bridge where all the river’s bodies would wash up. But they don't need to breathe, and if they can still walk, they essentially have the island surrounded. The water is opaque and a lot of the harbor is barely deeper than a swimming pool. They've been down there, a few feet below the surface, evolving into something harder to kill.

  But the thing I found this morning, it could barely move its limbs. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t still dangerous, but it wouldn’t have the dexterity to get up on the rocks and climb the fence.

  I’m missing something simple, and when I realize it I am going to be so angry at myself for not noticing it before.

  I load my gun, get ready to move. There’s no sound coming from the street. I try and push myself up into a standing position but slip on a thin pile of discarded papers. I get to one knee and look around, at the food wrappers and books and crumbled papers littered around me.

  The garbage.

  We toss our garbage off the southern tip of the island, where the floor of the harbor inclines up toward the shore.

  The northern and western shores have people living there. The eastern shore has the water farm. It had to be the south. All this time, we’ve been tossing trash into the water. And it’s built up, formed a ridge, probably. There’s even an opening in the fence so the workers can get to the water’s edge.r />
  People still complain to me about the garbage. That we shouldn’t be tossing it into the water. I don’t love it but with humanity diminished to maybe just us, our environmental impact is reduced by astronomical levels. Mother Earth would forgive us a little litter, now that we weren’t belching carbon gas into the atmosphere and clear-cutting rain forests.

  Except maybe she didn’t.

  I’ve seen these things copy each other. I’ve seen them learn and adapt. If one got on the island, there are probably more behind it. The one I killed this morning wandered clear across the island before we found it, proving our security isn’t as tight as I had hoped.

  We got too comfortable. All it took was a little carelessness and they found our weaknesses, monkey at a typewriter style.

  I stop caring about being unseen. I hit the street, run as fast as I can toward the water. Vaulting over dead cars and avoiding dead bodies.

  We moored near a rope ladder leading up onto a concrete dock, but I don’t bother with the formality. I just jump for the watercraft and land on it so hard it knocks the wind out of me, pushes me down a few inches below the water line, and pops up into the air. The bag is still secured to my back.

  My hand shakes as I turn the knob to the ‘on’ position and hit the button on the handle.

  Nothing happens.

  I hit it three more times, check everything to make sure I did it right, it doesn’t start. The duct tape that Reginald used to fix the handlebar obscures the gas gauge. I scratch at it until I can slide a finger underneath, tear it away.

  The tank is empty.

  Before I can check to see if there’s a problem, something slams into me and knocks me into the harbor.

  4. THEN

  The radio on my belt exploded with reports of fires and assaults, pouring in so fast the dispatcher couldn’t keep up. His voice growing more urgent with every address.

  The bar was empty. Out on the street cops were running with weapons drawn. A paramedic came shuffling from around a parked ambulance. Her eyes the same milky white as the kids’ downstairs. I didn’t give her the chance to get close.