That’s how it felt, watching myself riding scooters along the New York coastline with my friend, Rory, and my boyfriend, Norman, hiding from heavily armed thugs on our way to break into a psychiatric institute. Oh, and killing zombies. Can’t forget the zombies. When, exactly, did they become the mundane part of the equation?
Did I space out because I was exhausted? Or because I was still trying to process the whole human-being-trying-to-kill-me concept?
Probably. But I didn’t drift too far, never far enough to stop listening for any sounds of life that didn’t belong, and whatever disconnect I could get from that task was probably a good thing anyway. It stopped me from doing stupid, panicky things.
Norman and I kept the scooters close so that Rory and I could compare navigation notes. We stuck to the north edge of the island almost all the way as planned with me just barely in the lead. The water made it harder to listen and hopefully harder to be heard as well, and again, the zombies weren’t quite so thick there.
I didn’t want to zoom in again when the last edge of the sun disappeared under the water, leaving only the last grace period of twilight. I didn’t want to when we miraculously reached the road and the gate onto the adjacent island and had to hoist the scooters very loudly over it after the equally loud attempt at breaking the lock with the crowbar failed. I didn’t want to when Rory cheered as if she wanted to alert the whole city.
I certainly didn’t want to reclaim my one little chance at a life and all its associated concerns when we finally broke a window into the Manhattan Psychiatric Center’s front office and found exactly what we’d found on the outside: a complete absence of any signs of recent habitation.
But I did.
I slipped back into myself and watched Rory go from loud joy and excitement to loud frustration and denial, tearing the office apart, prying open every door she could reach, calling out Lis’s name. I called out with her.
I looked around the waiting room of the institute, our mythic promised land, the hope and purpose that every minute of our newly rebuilt lives had centered around, looking suspiciously like the site of an orderly and timely evacuation, and I searched anyway, just to stop it from sinking in.
That waiting room, at least, had definitely not been used as a shelter, and there was no particular reason for someone staying at the center to avoid it with the doors still secure like they had been. There was still the slim hope that someone might have settled further inside anyway, just to be safe.
Rory broke into the office with the name Defoe on the window, and Norman and I followed. It was as tidy as the waiting room had been before we got there, the desk perfectly aligned, all the drawers and cabinets closed and locked, except for the middle drawer of the filing cabinet, which was locked open instead, like some major neat freak had left in a big hurry.
From there, she started running down the halls, smashing open the other offices, the patient rooms, what looked like a group therapy meeting room, screaming over and over again, “Lis! Lis! Lis! Lis!”
She repeated it so many times that it barely sounded like a name anymore, or a voice, for that matter. Hers didn’t change the way a voice does when it repeats the same sound, getting softer or lower or higher. It was the same, over and over; the same full, uncompromising force behind it every time, and I had to keep shouting along just to be able to hear what we were saying.
Rory and I made one circuit of the first floor’s main hallways, climbed a flight of stairs, and circled a matching set on the floor above. We were back at the beginning when my voice gave out, and I had to stop. Rory was ready to charge back up the stairs straight through to the third floor, still shouting with that mechanical consistency. I grabbed her elbow to stop her.
“Rory—”
“Let go! Lis! Lis!”
I couldn’t yell, and without yelling, I couldn’t lie to myself anymore.
“Rory, I’m so, so sorry—”
“Don’t you dare start that! Lis!”
“Rory, there’s no way—”
“Hey, guys?” Norman interrupted us from the door of Dr. Defoe’s office. “You might want to come have a look at this.”
I probably would have called it impossible before it happened, but that actually made her stop.
Norman held up one of the files from the clumsily secured cabinet to show us the name on the side.
Borealis Hart.
Before Rory could snatch it away from him, he opened it.
All the medical records and whatever else normally goes in a psych patient file was gone. There was just one folded sheet out of a prescription pad with a swirly, familiar scrawl on it.
“It was open on purpose,” he said. “She left you a note.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Or What You Will
517 East 117th Street.
Love ya,
Lis.
“I’m working on it.”
I don’t know how many times I tried repeating those words. I stuck with them for a while after giving up “Try to get some sleep” as a lost cause.
The address in Lis’s note was tantalizingly close, but with the stars already out, the rain falling, and no prep time for me to study the specific streets in question, I flat out vetoed any plan that involved leaving the institute before morning. Norman didn’t hesitate to back me up that time. Rory didn’t say she agreed, and she certainly wasn’t happy, but she didn’t really try to persuade us either, just hovered restlessly around me and the maps I had spread out on the floor. She knew it was the best decision; she just couldn’t make it herself and feel like a good sister. So to be the good friend, I had to play the bad guy. It wasn’t a fun arrangement.
“It’s, what, two miles away?” Rory ranted over me. “How hard can that be to figure out?”
“It’s about two miles away from us,” I agreed as patiently as I could, “and about three miles from where we ran into those nutjobs. Remember, the reason we had to take the scenic route to get here in the first place? If they’ve got anything resembling a territory, this is going to be inside of it.”
“So what’s wrong with sneaking in while they sleep?”
“Did those guys look like they keep a curfew? We have no idea what their habits are like! And we have no experience traveling in the dark. We don’t know that about them. If we go at a time we’re used to, we might have an advantage.”
We went on like that for most of the evening, while I plotted every detail of our course, Norman chiming in occasionally, on my side but in his cheery, lighthearted, good cop voice.
When I put the maps away a little while after midnight, we did finally shut the lanterns off and go quiet. Norman was perfectly still in his sleeping bag beside me, but his breathing never reached that slow, deep-sleep rhythm. I spent a lot of time staring at the pitch darkness, switching back and forth between open and closed eyelids. There was no visible difference. The dark had never bothered me at all before. In fact, I used to keep my alarm clock under a pillow to blot out its light-up display. That night wasn’t different because of the obvious creep factor of spending it in a place one step shy of an abandoned insane asylum. It was just too much like the office at that apartment building. It was too featureless and hard to measure. I would have given just about anything for a self-illuminating clock to pin it down with.
Parts of time must have slipped by me. Though I was never aware of sleeping, dawn came earlier than I expected it, and as tired as I still was, my thinking was clearer than it would have been after a real all-nighter.
We ate and cleaned ourselves up as much as we could with what we’d brought, not talking much except to go over the plan one more time, the exact route, the need for silence, the empty promise to cut and run south if anything went wrong, the meeting place if anything separated us, a more convenient one chosen by Rory this time.
I’d told Rory so many times that this would work, that it would be worth the extra time needed to do it right, that by the time we were back on the wet, bri
efly-sunny road, I almost believed it myself. I almost believed that nothing terrible could possibly find us as long as we stuck to the plan. I was almost surprised when I heard the voices again and the purring of scooters that didn’t belong to us.
In my own defense, there wasn’t a safer route than the one I picked. The undershirts didn’t intercept us along the way. They were circling the exact parking lot we needed. Behind them, I could see the address, 517, painted on the side of a Costco. There probably wasn’t a better time, either. Judging by the strained look under their eyes, they’d been there most of the night.
It was just two of them, the mustache and the stubble. The goatee probably wasn’t dead quite yet, unless they’d decided to put him out of his misery, but he also probably wasn’t capable of anything but raving in some cool corner of a secure hideout anymore.
“I told you they’d be back,” the mustache shouted to the stubble before turning to us. “Hey! Hey, I’m talking to you!”
That would have been more than enough reason for us to turn tail, run for cover, and see if we couldn’t rethink this whole thing, if it weren’t for the figure on the rooftop.
It was backlit, impossible to see clearly, though its movements were far too healthy for it to be the goatee. It could have been another undershirt if the figure hadn’t ducked so violently when the first shot went off. It didn’t come up again, but after it had been gone a few seconds, there was a light behind one of the outside vents, the right color to be a flashlight beam. It looked like someone had retreated into the roof itself.
Wherever Lis had sent us, it wasn’t abandoned this time.
Instead of trying to pass them to the south, I turned to the east, and Norman followed me, cutting behind the Costco, hoping for some way to shake them off and come back.
I was planning to get back to the coast and circle around a few blocks, but I misjudged the turn, and instead of the next through street, we ended up in an alley, which dead-ended at the mouth of a parking structure. I could feel its corners setting us up as a kiddie-level shooting gallery. It was too late to double back, so we were forced underground.
There were lots of cars left in it, at least. That much made it harder to get a clear shot. That and the darkness that got thicker the deeper we went, cut with shadows that moved as fast and suddenly as our headlights. Even better, it was enormous, with two full helixes circling downward in a sort of figure-eight instead of just one.
We didn’t need a signal. Norman took the left helix and I took the right one, and like finding the simple rhythm of one of those arcade driving games, we started to race, the pace quick, smooth, and steady, listening for the engines behind to split up to follow us.
Like he always did in those games, Norman established a solid lead in a couple seconds, getting some nice distance ahead of both undershirts and me. I heard a shot just behind me, much closer.
One lap.
Two laps.
At the end of the third, Norman and Rory were already a full floor below me. The undershirt that had picked them, the mustache, looked at me across the middle aisle when he caught up to my level, and I looked back at him with the stubble closing to within a couple yards of me, waiting to see if he would turn and come after me. Instead he just fired a half-assed shot that missed me by a mile and kept going.
That’s what I was hoping he’d do. As soon as he overtook me, I cut across the center and started circling Norman’s side, heading up instead of down.
The stubble was too close, and he missed the turn and had to stop and double back in the middle of a lap instead.
I could easily have made it outside before he could get me back in range, but it wouldn’t have helped.
Norman and Rory were still a good distance ahead of the mustache, but their progress wasn’t toward another exit. They were headed toward the eighth level, the bottom level, at an alarming speed. And the bottom level wasn’t just a dead end. It was a screaming, clawing mess.
Thanks to its inclines, most of the structure was pretty much zombie-free, with the occasional few stumbling in from above after the sound of us. Most of those wandered over the edges of the lanes and fell as soon as they spotted one of us on the opposite side.
The basement, on the other hand, had collected more zombies than it could hold. Hundreds of shrieking bodies that had wandered wherever the slope took them when there was nothing to chase all packed together like flies in the bottom of a pitcher plant.
That’s where Norman and Rory were headed.
Norman wasn’t unaware of this or anything. He knew he was closed in, and he had slowed enough to keep the mustache on his tail while expanding his pattern onto the full figure-eight track. That was going to give him a few more turns before falling into the flytrap, but not many.
Losing the stubble wasn’t really on the table, so I opted for forcing a little breathing room from him, just enough to let me think clearly for a few seconds.
He was on track behind me, on the upward slope. I hit the brakes to let him gain on me.
I waited until I could hear him turning onto the same between-levels stretch I was on. I waited three more seconds. And then I ditched the pizza scooter against the inner railing and jumped.
I fell barely a story, and I rolled just right, like out of a tall tree; I still left a hell of a dent in the roof of the minivan I landed on, and the sore, rattled feeling in my ankles and shoulder almost made repeating that same move seem like a bad idea.
So I did it again before I could give it enough thought to change my mind.
That time I landed in a convertible, with the gearshift digging into my hip so hard that I could picture the inevitable, softball-sized, purple bruise already. Whoever it had belonged to had done enough riot looting to save me the trouble of trying to rip off one of the hubcaps or side mirrors. Sitting in the backseat, on top of a bunch of more expensive junk, was a jade green bowling ball just my size. I grabbed it and held it out over the next set of railings.
I didn’t really care whether the stubble decided to try following me or went around the long way. Both options had about an equal chance of turning out well for me.
He picked the latter.
The circuit took a slightly different turn on the seventh level before going into the basement itself, passing right under the center well I’d been jumping through. I had one chance.
I watched the path of the two scooters below me, trying to get in sync with it like you can with older arcade games, seeing where things will be as clearly as where they are. I refused to think about the sound of the third scooter or how many more turns it had to take to reach me. I didn’t think about why Norman suddenly cursed when he passed the sixth level, when he’d known how close to screwed he was long before then. I just kept breathing and tweaked my aim, my timing, to within a few degrees of perfect.
Norman took the last curve before the target stretch, and when he crossed the line a few feet before it that I’d measured out in my head, I let the ball go.
Norman and Rory’s heads, pressed together against both slipstream and gunfire, crossed out of the ball’s trajectory with maybe a fifth of a second to spare.
The nine pounds of polyurethane landed squarely on the mustache’s front tire with what a person might have called superhuman accuracy if they’d been watching from the sidelines. Whole truth be told, I was actually aiming for the guy’s nose.
Oh well, it knocked him off his wheels either way.
I would have liked to watch Norman get himself turned back around, but by then I had to duck really fast and roll under the ridiculously oversized SUV beside me to get out of the stubble’s line of fire.
The pizza scooter was still at least two floors above, and I was going to have a major disadvantage going uphill on foot. I was in the process of working out a way back to it until Norman shouted out, “Here!”
I had no idea what might be there, all I knew was that he was shouting it from the sixth level, three below mine, and that was somewhere
I could get to.
I jumped the first level from the low end of mine, so it was just a few feet, ran down the next incline into the far corner and down one of those tiny, concrete staircases, counting the landings.
I realized when I stumbled out of the first door and joined Norman and Rory along the adjacent wall that we were right about where the unexplained profanity had happened.
There was a door, riddled with bullet holes, surrounded by some painted-out space where more parking slots would normally go. It had a peephole on the inside, warped on our side to make it impossible to see in. A loading dock. It took a few moments for my internal compass to catch up after all the spinning. Once it did, I was sure it belonged to the Costco.
Norman hammered on the door.
“Let us in!” he called out. “We’re alive, let us in!”
Just being alive didn’t seem to be a good enough reason to trust us anymore, but I couldn’t think of a better way to ask.
The stubble was far behind and seemed to have lost track of exactly where we were. He was still winding his way toward us at a searching pace.
Norman knocked again.
The other engine started again below us, first with a crunch of broken plastic, but it shook free after a few seconds. Somehow, both the mustache and his scooter were still alive and kicking. The sound of him excited the zombies from monotonous grunting to fresh, sharp, identifiable shrieks, closer than before. They were climbing up.
Closed in on both sides, the three of us stared at that door. The only person we’d seen in the Costco had been on the roof. Even if he or she would have risked helping us, there was a good chance there was no one inside far enough underground to hear us.
Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know Of) Page 21
