Long Empty Roads

by Sean Little

  I crossed New Jersey quickly. I didn’t bother searching any of the little towns along the way. If anyone in Jersey was still alive, I figured they would have gone to New York, or they would be out in the country. A large part of New Jersey felt like never-ending suburb. There was probably plenty to scavenge, but I just didn’t feel like survivors would be hanging out in Toms River or Princeton with the big city and all its bounty so close. New York had a multitude of hospitals with medicine, stores rich with canned goods, and many, many apartments that could all be raided for whatever supplies they held. If nothing else, there would be tables and chairs that could be broken up and burned for heat. I didn’t know where people would be in New York, though. Brooklyn? Manhattan? I had no idea.

  I started in Manhattan because it was the first place I ran into when I crossed the Lincoln Tunnel from Jersey. Remember that I grew up near Madison, Wisconsin, a town of about 300,000. The county it was in had maybe 500,000 people. I had been to Milwaukee a handful of times and Chicago twice in my life. I was always impressed by their size compared to Madison. Even with the experiences of those “big cities,” I wasn’t prepared for New York. Even before I hit the tunnel, when New York was looming on the horizon, it felt like I was transporting to another world. Everywhere I looked were towering buildings. I was dwarfed. I was an ant. I’d been through cities on my way to New York, but New York was its own separate entity. Just in Manhattan alone, I felt like I could spend the next decade exploring and scavenging and still not breach all the apartments, grocery stores, restaurants, and every other place that might have held supplies. Throw in the rest of the boroughs, and all the surrounding suburbs in New Jersey and New York, and someone could live a good, long life just scavenging. The winters would still be cold, but there were trees to harvest and furniture to burn. Central Park alone could be turned into a tree farm and you could easily set aside a couple of acres for planting vegetables. New York overwhelmed me. I knew I should explore. I knew I should search for survivors or signs of life. I knew that there had to be someone, probably many people still alive in New York, but I didn’t know where to start looking. I stopped the Greyhawk and tried to sort through the crisscross maze of streets. Everything was in a grid system and that helped, but for someone from Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, population 35,000, the maps I had might as well have been written with hieroglyphics.

  I drove to the tallest building I saw and pulled the Greyhawk onto the sidewalk in front of it. I gathered weapons, my flashlight, and my ruck of tools and spare ammo. I closed the curtains on the RV and told Fester to hang loose. I’d be back as soon as I could. Fester yawned and sprawled on his side on the padded bench at the little table. Clearly, he was unimpressed by my big city daring.

  The doors to the office building were locked. I used the butt of the shotgun to smash one of the doors. It took a couple of shots, but caved eventually. The glass was safety glass. It didn’t shatter so much as it webbed and bowed until I could push it clear of the door and slip past.

  I couldn’t smell death in the building. I didn’t know if that was because no one had died in there, or because the bodies were far above me and the smell wasn’t carrying to the lower levels. The building smelled clean enough, but stale. There was a thick stillness that settled on the tongue like heavy cream. There was a faint scent of ammonia and institutional cleanser mixed with time and age. The air was warm and dry in the building, but given the sheer amount of windows and the excessive heat that day, that wasn’t unexpected. The air was so dry that only a few seconds in the lobby made me thirsty and made my nose itch. I had to go back to the RV and get a bottle of water.

  The elevators were obviously not going to take me to the top floor; I had to go by stairs. I climbed seventy stories in a darkened stairwell illuminated only by my MagLite. Each flight of stairs was nine steps to a landing, and then another nine steps to the next floor. Eighteen steps per floor. The first five or six flights were easy. No problem, even. I was giddy. It was exciting. Then, I started to lag. I was still moving quickly, but I lost any sort of bounce in my step. By the twentieth floor, my thighs were burning and I was trudging. By the thirtieth, I was dragging myself from step to step, and I still had thirty-nine flights to go! I could have bailed early. The fortieth floor was still a good view. I could have stopped, but I wanted to make it to the top. I wanted the reward of seeing the massive city spread out before me like a carpet. By the fiftieth floor, climbing the steps became a war of attrition. I would not let the stairs beat me. I was rationing my water because I had only brought one bottle, just a tiny sip every five floors to moisten my tongue. I was breathing hard. I started dreading the next day because I knew my legs would feel like I had gravel in all my leg muscles. The last ten flights, I was dragging myself with my arms on the railing as much as I was trying to lift my legs. For the first time in my life, I truly understood why StairMasters worked.

  When I got to the door at the top floor, I was spent. I flopped on my back on the stairwell landing and gasped for air. I wiped a thick sheen of sweat off my forehead with my wrist. Rivulets of sweat were dripping down my body. The notion that I would have to go back down all the steps flitted through my mind. It would be easier, but it was still going to be a chore.

  The door to the top floor was locked, of course. It was one of those big, solid steel fire doors, with a narrow window enmeshed with wire. I dropped my ruck and shotgun. I propped the flashlight on its end so it pointed straight up and lit the area. I tried the lock-pick kit but learned quickly the lock was outside of my range of talent. I had a small sledgehammer in the bag, a little 12-pounder with a short handle. I picked that up and began to lay into the door handle with gusto. The noise of each shot exploded down the stairwell and echoed. It was loud, sacrilegiously loud. The world felt like a church funeral service, and any loud noises felt like someone belching in the middle of Mass. I hammered and hacked at the door handle. It bent, but did not break. I decided to work on the narrow window in the door. These things were made to be difficult to break. You can shatter the glass pretty easily, but the wire in the middle was surprisingly tough. I had to get out a pair of tin-snips and cut through the wire. Once I did that, it was easy enough to reach my arm through the door and open it from the inside simply by pulling the handle. Interior doors leading to stairwells can never lock on the inside. Fire codes, and all.

  The top story of the office building was a collection of cubicles and small offices enclosed with glass panels. On the far end of the office were three executive offices. You could tell the executive offices because they had Venetian blinds covering their windows for privacy and big wooden doors instead of swinging glass doors. It looked like nothing special. If anything, it reminded me of the set of The Office, but it was ten times as large. All around the office were windows overlooking the city. The view was breathtaking and astonishing for a kid from Wisconsin; it was everything I hoped it would be. I wondered how anyone in that office got anything done. I was always the kind of kid who could not sit next to the windows in class because something outdoors would always distract me and I would have to spend ten minutes watching it. Here, seventy stories above Manhattan, I could see down into a myriad of streets and alleys, each more interesting than the last. They were interesting in an empty city seemingly devoid of life. When everyone was alive, it must have been a hypnotic swirl of things to see. I did a slow lap around the office looking at the city. I was supposed to be looking for signs of life, but I was entranced by the different buildings. I pulled binoculars out of my ruck and started to look into windows of other buildings. If I’d ever been able to have a job in a tall office building, I would have been fired—I just know it. I would have spent every moment that I could spying on other people.

  The roof access door was just above that floor. Another eighteen steps. I had to do it. I gathered my gear and marched up the last eighteen steps. This door didn’t have a window like all the rest of the fire doors, but this door also wasn’t locked for some reason. I
was able to push it open. Wind caught the door and slammed it open. The chain at the top of the door kept it from slamming back against the wall of the rooftop portal behind it, but the wind held the door with force. I dropped my ruck at the corner of the door so if the wind died, it couldn’t close on me. That would be all I needed—to survive a year and change over a Wisconsin winter, and then stupidly lock myself on the roof of a seventy-story office tower to die.

  There was a massive stack of air conditioning blocks on the roof. They were their own engineering marvel. They extended at least an additional twenty feet on top of the roof. For a split-second, I considered climbing them and doing a Leo DiCaprio “I’m-the-king-of-the-world” moment, but an image of a gust of wind catching me and chucking me over the edge of the building ran that idea out of my head.

  I walked to the nearest edge. There was a safety wall about four feet high around the edge of the roof. I put my hands on the little wall and glanced over the edge. That tickling sensation of vertigo whipped through my body. I liked heights, I liked that sensation, but it was a big difference to look down from this building than it was a five or six-story parking garage like I knew in Madison. Looking over the edge of this building made me think about throwing up and it filled me with an urge to pee.

  I walked to the edge of the roof to my left to look down at the ground from there, but caught something out of the corner of my eye that froze me in place: Huddled in the far corner of that edge was a skeleton in a ragged, sun-bleached coat and fading jeans. Someone had chosen to die on the roof of this building.

  The body wasn’t mummified like most of the graying, dry skin-covered corpses I’d found. This person had spent a year exposed to the elements, to insects and birds. It was an actual, honest-to-goodness skeleton bleached white by the sun and rain. At least, it was bleached white at the spots that were exposed. Beneath the clothes, there was still a few piles of tissue, organs, and skin. The odor of death was present, but it was not thick, not heavy. It was still enough to make me wrinkle my nose and breathe through clenched teeth, but it was far better than many of the bodies I’d seen. The body was on its side, slumped back against one edge of the roof safety wall. The skull was tilted downward slightly, the neck curving so the top of the skull was resting on the tar and scattered pea gravel on the roof. There were a couple of empty bottles of booze next to the body, along with a pulpy wad of dried cardboard that was once a pizza box. I could see the corner of a plastic Ziploc bag jutting out of the corpse’s fraying jacket. It seemed an odd thing for a dead body to have, so I knelt down and removed it as carefully as I could without disturbing the body. Inside the sealed bag was a note handwritten in blue ink on yellow legal paper.

  My name was Charles Spangler. I was the last person to come into work at Morris, Heifetz, and Weiss Law Offices. Everyone else is dead or dying. They stayed home. I thought maybe being at the office would keep me healthier than staying home. I was wrong. When I started coughing, I knew I was dying, too. I came up to the roof to jump, but chickened out. The disease will get me soon enough, I guess. The disease is killing everyone. We all wondered how the end would come, and when it would come. It looks like we all know the answer to that, now.

  I don’t have any last words or a will. Doesn’t look like it matters, anyhow. I just want it known that the skies over New York are beautiful without all the lights from the city to spoil them, but the city was better with all the street noise than it is with all the quiet.

  I regret that I never took the chance to ask Jennifer to go to dinner. I will regret that I harbored that desire for her for so long and never acted on it. I don’t think there is a kinder, gentler soul on the Earth than she.

  I will miss Central Park in the fall. Wherever I’m going, I hope there is something similar. If there is, look for me there.

  If there is a God, maybe Jennifer will be there, too.

  The note was signed with a flourish. It was neatly folded into eighths. A dying man’s last chance to say something to the world, and in the end that’s all he had to say. I would not have done any better.

  Seeing Mr. Spangler’s remains made me lose my taste for being on the roof. It tainted the thrill. I could only think about that poor guy lying huddled in that corner, hacking and coughing, gasping for air, and eventually dying. It made me wonder again why I was still alive. Why had Doug lived an extra year only to die by cancer? I know that this sort of feeling is called existential dread. It is a realization that life lacks meaning or purpose. I was battling existential dread heavily now. I had no reason for living, no reason why the Flu didn’t take me when it erased everyone else. I had no purpose on the planet other than pure survival; it wasn’t like I was going to have a career or something. As far as I could process, I was only living to spite the Universe’s attempt at wiping out the human race. That didn’t feel like much of a life. It certainly wasn’t a good reason to keep living.

  I let the RV roll on impulse through the streets of New York. I wanted to honk the horn as I had in the smaller towns and cities, but I refrained. I tried it once and it felt profane. The blare of the horn echoed around the buildings, and it sounded tinny and harsh. It didn’t sound right, which is funny considering how many horn blasts the city had endured since the creation of cars. I drove in silence, instead.

  When I looked at New York City on a map, it looked tiny. Even including areas around it like Newark, it was still smaller than southern Wisconsin. It was literally a fourth or a fifth of the size of Wisconsin as a whole. I spent weeks combing Wisconsin roads, towns, and cities during the past summer. I’d found nothing. The population density of New York City would suggest that there had to be people alive inside the city somewhere, but where? I was not a local. Half of my knowledge of New York came from either watching the ball drop on television on New Year’s Eve or an embarrassing amount of repeated viewings of “Crocodile” Dundee. My late girlfriend, Emily, used to watch Sex & the City over and over like I watched Scrubs. I kicked myself for not joining her now. Maybe I would have known more.

  I found Central Park on the map and drove there, winding my way through the streets until the green expanse spilled out before me. I pulled my mountain bike off the back of the Greyhawk and took it for a spin through the park. I found only overgrown weeds and fallen trees, no signs of human life. It felt good to ride again, though.

  I drove to Times Square. It was hauntingly empty. There were leaves and papers blown in from who-knows-where in the gutters. The myriad neon signs were dark and dusty. The Square felt melancholy, as though it missed the constant hustle and bustle.

  I drove to the Empire State Building. I had no desire to see the observation deck, though; I was worried about what I might find up there. Maybe someday I would regret that, but I did not want to find another Charles Spangler.

  The city streets were in bad shape. Many of them were lined haphazardly with cars. People had parked cars on the sidewalk, in the outer lanes of four-lane streets. I had to K-turn my RV a couple of times to get out of a street that was blocked by abandoned cars. I got lost a few times. One road was blocked, I took another, that road didn’t let me get where I thought I would get. I was getting frustrated and angry. I missed the open, empty highways. I missed the peaceful country roads. If I was this pissed with zero traffic, I fully understood why New Yorkers were considered angry people.

  I pulled off the road underneath an overpass bridge to stop for the night. The area underneath the overpass was congested with abandoned cars. The RV would not stand out there. It was camouflaged from potential passing eyes. I pulled the RV into a tight spot next to a rusty school bus that had a bad homemade paint job, sky blue with the words “NY SuperTaxi” on the side in white. The sky was getting dark. Ensconced inside the maze of monolithic darkened towers, I couldn’t see the sun to tell the time of day. I killed the engine and quickly pulled all my curtains. In the twilight, I left the RV to perform my nightly ablutions and returned to eat dinner. I ate prepackaged, simple food that d
idn’t need cooking and drank a couple of bottles of water. Fester ate his cat food crouching on the floor near me, and then he joined me at the table, flopping on his side and stretching his paws toward me playfully. I rubbed his head and he purred. Fester was a loud purring cat. When he really wanted to purr, he sounded like someone trying to crank-start a Model A. While he was purring, I realized something else was blending into his purr, something outside the confines of the RV. I cocked my head and listened. It was an engine. I could hear a car engine.

  I froze. I had to assess the situation. What was I hearing? Friend or foe? Where was it coming from? I shut off the lantern on the table and the RV plunged into darkness. Fester protested the end of head rubs with an annoyed meow, but he wasn’t one to hold a grudge. He rolled to his feet and retreated to the upper bunk. I like to believe he sensed something was up.

  I grabbed my handgun from the holster hanging near the door and crept out into the darkness. I held my breath. I stepped lightly, moving toward the street by slipping behind positions of cover. In the distance, I could hear the distinctive, unmistakable sound of a car engine.

  I crouched down behind a dusty, rusty car, one of those big, boat-like 70’s-style ragtop sedans. Headlights were illuminating the buildings a few blocks down. I waited, and eventually a large Jeep came around the corner. The engine sounded a little ragged, but it was still moving. The top was off the Jeep and I could see four people riding in it. Four! My first instinct was to jump out and flag them down, but I didn’t. Something felt wrong. The hair on the back of my neck raised. I got goosebumps. Something in the lizard-brain survival-at-all-costs section of my head said, Don’t. Stay down.