They go on and on. It is the conga line of the century. It's one for the Guinness Book, surely.
"Come on!" I shout out at them. "Lots of candy at grandma's house, come on!"
They come on. Some of them peel off the pack and come straight for me, cutting up 7th or 8th Avenue.
"The more the merrier, bring it on!"
I lead us onward and they follow. I weave the gridiron streets of Manhattan like I'm darning a sock, east to west and west to east, always heading north. When I come across a horde I circle round it to the north and add it to my centipede's mass.
Twenty thousand now? Fifty? I have no way of knowing. It's a goddamn ocean of bobbing gray heads back there, stretching to infinity.
I pull up to Yankee Stadium. I park the RV round the side, near the bank of three buses I have set up to seal the doors, and turn the music off. I'll need this baby to escape.
I stand in the entrance of Gate 1 and watch the leaders of the pack sprinting for me. Good. I wave. I reach up to the spot where I've mounted the speakers overhead and fire up the generator. It gutters to life, and one hundred decibels of Taylor Swift boom out at the entranceway.
I duck under it and head in, stopping at each of the wall-mounted generators in this trail of crumbs through the lobby to punch them all on. They gurgle, spit smoke, and the music dials up.
I run on, circling the shopping mall that runs the whole stadium's periphery, flicking on switches as I go. Gap streams by on my left, a McDonalds, a Burger King, a TGI Fridays. My feet clap on the marble floor and the interior echoes with the raucous yawling of dozens of simultaneous pop tracks.
At two hundred and seventy degrees I stop, not daring to look back, and ascend up the Gate 12 steps into the open air of the stands. There I do the same thing in another grand clockwise circuit, switching generators and stereo systems on behind me, blaring out discordant, mismatching music. I had to take whatever CDs I could find: vintage Kanye, The Sound of Music soundtrack, Prince. I'm just glad it isn't raining.
Halfway round the stadium I spot the first of the ocean emerging tentatively, like woodlice, back into the light. They turn left and follow the trail of sound. Pretty soon they're a flood. They halt to hammer at the first machine making the noise, but that only forces them to bunch up. They fill up the rows and ranks of seating beautifully around it as they all try to get closer.
Finally it goes down, even the generator stops chugging, and they spread on past it. I couldn't have planned this any better. They follow my trail round, slaves to the music, and crumb by crumb the stadium fills. At the two-seventy degree point I stop again, and now I climb down from the stands and onto the diamond.
I run out to the middle and fire up the clutch of speakers on the pitcher's mound, which I've locked inside a steel equipment cage used for holding computer servers. The Beatles blare out on endless repeat, one of my favorite tracks: Here Comes the Sun.
I turn giddily and watch the stadium fill up with gray ocean matter like lines of blood in a drip tube, inexorably leading to a vein. It is beautiful, rhythmic, and masterful. It is a zombie mandala, emblazoned on the earth. You could see this shit from space.
They fill it all up. They fill it up doubly, driven now by the impetus of their own sound and movement. They prowl like animals, looking for a way to get down to me. How long will it take, I wonder, for the whole thing to fill? How far back does my centipede trail go?
It's like watching a sand egg timer. More of them flood in until they're so crammed that they start to fall, popping over the edge of the stands like firing popcorn. They bounce off the sponsorship boards around the diamond, then get up, awkward-limbed and twisted, and start for me and the Beatles in the middle, performing in the park.
I run. I dodge smartly between their grasping arms, shoot the ones who get too close, then duck down and in through the player's tunnel. I crash out through the changing rooms, locking doors behind me, until I come upon the owner's area and private corridors. From there I ascend to the viewing box I've laid on for just this purpose.
The beer from the generator-driven fridge is cool. I crack Bud Lite and drink. I eat some Cheetos, and treat myself to a burger I rustle up on an electric grille. It is a perfect viewing point to see the stadium fill far beyond capacity.
It turns gray. I have kegged the ocean, and it is filling still.
I let an hour or two go by. I watch the center grass fill out like an inflating balloon. The stands are packed now, it hardly matters that most of the stereos and generators have died. A few of them even blow up and start minor fires, but without petrol to drive them on the flames soon die out.
The speakers in the middle are still playing. It drives the ones nearest crazy, and they thrash like rockers in a mosh pit. To be honest, it looks like they're having a great time. In time they pack in too tight to move at all, squeezing up against the railings. It'll buckle under the pressure at some point, like the tenement door, and the Beatles will be forever stilled.
It's getting late. Five o'clock, and dusk is coming. I take the trail back through the building, walking on a private owner's access route above the outer skin, filled with hot dogs stalls and shops. I look down and see this layer of the circle is utterly packed too, like gray cream in a donut. Happily though the thread of stragglers pushing their way in through Gate 1 seems to have diminished.
I exit through the owner's door. It's empty round there. I pad round to Gate 1, and the few who are coming in are making so much noise themselves, they don't notice as I get into the bus. I drive it slow and steady across the smashed-open entrance, crushing hardly any of them, shouldering the vehicle up against the walls.
The few stragglers whack against the glass windshield, and I leave through the back emergency exit, as planned. I pull two more buses round, sealing the stadium up like a powder keg.
That's for them, now. That can be their new home.
I get in my RV and drive away. I'm grinning like an insufferable fool. I hardly killed any, and now the streets are far emptier than before. The hordes are just not there. They can wander and moan and just get on with their lives, maybe even do some shopping.
I start to sing Yellow Submarine at the top of my lungs, feeling irrepressible. This is how it should be done. Now I just need to put up a bat signal for the living.
15 – ONE MONTH LATER
A month passes while I work, until my lighthouse is finished and I'm ready to say farewell to the zombies of New York, because I'm not meant to stay here forever.
The horde is waiting for me in the stairwells of the Empire State Building, as ever. I rappel down past them like a ninja, nudging the occasional one with the muzzle of my AK47 when they lean a little too close. Boom, I imagine. The report would ring out and the recoil would sway me like a pendulum, right into their waiting arms. Zombie brains splatter somewhere that no one will ever see or care about, and my brains quickly follow.
It's all a kind of art. But I don't need to, so I don't.
I hit the ground floor and glance around at all the supplies lying on the tarpaulin sheet: another twenty cans of industrial-strength paint, both blue and white, the fumes of which I've been faintly high on for weeks, plus ammo, weapons, ropes and harnesses, a few generators, gas barrels, and lots of window-cleaning equipment.
I don't need them now. Maybe I'll come back for them in years to come, like my own private geocache, but I doubt that. I don't think I'll ever come back to New York again, there are just too many shitty memories.
Zombies lean over the railings above, reaching down through the gaps and out of the security gate I've locked across the stairway base. They're so easy now. I don't kill them if I can avoid it; it'd be like shooting fish in a barrel.
I kick through the ammo and pick up a few rockets for my RPG. I found that in a military bunker inside city hall. If I come across a horde they may be useful as a distraction. Blowing gouts out of the horde itself would only smash up the road and make it impassable for me, but I can shoot ou
t a nearby hilltop or gas station, and they'll go busy themselves with that.
I check my belt for gear and find a few paint rollers still slotted in there. I was using those for the upper floors, where I last finished up. It was nice to use the graffiti cans in the early days, like following in the footsteps of my heroes, but they were really just a marker. To really ensure my cairn stays visible for the longest time possible I had to paint the exterior, in the same kind of thick industrial paint they use to make traffic markings on the road.
It's been a hectic month. It took two days just to get the window-cleaner's carriage to work, providing power and figuring out my safety protocol if it cut out. It took the rest of that week to spray on the outline, with me getting a deep appreciation for how hard any large-scale art must have been for the ancients, like the Nazca lines. It's been the best part of a month since, coloring it all in.
I read about cairns in a book on how the social media layer has changed our world. It talked about how the augmented reality of geo-locked bulletin boards and systems like Jeo's mayoral system made for a new kind of cairn; a way of leaving information, supplies and advice behind for those to follow.
Cairns were used primarily in the Arctic, back when those icy wastes were unexplored and the men who adventured there had to fight for every mile they took, where having a Snickers bar in your back pocket, or laid up and waiting for you in a little stone pile ahead, could mean the difference between life and death.
Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, all the greatest Arctic and Antarctic explorers used them. They were tiny finger-holds of civilization in the desolate white wastes, crammed as the world's first geocaches with maps, logs, coordinates, food and water, whatever could imaginably be useful; enough to allow those earliest souls to drag themselves out to the poles and back, thus mastering another facet of our world.
We don't master anything now. The cities and the oceans and the airwaves and even our own bodies and minds are lost to us. We are divided and scattered, if any people yet survive. We badly need cairns again, to help us claw something back.
So I've built one. I'm going to build a trail of them, like a dragnet belt across the country. If there's anyone left alive in America, in this whole northern continent, I'm going to dredge them up and give them a place to go.
I bid the echoey stairwell hall a silent farewell. For over a month it's been my workplace and these zombies have been my colleagues. I bow in the center. They applaud with their feet, always desperate to get close enough to touch, to kiss, to caress.
Farewell and be merry.
I roll out through the Empire State gift shop, snatching up a token key ring at the dim register, in the shape of the building itself. I'm thinking I'll collect these at every city on the way out West, then make a collage out of them; a museum to mankind's greatest achievements in bric-a-brac miniature. Cerulean would get a kick out of that. I'm still providing fulfillment with the best.
I step into the daylight of the cleared street and blink in the hot sun. Funny how the smell of baking asphalt brings me right back to reality every time, and I think of days long gone by, when becoming mayor of a tiny New York coffee shop was about the limit of fame my poor little mind could take.
Now I'm the self-proclaimed mayor of all America.
I stride east along West 34th street, kept company only by the rustling of old newsprint trapped in doorways and gutters. It still impresses me how much paper remains from our old life, carrying headlines two months out of date, reporting on a world long dead. I imagine them blowing west across the country like flyers announcing my coming tour.
At the intersection with 5th Avenue, surrounded by huge video screens suspended on the buildings, all blank now, and the bright splashes of color from giant bill-boards advertising Coca-Cola, Apple, some new fragrance called J'Habite, I stop by my JCB construction vehicle. It is bright yellow and zombie-proofed with welded grille plating around the cab, sourced also from the Coney Island construction park.
Beside it I climb onto the roof of a Subaru SUV, one link in perimeter chain of parked cars I created a month ago in advance of this endeavor. Back then I just wanted a clear stretch of road to walk along without needing to shoot out straggler zombies all the time.
Now it's my own rat-run maze across the city. I've cleared about a mile of streets all in, from Sir Clowdesley to here, the culmination of so many plans. After filling up Yankee Stadium it was easy, just driving and parking, like moving blocks around in Deepcraft. It was advanced valet work. I herded away any zombies trapped inside, killing only a few recalcitrant loiterers.
Now they bumble up against the flanks of the car-walls, unable to figure out how to climb over, at most gathering two or three deep. There aren't enough of them anymore, and I've given them no clear space to mass. Rather they line my route and wave to me as I come and wave to me as I go between here and my base in Sir Clowdesley. I've grown to quite like it, like my own ticker tape parade every day.
In all there are probably tens of thousands of them still, but they're spread all over. There must be millions in Manhattan, but most of them will be in tenement buildings, locked into boxes of their own making. For that I can only be thankful that the switch happened around midnight, with the streets devoid of the daily crush of tourists and workers.
From the dust-marked roof of the Subaru I look over the heads of the nearest floaters to one of the wandering herds, up on 5th Avenue somewhere near Bryant Park. Some of them do this too, endlessly wandering like the ghosts in a game of Pac-Man. I suppose whatever adaptive behavior has evolved into their funky brainstems, it rewards a hunting approach of both nesters and roaming hunters.
At first I watched these developing packs carefully, but they rarely massed at a barricade. The most I've had to contend with for a month is the odd one or two somehow finding their way onto my parade route, like lost sheep.
None of them have died yet. I look down at their sun-bleached gray faces and ice-white eyes, and they look back up at me like groupies to a rock star, as ever. A few feet closer and I'd be torn apart, like the cat or the dog, but standing here all they can do is strain, like blind Venus fly traps. Their hair is coming out now and they're very thin, many of them are sporting old wounds that don't heal; bites and broken bones. They're draped in ragged clothes crusty with old blood and bleached gray by the sun, but still, they're looking remarkably well. Not one of them can have eaten in months.
I wonder, as I often do, if they will eventually die, or if this is some kind of holding position they're capable of maintaining forever, perhaps metabolizing carbon directly from the air like plants. For all I know they could be cannibalizing each other at night, or eating moss, or anything. I know I eat far less now too. We're linked in that, at least, perhaps having a brain in the spine is a more efficient way to run things.
I climb down from the wall and get into the JCB cab, firing up the engine. I make a pointed effort to not look up at my work on the Empire State Building. I've got a spot all picked out for that.
The JCB rumbles over the asphalt on its caterpillar tracks, and I lean my hand against the lever taking us south toward Madison Park. This has been my daily commute for a month now. As the streets amble by, accompanied by the grind of my vehicle's heavy metal treads, I go over my checklist another time. There are two vehicles in the convoy pulled by this earth-mover, one a battle-tank filled with weapons, water and supplies plus my living space, and one a delivery truck full of gas and all the painting supplies and other stuff I'll need to stock up my cairns.
I'm not worried. I've cleared my route out of the city already, a few days work pushing cars to either side on 34th street and through the Lincoln Tunnel. It was like grinding out experience points in World of Warcraft, a game I used to play when I was a kid; little reward but a sense of hard work done. I'm certain there are plenty of supplies out there across the country though; enough to feed me for a thousand years, but it's better to be prepared.
I haven't spoken to an
other living soul since Cerulean died. It's just been me and Io and the ocean.
The streets ramble by, each of them blocked off by cars I cleared ages ago. Shuffling zombies track me as I go by. I pull up to Madison Square and take the JCB right over the curb and down the walkway of the Park, toward the Admiral David Farragut monument in the middle.
My convoy is waiting beside him, already linked up and bristling with weapons. I climb to the battle-tank's roof, actually a yellow school bus I fitted with howitzers and multiple mounted AK47s pointing out the windows, plus a Bluetooth relay hub. I settle myself on a bright orange beanbag I liberated from a Tommy Hilfiger window display. The sun is starting to set over the city and country, leading the way to the west.
I pop a beer and lie back with snacks at my side. I hardly need to eat or drink anything these days, just like the zombies, but these things still taste good. I've already chainsawed down the trees that might block my view. At last I look up at the Empire State building's south face, and see my art.
f
LMA
This is my work, a gigantic white 'f' on a blue field, blazoned across each face of New York's most iconic tower, covering the windows and the outer walls. It is ten stories high and nearly as wide as the building itself: a symbol for our modern times more potent than a cross or flag or sickle moon.
We are all one, it says. We are all friends under Zuckerburg. I chuckle, because while it's ridiculous it is also patently real. No one will see that symbol and be scared, because no one thinks evil cannibal-survivors have that kind of sense of humor.
It's given me a purpose, and perhaps, if there's anyone else alive out there, it will give them a purpose too. It's my lighthouse to guide the others safely in, to the ground floors of the Empire State building where they'll find my social media supply cairn: a mayor giving out free coffee, transposed to the real world.
The Last: A Zombie Novel Page 13
