by JJ Zep
Justine heard the first of the announcements as she made her way across the destroyed foyer of the San Remo. “Well, would you believe it,” she said out loud. “Eventually that lug got something right. Well done, Bobo.”
She stepped through the mess of glass and steel that had once been the frontage of the building and walked out onto the sidewalk. The morning was bright and chilly, a clear blue sky tainted only by the black smoke smudging the air to the north of her. She took in a deep breath and released it with a smile, enjoying the feel of victory, of a job well done. Not done just yet, she reminded herself. The path still had to be prepared for the arrival of the new governor. There were Z’s to be moved out, barricades to be repaired, citizens to be assessed and troublemakers to be dealt with. Take out the bad apples and everyone else would fall into line. Wasn’t that always the case?
Which brought her to the main bad apple. She’d have to deal with Joe Thursday personally, and soon. A man like that would be just the type to stir up the masses, get them all testy. A pity really, she liked Joe, found him kind of cute in a grandfatherly sort of way. Under different circumstances they might have been…
What did it matter? These weren’t different circumstances. There was her and there was Joe Thursday, the two of them on opposing sides. One of them was going to have to go, and she was damned if it was going to be her.
A Humvee made the turn from 76th Street onto Central Park West and rolled towards her, still blaring its monotonous message. Justine stepped from the sidewalk and walked into the middle of the road, raising her hand in a halt signal. The vehicle rolled to a gradual stop in front of her.
“Take me downtown,” she said to the soldier standing with his head out of the firing hatch. “I’ve got shit to take care of.”
***
Nearly a block away, Joe Thursday too heard the recorded message as he hurried north along Columbus. The ankle didn’t feel half as bad as it had recently, the stiffness all but gone. And it felt good to be involved again, good to be doing something constructive for a change. Even so, he cautioned himself against optimism. Any way you looked at it, they were in deep shit. The Corporation was in town, a zombie army at its disposal and no good intentions - that was for sure.
He still couldn’t figure out what this was about, why the hell Marcus Pendragon was moving against New York. Surely, he didn’t have the manpower to maintain a presence on both sides of the country? And why now? After all this time, why move on New York now? It didn’t make sense. Those questions would wait. He had other priorities at the moment. Finding Chris and Ruby for one thing, and then getting the hell out of Dodge while the getting was good. He’d heard about a settlement in Toronto.
“Attention! Attention! This is a recorded message from the Pendragon Corporation…”
Joe backed into the shadows on the road’s east side, wedging himself in between a staircase and a clutter of garbage cans. He watched the Humvee drift by, its repetitive message blaring from a roof-mounted speaker.
“Anyone found out on the streets will be summarily executed,” the announcement continued.
“Yeah well, you’ll have to catch me first,” Joe muttered under his breath.
fourteen
He was being followed. That much was certain. He could hear their clumsy footfalls in the dark, smell their fetid reek even through the oxygen mask, could sense their shadows shifting across the walls even in pitch dark. Scolfield stepped surefooted along the path between the cars, clutching the I-Pod for all he was worth, knowing that it was the only thing standing between him and a swift and horrible death. Despite himself he felt nervous and slightly giddy, as though he might burst into hysterical laughter at any moment. He bit back on it. A cool head was called for.
He scanned the path up ahead and saw what he was looking for. In the mad panicked rush to get out of Manhattan sixteen years ago, there had inevitably been auto wrecks and now one loomed out of the darkness, a twisted mass of metal. It was a doozy too, involving an articulated truck that had flipped on its side and lay across two lanes of traffic, crushing a number of other vehicles under its mass. That would provide him with a solid wall at his back. Marin Scolfield was a firm believer in fighting on a single front. When the Z’s approached him he wanted them coming at him from one direction only. Then he’d see how well his little invention performed in the field. Oh, what fun!
Walking swiftly he reached the cab of the truck, slapping the roof with the flat of his hand for good measure. It sent a metallic clunk echoing of the walls that he found pleasant in his dissonance. Then he turned to face his pursuers and a whoosh of breath escaped him.
He had expected a few dozen of the creatures, planned for it even. A few dozen he could handle, but this looked like more than that. Lots more. The darkness seemed alive with little spots of emerald light, eyes that shifted and wavered in his green-hued vision. How many? A hundred? More? Scolfield felt a sudden rush of panic and stilled it. He could still do this. All he had to do was stay focused.
But that was easier said than done. He’d never tested his device on anything like this many zombies before. He had no idea if it would work. The Z’s shuffled forward, the green specks of light piercing the blackness like radioactive fireflies. He could make out the leaders now, one the size of Bobo Benson at least, its green-white face festered with suppurating sores, a trail of green gunk dripping from its jowls. It was salivating, Scolfield realized. The goddamned thing was actually drooling.
Scolfield shifted his grip on the I-Pod. He could still hear the tinny vibration emanating from the earphones. For a moment he almost considered shutting it down and making a run for it. But it was too late for that now. They were locked in on him. He’d barely make it around the auto wreck before they tore him apart. No, he was going to have to play this out.
More of the creatures came into view, withered figures in the dark, the air redolent with their stink, their nightmare faces blank and carnivorous. Scolfield cast a nervous glance at the illuminated display of the I-Pod. The track currently playing was 60, which he’d designated “PIED PIPER.” When the time was right (and it wasn’t yet, too soon, way too soon), he’d have to spin the dial to track 62 and then to 65, designated, “MIGRANE,” and “MOSH PIT,” respectively. Meanwhile, he muttered a silent prayer that it would work as well as it had in his test runs.
The lead Z was just yards away, stripped to the waist, a pair of tattered trousers clinging to its bony hips. It canted its head to the side, its maw wide, ragged teeth showing. Scolfield fancied he could hear the patter of its saliva slewing to the pavement. Two more paces he figured. One… “Come on,” he muttered under his breath… two.
He rolled his thumb slowly over the dial, his hands trembling. Click…click, click. Too far! Goddamn too far! The creature lurched as Scolfield fumbled with the dial, wheeling it back. The Z grasped for him, rushed forward, its companions now joining the charge.
Click!
The result was instantaneous. A volley of dull splats, like fireworks failing to ignite properly. Scolfield saw the lead Z’s head explode, felt cold goo splatter his face, saw a volley of detonations as the Z’s in the front row also imploded. For a moment all he could do was stand back and admire his handiwork, eyes wide with awe. But the other Z’s were pushing forward, eager to get at him.
Scolfield spun the dial three clicks to track 65. For barely a second, the Z’s froze in place. Then quite suddenly, they turned on each other, biting and slashing and tearing.
“Mosh pit!” Scolfield shouted. Then he edged his way around the truck and into the darkness.
fifteen
Eddy Montague wasn’t going to make it. She knew that. Better to finish him now, while he slept. But Ruby couldn’t do it. Not even if her life depended on it, could she kill a helpless man. Not a man, she corrected herself, Eddy had been bitten, it was only a matter of time before he…
“And when he does turn, I’ll finish him then,” she said out loud. “Not before.” But
how long before that happened? Hours? Days? And in the meanwhile her father might be lying somewhere, injured or worse.
Eddy stirred in his sleep, mumbled something. Ruby looked down at the man and wondered how long he’d be out. Long enough for her to do a quick reckie? Maybe so. A quick turn around the immediate area to see if she could pick up clues, and then back to check on Eddy.
But she’d just begun to rise, when Eddy spoke. “Ruby?”
His voice was slurred, his eyes tightly shut.
“I’m here, Eddy,” Ruby said.
For a while, Eddy said nothing, and Ruby had begun to think he’d slipped back into unconciousness when he spoke again. “They took him, Ruby.”
“Who Eddy, who did they take?”
“Your father. They took him.”
Ruby felt a rush of adrenalin, a combination of hope and despair. Had she heard that right? Had Eddy said that someone had taken her father?”
“Who took him?”
“The men in the Humvees.”
“You saw this?”
Eddy nodded, opened his eyes. His pupils were dilated, strung out on the morphine. For a moment Ruby wondered if the effects of the drug were making him hallucinate.
“He was alive?” she said.
“I think so. He was pretty beat up.”
“But alive.”
“I think so.”
A weird mix of emotions washed over her – relief that her father was alive (or at least, had been), frustration that she was stuck here and couldn’t go after him. She immediately felt guilty for thinking that. Eddy needed her help. She was going to see this through.
“Go and find him, Ruby,” Eddy said, as though reading her thoughts.
“I’m not leaving you here.”
Eddy gave a dry chuckle. “I’m done for anyway,” he said, holding out his mutilated hand. “Only a matter of time. You’d be doing me a favor if you –”
“I won’t do it, Eddy.”
“Okay, okay,” Eddy said. He was silent for a while. “Will you do something for me, though,” he said eventually. “When this is done?”
“Sure.”
“Will you tell, Julie, I love her? I mean…that I always loved her, despite everything that happened between us.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“Thank you, Ruby.” He lay down on his side again and let out a dry cough that sent shivers up her spine.
sixteen
“Chris Collins!”
Chris opened his left eye a crack, shut it immediately as light streamed in, sending a jagged shard of agony into his brain. His other eye, the right, was glued tightly shut, his face felt puffy and swollen, his nose perhaps broken. That wasn’t the worst of it. His ribs felt as though he’d gone twelve rounds with Big George Foreman. He hadn’t hurt this bad since the beating he’d taken from Virgil Pratt and his goons back in Pagan. But he was alive, and that was a miracle in itself. Slowly he began piecing together what had happened. He remembered being in among the Z’s, the gap in the wall looming before him, the fifty-mil opening fire. Then that terrible moment when the Z’s had suddenly frozen and he’d realized that the signal had been cut. He recalled Ruby and some of the others shuffling past him, remembered turning, losing his footing, going down. Then…what? He’d been trampled underfoot, kicked, stomped. He’d blacked out. But someone must have picked him up, because here he was, still alive, sitting in a chair, his hands cuffed behind him.
“Collins!” a voice boomed, deep, resonant, like James Earl Jones doing the Star Wars voiceover. “Look at me!”
Chris angled his head towards the voice, tried again to open his eye, again the light forced its way in and shut it for him.
“Pull those drapes!” the James Earl Jones voice boomed and Chris heard footfalls across carpet, the swish of the drapes being pulled. He sensed that the light had been muted, opened his eye again, felt it tear up. As the room came into focus, he realized where he was. This was City Hall, the mayoral office in fact. He’d attended meetings here with Dave Bamber in the run up to the Staten Island debacle.
The man who’d addressed him was stooping with his butt resting against the mayor’s impressive oak desk. He was huge, six-five at least, his dark features carrying a somewhat sickly hue, like dead ashes in a campfire. It seemed, too, that he’d recently lost weight, his black corporation uniform hung slightly on his frame, as if it were a half size too big. He wore the insignia of a full bird colonel on his lapel. The nametag on his breast identified him as “BENSON.”
“You look like shit,” Benson said. “If you don’t mind my saying so.” He leaned back and retrieved a pack of cigarettes from the desk, shook one out, lit up, offered it to Chris.
Chris shook his head. Benson shrugged, put the cigarette into his own mouth, drew deeply and blew out a stream of smoke. “Do you know why you’re here?” Benson said.
Chris said nothing, ran his gaze across the section of the room in front of him. Aside from Benson there were four other people present. Two of those were stern-faced Rangers, standing either side of the desk, carbines clutched to their chests. Then there were two women, one in uniform, a captain by her insignia, a doctor. The other, Chris knew. Justine was the woman who had rescued Kelly from Barlow’s thugs. So she was with the Corporation. That made sense.
“Do you know why you’re here, Chris Collins?” Benson repeated.
“Is that a philosophical question?” Chris said, his voice coming out slightly slurred through his mashed lips.
Benson chuckled. “A sense of humor,” he said. “Always a good standby when you’re neck deep in the shit. No, I meant here in this office, right now.”
Chris said nothing.
“No?” Benson said. “Well, let me fill you in. There’s a warrant out for your arrest. You and your sidekick Joe Thursday are wanted back in Pendleton. What have you got to say about that?”
“Thanks for the offer, Colonel, but my family are kind of settled here on the east coast.”
Benson smiled, his teeth looking disconcertingly large and white against his sickly complexion. He gave a dry cough that Chris knew well. Suddenly, Benson’s appearance made sense to him.
“Thing is, Collins,” the Colonel continued. “Not to offend you or anything, but you’re the small fish in this pond. It’s Thursday we want. In fact, I’ve been authorized to offer you a deal. Give up –”
“Where’s Joe, Chris?” Justine cut in.
Chris angled his head so that he could see her, positioned to his left. Justine was dressed in a black combat suit of the kind favored by Corporation tank crews. Except, hers looked like it had been tailored specifically to show off her svelte figure.
“Gee, I don’t know, Justine. I’ve been out of town for a while. Did you try his apartment?”
“We looked,” Justine said, ignoring the obvious irony in Chris’ voice. “Searched the whole building, in fact. He wasn’t there. We did however –”
There was a knock at the door, cutting Justine off in midsentence.
“Come!” Benson boomed, but even before he’d spoken, the door swung open.
“Sorry for the interruption, Colonel,” a voice said. “We have a problem.”
seventeen
The distance from the apartment to Martin Luther King Boulevard was about a mile and a half and Joe had made it in pretty good time, all things considered. Now, as he crouched between the rusted old hulks at the curb, his breath came in rapid expulsions of vapor in the chill air. The wall loomed ahead, an ugly construction of gray breezeblock topped with razor wire, a guard tower perched precariously atop. He’d have to make a right here, track along for a couple of blocks to the section where the barricade had been blown.
He broke cover and jogged towards the corner of Martin Luther King and Morningside, once a busy intersection, now a dead T-junction formed by the wall. He edged his way around, ran towards a dense clump of weeds sprouting from the gutter. The road was quiet, clear of people and Z’s, its surface rutted, lit
tered with broken brickwork and smoldering rubble from the explosion. Further along, closer to the blast site, some of the buildings billowed smoke, casting a haze across the road.
He was about to break cover when he heard a shout from his left. Joe hunkered down and shifted his position so that he could look in that direction.
For a moment he saw nothing. Then a Humvee rolled into view and stopped in the road junction a block away. A soldier stood with his head popped through the firing hatch, but Joe could see that the vehicle wasn’t carrying a fifty. Instead it had one of those old-fashioned, roof-mounted speakers. Now, he picked up three soldiers, pushing two civilians in front of them, a couple of teenagers by the look of it. The kids had obviously been caught out on the streets, in defiance of the Corporation’s curfew. It appeared that the soldiers intended carrying out the summary execution they had been threatening.
Joe sized up the options. If he had any sense, any sense at all, he’d turn right while the soldiers were distracted, slip through the hole in the wall and continue his search for Chris and Ruby. This had nothing to do with him.
Except that it did. He wasn’t about to stand around while a couple of kids were gunned down. But what was he going to do? Go in there blasting? No, that wasn’t going to work. He placed the AK on the ground among the weeds, pulled the 9-mil from his waistband and checked the magazine. Satisfied, he re-holstered the weapon and then stood up.
Crouching for so long had cramped up his legs, and Joe played on that, limping more than the discomfort warranted. He was a great believer in lulling the opponent into a false sense of security.
Half a block away, the boys were being pushed up against the barricade wall. Joe could hear their pleas, the barked commands of the soldiers. The soldiers hadn’t seen him yet, but it was clear that, unless he drew their attention, these kids were going to be shot.
