Outcome

by Edward W. Robertson

  She sat on the bed and stared at the floor. "I know."

  * * *

  He went downstairs and bought bread, peanut butter and jelly, some bottled coffee drinks, frozen chicken nuggets, cup noodles, little bags of chips they could carry around with them. They were bodega prices, steeper even than the city grocery stores, and he didn't want to think of his checking account, but he had worse worries at the moment. He got five dollars in quarters and went back to their room. Ellie was asleep in her clothes. He put the food in the minifridge and went back into an afternoon that wasn't quite warm. He found a payphone with a phonebook and called one hospital after another. None had any record of Deanna Billips.

  At sunset, he went back to the hotel and made himself a sandwich. He drank one of the coffees, meaning to get back out and hit the streets, but he fell asleep in the chair. He didn't wake up until late that night. The TV was on, sound turned so low he could barely hear it above the sirens, its blue glow turning the room ethereal, ghastly. Ellie watched the news like a zombie, glued to death tolls that jumped from hundreds to thousands by the end of the report. New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Cleveland.

  "Is that for real?" he said at last.

  She startled, then looked back to the TV. "No. They're behind. Just like everything."

  "I called a bunch of hospitals," he said. "No luck."

  She nodded at the anchorman. "Keep trying, I guess."

  The defeat in her voice made him want to shiver. It was the voice of a person who expected to join the numbers on the TV.

  "I will," he said. "We'll find her."

  The next day he bought a disposable cell phone and tried every hospital in the book. He had no luck. He bought copies of the Times and the Post and saw a short article about a federal agent found dead in a parking lot on the north end of the island. He finished the piece with a hollow ringing in his stomach. A part of him hadn't believed Ellie until now.

  She disappeared with her laptop for hours on end. Sirens wailed up and down the streets. He no longer waited in dread for them to pull up to the hotel. These weren't cops, they were ambulances. Seeking out the dying and the dead. Behind the safety of the curtains, he could tell there weren't enough. He should be out there helping, seeing the infirm got the treatment their bodies couldn't provide for themselves. But when he left the room, it was to stock up on more food, to make more calls.

  Every hour, Dee felt further away. Ellie, too, for whatever that mattered. She hardly spoke at all, locked to her laptop and the TV, sopping up their input like a bar rag of infinite absorption.

  Another day passed. As Chip struggled to think up another way to dredge Dee up from whatever depths of the city had swallowed her, he found himself drawn more and more to the stories pouring from the TV: the death counts, the exhaustion of a vaccine supply that seemed to do no good at all, the grounding of flights, the worldwide paranoia as one country after another began stacking their dead in the morgues.

  Ellie was right about the end. It overcame the world with shocking swiftness.

  9

  She had been reading the same report for thirty minutes. It wasn't that it was long, or dense. But she kept clicking away, distracted by the death tickers, the newest celebrity obituary, the user-submitted photos of blood on hospital floors and mothers crying in the street. All that and the media kept rolling on as ever. Many wrote jazzy, first-person accounts of the sickness in the streets, making flat, objective-sounding I-observations about the dead they'd seen, the pale faces, the clothes and sheets soaked in coughed-up blood.

  Several nicknames appeared for the disease, but "Panhandler" stuck. Ellie never got a clear idea why. When the jazzy stories bothered to explain it, they disagreed on the source. Urbandictionary offered a bevy of different definitions—that it seemed to be on every street corner, that it left your face as worn and hollowed as an old wino. The one she liked best was that it nickel-and-dimed you, bleeding you bit by bit until there was nothing left to give.

  When she could no longer take the news, or her own haphazard efforts to comb it for insight to where the first wave of quarantined had been taken, she watched the streets. There was a riot once, a wave of people sporting signs and costumes and slogans. She had seen at least a dozen people fall down and stay down. The first few times, a stranger had come to the aid of the fallen, helping them up or standing over them as they called 911. Since the last day, when someone fell, the others on the street—when there were any; the city seemed to shed residents by the hour—crossed to the other side and jogged away.

  She felt fine. Chip looked it, too. Maybe it was the masks, the gloves. Maybe it was the fact they'd spent the last days when the virus hit hardest isolated in this room, eating their PB&Js and crunching on greasy Lay's like school kids. Maybe they were sick and just didn't know it yet.

  She no longer knew what she was doing. She didn't believe they would find Dee. Not alive. Without access to expansive data, her figures culled from the TV and internet were beyond fuzzy, but gauging by the rate and speed of infection, the estimates she'd given Rawlings last week looked foolishly conservative. The immunity levels were impossibly low. The virus was perfect. The back of her brain—disengaged from her weariness, her hopelessness, the devouring nausea of seeing Chip so hollowed-out—insisted it had to be engineered.

  Chip said something about heading uptown to a hospital that wasn't taking his calls. She nodded, attached to the TV. The door clunked shut. The news spooled on. He came back far too soon.

  "Subway's out," he said. "Construction."

  "On all the lines?"

  "Just one. Service has been suspended on the rest." He sat on his bed and used his insteps to shuck off his shoes. He chuckled. "Poor suckers can't have fixed up more than three feet of track. Started construction the same day you got here."

  She looked up from her computer. "How do you know that?"

  "It's written right there on the sign. I read it three times. Should have thought to pack some books."

  "Son of a bitch," she said.

  "What?" He glared across the dim room. "At least I'm out there trying. What are you doing, reading Oprah's obituary? How's that gonna find Dee?"

  "Not you. My boss. He listened."

  "I'm out to sea over here."

  "I told them we'd need to be drastic." Her mind spun, humming like a flawless machine. "That a course of action with any hope of changing the outcome would need to be a disaster in its own right. Is it coincidence they closed that tunnel the same day they started snatching people off the streets?"

  He frowned, jutting his lower lip. "This sounds bad."

  "Which station was it?"

  "This sounds like when you bite into a chicken salad sandwich, and you crunch into a bone that shouldn't be there, and you go all still, like that's going to make the bone go away, but—"

  "Which station?"

  "The 8th St. N-Q-R," he said.

  "Get your kit." She rose, glancing around for the box of disposable gloves. "We need to get there before curfew."

  He got up, spread his palms. "Why? What's down there?"

  She smiled with half her mouth. "Dee, you idiot."

  Hope overwhelmed any response to her insult. He pulled his shoes back on, got his coat, his little black satchel. She took her gun and her all-purpose bag, adding bottled water, potato chips, and the jar of peanut butter. They should have gotten more of those. High-energy, resistant to spoiling.

  Later afternoon light cut through the clear sky. The streets were quiet. Foot traffic had evaporated to that of Sunday dawn. Car traffic wasn't much heavier. At the corner, a sedan had crashed into the street light and been abandoned. The light was stuck on red. A car drove past them and stopped for the light. They caught up to it ten seconds later and it pulled through the still-red signal.

  "This is weird," Chip said.

  "Stay quiet."

  "Who's going to hear us?"

  "The only thing I want to hear is 'Ah, there is my daughter. Now come,
let us flee this godforsaken city.'"

  That shut him up. He was right, though. The city was as quiet as an open field. She could hear individual cars. Most stores were sealed behind metal shutters. Garbage overflowed the corner bins. The handful of pedestrians out walked even faster than normal, change and keys jangling in their pockets. She reached the park, the thicket of trees interrupted by rivers of pavement and the central fountain. She skirted it all. She had a bad feeling about it. The parks hadn't been good even when you could call 911 without a busy signal.

  They only saw one body along the way, a young girl curled up on the steps of the NYU dorm just north of Washington Square. Blood caked the girl's lips and collar. Her eyes were half open, slitted with a misery that had lasted to the end. Ellie guessed most people had fled the city, the survivors hiding behind the locks of their apartment doors, trying to late to outlast a sickness without end.

  Orange signs declared the 8th St. station closed. She dropped down the steps. An iron grille barred the door to the subway. The air beyond the door was silent, smelling of standing water and more faintly of decay.

  "Watch my back," she said. She passed him her pistol.

  He turned it in his hands. "You expect me to use this?"

  "If you have to. I'll only be a minute."

  He frowned, holding the weapon from his side as if it were something distasteful, one of the blue plastic bags dog owners used to sack up waste. She got out her tools and set to the lock. The one in the door was no trouble at all; the additional padlock took her nearly five minutes. She left it hanging from the grille and swung open the door.

  "Here." Chip passed back her gun. She pulled up the hem of her shirt, meaning to carry it in her waistband, then held on to it instead.

  Lights hummed from the ceiling. The MetroPass dispensers waited for payment. She swung herself over the turnstile and offered Chip a hand, which he accepted; he'd never had much of the standard male pride. She wasn't precisely sure what she expected to find, but the platform was just as empty as the entrance, gum-spotted and water-stained. In the pit beyond it, a rat shuffled calmly along the third rail.

  "What's supposed to be here?" Chip said.

  "I don't know."

  "You said Dee was here."

  "I thought she was."

  "Well, what?"

  She shook her head, helpless and frustrated, ashamed to be wrong. "I suppose we head back."

  "That's it?" His voice pitched up, bouncing down the tunnel. "Well, we came all this way, didn't we? Might as well get dirty."

  He sat on the raised yellow bumps lining the edge of the platform, scooted forward, and dropped down to the puddly rails.

  "What are you doing?" she hissed.

  "Exploring." He jerked his head toward the northern mouth of the tunnel. "I'm going up there a ways. You got a flashlight in that magic bag of yours?"

  "You can't be on the rails."

  "Expecting a train? Toss me a light."

  She gritted her teeth, sat down, and dropped into the muck beside him. She got out a penlight and fanned the tracks with a light disproportionately strong to the slender silver tube.

  "Be careful," she said.

  "Of what?" He pointed to the rat. "Power's off to the rails."

  She stared at it sniffing along. "Mutants."

  He blinked at her, then laughed sharply, barking down the tunnel. "You just made a joke."

  "Joke? I thought C.H.U.D. was a documentary."

  He grinned and walked forward, squelching through the dank grime of the tracks. Past the platform, graffiti clung to the bare walls, cryptic and faded, much of it decades old. Rats scuffled ahead and behind, furtive and clever. Service doors and short staircases interrupted the walls every few hundred yards; dim wall-mounted lights cast the ground in deep shadows. Spindly finger-long stalactites hung from the metal beams like knobby iron Cheetos. The air was still and damp and smelled vaguely of bad eggs.

  The tunnel ran on and on. It felt ancient, a leftover catacomb, the industry of a long-dead people. Water dripped irregularly from the ceiling, startling her each time. Her gaze flicked constantly between the slimy footing and the darkness ahead. Since flying to New York, she'd felt her share of panic and terror, but her brain was equipped to handle these sudden surges, shunting them aside while she continued to process the situation at hand. But the dread of the tunnel was a breakdown, a decay, the fraying of her nerves until she could no longer trust her mind's interpretation of her own senses.

  They rounded a curve. Overhead lights hung over the 14th St. platform, which was just as barren as the one they'd left. Ellie breathed out and kept her eyes on the fat third rail. She knew it was off, yet she couldn't convince herself it was dead, unable to hurt her.

  "I think we should turn back," she said.

  He glanced at her, then did a double-take, smiling gently. "I'm afraid, too. It's just a tunnel."

  "Who said anything about afraid?"

  He lifted his finger to his brow and drew a circle. "You do this thing with your forehead."

  She gestured down the tunnel. "We're not finding anything. We could spend all day in here."

  "What else you got on the docket? A full slate of couch-sitting? Bet we're safer down here than we are up there." Past the platforms, the tunnel darkened again. Unseen things moved in the gloom, scrabbling over old wrappers, ticking over the rails. Chip frowned. "Just rats."

  Hearing it from him helped in a way that telling herself the same thing didn't. She had forgotten this way about him, his calming gravity. She nodded. They walked on.

  A couple hundred feet down the line, her flashlight glinted on something silvery above the tracks.

  "Whoa." Chip gestured for the penlight. She handed it over. He continued forward, crouching instinctively, then stopped cold. He played the light over lines of barbed wire strung to chest height across the tunnel. "This normal in subway construction?"

  She glanced behind them, wishing she'd brought a second light, or sprung for an iPhone with a flashlight app rather than the cheap burner she had in her pocket.

  "Not unless Bloomberg has kept the city's zombie problem a closely-guarded secret."

  She pocketed her pistol and stretched two of the wires apart, careful not to puncture her gloves. Chip climbed through, coat snagging the upper barbs, then held the way for her. At once, she smelled a far greater stink than whatever was moldering in the puddles between the tracks, a beefy, rotten, clinging miasma that made Ellie swallow hard.

  "What's that smell?" Chip said.

  "Not good."

  "It's like a snake crapping out a burning tire."

  Her stomach took a sudden dip. "Stop talking."

  "You tell me that a lot, you know," he said more softly.

  "Give me the light."

  He opened his mouth to protest, then got a look at her face and handed over the penlight. As they walked on, he moved closer. "What's going on?"

  She shook her head and sloshed forward. A far-off hum sounded from down the tunnel, growing bit by bit as they continued toward the next stop. The passage curved and then straightened out into the 23rd St. platform. Ellie's light fell on a dark wall laid across the tracks.

  "Oh God," Chip said.

  Her scalp prickled. Within the makeshift wall, pale limbs extruded like beached fish. Hands poked from sleeves, greasy and bloated. Red, dried-out eyes sat in bruised and yellow faces. White teeth gleamed within decay-distorted mouths. Beneath a patchy cloud of flies, hundreds of bodies of all ages and race lay piled in the tracks, a barrier of rotting skin and meat and hair that rose to just below the subway platform.

  Chip stumbled forward, face dazed. "What is this?"

  "Don't touch them," Ellie said.

  "How can there be so many?"

  "This is what I saw in the stats," she said. "Get the Panhandler and there's only one outcome."

  He turned away, gagging and coughing. He snatched away his mask and vomited into a puddle beside the tracks. Ellie had to t
urn away or she would have joined him. He calmed down, shoulders shaking, and spat the taste from his mouth. Abruptly, a second spasm wrenched his ribs and he retched again. Ellie closed her eyes.

  "She's in here, isn't she?" Chip said, hoarse. He gestured to the wall of dead. "She's one of them."

  "We don't know that."

  "You said there's only one result. Death. The end."

  She pulled her light away from the wall of bodies and the cloud of flies. The overhead lights were dim here, as if most had been removed or broken, and without the white glare of her flashlight, the fleshy barricade became an indistinct lump.

  "We aren't sick," Ellie said. "We believe some people are immune."

  Chip looked up at her, face broken with anguish. "Oh yeah? How many?"

  She grimaced. "When I left, we didn't yet have a good sample."

  "Twenty percent? Ten?"

  "Probably closer to one."

  He laughed bitterly. "So one time in a hundred, my daughter's out there on her feet. The other 99, she's stretched out in this pile."

  "We don't know that," Ellie said, suddenly angry. "We don't know she's susceptible. We don't know that every gene cluster is as vulnerable as those common to the US. We don't know what kind of safety protocols they've had in place since they picked her up. We don't know anything."

  She stepped beside him, touched his shoulder. "And even if we did, you know what? Fuck the numbers. We're going to find her."

  He wiped away a tear, then ran his sleeve over his mouth. "That's all we can do, isn't it?"

  "That's all we can do."

  He laughed, a strange marriage of light and sorrow. "I don't know why you came here, Ellie. But I'm glad you did."

  She smiled at him, then moved to the edge of the platform, which stood a good six feet overhead. "Now give me a boost."

  He cradled his hands. She stepped into them and he counted down and launched her up. She grabbed hold of the top, shoes scrabbling against the wall, and rolled over the edge. She turned around, lay flat, and reached down for him. With her support, he got an elbow over the lip and heaved his way up beside her.