Part of the reason I came today was to escape the people of Sunset Park, if only for a few hours. I see a reminder of my fuckup in Jorge’s lackluster smile and the bleak, orphaned faces of Lincoln and Emily. In Indy’s strained overly-exuberant personality, and in the flashes of anger and sorrow that Sylvie tries to hide.
But what I really wanted to escape was myself. And now all I want is to go home and work out a way to handle this that won’t get me killed by either Walt or Sylvie. I promised Sylvie we’d do this together. If I break her trust, I’ll poison one of the only good things left in this world.
Paul walks to a window. “Looks like there’s an opening in the crowd. We could try for it.”
I join him and see the Lexers have thinned out enough to squeeze through. “If we ran up to Second, we could take that or a higher avenue home.”
“It’s better than your other plan, dipshit. Do me a favor and tell me you’re not going to do something stupid.”
He waits for an answer, and I give him the truth. “My only plan is to go home.”
“Then let’s go home.”
Stuyvesant Town doesn’t feel like home yet, but home is where Sylvie is. As well as my best friend, who every now and again surprises me by saying what I don’t want to hear when I most need to hear it. Dipshit.
Second Avenue isn’t clear, and neither are Third or Lexington, but Park Avenue’s eight lanes are wide enough to slink along the west side of the street while pressed to the ground-floor windows of Midtown office buildings.
I like quiet, but this is painfully quiet. Pin drop silence. Anything loose has been tucked in. If it jingles, it’s been cushioned. Thankfully, we don’t have a lot to carry, and we’re more than ready to run. Too ready to run, since every sound is amplified by my nervous system. I almost leap from my skin when a zombie trips and crashes to the sidewalk outside the gilded Waldorf Astoria across the street. Four new Lexers lurch around the corner, and we duck into the recessed area of the Colgate-Palmolive building before they spot us. Park Avenue turns into tunnels under the Helmsley Building just ahead, and tunnels are not a promising idea.
Paul leans against a steel column, shaking his head. I know what he’s saying, and he’s right: at this rate of travel, we’ll be on the streets after dark.
“Maybe up 49th?” Kate whispers.
We nod and ease from our hiding spot to the corner, where a quick peek confirms we can travel west. It’s farther from the east side, but our options are not plentiful. I look up as we walk. Aside from the possible Droppers that might lurk in the tall buildings, I don’t like the way they make me feel as though I’m trapped in the bottom of a canyon of glass and steel.
It’s different from an imposing mountain or a canyon of stone. Those remind you that though you may be nothing but a minor player in the universe, you’re a part of it all the same. These tower overhead, some broken and burnt, ready to crush you like the insignificant ant you are. I grip my knife tighter, cold at the sudden notion I’m going to die in this city. I’ll die on the return to Stuyvesant Town, and all because I wanted to escape it.
“We have a truck somewhere around here,” Kate whispers, though her voice bangs like a gong to my oversensitive ears. “We put them all over the city.”
“Louis had us check them this winter,” Roger says. “There’s one by Times Square.”
“I think we’re better off going out of our way west for a truck than on foot along the east. What do you guys think?”
“Sounds good to me,” I say, and Paul nods.
Roger skirts around broken glass on the sidewalk near Fifth Avenue. It’s a toy store—a doll store. Emily has access to plenty of toys, but they’re all castoffs. I’d bet anything she’d love a new doll just for her. And though guilt may play a role in this idea, I’d also like to see her smile.
I look behind us. Street is clear, and the side entrance doors are steps away. “Can I have two minutes in there?” I ask.
“The American Girl store?” Kate asks.
“I thought Emily might like a doll.”
“If she likes dolls, she’ll love one of those. Let’s do it.”
We crunch over glass into what’s more like a world than a store. Pink and red make up the color scheme, along with glass cases containing dolls and other doll-related merchandise. The prices are astronomical. This place must’ve been a goldmine. I tread across the carpet to a case of dolls and inspect the tall boxes lined up beneath. I grab one that has long blond hair like Emily. I have no idea what little girls look for in a doll.
“Done,” I say.
Kate stands at a case containing a doll-sized replica of a mid-century kitchen, the kind with white cabinets and cheery curtains at the windows. Pretend cookies and milk sit on the counter. She runs a finger down the glass. “My daughter would’ve loved this when she was little. She had—”
A clang comes from deep inside the store, and we duck out the side entrance. I didn’t know Kate has a daughter—or, more likely, had—and I glance her way, but her wistful expression has returned to watchful.
Half a block down Fifth Avenue, twenty Lexers window shop outside Saks Fifth Avenue, at a perfect angle to notice us cross the street. “Truck’s on 47th between Sixth and Seventh,” Roger says. “If we run, it’ll give us enough time to reconnect the battery.”
“Times Square?” Paul asks dubiously. It’s not my first choice of destinations in a city of zombies, either.
“Cleared out,” Roger says. “If there are no bodies, we can make it down the west side.”
At Kate’s nod, we race across the four lanes of Fifth Avenue. Groans follow, echoing off stone and glass to any zombie within a few-block radius. Several Lexers spill from the broken windows of a clothing store, and we edge between parked cars to the other side of the street.
Only when we reach the waving flags around the recessed ice skating rink do I realize we’ve hit Rockefeller Center. The rink is packed with Lexers, all of whom begin to carry on. They can’t get up here, but the ones on the plaza ahead have ample notice we’re on the way.
A mob of twenty reaches the corner of the rink before we do. Others near a possible escape out the side street. The rink is a no-go, for obvious reasons. Beside me, Paul pulls his pistol. I do the same. Normally, guns are the last resort, but it’s too late for silence.
Kate heads for the narrow exit between the converging groups. Her knife is out, her pack bouncing. As the zombie-free area closes, Paul dodges the arm of a man who rips at my coat with jagged nails, and I squeak through on his heels. A thud and gasp come from behind, and we spin at the clatter of Roger’s machete on the asphalt.
The man has him locked by the shoulders, a woman on the ground has her mouth on his jeans, and the rest are closing in. I lift my pistol. Roger knows what I mean to do, and he leans sideways. The blast rips through the street and the man drops, spraying Roger’s hair with a coating of chunky brown liquid. Paul takes out another as Roger bends for his machete, jams it into the woman’s head, and trips toward us.
Kate fires beside me, the report deafening in my left ear, and the center of a woman’s face implodes into a dark hole. I get a teenage girl, then a man. Roger crosses the final feet with the mass of zombies inches away.
“Go!” he yells.
We pound the plaza toward 48th Street on stones stained by dried gristle that snow and rain didn’t wash away. Bodies that bloated and leaked and then withered to husks lie on the ground, covered by flapping fabric.
I’m not out of breath or even that scared, until the first Lexer rushes by with a gust of wind and slams to the street two feet ahead. I stumble over its legs, catch my footing, and raise my eyes to the building. Maybe thirty floors and enough broken windows to send a pulse of fear from my brain to my feet. You can dodge the ones on foot, but Droppers are a crapshoot.
Paul smashes into my side as another thuds to the pavement where he ran a moment before. “Holy fucking—”
A body hits close enough to vibr
ate the soles of my boots, and I drag Paul beneath the marble entryway of the building to the right. Kate and Roger join us while three more bodies splat to the street, one sending up a shower of dark spray. The mobs are fifteen feet away.
“Fuck it?” Paul asks me. Though no one else would see it, I make out the smile hidden in the corners of his lips.
Paul and I weren’t bad teenagers, but we didn’t wear halos, either. And everything we did—a night of forty-ounce debauchery, train jumping, scaling an empty building to see what was inside an open window—began with one of us saying those two words.
“Fuck it,” I agree, then I turn to Kate and Roger. “Run.”
11
A run of two blocks is nothing. A run of two blocks with a mob of zombies behind you is something else entirely. This entire block of Sixth Avenue burned, and the skyscrapers are painted black by soot. Glass from exploded windows covers the street, reflecting back the rapidly dimming sky above. It slips and shatters underfoot on the way to 47th, where we round the corner onto a street untouched by fire. A few cars sit at the curb, but Roger and Kate make for an SUV on the sidewalk under the 24-Hour Parking sign of a garage.
Kate reaches under the back wheel, uses the found key to open the driver’s side door, and pops the hood. I hold it up while Roger reconnects the battery terminals.
“Done!” he shouts.
A couple of Lexers are on their way down the street. Paul moves to the back of the truck, gun raised.
“Start it up!” Roger yells.
“Not working!” Kate yells.
Roger peers under the hood. Ten zombies follow the first two around the corner. I wiggle the terminals, and the negative pops off in my hand. “The connection’s loose.”
“There’s usually a wrench for the bolts, but it’s not here,” Roger says. “Someone loosened it too much.”
I pull my multitool from my coat and flip open the pliers, then gauge our remaining time: Quarter block away and more behind them. I tighten the bolt a few turns, glad to see my hand is steadier than I expected. “Try now!”
The truck roars to life. I hop in the back with Paul. Kate floors it down the street with a whoop and turns left onto Seventh, where Times Square is eerily vacant of anything but trash and a few dead bodies. The screens have died and the billboards are dulled by a film of dust and ash. Underneath the dust, happy couples are ecstatic in their designer clothing, cars drive along unneglected zombie-free roads, and Broadway plays tout their best reviews.
“How the hell did you hold on to that thing?” Paul asks, nodding at the partially crushed doll box tucked under my arm.
I set it on the floor by my feet. “Kind of forgot it was there.”
It’s half true—the couple times I realized it’d be easier to drop it, I didn’t. I’m sure there are plenty of dolls in Stuyvesant Town, but all we have are hand-me-downs and charity. If I can’t give Emily her parents, I want her to have something of her own.
We have maybe an hour until sunset, and we pass 42nd Street doing forty miles per hour until we’re forced west by roadblocks on both the east side of 34th Street and Seventh heading downtown.
“The west is usually better than east,” Kate says. “And 23rd and 14th Streets are usually good. We’ll take Eighth Avenue down.”
The imposing columned post office goes by in a flash. My foot taps the floor. I’m sure we can find somewhere to stay for the night, but I don’t want to. Sylvie will worry, Leo will worry, and they don’t need any more worry.
“Shit,” Kate mutters.
I’m sure we’re going to hit the chunk of concrete in the road before 24th Street, but the SUV deftly swings around it, then around the next chunks in the street. Worse are the thirty bodies wandering ahead. Kate narrowly whips into the space between two, around another, and then through the remainder of the crowd in a feat of driving that leaves me slightly nauseous but thoroughly impressed.
Kate slows at 23rd with a curse. A mob stands a block away down the avenue, and 23rd is packed toward the east. The news that there weren’t many zombies down here as of a few days ago is, obviously, old.
“Guess we’re going west,” she says cheerfully, then yanks the truck into a right that throws me into Paul.
Kate speeds up the block, past Lexers who worked their way between wooden police barricades that do nothing to hold back rabid people. At Ninth Avenue, she slows alongside the cracked store windows of a deli and inches to the corner.
From the front seats, she and Roger get the first view of the avenue, and their disappointed exhalations tell me everything I need to know. Paul leans his forehead against his window, shoulders dropped. “It never ends.”
I don’t know if he’s talking to me or himself, if he’s speaking of the endless death that wanders the streets, or, possibly, the mobs that line Ninth Avenue for blocks. They surge past the cars that were moved in an attempt at a wall. Their clothes rip on bumpers. An old man’s black-veined calf tears down to bone on a bent license plate. He hobbles after us with the others, the thick strip of skin and muscle slapping at his ankle.
Kate swings onto Tenth Avenue, though I don’t hold out hope for smooth sailing. Sure enough, the few bodies become ten, then twenty, then a hundred. Kate swerves, tossing Paul into my shoulder. A face slams my window and leaves a smear of brown gunk. I can’t see through the glass, but there’s less to see now that the sun has dropped behind the buildings.
“Almost there!” Kate calls over the onslaught of bodies on metal. I grab the door handle as the truck jolts right around a corner.
We bump up the curb and screech to a stop, tilted half on the sidewalk. I throw up my arm to protect my head from slamming Kate’s seat. “We have to get the ones on the stairs,” Kate says. “We’ll do it from the roof. Sound good?”
“Sounds fine,” I say, exchanging a stunned look with Paul. I knew Kate was not your average middle-aged woman, but she’s turning out to be a lot less average than I thought.
Kate slides open the sunroof, crouches on her seat, and says, “This is why they all have sunroofs.” She disappears upward and lowers her face through the hole. “Might be a tight squeeze, so just two of you. Grab those pointy metal guys in the back, if you would.”
“I’ll stay at the window,” Roger says.
We collect a few long spikes from the cargo area, and then I follow her into the twilight. We’re parked alongside a staircase under elevated train tracks, where nine zombies are trapped on the stairs by a gate that once kept people out. They could’ve fallen from the station above, or they could be the humans who locked the gates in the first place.
The mob down 23rd is huge. A black mass in the dimming light. Paul hands up the spikes and joins us. I lean for the staircase railing and dip the spear end into the eye of a man in tattered clothing. It used to be you could classify a zombie by their clothing, their hairstyle. Now, the clothes have been weathered to pale shades of their former colors and begun to fall apart. Buttons are missing, shoes have dropped off or been worn down to cracked leather and holey canvas.
Most of these have small spots of black somewhere on their bodies. We’ve seen it before, and it appears to be spreading, yet it hasn’t shown signs of taking the zombies down. My spike, however, takes them down just fine.
I pop a woman in the mouth and shake her off the end. She’s pushed by another zombie, and she tumbles over the railing while a torrent of black fluid escapes her lips. A yell rises from below.
“Thanks, whoever that was,” Roger calls.
Paul laughs beside me. He might be having fun, and I realize that I am having fun. It’s a twisted version of fun, but it’s the first time I’ve felt light in the past weeks. Purposeful. Maybe because I need to kill something. If it isn’t Walt, it may as well be zombies.
When they’re down, Paul gives Kate a boost onto the stairs. Roger hands up our bags and the doll, which we toss to Kate, and then we step over bodies and past the landing where the staircase rises to the platform.
Only it’s not a subway platform. We’re on elevated train tracks—I know that much from below—but where the track should be is paved with strips of pebbled light concrete. Plants grow in unpaved areas by the railings that border either side of the platform. Farther down, the tracks widen, and a large stretch of overgrown grass and weeds flanks the walkway, though it likely wasn’t always overgrown. It continues on as far as I can see—a strip of nature running above city streets between the old and new apartment buildings of Chelsea.
“This is that park?” I ask Paul. “The one Sylvie mentioned a while ago?”
“The High Line,” Kate says. “It’s usually clear, but sometimes you get a straggler. We can take it downtown and then walk east.”
We reach the grassy area, where benches made of warm brown wood wait for people to contemplate nature. A small bleacher of the same wood almost touches the old brick building that rises inches away from the railing. It was once a factory, now likely condos.
I peer down what I guess to be 22nd Street. If it wasn’t nearing dark, I’d be able to see for blocks. The path narrows again, edged with bushes and birch trees before the trees turn to grasses behind benches. Being early spring, it’s not the riot of green it must be in summer, but it’s extraordinary. The city stretches out to the east, but the tall buildings no longer feel stifling as they did from the street.
“Cool, yeah?” Paul asks.
“Really cool.” We walk about a half block, and I say to Kate, “That was some kickass driving back there.”
“I used to drive a getaway car,” Kate says. Paul and I chuckle, though, honestly, I’m not sure she’s kidding. Strands of blond hair wave around her face, having been pulled from her ponytail by the breeze and exertion. “You know what I miss most about the old world? Road trips. I could get in a car and drive all day.”
“I miss any kind of trip,” I say. “Except this kind.”
“Seriously,” Roger mutters. We reach a locked chain-link fence that stretches across the path. “After this, it’s usually empty.”
The City Series (Book 3): Instauration Page 8
