“Dammit, Sylvie!” Indy screams. Her grip on my arm is tight enough to bruise. “We have to go!”
“Just another min—”
Casper grabs my other arm. “Sylvie. He’s gone.”
His hold is inescapable. They yank me from the ledge and drag me across the roof. I stop fighting when I realize they’re right. He won’t stay here. He’ll let the current carry him and come out downriver, where he’ll make his way to the High Line.
We race down the stairs, pick up our bags, and climb beneath the street. I hated it down here with the shit and the bugs and God knows what else, but today I see Eric wounded in the river, and nothing scares me more than that. Nothing is more unbearable than the thought of him trapped beneath the water, unable to breathe.
Indy leads the way with a flashlight, her feet quick and sure on the slick bottom.
“How far?” Casper asks.
“Roger’s place is soon,” Indy says, “but we’re going to the west side. Should we stop at Roger’s and get food?”
“If Walt’s his brother, won’t he know about Roger’s place?”
They turn for my opinion. I shrug. The sooner we get crosstown, the sooner I can make sure Eric is okay. Leo, Paul, and Jorge, too.
The orange ribbon that marks Roger’s corner comes into view. Indy stops. “We could use the food. Even if they do know about it, they’re probably all at StuyTown right now.”
Indy climbs the rungs. I follow behind Casper. Eric has to be out of the river by now. He knows no one could survive cold water for a long time. He’ll be drying himself off somewhere. Finding warm clothes to change into.
The street is empty. The corner still closed off by vehicles. Inside the apartment, we tear the cushions off the couch and load as many cans into our bags as possible. Casper leaves for another apartment and returns with two duffel bags and a rolling carry-on suitcase. “There were more suitcases,” he says, “but they won’t fit down the manhole.”
We take everything light that’s edible and then go for more cans. The bags weigh a ton, and we have Eric’s BOB to carry, too. Indy lifts a duffel bag with a wince. “We’ll drag them.”
We lug them down the fire escape, drawing a crowd of twenty Lexers. I’d forgotten they existed. Being attacked by living monsters will do that.
Back in the sewer, Indy mutters about directions as we follow the passageway. Tunnels branch off from this one, many shorter, and ours decreases in size until the roof is uncomfortably close to my head. I keep my eyes on Indy’s flashlight beam and roll the suitcase in one hand while I drag a duffel in the other. By now, Eric is dry. I hope he has enough strength to walk crosstown. I’m sure he can find the strength. I know he can.
What’s been a trickle of water at our feet becomes a small stream. Up ahead, the thunder of rushing water makes it impossible to hear Indy’s voice. She moves closer and yells, “That’s the river Eric and Paul were talking about. We’re in the right spot!”
Casper wipes his face and nods. We slosh through icy water that meets our knees and pours from smaller sewer lines into our larger one. When the current is with us, we fight to stay upright. Against us, and we fight to push through. My calves are numb and my thighs burn. The duffel bag sticks on something and I go down on my hands and knees. Frigid water rushes into every crevice, chilling me front to back, though I get to my feet quick enough that my pack doesn’t submerge.
“You okay?” Casper asks, pushing my hair from my face. I nod, and he takes the duffel bag. “I’ll get this.”
“You have enough to carry,” I say. He has his own duffel, Eric’s pack, and his own pack as well. He may be stronger than he was, but his face is strained. He’s at the end of his endurance. We all are.
“You hold my light.” He extends his flashlight. My hand muscles are stuck in a claw from clutching the duffel bag handle, and I have to work the light into my frozen fingers. “Ready?”
I nod, though my right knee aches from the impact with the sewer floor. My teeth chatter. I haven’t forgotten my bout with hypothermia. I’ll be okay for a bit, but if I start getting stupid, I’ll need to say something before I’m dumb enough to insist I’m fine.
Several times, Indy has chosen a direction at junctions where we meet a tunnel of the same size. She and Casper have debated the merits of one over another. Neither asks me. They know I don’t care. Now, at a point with three choices, they move left.
“I’m almost positive this is west,” Indy says. She’s shivering, too. So is Casper. Maybe we’ll all die down here, victims of hypothermia.
The thought is not particularly alarming, which alarms me enough that I force myself from my brain fog. I’m getting stupid. We need to get warm. Eat food. If we die underground with dry clothes in our packs and uneaten food that we’ve dragged over half the city, we’re imbeciles.
“Want me to lead?” I ask.
Indy moves to the side of the pipe. I yank my suitcase past her, accidentally shining my light on the ceiling. Six waterbugs run from the beam to a new hiding place. Six. In that one spot. I start to hum, glad the others won’t hear, and then I whisper, “You didn’t see anything.”
I’m going crazy, but I’m moving. Fuck waterbugs and fuck hypothermia and fuck dying underground like a fucking imbecile.
48
Eric
Holy fuck, the water is cold. It creeps everywhere as I sink below the surface. I came in at the river wall, which means I might be able to kick off and get clear of Walt. I bring up a boot and feel for the concrete, then draw up my legs and push as hard as I can. The final bit of breath leaves my lungs at the exquisite pain the move brings, and I let the current drag me while I ride out the wave of agony.
Turns out, breathing is crucial to riding out agony. I need to breathe. Now. I come up gulping air in a moving pocket of trash. Old bottles with sun-faded labels, pieces of plastic and metal and styrofoam, shredded fabric that must’ve come off bodies, all making the twice-daily trip to the bay before they move back with high tide. A zombie, naked and with skin beginning to bloat, gnashes her teeth twenty feet away.
I’ve moved south of StuyTown. The water was a shock to the system, an effective way to wake me up, but now it’s leaching out every bit of internal heat. The river’s temperature is likely in the fifties or low sixties. I have an hour or two before hypothermia renders me unconscious. It could be worse, could be January—thirty-degree water would allow me a quarter of that.
My muscles are already numb, though that numbness is an advantage for my rib cage. I have to swim to shore. If I get sucked into New York Bay, I’m done for, and the current is pulling me toward the middle of this river. I stop treading water and try to swim, but extending my right arm brings tears to my eyes. I settle for a doggy paddle.
A Lexer-filled park is to my right, and the remains of the Williamsburg Bridge hang above the water a quarter mile away. If I can get over enough to catch hold of one of its towers and pull myself onto the base, I can leave the current and rest before I swim for shore. I ditch the doggy paddle for the crawl, clenching my teeth and trying to keep my mouth above germ-infested water, though I’ve already swallowed enough that it likely doesn’t matter. With the speed of the current, I estimate I have between five and ten minutes to make the tower.
Arm, kick, other arm, kick. I make no headway. The bridge is coming up fast. I try harder. You can always try harder. Find that little reserve you didn’t know you had. I put on a burst of speed, cutting sideways through the water. Breathing through the pain and not looking at my destination.
I pass under the metal of the bridge, utterly spent. The base of the tower is hundreds of feet away, and I’m again drifting toward the middle of the half-mile-wide river. All of that energy expended for nothing, and, though my skin is numbed, my core feels bruised and beaten.
I feel beaten.
I flip on my back—pure fucking agony—and let the current carry me. It’s maybe a mile to the Manhattan Bridge. If I take it easy until I’m clo
ser, I’ll make that. Something heavy bumps my leg. A curved piece of fiberglass hull. I grab it two-handed, yank it under my upper body, and rest my head on the cool, smooth surface.
I open my eyes a few minutes later. I had a dream about Sylvie. She told me not to eat ketchup because of the bugs, and then she smiled and kissed me. She was warm, and I want to go back to her. I lift my head, unable to contain a groan. I’ve barely moved—the Williamsburg Bridge is just behind me. I have time to rest.
It can’t be the Williamsburg Bridge.
I pry my eyes open. The Manhattan Bridge is similar in appearance, and I’ve slept through my trip under it. My last chance at escape—the Brooklyn Bridge—is just ahead, and soon the entire shore of Manhattan will be out of reach. I won’t make the bridge, but I need to reach the South Street Seaport, a pier, something, before I miss my chance to stay on the island and get to the High Line.
I use my fiberglass piece like a kickboard. There’s more trash down this way, more bodies. Three just to my left, another two to my right. The water is browner, the stench horrendous. Something bubbles up from below, and a rotten shit smell fills the air as actual shit rises to the surface. I gag and kick past as fast as I can. The brick towers of the Brooklyn Bridge slip by. I kick harder, faster, but my wet boots are heavy and my legs tired. So tired that I need to rest, just for a second.
I awaken with a start. Shivering, teeth chattering. Still clutching my kickboard and drifting backward. Not sure how much time has passed, but enough that the buildings of Lower Manhattan are a dark, hazy blue against the lighter blue sky. New York Bay sits between us—a miles-wide stretch of water filled with bobbing garbage.
I missed it. I missed my chance.
The skyline disappears from view as I round the curve of the bay, heading into The Narrows, where the Verrazano sits two miles away. I kick my numb legs to spin around. It’s still there, as it has been for a year. Towers bent, cables and roadway collapsed into the water. Everything, including me, will collect there before high tide brings it all upriver again.
Brooklyn on my left, Staten Island on my right. I could swim for Brooklyn, but the Lexers on the four lanes of the Belt Parkway—and there are a lot—would have a feast. My options are pretty slim, and if all that’s left is that I choose how I die, I’m not going out that way. I’m hypothermic. My abdomen is a solid mass of pain. Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. I rest my head on the white fiberglass and close my eyes.
Something yanks my hair, grabs my coat, and hisses. A Lexer is a foot away, drawing its face to mine. Teeth yellowed and chinked with brown. His short hair is plastered to his skull, his cheeks shrunken. My slowing heart picks up the pace. I rip his hand from my hair and pull his fingers from my coat one by one, until he sinks and bobs up three feet away.
More groans come over the slap of water on my kickboard. I’ve drifted to the Brooklyn side of the bridge, into a floating junkyard of wreckage and bodies. They’re stuck in ropes and cables. One is impaled by a mast, her body suspended above the water. Some float with nothing, others have lucked into lifejackets, as though a boat of infected went over somewhere. It’s a graveyard of water zombies, and they all know I’m here.
Not dying like this. Any way but this.
I kick my legs, pushing trash from my path. Remains of bridge and roadway rise above the water fifty feet away. If I climb the steel trusses, the Lexers won’t be able to reach me. I dip my left arm in the water to paddle and retch when it comes up swathed in used toilet paper. My makeshift kickboard is covered with a brown slick of oil and shit and who knows what else.
A woman floats by in an orange lifejacket, her lips eaten away by seawater or fish. She bites at my hand but misses. “Fuck you,” I say hoarsely.
I avoid the pointy upright bow of a ship and push aside half a small sailboat to grab a thick wooden post. Inch by inch, I make my way to a yacht that rests against the waterlogged tangle of steel and cables. My cold, stiff limbs are warmed by a degree of hope. Maybe there’ll be a way to land. It’s a long shot that I’ll make it, but it’s better than no shot.
I shove at a woman, who spins away with a growl, and get a foot on the submerged deck rail of the yacht. The roadway is cracked and folded, partly above water, partly below, but the steel beam that runs alongside is as flat as it was when it stood hundreds of feet in the air and I crawled across it into Brooklyn.
I grab hold of a loop of metal cable to heave myself up, and the yacht tilts, wedging my lower left leg between rail and bridge. I feel the crack at the same time as I hear it—a dull thud like when I broke my arm as a kid. The yacht shifts again. I pull my leg free, relieved at the lack of pain, and get the cable under my armpits. A split second later, my left leg is on fire, the inferno drowning out the blaze in my abdomen. I hang from the cable and drown in this new misery.
My moans mix with the Lexers who wait for their meal to fall to water. Fuck them. If it’s the last thing I do, I will not end that way. I’ll die shivering and broken on that beam before I become one of them. Hand over hand, I drag myself up the cable until I can stretch my left arm to grip the far edge. I take a deep breath, brace myself for the coming pain, and throw my right arm across.
The beam digs into my abdomen, and I press my face to the pitted gray-blue paint while I wait for the torment to end. I hear myself whimper, but I can’t stop it any more than I can the pain. My arms are weakening, gravity is winning. There’s not enough of me on the steel to stay up here. I swing my right leg, catch the edge of the beam with the toe of my boot, and roar through the twisting of my torso and the lifting of my mangled left leg, until I lie on my back.
They say a world of pain. This is a universe. Dark vision, bursting stars of light, a black hole of agony. When I crawled across this beam a year ago, I wasn’t well, but I wasn’t shivering with cold, my leg and stomach battling for dominance in the pain arena. I’m in a bad way; I won’t lie to myself about that. I roll onto my side just enough to tilt my head and view Brooklyn. The beam does run to shore. Even if I could drag myself five hundred feet, there’s nowhere to go once I’m there. No one to find. No one to hold my hand the way Sylvie did.
I return to my back, arms heavy at my sides, and fight my lowering eyelids. I’ve never been this tired. I’m tired of everything—of the moans from the water and the worry and the endless struggle to stay alive.
Even so, I don’t want to die. I don’t want to leave Sylvie. I don’t want to die, but I’m dying. I said I wouldn’t lie to myself, and I won’t. I thought it was the end in StuyTown; I just didn’t want to believe it. But maybe it’s fitting that it ends on this beam where it all started. Full circle.
My eyes are hot. Wet. I wipe my face with the soaked coat sleeve of my left arm and whisper, “I’m sorry.”
I don’t know what I’m sorry for. Maybe for everything I’ll miss. For everything I fucked up and can never make right. For leaving people I love. For myself.
I fumble with my coat pockets for the picture of Sylvie. She said it was to remind me the world was color if ever it went gray, and the world’s looking pretty fucking bleak right about now. I want her, laughing in full color, to be the last thing I see.
My fingers hit on two tubes through the canvas. The flares Ren handed me last year. I wrestle one from my inner pocket with numb fingers. There’s no point. There’s no one to rescue me. But I pull off the cap and strike it against the bottom of the flare anyway. It takes three tries before fire fizzes and a bright orange plume of smoke erupts. I tuck the end under my leg and watch the color rise into the sky.
If nothing else, it marks that I was here. Am here. I find Sylvie’s picture. Smile at the little girl who grew up to tell me I made her that happy again, and I keep the image in my mind as I close my eyes.
49
Sylvie
A stop at a manhole two blocks away has both pointed us in the right direction and shown us that popping out of a manhole in the middle of a zombie-filled street is in our future. They�
�re not thickly mobbed, but there are enough that the first person out will have to fight them off to give the others time.
Finally, at what we believe is nearest the High Line, Casper nudges me out of the way. “I’ll go first. Push up the bags after me.” Indy and I shake our heads, and he views us with owlish, affronted eyes. “I promise I won’t run.”
“We know,” Indy says. Our head shakes concerned his safety, not his courage. She takes Eric’s pack and Casper’s duffel. “Go.”
He climbs up, wrests off the cover, and sticks his head into blinding light. “Come quick,” he calls down.
“Are we there?” Indy asks.
“Yeah. We don’t have much time.” He scrambles out, then reaches for the bags I hand to Indy, who’s clambered halfway up the ladder to pass them through the hole.
I take the rungs hastily, glad to be out of the dark and damp, and step into a fenced construction area that runs for half the cobblestoned street. Where we stand has been dug down, the cobblestone removed and dumped in a pile, so that the manholes sit a few inches above the surface instead of flush with the ground. The High Line crosses above our heads only fifty feet away, though there’s no entrance onto the tracks from this street.
Already, twenty Lexers are on their way. Indy points to the wide flat concrete support that holds the bulk of The Standard Hotel over the park. Metal fire stairs are bolted to the side, rising from the street to enter the underside of the hotel. “Does the hotel go onto the High Line?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “But maybe it’s safe inside.”
That’s assuming the fire door isn’t locked, but we’re out of options. This fence is temporary. Once we’re surrounded, the Lexers will send it to the ground. The first three bodies arrive, and I run to the front of the fence, where I bang on the chain link with my chisel. “Hey, over here!”
The Lexers veer for me while Casper and Indy open the gate. “Let’s go!” Indy yells.
The City Series (Book 3): Instauration Page 33
