Bleeders

by Max Boone

  The bridge was choked with cars. It looked like a bad accident far ahead had pushed a U-Haul truck through the concrete divider and into the pedestrian walkway on the left. A few more feet and it would have crashed through the outside barrier and its suicide-proof fence and down into the Harlem River. Instead of using the walkway, we weaved behind the abandoned cars. It seemed to slow down the Bleeders. They were so focused on go-go-go, they banged into and tripped on any obstacle in their way.

  As we passed the three-quarter mark across the bridge, I saw a shitty sight at the other end. "Bleeders up ahead," I said to Nkosi, pointing out the group loitering at the other end.

  "We are trapped."

  "Shit, kid, don't give up so easy." I jumped onto the U-Haul truck's hood, then onto the cab's roof and climbed up on top of its rectangular trailer. Nkosi followed suit, and the two of us managed to climb over the curved suicide fence and onto the outside of the barrier without killing ourselves, me with the M16 around my neck and him the duffel bag.

  We were on the outside of the bridge, high above the water with Bleeders banging on the fence on the other side. "Okay," I said, "now we're trapped." Nkosi didn't want to look down at the water. The fear of heights was in him. "Well, we might as well get to know each other. The name's Brody."

  "Nkosi."

  "Oh."

  "Oh what?"

  "I heard that before but I thought it meant 'hey' or something."

  "In South Africa, Nkosi means 'king.'"

  "It'll mean breakfast if we don't figure something out."

  Nkosi looked at the angry Bleeders that struggled to reach us. "We will have to wait for them to move on," he concluded.

  "I think we'll die before that happens. Speaking of dying, sorry about your dad." I winced the moment the words came out of my mouth.

  "You knew my father?"

  "The...the guy back there."

  His smooth face tensed up. "Oyibo. He was not my father."

  "Oh, I just assumed-"

  "Because we are both black we are related?"

  "Uh, no, because he was a lot older than you. You're really pulling that on me right now? Up here?"

  He scanned the bridge, avoiding eye contact. "Oyibo was a business associate."

  "Cool. Cool. That's not vague at all. So what does 'rooi' mean?"

  "Red. You have the sickness, yes?"

  "Yes. And no. It's complicated. I have it, but I didn't become one of them." I motioned to the infected faces chomping at the other side of the fence. "Apparently it's a thing. I met someone else the same way. Maybe two people."

  "I still do not trust you."

  "And I don't trust you, so at least we're on level ground, even if it is suspended above water." I exhaled, unhappy with the company. I would just have to make the best of it. "What about 'doodmaak,' what does that mean?"

  He looked me in the eye. "It means kill."

  "I figured. So is that a bag of guns?"

  "Guns, yes. Ammunition, no."

  "Not much good to us right now," I said, and he shook his head. I looked around, then down. "You think it's waterproof?"

  "I do. However I do not think we are waterproof."

  "I mean it's only a twenty, twenty-five foot drop, we could live through that. The problem is what's in the water might kill us."

  "There are crocodiles?"

  "No, more like it could be shallow, or we might smash into rocks or garbage or whatever else is down there." He nodded, envisioning horrible death. "But you'd share it with me, right? The bag, I mean, if we miraculously survived this whole situation, you'd share your guns with me?"

  He looked at the bag, then nodded. "Yes."

  I slapped him on the chest. "Good choice. I'm just fucking with you, the way down is this way."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  As we edged our way along the outside of the bridge, I explained to Nkosi how when I was a kid that bridge nearly burned down. "From what my dad told me a thousand times, the fire department showed up expecting an ordinary house fire, but instead found the fucking bridge was on fire, so they had to call in one of those boats with the bad-ass water cannons." I paused. "Come to think of it, I would love to have one of those cannons to wipe up these pricks." They still snarled and reached for us, following us as we moved. "Anyway, it was the center pier that had caught fire, apparently they used flammable paint on the wood."

  He looked at me, confused. "Center pier?"

  "If you weren't too scared to look down, you would see the giant platform underneath us." I pointed down to the walkway, and under that the huge pier, complete with outside railing. "This is a swing bridge. The whole thing pivots from the middle to let boats through."

  Nkosi looked down at the pier, feeling pretty stupid. "I am new to town," he said.

  "Yeah, it shows. C'mon." I nervously kneeled down on the thin, steel beam and lowered myself over the edge into a fireman's fall, hanging until the fall to the walkway was only a few feet. I let go and bent my knees when I hit. It still jarred my entire body, but it didn't break anything. Once he saw I was safe Nkosi did the same, and I caught him from tumbling into the railing when he landed. There was a door in the middle of the walkway that led inside the big structure at the bridge's center, some kind of access for workers, but it was locked. We found the metal stairs that went down to the pier, crossed under the metal bridge, and soon found ourselves at the railing, looking out on the churning, brownish-blue water of Harlem River.

  It wasn't the world's dirtiest water, or it's fastest moving, but you never exactly saw anyone splashing around in it, either. That was because whenever it rained, the run-off from the streets and sewers drained out into the river. It was especially bad after heavy storms, and no one short of bums and unsuspecting tourists wanted to swim in that much shitty water.

  "The water is the only way out," I told Nkosi, not bothering to fill him in on the rest. "We can climb out over there." I pointed to a small dock back on the side of the river we wanted to be on. If my guess was right, it was very close to where I'd first turned onto Park Avenue on my way to the pawn shop. It wasn't a bad swim, four hundred feet at most.

  The kid didn't look convinced. "Why should I follow you," he asked.

  "Are you hungry?" He paused, then nodded. "And where's your next meal coming from?"

  "I don't know."

  "You said you'll share your guns with us, so we'll share our food with you. We have a lot. Enough to go around and then some."

  "How is this?"

  "Simple, do you know what a food bank is?"

  "Like charity."

  "Exactly, only we're the good cause now, get it?"

  Nkosi nodded. "Okay. It is an agreement."

  "Good. Now swim like your life depended on it, because guess what- it fucking does."

  We climbed over the railing, looked at each other like the strangers and idiots we were, and jumped.

  However cold I thought the water would be, it was twice as bad as that. It felt like someone had taken paddles to my chest and run a thousand volts through my nerves. My heart pounded and my skin came alive as I sank into the murky waters, then kicked and pulled back up to the surface and the morning light.

  With my head above water, I looked around for Nkosi but couldn't see him. "Kid? You alright?" I was starting to get nervous and it came out in my voice. It didn't help that my dick had shriveled up inside my body like a scared turtle. "Where are you?"

  "I am behind you," his voice came. I turned to find him squinting at me with the duffel bag floating on the water's surface next to him. "Were you worried about me?"

  I scoffed. "More like worried about the guns." He wasn't buying it, but I didn't care. All I wanted to do was swim to that dock, get out of that freezing cold water and back to the food bank. He could think I was in love with him for all I cared, though that didn't explain the suddenly serious look on his face. "What now," I sighed and turned in the water, "what do you see?"

  "I do not know," he replied, and I
had to agree with him- I had no clue what was coming down the river toward us. It was something big and dark and messy, and it took up half the river as the tide carried it downstream, yet it barely rose above the surface any more than we did.

  "Go," I said, "head for the dock."

  Without another word we swam, cutting a line through the cold water with the shapeless mass creeping toward us. It reminded me of that black blob-stuff from Creepshow 2 that preyed on the group of teenagers hanging out on a dock, which was probably the last thing I should have been thinking about when I was up to my neck in murky water. Yet we were actually swimming toward it instead of away from it, which made us even dumber than a bunch of teenagers in a horror movie.

  When we were closer, I saw what the shape was made of.

  "Oh, God," I whispered. Dead bodies, at least a hundred of them, bobbed on the surface, some face-down, some not. Most of them had charred skin and clothes.

  I knew who they were. They were the Bleeders from the hospital, the ones the explosion had set free. They must have walked out through the fire and wandered burning toward the river, where they fell into the water like a bunch of goddamn lemmings following each other over a cliff. Maybe there was some instinct still alive in them that told them water put out fire, who knew. It was even possible they'd been following me and got lost. Either way they had died, from the burning or the drowning. They may have had the minds of monsters, but their bodies were still human.

  It was too late to turn back, and we couldn't swim sideways fast enough to avoid them. We were quickly enveloped by the dead bodies and their red eyes staring blankly into the sky. They bumped past us like river garbage, and we pushed them away and kept swimming toward the small dock. Every time one of them touched me I got a chill up my ass.

  One of the bodies was in my way, and I had to stop swimming to deal with him. He was face down with almost no burn marks on his clothes, though the back of his hairy neck looked like it had taken a beating. There was still blood in the water from a head wound.

  When I touched his side to move him out of the way, he suddenly picked his head up. He flailed in the water, puking up saltwater like a drowning victim, except he was also chomping and biting at me. Even dying, they cared more about eating faces.

  Nkosi was too far behind me to help. I panicked and pushed the struggling body away and into the other bodies, staying out of bite range, but one of his flailing hands managed to swipe at my left arm. His dirty fingernails scratched my forearm, tearing three lines into my skin that erupted with sudden, intense pain. I looked down at my arm in time to see blood pool up in the three, jagged wounds and begin to run down to join the already bloody water.

  Like back in the basement of Yankee Stadium, I couldn't tell you what happened next exactly. The sight of my blood woke up the anger in my gut, and I remember a surge of rage like dynamite going off in the back of my brain, but after that it became a blur. All I know is some time later Nkosi was trying to calm me down, telling me he was my friend as he tried to stay above water with someone's hands on his neck trying to push him under.

  When I looked down, I found the hands belonged to me.

  I let go of him and began to tread water, trying to calm down and get my bearings. The hairy man who'd scratched me had floated a bit further down, though he looked a little different. Someone had apparently pushed his eyeballs into his skull with their thumbs.

  "Are you alright," I eventually asked Nkosi.

  "No," he said, "I am not alright."

  "Yeah. Me, either."

  My arm burned as I swam the rest of the way toward the construction site, its small dock still our best chance to get out of the river safely. The kid followed behind me, though I noticed he gave me a bit of distance. When we reached the wooden dock, we found it was higher up than it seemed from far away. The pilings were covered in algae, and we both tried to climb but found it too slimy to get a grip on.

  "We need to find another way," Nkosi said, sounding as tired as I felt. It wasn't the only way out of the river, of course, but I didn't want to come out too far from where we were going and have to fight our way back.

  I also didn't know how much swim I had left in me.

  A shadow appeared over us. We flinched, prepared for the worst, but nothing came. I shielded my eyes to make out the figure. With the sun in my eyes, all I could see was the silhouette of someone standing above us on the dock with their hands on their waist.

  "Need some help," a woman asked.

  "Who is that?"

  The silhouette moved to block out the sun- it was Alison. "You forgot me already," she said, kneeling down to extend her hand. She helped me up out of the cold water and onto the wooden deck. Then I turned and helped Nkosi do the same. He took one look at her eyes and scrambled away from her, crawling backward on the dock. "She has the red," he shouted.

  "Whoa, whoa, be cool. I told you, she's not a Bleeder. She's like me."

  Nkosi looked back and forth between us. "How do I know what you say is true?"

  "Probably because I'm not trying to eat you," Alison assured him.

  "She has a point," I added. "How the hell did you know we needed help?"

  "When you were gone too long I ventured out to make sure you hadn't gotten yourself killed."

  "Aww, you do care."

  "More like I didn't want to be waiting around for someone who wasn't coming back. Finding you was the easy part."

  "Why's that?"

  "Because you make enough noise to be heard from two blocks away," she scolded. Before she got a chance to launch into a full lecture, she noticed the fresh wound on my arm. She pulled me closer to get a look at it. "When did this happen," she asked.

  "Just now, in the water."

  "You know, just because you're immune to the virus doesn't mean you're invincible. Do you have any idea what's in that water?" She tore a strip off the bottom of her shirt and wrapped it around my arm, tying it tight to stop the bleeding. "When we get back I need to clean this," she said, catching me looking at her bare stomach.

  "Are you together," Nkosi asked.

  "I mean we're together, but not together together," I said, and turned to Alison. "Unless you'd consider-"

  "Definitely not," she said.

  We were all silent, only the sound of the river moving past us. Then Nkosi said, "This is very awkward."

  Someone behind us cleared their throat. We spun around to find the group of bikers we'd seen earlier by the pawn shop. "Speaking of awkward," one of them said, "we'd really like your bag of guns."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A dozen guys and a few biker chicks stared down at us from the shore with chains and brass knuckles in their hands. They were all ages, from twenty to fifty, though they all had some city miles. They wore vests and jackets with patches on the sleeves that had the number eighty-six stitched into them in big, red letters.

  The guy in front was my age, maybe a little older, with a dark tan and darker hair. "There ain't a lot of time before that group catches up to us," he said, "so how about you hand it over?"

  "I have a better idea- how about you deep-throat my shoe?"

  He stepped forward, looking like he wanted to shove me up my third grade teacher's asshole. But then someone in the group whistled, and the sound of it stopped him in his tracks.

  "Ease up, Spanish Blood." The crowd of guys parted and a man came forward from their ranks. He wasn't the youngest of the group, but he wasn't the oldest, either. He had a shaved head, a dark beard, and a scar above his right ear that looked a lot like a bullet wound. He smiled in an alpha dog kind of way. "We don't want to make trouble for you, son, but dying people have no business keeping a gun out of the hand of the living," he said. A few of the others fanned out to keep watch while the rest of us talked. The bikers knew what they were doing, which I guessed came from living the way they did. Having enemies means always keeping an eye out for trouble.

  "Who says we're dying?"

  "Your eyes are b
leeding," Spanish Blood said. "Hers, too."

  "You want to see eyes bleed, see what happens when you try to take that bag."

  The leader chuckled. "He's funny," he said to the guy to his left. "You talk a big game, son, which I can respect, but you best take a look around at your situation. You're trapped, outnumbered four-to-one, and the flu's set on killing you anyway. The way I see it, taking you out would be the humane thing to do."

  The group moved forward, ready to attack. "Wait," Alison said, her hands up. "Just wait. It's true we're infected, but we're not dying."

  Spanish Blood scoffed. "Bullshit."

  "It's a fact. You can kill us if you don't believe me, but eventually you'll find out we were telling the truth." To the leader she said, "You can take the guns, but we're more useful to you alive."

  "What are you doing," I asked her.

  "Saving your life." She pointed to my chest and said, "What's that?"

  I looked down to find the M16 strap hanging loose around my neck, with no M16 attached to the end. "Shit," I said, and looked back to the river. "It must have gotten lost when..." I trailed off, thinking about the Bleeder with the pushed-in eyes.

  Meanwhile, their leader called out to Nkosi. "Hey," he said, "you're not sick."

  "No."

  "So why are you dicking around with these two? Wouldn't you rather be up here with us?"

  Nkosi looked me in the eye. I expected him to sell me up the river we just crawled out of. "He saved my life," he said. Alison flashed a look of surprise at his words.

  "That's nice and all, but why are you still with them?"

  "He said they have food."

  "Hey." I punched his arm. "Didn't anyone teach you how to lie?"

  "Lying is bad for the soul."

  "Yeah, well Oyibo didn't seem to have a problem with it." Nkosi looked a little pissed at that one. We had enough problems, so I didn't push him any further. "Alright, so we have food. A lot of it. But we're not telling you where it is."