The Last: A Zombie Novel (13 page)

Ah well.

The stink of greasy burning reaches me. It carries on the air. I look up 3
^rd
avenue and see there's a thick fog of black smoke curdling closer. I get in the police car and start it up. I click buttons until I find the one that starts the siren.

The lights flash overhead, splashing reflections off the hummer, and the siren rings. I drive it back up to the fog, and there I wait.

The ocean comes, bringing the whole fire with them. They stagger on crisping legs while their bodies burn, their faces running like the Gestapo-guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It is horrific, but I'm in the middle now and I can't stop.

I wait until they're almost on me, and the cloud of their black smoke is everywhere. Then I lead them away. I drive slowly north, with their burning bodies stumbling behind. None of them run now. I drive until they stop following, and the trail of oily smoke gives out, because they've all burned out. They lie behind me like a long black scar on the city.

Oh god, what have I done.

I find a bus facing west and I drive it back down 4
^th
avenue. I don't want to see the slug trail of their bodies, but on 23
^rd
I pull in and see them everywhere. There are myriad charred corpses on the floor and lying atop the scattered desks. There are deep black scorched carbon marks up all the buildings. The front of Sir Clowdesley has been obliterated with dark grease. You can't see my sign in the window for all the black. It's just a mess, and it reeks of half-cooked meat and gasoline.

I pull the bus in, and three-point turn it so it's blocking most of the western edge of 23
^rd
where it borders on 4
^th
. I get out and walk through the wreckage to the nearest car. The tarmac is hot underfoot, and my feet come away mired with black sludge, like I'm walking through treacle. A hand with most of the skin peeled away reaches out to me from a bubbly body.

I get in the car, so dark with tar I can't make out the model, and turn the key. My hands are black just from handling the door. The windscreen wipers work ineffectively to clear the mess from the glass. The engine turns and the wheels slip and skid in the human oil. I pull the car up and slot it lengthwise into the gap between the front of the bus and the nearby building. It's a near perfect fit.

Can they get past this?

I study the pattern of blackened desks. They've just been pushed apart and backward, like broken levees where the mass was too much.

I drive the other cars on my road to back sidelong to the bus. They'll add their weight. In large numbers they could climb over, and even a few floaters could probably squeeze through the gaps, but I'll mortar those in with something. Maybe mortar. I flash on the prepper Bible, and where New York's construction equipment may be kept.

That would help.

I pull up about eight more cars to block 23
^rd
to the east where it meets 3
^rd
Avenue. These will serve as ballast for when I get another bus, backing it up. I notice I've left my patrol car inside the barricade, but it doesn't matter now. My lime green moped is still there too, though it's not green anymore, and it's been knocked on its side and crushed by countless feet. There are thick mucusy strands of something glistening around it, like organic padlock chains. Entrails?

This whole charnel pit stinks of barbeque and offal. This was a mistake.

I climb out of the cesspit over my barricade of cars, boost another car with its key in the ignition, and drive off looking for a bus. I see floating lost zombies and swerve to hit them. Doing this disgusts me, but I can't stop myself. They rattle up the hood, into the glass and over the roof. When the windscreen cracks so badly that I can't see, I get another car. I find a bus somewhere around 37
^th
, and drive it back, crunching the crawlers beneath its ten-ton frame. All of these are mistakes but I can't stop making them. It's like I'm not myself, and all I can do is kill.

I pull the bus up flush along to the cars and handbrake it.

It's still not enough. Perhaps they can push them back. Perhaps they can climb over. I need more buses. I know where to find them.

The Port Authority bus terminal in Midtown feels like a dungeon, dark and dingy once I'm through the glass vestibule with its pop-red modern art. I use one of my stolen flashlights to illuminate my way. No floaters come for me, as it's empty inside. I walk through the massive dark interior, bigger even than the darkness, with only my footsteps as company. Right about now I'd talk to Io, if she still worked. What would I say?

Forgive me father for I have sinned.

I smash into a bus at stop C22, where I once took a trip up to summer camp in Boston. I was a camp counselor back then, working with at-risk kids from the inner city. I met a friend from Iowa State University by chance, sitting on a railing waiting for his Greyhound going west. It was bizarre. We talked about how easy it was to get lost in the bus terminal's dark nether halls, and what we both missed about college. We agreed to catch up online, but we never bothered. His bus came and we went our separate ways.

A different world, now.

There is no key in the bus. Of course not, that would be too easy. There are a few sleepy floaters though, rousing like this is finally their stop.

I leave them. I get out. I wander around the maze of buses for a while, feeling lost. Is this the nightmare, I wonder, or the reality? One of the ocean pops up around the edge of the bus alley I'm walking in, and I jab him hard in the throat with the sharp end of the iron. He falls to the ground. I notice as I step over him, he's wearing the gray uniform of a bus driver.

There must be a room where they keep all the keys. It would be an office for the drivers, probably protected by a pass card, some kind of electronic lock that would be fixed solid now, forever. I'll never find it before nightfall for sure.

I follow the buses to the exit. Light floods around me, shaping the mouth of this concrete nether-hall with black diesel smoke accretions. I feel sick at myself. I'm already tired of smashing my way into things.

I smash into a Greyhound bus sitting in the exit, which must've stopped on its way out. The keys are in it. I rev it up and drive. It bullies its way roughly down 8
^th
Avenue, plowing other road users aside. On 23
^rd
I turn left and pull it up across the gap where I slotted the car in. I work it back and forth until the flank grinds hard against the brick face of a Lush soap shop, knocking over a lamp-post and striking sparks off the other bus and car. This is my mortar. I get out and look up at my new wall.

It is impregnable. At first I'm not even sure how I'm going to climb it. Then I remember. I smash a few windows, clear the glass, and climb up them. Atop the bus I look back. My area is clear of floaters still, and grossly filthy still. A few more buses will do it.

I do the run to Port Authority on 41
^st
and 8
^th
three more times, swapping a stolen car nearby for a bus each time for the trip back. On the last trip back I stop off at the tech store on 44
^th
street and pick twenty laptop batteries off the dark shelves, plus headphones and immersion goggles. I stop at a clothes store and pick up some clothes. I stop at a bed store and pick up sheets and a few duvets.

I don't have a gun. I don't want one now.

I climb back in over my bus-blockades, each two thick now. I have the whole street now, and it's disgusting. I traipse through the treacle of burnt bodies like an alien landscape, numb and barely in control of my legs. Across the street there's a liquor shop and I pick up a bottle of whiskey. I pick up another one. I carry all my stuff to Sir Clowdesley and look inside.

A few floaters mill in there. It stinks sourly, like old vomit and charcoal that's been pissed on. I see my new bedding has been trailing in the black and I let it drop. I drop all this shit except the batteries in their shopping basket and the whiskeys. I climb in.

The floaters come for me. I hit them in the brains. They must be dizzy, because they're slow. They let me come in, and up in the library I find my nest, and my cache of guns spread around the floor.

I shoot them in the throats. I go back to my shitty sofa and stuff tissue paper up my nose to block out the stink. A breeze carries it in from the street and circulates it.

I boot up my laptop from my pack. I get the spare batteries on standby. I get out the USBs and boot up the darkness. I plug in my goggles, my noise-canceling earphones, and escape.

If they come for me, I don't care. I can't do this anymore. What I've done today is already unforgivable, a kind of genocide. The fulfillment center peels open before me. Here everything is simple, there are shelves to walk like city blocks and there are goods I need to collect like guns and buses.

I laugh. It's all the same. I get a mouthful of the stench of what I've done. I run on through the darkness while tears run down my eyes and hang in the goggle-cups, obscuring the screen. I do what I'm told. I drink some whiskey and I do what I'm told. 

11 – THE DARKNESS

The fulfillment center is dark and calm. I go round and round in circles for hours, picking up junk and delivering junk, bringing some measure of reality and routine back to my existence. I could even imagine I'll bump into Cerulean soon. We'll run together. I'll go to bed in my Mott Haven flat, and the next day I'll wake up looking forward to my trip to Sir Clowdesley, because the barista called Lara's on shift.

It's a dream that makes me sound like a stalker. I'm in Sir Clowdesley now, waiting for her. It doesn't smell of lovely roasted coffee anymore.

I go to Blucy at the print-on-demand machines. She runs through her set script, talking about her books, selling me on Deepcraft, things like that. I watch as Hank and the others go by, endlessly grinding for loot in the darkness' monster-less dungeon.

Hours pass into the night. At some point I sleep with the goggles still on. When I wake up the laptop battery is dead. The goggles have dug sharp creases into the skin around my eyes. I don't want to take them off, but just for a few moments I must.

Sir Clowdesley's walls, ceiling and floor are streaked with black grime. Light creeps in around the tumbled blackboards and through cracked windows. Chairs and tables have been scattered everywhere. One of the floaters is actually lying dead near my feet. I didn't notice that.

I get up and drag it by the feet to the stairs, where I tip it down. There are four other bodies there, each lying in a dark bloodstain in a pool of hot spring light, smeared with the ashy grease of their fellows.

I go to the toilet in the toilets off the stairwell. The water flushes for what I expect will be the last time. There'll be no water pressure any more to fill the cisterns. I open the door into the inner donut and look out. There's a deep blue sky, and the air here is so fresh it burns my lungs. I feel like a subterranean thing peering for the first time into the light.

It isn't for me.

I go back to my sofa. I unbox one of the batteries and slot it into place. I fish out my
USB pack, wrapped in saran plastic, and unfold them. I plug the first in and peruse the files. It's all prepper stuff, but for the file labeled 'Cerulean'.

I take a long fortifying slug of whiskey, then I open the file. Hit me with it all. I find the code for a new non-player character in the mod file, and preview it. Of course it's Cerulean, his image and a coded text file. I find myself blinking back boozy tears. I boot up the center, slip my goggles back into their grooves in my face, and install him into the mod.

There he is, just as always, a green and blue parrot with a pirate on his shoulder. Immediately he starts walking away, down the long halls, and I follow him. I try to raise him with a text interaction, but he's not interested. He's got a program. He's not even looking at his diviner.

Just to see him brings home the reality. I'll never talk to my friend again.

He turns left at Blucy, walks straight by the supervisor who's making marks on his notepad, then stops at an aisle in the shelving. I see some new items there, they look like comics.

"Hey Amo," Cerulean says. The text bubble floats above his head. My hearts turns over in my chest.

"Hey Cerulean," I type back.

"I made this for you," he says. His parrot picks up one of the comics and holds it out. "It's good work. It means something."

I take the comic and bring it up across my screen, then laugh aloud, in the real world. It is a digital version of my own comic, Zombies of New York. It is completely fitting. I leaf through the pages, every single panel and cell I made in the last six months present and correct.

"I hope you don't mind," he says. "I just want you to know I'm proud. If anyone deserves to survive a real zombie apocalypse, it's you. You have the right kind of empathy."

I laugh again, this one more like a sob. Nothing I've done so far has been empathetic. I've only been brutal and cruel, and making excuses for the reason why doesn't mean shit. It is a weakness in me still.

"You might not believe that now," Cerulean says, as if he can hear me scoffing. "But you will. I've seen it, you know? I saw things in my coma too. If you're even alive, and you ever see this message, you'll understand, or you'll come to. Because these zombies are you and me, Amo. Did you know that? Yes/No?"

I recognize this question as the start of a simple decision tree. We programmed them into our non-player characters, to give them some diversity in their scripts. I type, "No."

"You don't? Think about it. Did you see any photos of yourself in your coma? Probably not. Did they tell you any of the weird stuff you did? Probably not. Do you know I went gray for a month, like a dead man? My eyes went white, like I had glaucoma. I was up and sleepwalking, following people. They probably didn't tell you any of that, because it's too damn freaky. My mother told me. It sounds like a zombie though, doesn't it?"