Then something shifts. A kind of unspoken signal passes through the crowd like a ripple on water, and one by one they turn their ice-white eyes to me. Their faces are gray, washed out of all color, like the empty Atlantic ocean seen from Coney Island. Some are splashed with blood.
It's terrifying. I hold up my hands like I'm pacifying an angry drunk, as if that will somehow help. "Just a second," I actually say.
The first of them start running toward me. Their bodies flex and lope expertly, and damn fast. Some of them sprint.
I turn tail and sprint too, back up Willis. Intersections flash by with the thunder of their stampede gaining behind. Am I really running from a horde of, what, the dead? The infected? Back past 140th I toss a glance over my shoulder; leading the pack is a guy in a three-piece suit, splattered with dark blood. Yes, I am.
I break stride for a second to reach into my jeans for my phone, but of course it isn't there, I left it to charge. I remember Lara, she's in my apartment now.
Shit!
I crank up the speed, to levels I never attempted on the treadmill. I vault over the bonnet of a red Porsche jammed in headlight-to-trunk with a garbage truck. I dodge around another crawler on the ground. I run up the hood of a beat-up old Volkswagen and down the other side.
The Subway station passes by on my right. On 141st I hit the southern edge of Willis Playground. I pass back through the intersection on 142nd and pinpoint my snail-half man from his bloody trail. I jump over his head. This is ridiculous. My breath comes hard but my legs feel good, and the lack of a twinge still is amazing.
On the last stretch to 143rd I wheel left at the bodega, then I'm back on my street, with the lead guy maybe fifty yards behind.
I hit my block with the keys already in my hand. I jiggle them into the lock and dive into the hallway, slamming the door behind me. I stand for a second panting in the hallway.
It is so quiet in here it freaks me out. Then the door takes a massive thump as the guy's body hits it. I literally jump in place. I cast about me for something to reinforce the door with. This hall is so empty! There's an ancient dark pipe running around the base board into a heavy metal radiator mounted on the wall, but that's no use at all. There are shelves filled with the owner's chintzy bric-a-brac, the kind of Delft doggies and Portmeirion plates Cerulean and I sell in the online world we built together, a virtual copy of a real-world Yangtze fulfillment center.
No help there. There's a mirror too, and a little side-table and a chair.
THUMP.
The door rocks again and that must be the next in line. It's followed by a steady drumbeat as more bodies pound against the door. How long can it hold? I grab the side-table and push it up haplessly against the door. It looks utterly forlorn, far too small and light to do more than perhaps keep a cat out.
I grab the chair and stack it next to it, but that will do little more. I get frantic as more bodies impact, and the smacking of their dead white flesh on the wood becomes a hailstorm. They'll pummel the door from its brackets in moments, I'm sure.
My chest heaves up and down with panting. I can't do anything more here. We have to get the hell out.
I think of Lara.
I run up the stairs. Any day of the last year I would have been collapsed on the floor disabled by twinges a long time ago, but today I feel vital and alive. On the top floor I shuffle the key out and jiggle my room open, then step back into familiarity.
It's almost quiet up here, with the thumping four stories distant. My room's soothing smells are on the air; green tea, bolognese, fresh sheets. My Banksy print is there above the computer, my large JR canvas, my Space Invader reproduction. Everything is as it should be.
Except Lara is not here. I look to the bed, to the desk, even out the window, but she isn't here.
"What the hell…?" I mumble.
In her place the bed has been made and there's a note lying on the pillow, written in neat handwriting. I snatch it up and read it three times.
I had a great time. You have my number. Good luck with the zombies. Lara. xx
I sag to the bed and laugh. This is utterly crazy.
I showed her my painting of zombies. That's what she's talking about. But then, Jesus, what is happening?
The phone rings. I pick it up and see it's an incoming Skype call from Cerulean. There's a history of thirty-three missed calls, and I remember his message from earlier, that I thought had to be him just keen to get the lowdown on my big night.
Are you even alive? Call me!!
I've had his number for the last eight months, but we've never actually spoken. Neither of us wanted the novelty of our voices to bring on a twinge in the other.
Now I slap answer and hold the phone to my ear.
3. DEEPCRAFT
I met Cerulean six months in to my convalescence after the coma, while I was hiding out in my parents' dark Iowa basement. I met him in a virtual world I built myself, inside a video game called Deepcraft, where we both pretended to have the most boring job imaginable.
Those were slow, depressing days. My friends came to visit, but stopped as their presence made me twinge. My girlfriend in New York had already given up on me after I'd died in my coma for the third time.
I was pretty much alone.
"You'll be with us again soon," my mother would often say, when she brought down my lukewarm milkshakes or diet mayo tuna sandwiches. "Coming back to the land of the living."
I appreciated everything she did, but it pissed me off. I'd been through this terrible thing, a coma that literally killed me multiple times, and here now it was continuing. My brain was weak, my body too, I could hardly stand to be around other people and TV made my brain twinge like crazy, but I wasn't some feeble dying goat incapable of doing anything for myself.
"Baby steps," the doctor counseled. "Think of it like mental rehab. Your brain has to get re-accustomed to stimulation step gradually. Especially your art. Have you any idea how many parts of the brain fire when you're doing creative work? I'd stay away from it."
"Stay away from art?"
He gave a sad smile. "It looks like you may be allergic. I know that sounds strange, but trust me, Amo. Boredom is your bandage."
"And what if I don't?"
"Then there'll be complications."
"Like what, I might die?"
"Or worse."
"Or worse? What could be worse than dying?"
He shrugged. "Some would say a never-ending coma is worse. I've never been in a coma so I wouldn't know. I imagine if you never wake up though, then you may as well be dead. It's just a horrible, powerless delay."
"I woke up this time," I said, more confidently than I felt.
"You did," he agreed. "Who can say, really?"
Who could say? Nobody.
So I took it easy. I let my parents pamper me, I let boredom be my bandage, until I was more sick of reading old books and watching old black and white movies than I was afraid of death. I was already living with the crushing pain of the twinges, no matter what I did.
So I got a job.
I researched the least mentally demanding work out there, in the dullest, darkest environment, and came up with picker at a Yangtze online shopping fulfillment center. They're the people who collect the stuff we order on the website, who labor all day in vast windowless warehouses that cover about a square mile each.
I applied and they took me on. Two days later I turned up and nodded through a twinge-inducing but mercifully brief induction. The supervisor gave me a simple gizmo called a 'diviner', which I was to follow as it flashed left-right directions through the warehouse. I picked up the stuff it highlighted then put it on conveyor belts for the packing department, ad infinitum, like a rat in a maze.
I loved it. All day I walked down dark climate-controlled shelving corridors, making no decisions for myself, just following the diviner to pick up limited edition basketballs, sets of tea knives, greetings cards, self-published books from the cranky print-on-demand machine
s, talking teddies, butt-shaped pillows and so on. Whatever the diviner demanded, I collected.
It was a lovely monotony. I got back into some kind of physical shape, and built up my stimulation endurance. If any order was too weird, I'd count backwards from one hundred to distract myself. I got good enough that the twinges faded some and my thinking cleared up.
I started to notice the other pickers. They were all weirdos. Hank for example was a bitter redneck who got 'stranded' in Iowa after his community college kicked him out for selling weed. He was into the 'art' of picking up girls, and would try out conversational gambits on me when our paths intersected through the warehouse, like lonely little ants at a scent-trail crossing.
"So when she says her name, you say, 'You should speak a little louder, you must be the shy one in the group'," he told me once.
"It's embarrassing her," I said.
"Right, it's putting her on the spot, meaning you control the spotlight. It's cool stuff man, neuro-linguistic programming from the top artists in the game."
"Does it work?"
"I haven't tried it yet."
Bobby was six foot seven and really into North Korea. Sometimes he wore the red star of North Korea on a T-shirt he'd clearly printed himself, as if daring our overlords to kick him out. I don't think the supervisor ever noticed, he probably thought it was a basketball shoe logo.
Linda from Arkansas was working her way around all the Yangtze fulfillment centers in the US, for a travel memoir she was writing.
"It's like the travel book by the guy who hitch-hiked around Ireland with a fridge," she told me once. "You have to have a gimmick. This is my gimmick."
I loved it. Here were weird people, all with their own strange aspirations just like me, and I was handling it. When I needed time apart, I'd turn at a crossing when it looked as if we were going to intersect. A simple shrug of the shoulders and a point to the diviner would explain all.
The gods are re-routing me, that shrug said. It's just my fate.
It was Lucy on the print-on-demand machines, that clattery industrial corner of the center where books were baked in great X-ray like kilns, who put me onto Deepcraft.
I liked to stay near the printers for as long as I could before the sound made my brain twinge, watching pages slip in and out of the runners, forming up gradually into newly birthed books, their binding still tacky. These were dreams being made, just like my brain was rebuilding itself.
"I print my own here," Lucy told me once. She was a chubby girl with poorly dyed blue hair. We all called her Blucy. "I write romance with Amish vampires in the post-apocalypse. It's a big niche. They let me print them at cost."
I nodded. She showed me one of her books. The cover was awful, just clip-art of something representative of each of those genres horribly overlaid.
I made her one much better that night, stretching my brain's limits to the max. I had twinges for the following week, but she went wild for it. She invited me to play Deepcraft with her.
"It's just like digital Lego, Amo, you can turn down the danger and everything so there's no random events like falling into lava, no roaming zombies, nothing to make you scared or set off stress alarms, just a sandbox to build in. I make weird ruined worlds for my characters to live in. I think you'd get a kick out of it."
We went in together at her place, viewing one of her post-apocalyptic worlds through split-screen. It was funny to see the broken elevated roadways and tattered skyscrapers she'd envisaged built in chunky 3D blocks. Her ruins were fun and bright, like her writing. The game itself was intuitive and repetitive, involving grinding out ores by digging, then crafting them into tools and materials to create buildings.
It was fun. At home I built a miniature version of the fulfillment center; lovingly stacking up the long clean corridors, fitting it with low lights, stocking the shelves with whatever products I could craft, even hand-coding a diviner.
At the same time I started making covers for all Blucy's books. She never paid me, but she put me onto her writer friends who wanted covers, and they did pay. The work ran me down, but then I'd go into Deepcraft and grind out ores for hours, add to my fulfillment center, and wander it in a trance. In God mode I added non-player characters modeled on my co-workers in real life, who wandered its corridors endlessly online, forever doomed to think of little nuggets of information they wanted to pass on.
It was wonderfully soothing, and it sped up my recovery so much that I was able to make more covers. I had enough cash and energy after six months to quit the picking job and go full time with the covers.
"Don't go," my mother said, when I told her I was heading back to New York. "That place broke you. I couldn't bear for it to happen again."
My dad patted me on the shoulder and stood by.
I came back to New York on a Greyhound, quietly defiant. I worked on art that would've bored me to tears before. I went to the coffee shop Sir Clowdesley's as mental therapy to build up my tolerance. I crafted goods to sit on my Deepcraft warehouse shelves, even opening it up for others to run online and critique.
On one of those runs I met Cerulean.
Cerulean was an ex-Olympic diver who had a coma, just like me. He literally fell into his, in the midst of a dive off the highest platform. He broke his back on the edge of the pool, then nearly drowned in the water before anyone thought to fish him out.
He had everything way worse than me. With his broken back, he was a paraplegic, stuck to his bed and unable to leave his mom's basement, unlike me. It led to a coma far worse than mine, which left him far more crippled by the twinges.
But he found me.
We were the only two people in the world, as far as we knew, who'd been through the same coma and come out with the same mind-crushing migraines, and somehow, out of all the fake Deepcraft worlds in all the world, he found mine.
I saw him one night, loitering at the edge of the shelving, figuring out how to use a diviner. Wordlessly, I showed him. We started running the shelves together. We started to talk. Soon enough, we loved nothing better than to run the fulfilment center picking up randomly generated orders, together. He was always there for me. I was always there for him. We got each other through.
"Cerulean," I say into the receiver now, curled up against my bed and hardly believing this is happening, "holy shit, Cerulean you're alive?"
A moment passes and he says nothing, during which time I feel like I'm falling, then his voice comes through, weak and high.
"Amo?"
4. CERULEAN
"It's me," I whisper frantically, "I'm here, shit, I saw your message earlier, I thought you were talking about the date, then I went outside and damn, it's been crazy, the girl's gone, the whole city's gone crazy, what the hell is going on?"
"Amo," he says again, his voice getting clearer now, a light Southern drawl. "I'd just about given up, I've been calling and texting you for hours. You say you went outside?"
I take a deep breath. Abruptly tears start coursing down my face. Shit, this is Cerulean, and it's our first time to talk.
"The twinges are gone. I went out to get coffee and the world's gone mad. They're everywhere. They chased me up and down the Bronx. Planes were falling from the sky, New York is burning. What's going on?"
"Calm down. Amo, I know." He takes a breath, then plows ahead. "I've been watching it all night. It started around midnight and it spread across the country in hours. They were calling it a disease vector carried on the gulfstream, until it got them too and most of the news outlets went out. Twitter went down while they were trying to evacuate, but most people were at home asleep in their beds. The whole country's gone down, I'm surprised the internet is even up still, phone service and texts went down hours ago. I thought I'd call you until my uplink went dead, and then…" he trails off.
I stifle my tears and stare wide-eyed out the window.
"The whole country's gone down?"
"They've all turned, Amo. This thing is instantly virulent, one breath and
you're infected. You've seen them so you know. I watched it happen on the news; there were videos up on YouTube before that went down too. A few websites are still working, so I Googled everything I could find and downloaded it to the shared drive on your computer. You'll need to know this stuff, I have reams on the prepper lifestyle, survival tactics and strategies, how to make weapons and how to find weapons, how to rig a generator and hotwire a car, siphoning fuel from a station, all that kind of stuff. It's good I did because Wikipedia has just gone down; I guess they didn't get enough donations."
He gives a scrappy laugh. I'm struggling to catch up with everything he's saying. My heart's still pounding from the run.
"What are you talking about? Cerulean?"
He takes a deep breath. "Amo, I'm cured too. The twinges are gone and I'm thinking clearly. I've not turned, but everyone else is. You said everyone you saw in New York has gone gray? They're all that way, as far as I can tell. Now you need to survive."
"Sure, but-" I begin then trail off. There's something missing. "What about you?"
He laughs. "My brain got better but I'm still a cripple, buddy."
I hadn't thought of that. I wince as the repercussions come down. Of course his spine is still broken. He can't run, can't fight, he can't leave his mother's basement. It's why 'the Darkness', our shared nickname for the virtual Yangtze fulfillment center, came to mean so much to him. It was his only way out.
Shit.
"Where do you think I'm going to go?" he goes on. "I'm busting for a piss but is my mom going to come down and take me to the toilet? More likely she'll come down and tear out my throat. She's banging on the basement door even now, she's been at it all night, her and a few dozen others. It sounds like they're pulling up the floor overhead, actually."
"What the-" I start. "She's turned too?"
I can hear him smiling. God I love Cerulean. That fit, handsome, paraplegic bastard. His mom's upstairs coming for him and he's been calling me all this time, trying to save me. "Of course she is, and it's not to bring me a batch of midnight cookies."
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