They're charging again. I slam the horn down and charge right back.
It's like ten-pin bowling for people. They go flying in all crazy directions; off to the side, over the top, bouncing back into the crowd. Bits of them start to get tangled up in the windshield's fractured web, here a scrap of tongue, an earlobe, a gobbet of dry gray skin.
"Come on!" I yell into the fury of the stampeding storm. I hit the solid depths again and rev backward. The poor dog won't shut up. I ram backward and forward like a steam piston. When the windshield breaks inward it takes me totally by surprise, showering me with crystal glass and ocean bits. Hands grope inward from bodies suspended on the hood.
I race back and they slide off. I stop an intersection down, spy out a better machine, an RV, and get in. The keys are in the dash, it revs up nicely, and I bring it to bear like a battering ram.
The dog barks. I crush dozens of them. I splatter dozens. I probably grind hundreds under my wheels. In all, it doesn't do a damn thing. I can't get closer. Hot tears splash off my hands. One damn dog! I couldn't save Cerulean but maybe I can do this.
"I'm coming!" I shout to him. "Buddy, I'm coming." I hammer at the ocean but the ocean is an ocean and it swells to encompass me. Rather than getting closer, each time I get driven further away, carried on the surging tide. I can't think for the dog's crazed barking.
"Hold on, I'm coming."
Then the barking stops. I don't see the moment he gets pulled down. It's a wholly unremarked death, like every other death in this new age, and it makes me seethe. I beat the crap out of the steering wheel with my fists. Ramming them with an RV is not enough for this. Burning them won't cut it. I need something more.
* * *
The RV punches through the glass entrance hall of the Police Academy with ease. I drive it on into the lobby until it cracks to a halt against the elevator shaft.
HOOOONK.
I ply the horn, drawing the floodwaters out. The lobby is low and wide; more of a space to line up and wait, like the DMV, than a place to be awed and impressed by.
HOOOONK.
Some of the ocean come, trickling out of their hidey-holes. There's a few regular cops amongst them, plus some more civilians. They bang against the RV's sheet-metal sides. I feel like a turkey in tinfoil packing, waiting for the heat to turn on.
HOOOONK.
Maybe there are fifteen. Many have blood on them, masked around their lipless mouths like gory lipstick. I pull the RV back and ram them.
It works well for this many. It breaks necks and crushes limbs. It only takes one more go before they're all down. I get out and run over the glass-sprayed, blood-smeared lobby floor, to one of the cops. He's burst like a bloody piñata. I crunch the tire iron through his neck and pluck out his gun.
I have some familiarity with this now. I flick the slide to check the magazine, full. I toggle the safety off. I stride the remnants of this horror show and put them out of their misery.
Looking back at my RV is disgusting. It is not white any more, but a maroon-brown the color of guts and shit. It looks like a hairball made of blood and sinew, with hundreds of scraggly tufts of skin and meat caught on tears in the metal and cracks in the glass.
I collect three more guns and put them in my pockets. I collect two flashlights from utility belts. I look for the stairs. There's bound to be a shooting range in the basement. Near to that there's bound to be a munitions cabinet, and a key.
I rummage in the darkness, deep into the building. I shoot a few. I find pitch-black stairs and descend. In the mad, cold dark I advance, until I hit a long alley leading through swing double doors and onto a deep low-ceilinged range.
HANDGUNS ONLY
The sign is very helpful. It tells me this is not the shooting range for me. I keep on going until I find another one, with a mixture of long and short-range targets. My flashlight can't pick out the furthest ones.
I scavenge around. I shoot bits of kelp that come jogging out of the shadows, leaving them gurgling. I find a room with long metal roll-cupboards, and I shoot at the locks until it becomes clear that won't open them. I search in nearby desks and ranks of keys hung on hooks on a wall in an office somewhere until finally I find the one I need.
The cupboards roll open and they are not bare. They are full of sleek black shotguns, AR-15 platform rifles, and what look like sniper rifles.
Beneath them are banks of ammo in nice bright cardboard boxes, orange and green and purple. I find a gear-bag and stuff it with boxes, then throw in two of each gun type on top.
I make five trips or thereabouts to the surface, filling up the RV with munitions. I go back to Times Square. I stop a block away from the throng, where the marks of my passage are clear in blood and broken bodies.
I bolt the RV's door closed. I pop the skylight and push my gear bags through to the roof. Already they're coming for me. I settle on top with one of the sniper rifles. I work the new slide, line my eye up to the scope, and shoot.
The kick punches the scope back into my head, and blood springs out of my face. I gawp in shock at the fountain spurting out from above my eyes.
"Shit!"
I slap a hand over the wound and drop the rifle. I drop back into the RV and rummage through the cupboard until I find sticky bandages and a mirror. The wound is a half-moon just above my right eye, cut by the scope's sharp edge. I laugh and bandage it up. Blood seeps through but not much, and the first wave hits the RV hood.
I climb back up, fetch a shotgun, and shoot down into them.
The butt slams up into my armpit painfully, but three of them evaporate in gray mist. Brilliant.
More are coming. I get down on one knee above the windshield, take aim vaguely, and let rip.
* * *
It takes hours. Stragglers still come, drawn on strange tides.
I've killed them all. My trigger finger burns with blisters. Shooting the AR-15s was the most godlike. I sprayed wave after wave and they went down. I got better at shooting them in the throats at a distance, like scything down a row of corn.
SPAT SPAT SPAT DROP DROP DROP
Reload. They came on and I shotgunned them to brain-shells and dust. At one point they cleared far enough back that I popped out the sniper rifle again and set to work.
SMACK SMACK SMACK
They went down. They went down all day long.
Now I'm standing surrounded by the strange coral creations of their bodies, a landscape of the heaped-up dead like a full-color image of the holocaust, and it's too much. I can't take this, I don't want to kill them anymore, so I take the path I ought to, which is really the only decent thing to do, having come this far.
I hold a handgun to my head and pull the trigger.
18. AARON
When I was younger I had a brother. His name was Aaron and he was four years older than me, and he specialized in riding his Schwinn bike, playing WWF wrestling games, and calling out the endings to movies we watched as a family.
"Stop spoiling it!" I'd complain. "Mom, tell him."
"I haven't even seen this one," he'd laugh, spreading his hands. "How's it a spoiler if I'm just guessing?"
We used to ride our bikes up and down the street outside our house, jousting with fallen corn stalks picked from the fields. The stalks usually bent on impact, but they hit hard enough to hurt. That was part of the excitement though. The harder the hit the more we'd laugh.
Afterward we'd compare welts and bruises on our chests and shoulders, and guess at how mom would shout down the house if she ever saw them.
"For that one she'd shit a house," I'd say, pointing at a good bloomer I'd landed across Aaron's sternum.
"She'd shit a whole farm," he'd answer. "Even the barn!"
When I was fourteen Aaron died. It was a hit and run, he was in a rented Oldsmobile with his date for the prom, and whoever did it totaled them. We never found the guy. Just out of the darkness, my brother was stolen away.
I stole my first zombie comic a month after the wake
. In the mall, it was easy to do. I lingered for ages, fingering all the copies, leafing through them, hoping I'd become invisible to the clerk on duty down at the checkouts.
I knocked the comics over. I picked them up. I straightened them out. I luxuriated in the raspy touch of them, the wrapping paper feel of them, the vibrant colors; all that blood and gore.
I asked myself, is this what Aaron looked like when he shot through the front windshield and they found bits of him spread all across the corn? I thought knowing might help. I hated the zombies because they were like the guy who killed Aaron, but at the same time you had to forgive them, because they didn't know did they?
We don't hate tigers or sharks or bears, though they kill and eat people sometimes. We don't hate cows or buffalo in the fields, but they can trample people to death. A horse can kick the jaw clean off a man's face. A camel can bite off your nose. Maybe some people hated camels, I wasn't sure.
The point was, I couldn't really hate the zombies. They fascinated me too much.
I started stealing a copy a day. I'd slide it up my shirt or down my pants. Always I did it a different way, like each time it was a different crime and they could only get me for one, because there was never a pattern. On the way home I'd always do something good, like help an old lady carry some bags, even just a little way. They thought I was such a little saint. I'd help a little kid find his lost bit of green glass. I'd smile at a baby in a stroller instead of scowling, while all along the comic would be burning its secret message into my skin, trapped against my belly or around my back.
Hot, sweet shame. It was something to feel, something to be.
I'd never been into art before that. I was a sports junkie like Aaron, but every time I took to the field after the crash, all I could see was his burst-out eyeballs on the road, his guts piling out while he panted a few last hot breaths, wondering why nobody was coming to help him.
I got good at art by studying the comics. I started doing them myself. It wasn't always zombies, but it was always monsters of some kind; strong monsters that made everything seem hopeless, who could wring every bit of life out of heroes and leave them desiccated and weak. It had to be that way, so I could make myself stronger. Shit happened in reality, and true strength lay in knowing and accepting that, so you wouldn't be surprised when it hit you in the face like a clothesline out of the black on a weaving county road.
You saw it coming, like Aaron and the end of the movies. It didn't surprise you so it couldn't hurt you, not more than physically. You were the one left smiling, no matter how badly bruised, no matter how physically broken, because you'd seen it coming and kept on driving, kept on riding, kept on stealing anyway.
It was your decision. It meant something that way.
One day my dad caught me reading the comics up in the tree Aaron and I had once shared. He played it cool. Six months had gone by, and I had a stash of hundreds tucked away wrapped in plastic beneath a loose board on the porch. Maybe he'd known about it for a while.
"Sport, what have you got there?"
I told him. I admitted I'd stolen it. He climbed up the tree and put his arm around me and we sat like that for a while.
"We need these things," he said eventually. "I understand, we all need to heal, and God knows healing isn't pretty, but there comes a time you have to start back, Amo. You can't stay in your hole forever, you have to come out. It's never too late to stand up and be a good man. Do you understand what I'm saying? Aaron's gone, I know that's a bitch, it's a bitch for me and your mom, I won't lie. But we pick up and we act right just as soon as we're able, and not a minute delayed. I think you know that."
I started to cry quietly.
"You'll take those comics back to the store. You'll explain what you've done, and I'll come in and explain what it means. You'll pay them back Amo, whatever they ask. It's what a good man does. He doesn't take the things he doesn't need, and you don't need to be taking these. What even are they?"
"Zombies," I snuffled.
He looked at the one in my hand and made a squinty face. "Rather you than me."
I laughed. We laughed.
I miss my dad. I miss my brother. I miss Cerulean and everything that's gone.
* * *
I wake with a burning headache.
The skies above are gray with cold, thick clouds. It must be a whole other day.
I have really screwed this up. I lie there in Times Square and watch the clouds churn, because I can't move. I've become a paraplegic like Cerulean. I try to tilt my head to the side but it doesn't move. My arms and legs are a foreign country I can't even see.
The clouds morph into faces, just like in Zombies of New York. Here goes Lara. There goes Cerulean, or Robert, his silly parrot bobbling by. I try to wipe my eyes but of course I can't. Worst of all I can hear the ocean. I can't tilt my head to see but I know they're below me still, lapping at the RV's sides with the sighing breath of the ocean.
The RV starts to move. They're pushing it with their mass. I feel like a fallen Viking warrior, sent out to sea in his funeral ship, caught on the tide.
The tops of buildings pass by in my vision. They're bringing me into Times Square. Perhaps we'll go see a movie.
I laugh.
It starts to rain. It comes down hard and sleeting, it gets black overhead, and bright flashes of lightning fork the sky like Odin's wrath. Whoosh! My cheeks and forehead get peppered in a cold military drumbeat, driving in and out the pain. I open up my mouth and drink the water down. I'm dead but I'm not dead.
The ocean patters happily below me, slapping and slipping in the slick water. It's filling up the streets and the sewers, it covers me and gathers me up, dribbling in and out of the holes in my brain, getting ice cold and slushy into my thoughts.
A dog called Buddy comes to mind, and a little boy running up and down jousting with his older brother. He always let me hit him too. He was such a good brother and I loved him so much, and I never think about him these days. I want him back. I want to see my brother again.
"Can you show me that?" I shout into the rain. "Can you give me that?"
We never talked about him. It got so bad that if I even saw his name I'd go into a migraine that lasted for days.
"My dear boy, coming back to the world of the living."
My mother flashes before me, standing at the top of the steps with a tray in her hands, smiling down with misery-filled eyes. I see the misery now, and the fear. We were all so afraid, we've all been so afraid for so long.
"Aaron!" I cry into the rain, out to the floaters and the kelp and the ocean all around, because I don't have the words to say whatever it is I really mean. "Aaron!"
My brother smiles in my face, so mischievous, and I remember we were planning to firecracker the school's mailbox to celebrate after his prom. BOOM. Such fun. We would run away laughing, with the janitor on our tails and a security alarm going off from a nearby car.
What have we done? What have I done? Oh my brother, what have I become?
* * *
When I next wake it is silent and still. Overhead the sky is a beautiful and clear black, graffiti-sprayed with stars. I shot a hole in my head, but I can still appreciate this.
I think of Sir Clowdesley. He was a great British navy admiral, whose death prompted the rush to uncover the secret of longitude, which allowed European ships to traverse the great gulf of the Pacific Ocean to the Americas.
He prompted that rush by failing. His ship foundered on rocks in the British channel scarcely fifty miles from land, because he didn't know where he was. All of his men perished, or so the legend goes. So progress was born from loss, and humanity advanced.
I lift my arm to stroke the stars' patterns. My fingers are red and angry from trigger-work, but they paint the sky like delicate brushes in the most complex dot-to-dot.
The air is chill and eats into me. The RV's roof is frigid under my back, but I can't complain. The ocean have fallen quiet and I'm at peace.
My h
ead lolls to the side. I see them, all lying down on the ground. Their bodies are entwined, and by moonlight they don't look so monstrous. They look like brothers and sisters holding close to each other through the night, waiting for the warmth of the sun. Despite their filth and raw wounds and tight gray skin, they seem content.
I realize I can move.
I lift my arms. They are my actual, real arms. I lift my legs and the RV roof flexes with a tinny clang.
I lift my hands to my head. I feel the dry scab where I put the muzzle just above my ear. I probe it gently; it's tender and springy, because surely the bone is gone. I probe the other side, and find a large and ragged scab.
The bullet blew out and took a chunk of bone with it, but somehow it still sealed. Somehow I'm still alive, and thinking.
It's impossible. I've heard of people surviving gunshots, but not like this.
I push myself to my knees. The roof crumples and rolls. I'm unsteady, my balance is shot and the world whirls, but here I am on my knees. I pat my body down. All here. I look slowly around me.
The ocean is on all sides, white and gray in the moonlight. Their eyes are closed and they all lie still, wrapped in each other's embrace, breathing with one lung.
I've been spared.
A shudder passes through me. I run my hand through my hair, down my neck to my spine, and make my guesses. This is what kills the ocean. Perhaps this is what kills me too?
It reframes the infection. I imagine my coma, with data shunting from my brain into my spinal column like gigabytes transferring to USB, changing the way I think, the way I eat, the way I live.
I don't need my brain anymore.
It's a bizarre and meaningless revelation, the purpose of which I am lost to explain, but it is a revelation still. It means the ocean are like me, and I am like them. After all, I made them.
Kneeling in the dark, I make my vow. I will not treat them like this again. I will not exact revenge. They are what they are, an ocean, and there is world enough for us all.
I leave most of my guns on the roof behind. I climb down the ladder on the RV's back, then dizzily weave my way through their sleeping bodies.
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