by Frank Tayell
“I thought it was more like a wall,” Sholto said.
“What are you talking about?” Jay asked.
“You saw the corpses,” Chester said. “How did those zombies die? They gathered them onto this road to make killing them easier, that’s my theory. But Thaddeus, you think they were being defensive?”
“A funnel would suggest some level of city-wide coordination,” Sholto said. “After the outbreak, I can’t see that happening. But walling off each block is the obvious work of whoever lived there.”
“Could it have been the Canadians?” Jay asked. “Actually, no,” he added, answering his own question. “Those tyres are completely flat, and there are no drag marks in that mud. There’s a ton of bones, though. They must have belonged to the living, right?”
“Probably,” Chester said. “And so this all happened soon after the outbreak. Where are we?”
“The junction of Fourth Avenue and…” Jay turned around. “Ninth Street. Okay, I think I prefer it when the Americans re-used our place names.”
“And how far are we from Brooklyn Bridge?” Chester asked.
“About half an hour,” Sholto said.
“I reckon we should hit one bridge today, then turn back,” Chester said. “We can have a rethink tonight about how to proceed.”
“We could use the launch,” Jay said. “Or maybe—”
From inside a corner shop whose singed plastic sign still proclaimed Everything Natural, came a trailing, scraping clink.
“Might be a cat,” Sholto said.
“Or a dog,” Jay said.
But it wasn’t. It was just another zombie. This creature, in the tattered remains of professionally designed urban camouflage, staggered out of the doorway, arms raised, head bowed low by gravity’s tug on a long length of trailing chain. A very long length of chain. The far end was still in the shop when Sholto, having drawn his hatchet, stepped forward and swiped low, hacking at the back of its knee. The zombie tumbled. Sholto planted his foot on its back, grinding its face through the mud and onto the pavement beneath, swung again, and finished the zombie for good.
“Think it was alone,” Jay said after a moment’s long pause.
Sholto tugged at the chain, pulling another five feet outside before he reached the end, a metal loop still affixed to plaster.
“It’s a long chain,” Jay said, walking over to the corpse. He drew his bayonet, and began prodding at the corpse.
“What are you looking for?” Chester asked, scanning the rooftops before looking up and down the road.
“A wallet. Or a letter. Or maple leaves.”
“You want to know if it was a Canadian? I don’t think so.”
“Me neither,” Jay said. “I think she was a soldier. So why was she chained up? She had to be human at the time, right? I mean, no one would chain up a zombie.”
“I’m going to take a look inside,” Sholto said. He glanced at Jay. “Maybe you two should keep watch out here.”
“Agreed,” Chester said quickly. “There’s something I want to check, anyway.”
“What’s that?” Jay asked as Chester retrieved his bike from where he’d dropped it.
“These buses,” Chester said, walking his bike over. He leaned the bike against the rear. “Should have thought to look at those rubbish lorries back by the shore. Yeah, look, see?”
“What?” Jay asked, leaning his bike next to Chester’s. “Oh. The fuel cap is open. What do you think that means?”
“It means we’ve not been thinking hard enough,” Chester said, walking to the bus’s doors. “What would you have done if you were stuck on this island? The bridges have been demolished, so what would you do next?” He levered the doors open, stepping inside with bayonet raised, but the bus was empty.
“I’ve no ships, right?” Jay asked.
“And the apocalypse began on the next island over,” Chester said, searching beneath the seats until he found a road map, crudely photocopied, on which someone had circled the junction. “This is the junction of Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street, yes?” he asked.
“I think you’re supposed to call it Fourth and Ninth,” Jay said.
“They’ve circled this junction on the map,” Chester said. “This was the rendezvous.” He stepped back outside and crossed to the next bus.
“Rendezvous for who?” Jay asked. “Where’d they want to go?”
“Dunno, but I’d like to find out where they ended up going in the days and weeks afterwards. Yep, the fuel cap’s gone.” He forced the doors. “Put yourself in their shoes,” he added as he rummaged behind the seat. “Another map. Yep, so this was the rendezvous. Does it matter?”
“Chester, can you just tell me?” Jay said wearily.
“They took the fuel to run generators to keep the lights on,” Chester said. “Freezers, too, I bet. At least to begin with. They looted, took what was in the stores, the restaurants, but then what? What was the name of that movie where they turned New York into a prison?”
“Dunno. I don’t think I’ve seen it.”
“Point is, that wouldn’t have happened here,” Chester said. “They’d have left. If it was us, we’d have left. You know what we should have done? Looked at some of the parks. Seen if anyone had dug them over, made an attempt at ploughing them, but I bet they didn’t. What would they have had to plant?”
“But if the bridges are demolished, how would they have left?”
“How would we do it?” Chester said. “Build a boat. Build a raft. Build a bridge of our own.”
“Building a bridge can’t be that easy,” Jay said.
“It is when you’ve got millions of people to help you,” Chester said. “I don’t know why these buses were here, or who built that barricade down by the shore, but that’d have been right at the beginning of the outbreak. Maybe even before the ships were gone. But after they were gone, after the nuclear war, whoever was still alive, still uninfected, they had two options. Stay and be prepared to kill for the last scraps you had, or work together building a bridge to get the hell out of here.”
“You’re getting that from a school bus’s open fuel cap?” Jay asked, walking out into the road. “Anyway, I’m more interested in why the Canadians came here.”
“Assuming it was the people from Nova Scotia, it’d be for the same reason as us,” Chester said. “New York’s a big place. It’s easy to locate, a bit like London in that respect. And with even more to loot.”
“I guess that only leaves the question of where they went afterwards,” Jay said, as he walked out into the middle of the junction, beyond the buses. “Stand still a moment,” he added, fishing out his phone.
“You’re taking a photo?”
“Of the buses, yeah,” Jay said, raising the phone in front. “They are still yellow school buses. And this is still—”
The ground shook. Chester hunched down. “Earthquake!” he yelled, a reflexive instinct, but New York was no more prone to seismic tremors than London had been.
Jay, out in the middle of the junction, stumbled and seemed to fall. Except it wasn’t him who’d fallen, it was the road. Beyond the school buses, a jagged square of tarmac, almost the same size as the junction box, had slipped, dropping two feet.
“Careful!” Chester called. A vibration rose up, beneath the soles of his feet. “And quick, back over here.”
“It’s fine,” Jay began, managing another step before the ground completely gave way beneath him. He fell, disappearing from Chester’s view in a cloud of dust and grime. With the road beneath his feet shaking, Chester fell to his knees, crawling forward as the buses rattled.
“Jay!” he yelled as the damp dirt quickly settled. “Jay!”
“I’m fine!” Jay called back in return.
Abruptly, the ground stopped moving. Slowly, the air cleared. Uncertainly, Chester stood. There was no sign of Jay. There was no sign of the road. A jagged square of asphalt had simply vanished.
“Jay?”
“Down here
!” Jay called.
Chester stepped forward.
“Chester, Jay?” Sholto called, running out of the store.
“We’re over here. Careful, the ground’s unstable.” Chester took another cautious step, across a six-inch crack that seemed bottomless. “Very unstable.”
And so was Jay’s perch. He was sprawled on a five-foot oblong of blacktop suspended by tense rods of rebar that protruded from the crumbling roadway. Most of the weight of road and young man was being held by a thick steel pipe, a foot in diameter. Six feet of emptiness, and a drop of three feet, lay between the edge of the road and Jay’s floating island.
“I think the subway’s down there,” Sholto said, peering cautiously into the darkness.
“Just stay put,” Chester said. “We’ll get some rope.”
“The subway?” Jay asked. “You mean like the Tube?”
“Yep,” Sholto said. “I’ll go look for some rope.”
“Yeah, I don’t think there’s time,” Jay said. “I’m going to climb down.”
“Don’t be daft,” Chester said. “Just give us a minute.”
“Better to climb than fall,” Jay said. “And there’s some metal grating below that’ll do for a ladder. And there’s a pipe below that.” He took out his torch, and shone it below. As he moved, so did his asphalt cloud. He dropped back to hands and knees, losing his torch in the process.
“Jay, just stay still!” Chester called.
“No, it’s cool,” Jay said. “It’s not far. Follow me down.” He rose to a crouch, then leaped into the darkness, completely disappearing. A second later, the tarmac island, reacting against his jump, slid down in the other direction, tumbling with a damp splashing crash below.
“Jay!”
“Yeah. I’m cool. Told you I would be. So are you coming down, or what?”
“I’ve found a rope,” Sholto said.
“How about a set of stairs?” Chester asked.
“We’d lose the rest of the day searching for them,” Sholto said. “I can go down, bring him up if you want to wait here.”
“No,” Chester said, taking the rope. In London, he’d pledged to never set foot in the underground again. But this wasn’t London. This wasn’t the underground. Besides… “He’s family.”
Chapter 31 - Below, Where’s Death?
Long Island, New York
“It’s pretty rank down here,” Chester said as he squelched out of the thigh-deep mud and up onto the ledge that ran along the tunnel. One rope hadn’t been long enough. Two ropes, spliced together, still hadn’t reached Jay. The decision that the two men should both climb down had been made with a haste Chester had time to regret as he watched Sholto descend.
The bottom of the subway tunnel was flooded. Above, the roof had collapsed. Above that, the ground had been utterly washed away. Cables dangled loose among the broken pipes that crisscrossed a conical cavern topped by an icing-thin skin of blacktop. The ground-slip had blocked the tunnel to the south, the direction in which they’d come, but viscous mud oozed out around the fallen masonry, suggesting a far greater volume of water now lodged behind. Rivulets of mud ran around a heavy lump of concrete, as if the blockage was about to be uncorked.
“Hurry it up if you can,” Chester called. “Jay, start moving.”
“Just a minute,” Jay said.
“We don’t even have a second,” Chester said.
“I dropped the baseball bat,” Jay said.
“We’ll find you another. Quick now, along the ledge.”
Sholto reached the end of the rope, dropping the last few feet to the swampy pool below. Chester reached out, giving him a hand up to the ledge.
“Everyone alive?” Sholto asked.
“Rank and wet, but I’ve been worse,” Chester said. “Lead the way, Jay. Careful but quick. How far until the next station?”
“Not sure, but not far,” Sholto said, taking the rear.
The collapsed road had only created a partial dam. Water was still finding its way along the subway-turned-river, lapping onto the service-walkway at the tunnel’s edge, and down which, backs hunched, the three trudged.
“If I didn’t say it before, I’ll say it now,” Sholto said. “Welcome to New York.”
“I think there’s a station up here,” Jay called.
The ledge widened, joining a platform, which the signs proclaimed to be Union Street.
“Gate, stairs, daylight,” Chester said. “That’s what I want, in that order, and I think that’s the first of them over there.”
He shone his beam on the closed wire grill securing the entrance to the platform, just as, along the tunnel, a grinding rumble turned to a whooshing roar.
“Gate!” Chester bellowed, pushing Jay before him, but only as far as the steel-shuttered doorway. It was padlocked from the inside. Before he could reach for his bag and his lock picks, the dam-burst reached them. Flood water rushed over the platform, an inch deep, then three, then five, sloshing around ankles, then calves before subsiding just as quickly as the water flowed onwards, and along the tunnel.
“Owh,” Jay moaned.
“You okay?”
“These were my good boots,” Jay said.
“We’ll stop in a shoe shop later,” Chester said. “They have those in Brooklyn, right?”
“One or two,” Sholto said. He sat on the platform bench near the door, and unlaced his own boots, pouring the water out. “That could have been a lot worse. I was expecting a lot worse. Can you open that gate?”
“Give us a second,” Chester said.
“The water level’s dropped right down,” Jay said. “It’s like, only a foot deep.”
“A foot and an ankle,” Sholto said.
“So where’s it going?” Jay asked.
“Where’d it come from, that’s a better question,” Chester said. “There. Done.” He hauled the gate back, and shone his light on the corridor beyond. “Looks like the stairs are this… oh.”
The stairway was blocked by a collapse more complete than the roadway, and far older.
“There’ll be an emergency exit, won’t there?” Chester asked, returning to the platform, shining his torch in search of it.
“Or we could head back,” Jay said. “Climb back up that rope, maybe.”
“I think getting away from a part of the city that’s already collapsed would be a smart move,” Chester said. “And as much as I hate the idea, I think that means following the water. We’ll try the next station. It can’t be far, right?”
“Atlantic Avenue, the next stop’s called,” Jay said, pointing to the station-map.
Sholto crossed to the tracks, shining his torch up and down the flooded tunnel. “Bridges and tunnels,” he muttered. “Everyone’s worst nightmare.”
“They’re not mine,” Jay said.
“It’s an expression,” Sholto said. “Or it was. But what I was thinking was that there were more than just bridges linking this island with Manhattan.”
“Oh,” Jay said. “You think this is how the locals escaped from here?”
“It’s not people I was worried about,” Sholto said.
“Welcome to my nightmare,” Chester said. “I’ll take the lead.”
Walking single file and slow, with backs and knees bent, they trudged along the ledge at the tunnel’s edge. In the shadowy torchlight, it was difficult to gauge distance or speed, either of themselves or the water flowing along the tracks. The water seemed to be getting faster, though. After an interminable time that felt like decades, but could only have been minutes, and only a few hundred yards from the station, the water disappeared through a metre-wide hole in the tunnel floor, gushing downward in a pattering waterfall.
“How deep is it?” Jay asked, as Chester edged forward, shining his light into the hole.
“Twenty feet,” Chester said. “Maybe less. It’s hard to be certain. There’s fast flowing water down there. Must be a sewer or something.”
“Can we get by?” Sholto asked.
Chester shone his light on the ledge. Though covered in green slime, it was no worse than the section they’d just walked along. “We can’t go back.”
Cautiously, keeping his eyes on his feet and not on the water rushing below, he inched across the ledge. When he reached the far side of the hole, he kept his speed slow, proceeding with agonizing caution until there was a loud thump behind. Jay had jumped from the ledge onto the near-dry tracks.
“Seems like solid ground,” he said.
“That’s what I thought about the road up above,” Chester said, but he climbed down. The tracks weren’t submerged, and in the middle of the tunnel, there was room to stand up straight. The tunnel floor did feel solid, though it was still damp, and oppressively dank, but here water was only pooled in patchwork puddles between the sleepers.
“This city doesn’t have long, does it?” Chester said.
“A few months, if that,” Sholto said. “That’s all I’d give her. Regardless of whether the bridges are intact. We need to forget about Manhattan.”
“We’ve got to at least see Brooklyn,” Jay said.
“And once we’ve seen it, we’ll stick as close as we can to the coast on our way back to the ship,” Chester said. “Now though, I’d like to see daylight.”
But they didn’t get a chance at the next station. The platform was sealed. Again with padlocks on the wire gates, and with rubble filling the stairwells beyond.
“I think someone deliberately blocked these tunnels,” Chester said.
“I don’t fancy going back. Do we have to dig our way out?” Jay asked.
“And I don’t fancy doing that,” Sholto said. “I say we keep going, hope the next station is better, and look for a service exit along the way.”
Instead, they found a train.
Their torches reflected off the glass window at the rear of the carriage blocking the tunnel. Chester reached up and tried the door facing the tracks. It was unlocked. He climbed up, shining his torch inside.
“I was starting to wonder what had happened to all the trains,” Jay said as he followed Chester inside. “Woah.”