Are you even alive? Call me!!
I chuckle at that, because he's being dramatic. I texted him from the restaurant restroom in the middle of the date last night, while I was crumpled on the floor by the toilet bowl beneath the weight of an almighty twinge. He helped me get through the worst of it, as he so often has before.
Another half hour won't kill him.
I plug the phone into the charger and roll smoothly to my feet, then get dressed and pad quietly to the door.
Down through the tenement building's three floors and out the door, I emerge onto the street. It's quiet at this early hour, and there's a chill in the air; 143rd street in the South Bronx, overlooking the scrubby dry Willis playground, just a few streets over from the Mott Haven historic district. There are cars on the road but none of them are moving, stopped by traffic probably. I duck into my hoodie, tuck my hands in my pockets, and stroll down the sidewalk. My breath makes clouds of steam in the air.
At any minute I'll wake up. I can't stop thinking it. I focus on my feet. If my feet are still here, it has to be real. Surely the twinges will hit at any minute.
I round the corner onto Willis, crossing in front of the neighborhood bodega. The lights are on inside, with stacks of Bud Lite in crates in the window, but I don't see anyone come for their morning swig. The awnings are up so they're open, probably in the back getting stock.
I go by. A shorthaired terrier is shivering tied by the leash to a newspaper box. He looks at me plaintively as I pass. I figure I'll buy an extra croissant and hand it to him. Do dogs like croissants? All this is unreal.
I reach the coffee shop, a 24-hour Starbucks, and push through the glass door. It's not a patch on my favorite coffee shop in downtown Manhattan, called Sir Clowdesley; a cozy little indie spot rife with hispters and decked out in raw wood shelving and teal walls. Here there's no stacks of donated threadbare books, no warm feel of a weird little community; it's all so corporate.
I go to the register and scan the blackboard in back for prices. They usually put the decaffeinated somewhere tricky in the corner, surrounded by swirly chalk effects like they're trying to disguise it. Dare I go with a regular latte, or is that courting disaster?
I lean on the bar. The barista must be out back checking something too. Only the low whine of an air conditioning unit circulating hot air breaks the stillness. I survey the place; it's empty. Not a soul. I see a few haphazard coffees spread around on tables, the nearest one half-drunk.
This is getting weird.
"Hello?" I call.
No answer comes. I walk along the bar, looking for a bell, but there is none. I shout "Hello" again but nobody answers. Maybe they've all gone out for a bit, maybe a cigarette break, en masse, out the back?
My heart speeds up. One possibility leaps to mind.
I exit the coffee shop and jog out into the street. I see it now, where before I was too dizzy with the lack of twinges to really notice. The few cars have actually stopped, flat in the road and not at the traffic light, some lilted at weird angles like they were haphazardly pulled over. None of them are moving, and there's no one in them. Across the road a BMW with gold hubcaps has gone through the window of 'Billy Ray's' pawnshop. Its taillights flash on and off soullessly.
Normally this much would set me twingeing hard, but I'm still in the clear. I look all around, studying the unkempt bushes of Willis playground, the windows of studio apartments on the redbrick building's first floor, but there's no sign of anybody.
Nobody's here.
My mind races. Could I have slept through some kind of terrorist attack, and everybody has fled? Sweat prickles down my back, and through unconscious habit I start to count back from one hundred, a twinge-prevention tactic, but still no pain comes on. This has to be a dream, and I don't like it anymore.
I start to run.
"Hello!" I shout as I jog south down Willis toward the bridge. If there's one thing I've been able to do throughout this last miserable year of my life, it's jog. There is nothing interesting at all about running on a treadmill, staring at a wall, but the doctors said exercise might help, so…
"Anybody?" I call.
I think I see a glimmer of movement behind a curtain on a second story apartment, but it's gone. There may be figures in the park, but when I try to focus on them they blur away amongst the trees.
I blow into the intersection with 142nd panting, and see the wreckage of a car accident just round the corner. A blue Chevy saloon is resting at a crazy angle on its roof, its front all dented in, next to a yellow bulldozer in the middle of the road. I reconstruct the impact in my mind, following the sparkling pattern of smashed glass and black skid trails burnt onto the road.
Smoke gushes up through the car's chassis, and there's a strange scratching sound coming from inside. I look up and down 142nd, where normally there are people chatting and strolling, reading papers, checking their phones, but now it's empty but for more abandoned cars. They are scattered randomly across the four-lane blacktop, several crashed into each other, some nudged into walls, one punched through the window of the Halal meat place.
Smoke rises from them in near silence.
My mouth is dry. I can hear the click of the traffic light overhead, shifting in and out of sync with the scratching from the upturned Chevy. I notice I'm standing in the middle of the intersection, but no traffic is coming. The road is jammed with cars and trucks left like slaughtered buffalo on the plains.
"Somebody help," I shout, but nobody replies. I'm alone.
I run to the Chevy and round to the driver's side, waving through the thick black smoke that fogs around it. I lean closer and my eyes sting, but I can pick out a figure on the asphalt, trying to drag itself free from the driver's side window. There's broken glass on the ground and a dark puddle of what must be blood or oil spreading around him; a guy in a blue denim shirt with long brown hair. He's pulling to get out and the scratching sound must be the seatbelt tearing.
"Hang on," I call to him, "I'll get you out."
He looks up. His eyes are so pale through the smoke I think I'm looking into balls of ice. The pupil at the center is dark but the iris is drained of all color. It freaks me out. His jaw wags and blood spills down his chin.
"I'll get you out," I call again, though I can barely breathe in the smoke. I press my sleeve up to my face, squint my eyes tightly shut, and plunge closer. I get my hands on the guy's arms, in his hot wet armpits, and pull. I lean my weight all the way back and drag on him. His hands patter helplessly off my thighs but he doesn't come free. The scratching sound gets louder.
It must be the seatbelt. I contemplate ducking in and trying to clip him out, but he's so close already, and I don't like the way the car's starting to tick. We have to get clear. His head nuzzles against my knee. I put one foot up against the car body and tug with all my strength.
There's a sharp ripping sound, like Velcro unzipping, and he comes free. I stagger back with him trailing in my arms, so much lighter I can't regain my balance. I fall hard and smack my butt firmly on the concrete, dropping the guy at the outer reach of the smoke.
"Shit," I cry, rolling over. My whole butt's gone numb, I must've twanged my coccyx, and now my legs have gone trembly. I get onto my knees and shout to the guy.
"Are you OK?"
I see his weirdly white eyes emerge from the smoke first. There's blood running out from under his hairline and down his pale gray cheek and chin, staining his shirt. He's crawling to me on his chest, hand over hand, dragging himself near.
It comes to me as a cold flash that he's got no legs. I double-take, thinking maybe he's a veteran or a diabetic, maybe he never had legs, but now he's over halfway out of the smoke I can see the trail of black blood oozed out behind him like a slug trail. His legs were there but they're gone. I blanch, get to my shaky feet, and back up.
"What the hell…?" I mutter.
He keeps crawling. I back up more. He has no legs and no pelvis either. His lower body is wholly gon
e, ending at a ragged line across his middle, like torn chicken meat. A lump of flesh spits out of his open belly and straggles behind on a strand of purple gut like a sad little kite. I gag. I take another step back, but still he's crawling toward me.
"Hey buddy," I say, pointing with a trembling hand at the organ he's left behind. It looks like a crushed pink ping-pong ball. "You left, uh…"
I stop talking. His blood is everywhere. I finally get what just happened; I tore him apart. He was sawing himself through the window and I finished the job. Now he's coming for revenge.
"Holy shit," I blurt, as he snatches up at me with his bloody hand. I bat it away and take another step back. "Buddy look, I'm sorry, I didn't know."
It is a ridiculous thing to say. He's still coming. It isn't possible; it has to be a dream.
He keeps coming anyway.
2. GOOD LUCK
I walk backward and he follows, like some messed up dance. For each step I take he drags himself closer. I watch with sick fascination as more guts unspool from his belly. Of course I've seen this kind of thing a million times before, in movies and TV shows, in the comics I draw myself, but not like this. It looks really realistic, is all I can think. The words 'great special effects' roll numbly through my mind.
About twenty yards back, the Chevy explodes.
The blast wind smacks my face and flutters my clothes, but it doesn't throw me through the air like in the movies. The door does fly though, spinning end over end like a Krull blade and cleaving the guy in two like sour cheese, before taking off and pinging away overhead. Fire singes my eyebrows and something punches me hard in the arm and I go down.
Shit. I roll back to my feet and see the car's indicator lever sticking out of my shoulder. It is actually stuck into my left shoulder. The half-man is still nearby, grappling toward me with his one good arm. He's left the other one behind, along with all his spools of gut, slit diagonally apart by the door.
I stagger backward, in shock, looking at the indicator lever sticking out of my body. There's blood running wetly down my chest and belly, darkening my hoodie. What the hell? Dizzy ideas come through the fog, that maybe I should push it left, push it right.
Click click.
I yank it out. It comes easily, looks like a screwdriver in my hand, then I drop it. It hits the concrete and rolls. The guy is using his jaw now to propel himself closer. His head bobs up and down like a swimmer going under for breath.
"I mean," I start to say, though I have no idea what I mean to say. The car is burning hard now, with fire rising high, and the chassis has ruptured and warped. "Just a second."
I stumble away from the burning wreck. Twenty feet clear I realize I'm limping and stop. My legs are fine. My left hand is clamped to the indicator-wound but there's hardly any blood coming now. Smoke is drifting finely everywhere. Something catches my eye, and I see a jumbo jet spiral out of the sky.
I track it from high up, spinning like a ninja's shuriken star. The wings tear off and the fuselage breaks apart so it descends in pieces, raining seats, engine parts, and bodies. They're wriggling like maggots. Fire breaks out from a sputtering engine before it falls beyond my field of view, behind the redbricks to the south somewhere near the bridge to Manhattan.
BOOM.
The blast shakes the ground though it was at least a mile away. A fireball rises briefly above the 'Pimpin Ridez' moped shop.
The half-man is nearly at me again. His trail of blood is so full and thick I can barely believe he's got anything left inside to drive him on. Put a shell on his back and he would be a grotesque snail.
I snap myself out of it and start running back down Willis Avenue, toward the bridge to Manhattan. No matter what else is going on, there could be survivors. I dodge around cars, trucks, and motorbikes left driverless. In glimpses down intersections at 141st and 140th I see a maze of vehicles in disarray, some burning, some upturned. A few buildings are on fire too, but there are no wails of fire trucks drawing near.
As I pass through 139th I look to the sky expecting to see F1s or Stealth Bombers closing in, at least helicopters, but there's only the corkscrewing contrails of the plane that fell.
I cover half a mile in five breathless minutes, emerging past barren Pulaski Park to the Harlem riverside like a cork popped from a bottle, to survey the Mott Haven bridgehead to Manhattan.
The Upper Manhattan skyline is on fire. Black smoke rises from many points, forming a miasma that hangs over the city like cigarette fog in a jazz bar. Several of the nearby skyscrapers, bland buildings that aren't famous, have been damaged. There is a visible gout missing in the top corner of one, and something is burning on the upper floors of another. It looks like the city has been sacked by barbarians.
I shake myself and look across the bridge. A chunk of the white support scaffold has ruptured where the plane landed, and the railing beneath it has been swept away, leaving trailing metal fenders pointing down toward the Harlem River. The jet must have hit it like a bomb.
There are chunks of fuselage and wing hanging amidst the scaffold like garish Christmas decorations, while other pieces of wreckage lie spread over the blackened asphalt, some of them belching thick black smoke.
And there are people. My jaw drops. They cover the bridge like sand on a beach, a crowd of hundreds walking step by uneven step toward Manhattan. A horrible resurgence of my latest artwork rises in my head; the same piece I showed to Lara in Sir Clowdesley that earned me our first date. I'd seen it in a dream a few weeks back; a great tower of the dead heaped up in Times Square, building themselves higher like the zombies in World War Z scrambling upward to take down a helicopter.
Is it like that, I ask myself, halfway descending into illogical panic. Is that what pulled that jet out of the sky?
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 round 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 round the skirting board into a heavy metal radiator mounted on the wall, but that's no use at all. There are shelves fill
ed 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 Rot's War Page 46