by Paul Jones
Emily made sure to carefully avoid the holes in the floor as she made her way towards the stairwell for the final time. She didn’t think there would be any of the creatures left in the building, the thousands she had seen last night were probably just a small portion of the newly awakened hive that had spread throughout the city while she slept. Still, she kept the shotgun ready … just in case.
Emily eased the door to the stairwell open and poked her head inside. It was dark in there, so she pulled her flashlight from the backpack’s side-pouch and switched it on.
The stairwell was even worse than the corridor. Huge chunks of drywall had been pulled off the walls and now hung in tatters and dusty piles on the concrete stairs. She was glad she hadn’t decided to just chance walking down without the flashlight because she could easily have tripped over the debris.
It wasn’t hard to imagine the entire population of the apartment complex, potentially eight-hundred or more residents, awakening from their transformation and, driven by their new alien impulses, tumbling like a waterfall down these walls and steps.
And then of course, there was the baby-thing in apartment #26. So far she had only seen the strange spider-like creatures that she was sure had emerged from single pupas much like the ones she had dealt with at the Tribune’s offices. But what had that mess of melted flesh on the 18th floor transformed into? It would have been too large to form a single pupa. Could it have just been some aberration, a mutation of some sort, or could there be other, even stranger things walking the streets of New York today?
Emily didn’t intend to stick around to find out.
* * *
She pushed through the doors on the ground floor and walked straight over to the security booth where she had left her bike. A quick onceover reassured her none of her precious supplies had been taken, so she wheeled the bike out of the cubby and then through the exit doors of the apartment block and onto the concrete terrace.
Overhead, the sky was a deep crimson and she squinted against the change from dark to this diffused light. The clouds seemed to have thickened into an unmoving mass of gray with an ever-growing volume of red bubbling within.
Emily swung her leg over the bike and shuffled her butt around on the seat until it was comfortable. The extra weight of the clothing in the bergen took some adjusting to. She shrugged a couple of times, wincing at the pain in her right shoulder, until the straps repositioned themselves to a more comfortable position.
Emily began peddling,
The sun could barely force its way through the overcast sky. What little light did make it gave the streets she passed through a washed out, black and white tone. The buildings on either side seemed to loom towards her as she cycled north. It wasn’t hard for Emily to imagine a thousand eyes watching her from the empty windows. Strange, alien eyes that belonged to an inscrutable intelligence that regarded her as what? An insect? The proverbial fly in the ointment of their grand plan set in motion just days earlier?
If she was honest with herself, she doubted her presence had caused any more than the tiniest of blips on the radar of these things. She was a minor problem. Inconsequential. And that was fine by her.
* * *
72nd street was as deserted as the rest of Manhattan. She took the on-ramp up to the raised section of the Henry Hudson Parkway with a head of steam, but she still had to raise her butt up off the bike’s seat, her legs pumping like pistons, to ensure she kept her momentum up the curving on-ramp. When she reached the top of the ramp, she instinctively looked over her left shoulder to check for traffic as she merged out onto the main road, but this stretch of the freeway looked deserted on both sides of its six lanes.
In the distance, off to her left, past the concrete median and southbound lanes, Emily could just make out the New Jersey shoreline on the opposite bank of the dark sluggish Hudson. To her right, the elegant red brick offices and apartment buildings of Manhattan were quickly obscured by rows of trees lining the side of the freeway as she pedaled down the center lane, heading north.
Emily’s plan was to head directly toward Albany. It was about a 145-mile ride and she estimated it would take probably two days or so for her to complete if she could keep up a decent speed. When she reached Albany, she would take either the 87 north or the 90 west; depending on how everything looked out there. She was leaning toward choosing the 87 route, though. It was a longer, more circuitous route, but it would take her through less densely populated areas and reduce her risk of contact with the aliens. It would be a slower but far safer route, she thought, in the long run.
For now, she was going to stay on the Henry Hudson Parkway until she reached 252nd Street. There she would switch over to Riverdale Avenue and follow that through Yonkers as the road transitioned over to Broadway. Eventually Broadway would intersect with the 87 just outside of Tarrytown and she could cross over the Hudson on the Tappan Zee Bridge and continue her journey north.
Riding down a deserted freeway in the middle of the day was quite possibly the strangest experience for Emily so far. It took her some time to stop glancing nervously over her shoulder, expecting some speeding vehicle to come looming after her, horn blaring, driver leaning from his window and screaming at her to get out of his way as he sped past her. It did not happen, of course. The only thing on this freeway was Emily and the ghosts of a million drivers.
A particularly thick blanket of gray cloud hovered on the horizon ahead of Emily. Sunlight strained to push its way through the dense cloud as best it could, but what made it through was nothing but a diffused blur that pounded Emily’s eyes. She hadn’t thought to grab a pair of sunglasses, but the painful glare was forcing her to stare at the bike’s front tire rather than the road ahead. She had to glance up occasionally to make sure the road was still clear, squinting in the light, and then her eyes were back down again. She’d have to pick up a pair of sunglasses at some point, mentally adding them to her to-do list of items to scavenge.
The miles flowed by and Emily settled into a comfortable rhythm. While she considered herself a competent rider it had been a long time since she had ridden more than twenty miles in a single day, so she kept her speed down, pacing herself for what was going to be a very long ride.
Travelling along the parkway, it was easy to forget that beyond the tree line to her right and across the Hudson lay an entire city empty of all life. Human life at least. Apart from the occasional random empty vehicle stalled in the middle lane or canted awkwardly astride the median divider, there was little to draw Emily’s attention to her surroundings. However, when she finally exited off the parkway, freewheeling down the looping off-ramp onto Riverdale Avenue and into the district that shared the same name, it did not take long for the gnawing feeling of isolation to return.
The streets of Riverdale were lined on both sides with beautiful, expensive-looking older homes and an occasional apartment building. Where Manhattan had seemed deserted by many of its inhabitants and workers as they fled the coming catastrophe, most of the residents of this area had apparently made it back. As she slowly pedaled along the deserted avenue, in the driveway of almost every home, Emily saw a car or a truck neatly parked, waiting for an owner who would never return.
But was she right about that? She was struck by a sudden but overwhelmingly positive thought: She had naturally jumped to the conclusion that this little suburb was as dead as Manhattan and New York, but just because she hadn’t seen any signs of life did not mean there weren’t other survivors hunkered down in their homes. Maybe they were too scared to come out? It was an expensive neighborhood, after all. Maybe, they didn’t know about the creatures roaming the streets and were just waiting for rescue. With so many people making it to their homes there had to be survivors like her. There simply had to be.
Emily slowed to a stop outside a redbrick two-story with a late model Jeep Cherokee parked on the concrete driveway. She dismounted and began climbing the stone steps to the entranceway but stopped just halfway up. In the fron
t door of the house was the all too familiar circular hole, cut, she assumed, by the transformed residents as they escaped from the locked home. Emily looked around at the other homes next door and across the street. Shading her eyes against the glare, she could see the same telltale openings in both of the neighboring homes and, she was sure, if she walked to any of the other houses, she would find more of the same evidence of this sleepy town’s fate. While the tree lined street had the appearance of life, of a lost normality, it was just as dead as the city she had left behind her.
Somewhere close by, if she took the time to search, she knew she would find more of the alien trees she had seen back in Central Park. Probably tucked away in some park where kids used to play or lining the bank of a pond or lake where couples would have strolled hand-in-hand and watched the sunset. The alien structures would be all that remained of the residents of this town now, another piece of the inscrutable puzzle transforming what was left of Emily’s world.
Emily walked back to where she had left her bike and climbed into the saddle. Yesterday, she would probably have simply sunk to her knees and cried in despair, but that was a different Emily. Today’s Emily Baxter was stronger, she told herself. Today’s Emily Baxter could get past all of this. Still, a single tear escaped and trickled down her cheek. She wiped it away with a contemptuous swipe of the back of her hand. She didn’t have time to shed any more tears for this dead world; she had someplace to go and she intended to get there.
* * *
She had no clue how the fire had started. Maybe it was from a lightning strike or something as simple as a candle left burning on a night-side table. Whatever the cause, about an hour after passing through the equally dead town of Irvington with its uneasy mixture of sprawling mansions and clapboard homes, Emily caught the unmistakable scent of burning wood blended with an unpleasant undertone of melted plastic.
Thanks to the local topography, it was next to impossible for her to get a good fix on where the fire was burning. Just like most of the other neighborhoods and towns that had sprung up around the northern tip of New York City, rows of trees lined every roadway, effectively limiting her view to the main thoroughfares and side streets she passed.
Emily gave a small cough and wrinkled her nose as a sudden gust delivered a particularly strong burst of fumes to her nostrils. She pulled on the bike’s brakes and slowed her pace a little, stretching her neck to try to catch a glimpse of the direction of the fire through the occasional gap in the trees, but there was no sign of it, even though she knew it must be raging somewhere close by, the trees were just too densely packed together. The smell was growing stronger the further north along the road she travelled, so she was obviously heading towards the source of the fire rather than away, which made her nervous.
As Emily passed the sweeping driveway leading up to the Lyndhurst Museum, she caught her first sight of the leading edge of the fire, revealed by a massive wall of smoke. The smoke was so gray that for the last half-hour she had mistaken it for an extra layer of low-lying cloud. As she mounted a slight rise in the road, she spotted an open space between the trees large enough to give her a view past the museum building and into the distance towards where the Tappan Zee Bridge should be. But, as she looked through the break in the trees, instead of the bridge all Emily could see was smoke billowing up from behind the main building of the Lyndhurst Museum. Adjacent to the museum, according to a sign she could barely make out was a large hotel complex. Emily pulled the bike over to the side of the road and stared. From her vantage point, she could see wisps of smoke rising from the roof of both the museum and the hotel as embers caught by the wind landed on the unprotected buildings. It wouldn’t be long before both of those structures succumbed to the fire.
“Great,” she said aloud, as she watched the flames flickering in the distance. Small frail flecks of gray ash had begun to fall from the sullen sky, settling on the ground around her like snow.
Emily wasn’t one-hundred-percent sure, but it looked like the fire was between her location and the freeway she needed to take to get to the Tappan Zee Bridge, but with her limited view there was no way she could be sure. She would need to get to higher ground to see for sure.
She decided to press ahead, but less than a mile further along the road, Emily had her answer. The way ahead was being gradually devoured by a huge wall of smoke, billowing and creeping along the road like a bank of fog. The smoke stretched skywards, obscuring all view of the bridge she knew lay somewhere beyond it.
Standing on the temporary safety provided by the wide expanse of blacktop, finally with an unobstructed view to the west, Emily could see the fire burning brightly. From behind the pall of gray smoke, a long wall of flickering orange flames stretched northeast for miles, following the outline of the Hudson River. Emily had only ever travelled this far north once before, so she wasn’t that familiar with the area, but she was sure what she was seeing was the demise of Tarrytown and the surrounding area, as it was methodically consumed by this voracious beast made entirely of flame.
There was no way she was going to be able to continue with her original plan, she realized. Crossing the bridge or even continuing north was out of the question now, both the 87 west and all other routes north were cut off by the fire or at the very least obscured by the thick smoke. She wouldn’t be able to see a thing and would quickly succumb to either smoke inhalation or the fire if she stuck with her original plan and tried to travel through the smoke. There was only one way left for her to turn: she would have to head east along the 287 and then tack north when she was clear of the fire.
The fire was huge and moving fast. She estimated that it had already consumed thousands of acres. In the few minutes she had observed the fast approaching flames, Emily had already begun to cough as the smoke had wrapped its wispy tendrils around her. The occasional falling piece of ash had now turned into a blizzard driven by a breeze that was helping to spread the flames even faster. Pushed towards her by the fire, she chose just the wrong moment to breath in a deep raw lungful of the hot smoky air. She choked, doubling over as the fumes seared her nose and lungs.
Emily began running, pushing her bike alongside her, then leaping into the saddle like some Wild West cowboy from a black and white movie. Her feet continued to pedal furiously until she was sure she had built up enough speed to outrun the approaching fire-line.
Emily had no clue what lay in the direction she was heading, her plan had been to travel north and there was no contingency plan.
She was just going to have to wing it.
* * *
Emily only slowed her pace when she estimated she had put at least three miles between her and the leading edge of the fire, but it was hard to gauge exactly how far the fire was from her. It was moving so quickly, hidden behind the smoke and pushed by a breeze that was quickly transforming into a wind. If the wind grew stronger, it was going to spread the fire further and faster, making it even more unpredictable.
She pulled the bike over to the breakdown lane, swinging it around until she could get a good look behind her. The horizon was filled with smoke; it was next to impossible to tell where its leading edge was or even how far it had spread. She needed to plot the fire’s progress if she was going to be able to avoid it. The only way to do that was to get to higher ground.
Emily scanned the highway in both directions. There didn’t seem to be any nearby buildings she could see, but up ahead, about another quarter mile or so was an overpass linked to an off-ramp. That might at least give her an inkling of which direction to head. She jumped back on her bike and began riding toward the bridge over the freeway.
Emily reached the overpass, pulling to a stop near one of the bridge’s concrete buttresses. It would be quicker just to climb up the grass-covered embankment to reach the bridge rather than take the curving feeder road, she decided, so she left the bike lying on its side in the grass at the base of the bridge. Emily clambered up the incline of the embankment, grabbing clumps of the s
ickly yellow grass to help pull her up. She was surprised at how winded she felt when she finally reached the top of the embankment, but then she had been riding for the last couple of hours without a break. It was no surprise she was feeling fatigued. She had managed to tune out the pain in her shoulder, but it too was beginning to become noticeable again, despite her best efforts to ignore it.
The bridge had four lanes for traffic. Lined with low concrete walls, each topped by a five-foot wire-mesh barricade, the bridge had been designed to stop all but the most dedicated suicide from falling or jumping off.
Peering through the mesh back in the direction from which she had come, Emily had a better view of just how far the fire had spread. Judging from the distant flames she could see licking at the sky above the forest of trees that separated her from the blaze, the leading edge of the fire had extended for several miles in a northeast direction now, curving away in a wide arc of orange flame. It looked as though it had already jumped the freeway where she had first seen it, judging by the huge plume of smoke rising from the direction of where the Lyndhurst Museum had stood.