Aarif mimed the smashing action again. Not because he thought the girl wouldn’t try, but because he was filled with hope and adrenaline and just needed to pantomime what the child should do.
A dark shape moved in the corner of his vision, through the glass, behind the girl.
He began to pound on the Plexi, pointing frantically. “Something is coming,” he screamed. “Something is coming and you need to hide. You need to hide!”
He shouted this. Screamed this. Pantomimed this.
The girl didn’t get it until she had raised the chair again, and by then it was too late.
A tall slender thing appeared behind her at the coffee house door. Its arms snaked out, squirming like worms. Its bizarre blank face shook. It threw its head to one side and then the other, lolling, as if its neck was broken.
Aarif breathed heavily against the serving window. Each exhalation fogged it.
He could see it all from this vantage point. He could see every horrible ounce of violence done to the girl’s slight, slender frame.
He closed his eyes, ashamed that he unable to save her.
The girl started screaming. He heard her piercing howls too well.
Bones crunching. Liquid falling.
Aarif slumped to the floor. He beat the sides of his head with his hands. Why hadn’t he done more? Why hadn’t done something? Would saving that child not have been worth whatever torment awaited?
No. Not if he could get to his family. And he would.
In the dark, where Aarif could not see, wet slurping. No more screams.
Aarif checked his phone. No missed call from Zahrah or his children. No texts.
No service at all.
It didn’t take long for the hands of the undead to find the cart again. And soon he found himself besieged. Hundreds of them, by the sound of it. Surrounding him, wanting him.
Something heavy hit the cart, rocking it on its wheels.
This was no corpse hand. No former human trying to get at his flesh.
This was something big.
Aarif tried to peer out from the serving window.
A black shape. Blurry. Enormous. With another shape between its jaws and talons. Its long neck shook the prey in its teeth. It stomped the way any large predator might, claiming territory, declaring its dominance.
An eater of the dead.
The thing brayed. The sound was nothing less than a titanic auditory blast that made the family man cringe and cower.
Another heavy thump against the cart. And another. More and more.
Aarif fell back against the door. He wanted, desperately, for this all to pass. For the sun to come up. For the monsters to go away. For his own terrified tears to dry. For his family to be safe.
What could he do now but wait? Outside was death.
He shoved twisted napkins in his ears, hoping to drown out the cries of the dead and the cries of others he hoped weren’t victims – though his imagination knew better.
The ground shook with slight tremors, and Aarif knew that something even larger was out there. Stalking. The thing closer to him relented its pounding.
Tired, he eventually succumbed to his body’s wishes as evil hands wracked the cart. It wasn’t sleep so much as it was an exhausted, shock-induced coma. He nodded off, knife clenched in his right hand, when the turmoil seemed to dim. The moments before Wile E. Coyote hits the ground.
He had no dreams. He may have passed out for fifteen minutes. Or he may have passed out for hours. He had no idea. The sky gave him no hint. It was still the dark red of flowing blood.
All Aarif noticed was that the dead were gone and the thumps had ceased.
For the first time since he had been a child, he truly thanked God. Thanked him for seeing him through the – (Night? Had it been a night’s worth of slumber?) – period he had been asleep, but he did not forget his desperate warning: keep my family safe.
There was no sign of chaos outside the cart. Just the aftermath.
Yes, something terrible had certainly happened. The buildings in Brooklyn were all now burnt out and black, nothing more than apocalyptic shells. The red sky still cried above, and on the streets was a thin coating of gore that oozed and dripped like a wounded, dying body.
But otherwise, silence. A deep, penetrating silence.
No bodies. No screaming dead. No sirens.
A once thriving metropolis now the Abyss.
Aarif opened the back door to the cart.
Standing in the empty street, he found himself completely alone. And completely unsure of whether or not he should cry out for attention, lest the wrong thing rear its ugly head. Yes, there might be others like him. But perhaps it was better to let them find their own way. He only had one destination in mind: home.
With no pretense of threat, he prayed that his family was unharmed.
Inside the cart, he gathered up supplies for the trip. Food. Lamb. Rice. Yogurt. Bottles of water. He threw a few knives into his backpack, but held the largest one at the ready.
He stopped then, wondering if this was a fool’s errand. His family was more likely dead than alive, he knew (but at the same time, refused to believe). And the trip would be a suicide mission. Who knew what monsters lay in wait?
“Fuck it,” Aarif said, in perfect English.
He hoisted his pack and stepped out once more into the dead street.
His boots squished and squashed in the bloody muck as he made his way towards the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which he hoped to follow all the way home. And he hoped, moreover, that on it he could find a usable automobile, since Zahrah had taken the run-down Ford they used to ferry the cart around.
He stopped at the top of the off-ramp, looking down from the hill where the street met the BQE. No movement down there. Then he looked to his right and saw the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Its towers dwarfed everything in the area. They had once been brilliant, grey steel monoliths. Now they appeared mottled with a green that made Aarif think of disease.
Worse, there were shapes perched atop them. Great, black winged things that convened like Hell’s crows.
Aarif watched as they shuffled a little and he wondered if they were resting after the sickening feast from the night before, when the corpses had risen.
A massive black tentacle burst upward from the Hudson River underneath the bridge. It soared, making even the Verrazano’s massive towers seem small in comparison. There was a roar, louder than the one that had frightened him in the cart. The eaters of the dead scattered, flapping like mad. Most had gotten away when a second tentacle shot up and snatched one that hadn’t been quite fast enough.
What were those wretched limbs attached to?
He turned and began down the off-ramp, going the wrong way on a one-way road.
“Oh, Mr. Police Man!” he said with a sardonic grin to the death around him.
That grin evaporated quickly.
His hopes of finding a car to traverse the expressway were dashed once he recognized the full scope of the devastation. As he’d found the streets hours ago littered with human carcasses, so too was the BQE littered with the corpses of cars. It was a junkyard where nothing moved. Even if he could have gotten one started (which he was beginning to doubt) there was no way he would have been able to drive it more than a few feet.
It was, literally, an apocalyptic traffic jam.
Aarif passed by the burned out husks of gas-guzzler after gas-guzzler. Some of them looked as though they had been crushed by some earth-shattering weight. Others appeared thrown, turned over, and picked at. The glass in all of them was either shattered or melted.
In many sat the decaying bodies of drivers who had died with their belts still buckled. Victims, Aarif supposed, who hadn’t even been afforded the chance to run.
He tried not to look at their faces. He feared recognizing a friend or customer. He was thankfully numb.
One sedan commanded his attention. In the front seat was a woman. Her body was turned toward the back seat, ar
ms forever reaching out. In the rear was the baby seat she had been reaching for. It was covered by a singed blanket that the woman had no doubt been tucking in.
Underneath the blanket was a shape. A small shape. A shape that couldn’t have been more than a few months old.
Aarif felt warm tears rolling down his cheeks. He let out a sob, and he prayed again – this time that their pain had been brief. He laid his head on the car roof and let the wave of emotion take him. He panted and cried.
Then something tugged at his shirt.
He ducked down and peered into the car. In what little light the blood sky provided, he could see that the blanket was moving. Moving!
Aarif opened the back door and grasped the baby seat. He pulled it out into the street and gently lifted the blanket. There, looking up as though it had just awoken from a confusing slumber, was a cooing child.
Aarif hooted and hollered, joyous.
The baby had survived. God! Like him, it had ridden this terrible storm and made it safely to the other side.
It began to cry. His first instinct, as a father, was to cater to it and please it. Instead, he glanced around, checking to be sure that no unearthly creature was listening or watching.
Once he was satisfied that nothing was on its way to murder them, he turned back to the baby. It was pale, with big blue eyes. Its mouth opened and let loose a wail from behind empty gums. Saliva dripped from its lips.
Aarif smiled at the little survivor.
Judging by the baby’s paleness, he believed it to be from English-speaking parents. And as such, he wanted it to hear a familiar tongue. “Are you hungry?” He turned and reached into his pack. The lamb would not do. Nor would the rice. He grasped a cup of yogurt topping. While it wasn’t ideal, it seemed the only way to get some dairy into that tiny toothless mouth.
He tipped the container slightly until a small quick stream flowed and the baby drank.
It gurgled quietly, and Aarif beamed.
He pulled out a water bottle, unscrewed it, and tilted it into the baby’s mouth. He let only a little pour, not wanting to overdo it.
The baby coughed some of the water back up, and Aarif caught himself laughing. His own children had had the benefit of their mother’s breast and a bottle’s nipple. No such pleasantries now.
But the baby seemed happy. Pleased, even.
He cooed with it, there in the middle of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, surrounded by carnage and bodies and blood. He talked baby talk. It smiled, and he smiled.
Then he stood under the forever blood sky where time had ceased to matter and the sun was no more. “I am going to take you with me, and we are going to find my family, and we are going to be all right.”
He said this to the baby as much as he said this to himself.
Several hours later, still trekking among the wrecks of the BQE, he found a NYPD squad car that seemed ripe for pillaging.
“Stealing is not good,” he said to the baby, who merely gurgled in response. “But we must do what we must.”
From the driver’s corpse, he liberated a gun and a belt rife with ammunition. He had no experience with pistols, but it seemed like a good idea to arm himself. The weapon was a revolver, snuggled into the holster on the belt. This he strapped around his waist. It hung low, as a cowboy’s might.
He noticed some ash on the baby’s forehead and bent to wipe it off with what little cloth he was wearing that was still clean.
He stood again.
“I am like Clint Eastwood now, right babby?” He said, showing himself off.
The baby gurgled.
Aarif held the gun out, cocked the hammer, and aimed down the sight at the corpse of a nearby driver. A joke from a cartoon whose name he couldn’t remember popped into his head. “It is a simple point and click interface.” He looked at the baby. “I promise I will show you cartoons. They are the best.”
It was a pastime he enjoyed with his son and daughter, though she was beginning to outgrow cartoons.
A coo this time.
“Oh, yes, I am sure that you will love them. They are a big part of the reason I wanted to come to America.” He slid the gun back into its home on his side, and then picked up the baby seat. “Bugs Bunny. Daffy Duck. You will be very happy to see them!”
Aarif marched, pack on his back, baby in his hand. The Verrazano and the wretched flying beasts and those hellish tentacles became a distant memory. His mind worked to ignore even the carnage around him and the blood in the streets that made his boots squish and squash as he walked, because the only thing that mattered was home. His family.
Miles later, he was nearly there.
Forest Hills. Queens.
He climbed the off-ramp, toting the child. This time in the legal direction, on the straight path. He looked at the buildings in his neighborhood. They all seemed alien, bathed in red light from the sky and coated in the blood sprinkled forever from above.
He nearly got lost, trying to find his way through the destruction, but he found his way eventually.
His heart thumped heavy in his chest as he approached the apartment building that held his home. Just a matter of blocks, he knew. Just a matter of blocks and then Zahrah’s embrace. Bahir’s. Sabirah’s.
He wondered briefly: Would they accept the baby? Would they like it?
His mind blanked out the fact that the stores and homes and businesses were as skeletal as Brooklyn’s – burning, grabbing up at the sky with their bone-like infrastructure. His mind blanked out the fact that the streets here were as thick with gore as 86th.
At his apartment building, he fumbled for his keys before realizing there was no need. The doors had been crashed open. Obliterated by some unknown force.
He ran up the stairs, trying to keep the baby seat as steady as possible.
A coo.
“We must be hushed, babby,” he said to the squirming infant.
He got to his family’s apartment door and put the baby down in the hall.
“I don’t want you to see this,” Aarif said. “Just in case the worst has happened.” He began to cry – afraid. “You are so perfect and so pure. I don’t want you to see.” This, despite the millions of dead bodies they climbed through to get here.
The door was unlocked. Aarif turned the knob and stepped inside. It was dark. Grim. The wall facing the street had been blown out. Ash covered everything. So too did that dark green disease that he’d seen on the Verrazano’s towers.
“Zahrah,” Aarif shouted as he passed the empty kitchen. A light gust of wind from the vacated wall reminded him of how small he was. The border of the hole was an open eye to the apocalypse.
Blood oozed down the front of the refrigerator.
“Bahir,” Aarif whispered as he passed the empty the living room.
Small clouds of ash, picked up by wind, blew and scattered.
“Sabirah,” Aarif cried as he approached the bedroom they all shared.
He fell to his knees.
Huddled in the corner of the bedroom were three dark forms.
He crawled. And as he crawled, the horror of recognition took hold. He cried out to God, sobbing. He asked, “Why?” And he pleaded. Either for God to strike him down or for God to bring his family back.
Unanswered.
He caressed the shape of his girl, who died with her arms around their children, trying to protect them from some menace now gone. He kissed her forehead as tears fell and made splotches on the ash-strewn floor. A strange sense of pride in the strength of his girl fluttered briefly – and then caved to the darkness around and in him. He crawled still on, running his hands through the hair of his son. And on, touching the cheeks of his daughter.
Aarif didn’t know how much time had passed in mourning.
Or how many tears had fallen.
He stood, shaky, when he heard the baby cry out.
He planted goodbye kisses on the dead lips of his family and ran.
The baby was the only thing left. He had to protec
t it.
His hand fell to the gun.
Angry and filled with a sadness known only to parents besieged by the worst, he was ready to kill anything that threatened the baby.
Outside the apartment, the child shrieked.
Aarif ran through the dust and ash and broken memories of what once was his home. He was back outside in the hallway in an instant, ready. He checked the stairs leading up and saw nothing. He checked the stairs leading down and saw nothing.
No monsters scaring the baby. It must be hungry, he thought.
He knelt before the baby and dug into his bag, tears drying. His own sadness halted because the baby might need something, and he had to focus.
“What is wrong?” He said as he rummaged in his pack and once more brought out the container filled with yogurt. “Little one, what is wrong? I will fix it. I swear I will fix it. It is just you and me now. My family …”
He couldn’t finish.
He blinked hard, wiping at his eyes as he listened to the child voice its problems.
He tilted the cup of yogurt, pressed it against those tiny crying lips.
He looked away, thinking he’d heard something, still talking.
“It’s all right,” he said in a fake, reassuring fatherly voice that no child would have believed. It sounded fake even to him. “It’s going to be all right. I will find us a place where we can live. We will survive.”
Yes, he was afraid of being a baby’s father in this world.But what choice did he have? He tucked his worry and his concern down, deep in his gut.
He blinked again, looking around the fridge inside his apartment and out the iris that used to be his wall. The sight of crisped bones of structures breaking as they tried to pull themselves out of the world. The wind, howling. And still, he looked at some awful leviathan circling the world behind blood-red clouds.
He looked at all of this, and blinked, and he turned back to the child.
The yogurt dripped and splattered against powder.
It was not powder.
Ash.
The dairy treat curled in on itself and balled and tumbled along, down the dead ash of a small shape. A shape that couldn’t have been more than a few months old.
Aarif ripped the blanket on the baby seat away. Beneath it was nothing more than a pile of salt and pepper powder that flew up in a puff as he tore the covering away.
The Space Whiskey Death Chronicles Page 6