The End Is Now

by John Joseph Adams

  He’d known right away he’d found his next move. Whitman had never been a doctor, but he’d devoted his life to helping people. To protecting them from deadly epidemics.

  So they’d picked up everybody they could find, everybody with a plus sign and nowhere to go. Now those people looked up at him as he checked on them, looked up at him with hungry faces. Hungry for information, or just for somebody to tell them things were going to be okay.

  “We’re headed for Brighton Beach,” he told them. “Angie thinks there will be boats there to evacuate us.”

  “I heard we was supposed to get to La Guardia, man. You know, the airport?” someone called out.

  Whitman shook his head. Both airports—La Guardia and JFK—had been taken over by the military. There would be nothing for them there. “No, the airports are out of the question. And I don’t think there are any boats, either.”

  The truck erupted with people asking angry questions. A man wearing a pair of coveralls stood up and pointed at Whitman.

  “Angie said there’s boats. So there’s boats.”

  Whitman smiled at the man. “You’ve known her long?”

  “She’s our neighbor,” someone else volunteered, a young woman with a shaved head.

  “Just to talk to, but she always seemed nice,” an old lady replied. “I think she works on Wall Street.”

  “Nah, she’s a doctor,” the guy in the coveralls insisted. “She basically runs that college hospital, you know—”

  “If anybody knows what’s going on, it’s Angie,” her neighbor said. He nodded happily to himself. “Angie’ll know what to do. She’ll get us some place safe.”

  “Why don’t we take a vote?” Whitman asked. “I’m telling you right now there are no boats. How many people want to go and look for boats anyway, just because Angie heard a rumor?”

  He was not prepared to see all those hands go up.

  “Do you have a better idea?” the old lady asked.

  He opened his mouth and realized he had no answer for her. Shaking his head, he climbed back into the truck’s cab, into the passenger seat.

  “What the hell was that?” Angie demanded. She looked furious.

  “I figured I would give them a choice.”

  “Those people are scared out of their minds! Why on Earth would you tell them there are no boats?”

  That, he could have answered. But he looked up, then, just in time to see the roadblock come into view ahead.

  • • • •

  There wasn’t much traffic on the road, and the military hadn’t committed much to stopping what little there was. Just a single armored personnel carrier with a shovel-shaped nose, sitting so it blocked both lanes. A soldier with a rifle stood in front of it, flagging them down.

  Whitman could see more soldiers through the APC’s windows.

  “Don’t stop,” he said.

  “Fuck you. After that stunt you just pulled, undermining me? I’ll take my chances with the Army.” Angie said. “They can help us—give us an escort down to the beach.”

  “Turn around,” Whitman said. “Back up.”

  She must have heard the agitation in his voice, seen it in the way he craned forward, peering through the windshield, staring at the soldier with the rifle.

  “They’re not zombies,” she said, sounding exasperated. “They’re better than zombies, at the very least.”

  “For God’s sake, just back up,” Whitman pleaded. The soldier was coming closer, saying something Whitman couldn’t make out. He tried to give the soldier a cheery wave, an apologetic shrug: Sorry, we didn’t know this road was closed.

  The soldier started miming at him. Turning his hand, as if he were shutting off the truck’s ignition.

  “Please,” Whitman said.

  “You gonna tell me why?” Angie asked.

  “Yes! Yes, later, just—”

  The soldier raised his voice until Whitman could finally hear him. “Switch off your engine! Then come out one at a time, with your left hand visible!”

  “Go!” Whitman screamed.

  Angie shoved the gearshift lever hard as she stamped on the pedals. The truck didn’t want to switch directions. It didn’t want to move backwards—took forever to start accelerating, to get rolling away from the soldier and the APC. Through the windshield Whitman could see the soldier raising his weapon. The soldier was still shouting but not at Whitman or Angie, now—he was shouting at his buddies back in the APC. The armored vehicle had enough machine guns mounted on its roof to shred their truck, to turn it into strips of bright metal in the space of a minute. What that would do to all the bodies inside wasn’t worth considering.

  He shouted for Angie to hurry up, to get the truck moving.

  The soldier opened fire before they’d even rolled back ten feet. His assault rifle tore through the truck’s grille, into the engine compartment. Whitman could hear bullets rattling around in there like BBs in a cup. The windshield starred and turned white.

  But the truck moved. Angie stared at her side mirror and spun the wheel and they were accelerating, gaining speed. She fishtailed the truck and got it turned around, and there were more shots, a lot more, and someone screamed.

  But they were gaining speed.

  • • • •

  The truck died fifteen minutes later.

  Whitman had to give it to the truck’s makers—the ponderous thing wheezed and rattled and screamed, but it kept running long after its radiator was shot full of holes. It bled coolant across ten long Brooklyn avenues and got them clear of the soldiers who were chasing them.

  Working together, the bunch of them managed to push the truck into an abandoned taxi garage. Whitman felt it was important to get a roof over it, just in case anyone was tracking them with satellites or drones.

  “Why would anyone do that?” Angie asked. “Are we so important?”

  Whitman shook his head and bent over the steaming radiator again. The guy in the coveralls said he was a mechanic. He’d taken one look at the truck’s engine, though, and started swearing. Now it was Whitman’s turn to stare at the damage and try to pretend like there was something they could do.

  Angie picked up a wrench and pointed it at him. “Maybe it’s you. Maybe you’re the one they’re looking for,” she said.

  “I’m nobody.” He poked his finger through a bullet hole in the manifold, because he didn’t want to look at her.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” Angie asked. “I need to make a plan if I’m going to help these people. To make a plan I need information.”

  Whitman rubbed at his head. “I don’t know anything. How could I? I’m out here just like you.”

  “You’re lying to me.”

  “I don’t know anything,” he repeated.

  She lifted the wrench as if she would club him to death. He didn’t even know if he would resist if she tried.

  But then, after a second, she lowered the wrench again.

  Did she believe him? She didn’t say anything more.

  The baby in her arm gurgled and reached for her hair with its tiny fist. A tiny fist with a tiny plus sign inked on the back.

  “Your kid’s adorable,” Whitman said. Even to his own ears it sounded like he was trying to change the subject.

  “He’s not mine,” Angie said, staring daggers at him.

  “No?”

  “Somebody left him in a car seat. They just left him sitting on the sidewalk in a car seat and they never came back. I was inside, in my place. Trying to hunker down. But this little guy,” she said, stroking the baby’s nose until it wriggled in joy, “was right outside and kept crying. What else was I supposed to do? I went outside,” she said, “thinking I would just bring him in. That was when I saw Mr. Tydall from next door, limping up the sidewalk. Covered in bite marks. I knew I had to help as many people as I could. That it was going to be a long time before the government came to save us.”

  Whitman studied the bullet holes in the radiator. He knew nothing about c
ars or engines or anything.

  “Those soldiers were willing to shoot us all,” Angie said. “They were willing to shoot this baby rather than let us get away. You knew that.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “You knew.”

  She dropped the wrench, and it clattered on the concrete floor. Several of the others looked up at the commotion. Some craned their heads around the side of the truck to see what had happened. How many of them were listening?

  He couldn’t tell Angie everything. But she deserved at least a hint of the truth.

  Even so, it was hard to start. “How did you get that?” he asked, pointing at the plus sign inked on the back of Angie’s hand.

  “That’s not important.”

  “Please. It is. One of the guys in the truck, one of the people you brought with you—he said you ran one of the local hospitals.”

  “Hardly,” Angie said. She bounced the baby on her hip. “I’m a nurse. An RN.” She shook her head. “Fine. It was about a week ago. A guy from the CDC came through and interviewed all of us. He asked who among us had been exposed to zombies. Well, that was hilarious, right? We’ve been dealing with this epidemic for nearly six months now. You find me one nurse or doctor or orderly or x-ray technician even who hasn’t been bitten or spat on or bled on by a zombie. You find me even one and I’ll be surprised. So this guy from the CDC, he went down the line and stamped each of us. He didn’t even explain what it meant, though we could pretty much guess. It means we’re positives. Possibly positive.” She actually smiled a little. “What a bunch of horseshit, right? There’s no way this thing is that aggressive. No way we’re all infected.”

  “No,” Whitman agreed. “It’s not likely. But this thing—this disease. There’s a major problem with it. It’s asymptomatic.”

  One of the men leaning around the side of the truck cleared his throat. “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “It means,” Whitman said, picking his words carefully, “when somebody turns into a zombie there’s no warning. It just happens. You can’t predict who’ll it happen to, or when.” He threw up his hands. “There’s no way to diagnose it, no test. Nothing anyone can do to say this person is infected and dangerous and that person is clear.”

  “So the plus signs . . .” Angie prompted.

  “You’re a nurse. You know about reverse triage.”

  Angie’s face went blank. All expression just drained away, all at once.

  She got it.

  “I don’t know about it,” somebody said. The mechanic. “What the hell is that?”

  “Normally at a hospital,” Angie said, “we do triage. In the emergency room. We figure out who’s about to die if we don’t help them first. Then we make everybody else wait, all the people who just have bad headaches or they’ve got the flu, or whatever. We focus our resources on the people who need them the most.”

  “And reverse triage?” the guy asked.

  Angie looked down at the baby. “That’s for when things get bad. I mean, monumentally bad. That’s when you look at the people who are about to die and you . . . you just let them go. You use your resources to help the people who have the best chance of making it. The people with the least threatening injuries. And everybody else can just . . . they . . . you try not to think about them.”

  For a while she was silent. Whitman could see, from her face, that she was putting the pieces together. Figuring out just how bad things had become.

  “Guilty until proven innocent, huh?” she said. She held up her left hand to show him her plus sign. “Infected until I can prove I’m healthy.” She leaned down and kissed the baby’s head. Then she did it again, and Whitman knew she was trying to hide her face from the others. So they wouldn’t see.

  If you had a plus sign on your hand, the government was convinced you were a risk. That meant you had no rights. It meant they could tell you where to go, and how long you had to stay there, and there was nothing you could do about it.

  “I saw that ID you have around your neck. And the logo on the truck. You work for the CDC, don’t you?” she asked.

  He didn’t deny it.

  “You were around zombies this whole time, too. You got bitten, or spat on, or bled on too.”

  He looked down at his own hand. His right hand—the one that wasn’t inked. There was a mark there all the same, a red imprint in the shape of human teeth, in the soft flesh between his thumb and index finger. “It happened a long time ago. The very first zombie I ever saw, actually. I didn’t think she broke the skin. But my boss decided not to take any chances.”

  Angie took a long, difficult breath. “What happens to people like us? Potential positives?”

  “They go to Staten Island,” he told her.

  • • • •

  Earlier, back when he was still in charge of something, Whitman had seen what Staten Island had become. They’d flown him over the island in a helicopter. One corporal had even given him a pair of binoculars so he could get a closer look.

  Depending on how you counted, there were eight million people in New York City’s five boroughs, or nearly twenty million in the surrounding region. By a rough estimate, maybe twenty percent were potential positives—four million people with plus signs on their hands. Four million people who could turn into zombies without any warning, without any symptoms, at any time.

  It was folly to think that the evacuation could run smoothly. That the safety of all those people could be guaranteed. And of course, it didn’t work out the way anyone had hoped.

  Ferry boats ran nonstop, moving potential positives over to Staten Island. Dumping their human cargo at gunpoint, then turning around and steaming back for Manhattan or Brooklyn or across the harbor to New Jersey to pickup more. On the shore the evacuees stood in teeming crowds, unsure of what to do—many didn’t speak English, many more refused to follow the instructions bellowed at them by loudspeakers, if they could even hear those orders over the noise of all the helicopters.

  It would have been chaos and riots and panic even without the zombies. But these people were potential positives. They had a chance of having contracted the prion disease. Many of them, just by sheer probability, had. And if you extrapolated on those probabilities, if you ran the equation for how many of those people were going to go symptomatic on this night of all nights—

  The zombies had cut through the crowds like scalpels through healthy flesh. Even up in the helicopter Whitman could hear the screams. On the ground all he could see was waves, ripples forming in that sea of human heads as people ran and pushed and trampled each other, trying to get away from the teeth and fingernails of the zombies in their midst.

  And all the while the ferries kept coming, kept dumping their cargo on the shore.

  • • • •

  When Whitman finished telling Angie what he’d seen, he looked up with a start and realized that all of them, all of the positives, were staring at him.

  “They can’t do that,” the girl with the shaved head insisted. “They can’t do that to us.”

  “They just dump ’em there?” the mechanic asked. “But then what are they supposed to do?”

  Whitman couldn’t answer that question. Instead he turned to Angie. “Where did you hear about these boats that are supposed to evacuate us?” he asked.

  “From a doctor at my hospital. Just before he walked away from his post because he needed to take care of his family more than his patients. He made it sound like it was a good shot to get out of here. Was he talking about these ferries taking people to Staten Island?”

  “I doubt it,” Whitman told her. “They’re not loading from the beaches, just from the piers on the river. Wherever he got that information, it wasn’t from the CDC or FEMA.”

  Angie nodded and breathed in slowly. She paced around the room for a while and nobody got in her way. Finally she clapped her hands together, loud enough to make everyone jump.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?” Whitman asked.

>   “Okay, so fucking what? Nothing has changed. You never heard about any boats? Well, maybe nobody told you about them. But if there’s even a chance . . . we still need to get down there. To the beach. And we need to get there before dawn.”

  “The truck isn’t—”

  “We are going to get to those fucking boats. Maybe we can find some cars. We’ll go by foot if we have to,” Angie said, standing up. She looked over at the other positives, all of whom were watching her every move. The mechanic. The girl with the shaved head. The old lady. They hung on her every word. “Get ready. This isn’t going to be easy. But it’s our only chance. If they send us to Staten Island we’re never coming back.”

  Whitman looked up. He couldn’t believe it, but listening to her—he half believed. He wanted there to be boats, if only because the idea of disappointing Angie terrified him.

  “I don’t know who owns these boats, but they’ll take us—even if we have to make them. They’ll take us somewhere safe, somewhere that at least isn’t on fire or full of zombies. Okay? Everybody with me?”

  They were.

  • • • •

  There were plenty of abandoned cars in Brooklyn, but there was a real shortage of car keys, and not even the mechanic knew how to hot-wire a car. It was Whitman’s idea to steal bicycles instead. He helped Angie improvise a sling for the baby so she had both hands free. He helped the old lady onto a racing ten-speed and showed her where the brakes were. And then they were off.

  They skirted fires in Midwood, and a horde of zombies in Homecrest. Despite the military’s best efforts the infected were out in droves, hundreds of them crouching in the street, their eyes scanning the corners. Looking for the next threat, the next human to attack. They looked less human than ever, their eyes glowing red with the reflected light of the sky.

  It was getting hard to breathe by the time they got to the neighborhood of Gravesend. Smoke from the fires was blowing out to sea, right over them, and dropping soot like black snow that flecked their clothes and gathered in drifts in the gutters.

  There came the moment when Angie cried out and Whitman stopped his bike. “No, keep going!” she shouted as she coasted past him. “Don’t you see? The sky!”