Whitman looked up. At first he couldn’t see what she was talking about. The sky was red with fire, just as it had been for hours now, red . . . no. No, it was turning pink. They were headed southeast, right into the dawn.
Which meant if her boats were going to land at Brighton Beach, they should be well on their way. They should be getting ready to land at any minute.
Angie’s bike was the slowest, because she had the baby to worry about. Whitman hung back with her, afraid of being parted from her now. She called out to the others, urging them on. The mechanic’s bike was faster than the rest and she told him to get to the beach as fast as he possibly could. The girl with the shaved head poured on speed and passed Whitman by. Maybe not all of them would make it, but some would.
Angie had kept these people alive all night—that had to be worth something, right?
Whitman had no idea what they were going to find. He didn’t know what was going to happen.
It didn’t matter. Just then he would have followed Angie anywhere.
• • • •
As the dawn light came up, it showed them the soldiers. Warriors in full battle dress, carrying assault rifles. Lines of APCs and transport trucks and jeeps behind them. They stood to either side of the road, an implacable wall that blocked the way forward. There was no way to turn off, and if they tried to turn back now they would never reach the boats in time.
Whitman nearly cried out in rage. To have come so far, only to be scooped up now.
The soldiers moved to the sides of the road, falling back to let the cyclists through. Whitman stopped his bike in astonishment as he watched them make way. A soldier shouted at him, an order Whitman couldn’t hear.
“Just keep moving,” Angie said, coming up beside him. The baby was crying in its sling. “Whatever they say. Whatever they do, just get us as far as you can.”
He understood what she was asking of him. He knew he would do it, too.
But then the shouting soldier lifted his left hand. His unmarked left hand. He pointed at the back of it, then pointed down the road, toward the beach. “All positives this way,” he shouted.
Whitman just kept pedaling. The shouting soldier nodded in encouragement.
It was crazy, but—but maybe . . . maybe there were boats down there. Maybe Staten Island had filled up and they were going to move people to a new location. Maybe some place better than Staten Island. Maybe some place they could survive.
“Come on, you can do it,” Angie told him.
He steered the bike down the corridor of armed soldiers. Their honor guard. And up ahead, not a quarter mile away, was the beach. Ahead of him he saw the mechanic pumping his legs for this last little stretch, this last little race to make the rendezvous with the boats. Whitman’s legs burned, but he poured on more speed.
When they hit the beach, he jumped off his bike and ran stiff-legged across the boardwalk, down a short flight of stairs to the sand that glowed pink with the newborn sun. A crowd of people had gathered on the beach—no doubt they were waiting to board the boats. That had to mean the boats hadn’t left yet, hadn’t left without them. He spun around and looked at Angie and wanted to grab her, wanted to whirl her around in triumph.
“Where are the boats?” she asked.
He turned around and looked, for the first time, at the crashing waves. Listened to the sound they made, that perfect, thundering sound. It was mixed with something else, something like the high-pitched call of gulls.
There were no boats out there. Plenty of people waiting for them, plenty of people with marks on their left hands. But no boats anywhere.
So many people, all around them. People who must have been there before them, people in great crowds, pushing them, shoving them toward the water.
People were standing in the surf, up to their knees. Some up to their waists. Some of them tried to get back to the sand. Some of them staggered back, pushed by the waves.
Some of them were screaming. That was what he’d heard. Not gulls—screaming people.
“Where are the boats?” Angie asked again.
An amplified voice boomed out over the sand. “Keep moving into the water. You will not be allowed back onto the shore. Keep moving into the water. There is no room on the beach. Keep moving.”
“Wait,” Angie said. “Wait—are we—did we come all this way to—”
A big man came stumbling up out of the waves, hands and feet clawing at the wet sand, trying to get purchase. His mouth was a dark O sucking at the air. Whitman thought the man must be a zombie but no, his eyes weren’t red, his eyes were fine—
Shots rang out and blood erupted from the man’s chest. He collapsed into the surf and everyone started screaming, dropping to the ground, covering their heads with their hands.
“Keep moving into the water,” the amplified voice said again. “You will not be allowed back onto the shore.”
“No,” Angie said. “No. I won’t—I won’t just walk out there and drown. They can’t make me! I have rights!”
She had a plus sign on the back of her left hand.
“Reverse triage,” Whitman said. You treated those who had the best chance of surviving. The uninfected. Those who were already exposed, or even potentially exposed, you didn’t waste resources on them.
There had been a saying they’d had at the CDC. A mantra they repeated so they would never forget: Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
“Keep moving into the water.”
The sound of the surf, the screams. Occasionally he would hear the stutter of machine gun fire. Not often. That was why they were pushing people into the water. It was why the military had, he assumed, started the rumor of boats landing at Brighton Beach. Because there weren’t enough bullets for all the positives, but it didn’t cost anything to force people out into the water and let them drown.
“Keep moving into the water.”
Whitman’s head throbbed with horror, with regret, with anger. But maybe—maybe there was still something, some hope . . . his ID card, his CDC credentials, were in a plastic pouch around his neck. He reached inside his shirt and pulled out his lanyard. He held his ID up over his head. “CDC!” he shouted. “I’m CDC! Get me out of here! CDC!”
All around them people stared. People looked at him with hate in their eyes, and he didn’t blame them. He tried to shove through, to get to the nearest soldier, but the people shoved back.
“CDC! CDC!” It wouldn’t matter, he was a positive too. They wouldn’t care, they wouldn’t make an exception. Somebody grabbed the ID and nearly strangled him as they pulled it away from him. He pushed the lanyard over his head, just to stop it from choking him. “CDC,” he said again, “I’m CDC.”
Then he saw who had grabbed the ID. It was a soldier in full combat armor, his eyes hidden behind light amplifying lenses. He stared at the card for a long time.
“You’re CDC?” the soldier asked. “What the hell are you doing down here?”
“You have to get me out of here,” Whitman said. “And my wife and our baby. You have to get my family out of here. He grabbed Angie and pulled her close. She was smart enough to bury her face in his neck, as if they were together.
The soldier grabbed Whitman and hauled him toward the boardwalk. A few positives tried to interfere, but the soldier knocked their hands away with his weapon. Nobody had the strength to fight back.
Up on the boardwalk soldiers were gathered in a line. Whitman and Angie were shoved through, into an open space beyond. Whitman’s ID was cut off his neck and taken away.
Angie clutched at him and he wished he could tell her what was happening. He wished he knew himself. More soldiers came bustling toward them. One of them, with the eagle insignia of a Colonel, had Whitman’s ID in his hand.
“Where the hell have you been, sir?” he asked.
Angie looked up into Whitman’s face. “Sir?” she asked.
“I, uh—I got separated from a reconnaissance group,” Whitman said. “I was lookin
g for my wife and child, here. We found each other but then I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t . . .” He couldn’t finish the lie.
But the colonel nodded. “Emergencies like this, I’m surprised half my troops know where to be, much less the civilian staff. Well, thank God we found you in time. I’ll get a helicopter down here to take you back to Manhattan and the forward headquarters. We need every warm body we can get working on the evacuation. I don’t need to tell you what a clusterfuck this has become.”
“No, Colonel, you don’t. My wife and baby will of course—”
“Mr. Whitman, I appreciate what you’re trying to do. And we need you, badly. We’ve already lost Staten Island and the Bronx is . . . there’s nothing left up there. So I’m going to break regulations and let a positive into Manhattan.”
“Of course, as you should, and—”
“One positive. I know you’re not married, sir. And you don’t have a baby.”
Soldiers came forward then, soldiers with guns and they shoved Angie, they shoved her back toward the sand. She screamed. She screamed his name and she held up the baby like it would change somebody’s mind, like it meant something. The baby lifted its arms, held them up in supplication. Whitman could see the tiny plus sign marked on the back of its left hand.
Angie kept screaming, as they pushed her down the beach. He could hear her screaming, long after they put him in a helicopter and flew him away.
• • • •
They would let him live. They needed him. They needed him to come up with ideas, ideas about what to do next. Ideas about how to manage the end of the world.
Like the idea that anyone who was potentially positive should be marked, that the back of their left hand should be marked with a plus sign.
That had been Whitman’s idea, originally.
He’d been proud of it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Wellington is the author of the Monster Island trilogy of zombie novels, the 13 Bullets series of vampire books, and most recently the Jim Chapel thrillers Chimera and The Hydra Protocol. “Agent Unknown” (The End is Nigh) and “Agent Isolated” are prequels to Positive, his forthcoming zombie epic. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
THE GODS WILL NOT BE SLAIN
Ken Liu
Wildflowers in a thousand hues dotted the verdant field; here and there, fluffy white rabbits hopped through the grass, munching happily on dandelions. “Cute!” Maddie exclaimed. After that hard fight against the Adamantine Dragon, Maddie certainly welcomed the sight.
Maddie, a lanky monk in saffron robes, cautiously tiptoed closer to one of the rabbits. Her father, a renegade cleric in a white-and-red cloak who had turned from the god Auroth to the goddess Lia—pleasing neither though able to wield artifacts charged by both—stayed behind, alert for signs of fresh danger.
She squatted down next to the rabbit to pet it, and the creature stayed in place, gazing at Maddie with large, calm, brown eyes that took up a third of its face.
The force-feedback mouse vibrated under Maddie’s hand.
“It’s purring!” she said.
A line of text appeared in the chat window in the bottom left corner of Maddie’s computer screen:
“You have to admit the haptic modeling is amazing,” Maddie said into her headset. “It feels just like petting Ginger, except Ginger isn’t always in the mood to be petted. But I can come see these rabbits any time I want.”
“But you’re also—” Maddie stopped, reconsidering her words. Instead she said nothing, not wanting to start a fight.
A few blinking orange dots appeared on the mini-map in the bottom right corner of her screen. Maddie moved away from the rabbit and panned the camera up. A party emerged from the woods at the northern end of the field: an alchemist, a mage, and two samurai.
Maddie switched her mic from intra-party to in-range: “Welcome, fellow adventurers.” The software disguised her voice so that no one could tell she was a 15-year-old girl.
The strangers said nothing but kept on walking toward them.
Maddie wasn’t worried that the newcomers might be hostile. This wasn’t a PvP server. The community in this game had a reputation for being sociable, but there were always players who were more focused on “getting things done.”
Maddie switched the mic back to private. “Samurai get a discount on bows and I might tempt them into a trade.”
“The bow was actually the samurai’s weapons of choice. Mom taught me that.”
Maddie opened her inventory and took out an adamantine scale from the dragon they had slain, holding it up for the other party to see. Sunlight glinted off the scale’s convex surface in iridescent rays. Out of the magical Bag of Containment, the scale expanded to its natural size, almost as tall as Maddie. The dragon had been huge.
But the other party paid no attention to the scale. As they passed by Maddie and her father, they uttered no greeting, not even looking at them.
Maddie shrugged. “Their loss.”
She turned back toward the rabbit to give it more pets when several bright shafts of light came from behind her and struck the animal one after another. The mouse shuddered in Maddie’s hand as the rabbit leapt away and growled.
“What in the world—”
The rabbit began to expand rapidly and soon was the size of an ox. Its eyes were now flaming red and fierce.
The rabbit snarled, revealing two rows of dagger-like teeth. The sound was deep and fearsome, more appropriate for a wolf. Smoke unfurled from the corners of the rabbit’s lips.
“Um—”
The rabbit leapt at Maddie, and instinctively, she backed up, but tripped and fell. The animal opened its mouth wide and shot a stream of fire at her. David, her dad, rushed over to help, but it was too late. Monks couldn’t use armor and Maddie hadn’t had a chance to get her qi shell up. She was going to be hurt badly.
But the flaming tongue deflected harmlessly off of her—she had held onto the dragon scale, which acted as a shield.
Encouraged, Maddie jumped up and rushed at the rabbit. She punched it in the face, stunning it and taking off a large chunk of hit points. Dad followed with a strike from his ethereal axe, a gift from the goddess Lia, cleaving the rabbit cleanly in two.
They looked back in the direction the shafts of light had come from: the other party was standing some distance away and waved at them.
“We do like the scales,” one of the samurai said. “We’ll just wait here.”
Griefers. Realization dawned on Maddie. Although this wasn’t a PvP server, it was still possible to get other players killed and then take their possessions before they could respawn.
Maddie turned around just in time to dodge out of the way as two ox-sized rabbits charged at her, missing by inches. Maddie and David coordinated their attacks, and managed to cut down both rabbits—now four pieces of carcass. But instead of disappearing after a few seconds, the pieces began to wriggle, growing into four new fire-breathing rabbits.
“I’m guessing they cast a combination of explosive growth, fire breath, ferocity, and fast regeneration,” said Maddie. “Each time we cut one down, two more take its place.”
They could hear the other party laughing in the background and making bets as to how long they would last.
Together, Maddie and David ducked behind the dragon-scale shield to avoid the fire attacks. When there was a break, they tried to stun the rabbits with coordinated strikes from fists and clubs instead of slicing at them. Then they tried to dodge around in
such a way that the active rabbits would spit fire at their stunned clones, as that seemed to be the only way to hold the fast regeneration in check. But it was impossible to avoid relying on David’s axe to get out of the immediate danger when they got trapped by the rabbits’ movements. Over time, more and more rabbits surrounded them until, eventually, even the adamantine shield was burnt away, and the rabbits overwhelmed them.
• • • •
“That was so unfair!” Maddie said.
“But we were doing so well!”
Maddie translated the emoji in her mind: Well done, daughter. Our battle against the rabbits will surely live on in song and story.
She imagined her father solemnly intoning the words and laughed. “It will be remembered as gloriously as the last stand of Wiglaf and Beowulf.”
“Thanks for taking the time, Dad.”
And in a flash, the chat window was gone. Her father was away in the ether.
There was a time when Maddie and her father played games together every weekend. Such opportunities were few and far between now that he was no longer alive.
• • • •
Though life was as placid as ever at her grandmother’s house in rural Pennsylvania, the headlines in Maddie’s personal news digest grew gloomier and gloomier day by day.
Nations rattled their sabers at each other and the stock market went on another long dive. Red-faced pundits on TV made their speeches and gesticulated wildly, but most people were not too worried—the world was just going through another downturn in the cycle of boom and bust, and the global economy was too integrated, too advanced to fall apart. They might need to tighten their belts and hunker down for a bit, but the good times were sure to come around again.
But Maddie knew these were the first hints of the oncoming storm. Her father was one of dozens of partial consciousnesses uploaded secretly in experiments by the tech industry and the world’s military forces—no longer quite human, and not entirely artificial, but something in-between. The brutal process of forced uploading and selective re-activation he had gone through at Logorhythms, where he had been a valued engineer, had left him feeling incomplete, inhuman even, and he wavered between philosophical acceptance, exhilaration, and depression.
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