Survivor

by James Phelan

  “When the explosions started, they evacuated the tourists and nonessential staff, and the rest of us went down to the basement. We stayed down there for hours, I didn’t want to leave, but my colleagues helped me,” she said, smiling but looking distant as she conjured the memories. “And when we finally did come back up, that’s when we saw them, the . . . Chasers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, we saw them, deranged people, chasing people later in the day—on Fifth Avenue, and in the park. Didn’t know what to make of it. With a few other staff I kept attending to the animals. My last coworkers left in the afternoon, after they’d tried for hours to contact their families and friends. Landlines, cell phones, TV and radio, all went out around the time of the attack. No one knew what had happened. Said they’d be back with help and security, but, well . . .”

  “It’s the same everywhere I’ve tried, too,” I said, recognizing her frustration and resentment at being abandoned like that. “Every type of phone, all the television channels: blank. All the radio stations are either static or make a strange woodpecker sound. I think I heard some music on a car radio once, but I was tired and . . . I might have imagined it.”

  10

  The thought of Rachel here by herself for twelve days, having little idea what was going on outside these walls, made me shudder. I adjusted the wood in the fire to avoid the burning log spilling out the grate. I was glad when she broke the silence and changed the subject.

  “Whereabouts in Australia are you from?” It was nice to hear her ask a question like this. After the afternoon’s silent chores, I was afraid that maybe she was too shell-shocked by all this destruction to talk much about anything beyond survival.

  “Melbourne,” I replied. “It’s way down south—”

  “I went there with my family when I was about your age,” she said. She was thoughtful for a moment. “Nice place. Only spent a couple of days in Melbourne, though. We went to Sydney, mostly, and the outback.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Amarillo, Texas, originally. Moved to the West Coast when I was in junior high.”

  I listened to her talk about her old hometown. I asked her about cowboys and oil, she told me about her family and music, and we talked about being away from home and the things we missed. I liked Radiohead and Muse, she liked Kings of Leon and Green Day. We’d both learned some piano, liked to sing in the shower, and wondered why no one ever really became a real-life superhero.

  “Yeah, like that Kick-Ass character.”

  “Exactly,” she said, dipping a cracker into her steaming soup and savoring it. “Where’s our Hit Girl and Big Daddy? Hell, where’re our Guardian Angels?”

  “Were those the guys who used to go around keeping the peace on New York subways?”

  “They’re still operating in some places apparently,” she said. “Least, they were . . . Don’t you wonder where the military is? Where’s our police, our government?”

  I finished my story from before, filling her in on my past twelve days and concluding with the day’s events on the street, the trucks of soldiers and all that I could remember Starkey telling me.

  “And these soldiers, did he tell you where they were going?”

  “Wouldn’t say,” I replied. “But . . . they weren’t like regular soldiers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They were more like . . . renegade soldiers, unofficial or something. Older, like our parents’ age. And one of the trucks had a big container in it,” I said, thinking back. “Kind of the size of a big fridge. It had USA-something stenciled on it, and it looked military, too.”

  “I guess that makes sense about the roadblocks,” she said. “Maybe they were a small scouting party, an advance unit that’s the vanguard of a bigger relief effort or something.”

  “Yeah, but the weird thing was, the guy I spoke with said that they found a way around the roadblock.”

  “Around?”

  “Yeah. I remember thinking the way he said it was strange, like they weren’t meant to be here.”

  “And they didn’t tell you what happened?”

  I shook my head. “I told you everything he told me.”

  Telling her and seeing her reactions was reassuring; it seemed like it all made sense to her, at least a lot more sense than it made for me.

  I tried to eat more slowly, and held back a laugh.

  “What is it?”

  “Not used to eating with company,” I explained. “I—I’ve cooked and eaten pretty well, but guess I’ve grown used to just smashing it down fast.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I just . . . I guess learned to get by as best I could. I kept myself busy—exploring the building, making a sign on the roof, scanning the streets and horizons for hope.”

  “It’s good to keep busy.”

  “Like you’ve done here. I think that’s what got me through. That and luck.”

  “We’ve both been lucky,” she said, pouring a couple of mugs of Coke and passing me one. “This was all up in the top floors of the GE Building at 30 Rock?”

  I nodded. “Thanks.” We clinked mugs. Her eyes glowed in the warm light of the fire.

  “No other survivors there?”

  “No one else I saw,” I said. “You never know though, right? Someone may have locked themselves away in their apartment or office, waiting it out, waiting for help or death, whichever came first.”

  “That’s what I’ve assumed is going on out there,” she said. “I just assumed—I thought you would have seen lots of others.”

  “It’s . . . it’s just me. Do you have family here in Manhattan?” I asked quietly, over the steam of the soup.

  “No,” she replied. “Most of my family’s in southern California. I’ve been here for three and a half months. I live by myself in Williamsburg—that’s just across the East River.”

  I crunched my cracker and sipped my soup.

  “I couldn’t feed them,” she said suddenly.

  “Sorry?”

  “The polar bears. I didn’t have enough for them and everyone else . . . I had to let them out.”

  I felt as though she thought I was judging her, her work, her decisions.

  “They’ll be okay,” I said. “It’s winter—they can stick to the snow and head north, head home . . .”

  “I actually envy them that,” Rachel said.

  “Their strength?”

  “In a way, yeah: to be strong enough, equipped with the innate ability to get out there in this harsh environment and find a way home. Hundreds or thousands of years of our species being soft and lazy makes it difficult for us to do much of anything out there.”

  The weather rattled against the curtained window. It was good to eat with company, but eating seemed like a chore to Rachel, like she forced herself to have something to keep her energy up—if she faltered, if she failed, all the animals would suffer her fate. She sat cross-legged, her empty cup in her hands, watching the wood burn.

  “You happy to sleep there?” she said, pointing to the stack of blankets I sat on.

  “Sure,” I said. I made a bed of them, switched off my flashlight, climbed in and took off my damp clothes. She hung my jeans and shirt over a chair by the hearth, taking care as she did so and not saying a word. “Thanks.”

  She knelt by the fire, poking at the coals, put a big thick log on and went to her own bed. The lamp went out and I watched the flickering of the orange light from the flames and the shadows they cast on the ceiling. I was warm and cozy in this little room, more so than at any moment I could remember.

  “I can stay and help you, if you like?” I said. Rachel was silent, but I knew she was awake and had heard me. “Or . . . if I find Felicity, and we, I mean, if you want to, maybe we can all try to escape Manhattan . . .”

  I knew my words were pointless, knew that nothing I could say would persuade this girl to leave her animals alone and defenseless. I’m sure some part of her wanted to be at home, but how
could she leave? What would it take?

  The silence between us lasted until I was drifting off. I’d thought she was asleep, but when my new friend spoke her voice was clear and alert and showed that she felt and thought more about the situation than I’d allowed.

  “It won’t make much difference what we do,” she said. “None of it makes much difference. We’re stuck here, stuck with what we’ve got.”

  11

  The morning was bright and my eyelids were heavy. I rolled from my side to my back and stared up at the ceiling. For a moment I forgot where I was. I’d slept well, by far the best sleep I’d had these past thirteen days.

  It was a quarter-past nine. I stretched out, my back aching from this too-short makeshift bed. Just a few more minutes of sleep. I let myself doze, then sat up with a start, feeling sick. Twenty-past nine! I jumped up. I had to get to Rockefeller Plaza, to be there on time in case Felicity showed.

  All my clothes felt dry as I pulled them on and Rachel had laid out a clean T-shirt and hooded jumper next to my jeans. I noticed there were a dozen or so radios on the table; walkie-talkie type things for the zoo staff to communicate with each other. I tried them all, but the batteries were dead.

  Some cereal and long-life milk were set out, but I left the breakfast untouched. I put two radios in my backpack as well as a charging unit. I’d take them to 30 Rock, charge them up. Rachel needed a generator here, and I’d bring her one of those as soon as I could. I pulled on my shoes and ran downstairs, my backpack over one shoulder.

  Rachel was in an enclosure feeding and watering some monkeys. I watched, silent, hopping from one foot to the other and unsure whether I should interrupt. I waited for her to come out.

  “You’re heading off?” she asked as she walked by, seemingly too preoccupied with the morning’s work to stop and chat. She didn’t sound surprised.

  “For a bit,” I said, running to catch up with her.

  She stood up, wiped her brow, and hefted a big tub containing sad-looking fruit and vegetables, chopped and broken and sprouting here and there. She added a scoopful to a bucket, hesitated, then added a little more.

  “When will their food run out?”

  “Four days for the big cats,” she said. “Not long after for the other carnivores—sea lions will run out in six or seven days. Rest have maybe a couple of weeks’ worth.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’m on it.”

  Now I had surprised her. She couldn’t hide it from her voice. “On it?”

  “I’ll bring back food,” I said, zipping up my coat. “As much as I can carry.”

  “I don’t expect you to do that.”

  “How else will they eat?”

  She looked at me, paused at the entrance to the tropical bird enclosure, and put the feed bucket down.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Sure!” I said. I slipped the backpack properly across both my shoulders. “I’m headed out anyway, and they need food.”

  “You’re going right now?”

  I checked my watch, nodded.

  “You’re going to look for that girl?”

  “I left her that note.”

  “But what if—” A worried look passed over her face. She’d seemed certain that Felicity would be okay, so who was she worried about—herself, the animals? Or me? I couldn’t work it out.

  “I’ll come back this afternoon,” I replied. I knew what she had been going to say: What if she doesn’t show? Maybe even some version of, What if she’s dead? “I’ll bring back as much food as I can find.”

  Rachel nodded, and I stepped forward and hugged her. She didn’t move, and she felt so small in my arms. I moved back. She didn’t have an expression other than exhaustion, and she went back to work. I didn’t mind if she didn’t believe me, I was just looking forward to seeing her reaction when I returned with another survivor and more food for her animals than she could have imagined.

  Twenty minutes later I was at the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 57th. The skyscraper that had stood on the corner, between 57th and 56th, had come down, blocking the intersection entirely. It must have collapsed last night—there was no snow on the debris, but it was ankle-deep on the ground all around it. There was occasional movement as rubble shifted. I looked through some of the wreckage. There was a bent mail trolley that wouldn’t push straight; a leather couch that stood on its side, not a scratch on it; a smashed television; an unbroken wineglass; a dismembered foot, as white as the snow.

  I backtracked east to get around, moving fast, keeping to the center of the road so I’d have time to run from any Chasers that might leap out of a dark storefront. I stopped at the next block. There was money blowing from a bank’s open door, a steady stream of worthless paper.

  I scanned the road for footprints. The snow here was virginal: light, fluffy, a Styrofoam landscape under the winter’s morning sun. I looked north and south along Avenue of the Americas. There was a whistling or sucking sound, constant but faint. Wind through broken buildings, maybe. I pressed on, walked out to the middle of the next white intersection, the snow crunching loudly underfoot. Blinding white and contrasting dark shadows in each direction. I turned south—

  The ground beneath me gave way.

  My feet fell through the snow—my legs, my waist, my chest disappeared down a hole in the street. My chest hit hard, knocking the wind from me. I flung my arms forward, my hands dug into the snow, clawed at it, fighting for breath.

  I was sliding down, down into a hole in the road that had been iced and snowed over, cloaked in an invisibility blanket. I tried to hold on, to get any kind of grip to slow my descent, but my gloved fingers were sliding through loose snow on frozen ground, my feet dangling into what I imagined was an open manhole. When it was just my head above the ground level, my hands lost all purchase. I fell into the darkness.

  12

  The wind whistled around me. A shaft of sunlight penetrated the gloom as snow poured softly from the street level above. I could have been in a giant hourglass, the sands of time set to drown me.

  This was no manhole.

  I had landed on a steeply tilted ledge, a large chunk of broken road hanging by pipes, but I was slowly slipping down, deeper underground, the street level getting farther and farther from my reach.

  Below me was a subway tunnel—I saw the glinting tiles of a platform, illuminated by the shaft of daylight above me, the howling of the wind as it whipped through like an express train. The next fall would hurt.

  I grabbed hold of an edge of the asphalt, on my side, my feet hanging off the bottom edge. I tried pulling myself up, but my handhold gave way, a chunk of road-base crumbling away, and my fingertips and palms ground along the snow-covered surface. I was falling again, moving fast and hard through open space.

  The impact of landing knocked the air out of me and I could hardly breathe. I was flat on my back, winded, my near-empty backpack having broken my fall. My chest felt tight, crushed. Something sharp bit into the back of my leg—I sat up quickly, alert.

  It was dark all around but for the shaft of daylight in which I sat, as if I were at the bottom of a crumbling well. Snow from above whipped around in the wind and stung my eyes. I crawled into the shadows and listened.

  Amidst the sound of the gale ripping through the tunnel I could hear dripping water, what seemed like a constant stream of run-off into a pool. Slowly my eyes adjusted and revealed a little more around me—the walls were white and I could pinpoint where the sound of wind was coming from, passing through the tunnels, being sucked out through another hole in the street above. When I shifted farther I could see there was the faint glow of daylight to my left.

  But it didn’t feel right down here. Didn’t smell right.

  I slipped my pack off my back, as quietly as I could, and fumbled with the side zipper. My hands felt raw, one glove had fallen off and the bandages beneath were ripped. I found my wind-up flashlight. I flicked the switch but the dull illumination did little, so I wound the ha
ndle to build the charge and it shone brightly.

  A mass of people were crowded around, all turning as one to stare at my light.

  Chasers.

  Their faces were pale and ghostlike and they all looked my way. There were a hundred at least, sitting and standing on the subway platform, and more huddled on the tracks. All of them were staring at the light, staring at me. I scrambled to my left, flashlight in one hand and backpack in the other.

  I stumbled and bumped into a Chaser—another one, a wall of them. They were blocking my path, but I pushed through them and towards the faint glow of daylight at a far wall. I checked behind me. They hadn’t moved, they were silent, unfazed.

  They were all the docile ones, those content to make do with water.

  I could hear the constant dripping into pools and could make out a progression of figures sipping from it using cupped hands and reused bottles. So many of them, mesmerized by my light.

  I could have cut myself open in that fall and they would have seen my blood as an offering—maybe that’s how it started, how they turned from one kind of infected to the other: that first easy taste. I could become trapped—could end my life down here. These streets were ready to eat you alive. I shuddered; cold, the creepy someone-walking-over-your-grave kind of feeling.

  A new noise: a shuffling, bumping, hum through the main pack, getting closer. There was movement among the masses, someone pushing and shoving their way forward. I wound the flashlight brighter, tried to see farther back behind me, the way out of here. Further commotion as someone pushed their way through the crowd, the Chasers nearest me parting aside.

  A Chaser burst through, given a wide berth by the others. He looked at me and wiped the back of his sleeve across his bloodied mouth.

  I turned and ran.

  I hit a turnstile at a full run and somersaulted over it, landing in a mess and struggling to get to my feet.

  The Chaser clawed at the back of my bag, caught me.

  I swung around and hit him with the bottom of my closed fist to the side of his head, and the way he’d held me and the surprise of my fight made him lose his footing and he was knocked to the ground.