Survivor

by James Phelan

  “That’s crazy.”

  “I can outrun them.”

  “Accidents happen—you might slip or fall and then what?”

  I thought back to falling through the road yesterday.

  “Don’t take them on if you don’t have to. Don’t encourage their behavior,” she said. “Like any predators, they’ll wise up fast to ways of getting what they need.”

  I just wanted to be better prepared, to understand them more. With that knowledge, when the day came for Rachel to leave with me—for she surely had to leave one day—we’d stand a better chance.

  “They’re close by,” she said, “even if there’s no sign of them right now: Central Park is their smorgasbord, where the bulk of other infected are congregated en masse, around the ponds and lakes. You said so yourself.”

  She was right. They were all around us, just out of view, never far away. Rachel hadn’t stopped working all day, and had sweat on her face.

  “Let’s make dinner.”

  “I’ve got another fifteen minutes out here,” she said, judging the light left before night set in.

  “I’ll make it.”

  “Sure,” Rachel said, pausing to drink from her water bottle. “That’d be nice.”

  “Any requests?”

  She shook her head. “Surprise me.”

  I entered the arsenal building with a spring in my step—I really wanted to do this, to thank her by cooking her a meal. This much was achievable for me: caring for one. But how she managed to do all that out there on her own—that was more than impressive.

  Sometimes I wondered about my real mom, whether she had started up a new family, if she was caring for kids. Rachel was just a couple years older than me and was the greatest caregiver I’d ever seen. She deserved to not only get out of all this, but to be rewarded. How, I had no idea.

  Inside was quiet, cold, eerie. I walked slowly along the carpet runner leading to the front door. I stopped behind a partition, peering around at the front doors. The wind whistled in through the broken glass. I needed to fix that, barricade those doors. I’d do it tomorrow.

  Then I stopped.

  No. No more tomorrows. I would not put things off anymore. Put them off into days that might not be there. As long as Rachel was here, I’d do my best to keep her safe.

  I emptied a tall bookcase, dragged it to position up against the doors, restacked it, then added a desk, a few armchairs, and plenty of books and boxes of files from a front office. All up, there must have been a few hundred pounds stacked on and against that bookcase, itself a barricade against the glass. At the very least, it would slow down intruders long enough for us to hear them and make a break for it. I felt better for the construction, and headed upstairs with my backpack and a more comfortable feeling that I would not have someone creeping up behind me.

  It took a few minutes of blowing against the embers to get the kindling to light, by which time I was out of breath and had filled the room with smoke, but it felt satisfying to have ignited the flames without splashing lighter fuel over the wood. The fire warmed and crackled, and soon small split logs became coals hot enough for cooking. The smell of the burning wood was different to that back home, but the memories came anyway—sitting around a campfire, my father there telling me stories—and I was happy for them to keep me company. You could get lost in memories like that.

  Caleb had told me a recipe that would suit the ingredients I had. He’d given me some white wine, and I’d put half a bottle into the dish, along with chicken, rice, tinned tomatoes, and slices of onions, orange, garlic, some herbs and seasoning. Caleb had sworn by the chicken—it was from one of many tubs he had stashed on the snow-covered terrace. I had the pot slow-cooking on the side of the coals, it’d take about an hour and a half.

  I stood at the window and watched Rachel down in the zoo grounds, hurrying to beat the darkness. For a brief moment I glimpsed the absolute truth of her world, and some reality of mine: she felt she belonged here, but we were both visitors. How long could she look after all these animals and not look after herself? I’d been here for just hours and I could see that all the work to be done was more than she and I could sustain. What would happen when food and water in the vicinity ran out? This was a no-win situation: we were living on stolen time.

  Rachel came upstairs when it was dark out, moving so silently she startled me.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, that’s fine, just lost another year from my life.”

  Rachel laughed.

  “It’s so damn easy to get spooked in this city, I’m probably running out of years to lose.” I stoked the fire with another small split log. It spat and burned and smoked. The lidded pot sat heavy, almost ready. I glanced over at her as she took off her jacket and boots. “You know that feeling when you’re alone, but it feels like there’s someone around you?”

  “I think so,” Rachel said, motioning out of the window before drawing the thick curtains. “I feel like I’m being watched when I’m out there, out in the zoo grounds.”

  “I sense that too.” That feeling of being watched—whether by Chasers or other survivors—was constant, but that was not what I had meant, not totally. I stirred the pot and put the lid back on.

  “And I don’t mean by those infected,” Rachel added, taking her jumper off.

  “Yeah, me either,” I said, smiling. “I mean by those I miss.”

  She nodded and sat next to me by the fire. “Who do you think about?”

  “A few people. My grandmother, she used to talk to my grandfather’s ashes,” I said, smiling at the memory buried somewhere in the brilliant hot embers before me. “Even though he was nothing more than ashes in an urn, she’d go about it like it was the most natural thing in the world—like he was right there in the room, listening, as she went about her day, talking to him.”

  “Well, he was there, wasn’t he?”

  “Yeah. He was . . . It was the only time I saw her truly happy, on her own, speaking to her dead husband.” I smiled. “That, and when she’d hug me when I went to spend school holidays with her. Speaking to the dead and hugging me.”

  Talking to the dead had kept me alive.

  “You had that too, didn’t you?” she shifted over to the edge of her bed and rubbed her bare feet.

  I nodded.

  “With your friends from the subway here in New York?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you know what it’s like when you lose a friend or someone in your family and it’s like they didn’t really go,” Rachel said, kneeling next to me and warming her bare hands by the fire. “Me too. My best friend died in a car accident when we were in seventh grade. I felt she was with me all through school and every day since. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of her, when I don’t hear her voice.”

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded.

  “You’re lucky to have that,” I said. “You’re lucky she’s always there.”

  “I’m just glad it’s something I carry around in me,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be an urn on the mantelpiece. It doesn’t wear out, get lost, depend on the upkeep like my work out there every day.”

  I watched her, her features in the warm light.

  “The animals, me; we all eat, we all sleep, and we all leave, eventually.”

  I had a feeling she wasn’t talking about the present.

  “I had a boyfriend back home,” she said. “We kept it going for over a year; he’d come here or I’d head west, a few days here and there . . .”

  “Too much distance?”

  “Something like that. Still friends, just didn’t quite work out.”

  She seemed happy to talk about it, and it was nice to hear this side of her.

  “No one now?”

  “New York’s outta good guys,” she said.

  “If it wasn’t before, it sure is now,” I said. “I don’t mean to make you more depressed about the reality of this situation, but if there was anything that these events have d
one, it’s thin out the dating pool even further.”

  It took a moment for her to laugh, but when she did she was lost in it to the point of tears.

  By the time Rachel had come back from the bathroom all cleaned up and changed into pajamas, I’d set two spots at the desk, with chairs and cutlery and napkins and some candles. The fire was restoked and the room was warm. I poured wine for her and served up, as Rachel sat opposite, looking down at her plate then up to me. She was the big sister I’d never had, and I loved making her this meal.

  “This smells great,” Rachel said.

  “Thanks, I hope it tastes good.” I told her the recipe was Caleb’s, which gave me the chance to explain a bit about him.

  “Tell me about your friends,” she said over her glass of wine.

  Why not? So I told her. I told her everything about Anna, Mini, and Dave. Explained all that I’d done to get me through those first days. This was my story, and I was getting good at telling stories, never embellishing, describing events as I saw them, reporting the truth as I knew it. I enjoyed passing on details, and there was one thing above all that I’d noticed in this new earth: when people listened to you, they listened to your every word, hung onto them, savoring information. We were all hungry for it—I couldn’t imagine all the knowledge we were losing without information. It was somewhere, as long as there were people willing to listen, and talk and write. Even when I got home, I’d make sure I took this sense of observation and discourse with me. We needed to talk more, to listen more, all of us.

  “We dressed up, pigged out on junk food, danced around to music, it was great,” I said. “If I hadn’t laughed so much with them, I’d have gone nuts. We spent a whole afternoon launching rotten food off the top of the building, joking that seventy stories below the apples and cabbages would pick up such speed that they’d blast right through parked car’s roofs.”

  I laughed at the memory, so much that I had tears in my eyes and Rachel’s face was lit up with laughs too.

  “We’d laugh at the stupidest things,” I said. Rachel listened and never seemed to think my story strange or judge me, just ate her food and laughed with me. It was great to talk like that, with no barriers, to share.

  “I think you were lucky, Jesse. You did good.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks. And thanks for listening—feels good to share it, with you.”

  She smiled. It was a smile that I hadn’t yet seen; it radiated, like a great sentence or a good piece of music, so recognizably special that it could transcend the moment. Rachel may not be someone I could laugh with at stupid little things, not like Caleb, but I could tell her anything. Anything important, anything big. Like what I wanted to do. What we had to do. I painted a picture of truth that I felt would help persuade Rachel to move out from here.

  “Can you imagine going home?”

  My question bobbed in the water for a while, a float on a lure.

  “Jesse, the day I most look forward to right now is when the tourists flock back to Times Square, the city is healthy again, and this nightmare is over.”

  Sleep came easily here, easier than back at 30 Rock, Felicity’s apartment, or Caleb’s. The room was cozy and warm, and this big old building felt like a fortress. We were right in the park—the place I’d come to associate the most with Chasers, with fear—yet I felt unbelievably safe and comfortable.

  It was my second night here and I was being pulled into sleep. I needed to find Felicity, find a way to escape, to go home. But darkness was drawing, taking my conscious thoughts away.

  It was a dangerous feeling.

  20

  “Huh?” Something had woken me. The fire glowed and crackled. Rachel was a still form under her quilts. The fire sparked again, its coals shifting. The log still had a few good hours of burning ahead, which meant it must only have been an hour or so since I’d nodded off.

  I’d been entering that nightmare again, the soldiers on horseback, and to be away from it now, to be awake, was a relief; I was able to bear the reality. I should remember this scene—the crackling fire, Rachel peaceful in sleep—and this moment, for it was full of possibility, full of happiness. I watched the fire until I felt my eyes closing. A noise jolted me from my semi-lucid state. From downstairs?

  The hallway.

  I opened my eyes wide, my heart racing, my breath short. It was a tapping or a rattling, faint; there and then gone again. Just the wind seeping into the old building? Then silence . . .

  I was alert, on edge, but overwhelmed with exhaustion and soon felt myself start to drift off, my body heavy. I rolled onto my back, looked up at the ceiling. Stay awake. The whitewashed timber paneling, the knots and grains forming patterns and shapes. Stay awake. I picked out a car, a mountain range, a fox, a face.

  A louder bang. I sat up, wide awake now.

  “Rachel?” I whispered. I looked across the room at her sleeping form. She didn’t move. “Rachel?”

  I got up fast, pulled on my jeans and coat and went over to Rachel; she was sound asleep, breathing slowly and rhythmically and smiling against her pillow. I reached for her shoulder but stopped: let her be. Part of me thought that if this was it, I should let her go like that. Most of me wanted to prove something.

  I put on my shoes, pulling the Glock pistol from my FDNY coat pocket, making sure a round was loaded and ready to fire, and took a battery-powered flashlight from the bookcase.

  My hand rested on the brass doorknob. Just a moment. I took a deep breath, then turned the handle, inched the door open, felt the cold air flood in.

  The hallway was dark, quiet. I closed the door behind me, the faint glow of the fire just visible beneath it. We needed locks on these doors. What if someone got inside the building? It was quiet, not a sound or creak. Had I imagined those noises?

  I shone the light ahead of me, down towards the stairs, to the left and into the bathroom. Nothing untoward.

  I inched my way forward, the floorboards creaking under my weight. I reached the far end of the hall, where the noise had come from. The bright shaft of the flashlight beam illuminated the shadows. How I wished for a light switch; power and the security that came with it, freedom from the unknown, freedom from the surprises. The bathroom was empty, unchanged, silent, the buckets of water still lined up, just as they had been earlier. I went back out to the hall; so long, so dark, hoping the beam of bright light would scare away more than just the shadows.

  The door opposite the bathroom was a little different from the others, the bottom corner black and charred, leaving a gap that let through a constant draught.

  I watched that door, hesitating before opening it, not wanting to be reminded of another closed door back at 30 Rock—some doors should not be opened. I resolved that I had to check it for Rachel’s sake. Inside, I found myself in some kind of lounge or reception room, burned out by fire some time ago; from the attack, I supposed, though Rachel had said nothing of it. Black soot surrounded the hearth and spread out along the floor before it and the timber wall paneling surrounding the door was blackened too, as if the flames had spewed forth to consume the room.

  Why have I never opened this door before?

  I felt as though I’d seen this image before, in the charred corpses at a road tunnel. There was a hole in the floor where it had burned clean through, a blackened beam and the topside of a plaster ceiling just visible below; a desk by a window with a burned-out antique globe, another skeleton of what had once been whole. It was so cold in here, spookily so, and quiet. I left, shutting the door behind me.

  At the top of the stairs I waited and listened, a hand on the banister to steady myself. Maybe it had been the wind or an animal outside in the zoo? Maybe I had imagined it? I turned off the flashlight and sank down on the top step and sat there. So dark and so quiet. If I heard someone come up these creaky stairs I’d flick on the flashlight and blind them as they turned at the landing, shoot if I had to. What if there was more than one? I glanced back at the glow under the door to the
room where Rachel was sleeping. I waited in silence and darkness.

  Rustling. Another rattle-bang from downstairs.

  Then behind me.

  My mouth dry, I twisted on the flashlight, but couldn’t see anything in either direction, just my fogging breath swirling through the beam of light.

  The sound again, downstairs, then again a moment later only fainter, from behind me. I let out a breath; it was the original noise, reverberating and echoing around me.

  It sounded like it was coming from inside the building. Someone walking, feeling their way around in the dark? More than one person?

  I squeezed the pistol’s grip, tiptoed cautiously down the stairs. I paused on the landing; crouching, looking. There was nothing for it. I descended.

  My boots clamored, announcing my presence on the tiled floor of the lobby that linked the front and back doors of the building. There was a cold breeze, like a window somewhere down here had been left open. The narrow shaft of my flashlight beam pierced the shadows. I imagined that whatever was here was hiding in the shadows beyond its reach, retreating to another place, another world.

  Times had changed and who knew what went bump in the night anymore? The attack on this city had brought out a kind of monster in all of us. I’d seen a smashed-in tunnel out of Manhattan, where thousands of people had been claimed by fire in a death worse than anything I could have imagined. There was still some heat coming off the smoldering plastic and rubber and fuel, and the smell sent me away faster than the sight. I’d run away fast, blindly south, the gun held high, wishing I could confront the people responsible for all this. In that moment, given the chance, I would have killed as many of those responsible as I could—and what did that make me?

  Alone, standing here in a cold, dark, silent hallway.

  The barricaded front doors held fast, but a chair I had stacked up had fallen over to the floor. The flashlight beam bounced off the glass and lit back at me, showing me nothing of outside. The wind tonight was strong and whistled through the broken window, rattling the mass of furniture. I pocketed the pistol and put the flashlight down on the ground to illuminate the scene before me. I walked forward to pick up the chair—