by James Phelan
“Drink?” I asked.
“Water would be great.”
“Water it is,” I said and felt myself go a little red. Why’d I say that? It sounded so lame. Maybe I should have taken her to a cool bar, offered her a real drink. That’s what Caleb would have done.
I handed over the bottled water, my cheeks flushing as she smiled and held up her bottle.
“Cheers.”
“Cheers,” I said. To be here, sitting next to her, her body heat close enough to be felt, looking out the window together . . .
“So,” I said, “tell me about the Chasers—the ones that made you hide in the café?”
“There were lots of them, all running together. I didn’t know what to do, so I just figured I should hide out until they’d gone. It was getting dark and I was scared; I didn’t want to stay out there alone, but I knew I’d never make it home before they caught up with me, and I knew that bagel shop was nearby, so I ran down an alley, losing them.”
She shuddered, and I could sense how frightened she’d been.
“They’re not all predictable,” I said. “The ones in the park are weaker.”
“That group of them by the fire were leaving—I followed them down to a spot on the Hudson—they’re in a building down there. I called out, but they just waved again, and I didn’t want to risk getting too close. But it seemed, if they’re like the others, that maybe they’re getting better?”
“And who knows what’s gonna happen after this, if it’s the start of something new or the continuation of something old or the end or . . . whatever . . .”
“Jesse . . .”
“That’s my name.” God, why did I say that? I should talk deeper, more—
“It’s a cool name. I like it,” she said. “How old are you?”
“Sixteen,” I said. Should I have said eighteen? Nineteen, even?
“I’m seventeen.”
“Really?” Damn. Maybe I should have gone with nineteen.
“Yeah, really. What?”
“Nothin’.”
“What is it?” she smiled, punching me lightly on the arm.
“Just . . .” I smiled back. She could punch me like that all she wanted, so long as she smiled. Man, that smile . . . “I thought maybe you’d be, like, early twenties.”
Was that a bad thing to say, that a girl looked five or so years older than she actually was? Not for a seventeen-year-old, right? How the hell would I know? The only seventeen-year-old girls I’d ever spoken to were the older sisters of friends and they seemed to go out of their way to ignore me, all dating twenty-something-year-old idiots with tricked-out cars.
It was crappy being a teenager. Even though I had real company, I was still spending too much time living in my head and thinking too much. I wanted to be older and stronger and have more answers than anyone else. I wouldn’t mind skipping a few years if it meant I could wake up tomorrow in my twenties and everything would be back to how things were. But I knew that was unlikely; everything had changed for keeps.
“It’s cool, I get that a lot,” she said, smiling more and looking into the middle distance out on the deserted white street. “Comes in handy when I go out with friends.”
Like Caleb, she used the present tense. Maybe because this city was their home and it was too hard to put that kind of talk in the past, like it would never happen again. Whatever, I liked that she was closer to my age than I’d assumed.
“So,” I started, desperately wanting to know everything. “What’s your story? Where were you when—”
“The attack happened? I was home, doing some laundry in the basement.” She paused, gathering her thoughts—or maybe pushing the still vivid memory a little farther away to make it bearable. “I thought it was an earthquake. I even braced myself in a doorway until the sounds died down.
“I stayed down there for ages, in that doorway, and when I finally went back upstairs and looked out the windows, well . . . that’s when I saw people running. I don’t know why I didn’t rush outside—I just watched them. It took me nearly an hour to try to phone for help, but none of the phones, not even my cell, worked. TV, radio, all of it—gone. Then the power flickered off for good. All in the space of an hour, everything either destroyed or shut down, leaving me there, all alone. I sat at the window until it got dark, and then I sat on the couch and cried right through the night. I heard screams outside. I couldn’t move . . .”
“Where were your parents?”
“They’re away, thank God. We have a farm in Connecticut—they’re there now, I hope.” She paused, as though wondering about their possible fates, but snapped herself out of it. “My brother lives in Denver; he’s in the Air Force, a medic. He’s in Afghanistan right now, due back next month.”
“What about your friends?”
“I’ve been trying to find them, any friends. Some of their buildings were destroyed, or their apartments were all locked up. Then I . . .” she slowed, “then I found one friend . . . her body, at least . . . and that made me stop wanting to look.”
Her pretty face had turned pale and cold.
“Listen to me,” she said, self-consciously, “talking about myself . . .”
“I like it; talk all day if you want.” And it was true.
She blushed. “How about you? Where have you been these last two weeks?”
“The GE building at 30 Rock,” I said. I told her everything that had happened over the past two weeks, the short version.
“These soldiers—what were they doing?” she asked when I’d finished.
“I’m not sure, they just had the two trucks, but said there’d be more. They said things would get worse, and that this virus is more serious where it’s warmer.”
“But, I mean, were they here to save people?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know.” She looked disappointed, just a little, but it was true: I didn’t know and I didn’t want to lie to her just to make her happy. “They drove on.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it until this morning, when I headed out and—”
“And here you are.”
“And here I am.” God, why do I keep repeating what she says? She’s going to think I’m a class-A moron. I was eager to change the subject, to find out what she made of all this. “What do you think we should do? What do you want to do?”
“I’m not sure,” she shrugged. “I didn’t even know if anyone else had survived until I met you. I mean, survived and stayed normal.”
I wanted to check something with her. “So do you think the virus was in the air? Do you think that’s how the Chasers became infected? They happened to be outside when the virus was released on the city?”
“Must have been that,” she said. “But the air’s clear now, because of all that rain we had on day one, and all the snow since.”
“So the only way it can be passed on now is . . .” I hesitated.
“By a Chaser physically infecting a survivor.” She shuddered. “By . . . drinking from them.”
“If that’s possible, I haven’t seen it—but who knows, right? We’ve got to be wary of that, of anything to do with them . . .”
“Well, I think heading north sounds like a good plan; maybe up to my parents’ farm or something?”
I smiled. I imagined them, their farm, everything being how things were meant to be. How they might have news, real news, about all this. From there, maybe I could plan my way home. But I couldn’t leave without Rachel or Caleb knowing. I knew then that whatever happened, I must not choose Felicity over my other friends.
“Is there anything holding you here in the city?” I asked.
She shook her head and sipped her water, but I could sense her despair at the thought of leaving. I could understand her need to be somewhere safe and familiar. I’d felt that way about 30 Rock. The call of home, the safety of the familiar, however misplaced that feeling of sanctuary might be.
“I just want to get to my parents.”
/> “How about you come to the zoo with me?” I said. “See if we can get Rachel to come too.”
“Sounds like she has her hands full there.”
“But she can’t stay forever,” I said. “It’s not safe, and it’s too big a job. Maybe meeting you and Caleb will change her mind.”
“But what if we can’t get either of them to leave?”
“I think they will,” I said. “It might take time, but they’ve both seen how dangerous these Chasers are.”
“But don’t you think Caleb’s got so much here? It’s his hometown.”
She could have been talking about herself.
I thought about how Caleb spoke of his parents. Maybe he should go to their place to shock some reality into him—what was the likelihood that he’d find something as bad as, or worse, than he’d imagine?
“I think he’s smart enough to know what’s left, and to leave while he can,” I said. “Rachel’s hesitant about leaving the animals, sure. She wants to wait for help—she has to realize that it may never work out that way, and that things look like they’re getting worse around here.”
“Yeah.” She knew what I was trying not to think: Help may never come.
“The hard part might be convincing her that things are getting worse,” she said.
“We’ll both need to explain it to her,” I said.
“And if she won’t leave?”
“I don’t think I could leave her behind.”
“Okay . . .”
“Okay?”
“I’ll come and see her, try talking her around,” she said, but the way she rubbed her arm I could tell something was up, something was making her uncomfortable.
“But . . .” I said.
“Huh?”
“What is it?”
She smiled. “I’m that easy to read?”
“You’re like the third person I’ve spoken with in over two weeks,” I said. “I notice everything. What is it?”
“Okay,” she said, sitting forward. “This sounds stupid, I’m sure, but . . . I don’t like zoos, never have. Prisons, really, don’t you think?”
I was prevented from answering by a noise outside.
“What was that?” I asked, sitting up, alert, distracted from her confession.
“I was saying how I don’t—”
“No, listen!” I said, and we sat there, still.
It was a familiar noise, but it took me a second to place it.
Felicity whispered: “What is it?”
“I think it’s a truck,” I said, and I was out of my chair, nose to the window, looking down the street. I could see movement and I felt the glass vibrate. “Those soldiers. They’re back.”
24
They passed our store, crossed West 49th, and went north. The big-wheeled truck rumbled over the debris of the collapsed building opposite us, its facade reduced to rubble that lay spewed across Sixth Avenue, the stenciled lettering on the cabin’s door clear as it trundled by: USAMRIID.
“US Army!” Felicity said into my ear. “Medical Research Institute—they’re like the military version of the CDC.”
“They’re the guys I saw the other day,” I said, keeping low, peering out from the storefront as the truck climbed over the wreckage, two guys in the cabin and another couple sitting in the covered cargo area near the big container I’d noticed last time.
“Let’s go and talk to them.”
“No, wait!” I said, examining the soldiers more closely. My guy wasn’t among them. “They weren’t that friendly.”
“But you spoke to them,” she said. “Anyway, they’re US military, Jesse. My brother has worked with them, they’re good people: we’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“Only one guy was all right, though. The other two wanted me gone.”
“This is silly.”
“Felicity, wait!” I said again, this time putting a hand on her arm to stop her leaving the store. “Please, let’s follow them for a bit first, okay? If you’re right, awesome. But let’s just see to be sure.”
She looked at me, then back out the windows to the truck as it wove its way through crashed vehicles, then back to me. “Okay.”
Outside, I zipped up my coat as we ran to make up some distance. They were just over a block ahead, out in front of the Radio City Music Hall, when Felicity pulled me to a stop against an overturned bus.
“What?”
“Listen!” she said, a hand pointing up to the sky.
All I could hear was the sound of the diesel engine, reverberating off the buildings around us.
“Hear it?”
I was about to say “no,” when I heard it too. A high-pitched sound, like a mosquito, and getting louder.
“What the hell is that?” I asked, scanning around, trying to work out what could be causing the noise.
“I saw one yesterday,” she said, pointing up and to the south. There, flying at a height about forty stories above street level, was an aircraft. Long skinny wings and no canopy for a pilot. It was aimed straight for us. It looked like the glider that my dad had sent me up in for my sixteenth birthday, only this one was sans cockpit and had a motor of some sort, whirring away, growing in intensity, traveling fast, four blocks out, and then—
“Down!” I yelled, pulling Felicity to the ground.
An orange flash from under a wing pylon of the aircraft as a black cylinder broke free and streamed through the air, its heat palpable as it flashed over us and—
KLAPBOOM!
The shockwave shifted us on the ground, then the burning heat of a fireball and the concussive sound of windows blasting out and debris flying through the air hit us, in the same moment the aircraft buzzed loud overhead.
I looked up, coughing against the dust and rock fragments falling with the snow. What remained of the military truck was smoldering wreckage. The cargo area was gone and the cabin was a ripped-open shell burning bright with fire and making popping sounds. Black smoke plumed skyward. No one could be alive in that mess. The buzz of the attacking aircraft was fading, the smoke from the explosion now rising in two twisting vortices from where it had flown through the mushrooming plume—and then the noise changed as the aircraft ascended again, a fast buzzing gnat, soaring high over Sixth Avenue in what was apparently a huge loop.
“It’s coming back!” Felicity yelled, her hand reaching out to mine. I was already on my feet.
“Come on!” I said, pulling her up and we ran east along 49th. The last thing I saw as we raced around the corner was a group of Chasers, the fronts of their jackets covered with blood spatters, in a crouched run: they were heading towards the wrecked truck.
We ran up Fifth towards the zoo. I constantly looked back over my shoulder, checking out Sixth Avenue, half-expecting to see that aircraft make a sweeping turn from a side street and zero in on us. I didn’t see it, didn’t hear it, and—perhaps more important—I could see no Chasers back there either.
We were silent, just the sounds of our shoes on the snow and our heavy breathing in sync and then a sound like a pop and everything went black.
Floating, the warm sun on my face, Dad cooking on the campfire, but now he’s gone and I’m on the roof of 30 Rock. People running past me towards the edge of the building—it’s the masses I saw in Felicity’s video right after the attack; survivors like me. They’re running away from me? No. I turn around and see, clearly, the threat: they’re running from soldiers, men with the look and equipment and intent to do harm. I turn and go to call out, but too late, they’ve gone. What would I have said anyway? DON’T RUN? I run, fast as I can, to the edge and skid to a stop and look down—seventy-five stories and a blur of life below, hurtling to an end. Now they’ve disappeared, falling or fallen to the ground; they jumped to avoid being shot. I open up my fist to see a glass stone, small, dark and translucent; an irregular marble with swirls of gray, black, and brown, a childhood gift from an Apache American. “This stone holds the tears of my ancestors,” he’d told me.
Then all I could see was gray. I blinked my eyes clear. The sky. Clouds low, clouds high—smoke. Smoke wisped and I felt heat and I turned my head to the side and a car next to me was on fire.
I turned my head, felt the cold snow on my cheek and the heat from the flames radiating to my face.
Felicity was there, between me and the burning car. Motionless. I scrambled over, pulled her towards me and her face moved a little, her eyes blinking.
“Felicity!” I said. She didn’t change expression. I looked at her body, everything seemed fine but until she started moving, I couldn’t be sure. I had an image of my friends in the wrecked subway carriage. I swallowed it down and looked around us.
Three other vehicles were on fire. Crackling and smoking, bright and dark. The street seemed deserted.
I looked down into Felicity’s eyes, took her hands in mine. I touched her face, the back of my fingers down her soft cheek.
“Jesse?”
“Yes?” I said hopefully.
“I can’t move.”
I imagined her not moving at all, never again. I thought how I’d drag her to safety, to a building or the zoo if her legs didn’t work, and then about whether I should even drag her if that were the case—I mean, if it was some kind of spinal injury . . .
“Wait,” she said, her leg shaking. “See?”
“Are you doing that?” I asked, looking at her foot going side to side, then her knee bending.
“Not sure.”
Her hands were heavy in mine, and I had them pressed against my chest as I knelt next to her.
“Try to—”
She squeezed my hands.
“That’s it!”
I heard a noise—a whoosh of air—and a fireball erupted from a car nestled in among the wrecks. It lifted up from the rear as if the trunk had exploded and the sounds and percussion wave knocked me onto my back. I coughed and scrambled towards Felicity, who was rolling onto her side to face me.
“Can you move now?”
“I think so,” she said, propping herself up on one elbow. I took her gloved hands in mine and she squeezed on tight, harder this time. I pulled her to her feet. She stood, unsteady, arms around me.