“Why did they do that?” I asked.
“I’ve got no idea. Before they reached the end of the overpass, a screaming man appeared; he pushed one of the females straight onto the road below. Her partner started fighting with the man but he was killed as well…”
“Wait a minute, this mad-man killed two people?” Jack asked.
“Yes, the guy had a knife and stabbed him in the neck a few times.”
“What did he do after that?” Jack said.
“He ran away after that towards the airport.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“None of it makes any sense, Jack,” I replied. “Maybe he was only half affected?”
“Why would anyone be only half affected? We haven’t seen that anywhere else?”
“I don’t know. But it doesn’t really change anything, he still killed. We don’t let anyone close.”
Jack nodded.
“I don’t get why he ran away, what happened after that?” Bernie asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine. The other couple both huddled against the wall, I think they just froze or couldn’t take it anymore. Chris suggested that we had to find some shelter. I called to the couple to join us and get moving, but they told me they were going it alone and waved us away. Only six of us made it to Manhattan.”
“What was that like?” I asked.
“What do you think? A woman came sprinting out of an alley holding a bread knife and headed straight for us. I turned and started running as fast as I could, I had no idea where I was going. When I stopped to catch my breath, only Chris and a lady called Deb were with me. The others must have made-off in other directions. I looked down the street and she was still coming for us.”
“Shit, what happened next?” I said.
“A man stepped out of an entrance to an apartment block and hit her in the face with a baseball bat. He smashed her head all over the sidewalk with another few swings. He was like a fucking machine. I tried to thank him, but he ignored me, picked up the dead woman’s bread knife and sawed at his own throat until blood was pouring out. He dropped to his knees, and then fell face first onto the sidewalk.”
“Did you start to see a pattern?” Bernie asked.
”I wasn’t really thinking straight, but looking back I can. We ran into the apartment block the man had come from and found a door open on the second floor. We sneaked inside and searched the apartment for any signs of life, it was empty, so I locked the door, and finally breathed a sigh of relief.”
“It was like that when we got to Bernie’s. Is that where you tweeted from?” I replied.
“Yeah, it had internet access, food and drink, so we decided to wait there until we could figure out what was happening. Chris was really worried about Mike, and Deb wouldn’t stop talking about conspiracy theories. In the end, we both told her to shut up.”
“Did you see or hear anything outside?” Bernie said.
“No, none of us looked out of the window in case it brought some unwanted attention, if you know what I mean?”
I nodded.
“A fire alarm close by prevented us from hearing anything outside, I heard a few loud bangs near the apartment, but we kept the lights off and curtains closed. Just after we had dinner, there was a loud banging at the door-”
“Here we go,” Jack said.
“Chris looked through the spyglass and saw a man in a blue uniform. He said he was building security and wanted to come in so he could check that everybody was okay.”
“Right,” Bernie said, shaking his head.
“We didn’t know did we? In hindsight, we should have ignored him, but at the time, we were desperate to reach out for any kind of help. Chris put the chain on the door and opened it up. The man kicked the door really hard, it flew open and sent Chris flying backwards into Deb and me. The man came inside, he had a large tool or something like that above his head, you know? Like what a mechanic has.”
“A wrench?” Bernie replied.
“Whatever. He swung it down towards Chris’ face. Chris rolled out of the way to avoid being hit, but he exposed Deb, who took the full force of the blow to the side of her head. I wriggled backwards to get away from what was happening, it took me a few seconds to get my feet free from under Deb’s body. I was screaming, the man carried on hitting Deb’s head with the tool. Chris tried to grab his leg, but was kneed in the face. The man checked Deb’s pulse; I don’t know why, half her head was caved in. He walked out and I heard a window smash.”
Lea paused and drank her vodka.
“I’m sorry, Lea that sounds horrific, you’re lucky to be alive. What happened after that?” I asked.
“The guy had jumped out head first onto the sidewalk. We saw him again when we left the apartment to come and meet you. Chris blamed himself for Deb’s death. If he hadn’t rolled away, then she would still have been alive, he said. I tried to reason with him saying it was a natural reaction to avoid something like that, he wouldn’t listen. He kept repeating it over and over again until late into the night. He wrapped Deb’s body in a blanket from the spare room and sat with it all night. I don’t think he knew her at all, but he had started to lose control.”
“I suppose different people react in different ways,” I said, without giving it much thought.
Lea stared at me for a few seconds, and then continued.
“I didn’t get much sleep that night; I was too scared to close my eyes. In fact, I haven’t really slept at all since landing. Next morning, Chris and I were both completely worn out and he was making me despair at our situation. I felt like we were going to be killed at any moment, more in desperation, I checked twitter and saw your reply. Your tweets had been the only ones I received that stood out as being genuine. Chris was in a mess, I needed some confidence that I could actually get through all of this in one piece. That was when I replied and agreed to meet you at the bridge.”
We all nodded.
“Chris didn’t want to leave the apartment, but I convinced him that we needed to find more people if we wanted to survive, he eventually agreed. I found a map in the apartment and the bridge wasn’t far-”
“I’ve been waiting to hear this,” Bernie said.
Lea rolled her eyes.
”We crept along to the bridge and it was pretty quiet, but within fifty yards, I saw a man walking across the bridge from the Manhattan side. He jumped into a car and started driving through the stationary traffic away from us. There was no way I could warn you. Sorry.”
“It’s okay, Lea, we probably wouldn’t have recognised a warning even if you tried,” Jack replied.
“We waited to see what would happen as I knew you might be at the other end. I heard a shot then a long blast of a car horn. We sprinted back to the apartment and I still didn’t know if you had survived or were even genuine.”
“Well, here we are. What did you do after that?” I asked.
“Back at the apartment, I started to feel really desperate, and sent another tweet without much hope of reply. Chris had become manic, saying that we were going to die and that our last hope had gone. He wouldn’t eat and seriously considered just wandering the streets to find Mike. We agreed to stay in the apartment, purely because it seemed safer than any alternative.”
“What alternatives did you consider?” Bernie said.
“Not that many really, we were thinking about getting a boat and anchoring in the harbour, or heading to the end of Long Island. But once you replied on twitter, I wanted to hook up in Elmhurst regardless of what Chris wanted to do. I had a map that covered the area and was just about to send you another tweet confirming I was on my way, when the power died. Chris refused to leave at first. I ended up slapping him and shouting that he was risking both our lives by wanting to stay. If he wanted to do something stupid, I told him, he could do it after we had found other people.”
“So he went along with it?” Bernie asked.
“When I asked him what Mike would have wanted,
he agreed to leave with me and head to Elmhurst. We didn’t come across anyone while making our way over the Queensboro Bridge, although we did manage to get an automatic each from a crowd of corpses.”
“You know how to use one?” Jack said.
“I have used guns before. An ex-partner had a weird obsession with them and used to take me to a range.”
“And when you crossed the bridge?” Bernie replied.
“We crept along following the directions on my map. When we turned towards the heart of Elmhurst and walked a couple hundred yards, the music started a few blocks away. Chris decided that it must have been you letting us know your location, and that you were guiding us in. Just in case, we checked our guns. I let off a shot by accident.”
“I think we heard that.” I said, it was probably the shot that caused Bernie and me to start running from the scene of the trap.
“We crept up to the parking lot, you know the rest.”
We all sat in silence. While telling us her story, Lea showed she obviously had strength, otherwise, she wouldn’t have made it this far, and the incident in the parking lot when she shot the killer had proved that. Lea had shown no hesitation when the danger became clear.
“So why didn’t you leave the parking lot after the killer shot Chris?” Jack asked. “From what I saw, you just knelt in the same place until Harry arrived.”
“I thought I was on my own. Also, I figured that I’d been fooled on twitter by a killer, and Chris’ death was my fault. I didn’t know what to do next.”
“You know now it wasn’t your fault, and you’re not on your own either. You’re welcome to stay with us,” Bernie said.
We waited for Lea’s response, but she didn’t give one, perhaps she still didn’t trust us. I could understand that. But her options were limited, leaving our group and making her own way would be a lot more dangerous than staying with numbers.
The four of us finished off the bottle of vodka while we decided what we should do in the morning. Bernie wanted to find a camping stove so we could make some hot food. Jack and I were happy to go along with his suggestion, but were a little wary of heading anywhere that would take us around the parking lot. Lea was mostly quiet, but didn’t seem all that eager to revisit the parking lot either. Bernie played the gracious host and offered Lea his bedroom, which she gladly accepted and disappeared, closing the door. Relegated to the living room with us, he took a pillow and blanket and settled on the floor between the couches.
“What do you think about Lea?” I whispered.
“She seems a bit of a loose cannon, we just need to make sure she’s strapped to the deck,” Jack replied.
“I like her,” Bernie said, “if we have Lea with us, then it’s a bit more cover when we are in the open.”
“I agree, let’s sleep on our next moves,” I said.
As the room filled with Bernie and Jack’s snoring, I lay awake and started to think about our future options. Between the four of us, we had a reasonable mobile team capable of getting somewhere safe with readily available supplies. I wrestled with the problem of where to go as I fell asleep.
Early the next morning, I awoke to see dawn through the gaps in the blinds. Bernie was snoring on the floor, and Jack was curled up in a foetal position on the other couch.
I stood up and stretched, feeling a tightness in my thighs from the running yesterday, and then nudged Jack, whispering, “Get up. Let’s go up to the roof for a chat.”
Jack nodded his head and stretched quietly before getting up. Once he was awake, we grabbed our weapons, falling back into habits learned in the army. . We silently left the apartment and started climbing the stairs. We hadn’t had the chance for much of a chat recently, and I wanted to get his thoughts on Bernie, Lea, and our current situation.
As we neared the door to the roof, Jack noticed it was slightly ajar and grabbed my shoulder.
“Stop,” he whispered into my ear, “I closed that door last night when we came down. There’s no way it could have opened by itself.”
“Could it be Lea? We didn’t check the bedroom,” I replied.
“Maybe. Or it could be a killer.”
“If there is somebody up here, they will have heard us coming upstairs.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” he said before he called out, “Lea… Lea?”
There was no reply…
We couldn’t just turn around and go back down the stairs. If our apartment haven wasn’t safe anymore, we needed to know. Jack and I had to find out what was behind that door. If it was a threat, it had to be removed.
I could see through the gap between the doorframe and the door that it was starting to get brighter outside.
“You kick the door open quickly, and cover me with your rifle. I’ll crouch in front of you and go in low so we can both have a shot if needed,” I said.
“Okay, ready?”
I nodded, “Let’s do it.”
Jack kicked the door open and we heard a cry of pain from a male voice as the door bounced back towards us. Bernie was definitely still sleeping downstairs, so the man on the roof must have been behind the door, waiting for us to walk out so he could attack us from behind.
“Come out in front of the door with your hands up, there’s two of us here and we’re both armed,” I shouted.
“I’m armed as well. I promise I won’t hurt you. Throw down your weapons and show yourselves,” a voice shouted back.
“Bullshit,” Jack shouted, then said to me, “let’s just bolt the door and leave the prick locked up here.”
That would mean losing our observation post, but would solve the immediate problem. The door had swung back half way after hitting the man, so I kept low and slowly stretched out my arm to grab the handle. As I did, I looked down at the gap underneath the door and saw the edge of a shoe. The man was standing right up against the door on the other side.
I shifted the Glock into my right hand quickly, dropped onto the floor, and fired through the door. There was a scream of pain and frustration and the sound of a body hitting the ground, as the man immediately sank. I could now see the top of his head around the edge of the door and fired twice again. The first round hit the top left side of his forehead and sent it spinning back. The next round hit him straight under the chin, and I saw red spray appear behind him as the bullet exited the top of his head.
We waited for another twenty seconds to make sure the killer was dead before going onto the roof, even though I was more than confident that he was. When we did eventually walk out and look around, a nasty surprise was waiting for us. There was another body on the roof. This one had been hacked to death with something sharp.
“Shit, have I killed an innocent man?”
“I don’t know,” Jack replied.
We inspected the man I had shot for clues.
”I doubt he killed that other person,” Jack said, “he’d be covered head to toe in blood if he did. The blood on his clothes is only around where you shot him.”
I nodded. Next to him was an MP40, I slipped the magazine out of the grip, took out the eight rounds to confirm the matching calibre and loaded them into my own.
We walked over to the other body, which was a young woman. It looked like she had been stabbed several times in the chest and throat.
“Harry, look. There’s a trail of blood leading to the edge of the roof.”
I looked down at the droplets on the floor that led to roughly where we had been sitting the previous day. We followed the trail and looked over the edge of the building. A corpse was sprawled out on the pavement below us, another suicide mission completed successfully.
I was almost certain that the man waiting for us behind the door hadn’t killed the woman on the roof, but this confirmed it.
“Why did three of them all come up here?” I asked.
“I don’t know, they might have seen us up here yesterday? Maybe they came up for a view of the surroundings to try and spot a victim.”
Whatever had h
appened, three killers had all visited the top of our apartment block between dusk and dawn.
I looked over at the parking lot. The music was no longer playing but four more bodies were lying there. I pointed it out to Jack, “Just how many of these bloody killers are there around here?”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. We might have attracted more than we expected. Whatever is going on, I don’t think we can stay here any longer.”
I agreed. It could have been possible that we attracted attention to ourselves somehow with our trap, but I doubted it. I also doubted that there were that many people hiding in Elmhurst. Killers may have started to go looking for prey.
We took the opportunity while we were still on the roof to discuss Bernie and Lea. Bernie had not yet fired a shot and had instructed us to do so a number of times, but he didn’t shy away from going in first, as he had proved in the police building at the airport and his local store. He had also provided a sanctuary for a couple of nights after leaving the airport. Lea had shown good assertiveness and survival instincts by making her way to Elmhurst to find other people. She had shot the man at the parking lot and hadn’t shown any remorse. The memory of it was probably ingrained in her mind, but that was the same as many of the things the rest of us had seen or done. Jack and I both agreed that we had the makings of a good team.
“Come on, let’s get back downstairs and make the other two some cold breakfast. They might be up and wondering where we are,” Jack said.
“We’ll also have to discuss our next move with them. We can’t stay here and need some options,” I replied.
We walked down the stairs and knocked on the apartment door three times. Bernie opened it almost immediately; Lea was standing behind him, looking ready to pounce.
“Where the hell have you been? We both woke up to the sound of gunfire,” Bernie said.
“It’s a long story,” Jack answered, “we’ll tell you over breakfast.”
First Activation: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller Page 11