The cops shoot nonstop. In the short time I’ve been watching, they haven’t dropped one ghoul.
NYPD soldiers, like members of every military police force, are trained to aim for the center of the body, not the head. Killshots are trouble—legally and otherwise. So it’s not as though they’re being willfully ignorant.
Sean mutters. “They still aren’t shooting them in the head. They have to shoot them in the head.” His voice rises to a fever pitch.
Schaffer hefts the office chair from his desk and hurls it at the floor to ceiling window. It cracks but doesn’t shatter.
He grins. Seems a tiny bit embarrassed. “These windows are bloody fuckin tough, huh?”
That grin fades when the infected get to a cop who’s within arm’s reach of the ghoul. His Kevlar vest doesn’t do dick for him when the jaws of the monster multitude sink into his throat. His scream is a fresh addition to the maelstrom of noise.
Schaffer hits the window again. It explodes. Glass sparkles like tiny supernovas as light dances off the falling shards. There’s a rush of air and polluted grey snow in the office.
My boss braces himself against the winds that whip at his face. He leans out against the dying day. Screams. “The fuckin head. You gotta shoot em in the fuckin head.”
Noble effort, I guess. But there’s no way those cops are gonna hear him over the chaos.
Schaffer shouts until it’s clear he won’t not be making contact. He pulls himself back inside. His eyes are wild. “We’re fuckin journalists.” He sucks on the whiskey bottle. “Let’s go do our job.” He marches out the door. Drags Sean by the arm.
The young scientist shoots me a look of legitimate panic. He seems less than thrilled to be hauled off somewhere new by an entirely different kind of lunatic.
“I’m taking him up to the radio studios upstairs,” my boss says over his shoulder. “TV might be fucked, but I’m putting him on the air, and we’re gonna tell the cops and everyone listening exactly what they need to do. We’ll make a loop and pump it out until the city’s power grid dies and even then we’ll keep pumping it out until our backup generators die.”
He whips around to me. “Get online. Update. I don’t give a shit about spelling or grammar or anything else. Just get the goddamn word out. Big flashing fuckin thing on the homepage. Speed is key. You’ll be faster than us. It has to be radio or Internet now that the TV floor is gone.”
Schaffer shouts to the other end of the newsroom. “Stevenson, get on the horn with the NYPD. Tell em how do deal with these bitey shits.”
I can see the aging reporter, John Stevenson, give us the thumbs up from down the way. I kinda doubt he’ll succeed in his quest, but I’m sure he’ll try. Stevenson’s a solid guy.
We three march to the online desk. It sits opposite the stairwell that me and Sean made our way up before.
In a heartbeat of terror, I realize something.
The emergency door is open.
We hadn’t fuckin closed it.
An infected arm lashes out and grabs Schaffer by his collar. He grunts. Twists free. Backs away from the beast. The Keef stumbles into the newsroom—what remains of a stumpy brunette. Her face is falling off. It stains the carpet with drippy splotches of blackened, necrotized hemoglobin. She lunges again for Schaffer.
My boss brings the bottle of booze up. Bashes her skull. The glass cracks. The diseased dame hits the floor. I jump forward. Slam the edge of my red crowbar through her brain. The ex-woman gurgles as one last bit of breath slithers from her lungs.
Schaffer sighs. “My poor whiskey.”
Well, he’s certainly not having any problems coping.
We hear more monsters on their way up. I wonder if it’s by accident they found their way into the stairwell, or if they can track us.
The people left in the newsroom huddle around.
Schaffer bellows. “Here’s the deal: You kill the brain, you kill the ghoul. There’s a headline. Find some weapons. We have to keep these freaks from getting beyond this floor. If you aren’t in a killing mood, the pacifist pussies among you, start moving desks. We need a barricade.”
I snap the crowbar outta the woman’s head and run to my desk. I open up our content management system. Type. Publish an enormous red, flashing warning on our homepage: YOU KILL THE BRAIN, YOU KILL THE GHOUL.
I pump it out to our Twitter feed. Our Facebook page. Reddit. Aggregate sites all over. I log into SomethingAwful.com. Start a thread. Write a brief explanation of the brain-destroying “cure.” Within fifteen seconds, several people reply that I’m full of shit. The monsters. The cure. Everything. The reason being that it’s too much like the movies.
I also get called a “gay idiot retard faggot” and variations thereof.
Hooray for the Internet!
Behind me, I hear the staff photographers’ camera shutters blink.
Most of the remaining reporters turn to run. They bolt. Wanna get anywhere but here. Where do the bastards intend to go? They cower. They panic. They use phones and datapads to make last-minute calls.
My own phone vibrates in my pocket.
It’s Fred.
I say, “Can’t talk now. Bad guys trying to eat me.”
Fred says, “You know they’re contagious.”
“The bites, yeah. News travels fast, don’t it?”
“Call me back.”
“I will. Stay alive, Fred.”
Schaffer raises a fire axe. Where got it from, I have no idea. He lets loose a battle cry that both galvanizes and terrifies the others who stay to fight.
Our squad of soldiers is...not so great.
There are two women. Both old birds. One’s a suit from Human Resources and the other, Linda, is a librarian who’s helped me dig up obscure shit for stories on many occasions. I like her.
The rest of the team is comprised of a young copy kid, Brian Hunter, and the older reporter, John Stevenson.
This will not end well.
The granny from HR readies a butcher knife. The librarian has the steel hanging rod out of the coat closet. The copy kid’s armed with a chair leg. Our mild-mannered reporter has the fire extinguisher from the kitchen.
Schaffer turns to Stevenson. Says, “Did you get the cops?”
Stevenson shakes his head. “Busy signal.”
Hello, you’ve reached 911—if this is an actual emergency, please hold. If someone is digging their teeth into you, press one. If someone is merely staring at you hungrily, press two...
Sean approaches the stalwart newspaper people. He’s carrying the steel slicing arm from an old paper cutter. Removed from its chassis, it resembles a heavy machete.
Hmm, I think. Maybe this will work.
Two flesh-eaters shamble inward.
The HR woman with the butcher blade screams. A ghoul falls onto her as the copy kid hammers at it and the reporter sprays em both, uselessly, with compressed fire gel. The monster bites a chunk out of the woman’s neck.
Optimism does not suit me.
Sean shouts. “The head. The head!”
Schaffer looks down at the HR woman. “Sorry love.” He brings the axe’s weight down on the cannibal’s cranium. It splits the skull. Penetrates farther down. The blade lops the old woman’s head off above the jaw line. Blood and brains jet across the carpet.
Either my boss is losing it or his will to survive is off the charts.
Sean skirts around the group. He lodges his makeshift machete in the head of the second fiend. Then kicks the thing’s limp body back into a group of infected that are making their way up the stairs.
Sean yells. “I count eight more.”
I nod. Heft my crowbar. Get ready for impending doom.
Gotta get the fuckin signal out.
I pass a muted television. Slow to watch it.
The screen shows local ne
ws channel NY1. An aerial shot of the Lincoln Tunnel fills the screen. Grey snow races around the halogen lights of the toll plaza. The camera’s pointed at the New Jersey side. Traffic doesn’t move. A mob of dark figures march toward the Garden State.
I turn the volume up.
“—in yet. I repeat, we have no details. There appears to be a large group of what the police are only describing as ‘violent attackers’ heading west—” the signal cuts out. Static fills my ears. The image on the TV flickers.
TV ain’t as good as Fred and his web team, I think.
“—are being told that attempts to seal off the island of Manhat—”
The TV shows shambling monsters that sweep over cars like a tidal wave. There are a couple of those fuckers on stilts too. The camera zooms.
A smaller picture-within-picture from another camera feed shows more mobs of the things tearing up the West Side Highway.
“—ave failed. There are reports that the USC Air Force has been mobilized to—”
Crazed cannibal parents drag their children out of back seats and rip em apart. Mommies and Daddies feast on little Johnnies and Barbras. The infected clamber to the mainland like perverse Wile E. Coyotes forever hunting Road Runner.
“—roy the bridges and tunnels. I repeat. We are getting word that the USC military is moving to blockade all tunnels and bridges out of the New York City Zone, destroying them if need be.”
They’ll get to the mainland in minutes.
Except... No way can they be that fast. And what good would bombing do? There’s no stopping it now. We’re ground zero, but...
The forced isolation of Los Angeles suddenly seems like a real smart career move.
I cast wary eyes to the increasingly one-sided battle raging near the stairwell. The copy kid’s down. Pulled into the torrent of arms that spring from the emergency exit. He screams as the ghouls shred his flesh.
Panic and fear gnaw at my bravado.
The lights in the newsroom stutter. They blink on and off. Make the action seem as though it’s taking place in a strobe—jittery frames of a film.
Flash. Moan. Darkness. Flash. Scream. Darkness. Flash. Blood. Darkness. Flash. Flesh. Darkness. Flash. Ripping. Darkness. Flash. Reanimation. Darkness. Flash.
Visual schizophrenia.
Emergency lighting bursts to life in the stairwell. I see silhouettes of the carriers lurch and grab for whoever is within reach.
The hulking angry mass of Schaffer steps forward. His fire axe blazes red and metallic. He throws his force behind a chop. Beheads one ghoul. A wooshing second swing evicts another head from its host.
I jog toward the darkness. Tap Sean on the shoulder. He swings. Realizes it’s me and not some nutty fucker in the last second. Pulls back. His makeshift machete could’ve sliced my arm off. Instead, it just slices into my leather jacket.
I shout. “Oh, you fuck.”
Sean puts his hands out. “Sorry, shit, sorry.”
He pats my arm.
Linda rams her metal staff through the neck of a cannibal. Schaffer hacks at its head. The monster folds into a twitching heap. Another one replaces it seconds later. I introduce my crowbar to its forehead.
I pant. “So, level with me. Are these are zomb—”
Sean makes a noise like a yelp. “No, no, no. Don’t start that.” He holds his machete out and glares at me. “What these things are is reanimated. That’s the only word with any modicum of scientific precision that can be used here.” Sean swings down into the face of another walking maggot museum. “I’m trying to be serious.” An entire head’s worth of gore gushes out of its skull enclosure.
“Okay.” I shrug. “What is that, four left?”
“Uh...” Sean puts his foot on the parasite person’s skull and pushes off to free his embedded machete. “There were eight. The copy kid added one.” He rubs his head. Sweat pours off. His hair is matted down. It makes him look like a sewer rat. “Yeah, I think four left. Not counting, you know, all of them.”
Schaffer shouts and grunts and charges the stairwell. I can’t see the kills. Blood splashes up in massive waves every time he brings his axe down.
Conan the Editor.
He’s breathless. “Get. A. Fuckin. Desk.”
Sean and I scramble. We find one—some kinda heavy composited plastic deal. My arm muscles pump acid. Damn thing weighs a ton. Schaffer hustles out of our way. Linda admires us for a second then catches herself. We hurl the heavy thing down into the emergency stairwell, propping it vertically to make a barrier that should at the least buy everyone some time.
Schaffer grunts. “Good. We are leaving.”
Chapter 11:
Eat the Press
We climb the stairs. My lungs burn.
When we get to twenty-four, the radio floor, I light a cigarette even though it hurts to breathe.
Stevenson looks back. Nods to us as we ready our weapons.
No way to know what’s up here waiting.
He pushes open the emergency door open.
An axe smashes down into his head. The reporter’s brains shoot out in a hot flood.
“Oh, heavens,” cries a voice. “He wasn’t one, was he?”
I run in and grab the dipshit axe-swinger by his throat. A wild punch comes at me from the side. Hits me high in the ear. I don’t wince, but it hurts like a motherfucking dogcock hump.
The puny pugilist is some punk kid.
I bark at the axe-swinger. “Stop moving.”
The man I’ve got by the shirtfront whimpers. “I didn’t... How was I supposed to know? So many had come off the elevator. Gotten to the floors below us.” He whines. Sweat drips through his handlebar mustache. It looks like a moist caterpillar died on his upper lip.
There are five other people standing around. I assume most are engineers here to run the equipment.
I shake the skittish jackass with the stache. “Who are you?”
He blinks. “Reverend William Stout. The radio host.”
I know that name.
Linda, Sean and Schaffer file in after me. They’re all heated. Angry. Staring at the corpse of Stevenson.
I say, “You’re the evangelist. The guy who does the Christian Power Hour? The fundamentalist shitshow where you blame basically everything on the liberals and the LGBT folks and the abortionists and the minorities? Stop me if I’m wrong.”
“No.” Stout works to smooth out his tie under my arm. He fidgets. “I don’t know if you’ve ever actually listened to my show, but—”
“We don’t need you.” I rap him across the nose with my crowbar. He grabs his face. shrieks. I push him against a soundproofing wall and pound him on the nose again with steel. There’s a crack. Blood pours from his face. He slumps to the ground.
Sean snatches my crowbar.
Schaffer grips my shoulder. “A time and a place. Not now.”
I bend down. Get in Stout’s face. “I will kill you.” I point to Stevenson’s body to explain the obvious. I point to the craven, pimple-faced teenager who punched me in the ear. “And I’ll kill you, too.”
Well, actually, I probably won’t. But I want to.
Linda kicks Stout in the side and spits on him.
I pull Stevenson’s body into one of the soundproof radio studios. I’m gonna seal him in. Cut off the inevitable stench. Even with the barricade, I don’t want the parasite people to be able to smell their way up here. I’m not worried about him coming back. He wasn’t bitten—and even if he was, there ain’t no brain to take over anyway.
TVs mounted on the walls throughout the floor show more news reports. Fires rage everywhere. The death toll keeps rising. The authorities all look confused and pissed.
The infection is well beyond my city’s borders now. I don’t understand how a thing like this can move so fuckin fast. Only a few hours ha
ve passed.
In fact, this is too fast to pin on just those shambling carriers. Maybe bite victims are getting hauled off to hospitals and reanimating there. Trying to save lives is just spreading the infection at higher speeds.
Beth, or pieces of her, might say, “I told you so.”
Schaffer says, “We need help. We need to record something to put on an infinite loop. Which engineer wants to assist?”
The men around us shuffle their feet and stare at their shoes. Why they’re being chickenshit now of all times, I don’t know. They glance to Stout. Then to me. Like they’re trying to decide who to be most afraid of.
Finally, a young black man steps forward. He glares at his coworkers. “Pussies.” They shrink back. The engineer eyes my editor. Says, “I can set you up.” He smirks at me. “If you can get me outta here.”
I lean against the wall. Exhausted. My brain’s pounding. I’m happy to have a moment to catch my breath.
Schaffer stares at me.
As if I have any idea what the fuck I’m doing.
I roll my eyes. “Yeah. I can get you out of here.”
The engineer nods. “All right. Follow me.”
Sean hops to his side. Schaffer and Linda walk in lockstep. I bring up the rear.
I shout over my shoulder to the useless men. “Close that goddamn door.”
We walk along another one of those egg carton hallways. Same setup as the little TV studios on the third floor. Heavy foam juts out to cancel any noise from within or without.
The engineer stops. Opens up a sealed room. “Have yourself a seat,” he says to Sean. “Name’s Ben Jones.” He holds out his hand to the young scientist. Sean shakes it. A smile on his face.
“My name is Sean,” he says. “I’m a scientist.”
“Guess you’re the guy we need on air right now.”
Linda and Schaffer stay back a few steps.
I keep going. Tap Ben’s shoulder. “What we need is a recording of Sean giving a report and instructions. Seeding information. We need that to go out, on a loop, for... Well, for forever.” I nod to Sean. “Just record what you said to me on three. Tell em about the infection and the headshots and the aggression. Whatever you can think of that’ll help people.”
Live, From the End of the World Page 11