Sean shakes his head. “You’re misunderstanding this a little. The parasite is making changes, not the reanimated. The agent itself is adapting. Because of certain environmental pressures, it is influencing physical modifications to the human body.”
Ben says, “Like that little voice that tells freaky chicks it’s a good idea to pierce their pussies. But their babies won’t be born with metal in their snatches.”
It takes Sean a second to process that. But he’s in agreement. “Pretty much. Yeah. That.”
I say, “I don’t get it.”
“Ugh... Look, the reanimated humans are just automatons, right? They’re machines for the infection. Their purpose is to spread it.”
I nod. “Right.”
“The ‘Keefs’ aren’t people in any meaningful sense. They have no real biological functions. The parasite is just driving human bodies like a car. So let’s say it takes the human body on a road trip—”
“Don’t get too weird.”
“Give me a minute. For the first chunk of that road trip, the weather is nominal and everything is fine. Then suddenly there’s a blizzard, so you need snow tires and maybe chains, so you modify your car accordingly to make the trip easier. But the car itself isn’t changing. It’s still a Chevy or a Honda or whatever.”
I don’t say anything.
Sean says, “The parasite is mutating and trying to reassemble us into something better suited for spreading the infection—installing those hypothetical snow tires. The parasite is evolving in response to new environmental demands, and then recalibrating its machine, the human body, to meet those new demands.”
Sean’s calm. Totally immersed in theory. This is his escape from the horrors around us. “Longer arms here, longer legs there. Head tucked into the chest. Lips torn out for easier access to those biting teeth. All done by removing and reinstalling what already exists. Hell, it was puking up its insides, probably to decrease weight. It doesn’t need any part of the human body except for the brain case, teeth, and what it thinks will keep it mobile.”
I deduce that this is bad.
Sean says, “The point is that this isn’t a genetic mutation occurring in one of them that waits to be passed on to kin or victims. Carpenters don’t pass their calluses on to their children. Calluses are developed over time—experience, right? This is a responsive, physical adaptation influenced by the parasite.
“And it will happen in all of them.”
Chapter 13:
Corpus Malus
Skyscrapers go dark. Seems like a lot of the power grids in the city are burning out. It’s also fuckin freezing. The superstorm rages. More than a foot of grey snow smothers the ground. Countless cannibal corpses stalk us and every uninfected human in the five boroughs.
Even worse, we’re stuck on Manhattan’s East Side.
It sucks.
I hate the East Side.
I ignite a flare. Use it to light an American Spirit. The red glare from the flare contrasts with the grey of the snow and the steady blue beams of the streetlights.
The walk to Helene allows me to play photojournalist with the shitty camera on my shitty backup phone. I upload whatever shots seem like a good idea to my Twitter account. Which, I confess, I mainly use for trolling.
I have no idea if anyone’s still manning the servers, but I wanna stay on top of what little room for reporting there is.
I photograph the carcasses of the thrashing undead. A group eating something or someone under a burning awning at Bloomingdale’s on Lexington. People waving to us from the fourth floor of the Bloomberg News building.
There’s an enormous group of infected trapped inside a little three-story, brick clothing store on the corner of Third Avenue that intrigues me for reasons I can’t put into words.
Maybe it’s cuz I can walk right up to the glass and gawk. Snap photos like an idiot tourist, knowing that they’re too stupid get out. I’m watching dangerous animals behind glass at the zoo—humiliating to them and fascinating to me.
I even get what I might have referred to back at the office as an “action shot”: A group of five infected as they scamper (not trying to make em sound cute, but that’s the first word that comes to mind) out from under the overpass of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge between Second and First Avenue.
The light’s low. It ain’t perfectly in focus. But it’s serviceable, even with the blue tint from emergency lighting.
If I’d been back at the website, I would’ve let that image stand. Stark. Shadows elongated. Arms of the attackers reaching out. A little blurry. The eerie blue plays perfectly.
For the inset, I would’ve had a cropped cut of the faces reworked in Photoshop—just a bubble hi-lighted white where we adjusted the levels so that you could see the real faces of the monsters.
They’re us, of course.
People caught at just the wrong time in just the wrong place.
No, I ain’t gonna get into a whole “humans are the real monsters” thing. Dipshit kids with college degrees that wanna flaunt their education and act like look-how-sensitive-I-am-to-the-plights-of-others do that.
I’m not sensitive and I don’t really care.
And those other cocksuckers are liars anyway.
But I do have a “money shot.” A picture of Ben and Sean opening up with Glock and shotgun. One of em scores a headshot. It’s faintly illuminated from the front by their blasts. Just enough to give the burst of brains and gore from the shadowy shape a hint of red. It almost looks like a production still from a movie.
Awesome.
The composition is perfect. The clash of blue and black in the background with the yellows and red in the foreground gives it a distinctive style and flare that screams: Front page motherbitches!
Or in my case: Homepage.
If I still had my datapad—and a job—I’d record the screams and thuds and splashes and gunshots. I’d package it together as a multimedia “experience.”
I take a few more actions shots, just of Sean and Ben.
Enough for em to seem heroic.
I don’t stop till Sean screams for ammo.
Giving O’Bannon the shells to reload will take too much time. So I decide to blow the attacking Keef’s head into fragments at range with my own shotgun. That works well enough.
We arrive.
Helene’s office is at the corner of Sixty-First and First Avenue. Nothing special. Just a small data entry place. Drab. One grey office building that melts in with the thousand others in Manhattan. And that’s probably a blessing. The building hasn’t gained much attention from the Keefs. There’s a handful of em banging around Helene’s front door, but otherwise, the street’s empty.
We creep up on the infected. Don’t want to attract more to this spot when their numbers are small enough to be dealt with melee-style. Better, we figure we can cook em with flares.
Sean isn’t so sure.
Ben and I think it’s perfect.
Clever, at least.
Ben pops a flare. Sprints up to the group. Lights one on fire. The gases its decomposing body are releasing make it catch quickly. The burning Keef stumbles and lights up another one. Then another. The plan works.
Sorta.
What Ben and I didn’t realize is that while lighting the undead on fire and watching em fumble around like clumsy match sticks is inherently awesome, the fire isn’t actually killing the brain. Instead of a funeral pyre, we now have three—make it four—howling fiends on fire that want very badly to get their heated hands on us.
Snow hisses around their tattered, burning legs. I can smell em cooking. We introduce bullets to their heads. They go down quivering and we let em fry.
I wanna get inside. Fast. The gunfire will alert the maggot masses. Sure. But I’m betting if they can’t see a meal, they won’t bother with a trek.
Overhead, we hear jets scream through the sky.
Ben says, “More bombings?”
I shrug. “Dunno. Reconnaissance? They already destroyed the tunnels and bridges to the mainland.” I put my hands together and puff my cheeks, then make a pkrrshh noise as I slowly separate my palms. “Those were the booms we heard before.”
I look to Sean. He shrugs too. “Reconnaissance makes sense. USC wants to see how well their bombing operation went, I guess?”
Ben says, “More motherfuckers up our ass. Gunshots got their attention.”
A fresh mob appears from the west. Can’t tell how many. The snow might shield us for a little while, but I can feel the air getting warmer. Soon, it’ll just be the pollutant-heavy black rain turning the snow into dark slush.
I grab my phone. Dial Helene. She isn’t answering. My heart kicks into high gear. My mind races over every grotesque and horrible thing that could have happened to her.
A voice calls to me from above. “Hope you brought booze.”
It is wonderful and beautiful.
Helene waves from the third floor window. “Poppa Bear, I’ll buzz you in.”
I smile. Rush to Helene’s office building. We file into the chilly lobby. Slide the heavy metal door shut behind us. Make sure it’s locked. I can hear Helene and, I hope, Fred moving furniture around in the stairwell.
Helene grins gloriously when I get up to her floor. She grabs me. Kisses me hard.
Fred’s right behind her. Arms folded. A smirk on his face. “About time.”
I roll my eyes. “Long story.” I squeeze Helene. “Where’re your coworkers?”
“They wanted to leave. Wanted to try an escape.” Helene frowns. “I don’t know what happened to em or where they went.”
I hug her again. Hold her tight. Then make the necessary introductions.
We pack the desks back into the stairwell.
I sit down for the first time in what feels like years.
Shadows play over our faces. Dying signals on dying screens.
Helene says the power failed about an hour ago.
On one hand, the lack of lights keeps us hidden. On the other hand, we can’t do anything as simple as use a computer to get online and check for news.
I say, “Anyone try 911?”
Fred says, “Oh, of course.” He makes a face at me cuz apparently I’m the dumbest asshole in the world right now. “All busy signals though.”
“Datapads?”
Helene grimaces. “I don’t do datapads. You know that. Phone calls, yep. Texts, yep. But I haven’t gotten one of either since before all this started. Well, except you, Poppa Bear.”
Fred tries his Asimov. He brings up a hologram of the Times website. Grunts. “Hasn’t really changed since I left.” He scrolls to a few more new sites.
The LA Times site says that the infection is well into New York state and New Jersey. Ditto Reuters.
Twitter is an explosion of #infection, #nycpanic, and, of course, #omfgzombies, but it’s mostly useless information.
The only thing we actually learn is that the USC government has decided to bomb the crap out of infection escape routes. And it’s planning more hellfire. Everything on the mainland points to unorganized chaos and collapse.
But they think nukes might be an option.
Hahaha, nuke a mutating parasite. Brilliant!
Fred shows us a holographic map of the city streets. It’s from an app that uses cameras mounted on streetlights. Though originally meant to help avoid traffic jams, the cameras give us a 3D view of parasite movement.
According to a separate MTA app, subway trains are running “on time,” which is hilarious horseshit—just like everything the MTA does.
We watch a bizarre migration spread out from ground zero. My old office building. Concentric ripples of death on a concrete pond. The only good news is that the monster population is fairly thin in our current neighborhood.
For the moment anyway.
The hologram starts to stutter and fade.
Fred says, “Battery’s running low.” He switches his datapad off. “Better save it for when we really need it.”
I explain to Fred and Helene what happened at my office. Declan and Schneer. The infection. I explain that, as far as we can tell, the disease animates dead people. Takes the bodies for a ride. And it’s transferred through bites. It’s injected into the blood stream. Then heads for the brain, which it inhabits.
They laugh when I get to Keith “Keef” Richards.
Helene says, “Where the fuck did it come from?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. Light a cigarette to distract me from my headache. “Schneer. Beyond that I have no idea.” I look to Sean.
He stares out the window. Scowls at the scattered groups of Keefs that plod along on their mad course for flesh. “You guys hear that?”
Nobody says anything. More jets rumble overhead.
Fred says, “I hear that. The planes.”
Sean says, “No, no. Something else...” He stammers. “Uh, anyway, the disease. Where it came from? I don’t know. A mutation, certainly. I have a few ideas, but I would rather get some samples under a microscope.”
Ben claps his hands together. “Aliens, man. Sneaky space fucks did this.”
Fred waves his hand at Ben dismissively. “We already dealt with aliens. Ages ago. That insanity in Alaska. And there was Emergence Day. That thing waiting underground in Brooklyn.”
I arch my eyebrows. “Yeah, except he wasn’t the problem.” I laugh. “His relatives were. And they weren’t aliens. They were terrestrial. Ancient things that didn’t die out when the dinosaurs did. If the stories are true, anyway..”
“We just grew up in the aftermath, why should we care?”
Fred’s a sarcastic bastard when he wants to be.
Ben says, “So...no aliens?”
I say, “It ain’t aliens. It’s terrestrial. We just don’t know the details.”
Ben snaps his fingers. “Man, I was really hoping it was aliens. What’s the movie? Slither? No! No. Night of the Creeps. Yeah. That was extremely my shit.”
“You...are a fan of horror movies from the nineteen-eighties?”
“You saying I can’t be?”
“No, I just—”
“This some black shit?”
“Dude, what the fuck. It’s just a general surprise.”
Ben chuckles. “I’m messing with you. But I did think it was hilarious when the monsters ate up all those stupid rich white people.”
We sit for a while. Try to de-stress.
After some prodding from Fred, everyone gets to work scavenging useful stuff from around the office.
I just wanna sleep.
We don’t find much. Shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that most places are ill-equipped to deal with ravaging hordes of Keefs.
I dole out what’s already on-hand.
I keep my crowbar. Colt. Shotgun.
Sean, utterly useless with anything other than a scatter weapon, keeps his Remington and makeshift machete.
He gives his Beretta to Fred.
I load Helene up with a Glock and ammo. Hope our video game training helps her aim.
Ben finds a fire axe and keeps his Glock.
That’s everyone.
We’re a five-person, untrained squad. Locked, cocked, and ready to die.
Helene says, “Where are we going?”
Everyone looks to me.
I have no idea what I’m doing.
When we had the NYPD cruiser, I was certain Brooklyn was a good bet. There’s a smaller concentration of people, and we’d have our backs to the water. Just one front to cover. Plenty of bodegas around to raid for food. But without transportation, that’ll be a long fuckin walk. And by now, the bridge is probably out
.
As in: Exploded into many little pieces.
So, uh...
Fred says, “Maybe we should just stay here.”
I say, “No.” There’s no food. No back door. No real way to make it livable for an extended period of time. “We need something we can fortify. If enough of those things realize we’re in here, they’ll get in. That happens, we’re beyond fucked.”
“We need a school,” Ben says. “A high school. Those things’re all built like prisons. Tough. And maybe they’ve got labs and shit for Sean to do whatever it is he does.”
Sean taps his chin with his fingers. He’s still staring out the windows at the streetlights and the odd shadows of the shambling forms in the street. “We can use the subways to get there. We have to avoid the streets because otherwise the reanimated follow. They’re very good at that. Underground, we should be all right.”
I cross my arms. “Unless they’ve got day passes from the MTA. But, yeah, the gates and turnstiles should cut down on monster traffic.”
Helene tosses ammunition and flares into her oversized purse. “Okay. That’s not the worst idea ever. We hike over to Fifty-Ninth and Lexington. Big hub. That’s all the yellow and green lines. N, R, W, four, five, six trains. But again... Where are we actually going?”
Sean talks. Doesn’t look away from the window. “Cornell has an arm in the city. Thirty-Fourth and Fifth. I was an aide there once. In fact, we need to go there. It’s the only place that has the right equipment.”
Fred says, “There’s a Cornell Medical Center on Sixty-Eighth. Wouldn’t that make more sense?”
“I vote a big ‘fuck that,’” Helene says. She tucks her pistol into her jeans. “Where you think they took the sick? The dead bodies? To hospitals and medical centers. Those buildings are gonna be worse than the streets. More assholes in a tighter area.”
I gesture to Helene. “Cornell Labs it is. Long walk. But I can’t think of anything better at the moment. We’re doomed if we sit too long. Either the parasites get us or the bombs do.”
Moving is the smart option. I almost don’t care where. I have my Momma Bear and that’s what matters.
Live, From the End of the World Page 14