by Ben Oliver
I turn just in time to see him disappearing into the crumbling debris of wood and plastic.
“Just keep moving,” Tyco yells from one rooftop away.
I look over to him, and he shrugs, but I can see remorse etched on his face as he turns and continues on toward the city, leaping from roof to roof.
I turn back to the destroyed hut and see Malachai struggling to free himself from the wreckage. Behind him, maybe only two hundred feet away, is the horde of Smilers, tumbling and tearing and ripping at one another like crocodiles.
“Run!” I call out to him. His eyes meet mine, and for the first time, I see fear there.
Kina pushes past me, leaping toward the fallen Natural and down onto the dirt path beside him.
“Fuck!” I whisper, and jump down from the relative safety of my rooftop before running to Malachai. Kina grabs one hand, I take the other, and we pull him free of the rubble. The sound of hundreds of approaching killers grows.
“Go,” I tell them as I push Malachai toward the nearest shack.
He grabs the hanging wires and climbs up to the roof. I can feel the ground rumbling beneath my feet now, feel the heat coming off the mass of bodies as they close in, smell the dried blood and body odor.
Malachai turns, lies on his stomach, and reaches a hand down. He pulls Kina up by her hand that’s not holding the trigger. I jump for the lip of the roof, grab it, and feel my fingers slip.
“Luka!” Kina calls. She lies on her stomach and throws her hand toward me. I grab it and use my other hand to reach for the roof’s edge. A strong, vicious hand grabs my ankle, but I kick it free and clamber to my feet beside Malachai and Kina.
“Thanks,” Malachai says, and then he’s running again.
Kina and I follow. Up ahead I see the shape of Tyco making his way to the nearest Vertical, and I understand Malachai’s plan.
We move quickly, gaining a lead on the swarm of Smilers as we use the shacks like stepping stones all the way to the Vertical.
The shacks this deep into the city are older and over time have been reinforced until they almost resemble houses. They are so tightly packed here that we barely have to jump between them, just take slightly larger steps. The last of the shantytown’s homes are pressed right up against the Vertical, and from the rooftop of the last building, it’s easy to climb in through a broken window.
Malachai climbs in first, collapsing to the ground, his chest rising and falling as sweat pours from his head.
“Do you realize,” he says, gasping in oxygen, “how close we just came to being killed?”
I’m leaning forward, my hands on my knees. I don’t have the composure to answer his question.
Kina nods fervently; she too seems unable to speak due to exhaustion.
From outside I can hear the swarm of Smilers, the sounds of skin slapping and bones snapping. I lean forward and peer out the window, and what I see fills me with revulsion: There must be two hundred of them in a mass brawl, all killing one another without feeling. One is using his head as a bludgeoning tool to cave in the rib cage of another, two appear to be working together to dig into a prone man through his lower back, and the old lady appears to be systematically stalking the outside of the brawl and sticking her long knitting needle into whomever she sees fit.
“They’re all going to die,” I say.
“Come on,” Tyco says from the doorway of the dirty-looking living room we find ourselves in. Tyco is not out breath at all; of course he isn’t—he’s an Alt, his MOR system is working on overdrive inside his rib cage to pump oxygen into his bloodstream without the need for the primitive arcana of breathing.
“Yeah, can you give me just a minute, big guy?” Malachai says, rolling onto his front until his nose is pressed against the vinyl floor, his harsh breaths causing plumes of steam to form and disappear on the sheen of the surface.
“There could be more of them in here somewhere,” Tyco points out. “We have to keep moving.”
“This guy,” Malachai mutters. “No empathy.” He pushes himself up and follows Tyco out of the room.
I’m still looking out the window; as much as I’m horrified by the scene in front of me, I can’t bring myself to look away.
“I have to find my sister,” I say to myself as the horde begins to thin. More and more of the Smilers lie dead. The remaining fighters are all covered head to toe in the blood of their peers.
I try to fight off the mental image of my sister, Molly, infected like the killers below, somewhere out in the city, insane and hell-bent on death.
Finally, I manage to tear my gaze away.
I take a look around the living room. It reminds me so much of the house I grew up in: the furniture crammed together; cheap, old technology cluttering up the place; the light barely penetrating the dust outside or the dirty windows.
I follow Tyco, Malachai, and Kina out into the corridor of the Vertical. The place smells like urine, and the walls are covered with incandescent graffiti. In the darkness of the cut power, I can see more clearly the crude writing and gang symbols glowing in neon paint.
We’re only one floor up, so it doesn’t take long for us to move down the flight of stairs to the front doors. Tyco pushes them open, and we see, from our point on the raised landscape, the city laid out before us. Burned-out shopfronts, derelict pubs, and pawn shops dominate the foreground, but farther on down the hill I can make out the financial district: glass buildings trimmed in gold and silver, water fountains and statues to the gods of money and trade. The more expensive residential areas and social spots make up the center, where green parks and woods border eight-lane roads. Right in the middle lies Midway Park. Above us there is City Level Two, where the ultra-rich live in mansions. The city is encircled by hills dotted with sky-farms and Verticals that pierce the sky. It’s a view I’m familiar with, albeit from the perspective of the Black Road Vertical, but what makes us stare, unblinking, is the true scale of the city’s destruction.
I can see three planes that have fallen out of the sky and destroyed dozens of buildings; one lies still burning, its wing in a fountain in the financial district. Another has come down nearby in the center of a children’s playground. The third is half-submerged in the river that winds through the city; from here it looks like some mechanical river monster.
“Where are you headed?” Malachai asks me.
“Black Road. You?”
“Gallow Hill.”
“Tyco?” Malachai asks.
“That way,” he says, gesturing vaguely toward the center of the city.
“Okay,” Kina says, frowning into the distance. “I think we should stick together at least as far as the river, if we’re all heading that direction anyway. If we don’t find any painkillers on the way, we can cross the river to Old Town Infirmary and check for them there, then split up. Sound good?”
“Sounds good to me,” I say.
“Me too.” Malachai nods. “Pander probably headed that way too.”
We all turn to Tyco, who gives a dismissive shrug and sets off down the street.
As we begin to move cautiously down into the city, we use the piled-up wrecks of cars that litter the roads as cover—some of the airborne ones, that would have come down from eighty feet or so, are almost unrecognizable as cars at all. The rubble of collapsed buildings makes the air thick with dust, and fires still burn, roaring out of windows and destroying everything that they come into contact with. But all that is secondary—what I can’t help but stare at are the bodies, thousands of them filling the sidewalks, hanging half out of windows, inside the cars, charred in the middle of the roads.
“This is …” Kina whispers as we pause in a doorway. “This is unbelievable. Whoever did this …”
“We have to keep moving,” Tyco says, but even his voice is hoarse in the presence of such devastation.
He steps out into the fading sunlight, but Malachai grabs him by the collar and pulls him back into the shadow of the doorway.
“Wh
at’s your prob—”
“Shh,” Malachai says, pointing toward the playground where the plane wreckage lies, which is now only a little way down the street. I look to where he indicates and see a group of six soldiers, dressed head to toe in black, as they move out of the park and down a parallel street. Five of them travel with their weapons raised, checking corners and clearing their route, while the sixth walks, calmly, with no weapon at all. Her eyes are glowing, not like a normal Alt, but brighter, like torchlight.
“What’s the deal with the woman’s eyes?” Malachai whispers.
“Must be some new upgrade,” Tyco replies.
“Are they on our side?” I ask, remembering the soldiers we saw marching toward the Loop.
“I don’t even know what our side is,” Malachai says. “Let’s not ask them.”
We sidle along the outside of the building, keeping the distance between us and the soldiers as big as possible.
We dart, one by one, to the foot of a gigantic billboard that shows nothing on its enormous screen. We watch as the soldiers move out of sight.
“Who the hell are they?” Kina asks.
“Doesn’t matter,” Tyco says. “We’re here to find our families. Let’s not get distracted.”
Glass shatters from somewhere behind us, and we all move quickly, pressing ourselves against the wall of the building the billboard is attached to—it’s a provisions depot. A man wearing a tuxedo and a woman in a blue dress walk along the middle of the street toward us. Both of them are infected, but they’re not attacking each other.
“In here,” Kina says, and we enter the depot before the Smilers spot us.
Inside are row after row of shelves with different foods still piled up, but they’re far from full—they can’t have been restocked for a while and could even have been ransacked before we got here. On the floor are thousands of drones, which lie where they fell when the power went off.
“This is one of those grocery-delivery depots, isn’t it?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Tyco says, already grabbing a packet of protein bars off a nearby shelf and shoving them into his pockets.
“Might as well stock up while we’re here,” Malachai says, grabbing a bottle of water and some chocolate.
Kina walks over to where the protein bars were, but the shelf is now empty.
“Here,” Tyco says, handing one of his to her.
“Thanks,” she replies, tucking the foil-wrapped bar into her pocket before moving methodically through the depot, scanning each shelf with her eyes. “No painkillers,” she says, and we sit on the floor of the depot, among the downed drones, and eat.
“You think Pander made it?” Malachai asks.
“I doubt she even made it through the shantytown,” Tyco replies. He sees the look of disappointment on Malachai’s face. “What do you want me to do, lie? There are thousands of those smiling things and only one of her.”
“You’re a real optimist, you know that?” Malachai says through clenched teeth.
Tyco shrugs and turns his head away.
“Hey, she probably made it,” Kina says, reaching out a hand and placing it over Malachai’s. “She seems like a tough girl.”
“Yeah, she’s tough,” Malachai agrees, and takes another sip of water. “Let’s keep moving.”
I root around the higher shelves nearby, find another box of protein bars, and shove them into my pockets as we make our way back into the daylight. We head farther into the city, sticking close together but making swift progress. Other than the constant background noise of burning buildings and smoldering wreckage, the streets are eerily silent and empty of life. As the afternoon turns to evening, we reach the river and follow its path toward the bridge to Old Town—the area where the central hospital and the city’s administrative buildings lie.
We stop at the corner of a Church of the Last Religion, making sure the coast is clear. Kina leans close and speaks to me in a whisper. “That man and woman in fancy clothes—the Smilers outside the grocery depot—they were working together.”
“I know,” I say as we sprint closer to the edge of Old Town. I can see the ruins of the parliamentary building, left to stand in remembrance of the Futile War—a shrine to the corruption of the old ways.
“What do you think that means?” Kina asks when we pause again.
“I hope we won’t have to find out,” I tell her.
We continue our stop-and-go movements from the corners of buildings to crashed cars to fences, always checking for any danger before moving to the next cover.
We make it to the bridge that leads to Old Town and duck behind a solar-charge block. Kina, Malachai, and I catch our breath while the Alt looks out to check that the bridge is clear. I close my eyes for a second and rest my head against the charger, listening to the rushing river below.
“Shit,” Tyco whispers, holding up a hand.
I open my eyes, peer around the charge block, and watch as a man in a high-visibility vest and a dirty, old baseball cap sweeps the street.
“He’s not blinking,” Malachai says.
“Or smiling,” I add.
The man looks like he’s in his sixties, the skin around his eyes deeply wrinkled with laughter lines that are filled with dark dirt, his tanned hands gripped tightly around the brush that scrapes the ground in rhythmic sweeps. We watch him silently as he makes his way slowly across the bridge. This must have been his job before the end of the world, working side by side with the robot street sweepers. Obsolete but permitted to work thanks to protests by jobless Regulars who demanded employment opportunities. “He’s not one of them,” Kina says. “He hasn’t been affected by the poison.”
“What the hell is he doing out on the street?” Malachai whispers.
“He’s on Ebb,” Tyco replies, leaning forward and squinting. “There’s a patch on his neck.”
“What do we do?” I ask.
“We have to find out how he survived the attack,” Malachai says, getting to his feet. “Maybe there are more survivors.” Malachai opens his mouth to call to the man in the bright vest, but Tyco grabs him by the sleeve and hauls him back to the ground. “Look,” Tyco says in a quiet voice, pointing to the other side of the bridge.
Three almost-identical girls wander across the deserted road bridge ahead of us, weaving in and out of stalled traffic. All three have thick dark hair, blue-gray eyes that blink frantically, and wide smiles that reveal straight white teeth. They are dressed in the latest Alt fashion: three-piece suits that wouldn’t look out of place in a 1960s boardroom meeting.
“Shit,” Kina whispers.
The sweeping man glances up at the girls, smiles, and starts sweeping again, ensuring that he cleans every inch of the dusty road ahead of him.
The girls move faster toward the man, and as they get closer, I can see that all their suits are stained with blood.
“We have to help him,” I say as the girls begin to run across the bridge.
Kina looks to Malachai and then Tyco, who avoids her gaze, and by then it’s already too late.
The girls leap on the man, knocking him to the ground, and begin biting and kicking and clawing at him. I see now that he has not one but three Ebb patches stuck to the base of his throat. He begins to chuckle as the girls kill him.
“No, no, no,” I mutter, unable to stop the words from coming out of my mouth.
The sweeping man laughs up until the moment the girls end his life, adding to the bloodstains on their suits. The smiles never falter from their insane faces as they admire their work and then silently move on.
“No, no, no,” I say over and over.
Kina reaches toward me and puts her hand over my mouth; her eyes are wide, and they’re telling me to shut up or we’re next.
I nod to show that I understand, and all four of us crouch behind the charge block, listening as the girls’ footsteps grow and grow until they’re deafening in the silent city. As they pass, we slowly move around to the other side of the block until we’
re facing the open road of the bridge ahead of us, and the footsteps recede into the distance.
“Do we go on or split here?” Malachai asks. “There could be groups of Smilers all over Old Town.”
“Pander might be across there,” Tyco says, turning to look at us. “We should help her.”
Tyco’s sudden burst of empathy puts me on edge—all I’ve ever known from him is homicidal single-mindedness, and now he wants to help a girl he barely knows? But I can see fear in his eyes, and I think that perhaps he’s scared and doesn’t want to be left alone.
“He’s right,” Malachai says. “Let’s go.”
And so we resume moving from burned-out cars to lampposts to pillars until we’re across the water and into Old Town.
The cobbled streets are littered with the dead, all of them still grinning despite their violent final moments, and the heat of the day has amplified the odor of their decomposition until it overwhelms me.
Among the corpses are more drones than I can count. Most of them are security drones, tiny insectile robots carrying 360-degree cameras to film every inch of the city at all times. We try to move silently, but the microdrones crunch under our feet.
There must be more Smilers active in this area—we hear footsteps, slamming doors, explosions, and more, but all we can do is keep on moving, keep on making our way toward the hospital and, hopefully, Pander and painkillers.
That man wasn’t one of them, I think, my mind racing. He wasn’t infected; he wasn’t a Smiler. How? I can feel my mind reeling from all this insanity. I look to the east, toward the Black Road Vertical, my home on the 177th floor, and I remind myself of why I must survive. You’re still alive, I think, picturing Molly’s face and my father’s, both of you, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to find you and find the cure to … whatever this is.
We move on, weaving around dead bodies and stalled cars. We walk past another Church of the Last Religion—the city’s only remaining faith, where they worship the Final Gods—and turn onto Street 41-40.