by Guy James
“Progress, Ivan. Progress.”
Ivan scratched at the inside of the backpack again.
“We’ll walk the rest of the way, I promise.”
Sven left the bike and jogged up to 37th Street and turned west.
Sven turned north on First Avenue. He felt more secure moving on foot and in the thick of the East Side. Reaching the apartment seemed a distinct reality now.
The lighting on First Avenue made it easy for Sven to avoid the shambling infected by moving back and forth between the sidewalk and street.
He took a sharp right at 53rd Street and jogged east to Sutton Place South. There he crossed the street. He had three blocks left to go.
On the east side of Sutton Place South, Sven stopped short.
Beneath him, the occasional car crawled up or down the FDR, avoiding the other cars on the road that were stopped and turned in directions not contemplated by the road’s engineers. It was the same thing that had happened on Route 29 in Charlottesville, but much worse.
Sven turned away from the FDR and ran north. Jane and Lorie were the priority now. The thought of the two of them got Sven moving faster, an image of Jane holding her Beretta 92FS bringing comfort to his mind.
81
SVEN, JANE, AND LORIE’S APARTMENT, SUTTON PLACE, NEW YORK
The gun clicked.
Milt sighed. His heart was sinking rapidly, on the verge of drowning in the sorrow of his unfulfilled hopes. He had wanted Sven and Jane to understand what was happening and the good that he saw in it—the good that there was in it.
Jane’s hand flew into her pocket and dug for something there.
“I should have expected as much,” Milt said. “You cannot yet see, as I too could not, in my prior life.”
Jane pulled out a clip, ejected the empty one from her gun, and reloaded.
Fueled by fear and being unprepared for this obvious development, Milt twirled inelegantly.
The sound of gunshots filled Milt’s ears and he felt a number of bullets pierce his heft. Two bullets ricocheted off his canister and stuck in the walls.
“I shall return,” he said, “at a time when you find yourself more pleasantly disposed.”
Milt swept out of the room in a flutter of trench coat. He ran, lumbering out of the apartment.
Jane ran after him, but stopped just outside the door when Milt whirled around in the hallway to face her.
He was pleased to see her look of incomprehension evolve into one of complete understanding as she stared at the child’s squirt gun that he held. It was green.
“Yes,” Milt said. “You guess quite correctly.” He grinned. “There is hope of evolving you yet—and an eternally springing hope, at that.”
“Where is the virus?” Jane screamed after him.
“Other than in here as you have already gathered?” Milt pointed at the squirt gun with a fat finger. “You shall receive that knowledge,” Milt called, “in due course.”
Milt turned and plodded away.
Jane emptied the rest of her clip into his back, which slowed his progress not at all, and then he vanished into the stairwell, delayed for a moment by a corner of the trench coat that caught in the stairwell door. He wrenched the corner free with two tugs and then proceeded to effect the remainder of his escape.
82
SUTTON PLACE, NEW YORK
Sven moved north on Sutton Place South. It was even more quiet than usual. On most days before the outbreak, a smattering of local residents could be seen walking their dogs. There were no such residents out now, not even infected, uncoordinated, moaning dog walkers. Sven scanned the street, but he saw no movement.
“Where is everyone?” Sven whispered. “Where is anyone?”
He kept moving north.
Sven caught a glimpse of the front of his building, stopped, shook his head like a man who wasn’t sure if he was awake or dreaming, and then looked again.
What he had seen remained.
Sven started up the block again, moving more slowly this time, glancing around him, and up at the buildings. He looked at the windows, alert for movement, but then realized that was the wrong place to look.
Whoever had done that—the thing in front of him—had been on the ground.
He kept moving until he was standing as close to his building as he could get without going past the hip-high pile of infected. The pile of corpses spanned half the length of the block, the pile’s midpoint at the entrance to his building. It looked like a barrier made up of decaying heads, limbs, and torsos.
Sven leaned in for a closer look and spotted the bullet holes.
“Looks like Jane’s handiwork,” he said.
Ivan hissed.
Sven went around the putrefying barrier, keeping his distance. Then he entered the lobby of his building, ran past the elevator bank, and into the stairwell. He bounded up the stairs, three at a time, to his floor.
The door to his apartment was open.
He ran harder, and then he was there, in front of the open door.
Jane was standing just beyond the threshold, holding one of her Berettas at her side.
They embraced.
“What happened?” Sven asked.
“He came here, like you said—Milt. He tried to convince me that the outbreak is good, that the virus is good…that we should want to be infected.” Jane was shaking her head. “He said…he said it was evolution.”
“And then he just left?”
“I shot him—not to kill him—hoping to slow him down. It didn’t affect him at all, except emotionally. He seemed upset by it, and he left. He did say he knew where the virus was coming from…and he said we would find out in…in due course.”
“When did he leave?”
Jane shook her head. “It could not have been more than a few minutes ago.”
“Here,” Sven said, taking off the backpack and handing it to Jane. “Take Ivan. Stay here, I’m going after Milt.”
83
Ivan was out of the thing he was in on Sven’s back because Sven and Jane helped him and Ivan was happy to be inside and not cold and it was warm and that was good and Jane was there and she was good and he remembered her from before and he remembered her still and she was okay and Sven was okay too but Sven needed some water and Ivan could tell and Ivan needed some water too and there was a lot of thirst in the room but there was no bad smell and that was good because then the bad people who were not dead but worse could not reach Ivan and Sven and Jane and Ivan remembered Lorie who he liked and who was nice to him because she fed him in the middle of the night when she got up from bad dreams that she had on most nights and Ivan thought he could still smell her but he wasn’t sure and she fed him even though it wasn’t his feeding time and that was nice of her to do and Ivan wished she could be with all of them now but he was not worried about her because the wind had carried her scent to Ivan earlier and he could smell that she had been changed because she smelled different in a way that Ivan understood because he had smelled it before in the other place where there were more trees and less bad smells but Ivan remembered that the man who had that smell around him had become like the bad people but not exactly and Ivan hoped that was not going to happen to the nice girl who fed him in the middle of the night when she got up from bad dreams that she had on most nights and Ivan thought he could still smell her but he wasn’t sure and he wanted her to be there with them and Ivan was very proud of himself because he had led Sven back to safety like he was supposed to do and they would drink water soon and Ivan knew that he would get a snack because he had been very good to save Sven like he was supposed to do.
84
SVEN, JANE, AND LORIE’S APARTMENT, SUTTON PLACE, NEW YORK
“I’m coming with you,” Jane said.
“No, you need to stay here in case Lorie comes back, and to keep your eye on the forum. No more going outside and shooting up the neighborhood, either. Okay?”
“Sven, I’m sorry. And I should have tried harder to ge
t the answer out of him. But I just lost it. I thought shooting him would slow him down and I could get it out of him then, but it did nothing.”
“It’s okay,” Sven said. “It’s okay. We’re gonna get him, and this’ll all… Well, we’re gonna get him.”
He turned to leave, turned back, hugged Jane again, and then left.
Jane stuck her head into the hallway after him. “Wait,” she said.
Sven turned around just before going into the stairwell.
“He has a green squirt gun,” Jane said.
Sven squinted at Jane through his mask. “What?”
“A green squirt gun,” Jane repeated. “I think the virus is in it.”
85
Sven checked the stairwell and lobby. There was no sign of Milt in either. Sven was about to go outside and circle the block when he stopped, turned around, and went back into the stairwell. He descended into the basement.
He would have known the basement better if he had spent more time at his building. As it was, he had never done his own laundry there—Jane did that—and he had only a faint recollection of being in the building’s basement when they were moving in. He probed his mind for any hint of the basement’s layout, but couldn’t recall it.
“This should’ve been part of my planning,” he said, tightening his grip on the machetes. “And why are the lights off?”
The first of Sven’s emergency flashlights was gone, stuck in a mess of dried blood and infected flesh on the floor outside Sven’s City Hall office. The second emergency flashlight was gone too, lost somewhere on the bikeway when he had crashed.
He cursed and reprimanded himself for not grabbing another flashlight when he was upstairs with Jane. He peered into the darkness—both for any sign of Milt and for light switches or circuit breakers.
How a man as large as Milt could achieve this level of stealth Sven didn’t know, but it was in line with the surprising speed with which he’d seen Milt move earlier that day. Sven remembered Milt to have been a slow, plodding hulk of a man, but it seemed that had changed.
Sven extended his machetes in front of his body and took a step forward.
Glimmers of light played around the exposed pipes on the basement’s ceiling, affording a tiny amount of light by which to move. The glimmers did nothing, however, to illuminate the dark recesses that composed most of the basement’s area.
There was a sound—a trickle of water, or a light metal object falling—and Sven saw a flash of movement along the wall opposite him.
“I know you’re back there,” Sven said.
There was another dripping sound.
“Milt?” Sven said.
Then there was light entering the basement, and Sven saw Milt running out into the night. Sven went after him, caught the door before it swung shut, and, with some trepidation, stepped out into the moonlight.
He spotted Milt, who was rapidly waddling through the snow, moving toward his Segway.
“Hey!” Sven yelled as he ran after Milt.
Milt hopped on the Segway and began to scoot away from the children’s park that overlooked the East River. The Segway wobbled and Milt flailed one arm to stay balanced.
Sven jumped in front of Milt’s path, crossed the machetes in front of his body, and braced for impact.
Milt turned on a dime and reversed course toward the park.
“Stop!” Sven yelled, and began to run after Milt again.
Milt glided down the ramp into the park.
Sven followed, hesitant now that Milt seemed to be trapping himself in the park. The ramp that they were descending was the only means of escape…other than a plunge into the East River.
Milt scooted the Segway to a stop next to the boar statue and stepped off the vehicle.
He then squared his shoulders and directed a cool look in Sven’s direction. He stood in place for a moment while Sven came closer, until the man and the man in whom the virus had evolved were separated by the boar statue, whose tuft of carved back hair was covered with snow.
Sven’s gaze was drawn first to the boar’s sharp tusks, then to the surroundings in which he found himself in a face-off with the man—or thing—that had become his nemesis. Sven had been to this park several times since the move to New York, and though he now looked around in desperation, he knew there was little to work with in the place.
There were benches arranged around the boar statue, a shallow sandpit, some scraggly trees whose branches were frozen, and that was it. Beyond the benches lay the East River, its surface churning, as if reaching up to absorb the snow that landed on top of the water.
Sven was holding his machetes aloft, the blades bared for action. He stood there, hesitant and uncertain, eyeing Milt and thinking about the squirt gun that Jane said he had up his sleeve, and how and why he had returned from the dead.
A cold wind blew in from the East River. Large, hard snowflakes plinked against Sven’s mask and knives.
Milt and Sven each stood their ground for a long moment, studying one another.
Milt finally broke the silence with a hefty sigh, then he said, “I do wish that you or Jane would have received me with but a touch of eagerness.” He shook his head. “Just a hint of joy—perhaps even a feigned allusion of alacrity—would have warmed the cockles of my much evolved heart.”
Sven stared at Milt.
“Instead, you greet me with hostility, as if I were your enemy. You do not even ask me about my journey here. Well, it was lovely, quite scenic, actually. I wish you had inquired.”
Sven said nothing.
“Oh come now, Sven,” Milt said. “Speak with me for a little while. You and I both know this could well be the end. How have you been? Are you eating? I see that you have lost a great amount of weight. I too lost a quite significant amount of mass after the Virginia outbreak, and it has taken a lot of determination and mental fortitude to regain some of my previous bulk. I thought it would be easier, but the virus seems to have quashed my appetite.”
The wind howled. A gust pushed Sven sideways and he had to take a step to keep his balance.
“My word,” Milt said, “exactly how much weight have you lost? A stiff wind shaking the footing of the mighty, zombie-slaying Sven…” Milt shook his head. “What absurdity.”
“Let’s get on with this,” Sven said.
Milt shook his head sadly. “Please confirm that I understand your position correctly: you will continue to oppose me and the glory that I have wrought and you will stand here as my enemy and struggle to banish me from this realm, to remove my physical presence from said realm forever?”
Sven narrowed his eyes. “I intend to finish what the zombies in the parking lot didn’t.”
86
“Zombies?” Milt said. “My, my, how you are slipping. I thought you didn’t use that word anymore.” Milt pursed his lips. “Don’t you understand there remains nothing further for us to fight over? The virus has gripped the world, and it is now taking all of its people to new heights. The process is irreversible.”
“There are still people who are uninfected, and I intend to keep them that way.”
Milt sighed. “And I intend to convert them.”
“I won’t let you,” Sven said.
“Very well,” Milt said, “it appears that this shall be the venue of our final confrontation. It is poetic in a way, is it not?”
Sven glared at him.
“No?” Milt said. “You do not think so? The boar is our prize, he represents the world. The winner among us takes all.” Milt gazed at Sven for a moment. “Come now, Sven. It is a metaphor.”
“You’ve lost your mind,” Sven said. “You’re sick.”
“Yes, you are right in a sense. I am only toying with you now. I have already won, and there is nothing left for you to protect. Look around, Sven, the world is mine. The virus rules unchallenged. Humanity is lost.” He sighed and put the back of a hand to his mouth, suppressing a belch. “I would not be so mean, but you have offended me a great
deal.”
“How could you do this?”
“Sven, Sven, Sven. Oh Sven. It is nothing like that. I am evolution. I exemplify the principle of survival of the fittest. All sentimentality is irrelevant. It is not a matter of how I could or could not. It is simply a matter of what is. Survival and extinction is the way of the world, and the time has come for the extinction of your kind. The noble thing to do in your position is to succumb. Be a willing participant, and perhaps some remnant of your consciousness will survive the transformation. Perhaps you too can attain the superior existence that I have attained.”
“What?” Sven said.
Milt’s face hardened. “The virus is evolution, Sven. I am evolution. My whole life—the path of my existence—was structured for this development. Even the method by which I spread the gift of the virus had been a large part of my life before the outbreak. I am not one to believe in fate, but perhaps there is a scientific explanation for such coincidences that we do not yet understand. Perhaps the virus was reaching for me, recruiting and training me for what I now understand is my role on this planet. You too shall soon be part of the evolution. Any struggle against the forces that are now in play is a futile one, even if the struggle is taken up by one as capable as you.”
He’s completely out of his mind, Sven thought.
Sven closed his mouth and set his jaw. He took two deep breaths and waited for Milt to start up again.
Milt began again, “To put it in terms that will be easier for you to—”
Sven lunged for Milt, swiping at the bulging middle of his trench coat.
Milt sidestepped away from the blade, putting the boar’s broad body between Sven and himself. Sven came around the other way, and Milt sidestepped again, keeping the boar statue between them.
A broad grin lit up Milt’s face. “I see you are surprised by my newly-acquired nimble-footedness. The virus’s gift has a plethora of benefits. If you would only trust me, you would see your existence much improved by the advancement I am offering you…although the speed doesn’t seem to extend to my minions, who it appears, have become stronger, but also more brittle—” Milt looked up at the sky and frowned, “—like peanut brittle…” He shook his head and looked back to Sven. “But that is neither here nor there.”