Shiva had been clever and dangerous before the plague. Lijon doubted her leader ever felt real empathy for another’s pain. But to be impervious to physical pain, as well? Dear Sister’s fierce eyes saw too much. Shiva was too strong for Lijon to slay.
The boy would have to kill Shiva himself, if he dared to try.
God’s too high to reach with tiny voices
Eguskine X. Zubiri was one Manhattanite who witnessed the first Sutr-Z attack on American soil. When he told the story later, he didn’t describe the cruise ship’s destruction as a crash. He said the ship “made land” the way hurricanes are said to hit.
Gus had been a busker in the subway at the 68th Street Hunter College station before Sutr’s first wave. The short, handsome young man played the violin for Lexington Avenue Line commuters as a little marionette danced a clumsy jig at his feet. The hours were long and the work was hard. The marionette was guided by strings from his left hand. The doctor at the free clinic told him he was getting carpal tunnel syndrome. The doctor said he had to find another line of work.
The busker was spared that challenge when there weren’t enough commuters to perform for anymore. His audience was staying home with the flu or dying off. Gus turned to the shelters and dumpster diving. However, the shelters were soon closed for harboring disease and, without commuters, the restaurants were abandoned.
Before the plague, Gus had used poppers. He loved the short high from those little brown bottles too much. Then one night, Jessica, the dealer who sold him the amyl nitrite told him all her other clients used it to “relax the ass muscle.”
Until that moment, Gus had no idea why poppers were so popular among gay men. When Jessica asked if that was why he used, Gus denied the charge. When Jessica smiled, he was sure she didn’t believe him. Gus knew then that his chances of making Jessica his girlfriend had dropped from barely possible to never in a million lifetimes. Embarrassed, he walked out of her flop and never saw Jessica again.
Gus slept in Central Park for a week until steady rain drove him inside. There were plenty of places to sleep, but few that weren’t dripping with disease. Sutr-X flew through the five boroughs. Too many people packed tight meant mass contagion. Crime, which had dropped steadily for twenty years, shot up. However, most of the victims were the dead and the crimes were usually trespassing and stealing food.
Gus was better off than he’d been on the street, as long as he ignored the dead stench. Apartment buildings were towers of death. People were told to burn bodies in the street to avoid diseases worse than Sutr.
That’s when Gus moved into an empty brownstone across from Central Park. The family who had lived there smiled out at him from happy pictures on bookshelves. There had been a mother, a father and two boys.
Gus had one brother somewhere in Brooklyn. He hoped his real brother was dead. But, comfortable in looted Armani suits, Gus gave the absent owners his own parents’ names. The anonymous, big-haired mom in the pantsuit became Maria. The father looked like a serious businessman annoyed at having a family picture taken at a Sears’ Portrait Studio. His heavy brow reminded Gus of his own father, Ernie.
“Ernie!” Gus toasted the portrait with fine wine. “In this nice home with a big sectional couch, it’s like you never beat me!”
It took another bottle of red before Gus could forgive his brother. “And Thomas! I forgive you for hitting me with your Hot Wheels track at every opportunity. But you shouldn’t have made fun of me and the violin. And you should have let me play with your Hot Wheels set sometimes. Even once would have been good.”
Gus struggled to recall a happy memory of his estranged brother. However, his happiest day had been when he ran away from Ernie, Maria and Thomas to busk in the streets.
There were cans of food and each day Gus went out to find more. Each day, he made it his mission to help someone grieve. He found gloves and made a mask from tea towels and helped his neighbors burn the dead.
By day, he walked the streets around Central Park and played his violin by the funeral pyres. He shaved his beard and wore the Armani suits of his adopted father. The shiny shoes fit, too. Without the beard and cleaned up, Gus looked much younger. The street people who’d known him before the plague did not recognize him.
Each day had purpose. At night, alone in a quiet house with big, soft beds, Gus found God, too. Some of the grieving widows and widowers asked him to say a few words of comfort after he’d played Air on the G string or Vivaldi’s Winter (his favorite piece).
Gus had obliged with vague eulogies, stumbling at first. Then the words came to him and it was as if he was taking divine dictation. The words popped into his head and out of his mouth. The grieving families nodded as they wept. Death, he discovered, invites powerful poetry.
He began carrying a bible and reading it everywhere he went. He’d found it in the night table drawer beside the big-haired mom’s dead vibrator.
Survivors in the neighborhood began to call him the Central Park street preacher. They began to ask for his comforting words more than they wanted his violin. By the time his unused violin was out of tune and the carpal tunnel pain cleared up, Gus realized he’d taken his dead doctor’s advice. He’d found another job.
Then Gus lost everything again when the Mars bore down on Pier 11.
Lament the living and their poor dead choices
The road east was impassable. Whoever ran the tanks or bulldozers had abandoned their task. The Spencers were again pushed farther north. Little towns along the route had become ghost towns. Death waited in those towns, either by Sutr-X or at the hands of the survivors. Town signs declared: Refugees not welcome! Go or die!
Several hamlets they passed stacked bodies under their welcome signs, apparently as a demonstration. Blackened skeletons, twisted together in macabre heaps, lay so deep it was unclear where one body ended and another began.
As they motored through little towns, signs along the road told them not to get out of their vehicle. At night, though motels and houses appeared empty, Jack refused to give up the wheel for the comfort of a mattress.
When they stopped, she dozed in her seat. “If we leave the van, it’s vulnerable. We’ve got all our supplies in it. We aren’t leaving it for anything. I don’t want to fall asleep in a motel and wake up to find the van’s gone or we’re surrounded.”
Since the roadblock, the traffic changed within the space of a few hundred miles. They rarely saw anyone walking or driving. In towns they passed through, there was evidence people still lived there. However, no one stood outside waving as they had to the south.
Wildlife (every creature from foxes to birds) seemed to have received some signal that the way was safe for them. Unhindered by humans, packs of dogs roamed the streets. Sometimes packs chased the van for a short time before giving up.
When we get to Theo’s dad’s farm, will it even be there? Jack wondered.
* * *
Jaimie watched his mother’s energies ebb as mile after mile dropped behind them. The tires hummed on the pavement as they progressed north and the terrain rolled and dipped and became more treed.
At every west-east junction, the way was blocked by abandoned tanks, empty 18-wheelers flat on their tires or cars jammed from ditch to ditch. If the refugees in those cars had sought medical attention, they died out here before they found it. Each car was a glassed coffin.
Were there survivors beyond the blocked roads? Had they staggered east, trying to pick their way through the tangle? How many miles could a person walk in a day, climbing between fenders? How far out could the metal blockade reach?
“America,” Theo said, “is an east-west country. Everyone traveled east-west and far and wide. Families spread out over the last couple of generations. There was nothing for me in Maine. I can’t believe I’m going back like this.”
Focused on the road ahead, Jack said nothing, but Jaimie listened to his father.
“Imagine those communities with nuclear famili
es where everybody stayed put and worked the organic farm and didn’t go to California to be movie stars or east to make it big in New York. Even in New York, there are probably lots of families who sat tight and stuck together in their neighborhoods. Maybe they’re dealing with threats of cholera while we deal with the dangers of the road, so all the stark, raving terror evens out.”
Only the way north welcomed them. Jaimie watched his mother yawn and squint and grip the wheel. She looked as fierce as the dogs that chased them, but she would not give up her place in the driver’s seat.
“In a disaster, people look for problems they can solve and find what little they can control,” Theo whispered to Jaimie. “For your mother, that wheel is it.”
Farther north, they saw the leavings of lynchings. Women and men alike hung naked from overpasses by ropes and twisted bedsheets. Their crimes were carved into their bodies. The knife writing was opaque cryptography to Jaimie as they passed under the bodies.
However, if opportunistic birds didn’t get in the way and if the flesh was not rotted through or torn too badly to decipher, Anna read aloud: “Looter…thief…Adulterer…looter…looter…killer…carrier…looter…thief…carrier…blasphemer.”
The bodies hung so low over the road, Jack had to slow to a crawl to make sure the dead’s legs did not break the windshield. Many travelers had come this way, so the flesh had been torn away from their feet and legs leaving only white bone. The deads’ shinbones and broken toes dragged along the van’s roof, a grim skeletal tap dance.
After a long silence, Anna began to weep quietly. “Where is everybody? This doesn’t make sense.”
“Dead,” Mrs. Bendham said, her mouth full of a mealy apple.
Anna focused on her mother, ignoring the old woman. “The math doesn’t work. We’re alive. All of us. Douglas Oliver was an old man and he survived the Sutr virus.”
“My Al was an old man and he died of it,” Mrs. Bendham replied.
“There should be more people!”
“It’s true, by the law of averages, more of you should be dead,” Theo agreed. “However, weird exceptions do happen. I remember a story. One fellow was almost killed by a bomb at the Boston Marathon. He went home to Texas the next day and boom! He was almost killed again, this time by an exploding fertilizer plant in Texas.” Theo looked to his son and reached out to ruffle his hair. “We know all about the strange and unusual but possible, don’t we?”
“That’s not what worries me,” Jack said finally.
“What could there possibly be to worry about, I wonder?” Mrs. Bendham said.
“We aren’t getting to Maine this way. We just passed Lansing. We’re headed to Canada.”
To their left, they spotted a black bear clawing at something in a field. A baby’s car seat lay nearby. It was empty.
He watches, but what good does that do
Gus was at the far end of a long walk when he saw the ship’s smokestack above the South Street Viaduct.
The movement caught his eye first. He’d learned to watch for dangerous survivors, but he usually saw more rats than people. New York rats were big and bold and well-fed. There had been as many rats as people in New York before Sutr. Now there were many, many more rats.
The survivors were here, Gus knew. He often saw men and women at open windows. They fanned themselves and prayed for a break from the punishing, and surprising, spring heat.
Just before the ship struck land, he heard them, too. From blocks around, New Yorkers ran toward the ship. They saw the crash coming and they ran to help.
His first thought was how tall and out of place the cruise liner was. Even traveling at full speed, the illusion of the oncoming ship was not that it was speeding. It appeared to loom.
The cruise ship could have docked safely on the east side of the island beside 12th Avenue. Pier 11 was much smaller, meant for the East River Ferry. However, the ship did not dock. It plowed. The ship’s momentum carried it forward, first with a rumble and then to the sound of screeching and crumpling metal. The noise made Gus grit his teeth.
As he ran forward, he could make out the name of the ship. The hull said Mars.
Like the planet, he thought.
When he told the story in the future, he’d lie. He’d tell his rapt listeners that his first thought was of the God of War.
The ship came to rest at the South Street Viaduct. He expected quiet, but he was wrong. New Yorkers kept shouting to each other and came on the run. An irritating alarm sounded from somewhere on the ship.
“Like the world’s biggest digital alarm clock going off,” he’d report later.
And then the ship’s passengers ran out to meet their would-be rescuers. That’s what he thought they were. Some leaped to South Street from the Mars’ upper deck. The rest boiled out of holes in the hull. “Like ants from a kicked anthill,” Gus would say. “Like angry fire ants.”
“People call ’em zombies. I always thought of zombies as slow and slow-witted. Now, maybe they couldn’t pass an exam, but as soon as those monsters got off that boat, they didn’t hesitate. The first attack I ever saw, it was four of them. I thought they were fighting over a guy, pulling him back and forth. Maybe they were at first, but as soon as he was on the ground, they tore at him with their teeth.”
Gus stopped in the middle of Wall Street, frozen. He watched the zombies attack, horrified. They were mostly white people, but very disheveled and thin. Their clothes had been fancy once, but now they were dirty and torn. Bewildered, Gus even let out a surprised chuckle when he noticed that many of those feeding on the fallen wore soiled pants. (He always used the word “soiled” with a wink to the parents of the children gathered at his feet.)
“They kept pouring out of the Mars, but worse, people kept pouring into the street. I didn’t know there were that many people in that end of town. You wouldn’t think so, but maybe people were drawn to all the stored food in the dead restaurants.
“Women and children ran to the ship before I could warn them off. Funny thing about seeing what you don’t expect to see. At first, you go into denial and you think, this can’t be happening. When you rush, your brain’s not hooked up to your eyes right away. The people who ignored me, they ran right into the teeth of the zombie attack.
“You have to understand,” Gus would say later, “The crash of the Mars was the most exciting thing to happen in a long time. People were tired. There was nothing to do but burn bodies and scrounge and maybe stare at the walls. Maybe you think you’re a homebody, but stick anybody in a small room with their family for months on end waiting to maybe die from the flu? I guaran-darn-tee, you run out of conversation. Maybe you even welcome a little danger and excitement. Boy, did we get it that day!”
Gus always skimped on the deeper horrors he’d witnessed. He didn’t mention the children ripped from their mothers’ arms to be devoured in front of them. The kids’ soft bellies were pulled and pried open as easily as delicate, red flower petals.
He saw two disembowelments up close. The horror of the scene wasn’t merely that it happened. It was the joy etched on the faces of the monsters. The Atlantic was their desert. New York was their oasis. When they arrived, they leapt at their victims with such orgiastic joy, it was as if they were dying of thirst and hunger. Instead of water, they came for meat and blood.
Some idiotic listeners always pressed Gus for more details. They wanted him to paint a picture. His haunted look silenced most. If that didn’t shut them up, everyone got quiet and respectful when the tears came.
Tears were Gus’ opening to talk about God. He talked a long time about God’s mercies. With each well-chosen word, he hoped to erase the horrors he’d evoked. He told his audience how God put him in that place at that time to save a family from monsters. He said God made the mother of that family a pilot.
“That was how I went from the zombie attack on a Thursday at noon to escaping to Canada in a Cessna seaplane by noon the next day. I’d nev
er been farther than Coney Island before that, but here I am, alive and well by God’s grace.”
The crowd would always murmur and nod, appreciating a good story. Lots of people might have zombie stories, but no one else had zombie stories that included cruise liners crashing into New York City.
“Occupy Wall Street couldn’t do it. Islamo-fascist Nazis couldn’t do it. The government and courts wouldn’t do it. In the end, it was the murderous zombie army from Mars that finally brought down Wall Street.”
When they thought he was done, Gus added the kicker. “I saw God that day and he worked through me. He guided me. He came to me like the words to a eulogy.”
Some of the older ones shifted in their seats and looked away, but most eyes were on him, wanting to believe.
“In my panic, I saw things differently. I ran, carrying a child in my arms and guiding the pilot’s family to safety. We ran and hid and ran and hid. But all the way, whenever we ran, I kept seeing the orange Xs on the doors.
“You’ve all seen them, but I saw a pattern. Somehow, by God’s grace, I got it in my head that if I saw three doors in a row with the mark of death? I turned away. X is a powerful letter. X represents the unknown. X marks the spot. Three is a dangerous number. Peter denied Jesus three times. And — ” with a wink, “two’s company but three’s a crowd.”
His audience would smile and look curious and confused. Gus explained the feeling of being guided by an unseen, but sure, hand.
“Imagine yourself running in a panic, panting and exhausted and terrified to stop, or even look behind you, because if you look, monsters might be on your heels and you’re out of gas.”
When he mimed swinging his arms and panting, the children always laughed.
“Now imagine letting streetlights guide your way. If it’s red, turn right. If it’s green, keep going straight! That’s how it was for me, except the electricity was out. No streetlights anymore, so I was guided by the Xs. I just knew, I mean I was sure, those Xs were meant for me.”
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