He dug around in the mass of papers and trash in the passenger foot well, coming up with a map for New York. The George Washington Bridge seemed the closest, fifteen miles to the north. Chances were good it was just as clogged as the Holland Tunnel, but he didn't have a choice.
It took five hours.
The built-up city roads were at most one or two lanes wide, with narrow curbs and buildings stacked right up to the sidewalk, offering no space to bypass all the cars, buses, semis and motorbikes lying around.
He tried to plow through but the Audi wasn't powerful enough to shove other vehicles out of the way, so he had to constantly backtrack, kept company by a growing swarm of zombie bodies. They pressed up to his glass whenever he stopped, growing thicker as the night went by, until at last at four in the morning they were so tightly pressed around him, wedged into an intersection somewhere in Union City, he could no longer move at all.
Pushing the gas just spun his tires, filling the car with the stink of burning rubber. He tried to pry a way free, jolting between reverse and drive with the pedal pushed down hard, but there were too many. He heard their bones cracking and stopped.
He was trapped.
* * *
He dreamed of Amo burning atop a pyre of bodies, just like the image in his comic. Green-O stood nearby with a Zippo lighter in his hand, grinning like a demon.
Around noon they started to clear, and he eased the Audi through, rolling along streets bathed in warm mid-summer light. In 45 minutes he sat on the on-ramp to the George Washington Bridge, but it was just as crowded as Lincoln Tunnel.
He needed a bigger vehicle.
At the New Jersey Fire Department station he switched into a fire engine out in the yard. It was a high haul to get into the seat, and pulling his chair up after him was tough, but he made it. The key was in the ignition and sparked at his first try.
On the approach to the bridge he sped up. The huge machine responded slowly but surely, charging up like a dynamo. He steered it up the ramp to the bridge, pushed the gas-bat hard to the floor, and launched into traffic like a battering ram.
CRUNCH
The truck plowed through for about fifty feet before its momentum died out, with vehicles shifted to either side like logs in a beaver dam. The jolt of the seat belt across his chest felt good. He reversed and charged again, sending vehicles shearing against the bridge railings.
He forced his way over George Washington Bridge in a little over an hour, making landfall on Manhattan Island giddy with adrenaline. His chest ached where the seat belt had slapped him again and again.
Zombies were waiting for him, and he rolled on through, battering his way east along 174th street, punching a white Porsche to bits over the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, tearing a yellow Ford almost in half on his way into Tremont.
At an open intersection with 3rd Avenue on the corner of Tremont Park he looked south, but the smoke and ash were long gone. The fire had been somewhere near the Empire State Building, on 5th Avenue and 34th Street, so he turned right onto 3rd Avenue and raced down toward it.
What he found disgusted him.
The first body was near the corner of 3rd and East 112th street, deep in Harlem, lying in the middle of the road. It wasn't gray and the lights in its eyes had gone out, rather its skin was a mottled black with patches of purple and pink, and flesh hung off it like pulled pork at a barbeque.
He gagged. Moments later when the smell wafted through the open window, like burnt sausages, he vomited out of the window.
This was a person burned alive. Its face was gone, its hair was gone, its clothes were gone. He killed the engine and in the following silence heard the low drone of flies.
Around the body there was a wet and glossy smear, like translucent candlewax. A southerly breeze came and the smell hit him harder. He pinched his nose and looked away, momentarily startled by how normal the world looked to either side. There was a parked taxi, a yellow fire hydrant, a row of brightly colored newspaper boxes. The display window of a clothes shop called Hartegan's featured a Daniel Boone-like figure wearing a top hat. Then there was this.
Was this Amo's body? Was this a zombie?
Stretching south behind it was a trail of footsteps marked in glossy oil. Probably a zombie, lit up like a firecracker somewhere south, then it kept walking this way.
Robert looked toward East 111th a block south, expecting to see a burnt-out wreck that might have caused this, a fallen plane or a rubbled building, but everything looked normal. He drove on.
Half a block further down he found three bodies lying like a belt across the street, half-melted, their fats and juices running down into the asphalt and staining it a shiny yellow. They too had left footsteps behind them, written in glossy oil.
"Oh God," Robert mumbled. The roasted, greasy smell of cooked humans was worse here. He tied a kerchief around his mouth and wound the windows up, stopping up the vents.
It only grew worse.
Near East 110th street there was a silvery trail of seven or eight bodies, melted like slugs lying on salt. Halfway to East 109th the trail picked up again and didn't stop, beginning as a tapered point of a few bodies tumbled together with flaps of purple meat hanging loose, then expanding backwards to fill out the road.
After a time he couldn't drive any further, as bodies covered every bit of the asphalt, though they were hardly recognizable as bodies any more. They were a pink, purple and black soup of burnt flesh and bones, like bacteria beds in Yellowstone Park, ropey with veins of wriggling yellow that had to be curdled human fat.
There were peaks where bodies had heaped up and valleys between them where blood, offal and fat had coagulated in cracked platelets, like a dried-up desert.
The stench was thick in the fire engine cab. The flies beat at the windows like a droning black sandstorm, fogging the air in every direction.
"Jesus Christ," he whispered, again and again as though invoking the name could take the horror away. It was like an image of a mass grave in some third-world country, where victims of ethnic cleansing lined shallow pits, but this was New York, the greatest city in the world.
He felt it scarring him inside. It was so much worse than watching the zombies on TV that first night, because this had to be deliberate. No gas mains would have broken and sparked five days after the apocalypse, no more planes were falling, no open fires were left. Instead someone had lit this fire, and led this burning train of bodies north.
It had to be Amo.
His stomach wrung itself tight. Amo was kind and gentle, but then he hadn't seen another living soul since Memphis. No one else was even left.
He came round from a faint, leaning against the driver-side window. Flies spat at the glass by his elbow like black popcorn, and the stink was a solid taste in his mouth, like chewing rotten meat.
He saw his face in the rear view mirror, the skin pale. Shock was eating into him. Maybe he was turning into a zombie, to be burnt like the rest. Amo would do it with a grin on his face and a lighter in his hand.
He'd expected to find Amo much as he had been, cheerful and ready with a quip, but he'd been wrong. This was a hellscape.
A booming sound rang out, and Robert twisted toward it but the street hadn't changed. Another came, then another, and though he didn't know for sure, each one sounded like Amo's name hammered onto the air.
BOOM
BOOM
BOOM
Feeling woolly and thick-tongued, Robert pulled the fire engine back. He turned it on 110th and drove over to 7th Avenue, rolling down the windows in a fog to clear the foul taste of death from the cab. As he started south he heard the ratatatatat of distant gunfire. Far ahead down the canyon of skyscrapers he saw a tiny fireball plume up.
"Jesus, Amo," he whispered, less a prayer than a surrender, and drove the fire engine on.
10. TIMES SQUARE
He found Amo on the edge of Times Square, standing atop a long white RV facing south and spraying bullets from a machine gun into t
he ranks of a charging horde of zombies.
Robert stopped the fire engine at the intersection with West 48th Street a full block away and stared. The sound of the gun pummeled the air like a drill, mowing down line after line of stumbling bodies.
ratatatatatatat
He was killing them. It was Amo. He had his back turned but it was undeniably Amo; a hipsterish figure in khaki pants and a polo shirt just like his Yangtze avatar, surrounded by the banality of Times Square's blank video screens. Now he was killing people in their hundreds.
Zombies rushed up at his RV like a tide, drawn by the sound, the light, the movement, and Amo killed them. His RV rooftop was walled with red ammo crates stacked two high, like sandbags in a machine gun nest, and he constantly ducked in and out of them to gather fresh munitions.
Bullet-ruptured bodies were everywhere, forming a landscape of torn gray flesh and purple guts that coated the road like a carpet all the way up to West 48th where Robert sat watching. In places there were sooty clearings where grenades or rockets must have exploded, cratering the asphalt and blasting bodies into bits. Blood ran over the yellow parking lines at the curbs and dripped silently down into drains.
His mouth went dry. He couldn't drive any further without rolling the engine over the dead. It was worse than the fire, because it was still happening, and Robert couldn't take his eyes off Amo at the center. He couldn't hear anything but the ratatatatat of the gun, dropping more and more. He couldn't smell anything but the metallic stench of blood, infesting his lungs like water rising up.
"Amo!" he shouted, but his voice was pummeled back by the thunder of automatic gunfire. Another explosion came, blooming like a tiny flower and biting bodies out of the tide over a block away.
He slammed down on the horn.
HOOOOOOOONK
It rang out but wasn't enough. Amo was too far away, and the sound up on the RV with the bullets, zombies and adrenaline had to be overwhelming.
He leaned his head out of the window and shouted at the top of his lungs. He leaned on the horn with all his weight, as if that would make a difference, but Amo didn't turn.
So he gunned the engine forward. Bodies flattened and gushed out their innards under its thick tires, skulls popped like watermelons, and the seat jostled and jerked like a 4x4 going off-road. He leaned on the horn throughout, so he wouldn't have to hear the slosh as internal organs were forced out of gaping mouths by the fire engine's massive weight.
HOOOOOOONK
Amo kept firing without break, unloading clip after clip into the gray mass before him, and soon the engine hit a density of fallen bodies halfway down the block that it couldn't climb over or bull through. There were just too many.
Robert tried charging like on the George Washington Bridge, but it was impossible to get any momentum on the slippery, organ-strewn asphalt. He charged forward all the same but his front wheels just dug into the bellies of dead people on the wall's lowest tier, tearing them open like piñata and spilling more slick purple ropes across the road.
"Amo!" he screamed, but he barely even heard his own voice over the onslaught. He shot and shot and shot, and Robert could feel the vibration rising up through the ground.
There was nothing else to do. He unlatched his seatbelt, opened the door, and lowered his useless legs down to the street.
His arms were stronger now but his stomach wasn't, and as he lowered himself to lie on his side in the slick of freshly burst blood and guts by the front wheel, he vomited again.
His hip was in it, his fingers were in it, it was slimy and cold against his skin and it stank like rotten meat gone fetid in the trash, pus and sweat mingling with the slit pork-stink of the butcher's. His eyes stung with the bitter tang of ammonia and shivers wracked down his broken spine.
He began to crawl.
On his elbows he edged round the blockade of bodies, squirming through a narrow valley between sprawling arms and legs. His belly and hips scraped through puddles of cold guts, his legs trailed through it behind him, and liquid seeped down his waistband and into his pants.
He gagged and tears fogged his vision. Merciful streams of snot blocked his nose and he made no effort to clear them. In moments he rounded the heap and faced a saddle of bodies three deep.
Just like ladder rungs, he told himself, climbing to the platform. Focus.
He reached for a sturdy looking arm at the top, hairy and pale, gripped it round the wrist and pulled. It creaked then tore loose, dropping him roughly back to the road and showering his face with fresh gore as the stump smacked down off the top of his head. The asphalt punched his hip and elbow sharply, freezing him momentarily in pain.
"Come on!" he cried.
Amo's onslaught went on, a deep bass thrum that vibrated through his sodden pants. He rubbed tears from his eyes with an arm covered in blood and tried again, taking hold of a leg in blue jeans and tugging on it experimentally.
It held. He pulled himself up.
The bodies were firm but yielding, and he slipped and rolled over them. They turned under his weight, arms and legs shifting position, broken hips twisting and torsos wheezing like bellows, wounds tearing open and disgorging rotten purple innards, like some disgusting, hellish orgy.
From the top he gained no vantage or fresh view; the landscape extended like a mass grave. He slithered ungainly to the bottom of the small heap, where he came face to face with a young woman who was still alive. Her jaw gaped at his face, gray tongue waggling. Her broken arms twitched where they lay trapped underneath other bodies. Her chest was blown apart from the third rib down, with her lungs and heart poking their heads out like shiny friends come out to play. The heart pulsed and the lungs expanded and contracted.
He vomited, looked away and crawled on. He slithered like a snail round a thick encampment of bodies drifted up against a yellow school bus, over a mercifully clear rocket crater where the road beneath his belly was still warm, and circled a jagged wall of ribs and leg bones like a stack of chopped wood, all the time drawing closer.
The sound of gunfire grew louder with every slap of his palms on cold and wriggling bodies. He was alive and they were alive and they were all alive together, waving like the dying waves. His were arms slathered in a thick coating of viscera, like the glaze on a cake.
He dry-heaved and went on and it took forever. The block went on and on, the gouged, ruptured, torn bodies went on and on, until at last the RV was there. He could smell the burn of gunpowder and welcomed it as something different to raw and rotten meat. The RV was white or cream, it was hard to tell with so much blood in his eyes. He crawled up to it and laughed.
ratatatatatatatat, said Amo's guns.
BOOM, said Amo's rocket launcher.
Robert laughed madly and pounded at the RV's side. He could barely reach up above the wheels to the metal skin. His shoulders trembled and threatened to drop him chin-down to the asphalt.
bang bang, his palm said on the metal, barely an ant nipping at Amo's heels.
ratatatatatatat
BOOM
ratatatatatatat
bang bang
He slithered round the back of the RV looking for a way to climb up; halfway up there was a ladder but he couldn't reach it. He slithered round toward the front.
"Amo!" he shouted up, lying to the RV's side and fighting to be heard above the oppressive roar of the gun. "Amo!"
He pushed away from the RV's shadow and looked up at Amo's face in profile, bobbing above the ammo crate fort. His dark hair was swept back from a face grim with dark lines of smoke, sweat and gunpowder. He looked like a grizzled war veteran with a thousand yard stare, focused on a horizon point beyond the ocean of charging bodies, trying to shoot his way through them all. He looked like the last man alive after the apocalypse, giving up.
"Amo!" he screamed.
But Amo didn't hear. Robert tried grabbing up bits of organs and throwing them but he couldn't even reach the roof of the RV. They splatted against the side ineffectually.
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"Amo!"
He wanted to help him. More than anything lying there in the blood and shit, he wanted to reach up and take the weapons out of Amo's hands and tell him, "You don't need to do this! You don't need to do any of this!"
But he couldn't. He was a cripple lying in the shit and he couldn't do anything. He couldn't climb or make himself heard, he couldn't stop his only friend in the world from perpetuating a massacre the likes of which he'd never recover from. He couldn't do a damn thing except bury his bloody face against his bloody elbow and sob.
* * *
Some time later the shooting stopped.
It took Robert a moment to recognize the emptiness in the air, like a vacuum sucking at his ears after the constant assault of gunfire. He heard his own breath and his own heart banging hard in the silence.
The zombies were gone. The groan and crush of them, the stampede of their feet up 7th Avenue, was halted. He looked out over an endless wasteland of the dead. Their bodies were everywhere, fogged with a low and bloody haze, scattered around crashed vehicles and piled up near lampposts and newspaper boxes. Thousands or tens of thousands; an entire herd, the entire population of New York, and every last one of them ripped and dead.
Finally the shooting had stopped.
He felt like he could breathe again. He rolled and looked up. There was Amo standing just as before, though the grim expression of defeat was gone from his face. Now he looked faintly amused.
This was the Amo he remembered, who'd saved him in the darkness and who he'd saved in turn on the phone, who any minute would climb down and help him up and together they'd plan a way to move forward.
Robert sucked in a breath to shout and this time be heard. It wasn't too late.
"Amo!"
At the same time there was one final BANG.
Fluid splashed on Robert's face and across his chest, fallen from the sky. There was a thump from the RV as Amo's body settled on the roof.
Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least Page 9