The Last: A Zombie Novel

by Grist, Michael John

  I painted the walls of the grand central lobby into a bulletin board that anyone can post their name and date of arrival on. I wrote my map and directions of where I will go across the floor; a plan of the entire journey and every step that I will take, with coordinates of all the cairns I plan to leave behind like giant geocaches along the way, so they can follow along. I left a big tray full of USBs with every point of the map marked out inside too. There's no shortage of laptops now, so I left plenty of them to read the USBs by, laid out like display units in an Apple store. I left GPS units too, and solar panel chargers, and in the basement below are a dozen RVs with enough gas and supplies stacked in their backs to take anyone clear across the country.

  Of course there's coffee too. Down one wall there are ten Nespresso machines, in case there's a crowd, each stacked with its own brightly colored pile of refills, packaged in neat little boxes like shotgun shells.

  If there's anyone left behind they will see this trail I've left for them. Perhaps they'll follow, and find me, and then I won't be alone anymore and neither will they.

  I sip my beer, a craft brew I rescued straight off its microbrewery production line in Yonkers, and admire the giant 'f'. My work looks crisp and neat hanging in the sky above this abandoned and overgrown city, visible for miles, the graffiti tag to eclipse all other tags. I can relax, the first step is done.

  It feels especially meaningful seen from this viewing point beside the Admiral David Farragut. I read about him in an encyclopedia in a book store; a lot less convenient than Wikipedia, but just as useful. Like Clowdesley he was a naval officer, the first full admiral in the US fleet. He distinguished himself in the civil war amongst numerous other naval campaigns, though he was most famous for his quote: "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"

  I have adopted that catchphrase now, in light of modern events, and adapted it. It's the sweltering summer of 2018 and no one uses torpedoes anymore.

  Damn the zombies, full speed to the West!

  I wrote it on the floor of the Empire State Building foyer in the same thick paint I used for the 'f'. I wrote it here at this ancient hero's feet and signed it with my new tag in full, Last Mayor of America, LMA for short. These words will last for decades, maybe centuries, long after I'm gone. All these marks I'm leaving will be a symbol for others until the Empire State Building comes crumbling down and New York is left as rubble and dust for the zombies to frolic in.

  That makes me feel better, and helps still the gnawing loneliness that bites at me every day. I lie back and wait for dark, listening to the comforting sound of the ocean lapping against the barricade. Tomorrow my odyssey begins. It might take a week, it might take a year, but at the end I'll settle down to watch our last great movies in LA's Chinese Theater, beside the Wall of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard, and wait for the others to come, because I can't truly be the last in all of America, in all of the world, left alive.

  INTERLUDE 1

  The street was quiet when Lara slipped out of the redbrick tenement in Mott Haven, two months earlier. It was just past dawn, a fresh spring morning in New York, and the wet dew-smell from the scrubby park across the road filled her nostrils.

  She smiled at the memory of the night before. It had felt like falling into a movie, a cushiony velvet script that carried them along quickly, full of wit and promise. The sex that followed was like a bomb going off. Her whole body tingled in ways it never had before.

  She shivered, walking down the street. Willis Street, she saw. She knew roughly where that was, though she'd rarely ventured into the Bronx. Her parents would disapprove. She chuckled and ran her tongue around her fuzzy teeth.

  Wine-mouth. She was probably still a little drunk. She felt like simultaneously shouting out and giggling.

  "It was so weird!" she expected to tell Alejandro in their shared apartment in Queens later on. "He rolled out this ancient pick-up move, reading my palm for color, and I was ready to get up and walk out, but I don't know. There was something magnetic about him."

  "So you screwed him," Alejandro would say, poking her in the belly with a banana. "All the best magnets screw each other."

  She'd laugh and he'd tease and they'd relive the whole delicious, bizarre thing together.

  She chewed on a bit of her dark hair pensively. It was a good note she left. Good to keep the mystery.

  At the bodega she turned the corner and started south. There had to be a Metro line somewhere along here, or a bus stop, probably the 25 would take her at least to the bridge to Queens.

  She brought up her phone and clicked through a few text messages. There was one from Alejandro, time-stamped around midnight, just after she'd sent him a frenzied misspelled message that she wasn't coming home.

  Look out, y'all!

  was all it said. He was trying it out as his catchphrase. She slid it by and brought up her email, full of the usual garbage; junk mail, notices from the Sir Clowdesley Jeo list, and something from her mother.

  We love you dear. Come home if you can.

  That was strange. She clicked to bring up the number and called. The phone on the other end rang and rang but no one picked up. They were probably asleep, especially if they'd been up at, what? Lara laughed. The time-stamp on that message was 2am. She imagined her white-haired old French mother fussing up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet, then settling in for some ancient black and white movie on TV, probably with a glass of warm milk and cognac.

  Lara looked up from the phone at the intersection, and saw a bloody torso and head crawling toward her. Beside it lay a smoking upturned car chassis, and between the two lay a trail of bloody organs, linking them together like yoyo string.

  Her brain melted for a few seconds. The head stared back at her with bright white eyes. She blinked and tried to fathom what on earth this apparition really was, some weird kind of cat hit by a car, a pig fallen out of a crashed meat van, or a…

  BANG

  The explosion rocked her awake, a huge blast that she felt through the curb. A cloud of black smoke rose up from further down Willis, and she understood.

  New York was under attack. She glanced once more at the grotesque creature in the road. Was this what nuclear fallout looked like? She clamped her hand over her mouth, turned and ran. After five strides she stopped, pulled off her high heels, then ran on barefoot in her stockings. What the hell? She fumbled in her bag and got her phone out again, dialing 911 on the trot.

  She got a busy signal. She dialed again as she jogged back past the bodega. Her feet were cold and her heels hurt where they thumped on the paving slabs.

  Still a busy signal; 911 was down or inundated. How many people were calling in the same emergency at once? She looked to the sky, expecting to see the contrails of more incoming planes, or, what, missiles, but there were none. The streets were silent.

  Where was everybody?

  She bolted past 143rd with Amo furthermost from her mind. In the middle of the road lay a car with the engine ticking over and the door open. She plunged into the driver's seat and slamming the door behind her.

  The unnatural quiet of the city receded, replaced by the white shush of the air conditioner. The keys were in the ignition and she twisted them a click over to kick the engine in. It coughed to full life. Out of habit she checked the rearview mirror, and saw another one of the victims coming for her.

  It was a girl wearing a white dress covered in blood. Half of her face had melted away, replaced by mottled purple underskin. Her eyes shone like radioactive cesium.

  Lara punched her bare foot hard on the accelerator, lifted the handbrake, and burnt rubber the hell out of there. For the first twenty or so blocks she could barely think, too busy weaving in and out of a constant stream of stalled traffic.

  There were more badly wounded people wandering around the streets, but they didn't hail her for help. They started running after her, and though she knew she ought to stop and help, there seemed something very wrong about them, like they were infected.
She kept the windows rolled up and raced on.

  Somewhere at the top of the Bronx she saw a heaving tideline up ahead; a mass of people filling out the street, gathered like they were walking in a parade. She stopped half a block down from them and rolled down the window to shout.

  "What the hell's going on?"

  They started running. Their eyes were white and many were dappled with blood. She didn't hang around to find out what they wanted, sending the car back and racing off to the left. After that she drove manically, not stopping for anything, just weaving her way north.

  She flew out of New York along the Sprain Brook Parkway, dodging constantly around the abandoned vehicles, here pulled neatly to the sides. There were people here too, and they came with their eyes blazing and their arms out, some running directly at the car. One boy ran right into the bumper like he wanted to go under the wheels. He did.

  Lara drove on, until the frozen traffic thinned out and the detritus of the city fell away and she switched lanes automatically to the 684, the 84, the 87 headed north. Soon she was in amongst the bright spring greenery of lower New England. Red oaks proliferated, and the highway swept in over them on a raised plane, like the rings around Saturn. Every now and then one of the infected people was there in the middle of the road, wandering near a stopped car or truck, like they were lying in waiting for her.

  She didn't now what it was anymore. Nuclear didn't make people turn crazy. She flipped on the radio and scrolled all the stations, but got only static. She called home again and again, tried Alejandro and anyone she could think, but none of them answered and her phone stopped working altogether fifty miles out of New York. The signal cut out and it wouldn't even attempt to dial, so she flew on alone in furious silence, her jaw working silently under the skin, bound for one place: her parents' home in Utica. If anybody knew what was going on, and what to do, it would be them.

  Lara pulled up to the outer gate of their community, Oakwood Briar, a little before midday. Barefoot she got out of the car and went up to the wrought iron metal gate.

  "Hey," she called through, hoping to snag the attention of the security guy in his little booth, but no one was there. She shook on the metal but it didn't budge. She backed out onto the road, a safe bet now with no other cars in sight, and ran her stolen Toyota around the circumference. The wall from the gate continued for about fifty yards, then ran down into an intermittent screen of Douglas firs.

  She bustled out of the car door and into the heady brown matting of pine needles that lay beyond the grass verge, still damp. The needles pricked her feet softly, and sent up the hickory smell of Christmas. She pushed the damp branches aside and emerged into the Oakwood Briar community, on a looping one-way road that encircled the community.

  She ran along the grass of people's front yards, glancing into windows as she went by. There was no one around at all. Cars were in driveways, doors were closed and curtains were drawn, though it was noon.

  "Hello!" Lara called. "Anybody home?"

  No answer came. She heard barking as she rounded the first cul-de-sac and followed it. Round the corner of a Georgian-style retirement bungalow a crowd of people was gathered, circling the chain-link fence on a backyard. They were pressed so tightly Lara could only see glimpses of the backyard, within which were a pair of full-grown German Shepherds, now racing back and forth and barking frantically at the crowd.

  In the crowd were old guys in pajamas pressed hip to hip with grannies in floral nighties, kids in bright superhero romper suits, a few security guys in reassuring dark blue, and one or two young men in bright boxers.

  Lara didn't run over to them or shout out. She crept carefully away. When one of the dogs abruptly yelped, and she saw its body swing up over the fence in the arms of the crowd, who dropped it to the ground, tore at its face and belly, and ducked their faces into the gore to eat as though bobbing for apples, she understood.

  Zombies?

  She covered the distance to her parent's place not expecting anything good, muttering, "Get your shit together Lara," under her breath. She went round the back and opened the basement door with the slim-jim her father, a hobbyist mechanic, kept hidden in the drainpipe.

  The basement was quiet but for the low hum of the dehumidifier, working to counteract the natural damp of the surrounding clay soil. The light clicked on and illuminated a familiar square space. Shelves circled the bare concrete walls, laden down with old rolls of carpet, her mom's doll house and her workshop. Along one wall hung all the tools for making her dad's kit cars, and of course their computer, banished to a little faux lounge where a TV and Lazy boy had been set up.

  This was the Lara cave, where she spent most of her time whenever she visited.

  "Mom," she said, so quietly there was no chance anyone would hear her. "Dad."

  She padded over to the tool wall, and trailed her fingers over the chipboard-backing full of pinholes. Adaptable shelving spokes jutted out to hold her father's tools. She settled on a heavy metal mallet, which he used along with a lug wrench to knock the screws off wheels.

  Was she going to brain her zombie parents? She snorted at the thought. This was all some crazy, revolting dream. But maybe a little bit?

  The air was cold and the concrete colder. She started up the carpeted stairs, which led up into the kitchen. She reached the top and her hand on the door trembled. She opened it tentatively and entered the corridor, enjoying the familiar flex and the warmth of the cedar boards underfoot, and looked around.

  "Mom?" she whispered.

  She heard a creak from the kitchen. Two steps further and she'd see.

  Lara lifted the mallet back with both hands.

  "Mom, I'm holding a mallet."

  Her mother burst round the side of the kitchen and bounced off the refrigerator so hard she set it rocking. There was blood round her mouth and the same furious white in her eyes, and she came grasping hungrily for more.

  The mallet dropped from her hand and Lara leapt back, at the last moment grabbing the basement door and yanking it fully open. It caught her mother on the shoulder and rolled her, and Lara leaned in to that roll, pushing the door and her mother with it closed.

  The back of her mother's head hit the door jamb with a solid thunk, Lara gave her a shove, and she tottered through and fell. Lara slammed the door and jammed her back to it, while from the other side came the thump thump thump of her mother tumbling down the stairs.

  "Oh my god," Lara said.

  She looked to her left. Her father was standing there. The strangest thing was, he was wearing a plain white T-shirt with words sprayed across it in purple car-body paint.

  We love you Lara.

  He came for her. She pulled the same trick on him, more smoothly this time, though his weight as the door caught him across the face almost knocked her back. She kicked off the wall and rolled round, shoving him off-balance as she'd always learned in Wing Chun classes, and kept the door closing. It felt like forcing a crab into a hot pot, but he went down.

  She slammed the door. Thump thump thump he went all the way down. She opened the door and looked. He was OK, he was getting up already. Her mom was already up, though her leg seemed to be twisted at a nasty angle.

  Lara closed the door, locked it, then ran to the sink to puke.

  So this was the zombie apocalypse, then.

  Nothing much happened for a long time after that.

  Lara laid low. Zombies came up to the door in dribs and drabs, like Mormons, but they were often distracted away by dogs or cats. There was a cat living on the roof of the folks across the street, and every now and then it came down for long enough to run down a mouse. There were dogs barking constantly, though their number steadily diminished as they were rousted out, or died of starvation.

  Lara stayed mostly on the second floor, looking out of the windows, far enough away from the basement that she didn't have to hear her parents rattling around down there. She'd been down to look at them once, and had surprised herself by not
crying.

  It wasn't that she didn't care about them. She did. But this was so emphatically not them. The message of her father's shirt had told her all she needed to know. They'd known, they'd had enough warning to send her a text and write her a farewell, and wasn't that nice and tidy?

  She was in shock, true enough. She sat on her chair by her old roll-top desk, where she'd blitzed out on learning drugs to help her study for law school, and looked out through the lacy windows like Mama Bates, waiting, but nobody came.

  No army, no navy, no CIA. She had the radio on but nothing played but a lonely hiss. The electric went out and then the water, but she was hardly hungry or thirsty. She stopped eating almost altogether, just little bites once a day. She watched the old zombies flow up and down the street, stopping at her door only to be lured away. She watched them go gray, watched as more splatters of blood appeared on their clothes from the dogs they'd managed to pry out of their yards.

  After a week of lolling, waiting, watching and reading her old books and diaries, she tooled up. Her father kept a shotgun, a pump-action Remington with forty shells worth of ammunition. She took one of his fishing jackets and stuffed the pockets full of shells. She hooked a knife through her belt. She put on two pairs of jeans and two thick jackets, then duct-taped glossy magazines round her arms and legs, round her midriff and chest. She found an old football helmet and fitted it to her head.

  She loaded the shotgun. She went down to the basement.

  It was easy. Boom, boom.

  She emerged through the basement door into the garden. This was hunting.

  She took out two near nice Mrs. Batcher's hot tub. One of them tumbled into the water and sank like a turd. She reloaded and continued on. She patrolled the community, finding them in strange pockets; some gathered around the last few emaciated dogs, some at water sources, others wandering aimlessly.