Paths

by David DeSimone

  Black.

  Total, absolute, infinite blackness.

  The city was blanketed in darkness.

  From the awestruck crowd there was a mixture of bewildered mutterings as they watched this great void engulfing them.

  The screams began when the darkness was complete.

  People ran for cover, but with no visibility it became a scene of chaos and panic. Among the shrieks of frightened people, brakes screeched, horns blared, cars collided.

  Ana heard a horrible guttural noise and a grunt. She didn’t have to see to know it was the sound of a woman being trampled to death. She was close, where Shawna or Liz could have been standing.

  Maxwell pushed Ana down and covered her as best he could with his body. “Stay down!” he shouted amongst all the screaming and shouting.

  “Liz!” she called out. “Shawna!”

  She made a feeble attempt to pull away. “Ana!” Maxwell shouted again. “Stay down!”

  “What’s happening?”

  Maxwell had no answer. He was as confused and frightened as she and everyone else. Quantico had trained him to deal with terrorists, drug cartels, murderers and treasonists, but it had never trained him for this. What he saw couldn’t be compared to anything in either his professional experiences or his life. That didn’t stop his mind from making free associations, the first of which had to do with a possible terrorist weapon, although he found it hard to believe that any terrorist group would have the resources to build a weapon so big. He also considered that it could have been a science experiment gone haywire. Those crazy eggheads and their atom smashers were always messing with the forces of Nature. Maybe they went too far this time and triggered a chain reaction that would eventually turn the whole goddamn world into a mound of goo. Or it was a freak solar eclipse of gigantic proportions. The Wrath of God.

  Who the fuck knew!

  When the bright flash hit, Special Agent Beau Maxwell joined the chorus of screams already in progress.

  A new level of panic came over Maxwell when he felt his mind beginning to go, burning away like paper held over a flame. He tried desperately to hold onto whom he was by thinking of his name over and over, but like all other facets of self-awareness - memories, concerns, hopes and dreams, his name slipped through the gaps of his mental fingers. Finally his very capacity to think was weakening, dissolving under the razor-shredding effects of the flash.

  By the time he collapsed, the person who was Special Agent Beau Maxwell was gone.

  14

  The canopy of blinding white light could not hide the horrific sounds of panic, chaos and destruction. Underlying the sudden crashing of a car or the shrill explosion of shattering glass or the ground-shaking bang of a truck slamming into a wall was the continuous screams of countless people, a boundless choir giving voice to a dying world.

  The light gave no mercy to their cries, gave no mercy to their screams, no mercy to their pain. Powerful invisible rays penetrated their flesh and destroyed their minds.

  Somewhere in midtown a church bell tolled as it had done for hundreds of years, counting the hour in long somber tones.

  BONG!

  A car broadsided a bus at the intersection of 23rd Street and Third Avenue, killing the driver and two bus passengers instantly. Blinding light made it impossible for drivers to see the collision just ahead, causing a massive pileup in both directions.

  BONG!

  In Stuyvesant Park two Park’s Department crewmen were driving on their way to plant flowers along the east side of the center lawn, where a fountain shot plumes of water and mist thirty feet into the air. They were caught off-guard when everything went black. When the world turned white seconds later, the driver instinctively covered his eyes and, forgetting his foot was still on the gas, the red dump truck veered to the left, off the cement walkway and trundled across dirt and grass before plowing into the back of a bench. After crushing five people, the truck continued across the cement plaza before coming to a crashing halt at the base of the fountain.

  BONG!

  Antonia Santiago was guiding her East River Ferry away from the Greenpoint terminal. After spending three years of apprenticeship while studying to get her captain’s license, she had finally convinced her boss that she was just as capable of soloing a boat as the 17 male captains that made up the fleet. Heading due south, southeast she expertly steered the boat into deeper waters avoiding underwater remnants of old piers. Ahead was the sprawling view of the Williamsburg Bridge connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan, followed by the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges in all their golden late-afternoon glory. It was a view that had never tired her.

  Something covered the sky. It looked like giant black blob and it consumed everything overhead. Within seconds the golden light of the lowering sun was consumed.

  It happened so fast that Antonia was too stunned to hit the floodlights. The pilings supporting the North Williamsburg pier were approaching fast. So she gripped the throttle intending on pulling it back.

  And then the flash occurred.

  The instantaneous transformation of the world going from darkness to an absolute whiteout gave Antonia such a start that when she jerked her hands up to cover her eyes her right hand inadvertently caught the throttle knocking it upward. The ferry jerked forward throwing Antonia and several passengers off their seats.

  By the time the ferry’s bow rammed into the metal pier, the dozens of shrieks and screams onboard were already diminishing. The ferry tore through the pier, first crushing into and then splitting the platform like it was made of tin foil. With its pilot incapacitated, the ferry had no one to steer it out of harm’s way. It made a beeline toward the rocky coastline at full throttle. The bow struck the cement edge so hard that the port and starboard sides of the boat exploded sending shards of glass and metal in every direction.

  The ferry came to a halt at a steep incline, it’s nose pointing upward at the tall luxury apartment complexes overlooking the East River, with keel sitting three quarters on dry land. Had anyone still been alive, they wouldn’t have been able to see any of it. They would have only seen white.

  BONG!

  BONG...

  At the final tolling of the bell, the city fell silent.

  15

  If there was a God, He was a cruel one indeed, not even giving anyone a chance to say a prayer before unleashing a gamma-ray burst to annihilate humanity along with most other life forms on earth. That was what Rufus or Special Agent Maxwell might have said had they still been alive. Though each man earned his cynicism in a different way - Rufus over failing to see any logical sense in religion and Maxwell having been disillusioned through years of exposure to evil people - both would have agreed that if God actually did exist He had had enough of humanity, its hypocrisy and destructiveness; that His Great Experiment with creating beings in His own image had once again proven an abysmal failure. It was time to wipe the slate clean and thus brought down the hammer in the form of an extremely energized beam of light. Or perhaps it was just a random event. A cosmic cataclysm happening countless times a day across the infinite universe, except in this one very rare instance, earth had gotten caught in its path. A one in a billion, billion chance occurrence that had actually come to pass. Either way, the world as it was had come to an end.

  New York City was a smoldering wasteland covered in a greenish haze. Fires burned in scattered clusters, their crackling flames echoing off the great skyscrapers, streets and avenues.

  Between the popping and low rumble of flames and flying debris were moments of profound silence, as though the city was really nothing more than a mirage.

  For now electricity still hummed across the countless interconnecting power lines above and below ground.

  Marquees scrolled movie titles but no eyes would ever look at them again.

  Televisions and cable boxes continued to broadcast; the Internet still enabled communication among continents.

  Giant LED billboards projected scenes of idyllic life: l
overs strolling on a beach, smiling; an older couple hugging, children laughing in a playground; a man in mirrored sunglasses racing his new sporty sedan across a winding road.

  Subway trains continued to run (until either colliding into the train ahead or coming to a crashing halt at the end of its line).

  Music continued playing through speakers and headphones.

  Mobile phones continued to charge on their wire tethers.

  Refrigerators never stopped chilling food.

  Microwaves still heated leftovers and old cups of coffee.

  Cell towers continued to send trillions of bits of data over the airwaves.

  In hospitals and medical centers, respirators continued to keep bodies alivewhile patient monitors still measured vitals.

  These remnants of modern living would go on a little longer. However, like all ruins of past civilizations, erosion will inevitably remove them from existence. But unlike the past, obliteration will take only a few years instead of centuries, ending in a protracted series of flickers.

  Then nothing.

  16

  They began to rise all at once, as though commanded by a hidden puppet master. Whoever wasn’t physically killed by collateral damage caused by accidents and other mishaps associated with the gamma ray burst clambered drunkenly to their feet. Having lost all ability to think and reason, each person that managed to steady themselves had not a clue of what to do next, so they looked around at one another ready to follow the first person indicating any show of intention.

  They spotted this quality in the tall suited figure that was once Special Agent Beau Maxwell.

  Maxwell had no awareness of what he was going to do next. Some silent beacon deep in his scrambled brain pointed him northward. After standing for several minutes staring idly, his head cocked confusedly to one side as though struggling to understand the meaning of that direction, Maxwell began to walk. He made a left turn at the corner of 43rd Street and headed north on Fifth Avenue. He wasn’t aware of why he made that turn, nor was he aware of the unwitting crowd growing and coalescing behind him. There would be other zombie group heads, some with larger followings than Maxwell’s, others with smaller ones.

  Men and women.

  Young and old.

  Black, Hispanic, Asian…

  There was no discrimination among the new world of zombies.

  Whoever appeared to move with a purpose acquired a following.

  But the one fronted by Maxwell had a very special person at his side. She was going to birth twins at any moment. The maternity dress occasionally bulged and collapsed over her belly, but she ignored it. She had no concern over what would become of them or what has already become of them. Ana’s mind was gone but her living her body kept the babies alive.

  Also among the flowing rivers of dying humanity were Shawna, Liz and Rufus. Their gazes were fixed listlessly ahead as they clumsily kept pace with the rest of the line. Any concerns of their previous lives - the adultery, the embezzling, the backstabbing, premonitions, regrets, passions and fears - had been stripped away with the rest of their minds like sandcastles swept into the ocean by high tides. Like everyone else, they had been reduced to shells of their former selves.

  Central Park had been the place to go when Maxwell needed to get away from work. It was a place that afforded peace and an occasional rendezvous with women he’d met either in the federal building or while doing fieldwork. The Lake held a particularly special place in his heart. Before he lost his mind to the gamma ray burst, there was a bench on the west side parallel to 78th Street that he claimed his own in which he would sit by the edge of the lake and watch the buildings across the east side of the Park, rising over the trees turning to gold as the sun dipped behind him toward the western horizon. Sometimes he thought about a woman in his distant past and what had become of her, thought about what life could have been like had he first dated her instead of her younger sister, Candace. Or had been honest with Candace about his feelings for her sister, Eva. He couldn’t bring himself to admit it might have been love. Love was an illusion, an invention by advertisers to sell sappy greeting cards and expensive jewelry. But on those evenings by the lake, Maxwell sometimes wondered if he might have been mistaken.

  The trek up Fifth Avenue was slow, a snail’s pace. Unlike the life of the old world, there was no hurry, no longer a sense of urgency among the cognitively brain dead New Yorkers. Those days were gone forever. A ninety-second walk from one street corner to the next now took an agonizingly long time to complete. Maxwell’s stride was inconsistent, halting. Sometimes minutes passed between each step.

  As he struggled to find the significance in the direction his body chose, the line of zombies behind him stood and waited. His propensity to stop-and-go, stop-and-go prolonged the walks from corner to corner by ten minutes or longer. And when there was an obstacle in the way, such as a car pile-up, several more minutes would be tacked on as he and his group negotiated around them.

  Maxwell’s line began to dwindle as zombies broke away to join faster moving lines. By the time he reached 53rd Street, two hours had passed and the line that once stretched for twenty blocks behind him had shrunken to two. This did not concern Maxwell in the least. Nor did it concern Ana, Shawna, Liz and Rufus. They stayed close to Maxwell throughout the trip. In their previous lives, they had been close. At times they argued and gossiped about each other, but their bonds remained strong - the Lang-girls with one another, Shawna to Rufus and Ana to Maxwell. Although she kept close guard of her feelings, Ana had begun to grow infatuated with him. She still had loved Hector, would never have done anything to destroy their marriage, but the strong pull she felt in her heart whenever Maxwell entered the office could not be denied. It began as simple curiosity about him, who he was, what he was like. She had decided early on that he was a vain man and a womanizer, a man who couldn’t be trusted. But these apparently negative traits somehow contributed to his appeal. She had no idea why.

  Her curiosity evolved into interest. Through casual talk, she got know him better, that he enjoyed relaxing in the park on his time off. He liked to read and hang out at funky bars, the kind with mismatched furniture and photos of old New York City on the walls.

  She had developed conflicting ideas about him. On the one hand, Maxwell was a self-centered scoundrel; on the other, there was a gentle side to him. He was intelligent and had a lifestyle Ana found appealing. All this only strengthened her fascination with him. After years of successfully fighting her heart, Ana had started to slip. She found herself careening down a bumpy path that would have inevitably forced her to make a difficult decision: Either choose maternity leave as a time to quit InterLang, or return in three months and risk falling in love, and in doing so ruin her marriage, her family, for a man who in all likelihood would never reciprocate.

  But Nature intervened and had decided for her.

  The itch hadn’t begun until they had reached 48th Street. The zombies responded instinctively to an irritation starting around the abdominal area. Then as minutes turned to hours, the itching had spread throughout their bodies. By the time they reached the southwest entrance to Central Park, every zombie, including Maxwell, Shawna, Liz, Rufus and Ana, were scratching violently across different parts of their bodies - face, arms, neck, breasts - tearing at their clothing and drawing blood.

  Darkness seemed to descend sooner upon the Park than the rest of the city. Gold and crimson reflected off the glass surfaces of the surrounding tall buildings while in the Park there was no light, no reflection. Shadows loomed deep and the trees whispered solemn prayers to the processions of the living dead below. The monotonous sounds of hundreds of shuffling feet were topped with sounds of ripping fabric and skin, as well as the screams, moans and cries of unrelenting suffering. Blood appeared as black patches on the clothes of the zombies and a trail of black streaks were left on the roads and sidewalks in their wake.

  They fell in bunches, ten, twenty, thirty at a time. Gasping their final breath
s in a pool of their own blood and torn flesh, the zombies crumpled to the ground, and with the last glimpses of daylight retreating behind the New Jersey horizon, bodies carpeted the parks, streets and floors of countless tenement buildings and skyscrapers, turning the city into a massive killing field.

  17

  Ana - or the creature that was once Ana - stopped breathing a few hours after sunrise. At some point during the night, her legs had given out and she ended up rolling onto her back while Shawna, Maxwell and the few dozen surviving zombies in Maxwell’s line left her where she fell (Rufus dropped on 51st Street and Liz had pulled apart her carotid artery as the line headed west on 59th Street toward Columbus Circle).

  Ana had torn at her cloth and flesh until shock from loss of blood sapped the strength from her arms.

  The last agonizing hours of her life were spent in a catatonic stupor, her vacuous eyes locked on a starless sky. Ana’s breathing grew more rapid and shallower as her heart gave out, dwindling to a tiny fluttering in the chest before stopping altogether. She took one last hitch of breath, her body jerked once as if jolted by an open wire, and she died.

  18

  Morning breeze found its way through the park. Had anyone still been alive he or she would have clearly heard the leaves rustling in the trees and the sounds of paper and plastic litter scraping across the pavement; gentle sounds once obscured by layers of city noise - traffic, music, chatter, construction and clucking hooves of horse-drawn carriages.

  Hitching a ride in the breeze was an errant gray pigeon feather doing aerial stunts over an audience of corpses, twirling and cartwheeling in the slightly green-tinted air, before the breeze took it on a nosedive, was picked up again, carried a little distance longer, and then ran into blood soaked mound, stopping abruptly.