Paths

by David DeSimone

  The interstate heading west was out of the question. He thought he could stay on the eastbound side and simply drive against the grain heading toward New York. He was quickly drawing a sobering conclusion; that somehow he was one of a handful of people who may have been spared a terrible affliction, one that caused people to act like rabid dogs and tear themselves apart with their own hands.

  The explosion caused all this, he realized with a mixture of sadness and dismay.

  What exactly was the explosion anyway? A nuke? A new terrorist weapon? Was it the North Koreans? The Chinese? The Russians? As he pondered this question, he realized how little it mattered. There was no way of undoing it. What was done was done. If he survived long enough, perhaps he would find answers. But for now he had more pressing concerns - like how to get to his mother.

  I-95 was littered with wreckage, along with the dead and dying for as far as the eye could see in either direction and he still saw no sign of anyone else whom the explosion hadn’t affected. Could he possibly be the only survivor? He couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t imagine his mother hadn’t survived.

  Before retiring three years ago at 65, early by doctor’s standards, she had been a pediatrician, wrote several articles on sudden infant death syndrome and won lots of awards. Though now 68, she was fit and still fared surprisingly well in the looks department. She could still turn heads. When her husband had died of liver cancer eleven years ago, she had dated a few times since but never remarried. Her son was all she had and all she ever wanted to have.

  If anyone else could survive the apocalypse, it was his mother.

  He wove in and out of traffic with hardly any interruption for over twenty miles. Congestion wasn’t an issue until he entered New Haven. There, the stayed traffic and pileups looked nearly as bad as the westbound lanes. To his good fortune, however, the left shoulder was still fairly cleared. He took it. When he did come up to the occasional traffic obstacle, he was able to drive around it without much of a hitch.

  He drove this way through West Haven and Milford. And for the next 30 miles he enjoyed a long stretch of wider clearings, through Bridgeport, Fairfield, Stamford and Greenwich. During his trip he had come across several afflicted people rushing toward his car, but he drove too fast for any to keep up. Those that got in his way, he drove around; and in some cases, with no other choice, drove through.

  Port Chester, the picturesque Colonial towns Rye and Mamaroneck provided the man with the longest reprieve from attack since parking in the middle of the exit ramp three hours earlier. He checked his fuel gauge. The needle pointed just above one quarter remaining. He had enough to make it into the city. From there, who knew?

  He would have to worry about that later.

  When the gas needle dipped below a quarter full, he pulled into the first gas station that appeared void of afflicted people. Correction: living afflicted people. He parked alongside a gas pump, tried the driver-side door. It wouldn’t budge. The metal had been fused from grinding along the divider. He had to slide out from the passenger-side door.

  In front of him was the bloody corpse of a man sitting upright with his back leaning against a car. Under him was a large pool of blood. His hands held a loose shredding of flesh that looked like slices of raw London broil meat.

  The man felt his stomach lurching and had to turn away to avoid puking.

  Gathering himself, he put his credit card in the card slot knowing that he’d never see the bill, but after flipping the lever to get the gas flowing, the pump failed to work. Noticing the numbers on the pump’s display flickering, behaving as strangely as his cellphone, the man was taken aback. He tapped the display and punched buttons on the keypad, which only seemed to make the numbers jump around and flicker more.

  “What the…” he said, bewildered. Why weren’t things working for him? It was a question that was becoming more urgent. It was up there with, how was I unaffected? He was starting to wonder if the MRI accident had something to do with it. Gadgets like his cellphone hadn’t started behaving erratically until after the accident. And hadn’t his car started up normally yesterday morning before the accident?

  He nodded to himself. Yes it did.

  He put the idea on the back burner, not wanting to pursue it further, because if he was correct, it meant a very grim forecast for his mother.

  New Rochelle presented him with a mess of crashed cars, SUVs and trucks that extended from shoulder to shoulder across the highway. In order to negotiate through the maze, he brought the Honda down to a crawl. The gas gauge needle sunk to the last line.

  Less than a mile from the business district, exhaustion became overwhelming. He could not concentrate on the road any longer and decided to pull over for a few hours of needed sleep. He turned off the headlights. He killed the engine, knowing the risk involved but also knowing he had no choice. He needed to conserve gas.

  He checked the door locks and windows and climbed into the back seat. More grim thoughts invaded his restless mind about all the people who were afflicted by the explosion - the world from what he could tell.

  They were dying.

  Since New Haven, he had witnessed not just some but many killing themselves with their own hands. It got worse by the hour until he was forced to conclude that all of the afflicted were killing themselves. One hundred percent. And they were dropping in massive bunches.

  It was unbelievable, too hard to accept, and at the same time impossible to deny.

  This gave the man another idea. If he could go the night without being attacked, he might be able to drive or even walk the rest of the way without future threats. It was a double-edged sword that on the one hand gave him relief and on the other a feeling of mounting grief and resignation.

  His mother. If she weren’t already dead, she would be by the time he got to her. He had little doubt about that now. He would wade through streets piled with corpses, reach her 950 square foot apartment on East 82nd Street overlooking the Park, climb eleven stories, enter the living room and find her lying dead on the carpeted floor.

  And he would see blood. Lots of blood.

  Before grief could get a foothold, he blocked any further thoughts about her. He could do this because he was still numb over how fast the world had gone to shit. He also knew his resistance would not last, buying only a little time. Somewhere down the road, grief will return and it will hit him like a truck. He had to brace for that, though he had no idea how.

  But knowing she was dead failed to deter him from finding her. He had to see with his own eyes to be sure. Crazy, yes, but he stopped caring about logic the moment her death hit home. Once you’ve lost everything, did anything else really matter?

  Yet at the same time he did not want to die. Death itself didn’t scare him as much as the pain of going through it. Imagining himself succumbing to the afflicted, having to experience being torn apart by countless hands and teeth made him shiver to the bone. He didn’t want to call them afflicted anymore, fed up with how polite it sounded in his head. He was ready to label them for what he knew in his gut they had become. Zombies. Fucking zombies!

  If his theory was correct, the zombies would soon be dead anyway.

  Like Mom.

  During the evacuation at the hospital, the man had left his jacket in the basement locker room. He hadn’t gone back to get it, thinking he could pick it up the next day. The weather had been decent, upper 60s. Now the inside of the Honda was chilly and he was cold. Scrunched in a fetal position wasn’t helping and he needed sleep. So he risked going outside. He found his way around by the yellow light of the street lamps.

  Making sure not to venture too far from his Honda, the man went from car to car peering through the windows of each one, arousing zombies trapped inside who were still breathing, until he found what he was looking for: a dead man wearing a trenchcoat.

  His car was a four-door black BMW. A nice ride, had the hood not been pushed in like an accordion.

  He tried the door but, of course, it
was locked. Childproof locks always self-lock. To get inside required another risky move. From the trunk of his Honda, the man retrieved a tire-iron and used it to smash the driver-side window of the BMW.

  The risk paid off. No zombies came at him and driver of the BMW - a young man - stayed dead. Not too surprising since he had torn his own throat out.

  But the blonde man in the green hospital scrubs did not want to take chances. He had to act fast. He pulled the lock switch and opened the door. Then he proceeded to unstrap the driver and pull the spent airbag out of the way. The driver began to fall forward but before his head hit the steering wheel sounding the horn, the man in the green scrubs caught him and dragged him out of the car.

  He spent several tense minutes working the dead man’s arms out of the sleeves of the trenchcoat. It felt like an hour.

  When finished, the man in the green scrubs put on the trenchcoat. He felt something in the front left pocket, removed it and had a quick look.

  It was a conference badge. The name on it said, FRANK SLOAN. Below it read, Software Designer, Grober Systems, Inc.

  Thanks Frank. Looks like you won’t be developing software any time soon, unless there’s an app somewhere for bringing back the dead. That almost made him laugh. If not for his mother’s undeserving fate, he might have laughed. Instead, he only wished such an app existed, not just to bring back the dead but to bring back the past. His eyes began to well up with tears. He fought like hell to push them back. His resistance was weakening.

  Sleep should help.

  He slept relatively well, waking now and then to the pounding of zombies trapped inside their cars. The trenchcoat proved to be an effective blanket. He finally felt warm.

  By the time the first traces of dawn colored the sky with a muddy shade of pink, the pounding had stopped.

  The man sat up groggily, rolled down his window. The air was chilly but refreshing. He took a deep breath.

  Once again, using the passenger-side door, he stepped outside the Honda to stretch and put on his trenchcoat, compliments of the late Mr. Frank Sloan.

  Looking around at the other cars, he saw little activity. Their windows were fogged and smeared with blood, but in some he still caught movement. A hand came up patting weakly against the window of one car. In another, a zombie was head-butting against the glass. Others only bobbed their heads up and down as if too weak to hold them up but kept trying anyway.

  The man got back in his car.

  After several tries, the Honda’s engine fired up. He threw it into Drive and headed for the city, knowing that sadness and total ruination awaited him there, but not caring anymore.

  Taking the Hutchinson River Parkway - the “Hutch” - was definitely a no-go. He could tell right away by looking at the exit ramp. Beginning from the exit sign and stretching around the bend was a complete deadlock. Too bad, the man thought. He could have trimmed ten miles off his trip, saving precious gas.

  He followed I-95 as it headed southwest.

  New Rochelle became Eastchester.

  Eastchester became the Bronx.

  Heading through Parkchester, I-95 turned into the Cross-Bronx Expressway.

  The man was heading west now, toward the Henry Hudson Parkway.

  Closer to the city, driving became more and more sluggish as the roads grew more clogged.

  From sidewalks on either side of an overpass, several surviving zombies spotted his car. Some used what remaining strength they had to give chase. The man either ran them over or they struck the sides, dropping to the ground as the car passed.

  With only five miles until the last turnoff, the man sighted one of the two grand steel towers of George Washington Bridge, looking gray and ghostly in the morning haze. He felt a sudden tug at his chest. He had a yearning for the haze to lift and for the bridge to solidify once again, a yearning for the world to solidify again.

  With only a quarter mile left to go, his Honda had finally given out. Not finding the need to pull off onto the shoulder, he let the car roll to a dead stop in the right lane.

  He checked the time on the dashboard clock. It was an analog type. The clock hands read 7:48 a.m.

  The 19-mile drive between New Rochelle and the West Bronx took a little over two hours.

  The man opened his door and cautiously stepped out. Looking out at the road ahead, he knew he would never be able to drive much further. The expressway had become a complete deadlock.

  By now, there was no movement coming from any vehicle.

  As he continued westbound on foot, the man became aware of the tall retaining walls flanking either side of the expressway. They were steep shale drops running long stretches between exits and changing to brick around the overpasses. Some areas even reached heights of 30 feet or more. He never noticed how high they were before. Being on foot among the traffic of the dead, the silence and the unnerving feeling that someone or something is lurking between the metal heaps, makes one more attuned to the environment, he supposed. He also supposed that the high walls acted as a barrier, keeping the majority of zombies from entering the expressway.

  And now everyone appeared to be dead.

  He crossed over the Harlem River and continued for several more miles, favoring the left shoulder of the road, where there were fewer corpses to step over and where he was provided with a better view of Manhattan.

  Growing weaker with hunger, the man decided to head off Cross-Bronx Expressway and find a deli. He was on the upper level, which meant he had to travel over several avenues inland before the road finally sloped downward. He made a left on Audubon Avenue, between 178th and 179th Street, in Harlem.

  Surrounded by endless stretches of identical apartment complexes - thick structures made of light gray masonry and red brick - there were no delis nor grocery stores, which he thought was quite shocking. “Where did they buy food?” he asked himself.

  He made a right on 168th Street, walked to the end of the block and then turned left onto Broadway, and came to a dead stop. He had already begun to see hundreds of bodies littering the highways, avenues and side streets, but when he stopped and gazed across Broadway, the man was absolutely thunderstruck by the scale of death before him. Not even his worst imaginings could compare. Broadway was literally carpeted with bodies. It made Jonestown look like a minor disturbance. The stench of feces, urine and blood hung in the air like in a slaughterhouse, but that would pale compared to the reek of decomposition soon to come.

  Working his way across Broadway, he quickly discovered that avoiding stepping on bodies was impossible, though he tried. The best he could do was to get to the other side of Broadway and 168th Street, where he saw a deli, without tripping and landing on a body.

  He went inside the deli, stepping over more bodies at the doorway and behind the counter. He was quickly adjusting to the sight of genocide, but the reek of it was intensifying.

  He spent the next half hour filling himself on ham, turkey, Swiss cheese, eating straight from the unsliced mounds. Before he left, he stuffed his pockets with beef jerkies, small bags of potato chips, bottled water and Tylenol.

  As the day grew warmer, sweat began to dampen his shirt. He kept wearing the trenchcoat though because the breeze was still chilly, and wearing it kept his provisions from spilling out of his pockets.

  He turned around and headed back east, took St Nicholas Avenue past 162nd Street. Reaching a crossroads, the man in the trenchcoat made a right onto Amsterdam Avenue. Though the avenue was littered with countless dead, they lay more scattered about than Broadway.

  He made a left on 110th and Amsterdam and continued to walk, stopping once to urinate and take a swig of water.

  When he finally reached Central Park, he sat on a bench near the park’s entrance and rested.

  During this time, he thought about what he would do once he found his mother. Barring some miracle that she might still be alive and not turned into a zombie, he considered giving her a proper burial. She always loved the park. A place by the Lake would be
nice. He would need a shovel, of course. He could get one at any hardware store or Home Depot, the city was full of them, and he wouldn’t even have to pay. Everything was free.

  Perks of the Apocalypse, he chuckled.

  He would have to survey the area to find the perfect spot for her. A place with a lot of shade.

  She loved to sit in the shade and stare out at the water. It used to soothe her. As someone who at times had to make difficult decisions over children with terminal illnesses, a lakeside view of the city surrounded by trees and flowers was more than a nice spot to pass the time between early lunch and Happy Hour, it was a life-saver.

  The man rose from the bench not without some difficulty. Sweat running over the inflamed gashes across his chest stung and his muscles ached.

  He stood and stretched his lower back, groaning with a mixture of pleasure and pain. He turned toward the park and entered.

  EPILOGUE

  With so much meat for the taking, the twins decided to sample small bites from different corpses instead of gorging on one, doing so as they trekked northward.

  They came up to a fence. The area was covered by lots of trees, and from their low vantage point tall plants and bushes obscured much of the view. The fence and the large body of water beyond it, hadn’t entered the children's’ view until they were nearly on top of it. They had to pause, taken by the enormity of it. A red brick building about the size of a one-car garage stood to their right. Corpses covered the packed dirt path that surrounded the fence.

  The twins stepped onto the path, crossed it and approached the fence. They peered through the crisscrossing chain links. The sight of the water made Brother’s tongue feel thick and pasty. Swallowing made the back of his tiny throat click dryly. Though not knowing to call it water, Brother still knew that the substance would get rid of the discomfort in his mouth and throat. His reasoning was simple. If just by looking at it made his body want it, then it must be had.