Bleeders

by Max Boone

  "It's a few blocks that way," Alison said, pointing past them.

  "What the fuck," I shouted. "Doesn't anyone believe in secrets anymore? Holding onto an advantage?"

  "We need each other."

  I turned away from the bikers and lowered my voice. "We have everything and they have nothing, what exactly do we need from them?"

  "Numbers."

  "To eat our food quicker?"

  "To survive. Look around, it's getting harder and harder to stay alive. You need eyes in every direction to make it out here."

  "We have four sets, that should cover it."

  "Four," their leader asked. "So there's one more of you?"

  I winced. Another secret lost, this time my fault. Then I had a thought. "Yeah, there's one more. We have a guy watching us right now with a sniper rifle."

  "Some of that is true at least," he said.

  "Whatever. We'll be fine on our own. All we have to do is stay alive long enough to let things clear out a bit and then get the fuck out of the city."

  The bikers exchanged a look between them.

  "What," I asked, "what was that?"

  The leader cleared his throat. "We tried that already, getting the fuck out of the city, like you said. It seems the United States government, in all their power and wisdom, saw the inevitable coming coming down the road."

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means the city's on lock-down- no one's making it out."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Their leader introduced himself as Silas. He also named a few of the others. They had names like Big Little and Rat and a bunch other that probably had totally hilarious stories behind them that I could not give two watery shits about.

  With Alison leading the way to the food bank, we all walked up 132nd Street with the tall brick apartment buildings looming overhead. One of the guys grabbed a few bottles of booze from an empty liquor store and handed it to his buddy. "This should lift your spirits," he said with a laugh. A few of the others joined in, freeing the store of some of its wares. I couldn't say I hated the idea, it just wasn't the time to drink.

  I caught up to Alison and leaned in close to her. "I still don't agree with this," I said.

  "I'm not saying I love it, but you have to admit there's safety in groups."

  "What do you care about safety? Aren't you ready to check out any time now?"

  She glanced at me. "You love to bring that up."

  "It's just interesting to me that someone would give up without a fight. Me, I'm not going down without taking down as many motherfuckers as possible on the way out. I don't know, call me an optimist." She shook her head. "Besides, I don't think groups are as safe as you think anymore. The more people, the more noise. That's the way I see it."

  A large woman with dried blood on her neck that ran down her tube top came running out of a corner bodega. She was a Bleeder, and she ran right for one of the biker chicks, a red-head in denim shorts with full tattoo sleeves. Two of the guys, one of which was the chick's boyfriend or old man or whatever the fuck they called it, dealt with the Bleeder. His buddy took her down and held her head to the blacktop with a chain around her neck while the boyfriend got on top of her. He drove a switchblade into her neck, and she gurgled and spasmed and kicked her legs until he delivered a second stab, this time to the eye. The woman stopped kicking after that.

  Alison said, "See?"

  The guy waved his girl over and said, "C'mon, doll, I know you've been wanting a threesome." He pretended to go in for a kiss with the corpse.

  "You're nasty," the red-head said with a giggle.

  "You know it."

  Alison looked at me, feeling a little deflated.

  "You were saying?"

  "Beggars can't be choosers."

  "Speaking of beggars, I wonder how our friend is doing."

  "That's not very nice."

  "Me? You're the one who left him alone in that place."

  "Screw you."

  "Especially now, when he's so vulnerable. I'm just calling him a few names, but you, you just don't care about him at all." She didn't respond back, but I could tell she wanted to break my nose. The little pleasures were all I had left.

  The youngest guy of the group had short hair with a small ponytail and a big, green rat tattooed on his neck. He moved next to Nkosi and tapped him on the shoulder. "Hey. You want to hand out some of those guns now?"

  "No," Nkosi said. "I would not."

  "It'd make things a lot easier, y'know? Defending you and all that?"

  "There is no ammunition, therefore there is no point."

  The guy looked annoyed. "Hey, Silas," he called out, "aren't we supposed to get some of these guns here?"

  "Yes, Rat. That was the deal."

  "And what a fine deal it was, Silas. So can you tell this joker to fork 'em over or what?"

  "In due time, Rat, in due time. First we need to accompany these fine people to their secret tree-house, then and only then can we even think about what we're allowed to share. Do you understand me, Rat?" He raised his voice to the group. "Does everyone understand me?"

  They all nodded and grunted and said their yeses. Rat didn't have anything to say after that- his expression did all the talking. He wasn't about to go up against Silas' word, but it didn't mean he had to like it.

  There was a sound from up on high like glass breaking. We looked up in time to see a man wrapped in a yellow curtain tumble out of the sixth-story window of one of the tenement buildings and fall like a screaming ghost with the curtain whipping around him. One of the biker chicks screamed as he hit the ground inside the small, fenced-in strip of grass that surrounded the apartment. The sound of his neck snapping answered any question we had that he might have survived the fall, although he might have already been a Bleeder for all we knew.

  "Uh oh," Alison said. She was looking up at the apartment building, and I followed her line of sight to see a worrying sight- the windows, not all of them but a lot of them, had faces behind the glass. They were all Bleeders, people who had fallen asleep in their beds and not survived the night.

  "You see," I said, "the more people, the more noise." I looked over at Silas and gave him the eye daggers. "In other words, you people are too loud."

  "Are you telling me how to run my group?"

  "No, I'm telling you to stay the fuck away from me." I started to walk again and pulled Nkosi along. Above us the Bleeders had started pounding on the glass and smashing into it with their bodies, tangled up in curtains and blinds.

  "Alright, ladies and gentlemen, time to move," Silas said. At that moment the first window gave. A young woman fell from one of the middle floors and plummeted to the ground, followed quickly by a boy. The woman's head caved on impact, but the boy bounced off her body and landed to the side.

  More windows broke out. Bleeders began raining out of the sky, some of them hitting the grass, others making it as far as the sidewalk and street. One crushed the roof of a parked car. They snarled in the air and make sick crunches on the street. Half-broken, the boy who had bounced off the young woman's body was already trying to drag himself toward us. Others were, too, any of the ones who survived the fall. No matter how badly their legs were twisted or their teeth caved in, they still only cared about reaching us, the living who were running away.

  As we passed the next apartment building in the row, I could see faces in its windows, also, and hands beating at the glass. It was becoming a domino effect- the more Bleeders that came after us, the more the noise attracted more Bleeders. We wouldn't last five more minutes out there.

  We came to an intersection where I had to decide whether to continue straight or make a right, depending on which way we wanted to approach the food bank, but a sound caught my attention. There was a Baptist church on the far left corner with a blue sign. At the top of a small set of steps, its red doors shook in their frames, an intense banging coming from the other side.

  "Sounds like church is letting out," Silas s
aid. I glanced back and saw a few of the Bleeders that fell from the windows following us. They were slow from broken legs and half-crushed faces, but they weren't stopping, either.

  "No way there's that many in that little place," Spanish Blood said.

  I'd noticed the Bleeders weren't very good at handles and locks. They were too dumb, too focused on what they wanted to figure anything out. So either there was a genius Bleeder in there, or more likely it happened by accident, because the handle turned on one of the doors, the left one to be exact, and the door swung open to reveal a crowd of hungry faces.

  "This way," I shouted, deciding to take the right turn.

  The church folk spilled out of the red door in their Sunday finest, tripping over each other and tumbling down the small steps. Bleeders continued to pour out of the doorway even as they crushed their fellow church-goers, focused only on us.

  We ran up Fifth Avenue. I was at the front with Alison, Nkosi and Silas with the rest of the bikers fanned out behind us. The church Bleeders were surprisingly fast considering some of them were a little older, though the younger ones were at the front. I had a feeling they'd been trapped a while and had managed to work up a hunger. Whatever the reason, they started to gain on us way too quick, and it made me wish we were in a car. There were cars everywhere, but that was part of the problem- most of the roads I'd seen so far were blocked by abandoned cars. Even if getting too much attention from the Bleeders didn't bother you, you would soon find yourself in a spot you couldn't get through, like we had the day before with the humvee. Being on foot made us vulnerable, but at least it kept us flexible.

  Halfway to 135th Street, where the food bank was, the Bleeders caught up.

  Someone let out a shout as a Bleeder grabbed them from behind. The scream that followed could only mean one thing- a bite. One of the other guys slowed down to help, only to be taken down himself.

  In a moment, everything fell apart as brother helped brother, fighting off the church Bleeders with their chains and brass knuckles. They did well against the first few, but the line of screaming faces that stretched all the way back to the small church was too much for them. I had to think fast or the bikers would be overtaken in seconds. More importantly, we would, too.

  I spotted a walkway that ran between an apartment building and a strip of stores. There was a second apartment building behind and to the right of the first that I recognized from when Alison and I had been on the food bank's roof. If my guess was right- and our lives depended on it- we could cut through and reach the food bank that way.

  I didn't even have to tell Alison what I was thinking, she saw where I was looking and gave me a nod. She pushed Nkosi and his bag of goodies toward the walkway as I signaled to Silas to round up his people and follow us, but he was busy fighting off two Bleeders at once. The churchgoers had started to mount up, and they were quickly becoming a serious problem for the group. The bikers had already lost two people, with a third one bleeding out on the sidewalk, and it wasn't sitting well with them.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Alison coming back toward me. It was bad news for our cut-through if she was returning so soon, but the way she moved was what worried me. She seemed to be in a panic because she was running at me like her life depended on it. It was out of character for her to care that much about her life.

  Too late to do anything about it, I realized it wasn't Alison.

  A man ran into me screaming a Bleeder scream. He knocked me down and we both tumbled on the street, scratching skin on the blacktop. Before I could stop rolling, he lunged at my face with his teeth, but I kept him from biting me.

  That familiar anger worked its way from my gut, up my esophagus and into my eyeballs. I pushed the man off me and jumped on him, punching and kicking him as I screamed his scream back at him. I felt his nose break and watched the gush of blood squirt onto the street. Even when he stopped moving, his blood covering my straining fist, I kept going. It was the most intense tunnel vision I had ever experienced, and I would be lying if I said I wanted it to stop.

  A hand grabbed my shoulder as I swung down. I lunged to bite it, but then I caught myself. I looked up into the eyes of the young one they'd called Rat. He tried to look hard but there was fear in his eyes, and I was the one who had put it there.

  Past him, Spanish Blood watched us. He had seen the whole scene go down, and I couldn't tell if he was excited to have dirt on me or scared of what I would do. As he stared at me, one of the churchgoers popped up behind him and went for a bite. A gunshot rang out from above, and half a second later a Bleeder fell to his knees and spilled his head brains the street. A second shot sounded, this time hitting a second Bleeder square between the eyes.

  "Where did that come from," I asked, still in a fog.

  "Who cares, let's go," Silas said.

  I agreed. I led him and the rest to the walkway between buildings, and I glanced back and up as I did. Way up on the sixth or seventh floor of the apartment building next door, there was a face in the window. I couldn't get a look look at it, and whoever it was stepped back into the dark.

  With the remaining churchgoers chasing us we cut through the walkway and jumped the fence, landing in a parking lot behind the tenement where Alison was waiting at the far end with Nkosi, waving us over. We weaved between the parked cars, hopped another fence and found ourselves exactly where I'd hoped- in the chalk-heavy rear courtyard of the food bank, almost to safety.

  We entered the food bank through the back door, first Alison, then Nkosi, then me, followed by the bikers. Silas waited for every man and woman to clear the door before he joined us inside. All panting and coughing, we spilled out the back hallway and into the reception area.

  We were safe, the door locked and everything where it should be except for one, tiny detail- the couch was empty.

  Jeremiah was gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  "Where's your friend," Silas asked.

  I turned to the sweating, heavy-breathing group of bikers waiting for an answer. "He has to be in here somewhere. But, uh, full disclosure time...he might be infected."

  They groaned and cursed, looking around them to make sure nothing was sneaking up on them in the dark. Silas looked pissed. He walked up to me, stopping a foot from my face. "We just lost three people getting here, and you're saying this place isn't safe?"

  "Just a little unsafe." I held my thumb and forefinger together in front of my eye. "Like that much."

  "You realize we could kill you both and take it no problem."

  "I do." I looked over at Alison to rub it in her face. "But he's only one guy, which shouldn't be a problem for a bunch of hard-asses like yourselves. And he might be immune like us."

  "Oh, yeah? And what are the odds of that?"

  "Not great, but I have to give him a chance. This guy saved my ass, and he knows the city. The only reason we have this place is because of him. If he pulls through- and I know it's a big fucking if- we could really use him."

  Silas straightened up. He didn't love my answers, but he didn't hate them, either.

  "Holy shit, Silas," one of his guys said from the other room. He stood in front of one of the huge boxes of food holding up a can of beef stew. "There's enough food in here for months."

  Silas walked through the crowd and checked out the room. I could tell he found it just as impressive as I had. "Alright. We spread out and find him."

  "No one shoots him until I see him," I said. He turned to me, about to jump down my throat, but he stopped himself.

  "You heard the man. Find but don't touch." The guys started to complain but he shut them down quickly and sent them away. The group spread out, their weapons ready and their eyes peeled. I decided to check upstairs, and Silas went with me.

  "I'm a big boy," I said as we climbed the stairs at the back, "I don't need a chapperone."

  "This isn't for you, this is to make sure you're not pulling any shit while I'm not looking."

  "Me? You're the one who threa
tened me a minute ago."

  "And you're the one with the red eyes. For all I know this is a trap so you can cage us up and eat us one-by-one."

  My laugh echoed in the stairway. "Trust me, bike-boy, if I was a cannibal I would have much better taste in men." I stopped. "For men. You know what I mean."

  "I believe I do," Silas said, passing me on the stairs with a grin. I cursed under my breath and ran to catch up as he stepped out and into the second floor ahead of me.

  A good amount of morning sunlight came through the partially-painted windows, making the second floor brighter than the last time I'd been there, but it had so many corners and so much stored in it that there were still plenty of shadows to worry about. I was worried about how we would find Jeremiah, whether he would still be himself or the Bleeder he was more likely to be. At his size, and with his strength, I was even more worried about how he would find us.

  We started our sweep of the open floor, moving slowly and checking behind each palette and box. A few more of Silas' people joined us, including Rat and one of the women, who moved like she was in a haunted house looking for ghosts. As I moved toward the furthest corner of the open space, near the back windows I'd looked out before, I started to hear a sound. It was low, and wet, and a lot like chewing.

  Silas heard it, too, and we both quieted our footsteps, splitting up to move around both sides of a large stack of crates. As I came around the other side with my heart pounding in my chest, I caught sight of Jeremiah's back. He was crouched low to the ground with something clutched between his fingers. He loudly chewed whatever it was, oblivious that anyone else was in the room.

  Oh, God, was it a rat? There was only one way to find out. I prepared for the worst.

  "Jay?"

  He picked his head up and turned to face me. With the sun to his back I couldn't make out his face, but I could see what was in his hands.

  A peanut bar.

  "I've never been this hungry in my life," Jeremiah said.

  Back downstairs, with everyone regrouped and relaxed, Alison sat next to me and cleaned and dressed the wound on my arm with proper first aid supplies. Most of the bikers were raiding the food and checking the place out, except Silas and a few others who stayed close-by.