Bleeders

by Max Boone

  "What were you doing upstairs," I asked Jeremiah. He was sitting in one of the chairs eating his fourth peanut bar. He didn't look like death anymore, just hungover. His irises were dark red like Alison's. Like mine.

  "It's a blur to be honest." He rubbed his head. "I remember waking up starving. I stumbled into the other room to look for food. Then I must have wanted to look out the window, but I heard people coming, so I hid."

  "You heard us?"

  "I think so." Jeremiah looked around the room. "The group is a bit bigger than I remember."

  "Things change fast these days."

  He said, "Tell me everything."

  I caught Jeremiah up on what had gone down since he passed out the day before- from the search for guns that led me to the pawn shop, to meeting Nkosi and his former business associate, Oyibo, to our dip in Harlem River, to meeting the bikers and hauling ass back to the food bank. He listened intently to the whole story, then crinkled up the wrapper from his fifth bar. "It was a stupid move going out there," he finally said.

  "Well, gee, dad, thanks for the advice. I didn't know if you'd live or what I would do when the M16 ran out of ammo, what was I supposed to do?"

  "Definitely not drop the gun in the river."

  "Listen, I'm not looking for a pat on the back here or anything, but you'd be a stain in the outfield right now if it wasn't for me, so how about you cut me some slack?"

  Jeremiah smiled. "You're right. Thank you. Besides, I have a plan to get us out of here. Isn't that right, doc?"

  Alison glanced up from dressing my arm at the mention of the word.

  "Why did you call her that," I asked, looking back and forth between them as Alison finished wrapping my arm and stood up. "You're a doctor?"

  "You didn't tell him," Jeremiah asked. Alison was faced away from me. She shook her head at him.

  "I thought Frank was the doctor," I said.

  "Frank was my cat when I was twelve." She held up her hand. "The ring is fake. I wore it to keep the guys on the team from being interested."

  "What team? What are you talking about," Silas asked.

  "It was me," Alison said. "I worked with the WHO, studying Red Flu patients."

  I felt like I'd gotten punched in the face. I'd trusted this woman with my life and she wasn't even honest about who she was. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "It wasn't important at the time."

  "I'm sorry...not important? How the fuck is you being a doctor who studied Red Flu patients not important?"

  "Because."

  "Why?"

  "Because they're all dead," she shouted. Heads turned across the food bank. "They're all dead and we learned nothing. If we did anything we made things worse. It's like you said, it doesn't matter now. It's all coming to an end. Everything is crashing down, and all we can do now is watch." She turned to address the group that had started to gather, including Nkosi. "You people want food, water, guns, that's fine, you deserve a chance. But if you don't show respect to what this virus can do, it will eat you alive. I've seen what it can do. I've watched as people became monsters and mothers ate their own daughters." She started to tear up, her voice breaking. "This isn't going to end well. No one is coming to help you. There's no clean-up with the government sweeping in to save the day. Their plan is quarantine, plain and simple. They'll keep those bridges closed until nothing moves, as long as it takes."

  "Wait, that doesn't make sense," I said. "The flu isn't just in New York, it's all over the world. Why would they bother to shut down the city?"

  "It's not just New York, this is happening in every major city right now. Cities have the densest populations, if you keep letting the infected spill out you never gain control. The idea is to slow it down as much as possible, preserve the outer areas. That way you buy enough time to build fences, create safe zones, and eventually develop a vaccine."

  "No," I said, "I'm not buying it."

  Silas leaned in. "We tried to get out on the GWB and we got shot at just for trying. Whether you buy it or not, little man, she's right. They have this city locked down tighter than a nun's pussy."

  "So what's the plan," I asked Jeremiah.

  "Tell him," he said to Alison.

  She hesitated, then let out a long breath. "I...I still have contacts with the WHO. I might be able to secure us safe haven on a vessel anchored off-shore."

  Everyone hooted and talked excitedly. "I don't know if they'll take all of you," she cut them off. "I can't promise anything."

  "It's still a hell of a lot better than waiting around to die," Silas said, and everyone nodded.

  I stood up from my chair. "That's great and all, but how are we supposed to reach this boat, swim? It's probably miles off shore, if it's even still there."

  Everyone was quiet. Then Nkosi raised his hand and said, "I have a boat."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I wanted to wait until the next day to leave, or the day after that, or maybe never, but everyone decided it would be a good idea to leave as soon as possible. The longer we waited, the less likely the boat would still be anchored off shore. I couldn't argue with that, and I wasn't about to be left behind, so come sunset I helped pack for the trip, though I didn't exactly do it with a smile.

  As Nkosi explained it, he had a small boat tied up and ready to go near where the Bronx Kill met the East River. I asked him which dock it was, but his response was, "None that you know."

  He didn't tell us how the boat had gotten there or what it was there for, and no one asked. Even the dirtiest bikers were respectful of his privacy. Quietly, when Nkosi wasn't around, I asked Silas if he didn't think the whole thing sounded sketchy. "My guys don't ask dumb questions," is all he said. Obviously he didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, even when the horse was clearly some kind of smuggler.

  We loaded up every backpack and bag we could find with food and supplies in case we got stranded along the way. There was some distance we had to cover, and no one expected it to be easy. On a good day it would have been a twenty or thirty minute drive, but we were all out of good days. While we got ready Silas spoke to a few men and they left for an hour. When they came back, they were driving a garbage truck. They parked out front, right against the building, and Silas patted them on their shoulders.

  "You couldn't find anything louder," I asked from the door.

  "A quiet engine ain't gonna do what we need it to," Silas said. I stepped up into the passenger seat and took a look inside the truck's cab, mainly because I'd never seen the inside of one. I was surprised to find there were two steering wheels and enough buttons to land a jumbo jet.

  There was also blood on the dashboard.

  "You ran into Bleeders," I asked the one who'd been driving.

  "Sure," he said with a grin before he jumped out. I went to follow him, but when I stepped down I found Alison leaning against the truck with her arms crossed.

  "Do you want to talk," she asked.

  I walked past her and toward the door. "It's getting dark out, almost time to leave."

  "Are you still sulking," she asked.

  I stopped short and turned to face her, ready to give her hell, but instead I kept my cool. "I know we just met and all, but after the shit we've already been through I thought we trusted each other."

  "I'm doing my best here."

  "It's not good enough. Those tears you shed back there don't make up for the fact that you haven't been straight with me this entire time."

  She uncrossed her arms. "I'm sorry no one trained me in pandemic etiquette. In my nine years of training there was never a class on 'when is the best time to disclose my status as an Infectious Disease Specialist?' I was usually too busy learning about genotyping and saprophytes to develop my interpersonal skills."

  I nodded. "Now that Jeremiah's alive you'll need a new suicide plan. Maybe your friends in the WHO will help you. If they're anything like you, they're just cold-hearted enough."

  "Maybe I've decided not to do that."

&
nbsp; "Since when?"

  "Since right now."

  I didn't know what to say. Alison walked up to me like she was going to say something. Then she reached in her back pocket and dropped something in my hand.

  It was the keys to the humvee.

  "Why are you giving me these?"

  "Because I don't need them anymore."

  "And I do?"

  Just then a crowd of guys came hauling ass out out of the food bank. Jeremiah was at the back, and he glanced at us on the way to the garbage truck. "We're leaving," he said. "Two minutes." Already the guys were busy preparing the truck. One of them figured out which button operated the tailgate to open the rear as the others threw their bags up top and climbed the sides.

  "What's going on," I asked Jeremiah. "I thought we weren't leaving for at least another hour."

  "We have Bleeders on the way. A lot of them." He pointed his thumb up toward the roof. "I was on lookout and spotted a group of them half a mile to the west heading this way."

  A few men had climbed into the open rear of the truck and were tossing every bit of dripping, stinking garbage out onto the street, which luckily for them wasn't much.

  "Why don't we stay inside? Let's just lock the doors and wait for them to pass, there's no reason to rush out and get ourselves killed."

  "And what if they don't just pass by? What if they decide to stay here, surround the building? We can't risk being trapped, not right now when we have somewhere to be. Do you want to stay?" He didn't wait for an answer before jumping up into the driver's seat and kicking out the guy who mistakenly thought he was driving.

  Behind us, Silas and the rest of the crew emerged from the food bank, including Nkosi. He set the duffel bag on the sidewalk and started to hand out guns. The bikers took them happily, some of them looking a little too familiar with holding a gun.

  "I thought you didn't have ammo," I said.

  Nkosi tossed the empty bag and stuffed two pistols into his belt. "Someone taught me how to lie," he said. He climbed onto the top of the garbage truck and settled in with the other men up there, including Rat, who said something to him I couldn't hear but I'm sure was about as heartfelt and clever as a tequila fart.

  Alison looked at the leaking bag of trash at her feet, the smell of sour milk hitting both of our noses. "I call shotgun," I said, "though an actual shotgun would be nice, too." At that moment, I heard the first sign of the Bleeders on their way toward us. A car alarm triggered somewhere not too far to the west. On the one hand the sound might distract them as they tried to attack the car. On the other hand, it confirmed what Jeremiah had seen.

  When I turned to get into the truck's cab, I noticed Silas in the rear with five or six armed bikers. "I thought for sure you'd want to be up front," I said.

  "You can have your first class seat, pretty boy, I'd rather be in coach with the men," he said. They all nodded and shouted, raising their guns like they were raising beers.

  "Whatever. Enjoy the smell." I left the garbage to their garbage, went around to the front, hopped up on the passenger side and opened the door, only to find Alison had already taken the seat. "What the hell is this," I asked.

  "I need you on point." Jeremiah handed Alison a pistol to hand to me. I took it with no small amount of relief, but I was still pissed.

  "Thanks for the gun and all, but I called the seat."

  "Whatever happened to chivalry," Alison asked.

  "It's dead, along with the rest of the world." I stared at Alison, then at Jeremiah. They both stared back. "You guys suck," I said, and shut the door. Alison and Jeremiah both kept their windows rolled down while I clung to the side of the truck like a garbage man, except without the paycheck. Jeremiah fired up the engine. It sounded like a dragon clearing its throat. The truck rumbled to life and Jeremiah pulled away from the food bank, a place I thought I'd be calling home for a while.

  As we pulled out of the dead end to make a right onto 135th, I saw movement in the other direction through Alison's window. The group Jeremiah had spotted from the roof was running like a screaming wave, and there was no doubt in my mind that we were their target.

  Like I'd told Silas, the garbage truck was too loud.

  Jeremiah gave it some gas and we sped up out of the turn. It was still a fucking garbage truck, though, so it didn't have the best acceleration, and as we turned the Bleeder crowd caught sight of us. I could hear the worried shouts of the bikers coming out the back of the truck as the Bleeders closed the distance, a tangled swarm of blood and anger.

  The bikers opened fire on the Bleeders, ruining any chance that there was someone left in New York who hadn't heard us. From my vantage point on the side of the truck, I saw the tumbling limbs of the Bleeders who were hit. The truck accelerated slowly. By the time we got up to speed, the Bleeders were all over us like moths to a light-bulb. The men in the back and up top lit them up but they kept coming, screaming their blood back at the men.

  I leaned away from the truck and aimed at a female Bleeder who was making her way toward me. She had been a businesswoman based on her tight hairstyle and pant-suit, and she reminded me of some of the people I'd left behind at work. As I shot her in the face, I wondered what had happened to everyone at that shit-show of a job. As she fell under the garbage truck's back wheels, and her head popped like a handful of cherries, the thought passed.

  Jeremiah turned us onto Madison Avenue and over the bridge, leaving the Bleeders behind. He steered around most of the dead cars and plowed through a couple he couldn't while we all held on tight. We made it to the Bronx side in one piece, which was step one in a comprehensive, five step plan to not die like fucking idiots.

  We drove along Exterior Street, which was empty just like I'd thought it would be, back when Nkosi and I were on foot leaving the pawn shop, though getting onto the expressway proved to be impossible. The entrance was jammed up with cars, and the rest of it didn't look any better. Even the garbage truck wouldn't be able to push that many cars out of the way.

  Nkosi leaned over the top of the truck. "Keep heading toward the water," he shouted to Jeremiah.

  "At some point you have to tell me where we're going," he shouted back.

  "When we are close, I will tell you."

  We stayed on Exterior as the expressway rose above us and became a gray wall, until we couldn't take it any further and merged back onto the streets. First it was Lincoln, then Bruckner, and as we rode we passed more horrors than I could count. There were storage buildings on fire, a gas station with an attendant shot dead, twenty dollar bills stuck in the dried blood. Cars were up on the sidewalk and through storefronts, on their sides and upside down. Even though we were passing through an industrial area, human misery was on full display.

  We left Bruckner when it started to veer too north for our needs, opting for 133rd. Ahead of us, the road over Robert F. Kennedy Bridge came into view, and I couldn't place it, but I started to get a weird vibe about the underpass we would be driving underneath. When I looked through the passenger window at Alison, she looked back at me with a face that said she had the exact same feeling.

  "Slow down," she told Jeremiah.

  I peeked my head in through the window. "I feel it, too. Something's off."

  Jeremiah let off the gas and leaned in close to the windshield. We came to a complete stop a hundred feet from the underpass. There was a fenced handball court to our left, and an old warehouse building to our right. The cross street on the right just after the warehouse was blocked by cars, but as Jeremiah pointed out, the cars were too uniform. He was right. They looked as if they'd been left intentionally. "You know what that means?" He turned to us, dead serious, and said, "Trouble."

  I smirked at him. "I think you're...being...dramatic." I trailed off as I saw heads moving over the weeds that grew to the right of the handball court. For a second I couldn't tell if they were Bleeders or not, until I saw one of them with a bottle in his hand, a rag coming out the top. In the other hand, he had a lighter.
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br />   "Go," I shouted, "go now!"

  Jeremiah gave it gas it as the people in the weeds jumped out of their hiding spots. They ran at us at full speed with Molotov Cocktails burning in their hands. As I fired at them, and the bikers in back joined me, I could see they covered their faces with ski masks spray-painted to look like all different color smiley faces. Molotovs hurled through the air. Glass shattered and fire exploded around us.

  As the truck picked up speed I heard Jeremiah curse over the sounds of gunfire and shouting. More smiley faces were rising into view up top, leaning over the side of the RFK Bridge trail with more Molotovs in their hands. Nkosi fired up at them with his two pistols. They ducked out of sight long enough that we were able to pass under them and into the underpass we'd meant to avoid.

  On the other side of the underpass a truck lurched into view from the right, backing up to blockade us in, but Jeremiah wasn't about to take that. He floored the gas pedal, accelerating a bit too fast for the lumbering diesel engine. "Everyone hold on," he shouted. The smileys up top released their Molotovs. The bottles exploded on the street and created a wall of fire behind us. It was too perfect to think it wasn't their plan to begin with.

  I looked back in the direction we were heading just in time to see the truck ahead of us a second before Jeremiah rammed it. It was one of those side-loading coke trucks with the doors that slide up, and I caught a quick glimpse of rope tied to the handles that lead up and over the roof.

  Whatever they were planning, it wasn't nice.

  Jeremiah rammed the back of the coke truck before it could get all the way across the road and block us in completely. It was a heavy impact, and I nearly lost my grip on the door but managed to hold on as the coke truck tore open and skidded to the side. I tucked in close as torn metal and other debris whizzed past my face.

  Not letting off the gas, Jeremiah regained the wheel and tried to put as much distance between us and the psycho smileys as fast as possible, speeding down an industrial side road. The garbage truck was banged up but still alive. I picked my head up and saw the strangest sight behind us- the road was littered with bodies that had spilled from the side of the coke truck where it had been ripped open.