Bleeders

by Max Boone

  "It's a hundred count of aerials," I said, "it should keep their attention long enough to draw them all the way down there."

  "Then it's time to go," Silas said.

  "Yeah. Obviously."

  Alison unlocked the door, but Jeremiah moved her out of the way so he could be the first out of the building. He did it in a way that wasn't belittling or chauvinistic. He would put himself in danger before he let anyone else do that for him. Alison seemed to understand, and she took her place behind him.

  Jeremiah cracked the door open with his semi-automatic at the ready. Everyone was tensed, waiting for something to come screaming through that door, but he opened the door further and further until he gave the all clear signal.

  Single-file like we planned, the ten of us hurried through the door and up the ramp. I took up the back- mainly so no one would stab me in mine- and we cleared the incline to get back onto the road. We only had an hour's delay under our belts, and the pack of Bleeders was well behind us. The group of us collected in the middle of the street, watching them attack the light and smoke. A few of the Bleeders wore smiley masks, which answered the question of how their fight went.

  "I have to hand it to you," Alison said, "you were right about the fireworks."

  I turned to her and smiled. "You haven't even seen phase three yet."

  Right on cue, the street exploded in light and color around the Bleeders. They were swallowed up by a great burst of red, white and blue sparks that burnt their red eyes and made them clutch their bloody ears. Glittering pellets of light bounced off the surrounding buildings and rained down on the street.

  I looked over at the faces staring back at me. "Guess I forgot to put those in the mortars, huh?" They just shook their heads and turned to walk away. Jeremiah smiled and nodded. At least someone got me.

  Heading toward water, we crossed under the elevated tracks and past a recycling center that smelled of burnt garbage. It was a long stretch of industrial road, with trucks everywhere and barbed wire to keep people away from power stations and processing plants. It didn't stop until an old fence stopped us from running straight into the East River. I pulled up a bit of loose fence where people obviously snuck through all the time. One-by-one everyone ducked and crawled through until the last guy held it for me, and I joined them on the shore.

  The two small Brother Islands were ahead of us, a few thousand feet off-shore, both thick with trees. Riker's Island was just past them, home of the correctional center, a place I didn't even want to imagine at that moment. We stood on the remnants of what hadn't been a functional dock in what looked like fifty years. Shards of broken and rotted wood retreated into the green-blue water until they disappeared into the darkness.

  I turned to Nkosi. "This is about where you said the boat would be, so where is it?"

  "Further north," he pointed up the jagged shore.

  "Then it's not where you said it would be."

  He shrugged. "Think of it as an insurance plan."

  "Don't jerk us around so you can feel like you're in charge."

  "You're playing with our lives," Jeremiah added. "It's important we have all the intel so we can plot a path."

  "It's fine," Silas said.

  I squinted at him. "It's fine?"

  "It's fine," he repeated. "We're on the shore. We're safe. He'll get us to the boat. That is, if he wants to live, right?"

  "Right," Nkosi said.

  "See?"

  I looked back and forth between Silas and Nkosi. For some reason I didn't like having them on the same side of an issue, but there wasn't much else to do now except get to the boat and get the fuck out of Dodge. "Okay, but if I come across a boat with the keys in the ignition, you can sure as shit bet I'm taking it."

  "Of course."

  After a few moments collecting ourselves, we left the rotted dock behind and traveled along the shore with the water to our right. Nkosi led the way.

  The shore had a way of disappearing and reappearing from under us. It was slow going considering we had to cut through refineries and pipelines and all kinds of things that aren't meant to be touched let alone hiked, but it was safer than being on the streets. Even now we could hear distant gunfire, signs that people were still out there. Running. Fighting.

  Dying.

  After passing a beer distributor- try keeping half a dozen thirsty bikers on task during that- we came to the sprawling ruins of some long-gone building that used to stand on the water's edge, now just a series of stone and wood jetties that collected floating garbage.

  "You really know how to hide a thing," I told Nkosi.

  "We are getting close now," he assured me.

  "Sure."

  I was starting to feel like I'd been conned. The sun was getting low in the sky. Soon the shore disappeared again, and we had to cut through a junkyard and around the left side of a lumber yard, bringing us a little too close to the road for comfort. We were exhausted, and it showed. We dragged our feet and moved slow- which is probably why we didn't hear them until it was too late.

  At first it sounded like our own feet shuffling along the gravel lot, but then it became obvious that it was way too many feet for just the ten of us. As we came around the corner of the lumber yard's warehouse, a crowd of Bleeders a hundred strong came into view.

  Everyone froze, trying not to make a sound. The Bleeders were crammed like cattle in one side street, surrounded on both sides by the barbed walls of factories. Even though they wore the uniforms of factory workers, it seemed impossible for so many to be in one place, like they'd been herded together and led down the long road.

  It was a feeling I was familiar with.

  Over the top of a small group of trees, I saw what was keeping the Bleeders in one place- a young couple at the top of a white silo. They were trapped a few hundred feet up with the Bleeders reaching and clawing up at them. A section of the metal staircase that wrapped around the silo had collapsed and fallen away. My bet was the Bleeders had chased them up the stairs and it collapsed under the weight of too many bodies on it at once. The young couple was safe from attack, but they had no way of getting down.

  The guy couldn't have been older than eighteen. He had long hair tied in a bun on top of his head. The girl had short hair dyed black. Both wore what looked like matching fast food uniforms. As if making minimum wage wasn't bad enough, the poor kids were about to die in those horrible yellow and red clothes.

  "Hey!" The guy waved his hands above his head. "Help!"

  "Please help us," the girl shouted. There was panic in her young voice.

  I looked back at Jeremiah. "I feel bad and all, but even if we wanted to-"

  "No point in having that conversation now," he cut me off. He was already backing up, getting ready to run in the other direction, and soon I found out why.

  The Bleeders had seen us. Not all of them, but enough.

  The first few started to break off toward us. Even fully rested, the group would have been impossible to take on. In the shape we were in it might as well have been called suicide.

  We ran around the warehouse and to the right in the direction of the river again. Nkosi shouted something about the dock being up ahead but the Bleeders were closing the distance too fast to think about launching a boat. We needed something to climb or somewhere to hide in the next thirty seconds.

  Around the other side of the warehouse was a large dirt lot crammed with rows of tractor trailers, some with cabs, others without, and piles of lumber. Running down the middle looked like a death trap, so when Silas jumped full speed onto a crate, then a bigger one, and then onto the roof of a truck, everyone followed his lead. I glanced back before I followed, which was a mistake. Less than ten feet behind me, a Bleeder screamed at me with a dirty, torn up face. Something hung from his jacket and bounced against him as he ran, and it took me a second to realize it was a bit of intestine. With that kind of motivation, I made the jump onto the truck no problem.

  I couldn't say the same for everyon
e. Two of the bikers, one of them the woman who had argued with me in the paper warehouse, missed the jump and bounced off the side of the trailer. They fell back into the hands and mouths of the hungry.

  The trucks were so tightly packed we were able to jump from roof to roof. We made our way toward the water while behind us the Bleeders slammed into the side of the first trailer. If any of them had even tried to follow us up they didn't have the coordination to pull it off, not to mention they had a few unlucky souls to feast on back there.

  We jumped from one trailer to the next to the next, being careful not to slip. The Bleeders followed us from the ground, snarling up at us and trying to reach. At the far end of the lot the trailers trailed off, replaced by a sea of metal shipping containers in different colors.

  As we jumped from the trailers to the containers, the group started to spread out. We came to the end of the line still shy of the waterline by a fair distance, enough that we couldn't make a run for it. Not in our state. To the right, a long loading pier jutted out into the water. It must have been what they used to get those giant shipping containers on and off the ships.

  Jeremiah and I ended up on the same container, the one furthest to the right by the loading pier. Alison was on her own to our left. Nkosi was with two men, Silas with the remaining biker chick, and so on. The Bleeders filled in around us, and the men grabbed up their guns and got ready to fire down on them.

  "Save your bullets," Jeremiah shouted. "They can't reach us up here."

  "And then what," one of the men asked.

  "If we wait long enough something else might catch their attention."

  Silas agreed. We all decided to get some rest and eat from the few remaining packs of food. It would give us some time to figure out how to get out of another goddamn mess.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  A few hours later the Bleeders were still in the exact same spot- underneath us, smelling like shit. A few days of eating people, pissing themselves and not showering wasn't doing them, or us, any favors.

  The sun had long gone down and left us with a cool night. The dark was thick. The lot was unlit and the closest streetlights were back in the direction we'd run from. Most of our group was asleep on the other containers. Even the Bleeders seemed quieter in the dark, and it wasn't the first time I'd noticed it. Maybe with less things to see they weren't as excitable. It reminded me of the bird my mother used to have, how she would put a towel over the cage to make it sleep.

  Deciding to check on them, I got down low to the cold metal until I was on my stomach and crawled to the edge. Jeremiah was faced the other way, his eyes closed, which was better since he probably wouldn't have approved of what I was doing.

  Most of the Bleeders below were kind of just milling around, bumping into each other or standing still, but more than a few of them were actually asleep. They lay sprawled out on the ground or up against the container, waking up angrily when one of the others stepped on them or knocked into them. It was a weird reminder that these things may have acted like monsters, but they still had human bodies with limits. Eventually, even the strongest would get tired, eat, sleep. Somehow it made them even creepier to me.

  I crawled away from the edge and sat up, only to find Jeremiah looking back at me.

  "Jesus," I said with a jump. "You scared the shit out of me," I whispered.

  "They don't like us," he said.

  "The Bleeders? Are you kidding, they love us. Especially with barbecue sauce."

  "Not them." He nodded to the group.

  "If you haven't noticed, I don't like them much, either."

  "But that's on their own merit. They don't like us because they think we're infected."

  "We are infected."

  He frowned. "You know what I mean."

  I nodded to Alison, asleep on her own container. "They like her just fine."

  "That's different."

  "Because she's a woman?"

  "Because she's their ticket out."

  I moved closer and sat next to him facing the river. The dark water moved slowly in the night, reflecting the bit of moonlight that penetrated the smog. "I've been meaning to ask something."

  "Shoot."

  "In the back of that army truck, you said a word but you wouldn't explain what it was."

  He nodded. "Conplan."

  "So what is it?"

  Jeremiah looked me straight in the eye and said, "It's the United States Government's zombie plan."

  "Bull. Shit."

  "I thought so too when I heard about it. They claimed it was an exercise, a training tool so ridiculous no one would mistake it as real. The public wouldn't get worked up about a real scenario the government was prepping for and not telling them about, and they could openly discuss a plan to defend and fight back against a major attack on home soil. They called it 'Counter-Zombie Dominance.' I read it myself."

  "Are you saying they're actually following the plan?"

  "It fits so far. Phase One was deterrence, which is basically just trying not to create them, so you can pretty much ignore that part. But Phase Two, that's where it gets interesting. When the alert is given that an actual attack is underway, one of the first steps is to ensure our nuclear-armed peers that our preparations are not an act of war."

  "That's what the president did on the radio."

  "And can you guess the other half of Phase One?"

  I thought about it a second. "Quarantine," I said.

  "And not just medical quarantines like the stadium. That means geographical as well. Areas of high concentration have to be locked down to slow the spread to lower concentration areas. Sound familiar?"

  "Sweet mother of shit."

  "You don't want to know what Phase Three is. Needless to say, it's why we need to get out of New York now."

  I was quiet while I chewed it over. "Who were you," I asked.

  He snorted. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean I'm pretty sure I know who you are now, but I don't know who you were before. Not just all this," I gestured to our situation, "before everything."

  "Who do you think I am now?"

  I shrugged. "Well, you're...you know..."

  "What?"

  "Homeless."

  "In case you didn't notice, we're all homeless." He nodded to all the people laying out on containers.

  "Yeah, yeah, you know what I mean. So who were you before you were..."

  "A bum."

  "I didn't say that. But yeah, a bum."

  "I'll tell you what," he said, "once we're on that boat and safely off-shore, I'll tell you everything you want to know."

  "It's a deal."

  He looked around at the stillness around us. Then he handed me a gun. "We need to start waking these people up," he said, looking a little edgy.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Quietly as we could, staying low and using the night as cover, Jeremiah and I hopped from container to container, waking everyone up and telling them to follow us. We all gathered on the container the furthest to the left side of the lot, which was the closest to where Nkosi said the dock should be. As we discussed our plan, we kept our voices down to not disturb our buddies stumbling around down below.

  "Exactly how far is the boat from here," Jeremiah asked Nkosi. "We can't go into this blindly following you."

  "It is right around this bend." He pointed past the white building to our left. "There is a strip of land with white stone which has a dock used by no one. We paid the man who owns this land so that we could keep our boat tied there."

  "It'll hold all of us?"

  "There are not many of us left," he said, which was true. We were down to eight people. "Yes, it will hold us."

  "So here's the plan," Silas said. "Alison and Nkosi, when we go you'll stay at the middle of us four so we can make sure nothing happens to you. Brody, Jeremiah, you'll stay to our right and lead the Bleeders away."

  "What?"

  "Get to the end of that loading dock," he pointed. "When we have the boa
t, we'll circle around and pick you up."

  I looked around at the nodding group. "Who decided this?"

  "We did," Spanish Blood chimed in.

  "No one invited me to the meeting."

  "You are not the leader of us," Nkosi said. "You are not the leader of anyone because you do not know what you are doing."

  "Oh, yeah? The fireworks worked pretty well, didn't they? Remember that?"

  "You saved my life once, and have spent every minute since putting me back into danger."

  I scoffed. "This wasn't even my idea! I wanted to hide back in that nice building with all the food, you guys are the ones who wanted to come out here and get on some fucking boat, to get to another boat that, even if it's still out there, probably won't even let you on!"

  "Keep your voice down," Jeremiah said calmly. "It's a good plan. It'll work."

  "They want to use us as bait while they sneak off the other way, and you're calling it a good plan?"

  He put his hand on my shoulder. "I think we can all agree Alison is the most important element here. We need to protect her above anything else." Jeremiah gave me a look. I hated him for it, because I knew he was right.

  "I don't agree with that," Alison protested. "Why should you risk your lives for me?"

  "Alison," I said.

  "You deserve the same chance I do."

  I pulled Alison off to the side. "He's right. You have to make it out of here."

  "Why do you care?"

  The question caught me off guard. "Well...because you have to get back, you know? Start working on a cure."

  "That's it?"

  "What else do you need?"

  She frowned, clearly disappointed by my answer. "What if there is no cure, Brody? What if all the research in the world isn't enough to save it?"

  "Then we still need your connections to get onto that boat," Silas interrupted. "Like it or not, sugar, you're the most important person in this group, and maybe the city. So are we going to keep arguing, or are we going to get the hell out of this dump before it really starts to gets bad?"