by J. Thorn
"Everyone's got the flu. Anyone who isn't is probably tending to their own family."
Bill shrugged his thick shoulders. "Look, you seem like an all right guy, you know? Watch out for yourself."
He went home to bring Mia the good news. A frown fought a smile for her face. "I'm glad you're working. I was starting to get scared about moving out. But now I have to be scared for you at work instead?"
"It's not a big deal." He clicked open the cabinet under the microwave, snagged the bottle of Captain Morgan Private Stock she liked. "It's sitting behind a desk in a little tech room watching screens."
"And getting shot like a redshirt if something goes wrong."
"The guy's Hollywood. If something goes wrong, he'll have a SWAT team in three minutes."
She mashed her lips together and absently accepted his celebratory rum and Coke. "Don't get hurt, okay? If anything happens to you, I'll run away with the mailman."
He woke before his alarm, rolled up to the manor eight minutes early. Craig met him on the porch, blear-eyed.
"Have fun, kid. I was too bored to beat off."
He learned quickly what Craig meant. For all the break-ins, looting, riots, and fires around Los Angeles County, none of that manifested itself on Murckle's quiet cliffside street. He had the nine closed-circuit screens to watch, but except for the constant soft sway of the fronds, he may as well have been watching nine still lives of palms. He tried to find an internet radio feed for the Mariners and discovered the games had been postponed. For the Mariners, that was probably a mercy.
He wandered the grounds. A light fog clung to the cliffs, dewing the grass and the planks of the deck. He went back inside. The radio reported riots in a park in New York, three deaths and a couple dozen injuries, armed anarchists clashing with police over accusations the disease was an escaped government project. In Atlanta, crowds had been forced away from the CDC with live ammunition.
Bill clapped him on the shoulder that afternoon. "Anything go down?"
"Just my heart rate."
"Guess them crooks haven't figured their way up to the hills yet."
Before he left, Hu asked him to drop off a box of files in Hawthorne. The windows of the looted Ralph's were dark, gaping, glass glittering on the asphalt. Men stood on their front porches eyeing pedestrians and traffic, baseball bats and golf clubs dangling from their hands. At a Spanish bungalow with an iron fence around its rooftop barbecue, Raymond handed off the box of files and got home an hour before dark.
"I made $96 to sit in a room and watch a bunch of TV screens," he told Mia. "I think we'll be okay."
She gathered her long dark hair behind her head, sticking out her lower lip. "No one tried to break in?"
"It was so quiet I could hear the mice in the walls plotting their heist."
So was the next day. When Bill showed up to relieve him, Hu handed Raymond an address. "Mr. Murckle has some files he needs delivered to Torrance. Do you know Torrance?"
"Enough to get around."
"When you arrive, knock on apartment 218 and return to the car. When the man comes downstairs to the car, pop the trunk. Do not speak to him. Once he accepts the files, return here and see me before you begin your rounds."
Down the hill in Torrance, tarps fluttered from smashed windows. In the Sprouts parking lot, cops stood over a line of men cuffed and laid out on their bellies. Ambulances howled down the PCH, shepherding the thinned traffic to the sides of the road. Raymond turned off, passing a bowling alley, liquor stores. He parked in a weedy lot between two beige stucco apartment buildings, stepped out into an afternoon as warm as a dog's breath, climbed the stairs, knocked on 218, and returned to the car.
A minute later, a skinny white guy with a shaved head and the long, drooping jaw of a basset hound jogged down the steps, reached into the open trunk, and pulled out a briefcase.
Raymond drove back to Murckle's. Hu opened the door before he could knock. "Everything went well?"
"Perfectly," Raymond said. "Hey, I think I left something in the control room."
Hu nodded and gestured him upstairs. Raymond took them at a walk. In the control room, Bill clasped his hands behind his head and gazed blankly at the ceiling. Raymond knocked on the open door and Bill flailed to keep from falling from his chair.
"Christ, man, I'm trying to goof off in here."
Raymond closed the door. "You were right. We're into something strange."
Bill glanced at the door and leaned forward, suit drawn tight over his shoulders. "What's up?"
"I think we're dealing drugs."
8
Walt wanted to die, but he didn't want it to be easy. He packed extra shoes, a toothbrush and toothpaste. He packed as many lighters and matchbooks as he could find and then went to the nearest open bodega to buy more. He packed six pairs of his least-worn socks, a flashlight and extra batteries, his fuzzy-cornered copy of Catch-22. He packed the aspirin and cold meds he'd gotten for Vanessa, a mostly-full box of Band-Aids, some old rags, a tube of Neosporin, an extra pair of jeans, and two shirts. He packed his rusty old jackknife and a half-eaten bag of beef jerky and a box of saltines. He moved to a second backpack, filled it with a small pan, scissors, paperclips, three pens, two more pairs of socks, a pair of gloves, a windbreaker, some vitamins, a plastic water jug, a sleeve of bagels, a legal-sized notepad. Because, well, fuck it, he combined his remaining whiskey, vodka, and rum into a single handle and jammed that into the first pack.
Then he sat down, because his stitches hurt, and he dug out his handle of mixed business and poured a drink and thought some more. He decided to wait until he'd recovered enough to walk without pain. He didn't want to die midway through the Bronx or Jersey City, dropped by blood poisoning or because he couldn't hobble away from some thug with a crow bar. He could only die once. He wanted to make the most of it.
But he did want to die. The urge was like a hand pulling him below the soil, as if the dirt were water and his feet were covered in oil and all he could do was sink and drift and fall, a voiceless lump plummeting through the lightless caverns beneath an empty sea, alone and lost. Vanessa's lavender scent hugged the couch pillows. Her cursive handwriting graced the fridge lists and the end table beside the bed where she logged her dreams, inspirations, and performance notes. By comparison, the death of his parents was a small and sighing thing: he'd accepted long ago they'd die before him. All he'd wanted was to be with Vanessa until the far-off day one of them winked away.
Nothing seemed worthwhile—why work when the woman he'd worked for was gone? Why move, why watch, why breathe? Walt ate listlessly, cramped by constant nausea, microwaving canned soup and buttering toast. He left his apartment once the day after his return from Long Island. He bought things that would last: beef jerky, canned beans, alcohol. He didn't know whether the whole world was ending or just his own. Either way, money no longer mattered; instead of plastic jugs, he bought handles of Crown Royal, the fat bottles like fantastical potions. Anyway, the couple liquor stores still open had run out of the cheap stuff.
He watched the city from his window. Ambulances painted their lights on apartment walls, idling while pairs of men in biohazard suits dragged lumpy black bags down to the street. At sunset, a speeding SUV slammed into an oncoming sedan, smearing the sedan's driver over its hood and catapulting the SUV's into the middle of the intersection, where he lay, moaning, until he bled to death. At midnight, a yellow pickup braked behind the wreckage. Two big dudes got out, failed to start the SUV, and finally tried to push it out of the way. As they sweated in the cold, a taxi swung around the corner, tires screaming, and plowed into the remnants of the sedan, jolting the SUV backwards over one of the two men and pinning him under a tire. As his blood filled a black pool in the street, his friend ran screaming. The cab driver got out and approached the pinned man. Moans filtered through the window. The pinned man stretched a bloody arm across the pavement, pawing at the cabbie's shoelaces. The cabbie skipped away, vomited into the gutter, and jogg
ed away down the street, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
By morning, the street was impassible, a rubble of abandoned cars and hovering flies. A rat crouched on the pinned man's corpse, eating his nose. From his window, Walt took this for a sign. The ultimate metaphor for what happened when you tried to do good.
It rained that night, a steady beat that washed the blood and debris into the drains. Maybe the fish would get sick, too. Gunshots popped every few minutes, dampened by the mist. On the sidewalk below, a man shuffled forward, dropped his umbrella, and collapsed to his knees, phlegmy blood dangling from his mouth in strands.
Jets rattled his windows that morning, jarring him awake. The pain of his hangover felt right—the stabbing temples, the slow crush of his stomach, the sluggishness that made everything look less real than it already did. Heavy squeals and metallic shudders echoed between the buildings. Walt leaned out the window. Upstreet, a platoon of camo-wearing, rifle-swinging soldiers jogged across the intersection. With a rumbling, ear-wrenching shriek, a tank followed them down the street, pluming exhaust.
They came for him the next day.
The door pounded. His head did, too; he sat up from his blanket-nest on the couch, gum-eyed, parch-mouthed. "What?"
Quick, muffled talk from behind the door. "Open up! U.S. Army!"
Walt rose, naked except his underwear, and draped a sheet over his shoulders. He leaned his mouth against the door. "What can I do for you?"
"We're here to take you to a safe place."
"I'm pretty safe in here."
"What about your family? Any roommates?"
"I think they're pretty much dead. Let me check." Walt sniffed, gazing dumbly at the floor. "Yeah, all dead."
"Sir, I need you to step outside and come with me. In the event of noncompliance, we are authorized to break down your door."
"Authorized by who?" He unbolted the bolts, unlocked the locks. A pair of armed soldiers stood in the doorway, helmeted and vested, protected by gas masks and rubber gloves. "I appreciate your belief that you can keep me safer than I can keep myself, but I'm doing fine here."
The taller soldier shook his head. "We're authorized to round up all the survivors."
"The fact we are survivors might just imply we don't need your help."
"Sir, we don't have time for this. Come with us or we'll drag you down the stairs."
"Doesn't sound like either of us would enjoy that," Walt said. "Just tell them nobody was here."
The shorter soldier passed his rifle to his partner, grabbed Walt's wrist, and twisted until the bones rubbed each other sideways. Walt wilted to his knees. Stitches tugged his gut. The soldier clamped his wrists together, tying them tight with a plastic strip-cuff.
"Drag him out."
"I'm in my underwear here," Walt said from his knees.
"There's no time."
"At least put on my shoes. You expect me to walk through fucking New York City barefoot? People were shitting, bleeding, and puking in the street. And that's before the Panhandler."
The soldiers exchanged gas-masked glances. The one who'd hogtied him swore. "Where are your shoes?"
They let him pull on some pants and his Converse, then draped his coat around his shoulders and fitted him with a surgical mask and thin, transparent gloves.
"What's this about?" he asked on the way down the cold stairwell.
"Rounding up the survivors to keep you safe," said the soldier who'd cuffed him.
"Brilliant, gather us all together. The best way to guarantee that if we can get sick, we will."
"Has anyone told you you stink like whiskey, sir?"
They exited the building to an overcast noon. The streets smelled of smoke and blood and sour biology. Walt thought about running—he doubted they knew New York any more than he knew whatever non-New York backwater they'd coagulated in, and if they truly intended to scour the entire goddamn city for survivors, there was a fair chance they wouldn't waste time coming after him—but then again, they had guns. And tanks. And troops on the corners. Helicopters ruffled the clouds overhead. The soldier led him to a high-roofed truck and gestured him up a ramp. Twenty-odd other survivors sat on the truck bed, surgical masks in place, eyes bored rather than glassy or watery, no coughing or blood staining their masks. Only two of them were handcuffed. Walt sat down and leaned his back against the truck's side, glad for the shade. His stomach twisted, wringing itself like a beery old sponge.
They sat there a long time. The soldiers brought down an old woman in a black coat and led her into the truck, then a scruffy bearded guy around Walt's age. The soldiers cracked a can of paint, splashed a bright red X across the door, and moved on to the next building.
A woman asked to go to the bathroom. The soldiers told her to hold it. She asked again and a soldier glanced down the street, smashed in the door of a Starbucks with the butt of his rifle, and gestured her in. Walt napped, woken constantly by the truck bed jostling with new arrivals, by the whirr of choppers and the sky-tearing sound of jets, by people sobbing, the crackle of radios, the squeak of tank treads, by his own headache. Sometime midafternoon—he'd left his cell beside the couch—the truck grumbled to life and weaved slowly down the street, dodging abandoned cars, sprays of glass, sometimes a body.
Earlier, he'd asked a soldier where they were headed and gotten a vague non-answer. He didn't bother asking the other passengers. They rocked in the truck bed, staring blankly, as unresponsive to the contact of their neighbors' shoulders and knees as if they were down on a cramped 4-train to Yankee Stadium. The truck hooked south down Lafayette and rumbled through Chinatown, where shutters barred the stalls and seafood markets and t-shirt shops. Goods carpeted the sidewalks—shirts, wallets, belts, toys in cheap bubble plastic, sunglasses, squashed bananas, trampled cabbage, crushed crabs, some still waving their claws from the gutters. It stunk like old fish and rain-sodden greens. The truck turned down a street Walt didn't recognize and stopped cold. Radios squawked from up front.
Truck doors thumped. Boots hit the sidewalk. Ahead, metal scraped asphalt. Men swore, chattered over radios.
Out past the tailgate, three strangers wandered toward the truck, a slow shuffle punctuated by coughing jags. They wiped bloody fists on their pants and continued closer.
"Stay where you are," a loudspeaker blared from the truck.
"We're sick," a tall, thin man called from the trio. "We need help."
"Wait on the corner," the soldier replied. "Help will be sent as soon as it's available."
"You're the third truck that's told us that!"
Windows opened from a handful of apartments. Two more people turned the corner, leaning on each other for support, and joined the trio. Up front beyond Walt's sight, something heavy and hard grated over the pavement. He took shallow breaths. He'd been thinking he might throw up for a while now. At least the truck was canvas-topped, open around the sides. Fresh air.
Down on the corner, the crowd grew to a dozen. Five minutes later, with the soldiers still struggling to clear whatever was blocking the road, and Walt wondering why they didn't just take a different street, the gathering of the sick swelled to more than thirty, shivering, coughing, spitting wads of blood on the sidewalks.
"Where are you taking them?" a squat woman shouted. "Do you have medicine?"
"My apartment's full of fucking corpses," a hefty guy hollered in a Brooklyn accent. "How about you show us a place to sleep that doesn't smell like a Red Lobster's Dumpster?"
"Help is on the way," the soldier said. "Stay where you are."
"Like hell!" The hefty guy started forward. After two steps, the crowd followed in one of those strange mass movements, muttering, shouting, crying for answers and aid.
"This is a quarantined vehicle. Stop where you are and turn around."
Two soldiers ran to the back of the truck and knelt, raising assault rifles to their shoulders. The hefty man sneered and limped on.
"You're taking them to the cure!"
"Ple
ase don't leave us!"
From the advancing crowd, a thin blonde woman staggered away, hugged a lamppost, and sicked blood across the gum-dotted sidewalk. Someone in the truck moaned.
"Stop now or we will open fire," the loudspeaker blared.
Fifty feet away, the man laughed and broke into a run. Others lurched to keep up.
"Oh fuck," one of the kneeling soldiers said. Gunfire battered Walt's ears. The hefty man's chest puffed in three places, blood misting the people to either side of him. They fell alongside him, holes in their foreheads, chests, legs. Those in back screamed over the gunshots. One woman froze, clamping her arms to her face. Holes burst in her elbow, the back of her hand. The others turned and ran, stumbling and shrieking, disappearing around corners and through open doorways. The gunfire stopped dead. A dozen bodies lay bleeding on the pavement, some gurgling and clawing the asphalt, others as still as the streets beyond. Pale faces watched from windows. In the truck, people moaned, scrabbled their feet on the floor and pushed their backs against the walls, gagged, prayed.
"Shit," the first soldier to fire said.
"Hold your fire!" A man with stripes on his shoulder jogged from the side of the truck.
The soldier stood, shouldering his rifle. "Sarge, they charged us. Another two seconds and—"
"I know." The sergeant leaned in, grabbed the younger man by the neck. "You followed the protocol. You remember that tonight. Those people were already dead."
"Key word people," Walt called, dazed, tingly, jarred free from himself. "Not some goddamn zombies."
The sergeant turned on the truck, vaulting up onto the bumper. "Who said that?"
Walt shrunk against the side of the trunk, suddenly paternalized, pinned down by the authoritarian bark of a teacher quick with the detention. Across the truck, a dark-haired woman pointed him out. The sergeant clambered in over the tailgate and stuck a finger in Walt's face.
"Listen up. People are dying out there. You want us to leave you with them, just say the word."
Walt lifted his cuffed wrists. "This look like I volunteered?"