"Hey buddy," I say, pointing with a trembling hand at the organ he's left behind. It looks like a crushed pink ping-pong ball. "You left, uh…"
I stop talking. His blood is everywhere. I finally get what just happened; I tore him apart. He was sawing himself through the window and I finished the job. Now he's coming for revenge.
"Holy shit," I blurt, as he snatches up at me with his bloody hand. I bat it away and take another step back. "Buddy look, I'm sorry, I didn't know."
It is a ridiculous thing to say. He's still coming. It isn't possible; it has to be a dream.
He keeps coming anyway.
2. GOOD LUCK
I walk backward and he follows, like some messed up dance. For each step I take he drags himself closer. I watch with sick fascination as more guts unspool from his belly. Of course I've seen this kind of thing a million times before, in movies and TV shows, in the comics I draw myself, but not like this. It looks really realistic, is all I can think. The words 'great special effects' roll numbly through my mind.
About twenty yards back, the Chevy explodes.
The blast wind smacks my face and flutters my clothes, but it doesn't throw me through the air like in the movies. The door does fly though, spinning end over end like a Krull blade and cleaving the guy in two like sour cheese, before taking off and pinging away overhead. Fire singes my eyebrows and something punches me hard in the arm and I go down.
Shit. I roll back to my feet and see the car's indicator lever sticking out of my shoulder. It is actually stuck into my left shoulder. The half-man is still nearby, grappling toward me with his one good arm. He's left the other one behind, along with all his spools of gut, slit diagonally apart by the door.
I stagger backward, in shock, looking at the indicator lever sticking out of my body. There's blood running wetly down my chest and belly, darkening my hoodie. What the hell? Dizzy ideas come through the fog, that maybe I should push it left, push it right.
Click click.
I yank it out. It comes easily, looks like a screwdriver in my hand, then I drop it. It hits the concrete and rolls. The guy is using his jaw now to propel himself closer. His head bobs up and down like a swimmer going under for breath.
"I mean," I start to say, though I have no idea what I mean to say. The car is burning hard now, with fire rising high, and the chassis has ruptured and warped. "Just a second."
I stumble away from the burning wreck. Twenty feet clear I realize I'm limping and stop. My legs are fine. My left hand is clamped to the indicator-wound but there's hardly any blood coming now. Smoke is drifting finely everywhere. Something catches my eye, and I see a jumbo jet spiral out of the sky.
I track it from high up, spinning like a ninja's shuriken star. The wings tear off and the fuselage breaks apart so it descends in pieces, raining seats, engine parts, and bodies. They're wriggling like maggots. Fire breaks out from a sputtering engine before it falls beyond my field of view, behind the redbricks to the south somewhere near the bridge to Manhattan.
BOOM.
The blast shakes the ground though it was at least a mile away. A fireball rises briefly above the 'Pimpin Ridez' moped shop.
The half-man is nearly at me again. His trail of blood is so full and thick I can barely believe he's got anything left inside to drive him on. Put a shell on his back and he would be a grotesque snail.
I snap myself out of it and start running back down Willis Avenue, toward the bridge to Manhattan. No matter what else is going on, there could be survivors. I dodge around cars, trucks, and motorbikes left driverless. In glimpses down intersections at 141st and 140th I see a maze of vehicles in disarray, some burning, some upturned. A few buildings are on fire too, but there are no wails of fire trucks drawing near.
As I pass through 139th I look to the sky expecting to see F1s or Stealth Bombers closing in, at least helicopters, but there's only the corkscrewing contrails of the plane that fell.
I cover half a mile in five breathless minutes, emerging past barren Pulaski Park to the Harlem riverside like a cork popped from a bottle, to survey the Mott Haven bridgehead to Manhattan.
The Upper Manhattan skyline is on fire. Black smoke rises from many points, forming a miasma that hangs over the city like cigarette fog in a jazz bar. Several of the nearby skyscrapers, bland buildings that aren't famous, have been damaged. There is a visible gout missing in the top corner of one, and something is burning on the upper floors of another. It looks like the city has been sacked by barbarians.
I shake myself and look across the bridge. A chunk of the white support scaffold has ruptured where the plane landed, and the railing beneath it has been swept away, leaving trailing metal fenders pointing down toward the Harlem River. The jet must have hit it like a bomb.
There are chunks of fuselage and wing hanging amidst the scaffold like garish Christmas decorations, while other pieces of wreckage lie spread over the blackened asphalt, some of them belching thick black smoke.
And there are people. My jaw drops. They cover the bridge like sand on a beach, a crowd of hundreds walking step by uneven step toward Manhattan. A horrible resurgence of my latest artwork rises in my head; the same piece I showed to Lara in Sir Clowdesley that earned me our first date. I'd seen it in a dream a few weeks back; a great tower of the dead heaped up in Times Square, building themselves higher like the zombies in World War Z scrambling upward to take down a helicopter.
Is it like that, I ask myself, halfway descending into illogical panic. Is that what pulled that jet out of the sky?
Then something shifts. A kind of unspoken signal passes through the crowd like a ripple on water, and one by one they turn their ice-white eyes to me. Their faces are gray, washed out of all color, like the empty Atlantic ocean seen from Coney Island. Some are splashed with blood.
It's terrifying. I hold up my hands like I'm pacifying an angry drunk, as if that will somehow help. "Just a second," I actually say.
The first of them start running toward me. Their bodies flex and lope expertly, and damn fast. Some of them sprint.
I turn tail and sprint too, back up Willis. Intersections flash by with the thunder of their stampede gaining behind. Am I really running from a horde of, what, the dead? The infected? Back past 140th I toss a glance over my shoulder; leading the pack is a guy in a three-piece suit, splattered with dark blood. Yes, I am.
I break stride for a second to reach into my jeans for my phone, but of course it isn't there, I left it to charge. I remember Lara, she's in my apartment now.
Shit!
I crank up the speed, to levels I never attempted on the treadmill. I vault over the bonnet of a red Porsche jammed in headlight-to-trunk with a garbage truck. I dodge round another crawler on the ground. I run up the hood of a beat-up old Volkswagen and down the other side.
The Subway station passes by on my right. On 141st I hit the southern edge of Willis Playground. I pass back through the intersection on 142nd and pinpoint my snail-half man from his bloody trail. I jump over his head. This is ridiculous. My breath comes hard but my legs feel good, and the lack of a twinge still is amazing.
On the last stretch to 143rd I wheel left at the bodega, then I'm back on my street, with the lead guy maybe fifty yards behind.
I hit my block with the keys already in my hand. I jiggle them into the lock and dive into the hallway, slamming the door behind me. I stand for a second panting in the hallway.
It is so quiet in here it freaks me out. Then the door takes a massive thump as the guy's body hits it. I literally jump in place. I cast about me for something to reinforce the door with. This hall is so empty! There's an ancient dark pipe running round the skirting board into a heavy metal radiator mounted on the wall, but that's no use at all. There are shelves filled with the owner's chintzy bric-a-brac, the kind of Delft doggies and Portmeirion plates Cerulean and I sell in the online world we built together, a virtual copy of a real-world Yangtze fulfillment center.
No help there. There's a
mirror too, and a little side-table and a chair.
THUMP.
The door rocks again and that must be the next in line. It's followed by a steady drumbeat as more bodies pound against the door. How long can it hold? I grab the side-table and push it up haplessly against the door. It looks utterly forlorn, far too small and light to do more than perhaps keep a cat out.
I grab the chair and stack it next to it, but that will do little more. I get frantic as more bodies impact, and the smacking of their dead white flesh on the wood becomes a hailstorm. They'll pummel the door from its brackets in moments, I'm sure.
My chest heaves up and down with panting. I can't do anything more here. We have to get the hell out.
I think of Lara.
I run up the stairs. Any day of the last year I would have been collapsed on the floor disabled by twinges a long time ago, but today I feel vital and alive. On the top floor I shuffle the key out and jiggle my room open, then step back into familiarity.
It's almost quiet up here, with the thumping four stories distant. My room's soothing smells are on the air; green tea, bolognese, fresh sheets. My Banksy print is there above the computer, my large JR canvas, my Space Invader reproduction. Everything is as it should be.
Except Lara is not here. I look to the bed, to the desk, even out the window, but she isn't here.
"What the hell…?" I mumble.
In her place the bed has been made and there's a note lying on the pillow, written in neat handwriting. I snatch it up and read it three times.
I had a great time. You have my number. Good luck with the zombies. Lara. xx
I sag to the bed and laugh. This is utterly crazy.
I showed her my painting of zombies. That's what she's talking about. But then, Jesus, what is happening?
The phone rings. I pick it up and see it's an incoming Skype call from Cerulean. There's a history of thirty-three missed calls, and I remember his message from earlier, that I thought had to be him just keen to get the lowdown on my big night.
Are you even alive? Call me!!
I've had his number for the last eight months, but we've never actually spoken. Neither of us wanted the novelty of our voices to bring on a twinge in the other.
Now I slap answer and hold the phone to my ear.
3. DEEPCRAFT
I met Cerulean six months in to my convalescence after the coma, while I was hiding out in my parents' dark Iowa basement. I met him in a virtual world I built myself, inside a video game called Deepcraft, where we both pretended to have the most boring job imaginable.
Those were slow, depressing days. My friends came to visit, but stopped as their presence made me twinge. My girlfriend in New York had already given up on me after I'd died in my coma for the third time.
I was pretty much alone.
"You'll be with us again soon," my mother would often say, when she brought down my lukewarm milkshakes or diet mayo tuna sandwiches. "Coming back to the land of the living."
I appreciated everything she did, but it pissed me off. I'd been through this terrible thing, a coma that literally killed me multiple times, and here now it was continuing. My brain was weak, my body too, I could hardly stand to be around other people and TV made my brain twinge like crazy, but I wasn't some feeble dying goat incapable of doing anything for myself.
"Baby steps," the doctor said at discharge, by way of advice. "Think of it like mental rehab. Your brain has to get re-accustomed to stimulation step gradually. Especially your art. Have you any idea how many parts of the brain fire when you're doing creative work. I'd stay away from it."
"Stay away from art?"
"It looks like you may be allergic." He looked a little embarrassed to be saying it. "I know that sounds strange, but trust me, Amo. Boredom is your bandage."
I'd frowned. How could I give up my art? "What if I don't do that? If I just dive back in?"
He smiled gently. We both knew that wasn't possible. I'd twinged already that morning when they served me a pot of strawberry jam with my breakfast, just because the color was too vivid. "Then there'll be complications."
"Like what, I might die?"
"Or worse."
"Or worse? What could be worse than dying?"
The doctor shrugged. "Some would say a never-ending coma is worse. I've never been in a coma so I wouldn't know. I imagine if you never wake up though, then you may as well be dead. It's just a horrible, powerless delay."
"I woke up this time," I said, more confidently than I felt.
"You did," he agreed. "Who can say, really?"
"Who can say?" I repeated, then slumped back on the pillows, with the jam-twinge ramping up to migraine proportions.
But those days were months ago. Boredom had been my bandage long enough for me to get sick of reading old books, watching old black and white movies, and looking forward to the taste sensation of a dinnertime tuna sandwich. I had to do something real, had to take meaningful steps on the road to recovery.
So I got a job.
I researched the least mentally demanding work out there, in the dullest, darkest environment, and came up with picker at a Yangtze online shopping fulfillment center. They're the people who collect the stuff we order on the website, who labor all day in vast windowless warehouses that cover about a square mile each.
I applied and they took me on. Two days later I turned up and nodded through a twinge-inducing but mercifully brief induction. The supervisor gave me a simple gizmo called a 'diviner', which I was to follow as it flashed left-right directions through the warehouse. I picked up the stuff it highlighted then put it on conveyor belts for the packing department, ad infinitum, like a rat in a maze.
I loved it. All day I walked down dark climate-controlled shelving corridors, making no decisions for myself, just following the diviner to pick up limited edition basketballs, sets of tea knives, greetings cards, self-published books from the cranky print-on-demand machines, talking teddies, butt-shaped pillows and so on. Whatever the diviner demanded, I collected.
It was a lovely monotony. I got back into some kind of physical shape, and built up my stimulation endurance. If any order was too weird, I'd count backwards from one hundred to distract myself. I got good enough that the twinges mostly went away and my thinking cleared up.
I got so good at the job I could anticipate turns even before the diviner told me where to go. With all that extra brain-space, I started to notice the other pickers. They were all weirdos. Hank for example was a bitter redneck who got 'stranded' in Iowa after his community college kicked him out for selling weed, and he washed up on the fulfillment center's shore to make ends meet. In lieu of completing his studies he'd signed up for an online 'sexual mastery class,' and often would try out conversational gambits on me when our paths intersected through the warehouse, like lonely little ants at a scent-trail crossing.
"So when she says her name, you say, 'You should speak a little louder, you must be the shy one in the group'," he told me once.
"It's embarrassing her," I said.
"Right, it's putting her on the spot, meaning you control the spotlight. It's cool stuff man, neuro-linguistic programming from the top artists in the game."
"Does it work?"
"I haven't tried it yet."
Bobby was six foot seven and really into North Korea. Sometimes he wore the red star of North Korea on a T-shirt he'd clearly printed himself, as if daring our overlords to kick him out. I don't think the supervisor ever noticed, he probably thought it was a basketball shoe logo.
Linda from Arkansas was working her way around all the Yangtze fulfillment centers in the US, for a travel memoir she was writing.
"It's like the travel book by the guy who hitch-hiked round Ireland with a fridge," she told me once. "You've got to have a gimmick. This is my gimmick."
I loved it. Here were weird people, all with their own strange aspirations just like me, and I was handling it. When I needed time apart, I'd turn at a crossing when it looked a
s if we were going to intersect. A simple shrug of the shoulders and a point to the diviner would explain all.
The gods are re-routing me, that shrug said. It's just my fate.
It was Lucy on the print-on-demand machines, that clattery industrial corner of the center where books were baked in great X-ray like kilns, who put me onto Deepcraft.
I liked to stay near the printers for as long as I could before the sound made my brain twinge, watching pages slip in and out of the runners, forming up gradually into newly birthed books, their binding still tacky. These were dreams being made, just like my brain was rebuilding itself.
"I print my own here," Lucy told me once. She was a chubby girl with poorly dyed blue hair. We all called her Blucy. "I write romance with Amish vampires in the post-apocalypse. It's a big niche. They let me print them at cost."
I nodded. She showed me one of her books. The cover was awful, just clip-art of something representative of each of those genres horribly overlaid.
I made her one much better that night, stretching my brain's limits to the max. I had twinges for the following week, but she went wild for it. She invited me to play Deepcraft with her.
"It's just like digital Lego, Amo, you can turn down the danger and everything so there's no random events like falling into lava, no roaming zombies, nothing to make you scared or set off stress alarms, just a sandbox to build in. I make weird ruined worlds for my characters to live in. I think you'd get a kick out of it."
We went in together at her place, viewing one of her post-apocalyptic worlds through split-screen. It was funny to see the broken elevated roadways and tattered skyscrapers she'd envisaged built in chunky 3D blocks. Her ruins were fun and bright, like her writing. The game itself was intuitive and repetitive, involving grinding out ores by digging, then crafting them into tools and materials to create buildings.
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