It was fun. At home I built a miniature version of the fulfillment center; lovingly stacking up the long clean corridors, fitting it with low lights, stocking the shelves with whatever weird products I could craft, even hand-coding a diviner.
At the same time I started making covers for all Blucy's books. She never paid me, but she put me onto her writer friends who wanted covers, and they did pay. The work ran me down, but then I'd go in Deepcraft and grind out ores for hours, add to my fulfillment center, and wander it in a trance. In God mode I added non-player characters modeled on my co-workers in real life, who wandered its corridors endlessly online, forever doomed to think of little nuggets of information they wanted to pass on.
It was wonderfully soothing, and it sped up my recovery so much that I was able to make more covers. I had enough cash and energy after six months to quit the picking job and go full time with the covers.
"Don't go," my mother said, when I told her I was heading back to New York. "That place broke you. I couldn't bear for it to happen again."
My dad patted me on the shoulder and stood by.
I came back to New York on a Greyhound, quietly defiant. I worked on art that would've bored me to tears before. I went to the coffee shop Sir Clowdesley's as mental therapy to build up my tolerance. I crafted goods to sit on my Deepcraft warehouse shelves, even opening it up for others to run online and critique.
On one of those runs I met Cerulean, who loved nothing better than to run through the fulfilment center picking up randomly generated orders, just like me. He was always there for me. I was always there for him. We were the only people in the world, as far as we knew, who'd been through the same coma and come out with the same mind-crushing migraines.
"Cerulean," I say into the receiver now, curled up against my bed and hardly believing this is happening, "holy shit, Cerulean you're alive?"
A moment passes and he says nothing, during which time I feel like I'm falling, then his voice comes through, weak and high.
"Amo?"
4. CERULEAN
"It's me," I whisper frantically, "I'm here, shit, I saw your message earlier, I thought you were talking about the date, then I went outside and damn, it's been crazy, the girl's gone, the whole city's gone crazy, what the hell is going on?"
"Amo," he says again, his voice getting clearer now, a light Southern drawl. "I'd just about given up, I've been calling and texting you for hours. You say you went outside?"
I take a deep breath. Abruptly tears start coursing down my face. Shit, this is Cerulean, and it's our first time to talk.
"The twinges are gone. I went out to get coffee and the world's gone mad. They're everywhere. They chased me up and down the Bronx. Planes were falling from the sky, New York is burning. What's going on?"
"Calm down. Amo, I know." He takes a breath, then plows ahead. "I've been watching it all night. It started around midnight and it spread across the country in hours. They were calling it a disease vector carried on the gulfstream, until it got them too and most of the news outlets went out. Twitter went down while they were trying to evacuate, but most people were at home asleep in their beds. The whole country's gone down, I'm surprised the internet is even up still, phone service and texts went down hours ago. I thought I'd call you until my uplink went dead, and then…" he trails off.
I stifle my tears and stare wide-eyed out the window.
"The whole country's gone down?"
"They've all turned, Amo. This thing is instantly virulent, one breath and you're infected. You've seen them so you know. I watched it happen on the news; there were videos up on YouTube before that went down too. A few websites are still working, so I Googled everything I could find and downloaded it to the shared drive on your computer. You'll need to know this stuff, I've got reams on the prepper lifestyle, survival tactics and strategies, how to make weapons and how to find weapons, how to rig a generator and hotwire a car, siphoning fuel from a station, all that kind of stuff. It's good I did because Wikipedia has just gone down; I guess they didn't get enough donations."
He gives a scrappy laugh. I'm struggling to catch up with everything he's saying. My heart's still pounding from the run.
"What are you talking about? Cerulean?"
He takes a deep breath. "Amo, I'm cured too. The twinges are gone and I'm thinking clearly. I've not turned, but everyone else is. You said everyone you saw in New York has gone gray? They're all that way, as far as I can tell. Now you need to survive."
"Sure, but-" I begin then trail off. There's something missing. "What about you?"
He laughs. "My brain got better but I'm still a cripple, buddy."
I hadn't thought of that. I wince as the repercussions come down. Of course his spine is still broken. Ever since the coma hit while he stood atop the highest dive board in his Olympic pre-trials, ready to dive, he's been confined to his bed. He fell, hit the pool's concrete edge, and it was game over for his Olympic hopes. Ever since then, his twinges have been worse than mine. He can't leave his mother's basement. It's why 'the Darkness', our shared nickname for the virtual Yangtze fulfillment center, came to mean so much to him. It was his only way out.
Shit.
"Where do you think I'm going to go?" he goes on. "I'm busting for a piss but is my mom going to come down and take me to the toilet? More likely she'll come down and tear out my throat. She's banging on the basement door even now, she's been at it all night, her and a few dozen others. It sounds like they're pulling up the floor overhead, actually."
"What the-" I start. "She's turned too?"
I can hear him smiling. God I love Cerulean. That fit, handsome, paraplegic bastard. His mom's upstairs coming for him and he's been calling me all this time, trying to save me. "Of course she is, and it's not to bring me a batch of midnight cookies."
I get to my feet, deciding instantly. I look around the room taking stock of what I'll need. "Where are you? I have your address here somewhere. I'll come get you. I'll get you out."
He laughs softly. I picture the only Cerulean I've ever seen images of on Google, the dark young man on the dive platform or the medal stand, full of confidence and in his prime, ready to take on the Olympics and the world and make them his own. "Don't be silly, Amo. You'll never get here in time. The basement door's been iffy for years; it won't take much longer for them to get down here. They'll come through the floor in a day or two anyway. Don't worry about me, I've got a syringe here and I know what to do with it."
The blood drains from my head and I go dizzy. I'm still looking round my room urgently, like there might be an answer here when there cannot be.
"What do you mean, you've got a syringe?"
"It's all right," he says. "Sit down. Are you somewhere safe, Amo? Are you in your room, are you barricaded in?"
"I don't-" I begin, then look at the door. I can hear them thumping faintly from downstairs. "I'm in my building. I blocked up the front door, but there's probably hundreds of them out there now. I don't-"
"Block up your room," he says. "Do it now. Wedge the bed against the door, wedge something against that if you can. They're not smart but they're persistent, and you're in no state to take to the streets again. You need to lie low and get your head straight, Amo, if you're going to get through this. Do you hear me?"
"I-"
"Deadbolt the door and wedge it in. Use everything you've got. Do it right now. I'll still be here. Put the phone on speaker and do it now. I want to hear it happening."
I take the phone from my head and stare at it blankly for a moment. I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
"Amo!"
I remember and click the button for speaker. I hear the distant sound of Cerulean's home somewhere in the South filter into my New York apartment. There is his breathing and the sound of a dehumidifier, sucking damp out of the cement basement that's been his prison cell since he fell.
I shake myself and look to the bed, then the door, and start moving to bring them together. The bed drags
noisily out of the recessed wall. I push its headboard flush against the door. The headboard has metal slats that reach three quarters up the height of the door, so even if one of the zombies get in the house and successfully punch a hole through the door, they'll still have to get over the slats.
"I've done the bed," I call to Cerulean. "I'm getting the desk."
"Good. Don't damage your computer, you're going to need that."
I lift my monitor carefully off, then drag the desk to the tail of the bed. Laid end on, it fits almost perfectly between the bed and the wall, wedged into place. It's going nowhere. They'd have to bend the bed's metal frame or push it through the wall to get in, and I don't see either of those happening. That's more force than human bodies can muster.
I drop to the floor by the side of the bed and start to shake.
"I've done it," I say to the phone, turning it off speaker mode and holding it back to my ear.
"Good, good. Now you need to relax. We can talk about something that really matters. How did your date with the Tomb Raider girl go?"
I laugh beside myself. I scratch at the wooden floor with a fingernail.
"It went fine. It went great. She liked the final panel in my comic book. You remember?"
Of course he remembers. I showed it to him first, two days earlier, and it sent him into a monumental twinge, but still he stayed on the line to tell me how beautiful he thought it was.
That's the kind of friend he is. When all my other friends left, or just drifted away, because staying in touch with someone in 'my condition' was just too damn hard, or too slow, Cerulean showed what true friendship is.
He was there last night, texting me when I collapsed in the restroom, overcome by all the stimulation on my date with Lara. I'd thought for sure I was going to die at the table, face-first in my grey poupon soup. He'd sent me a text that made it all seem different, that gave me the strength to pick myself up, push back the twinge, and get back in their and enjoy my date.
"She came back here afterward," I say, shy now. "I didn't expect that, but…" I trail off. "But she's gone now. The note she left Cerulean, it's mad."
"Call me Robert," he says. "That's my name."
More tears pour down my cheeks. I try to gulp them back. "I know. OK, Robert."
"Are you crying? Come on old buddy. Pull yourself together. It's not the end of the world. Just the end of most of it. You said she's gone?"
I laugh. I rub my eyes. "I don't know. I think so, yes, she's gone. She left a note, it said 'Good luck with the zombies'. She was talking about the comic, but Christ, look at this shit Cerulean. I mean Robert. Where the hell is she now?"
"Probably running halfway down Manhattan, if she's not already infected. Calm your ass down, Amo. What are you going to do for her now? She'll either get safe or she won't, on her own. You're lucky you're alive. You know how many people out there who're immune? Do you have any idea?"
"No idea. I didn't see any. Maybe her?"
"Maybe her. On top of that there's me and there's you. I've not seen any others, Amo, not any at all. Every live video feed I saw got corrupted in seconds, because the people filming it were infected. It's the most virulent thing ever. It's like that cat in the box, the second you open the box to see if it's alive or not, it drags you in so you're inside the box too. There's no time to report out."
I laugh through my tears. "Schrodinger's cat. I don't think that's how it works."
"Whatever. Listen Amo, it can't be a coincidence that it's me and you, and maybe her. Did she have the same condition as us, did she have a coma then recover like us?"
I wince as I try to recall. "She said she burned out. I don't think she was twingeing though. I don't think so."
"Well maybe you'll find out. Perhaps proximity to you conferred immunity. I'm pretty sure we're immune, Amo, because whatever is hitting them now hit us a year ago. Do you follow? Some lesser strain hit us, but it acted like a vaccine, so now we're safe. We went blank, we died multiple times, but they brought us back. Maybe if we hadn't been brought back, we'd be like these others out on the streets now. We got saved."
I shudder. I'm grasping at straws now.
"You're alive," is all I can say.
He laughs. "I am."
We sit in silence for a while. My room comes back to me. I look up at my Banksy print on the wall, the guy throwing the flowers. I wonder, is Banksy a zombie now too? Is Space Invader?
"I can come for you," I say. "I'll get a nice car and make it there in a day. I'll drive all night."
"That's a lyric from a song isn't it?"
"Stop it! Tell me your address and I'll come."
"No, you won't. Why in hell would you come here Amo, to see my bitten-out corpse laid up in a bloody cradle stinking of methadone and shit? I'll not have that. I won't be alive by then, Amo. Understand that. Accept that, and we can move on. I've downloaded everything I can think of to your computer, plus a few extras I've had the time to come up with. The fulfillment center will be a bit different. I think it's going to be pretty important to you, going forward, or for a while at least. There are some new routines. You'll figure it out. Until then we can talk."
I sag. "I want to come."
"I want you to come too. Don't you think I'd love that, if you could come charging in now and rescue me from this mess? But you can't. It's not going to happen, so let's move on. We've never even spoken before, have we? Hi, Amo, I'm Robert. I'm a freak just like you. We might be the last two people alive in the world."
I laugh. "Hi Robert, I'm Amo. It's good to meet you. I don't want you to die."
"So tell me about the date," he says. "Tell me everything."
I do. It starts off jerky and unclear, but soon I'm rolling. I tell him about how we'd talked about my art, and our families, and my coma. She'd burned out herself a few years earlier, suffering panic attacks right after passing the New York bar exam to become a lawyer. It had been a dream for so long, and when she lost that dream it shattered her. Working as a barista at Sir Clowdesley did the same thing for her as it did for me: boredom as a kind of bandage.
I tell him about the pick-up line I tried on her, improvised on the moment and only partly inspired by Hank, when the twinge was bearing down hard and I had to do something to stop my eyes from popping out.
"I took her hand, and I talked about the colors of her palm," I tell him. "Ecru. Faun. They're both shades of brown. You know, because I'm an artist."
He chuckles.
"I said there's meanings behind each one. Honestly, I made it up, and she knew that too, but somehow she went with it. I don't know. After that, maybe the twinges started to stop? I don't know what was happening."
He sighs contentedly. "I'm happy for you, Amo. It sounds great."
I smile through tears, because yes, it was. I fill the empty air with the rest of my story from the morning, about the street and the horde and pulling the guy apart on Willis Avenue.
"It's still a good memory, on the whole," he says, at the end. "You'll need to hang on to that, Amo. You will, won't you? Lara might be alive out there. You might be able to find her. Hold on to that. You'll put out some flags and let her now where you are. You'll figure this thing out and make it right. I know you will. You've always been resourceful, and smart, and so damn charming."
I laugh.
"It's good you can laugh. Don't forget that Amo. Don't you dare feel guilty. I want it to be you, not me. You're a good man. You're the best friend I've ever had. I want you to get good things out of this and become better for it. There's always room to grow. When I lost my legs and I knew I could never dive anymore, I just about gave up. Then I found this weird guy who'd built a weird world on Deepcraft, and he welcomed me in. He loaned me a diviner and we fulfilled stupid orders together. I saw the world through him, and I'm still seeing the world through him now. Amo, you're going to be OK."
I find I'm gulping at the air.
"Get yourself solid. Research the stuff I sent. Find a safer place than yo
ur apartment, a bank or something downtown, somewhere this girl Lara can find, and start clearing the streets around. Make a base and she'll be drawn to you, Amo, if you're offering safety and something worth having. That way you'll find the others too, the ones like us who are lost somewhere across the country and don't have each other like we've had each other. I know you will. You'll make good things out of this."
I gulp back tears. I can hear the thumping through the phone getting louder.
"She's almost through the door isn't she?"
"She is. It's all right. I've got the syringe loaded with my methadone, enough of a dose to knock me right out. I won't feel a thing. It's better this way Amo. I wouldn't stand a chance on the road. I was never good in a wheelchair."
I sob into the phone. "How long?"
"I don't know. A minute, maybe five? I've already injected it." His voice starts to go woozy. "You'll stay on the line won't you? You'll wait with me."
"Of course I will. Robert I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. You're here with me. We're in the fulfillment center, running it together. I've got legs again, Amo. We're keeping up with the orders. We're one step ahead."
The tears are coming freely. I hate this. I want to reach through the phone and save him. I want to save my friend, but I can't.
"Goodbye, Amo," he says fuzzily. There is a crash through the line, and his mother must have breached the basement.
"Robert," I say urgently. "Robert."
"She's coming. I won't feel a thing. The Darkness is so close. I'm going to turn the phone off now Amo. I don't want you to hear this. Goodbye."
The phone clicks dead. The sound from his distant basement fades at once. My last link to Cerulean is severed.
I lean back against the bed and cry, curled around the phone like it's a dagger thrust though my belly.
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CHARACTER ART
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 50