5 Years After

by Richard Correll

  Every time he wanted to get out it was the same. By the time they were letting anyone on it was just too dangerous. The smell and motion of thousands in one place at a ferry dock was a natural attraction for the dead. They came from everywhere and did what they always did. Attacked and attacked and attacked. Ammunition ran out. Soldiers deserted and the slaughter began. What was

  happening on this side of the Hudson was happening on the other side as well. Ferry boats began running up and down the river as dock after dock fell to the gathering darkness. Some would run out of fuel, slowly drifting toward shore and a waiting army of hungry predators.

  At first, it was okay. He would string ladders and boards between those four and five-story buildings that dotted neighborhoods all over New York. He kept to the rooftops, leaving the streets to the dead and the soon-to-be-dead. Supplies, food were good enough to get by. Day after day, week after week, the city seemed to gradually lose its voice. The lights went out one night and never returned. No one has ever seen true darkness until they have moved through a city in pitch black.

  New York City. Dead and buried.

  He climbed carefully to the rooftop in the driving rain. The rumble of thunder and the flash of lightning made him slowly turn his head. The lightning struck somewhere uptown, maybe the Empire State Building. He carefully walked across the boards that were strung together across the buildings. They were far from treacherous. Heavy industrial-strength materials strung together for safety. They were like his little monorail system around his neighborhood. The less he was on the street the better was his logic. Tonight, with a heavy backpack over his shoulder he was looking for batteries. They gave him light where everywhere else was darkness. He could read, listen to the radio and operate a fan in the sweltering summer heat. He reached the end of the line of his monorail several city blocks north. Dylan looked out at the street below. There were a few dead ones standing in the street as if caught in a photograph, the rain mercilessly pelting them with fat droplets that poured down their clothes and dripped off their sleeves into the streets. He flipped the ladder made of rope and aluminum into the alleyway directly below.

  It cascaded down to the blackness. The only thing visible in the darkness was trash cans reflecting what little moonlight that shone through the rainclouds. Now was the waiting game. He always liked this part. If there was something down there it would move. No need to be in a hurry to make a mistake.

  The only movement was water quickly collecting on the street below, finding grooves and changes in elevation in the pavement to form tiny rivers that cascaded down the street going from here to nowhere. He finally slipped out of the window and down the steady rope ladder. He waited for movement or attack. He became a statue, just like the dead. Slowly he stepped away from the alleyway and into Times Square.

  He was careful to move from shadow to shadow, a slow and careful pace from darkness to darkness. He kept a screwdriver in his right hand at the ready. When he saw one standing in front of him just a few yards away he froze. He then slipped into an alleyway with a careful, slow step. He had noticed that without smell the dead relied on their vision to identify prey. If you moved at their pace, they had a hard time singling you out as prey. You were just another companion in a slow, endless ballet performed until the end of time.

  He moved around the alleyway in the dark, careful to use the red setting on his flashlight a few times to get his location. After a minute or two, he was back on the wide street, a curious maze of pathways created by an endless traffic jam. The batteries he was looking for were not in everyday vehicles. Anything in the new millennium was way too high-tech and probably burned out by now from all the phantom power computerized crap in them.

  1994 and before were the best. The batteries were heavy to carry. But even now they held their charge. He would just hook them up to a 110 inverter he had found in a hardware store and he would be set. He had broadened his search for deep cycle batteries like the ones you found in RVs, transport trucks and motor homes. How to get them home was another issue. Well, one thing at a time. The rain picked up tempo as he spied an old Ford truck in a mile-long traffic jam of vehicles six deep. The driver-side window pushed in soundlessly and he checked the cabin before reaching in and popping the hood. The heavy bastard was disconnected from its rusting cables in the blink of an eye. He didn’t dare close the hood for fear of attracting noise among New York’s new silent sentinels. They stood like statues in the rain. Like toys waiting to be wound up or turned on.

  “Gone in sixty seconds,” he muttered. Yeah, that was a pretty cool movie back then. Not exactly what it was like to steal cars but close enough for Hollywood. He slipped the heavy battery into his backpack and he carefully lifted the weight on his shoulders. This would really slow him down. He had to be careful if it…

  …stopped raining.

  The staccato rhythm on the hoods of the cars stopped and the silence was horrifying. He didn’t waste a second trying to pretend anymore. He hauled ass towards the ladder that suddenly seemed so far away. The street that had seemed such a wide, safe expanse a few minutes ago underwent a change. It was a claustrophobic maze of cars bumper to bumper. Figures that had been just mannequin shadows in the rain suddenly looked up and looked straight at him. Their mouths fell open and let their teeth grind in anticipation. The feet shuffled forward and the eyes locked on the prey. The hard part was this was not a straight run.

  It was weaving in and out cars parked so close together that when one was in your way you couldn’t run around without a huge detour from your destination. He finally ditched the battery by tossing it at a creature that blocked his way. It staggered backwards from the weight and fell on the pavement. Dylan jumped over the sprawling figure and scrambled onto the hood of a taxi. He leaped on to the massive trunk of a 1980s Cadillac to the cargo area of a Ford truck. His running shoes slipped out from under him and he landed hard in the cargo bay. Fucking rain, he thought. Getting up he jumped on the hood of a Malibu, then a Toyota something-or-other and made a dead sprint to the alley.

  They must have known. He felt his jaw fall open at the five shadows in the dark that lurched toward him. They were right where he needed to be, right where he had to be to stay alive. He couldn’t back up. They were still following from behind. In the dark, in Times Square was where it would end. All because of a freak storm that stopped like someone turned off a tap. He felt the strength slowly leave his arms and legs as they closed in. I just can’t die this way, he kept thinking.

  The one closest to him fell sideways onto the sidewalk like an invisible hammer had connected to its head. A pool of blackness began to spill out onto the pavement where it lay motionless. The second stretched out a hand that he batted away and drove the screwdriver into its eye and worked it up and down in the socket. In between desperate sobs he watched fluid pouring from the opening. He looked up to see another one of the things had fallen and a spray of blackness spattered against a shop window.. There was a small pop in the distance just before it fell. Like a firecracker a few streets over on a holiday.

  He grabbed the last one by the shoulders and spun it around to trip the ones behind him as he dashed into the alley, another pop. He dared not look behind him as he bee-lined toward the ladder. He made it up the rungs by leaping as high as he could and scrambling up like a squirrel on a tree trunk. Ten feet up he looked out of the alleyway to the building across the street. A figure was standing up and shouldering a rifle. Then, as the silhouette stood to leave the moon slid out of the curtain like clouds and provided some feeble light.

  A woman, it was a woman.

  He stared for the longest moment. Finally, he continued his ascent without looking down at the things that were gathering below his ladder. He couldn’t help but keep looking at the spot where he’d seen her. It was like a ghost in your own home. Someone else was alive. It occurred to him in a thunder flash that he had seen her earlier today dashing past an alleyway.

  How long had she been here?
He tried to rack his memory. Trying to remember the last time he had seen another living person. Shit, it had to be over a year. Reaching the top of the building, he stared longingly across the street where she had been, a specter that had winked into his world and then vanished without a trace.

  He slowly pulled up the ladder from the street. A brief game of tug of war ensued with the dead below before they finally succumbed. The noise they were making attracted more and more to the alleyway until they were just a sea of misshapen faces and hands that clawed at the air far above.

  A woman, the thought left him numbed in shock. He was so used to seeing only the dead that the idea of another human left him confused. It did light a small cinder of hope in New York’s blackened streets. It was just like the feeling he got when he turned on the radio. He still had enough battery power to listen in that night. It was wonderful to hear new music. It was like the world was getting back to normal when new tunes were being recorded. The only stations he could pick up were on the AM band. FM, he had discovered stood for frequency modulation and the big buildings in New York played hell with that. They used to get around it by sticking their antennas on the Big Apple’s tallest towers. But now they, like the city had gone dark. AM bounced off the upper atmosphere and rained down its sound over a wider area. This frequency went farther and a lot of stations seemed to have jacked their power and switched over.

  He listened to one station in New Jersey and another that was once upon a time from Cleveland that he remembered used to be on the FM band. It was now broadcasting from some small-assed town he could never remember. News stations were huge and everywhere up and down the dial. The way the news was being presented struck him as, well, different.

  Used to be news had been full of movie star sightings and this rapper having beef with some other guy. There would be traffic reports, talking heads with crazy ass comments about the president and the ever popular sex scandals. Now, the tone was serious. It was about a lot of stuff happening from that community the station was in. Town meetings sounded like they were big. There was information about when the hydro would be on and when it would be turned off. Local sports scores were big, too. One night it had occurred to Dylan that he hadn’t heard a single professional sports score. NBA, NFL, MLB, not even that NASCAR shit. Did they even exist anymore?

  There wasn’t a lot of national news either. Most of the focus seemed to be on the community, the small town that the once-big-city-stations had found themselves in. Another disturbing clue to the world outside, there were only small town stations. He slowly went up and down the dial a few times. Listening to where the stations broadcast from. There was nothing from Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh or other major cities. It was like they had never existed. Maybe they were just like New York City now. Dead husks of what they had once been. He heard a news story from Washington by a reporter named Molly Hunter. So that city was still around.

  But each and every story told him that people were getting by somewhere. It wasn’t all over. It was starting up all over again. It sounded like it was miles away but it was there. He had been listening for months to the sounds of another world while his supplies ran into critical shortage. The time had come to move. But hey, he was a guy who had killed a cop. If they found out who he was, he would be back in prison or worse.

  So the answer was simple. He couldn’t be him. He had to be someone else. The search had been slow and careful. After all, he had all the time in the world. The trains had all stopped running in New York and the clocks were broken. Here, time stood still on the edge of forever.

  About two months before, he had seen the man from his apartment window. He was doing the slow, lonely, desolate shuffle of the dead. Picking up something on the wind made his head turn away from the setting sun and east past cars that had just started to show rust, shops that were shuttered forever and streetlights that would never guide the way again. Here and there in the cracks in the sidewalks, small tufts of grass stubbornly began a new cycle of life. They would flourish here, the living were gone and the dead could care less. He was perfect. Dylan followed his slow shambling target through the streets from the roof. He moved from building to building, watching, waiting for the right moment. When he passed close to an alleyway, Dylan tossed a couple of pebbles on the pavement. The noise made the thing stop and turn with a start toward the sound. There was a moment of immobility as instinct decided the next course. Hunger dictated investigation. He slowly shuffled into the alleyway.

  Dylan had slid down his ladder in the back of the building as it sniffed about in the darkness. Three hard cracks to the skull from his hammer made it motionless forever. He then felt around for the real prize inside the coat pocket. Yes! The wallet! He seized it like a talisman and scurried up the ladder. He was perfect. Dylan’s age, height and he even looked a bit like him. A few small changes that could be peeled on with tape and this was his new identity.

  Brad Collins, age 25, height 5 foot ten inches...yadda yadda. The less you needed to change the less chance to get caught. It was perfect. He thought about following the tracks of the commuter trains on his trek outward. The tracks were elevated and fenced in at most places, but the tunnels? He would cross that when he got to it. Food? He could hoard a bit but the most important thing was water and plenty of it. He had already smashed the cash registers in the shops in Times Square for every dollar he could find. There was also plenty of cash on the dead he took down one at a time. They clearly had been bitten while making their escape. It was like the carjacking he had shied away from many years earlier. This time, the risks were just fine. This time there was an end to a means, a destination to all of this in the distance.

  Dampness was in the air as the sun rose and mist began to form in the streets like dancing phantoms celebrating another day. The wisps played about the staggering forms on the streets and swirled about the signs that gave directions to nowhere. Large buildings were now manmade valleys and canyons that were as much a part of the landscape as hills and river basins. Moisture collected on windshields of row after row of cars, trucks and buses that had lined up for escape and had found only a permanent parking space. Forever captured in time like a fossil in amber. This is where they would always be, time’s end in Times Square.

  The daily routine slowly began to stir again. Rising up, relieving himself and feeling the hunger. He had washed some clothes a day or so ago in a rain barrel and they were strung up in his small living room. The water was clean now that industry had died with half of the world’s population. His clothes were supple and had the aroma of fresh air and flowers he could not identify. As he inhaled the scent into his lungs he thought of her. It was funny how just the sight of another could arouse things long dead and buried.

  He had remembered friends from five years ago. Were they still alive? He doubted it. Although they were tough and resourceful, he knew they never understood when to run and hide. Avoidance seemed to be the way of survival. He threw on a t-shirt with some sweats and walked into the kitchen to get his dentist’s mirror for a look outside. A thick fog now rolled through the street, turning the dead into upright shadows of no color but darkness. The cars were close enough in some spots to look like a modern siege wall that stretched on forever. New York under siege, Dylan thought. No, New York was lost, a part of the world that had run out of time. He had the feeling that a hundred years from now he could look out this window and see the same thing. The cars would rust to heaps, looking like the metal version of ancient walls that had been uncovered from thousands of years ago. But among this ruin, the dead would still perform their slow choreography through the city. They would never love, cry or grow old. Today they would be the same as tomorrow and forever. Time was on their side.

  Satisfied, he opened the window slowly and stepped out into the damp morning air. Rung after rung was a conscious effort with the burn of hunger in his stomach. There had to be something today. He splashed his face from water in a rain barrel and turned to check the t
raps.

  She was standing there on the next rooftop over. She seemed to be waiting for him to see her. She was dressed in black jeans, a thick padded black hoodie with some kind of layered armor underneath. Her hood was pulled back so he could see her face. She had brown hair that hung past her shoulders, a lean face with an athletic build. She raised a leather-gloved hand in greeting.

  “Hey,” she said softly.

  “Uh…..hey,” he replied hoarsely.

  “You look like you have a great setup,” she said shyly after a long, awkward silence. “Can I come over?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he seemed to be in awe of her. Did he miss people that much? Was it because she was a woman? “You just walk over those boards.”

  “Really, it’s safe. Trust me,” he finally said when she hesitated at the boards and then chanced a look back at him with doubt in her eyes.. With a slow turn of her head and a slight smirk she walked over with a few tentative steps. After the first few footfalls she gained confidence in the makeshift bridge and her pace quickened.

  “That’s a cool idea.” She smiled at him and he felt his temperature rise. she introduced herself; “I’m Rebecca,”

  “Dylan.” He looked into her grey-blue eyes silently wishing he had time to look better. “I’m Dylan. Thanks for yesterday.”