"And your friend?"
"I am alone," he said.
"Nice try. Please tell him to show me his face."
"There is no one else. It is just me."
I tilted my head. "Really, dude?"
"Yes, dude."
I sighed. "I heard you whispering when I came in. There's another guy back there. Please tell him to show himself."
"No, it was me. I whisper to myself."
This guy was unreal. "You know what? Doesn't matter. I don't have time to argue, so I'll just be on my way and leave you and your imaginary friend to it." I started backing toward the door with my hands raised away from my gun. As I passed under one of the fluorescent ceiling lights, the guy's face changed.
"Rooi, rooi," he shouted, thrown into a panic. I didn't have to speak whatever language it was to understand what he meant- he'd seen my eyes, and he thought I was infected. That I was a Bleeder.
"Wait, I'm not one of them," I shouted back, but it was too late- his friend, who supposedly wasn't there, popped up from under the counter. He came up shooting and I didn't get a chance to see his face, only the floor as I dove to the side and hit the ground hard before crawling messily out of sight.
Both men opened fire, lighting up the inside of the pawn shop with a barrage of bullets that tore the place apart. Plastic and glass flew from display cases and shelves, pawned belongings exploding to shreds that rained down on my head as I took the safety off the M16. I didn't want to kill anyone, but I wasn't going to let them kill me, either.
A few of their shots went wild and hit the front of the store, punching holes through the large display window to the right of the door. Spider webs crackled through the pane of safety glass, but it held.
The gunfire stopped. They ducked down and spoke as they reloaded their weapons, probably making plans to flush me out or corner me, but I wouldn't give them the chance. I stood and returned fire on the cage. I was more comfortable with the gun now, holding it firmly against my armpit, and I was able to control the gunfire better as I moved to my left, crossing the shop. It was scary as fuck, but it also felt kind of great. The counters fell apart under the attack, and I could only imagine the two men were huddled behind them, clutching their ears and pissing their pants.
I took my finger off the trigger. The pawn shop fell back to quiet, with only the sound of tinkling glass. From this angle I could see through the cage to the back of the shop, where the back door had been pried open and was left open on its broken hinges. So that's how they got in there, I thought to myself.
The two men didn't move or speak, so I broke the ice. "Are we cool now," I asked, keeping the M16 ready.
There was movement all the way at the back of the shop by the open door. A figure blocked out the morning light, and for a second I thought the men might have called for backup, but then I saw the way it moved as it came through the door, and I knew the truth: all that noise hadn't gone unnoticed. There wasn't just one Bleeder, three more of them appeared right behind the first, and they followed him in to seek out its source.
The two men shouted and started firing at the Bleeders. They took out the first in the line, but he was quickly replaced by a second. They took her out and she was replaced by a third, each one a little further down the short hallway, a little closer to the men. What was worse, more Bleeders were already at the back door and finding their way inside. Every gunshot drew more attention, and these two, poor fuckers were trapped in a cage.
Unless I helped.
"Open it," I shouted between gunshots. I moved to where the men could see me and pointed to the cage door. It was made so that the shop-owner could open it from his side to reach the customers but not the other way around. The man I'd been talking to glanced over at me, then at the man at his side. Only now I could see how young the other one was, just a young man of nineteen at most. Maybe that's why the older guy had been pretending he was alone- to protect him.
The older man hesitated. I'm sure he wanted to shoot me in the face, but at that moment I was the lesser of two evils, and the other evil was swarming through the door more and more as his bullets became less and less. He shouted at the young man to open the door while he continued to hold the line. The younger one hugged the counter and moved around closer to me. With the M16's muzzle pushed through the cage I squeezed off a few rounds and covered him long enough to come over to the cage door. He turned the handle and unlocked it, eying me with mistrust as it swung open.
I stepped through and opened fire on the Bleeders. The older one nodded, relieved by my actions. He returned to the swarm of angry, bloodied faces pouring in at him from the small hallway. In his eyes, I saw the look of a man who was faced with his death. It wasn't noble or brave, it was very real and scary. "Nkosi," he shouted. He stopped firing long enough to grab a duffel bag by his feet and toss it to the younger one, who caught the heavy bag against his chest.
That second was all they needed. The first screaming Bleeder reached him, an Indian man of seventy who any other time would be a harmless face on the street. He ran at the man, his arthritic joints moving more than they must have in years, and as he leapt I heard one of his legs break. The man tried to bring his gun down on the Indian man's head, but he was too late- the old man took him to the ground in a biting, tumbling fury.
"Oyibo!" The younger one by my side screamed as the man was overcome by the swarm. He tried to go for the older man to help him, but I pulled him back by his arm and stopped him from getting himself killed. I didn't know what to say. I just shook my head.
There wasn't time to be sad about the man being torn apart a few feet from us. There were still more Bleeders coming through the back door, and they quickly understood there was only so much Oyibo to go around. They focused on us, and I elbowed the young man behind me and out of my line of fire. When there was a break in the swarm, I pulled the cage door closed. It clicked shut just as a bloody face smashed into the cage. Safe, I looked back over my shoulder at our exit.
There were more Bleeders beating at the door.
"Damn it," I shouted. The young man looked overwhelmed by what he'd just seen, and if I didn't snap him out of it soon he'd be no help at all. "Hey," I said, "he's gone, but you're not. Get it?" He stared at me blankly, so I added, "Did he die for nothing?"
He looked from me to the cage, then back to me. "Yes," he said. He grabbed a power drill from a shelf and hurled it through the cracked display window to the right of the door. The safety glass shattered onto the sidewalk in a million pieces. He looked back at me and said, "But I will not."
I shrugged. "I mean that's not what I meant, but as long as it worked for you."
I gave the shop's door a hard kick, knocking the Bleeders on the other side back to keep their attention on the door. Then we jumped through the open window as quietly as possible and put a little distance between us and the pawn shop before they could figure out what was going on.
The way back was cut off. The Bleeders we'd been dealing with for the past two minutes were just the tip of the shit cake apparently, because a ton of infected were crowded all around Park Avenue and under the elevated track, attacking an unlucky group of bikers in leather jackets and red patches.
"C'mon," I said with a nod, and headed toward the river.
CHAPTER TWENTY
One of the Bleeders beating on the door noticed us out of the corner of his bloody eye as we jogged away. He was a skinny man in a track suit, and he turned and started to follow us up the block. As I walked backwards, I aimed the M16 at him. I waited until he was a little closer and pulled the trigger.
Click.
"Oh, crap."
Oh, that's right. Guns run out of ammo. Lied to by movies once again.
Track Suit let out a scream that woke up every, damn one of his Bleeder friends at the pawn shop and even some of the ones on Park Avenue. More than a handful of them shifted their focus and began to come toward us.
"It is time to run," the young man said.
"I believe you're right."
We turned left and ran up Lexington, hoping to cut back toward Park whenever the way looked clear, but every time we tried the way was blocked. Park Avenue had too much action, so I decided the Third Avenue Bridge was our best chance. We could cross over to Mott Haven and make our way up Exterior Street, back over Madison Ave Bridge and to the food bank. It would be a major detour, but Exterior was a minor road that ran along the expressway, which would make for an easy and hopefully quiet run.
We reached the ramp and ran up and onto the bridge without slowing down, a growing tail of Bleeders following us a dozen yards back. We passed a tennis court to our left where some poor sucker was being torn apart by Bleeders. A few of the ones following us became interested in his screams and darted off toward him instead. I hated to say it, but I was happy about it. At least he was already doomed.
The bridge was choked with cars. It looked like a bad accident far ahead had pushed a U-Haul truck through the concrete divider and into the pedestrian walkway on the left. A few more feet and it would have crashed through the outside barrier and its suicide-proof fence and down into the Harlem River. Instead of using the walkway, we weaved behind the abandoned cars. It seemed to slow down the Bleeders. They were so focused on go-go-go, they banged into and tripped on any obstacle in their way.
As we passed the three-quarter mark across the bridge, I saw a shitty sight at the other end. "Bleeders up ahead," I said to Nkosi, pointing out the group loitering at the other end.
"We are trapped."
"Shit, kid, don't give up so easy." I jumped onto the U-Haul truck's hood, then onto the cab's roof and climbed up on top of its rectangular trailer. Nkosi followed suit, and the two of us managed to climb over the curved suicide fence and onto the outside of the barrier without killing ourselves, me with the M16 around my neck and him the duffel bag.
We were on the outside of the bridge, high above the water with Bleeders banging on the fence on the other side. "Okay," I said, "
now
we're trapped." Nkosi didn't want to look down at the water. The fear of heights was in him. "Well, we might as well get to know each other. The name's Brody."
"Nkosi."
"Oh."
"Oh what?"
"I heard that before but I thought it meant 'hey' or something."
"In South Africa, Nkosi means 'king.'"
"It'll mean breakfast if we don't figure something out."
Nkosi looked at the angry Bleeders that struggled to reach us. "We will have to wait for them to move on," he concluded.
"I think we'll die before that happens. Speaking of dying, sorry about your dad." I winced the moment the words came out of my mouth.
"You knew my father?"
"The...the guy back there."
His smooth face tensed up. "Oyibo. He was not my father."
"Oh, I just assumed-"
"Because we are both black we are related?"
"Uh, no, because he was a lot older than you. You're really pulling that on me right now? Up here?"
He scanned the bridge, avoiding eye contact. "Oyibo was a business associate."
"Cool. Cool. That's not vague at all. So what does 'rooi' mean?"
"Red. You have the sickness, yes?"
"Yes. And no. It's complicated. I have it, but I didn't become one of them." I motioned to the infected faces chomping at the other side of the fence. "Apparently it's a thing. I met someone else the same way. Maybe two people."
"I still do not trust you."
"And I don't trust you, so at least we're on level ground, even if it is suspended above water." I exhaled, unhappy with the company. I would just have to make the best of it. "What about 'doodmaak,' what does that mean?"
He looked me in the eye. "It means kill."
"I figured. So is that a bag of guns?"
"Guns, yes. Ammunition, no."
"Not much good to us right now," I said, and he shook his head. I looked around, then down. "You think it's waterproof?"
"I do. However I do not think
we
are waterproof."
"I mean it's only a twenty, twenty-five foot drop, we could live through that. The problem is what's in the water might kill us."
"There are crocodiles?"
"No, more like it could be shallow, or we might smash into rocks or garbage or whatever else is down there." He nodded, envisioning horrible death. "But you'd share it with me, right? The bag, I mean, if we miraculously survived this whole situation, you'd share your guns with me?"
He looked at the bag, then nodded. "Yes."
I slapped him on the chest. "Good choice. I'm just fucking with you, the way down is this way."