"Okay, better question- do you trust them? And don't tell me you don't have to, because that's pretty fucking important." I was easing into telling her about what Spanish Blood had pulled- namely a gun- when he thought we were alone.
"Brody," she said, suddenly serious. I dropped what I was doing and rushed over to her. She stood in front an open door, looking into a closet.
"What? What is it?"
She bent down into the closet and came up with something big enough to hold in both hands. "Look," she said, and held a long cardboard box up for me to see. Written on the side in red marker, it simply said, '4th of July.'
I smiled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Bleeders pounded and smashed at the loading dock doors, not as worked up as they'd been before but still impatient, still hungry, their cries and moans occasionally raising up. At the opposite end of the building, not far from the office Alison and I had searched, was a small hallway area that led to a metal door. Jeremiah checked all the surrounding rooms for unwanted guests while I took stock of the explosive beauties.
"It was not very smart keeping fireworks in a paper factory," Nkosi said.
"Yeah, well thank God for idiots."
About chin high, the metal door was thick with what looked like reddish-black paint that had been brushed on so thick it had thick chunks in it. There were drips that went all the way down to the floor. As I got closer, I realized it wasn't paint, and I remembered the Bleeder back in the stock room with the fingers worn down to the bloody bone.
Those chunks were skin. A few of them looked like fingernails.
Trying not to throw up, I pulled the door open, checked both ways and closed it again. Right then, if everything was as it should have been, Silas and Alison had the group gathered in the loading dock, ready and waiting by the door where we'd come into the warehouse. "Are you ready?"
Nkosi held his pistols up, their safeties off, and said, "I will die ready."
"That's not how that- you know what, never mind, let's go."
I threw the door open and we ran down the small set of concrete steps, me clutching two armfuls of fireworks to my chest and nearly dropping them the whole way. Jeremiah covered us from the door as I set everything down in the middle of the street and got to work. Nkosi stood over me, scanning the street for trouble with his pistols ready.
"Should we not spend the night and rest," Nkosi asked.
"Now you're asking this? Look, this isn't my plan, but the longer we wait, the less chance we have that that boat is still anchored out there."
I continued to set up the fireworks. Nkosi was quiet for a moment. Then: "What if the fuse does not work?"
"Hey. I'm gonna be honest with you for a second here- nobody likes a Negative Nancy."
"Negative Nancy?"
"You're the guy with the boat that gets us to the other boat. Stick to that guy. People like that guy."
I finished setting the fuses and stood to check out my work. If my so-called misspent youth was correct, we had about twenty seconds from the time the main fuse was lit before phase one started. I took out the lighter I borrowed from one of the bikers and lit the fuse. It immediately began to burn down toward the splits I'd set up.
"That is fairly impressive," Nkosi said.
"See?" I slapped him on the chest. "I like you better already."
We ran back inside and Jeremiah slammed the door shut behind us. There was no point in being quiet about it now.
As we booked it from one end of the sprawling warehouse to the other, I silently prayed Nkosi's stupid questions didn't jinx the whole thing. But my doubts were put to rest when I heard phase one kick in with the pop of firecrackers outside, loud enough to hear through the brick walls. "See," I said to Nkosi, "never a doubt."
We ran the entire length of the building, from the offices, down the long stockroom through the swinging doors and to the loading dock where the group was crowded around the door. There weren't any windows to see what the Bleeders were doing, but the incessant pounding on the sliding metal doors had finally stopped. Alison had her ear to the door we had come through, and were about to leave through, listening to their movements.
"It's working," she said. Sure enough, we could hear the moans and screams start to move away from the doors and around the building. Right then phase two started with a series of booms followed by a crackling far up in the air.
"It's a hundred count of aerials," I said, "it should keep their attention long enough to draw them all the way down there."
"Then it's time to go," Silas said.
"Yeah. Obviously."
Alison unlocked the door, but Jeremiah moved her out of the way so he could be the first out of the building. He did it in a way that wasn't belittling or chauvinistic. He would put himself in danger before he let anyone else do that for him. Alison seemed to understand, and she took her place behind him.
Jeremiah cracked the door open with his semi-automatic at the ready. Everyone was tensed, waiting for something to come screaming through that door, but he opened the door further and further until he gave the all clear signal.
Single-file like we planned, the ten of us hurried through the door and up the ramp. I took up the back- mainly so no one would stab me in mine- and we cleared the incline to get back onto the road. We only had an hour's delay under our belts, and the pack of Bleeders was well behind us. The group of us collected in the middle of the street, watching them attack the light and smoke. A few of the Bleeders wore smiley masks, which answered the question of how their fight went.
"I have to hand it to you," Alison said, "you were right about the fireworks."
I turned to her and smiled. "You haven't even seen phase three yet."
Right on cue, the street exploded in light and color around the Bleeders. They were swallowed up by a great burst of red, white and blue sparks that burnt their red eyes and made them clutch their bloody ears. Glittering pellets of light bounced off the surrounding buildings and rained down on the street.
I looked over at the faces staring back at me. "Guess I forgot to put those in the mortars, huh?" They just shook their heads and turned to walk away. Jeremiah smiled and nodded. At least someone got me.
Heading toward water, we crossed under the elevated tracks and past a recycling center that smelled of burnt garbage. It was a long stretch of industrial road, with trucks everywhere and barbed wire to keep people away from power stations and processing plants. It didn't stop until an old fence stopped us from running straight into the East River. I pulled up a bit of loose fence where people obviously snuck through all the time. One-by-one everyone ducked and crawled through until the last guy held it for me, and I joined them on the shore.
The two small Brother Islands were ahead of us, a few thousand feet off-shore, both thick with trees. Riker's Island was just past them, home of the correctional center, a place I didn't even want to imagine at that moment. We stood on the remnants of what hadn't been a functional dock in what looked like fifty years. Shards of broken and rotted wood retreated into the green-blue water until they disappeared into the darkness.
I turned to Nkosi. "This is about where you said the boat would be, so where is it?"
"Further north," he pointed up the jagged shore.
"Then it's not where you said it would be."
He shrugged. "Think of it as an insurance plan."
"Don't jerk us around so you can feel like you're in charge."
"You're playing with our lives," Jeremiah added. "It's important we have all the intel so we can plot a path."
"It's fine," Silas said.
I squinted at him. "It's fine?"
"It's fine," he repeated. "We're on the shore. We're safe. He'll get us to the boat. That is, if he wants to live, right?"
"Right," Nkosi said.
"See?"
I looked back and forth between Silas and Nkosi. For some reason I didn't like having them on the same side of an issue, but there wasn't much else to do now except get to the boat and get the fuck out of Dodge. "Okay, but if I come across a boat with the keys in the ignition, you can sure as shit bet I'm taking it."
"Of course."
After a few moments collecting ourselves, we left the rotted dock behind and traveled along the shore with the water to our right. Nkosi led the way.
The shore had a way of disappearing and reappearing from under us. It was slow going considering we had to cut through refineries and pipelines and all kinds of things that aren't meant to be touched let alone hiked, but it was safer than being on the streets. Even now we could hear distant gunfire, signs that people were still out there. Running. Fighting.
Dying.
After passing a beer distributor- try keeping half a dozen thirsty bikers on task during that- we came to the sprawling ruins of some long-gone building that used to stand on the water's edge, now just a series of stone and wood jetties that collected floating garbage.
"You really know how to hide a thing," I told Nkosi.
"We are getting close now," he assured me.
"Sure."
I was starting to feel like I'd been conned. The sun was getting low in the sky. Soon the shore disappeared again, and we had to cut through a junkyard and around the left side of a lumber yard, bringing us a little too close to the road for comfort. We were exhausted, and it showed. We dragged our feet and moved slow- which is probably why we didn't hear them until it was too late.
At first it sounded like our own feet shuffling along the gravel lot, but then it became obvious that it was way too many feet for just the ten of us. As we came around the corner of the lumber yard's warehouse, a crowd of Bleeders a hundred strong came into view.
Everyone froze, trying not to make a sound. The Bleeders were crammed like cattle in one side street, surrounded on both sides by the barbed walls of factories. Even though they wore the uniforms of factory workers, it seemed impossible for so many to be in one place, like they'd been herded together and led down the long road.
It was a feeling I was familiar with.
Over the top of a small group of trees, I saw what was keeping the Bleeders in one place- a young couple at the top of a white silo. They were trapped a few hundred feet up with the Bleeders reaching and clawing up at them. A section of the metal staircase that wrapped around the silo had collapsed and fallen away. My bet was the Bleeders had chased them up the stairs and it collapsed under the weight of too many bodies on it at once. The young couple was safe from attack, but they had no way of getting down.
The guy couldn't have been older than eighteen. He had long hair tied in a bun on top of his head. The girl had short hair dyed black. Both wore what looked like matching fast food uniforms. As if making minimum wage wasn't bad enough, the poor kids were about to die in those horrible yellow and red clothes.
"Hey!" The guy waved his hands above his head. "Help!"
"Please help us," the girl shouted. There was panic in her young voice.
I looked back at Jeremiah. "I feel bad and all, but even if we wanted to-"
"No point in having that conversation now," he cut me off. He was already backing up, getting ready to run in the other direction, and soon I found out why.
The Bleeders had seen us. Not all of them, but enough.
The first few started to break off toward us. Even fully rested, the group would have been impossible to take on. In the shape we were in it might as well have been called suicide.
We ran around the warehouse and to the right in the direction of the river again. Nkosi shouted something about the dock being up ahead but the Bleeders were closing the distance too fast to think about launching a boat. We needed something to climb or somewhere to hide in the next thirty seconds.
Around the other side of the warehouse was a large dirt lot crammed with rows of tractor trailers, some with cabs, others without, and piles of lumber. Running down the middle looked like a death trap, so when Silas jumped full speed onto a crate, then a bigger one, and then onto the roof of a truck, everyone followed his lead. I glanced back before I followed, which was a mistake. Less than ten feet behind me, a Bleeder screamed at me with a dirty, torn up face. Something hung from his jacket and bounced against him as he ran, and it took me a second to realize it was a bit of intestine. With that kind of motivation, I made the jump onto the truck no problem.
I couldn't say the same for everyone. Two of the bikers, one of them the woman who had argued with me in the paper warehouse, missed the jump and bounced off the side of the trailer. They fell back into the hands and mouths of the hungry.
The trucks were so tightly packed we were able to jump from roof to roof. We made our way toward the water while behind us the Bleeders slammed into the side of the first trailer. If any of them had even tried to follow us up they didn't have the coordination to pull it off, not to mention they had a few unlucky souls to feast on back there.