We jumped from one trailer to the next to the next, being careful not to slip. The Bleeders followed us from the ground, snarling up at us and trying to reach. At the far end of the lot the trailers trailed off, replaced by a sea of metal shipping containers in different colors.
As we jumped from the trailers to the containers, the group started to spread out. We came to the end of the line still shy of the waterline by a fair distance, enough that we couldn't make a run for it. Not in our state. To the right, a long loading pier jutted out into the water. It must have been what they used to get those giant shipping containers on and off the ships.
Jeremiah and I ended up on the same container, the one furthest to the right by the loading pier. Alison was on her own to our left. Nkosi was with two men, Silas with the remaining biker chick, and so on. The Bleeders filled in around us, and the men grabbed up their guns and got ready to fire down on them.
"Save your bullets," Jeremiah shouted. "They can't reach us up here."
"And then what," one of the men asked.
"If we wait long enough something else might catch their attention."
Silas agreed. We all decided to get some rest and eat from the few remaining packs of food. It would give us some time to figure out how to get out of another goddamn mess.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A few hours later the Bleeders were still in the exact same spot- underneath us, smelling like shit. A few days of eating people, pissing themselves and not showering wasn't doing them, or us, any favors.
The sun had long gone down and left us with a cool night. The dark was thick. The lot was unlit and the closest streetlights were back in the direction we'd run from. Most of our group was asleep on the other containers. Even the Bleeders seemed quieter in the dark, and it wasn't the first time I'd noticed it. Maybe with less things to see they weren't as excitable. It reminded me of the bird my mother used to have, how she would put a towel over the cage to make it sleep.
Deciding to check on them, I got down low to the cold metal until I was on my stomach and crawled to the edge. Jeremiah was faced the other way, his eyes closed, which was better since he probably wouldn't have approved of what I was doing.
Most of the Bleeders below were kind of just milling around, bumping into each other or standing still, but more than a few of them were actually asleep. They lay sprawled out on the ground or up against the container, waking up angrily when one of the others stepped on them or knocked into them. It was a weird reminder that these things may have acted like monsters, but they still had human bodies with limits. Eventually, even the strongest would get tired, eat, sleep. Somehow it made them even creepier to me.
I crawled away from the edge and sat up, only to find Jeremiah looking back at me.
"Jesus," I said with a jump. "You scared the shit out of me," I whispered.
"They don't like us," he said.
"The Bleeders? Are you kidding, they love us. Especially with barbecue sauce."
"Not them." He nodded to the group.
"If you haven't noticed, I don't like them much, either."
"But that's on their own merit. They don't like us because they think we're infected."
"We are infected."
He frowned. "You know what I mean."
I nodded to Alison, asleep on her own container. "They like her just fine."
"That's different."
"Because she's a woman?"
"Because she's their ticket out."
I moved closer and sat next to him facing the river. The dark water moved slowly in the night, reflecting the bit of moonlight that penetrated the smog. "I've been meaning to ask something."
"Shoot."
"In the back of that army truck, you said a word but you wouldn't explain what it was."
He nodded. "Conplan."
"So what is it?"
Jeremiah looked me straight in the eye and said, "It's the United States Government's zombie plan."
"Bull. Shit."
"I thought so too when I heard about it. They claimed it was an exercise, a training tool so ridiculous no one would mistake it as real. The public wouldn't get worked up about a real scenario the government was prepping for and not telling them about, and they could openly discuss a plan to defend and fight back against a major attack on home soil. They called it 'Counter-Zombie Dominance.' I read it myself."
"Are you saying they're actually following the plan?"
"It fits so far. Phase One was deterrence, which is basically just trying not to create them, so you can pretty much ignore that part. But Phase Two, that's where it gets interesting. When the alert is given that an actual attack is underway, one of the first steps is to ensure our nuclear-armed peers that our preparations are not an act of war."
"That's what the president did on the radio."
"And can you guess the other half of Phase One?"
I thought about it a second. "Quarantine," I said.
"And not just medical quarantines like the stadium. That means geographical as well. Areas of high concentration have to be locked down to slow the spread to lower concentration areas. Sound familiar?"
"Sweet mother of shit."
"You don't want to know what Phase Three is. Needless to say, it's why we need to get out of New York now."
I was quiet while I chewed it over. "Who were you," I asked.
He snorted. "What do you mean?"
"I mean I'm pretty sure I know who you are now, but I don't know who you were before. Not just all this," I gestured to our situation, "before everything."
"Who do you think I am now?"
I shrugged. "Well, you're...you know..."
"What?"
"Homeless."
"In case you didn't notice, we're all homeless." He nodded to all the people laying out on containers.
"Yeah, yeah, you know what I mean. So who were you before you were..."
"A bum."
"I didn't say that. But yeah, a bum."
"I'll tell you what," he said, "once we're on that boat and safely off-shore, I'll tell you everything you want to know."
"It's a deal."
He looked around at the stillness around us. Then he handed me a gun. "We need to start waking these people up," he said, looking a little edgy.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Quietly as we could, staying low and using the night as cover, Jeremiah and I hopped from container to container, waking everyone up and telling them to follow us. We all gathered on the container the furthest to the left side of the lot, which was the closest to where Nkosi said the dock should be. As we discussed our plan, we kept our voices down to not disturb our buddies stumbling around down below.
"Exactly how far is the boat from here," Jeremiah asked Nkosi. "We can't go into this blindly following you."
"It is right around this bend." He pointed past the white building to our left. "There is a strip of land with white stone which has a dock used by no one. We paid the man who owns this land so that we could keep our boat tied there."
"It'll hold all of us?"
"There are not many of us left," he said, which was true. We were down to eight people. "Yes, it will hold us."
"So here's the plan," Silas said. "Alison and Nkosi, when we go you'll stay at the middle of us four so we can make sure nothing happens to you. Brody, Jeremiah, you'll stay to our right and lead the Bleeders away."
"What?"
"Get to the end of that loading dock," he pointed. "When we have the boat, we'll circle around and pick you up."
I looked around at the nodding group. "Who decided this?"
"We did," Spanish Blood chimed in.
"No one invited me to the meeting."
"You are not the leader of us," Nkosi said. "You are not the leader of anyone because you do not know what you are doing."
"Oh, yeah? The fireworks worked pretty well, didn't they? Remember that?"
"You saved my life once, and have spent every minute since putting me back into danger."
I scoffed. "This wasn't even my idea! I wanted to hide back in that nice building with all the food, you guys are the ones who wanted to come out here and get on some fucking boat, to get to another boat that, even if it's still out there, probably won't even let you on!"
"Keep your voice down," Jeremiah said calmly. "It's a good plan. It'll work."
"They want to use us as bait while they sneak off the other way, and you're calling it a good plan?"
He put his hand on my shoulder. "I think we can all agree Alison is the most important element here. We need to protect her above anything else." Jeremiah gave me a look. I hated him for it, because I knew he was right.
"I don't agree with that," Alison protested. "Why should you risk your lives for me?"
"Alison," I said.
"You deserve the same chance I do."
I pulled Alison off to the side. "He's right. You have to make it out of here."
"Why do you care?"
The question caught me off guard. "Well...because you have to get back, you know? Start working on a cure."
"That's it?"
"What else do you need?"
She frowned, clearly disappointed by my answer. "What if there is no cure, Brody? What if all the research in the world isn't enough to save it?"
"Then we still need your connections to get onto that boat," Silas interrupted. "Like it or not, sugar, you're the most important person in this group, and maybe the city. So are we going to keep arguing, or are we going to get the hell out of this dump before it really starts to gets bad?"
I hated to think I agreed with him, but he was right. New York was only going to get worse from there on out. More than eight million people lived in the five Burroughs, yet we hadn't seen nearly enough people running around, not nearly enough bodies and Bleeders to explain where they'd all gone. Even if half of them had gotten out before the lockdown went into effect- which was almost impossible- that left four million panicked, psychotic or otherwise dangerous souls unaccounted for. That left one possibility I knew of- the rest of them must have listened to the emergency announcements and locked themselves indoors. But that would only last until either the food ran out, the water ran out, or they gave in to the virus.
Then they would start to come out.
After a bit more of us convincing Alison that she was in fact the package to be delivered, we worked out the details of the plan and got ready to leave under cover of dark.
Jeremiah was the first to move, like always. His huge feet barely made a sound when they hit the dirt on the river side, but two Bleeders lurking between the containers still noticed him. One of the bikers raised his gun to take them out, but Jeremiah waved them off. We had agreed that there would be no gunfire until we reached the docks, and not unless absolutely necessary.
The rest of us climbed and jumped down to the ground to help Jeremiah, but he was already dealing with the Bleeders. The first one tried to grab for him. He sidestepped its drive, pulled it off its feet and snapped its neck in one, frightening motion. As he let it go, the second struck him from behind and knocked him to the ground.
It's hard to explain what happened next in any other way, and believe me I've tried, but the Jeremiah that tumbled down into that dirt was not the same one that got back up. His eyes weren't just red but on fire with pure rage. That wave he gave the biker a few moments before for the sake of silence was ancient history. He screamed and ran at the Bleeder, slammed him into the shipping container and set to destroying the thing with his bare hands.
Seconds later, when he dropped the mutilated corpse like so much sticky garbage, the group was staring at him with horror on their faces.
He looked over at them with crazed eyes and said, "You should be running."
And they ran.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Jeremiah and I broke to the right toward the long loading pier while the rest of them, including Alison, broke left. The Bleeders were already stumbling their way around and between the shipping containers, drawn by the sounds of Jeremiah's vengeance, and we made sure they focused on us. We walked backwards and fired on them. Jeremiah hit one woman dead between the eyes. Blood and brains exploded out the back of her head and blinded the Bleeder behind her. I hit an old guy in the throat and his neck opened up wide. He kept coming, only mildly inconvenienced.