The officer in charge was a gray-haired man in good shape for his age. He climbed onto the bumper of one of the vehicles and aimed a bullhorn at the crowd.
"Your attention, please," he announced through the speaker. "We know you're looking for help, however this hospital has no room for you." People started to boo, but he continued. "It is filled beyond capacity. We ask that you leave and return to your homes, where you are to await further instructions."
The booing and shouting started to get worse. It reached a point where the officer with the bullhorn couldn't be heard, though he didn't stop trying.
"This is going from shitty to shittier," I said, and Jeremiah nodded.
In the middle of all the noise, a single scream just barely heard over the shouts caught my attention. It was a woman's voice, and I scanned the faces. A few shouts went up from the right side of the crowd. One man pointed and shouted something I couldn't quite make out.
"What did he say," I asked Jeremiah.
"It sounded like he said, 'Bleeder.'"
I followed the shouting man's eye line to a young Colombian woman holding a little boy, but I couldn't tell what he was yelling about. The woman looked fine to me, kind of hot, actually, maybe a little worried and stressed out but so did everyone.
Then I noticed the little boy's eyes.
He must have been asleep in her arms, because he was leaned over her shoulder looking around at the crowd as if for the first time. But it wasn't the look of a little boy. Maybe that's what he fell asleep as, but he had woken up something else. There was anger in those red eyes. Anger, and hunger.
"I think it's time to go," I said, looking around for a way out. The crowd had only gotten thicker, and behind us was no different.
The mother realized the growing shouts were aimed at her. She checked her boy's face and gasped at what she saw. It was heartbreaking to see, even for a prick like me.
Even with the way he looked, she tried to cover him up, to protect him from the eyes of the crowd. In return, he attacked her, viciously biting her face.
Her screams became the screams of the crowd. Panic moved through them in seconds, sending people scattering in every direction. They pushed and shoved and tripped over each other, desperately trying to get away.
"Go, now," I shouted, and Jeremiah pushed through the people behind us. I followed in the wake he made, like a running back cutting a hole up the field. In the middle of all the panic and running a gunshot rang out. Whether it was from the cops or someone else I couldn't tell, but in moments like that you realize it doesn't matter much. A bullet is a bullet.
Jeremiah tripped over a man huddled on the ground and went down hard. I helped him up and we ran again, finally clearing the thickest part of the crowd. We caught our breath behind an abandoned food cart and looked back the way we came. It was still absolute chaos, and a freaking miracle we somehow made it out.
"Shit," Jeremiah said. "He was just a kid."
"Not anymore."
With panicked people running around us, and screams that sounded like a second attack starting, we took off again. As we ran, that word was still echoing in my head, the word I'd heard from the man in the crowd. It was the first time I'd heard it, yet somehow I knew it wouldn't be the last.
Bleeder.
CHAPTER TEN
Jeremiah knew of a place in Hamilton Heights where we could hide until things blew over. Getting help for our bites was still right near the top on our list of priorities, but we decided there wouldn't be much point in finding meds if we had no throats to swallow them. I asked him why we couldn't pick somewhere closer and he said it was because he was "Thinking long term." I asked what he meant but he didn't explain himself any further. I wasn't in any condition to argue, and he was starting to look worse by the block, so I left it alone.
The thing that amazed me was all the people we saw just going about their day. Lawyers taking cabs. Kids staring down at their phones. Halal stands and newspaper booths operating business as usual. I knew us New Yorkers were a stubborn group, but by now there had to be reports of what was going on. The hospital alone, what happened there, should have been scary enough for half of Manhattan to call out sick, but the streets were still busy with the rat race.
I had a flash of myself watching TV earlier that day, like nothing could hurt me, about ten minutes before something did. If I could go back in time I'd punch that asshole in the face.
We got as far north as West 131st Street without seeing anything crazy. Jeremiah said we were getting close as he slowed down to peek around the side of a building. "Which is usually when everything goes to shit," I mumbled. He said it was all clear and we turned the corner.
As we waited for the signal to change to cross the street, a woman waiting on the opposite corner caught my eye. She wore a red dress with white patterns, and she looked confused about where she was. She looked back and forth frantically until her eyes landed on me with what looked like recognition.
"Shit," I hissed. Through the passing cars I could see now her dress wasn't red with white patterns- it was white with red bloodstains.
Just like her eyes.
"It's a Bleeder," Jeremiah said.
She broke into a run, bolting into the street without looking. One taxi swerved to miss her and she didn't even notice the car screech around her, the front bumper just missing her leg. She continued to run right at me.
The moment she stepped into the next lane, a second taxi plowed into her. Her head bounced off the taxi's hood so hard we could hear the dull thud from where we stood fifty feet away. The driver slammed on his brakes and she rolled off the car and onto the street where she rolled to a stop face down.
Brakes and tired screeched. Traffic stopped dead. The woman wasn't moving. The driver of the taxi jumped out, already on his phone. He was freaking out, and I felt bad for the guy. If only I could tell him the blood he saw on the woman's dress was already there when he hit her.
The woman stirred and tried to get up off the street but her arms were broken. She got to her feet somehow and stumbled toward the taxi driver. At first he walked toward her, trying to help her, but then he saw the look on her face and began to realize what he was looking at. In that moment, I could see everything he'd seen on the news crashing down on his head.
He was realizing what we already had- that it was all true.
Before he could get back into his taxi, the woman lunged for him. With broken arms she fell on him and knocked him into his seat. His screams rose up from inside the taxi, while all around them other drivers began to catch on.
We didn't want to wait for the woman in the blood dress to remember us. As we ran the other way, I saw what I thought were fellow citizens coming to help the man. Then I got a good look at their faces, and that's when the real fear set in.
Bleeders, five or six of them. They were making their way through traffic, attacking people at random. There was no pattern to their movements, which made them all the more unpredictable. It seemed there was also no pattern to the kind of person the Red Flu preferred. They were old, young, man, woman. It didn't matter what race they were; the sickness didn't care. An equal opportunity virus.
Two of them came at us. One was a heavy man in a striped sweater and light blue coat with half his mouth hanging down his chin in flaps. The other was a blonde woman in a denim coat and pink skirt with a hole punched in her gut. Like the woman who had just been struck by the taxi, neither of them seemed the least bit bothered by their injuries. It was as if their pain switch had been flipped to the off position.
"Yeah, so we need to get the fuck out of here," I said to Jeremiah.
He agreed. "This way," he said, and we ran.
We cut back a block and turned right, trying to circle around wide enough to go around the mess on 131st Street, but the Bleeders weren't giving up. They followed us, and they were fast. Their speed wasn't superhuman or anything, but it was like they were hopped up on adrenaline. They didn't care if they fell, they didn't care what they looked like, and they definitely didn't save anything for later. They were pure drive, and what drove them was killing and eating.
Every move we made, they followed. Every step we took, they gained one. I noticed an alley up ahead, blocked by a security fence, and I shouted at Jeremiah to take the turn.
We hit the fence hard and climbed it as fast as we could, clambering up and over it and jumping down on the other side as the Bleeders crashed into it. My body hated me. My fingers hurt from the fence, my joints from the impact, and meanwhile on the inside I could feel the infection burning me up like a poison soaking through every part of me.
The Bleeders clawed and smashed at the fence and screamed at us from the other side. "Why don't they climb," I asked Jeremiah, trying to catch my breath.
"I don't know. Maybe they're too dumb."
"Too dumb to climb a fence?"
"Look at them," he said, and I did. They were anger incarnate. "It's like they're so focused on what they want, they refuse to see anything else."
Mind blind, I thought. It was true, they barely seemed aware of the fence, only that something was in their way. Their eyes drilled into us so intensely it sent a chill up my back, like we were the one thing in the world they wanted more than anything. It would almost be flattering if they weren't trying to kill us.
After we caught our breath in the delightful smell of the dirty alley, and with a soundtrack of angry screams and repeated clawing and crashing against the fence, it was time to get back to it. We needed to get off the streets while there was still more of us than there were of them. At the rate New York was falling apart, that didn't give us much time. We turned the other way to exit out the other side of the alley, took about two steps and stopped dead.
At the opposite end of the short alley, four Bleeders stared at us through the fence.
"I think we're trapped," Jeremiah said.
"Really," I asked, "is that what you think?"
The four of them lunged, screaming and shaking the fence. To make things worse, the fence must have come loose a while ago because someone had fixed it by tying it to the wall with a bunch of wire. The noise stirred up the two Bleeders behind us all over again, and they smashed their fists on the fence even harder.
We needed to find a way out before they drew more attention. Jeremiah ran to the only door in the entire alley while I looked for a fire escape we could reach. I knew there was no way that door was unlocked. He pulled on the handle and, of course, it didn't open.
The lowest fire escape I could find was still way too high a jump. Maybe if we stacked a few garbage pails we could climb up and reach it. It was our only chance at this point. "Help me," I shouted as I dragged the closest pail under the fire escape. Jeremiah left the locked door behind and grabbed two plastic crates. It was insane to think our lives depended on a bunch of trash in a random alley that smelled like sour milk, but that's where we'd found ourselves.
You don't see these things coming.
Jeremiah stacked the crates on top of the garbage pail and I started to climb them. We heard a sharp snap as the wire holding the fence broke under the weight of the four Bleeders. They didn't even notice it happened, but as they kept pushing on the fence it began to move.
I looked down at Jeremiah. "Move," he said.
As the Bleeders began to stumble through, and their shouts grew more excited, I got to the top of the unsteady tower of trash. Jeremiah held my ankles as I reached for the sliding fire escape ladder above. It was out of my reach by at least two feet. My stomach knotted up as I glanced back at the four infected crazies tripping over each other to get into the alleyway.
"Focus," Jeremiah scolded.
"I can't reach it!"
"Try again!"
I stretched as far as I could, up on my toes with my fingers straining to so much as touch the metal, but it couldn't be done. I lost my balance and tipped forward, falling awkwardly from the trash tower and back down to the ground. I caught myself against the wall and looked back at the Bleeders. Clear of the broken fence, they ran at us with hunger in their bleeding eyes. They would be on us in seconds, and there were too many of them to fight off.
We had no options left. We went back to the fence behind us and climbed it again, kicking at the faces of the two Bleeders on the other side to keep them from biting. I was bone tired, but I put everything I had into scaling that fence.
At the top, Jeremiah and I straddled the fence and held on tight as the other four Bleeders crashed into it. Thankfully that fence wasn't broken like the other one, and it held under the impact of their bodies.
On both sides of us, Bleeders pawed and slapped at the fence, reaching out with their bloody hands. It wasn't the same desperation like I had reached for the ladder with. Theirs was out of hunger. Blood lust.
All I could think as I looked down at their snarling faces was, Would that be me soon? Would I become one of those face-chewing monsters?