That you, an insane person after all, would hold the answer, the road map to redemption for mankind’s newest plague?
It-or I-was laughing, genuinely amused.
Isn’t it just a tad more likely that you’re back in your bed, strapped to the steel frame, frothing at the mouth?
No. It wasn’t possible. That would be absurd.
Oh really? Can’t you see why you’d create this story? You’re an actor for God’s sake, you know scripts. What better to redeem your deepest regret; your darkest, vilest hour, than a new story? One where Maria is a hero, and you-a washed out movie star-hold the answer to mankind’s very salvation and can act in one final role as the goddamn savior of the human race! One where you aren’t a certifiable whack job, destined to drool out your lonely, pitiful days in a state sanatorium and, with this, the tone changed from aggressive to sly, there’s a chance that this little flame you’re harboring deep down for Doctor Hottie might get stoked a little higher, a little hotter? Can you say happy ending?
More laughter, now, amused more at the joke than the concept.
My head was silent for a moment, my mind afire with the agony of this possibility; my confusion and my anger boiled inside me, guilt and weariness battling for supremacy over my tortured head. Doubt crept into an unwanted corner of my consciousness, perched just out of range but clamoring for my attention nonetheless.
Or, this, the voice said dismissively and effecting the verbal picture of a shrug, maybe it is real.
You could jump down there and find out. See if mind can really win out over matter.
My foot moved, and my arm was pushing against the floor-did I ask it to do that?-to lever myself up, when the torture of this internal dialogue was interrupted by the hiss of the radio, much clearer, much more intelligible than the last transmission. Kate started awake, eyes sleepy but alert. Fred grunted, still asleep.
“This is Lieutenant Hartliss of the HMS Liverpool, and I am approximately 3 kilometers from your location,” the voice was loud and confident; I noticed in passing that he pronounced Lieutenant left-tenant. Ha. Silly Brits.
“You should be able to make my location. I am flying West Northwest and need a situation report prior to pickup. Please advise on number of party and infection status. Over.” The British accent was much clearer with the radio in better form.
Scanning the horizon, I picked up the unmistakable insect-like shape of a helicopter flying low over the tree line. The same helicopter I had seen on our flight from the expressway. In my pain and self-doubt, I over-compensated with joviality.
“Tell him to hang a left, and look for the tower with the three jolly idiots parked on top. No nibbles yet, but our friends downstairs would love to fix that for us.”
She relayed my comments, smiling out of the corner of her mouth, and we saw the helicopter bank in our direction.
“We’ll need to lower a rope ladder to you, and each person should come up one at a time. We cannot land, given the infestation of your position. Confirm you understand. Over.”
“That’s fine Lieutenant,” Kate replied. “We’re just happy to see you guys and anxious to get off this tower.”
As an afterthought, she threw in “Over.”
The steady, low-pitched thumping of the rotors got closer. The helicopter circled the tower once, and lowered itself into position over our perch, about thirty feet up. A rope ladder came into view on the front side, over the lawn and our parked truck, whipping from side to side in the downdraft produced by the spinning blades. The creatures below, on the roof and on the ground, howled their displeasure at the whirling blades above their heads. I wondered whether they had enough cognition to realize they were being denied a meal.
Fred, having been awakened by the thrumming rotors overhead, was the first to go. He was also the most reluctant. Looking over the edge to the milling creatures below, which were aggravated by the activity above, Fred considered the rope ladder hanging precariously before the railing and promptly sat down. Head shaking, he crossed his arms and looked stubbornly to the distant tree line, frowning and not meeting either of our gazes. Finally, after much cajoling, and the offer of a candy bar by Kate, he rose, tentatively reaching out to the gently undulating rope, and climbed out.
Kate went next, packing up the radio and quickly reaching for and navigating the ladder as I held it steady, waiting my turn. When she reached the top, she turned, gesturing, and I caught the closest rung, stepping out over the abyss, the vibrating rope my lifeline above a mass of ghouls whose upturned faces and open, drooling mouths gaped wide. Shuddering, I gripped the lines firmly, and pulled myself aloft. As I reached the top and heaved my torso onto the floor of the chopper with the assistance of the crewman, I heaved a sigh of relief.
I sat next to Kate on the hard steel bench seat against the aft bulkhead, and looked back down at the school as the helicopter banked hard and away. The roof was a solid carpet of creatures, their bodies colliding against one another in their haste to feed, but their urges frustrated by our escape. The lawn and the football field were similarly covered, although the ghouls wandering those areas were milling with less purpose, shambling from spot to spot, brought here by the promise to feed, but denied the pleasure: now sentenced to a temporary purgatory of hunger and purposelessness.
The engine was a monstrous roar as we were instructed with hand gestures to don large, insulated headsets complete with microphones and muffled ear pads. We pulled upward and my stomach lurched, as the crewmember manning the ladder and winch turned to us, lifting his sun visor. He smiled crookedly as he grabbed the doorframe for support. He was a young man, probably no more than twenty or twenty-one, freckled face undisturbed by the scene he had witnessed probably dozens of times already.
He spoke, the upbeat English accent lending an Oliver Twist flavor to the event and rendering the moment slightly more absurd.
“Welcome aboard,” his greeting crackled over our headsets. “You lucky chaps just caught the last taxi out of hell.”
Chapter 14
“Last?” asked Kate into her mouthpiece, leaning forward, her comment coming through clearly in my own earphones as he nodded.
“The ship is at capacity, but we were on our way back out for one last patrol before wrapping it up when we got your call.” He shook his head, still smiling at us. “You were very fortunate to have rung us when you did. Lieutenant Hartliss was already in his bunk drinking tea when we got your call; at least mentally” he joked, looking over his shoulder at the pilot, who was mostly obscured by the front bulkhead.
“Not that I don’t appreciate the effort,” I interjected, “but what is a British ship doing parked in the Bay and running search and rescue over Long Island?”
He frowned, with a sardonic twist to his mouth and eyes, “We just happened to be the lucky buggers picked for joint maneuvers with your Navy off the East Coast for the last month. We were fitting out for our return jog when all this mess started up.” He looked out the open door, gesturing down as he did so, eyes squinting against the glare of the sun, small mouth tightening with what could pass for anxiety.
Fred was seated across the cabin from us, watching our interactions with an unusually astute expression. When the crewman gestured to the door and the landscape below, he sat up, watching intently as if something was expected of him.
“It’s a right mess down there, no doubt. We’ve picked up twenty-six survivors so far, and we’re not getting many more distress calls.”
Kate looked to me and back to the crewman, hugging herself in the cold air. “Who’s picking up the rest of the survivors? I mean, millions of people lived in the City, on Long Island and Jersey. There have to be more survivors out there. More people like us?”
The frown laced with sorrow was out of place on such a young face. He looked back to the door, shaking his head. “Twenty-eight calls. Twenty-six pickups. Like I said,” he said quietly, “a right mess.”
Kate was leaning toward the door, looking down as we traveled west over the Island, toward the Bay.
“Mike,” she said, transfixed by what she saw, wisps of hair escaped from the headset batting against her face as the cold wind blasted the cabin, “you should see this.”
I looked out the window on my right. Smoke from hundreds of fires made tunnels of black into the gray autumn sky. The expressways were packed with cars, none of which were moving. Zombies were everywhere, moving individually and in groups, threading clumsily between cars and buildings, over streets and fields - no reason or method to their shambling.
On a large, four lane road below, we were forced to watch as dozens of creatures converged on two people who had clearly just been dragged from the back of a motorcycle. A man and a woman, both in what looked from this height like leather riding gear, struggled and squirmed on the pavement as zombies pawed and grasped at their limbs and exposed flesh. Details from our height were blessedly indiscernible, but I could see enough to be sick.
Green woods and gray concrete made a patchwork quilt of civilization, the appearance of which was shattered when the mind imposed upon it the reality of the moving forms below. If you concentrated, you could almost make believe that the shambling forms, so apparently inhuman from above, were the same people they had been. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. Friends and lovers. Until recently, each of these shambling specks had lives; they had hopes, dreams and fears. Now they had no hope, no dreams. Their lives were forfeit to this plague. And they had become our fears.
How many people that used to live in these peaceful-looking homes, who used to work at these stolid, boring offices? How many of us had died in the space of days? Thousands? Millions? What the fuck was going on?
And is it real?
I had to admit, I had my doubts.
But as I watched the earth unfold below me, I realized what I had to do. Not just because it might actually help others, but because I needed to know. I had to know that I was sane; that Maria wasn’t involved-that the dreams and the memories weren’t coincidence, and they weren’t inconsequential. I desperately wanted to believe that, somehow, I had escaped the first round of carnage with knowledge that might lead to finding a cure to this hellish plague. I couldn’t ignore that possibility.
Unfortunately, neither could the fact that Maria’s lab was miles away and that I was, legally speaking of course, insane.
That might impact my ability to convince people that my memories were real and that, in some huge convenient coincidence, I happened to be married to someone who may have contributed to causing this but who also might have possessed knowledge of the cure.
Well, I knew what I had to do. I’d deal with figuring out how to do it later.
Eastchester Bay was off the starboard side, and we were flying relatively low, maybe a thousand feet. From below, a car moving too fast careened into a mass of creatures, shattering against the side of a building and exploding in a sheet of flame. The creatures that were left standing moved to the car’s ruined hulk, ignoring the flames and allowing themselves to become engulfed, turning their already dead bodies into moving torches with a singular goal of feeding. As they reached into the car, it passed out of sight, denying me the absurd pleasure of witnessing their disappointment at finding their meal to be well-done, rather than rare.
A massive fire was burning out of control ahead, looking like it had engulfed an entire town. The crewman caught me looking and followed my gaze. “Used to be a town there, about thirty survivors. We caught a distress call from ‘em about an hour ago. Seems they had barricaded themselves in and were being overrun and couldn’t hold off the you-know-whats.”
“Did you help?”
He chuckled. “Bloody well didn’t! Those bastards shot at us a day ago on a fly-by; Lieutenant held back after that. Besides, if we had landed, we would have been swamped. This bucket can only carry six.” He nodded his head toward the fire. “But we were glad to oblige with some rockets when they were overrun.”
We passed over the marina, most boats still attached to their moorings, some wallowing half-sunk in the shallow water. The Bay was relatively quiet but for those that had made it away and were apparently anchored not far off shore, confused and directionless. Bodies littered the pavement of the parking lot, but it was impossible to tell whether they were human or zombie. As we flew over the last pier, a moving crowd caught my attention, and I looked back to the crewman.
“Looks like a crowd-maybe survivors down here,” I said, pointing. He stood up, crouching, and moved across the cabin.
“No, mate. Look closer. See how they move? See how slow they’re walking? Those are zeds, right as rain.”
Zeds? I did see, and the pilot must have too, as the chopper banked hard to the right, and a new voice-the voice from the radio-sounded in the headphones. “I think I make two at the end of the dock; get the ladder ready for a pickup.”
“Aye, sir,” as he moved back to the winch, checking the harness.
I looked out again. The crowd, there must have been hundreds of them, was moving toward the end of the dock where two people stood, looking from the edge to the crowd and back again. One waived at us as we banked in hard and accelerated. Not fast enough-we couldn’t possibly get there in time. The zombies were going to beat us there.
“Lock the cabin,” came a terse order from the pilot, a young voice: young but unafraid. The helicopter accelerated even more, pushing us against our seats, and moving fast and low toward the dock. I could no longer see from the side window, but was able to peer straight ahead from the pilot’s viewpoint, as the chopper lined up right into the crowd.
“Aye, sir,” again as the door was locked open, the ladder bound tight, and the overhead compartment housing the headgear was shoved closed.
Suddenly from either side of the cabin, twin bright flashes erupted in an epileptic’s nightmare of white light roared out of the side-mounted canons with the impossibly amplified buzzing of millions of wasps. From the front window, twin rows of destruction sprayed a path of splintering wood and ruptured bodies before us as we moved toward the end of the dock. Reaching the end, the pilot banked hard, bringing the left side of the chopper almost horizontal to the dark water below, and then slammed the controls back to the right, the helicopter righting itself abruptly, this time facing the oncoming horde and hovering thirty feet above the surface of the wooden planking.