I go to the first door on the right, the owner's flat. She must have furniture I can use, a sturdy chest of drawers or something.
I try to kick the door open but fail. My foot hurts from the impact. I try again, growing more frantic as the hailstorm becomes a thunder. How many zombie body battering rams can my door take? I kick again, then throw my shoulder into it, before I remember the landlady keeps a key under the rug. I drop to one knee and flip up the frayed Persian and voila, key. I open it up.
The door leads directly into a dark and dank living room full of heaps of junk stacked high to the ceiling; a hoarder's paradise. It smells of moldy plaster and old newspapers, likely because there are tall piles of newspapers and magazines tied in coarse string bundles filling the room like pillars.
This is my salvation. I grab a heavy block of newsprint in each hand and carry them down the hall to stack at the door. It is weirdly reminiscent of building with blocks in Deepcraft. I make ten frantic trips more and build a wall of solid paper bricks three wide and seven high in the entrance hall.
My chest heaves up and down with panting, but at least the thumping from outside is muffled now. Will it hold? It might. If it's anything like as strong as the door to the landlady's room, it will. Either way I'm hanging by a thread.
Lara.
I run up the stairs. Any day of the last year I would have been collapsed on the floor disabled by twinges, but today I feel vital and alive. On the top floor I shuffle the key out and jiggle my room open, then step back into familiarity.
It's almost quiet up here, with the thumping four stories distant. My room's soothing smells are on the air; green tea, bolognese, fresh sheets, but Lara is not here. I look to the bed, to the desk, even out the window, but she isn't here.
"What the hell…" I mumble.
In her place the bed has been made and there's a note lying on the pillow, written in neat handwriting. I snatch it up and read it three times.
I had a great time. You have my number. Good luck with the zombies. Lara. xx
I sag to the bed and laugh. This is utterly crazy.
My phone rings. I pick it up and see it's an incoming Skype call from Cerulean, with a history of thirty-three missed calls. I've had his number for all these past six months, but we've never actually spoken.
I slap answer and hold it to my ear.
5 – PHONE
"Cerulean," I say into the receiver, "holy shit, Cerulean you're alive."
A moment passes and he says nothing, during which time I feel like I'm falling, then his voice comes through, weak and high.
"Amo?"
"It's me, I'm here, shit I saw your message earlier, I thought you were talking about the date then I went outside and damn, it's been crazy, the girl's gone, the whole city's been turned to zombies, what the hell is going on?"
"Amo," he says again, his voice getting clearer now, a deep Midwestern drawl. "I'd just about given up, I've been calling and texting you for hours. You say you went outside?"
I take a deep breath. Abruptly tears start coursing down my face. Shit, this is Cerulean, and it's our first time to talk.
"The twinges are gone. I went out to get coffee and the world's gone crazy. They're everywhere. They chased me up and down Mott Haven. Planes were falling from the sky, New York is burning. What's going on?"
"Calm down. Amo, I know. I've been watching it all night, it started around midnight and it spread across the country in hours. They were calling it a disease vector carried on the gulfstream, until it got them too and most of the news outlets went out. Twitter went down while they were trying to evacuate, but most people were at home asleep in their beds. The whole country's gone down, I'm surprised the internet is even up still, phone service and texts went down hours ago. I thought I'd call you until my uplink went dead, and then…" he trails off.
I stifle my tears and stare wide-eyed out the window.
"The whole country's gone down?"
"They're all zombies, Amo. This thing is instantly virulent, one breath and you're infected. You've seen them so you know. I saw them on the news; there were videos up on YouTube before that went down too. A few websites are still working, so I Googled everything I could find and downloaded it to our shared drive on your computer. You'll need to know this stuff, I've got reams on the prepper lifestyle, survival tactics and strategies, how to make weapons and how to find weapons, how to rig a generator and hotwire a car, siphoning fuel from a station, all that kind of stuff. It's good I did because Wikipedia has just gone down, I guess they didn't get enough donations."
He gives a scrappy laugh. I'm struggling to catch up with everything he's saying. My heart's still pounding from the run.
"What are you talking about? Cerulean?"
He takes a deep breath. "Amo, I'm cured too. The twinges are gone and I'm thinking clearly. I'm not a zombie, but everyone else is. You said everyone you saw in New York is a zombie? They're all zombies, as far as I can tell. Now you need to survive."
"Sure, but-" I begin then trail off. There's something missing. "What about you?"
He laughs. "My brain got better but I'm still a cripple, buddy. Where do you think I'm going to go? I'm busting for a piss but is my mom going to come down and take me to the toilet? More likely she'll come down and tear out my throat. She's banging on the basement door even now, she's been at it all night, her and a few dozen others. It sounds like they're pulling up the floor overhead, actually."
"What the-" I start. "She's a zombie?"
I can hear him smiling. God I love Cerulean. That fit, handsome, paraplegic bastard. His mom's upstairs coming for him and he's been calling me all this time, trying to save me. "Of course she is, and it's not to bring me a batch of midnight cookies."
I get to my feet, deciding instantly. I look around the room taking stock of what I'll need. "Where are you? I have your address here somewhere. I'll come get you. I'll get you out."
He laughs softly. I picture the only Cerulean I've ever seen images of on Google, the dark young man on the dive platform or the medal stand, full of confidence and in his prime, ready to take on the Olympics and the world and make them his own. "Don't be silly, Amo. You'll never get here in time. The basement door's been iffy for years; it won't take much longer for them to get down here. They'll come through the floor in a day or two anyway. Don't worry about me, I've got a syringe here and I know what to do with it."
The blood drains from my head and I go dizzy. I'm still looking round my room urgently, like there might be an answer here when there cannot be.
"What do you mean, you've got a syringe?"
"It's all right," he says. "Sit down. Are you somewhere safe, Amo? Are you in your room, are you barricaded in?"
"I don't-" I begin, then look at the door. I can hear them thumping faintly from downstairs. "I'm in the tenement. I blocked up the front door, but there's probably hundreds of them out there now. I don't-"
"Block up your room," he says. "Do it now. Wedge the bed against the door, wedge something against that if you can. They're not smart but they're persistent, and you're in no state to take to the streets again. You need to lie low and get your head straight, Amo, if you're going to get through this. Do you hear me?"
"I-"
"Deadbolt the door and wedge it in. Use everything you've got. Do it right now. I'll still be here. Put the phone on speaker and do it now. I want to hear it happening."
I take the phone from my head and stare at it blankly for a moment. I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
"Amo!"
I remember and click the button for speaker. I hear the distant sound of Cerulean's home somewhere in the Midwest filter into my New York apartment. There is his breathing and the sound of an air conditioning unit, circulating round the cement basement that's been his prison cell since the incident.
I shake myself and look to the bed, then the door, and start moving to bring them together. The bed drags noisily out of the recessed wall. I push its headboard flush against the door. The board is a metal lattice that reaches three quarters up the height of the door, so even if one of the zombies get in the house and successfully punch a hole through the door, they'll still have to get over the headboard's metal slats.
"I've done the bed," I shout to Cerulean. "I'm getting the desk."
"Good. Don't damage your computer, you're going to need that."
I lift my monitor carefully off, then drag the desk to the tail of the bed. Laid end on, it fits almost perfectly between the bed and the wall, wedged into place. It's going nowhere. They'd have to bend the bed's metal frame or push it through the wall to get in, and I don't see either of those happening. That's more force than human bodies can muster.
I drop to the floor by the side of the bed and start to shake.
"I've done it," I say to the phone, turning it off speaker mode and holding it back to my ear.
"Good, good. Now you need to relax. We can talk about something that really matters. How did your date with the Tomb Raider girl go?"
I laugh beside myself. I scratch at the wooden floor with a fingernail.
"It went fine. It went great. She came back here, but she's gone now. The note she left Cerulean, it's mad."
"Call me Robert," he says. "That's my name."
More tears pour down my cheeks. "I know. OK, Robert."
"Are you crying? Come on old buddy. Pull yourself together. It's not the end of the world. Just the end of most of it. You said she's gone?"
I laugh. I rub my eyes. "I don't know. I think so, yes she's gone. She left a note, it said 'Good luck with the zombies'. She was talking about the comic, but Christ, look at this shit Cerulean. I mean Robert. Where the hell is she now?"
"Probably running halfway down Manhattan, if she's not already infected. Calm your ass down, Amo. What are you going to do for her now? She'll either get safe or she won't, on her own. You're lucky you're alive. You know how many people out there who're immune? Do you have any idea?"
"No idea. I didn't see any. Maybe her?"
"Maybe her. On top of that there's me and there's you. I've not seen any others, Amo, not any at all. Every live video feed I saw got corrupted in seconds, because the people filming it were infected. It's the most virulent thing ever. It's like that cat in the box, the second you open the box to see if it's alive or not, it drags you in so you're inside the box too. There's no time to report out."
I laugh through my tears. "Schrodinger's cat. I don't think that's how it works."
"Whatever. Listen Amo, it can't be a coincidence that it's me and you, and maybe her. Did she have the same condition as us, did she have a coma then recover like us?"
I wince as I try to recall. "She said she burned out. I don't think she was twingeing though. I don't think so."
"Well maybe you'll find out. Perhaps proximity to you conferred immunity. I'm pretty sure we're immune, Amo, because whatever is hitting them now hit us a year ago. Do you follow? Some lesser strain hit us, but it acted like a vaccine, so now we're safe. We went blank, we died multiple times, but they brought us back. Maybe if we hadn't been brought back, we'd be like these others out on the streets now. We got saved."
I shudder. I'm grasping at straws now.
"You're alive," is all I can say.
He laughs. "I am."
We sit in silence for a while. My room comes back to me. I look up at my Banksy picture, the guy throwing the flowers. I wonder, is Banksy a zombie now too? Is Space Invader?
"I can come for you," I say. "I'll get a nice car and make it there in a day. I'll drive all night."
"That's a lyric from a song isn't it?"
"Stop it! Tell me your address and I'll come."
"No you won't. Why in hell would you come here Amo, to see my bitten-out corpse laid up in a bloody cradle stinking of methadone and shit? I'll not have that. I won't be alive by then, Amo. Understand that. Accept that, and we can move on. I've downloaded everything I can think of to your computer, plus a few extras I've had the time to come up with. The fulfillment center will be a bit different. I think it's going to be pretty important to you, going forward, or for a while at least. There are some new routines. You'll figure it out. Until then we can talk."
I sag. "I want to come."
"I want you to come too. Don't you think I'd love that, if you could come charging in now and rescue me from this mess? But you can't. It's not going to happen, so let's move on. We've never even spoken before, have we? Hi, Amo, I'm Robert. I'm a freak just like you. We might be the last two people alive in the world."
I laugh. "Hi Robert, I'm Amo. It's good to meet you. I don't want you to die."
"So tell me about the date," he says. "Tell me everything."
I do. It starts off jerky and unclear, but soon I'm rolling. He laughs as I pull the move inspired by Hank on her. He goes quiet when I bring her home. He listens while I pull the guy apart out on Willis Avenue.
"It's a good memory, on the whole," he says. "You'll need to hang on to that, Amo. You will, won't you? She might be alive out there. You might be able to find her. Hold on to that. You'll put out some flags and let her now where you are. You'll figure this thing out and make it right. I know you will. You've always been resourceful, and smart, and so damn charming."
I laugh.
"It's good you can laugh. Don't forget that Amo. Don't you dare feel guilty. I want it to be you, not me. You're a good man. You're the best friend I've ever had. I want you to get good things out of this and become better for it. There's always room to grow. When I lost my legs and I knew I could never dive anymore, I just about gave up. Then I found this weird guy who'd built a weird mod on Deepcraft, and he welcomed me in. He loaned me a diviner and we fulfilled stupid orders together. I saw the world through him, and I'm still seeing the world through him now. Amo, you're going to be OK."