He parked Matthew's yellow van at the intersection of 43
rd
and 7
th
Street, then rolled out in the wheelchair. It was a sunny and warm day, with the wind blowing little zephyrs of dust along the curbs, fluttering against chip packets trapped in fleshless ribcages.
He sat before Amo's RV and looked at the dark matter streaking sides, all dry now, like the scar over an old wound. All of Times Square felt that way.
"I'm back," Robert said. His voice was clearer now; weeks of rolling in his chair, of eating and drinking, had brought his strength back.
"I guess you didn't expect me again. Though you never even knew I was here."
Amo atop the RV said nothing, surrounded by his tall ammo crates. He'd be a skeleton now too, a scar instead of an open wound.
"That hurt," Robert said. The catch in his voice surprised him. He thought he'd been through all the emotion he could take. "I wish you'd seen me. I wish you'd just looked."
Amo said nothing.
"You were my only friend, you know. I wish you'd waited."
He didn't have any more to say after that, so he rolled up to the ladder at the back. On the lower rungs there were dark clots of bloody matter from when he'd tried to climb it before. Now he pulled himself up the rungs with ease, rising hand over hand, until he looked down on the RV roof.
Amo wasn't there.
* * *
He sat on the RV's roof and watched the sun scroll by overhead, trying to decide if Amo being alive was worse or better than Amo being dead. It was good, and he was glad, but either way it didn't make him feel any hope.
It just made him feel tired.
He peered over the ammo crate edge, considering a dive. It seemed poetic justice, but from this height he'd almost certainly fail again. Fall, crunch, perhaps he'd lose the use of his left arm, his right, or better yet he'd be blinded.
No. He could do better than that.
* * *
The Empire State Building was only a few blocks away, according to a map he smashed out of a dispenser box, so he rolled toward it down streets lines with broken vehicles. Thoughts of the dive to come inflamed him; the most amazing arm-stand the world had ever seen, 60-odd stories of flight all the way to the street. He'd punch right through the asphalt, all the judges in the world would flash up 10s, and the burning emptiness inside would finally be wiped away.
He turned on 34
th
Street, weaving through traffic and starting to feel excited. The entrance was just ahead, and he entered through the tall narrow doors.
The lobby was stunning even in the half-light cast from the street, with rich marble floors and gilt golden walls in a vaulted hallway. At the end a glinting image of the Empire State Building hung in gold relief, though atop it somebody had strung up a chalkboard there, with gridlines and two entries at the top.
Amo – Last Mayor of America 06/08/2018
Lara – Last Barista in America 06/30/2018
Robert laughed and laughed so much he cried.
Amo and Lara, Lara and Amo. There was a map painted onto the floor, outlining a path to the West Coast and Los Angeles, and he imagined Amo and Lara chasing each other along it like Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle. Their paths had crossed at the Empire State and now they were forever linked.
It was beautiful, in a way. It made him happy for them, that they could survive and go on to thrive. He wished them all the best wishes in the world.
But it wasn't for him. He needed to dive.
That was the only way to forget Matthew and make himself clean again. He'd crawled through too much blood to go back now, and the emptiness inside had cut too deep. The thought of diving shone like a star before him, offering the chance to return to the Robert he'd once been, so full of potential and hope, before it all went so wrong. He dreamed of flight all the way to the ground, where having no legs wouldn't matter at all.
He rolled forward.
At the head of the lobby Amo had set out several desks beneath the chalkboard, laden with an interesting array of bits: laptop computers and bowls of USB sticks, a bowl of car keys and maps, wires and generators and red gas canisters stacked neatly like the entrance to a prepper Wal-Mart, even ten chrome Nespresso machines, each with a neat stack of shiny, multicolored coffee pods beside it, like zombies in a heap.
He smiled. Amo was funny, even after what he'd done. He'd survived, the bastard, and this was his world now. Good for him.
Robert wheeled into the darkness down a side corridor, looking for the stairs. It would be a long crawl up, but that was part of the excitement. He found them in a broad vertical chamber lit with faint light from far above, stretching up and up in a square spiral, and completely thronged with zombies.
He hadn't expected that.
"Jesus Christ," he whispered.
A heavy barred security gate had been latched across the bottom of the wide stairwell, behind which squirmed and breathed a mass of zombies with skin like pale and moldy milk. He stared at them, stretching up the spiraling stairs as far as he could see, bulging over the edges and breathing as one, filling the column of open space down the spiral with a wheezy, sucking wind.
In the middle of the stairwell floor there were dozens of blue and white paint cans lying dented atop a white tarpaulin, itself spattered with blue and white paint, along with a heap of used paint-brushes and rollers, a tangle of rope and harnesses, two large metal gas drums and two square generators. Boot marks in blue and white spread all round the square space.
"What the hell were you doing in here, Amo?" he whispered.
Some crazy plans. Some crazy art?
First things first. To dive he had to use the stairs, and for that he had to clear the zombies.
They were pressed against the security gate so tightly that the bars had eaten into their skin in places, embedding through gray cordy muscle the same way trees grow around railings. Robert rolled over and studied the padlock barring the gate. The key was right there.
He laughed, and turned the key. It clicked, the gate opened and Robert rolled back while the zombies poured out. They flooded back down the dark hallway toward the lobby, ignoring him, and he grinned as he imagined the dive to come. Soon he would be free.
Then came the scream.
13. MASAKO
It was a woman, high-pitched and terrified, her cry barely carrying over the heavy wheeze of the zombies' breath and the trudging of their many feet, but he heard it and it woke him up.
BANG
A gunshot followed, then another and the mood of the zombies shifted. The random pattering of their footfalls became a purposeful, unified drumbeat, their breathing sharpened, and they moved toward the sound.
Robert didn't like the shift; it felt primal and violent, and he flashed back to the news anchor during the initial infection, when she paced off to tear some living thing apart.
"Stop shooting!" he shouted. He tried to drive his wheelchair forward but the gray bodies were too tightly packed already, with more forcing their way down the stairs every second.
BANG came another shot, then another.
He took a deep breath then shoved off the wheelchair's armrests in a kind of arm-stand, climbing high enough to lift his legs off the stirrups and hit the wall of zombie shoulders on his chest. He grabbed for something to hold onto, latching onto a toothy open jaw with one hand and a dry and withered neck with the other, then pulled himself onto the top of the zombie flood.
More rushed in to fill the gap he'd left behind, pressing in beneath him and buoying him so there wasn't a single crack he could fall down. A knobbly ocean of gray heads, faces and shoulders stretched out before him, pressed tight to the walls and flowing through the doorway toward the lobby like a Yangtze conveyor belt.
He laughed, then started crawling along the top. He was swimming on the ocean!
BANG the gun shouted again. She was going to get herself killed, and Robert swam urgently, each stroke grappling with somebody's nose or chin or hair, pulling himself over the hard waters of collarbones and skulls. He tensed his stomach against their various bony bits, and gave silent thanks that everything from the waist was not feeling the pain of the pummeling it was taking.
The walls of corridors passed by fast, then BANG-
He spilled into the golden lobby, now flooded with the undead; Amo's tables were lost within their bulk, the Nespresso machines buried along with their shiny egg-pods, but there before the high name board, teetering on the top rung of a ladder like a terrified child about to make her first dive, stood a beautiful Asian woman holding a gun.
Robert stared up at her as the tide of bodies carried him on.
She wore jeans and a white vest with a silver pendant round her neck. The gun was black and snub like the ones atop Amo's RV, and she was waving it desperately around the flooded hall. She had black hair in a ponytail and her eyes were wild and frenzied, but in that wildness there was a bright and shining life.
The sight of her punched him hard in the heart. She was his first human in months to not die or turn into a zombie within seconds. He stared and stared.
BANG
She shot a zombie at point blank range as it crawled up the ladder rungs, but others followed and she aimed the gun again.
Robert shook himself out of his daze.
"Stop shooting them!" he shouted. "It's making them angry."
He was somewhere above the laptop desks now, paddling toward her with all his strength. She heard and spun to see him. Her eyes went wider, she raised the gun, and he almost laughed ay her puzzled expression. It must have been quite a sight to see, some guy crawling across the top the dead.
"I'm alive!" he shouted, holding up his arms. This caused his face to drop hard against a shoulder, bloodying his nose, so he hunkered up onto his elbows. "I'm alive," he went on, "just stop shooting them, noise riles them up. Hang still and I'm coming over."
She looked like she was about to faint, almost as pale as the zombies. The gun had gone slack in her hand and she stared as he swam over.
"It's all right," he cooed up at her, "just keep calm."
When he reached the ladder he gently pushed the climbing zombies away, and they let him. The wonder on her face was priceless.
"They don't want to hurt us," he explained, and pulled himself onto one of the rungs, settling himself in position to ward off any more climbing zombies. "Not normally, anyway. I promise you, you don't need that gun."
She made a sound that might have been a word but came out like gargling. Robert pushed another zealous zombie gently on the forehead, guiding it away. It let itself be tipped back into the throng. He pushed a few more, then they stopped trying to climb past him.
The militant sound in their breathing shifted, becoming softer again. The storm of their footsteps dissipated back into the trudging patter of rain on the roof.
"You see?" Robert said, waving an arm soothingly. "Move along folks, nothing to see here."
They moved along. The lobby settled as they went back to flowing by and out onto the street. Robert looked up at the Asian lady. The expression on her pretty, sharp face shifted between confusion and terror. She probably thought he was magic. The zombie whisperer. He reached a hand up toward her.
"Hi, I'm Cerulean."
He hadn't even meant to say that. He hadn't thought of himself as Cerulean for months, but now it came out easily. Cerulean was a strong man, he was brave and he saved people, and that's what this woman needed now.
It was like slipping into his Deepcraft avatar, and he found himself grinning.
"I'm Masako," the woman said, and shook his hand.
* * *
The zombies moved on, while Cerulean explained. He even caught one by the arm and held it out for her to stroke.
"I don't believe it," Masako said, as she gingerly touched its papery skin.
"Believe it. They haven't hurt me yet."
Her eyes were still a little glazed over, but the shock was fading now.
"So you thought they were killers all this time?" he asked.
"I saw them kill," she said, her voice tight but controlled with a light Brooklyn accent, her eyes not on him but still watching them nervously, tracking any that came too close.. "They killed a man in Queens on the first night, right out on the street. He was running and shooting and they ripped him to rags."
Cerulean nodded. "I guess that's a defensive reaction. If you don't attack them they're calm. Friendly even, like dogs."
Now her eyes focused on him. It seemed like she was seeing him for the first time.
"Did you swim in?" She pointed in a zigzag line from the corridor entrance to where they were sitting under the name board. "Did you crawl on their heads?"
He shrugged. "It was the only way."
Her delicate lips quirked into a slight smile. "I felt sure I was dreaming it. I almost shot you."
"I'm glad you didn't."
"I've never seen anything like that. It was amazing. How did you know they wouldn't hurt you?"
He smiled. It was a good question. "I woke with them around me," he said, then went on to tell the rest of it, though he left out the worst bits, like Amo's suicide and the gun tower in Maine. Without those it seemed like just a lot of crawling.
"Then you came back to New York," Masako prompted.
"For Amo. I wanted to bury him." He didn't want to mention his dive.
Masako scratched her face. A few lines of dark hair had pulled out of the knot high on the back of her head and stuck to her narrow tanned face. She was pretty.
"Then you saw the big F and came here."
Cerulean frowned. "What big F?"
She frowned back. "You're kidding, right? The big F painted on the top of this building? That your friend Amo put there?"
It didn't make sense and he looked at her blankly. "F?"
"F for Facebook, you know? He did the symbol on all sides, blue and white. You really didn't see it?"