Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

There were zombies all over Brooklyn, but at the moment the fires jumping from house to house downtown were the real danger.

There was a germ, a prion, going around that turned people into zombies. Somebody had gotten a bad memo. They’d been told that fire would kill the prion. It didn’t. It killed zombies pretty well, but there were just too many of them and they just kept coming. Now the fires were spreading, too.

Whitman stomped on the brakes as the whole front of a warehouse erupted into the street in front of him. He threw the truck in reverse and got it turned around, looking for a safe way forward, any way forward, any direction.

“There,” the woman in the passenger seat said. He didn’t know her name. He wasn’t sure he’d get a chance to find out. “Head south, to Brighton Beach. There are boats there. There are boats coming there at dawn, and they’ll take us to safety.”

He looked over at her. “Boats?”

She had a baby in her arms. There were kids and old people and just people, lots of people, in the back of the truck. Whitman hadn’t stopped to count them, or find out where they had come from. It didn’t seem to matter much at the time.

“Who told you there would be boats?” he asked. There were a lot of rumors going around, of course. The government wouldn’t say anything. Couldn’t, now that the power was out—no cell phones, no internet, no emergency broadcast system. The best information came from finding a soldier, one of the many, many soldiers in New York City that night, and asking them. But Whitman couldn’t afford to do that, not anymore. “I didn’t hear anything about boats.”

Whitman himself should have been a great source of information. He had worked for the CDC. Originally he had been the head agent in charge of this operation, the quarantine and evacuation of New York City. Funny how much could change in twenty-four hours.

If the people in this truck knew who he was—if they knew what he’d done . . . they would tear him to pieces.

He threw his arm across the woman and the baby as he stomped on the brakes.

“Jesus,” the woman screamed.

He’d had to stop short because the street ahead was full of zombies.

Smoke might have made their eyes so red. The dead expressions on their faces might just have been shock. But by now Whitman could tell. He knew a zombie when he saw one. The way they held themselves, the way they moved.

The prion made little tiny holes in their brains, until they couldn’t talk. Until they couldn’t think. They fell back on animal instincts. Flight or, far more often, fight. Humans were predators by design, honed by two hundred thousand years of evolution into brutal hunters. Only the thinnest veneer of civilization lay on top of that. Strip it away, break down everything that made a person human, and what was left wanted very badly to punch you and scratch you and make you bleed.

Which was how you got the prion in the first place. Fluid contact. Blood from wounds, saliva from bites, mucus from anywhere. Nice how that worked out. Nice if you were a prion, anyway.

Whitman threw the truck in reverse, but when he looked in his mirrors, he saw the fire was spreading behind him. Smoke filled the street, smoke full of sparks. There were a lot of warehouses in Brooklyn, and they were all stuffed full of toxic shit. Going backward wasn’t an option.

He peered through the cracked windshield. The zombies stared back.

“Everybody,” he shouted to the passengers in the back, “keep your arms and heads inside the vehicle. And hold on to something.”

“What are you doing?” she said, her eyes wide.

He threw the truck back into first gear and stood on the accelerator.

“We can take Flatbush all the way down to the beaches,” the woman pointed out. Angie. She’d told him that at some point, that her name was Angie. He couldn’t remember when, exactly. A lot of his memories had gotten jumbled up.

He shook his head. He remembered some things just fine. “The Army’s using Flatbush as their main corridor into the city. They’ve got materiel coming in nonstop, all headed toward Manhattan, taking up all the lanes. Flatbush Avenue is strictly one-way right now.” Whitman had his own reasons for not wanting to meet up with any Army units, but she didn’t have to know that. As far as Angie was concerned he was just a nice guy with a stolen truck.

A truck that was now covered in blood and body parts. Whitman could see a finger rolling around on the hood. He tried not to remember the moment he’d rammed through the crowd of zombies. Apparently he hadn’t seen enough horror in the last day to desensitize his stomach.

“How do you know all this?” she asked.

“Just trust me,” he told her.

She shook her head, but she didn’t ask any more questions. He wondered how long that would last. “There are other roads. We can take Atlantic Avenue pretty far.”

He nodded and focused on driving.

Angie ran her left hand through her hair. There was a plus sign drawn on the back of it with permanent marker. Whitman had one, too—just like everybody in the truck. They’d all tried to scrub them off, with spit or with lemon juice or whatever solvent they could find. One guy in the back of the truck had tried to burn his off with drain cleaner, and still it hadn’t worked. None of them had managed to do more than smear the ink around a little. That ink was military grade and it was designed not to run.

Nobody with a plus sign on their hand was allowed into Manhattan. Whitman was pretty sure nobody with a plus sign was going to get on a boat, either. But he was out of better ideas.

He’d had a bunch of good ideas, once.

He’d had the idea, for instance, that they could block all the bridges and make Manhattan a safe space. That if all the healthy people locked themselves indoors they would be safe from the zombies.

He’d had the idea that the Army could move through the city block by block with non-lethal weapons, finding and detaining every zombie they came across. That had been a great idea—until soldiers started getting bitten. After that, nobody talked about detaining zombies. After that, the real guns started coming out.

He’d had the idea that three of the outer boroughs of New York City—Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx—were expendable. The idea that there was plenty of room in Manhattan for all the healthy people, if they crowded together. The idea Staten Island made a great place for a quarantine facility. Those ideas had come thick and fast, when it became clear that his original ideas just weren’t working. That there were a lot more zombies than they’d thought, and that most of the city was already a lost cause.

He’d had the idea that if he could just save Manhattan . . . then . . . something. Something good would happen and the tide would turn.

He’d had another idea, his best, but he refused to think about that. To accept he’d been responsible for it.

He’d had the idea that he was very tired.

He’d had the idea that he had bad information, and it was going to ruin everything.

He’d had the idea he was the wrong man for the job.

And then, when the call had come in from Atlanta, when Whitman’s own name showed up on the database of potential infections—well, then, he’d thrown away every idea he’d ever had, except one.

The idea to run away.

He braked the truck to a stop. “You drive for a while,” he told her.

“What are you doing?” Angie asked. But she took the wheel, her baby still in her right arm, while Whitman moved through the back of the truck. It had been a transport, originally, a CDC vehicle meant for moving squads of clean-suited technicians around. There were benches in the back, and it could comfortably hold about a dozen people and all their gear.