Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

The zombies had cut through the crowds like scalpels through healthy flesh. Even up in the helicopter Whitman could hear the screams. On the ground all he could see was waves, ripples forming in that sea of human heads as people ran and pushed and trampled each other, trying to get away from the teeth and fingernails of the zombies in their midst.

And all the while the ferries kept coming, kept dumping their cargo on the shore.

When Whitman finished telling Angie what he’d seen, he looked up with a start and realized that all of them, all of the positives, were staring at him.

“They can’t do that,” the girl with the shaved head insisted. “They can’t do that to us.”

“They just dump ’em there?” the mechanic asked. “But then what are they supposed to do?”

Whitman couldn’t answer that question. Instead he turned to Angie. “Where did you hear about these boats that are supposed to evacuate us?” he asked.

“From a doctor at my hospital. Just before he walked away from his post because he needed to take care of his family more than his patients. He made it sound like it was a good shot to get out of here. Was he talking about these ferries taking people to Staten Island?”

“I doubt it,” Whitman told her. “They’re not loading from the beaches, just from the piers on the river. Wherever he got that information, it wasn’t from the CDC or FEMA.”

Angie nodded and breathed in slowly. She paced around the room for a while and nobody got in her way. Finally she clapped her hands together, loud enough to make everyone jump.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Whitman asked.

“Okay, so fucking what? Nothing has changed. You never heard about any boats? Well, maybe nobody told you about them. But if there’s even a chance . . . we still need to get down there. To the beach. And we need to get there before dawn.”

“The truck isn’t—”

“ We are going to get to those fucking boats. Maybe we can find some cars. We’ll go by foot if we have to,” Angie said, standing up. She looked over at the other positives, all of whom were watching her every move. The mechanic. The girl with the shaved head. The old lady. They hung on her every word. “Get ready. This isn’t going to be easy. But it’s our only chance. If they send us to Staten Island we’re never coming back.”

Whitman looked up. He couldn’t believe it, but listening to her—he half believed. He wanted there to be boats, if only because the idea of disappointing Angie terrified him.

“I don’t know who owns these boats, but they’ll take us—even if we have to make them. They’ll take us somewhere safe, somewhere that at least isn’t on fire or full of zombies. Okay? Everybody with me?”

They were.

There were plenty of abandoned cars in Brooklyn, but there was a real shortage of car keys, and not even the mechanic knew how to hot-wire a car. It was Whitman’s idea to steal bicycles instead. He helped Angie improvise a sling for the baby so she had both hands free. He helped the old lady onto a racing ten-speed and showed her where the brakes were. And then they were off.

They skirted fires in Midwood, and a horde of zombies in Homecrest. Despite the military’s best efforts the infected were out in droves, hundreds of them crouching in the street, their eyes scanning the corners. Looking for the next threat, the next human to attack. They looked less human than ever, their eyes glowing red with the reflected light of the sky.

It was getting hard to breathe by the time they got to the neighborhood of Gravesend. Smoke from the fires was blowing out to sea, right over them, and dropping soot like black snow that flecked their clothes and gathered in drifts in the gutters.

There came the moment when Angie cried out and Whitman stopped his bike. “No, keep going!” she shouted as she coasted past him. “Don’t you see? The sky!”

Whitman looked up. At first he couldn’t see what she was talking about. The sky was red with fire, just as it had been for hours now, red . . . no. No, it was turning pink. They were headed southeast, right into the dawn.

Which meant if her boats were going to land at Brighton Beach, they should be well on their way. They should be getting ready to land at any minute.

Angie’s bike was the slowest, because she had the baby to worry about. Whitman hung back with her, afraid of being parted from her now. She called out to the others, urging them on. The mechanic’s bike was faster than the rest and she told him to get to the beach as fast as he possibly could. The girl with the shaved head poured on speed and passed Whitman by. Maybe not all of them would make it, but some would.

Angie had kept these people alive all night—that had to be worth something, right?

Whitman had no idea what they were going to find. He didn’t know what was going to happen.

It didn’t matter. Just then he would have followed Angie anywhere.

As the dawn light came up, it showed them the soldiers. Warriors in full battle dress, carrying assault rifles. Lines of APCs and transport trucks and jeeps behind them. They stood to either side of the road, an implacable wall that blocked the way forward. There was no way to turn off, and if they tried to turn back now they would never reach the boats in time.

Whitman nearly cried out in rage. To have come so far, only to be scooped up now.

The soldiers moved to the sides of the road, falling back to let the cyclists through. Whitman stopped his bike in astonishment as he watched them make way. A soldier shouted at him, an order Whitman couldn’t hear.

“Just keep moving,” Angie said, coming up beside him. The baby was crying in its sling. “Whatever they say. Whatever they do, just get us as far as you can.”

He understood what she was asking of him. He knew he would do it, too.

But then the shouting soldier lifted his left hand. His unmarked left hand. He pointed at the back of it, then pointed down the road, toward the beach. “All positives this way,” he shouted.

Whitman just kept pedaling. The shouting soldier nodded in encouragement.

It was crazy, but—but maybe . . . maybe there were boats down there. Maybe Staten Island had filled up and they were going to move people to a new location. Maybe some place better than Staten Island. Maybe some place they could survive.

“Come on, you can do it,” Angie told him.

He steered the bike down the corridor of armed soldiers. Their honor guard. And up ahead, not a quarter mile away, was the beach. Ahead of him he saw the mechanic pumping his legs for this last little stretch, this last little race to make the rendezvous with the boats. Whitman’s legs burned, but he poured on more speed.

When they hit the beach, he jumped off his bike and ran stiff-legged across the boardwalk, down a short flight of stairs to the sand that glowed pink with the newborn sun. A crowd of people had gathered on the beach—no doubt they were waiting to board the boats. That had to mean the boats hadn’t left yet, hadn’t left without them. He spun around and looked at Angie and wanted to grab her, wanted to whirl her around in triumph.

“Where are the boats?” she asked.

He turned around and looked, for the first time, at the crashing waves. Listened to the sound they made, that perfect, thundering sound. It was mixed with something else, something like the high-pitched call of gulls.

There were no boats out there. Plenty of people waiting for them, plenty of people with marks on their left hands. But no boats anywhere.

So many people, all around them. People who must have been there before them, people in great crowds, pushing them, shoving them toward the water.