Necrophobia - 01 Page 17

“What sort of APCs?” I asked, warming to the idea.

  Riley shook her head. “Listen, I wasn’t in the Army or anything and one pretty much looks like another.”

  But I had a feeling. “Describe them to me.”

  She did.

  I smiled. “Those are Strykers,” I said.

  BLUEPRINT

  In any operation there are countless maybes and what ifs, dozens of small little details that you cannot plan for. And this one was worse than most. First off, the zombies. Were they still there (at the school)? Were there more or less of them now? The militia. Had they returned? Had they tried to take back the school? The neighborhood. Was it still there or had it been bombed to rubble? The Precinct. Ditto. Was it still standing? How about the garage with the Strykers? Had it been bombed? Had the Strykers been taken away? Without them, there was no hope of success. Everything depended on that. The plan we threw together spun on them.

  That night after a round of MREs for everyone, and after Jilly and Riley had cleaned up and we outfitted them in some DPMs, we got down to it. We drew a map of the school. It was not just a single schoolhouse, but a complex of sort. Behind the fence, there was a wide courtyard you drove into that was sort of a quadrangle with the schoolhouse in the center (three stories, brick), another building on the left, a sort of convent where the nuns had lived, and to the right a chapel (falling apart) with a clock tower up on top of it and, above that, an open belfry that had once housed a bell.

  Our plan was to block off the alley with a Stryker (God, I hoped they were Strykers), then one of us would go with Riley into the steam tunnels to get the women out. Once we had them in the alley we could drop the rear gate and get them in back and then get the hell out. That was our basic plan. We had some back-up ideas, but that was the gist. It all depended on luck, timing, and more luck.

  “You know this is fucking suicide, don’t you?” I said to Tuck.

  He laughed. “It sure is, isn’t it?”

  Same old Tuck. Looking for a fight and having found one, he was excited like a kid on Christmas morning. I had said earlier that surviving wasn’t quite enough, that we needed something to aspire to, something to unify us in a common cause. Well, I thought we had found it. This was the carrot at the end of the stick. Getting to it would not be easy. Not easy at all, but we were all excited, I think. Riley told us there were four APCs in the garage near the Precinct house. If they were Strykers we would need a minimum of two people in each: a driver and someone to man the .50-cal machine guns. The beauty of the Stryker is the Remote Weapons Station where you can operate the .50-cal remotely without having to stick your head out of the vehicle. The more I thought about it, the more it sounded more realistic to take only one Styker. I mean, I could give Tuck and the others a crash course on the vehicle, but if anything went wrong—with me in the second Stryker and zombies in-between—there wouldn’t be much I could do to help them without exposing myself to an ugly death.

  No, one vehicle.

  Generally what you had in a Stryker was a driver and the TC, Truck Commander, up front. In the back there were eight soldiers and a squad leader. So you were talking eleven people without crowding. On this op, it would the four of us and ten or twelve others, maybe more. We’d be a little crowded but at least we’d be together in case something happened.

  I knew right from the onset that Paul would not be coming on this one and I didn’t care how much of a fuss he threw. I pulled him aside and talked to him about it once we had decided that Tuck, Diane, Riley, and I would be going. Jimmy would stay behind with the kids and he was okay with that, deciding he’d had enough action for awhile.

  “I can’t go, can I?” Paul said.

  “Not this time.”

  He brooded.

  “Listen,” I said to him. “I’ve let you come on a lot of runs now. I’ve allowed you to do things your mother would not have approved of. But this time you can’t come. I need you here. I need you to be strong. I need you to set a good example for the girls—we all have a job to do and if we don’t do it, we won’t survive. That’s the way it is. I need you here with Jimmy. I need you to keep Maria and Jilly safe. They’ve both been through a lot. They’re both fragile in different ways. They both need a friend. I want you to be that friend. That’s what I need of you. I need to know that if I go into the city that things are safe here. I’ll have enough to worry about. Can you help me?”

  I took a cue from Diane and I did not treat him as a child. I talked with him the way one man would talk with another. He looked at me and smiled. “You can count on me, Dad.”

  I have to say that I felt an immense welling of pride at that moment. It was all I could do not to hug the kid and tell him how proud I was of him. Because you know what? I was proud of him. He’d been through the mill, he’d lost his mother, but he was adapting to it. It was something that neither he nor I would ever really get past, but we were honoring her memory, I thought, by going on and being strong and taking care of ourselves. That’s what Ricki would have wanted. Paul was pulling through and though he was only ten years old, I was beginning to see less of the kid and more of the man he was to become.

  Later, after we had cleaned and oiled our weapons with Tuck and packed everything in the Jeep we thought we would need, I pulled Diane aside. “How do you feel about all this?” I asked her.

  She pulled her long hair back and put it in a ponytail ring. “I feel like we’re doing the right thing.”

  “You want to go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We need you. If you didn’t want to, Jimmy would have to come.”

  “Jimmy needs a break, man. I think he’s feeling his years.”

  I sat down by her. I smiled.

  “What?” she said.

  I laughed. “I had this real strange scenario in my mind when we went to the tower. I was certain that you and Tuck would hook up. Opposites attracting and all that.”

  “Matchmaking, eh?”

  “I guess.”

  “No, I like Tuck, and maybe we would have gotten together if things were different. I was wild in the old days. Sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, man.” She shook her head. “But I’ve had to kind of reassess who and what I was. Things have changed. I’ve changed. I’m not the same person I was before. Are you?”

  “No,” I admitted. “And I never will be again.”

  The next morning before we left, Jimmy came over to me and said, “I don’t want you worrying about anything here, Steve. I got the reins. I won’t let go of them. You got my word on that.”

  “I know,” I said. “I have complete faith in you.”

  “Good. I wanted to hear you say that.”

  We said our good-byes and Paul stood strong even when Maria broke down and started crying. Jilly and Paul kept her between them and she hung on tight. Jilly still wasn’t talking much, but I could see in her eyes that she felt she was part of us now and it gave her strength and made us stronger. It was all good.

  “Be careful out there,” Jimmy said as I climbed into the Jeep.

  We pulled away and he waved to us.

  CEMETERY

  We came into the Bronx on Broadway, creeping our way past Van Cortlant Park which looked like it had become some sort of immense tent city. We slowed down to see if we could see any life out there, but all we saw were the dead walking around. There were National Guard trucks parked and a few of them looked like they’d been hit by heavy fire, maybe artillery, but we saw no one living over there. Just the dead mulling about in packs. There were upwards of a hundred from what I could see at the park’s outer edge.

  The deeper we got into the city, the more it began to stink.

  We were moving deeper into what had to be one of North America’s biggest graveyards and it smelled like it. The air was hot and fusty, moist with the stench of putrefaction. It’s hard to describe what that odor was like. Certainly it was overpowering and nauseating, but the combined stink of thousands, millions, of decomposing, unburied bodies was
unimaginable and nearly indescribable. It was a fog of death, fuming and thick, a dirty, profane, mean smell of carrion boiled green in the hot sun, of husks bursting with maggots, human flesh gone to a liquid ooze of rot. Like some immense black cauldron of steaming, hot putrefaction boiling and bubbling and releasing a pandemic reek of simmering death.

  We all smelled it and we recoiled from it.

  We knew the smell of death by that point. Tuck had been a combat Marine in a jungle war. Riley was an inner city cop. I was an Iraq vet. We knew death. We knew its scent. And since Necrophage we’d come to know that scent on a very personal, almost intimate level…but this, Jesus, it was enough to put you to your knees and all I could think about was all those corpses, both walking and inanimate, and all the germs that must have been brewing. I thought that even if we completed our mission and got those poor women out of that awful place we’d be damned lucky to escape the city again without an infectious disease or a certain particularly nasty virus.

  Tuck had cranked up the AC but it did little good. The air in the Jeep still smelled like spoiled pork only now it was cooler. I looked at all the tenements and high-rises and apartment buildings around us and imagined what it must have been like in them. The dead sequestered in them, slow-cooked in the ovens of those hotbox rooms. Some of them would never move, but others would. Others were moving right now. And we could see them. They were on the sidewalks and in the streets, shambling out of alleys and down steps, swarming in parks and vacant lots.

  I saw packs of wild dogs running at our approach in lethal wolf packs. I saw a cat chewing on the face of a dead woman sprawled over a curb. That was bad enough in itself, but two children were gnawing on the woman’s legs. I saw a man whose face had mostly rotted away, leaving him eyeless, look in our direction as we passed…then dip his head back into an abandoned baby carriage to feed on what was also abandoned in there. A little boy who was so mildewed it looked like he was wearing a fuzzy green T-shirt was squatting on the corpse of a man, trying to yank something free. As we passed he succeeded and shoved it into his mouth: the man’s tongue. I saw a woman standing there, her face white and expressionless, staring off in the distance as the little girl standing next to her gnawed at her wrist. And I saw the immense and bloated corpse of man leaking a foul black fluid that a teenage girl lapped up like a dog. When we passed, she looked up and her face was a mass of feeding flies.

  These are the things we saw.

  The things we came to know and bury deep within ourselves where they would haunt us forever, I imagined.

  “Was it this bad when you escaped?” I asked Riley.

  “Yeah. It was this bad.” She looked out the windshield at two of the dead dragging a legless corpse behind them. “I don’t know…I hate to say it, but it might even be worse and I didn’t think that was possible.”

  Tuck moved us forward, taking it slow because zombies were in the streets and they had no fear or understanding that the Jeep would smash them down.

  “Did you have any family?” I asked her.

  “Yes. I had a husband. He got the virus right away,” she told me. “By then I knew what was happening, so I had him taken away to be incinerated. He wasn’t even dead twenty minutes. I couldn’t bear the idea of…”

  “I know.”

  “How about you?”

  I swallowed. They always said that it was good to talk about loss, to share your pain, but I wasn’t so sure. Riley watched me with moist dark eyes that held leagues of pain and leagues of understanding. So I told her about Ricki. I spoke in low tones so as not to make Tuck and Diane uncomfortable in the front seat. I’m sure they were anyway. But I told Riley all there was to tell and somewhere during the process she reached out and took my hand and held it in her own, gripped it as if she were trying to infuse me with some of her own strength, and I could almost feel it running into me. She held my hand for a long time after my tale was told and I looked at her brown hand holding my white one and I thought of all the black/white racial bullshit that had come down for so many years. It was only now as the world we knew was trembling on the edge of the pit that I could see it with true clarity and recognize the absurdity of it all.

  She looked at our hands, too, then she looked at me and I think she was thinking the same thing.

  Tuck slowed down and it wasn’t for the zombies but for the wrecks. Broadway was a sea of cabs, trucks, buses, and cars. They were bumper to bumper, all jammed together in a silent train of mangled metal and chipped paint. There was a path cut through them and cars had been heaped on top of other cars and I wondered if maybe somebody had come through here with a big front-end loader and cleared the way. Many of the cars were blackened from fire. Some were twisted or flipped over, hoods crumpled and windshields shattered. I saw bodies in those cars, all of them withered down to husks and skeletons with wide screaming jaws. Birds—crows and ravens and buzzards—were perched atop cabs and peering from the missing windows of trucks. Some were feeding on what was inside.

  At the intersections it was often much worse—rivers of cars smashed into other rivers of cars. It was like some mass exodus had occurred (I didn’t doubt that), everyone trying to escape at the same time and I could just imagine what it must have been like: the flaring tempers, the road rage, the fighting and battles waged amongst the auto graveyard. A lot of those people would have been infected. Many would have been stark raving mad. Some of them might have even been trying to smuggle their dead loved ones from city so the authorities did not burn them. A lot of those loved ones would have reanimated in backseats and trunks. And zombies, of course, would have pushed in from every direction when they realized people were trapped, that there was no escape from the madhouse for them.

  Hearses, that’s what we were seeing.

  The world’s largest collection of hearses locked in a traffic jam of immense proportions.

  “It’s worse in Manhattan,” Riley told me. “A lot worse from what I’ve been hearing. I can’t even imagine what it must be like there.”

  “And the militias and the Army have been fighting over…this?” Tuck said. “Bomb it flat. Burn it. That’s what I say. Fuck yes. This ain’t nothing but an open grave, man.”

  He was right. And once we got the women out, they could do just that as far as I was concerned.

  I watched the cars as we passed. Windshields were threaded with cracks, many of them splattered and stained with old blood. Corpses hung out of windows. Some were headless and others chewed right down to the vertebrae. I wondered if some mop-up crew had passed through, wasting the dead as they fed. I saw a minivan with a spiderwebbed driver’s side window. There was a corpse on the other side of it that had apparently impacted with the window at considerable velocity because it looked like its head had exploded behind the glass like a very ripe and very wet honeydew melon.

  “Kingsbridge Ave is coming up,” Riley said.

  Tuck was watching for it, guiding the jeep through that narrow avenue of Detroit steel. Now and again a few of the dead would see us and come over, beating their hands against the steel plating.

  “How are you doing?” I asked Diane.

  She looked back at me and what was in her eyes told me all I really had to know. She was doing about as good as I was doing which wasn’t very good at all. Even though we were probing deeper into the wormy carcass of the city and were no doubt in incredible danger, I was worried about Paul. And Maria. And Jilly. And Jimmy. Had we made the right decision leaving them behind? I thought so…yet I was nagged by guilt.

  All I could think of was seeing my boy again. Nothing else remotely mattered and I knew right then I’d claw my way through a million rotting zombies to get to him if I had to.

  IN THE STREETS OF THE DEAD

  We got lucky when Tuck cut over on West 236th to Kingsbridge Ave. There were wrecks and pile-ups everywhere, but there was still a passable lane down the middle of the street and the farther we went the fewer vehicles we saw. But, on the other hand, the farther we went
the more of the walking dead there were. And nearly all of them paused in what they were doing to watch us drive on by. Two of them decided to meet the Jeep head-on and Tuck ran them down. It was amazing (and maybe even a little disturbing) how desensitized we were all becoming. We didn’t even cringe at such a thing anymore.

  Tuck took his time getting us down the Ave so we didn’t smash into any abandoned or wrecked vehicles, yet he maintained enough speed that the deadheads didn’t pay too much attention and mount some organized attack. As we drove I noticed something that I had not seen before: the zombies were armed. No, not with guns or anything, but some were carrying clubs and sticks, lengths of rebar. I saw one of them with a baseball bat. We were still talking rudimentary weapons that any jungle ape could use, but I hadn’t seen that before and I didn’t like it.

  Leave it to urban zombies to arm themselves.

  I mentioned it to Riley but she’d seen it before.

  We came upon the Precinct house and there were zombies everywhere. They were in the streets and on the sidewalks, clustering in parking lots. I didn’t like the idea of getting out of the Jeep in a situation like that. Tuck kept driving until we found what looked like an old public service garage set just back from the road.

  “That’s it,” Riley said. “That’s where they are.”

  “Let’s cross our fingers that nobody took them,” Diane said.

  Tuck pulled into the drive before the doors and Riley and I jumped out with our CAR-15s. There were zombies out in the street, seven or eight of them, but they hadn’t picked up on what we were doing yet. We had to move fast and I knew it. It was dangerous as hell and I figured we’d get our asses smoked at any time. We sidled alongside the building and down a narrow passage between it and the building next door. Once we got in there, the dead came.

  First it was one or two and we shot them down.

  Then a dozen came striding in to meet us. We put down four of them before the others got too close for comfort. Three of them were cops and from the way Riley gasped, I had a pretty good idea that she had known them in life. When they came at us, hands raised like claws…she hesitated. I shoved her out of the way and dropped two of them with nice headshots and most of the others immediately dropped and began to feed on them, tearing open their bellies and stuffing themselves with the entrails that spilled out.