Chapter 1
Cray
I am a freak. At least that’s what my pop always used to tell me when I was a kid. Thanks for the encouragement dad. I guess, in all fairness, it’s a pretty accurate description. But he could have been a bit more understanding. It wasn’t like I asked to have a photographic memory, remember anything and everything, and basically be a complete genius. You can be sure with a background like that I never had a girlfriend.
My name is Alex Sorren, but I prefer to be called Cray. In my earlier years, I was a pretty hard-core nerd. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a nerd, but it just didn’t work out well for me. As a result, I’ve spent most of my life hating my own mind.
True, there are some advantages. Unlike most geeky brainiacs, my brilliance has always gone beyond the purely cerebral. I’ve always seemed to have a greater connection between mind and body, things like heightened senses, almost supernatural hand-eye coordination, agility, blah, blah. Oh yeah, and I also have this freaky ability to speed up my perception to the point where it seems like things around me are moving in slow motion. But I digress.
If you can’t tell by now, I’m a tad bit cynical. No doubt a lot of that comes from growing up like an Einstein wannabe in the ghetto. A good deal of it also comes from my job, and that’s where things get really interesting, but first, a little history.
For a while back in the early 21st century, zombies were a huge fad. People sold lots of books, made movies galore, and everybody wanted to capitalize on the undead thing. Well, when the “zombie apocalypse” finally came for real, we found that the storytellers actually got a lot of it right.
It was the result of chemical warfare. That part pretty much everyone predicted so no gold medals there. The nations didn’t get along too well back in those days, so somebody decided it would be better if we just tried to turn everybody into a monster. I think we can all agree that this plan wasn’t very well thought out.
These “zombies” do eat human flesh like the ones in the stories, but not exclusively. They’ll make a meal out of anything they can kill: bird, deer, horse, it doesn’t matter. They’ll even eat things they didn’t kill like the decimated carcasses you find in the middle of the highway. And they’re not walking corpses as far as we can tell, although you might be tempted to think so from their smell.
We generally refer to them as Festers because their skin is pretty foul. Understandable given that they’re usually covered in sores, lesions, and a host of other disgusting disorders that have never even been named. They’re the diseased shells of people that used to be like us, but now they have an incurable virus that makes them your everyday run-of-the-mill homicidal maniacs that try to kill everything that moves. It can actually be pretty comical to see one try to take out a freight train. They don’t seem to have much left in the way of minds. They’re more like crazed animals always ready for a fight.
You can kill them in a variety of ways. Cutting off their heads is just a more creative way to do it. And most of the time, the zombies in the books were slow and goofy. In reality, these guys are fast, vicious, and dangerous. They tend to move in small packs and primarily at night. Why? I don’t know. We can’t really have all the answers, can we?
There’s also the issue of biting. When the Virus first hit, everybody was afraid of being bitten by a Fester because they thought they would contract the Virus too, but that proved false. If you get bit, you don’t turn into one of them. You just lose a chunk of flesh and it hurts like you know what.
But this much is certain, you don’t want to cross them. So, what is left of the normal population stays locked away in safety during the dark hours from around twilight until dawn. Where the Festers go during the day hasn’t been fully proven. We think a lot of them go into the sewers and old subway systems. That’s probably the real cause of their rotten stench. Either way, you’ll almost never find one out during the daytime.
And that’s where I come in. They call me a Sweeper, and my hunting ground is good old New York City. I’m sort of like a trash collector, but instead of debris, I clean up Festers. Every night, while everyone else is locked away in their safe little condos with steel bars and chain mail over the windows, I go out and hunt.
My job is to take out any Fester I can find. Since no cure has ever been found and the Festers are such an overwhelming threat to the remaining populace, it’s the hope of the government that one day the Sweepers will be able to completely clear our cities from the scourge so we can all get back to partying late into the night and breaking curfews and other important stuff like that.
As I said, Sweeper is our official title, and we fall under the domain of The Organization. There are several of us. We’re highly trained, intensely disciplined, and overall pretty kick-butt if I do say so myself. I don’t mean to brag, but rumor has it that I’m the best at what we do. We work on a solo basis, sleeping during the day, and hunting at night. And so, the ordinary citizens have nicknamed us “Vamps”.
The remaining population of normal people isn’t very large. When the Virus hit, it spread like wildfire. Only a small percentage of the people were naturally immune, and a lot of those who were immune were killed by those who weren’t. Luckily, a lot of the Festers were also killed by natural causes, accidents, lack of food, that type of stuff.
So now I traipse through New York, killing these creatures, and then clipping little tracking devices to them so the Haulers can find them after the sun rises. Haulers are sanitation workers that take the dead Festers and “haul” them to the city incinerator. I know, I know, our titles aren’t very original.
Tonight’s been busy so far. I’ve taken down a pack of Festers already and I’m on the trail of another in what used to be Central Park. I’ve seen packs up to ten or more from time to time, but that isn’t typical. The larger groups usually require a little more stealth. I mean, only a moron charges into that many Festers head on expecting to come out alive. But the group I’m tracking now is maybe four at the most judging from the footprints. In the distance I can hear the unmistakable scream of one of them, feral and crazed, followed by the grunts and moans of the others.
Sprinting towards the sound, a detached part of my mind analyzes the beauty of the old park around me. Leaves drift gently to the ground in the whispering, autumn breeze. The air holds a chill, but there is also freshness to it, as if it carries something new and clean. It makes me feel alive and my running feels effortless.
My senses have always been above average. Well, that’s actually an understatement. Fact is I can pick up on things most average Joes wouldn’t pick up on in a thousand years. I suspect it’s somehow related to how my mind processes information, but even running at top speed, I’m able to pick up subtle scents in the air; earthy smells from the soil, a hint of magnolia, and the not-so-nice smell of animal refuse somewhere nearby.
Slowing now, I hear more grunting and hissing not far ahead. I tread like a wraith, no sound whatsoever. This is part of my training. I could make a ninja look like he was walking around in tap shoes on a wooden floor. Concealment, firearms, blades, lethal state-of-the-art hand to hand combat training combined with all the best parts of traditional fighting methods, explosives; there was no limit to the level of training The Organization poured into its recruits, and I soaked it all up like a sponge.
I find it’s a blessing and a curse to never forget anything. As far as training goes, I wracked up military and martial arts skills like a marble collection and I’m able to pull upon that information instinctively. On the other hand, I also remember every bad thing that’s ever happened to me and the face of every Fester I’ve ever killed.
I pause behind a tree, directing my senses outward to a small clearing ahead, the location of the noises I heard. Based off of what I can hear, I place four Festers in t
he clearing, approximating the position of each. There are two groups of two, one about thirty feet directly in front of the tree I am camouflaged behind, and another to my right, roughly one and a half times that distance. Relaxing, I allow my senses to expand beyond the clearing, absorbing every sound of the night, every smell, every rustle of leaves and flutter of birds, to determine if there are any other Festers nearby. It appears the four in the clearing are the only ones in close proximity to me.
I catch the slight, sickly-sweet tang of blood in the air as the breeze stirs in my direction. They must have a kill; probably a small rat or squirrel, maybe a dove. It certainly wouldn’t be a human. No one is stupid enough to venture into the night anymore. I smile. No one, that is, but me.
Easing my head around the tree slowly to keep from drawing attention, I absorb the scene in front of me. My judgment of their location was pretty accurate. The two directly ahead are milling about mindlessly while the two off to my right are crouching in the dew-laden grass, ravenously devouring what appears to have been a small rodent. From this distance, I can’t make it out clearly. The moon is hanging low, but the Festers are in deep shadows from the surrounding trees, and the tiny details