Logan was up first after a sleepless night of watching the windows and doors. He reached immediately for his radio and made a desperate attempt to reach General Cygan. Lizzie awoke to his raised voice.
“I’m still here! I’ve encountered two survivors already in only one night. We have to give them more time to reach the screening net!”
“I already have a missile prepped for launch onboard a class one nuclear sub, Logan. This is how this needs to end. The longer you piss around trying to save a whole two people in a city that size we risk the rest of the world! We need to wipe out every carrier before they start leaving the city. Face it son everyone in that city is Reggie food.”
“Don’t be an idiot! One will always get through!”
“For you and only for you I’m holding off. You can make it to the screening net in half a day by my calculations.”
“That isn’t enough time! I can save these people! Help me to do it!”
“Get your little friends together and hustle kid. I hope you can still run like a jack hammer on meth!”
“You stupid mother…”
Cygan hit the cancel on his radio. Logan was livid with him. What did their friendship mean now? He was about to authorize a nuclear strike on New York with Logan still trapped there!
‘Who was that?’ He hadn’t heard her get up. He had been too busy arguing over the radio.
‘An old friend.’ Logan answered and started pushing buttons on his field radio. It was only the size of his palm, grey in color, with a brightly lit green LCD display. He was tuning it so he could talk to Abraham.
‘He doesn’t sound like a friend.’ She was brave and fighting back the fear. She knew what he was talking about. She figured out that the half day was a push to make it out of the kill zone. She hadn’t eaten right for weeks and she hadn’t been for a run in even longer. Chances are she would slow Logan down. He ignored her for the sake of not having an argument. He had found Abraham’s frequency. He needed to talk to him, to vent his anger, and to come up with an exit plan.
“Do you have any contact with that army unit you pinged before?”
“Yeah, why what do you need?”
“Immediate evacuation. Cygan won’t listen to me!”
“Call them on frequency 180.85. They are mechanized I’m sure. They might have a helicopter or maybe a gunship if you are lucky.”
“Thanks. I need to break off as soon as I can. He hasn’t given much time for us to get the Hell out of here!”
“Got it. Call me if you need anything at all.”
‘Get dressed.’ Logan snapped at Lizzie a little unfairly and fastened the radio back into its place. She responded quickly though and started packing instantly. Maybe that was the police officer inside of her coming back out. She hurried back into her bedroom and threw on her old uniform. It was bright blue but stained in a few places with blood. The uniform hugged her frame neatly but was a little loose on her for it be a perfect fit.
She looked pretty and attractive as the uniform emphasized her peach shaped curves. It still had NYPD in big yellow letters plastered across the back. He remembered to ask her about that sometime later. Maybe she had been caught up in the middle of an outbreak herself. She threw on her coat and rushed back to the small kitchen by the door of her place. She grabbed a satchel bag from a top cupboard in the kitchenette and started cramming bottles of water and a few bars of chocolate inside it.
She threw it over her shoulder and then raided a draw for a sharp knife and the rest of her ammo for the handgun she had already stuffed down her trousers at her back. She carefully slid the knife behind her tightened belt to her left side.
‘You’re a lefty then?’ Logan had watched her every move while guzzling as much water as he could from her stash.
‘Yeah, so?’ She looked down at her waist and patted the knife with her left palm.
‘I bet you couldn’t throw a rock and hit the ground.’ He glanced at her small and feeble gun. ‘I bet you can’t shoot either?’ He asked and pointed down to her back where the gun was just poking out of her trousers. That was the first mistake he had made in figuring her out.
There was a picture on the wall behind the sink that he had not seen in the darkness last night. She was holding an impressive Sniper Rifle over her shoulder and had a pair of 45 caliber SOCOM pistols holstered to her belt too. She looked better in that picture. Happier than she looked now. Lots of color and vibrancy in her face and a better fed stomach. She had an even nicer figure. She must have been as fit as a snow leopard. She could probably give Logan one Hell of a run for his money!
‘State champion twice.’ She gleamed at the chance of being right. Of getting one up on him. Now every shot each of them made was going to be a competition. Who could hit them right between the eyes every time?
Logan eased over to the door and unlocked it again. The corridor was still clear and he proceeded out. Lizzie took a last look around. The place was about to be vaporized after all. She closed the door behind them and tried to forget about it. The pressure didn’t seem to upset Logan. He had that irritating calmness about him again.
He had that strength and that quality of leadership. He was either fully used to the jeopardy or was bottling all the panic and dread inside so that she would feel safer with him. Or so she figured. They dashed right back to the staircase and bolted for the floor below. He was making for the apartment and then the fire escape that he had used to enter the building.
He bounced through the door to the next floor. There was a wheelchair down the hall that hadn’t been there last night. He slowly walked up to it. There was blood all over the chair and human entrails all across the floor. But that was all. No body parts or clothes. The zombies must have eaten every single last bit of the poor person. Lizzie almost threw up once she reached the chair too. She fought hard to keep it back.
‘Come on.’ Logan gestured with his hand to the door at the end of the hall. ‘Let’s go.’
He gently pushed the door back open and entered. The smell hit them again and Lizzie started to gag with the shock. She held it together though and followed Logan right through to the back bedroom. She tried not to look at the murdered child wrapped in the bed and followed him through the shattered window.
The snow had stopped at long last but the sky had not cleared yet. It was still a grayish black and the early morning sun had hardly punched through at all. The air was cold but fresh and it was nice to be outside. They were walking well above street level over frozen snow piled high. The tops of the busses and lorries were all that poked through the top.
Logan held out his hand and helped Lizzie jump down from the fire escape. He needed to get in touch with the mechanized military unit outside of the city. They had shown up on the radio a few days ago and hadn’t seemed to move since. They were either waiting there for orders or had since dispersed.
‘This is Brigadier General James Logan does anyone copy. Please respond?’ He shouted over his radio. He held it close to his ear and listened with all his concentration for any response. He had already programmed in the new frequency.
‘I hear you loud and clear General, please state your position. Call sign Hummingbird. Over.’ Hummingbird? That was a colorful call sign for bleak world.
‘34th street west New York City, Hummingbird, “Reggie” has us surrounded and a rouge General is about to blow us all to Hell with a nuclear strike. I could really use evacuation if you have a bird ready to fly?’
‘Say again General Logan. I heard nuclear strike?’
‘You hear right Hummingbird.’
‘Copy that General all understood. Cygan failed to mention that part to us. I have a bird ready to fly yes sir. Get to a clear space and pop a flare for pickup. ETA (estimated time for arrival) 30 minutes.’ Hummingbird cut the connection and Logan placed his radio back into his pocket. Great! He wanted to shout out in a
nger and frustration. The radio handler had said “Cygan” in his communication. That meant they at least knew the old man. Logan could only hope they weren’t too loyal to him.
Lizzie had wandered over to the other side of the street where there was a school bus stuck in the snow. She had dropped down to her knees to peer through the exposed windscreen. There was only a foot or so of glass above the snow level, only just enough to see into. All of the children, teens and middle school age, had all turned.
They had died in that bus and the virus had brought them back. They were all just sat there staring to the windows blocked by snow. They were in that kind of dormant state. They just looked like they were frozen in time. It looked like they were just riding the bus to school.
She cried. She couldn’t hold it back. These were kids from her neighborhood. She could have told some of them by the name. She put her hand over her face and rubbed the tears away. She just sobbed into her hand as Logan came over to her. He didn’t ask if she was ok. She just needed to get it out of her system and grieve and he knew that. But she did need to do it quickly and get her head back in the game.
They had to find a good pick up point and make it for the North as fast as they could. Logan dropped to his knees and peered into the bus by the same window. It wouldn’t matter if he made any noise to stir them, so he wasn‘t careful or even quiet. There was no way for them to get out of their frozen tomb. The snow had frozen solid on every inch of glass and the doors might as well have been welded shut.
‘Why do they do that?’ Logan asked calmly. He wasn’t looking for an answer, just shooting the question out there. He glanced up to Lizzie. She was trying to fight her emotion back and had started gasping for breath while looking straight up to the sky. She shook her head but couldn’t manage a reply without choking on her own tears.
‘The way they sit there looking out of the window. They look like they just set off for school.’ She had noticed that too. ‘Is that a memory? Because it’s what they used to do?’ Logan just thought aloud and forgot to mask his intrigue for the sake of her upset feelings. He could be really cold at times. It wasn’t intentional. He just had a hardened heart and could all too easily forget that others did not. Was it possible that something of the person survived inside?
The thought curdled her blood. The thought that the person might be trapped inside of the body of a decaying zombie. That would be the truest form of Hell on Earth. She was sickened by the thought that someone’s consciousness, their soul, might be trapped inside, only to have to watch their own body decay. To feel themselves forced out of relentless compulsion to feast on the living. She felt her tongue expand in the back of her throat as the thought conjured up a nightmarish sense of fear.
‘I don’t know.’ She spoke slowly and her voice shook as the last tear rolled down her cheek.
‘Come on. We have to go.’ Logan grabbed her by the shoulder and half pulled her to her feet. He snapped out of his cold stare and remembered what it was like to watch a woman he cared for cry. There wasn’t much left in the world that could melt him like that could. He was a sucker to his own bravado. Logan was going to make for the nearest junction in the iced roads, where there would be a bigger open space, and the helicopter could land.
The city looked different in the cold light of day. They could see into all of the buildings from their elevated position above the buried street. There were zombies behind every window. Some of them were half dressed in their work clothes, some in suits, and others in overalls.
It really was like a time capsule. As soon as the virus hit New York it had frozen in a matter of days leaving the zombies in desperation trying to act out their past lives. They looked vacantly out of the windows at the street below. They tried the door handles or they sat at their desks staring at the telephones half expecting them to ring.
Ahead there were a few of them in the street. At least on the snow atop the street. They were still in that dormant state. Logan could just about see the top of the bus stop sign above the snow line. They were waiting there. Just like they had in their past lives. That was odd. Were they driven by instinct or by memory? The need to feed was primal and had to come from deep and ingrained instinct. But that didn’t explain why they stood there like ghosts with unfinished business. Why did they act like echoes of their past lives? Was it because they turned so quickly?
Logan pondered the question as they paced through the crunchy snow. The virus destroyed this city in days. People were in shock and awestruck by the pace of it all. That feeling seemed to be ingrained on the zombies too. They acted like a snapshot re-enactment of whatever their last moment of life was spent doing. He wondered if they even realized they were dead. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for them too, not the people they used to be, but the zombies themselves.
It would only be a matter of time before they were in a fight. There were millions of people in this city and most of them were most likely now zombies. There were ten of them at the bus stop and that was the way they needed to go.
Lizzie had a kitchen knife and he had a combat knife but there was no way they could take out such a big group silently. Doing it with blades was out of the question. He drew his Desert Eagles and she followed suit with her 9mm.
‘No choice.’ He whispered to her and moved to the other side of the street. He would draw them all away and face them head on while she picked them off one by one from behind. He whistled for their attention. The long line of seemingly polite well dressed zombies reacted as one. They each raised their heads in turn and started howling. That same penetrating howl they all made.
The sound echoed around the tall buildings. He drew his right-hand gun and shot with that one first, then his left, and then his right again and continued. Every shot hit but he wasn’t always as accurate as he should have been. Some fell wide and hit the creatures in their shoulders. Three of them went down with headshots and the rest continued hurtling forward.
Lizzie pulled her trigger with precision. She fired one shot every two seconds and maintained that rhythm. Each one a deadly headshot. That left only two still lurching towards Logan. He holstered both guns and drew his knife. He darted forward and slashed for the neck of the first one. His blood sprayed all over the snow and he fell convulsing to the floor.
Lizzie popped the last one in the back of the head. It slumped to the ground as blood oozed out from the back of its skull. Logan nodded in appreciation and set about reloading. That fire fight was as noisy as Hell and it would draw more of them in for sure. He remembered that it was the brain that he needed to destroy and fired one last, somewhat sympathetic, shot at the convulsing zombie bleeding out on the virgin white snow.
‘Come on.’ Logan holstered his weapons and broke out into a sprint. He was agile enough not to fall in the thick snow but it wasn’t easy. Lizzie followed him and managed to keep up with him easily enough.
It didn’t take long for them to reach the junction where the snow piled high above the crashed and crumpled vehicles below. The only thing popping above the snow level there were the traffic lights. He could hear the blades in the distance.
The helicopter must have been getting closer. He reached into his back pocket and took out an emergency flare. He ignited it by cracking the bottom hard off his raised knee and threw it into the centre of the junction. Now they could just wait and hope.
‘General Logan? I see red smoke please confirm?’ A voice came over his radio. It was a different man from before. He seemed calm and collected, oozed confidence, and was instantly trustworthy. It must have been, presumably, be the pilot.
‘Affirmative. How long?’ He yelled down the radio. He could hear howling coming from all corners of the city by now. There must have been hundreds of them all pressing down on their position.
‘Approximately three minutes out General.’ The same laid back voice replied.
‘Be faster than that! This landing zone is going to get very hot very quickly!’ He y
elled and put the radio back into his pocket.
He darted his eyes from one street to the next. He could hear the approaching hoard but he couldn’t see them yet. Suddenly the ground felt uneasy. Something was stirring underneath their feet! The things were crawling out of the cars beneath and digging their way up through the ice and snow! First a finger, then a fist, then a gnashing jaw and a shrieking zombie!
Logan put the first one down with a merciless shot to its head. Lizzie was turning around on the spot in a circle with her gun pointing down. It was unnerving to know the next one could pop up at any point. That was when the rest of them came slowly but terrifyingly into view. A pack of them, at least thirty just in the first wave, down every street connected to that junction.
‘Come on!’ Logan howled. He glanced up into the sky and hoped the pilot was slamming it hard to reach them. They were boxed in at every turn and had an unknown number of the creatures buried beneath them, all trying to dig their way up to the surface. The reality of the situation hit him and he had to admit to defeat.
‘They can’t land here!’ Logan shouted to Lizzie who was only a few hundred meters to his right by the side of the road. She looked desperately back to him without any answers. He reached into his pocket and started shouting down the radio.
‘Abort pickup the LZ is too hot.’
‘With respect General I don’t leave my people behind.’ The pilot calmly announced back.
‘I’ll find another way!’ He wasted no more time and cut the connection.
He fixed his eyes on Lizzie. His chest heaved with every panicked breath. She was frozen to the spot and was staring blankly back to him with a look of cold desperation. He closed his eyes just long enough to calm the furious surge of thoughts that rushed through his mind. He took one deep breath and demanded of himself that he should think outside of the box. The answer occurred to him almost instantly. He opened his now much more focused and purposeful eyes and began scouring the snow line.
There! A sign for a subway station just above the snow line! Lizzie saw it too after following his eyes and immediately dropped to her knees to start digging with her bare hands. She should have known that would be no way to reach the street level. No way would they have that much time.
‘Get ever here!’ Logan ordered her and took the grenade from his pocket. He had almost forgotten he had it. Sure the noise of the thing going off would attract more of them but if they stayed there they were dead. She ran full pelt to his side and watched him toss the grenade over her head right at the sign. A few seconds later it exploded and ripped through the snow below as well as a good chunk of the building next to them.
Rubble and water rained down on them but he wasted no time in pushing her back in the direction of the explosion. His grip on her arm was painful, tight and unrelenting. It hurt her but she said nothing.
‘Move it!’ He reminded himself of his days as a Non Commissioned Officer, barking his orders like a madman in the heat of battle. They both sprinted across the snow as more and more zombies punched their way through from underneath. He bolted ahead first and threw himself down the cave in the snow that the grenade had blown.
It had successfully opened up the steps of the tube station and there was no sign of immediate danger down there. But they were starting to converge on the junction from above. Lizzie jumped down behind him just as the army of zombies started tumbling down the steps in hungered pursuit. He flicked on the light of his gun to reveal the darkened station. It was only small.
He jumped the turnstiles in one leap and shot a single bullet into the corner. There was a zombie there on the floor trying to get up. Lizzie followed him closely and they both bolted for the train stood still on the platform ahead. The light atop his weapon swung up and down like a ship being tossed around by violent waves.
It lit up only a small portion of the train station at a time in a constant swimming and dizzying motion. Every time the light swung with the sway of his arms she imagined it would light up a mass of the things gnashing on the floor. Thankfully it was just the grey concrete and nothing more.
He jumped inside of the open train and kicked the button until the doors closed shut behind Lizzie. The zombies had just about caught up and began banging with bloodied fists against the sides trying to get it. He had to get the train moving before the sheer weight of them eventually broke down the glass doors.
He tore through the empty carriage and opened the door to the cabin with his gun ready. All was clear. That lever on the big and basic console must have been the main controls. He pushed it forward and the train lurched into life. Its front lights flickered on to light up the darkness ahead and they were on their way out of the station. He dared to breathe a sigh of relief.
‘Go back there and unhook the train from the carriage.’ He pointed back down the way they had come. She obeyed him instantly and jogged down the carriage. There were no zombies in the seats, she made sure to check every one, and there were none she could see in the next carriage through the connecting glass.
There was a big red emergency button at the side of the connecting, flexible and rubbery, section of the train. That had to be it. Hopefully it wouldn’t just be the emergency shut off for the engine! She closed her eyes and hit it with a balled up fist.
It wasn’t. The next carriage uncoupled and started falling behind back to the station. The zombies had spilled out onto the tracks and were giving chase. They just stumbled awkwardly and most of them just hit the ground, tripping stupidly over the wooden railway sleepers below. They were just about away safely. Now just to get out of the city and to relative safety.