"Block up your room," he says. "Do it now. Wedge the bed against the door, wedge something against that if you can. They're not smart but they're persistent, and you're in no state to take to the streets again. You need to lie low and get your head straight, Amo, if you're going to get through this. Do you hear me?"
"I-"
"Deadbolt the door and wedge it in. Use everything you've got. Do it right now. I'll still be here. Put the phone on speaker and do it now. I want to hear it happening."
I take the phone from my head and stare at it blankly for a moment. I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
"Amo!"
I remember and click the button for speaker. I hear the distant sound of Cerulean's home somewhere in the South filter into my New York apartment. There is his breathing and the sound of an air conditioning unit, circulating round the cement basement that's been his prison cell since the incident.
I shake myself and look to the bed, then the door, and start moving to bring them together. The bed drags noisily out of the recessed wall. I push its headboard flush against the door. The headboard has metal slats that reach three quarters up the height of the door, so even if one of the zombies get in the house and successfully punch a hole through the door, they'll still have to get over the slats.
"I've done the bed," I call to Cerulean. "I'm getting the desk."
"Good. Don't damage your computer, you're going to need that."
I lift my monitor carefully off, then drag the desk to the tail of the bed. Laid end on, it fits almost perfectly between the bed and the wall, wedged into place. It's going nowhere. They'd have to bend the bed's metal frame or push it through the wall to get in, and I don't see either of those happening. That's more force than human bodies can muster.
I drop to the floor by the side of the bed and start to shake.
"I've done it," I say to the phone, turning it off speaker mode and holding it back to my ear.
"Good, good. Now you need to relax. We can talk about something that really matters. How did your date with the Tomb Raider girl go?"
I laugh beside myself. I scratch at the wooden floor with a fingernail.
"It went fine. It went great. She came back here, but she's gone now. The note she left Cerulean, it's mad."
"Call me Robert," he says. "That's my name."
More tears pour down my cheeks. "I know. OK, Robert."
"Are you crying? Come on old buddy. Pull yourself together. It's not the end of the world. Just the end of most of it. You said she's gone?"
I laugh. I rub my eyes. "I don't know. I think so, yes she's gone. She left a note, it said 'Good luck with the zombies'. She was talking about the comic, but Christ, look at this shit Cerulean. I mean Robert. Where the hell is she now?"
"Probably running halfway down Manhattan, if she's not already infected. Calm your ass down, Amo. What are you going to do for her now? She'll either get safe or she won't, on her own. You're lucky you're alive. You know how many people out there who're immune? Do you have any idea?"
"No idea. I didn't see any. Maybe her?"
"Maybe her. On top of that there's me and there's you. I've not seen any others, Amo, not any at all. Every live video feed I saw got corrupted in seconds, because the people filming it were infected. It's the most virulent thing ever. It's like that cat in the box, the second you open the box to see if it's alive or not, it drags you in so you're inside the box too. There's no time to report out."
I laugh through my tears. "Schrodinger's cat. I don't think that's how it works."
"Whatever. Listen Amo, it can't be a coincidence that it's me and you, and maybe her. Did she have the same condition as us, did she have a coma then recover like us?"
I wince as I try to recall. "She said she burned out. I don't think she was twingeing though. I don't think so."
"Well maybe you'll find out. Perhaps proximity to you conferred immunity. I'm pretty sure we're immune, Amo, because whatever is hitting them now hit us a year ago. Do you follow? Some lesser strain hit us, but it acted like a vaccine, so now we're safe. We went blank, we died multiple times, but they brought us back. Maybe if we hadn't been brought back, we'd be like these others out on the streets now. We got saved."
I shudder. I'm grasping at straws now.
"You're alive," is all I can say.
He laughs. "I am."
We sit in silence for a while. My room comes back to me. I look up at my Banksy print on the wall, the guy throwing the flowers. I wonder, is Banksy a zombie now too? Is Space Invader?
"I can come for you," I say. "I'll get a nice car and make it there in a day. I'll drive all night."
"That's a lyric from a song isn't it?"
"Stop it! Tell me your address and I'll come."
"No you won't. Why in hell would you come here Amo, to see my bitten-out corpse laid up in a bloody cradle stinking of methadone and shit? I'll not have that. I won't be alive by then, Amo. Understand that. Accept that, and we can move on. I've downloaded everything I can think of to your computer, plus a few extras I've had the time to come up with. The fulfillment center will be a bit different. I think it's going to be pretty important to you, going forward, or for a while at least. There are some new routines. You'll figure it out. Until then we can talk."
I sag. "I want to come."
"I want you to come too. Don't you think I'd love that, if you could come charging in now and rescue me from this mess? But you can't. It's not going to happen, so let's move on. We've never even spoken before, have we? Hi, Amo, I'm Robert. I'm a freak just like you. We might be the last two people alive in the world."
I laugh. "Hi Robert, I'm Amo. It's good to meet you. I don't want you to die."
"So tell me about the date," he says. "Tell me everything."
I do. It starts off jerky and unclear, but soon I'm rolling. He laughs as I pull the move inspired by Hank on her. He goes quiet when I bring her home. He listens while I pull the guy apart out on Willis Avenue.
"It's a good memory, on the whole," he says. "You'll need to hang on to that, Amo. You will, won't you? She might be alive out there. You might be able to find her. Hold on to that. You'll put out some flags and let her now where you are. You'll figure this thing out and make it right. I know you will. You've always been resourceful, and smart, and so damn charming."
I laugh.
"It's good you can laugh. Don't forget that Amo. Don't you dare feel guilty. I want it to be you, not me. You're a good man. You're the best friend I've ever had. I want you to get good things out of this and become better for it. There's always room to grow. When I lost my legs and I knew I could never dive anymore, I just about gave up. Then I found this weird guy who'd built a weird mod on Deepcraft, and he welcomed me in. He loaned me a diviner and we fulfilled stupid orders together. I saw the world through him, and I'm still seeing the world through him now. Amo, you're going to be OK."
I find I'm gulping at the air.
"Get yourself solid. Research the stuff I sent. Find a safer place than your apartment, a bank or something downtown, something this girl Lara can find, and start clearing the streets around. Make a base and she'll be drawn to you, Amo, if you're offering safety and something worth having. That way you'll find the others too, the ones like us who are lost somewhere across the country and don't have each other like we've had each other. I know you will. You'll make good things out of this."
I gulp back tears. I can hear the thumping through the phone getting louder.
"She's almost through the door isn't she?"
"She is. It's all right. I've got the syringe loaded with my methadone, enough of a dose to knock me right out. I won't feel a thing. It's better this way Amo. I wouldn't stand a chance on the road. I was never good in a wheelchair."
I sob into the phone. "How long?"
"I don't know. A minute, maybe five? I've already injected it." His voice starts to go woozy. "You'll stay on the line won't you? You'll wait with me."
"Of cour
se I will. Robert I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. You're here with me. We're in the fulfillment center, running it together. I've got legs again, Amo. We're keeping up with the orders. We're one step ahead."
The tears are coming freely. I hate this. I want to reach through the phone and save him. I want to save my friend, but I can't.
"Goodbye, Amo," he says fuzzily. There is a crash through the line, and his mother must have breached the basement.
"Robert," I say urgently. "Robert."
"She's coming. I won't feel a thing. The darkness is so close. I'm going to turn the phone off now Amo. I don't want you to hear this. Goodbye."
The phone clicks dead. The sound from his distant basement fades at once. My last link to Cerulean is severed.
I lean back against the bed and cry, curled around the phone like it's a dagger thrust though my belly. I have just lost everything and everyone I love.
6. ESCAPE
I come back to myself and it's bright still, with early spring light glowing in through the skylight right onto my face. I don't hear the zombies, they're not banging on the downstairs door. I look up at the sky and wonder if it could all truly be a dream.
I don't have a headache, no twinge at all. That is a wonder I can't help but be glad for. At least Cerulean had that too, in his final hours. At least we got to speak.
I look at my phone. It's not even mid-day, I guess I slept for only an hour or two. In the corner there are no signal bars, but the Wi-Fi symbol is still there. I click through to the Internet but the pipeline is empty and I get missing server messages. I click through each of my tabs on the phone methodically, social media, email, news, and they all erase themselves away.
Perhaps I'll never see them again. Pushing the back button in the browser doesn't recapture them. The Internet is gone.
I double click the button and the phone pings.
"Hi Io," I tell the screen. Io is the name I've given my phone's generic AI assistant. Io and Amo, it was a kind of lame joke, I suppose.
"Hello Amo," she says.
"My friend just died. His name was Cerulean."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"Me too. Now the whole world's gone to shit."
"That sounds difficult."
I laugh. "Yeah. But Lara might be alive. I don't know where she's gone though."
"I hope you find her, Amo."
I put the phone down. I need to think clearly.
I get to my feet and go to the window.
The street is filled with zombies. Seeing this is like an ice water shower. There are hundreds of them, all pale-faced with bright white eyes looking up at me. It chills my blood. They don't groan or rasp, they just stare. I open the window and I can hear them breathing, like a lapping tide. They jostle and sway like bits of wreckage caught on a wave.
I hold my hand out like the Pope giving benediction. Their ice-white eyes track me. It makes me feel dizzy and I step back. I drop to the bed and the springs crunch comfortingly. Lara's note is still there.
Good luck with the zombies.
It's a good joke.
I sit there slackly for a while, adjusting. My art doesn't matter now. Nothing really matters, now that everyone is dead. There's no sound from the city; no rescue helicopters are coming, because they're all gone. Cerulean saw it, and it's really over, the zombie apocalypse.
Lara though may be alive. I have to find her. That thought gets me up and moving.
First I need to prepare. My shoulder throbs where the indicator lever hit me, so I'll deal with that. I pull back my shirt to study the wound. It's capped by a stud of dried blood, which I nudge away. The hole beneath is puckered and sealed already, with only a slight red ring of inflammation. I rub it gently; it feels OK. I rotate my arm and it works well enough. I put two sticky bandages on top and call it a day.
Next I go to my computer on the floor, and swizz the mouse. The soft chime as it wakes up comforts me, telling me the power grid isn't down, though it probably will be soon.
I open the shared drive with Cerulean and survey the contents he downloaded. It was less than a gigabyte of stuff before, mostly texture maps and crafting patterns, but now it's packed to the gills and close to its hundred-gigabyte limit.
I scroll through the contents and find a mish-mash of html webpages, pdfs, videos and books about the 'prepper' lifestyle; people who spent their free time preparing for a coming cataclysm.
Judging from the titles they are mostly about basic survival; securing sources of food and water, finding and reinforcing shelter, sourcing weapons and using them in combat against 'hostiles', sourcing power and fuel and using these to employ vehicles, computers, walkie-talkies and so on. I notice that preppers like the word 'source' a lot.
I go to the desk and pluck out five thumb-drives, which I use all the time to back up my art. I slot them in to the computer and set the contents downloading. The prepper Bible needs to be portable.
The computer says it'll take at least an hour. I slump back against the bed, and a sound comes from beyond the door as if in response.
I freeze. I look. The door is sealed but the sound is still coming, a wheezing right outside my room. Is that…?
My blood goes cold. I listen to the low susurrus of breath rise and fall like one giant lung. I get up quietly and go to the door, then lean over the bed and put my eye to the spyglass.
Holy shit. They are in the corridor, packed five wide all the way back to the stairs, so tightly they can't move, like wieners in a vacuum-packed casing.
I jerk away. I back-pedal across the room until I hit the wall.
I'm trapped.
* * *
I make green tea.
It's gratifying that the kettle still works. I spoon green dust that smells like freshly mown grass into the cup, and pour boiling water atop it. The smell of bitter tannins wafts into the room, and I hold the cup in my shaking hand. There is solace in such routines, even though my brain may no longer need them to survive. They've saved me before, and they can save me now.
I'm barely even thirsty, but I sip anyway. I try to think about practicalities objectively, one at a time. I look at my phone; it's 11:33. Plenty of daylight left. Wherever Lara is it can't be that far.
I need to plan. I bring up my phone and click the app for Jeo. My geo-location still works, though the map it's built upon doesn't refresh. I am a blue dot in the midst of the gray blur of New York, pointing southeast. Good to know.
I'm not hungry, but I make up a bowl of cornflakes with crisp cold milk. I'll need fuel. I sit on the bed and eat it, trying not to think of Cerulean's voice on the phone. I try not to think of what remains of him now, in his basement.
I start making up a pack, adding my laptop, a kitchen knife, a water bottle, some clothes. What else do I really need? I add my comic, Zombies of New York, to the USB download tray, plus the latest build of the fulfillment center. I add my phone and laptop chargers like I'm packing for a trip.
The computer chimes, signaling the transfer is finished. I put the USBs in my pocket. I look at my bag and think about where I'm going to go. I think about Lara, and where she would go. I don't know anything about her, not really. Her folks live in upstate New York somewhere, but that could be anywhere. She lives in Brooklyn, but that could be anywhere too.
The computer blanks out abruptly. My phone chimes to say it's been disconnected.
The power's gone out. I toss the keyboard and mouse away, useless now. There's only one place I can go where she might conceivably be.
Sir Clowdesley. It helps that I'm still the mayor.
* * *
First I experiment. I smash the glass out of my window and toss mugs and plates down at the zombies' heads, but that doesn't do a damn thing. Mugs bounce off their heads in shards, and plates, no matter how hard I Frisbee them down, just buckle whichever one they hit for a few seconds.
Next I try my computer, contained within a 33" monitor. I
t's heavy, edged, and I won't need it anymore.
"Goodbye old friend," I tell it. I take aim and hurl it out the window. It hits a male zombie on the head corner-first, staving in his skull. There's a nasty crunch and he goes down bleeding. Then he comes right back up.
I feel nauseous. He's looking right up at me. He still looks like a person despite the gray skin and white eyes. He's dressed like a salesman with his tie neatly knotted at the throat. Now black blood discolors his white shirt.
I turn to the side abruptly dizzy. I just tried to kill someone. It doesn't seem to matter that he's already dead, I still feel sick. Is he even dead? Could be they'll all recover in a day or two, and I just tried to kill one of them.
I bend over and breathe heavily for a while. Shit. Perhaps I'm not cut out for murder with a monitor. The sweet scent of orange blossoms on the air only makes it worse. I pant until I'm feeling better.
At the least, I learned something. Caving in their skulls doesn't kill them. Good to know.
It's past two. I've got my bag and my USBs. It'll never be any easier or better a time than now. I survey my room a final time, then I move the chair beneath the skylight, push it wide open, and climb out onto the roof.
It's chilly here but sunny. The roof is red slate and thankfully dry, so I'm not slipping on moss. The zombies start to breathe harder down below. From higher up they look like an ocean of grayish heads. To the south the skyline of Manhattan rises over the blocks of apartments. Still there are no jets or helicopters in the air.
I have a loose plan, and for it this bit needs to be quiet, and fast. I slide awkwardly up to the roof's sloping crest, with my bag on my back. At the crest a line of stacked ceramic tiles runs like a monorail, which I hold onto as I pad along the roof, looking down into the square back yards behind each house.
Three houses over I see the first parked motorbike, a black and chrome beast which is surely more than I can handle on a first outing. I've never ridden a bike before, plus there's no skylight into the garret for easy access, so I slide on. Two buildings further on there's a pastel green moped on a kickstand, much more my style, and a skylight in the roof.
I try to pry it open, and to my joy it's already unlocked. I peer in checking for zombies, but there are none. It's a rec room with a drum set in one corner and some workout weights in the other. I dangle in from the skylight frame, then drop to the carpeted floor with a soft thump.