No turning back, p.14
No Turning Back, page 14
“Can we sail through?” Pete asked.
As if to answer, the ship shuddered as the bow-thrusters came to life.
“Oh, I hate this,” Pete said, grabbing hold of the bolted-down table as the ship began a steep turn, but the ship settled into its new course too swiftly for them to have turned south.
“Change of plans,” Tess said, even as she bounded down the ladder from the bridge. “Who’s here? Good. We’re taking the icebreaker to Great Kills Bay. Nicko and Bruce will take one of the boats first to scout for a dock. We’re not going to wait for them. Our team is taking the other boat, and we’re going to motor right up to Manhattan. I reckon two hours to get there, one hour to reach the subject we are, against my objections, calling the peach-zom, and an hour to return to the launch. We’ll sail back as night falls. Bruce and the mayor’s people will look for supplies around the harbour, and we might get out of New York with the first tide tomorrow. Where’s Zach?”
“Clyde went to find him,” Olivia said.
“Well, you find them both, and meet me at the boat,” Tess said.
The air hummed with chatter as the Georgian survivors mingled on deck. Now armed, they were lookouts, ready to defend their floating refuge. Louder still, though diminishing with each second, was the buzz of the smaller launch, cutting its way towards Staten Island, with two sailors, Clyde, Nicko, and Sergeant Temple aboard.
“Anyone know who they killed here?” Zach asked, as they waited for the other launch to be lowered into the water.
“Who killed whom where?” Avalon replied.
“They’re going to somewhere called Great Kills Bay,” Zach said. “Who got killed, and who thought that was great?”
“Ah, a common misconception,” Avalon said. “Kills is actually an Anglicisation of a Dutch word for creek. That the English settlers opted for the bloodier name provides a useful insight into the mind-set of the early settlers and, indeed, into their descendants.”
The small launch was now a speck, disappearing towards the urban shorefront sprawl. Concrete. It was everywhere, except where there was water or sky. Immediately to the west, and a large arc to the north, was Staten Island. Further north and east, beyond the ruin of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, lay Long Island. To the south was New Jersey.
“Everyone ready?” Tess asked, though the question was addressed to Clyde who was walking through the small group, inspecting their gear.
“Ready enough, Boss,” he said.
“Why aren’t we waiting on Colonel Hawker to confirm there’s a safe harbour?” Olivia asked as they lined up to board the boat.
“Because our treasure is not to be found on Staten Island,” Avalon said.
“There are people here,” Tess said. “We don’t know who they are, where they are, or whether they’re aware of our presence. A ship like this is hard to miss if they’re watching the harbour, but it’ll take them time to get organised. Maybe they’ll miss us, or ignore us, but if they want to be pirates or seek rescue, they’ll make their approach around dawn. Whether it is before or after will tell us whether they’re friendly or not. Either way, we need to be ready to go, with those samples aboard. Even if they’re friendly, we can only take a maximum of seventy with us.”
“What if more come?” Olivia asked.
“We’ll work something out,” Tess said, “but getting those samples, the children, and what we’ve learned, back to the Pacific is our priority.”
“How many people do you think might be here?” Pete asked.
“Modelling from Cape Town, Savannah, and Cancun would suggest thousands,” Avalon said.
“Wow,” Pete said. Then he remembered the twenty million who had lived in the region before the outbreak. “Wow.”
There were eight in their shore-party: Zach, Tess, and Clyde, Corrie, Olivia, and himself, and Leo and Avalon. Everyone had a gun, a camera, and wore a uniform. The two scientists carried large, though empty, first aid bags to store the samples. Corrie had a radio. Leo wore a tool-belt with what looked like a bone-saw next to his holster. Tess wore a watch she checked as they boarded the boat, and again as Clyde began motoring them north.
The small launch was noisy due to the engine and made noisier still with Avalon listing what she considered the tourist highlights, and Zach interrupting her with pop-culture footnotes. Pete tuned them out.
The water through which they ploughed might not be as radioactive as the deeper ocean, but it was definitely toxic, foaming grey and green in their wake. Staten Island’s South Beach was, like Sandy Hook, covered in wrecks, but here they were cars, driven onto the sand after their owners had run out of road.
Those cars were now roosts to gulls which rose and circled, collectively shifting up, then down the beach. Their flight was elegant. Beautiful. Serene. Until he saw the reason behind the pattern: the small pack of undead, lumbering slowly back and forth after the flocking birds.
As the bridge neared, his ears whistled with relief as Clyde cut their speed. The water grew rougher, churning wildly as they carved through the semi-submerged wreckage: parts of cracked hulls, plastic furniture, clothing, toys, bodies. One moved its arm as it rolled with the current, but was dragged beneath a fibreglass pontoon before Pete could ascertain if it was undead or a true corpse. That pontoon had belonged to a seaplane, the remains of which were still tied to the bridge, but there were no signs of the pilot, or of why they had landed here.
Clyde cut their speed again. The wreckage grew denser, topped with a colourful mat of river-rinsed clothing, spilled from the bags of refugees who’d been on the bridge when it was destroyed. Just when Pete was wondering if they would become entangled in the multi-patterned debris-quilt, Clyde opened the throttle, and they accelerated north.
All around them, the skyline filled with cement and steel, but not enough glass. Few buildings had survived the apocalypse unscathed. Many were smoke-blackened. Many more had sheets hanging from those broken windows, all making an unheard plea for help. It was a cry echoed by Lady Liberty, whose eyes cried soot-black tears from a missile strike which had dented her crown.
Clyde slowed. “Didn’t you want a photo, Zach?”
Zach simply shook his head.
They circled around Liberty Island, and turned west, then northwest, entering the East River. Where the Upper Bay had been brisk and chill, the East River foamed grey, like the waters of the Atlantic.
“Do we need gas masks?” Tess asked.
“If we did, it would be too late now,” Avalon said.
“We’re fine,” Leo said, having dropped a sensor over the side. “And the radiation’s still low. Just no one drink anything unless it’s in a bottle.”
“Why’s it that colour?” Olivia asked.
“It’s probably just ash,” Leo said, with a rare hesitancy as disturbing as the devastation.
Now sailing the narrower, though still kilometre-wide, waterway between Manhattan and Long Island, they found the surface littered with storm-dragged debris from the war-torn shores.
“Break out the paddles!” Clyde called as they approached the white-water rapids where the old Brooklyn Bridge had once stood. Like at the Verrazzano Narrows, the bridge had been destroyed, and the towers had become a magnet for clothing and signage, plastic and wood.
With no warning, Clyde throttled the engine up to full. A flat bang echoed from below as Clyde slalomed them over the crashing white-water, and didn’t slow until they were long past the bridge.
“Bullet!” he called. “Fired from the Long Island side of the bridge.”
“Keep going!” Tess said.
No one shot at them from the ruin of the Manhattan Bridge, nor from the Williamsburg Bridge, but Clyde didn’t slow until Leo called out. “There! We’re here. That’s the U.N. building. Take us ashore.”
Chapter 15 - Where Nightmares Come True
Manhattan, New York
Clyde docked the launch at the northern side of the East 34th Street Ferry. As Corrie secured the boat to a rung of a barnacle-encrusted ladder, Clyde bounded up, pulling himself over the chest-high safety-barrier.
Between the unfamiliar weight of the helmet, and the impossible devastation to the storybook city, Pete hadn’t noticed the clouds gathering overhead until, as he looked skyward, a raindrop landed on his cheek.
“Looks clear, Boss,” Clyde called down.
“Everyone up,” Tess said, taking the lead. “Who shot at us?” she asked even as she climbed.
“Two people, one shooter,” Clyde said, pointing south while keeping his gun trained forward, towards Manhattan. “They were on the Long Island side of the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“Yeah, it was only two of them,” Zach said, looking at his phone.
“Did you get a picture?” Tess asked.
“A video,” Zach said, handing his phone to the commissioner.
“Looks like they were camped atop a flat-bed truck,” Tess said, watching, pausing, and then re-watching the clip. “They’ve got chairs, but no shelter, except maybe inside the truck’s cabs. Chairs mean sentries. So they’re watching the river. If they were hoping for rescue, they wouldn’t have shot at us. Sentries don’t stand guard for themselves, so they’re not alone. Clyde, how much danger is the icebreaker in?”
“Depends on whether these people have boats,” Clyde said. “If they do, they’ll come after us before they explore where we came from. We’ve got about three hours until dusk, four until dark. Assuming they have a boat, and the people to come hunting, it’ll take them a couple of hours to find us. They won’t go searching for a large ship until dawn at the earliest.”
“Then we’ll stick with the plan,” Tess said. “Corrie, radio the ship. Warn them there are hostiles on Long Island. We’ll make contact in two hours. If we fail to make contact in four, they’re to implement plan-Adelaide.”
“Pete, Olivia, hide your bags among the luggage,” Clyde said. “Doc, same goes for you. Anything you don’t absolutely need stays here.”
“But hidden,” Avalon said. “You believe we’re in danger?”
“That’s what gunfire usually means,” Clyde said.
“Any idea what plan-Adelaide is?” Olivia asked as she and Pete pushed and kicked a gap in the abandoned luggage.
“There’s only two things it could mean,” Pete said. “Either leave, or mount a rescue. Neither bodes well for us. Did you see who fired?”
“I was too shocked by what I could see of the city,” Olivia said. “I was expecting… I suppose I wasn’t expecting it to look like a warzone. Here will do.”
The abandoned luggage had been stacked beneath a fixed awning next to security gates leading to the rest of the ferry concourse: suitcases, holdalls, school backpacks, designer gym bags, even a few handbags. They were all full, and while a few had been searched, jutting from the phone-pouch of a delivery-driver’s over-the-shoulder bag was the bright orange pistol grip of a flare gun. Inside the bag were plastic-wrapped t-shirts.
“Let’s move,” Clyde said. “They could have a boat and could have followed us here. Pete, Olivia, beanbag rounds in the shotgun, but you two are at the rear. Avalon, this is your turf. You tell me the way, but I’ll lead.”
The pier’s gates were closed, though not secured. A mound of litter and mulch marked where a debris-drift had gathered, then been pushed aside when the gate was recently opened.
“Someone’s been here before,” Pete said.
“Don’t say that,” Olivia said. “And don’t you dare say you’ve got a bad feeling, either. No tweaking fate’s beard with lines from horror movies until we’re back on the ship. Careful,” she added. “Skateboard.”
“Where?” Zach asked, turning around before looking down. “Cool!” He ran back a step to pick it up. “Slot it in my bag, mate.”
“You are not using it on the ship,” Tess said. “Not inside, or out.”
“Yeah, no worries,” Zach said, “but I still want a souvenir.”
Outside the pier, twenty corpses had been dragged into a pile by ropes tied to limb or neck, but at least twice that number still lay where they’d fallen, amid a sea of rain-rinsed brass bullet casings.
“Movement,” Tess said, pointing beyond an upturned limo, lodged across the on-ramp leading up onto the elevated FDR Drive.
Pete saw nothing, until he looked down. A column of rats scampered out of a drain, becoming a dark river, flowing across the road, disappearing behind the limo and up the on-ramp.
“Gross,” Zach said.
“Entirely natural,” Avalon said. “Without power to the pumps, the sewers and subways will be flooding. The rodents are seeking safer ground.”
“Aren’t we all?” Corrie said.
“Nah, bet they were fleeing from gators,” Zach said. “That’s why I’d go to Roosevelt Island.”
“Where’s that?” Olivia asked.
“I thought you were locals,” Zach said.
“Local to two thousand miles away,” Olivia said.
“Roosevelt Island is in the middle of the East River, just north of here,” Leo said.
“Mayor Jak said that was the most likely place to find people,” Zach said. “Boss, why didn’t we bring Mayor Jak with us?”
“Because he’ll do what Bruce tells him, and the Georgians will do what the mayor tells them,” Tess said. “Right now, they’re being told to keep watch for trouble, and you should do the same.”
“Which way?” Clyde asked.
“Straight ahead to First Avenue, then north until we reach East 40th Street,” Avalon said.
Clyde set a steady pace while his rifle metronomically pivoted in time with his steps: left, up, right, down, left. Pete kept his shotgun aimed down as he trudged a path through the inch-thick sludge shimmering with broken glass, discarded brass, and far, far too many bones. Some of the small skulls clearly weren’t human, but were too big for rats. They had to have belonged to pets. Killed by the rats, or the undead, or by hunger, just like the people who’d once loved them.
Here, more than anywhere else he’d been, he saw the truth of the outbreak. It could have been stopped, but the quarantine had come too late, long after the virus had become global. Destroying the bridges had simply turned the island into a death camp, the inhabitants sentenced to the cruellest and most unusual end.
At the junction with First Avenue, a fire truck and bus formed a V-shaped barricade outside a brick-clad tower block’s main entrance. Outside and atop both vehicles were coils of razor wire, coated in snagged strips of cloth and wind-dried flesh. The fire engine’s ladder was extended, leading up to a fourth-floor window. But was that an entrance or had it been last used for an escape?
“Crawler!” Zach called, nearly as quickly as Corrie fired a hasty shot, and then a more measured, and more accurate, bullet.
“Close up!” Clyde called.
A second zombie snaked around the bus’s partially deflated tyres. What remained of its clothing was fluorescent orange. What remained of its left arm was unnaturally bent downwards above the elbow while its stump swung left and right with each lurching step, until Clyde fired.
“Stay close,” Tess said. “Doc?”
“Straight on,” Avalon said.
An animal roar echoed along the canyon street, its origins impossible to pinpoint.
“No way was that a zom,” Zach said.
“Or a human,” Corrie said.
“It is the aptly named Ursus arctos horribilis,” Avalon said.
“A grizzly,” Leo said. “They imprisoned a pair at the Central Park Zoo.”
Regretting that the shotgun was loaded with a beanbag, Pete began checking behind as he brought up the rear. “Think I’d rather face gators,” he said.
The next skyscraper had smoke stains ringing the entrance, but the fire hadn’t spread beyond the lobby. Across the road, a mound of dead zombies lay heaped against an ambulance. As they neared, the vehicle began to shake, causing the pile of corpses to shudder.
“Hold fire, hold your fire,” Clyde said calmly, jogging ahead to look through the grime-smeared windshield. He raised his rifle, and fired twice. The ambulance went still. “Clear. Move on.”
For Pete, New York was a place from the TV. A place from the movies. Attacked by terrorists, plagued with serial killers, and destroyed by aliens. A place to find love, fame, and friends, and a place to lose them, too. A place to dream of leaving, and a place to leave one’s dreams behind. A place of history and myth, and he wasn’t sure which was which. But it was now a place without a future. A place of darkness, dirt, and decay. A place of broken glass and fallen stone, blocked drains and flooded streets, twisted lampposts and abandoned cars. A place of decaying bodies and still-living corpses. There was no hope, no life, no love, only the promise of destruction as the foundations flooded, and the towers fell.
A howl came from the north.
“Did they have wolves at the zoo?” Pete asked.
“Let’s assume it was a dog,” Olivia whispered.
“Dunno if that’s much better,” Pete said, as a very familiar sound bounced off the clad stone.
“Single shot, came from the south,” Tess said.
Pete reflexively looked behind him, though he was uncertain which way was which.
Clyde whistled softly, pointing them on.
They were getting close. They had to be. Nearing the end. Nearing the point they’d turn around. Never had he so wanted to leave a place behind. But if First Avenue had been depressing, walking down East 40th Street was terrifying. On either side were moon-scraping towers, which created a desert canyon the sun would rarely reach. Beneath his feet crunched glass fallen from the gaping windows above. Far more forbidding, on either side, were dark caves marked as below-building parking structures. These were perfect places for the undead to hide, as proven when the shadows moved immediately to Pete’s right. Less than four metres away, a trio of damp and dripping undead staggered up the ramp.
He only had to raise the shotgun a few degrees, and fired reflexively but on target. The beanbag round slammed into the chest of a woman wearing a hedge-fund suit and designer diamonds. She skidded backwards, into the dark cavern.
