Breakers

  Walt wanted to die, but he didn't want it to be easy. He packed extra shoes, a toothbrush and toothpaste. He packed as many lighters and matchbooks as he could find and then went to the nearest open bodega to buy more. He packed six pairs of his least-worn socks, a flashlight and extra batteries, his fuzzy-cornered copy of Catch-22. He packed the aspirin and cold meds he'd gotten for Vanessa, a mostly-full box of Band-Aids, some old rags, a tube of Neosporin, an extra pair of jeans, and two shirts. He packed his rusty old jackknife and a half-eaten bag of beef jerky and a box of saltines. He moved to a second backpack, filled it with a small pan, scissors, paperclips, three pens, two more pairs of socks, a pair of gloves, a windbreaker, some vitamins, a plastic water jug, a sleeve of bagels, a legal-sized notepad. Because, well, fuck it, he combined his remaining whiskey, vodka, and rum into a single handle and jammed that into the first pack.

  Then he sat down, because his stitches hurt, and he dug out his handle of mixed business and poured a drink and thought some more. He decided to wait until he'd recovered enough to walk without pain. He didn't want to die midway through the Bronx or Jersey City, dropped by blood poisoning or because he couldn't hobble away from some thug with a crow bar. He could only die once. He wanted to make the most of it.

  But he did want to die. The urge was like a hand pulling him below the soil, as if the dirt were water and his feet were covered in oil and all he could do was sink and drift and fall, a voiceless lump plummeting through the lightless caverns beneath an empty sea, alone and lost. Vanessa's lavender scent hugged the couch pillows. Her cursive handwriting graced the fridge lists and the end table beside the bed where she logged her dreams, inspirations, and performance notes. By comparison, the death of his parents was a small and sighing thing: he'd accepted long ago they'd die before him. All he'd wanted was to be with Vanessa until the far-off day one of them winked away.

  Nothing seemed worthwhile—why work when the woman he'd worked for was gone? Why move, why watch, why breathe? Walt ate listlessly, cramped by constant nausea, microwaving canned soup and buttering toast. He left his apartment once the day after his return from Long Island. He bought things that would last: beef jerky, canned beans, alcohol. He didn't know whether the whole world was ending or just his own. Either way, money no longer mattered; instead of plastic jugs, he bought handles of Crown Royal, the fat bottles like fantastical potions. Anyway, the couple liquor stores still open had run out of the cheap stuff.

  He watched the city from his window. Ambulances painted their lights on apartment walls, idling while pairs of men in biohazard suits dragged lumpy black bags down to the street. At sunset, a speeding SUV slammed into an oncoming sedan, smearing the sedan's driver over its hood and catapulting the SUV's into the middle of the intersection, where he lay, moaning, until he bled to death. At midnight, a yellow pickup braked behind the wreckage. Two big dudes got out, failed to start the SUV, and finally tried to push it out of the way. As they sweated in the cold, a taxi swung around the corner, tires screaming, and plowed into the remnants of the sedan, jolting the SUV backwards over one of the two men and pinning him under a tire. As his blood filled a black pool in the street, his friend ran screaming. The cab driver got out and approached the pinned man. Moans filtered through the window. The pinned man stretched a bloody arm across the pavement, pawing at the cabbie's shoelaces. The cabbie skipped away, vomited into the gutter, and jogged away down the street, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

  By morning, the street was impassible, a rubble of abandoned cars and hovering flies. A rat crouched on the pinned man's corpse, eating his nose. From his window, Walt took this for a sign. The ultimate metaphor for what happened when you tried to do good.

  It rained that night, a steady beat that washed the blood and debris into the drains. Maybe the fish would get sick, too. Gunshots popped every few minutes, dampened by the mist. On the sidewalk below, a man shuffled forward, dropped his umbrella, and collapsed to his knees, phlegmy blood dangling from his mouth in strands.

  Jets rattled his windows that morning, jarring him awake. The pain of his hangover felt right—the stabbing temples, the slow crush of his stomach, the sluggishness that made everything look less real than it already did. Heavy squeals and metallic shudders echoed between the buildings. Walt leaned out the window. Upstreet, a platoon of camo-wearing, rifle-swinging soldiers jogged across the intersection. With a rumbling, ear-wrenching shriek, a tank followed them down the street, pluming exhaust.

  They came for him the next day.

  The door pounded. His head did, too; he sat up from his blanket-nest on the couch, gum-eyed, parch-mouthed. "What?"

  Quick, muffled talk from behind the door. "Open up! U.S. Army!"

  Walt rose, naked except his underwear, and draped a sheet over his shoulders. He leaned his mouth against the door. "What can I do for you?"

  "We're here to take you to a safe place."

  "I'm pretty safe in here."

  "What about your family? Any roommates?"

  "I think they're pretty much dead. Let me check." Walt sniffed, gazing dumbly at the floor. "Yeah, all dead."

  "Sir, I need you to step outside and come with me. In the event of noncompliance, we are authorized to break down your door."

  "Authorized by who?" He unbolted the bolts, unlocked the locks. A pair of armed soldiers stood in the doorway, helmeted and vested, protected by gas masks and rubber gloves. "I appreciate your belief that you can keep me safer than I can keep myself, but I'm doing fine here."

  The taller soldier shook his head. "We're authorized to round up all the survivors."

  "The fact we are survivors might just imply we don't need your help."

  "Sir, we don't have time for this. Come with us or we'll drag you down the stairs."

  "Doesn't sound like either of us would enjoy that," Walt said. "Just tell them nobody was here."

  The shorter soldier passed his rifle to his partner, grabbed Walt's wrist, and twisted until the bones rubbed each other sideways. Walt wilted to his knees. Stitches tugged his gut. The soldier clamped his wrists together, tying them tight with a plastic strip-cuff.

  "Drag him out."

  "I'm in my underwear here," Walt said from his knees.

  "There's no time."

  "At least put on my shoes. You expect me to walk through fucking New York City barefoot? People were shitting, bleeding, and puking in the street. And that's before the Panhandler."

  The soldiers exchanged gas-masked glances. The one who'd hogtied him swore. "Where are your shoes?"

  They let him pull on some pants and his Converse, then draped his coat around his shoulders and fitted him with a surgical mask and thin, transparent gloves.

  "What's this about?" he asked on the way down the cold stairwell.

  "Rounding up the survivors to keep you safe," said the soldier who'd cuffed him.

  "Brilliant, gather us all together. The best way to guarantee that if we can get sick, we will."

  "Has anyone told you you stink like whiskey, sir?"

  They exited the building to an overcast noon. The streets smelled of smoke and blood and sour biology. Walt thought about running—he doubted they knew New York any more than he knew whatever non-New York backwater they'd coagulated in, and if they truly intended to scour the entire goddamn city for survivors, there was a fair chance they wouldn't waste time coming after him—but then again, they had guns. And tanks. And troops on the corners. Helicopters ruffled the clouds overhead. The soldier led him to a high-roofed truck and gestured him up a ramp. Twenty-odd other survivors sat on the truck bed, surgical masks in place, eyes bored rather than glassy or watery, no coughing or blood staining their masks. Only two of them were handcuffed. Walt sat down and leaned his back against the truck's side, glad for the shade. His stomach twisted, wringing itself like a beery old sponge.

  They sat there a long time. The soldiers brought down an old woman in a black coat and led her into the truck, then a scruffy bearded guy around Walt's a
ge. The soldiers cracked a can of paint, splashed a bright red X across the door, and moved on to the next building.

  A woman asked to go to the bathroom. The soldiers told her to hold it. She asked again and a soldier glanced down the street, smashed in the door of a Starbucks with the butt of his rifle, and gestured her in. Walt napped, woken constantly by the truck bed jostling with new arrivals, by the whirr of choppers and the sky-tearing sound of jets, by people sobbing, the crackle of radios, the squeak of tank treads, by his own headache. Sometime midafternoon—he'd left his cell beside the couch—the truck grumbled to life and weaved slowly down the street, dodging abandoned cars, sprays of glass, sometimes a body.

  Earlier, he'd asked a soldier where they were headed and gotten a vague non-answer. He didn't bother asking the other passengers. They rocked in the truck bed, staring blankly, as unresponsive to the contact of their neighbors' shoulders and knees as if they were down on a cramped 4-train to Yankee Stadium. The truck hooked south down Lafayette and rumbled through Chinatown, where shutters barred the stalls and seafood markets and t-shirt shops. Goods carpeted the sidewalks—shirts, wallets, belts, toys in cheap bubble plastic, sunglasses, squashed bananas, trampled cabbage, crushed crabs, some still waving their claws from the gutters. It stunk like old fish and rain-sodden greens. The truck turned down a street Walt didn't recognize and stopped cold. Radios squawked from up front.

  Truck doors thumped. Boots hit the sidewalk. Ahead, metal scraped asphalt. Men swore, chattered over radios.

  Out past the tailgate, three strangers wandered toward the truck, a slow shuffle punctuated by coughing jags. They wiped bloody fists on their pants and continued closer.

  "Stay where you are," a loudspeaker blared from the truck.

  "We're sick," a tall, thin man called from the trio. "We need help."

  "Wait on the corner," the soldier replied. "Help will be sent as soon as it's available."

  "You're the third truck that's told us that!"

  Windows opened from a handful of apartments. Two more people turned the corner, leaning on each other for support, and joined the trio. Up front beyond Walt's sight, something heavy and hard grated over the pavement. He took shallow breaths. He'd been thinking he might throw up for a while now. At least the truck was canvas-topped, open around the sides. Fresh air.

  Down on the corner, the crowd grew to a dozen. Five minutes later, with the soldiers still struggling to clear whatever was blocking the road, and Walt wondering why they didn't just take a different street, the gathering of the sick swelled to more than thirty, shivering, coughing, spitting wads of blood on the sidewalks.

  "Where are you taking them?" a squat woman shouted. "Do you have medicine?"

  "My apartment's full of fucking corpses," a hefty guy hollered in a Brooklyn accent. "How about you show us a place to sleep that doesn't smell like a Red Lobster's Dumpster?"

  "Help is on the way," the soldier said. "Stay where you are."

  "Like hell!" The hefty guy started forward. After two steps, the crowd followed in one of those strange mass movements, muttering, shouting, crying for answers and aid.

  "This is a quarantined vehicle. Stop where you are and turn around."

  Two soldiers ran to the back of the truck and knelt, raising assault rifles to their shoulders. The hefty man sneered and limped on.

  "You're taking them to the cure!"

  "Please don't leave us!"

  From the advancing crowd, a thin blonde woman staggered away, hugged a lamppost, and sicked blood across the gum-dotted sidewalk. Someone in the truck moaned.

  "Stop now or we will open fire," the loudspeaker blared.

  Fifty feet away, the man laughed and broke into a run. Others lurched to keep up.

  "Oh fuck," one of the kneeling soldiers said. Gunfire battered Walt's ears. The hefty man's chest puffed in three places, blood misting the people to either side of him. They fell alongside him, holes in their foreheads, chests, legs. Those in back screamed over the gunshots. One woman froze, clamping her arms to her face. Holes burst in her elbow, the back of her hand. The others turned and ran, stumbling and shrieking, disappearing around corners and through open doorways. The gunfire stopped dead. A dozen bodies lay bleeding on the pavement, some gurgling and clawing the asphalt, others as still as the streets beyond. Pale faces watched from windows. In the truck, people moaned, scrabbled their feet on the floor and pushed their backs against the walls, gagged, prayed.

  "Shit," the first soldier to fire said.

  "Hold your fire!" A man with stripes on his shoulder jogged from the side of the truck.

  The soldier stood, shouldering his rifle. "Sarge, they charged us. Another two seconds and—"

  "I know." The sergeant leaned in, grabbed the younger man by the neck. "You followed the protocol. You remember that tonight. Those people were already dead."

  "Key word people," Walt called, dazed, tingly, jarred free from himself. "Not some goddamn zombies."

  The sergeant turned on the truck, vaulting up onto the bumper. "Who said that?"

  Walt shrunk against the side of the trunk, suddenly paternalized, pinned down by the authoritarian bark of a teacher quick with the detention. Across the truck, a dark-haired woman pointed him out. The sergeant clambered in over the tailgate and stuck a finger in Walt's face.

  "Listen up. People are dying out there. You want us to leave you with them, just say the word."

  Walt lifted his cuffed wrists. "This look like I volunteered?"

  The sergeant grabbed him by the belt and frogmarched him to the tailgate, where he shoved Walt's front half over the ledge and planted a boot on his ass. The pavement waited below. "Just say the word!"

  "At least cut my cuffs!"

  "Say the word. You know how many bodies I seen the last week? Say the word and over you go."

  "Okay," Walt said. "Please set me down. Please, officer."

  "I'm not a fucking officer."

  The man shoved him aside and jumped out the back. Walt eased himself back against the truck's side, stitches tingling. He flushed, furious. Why not jump? He was cuffed in the front; he could run home, get inside, find a knife to saw through the plastic. The truck juddered to life, pulling forward. But what if he snapped his wrist in the fall? Cracked his head? Were there any hospitals left? He hadn't kept up with the news. The city had fallen overnight, becoming a cemetery instead, its dead memorialized by the mausoleums of skyscrapers, the catacombs of the subways, the island-tomb of the unknown citizens. The military's plan, that was dead in the water. What would they do, ship everyone to Antarctica to trade stocks from their igloos? The plague had already taken the world. It had come too fast, spread too far to be stopped now. Everything else was delusion.

  If he knew that much, why hadn't he jumped?

  The truck rolled into a broad garage with red axes and thick fabric hoses strung along the walls. The soldiers waited for the doors to creak shut, then offloaded the civilians, split them by gender, and shuffled them into two locker rooms. An armed soldier ordered them to strip and deposit their clothes in a wheeled canvas cart.

  "What are you doing with them?" a chubby guy said through his thick black mustache.

  "The same thing we're about to do to you," the soldier said. "Now get in the showers."

  "Oh Jesus," said the lanky young Jewish guy next to Walt. A soldier clipped Walt's cuffs. He showered, got dusted with a sharp-smelling powder by two anonymous people in full rubbery biosuits, then got ordered to shower again. In a tight benched room, a soldier passed Walt a pair of sweat pants and a loose white t-shirt that billowed past his waist. After he dressed, a man in a mask and a lab coat called the captives one by one into a room that until recently had been a personal office; photos of somebody's daughters hung on the walls, with bowling trophies occupying a corner shelf. The doctor drew Walt's blood, checked his breathing, his pulse, pressed his fingers to the side of Walt's throat and made him swallow, examined his stitches and told him they looked good.

/>   "What's going on?" Walt said.

  "We're seeing if you're sick."

  "I wasn't before I got hauled onto that truck. Couldn't tell you for sure now."

  The doctor smiled with half his mouth, skin crinkling around his eyes. "If you aren't already ill, chances are you never will be. Besides the cold, the flu, and cancer, of course."

  "If we're doing fine, why scoop us up at all?"

  "In the hopes you can help those who aren't so lucky."

  "I can think of safer places to base the world's salvation than an old fire station in downtown Manhattan."

  The man laughed, tapping his nose. "That's why we're shipping you to Staten Island. We've already disabled the bridges." He flicked his fingers apart. "Kablam!"

  A short man with angry blond brows led him in silence to a small dorm and locked him in. Walt paced the tiles, fuming and muttering, castigating himself for not asking the doctor why they needed so many subjects, for not pulling the old man's lab coat over his head and punching him in the back of the skull. If Walt didn't want to be here—and he'd already begun to consider clocking his head against the wall until it or he cracked—why hadn't he done anything to get himself out? Were the solutions to his desires supposed to manifest themselves by magic? Did he expect, when he silently asked the universe to return him to his apartment, it would give him a thumbs-up, a grinned Heyyyyy, and poof him back to his ratty couch?

  The blond man brought him a plate of hamburger and rice. Walt chewed sluggishly, forcing himself to swallow. He couldn't finish. The man returned for his plate, exchanged it for a glass of water and a bucket.

  Walt tried to sleep on the sheeted twin bed. Instead, he remembered Vanessa. He remembered how long it took him to tell her he loved her. He remembered wanting to ask her about Mark. He remembered sitting next to her in a theater in college before they started dating, their arms resting so close on the arm of the seat he could feel the warmth of her skin, the brush of her tiny translucent hairs, and he wanted to put his hand in hers and smile at her, but he was afraid she'd pull away, that she'd say no, that the time wouldn't be right, that he'd never have a chance to find the moment that was. She'd kissed him, finally, two months later.

  He'd lost two months he could have spent with her. Lost the better part of their junior year to a fun-but-light relationship he couldn't properly enjoy for always wanting more. When she'd started practicing lines with Mark, he'd lost weeks to gut-crushing anxiety.

  For all those worries, here he was trapped in a room, shitting in a bucket and waiting to be shipped to a quarantined island. Vanessa was dead. He'd never have another minute with her again.

  The labs came in the next afternoon. Walt was released from his room. The cafeteria smelled like sweat and Lysol and boiled meat. Walt counted heads. Three missing. He asked around. No one knew where they'd gone.

  The doctor drew more blood. Soldiers sentried the exits like gas-masked gargoyles. At dinner, driven by the instinct they were no safer here than they'd been on their own, Walt sat down across from a girl with rows of tight black braids and asked about the missing men.

  She frowned, spoonful of mashed potatoes halfway to her mouth. "You say there were three of them?"

  "I counted on the ride in. A few times. I do things like that."

  The girl chewed potatoes. "They killed them."

  Walt glanced at the door. A soldier scratched the mask strap beneath his neck. "How do you know that? Did you see the bodies?"

  "My room's got a window looks over the courtyard. Last night I heard three shots—pop pop pop."

  "Maybe they were popping champagne to celebrate their upcoming non-execution."

  The girl smiled. He noticed she was pretty. He went to his room and closed the door. That night he dreamed of wrestling the soldiers' rifles away, of leading a charge for the exits to a city too bright to see. But when he faced down the last guards between himself and freedom, he raised the rifle to his shoulder and couldn't pull the trigger. The people around him fell and died, eyes blacked out by bullets, shots connecting dots across their chests. The world faded to something he wouldn't remember when he woke.

  He stared at the wall. Cinderblock. Painted white. No windows. That was clearly a fire code violation. He went to the cafeteria, tried the double doors that led out into the halls where they'd been showered down and prodded by the doctor. A chain rattled from the other side. Across the room, a masked soldier pushed off from the wall and closed on Walt.

  "Please step away from that, sir."

  Walt tried the other handle. "What if I told you to unlock this and get out of my way?"

  "Sir, I would try not to laugh."

  "I'm not a beanbag chair. I'm not a beagle. I'm not your property."

  "Orders say we keep you here." The mask muffled the soldier's voice as thoroughly as it did his face. "They think we can break this thing. It's time for all of us to step up."

  Days crawled by, as foolish and horrid as a half-crushed spider, as divorced from life as a button on a calculator, marked by blood-draws and meal times and the morning/evening lights-on/lights-off. Without notice, Walt was rousted by a heavy knock four days later. He dressed in darkness, angry and sleepy, and joined the others in the garage, where they milled for most of an hour before a pair of soldiers ordered them into the truck.

  The truck blew through streetlights that kept changing despite having no one to change for. Walt rocked as they turned southwards. Cold wind cut through the gaps in the canvas and he snugged his loose clothes to his body. Once, he thought he heard a gunshot; another time, a scream. The truck strolled along, weaving irregularly. Out the back, in the dimmest light he'd ever seen in downtown Manhattan, Walt saw bloody bodies in the lanes, charred shells of burnt-out cars. Despite their sluggish pace, the drive didn't last long.

  To Walt, the port looked how he imagined the rest of the world would look in another fifty years: dingy and abandoned, a useless leftover of the dead. Grime marred the grout between the time-beiged tiles that covered the floor and the lower half of the walls. High-backed wooden benches lined the terminal, the wood's grain fuzzed by salt air and the asses of countless passengers. The room smelled like mold and salt and far-off sweat. The soldiers marched them up a ramp where a massive orange ferry idled alongside a palisade of sea-soaked logs. The wind ruffled Walt's hair, stinging cold, and he was glad for the two-week stubble shielding his face. Out in the bay, lights speckled the black lumps of islands.

  A pair of soldiers shepherded them over to the gently rolling ferry and up the flight of stairs to its top deck. Another pair brought up the rear, posting up at either side of the staircase. The survivors fanned out, taking seats on the plastic benches, gazing silently across the dark bay. Across the two rivers that bracketed Manhattan, the towers of Jersey City and Brooklyn stood dark, pricked by sporadic lights. Boots clunked on the lower deck, just audible over the burbling grumble of the engines. Staten Island. And they'd blown up the bridges. Walt had ridden the ferry there once in college just to see the fifth borough. He'd been shocked to find suburban neighborhoods complete with lawns and wooden fences.

  The engines growled up, churning water and foam. The ferry pulled off with a neck-swaying jerk. The four soldiers watched the two dozen survivors with dispassionate professionalism, rifles slung from their necks, pockets bulging with gear. Beyond the windows, the rails of the observation deck painted dim orange lines over the silhouette of Brooklyn.

  Walt's heart beat so fast he was sure the soldiers would be able to count his pulse by the throb of his carotid. He breathed slowly, inhaling through the nose, exhaling between his lips. That only helped so much. He had no intention of getting hauled to Staten Island just to get locked up there, too.

  He thought he might die. He had resolved to risk it. A large part of him welcomed it. But he still feared—what? The irrationality of death? Even those who thought they had all the answers, the right Reverend Frank Phillips, for instance, well, those answers made no fucking sens
e. If there were a heaven, which there wasn't, how could it possibly function? His heaven would be with Vanessa; he had no delusions hers would include him, at least not in any capacity greater than an awkward semi-friendship. How could the two paradises coexist? In his perfect heaven, would his Vanessa be just a specter, a perfect simulacrum, while the real Vanessa spent eternity in her own separate bliss, charming men at parties, chugging champagne without hangovers, her face on every cloud? Yet how could it be perfect if he knew the woman he was with wasn't the real thing? Was heaven then a series of parallel paradises, each one honed for its individual inhabitant, no more or less real than any of the others? If so, what about the alternate-Vanessa forced to inhabit his heaven? Wouldn't he effectively be raping her? The alternate-her wouldn't even know the real her would never share his bed. So either Vanessa would be forced to be with him, or he'd be forced to be without her. Either way, one would suffer. One wouldn't know heaven.

  He knew the out: in the divine hereafter, earthbound romance would seem irrelevant, a gravel-crumb's worth of joy beside the mountain that is His Truth. That, above all else, proved it was all a sham.

  Hell was more laughable yet, a ghost story meant to scare kids from stealing toy cars at the supermarket. Reincarnation was pointless because, with no knowledge of your past lives, you may as well never have lived them in the first place. Heavens, hells, rebirths—what else was there? The great crushing nothing, the permanent mute button? Too absurd to dissect. If there were nothing, you wouldn't even know it when you began to experience that nothing. Regardless, that nothing, he believed, was the truth, but—

  Outside, the ferry cut east, putting more space between itself and Brooklyn as it vectored to Staten Island. He was out of time.

  Walt raised his hand. "I need to go to the bathroom."

  "Hold it," a soldier said.

  Walt didn't really have to piss—just a bluff, a pardon to get up and walk around—but something about being denied the base right to go to the bathroom made him want to choke the soldier until vertebrae cracked free of the man's skin like ice cubes from a tray. Walt stood and sprinted for the doors to the deck. A soldier shouted behind him. He slid the door open and rushed onto the concrete platform. Sea winds buffeted his face, stealing his breath away, wetting his eyes with tears. He sprinted down the deck toward faraway Manhattan, thumping the metal floor.

  A soldier spilled out the open door and leveled his rifle. "Stop right there!"

  Walt laughed madly. "I didn't kill my wife!"

  The soldier stepped forward. Walt thought: I love you. He vaulted the gut-high rail, palm slipping on the spray-damp metal, and plunged headfirst over the side. The ocean roiled above him, the liquid sky of an upturned world.

  9