16.
We went to sleep that night with a false sense of calm. The streets below us were quiet, and Carson slept soundly in his room.
A light moan from behind Carson’s door snapped me out of my slumber on the living room couch. I’d heard that moan before. Like a student who realizes he forgot he had an exam, I was on my feet and freaking out that we’d failed to connect the dots.
I ran over to Celeste’s room and yanked the door open, nearly hitting Alex, who was sleeping on the floor.
“Alex, Alex, wake up!” I yelled, shaking him. “It’s Carson. He’s got the disease.”
“He doesn’t have a disease,” Alex said, pulling the covers over his head.
“Wake up, you idiot! He was bit by Dr. Feng. Dr. Feng bit him! That means he has the cryonic disease. We have to do something.”
Alex pulled the covers down, and looked at me wide-eyed. He leapt up, and we stormed into Carson’s room. He was covered in sweat, writhing and moaning in his sleep.
“What if it’s just a fever?” Alex asked. “It might not mean anything.”
“Alex, you didn’t have to sleep in the same room as those freaks. I know what’s going on here.”
“What’s wrong with Carson?” Celeste asked, stepping into the room. She wore a long silk nightgown that hugged her frame at her chest and hips. I tried not to look. Her figure made it hard to concentrate.
“Nothing . . . he’ll be fine. It’s just a fever,” Alex said with a smile.
“Come on, guy! You know better than that. Celeste, he has the disease just like those people down on the street, and pretty soon we’re going to have a homicidal maniac on our hands.”
“What do we do?” she asked. “How can we stop it?”
“We can’t,” I explained, “unless we stop him.”
“You mean kill him?”
“Nobody is going to kill your roommate,” Alex said. “We don’t know for sure that he has it. It’s just a fever.”
Carson groaned and looked around the room. Alex walked over to the bed.
“You all right, buddy?” Alex asked, stroking Carson’s hair off his forehead.
Carson didn’t respond. He looked right through Alex, then threw his head back against the bed, and stopped breathing. I ran over.
“Alex, he is not breathing,” I said. “You know what’s next.”
“What’s next?” Celeste asked.
“I’ll tell you what’s next.” I ran out of the room and retrieved the machine gun. “We put an end to this before he hurts somebody.”
“You can’t just shoot him!” Alex shrieked.
I looked over at Celeste, who looked at me and shrugged. I put the gun down, ran into the living room again, and retrieved a wooden baseball bat from a wall display.
“Fine, I’ll just hit him with this.”
“No, not that,” Celeste insisted. “Geronimo Pacheco hit a game-winning home run with that bat.”
“Geronimo who?” I asked.
“Pacheco. You must not be a baseball fan.”
“You won’t find a bigger baseball fan,” I huffed.
“He was after your time,” Alex intervened.
“What do you mean after his time?” Celeste asked. “That homer couldn’t have been more than fifteen years ago.”
I looked at Alex incredulously. “You didn’t tell her about me?”
“Tell me what?” Celeste asked.
Our ridiculous bickering had shifted our attention away from Carson who was now out of the bed and heading for Alex.
“Alex, look out!” I yelled.
Carson grabbed hold of Alex and went in for the bite, but Alex knew what to expect and held him back by the throat. Carson growled and shrieked. Alex’s pencil-thin arms looked like they’d give way at any moment. I looked for the gun and was contemplating bullet or bayonet when Celeste jumped onto Carson’s back and tried to pull him off Alex. The trio fell back onto the bed and rolled around wildly. I knew there was no way I could use the gun safely so I gripped the bat tightly and walked over to the bed. Carson was sandwiched between the two of them with Alex holding his arms from behind and Celeste pushing his face away from hers. I waited until they rolled onto their sides so that I could get a good look at Carson’s head. As soon as they did, I swung the bat down with all my might. I felt his skull cave in beneath the pressure of the bat. His arms were still moving so I hit him a couple of more times for good measure. Each stroke of the bat splattered Alex and Celeste with blood.
I stood there, breathing heavily above Carson’s lifeless body. Alex and Celeste lay motionless on either side of Carson, their faces polka-dotted with blood. The room was dead silent. We stared at one another until the adrenaline subsided. That’s when we heard it—a chorus of moans from the streets below the building. We ran over to the window. It was still dark out, and the building across the street, adjacent to the lab, was engulfed in flames. The blaze illuminated the swarm of undead roaming the streets below. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of them moving in every direction. The disease was spreading.
17.
“We better go check the barricade on the front door. You two come down with me, and we’ll make it stronger.”
I grabbed the gun, Alex gave Celeste the bat, and we made our way out into the hallway. We heard thumping and screaming coming from one of the apartments at the other end of the hallway.
“You know your neighbors?” I asked Celeste.
“Yes, most of them, but I’m not sure which apartment that noise is coming from.”
“Maybe we can check on them when we get back. We better go and take care of that door first.”
“Let’s stay out of the elevators,” Alex said. “We don’t want to get stuck in there.”
“Good thinking, Al.”
After we passed the third floor, the concrete stairs were smeared with fresh blood.
“Looks like your barricade didn’t hold,” Alex said.
“Could be. Or maybe somebody brought it in the building.”
When we reached the lobby, we found the barricade still intact. We went into the janitor’s closet and dragged the shelving out. We piled on toolboxes, paint cans, and anything we could find to add weight. The barrier left a lot to be desired, but we had very little to work with. A sea of infected made their way up and down the street on the other side of the glass. If something inside the building caught enough of their attention (or worse, someone opened the doors), everyone in the building was done for. With that in mind, we tiptoed back into the stairwell.
When we reached the second floor, I caught a glimpse of someone walking past the stairwell door. I stuck my face up to the tiny window to see what it was and was promptly greeted by a bloody, slobbering mess of bared teeth.
“Oh shit!” I screamed, jumping back in fear. “Looks like somebody brought it in the building.”
“Either that or they got in through the parking garage,” Alex said.
I aimed the rifle at the doorway and waited. Celeste joined me, bat in hand, and Alex stood in the corner looking nervously up and down the stairwell. The creature clawed and scratched at the thick steel door. It rammed the door violently with its head and shoulders, producing nothing more than a smear on the glass from the effort. It attacked the door so violently and screamed so loudly that we thought it would burst through at any moment. After a couple minutes of standing guard, we realized that we were safe behind the door.
“Apparently, they don’t know how to turn doorknobs,” I said with a chuckle.
“Lucky for us,” Celeste added.
We grabbed Alex and ran up to Celeste’s floor. The doorway at the end of the hall was open. Two of the infected were on the floor eating what was left of someone.
“Should we do something?” Alex asked.
Alex’s comment captured the creatures’ attention. As soon as they saw us, they started hustling in our direction.
“Fuck that, let’s just get into the apartment,” I said, opening
the door and beckoning my companions inside.
We slammed the door shut. The ghouls in the hallway howled and scratched on the other side for several minutes but then abandoned us to return to their meal.
“I know them. They’re my neighbors. That was their little boy they were eating.”
“Oh, no. I’m sorry, Celeste,” I said gently, resting my hand on her shoulder. “You two should go and get cleaned up. Take your mind off things for a minute. I’ll stay out here and make sure we don’t get any uninvited guests.”
“I’ll go in Carson’s room,” Alex said. “You don’t need to see that.”
Alex and Celeste headed back into the bedrooms. Things remained quiet on the other side of the apartment door so I put the gun down and went over to the windows to look outside. It was just past dawn, and what I could see of Harlem was in ruins. Smoke from building fires dotted the landscape. The streets were overrun with undead in every direction. It was clear the Chinese weren’t going to be coming in to save us. We were trapped.
Alex and Celeste emerged from the bedrooms looking clean and composed. I pointed to the scene outside the apartment.
“I think we need to go.”
“Go where?” Alex asked.
“Away from all this.” I motioned at the street below. “Outside the city.”
“We’ll never make it.”
“You need to realize something, Alex. It won’t be long before all of them make their way in here, and that will be the end of us. Just look down there. You see that horseshoe-shaped crowd in front of the building? Those freaks are trying to get through our front door.”
“Still, they can’t open doorknobs, and we don’t have a car. We can’t just run for it,” Alex said.
“Carson has a car,” Celeste said with a smile. “They gave him one when they promoted him to supervisor.”
“There we go, Al.”
“We’ll never make it out of the city. Americans are not allowed to leave the city without authorization. They have checkpoints.”
“We’ll never know until we try, but if we stay here, they’ll eventually break that door down. That’s certain.”
“And there isn’t much food here for three people,” Celeste added, sorting through the rations.
“We’re going to have to come out eventually. Isn’t it better to do it now, before the building is overrun?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Alex fretted, pulling back his hair with both hands and pacing around the room. He stopped and looked out the window. I thought he was building nerve, but then he got that white-faced look—the same look he had when I needed him to free me from the hospital bed. “We should just wait it out. The army could come storming through here any minute, and then we’ll be fine.”
“Oh, really? We’d be fine, huh? What do you suppose the army is going to do with us when they find us? Two fugitives and a person harboring them? We’d be better off with the freaks.”
I could tell Celeste was on board, but Alex sat down and put his head in his hands. He couldn’t be convinced, but I wasn’t going to leave without him.
18.
The moans and wailing inside the building grew louder as the day wore on. They were so piercing in the evening hours that we only mustered a few hours of terrified, restless sleep. By lunch the following day, it was clear the building was being overrun. People were jumping from the floors above us, and screams emanated through the floor.
I looked through the peephole. At least a dozen zombies paced up and down the hallway and scratched on doors.
“You think they busted through the barricade?” Celeste asked.
“I don’t know, I just don’t know.” Our inactivity was making me nervous. I started pacing, racking my brain, and eyeballing Alex for any sign he’d changed his mind. “How many people live in this building?”
“A thousand. Maybe a couple thousand.”
“Are a lot of them home this time of day? I mean, when all of this started happening?”
“No more than twenty-five percent.”
Alex chimed in. “They keep us working in shifts so that people can’t gather in large groups.”
“Maybe that’s all that’s out there, people from the building. I don’t see any soldiers or doctors. Here, take a look,” I said to Celeste, giving her the peephole. “Are they your neighbors?”
“Most of them, yes.”
“Then we still have a chance.”
Celeste nodded. I could tell she was ready to make a move. Alex on the other hand was over by the window, staring blankly at the street below. I heard snorting and growling at my feet. I got down on my hands and knees and looked through the crack at the bottom of the door. I couldn’t see much, but I could hear one of them sniffing at the crack. The growls turned to screams.
“Oh shit! It can smell us in here.” I got up and looked through the peephole. The shrieking zombie was drawing the attention of the others down the hall. “I know how to stop this,” I said with a smile. “Plug your ears.”
I grabbed the assault rifle, released the safety, and got back on the floor. I pushed it against the crack and waited for the sniffing to come near. As soon as I heard sniffing near the barrel I pulled the trigger. The gun went off, and we heard a loud shriek followed by a light thump.
“I think I got him,” I said excitedly, jumping up to look out the peephole. I saw a pair of feet, heels up at the bottom of the frame, but I didn’t get to revel in my kill. The noise from the gun attracted the other zombies, who attacked the door ferociously. They pounded on the door and rammed into it until the hinges started coming loose.
“Oh, man, I did it now,” I said sheepishly to my companions.
“They’re going to break the door down. How many of them are out there?” Celeste asked calmly.
“About a dozen.”
“How can they even do that? Do they have some kind of superhuman strength?”
“I don’t think so. They just don’t feel any pain. They’ll keep ramming it until they break in.”
“It’s time to go,” Celeste declared. “Alex, get the keys from the drawer in Carson’s nightstand.”
Alex didn’t move. Celeste picked up the gun and walked over to him.
“We’re out of time, dear. We have to go,” she said sweetly. Alex stared at his shoes. She held the gun up by the muzzle, and her voice grew stern. “Come on, Alex. We can do this. This is a powerful weapon.”
I grabbed the keys and ran around the apartment gathering food and clothing. I threw what I could in a duffle bag I found in Carson’s closet. When I came back out into the living room, the front door was beginning to tilt into the apartment. Macabre fingers wriggled along the length of the gap. I went straight to Alex and handed him the bat.
“Alex, it’s time,” I said. He wouldn’t even look at me. “This is just like when I was strapped on that bed across the street. If you stand there frozen, we die. If you move, we live.” I put my hands on his shoulders. “You saved my life, buddy. I’m not going to let you die.”
Alex held up the bat sheepishly, and we moved him toward the door. Celeste took charge. “Royce, I’m going to have you open the door, and then you two just follow me, but stay behind me. You do not want to get in front of this thing.”
“You don’t have to take the lead,” I said. “I can do it.”
“Actually, I do. Someone has to show you how to use this thing.”
Celeste pointed the gun at the ceiling and pushed a button on the side. The bayonet retreated, and a thick, red laser beam emerged. It nearly reached the ceiling but cast no light upon it.
“Ok, just be sure to aim for the head. Shots to the body don’t seem to kill them.”
Celeste smiled at me wryly. I crouched down next to the doorknob and waited for her signal. When she was ready I yanked the door open so hard that I fell back on my ass. Celeste stepped forward into the doorway like a gladiator and waved the laser back and forth at the zombies. The powerful beam seared through th
em like a hot knife through butter. They were in pieces on the carpet before I could get to my feet.
The hallway was littered with body parts and blood. Deep cuts and burn marks lined the walls where the laser had made contact. The jaws of severed heads chomped blindly like wind-up novelty teeth. A ghoul severed at the waist pulled itself slowly toward us.
“Holy shit, Celeste! That was incredible!” I squealed like a schoolgirl. She pushed the button on the side of the gun, and the metal bayonet returned from its sheath. “Did you know she was going to do that?”
Alex shook his head.
“Watch out for those heads, guys. They’re still moving pretty good,” I said.
As we tiptoed through the carnage, Celeste forced the bayonet into the skull of the crawling zombie. I heard a shucking sound behind me, like someone had tossed a pumpkin out the back of a moving pickup truck, and turned. Alex was smashing the active skulls with the baseball bat.
“Atta boy, Al. That’s the spirit.” I patted Alex on the back, and he smiled at us. It was the first time I’d seen him smile since the beginning of the outbreak.
We followed Celeste into the stairwell. Each time we reached a new floor, the zombies on the other side of the door shrieked and pounded against it as soon as they saw or smelled us.
When we reached the first floor, we paused before opening the door. The entrance to the parking garage was on the other side of the lobby, and the door in front of us was windowless. Celeste turned on the laser, and I took a deep breath before pulling the door open. To our delight, the barricade had held, and the lobby was clear. We strolled out into the open feeling victorious, but as soon as the ghouls out front saw us, they began pressing against the glass doors and climbing on top of each other en masse to get inside. The glass caved in under the pressure, and a sea of ghouls chased us in to the garage.
The zombies were so close behind us that we didn’t even try to close the door. Celeste sliced and diced them as they erupted through the doorway. Alex handed me the bat, grabbed the key, and went off searching for Carson’s vehicle.