I shook my arm out of his grasp and scowled. “I didn’t just donate blood, Harry. I don’t need any of that. I just need away from her. I mean, here. I need away from here.”
I didn’t know why I’d said that, until I’d had time for my few firing synapses to catch up with my Freudian back-brain.
“What? Who is ‘her’? What are you talking about?” Harry asked, and I think Nick already knew.
“The little girl,” he said. “She’s the one running this show, you said it yourself. So, what then? We find her, we deal with her, we wrap it up and write a four-minute piece about it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Sure. And it’ll be just that easy, too.”
“What little girl?”
“All right, let’s go sit down somewhere and have a talk. It’ll take a few minutes to catch you up.” Nick was already scanning the crowd for an island of solitude to which we could retreat, but even before the screaming started, I knew it wasn’t going to happen.
And then, it did—the screaming began in earnest, I mean—and I didn’t have to look down the street to know why. I only had to look down at my feet, where the edges of my boots were up to their soles in manky black river water.
“Too late,” I whispered. “Too late. Harry, go. Nick, go. We’ve got to get out of here. It’s about to get very, very nasty.”
The first wave of the stampede cuffed us then, buffeted us back into the building as people who didn’t even know why they were running turned themselves towards the road and ran. The human tide parted around the cars and sometimes went over them; but people were really getting frightened. Part of it was that some of them had seen the wobbling, shaking bodies burned black and awful as they lumbered up out of the water. The rest of it was that so many of them hadn’t seen anything yet. All they knew was that there was running and screaming, and that to stay in place meant to be trampled—or caught by the unseen things oncoming.
“How do we get out of here?” I yelled, but was cut off by someone’s elbow in my face. I ducked aside and pulled Nick and Harry both with me. “And how, precisely, do we ‘deal’ with a girl who’s been dead for eighty years? And who’s powerful enough to raise the dead?” I braced one foot on a jutting edge on the building’s brick face, and jumped up to give myself a second or two above the crowd. I saw them, coming up the road, and I had to amend my statement. “So to speak.”
“So to speak?” Harry asked, tiptoeing to see—and since he’s so much taller than me, he had an easier time of it. “Holy shit. . . .”
“I wouldn’t call them ‘raised’ exactly, that’s all. They’re up and moving, but they’re not traveling with all their factory original parts, if you get what I’m saying. They’re blind and mindless. They’re being moved by the only one who can see—the little girl. She’s been using the biggest of them, a really big man, as her front man because he’s huge and intimidating looking. Do you see—Harry, look over that way again, tall man—do you see one that’s smaller than the rest of them?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “What the hell are they?”
“Zombies,” Nick said. “She’s right, let’s just get the hell out of here.”
“Where?” Harry asked. “Back to the Choo-Choo?”
“You could do that, yeah. Or maybe just get out of town the more direct way—up the ramp there. These things can’t get very far out of the water; or even if they can, they can’t move very quickly on dry land. Get up there onto the asphalt. I think we’ll be pretty safe.” The interstate was elevated behind the Read House anyway. It was the same road Nick and I had climbed from the ball park, and it ought to be well out of the water except right at the river.
Though many of the refugees wouldn’t be able to get terribly far on foot, they could get far enough. And quite a lot of them could probably make the mad, sprinting run to where 27 meets 24, a mile or two away—and there, the entire road is up on columns, elevated well above the earth.
“We need to spread that around,” Nick said, and he was right. I gave Harry a nudge, Nick a nod, and we three split up to burrow through the crowd. It was easier said than done.
People were panicking, and we were going against the flow of human traffic no matter which direction we picked. The Read House parking garage, the places on the sidewalks out front, and the lobby area were all a boiling stew of humanity and there was no way around it.
I peeled my eyes for people in uniform and I located them, here and there. One cop with a radio in one hand and a megaphone in the other had hooked his arm around a lamppost and was standing on its moorings, leaning above the crowd.
I worked my way towards him and when I reached him, I grabbed him by the leg. “Hey,” I said, and he looked like he wanted to ignore me. He tried to shake me off, but he didn’t have enough leverage to do so.
I had to yell over the din, and I was tired of yelling, but I wasn’t giving up yet. “Listen to me—and don’t ask any questions. Those things can’t get out of the water. They can’t leave it, not very far and not very well.”
“What?” He looked down at me like I might be mad, but there was hunger in his lean, saggy face—like at least I was telling him something concrete, and this was a first for the day.
“Get everyone away from the water—away, it doesn’t matter where. Those things over there, the things you see coming—they can’t leave the water hardly at all. When they’re out of it, they move slow. Get everybody up onto the interstate—up that onramp and out.”
He nodded like he understood but he wasn’t sure if there was any good reason to believe me. But right about then, gunshots popped around our ears like fireworks, like baby versions of the Salute shells for all their volume. People started screaming and the press of bodies only got worse, more frightened and desperate.
Glass was breaking and I didn’t know where it was coming from. I didn’t know what it belonged to.
I think—at least, it looked like it, anyway—most of the gunfire was coming from the authorities and was aimed down the street where the water came creeping high, bringing the dead things with it.
“Headshots,” I told the officer, whose calf I still clung to. “Won’t stop them, but it’ll slow them down.”
“Is that how we kill them?” he asked, and I thought he probably hadn’t heard me very well.
“No, can’t kill them. Already dead. Just distract them, slow them. Get everyone else out of the way.”
He nodded again, but that didn’t mean anything. He lifted the megaphone to his mouth; it was one of those electronic ones that you push buttons to speak through, not an old-fashioned cheerleader’s model. When his voice came through the device the words were murky but much, much louder.
“Everyone go towards Martin Luther King. Go towards Twenty-seven!”
This was more or less the only direction anyone was running anyway, but they were all running like marbles dumped from a sack, bounding back and forth and around, ricocheting off of cars and off the sides of buildings—a great experiment in chaos flow. Gradually, the place was starting to empty.
The Read House had only held a finite number of fugitives from the water. There were only so many of those who knew they should flee, and only so many who were capable of running farther under their own power. The smaller ones, the older ones, the weaker ones were getting left behind, but that’s the way it always goes. That’s the way it always works when no one’s in charge and there’s no way to stop the water, or the monsters, and the only thing you can do is get out of the way.
It’s not like the government is there to help you.
So as the first wave poured, drained, and howled away from the building—even though some of them didn’t know what they were running from—most of the ones who were left were looking for safe places.
“Up,” I told the first one I found, an older woman with two small, shrieking kids who were probably grandchildren. “Up, go up. Get as high as you can. The parking garage—get to the elevators.”
“I don’t know where—”
“Come with me.”
It was the best I could do; even though it trapped them up on the roof. Up on the roof, the helicopters swirled and swooped—the helicopters might see them and get them. And besides, that high up they were so far beyond the water they ought to be safe.
Safer. It was the best I could do.
I grabbed a couple more on my way to the elevators beneath the building. One was a heavily pregnant woman and one was an elderly man in a gray bathrobe; then we picked up a girl with crutches, and were lucky that a hotel employee (in his valet uniform) could lift her into his arms and carry her along with us.
I stuffed the lot of them into the elevator and called others over to do the same. “Go to the top level,” I told them. “Get on the roof and flag for the helicopters.”
The police officer who’d been hanging on the lamppost caught up to us and saw what we were doing. At first I thought he was going to stop us and start making some official, by-the-book kind of suggestions that would royally piss me off, and then I’d have to kick him in the balls . . . but he surprised me.
“I’ll radio it in. The roof of the parking garage.”
He left us, clutching the radio to his mouth and squeezing the buttons on the megaphone, which hung limp from his other hand. On his way back outside, into the stark white afternoon with the ash-gray sky, he waved others in our direction.
They hadn’t all been abandoned; someone always stays. A mother, a son, a father, a grandfather here and there, and more grandmothers with little ones in tow. There weren’t enough healthy helpers to go around, but even then—even understanding that terrible, awful things were creeping forward—the brave ones understood that there was time. The loyal ones kept one eye on the road and the river trash, calculating the time until there was no time left to run.