MZS- North East Page 9

  “Could you be a little more quiet? They’re attracted to noise and there’s not much room in that hallway to fight,” says the gigantic one with the tire iron, scolding.

  “Have you had to…” I trail off.

  “Yes. We all have.”

  The water on the stove boils over a little and makes a quick hissing sound. I can’t bring myself to move.

  I’ve been up here, in my tower, watching the zombie apocalypse. It’s been on TV and out my window. Now it’s standing in my door and—I may barf—its gore is dripping on my floor. Before this, it was just happening, now it’s really happening, to me.

  Patrick breaks the silence. “Um. This is Todd, Cupcake and Tucker,” he says.

  “Cupcake? Really?”

  “What can I say? A couple of no-handed cupcake-eating races and you’re labeled for life.” The big guy smiles warmly as he talks.

  The one Patrick nodded to as Tucker steps forward and takes my hand gently to his lips. “Enchanted,” he says softly.

  The other three burst out laughing. After a beat or two I join them. It’s a creepy way to meet someone but the release from laughing feels good.

  “Tucker is harmless. Kind of like a puppy, be nice to him and he’ll always trust you.” Patrick eases some of my fears.

  “Being a gentleman is never a bad idea,” I say, flashing a smile. “Thank you, Tucker.”

  Now we’re back to silence, but at least we’re all smiling and they don’t seem like assholes. What’s the protocol for welcoming guests in the middle of an apocalypse?

  “Do I smell something cooking?” The big one, I think it was Cupcake, breaks the silence.

  “I have water up. I was going to make some pasta,” I explain.

  “Oh my god, I would kill for pasta!” Tucker declares.

  The four men flood into my small apartment. Weapons are placed haphazardly on my small table and a chair. Cupcake goes to the kitchen and Patrick crosses over to the window.

  He scans the street below. I’m not sure if I hope he sees some of the horrors I’ve witnessed or if I hope he sees nothing. The things that have gone on outside that window are unspeakable and while I want them over, I want someone else to know that I couldn’t stop it.

  As I survey Patrick’s doughy frame, I notice the glossy grey wrappings on his arms and legs. It’s a weird look, even for him. The jean jacket cannot be comfortable on a warm day like today.

  Looking more closely, I can see that the grey coating on his leg is torn in places. It looks like the teeth of something very large chomped down on him and he had to struggle to get free.

  “Patrick, what are you wearing?” I ask.

  “Jean tuxedo,” he calls over his shoulder.

  “No, I mean the grey stuff on your arms and legs.”

  “Oh. That’s my wine box armor, covered in duct tape. Do you like it?” He turns and strikes a catwalk pose.

  I want to ask him so many questions. Does it help? Have you needed it? Is it comfortable?

  I know the answer to all of them, though: Yes, yes, and probably no.

  I have to get my brain around this, have to stop thinking like a stupid little girl. It’s happening at a really bad time, but this is not how I deal with big things. Not normally. Jason, that asshole, threw me completely off-balance.

  “Can I make both boxes?” Cupcake yells from the kitchen.

  “Of course.”

  “Do you have any red sauce?” he asks.

  “Top-right cabinet,” I reply.

  Todd and Tucker have flopped down on the couch. Their feet are up on the small coffee table. Todd is leafing through a magazine and Tucker is immersed in his phone. I doubt there is a magazine that truly interests Todd, but he doesn’t seem to mind. It all seems too typical for the state of the world.

  The smell of food starts to take over the apartment. I can’t remember the last time I ate. If I had known the zombie apocalypse was coming, I would have gotten dessert the other night.

  “How much food do you have here?” Patrick asks. He has turned away from the window, facing back into the apartment.

  “Some? I wasn’t planning to grocery shop until the end of the week.”

  “Any bottled water or jugs of water for like a power outage or a blizzard?” Patrick asks.

  “No. There is an old wooden tank on the roof. Gravity takes care of everything.”

  “You thinking about staying?” Todd sounds harsh and studies Patrick intently.

  “Might not be a bad idea to hang for a day or two,” Patrick says, shrugging.

  “I don’t think we should spend the night. No way I’m signing up for a day or two.” Todd says. Clearly he is not happy to be here.

  “Why wouldn’t you stay the night?” I ask.

  Todd, Tucker and Patrick all stare at me in silence. Patrick eventually inhales deeply. “Supposedly they are going to be dropping nukes on the major cities. I think it’s too late. There’s probably no one left to give the order or no one left to carry it out if it was given,” he says.

  “I heard an explosion last night.”

  “The GW Bridge was taken out,” Todd says. “Looked like conventional weapons to me, though.” Todd has a hard look on his face, like he’s remembering something from years ago.

  “And?”

  “And what?” Todd seems to resent me.

  “And does that mean they are or are NOT going to drop a nuclear bomb on us?” I ask urgently.

  Todd gets to his feet slowly and pauses. I think he’s doing it for dramatic effect. “In my opinion, the bridge was a local act. The nukes will be federal government; they may be late, but they are coming.”

  “So they’re going to drop a nuke on us, but you’re comfortable sitting here on my couch, flipping through a magazine?” I can deal with fear, but not fear-mongering.

  “Cupcake’s rig, Cupcake’s rules,” Todd says offhand. “He says we’re here, so I’m here.”

  Patrick looks into the kitchen. I can tell that he wants to say something, but he’s not sure. If these four are playing politics, I may be in real trouble. It would have been nice if someone more organized had come to save me.

  “My vote is that we crash here, if that’s okay with you?” Patrick asks. “If the government was together enough to drop nukes, they would also be changing the message on these emergency broadcasts. Managing people with words is actually a lot easier than directing them with force.” Patrick looks to me with hopeful eyes.

  None of these guys are taking a stand. They’re voting, hoping and guessing. Someone needs to man up and take charge. I don’t want to do it, but “damsel in distress” has never really suited me either. Maybe Cupcake will have more conviction and I can get behind his plan.

  “So what’s the plan?” I ask the giant in the kitchen.

  “My plan is to eat,” Cupcake says. He raises a big bowl of pasta in the air before moving to the table and setting it down. He slides a chair out and drops his hefty frame down with a thud.

  The other three make a beeline for the kitchen, two of them return with bowls and plates loaded with pasta. Patrick drops five beers on the table and then goes back for his food. When he sits down, they all crack open cans and raise them over the middle of the table.

  All eyes turn to me.

  I make them wait.

  Just before it gets awkward, I crack open my can and lift it in the air. I meet them above the center of the table, but my can is higher than theirs and they all see it.

  “Viva!” They toast.

  “Viva.” I nod in agreement.

  Looks like we’re going to stay here for a while. They may not know it, but that’s my first leadership decision.

  Patrick

  Chapter 16

  Thank God Tucker has boundless energy. After a couple of bowls of pasta I don’t feel like getting out of my chair, let alone cleaning up in the kitchen. He’s in there scrubbing away and I think I can hear him whistling.

  I bet in his mind Tucker thinks
he and McLean are a couple already and this is like a dinner party. She cooks, he cleans; it’s one of their “couple things.” In fact I think he almost kissed her on the forehead when he cleared her place.

  But really, Cupcake cooked and McLean spent the dinner grilling us on our plans. I don’t think she has any attraction to Tucker, and even if she did, I’m sure she knows that now is not a good time. I’ll let Tucker do the dishes in fantasyland though; no one needs to burst his bubble.

  The public service announcement looping here is actually different than the one that was looping in Boston. This gives a little credence to the idea of an active government, but I’m not convinced. It’s more likely that the person who activated the message was in a rush and picked the wrong one.

  “We weren’t told to shelter in place,” I tell Laney. “They just said that if you were inside, keep your door closed, but unlocked. If you were outside, avoid the diseased.”

  “Well, you’ve heard our message now,” she says. “Stay inside. When the situation is under control, they’ll let us know.”

  “And you think people were listening to them?” Cupcake asks, confused.

  “It seemed like it. I only woke up a little after four, so I’m not sure what the rest of the day was like. But from four until just before I called you, everything was quiet. People seemed to actually be staying inside.”

  “If I were shooting fish, I would want them in a barrel, too,” Todd says, grinning wickedly.

  He makes good points, keeping the infected and potentially infected contained would be wise, but it’s the way he does it that bugs me. He always talks with an attitude that no one is as smart as he is or that he’s tougher than the rest of us. That, and his eyes and smiles; those are creepy.

  “But after the bridge blew up, people started to go outside?” I ask. I don’t know why the timeline is important to me, but I want to understand it.

  “Yeah. First it was a family of four…” McLean’s eyes begin to fill with tears.

  I’ve seen more carnage than I ever wanted to but so far there have been no children and no families. The little old lady in the convenience store was hard; she’s the one I see when I close my eyes, but nothing like a kid. I can convince myself that she had a good long life. Reaching the end, for her, wasn’t a bad thing; it was just the next step. Kids are different though. They haven’t even learned about fair and unfair. How can anything hunt down a child and slay them mercilessly?

  I put my hand on her back and rub gently. There are no words of comfort to share. This one would stump even the greeting card companies.

  Surprisingly, she doesn’t get to a full cry. She wipes her eyes and then continues. “Every time the street would clear, someone else would try and make a run for it. And every time someone tried to make a run for it, the zombie horde would be back to cut them down.”

  The view out my window was at a different time. People weren’t leaving home in panic, they were leaving in relief. In Boston, people were getting their jog in or going for a bike ride when the streets cleared.

  “Where do you think they were trying to get to?” I can’t imagine trying to escape New York on foot.

  “I have no idea. Maybe they heard about the nukes too, and were just trying to get away,” McLean asks. “What’s your source on that, by the way?” She clearly isn’t sure she believes it.

  I’m a closet stoolie. I check out Barstool Sports a few times a week, but almost never click on their NSFW links. Okay, I don’t always click on the NSFW links. But it’s not something I talk about to anyone but the guys.

  “Stoolie grapevine,” Tucker says. He walks over from the kitchen, grinning wide.

  “I’m sorry, what?” McLean does not follow.

  “I heard about the nukes through the Stoolie grapevine,” he repeats, like she’s being slow.

  “I gathered that. What is the ‘Stoolie grapevine’?”

  “Oh. It’s a bunch of bros who kind of know each other from the comments section of Barstool Sports and from some of their live events,” Tucker says. He thinks he’s clarifying.

  “What is Barstool Sports?” McLean asks.

  “It’s a blog, but that’s not the point,” I interject. “Tucker knows a guy in the Army who sent him a text that told him about the plans for the nukes. I’ve met the guy, and he seems solid. I don’t think he was trying to scare anyone; I think this was genuinely the plan.”

  “Was he a general or other high-ranking officer?” McLean is still skeptical.

  “Umm.” Tucker isn’t sure what to say.

  Great, with a handful of questions she’s blown a hole in our entire theory about the zombie apocalypse. Maybe there are no nukes coming. Maybe “sit tight and wait it out” was the best strategy. If it turns out that I could have crashed in my apartment for two days and avoided this whole mess, I am going to be so pissed at Tucker.

  “So no,” McLean says. She has a look of disgust plastered on her face.

  “You know what? I don’t care what his rank is,” Todd says. “A stand-up guy in the military gave us a heads-up that we were in danger. It’s plausible, hell I would call it probable. The only way to stop the surge is to kill them, and if you have to kill them, why not take out as many as you can with one shot?” He tries to defend our side of the story.

  “Look, I’m not saying he’s lying. I’m just saying that maybe we don’t need to rush out of here. It’s almost one. We have enough daylight to get somewhere, but then we would have to find safety in a strange place in the dark,” McLean explains.

  “We can be in the Adirondacks in two hours,” Todd asserts. “That gives us three hours of daylight to find a safe place for the night and gets us far enough away from the city to be clear of the nuclear blast.” Todd’s edge is getting harder, and it feels like he’s going to fight for this one.

  “Try five hours to upstate,” McLean shoots back. “If that’s where we’re going, fine, but we leave in the morning, not…”

  The heavy thump of rotor blades fills the air. By the depth of the sound, it’s not a news chopper reporting on traffic; it’s military.

  We all rush to the window. McLean is statuesque but still a little shorter than the rest of us, so she makes her way to the front and we all look out around her.

  I thought my apartment was a coffin. Her place is nice on the inside but the outside is claustrophobic. Her one window looks out over the street, but the building across is so tall that there is no way to even see the sun. All of the light she gets in here is ambient.

  “Roof deck?” Cupcake asks hopefully.

  McLean shakes her head no.

  “Street?” Tucker wonders aloud.

  If the military is active and sending rescue missions, I want to be found. They can’t fly low enough to see us through our window; we need to be outside. Our only outdoor option is the street, so Tucker is right.

  The four of us scramble for our weapons. Cupcake is first to the door and is fumbling with the locks. Adrenaline is surging through my veins and I’m ready to jump, scream and wave my arms. I’m also ready to fight, if needed.

  “Wait!” McLean yells.

  We all stop in our tracks. The silence is deafening. Gone are the sounds of rotors. How did they disappear so fast?

  BOOOM rumbles through the tiny space.

  I regret my question, as if asking it had something to do with the outcome. There was one helicopter, alone, and now it’s crashed.

  Maybe it was a foreign government rescuing a dignitary who had been at the UN. Maybe it was the air National Guard dropping supplies for survivors. Maybe… there are a million maybes.

  ‘They wouldn’t send a chopper in if they had bombs on the way,” Cupcake says, trying to reassure us.

  “Oh yeah? They wouldn’t let Manhattan get overrun with zombies,” Todd says. He does not want to stay here.

  “We have not idea what they would do or even who they are at this point,” I remind everyone.

  Tucker quietly slips out his
phone and starts reading and typing. He doesn’t say anything but keeps glancing up nervously.

  “Now seems like a good time to talk about your plan,” McLean says, putting an end to the argument.

  None of us jump in.

  “You don’t have plan, do you?”

  Cupcake tries to answer her. “Yesterday, our plan was to get out of Boston. Today, our plan was to come get you.” Cupcake doesn’t want to lead, but he doesn’t like being criticized for not doing it.

  “Well if that’s the extent of it, then you might as well have stayed in Boston,” she says. McLean doesn’t “go with the flow.”

  “You’re welcome, by the way,” Cupcake says. He is getting defensive, and telegraphing with his arms folded tightly across his chest.

  “Thank you,” McLean says tartly. “But seriously, if we don’t come up with a plan for what we’re going to do tomorrow, next week and even next month, we aren’t going to live long.”

  “Tomorrow there could be no Manhattan. Next week there could be no zombies, and next month things could be back to normal. How are we supposed to plan when there’s no way to tell what’s going to happen?” Cupcake says. He has just laid out the mindset for my entire group of friends. We don’t make plans; we wing it, everyday. Using the excuse of not knowing what’s going to happen has been my crutch for years.

  We’re all so much smarter and cooler than those idiots working for “the man” and trying to get ahead. I don’t want to rot in a cube farm mindlessly pushing some stupid software program. I’d much rather rot on my couch, wondering what I should be doing.

  If I’m brutally honest—which I wouldn’t be without the zombie apocalypse providing some motivation—it’s a lame excuse. Sitting around to see what the day is going to do to you is a victim’s mentality. Mindlessly rotting on my couch isn’t significantly different from mindlessly rotting in a cube.

  It would just be nice if my first efforts at planning were a little easier. Something like planning meals for three days or planning when I would do my laundry and get a haircut. Coming up with a plan to save myself and four others from the zombie horde that has taken over New York is a complicated place to start.