At the Minimart Express he went shopping, picking up candy bars and dried meat sticks, batteries, more flashlights, some sandwiches and bags of chips, several rolls of duct tape, bottles of water, a penknife, a state map and a bag to put them all in, two canisters of gas and two whiffle-ball sets, then left and rolled on.
Two blocks further he came across a silver automatic BMW resting across the dark asphalt and stopped. The driver's side door was open and the keys were in the ignition. He looked around the street but nobody was there, of course. He felt a pang of guilt but rubbed it away. The rules were different now.
The keys turned, lighting up the dash for a second before spluttering as the engine died. He rolled to the back, located the gas tank and filled it from the canisters, turned the key again and now the engine purred to life. The front beams winked on and bathed the leaf-strewn street in sterile white light; a bright island in the road's dark river.
He took firm hold of the handle above the door and hoisted himself off the wheelchair and in. His weak grip failed halfway through, dropping him painfully onto the car's metal doorframe, but he caught himself on the steering wheel and climbed the rest of the way.
Now he was sitting in the car.
It was hot and fiddly work attaching the two plastic whiffle ball bats to the gas and brake pedals with duct-tape, but he got it done. He tested them and they worked, revving the engine sweetly as he pushed down. A quick study of the steering wheel showed it had cruise control, which would help. Cool air blew on his face from the air con vents and he turned it up, basking for a moment.
He got the wheelchair in with difficulty. He closed the door and looked in the rear view mirror, but could only see a few yards of road illuminated by his red brake lights. That was all that remained of Frayser, now, perhaps all that anyone would ever know. But he didn't feel sad, instead he was growing more excited. He was a grown man finally leaving his mother's basement behind, and Amo was waiting.
He pushed the gearstick to drive, pressed down on the whiffle for gas and the BMW pulled away.
9. NEW YORK
It took him two days solid driving to reach New York.
For six hours that first night he drove in silence, with all the windows rolled down and the high beams on, plunging alone into the dark. There wasn't a single electric light on anywhere, not in any of the tenement buildings in the little towns he rolled through, not on the I-40 toll booths or in roadside burger shacks, motels or bars.
All he saw was the tiny slice of the world his headlights illuminated: shuttered shop fronts and the washed-out entrances to malls; dark alleys passing by like dry veins; parking lots that stretched away as endless silver-tinged deserts, their contours just discernible by the light of the moon; and between each town the long dark walls of forest, marking the outer edge of a darkness that went on forever into the night.
The road was full of motionless cars, dropped like heavy metal hailstones from heaven. In places they had crashed into each other, forcing him to weave between them, telling a story of sudden, hard infection. Cubes of shattered glass lay sprayed like diamonds across the road. Some cars had flipped onto their roofs after head-on collisions, the trajectories of which Robert would work through backwards as he passed by.
CRASH
BANG
BURN
Some were smoking still, reduced to skeletons of corroded black bones full of white and black char. He breathed in the smell of ash and the chemical stink of burnt plastic seats.
He drove on.
There were zombies everywhere, wan pale figures emerging from the darkness and quickly receding behind. Most ignored him, rolling by as impersonal as a weather front, though some turned to follow, running in his wake like glowing white meteors. On clear sections he sped away, and their pale figures soon faded in the rear-view mirror.
He drove down pitch-black roads until he hit the edge of Nashville around 5am. He didn't feel hungry, though he was tired; a deep, bone-weary kind of exhaustion. For a year he'd barely moved, and now this.
The odometer said he'd covered 212 miles. He rolled into a Big Eastern motel and switched the BMW off, dropping him into near complete darkness but for a few tiny lights on the dash. The engine ticked steadily as it began to cool.
He tilted the seat and crawled over it to the back, where he laid down with a water bottle for a pillow. He chewed on a single sandwich before giving it up as a lost cause; he wasn't even hungry. He drank a few gulps of water and closed his eyes.
* * *
When he woke it was steamy and hot in the car, and pale zombie faces pressed against the glass like Halloween wallpaper. The white glow from their eyes lit the interior, and their synchronized breathing rocked the vehicle from left to right, like a lullaby.
He rubbed his face, damp with sweat. His shoulders ached deeply, his whole body throbbed and he barely felt rested at all, but Amo was waiting.
He crawled back into the driver's seat and the zombies' eyes tracked him, like paintings in a haunted house. They were all races, genders and ages, bleached back to the color of pale milk. This was what the end of the world looked like.
He had to pee.
He put the car in reverse and backed up slowly. The bodies in back shuffled awkwardly but gradually split to the sides, so he flipped to drive and steered the car through the bumping bodies by memory, dipping down a verge, bobbing back up, bound for the highway. In a few minutes the bodies thinned and bright midday sun slashed in.
Ahead lay a largely clear highway, stretching through a meager services stop penned on all sides by thick bristlecone pine forest.
Beautiful. He looked behind him and saw a zombie horde sprawling across the parking lot and four-lane highway, probably thousands strong, running at him like a surging wave. He pushed the gas and drove away at sixty miles an hour, rolling the window down and sucked in deep lungfuls of hot, pollen-scented air, clearing out the fog of the night before.
The world was strange now.
To either side the dark, wild expanses of the night were replaced by the suburbs of Nashville; malls, parking lots, gas stations and off-ramps. Soon he was rolling through downtown flanked by upmarket skyscrapers, genteel old law offices and saloon-like designer cafes, edging carefully through herds of milling zombies. At times he wound down the window and called out, "Hello!", but no responses came. Zombies running at him out of dark buildings and side-alleys became commonplace.
He passed out of Nashville twenty minutes later, catching a glimpse of the Cumberland River off to the left. On a barren stretch of I-40 overlooking the long empty runway of Nashville airport, he stopped at a Barky's gas station and refilled the tank direct from the pump.
A plane wreck south of Lebanon slowed him briefly, spread across I-40 like a vast swatted fly, and he pushed through charred rows of seats and odd bits of twisted metal like a snow plow. In Buffalo Valley he stopped for a Fat Boy donut, then drove on, pushing the BMW and himself hard until he was almost asleep at the wheel, lulled by the silence and drowsy warm monotony.
When it was past midnight he stopped in the middle of the road and slept in the driver's seat, waking chilly and confused sometime in the early morning, with more zombies around him, like ghosts in the ruins of a world.
He made good time that second day, reaching Knoxsville by mid-afternoon and crossing over into Virginia by nightfall. Once his BMW burst a tire on shattered glass and he climbed out and swapped to a nearby Audi. The ache in his shoulders began to fade a and he was feeling stronger already.
The air was hot and humid in the run toward Roanoke. He reached Maryland by lunchtime. The zombies seemed more numerous now, and he imagined all the East Coast cities emptying out and wandering the countryside. He finished the last stretch to New York in a kind of fugue, half-asleep at the wheel as dusk set in. He came in on I-78 through a warren of neighborhoods and tiny little towns, following signs for Manhattan.
A bridge carried him over Newark Bay to Jersey City, where he zagged north and pulled over to the waterfront before the last vestige of light faded from the sky. There he sat staring out at the towering skyline of New York, all dark silhouettes against pink clouds.
It was on fire.
A thick plume of greasy smoke rose up from somewhere behind the Empire State Building, illuminated by a swathe of orange flames in the streets below. It set a deep cold fear burning in his belly, reminding him of 9/11, when he'd been only 5 years old and barely understood what had happened.
He understood this. New York was burning, and somehow Amo was in the thick of it.
* * *
Holland Tunnel was blocked a few hundred feet in and he couldn't get through. His headlights illuminated a butter-churn of vehicles all cramped and pressed together.
"Shit," he cursed.
If he'd had his legs he could climb through easily. Perhaps even now he could try, but it would be madness to crawl over so much jagged metal and glass in the pitch black. He'd cut his unfeeling legs to ribbons and bleed out without even knowing it.
He reversed back out, halting at the water's edge. The Hudson flowed by uncaring, dark and fast. Already the pink was fading from the sky, though the flames still burned high on Manhattan Island, their light reflecting off the plumes of smoke and ash.
He dug around in the mass of papers and trash in the passenger foot well, coming up with a map for New York. The George Washington Bridge seemed the closest, fifteen miles to the north. Chances were good it was just as clogged as the Holland Tunnel, but he didn't have a choice.
It took five hours.
The built-up city roads were at most one or two lanes wide, with narrow curbs and buildings stacked right up to the sidewalk, offering no space to bypass all the cars, buses, semis and motorbikes lying around.
He tried to plow through but the Audi wasn't powerful enough to shove other vehicles out of the way, so he had to constantly backtrack, kept company by a growing swarm of zombie bodies. They pressed up to his glass whenever he stopped, growing thicker as the night went by, until at last at four in the morning they were so tightly pressed around him, wedged into an intersection somewhere in Union City, he could no longer move at all.
Pushing the gas just spun his tires, filling the car with the stink of burning rubber. He tried to pry a way free, jolting between reverse and drive with the pedal pushed down hard, but there were too many. He heard their bones cracking and stopped.
He was trapped.
* * *
He dreamed of Amo burning atop a pyre of bodies, just like the image in his comic. Green-O stood nearby with a Zippo lighter in his hand, grinning like a demon.
Around noon they started to clear, and he eased the Audi through, rolling along streets bathed in warm mid-summer light. In 45 minutes he sat on the on-ramp to the George Washington Bridge, but it was just as crowded as Lincoln Tunnel.
He needed a bigger vehicle.
At the New Jersey Fire Department station he switched into a fire engine out in the yard. It was a high haul to get into the seat, and pulling his chair up after him was tough, but he made it. The key was in the ignition and sparked at his first try.
On the approach to the bridge he sped up. The huge machine responded slowly but surely, charging up like a dynamo. He steered it up the ramp to the bridge, pushed the gas-bat hard to the floor, and launched into traffic like a battering ram.
CRUNCH
The truck plowed through for about fifty feet before its momentum died out, with vehicles shifted to either side like logs in a beaver dam. The jolt of the seat belt across his chest felt good. He reversed and charged again, sending vehicles shearing against the bridge railings.
He forced his way over George Washington Bridge in a little over an hour, making landfall on Manhattan Island giddy with adrenaline. His chest ached where the seat belt had slapped him again and again.
Zombies were waiting for him, and he rolled on through, battering his way east along 174th street, punching a white Porsche to bits over the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, tearing a yellow Ford almost in half on his way into Tremont.
At an open intersection with 3
rd
Avenue on the corner of Tremont Park he looked south, but the smoke and ash were long gone. The fire had been somewhere near the Empire State Building, on 5
th
Avenue and 34
th
Street, so he turned right onto 3
rd
Avenue and raced down toward it.
What he found disgusted him.
The first body was near the corner of 3
rd
and East 112
th
street, deep in Harlem, lying in the middle of the road. It wasn't gray and the lights in its eyes had gone out, rather its skin was a mottled black with patches of purple and pink, and flesh hung off it like pulled pork at a barbeque.
He gagged. Moments later when the smell wafted through the open window, like burnt sausages, he vomited out of the window.
This was a person burned alive. Its face was gone, its hair was gone, its clothes were gone. He killed the engine and in the following silence heard the low drone of flies.
Around the body there was a wet and glossy smear, like translucent candlewax. A southerly breeze came and the smell hit him harder. He pinched his nose and looked away, momentarily startled by how normal the world looked to either side. There was a parked taxi, a yellow fire hydrant, a row of brightly colored newspaper boxes. The display window of a clothes shop called Hartegan's featured a Daniel Boone-like figure wearing a top hat. Then there was this.
Was this Amo's body? Was this a zombie?
Stretching south behind it was a trail of footsteps marked in glossy oil. Probably a zombie, lit up like a firecracker somewhere south, then it kept walking this way.