He smiled as he grasped it. Now all the paint cans in the stairwell made sense. It meant Amo really had gone big, choosing a symbol that anyone would understand, that couldn't possibly have been there before the world ended. He'd put up a flag for the whole world to see.
A blush of pride ran through him.
"I just came for the view," he said. "I didn't see it."
Masako narrowed her eyes at him. "Climb fifty-odd floors for the view?"
He shrugged and looked around. The zombies were starting to dissipate, and he didn't want to pursue this conversation any further.
"I'm going for my wheelchair," he said, "I'll be back in a minute."
He slid down the rungs, slid onto his side on the cool lobby floor, then began to crawl. The marble was cool and it was easy enough to weave between the moving bodies, like dodgem cars.
"You don't have to-" Masako said, then stopped. He turned to look up at her.
"Don't have to what?"
"I mean," she paused awkwardly. "I didn't realize. Your legs, you know. You don't have to crawl."
He looked down at himself. Yes, he was crawling, that was true. He hadn't thought about it really, not since waking up in his basement. It was true though, paraplegics weren't often crawling around in the old world, were they? That was a kind of taboo.
"How would I get my wheelchair then?" he asked.
She came down the rungs of the ladder tentatively, still skittish as the dead went by. "I could get it."
Ah. He hadn't considered that. "You could, but why shouldn't I get it myself?"
She didn't have an answer for that. Obviously she wanted to say it was embarrassing to crawl on your belly like a slug or something similar, but what did that even mean now?
"Walk with me, if you like," he said, and smiled.
She did.
* * *
They ate a meal of warmed-up hotdogs and beans over Masako's gas camping stove; his first hot meal since it began, served on an actual plate. They lay down in the lobby on bedding she found in a storage closet, gradually growing bolder as zombies failed to attack. They lay there and talked about the big F and Amo's California plan and each other.
Masako was from Brooklyn, a teaching assistant at the University there. For the last two months she'd hidden in her apartment, reading books and watching out of her window. She'd only gone out after she ran out of food, then saw the big F and planned her trip over for three days.
Cerulean put his arm around her as it got dark outside, and she nestled in to his side; just two survivors together. She fell asleep easily, but Robert lay in the still dark of the lobby, looking up at the ceiling. By now he would've reached the top and dived.
Nothing had changed.
Masako was sweet, but she didn't scratch the surface of the emptiness inside him. At the same time he couldn't just leave her. That wasn't something he could live with, or die with.
So he would deliver her to Amo. Then he would dive.
14. SURVIVORS
The next day all the zombies were gone.
Together they tidied up Amo's goodies, scattered across the floor by the zombie flood.
"Why the coffee?" Masako asked.
Cerulean looked up. She was handling one of the shiny Nespresso pods.
"Lara was a barista?" he offered. "It's a kind of in-joke, I suppose. Other than that, I think he wants us to feel like the old world is still here, only shifted. We can have luxury if we want."
"I don't even know how to use this thing," Masako said, tapping the coffee machine and giving him a shy smile. He didn't know either, but that was his cue. He went over and figured it out, slotting the pod in and puncturing the seal, running the process with a mug waiting underneath.
"Good thing it runs on powdered milk," he said. "I don't know when we'll have real milk again."
The air filled with the smell of brewing coffee as the machine percolated water and milk powder through its innards. It almost eclipsed the smell of gasoline in the air, though it did nothing to counter the loud buzz of the generator, connected by a long orange power line.
Amo had thought of everything.
They sipped coffee and studied Amo's maps. He'd laid out a route leading west across the northern states, culminating in Los Angeles. Cerulean could feel the excitement growing in Masako, from her excited tone and the way she skipped around and kept touching his shoulders lightly. These tastes of the old world probably felt more natural to her, like a welcome home. She'd never even left her room, let alone the city. She hadn't dragged herself through blood and guts, through mud and falling bodies. She hadn't seen Amo die, or Matthew.
He marked Las Vegas in his mind. That's where he'd leave her. She could go the rest of the way on her own; he didn't owe her any more than that.
Still, he got caught up in the excitement of planning their voyage. You couldn't wear an avatar and be fake the whole time, since Cerulean was him just as much as Robert underneath. Travelling across the country was exciting, that was undeniable.
Amo had parked ten neat blue and white RVs in the Empire State Building's underground car park. He'd even painted the bays with names, and they chose-
Lincoln
The name was also stenciled neatly on the RV's side. That instilled pride. He brushed off the similarity to Matthew's RV. At least this one wasn't bright yellow.
"How do you drive?" Masako asked, as they finished looking over the vehicle. There was nothing to load, not even gas, since Amo had done it all for them.
He held up two mop handles from a broom cupboard. They would serve as his whiffle bats. "I push the pedals with these. Then I drive."
She nodded. "Would you take us out, then? I hate driving in the city."
They both laughed at that. He appreciated it, even if it was slightly patronizing. She was trying to build him up into the heroic male she needed, and for a time at least he could go along.
They rolled up and out of the parking lot into a beautiful, hot summer's day. On 5
th
Avenue there was a big arrow painted on the asphalt, pointing left.
Cerulean laughed. This was going to be easy.
Another arrow guided them left onto West 34
th
Street, which lay ahead completely cleared of vehicles. Cars and trucks lined the route like barricades at a ticker tape parade, with gatherings of white-eyed people behind them, waving them on.
"This is amazing," Masako said quietly as they rolled by. "Amo did all this?"
Cerulean pushed the mop-pedal down and New York blurred by. At some point Masako leaned over and turned the stereo on. The sudden blare of music, something by the Beatles, filled up the cab. Here Comes the Sun.
He hadn't listened to music for a year and three months. He bobbed his head and tapped the steering wheel like a real person, while Masako began to sing.
Lincoln tunnel was clear. He couldn't believe it, but there it was. The whole tunnel, so clogged with traffic when he'd come by a month or so earlier, was empty.
Masako was laughing about Amo now.
"He's like some kind of god," she whispered as they rolled through the dark tunnel. "You said he was a comic book artist?"
"Zombie comic books," Cerulean said. "His last project was a tower of them in Times Square."
That delighted her.
They emerged up from the tunnel and followed the arrows laid down on the road, through a broken tollbooth and up a circling onramp to the 495. At a corner looking back over Manhattan Cerulean pulled the RV to a stop and they surveyed the city they'd left behind.
"Wow," Masako said.
The big 'f' was there, painted proud across the top ten floors of the Empire State Building. Robert had to tip his hat to Amo. He'd really remade the world.
* * *
The roads were clear to the I-80, and on it they zoomed through New Jersey. Air rushed in through the open windows hot and sweet and green, as to either side the suburbs faded into forest, fields and creeks. There were yellow wildflowers everywhere; on the highway verge, in the fields, springing up down the central boundary grass.
They passed a large troop of the dead roaming on the right, mute as wildebeest stalking the prairies.
"Where are they going?" Masako asked, watching until they fell out of sight.
Cerulean shrugged. He'd seen them going west, and going north, and heading towards him. It didn't add up to much. "Just walking."
Beatles tracks played on the stereo and little towns flew by, all picket fences and historical old restaurants, windmills painted Shaker white and blue, churches with inspirational messages out front. Here and there lay crunched cars, shoved off to the side.
In two hours they were clear across New Jersey and entering Pennsylvania through a forest of red maples, then as they climbed to cross a low bridge over a wide creek, there was a white line painted in a broad stripe across the road. Cerulean slowed down. Off to the side lay a semi trailer and cab with a single word painted on its side in large letters.
SORRY
Cerulean pulled the RV over. They both got out, Masako helping him with the wheelchair, and went to investigate.
Painted near the thick white stripe there was a message.
Sophia – RIP
06 / 11 / 2018
I should have reached you in time
LMA
They looked at each other and said nothing.
In the back of the semi they found a noose hanging ominously from the roof, and a living space with a bed, sofa, TV and generator. Cerulean hauled himself in and Masako followed.
There was a diary on a coffee table next to three burnt-down spliffs, which detailed the misery of a young trainee doctor called Sophia. Cerulean and Masako sat side-by-side on the sofa like a couple looking at a wedding album, reading about a lonely life that culminated in suicide.
Her entries were a fluctuating mix of fatalism and optimism, at times detailing her theories about the infection. Her goal was to find an electron microscope and study 'living' infected cells, with the dream of curing the world.
Her final entry was:
Sorry,
I wish I could do this. I feel like I'm letting you down. But I can't do it anymore.
"She hung herself," Masako said, her voice thick with emotion. "Poor girl."
Cerulean pointed at a second batch of writing underneath Sophia's last entry, penned in red ink in a different hand.
You're all right now, Sophia. We're taking care of you. You are an important trailhead on the way out West. Your death was not for nothing and you will not be forgotten. I wish I'd known you, you sound like a lovely girl.
Thank you.
"Lara wrote that," Cerulean said, pointing at her signature in block capitals. He flicked back through the diary, pointing at numerous other places where Lara had annotated Sophia's most miserable moments with kind words and support, the kind of things that might have saved her life if she'd heard them in time.
Masako was crying. "It's beautiful," she said. "Don't you think so?"
He wasn't crying. He could see the beauty in it, and the hope, but it didn't affect him like it did her. Sophia was still dead. Matthew was still dead. It was good to chew down all the pain, chomp it into palatable bits in the past, but that wasn't what was real.
What was real was the dive. Diving into the truth and letting it wash all over you, down into your lungs. Hanging there in the semi-trailer's mouth was beautiful. Making that choice was the right thing for Sophia, because this wasn't the world for her.
"It's beautiful," he agreed.
Masako wanted to write something. They discussed it briefly, then she wrote it neatly and clearly on the next page over, like a log book.
We're coming, Lara, and Amo, and Sophia. We're right behind you. We'll see you in Los Angeles.
Masako and Cerulean.
They drove on.
* * *
They saw a woman by the roadside at the edge of Pennsylvania, lurking by a small fire in a dense patch of pine forest just out of Grove City. She was old and weathered, dressed in denim stonewash dungarees with wrinkled skin and a shotgun over her shoulder.
They pulled up and she leveled it at them.
"I can keep driving, if you like," Cerulean called out of the open window. "It's just two of us. I'm in a wheelchair, my name's Cerulean. This is Masako."
The woman hawked and spat. "Wheelchair? Let's see that."
He lifted it out and climbed in. The woman frowned. Her skin looked like old parchment, lined with ground-in dirt.
"How'd you do that?"
"I fell."
She studied him for a time, then spat again. "You know anything about hunting foxes?"
Masako chuckled politely.
"Not a thing," Cerulean said, "but we're willing to learn."
"Willing's good," said the woman, brushing a sliver of silvery hair out of her face. "God willing and all. I ain't seen folks since the big flood rolled out. Sit down." She gestured to the grass around the fire.
Masako climbed out cautiously and started over, Cerulean following.
"Cynthia," the woman said, pointing the shotgun down. "That's me."
They cooked and ate fried spam and beans together from the RV's stores, with wild onions the woman rustled up out of a burlap sack.
"You need these for vitamins," she said, holding one up like it was a diamond to be studied in a fine light. "They'll put the stink on you, but you'll shit perfect for three days."
Masako gasped and laughed. They made other small talk, sharing theories about where everyone had gone, though Cynthia was certain it had to be the rapture.
"There's not a more sinful soul than me," she said, and winked at Masako. "I ain't never said my rosaries right."
Cerulean laughed. It was a good sign that there were other people. It meant they wouldn't need him. Masako explained about Amo's plan, heading to LA to see a superhero movie, and Cynthia thought on it, spat once, then nodded.