6th Horseman, Extremist Edge Series: Part 1 (26 page)

Markus chimes in. His voice is calm and
reassuring, “Peter tells us about the apocalypse, ‘the day of the
Lord will come like a thief’. . .”

“Thanks for that,” Isabella mumbles.

Markus continues unabated, “...The heavens
will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire,
and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare. In
Thessalonians, the passage says, ‘While people are saying, “Peace
and safety,” destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains
on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better,
Markus,” Hana mumbles.

“But we have, all of us here, have passed
through the fire. We are to become the righteous. We will rebuild
the world.”

“So you think there’s no quarantine line?”
Hana asks. “This virus is crawling across the entire Earth?”

“I don’t know for sure. But these are the end
times,” Markus replies. “I know it in my heart. When there’s no
more room in hell, the Lord will come and the dead will walk the
earth.”

I pull my oar slowly through the water,
steering us back to the middle of the Hudson. “I have to agree with
Markus. If they stopped the spread of the virus wouldn’t we see
planes in the sky? Wouldn’t we see the full force of the U.S. Army
by now?”

“They should’ve firebombed the entire area,”
Isabella adds.

Rice sits up. Her face has long lines of dark
mascara streaking from her cheeks. In the shadows of my weak
lantern her face is wrecked. She asks Markus, “Why are we saved? I
never spent one hour in church. My parents didn’t believe in God. I
never took communion or prayed!”

“God has a plan for all of us. It isn’t quite
clear to me yet, but I will see the plan. Stick with me. I’m in
God’s favor,” Markus answers with a smile.

“Where do we go if the world has ended?” Rice
asks.

“Let’s first find out if there’s a quarantine
line before we lose our minds. If we can find safety, we will,” I
reassure Rice. She puts her hand on my knee and tries to smile.

“Okay, how do we find out?” Rice wipes her
cheeks.

Hana wakes up Tanis. “Hey, did you bring the
radio you fixed?”

Tanis nods and hands the bag to Hana. He lies
back down on the floor of the rowboat.

Hana takes out the radio. “Tanis fixed this
thing. It’s not digital anymore, but he rigged this pin to scroll
through the stations. If the world didn’t end, we’d be able to pick
up a signal.” She flicks the radio on and slowly scans for
stations. First there’s only static as Hana moves the makeshift
dial slowly.

The static breaks around 97.1. “Need
survives. Greed dies. There is an Eden,” says a somber monotone
voice. “You have been chosen.”

“What the hell?” Isabella’s brow tightens as
her eyes fixate on the radio.

“Let me recheck the rest of the dial,” Hana
says, but the rest of the dial is nothing but static. She tunes it
back to 97.1.

“Twenty-one degrees, forty eight minutes,
north. Eighty degrees, zero minutes, west,” the voice on the radio
says. Then it repeats the earlier message. “Need survives. Greed
dies.”

“It’s an invitation. There are survivors
gathering at those coordinates,” I proclaim. “That means the virus
has circled the world.”

“How is that possible?” Rice asks.

“Everyone is sick now?” Andy mumbles. It’s
the first time I’ve heard him make a peep. His shock must be
wearing off. His mouse voice cracks. I’m guessing he’s seven or
eight years old. Cute kid. He reminds me of the gas station and the
station wagon. A fresh wave of sadness fills my veins.

“Shhh, Andy. Not everyone is sick. We’ll find
the survivors and your parents. I promise.”

The virus works so unbelievably fast to me.
Three days from death to rebirth. “The same sickness has crossed
oceans? Continents? Islands?”

Josh adds groggily, “There are over eighteen
million flights a year. That translates to roughly forty-nine
thousand flights per day.” He does a bit more math in his head.
“Average is 200 passengers per day, per flight,”

“That’s over nine million passengers a day,”
Markus calculates. He’s clearly done the math already.

“Doesn’t take a genius to see how fast a
virus could jump continents,” comments Isabella.

“Especially for an airborne virus that has no
symptoms in the first twenty-four hours of infection,” Josh
says.

“So, the world is dead,” mutters Hana.

I pull on my oar again, pointing our nose
back to the middle of the Hudson.

There’s a long silence in the boat. I can
hear the lapping of the waves on the hull. A scream spears the dark
night. Then another. The darkness seems to press against my back as
the whole world gets a lot more threatening.

“I suggest we get a bigger boat,” I say.

“Let’s find Eden,” Rice suggests, covering
Andy’s ears. “Anyone know how to read longitude and latitude?” She
looks at Josh who seems to have the biggest brain in the boat.

But it is Markus that answers, “Those
coordinates say that Eden is in Cuba.”

I don’t know how he knows that without a map
and I don’t care. “I guess we’re going to Cuba.”

Time passes as slow as sap drips from a
wounded tree. And like that sap that heals the tree, I feel more
relaxed. It’s as though the worst is behind us. Hana touches my
shoulder and points to the sky. “Manhattan hasn’t seen such stars
in over a century.”

The stars are as numerous as sand on a beach.
Are we special here? On Earth? Did I just fuck up the one grand
thing in the entire universe? Though I try to hide it, I cry. I let
my tears collect on my lids and watch the starlight blur into
obscurity.

Something bumps into the hull. Then another
bump. I sit up. It’s too dark to see anything so I grab my
flashlight and hold it over the edge. There’s a face in the dark
water. I exhale like I’d been hit in the stomach with a tire iron.
I’m about to scream out when I notice there are no roots in the
eyes.

“Ian,” whispers Isa. “Over here.”

I switch places with Hana as quietly as I can
and hold the light over the other edge. There’s a mass of dead
bodies in the water. None are moving. None are infected.

Josh takes the light and moves it to his
side. “The bodies are floating in a tight formation. It would seem
there’s a surface current pushing everyone together.”

“They’re all dead!” Andy yells and becomes
silent again. I want to cover his eyes but I think he needs to see
it. He’ll grow up in this dead world.
So look, kid. Really see
this. It will help you survive it.

Rice hugs Andy hard.

“It smells bad,” Hana mumbles.

Josh continues to look around with the light.
“We’re caught in the same current. We’ll be floating with the
corpses until we hit the lower bay and the current breaks up.”

W
e’re floating down
the Hudson, surrounded by dead and bloated bodies. It smells
terrible. I’d throw up if I had anything in my stomach. The flies
bombard me, swarming all of us. I feel the tickle, then swat. On
multiple occasions I scream, though only in my head. Squeezing my
eyes shut helps drown out the world around me, but I can’t keep
them shut. Inevitably, they pop open and I see the starlit shapes
floating around us. The bodies seem to hold us like we’re being
held in the chair by a crowd at a Jewish wedding during the Hora
dance.

Ben stands. The boat rocks.

“What did I say about sitting down?” Isabella
hisses.

“I have to piss.”

“I’m gonna rip that thing off.” She looks
ready to launch over me and fulfill her threat.

“Fine, then get piss in your face. I’m going
with or without a dick.”

Ben unzips, then pees. I want to cover my
ears. Not because of the sound of urine splashing on the water but
because it’s pattering on the body of some poor soul. Maybe they
weren’t poor. Maybe they had it easy. None of these bodies have
roots growing out of them. So they died in the beginning. They
never chased, never tried to bite or tear, never had to starve to
death like we might.

All the men take turns peeing over the side
of the boat. Even Isabella somehow squats over the edge enough not
to pee down her leg. I hold it. The pressure distracts me. Rice
does the same. Ian passes around his water bottle. I drink because
my throat is filled with razor blades. I know it’ll make me have to
go even worse.

Eventually, the sky brightens as the sun
rises. It’s the same sun as always. The same ball of warm light,
same slow-motion revival and I’m glad the day has come. I pull my
ponytail out and run my fingers through my hair. It makes my scalp
feel good. I notice I’m shaking. As a cop, I’ve seen and
experienced many scary things: perps with guns and no brains, AIDS
patients cut and bleeding after downing a ton of pills, and my
favorite, stampedes in the subways from terrorist threats. But
nothing compares to last night. Alien things have taken over our
world, and they kind of look like us.

Now that the Hudson has opened up and headed
out to sea, the flotilla of the dead have broken up, though a few
bodies remain, reminding us what will happen if we don’t get out of
this tiny boat.

I’ve moved faster following parades. As the
sun illuminates the landscape, I notice the Statue of Liberty on
the horizon. Her arm is broken off and the wreckage of an Apache
Helicopter burns on the islands edge. She’s broken, just like her
country.

Tears fill my eyes and spill down my face. I
became a cop because of how proud she made me feel. I hadn’t felt
her power for a long time. Her purpose inspired a world to go down
the road of tolerance. We were free here: free to thrive, free to
fail, and free to lean from our mistakes. The idea that anyone
could control an entire population is laughable! The true result of
overwhelming fascism is total anarchy. And the nature of a large
government or a large corporation is the same, repression. They are
two heads of the same beast.

I wipe away my tears. The last thing this
boat needs is the resident cop sobbing with sentimentality.

The shore of the island is only a couple
hundred feet to my left. Movement surrounds the downed chopper. I
see our frightening future — walkers everywhere. They’re still
following us, watching us, hunting us in their clumsy blatancy.
Thousands of them.

Isabella didn’t sleep at all. She stayed at
the front of the boat all night, mostly in silence. Everyone else
had managed to get some sleep.

Josh wakes up shortly after we pass under the
statue’s shadow. “We made good time,” he says, yawning. “Must have
been going just over two miles per hour on this thing.” Josh’s
brain never quits calculating.