Survivor (13 page)

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Authors: James Phelan

BOOK: Survivor
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26
I
n a panic, I banged on the glass door. The sun was really shining now, blinding, and squinting against the reflected white light sapped at the energy I thought I had. My head was spinning and I could feel droplets of sweat running down my temples. I heard a sound behind me and was relieved to see Caleb staring out at me through one of his black paper peepholes. He unlocked the door, all smiles, and gave me a big bear hug as I stood there.
“What happened?” I asked, pointing at the carnage, evidence of a fight out here at his doors. Was I leading Chasers and danger to my friends?
“They came last night,” he said, looking at the fresh debris matter-of-factly.
“How many?” I asked, looking around me. No bodies, no sign of Chasers or anyone else—but no doubt, there were fresh footprints and marks out here, shattered bits of broken . . . something.
“Enough,” he said. It was as if the matter was closed. “You all right, buddy? You don't look so great.”
“I'm okay.” I crouched down to examine the blood more closely. “So, how did they get in?”
He shrugged, scratched at the back of his head. He seemed so calm when I was so tense.
“Just after dark there was knocking at the door. I thought it was you.”
“They knocked?”
“Yep,” he said “Stupid . . . I opened the door without checking.”
I swallowed hard, trying to catch my breath.
“Four of them, the kind with the dried blood welcome sign around their mouths,” he continued, miming the ghoulish clown face with a finger motion around his lips. He stopped and followed my gaze; I was looking at his bandaged hand. “This? Oh, it's nothing. They rushed me, I managed to get the doors closed, and they would have bashed through if I hadn't run upstairs and pelted them with pots and pans and crockery. Then the riot gun when they moved out onto the street.”
“Holy crap . . .”
“Yeah,” he said. “Freaky thing is how they knew I was in here; I wasn't followed, I'm sure of it.”
“So . . . what? They remembered you being here?”
“None have ever seen me come in here,” he replied.
“Maybe they tracked your prints?”
“I'd been careful, and it'd snowed over. You know, I think it could have been those who followed us the other day.”
“Serious?”
“Serious. I can't think of any others who have come here, seen me in here. Told you they're getting smarter.” He was peeved. “So what are you doing here, Jesse, are you coming in or what?”
“Yeah, listen,” I said. But I started to choke before I could continue. My throat was so dry and I felt hot all of a sudden. I moved away and leaned on a crashed car and coughed until I felt myself calming down, then looked through the windscreen and saw a frozen family of corpses staring back at me through long-dead eyes.
 
I run through the empty streets of Manhattan. The winter sun is out, warm on my back. I round the corner and the world is in shadows. I stop here, not wanting to enter into the impenetrable dangers before me. I could be in a tunnel, the light behind me calling. The snow here is up to my knees and I turn to head back—but they are still there. They are after me, nearing, getting closer with every stride. I am being chased and they will not stop. They're after me, or what's in me, and there is no time to waste, for to hesitate is to die. To die by their hand is a brutal way to check out of this world. Violent. Unspeakable. I have no choice. I speed into the darkness.
Black broken storefronts flash by me. I imagine I hear their footfalls but I believe it's my heart beating loud in my ears. This is a pace I cannot keep up for long.
Seconds later I am inside a building, the lobby of some formerly grand hotel, my shoes skidding on the ash-strewn marble floor and I catch myself against an overturned chair. My breathing echoes, so loud. Like most other places in this city, this building has survived the attack but has been gutted by some kind of fire, the windows long blown out, debris everywhere.
I am out the back, on a silent street void of cars. The shadows here are long, stretching across and up the road, lonely flashes of sunlight between the teeth of buildings. I pause for the briefest moment and in that stillness I weigh up my options. I hear a scream of the chase and I resume running. I know my only option is to keep on running and hope that before I can run no more I find a place to hide.
Three blocks pass before I stop, hidden around a bleak corner, my hands on my knees as I catch my breath. My heartbeat drums in my ears, louder than I have ever heard it, as if it may be beating the last of what it can take or is spending all of its predetermined beats far too soon. My breath fogs as plumes of steam crashing through the still air in front of me, the frantic rhythm I've come to know well, always synched to the terminal sequence of heartbeats. I want to sink to the ground and rest, to catch my composure before they catch me. Just a matter of time, I know that. Something else I know: I know that when you run for your life, it is the fastest and farthest and fiercest you will ever move. It is, if you want to stay alive, the one time you have no choice. You have to run. Run!
 
When my eyes opened all I could see was a dim light.
I felt dizzy and my head throbbed.
“Jesse?”
I turned my head to the right. Caleb was on a seat by the couch where I lay. He sat there, a bottle of water in one hand, his face concerned.
“Hey, Caleb . . .” I said, hoarse. I had something to say to him, something to ask, something urgent, but I couldn't place it. I tried to sit up, but it made me nauseous and my world went spinning.
“Here, buddy,” Caleb said, holding the bottle to my mouth. I sipped slowly—two, three mouthfuls—then he took the water away. My breaths were deep and long, measures against the panic that was rising within me for no apparent reason.
What's bugging me? What's so urgent?
“How you feel?”
“Sick,” I replied. I looked at him through half-closed eyes. “How did I—What happened?”
“You collapsed in the street out front,” he said. “Knocked your head on a car on the way down to terra firma.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You've been out for a while. I was worried.”
My head was heavy and I was so tired I couldn't even sit up straight.
“You look like crap,” Caleb said.
I was glad Caleb was there to drag me in.
We're in this together, and we came together for a reason. We've found one another amidst all this.
“Here,” he said, rifling through some orange prescription bottles and presenting a couple of pills in his palm, “take these.”
Taking those pills was the last thing I remember before falling asleep.
27
I
turn and run. Upstairs.
The dark stairwell now lit by my flashlight, my feet finding their way and because the power has been out for over two weeks I am adept at moving like this, the sixteen-year-old me versus the eternal darkness. I trip and skin my knees. When your life depends on speed, accidents happen and you don't stop to sulk about it. The flashlight broke in the fall and I ditch it. I do not slow my ascent, feet a blur somewhere in the darkness until I get to the uppermost door. I am used to this now, this way of avoiding the chase. I'm a survivor, one of the few, uninfected, hunted. Preyed upon.
My hand finds the door handle. I open the door.
Daylight. This is the roof of the building. Several stories above the street, ankle deep snow. From the edge I cannot see them down there on the street or at the entrance and I know they must now be inside this building. Will they be smart enough to track me up here? Yes. When you are being chased, there are no doubts as to the ability of those who want to have you. They will get you, given the slightest chance. They don't use flashlights or even matches or a lighter—they will navigate those stairs in complete darkness and they will do so better and faster than you or I, for their lives depend on this chase too. I reach around to the side pocket of my backpack and pull out the pistol. Heavy, loaded, ready to fire. How many bullets did it hold? Thirteen? Fifteen? I think thirteen. Dave's held fifteen.
Dave. He was . . . I missed him. More than my school friends back home, maybe even more than my family. Dave, another guy my age, a friend I'd known for just a couple short weeks, a guy taken too soon by this place. I missed him, and I missed Mini, and I missed Anna—
Jesse! Someone called my name. Jesse!
Jesse, over here!
It's a girl's voice, so familiar, so sweet. As I hear it and it registers I know it should not be, but then nothing in this place is certain anymore. I turn—
Anna is there. Standing, by a handrail, waving at me. Beautiful Anna, my lost friend, here now . . .
She yells: Come on!
I run to her. At the edge of the building, where it backs onto another street, she's disappearing. The steel handrail of the fire escape snakes downward and I see that Anna is already a couple levels below, headed fast for the street.
I rush after her. I am halfway down the series of steel grate stairs when I hear noises from above and feel the vibrations of twelve pairs of feet thundering after us. I slip on the slick cold steel, tumble down to a landing, crushed of breath, but I get to my feet and push on, limping. Another flight, the sounds nearing behind me as I slide down what is a slim steel ladder to the street and turn to scan for Anna. I see her back as she rounds a corner up ahead—I chase after her.
I yell: Anna!
She's faster than I remember, faster than I'd ever given her credit for. When I get to the corner I see her across the street and she calls out to me before disappearing again and I chase after her, slipping on the icy road but somehow keeping my feet. In a few seconds I am running through the stacks of a library, headed for a light towards the back of the room and then I see them: my three friends. Anna is there, so is Dave, and Mini. I thought they'd left me days ago, I thought they were gone, that I'd never see them again. They smile. I have so much to say, so many questions and so much to share. Outside the window, the Chasers flash by, running fast down the wrong street. Then they're gone.
That was—
I stop speaking as I look across to my friends. I take a step back, taking it in—they've changed. Felicity, Rachel, and Caleb are now standing next to me, right where my departed friends had been. Had I imagined them just now, some kind of mind trick, some measure of madness? It's then I know that none of this adds up; the illusion is over, I know what this is.
I don't know what to say to them, the three people before me now. I am lost, more than just for words. My world seems to spin and I catch myself from falling by holding on to a bookshelf. My friends before me now, each of them a survivor like me, I'd met in the last couple of days. I'd met each of them in the days since I'd been alone, since the attack, since all this . . .
Am I dreaming?
None of them answer. The looks they give me—I could read anything into that. Pity. Fright. Ineptitude. Love. Anger. Anything and everything, to the point where I cannot face them and I turn my back and look out the window to a day that is growing darker. I see Anna's reflection in the glass, her dark hair and pretty face and bright red mouth that tasted of strawberries. This may be the last time I see her like this, and I watch her, taking in this last moment in a string of final moments and we share a last look backward before going forward to the light: that pinprick of dawn, the horizon turning on itself, inverted, so that you are looking down at the earth and you're suspended up there, with the sun and the moon and all of us in the same big sky.
I know what this is. I know, and I'm sad about it. I know Dave couldn't be here, not like this, standing there behind me. Certainly not Anna. I know only one place where they could all appear like this, replace my other friends like that, so I know what this is. I've had enough and I have to leave, it'll drive me mad otherwise, it might even tempt me to stay with them. But something in me won't let me hang around and I think I'm grateful for that. This will all be over soon, and then I won't be alone anymore.
Anna asks: Jesse, what do you want?
I look at her reflection, and even though I'm asleep I cry in my dream and I can feel the tears in my eyes in my sleeping self.
I want what I've wanted every day since all this happened—I want to go home. But I know that's now not that easy, nor is that place so easily defined. I accept that home may now be wherever my friends are.
28
I
opened my eyes and rolled to my side. I was hot, laid up on the couch, covered with a couple of heavy quilts, and weary, but there was something niggling away at the back of my mind. I stretched out to try to wake up, and kicked the covers off. Caleb sat next to me, writing in a book. I liked being here with him, but I could not shake the feeling that I had to be someplace else, that there was something urgent that had to be done . . . I just could not summon what it was.
“Hey, welcome back, buddy,” Caleb said, looking at me.
I smiled sleepily.
“I've been talking to you all night while you slept,” he said. “Hear any of it?”
I didn't answer, my world in a drowsy fog.
“Gotta say, you're a good listener; helped me figure some stuff out with my story.”
“Story?” I asked, my voice raspy.
“Yeah, this is what I was talking about,” Caleb said, showing me his notebook. It appeared to be some kind of graphic novel, evidently an epic judging by the size of the pad. “
Very
much a work in progress.”
The cover seemed familiar: a cool but spooky emblem had been drawn in black ink on the gray-green card and it looked like a world that had burned, leaving a skeleton frame within, and there was a winged shield wrapped around the equator, all filled in solid with black. Was that winged shield protecting the world or attacking it?
“My villains are cannibals,” Caleb explained, flicking though some pages. “That's just part of it, though. But they prey on people, hunt them, target them for all sorts of different reasons. Course, this is still concept artwork, but close to what I think it needs.”
“Looks good.” It really did. The illustrations were black and white but they were detailed, set out in a simple nine-grid layout against a backdrop that looked like near-future New York, emerging from the other side of all this mess. I thought about outside, about banging on Caleb's door and feeling sick, about fainting.
“These are inspiration,” he said, showing me some open art books he had splayed before him on the floor. They featured vivid color pictures and they were spooky as hell, yet I couldn't help thinking perhaps my new friend was really more inspired by what had happened to this city in the last fortnight than the work of past masters.
“This one here is my favorite:
Raft of the Medusa
by Théodore Géricault.”
The double-page color image depicted a handmade life raft covered with the dead and dying, with some survivors sitting among and standing on top of them.
“It's . . . amazing,” I said.
“Yeah,” Caleb replied. “The picture, it was a French shipwreck in 1816, and the artist would visit the survivors in hospital to sketch and paint accurately—I mean, he even built a scale model of the raft. And he—and I'm serious—he kept a severed
head
on his studio's roof to sketch a corpse head! It's . . . sorry, I could talk about that painting for hours. I mean, even the way it's
composed
. . .”
I nodded, feeling a bit put off by his story and the scenes it conjured before me. They were creepily similar to what had been going on around us but in a sense there was something even more real about it than reality. Maybe it was the knock to the head. Maybe it was the pills Caleb had given me.
Maybe my lingering doubts about what was real and what was in my imagination hadn't gone away completely. Memories were all I had of some things—the memory of a happy family before mum left home was one I clung to. I wanted to get rid of some of them, of course—the bad memories—and I thought I could do that if I left 30 Rock. But that would mean surrendering all the good ones, too. Then again, I'd realized that even the most embarrassing ones or shameful ones—which I would have given anything to take back—were to be cherished. But perhaps the
lesson learned
—as if it were the title of one of Dave's books—was that none of them could be trusted. Or none of them was mine to control.
I stared at one of the other paintings, but found it hard to focus. There were some images from the Sistine Chapel that I'd seen with my grandmother when I was ten. They had been moving to me then, but they were haunting now; a reminder not only of perpetual gloom, but the reality of it.
“Why the hell cannibals?” I asked, feeling sick by the thought of it—too close to what was all around us now. “Couldn't you have some mutant space monster?”
“And what, copout with some giant squid coming in at the third act, destroying the city?”
“It'd do. It'd be better. It could still work as an allegory.”
“Yeah, well I'm not running from this idea because of what's going down all around us,” he said. “Since I was a kid, I've thought about this. And believe me, beyond all this Chaser crap, cannibalism has been around us—remember the news reports of that creep in Europe who advertised in a newspaper for someone to eat?”
I remembered that. It had really happened.
“Someone actually replied to the ad, right?” Caleb tapped the table. “There's good reason why they say that truth is stranger than fiction. My grandpa used to scare us with stories about a guy he worked with—another reporter at the
New York Times
—who had tried cannibalism out. I guess it stuck with me ever since, and when I started thinking about this book . . . it was something I wanted to write about, explore why it had stayed in my mind. Besides, what more evil a thing could I make up than something that was true?”
“People might not want to read this kind of thing anymore.”
“I'm exploring this in my own way, looking for some answers, and to me that's art,” he said. “Besides, my good guys will show you how the others can be beaten.”
“And your heroes do what, exactly?” I asked, feeling slightly beaten myself. “Turn the bad guys into level five vegans?”
“Ha! No, but I might steal that line,” he said. “They fight this underworld group—but it's hard, because these cannibals walk among us.”
“Feeding on the weaker masses . . .”
“Yeah.”
“And what, that's their secret? That they get power from whoever they eat?”
“There's more to it than that, but yeah. They have a litany of secrets that they live by, cannibalism being just one of them.” He packed away his ink pens.
I looked up at the ceiling, my head floating on the pillow.
“But your good guys don't just go in and karate them about I hope?”
“Hell, no!” Caleb replied. “The better the evil, antagonistic force, the better the good guys—they've all in some way seen and felt the exhilaration of violence, and were distraught by the human consequences. That's why they were selected to defend humanity.”
“Well . . . it sounds pretty cool, pretty solid,” I said. Cool and solid. Was it? What was I doing here, anyway? My memory came, short and sharp; a knife, in and out:
I had not slept last night,
but why? I looked at my watch: it was now the afternoon.
Was I just tired? There was more to this memory. Voices had woken me in the night—no, noises. I'd woken and gone out someplace cold, someplace old . . . the zoo! And slowly, my foggy mind began to clear, bit by bit. The girls were safe, they were together, but why had I left them?

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