Here We Stand (Book 1): Infected (Surviving The Evacuation) (8 page)

They were alive. That was all that mattered. But what had he really achieved? It had taken most of the night to cross a few miles of city. Ahead lay a vast continent in which he had no real refuge, few friends, and which was now peopled by the impossible undead. The temptation to run and hide was strong. The desire to travel far, far away was stronger. Perhaps Julio would still be at the airfield. He could call him and… An image of the diggers came to mind.

“Yellow,” he muttered. They were civilian models taken from some construction site, not the type used by the military. He looked down the length of the bridge, seeing it properly for the first time. The pre-dawn light added weird shadows and curving shapes, but there was no mistaking how empty it was. They’d set up a roadblock, not a checkpoint. Why? Why had they cleared the bridge? There were no lanes marked out for the millions of refugees who would descend upon it in a few short hours. Nor were there any military personnel ready to organize and control that exodus. So why clear the bridge? There were hundreds of people behind them now. A long ragged line that would only grow as the day wore on.

“No helicopters. No checkpoints. Helena, what was it you said about the boat? A quarantine?”

“What?” she asked, her face showing nothing but exhaustion. It didn’t matter. He knew what she’d said, and he knew what it all meant.

“We need to run!” He grabbed her arm, dragging her along until her feet overruled her brain. They ran, and some of the other refugees copied them. A few called out questions. Tom ignored them. He should have realized. She’d practically told him, but he’d not listened. They were quarantining Manhattan. You couldn’t do that without destroying the bridges and tunnels.

They ran past the first set of skeletal steel supporting columns. Halfway across, they passed a pair of maintenance trucks, abandoned on the road. In the back were… he wasn’t sure. Folding tables, perhaps, or partitions from some office building. Did they originally have a proper evacuation plan for Manhattan that was abandoned in favor of cutting the island off from the rest of the world? And why civilian vehicles? He didn’t have the breath to think. He barely had it to run.

Two-thirds of the way across the bridge, cars and trucks had been shunted to the side of the road, not pushed down into the Hudson. He ignored them, his eyes fixed on the skyline of Fort Lee, growing more distinct as the sun rose behind them.

“Look!” Helena yelled, waving to the south. He’d already heard it approach. A fighter jet buzzed the bridge, flying scant feet above the supporting wires.

“It’s coming,” Tom tried to yell, but he didn’t have the breath. He knew what was going to happen. There was a sound in the background, almost like people, yelling. And there, horns. A siren. The sound was coming from ahead. At the far end of the bridge was a solitary military vehicle. An APC with a mounted machine gun that was pointed straight at them. Tom raised a hand, trying to wave and show that he was still human.

The road shifted beneath his feet. It rose like a wave, and he fell. A sea of noise washed over him. All sound was replaced by a buzzing drone. He could taste iron in his mouth. He tried to stand, but his legs were unsteady. No, it was the bridge itself, shaking and undulating and tearing itself apart. A hand grabbed his arm. Helena hauled him to his feet, and it was her turn to drag him along the shifting, cracking asphalt, through a storm of dust and dirt that was followed by a rain of concrete and steel. Her mouth was open, but he couldn’t hear her scream. Couldn’t hear anything except that high-pitched tone that grew louder and lower into a wall of white noise that became a metallic wail as the bridge collapsed behind them. And then, just as quickly, they stumbled out of the cloud of dust, and into a rifle barrel.

“Say something!” a soldier barked. “Say something!”

Tom opened his mouth, managing nothing more than a rasping wheeze. The soldier’s eyes went wide, and the barrel moved forward, to point at Tom’s forehead.

“Wait!” Helena said. “What do you want us to say?”

“Say something!” the soldier screamed the words at Tom.

“Trying. Trying to,” he managed. The words were more cough than coherent, but it was enough for the soldier. He moved on, past them. Tom turned to watch. There were other figures stumbling out of the cloud of dust, but not nearly as many as had been on the bridge.

Gloved hands gripped Tom’s arms.

“Move! This way!”

Half pushed, half dragged, he staggered off the ruined bridge.

Chapter 7 - Searched

February 21
st
, Fort Lee, New Jersey

“What the hell were you thinking?” a woman asked. Her uniform had no badges of rank, but from her tone and demeanor, she was in charge. “Didn’t you hear the warnings?”

Tom tried to reply, but all that came out was a coughing fit.

“There were no warnings,” Helena said.

The officer shook her head, her expression one of irritated disbelief. “Line up,” she said. “Follow the fences until you reach processing.” She waved a hand toward a mass of metal fencing that snaked back and forth across the interstate.

“Here,” a soldier said, holding out a canteen to Tom. “Rinse and spit.”

Tom did, spewing a gobbet of grey dirt onto the filthy roadway. He offered the canteen back to the soldier.

“No,” the woman said. “Keep it. Your need’s greater than mine.” The tone was kindly, but the words were portentous. So were the fences. They ran north to south on a road that traveled east to west, and stretched for at least a mile. How many people could they contain? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

Helena took the water bottle from his hand. “Look at that,” she said.

He looked around and wished he hadn’t. Smoke poured upward from the island of Manhattan. The plumes weren’t big, just narrow columns. Caught by the Atlantic breeze, they drifted southward.

“Do you think the other bridges are gone?” Helena asked. Her expression was unreadable beneath a thick coating of dust, but her tone was anxious.

“Probably,” he said.

“Then no help will get there,” Helena said. “No fire trucks. No ambulances.”

“No.”

“That’s…” She turned around. “They’ve killed them all. No food. No help. No electricity. No water. I can’t believe the president would do that.”

“He wouldn’t,” Tom said.

“But he has. He’s killed them all.”

Tom didn’t argue. The fences, clearing the bridge of stalled traffic, even the military presence suggested the original plan had been for an evacuation of Manhattan. At some point during the night, that had been abandoned in favor of quarantine.

“And quarantine isn’t going to work. The zombies are already ahead of us.”

“You said that before. Are you sure?” she asked.

He hadn’t meant to speak aloud. “I am,” he said.

“Maybe they’re dead, and the outbreak’s under control,” she said. There was little confidence in her voice.

Though the barriers had been set up to form a snaking corridor for at least half a mile, a gap had been cleared down the middle. In the narrow alleyways that remained, and across the clear stretch of road, the ground was littered with the detritus of the refugees who’d passed this way before.

There was a sad mathematics about the scarves, hats, bags, mementos, and trinkets that lay among the empty water bottles, food wrappers, baby carriages, and broken bicycles. They were the items deemed important enough for the refugees to bring from their homes, but discarded when speed outweighed sentimental value. From the way those once-cherished keepsakes often bore the tread marks of heavy vehicles, he guessed that the barriers had been pushed aside by the soldiers who’d been on that checkpoint. Somehow that made it worse. It emphasized that they’d abandoned all hope of halting the outbreak.

He found his hands going to his pockets. The revolver, sat-phone, and tablet were still there. However, the bag with its candy and water was not. He must have dropped it on the bridge. It felt like a great loss. He could almost imagine a clock counting down until thirst and hunger would become all-consuming.

“Right now, we’re alive.”

“What?” Helena asked.

“Oh. Nothing.”

Tom counted twenty-three other refugees on the interstate. In an effort not to think of the fate of the hundreds who’d been on the bridge or the millions still in Manhattan, he turned his attention back to the roadway. He stepped over a bicycle with a buckled wheel and broken chain.

“Where did the barriers come from?” Helena asked.

“Dunno. A stadium?”

“When? Yesterday afternoon? The evening?”

Tom couldn’t answer, but he guessed the direction her questions were leading. “You’re wondering how many people passed this way?”

“Yes, before they changed their minds and decided to destroy the bridge. It can’t have been many.”

“No.” And it didn’t matter. There was smoke over Fort Lee. Three plumes close enough together that the smoke merged into a single cloud as it drifted up to the sky.

Just before the New Jersey Turnpike, they came to group of a hundred soldiers dismantling what he first thought was a checkpoint. They were supported by ten military Humvees parked across the road with their machine guns pointing east. Only one had an operator, and his attention was fixed on the skyline to the north. On second inspection, Tom realized it wasn’t a checkpoint. The white screens looked like they’d come from a hospital. They’d been set up behind folding desks in a line across the highway. Adding to that medical feel, the soldier walking toward them wore a white coat over her uniform.

“Men over here, women over there,” the soldier said, waving her hand left and right. “Quickly now. Men to the left, women to the right.”

Helena gave a shrug and what was either a grimace or a smile, and went to the right. Tom fell in with the other men. There were twelve of them, in all.

“Through there,” a soldier said, gesturing toward the thin row of screens that offered only the illusion of privacy. Behind the screens were more tables, suggesting there had been a lot more people working there than the three soldiers currently on duty. One of these also wore a white coat. From the insignia on his uniform, Tom didn’t think he was a nurse.

“Please strip,” the white-coat said with brusque indifference. “Place your clothes and belongings on the table. The quicker you do this, the quicker you’ll get to the reception center in Overpeck Park. Please. Take your clothes off.”

Conscious of the two soldiers standing behind the white-coat, both of whom had fingers resting on the trigger guards of their rifles, Tom did as he was ordered.

“You can’t be serious,” a man to his left said. “It’s freezing out here.”

“No one passes this checkpoint unless they’ve been confirmed as having no bites or cuts on them,” the white-coated soldier said.

“And what’s your legal authority for that?” the man protested. “I’d say this constitutes an illegal search.”

“You want to call your lawyer?” the white-coat asked. One of the soldiers behind him smirked.

“I don’t need to,” the man said. “I
am
a lawyer.”

The white-coat gave a weary sigh. “Of course you are. If you don’t want to strip, please go with the corporal.” His tone that suggested this was far from the first time this had happened. “You’ll be taken to the local police station, where your rights will be explained. You can place a formal complaint. And then you’ll be asked to strip, or be charged. That’ll take about a day, I think. Maybe two, because there were a lot of people here yesterday, and you’d be surprised how many of them were lawyers. By the time you’ve been processed, everyone else here will be in a nice warm house, eating hot food. So, it’s up to you.”

Tom was already down to his shorts, and shivering in the cool morning air. At least the skies were clear. The soldier had seen him take out the revolver and place it on top of the jacket, but he’d not said anything. In fact, Tom was far from the only one to be armed.

“You want us to take off our boots, too?” Tom asked.

“No. Raise your arms. Now turn around. Thank you. Put your clothes back on, and then continue past the trucks and down the interstate. There’ll be signs to the reception center.”

Tom guessed the brief inspection was more for the benefit of the objecting lawyer, in the hope that would mean these three soldiers could finish their duty all the quicker. It worked. Still grumbling, the lawyer pulled off his jacket as Tom was pulling his back on.

“You had a lot of people through here last night?” he asked as he picked up his bag.

“About five thousand,” the white-coat said. It sounded like a lot until you compared it to the number of people in Manhattan. “Through there,” the soldier added.

Tom made his way past the vehicles. Helena was waiting. She looked cold and numb. Her face and hands were clean.

“They didn’t make you wash?” she asked.

“No. They wanted us to get us through as quickly as possible.”

“Huh!” she snorted. “I got one of the most thorough medical exams of my life.”

A few of the other men fell in with the woman with whom they’d been traveling.

One of the men looked around, somewhat confused. “Diane,” he called.

“Come on,” Helena said. She started walking.

“Diane?” the man called again, this time louder. A female soldier walked up to him, and spoke in a low voice.

“You coming?” Helena called, from a dozen paces down the road.

“You know what happened to Diane?” Tom asked, when he’d caught up.

“There was a woman with cuts on her legs,” Helena said. “She was separated from the rest of us.”

Tom glanced back. He shrugged. The whole thing was a nightmare. One from which there would be no waking. The walls of reality had come crumbling down. They might be rebuilt, but they’d never be the same.