Quarantine (7 page)

“W
e'll have to pull over,” Daniel said.

I slowed the truck and put it into park, keeping the engine running. The visibility was near gone, although it was only 10
A.M.
The day's sky was black and the headlights of the truck only served to bounce back in our faces off the thick curtain of snowfall. At least it was warm in here.

“Do you think Bob's okay out in this?”

“He'll be fine,” Daniel replied. “He can hardly see his feet in front of him, so who's going to see him?”

I almost laughed. Yeah, he'd be fine—I'd been out on my own enough, and he was at least twice my size.

“How'd Bob know all that?”

“He was working for the Department of Environmental Protection,” Daniel said. “He told me he once spent three months deep under the city, with a dive team, living and working down there to repair the old tunnels. Imagine that. Living in a little house so far below this city, in a subterranean world as deep as the Chrysler Building is high. You believe that?”

“I believe anything these days,” I said, “nothing seems too strange anymore.”

“True. He said it's hot down there,” Daniel said. “Unlike the freezing air up here at the surface, it's like seventy degrees down there, a humid mist of dust and fumes.”

“Seventy degrees—compared to this, that'll be like going to the tropics for a holiday.”

“Hey, look there,” he said, pointing across the street. Through the snowfall I could just make out a hotel and a few shops. “Since we're stuck for a bit, how about we go check it out, see if there's anything useful?”

“Sure.” I killed the engine, pocketed the keys, and we darted across the road. The wind cut at me, ice knives at my face and neck; inhaling the cold air made me feel frozen from the inside out.

“Tight fit,” I said, just managing to squeeze through the lobby doors, which were jammed partly open. Daniel followed; he seemed to fit more easily.

“No way Bob would have fit through that,” I said and Daniel laughed.

Illuminated by our flashlights, the place looked pristine, unlike so many of the ransacked shops and other buildings. Through a side door we looked around the type of hotel store that sold a bit of everything. I took a new watch, as the face of mine had cracked. Daniel pulled on an extra coat, and I found a couple of wheeled bags that we could fill with whatever we might find of use in the hotel.

“Let's find the kitchen,” Daniel said. We went through the lobby and looked around in offices and bathrooms, emerging into a large banquet hall that had been burned out, leaving a vast black-on-black landscape. Our flashlight beams couldn't reach the far walls.

“This isn't creepy at all . . .” Our feet scrunched the charred carpet and ash-strewn floor, sounding as though we were walking through a thick blanket of autumn leaves.

“There's a door down there,” Daniel said, and we headed towards a couple of shiny brass handles at the corner of the room. Our movement kicked up a cloud of dust that hung in the air like smoke.

The double swinging doors squeaked open to reveal a huge stainless-steel kitchen, untouched by the fire.

“Just grab a few things that are easy to carry,” he said.

“Hallelujah!” The pantry was as well stocked as any I'd ever seen, and reminded me of an apartment back at 30 Rock. “There's enough canned and packaged food here for the whole group, at least for a couple of months.”

“At least,” Daniel said, his voice echoing from another storeroom.

Then the meaning of my words hit me. We had to think in terms of escape—of hours left at Chelsea Piers, not days and weeks. “But let's hope we won't need it.”

I began loading the bags with blocks of chocolate and packets of crackers and jars of jams and preserves. I only filled each halfway, thinking we'd need to squeeze them through the small gap in the lobby doors. I dragged them out to find Daniel washing down a couple of painkillers with a bottle of mineral water.

“Feeling all right?”

He nodded, then we both froze. A noise. Movement.

Outside the kitchen. In the banquet hall.

I made my way across the tiled floor, pausing by the doors, in my attempt to be quiet almost knocking a fire extinguisher off its rack. I put my hand over the lens of my flashlight, dimming it.

I put my ear to the gap between the doors. There, the noise again. I reached into my coat pocket for my pistol. Shit. It was in my pack, in the car!

Silence. Had it been just shifting debris? I looked back at Daniel, who stood still with apprehension.

I turned my attention back to the doors. Deranged eyes stared back between them.

“Aaarghh!”

I fell backwards onto the floor as the double doors burst open—and three Chasers emerged from the dark. I kicked out, so that one of the doors swung with a thud against the first Chaser.

Daniel rushed and slammed against the doors, sending them back again. I scrambled to my feet. He was holding firm but they pushed against us with overpowering force and we both lost our balance, skidding across the tiles.

Another glimpse of the Chasers lit by our fallen flashlight beams—

Daniel was on his hands and knees, trying to keep the doors shut as the Chasers banged hard against them—

“Hang on!” I yelled. I hauled myself up and took the extinguisher from the rack, pulled the pin, and got back beside Daniel with my shoulder against a door. “On three, let the doors go, I spray them, then we run past them and out to the truck!”

“Okay!”

“One.”

“Two—”

The doors flung open towards us with incredible force. Daniel was trapped between the wall and the door, while I faltered backwards and dropped the extinguisher.

The three Chasers burst back into the room, their lean bodies tense and ready to spring, as though they were powerful predators and we hopeless prey. They stood and took me in, their eyes darting about—

SMASH!

Daniel shoved the door into them, surprising them for just long enough—

I grabbed the fire extinguisher, aimed the nozzle and squeezed the handle. White foam erupted into their faces.

“Daniel,
go
!
Move!
”

We crashed past, out into the dark banquet hall. Without our flashlights it was pitch black except for the distant glow at the far end of the hall. We ran side by side through ankle-deep ash, the sound of the Chasers behind us. The fire extinguisher was heavy but I could not leave it behind.

Daniel yelled, “Look out!”

A Chaser emerged through the shaft of light ahead and stood there just inside the room, standing his ground, and I reached him before Daniel . . .

CLONG!

The extinguisher met the side of the Chaser's head and he fell hard.

“Come on!” Daniel shouted. I was a few steps behind him. I slipped and rolled through the ashy dust. I got to my feet to see him run through the entrance hall and then the lobby and out the tight opening of the front door. I passed the extinguisher through the gap in the doors, turned on my side to squeeze through—

“I'm stuck!” I said, panicking. My chest wouldn't get through as I was heaving deep breaths.

“They're coming!”

I looked behind me and two of the foam-covered Chasers appeared at the end of the lobby.

I was wedged halfway in and out of the doorway. I pushed and wriggled, slowly squeezing myself through.

“Pull me through!” I felt Daniel tug at my arm as I looked back and kicked out at the first Chaser, hitting him in the guts, then the second careened hard into me . . . and forced me out the door.

Daniel emptied the extinguisher at them, then he helped me to my feet. We raced across the road. I couldn't see the truck for the density of the snowfall so we ran blind, me following what I thought was Daniel's footfall ahead—

I slipped, fell hard, my head hitting something solid, and everything went red-blue-black.

I
was woken by a pat on the arm. I could see only darkness, and I realized that the hood of my sweatshirt was over my head and eyes. It was peeled back, causing me to blink at the daylight and the face before me. It took a moment to focus and recognize Tom.

So Daniel had managed to drive back, while I'd sat in the passenger seat, my head flopping about, as if my neck could no longer support it.

“Come on,” Tom said. “Grab his legs, get him upstairs.”

I felt myself being manhandled out of the truck and taken inside the building. I'm not sure if I said anything in those first minutes.

Propped onto a camp stretcher, the room spinning, I saw the sun in all its brilliant overwhelming glory. For a moment I had to wonder if my journey was over, and I'd made it back to summer in Australia. Back home . . .

No, the light came from a little flashlight, shining brightly into my eyes, as Tom examined me.

“Concussion, and his head's open—pass me the sutures.”

A needle homed in towards my forehead but I couldn't protest. I felt pressure but no pain as he threaded through eight, nine times, up close, somewhere around my left eyebrow. His gloved hands moved fast. I smelled coffee and soap.

“Done,” Tom said. “Clean him up and look him over for any other injuries.”

I felt my clothing coming off. My head raised only slightly on a pillow, I saw the lady who'd been working as a nurse yesterday. She pulled off my boots and socks, and used scissors on my jeans and T-shirt.

“I g-g-gotta start wearing a helmet.”

“Shh, you'll be okay,” she said.

My head ached now. My face felt numb or maybe frozen. I slapped at it, but it just made my hand ache. The nurse pulled my right glove off, but had to cut through the left. My swollen hand had doubled in size since yesterday: all five fingers were now bright scarlet and so inflamed I thought they might pop. It was the second time this week I'd seen that color in nature, the first being a bird back at the zoo's Tropical Zone. A scarlet ibis? I was glad Rachel couldn't see my hand now.

Daniel brought me a cup of hot chocolate. “Can he have this?”

The lady shrugged but I nodded.

It was good, so good, and I could just bear to hold it in my shaking right hand. By now, a few people had gathered around to look at me. I hoped I still had my briefs on.

“How do you feel?” Daniel asked.

“How-w-w . . .” my teeth chattered, “d-d-do I look?”

“Like hell.”

“Yep-p-p,” I replied, the steam of the drink sweet on my face. “What happ-p-pened?”

“You slipped, hit your head on the way down, and went out cold,” he said, squatting by my cot and lacing a blanket over my bare torso. “Took me a while to find you in the blizzard, and I had to put you in the bed of the truck—those infected were right on us.”

That explained my frozen coat and face. I hoped they hadn't cut off my FDNY coat; that thing was an old friend.

“Thanks,” I said. He helped me drink some more of the warm, sweet drink, and my teeth-chattering started to lessen.

I looked around the sparsely populated makeshift medical ward. The nurse seemed to have finished her inspection. I knew she was talking, could see her lips moving. Michael Jackson's “Heal the World” was playing in my mind's iTunes shuffle—how did that work? Why that song—couldn't it have been something cooler?

The nurse and Daniel moved me over to a shower stall in a bathroom. There was a small mirror. My face was black, my neck too, hair, all covered with a thick layer of ash and dirt and grime. From the burnt-out hall in the hotel? Just the whites of my eyes and teeth shone through.

Daniel and the nurse wrapped me in a hot, steaming towel. Then she sat me on a plastic seat, and Daniel lifted my feet into a tub of warm water. The woman cleaned my face and hair, the gray water streaming onto the white tiled floor. With a fresh bucket and cloth, she gave my body a sponge bath. It warmed me inside and out. As soon as she stopped I started to feel cold again, and I was stood up, unwrapped, dried off, and moved to a bed. It was a proper bed, with springs and a foam mattress and clean sheets, and they piled blankets on me. They gave me an extra pillow, propped me up a little, and almost as soon as I blinked Daniel handed me a fresh hot cocoa loaded with condensed milk.

“Thanks.”

“No problem,” he replied, faintly, but I heard him. I felt the effects of the needles in my head, some kind of local anesthetic.

Tom returned. Paige's dad. Plastic surgeon Tom. I watched as the nurse spoke to him. He knelt down, took my left hand, and lifted it by the wrist. I felt as detached from the appendage as if it were a piece of dead meat. He held it, turned it, prodded it, looked concerned. Unbandaged, the jagged, deep cut was angry and inflamed.

He put my hand down to my side, and motioned to the nurse. She passed him one of those things that a doctor uses to look into ears—a light and magnifying glass in one little pointy contraption.

“Anyone else hear Michael Jackson?” I asked. Blank faces. Tom checked my ears and went back to prodding my hand. He applied some liquid. Gave me several injections into the meat of my palm.

“Daniel, help me out, man,” I said. “‘Man in the Mirror'? No?”

He shook his head.

Paige and Audrey appeared next to Daniel. I remembered how Paige had looked when she'd fired my gun. Now . . . now, she looked hot, dressed in tight track pants and hoody. She pulled back her hood—she'd dyed her hair. It was darker now, black-brown, contrasting with her red lips.
Hot damn . . .

I lifted my knees a little to adjust the blankets, looked over to Tom and watched as he pulled a jagged splinter of steel the size of a two-inch nail from the heel of my palm.

“Ouch.”

He looked at me, as if he was surprised that it had hurt, and went back to cleaning the wound.

“I'll give you a tetanus shot,” he said. The nurse came over with a few pills and a cup of water, while Tom administered another injection. “Take those for the pain and inflammation, I'll give you a penicillin shot to kick-start things. All this may make you drowsy.”

I took the pills. Tom prepped yet another syringe.

“Really?” I said. “Another one?”

He didn't answer, just swabbed my upper thigh and jabbed me.

“Gee, buy a guy dinner first.”

It all seemed kind of comical, as if I were not really participating, let alone in pain and discomfort. No one was laughing, though. Audrey held onto Paige's shoulders. They both looked concerned. Especially Paige. It was really great.

“Paige, can you stay with Jesse?” Tom asked his daughter.

“Sure,” she replied, beaming. She came and sat on the floor next to my mattress—to my right, away from my gruesome hand. I gave the thumbs-up to Daniel. He cracked a smile through his bandages.

“Hey, you guys,” I said to Tom and Daniel, who were standing there. As well as feeling weirdly upbeat I felt a new kind of confidence to speak out. “You figured out your differences yet?”

Tom looked from me to Paige and then to Audrey. She gave him a look in return that revealed her influence over him. He turned to Daniel and briefly extended his hand. The hand was ignored. Instead, the preacher leaned in and embraced the surgeon, and the pair let go just as quick.

“I'm sorry,” Tom said. “I didn't mean to—”

“I know.”

That was as much as they were willing to concede to one another, but perhaps it was enough. Glancing at me briefly, maybe reproachfully, Tom took his medical gear and left the scene. Daniel looked at me too, those swollen eyes through the slits of bandages, his broken smile speaking of so much. He and Audrey left a moment later.

I felt sleepy. I was so warm and felt as if I didn't have a care in the world. Paige stroked my face and I forgot my hand. I closed my eyes and I think I fell asleep for a second or two. When I opened them I didn't know where I was—I loved that feeling, could have been anywhere. Paige leaned forward on her knees, brought her face to mine, looked close into my eyes. She kissed me. The sensation was so familiar.

“I remember you tasted of strawberries,” I said, the heavy dark blanket of exhaustion falling upon me. The drugs were doing their thing. My mind working its magic. “I'm so sorry I left you behind . . .”

“Jesse?” She held my hand and watched me as I drifted to sleep.

“Sorry, Anna. I didn't mean to. I should have been there, with you, forever.”

“Jesse—it's me,” she leaned forward and was close to my face. “You haven't left me anywhere.”

I smiled, my eyes closed. “And . . . I won't. I won't leave my friends, not here, not again.”