The End Is Now

He looked down at his own hand. His right hand—the one that wasn’t inked. There was a mark there all the same, a red imprint in the shape of human teeth, in the soft flesh between his thumb and index finger. “It happened a long time ago. The very first zombie I ever saw, actually. I didn’t think she broke the skin. But my boss decided not to take any chances.”

Angie took a long, difficult breath. “What happens to people like us? Potential positives?”

“They go to Staten Island,” he told her.

* * *

Earlier, back when he was still in charge of something, Whitman had seen what Staten Island had become. They’d flown him over the island in a helicopter. One corporal had even given him a pair of binoculars so he could get a closer look.

Depending on how you counted, there were eight million people in New York City’s five boroughs, or nearly twenty million in the surrounding region. By a rough estimate, maybe twenty percent were potential positives—four million people with plus signs on their hands. Four million people who could turn into zombies without any warning, without any symptoms, at any time.

It was folly to think that the evacuation could run smoothly. That the safety of all those people could be guaranteed. And of course, it didn’t work out the way anyone had hoped.

Ferry boats ran nonstop, moving potential positives over to Staten Island. Dumping their human cargo at gunpoint, then turning around and steaming back for Manhattan or Brooklyn or across the harbor to New Jersey to pickup more. On the shore the evacuees stood in teeming crowds, unsure of what to do—many didn’t speak English, many more refused to follow the instructions bellowed at them by loudspeakers, if they could even hear those orders over the noise of all the helicopters.

It would have been chaos and riots and panic even without the zombies. But these people were potential positives. They had a chance of having contracted the prion disease. Many of them, just by sheer probability, had. And if you extrapolated on those probabilities, if you ran the equation for how many of those people were going to go symptomatic on this night of all nights—

The zombies had cut through the crowds like scalpels through healthy flesh. Even up in the helicopter Whitman could hear the screams. On the ground all he could see was waves, ripples forming in that sea of human heads as people ran and pushed and trampled each other, trying to get away from the teeth and fingernails of the zombies in their midst.

And all the while the ferries kept coming, kept dumping their cargo on the shore.

* * *

When Whitman finished telling Angie what he’d seen, he looked up with a start and realized that all of them, all of the positives, were staring at him.

“They can’t do that,” the girl with the shaved head insisted. “They can’t do that to us.”

“They just dump ’em there?” the mechanic asked. “But then what are they supposed to do?”

Whitman couldn’t answer that question. Instead he turned to Angie. “Where did you hear about these boats that are supposed to evacuate us?” he asked.

“From a doctor at my hospital. Just before he walked away from his post because he needed to take care of his family more than his patients. He made it sound like it was a good shot to get out of here. Was he talking about these ferries taking people to Staten Island?”

“I doubt it,” Whitman told her. “They’re not loading from the beaches, just from the piers on the river. Wherever he got that information, it wasn’t from the CDC or FEMA.”

Angie nodded and breathed in slowly. She paced around the room for a while and nobody got in her way. Finally she clapped her hands together, loud enough to make everyone jump.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Whitman asked.

“Okay, so fucking what? Nothing has changed. You never heard about any boats? Well, maybe nobody told you about them. But if there’s even a chance . . . we still need to get down there. To the beach. And we need to get there before dawn.”

“The truck isn’t—”

“We are going to get to those fucking boats. Maybe we can find some cars. We’ll go by foot if we have to,” Angie said, standing up. She looked over at the other positives, all of whom were watching her every move. The mechanic. The girl with the shaved head. The old lady. They hung on her every word. “Get ready. This isn’t going to be easy. But it’s our only chance. If they send us to Staten Island we’re never coming back.”

Whitman looked up. He couldn’t believe it, but listening to her—he half believed. He wanted there to be boats, if only because the idea of disappointing Angie terrified him.

“I don’t know who owns these boats, but they’ll take us—even if we have to make them. They’ll take us somewhere safe, somewhere that at least isn’t on fire or full of zombies. Okay? Everybody with me?”

They were.

* * *