Now I wait in my assigned place, on the roof of the community hall, behind a pile of concrete blocks. Luke Ames, our self-appointed leader, determined the positions, weapons, and ammunition for the five of us defenders. In a long-ago life he was a Navy SEAL. We don’t know how many will come against us. We do know the Sweets will be no help.
If we could cure the Sweets, you’d have—
Luke’s AK-47 feels warm in my hands. I have a hat, but the summer sun is full on the gunmetal. I should be mentally rehearsing all the instructions Luke gave his tiny army, but instead my mind is full of different images. Of all the things that the world is losing, the things that made the texture of the life I grew up in. Football on crisp autumn afternoons. War movies full of heroism. Sexy military uniforms.
—no reason to be angry at yourself for—
Anna Karenina and Oliver Twist and Charlotte’s Web. Businesses started in garages and built through stubborn, ornery individualism in the face of all consensual wisdom. Sweets did everything by consensus and nobody was stubborn or ornery. Nobody would think of letting an orphan starve, or of throwing themselves under a train for love, or of killing Wilbur the pig for bacon.
—not being as good as your sister is. And without that anger, you’d—
In two generations, maybe less, my lost world would be incomprehensible to the human race. If it survived at all.
—have no idea who you are.
Harbingers of the End Times, the religious nuts call the Sweets. Angels of the apocalypse. But there are all kinds of apocalypses.
The first of the attackers comes into sight down the road. There are three trucks, driving very slow so as to not outpace the walkers beside them. Everyone is armed. On the back of a dusty red pick-up rests some sort of missile launcher. I raise my weapon and wait for Luke’s signal.
Nancy Kress is the author of thirty-two books, including twenty-five novels, four collections of short stories, and three books about writing. Her work has won two Hugos (“Beggars in Spain” and “The Erdmann Nexus”), five Nebulas (all for short fiction), a Sturgeon (“The Flowers of Aulit Prison”), and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for Probability Space). The novels include science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers; many concern genetic engineering. Her most recent work is the Nebula-winning and Hugo-nominated After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall (Tachyon, 2012), a long novella of eco-disaster, time travel, and human resiliency. Forthcoming is another short novel from Tachyon, Yesterday’s Kin (Fall 2014). Intermittently, Nancy teaches writing workshops at various venues around the country, including Clarion and Taos Toolbox (yearly, with Walter Jon Williams). A few years ago she taught at the University of Leipzig as the visiting Picador professor. She is currently working on a long, as-yet-untitled SF novel. Nancy lives in Seattle with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.
AGENT ISOLATED
David Wellington
There were zombies all over Brooklyn, but at the moment the fires jumping from house to house downtown were the real danger.
There was a germ, a prion, going around that turned people into zombies. Somebody had gotten a bad memo. They’d been told that fire would kill the prion. It didn’t. It killed zombies pretty well, but there were just too many of them and they just kept coming. Now the fires were spreading, too.
Whitman stomped on the brakes as the whole front of a warehouse erupted into the street in front of him. He threw the truck in reverse and got it turned around, looking for a safe way forward, any way forward, any direction.
“There,” the woman in the passenger seat said. He didn’t know her name. He wasn’t sure he’d get a chance to find out. “Head south, to Brighton Beach. There are boats there. There are boats coming there at dawn, and they’ll take us to safety.”
He looked over at her. “Boats?”
She had a baby in her arms. There were kids and old people and just people, lots of people, in the back of the truck. Whitman hadn’t stopped to count them, or find out where they had come from. It didn’t seem to matter much at the time.
“Who told you there would be boats?” he asked. There were a lot of rumors going around, of course. The government wouldn’t say anything. Couldn’t, now that the power was out—no cell phones, no internet, no emergency broadcast system. The best information came from finding a soldier, one of the many, many soldiers in New York City that night, and asking them. But Whitman couldn’t afford to do that, not anymore. “I didn’t hear anything about boats.”
Whitman himself should have been a great source of information. He had worked for the CDC. Originally he had been the head agent in charge of this operation, the quarantine and evacuation of New York City. Funny how much could change in twenty-four hours.
If the people in this truck knew who he was—if they knew what he’d done . . . they would tear him to pieces.
He threw his arm across the woman and the baby as he stomped on the brakes.
“Jesus,” the woman screamed.
He’d had to stop short because the street ahead was full of zombies.
Smoke might have made their eyes so red. The dead expressions on their faces might just have been shock. But by now Whitman could tell. He knew a zombie when he saw one. The way they held themselves, the way they moved.
The prion made little tiny holes in their brains, until they couldn’t talk. Until they couldn’t think. They fell back on animal instincts. Flight or, far more often, fight. Humans were predators by design, honed by two hundred thousand years of evolution into brutal hunters. Only the thinnest veneer of civilization lay on top of that. Strip it away, break down everything that made a person human, and what was left wanted very badly to punch you and scratch you and make you bleed.
Which was how you got the prion in the first place. Fluid contact. Blood from wounds, saliva from bites, mucus from anywhere. Nice how that worked out. Nice if you were a prion, anyway.
Whitman threw the truck in reverse, but when he looked in his mirrors, he saw the fire was spreading behind him. Smoke filled the street, smoke full of sparks. There were a lot of warehouses in Brooklyn, and they were all stuffed full of toxic shit. Going backward wasn’t an option.
He peered through the cracked windshield. The zombies stared back.
“Everybody,” he shouted to the passengers in the back, “keep your arms and heads inside the vehicle. And hold on to something.”
“What are you doing?” she said, her eyes wide.
He threw the truck back into first gear and stood on the accelerator.
“We can take Flatbush all the way down to the beaches,” the woman pointed out. Angie. She’d told him that at some point, that her name was Angie. He couldn’t remember when, exactly. A lot of his memories had gotten jumbled up.
He shook his head. He remembered some things just fine. “The Army’s using Flatbush as their main corridor into the city. They’ve got materiel coming in nonstop, all headed toward Manhattan, taking up all the lanes. Flatbush Avenue is strictly one-way right now.” Whitman had his own reasons for not wanting to meet up with any Army units, but she didn’t have to know that. As far as Angie was concerned he was just a nice guy with a stolen truck.
A truck that was now covered in blood and body parts. Whitman could see a finger rolling around on the hood. He tried not to remember the moment he’d rammed through the crowd of zombies. Apparently he hadn’t seen enough horror in the last day to desensitize his stomach.