For a while she was silent. Whitman could see, from her face, that she was putting the pieces together. Figuring out just how bad things had become.
“Guilty until proven innocent, huh?” she said. She held up her left hand to show him her plus sign. “Infected until I can prove I’m healthy.” She leaned down and kissed the baby’s head. Then she did it again, and Whitman knew she was trying to hide her face from the others. So they wouldn’t see.
If you had a plus sign on your hand, the government was convinced you were a risk. That meant you had no rights. It meant they could tell you where to go, and how long you had to stay there, and there was nothing you could do about it.
“I saw that ID you have around your neck. And the logo on the truck. You work for the CDC, don’t you?” she asked.
He didn’t deny it.
“You were around zombies this whole time, too. You got bitten, or spat on, or bled on too.”
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.
There were plenty of abandoned cars in Brooklyn, but there was a real shortage of car keys, and not even the mechanic knew how to hot-wire a car. It was Whitman’s idea to steal bicycles instead. He helped Angie improvise a sling for the baby so she had both hands free. He helped the old lady onto a racing ten-speed and showed her where the brakes were. And then they were off.
They skirted fires in Midwood, and a horde of zombies in Homecrest. Despite the military’s best efforts the infected were out in droves, hundreds of them crouching in the street, their eyes scanning the corners. Looking for the next threat, the next human to attack. They looked less human than ever, their eyes glowing red with the reflected light of the sky.
It was getting hard to breathe by the time they got to the neighborhood of Gravesend. Smoke from the fires was blowing out to sea, right over them, and dropping soot like black snow that flecked their clothes and gathered in drifts in the gutters.
There came the moment when Angie cried out and Whitman stopped his bike. “No, keep going!” she shouted as she coasted past him. “Don’t you see? The sky!”
Whitman looked up. At first he couldn’t see what she was talking about. The sky was red with fire, just as it had been for hours now, red . . . no. No, it was turning pink. They were headed southeast, right into the dawn.
Which meant if her boats were going to land at Brighton Beach, they should be well on their way. They should be getting ready to land at any minute.
Angie’s bike was the slowest, because she had the baby to worry about. Whitman hung back with her, afraid of being parted from her now. She called out to the others, urging them on. The mechanic’s bike was faster than the rest and she told him to get to the beach as fast as he possibly could. The girl with the shaved head poured on speed and passed Whitman by. Maybe not all of them would make it, but some would.