Wow. Hiatus is over now I guess. Anywho, more of the future story is organized. I ran it by a few people and they liked it so one could say it's finalized! A googolplex of huzzahs for procrastination!
"Okay," I began, "How do I get past this?" Manhattan lay before me. Flames spewed from countless buildings and sirens bellowed loud enough for him to hear all the way from the building he was standing on. Sighing I stepped off of a small metal box and walked the perimeter of the roof. A crowd of zombies swarmed maybe 20 or 30 floors below. I could only see a small reflection of sunlight off of the windshield of my car from Nassau. All sorts of colors melded in the horde below. The majority were wearing overcoats or wind breakers. A handful had riot armor on. One was even encased in a bright orange bio-hazard suit.
"Hoo, okay." I ran a hand through his hair, searching my mind to find a way down to ground level and a path through Manhattan. A small explosion came from the direction of the city. A large section of glass shattered on a tall building across the Brooklyn Bridge. Flames licked up an even taller building with a spire topping the monolithic structure. Gunfire in the distance pulled me from the depths of my mind. But again, it was nothing more than background noise to this new reality. Briefly I thought of my own parents and what befell of them. Probably dead, I concluded, I seriously doubt they have any survival skills to live like this. Maybe it's better this way. Maybe we're all better-
More gunfire erupted from the streets. But these were much closer than before. Light rapid pops and a few rhythmic medium pops. A sub-machine gun and pistol or two. Jogging over to the side of the building and peering down I spotted a group of three people. Two men and one woman were running and gunning down a side street. One of the men was carrying pieces of scrap metal. The group slowed near a large door. The woman and a man held off a few straggling zombies as the horde of over 200 zombies morphed closer. The third person was fiddling with a pad next to the door.
"Alright, people. Good. Are they good people? Should I yell? Screw it. HEY!" The shouts got the attention of the people down below. They raised their heads at him before turning back to each other. The man by the door made quite a lot of noise and was pointing his finger between the two others. Soon he totally abandoned the panel on the wall and was fully screaming at the people. Something about a time limit and a very hearty "We need the fucking parts" emanating every other head spin. The woman pointed to the man at the door and he closed the panel. She then pointed to the man holding off the few zombies and he nodded. The woman darted in the direction of the building I was standing on. The man jogged behind her but peeled off into a collection of low shops along a park to my right. The man who was at the panel went into the nearby alley and was on the roof maybe a minute later. They're actually coming for me, I thought.
The woman continued towards me before hopping on to a bus and gracefully leaping across a few cars to a low ledge on the building. The man in the shops climbed up the fire escape and began shooting into the crowd of zombies. The man on the roof by the door spawned a scoped rifle and took down a few zombies that were closing in. I watched over the edge as the woman circumnavigated the lower level and stopped as a metal cart. She threw a lever and a motor began to whir and the basket was rising.
"Wow, do I feel like an idiot for not noticing that." I shout down at her. She gave me a thumbs up. Both of the men continued shooting at the zombies. There must've been thousands here but they did a fair job of curtailing their movements. By the time we got down though, there might be a little too many to just dart around. A few seconds pass and the cart reaches the top. I step on and take a breathe.
"My name's Toni," she began with a slight British or Australian accent, "Pleasure to meet you." She had rough blistered hands and was well tanned with a very curvy form. It appeared she was well aware of this and tried her best to show it off even after things went to shit. Her face was twisted in worry when she spotted my bloody shoulder.
"Sean," I stuck out my hand to shake but she shied away as gunfire reminded both of us where we were, "Don't worry, it;s just a bullet wound. Oh and uh, thanks. Hope I didn't screw up your plans or anything."
"No prob, the apocalypse isn't not gonna go away any time soon, might as well save as many as we can. We should probably fix that shoulder of yours up." The basket-window washer thing began its journey down the side of the building. Through the glass I glimpse rows and rows of desks, some in order, some thrown about, and the odd zombie or two. The window washer ride finally ended and me and Toni stepped to the edge of the lower roof. Below were hundreds, more like thousands, of zombies swelling and swerving around derelict cars and all sorts of debris. The moans and growls were like roaring ocean waves.
"Well, if you happen to know how to walk on heads we might just get out of this." A joke here and there can make any situation less peril.
"No, no. We have something." She pointed over to where one of the men ran into a store. A moment later an SUV came barreling out and drilled through the horde. It stopped 10 feet below us and the sunroof opened. The man from the store waved at us as zombies scraped against the windows and straggled onto the hood. One zombie almost made it into the sunroof before his head erupted into a fine puff of red. Jesus Christ these guys are pros.
Toni crawled down the edge and landed on the roof before slipping into the SUV. I sighed. There was nothing I couldn't stand worse than falling. Much less falling 10 feet onto an SUV surrounded by zombies. But it was do-or-die time and I had to act fast. Without another thought I sat on the edge and slowly scooted forward a few inches before falling like a stone onto the roof. My legs went into the sunroof and I swear I felt the roof cave in a few inches. A bloody hand nearly swiped my face and I slid fully into the vehicle.
It was a Cadillac. The only thing actually giving it away was the monogrammed seats and logo on the steering wheel, every other characteristic feature was roughed up and replaced with all sorts of apocalyptic features. Gun racks, ammo boxes, even a small cache of food just in case. The windows were even barred and the doors were all but welded shut. The car started forward through the crowd when Toni began talking. "Ed this is Sean. Sean, this is Ed."
"Amazing you survived this long. I'd never expect someone as young as you to make it." Just like Toni he observed my shoulder wound. Toni explained I wasn't infected and that she just needed to look at it. Ed drove over more zombies and clipped a fire hydrant. Ed had a gruff voice like a construction worker and one hell of a strong Brooklyn accent. He had a smattering of 5 o'clock shadow and equally short hair on his head. But I wouldn't know if it was continuous what with the hard hat he had on. By what I could tell he was pretty muscular. Rifle fire continued in the background.
"Well I had some help from my... friends. I don't know where they are now. I'm pretty sure they didn't make it." I sighed. I've really come far, but in all honestly I knew there was even more to come.
"Well when we get back in, oh say 20 seconds, we can sort you out. Oh yeah, the guy on the roof is Michael. Just call him Mike, he hates being called Michael." Toni turned back facing the front of the car just as a zombie rolled over the hood.
"Why does he-Oh it I can wait." The worst time for questions is when people are under pressure. I always flip out when someone asks me questions during a test or some other pseudo-stressful situation. But I doubt I have many scantrons to fill out for a long, long time. The car continued up to the large metal door and stopped. Ed gave a reassuring shout to whoever had control of the door and it opened. A few zombies followed us in but they were taken care of by Toni's pistol at a speed and accuracy I have never seen.
By the end of the ordeal we were in a cavernous room. Behind us was the door, at the far end was a platform with a few doors leading to what used to be offices over a gated tunnel leading to pure blackness, and along the walls were semi-raised platforms with all sorts of tools. But the main attraction was the MTA subway car sitting on the rails in the rough center of the building.
"Let me guess. This was an old metro repair station or something? Huh, lucky find." The windows were pretty high up letting in the noon sunshine albeit slightly duller what with the grime and smog or something. The walls were mostly red with yellow edges along the top and orange along the bottom. Toni , what a strange name, walked up a flight of stairs and into one of the rooms. Ed motioned for me to follow him onto the side platforms. He waved his hand at the train and I realized this was no ordinary MTA train car.
First and foremost it was covered in graffiti. Colorful, artistic graffiti, not gang signs and explicatives like the majority I've seen. But second to the graffiti was the iron bars covering the windows and the corrugates metal sheets over the wheels. This thing looked more like a moving fortress than a mode of transportation. Oh, they must be trying to move in it or something. "What's the train for?"
"Stuff," Ed replied nonchalantly but then turned slightly hostile, "Stuff I'm not sure we can tell you just right now." Wow, right off the bat I'm an outcast. It's like Junior High all over again. I followed Ed up a flight of metal stairs and by a few of the offices. A mess of pillows and blankets lay in the first one, the next one had a map of the NYC Subway with tacks and marks all over it plus some complicated looking radio equipment., and the third one held Toni drinking a cup of coffee while on a counter next to a dangerous looking coffee machine and Mike skimming through a magazine about weddings or fashion or something leaning on a table. Mike had a pair of plastic framed glasses on with quite a full beard. He had a fairly lanky form to go with it. He glanced up and looked me up and down stopping at my bloody shoulder. Toni assured him it was just a bullet hole and nothing to worry about in the way of zombie infection.
Stepping into the third room I felt all eyes were on me and I sunk mentally into myself, absorbing where I was, what I could do in case things turned sour for whatever reason, and breathing in the air which had a peculiar smell of blue-collared labor and desperation. This place held a cozy feeling for some reason.
"Alright," Toni began, "Sean, this is Mike. He's our sharpshooter and sort of our planner. I mean, he doesn't give good ideas but he can pull together a way to do anything."
"Pleased to meet you." He stuck out a hand while shooting an annoyed glance Toni's way which she brushed off with a slight chuckle. I hesitated a bit and gave nothing more than a weak handshake.
"Likewise. Uh, before I get lost in all this, can I ask what the hell's going on? I hear screaming about parts and stuff from up on the roof and that train down there and-" I shut my mouth. I was rambling again like I always do around new people. Sort of a coping mechanism for the nervous fear that I usually get. "Sorry, basically I'm just wondering what's going on with you guys."
Toni slid off of the counter and stepped over to a bag on the table by Mike. After shooing him away she reached inside and pulled out a tourist pamphlet for Manhattan. She flipped through a few pages as Mike moved to my left with Ed on my right. Suddenly a map folded down from the small pamphlet and grew into a squarish piece of paper at least 100 times larger than the original pamphlet. How a tourist could unfold and refold that conveniently while gawking at skyscrapers and buying trinkets was beyond me. After a minute of fumbling and an exasperated sigh from Mike responded with a sneer from Toni, she finally sorted out the mess of paper and turned it around.
"Alright, we," She moved her hand to a red star near the border between Kings and Queens, "...are here. And our target," She moved her hand to the other side of the map labeled 'New Jersey', "...is over here." She dragged her finger in between the red star and another star on the New Jersey side on a thick red line that started on the star, looped south along Brooklyn by Coney Island, headed over the East river and into Manhattan, ran around the financial district before shooting north and into Penn Station before veering to the west and over to New Jersey. "Raise your hand if you're confused."
I raised my hand. "By train?"
"You betcha, deary. We're gonna ride through this mess and come out without the least bit of damage." She began to fold up the map with a slight hint of satisfaction on her face. Like how a child feels after presenting their artwork to the adoring parents.
"8 million people, 8 million zombies. 8 million zombies in dark tunnels under a burning city which is probably blocked off by other crashed trains. I can see the logic but how can you be sure?" Toni stopped folding the map and eyed me with a mix of understanding and tiredness as if she has done this all her life.
"Ed works these tunnels, they shut down the metro right?" Ed nodded. "See, they knew well beforehand that shit's gonna go down so they stopped all the trains at the stations. But a few of them are out there on the tracks, yeah." I remembered Kevin's story. All those people trapped in trains in the dark besieged by the undead. But I thought that all hope was lost when it came to the tunnels.
"Aren't there more direct routes through the city though? I mean, you're going all over the damn city there." Toni finally gave up and tossed the unfolded map onto a table. She grabbed her coffee and pointed to Ed.
"You see," He began, "The subway ain't some sorta network of tunnels without ways to tell what's goin' on, it's kinda like the uh, the nervous system. Electrical signals and stuff can tell which parts are still workin' and which ones ain't through the computer. As you can see up on the map, that's the only workin' path through Manhattan. Anyways back before you were screamin' for help we were getin' parts to get the train through. There's no power in the rails so we're kinda left in the dark without a good motor. Plus a few other things we need. Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta get back to the train."
"I should try the radios again, I doubt anyone's on but it's worth a shot. We got one guy yesterday all the way from D.C. Talking about bombs and some government conspiracy. Freakin' loonies is what they are. Then I'll get to work on your arm." Toni sauntered to the door and headed right. I sat down at one of the chairs and put my head down. Today was just to much to handle. I wake up to a war, drive a hundred miles, manage to strand myself up on a building in the middle of a freaking city and get adopted by another survivor group. I swear I can't last one second without someone else next to me. But the one thing bugging me the most is the lack of hygiene. My hair was stiff with grease, sweat, dirt, and all sorts of bodily fluids. All sorts of glands on my body secreted horrible smells and my skin was tanner than it ever was before.
But there was some good news. I must've lost at least 10 pounds since this whole thing started.
A/N: Hey! I'm not dead! Once again, sorry for the hiatus. Oh who am I kidding I got lazy and backed up with all sorts of exciting things like sitting around, sleeping, and eating. Also Dead Island.