On the way back to my hotel via the subway, I noticed more police out and about than usual. They seemed to be dealing with an increase in homeless activity. Several incidents appeared to have turned violent, but most were far away from me so I was not sure what was happening. Once I got back to the hotel, I locked the door behind me and kicked off my shoes for the evening. Turning on the news, the images were stunning. The news itself was a jumble of confused and contradictory facts about riots, disease, civil unrest, and cannibalism. The world was exploding around us and no one really seemed to know why.
Opening my suitcase, I pulled a black case out of the bottom. Taking it to the bed, I opened it and took out my Kimber 1911, stuffed a magazine of 230 grain jacketed hollowpoints into the grip, and racked the slide to load it. The spare magazine I left in the case for the moment. Yes, I know. Possession of any type of expanding ammunition and possession of a handgun without a NYC handgun license are both considered felonies. Well, too damn bad! After the events of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Baghdad anyone who thinks the government is going to be there to take care of them when the shit hits the fan is a fool. The only person you can rely on to look out for you is you. Plus after the black eyes and expensive lawsuits New York City faced due to ex-mayor Bloomberg's anti-gun rhetoric, unless they caught me actually carrying the pistol, the New York City Police Department was most likely to give me a warning and send me on my way. After all, the handgun was unloaded and locked in a case in the trunk of my car when I was traveling, which federal law said was legal anywhere, even if both New York State and New York City had tried to ignore that particular law for the last couple of years.
Settling down for the night, I made sure the door was locked and bolted, then turned in. New York City seemed unusually loud that night, but sirens and noise were normal for New York and I had learned to ignore them and sleep.
When I awoke in the morning, the first thing I noticed was the quiet. While New York is typically quieter at 4:30am, it's never quiet. But, I had a long workday ahead so I went to the bathroom and did my usual morning routine of shower and shave. When I came out of the bathroom, I still was not hearing any street noise. Looking out my window, I saw no movement on the street, pedestrian or vehicle. That was definitely not a good sign. Before I could look any further, I was interrupted by a scream from the hallway. Armed with my pistol and clad only in a pair of shorts, I snatched open the door to see a woman fighting off a man clad in a business suit. At first I thought his attack was sexual, but it became apparent that it wasn't. Instead he seemed to be trying to bite her. Moving towards them, I yelled at the man to stop, but he completely ignored me. The woman however, heard my yell and managed to slip away from the man, running down the hall to me. The man followed and seemed totally uncaring when I lifted my gun to cover him. Not wanting a confrontation, I backed up through the door into my room, keeping the woman behind me. Once in the room, I slammed the door and relocked it. You could hear the man beating on the door and moaning, but he would not respond to any attempts at conversation.
Asking the woman what had happened, she explained that the man was in the elevator and had seemed ill. When she had inquired about his health, he had attacked her. Her arm was covered in blood, so I got a towel and began to clean it up. Under the blood was a gash that resembled a bite more than anything else. Almost immediately, scenes from old horror movies swept through my mind, but I dismissed them as silly. After cleaning up the woman's wound, I tried to call hotel security. The man was still beating at the door and moaning. Looking out the peephole, you could see his face. His skin looked pale and blotchy, while his eyes were bloodshot and jaundiced. No one answered the phone at the security desk.
Looking at the woman, I noticed that she too was very pale, more so than she had been when I first tended to her. When I asked her if she was okay, she looked at me without answering and I could she that her eyes were becoming bloodshot and jaundiced as well. I knew she was infected with whatever the man outside had. Numerous questions went through my head, mainly I wondered if I was already infected. I watched with horror as over the next few hours the woman changed from a scared human being into something else. Even as I finally backed away from her, she sprang from the couch, moaning and clawing towards me. My reaction was instantaneous, the pistol in my hand came up and I fired, hitting her between the eyes. After taking the shot, I quickly replaced the magazine with a fresh one and then topped off the original one with one of the lose cartridges from my pistol case. I had learned long ago to never shoot a magazine dry unless absolutely necessary. I could always top off partially empty magazines during a lull, but having the slide lock back on an empty magazine at the wrong time could prove fatal. And I had a feeling I would need every round I had to get out of the city.
I knew I had to get out of this hotel and out of New York City. First I got dressed, jeans and tennis shoes, with a black short sleeve shirt. I packed my laptop case with things I thought I would need, mostly bottled water from the room's convenience refrigerator. Like the hotel was going to fuss about those charges! Steeling my nerves, I jerked the door open and shot the man in the business suit in the head. Stepping over him, I moved down the hall to the elevators. Since the power was still on, I pushed the call button and then backed away where I would have a clear shot if an infected person was in the elevator.
When the elevator arrived and its doors opened, it proved to be empty. Moving into the elevator quickly, I punched the button for the parking garage. Like normal, I had given the valet my spare key and the primary was still on my key ring. Once the door shut, I again changed magazines for a completely full one and topped the one from the gun with another loose cartridge.
When the elevator door opened, the parking attendant was standing there. His skin was grey and dead, while his once pristine uniform was covered with blood. As he advanced on me, I shot him in the head. The noise and concussion of the big .45 going off inside the enclosed metal elevator was painful. Stepping over the body, I looked out into the parking deck. Seeing nothing moving, I began moving from column to column seeking my car.
Many of my liberal coworkers would have been shocked beyond words at this point. Most knew that I shot in competition, but the fact that I had just killed three people in what they would see as cold blood would have sent them into fits. If this was the end, and it was going to be anything like the old zombie movies, I figured most of them would not live to see the end of the week anyway.
Unfortunately, the hotel's parking deck was several floors. Twice I was confronted by the dead and was forced to kill them. I knew my Kimber was down 3 rounds, so I changed the magazine to the full one. But I did not have time and enough safety to reload the partial magazine so I just stuck it into my back pocket.
As I entered the 3rd level of the parking deck, I could see the dark black silhouette of my car, easily distinguishable by the dual silver hood stripes. It was backed into a slot on the far side of the deck facing outwards towards me. Deciding to risk it, I quickly moved down the middle of the parking lot towards my car. That mistake almost cost me everything.
About halfway across the parking lot, I fell and stumbled, dropping my Kimber, which slid under the bumper of a parked car. Looking down to see why I had fallen, I was shocked to see a dead woman trying to crawl up my leg towards me. Her legs were torn to shreds below the thighs like someone had been gnawing on them. While a kick to the dead woman's face got me free of her grasp, I could see more of the dead coming up behind her. Scrambling backwards on my hands, I backed up until I hit the bumper of the car behind me. Never taking my eyes off the approaching dead, I felt around behind me and found my pistol.
My first shot was to the lady at my feet. As I scrambled up to my feet, I fired a couple of more rounds at the oncoming crowd. The seemingly ignored impact of the rounds on the dead confirmed what horror movie writers had always assumed. Shoot them in the head! Leaning against a cement column, I began to methodically shoot the oncoming crowd, one shot each into the head. Twice I had to retreat to another column as the crowd got too close, but in the end, they all died.
Hiding behind the cement column, I stood still and watched making sure that no more of the dead were near. Not seeing any, I quickly moved to my car and opened the trunk. Sitting down in the spare tire well was a second black case like the one I had in my suitcase, only larger. Grabbing the case, I slid into the front seat and locked the car doors. Like most men, raised through their teenage years in the 70s and 80s, I thought that raw Detroit horsepower was the pinnacle of car development, and my 2006 Dodge Charger SRT10 "Petty" Edition was definitely raw horsepower. It was basically the Dodge Charger Coupe with the Dodge Viper V-10 engine outfitted with a supercharger for 780 peak horsepower. A lot of the unneeded "stuff" had been stripped from the car to lighten it, plus the suspension and all was tuned to produce a track-ready street-legal car.
Opening the second case, I took out my second Kimber 1911. I shoved a magazine of 230 grain jacketed hollowpoints into it and racked the slide to load the first round. Taking a Jackass Leather double rig out of the case, I slid my arms into the rig and shrugged to settle the holsters. I holstered the two 1911s, one under each arm, and sat back in the seat to think. At the moment, I was safe. While I sat there thinking, I reloaded the spent magazines from my first Kimber and topped the magazine in my second.
I needed to head south. If this was spread by contact, then the densely packed cities of the northeast like New York, Boston, and Washington DC were doomed. But the lightly populated rural areas of the south could possibly survive. Plus my wife and family were down south and I needed to get back to them.
Cranking up the powerful car, I eased it out of the parking spot and headed for the exit ramp. The hotel parking deck was one of those where you had to go through each floor to get to the ramp for the next. Passing through the first two floors I nailed a couple of the walking dead with the bumper, but it wasn't until I got to the final level that life got interesting.
As I passed through the final floor before getting back up to ground level, I saw a screaming woman being chased by three of the dead. Without thinking, I turned the car to cut between her and the dead, using my bumper to smash two of them to the ground.
"Get in the car!" I yelled at the woman. Drawing one of my Kimbers I shot the dead man that was still standing and then the two that were on the ground. The damn woman screamed again. As I turned I could see another one of the dead trying to reach around the car door to get at her. A fast double tap solved that problem and I slid back into the car. Dumping the magazine from my pistol and shoving a fresh one home, I stuck the pistol between my legs where I could get to it easily. Flooring the big supercharged engine I yelled at the woman to hang on. When I got to the top of the ramp, I never slowed down, crashing through the wooden gate.
Pulling out of the parking deck, I turned and headed up Lexington. I could head across the 59th Street Bridge to Queens, but I thought heading up and across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey was a better idea. It got me onto the mainland and headed south down Interstate 95 towards home. The woman I had rescued in the parking garage, she said her name was Kim, was finally beginning to calm down. The tunnels into New Jersey were out of the question. They would be deathtraps with nowhere to go. At least on the bridges, one could jump to the water if trapped. The fall might kill you, but at least you had a chance.
As I turned off Lexington Avenue and onto 57th street to cross over to the west side of New York, I was forced to come to a complete stop. Ahead, a New York Police Department SWAT van was parked across the road. From the bodies lying about, it was pretty obvious that a major conflict had taken place in the streets here. After waiting a few minutes to see if the coast was clear, I slid out of the car. The first body was a NYPD officer that had become one of the walking dead and whose head had been blown open afterwards. Kneeling by the body, I quickly took his sidearm, thigh holster, and spare magazines, as well as the spare MP5 magazines tucked into his vest pockets.
"Look Out!" The high shriek from Kim caused me to turn and look as a group of the dead shambled out of an alley. Now I found myself trapped with them between the car, and me and Kim was not going to be any help. Drawing my matched Kimbers, I started firing with the gun in my strong hand. Even as the undead around them fell, the rest kept coming. Suddenly, a small caliber submachine gun started firing short bursts from behind me. Two of the undead fell, their heads destroyed by the fire.
Looking behind me, I could see a tall black man in a SWAT uniform on the porch of one of the buildings. He motioned for me to come to him. Figuring he was forted up inside the building, I yelled at Kim to come to me. At first she refused, but faced with the threat of staying out in the car by herself, she finally complied. Together we ran into the building, followed closely by the SWAT officer.
The main floor of the building was a trashed mess of dead bodies and broken furniture. Stairs led up to a second floor and we quickly followed the SWAT officer upwards without a word being spoken. At the top of the stairs, another SWAT officer pushed a huge piece of furniture across the top of the stairs, sealing off the second floor.
The two SWAT officers introduced themselves as Carl Roberts and John Luigie. Carl had been the officer outside on the porch providing us with cover fire. John was a short stocky white man with Sergeant's stripes on his shoulder. It was immediately apparent that he felt that he was in charge; and painfully obvious that he did not have a clue what to do.
John immediately got into my face about the pair of handgun's I was carrying. I told him I could care less what the liberal shitheads of New York City had passed for laws and that he was a traitor to his country for enforcing the Sullivan Act to begin with. If he wanted my guns, he was welcome to try and take them away from me, but I reminded him that there were no longer any courts to back his silly play, assuming her survived it. He immediately went on the defensive, acting like a 12 year old who had been out insulted in a "Your Momma" contest. Not caring to butt heads with him, I told everyone I was going to find a room and stretch out. Kim followed me to one of the back halls. The room had an old bed in it and I offered it to her. Before we settled in, I gave her a quick lesson in firearm handling. Luckily, the dead officer on the street had been carrying a Glock 17 9mm Semi-Automatic that is one of the easiest handguns in the world to operate. Tucking the Glock under her pillow, and my spare Kimber between the cushions of an overstuffed easy chair, I curled up in the chair for a nap.
When I awoke, the afternoon sun was fading. Retrieving my Kimber and leaving Kim asleep, I wandered back into the main part of the second floor. Carl was sitting in a chair watching over the stairwell with John nowhere to be found. Carl and I talked for a while about ways to make our shelter more defensible, but most required heavy labor and we decided that could wait until tomorrow.
I decided to go through the four apartments on this floor and search the refrigerators and cabinets. In one of the apartments, I found a wok and plenty of ingredients for making Chinese food. Lighting the gas stove, I stir-fried some vegetables and sliced chicken with a Schezuan Peanut sauce I had found and fixed four plates. I had found a case of bottled water in one of the other refrigerators and I sat four of them out as well.
Returning to the main hallway, I found John on watch in place of Carl. When I handed John the plate of food, he began to complain about the food being Chinese. Since I still had my hand on the plate, I pulled it away. He quickly shut up and took the plate. His asshole attitude was beginning to wear on my nerves, but I let it slide.
Waking Kim, I waited on her to go to the bathroom, and then led her to the apartment I had cooked in. There I had set a table for her. Unlike the officers and myself, I figured Kim was much more sheltered and for some reason I was trying to make things normal for her. After dinner, I found several movies and we put "Walking Tall" in to watch. Carl dropped in and thanked me for dinner. He sat and watched the movie with us for a while, then left to sleep.
About midnight, I went and relieved John on guard duty. He made a couple of crack comments about civilians and guns, but stayed out of my face. I think he had figured out that I was probably much better trained than he was and that his badge meant nothing to me. That is not completely true. I have always had a deep respect for those who go into law enforcement and put their lives on the line daily. But I think a lot of officers have lost the whole point of "Protect and Serve" and I have no respect for them individually.
Late in the evening, I heard Kim scream. Thinking the dead had gotten in; I ran to the room we had given Kim so she would have some privacy. Bull-rushing my way through the door, I was stunned by what I saw in front of me. Sergeant John Luigie was holding Kim down and trying to pull her pants off. The girl was putting up a fight and from the looks of things she had landed a knee, which distracted John long enough for her to scream.
Grabbing John by the collar, I yanked him off of Kim. Carl had also burst into the room and he was now hollering at John. Gaining his feet, John threw a hard left into my gut, causing me to release the hold I had on him. I retaliated with a snap kick to the calf that took his legs out from under him, and then followed through by dropping my knee into his solar plexus. Once he was down, I slammed the butt of my pistol across his jaw, knocking him out for the moment. As I stood up, Kim was there, throwing kicks into the side and head of the unconscious John. I let her go for a moment and then pulled her off.
"What the hell is going on here!" The anxiety in Carl's voice betrayed the fact that he knew what had been happening; his superior had been trying to rape Kim. Before the discussion could go any further, a huge crash came from out in the hallway. Both of us knew instantly that the dead had been attracted by all the commotion and had broken through the blockade at the stairs.
Grabbing up the MP5 that John had set aside, I ran back towards the stairwell. One of the dead, wearing the white monogrammed shirt of a worker from a local Deli, shambled around the corner from the main stairwell and in to the hall. I dispatched him with a quick burst to the head, but he was followed by several more. Slowly we were pushed back down the hallway. Regardless of what kind of an asshole John was, we did not leave him. Pulling him down the hallway with us, we kept up a steady stream of fire, cutting down the advancing dead.
At one point the hungry crowd of the dead overran us. Carl and I fought with shots at pointblank range and slamming buttstocks, while Kim tried to protect John with the Glock. One of the dead slipped past her and mauled John and the smell of his blood attracted the ones attacking us. In the end, his death bought us a bit of breathing room to disengage from close quarters with the dead so we could slide further back down the hallway. However, we found ourselves with another problem. The hallway was coming to an end. At the end of the hall was a window and looking out, I could see that this was a typical New York City apartment building with a fire escape outside the window.
Shattering the window with the butt of the MP5, I pushed Kim out the window onto the fire escape. Yelling for Carl to come on, I fired short bursts past him into the restless mob of the dead. He yelled back for us to go on and I slid out the window. The street below was clear and Kim had already moved down the fire escape towards the ground. Swinging down to the ground, I grabbed her hand and ran towards the SWAT van.
Looking back, I was stunned to see Carl nowhere to be found. I could hear his MP5 chattering back inside the building. Even before I could yell at him to come on, or start back towards the window, I heard him scream and knew it was too late. Carl had made his last stand to buy us time to get away.
The NYPD SWAT van was a huge beast of a vehicle, built to transport a SWAT team and its gear and act as a mobile headquarters in the field. Turning the ignition, I threw the van into gear and drove away from my car and the brownstones. Away from a brave man who had sacrificed his life for Kim and I. When we got to 8th Avenue, I turned and headed uptown. Central Park South had once been an area of high-end condos and townhouse and fancy shops. Now it was a warzone of burning cars, broken windows, and bodies. Several times, we saw the dead wandering about or chasing the living, but we could not stop and help. There was just nothing we could have done, nothing no one could have done with less that a full SWAT team in heavy riot gear.
As I turned the SWAT van onto West 177th Street, I was relieved that we were about to leave New York City behind us. I figured we would have trouble in New Jersey, but once we got clear of the big cities, south on I-95 would be fairly easy down into Virginia. There we would run into larger cities again. The outbound ramp up onto the bridge was blocked with wall-to-wall abandoned cars, many showing the bloody signs of the chaos that had happened here in the final hours of New York's fall. Turning up the inbound ramp, I maneuvered through the few cars that had tried fleeing into the city for protection. A couple of times, I was forced to push cars out of the way with the heavy front bumper of the van.
Ahead, I saw people. At first I thought they were survivors trying to cross the bridge on foot, but as I got closer I realized they were the dead feasting on a corpse. As my anger got the better of me, I slammed on the brakes of the SWAT van and came to a stop in the middle of the roadway. Stepping out, I brought my handgun up and calmly fired four rounds, each round blowing apart the head of one of the dead. As soon as the echo of the last shot died away I heard moaning and looked over at the outbound side of the bridge. There were many dead milling around there; they had been attracted to my gunfire, but were unable to cross the median to get to me.
Returning to the van, we once again started towards the New Jersey shore. Several times I had to push cars out of the way with the van's front bumper and we encountered individual dead, but the transit was fairly easy.
As I pulled off the George Washington Bridge and down onto Interstate 95 South, I spotted several of the dead trying to get into a green conversion van parked on the side of the road. As I pulled closer, I could see a face in the rear window of the van. The face was that of a young girl, probably in her late teens, who was frightened and alone. Bringing the van to a stop, I exited with one of the SWAT MP5s and began destroying the dead with short bursts. After the first burst, the dead turned and began to shamble towards me. Several fell, but the rest closed and I was forced to retreat in order to keep enough distance between the dead and myself.
Once the dead had started following me, Kim ran from the SWAT van and helped the young girl out of the wrecked conversion van. Together they ran back to the SWAT van just as I destroyed the last of the dead who had been trying to get the girl. Looking around I realized that I had attracted the attention of many more dead and had moved away from the safety of the SWAT van as well.
Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, I ran back to the SWAT van and quickly got it back into motion. Kim had the young girl in the back of the van calming her down. Armed and with two woman in my care, I continued heading south.