The Last Mayor

Part 3

CHAPTER 15 ALL I CAN DO

I can't stay and watch this, so I get in my Humvee and drive. It's easy to punch other vehicles out of the way. I go east on 24 th to 3 rd avenue, then south. I know the Police Academy is this way, and I'm in no big rush. At various points I can see the greasy black smoke rising from Sir Clowdesley over buildings like a bleak cloud, and look away. Probably that was a bad idea. If anything, it'll just draw more of them.

I go by a police car stuck in traffic, then stop and get out. I have the tire iron and the street is empty. The driver side door is open, and the keys are in the ignition. I pull them out and go to the trunk. I read in the prepper Bible that some of these cars have weapons lockers in the back, where I might find a shotgun or patrol rifle. The trunk opens, and there's a metal box built into the trunk that might be a locker, but the car key doesn't work to open it. I give it a few desultory whacks with the iron, but it just clangs. I try to pick it up but it's built into the trunk. Probably the key is in the pocket of some floater cop roaming the streets.

Ah well.

The stink of greasy burning reaches me. It carries on the air. I look up 3 rd avenue and see a thick fog of black smoke curdling closer. I get in the police car and start it up. I click buttons until I find the one that starts the siren.

The lights flash overhead, splashing reflections off the Hummer, and the siren rings. I drive it back up to the fog, and there I wait.

Soon enough the ocean comes, bringing the whole fire with them. They stagger on crisping legs while their bodies burn, their faces running like the Gestapo-guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It is horrific, but I'm in the middle now and I can't stop.

I wait until they're almost on me and the cloud of their black smoke is everywhere. Then I lead them away. I drive slowly north, with their burning bodies stumbling behind. None of them run now. I drive until they stop following and the trail of oily smoke gives out because they've all burned out. They lie behind me like a long black scar on the city.

Oh God, what have I done.

I find a bus facing west and I drive it back down 4 th avenue. I don't want to see the slug trail of their bodies, but on 23 rd I pull in and see them everywhere. There are myriad charred corpses on the floor and lying atop my scattered desks. There are scorched black carbon marks up all the buildings. The front of Sir Clowdesley has been obliterated with dark grease. You can't see my sign in the window for all the black. It's just a mess, and it reeks of half-cooked meat and gasoline.

I pull the bus in, and three-point turn it so it's blocking most of the western edge of 23 rd where it borders on 4 th . I get out and walk through the wreckage to the nearest car. The asphalt is hot underfoot, and my feet come away mired with black sludge, like I'm walking through treacle. A hand with most of the skin peeled away reaches out to me from a bubbly body.

I get in the car, so dark with tar I can't make out the model, and turn the key. My hands are black just from handling the door. The windscreen wipers work ineffectively to clear the mess from the glass. The engine turns and the wheels slip and skid in the human oil. I pull the car up and slot it lengthwise into the gap between the front of the bus and the nearby building. It's a near perfect fit.

Can they get past this?

I study the pattern of blackened desks. They've been pushed through, like a broken levee beneath too much mass.

I find other working cars nearby, and drive them back to park alongside the bus. They'll add security. In large numbers the ocean could climb over, and even a few floaters might probably squeeze through the gaps, but I'll mortar those in with something. Maybe mortar. I flash on the prepper Bible, and where New York's construction equipment may be kept.

That would help.

I pull up about eight more cars to block 23 rd to the east where it meets 3 rd Avenue. These will serve as ballast for when I get another bus, backing it up. I notice I've left my patrol car inside the barricade, but it doesn't matter now. My lime green moped is still there too, though it's not green anymore, and it's been knocked on its side and crushed by countless feet. There are thick mucusy strands of something glistening around it, like organic padlock chains. Entrails?

This whole charnel pit stinks of barbeque and offal. This was a mistake.

I climb out of the cesspit over my barricade of cars, boost another car with its key in the ignition, and drive off looking for a bus. I see lost floaters and swerve to hit them. Doing this disgusts me, but I can't stop myself. They rattle up the hood, into the glass and over the roof. When the windscreen cracks so badly that I can't see, I get another car. I find a bus somewhere around 37 th and drive it back, crunching the crawlers beneath its ten-ton frame. All of these are mistakes but I can't stop making them. It's like I'm not myself, and all I can do is kill.

I pull the bus up flush along to the cars and handbrake it.

It's still not enough. Perhaps they can push them back. Perhaps they can climb over. I need more buses. I know where to find them.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The Port Authority bus terminal in Midtown feels like a dungeon, dark and dingy once I'm through the glass vestibule with its pop-red modern art. I use one of my stolen flashlights to illuminate the way. No floaters come for me, as it's empty inside. I walk through the massive dark interior, bigger even than the Darkness, with only my footsteps as company. Right about now I'd talk to Io, if she still worked. What would I say?

Forgive me father for I have sinned.

I smash into a bus at stop C22, where I once took a trip up to summer camp in Boston. I was a camp counselor back then, working with at-risk kids from the inner city. I met a friend from Iowa State University by chance, sitting on a railing waiting for his Greyhound going west. It was bizarre. We talked about how easy it was to get lost in the bus terminal's dark nether halls, and what we both missed about college. We agreed to catch up online, but we never bothered. His bus came and we went our separate ways.

A different world, now.

There is no key in the bus. Of course not, that would be too easy. There are a few sleepy floaters though, rousing like this is finally their stop.

I leave them. I get out. I wander around the maze of buses for a while, feeling lost. Is this the nightmare, I wonder, or the reality? One of the ocean pops up around the edge of the bus alley I'm walking in, and I jab him hard in the throat with the sharp end of the iron. He falls to the ground. I notice as I step over him, he's wearing the gray uniform of a bus driver.

There must be a room where they keep all the keys. It would be an office for the drivers, probably protected by a pass card, some kind of electronic lock that would be fixed solid now, forever. I'll never find it before nightfall for sure.

I follow the buses to the exit. Light floods around me, shaping the mouth of this concrete hell with black diesel smoke accretions. I feel sick at myself. I'm already tired of smashing my way into things.

I smash into a Greyhound bus sitting in the exit, which must've stopped on its way out. The keys are in it. I rev it up and drive. It bullies its way roughly down 8 th Avenue, plowing other road users aside. On 23 rd I turn left and pull it up across the gap where I slotted the car in. I work it back and forth until the flank grinds hard against the brick face of a Lush soap shop, knocking over a lamp-post and striking sparks off the other bus and car. This is my mortar. I get out and look up at my new wall.

It is impregnable. At first I'm not even sure how I'm going to climb it. Then I remember. I smash a few windows, clear the glass, and climb up them. Atop the bus I look back. My area is clear of floaters still, and grossly filthy still. A few more buses will do it.

I do the run to Port Authority on 41 st and 8 th three more times, swapping a stolen car nearby for a bus each time for the trip back. On the last trip back I stop off at the tech store on 44 th street and pick twenty laptop batteries off the dark shelves, plus headphones and immersion goggles. I stop at a clothes store and pick up some clothes. I stop at a bed store and pick up sheets and a few duvets.

I don't have a g*n. I don't want one now.

I climb back in over my bus-blockades, each two thick now. I have the whole street now, and it's disgusting. I traipse through the alien landscape of treacly of burned bodies, numb and barely in control of my legs. Across the street there's a liquor shop and I pick up a bottle of whiskey. I pick up another one. I carry all my stuff to Sir Clowdesley and look inside.

A few floaters mill in there. It stinks sourly, like old vomit and charcoal that's been pissed on. I see my new bedding has been trailing in the black and I let it drop. I drop all this s**t except the batteries in their shopping basket and the whiskeys. I climb in.

The floaters come for me. I hit them in the brains. They must be dizzy, because they're slow. They let me come in, and up in the library I find my nest, and my cache of guns spread around the floor.

I shoot the floaters in the throats. I go back to my shitty sofa and stuff tissue paper up my nose to block out the stink. A breeze carries it in from the street and circulates it.

I boot up my laptop from my pack. I get the spare batteries on standby. I get out the USBs and boot up the Darkness. I plug in my goggles, my noisecanceling earphones, and escape.

If they come for me now, I don't care. I can't do this anymore. What I've done today is already unforgivable, a kind of g******e. The fulfillment center peels open before me. Here everything is simple, there are shelves to walk like city blocks and there are goods I need to collect like guns and buses.

I laugh. It's all the same. I get a mouthful of the stench of what I've done. I run on through the Darkness while tears run down my eyes and hang in the goggle-cups, obscuring the screen, while the diviner gives me my instructions. I do what I'm told. I drink some whiskey and I do what I'm told.

CHAPTER 16 THE DARKNESS

The fulfillment center is dark and calm. I go round and round in circles for hours, picking up junk and delivering junk, bringing some measure of reality and routine back to my existence. I could even imagine I'll bump into Carl soon. We'll run together. I'll go to bed in my Mott Haven flat, and the next day I'll wake up looking forward to my trip to Sir Clowdesley, because the barista called Talia's on shift.

It's a dream that makes me sound like a stalker. I'm in Sir Clowdesley now, waiting for her. It doesn't smell of lovely roasted coffee anymore.

I go to Blucy at the print-on-demand machines. She runs through her set script, talking about her books, selling me on Deepcraft, things like that. I watch as Hank and the others go by, endlessly grinding for loot in the Darkness' monster-less dungeon.

Hours pass into the night. At some point I sleep with the goggles still on. When I wake up the laptop battery is dead. The goggles have dug sharp creases into the skin around my eyes. I don't want to take them off, but just for a few moments I must.

Sir Clowdesley's walls, ceiling and floor are streaked with black grime. Light creeps in around the tumbled blackboards and through cracked windows. Chairs and tables have been scattered everywhere. One of the floaters is actually lying dead near my feet. I didn't notice that.

I get up and drag it by the feet to the stairs, where I tip it down. There are four other bodies there, each lying in a dark bloodstain in a pool of hot spring light, smeared with the ashy grease of their fellows.

I go to the toilet in the toilets off the stairwell. The water flushes for what I expect will be the last time. There'll be no water pressure any more to fill the cisterns. I open the door into the inner donut and look out. There's a deep blue sky, and the air here is so fresh it burns my lungs. I feel like a subterranean thing peering for the first time into the light.

It isn't for me.

I go back to my sofa. I unbox one of the batteries and slot it into place. I fish out my USB pack, wrapped in plastic, and unfold them. I plug the first in and peruse the files. It's all the familiar prepper stuff, but for the file labeled 'Carl'.

I take a long fortifying slug of whiskey, then I open the file. Hit me with it all. I find the code for a new non-player character in the Deepcraft file, and preview it. It's Carl, his image and a coded text file. I find myself blinking back boozy tears. I boot up the center, slip my goggles back into their grooves in my face, and install him into the fulfillment center.

There he is, just as always, a green and blue parrot with a pirate on his shoulder. Immediately he starts walking away, down the long halls, and I follow him. I try to raise him with a text interaction, but he's not interested. He's got a program. He's not even looking at his diviner.

Just to see him brings home the reality. I'll never talk to my friend again.

He turns left at Blucy, walks straight by the supervisor who's making marks on his notepad, then stops at an aisle in the shelving. I see some new items there, they look like comics.

"Hey Simon," Carl says. The text bubble floats above his head. My hearts turns over in my chest.

"Hey Carl," I type back.

"I made this for you," he says. His parrot picks up one of the comics and holds it out. "It's good work. It means something."

I take the comic and bring it up across my screen, then laugh aloud, in the real world. It is a digital version of my own comic, Zombies of New York. It is completely fitting. I leaf through the pages, every single panel and cell I made in the last six months present and correct.

"I hope you don't mind," he says. "I just want you to know I'm proud. If anyone deserves to survive a real zombie apocalypse, it's you. You have the right kind of empathy."

I laugh again, this one more like a sob. Nothing I've done so far has been empathetic. I've only been brutal and cruel, and making excuses for the reason why doesn't mean s**t. It is a weakness in me still.

"You might not believe that now," Carl says, as if he can hear me scoffing. "But you will. I've seen it, you know? I saw things in my coma too. If you're even alive, and you ever see this message, you'll understand, or you'll come to. Because these zombies are just like you and me, Simon. Did you know that? Yes/No?"

I recognize this question as the start of a simple decision tree. We programmed them into our non-player characters, to give them some diversity in their scripts. I type, "No."

"You don't? Think about it. Did you see any photos of yourself in your coma? Probably not. Did they tell you any of the weird stuff you did? Probably not. Do you know I went gray for a month, like one of the ocean?

My eyes went white, like I had glaucoma. I was up and sleepwalking, following people. They probably didn't tell you any of that, because it's too damn freaky. My mother told me. It sounds like a zombie though, doesn't it?"

"Yes/No," he offers.

"No."

Carl flips me the bird. This is one of his jokes, a bird flipping the bird. I can't stop myself laughing again, through my tears.

"Use your head, Simon. Think things through. I'm here lying in my cripple bed, dreaming you're alive. Can you imagine what things will be like if you are? It's beautiful. It means I'm not alone, which means you're not either. I don't feel the twinges anymore. If it wasn't for my mom and her friends banging on the door upstairs, I could go out in the world and I'd be fine. I'm cured! Do you think that's a coincidence, the same day the zombie apocalypse hits the whole world? Yes/No?"

"Shut up, Carl," I type.

The parrot waits. His Yes/No dialog clicks up again. He'll have all the patience in the world, now. I wonder how far down the decision tree he planned this interaction, when he was lying in his bed listening to the Skype call to me ring out, with his mother thumping overhead. What did that feel like, to finally be free and know that it could only last for hours?

Now I'm crying again.

"Yes," I type. It's just a coincidence.

"Yes? Pull your s**t together, Simon. You're being willfully blind. We started this thing, or it started with us, don't you see that? Whatever hit us a year ago primed us and the world. It's obvious, don't you think? We became the proto-zombies, even the incubators for this infection. We went gray, we got white eyes, we wandered. But we were cared for, because there were only a handful of us, and they brought us back. What if that's what's happening out there, now? We seeded this apocalypse, or it seeded us. I don't have time to offer a Yes/No now, Simon. You've just got to be with me on this, because the next one is a big one."

He goes quiet.

"What?" I type.

Thirty infuriating seconds pass.

"Are you ready?" he asks. "Yes/No?"

"For s**t's sake, Carl!" I shout in Sir Clowdesley. "Tell me. Yes."

"Then consider this. He said it might cause something worse. Do you remember that? I don't know for sure.

You are a charming bastard. You had your date, you took her home, and the earth moved forever. Whatever chemical buttons that act pushed in you, it also triggered the world's zombification. The infection began in New York, Simon, I gathered that much from the first blush of its spread. It went everywhere after that in hours, across the globe faster than any wind vector could carry it. People were primed to a wavelength, it has to have been something like that, because they were all pre-infected, and you were the trigger.

He goes quiet. I lie on my filthy grime-smeared sofa and stare at his image on two goggle-vision screens, while the last cold hard chunk of text bobs above his parrot head.

What the?

"Simon," he types. "Are you listening, Yes/No?"

I stare. I caused this, he's saying? It's true the doctor told me to be clinical, to never involve myself with women, and I did exactly as he asked until Talia, and then…

Then I killed the whole shitting world?

"Simon," he types again. "Are you listening, Yes/No?"

I want to punch his stupid bird face. I want to burn myself to the ground.

"No," I type. "

Are you listening, Yes/No?"

"No!"

"Are you listening, Yes/No?"

"Yes, goddammit, yes Carl you bastard!"

"Yes, so get over yourself. Get over yourself Simon. You cannot for one second feel guilt over this. You died multiple times in a coma. You spent a miserable year running around in a fake dark cave with a cripple. That it was you who first reached out of your confinement means not a damn thing. If it hadn't been you, it would have been one of the others. There must be others, Simon; it can't only be you and me. The chances of only us finding each other are infinitesimal. There must be hundreds like us, out there somewhere. Perhaps some of them have been in comas this whole time, and now they just woke up. Have you thought about that? Think about that.

"And of those hundreds, any one of them might have recovered sufficiently to do something big enough, emotional enough, to trigger the end. But none of them did, because none of them are as defiant as you. Do you understand that? You were brave, Simon! That's human. You were willing to risk dying just to live a little, you chose man not mouse, and that's nothing to be ashamed of. There is no guilt here; you had no conception of this godforsaken outcome.

"Now, your duty is clear. Your people are out there, all the lost ones who never found each other and have no idea what's going on. They're going to need guidance. They'll need a leader. They'll be lonely and broken, like I was when I found your center. You have to do what you did for me, for all of them. Do you understand? Yes/No?"

I stare at the block of text. The Yes/No tag repeats insistently, refreshing once a minute. Steadily it pushes his speech off the screen. This was Carl. He isn't here, but that doesn't change anything. He was my friend, and I won't disrespect that even if I don't believe or agree with him.

"Yes," I type eventually.

"Good. I'm glad. I can die happily, knowing you're out there doing what you can, in the full light of the truth. You're a good man, Simon, you'll be a great man, and if there's any way to save these infected millions, or to alleviate their suffering, I know you'll find it, just like you did for me. I know you'll die trying if you have to, and no one could ask for more than that." I look at his damn bird. It looks glassily at me.

"Goodbye Simon. Good luck."

The parrot doesn't disappear or fade, it just stops talking. Its diviner blinks, and it starts walking away. I watch it go.

Now it's just a non-player character like the others, a true ghost in the Darkness. It passed along its message, one it carried across the vast distances between this broken world and the world when it was still on the cusp, and now it's for me to carry onward.

It bows me. I crumple beneath it.

I tear off the goggles and drink.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

I rouse in the evening looking out over 4 th avenue, sitting atop one of my Greyhound barricades with my legs dangling like a child's over the side. The ocean spreads gray and white before me, its arms reaching up like the fins of fish, its eyes glowing white like the lantern-antennae on those hideous deepsea fishes that lure other fish in.

Cannibals.

I swig the whiskey, which I hate. I pour a little out for the floaters to enjoy, on their faces and heads.

"I'm not going to burn you," I slur at them. "Don't worry."

They wave and drift like fronds of seaweed in the water, like groupies holding up their lighters at a stage. Their fingers sometimes plink against my shoes, tickling me gently.

think about the cosmic s*x that sent a signal out that somehow caused this. "Did you know?" I ask the bodies below. "Did you feel it? Do you feel it now?"

They grope and waggle like anemone fronds. I pour the rest of the bottle on the head of an obese man wearing a sodden Carl velour training top. As the liquor splashes he lifts his face and I get it in his mouth. This makes me laugh hysterically. He blows bubbles with it.

I get to my feet and throw the bottle as far as I can. It hits the darkening asphalt across the intersection but disappointingly doesn't smash. Rather it chips and skitters away, like a flat rock skimmed over calm waters, receding underneath a resting car.

I laugh. I look out west along 23 rd and north and south on 4 th . The sun is going down, a nice burned sienna, and it's really just me. There's no sign of Talia, and if she was here, would she even want to come within a mile of this disgusting charnel fiefdom?

I laugh. I have screwed myself, by surviving.

Down Simonngst the midst of my crop of floaters there is a cop. His uniform is easy to pick out. I pull one of my guns, strapped like bandoliers now across my chest, and shoot at him.

His shoulder blows out, and a floater behind him takes the slug and his dark blood in the chest. It's quite hilarious. I shoot again and the top of his head comes off, the face behind him explodes, and still no holy retribution rains down.

I get these for free. I shoot until the g*n clicks out, but he still hasn't gone down. There's blood all over him, his head is in half, there are pockmarks torn into his chest and flesh, but still he sways his glowing eyes at me like lanterns in the depths.

I throw the g*n and it disappears beneath their mumbling feet. I pull all my guns and shoot them blank at him. This is the way to fish. I get about five rounds before all my guns are blank, and I throw them.

He's still standing. He looks like a stick of pulped meat.

I drop back inside my blackened block as the sun goes down. I head for the liquor shop, through the darkness as night comes on, with his one burning eye still foremost in my mind.

CHAPTER 17 RV

Talia isn't coming.

I figure that out the next afternoon, looking over the ruin of my domain from the fourth-floor office. She isn't and she won't, because she's surely dead like everybody else.

I've damned the whole world. It's a sick kind of vanity that allows me to feel responsibility for this, to feel guilt for 'what I did', but still I do.

I need to find other survivors.

There have to be some. Carl promised.

I go out the embassy back door, still drunk in the clean morning light, with a whiskey bottle in my hand. I hate the taste but it's starting to grow on me. I wander up the street, tapping out silly rhythms on deserted car frames with the bottle and shouting at any floaters that come near. I hit one with the tire iron and fall into an ugly embrace with him.

He grabs for my brains, and I get on top where I can press the tire iron in through his eye. Of course that does nothing. I have to pull it out again, fascinated and grossed out by the black blood welling up from the ruined socket, and press it into his throat. Getting it through the skin is hard, but with enough weight it punctures.

He doesn't die until I sever his spine.

I wander on. Somewhere around 26 th and 5 th I see a horde gathering in the distance. What are they so interested in? I wander over. There are hundreds grouping near Times Square. I go around a corner stacked high with blank digital screens and see.

It's a dog, standing somehow atop a city bus in the middle of the road. I laugh. He's skinny and barking, some kind of Carl/white terrier breed, and he's probably a few hours from dying. He keeps on barking like somebody's going to come save him.

Poor little guy. He's meat for the ocean, now.

Some of the horde peel off and come for me. I move like I'm in a dream, climbing into a nearby SUV. The keys are there in the ignition and I rev the engine. More of them flow toward the sound. I put my seatbelt on, press the pedal down and drive right at them.

I hit the first with a thump, the second with a thwack, then it's a barrage of thwack, thump, c***k for a hundred yards, running over bodies and sending them flinging to the side like Moses parting the Red Sea, until the windshield is fractured so badly I can barely see and my forward momentum is halted by their sheer mass.

A breaking wave of gray and white faces stares at me through the whitewebbed glass less than two yards away. Dryness has pulled their lips back from their b****y teeth in a series of rictus grins, shriveling their cheeks into dark hollows. Death is really changing them.

The dog is still somewhere ahead, barking frantically. He sees me, he knows I'm one of the good guys.

"Just a second," I call, and twist to look through the rear window. I shift the stick to reverse and rev backward.

Thump, bang, c***k, smack. Bodies impact and go smearing across the asphalt, bodies crush beneath my wheels. I rev back until my tire marks run dry of blood and I've dinged off a dozen cars, clearing something of a path

They're charging again. I slam the horn down and charge right back.

It's like ten-pin bowling for people. They go flying in all crazy directions; off to the side, over the top, bouncing back into the crowd. Bits of them start to get tangled up in the windshield's fractured web, here a scrap of tongue, an earlobe, a gobbet of dry gray skin.

"Come on!" I yell into the fury of the stampeding storm. I hit the solid depths again and rev backward. The poor dog won't shut up. I ram backward and forward like a steam piston. When the windshield breaks inward it takes me totally by surprise, showering me with crystal glass and ocean bits. Hands grope inward from bodies suspended on the hood.

I race back and they slide off. I stop an intersection down, spy out a better machine, an RV, and get in. The keys are in the dash, it revs up nicely, and I bring it to bear like a battering ram.

The dog barks. I crush dozens of them. I splatter dozens. I probably grind hundreds under my wheels. In all, it doesn't do a damn thing. I can't get closer. Hot tears splash off my hands. One damn dog! I couldn't save Carl but maybe I can do this.

"I'm coming!" I shout to him. "Buddy, I'm coming." I hammer at the ocean but the ocean is an ocean and it swells to encompass me. Rather than getting closer, each time I get driven further away, carried on the surging tide. I can't think for the dog's crazed barking.

"Hold on, I'm coming."

Then the barking stops. I don't see the moment he gets pulled down. It's a wholly unremarked death, like every other death in this new age, and it makes me seethe. I beat the crap out of the steering wheel with my fists. Ramming them with an RV is not enough for this. Burning them won't cut it. I need something more.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The RV punches through the glass entrance hall of the Police Academy with ease. I drive it on into the lobby until it cracks to a halt against the elevator shaft.

HOOOONK.

I ply the horn, drawing the floodwaters out. The lobby is low and wide; more of a space to line up and wait, like the DMV, than a place to be awed and impressed by.

HOOOONK.

Some of the ocean come, trickling out of their hidey-holes. There's a few regular cops Simonngst them, plus some more civilians. They bang against the RV's sheet-metal sides. I feel like a turkey in tinfoil packing, waiting for the heat to turn on.

HOOOONK.

Maybe there are fifteen. Many have blood on them, masked around their lipless mouths like gory lipstick. I pull the RV back and ram them.

It works well for this many. It breaks necks and crushes limbs. It only takes one more go before they're all down. I get out and run over the glasssprayed, blood-smeared lobby floor, to one of the cops. He's burst like a b****y piñata. I crunch the tire iron through his neck and pluck out his g*n.

I have some familiarity with this now. I flick the slide to check the magazine, full. I toggle the safety off. I stride the remnants of this horror show and put them out of their misery.

Looking back at my RV is disgusting. It is not white any more, but a maroon-Carl the color of guts and s**t. It looks like a hairball made of blood and sinew, with hundreds of scraggly tufts of skin and meat caught on tears in the metal and cracks in the glass.

I collect three more guns and put them in my pockets. I collect two flashlights from utility belts. I look for the stairs. There's bound to be a shooting range in the basement. Near to that there's bound to be a munitions cabinet, and a key.

I rummage in the darkness, deep into the building. I shoot a few. I find pitch-black stairs and descend. In the mad, cold dark I advance, until I hit a long alley leading through swing double doors and onto a deep low-ceilinged range.

HANDGUNS ONLY

The sign is very helpful. It tells me this is not the shooting range for me. I keep on going until I find another one, with a mixture of long and short-range targets. My flashlight can't pick out the furthest ones.

I scavenge around. I shoot bits of kelp that come jogging out of the shadows, leaving them gurgling. I find a room with long metal rollcupboards, and I shoot at the locks until it becomes clear that won't open them. I search in nearby desks and ranks of keys hung on hooks on a wall in an office somewhere until finally I find the one I need.

I scavenge around. I shoot bits of kelp that come jogging out of the shadows, leaving them gurgling. I find a room with long metal rollcupboards, and I shoot at the locks until it becomes clear that won't open them. I search in nearby desks and ranks of keys hung on hooks on a wall in an office somewhere until finally I find the one I need.

Beneath them are banks of ammo in nice bright cardboard boxes, orange and green and purple. I find a gear-bag and stuff it with boxes, then throw in two of each g*n type on top.

I make five trips or thereabouts to the surface, filling up the RV with munitions. I go back to Times Square. I stop a block away from the throng, where the marks of my passage are clear in blood and broken bodies.

I bolt the RV's door closed. I pop the skylight and push my gear bags through to the roof. Already they're coming for me. I settle on top with one of the sniper rifles. I work the new slide, line my eye up to the scope, and shoot.

The kick punches the scope back into my head, and blood springs out of my face. I gawp in shock at the fountain spurting out from above my eyes.

"s**t!"

I slap a hand over the wound and drop the rifle. I drop back into the RV and rummage through the cupboard until I find sticky bandages and a mirror. The wound is a half-moon just above my right eye, cut by the scope's sharp edge. I laugh and bandage it up. Blood seeps through but not much, and the first wave hits the RV hood.

I climb back up, fetch a shotgun, and shoot down into them.

The butt slams up into my armpit painfully, but three of them evaporate in gray mist. Brilliant.

More are coming. I get down on one knee above the windshield, take aim vaguely, and let rip.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

It takes hours. Stragglers still come, drawn on strange tides.

I've killed them all. My trigger finger burns with blisters. Shooting the AR15s was the most godlike. I sprayed wave after wave and they went down. I got better at shooting them in the throats at a distance, like scything down a row of corn.

SPAT SPAT SPAT DROP DROP DROP

Reload. They came on and I shotgunned them to brain-shells and dust. At one point they cleared far enough back that I popped out the sniper rifle again and set to work.

SMACK SMACK SMACK

They went down. They went down all day long.

Now I'm standing surrounded by the strange coral creations of their bodies, a landscape of the heaped-up dead like a full-color image of the h*******t, and it's too much. I can't take this, I don't want to kill them anymore, so I take the path I ought to, which is really the only decent thing to do, having come this far.

I hold a handgun to my head and pull the trigger.

CHAPTER 18 AARON

When I was younger I had a brother. His name was Aaron and he was four years older than me, and he specialized in riding his Schwinn bike, playing WWF wrestling games, and calling out the endings to movies we watched as a family.

"Stop spoiling it!" I'd complain. "Mom, tell him."

"I haven't even seen this one," he'd laugh, spreading his hands. "How's it a spoiler if I'm just guessing?"

We used to ride our bikes up and down the street outside our house, jousting with fallen corn stalks picked from the fields. The stalks usually bent on impact, but they hit hard enough to hurt. That was part of the excitement though. The harder the hit the more we'd laugh.

Afterward we'd compare welts and bruises on our chests and shoulders, and guess at how mom would shout down the house if she ever saw them.

"For that one she'd s**t a house," I'd say, pointing at a good bloomer I'd landed across Aaron's sternum.

"She'd s**t a whole farm," he'd answer. "Even the barn!"

When I was fourteen Aaron died. It was a hit and run, he was in a rented Oldsmobile with his date for the prom, and whoever did it totaled them. We never found the guy. Just out of the darkness, my brother was stolen away.

I stole my first zombie comic a month after the wake. In the mall, it was easy to do. I lingered for ages, fingering all the copies, leafing through them, hoping I'd become invisible to the clerk on duty down at the checkouts.

I knocked the comics over. I picked them up. I straightened them out. I luxuriated in the raspy touch of them, the wrapping paper feel of them, the vibrant colors; all that blood and gore.

I asked myself, is this what Aaron looked like when he shot through the front windshield and they found bits of him spread all across the corn? I thought knowing might help. I hated the zombies because they were like the guy who killed Aaron, but at the same time you had to forgive them, because they didn't know did they?

We don't hate tigers or sharks or bears, though they kill and eat people sometimes. We don't hate cows or buffalo in the fields, but they can trample people to death. A horse can kick the jaw clean off a man's face. A camel can bite off your nose. Maybe some people hated camels, I wasn't sure.

The point was, I couldn't really hate the zombies. They fascinated me too much.

I started stealing a copy a day. I'd slide it up my shirt or down my pants. Always I did it a different way, like each time it was a different crime and they could only get me for one, because there was never a pattern. On the way home I'd always do something good, like help an old lady carry some bags, even just a little way. They thought I was such a little saint. I'd help a little kid find his lost bit of green glass. I'd smile at a baby in a stroller instead of scowling, while all along the comic would be burning its secret message into my skin, trapped against my belly or around my back.

Hot, sweet shame. It was something to feel, something to be.

I'd never been into art before that. I was a sports junkie like Aaron, but every time I took to the field after the crash, all I could see was his burst-out eyeballs on the road, his guts piling out while he panted a few last hot breaths, wondering why nobody was coming to help him.

I got good at art by studying the comics. I started doing them myself. It wasn't always zombies, but it was always monsters of some kind; strong monsters that made everything seem hopeless, who could wring every bit of life out of heroes and leave them desiccated and weak. It had to be that way, so I could make myself stronger. s**t happened in reality, and true strength lay in knowing and accepting that, so you wouldn't be surprised when it hit you in the face like a clothesline out of the black on a weaving county road.

You saw it coming, like Aaron and the end of the movies. It didn't surprise you so it couldn't hurt you, not more than physically. You were the one left smiling, no matter how badly bruised, no matter how physically broken, because you'd seen it coming and kept on driving, kept on riding, kept on stealing anyway.

It was your decision. It meant something that way.

One day my dad caught me reading the comics up in the tree Aaron and I had once shared. He played it cool. Six months had gone by, and I had a stash of hundreds tucked away wrapped in plastic beneath a loose board on the porch. Maybe he'd known about it for a while.

"Sport, what have you got there?"

I told him. I admitted I'd stolen it. He climbed up the tree and put his arm around me and we sat like that for a while.

"We need these things," he said eventually. "I understand, we all need to heal, and God knows healing isn't pretty, but there comes a time you have to start back, Simon. You can't stay in your hole forever, you have to come out.

It's never too late to stand up and be a good man. Do you understand what I'm saying? Aaron's gone, I know that's a b***h, it's a b***h for me and your mom, I won't lie. But we pick up and we act right just as soon as we're able, and not a minute delayed. I think you know that."

I started to cry quietly.

"You'll take those comics back to the store. You'll explain what you've done, and I'll come in and explain what it means. You'll pay them back Simon, whatever they ask. It's what a good man does. He doesn't take the things he doesn't need, and you don't need to be taking these. What even are they?"

"Zombies," I snuffled.

He looked at the one in my hand and made a squinty face. "Rather you than me."

I laughed. We laughed.

I miss my dad. I miss my brother. I miss Carl and everything that's gone.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

I wake with a burning headache.

The skies above are gray with cold, thick clouds. It must be a whole other day.

I have really screwed this up. I lie there in Times Square and watch the clouds churn, because I can't move. I've become a paraplegic like Carl. I try to tilt my head to the side but it doesn't move. My arms and legs are a foreign country I can't even see.

The clouds morph into faces, just like in Zombies of New York. Here goes Talia. There goes Carl, or Robert, his silly parrot bobbling by. I try to wipe my eyes but of course I can't. Worst of all I can hear the ocean. I can't tilt my head to see but I know they're below me still, lapping at the RV's sides with the sighing breath of the ocean.

The RV starts to move. They're pushing it with their mass. I feel like a fallen Viking warrior, sent out to sea in his funeral ship, caught on the tide.

The tops of buildings pass by in my vision. They're bringing me into Times Square. Perhaps we'll go see a movie.

I laugh.

It starts to rain. It comes down hard and sleeting, it gets black overhead, and bright flashes of lightning fork the sky like Odin's wrath. Whoosh! My cheeks and forehead get peppered in a cold military drumbeat, driving in and out the pain. I open up my mouth and drink the water down. I'm dead but I'm not dead.

The ocean patters happily below me, slapping and slipping in the slick water. It's filling up the streets and the sewers, it covers me and gathers me up, dribbling in and out of the holes in my brain, getting ice cold and slushy into my thoughts.

A dog called Buddy comes to mind, and a little boy running up and down jousting with his older brother. He always let me hit him too. He was such a good brother and I loved him so much, and I never think about him these days. I want him back. I want to see my brother again.

"Can you show me that?" I shout into the rain. "Can you give me that?"

We never talked about him. It got so bad that if I even saw his name I'd go into a migraine that lasted for days.

"My dear boy, coming back to the world of the living."

My mother flashes before me, standing at the top of the steps with a tray in her hands, smiling down with misery-filled eyes. I see the misery now, and the fear. We were all so afraid, we've all been so afraid for so long.

"Aaron!" I cry into the rain, out to the floaters and the kelp and the ocean all around, because I don't have the words to say whatever it is I really mean.

"Aaron!"

My brother smiles in my face, so mischievous, and I remember we were planning to firecracker the school's mailbox to celebrate after his prom. BOOM. Such fun. We would run away laughing, with the janitor on our tails and a security alarm going off from a nearby car.

What have we done? What have I done? Oh my brother, what have I become?

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

When I next wake it is silent and still. Overhead the sky is a beautiful and clear black, graffiti-sprayed with stars. I shot a hole in my head, but I can still appreciate this.

I think of Sir Clowdesley. He was a great British navy admiral, whose death prompted the rush to uncover the secret of longitude, which allowed European ships to traverse the great gulf of the Pacific Ocean to the Americas.

He prompted that rush by failing. His ship foundered on rocks in the British channel scarcely fifty miles from land, because he didn't know where he was. All of his men perished, or so the legend goes. So progress was born from loss, and humanity advanced.

I lift my arm to stroke the stars' patterns. My fingers are red and angry from trigger-work, but they paint the sky like delicate brushes in the most complex dot-to-dot.

The air is chill and eats into me. The RV's roof is frigid under my back, but I can't complain. The ocean have fallen quiet and I'm at peace.

My head lolls to the side. I see them, all lying down on the ground. Their bodies are entwined, and by moonlight they don't look so monstrous. They look like brothers and sisters holding close to each other through the night, waiting for the warmth of the sun. Despite their filth and raw wounds and tight gray skin, they seem content.

I realize I can move.

I lift my arms. They are my actual, real arms. I lift my legs and the RV roof flexes with a tinny clang.

I lift my hands to my head. I feel the dry scab where I put the muzzle just above my ear. I probe it gently; it's tender and springy, because surely the bone is gone. I probe the other side, and find a large and ragged scab.

The bullet blew out and took a chunk of bone with it, but somehow it still sealed. Somehow I'm still alive, and thinking.

It's impossible. I've heard of people surviving gunshots, but not like this.

I push myself to my knees. The roof crumples and rolls. I'm unsteady, my balance is shot and the world whirls, but here I am on my knees. I pat my body down. All here. I look slowly around me.

The ocean is on all sides, white and gray in the moonlight. Their eyes are closed and they all lie still, wrapped in each other's embrace, breathing with one lung.

I've been spared.

A shudder passes through me. I run my hand through my hair, down my neck to my spine, and make my guesses. This is what kills the ocean. Perhaps this is what kills me too?

It reframes the infection. I imagine my coma, with data shunting from my brain into my spinal column like gigabytes transferring to USB, changing the way I think, the way I eat, the way I live.

I don't need my brain anymore.

It's a bizarre and meaningless revelation, the purpose of which I am lost to explain, but it is a revelation still. It means the ocean are like me, and I am like them. After all, I made them.

Kneeling in the dark, I make my vow. I will not treat them like this again. I will not exact revenge. They are what they are, an ocean, and there is world enough for us all.

I leave most of my guns on the roof behind. I climb down the ladder on the RV's back, then dizzily weave my way through their sleeping bodies.

They let me pass. I don't understand it. I accept it for the forgiveness it is.

CHAPTER 19 LMA

It's a new world. I climb to the top of the Sir Clowdesley building for the first time and look out. Eight stories high everything looks different, smaller and more manageable, like I'm viewing it through a tilt-shift lens. Buildings look like Deepcraft blocks, and everything is a resource I can mine.

The ocean are inconsequential. They are the trucks and cars going back and forth in a huge game of Frogger, part of the natural environment now, and it's not worth the cost to my soul to destroy them en masse. It wouldn't even be right.

I bring up my phone, holding a nice charge now since I plugged in the battery packs, and double-click it.

"This city is a grave," I tell Io.

"New York, New York," she says. I nod along. I realize I have that track in my library somewhere.

"Play Frank Sinatra, New York New York."

"Playing," Io says.

Frank comes in. What a crooner. He sings an elegy for the lost city. His rich voice rings out over the rooftops and down the building sides, swooping like Spiderman. I get shivers down my skin. I look out over the grand towers of the Big Apple, these monuments proclaiming all the amazing things we did, and feel pride. We did good, and maybe, just maybe, we still can.

The idea comes to me full of cheek and irreverence, and I embrace it.

I need to make something of this. I look across the skyline to the skyscraper that was always my favorite: the Empire State.

Carl could be right, there may be other survivors. Talia could still be alive. I need to give them a sign big enough to see, a lighthouse of sorts to shine out over the raging ocean, guiding my people safely in.

I start to smile. I am an artist after all, and a Deepcraft adept. I'm going to make a new world for us all to live in, together.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

I start small, sourcing cleaning equipment; stout wooden brushes, chemical scourers, bleach, a hundred water cooler tanks, from hardware stores up and down the streets outside. I find a few gallon drums in the back-end of a pizza shop. I roll them to my truck and stack them with all the rest.

As long as I avoid the throng developing outside my slice of 23 rd street, I can move with relative freedom. It takes them time to notice me, and I don't give them that. I sometimes stumble upon a few by accident, but I feel no qualms to shoot them like this, to save myself. I do it clinically, as neatly as I can, clipped through the necks. They drop. I finger the scabbed holes in either side of my head. It isn't revenge, it's just getting along.

I get along.

On the street of 23 rd I pour the bleach into the drums and splash in chemicals. The liquids fizz. I dip the first of my brooms in and wonder if it's going to come up with the head comically dissolved. It only steams faintly in the air.

I put on safety goggles and long gloves, and I get to work scrubbing down the black grease stains covering the walls, caused by the firestorm.

It's worse in certain areas, I suppose where they were gathered densest, but it comes away fairly easily, like soot, and runs down to the sidewalk in gloopy dark trails. I splash water to push it on to the sewer grates and move on.

In a day I clear the ground level of a few walls. The painted bricks, store windows, and doors look brighter than they probably have for years. I stand back and admire my work. It feels like I'm polishing a toy train set to a fine buff.

I won't whitewash though. I'm not trying to undo the past. I'm going to leave a clear record of what happened here, so if I'm to be judged, let me judged for the things I truly did.

In Sir Clowdesley the stink remains, like the stale tang of cigarette smoke that lingers in your hair all day. The fresh food in the bar is now wilted, rotting and Carl. I dump it in a bucket and toss it down a sewer. In the pokey office I dig out a spare key and open up the front door for the first time.

It feels good to walk in and out like a human, no longer crawling through the broken window. I drag the dead floaters out by the heels, to the bus-wall. They're rotting quickly, their gray skin falling in on itself. I can already see bone. I wonder if touching them can infect me. I avoid it.

If they continue to rot at this pace they'll dissolve in a few weeks, and I can inter them in the sewer.

Into that first new night I clean Sir Clowdesley. I scrub the living bejeezus out of it. I clean every book's spine lovingly with a toothbrush. I degrease the floors and walls and set all the tables right. I tidy up the bar display, clean the windows, and set my chalkboard L A R A back in position

I made that less than a week ago. It feels like a lifetime.

I sponge clean the sofa and set it up with fresh bedding. I polish the floors. As a final touch, I make some coffee. I set a big pan of beans percolating over a generator-powered electric hob I dug out of the building's cellar. Ah, roast coffee. I drink a slug of my first brew and it is delicious; dark, bitter, lifegiving.

I clean for the whole week. I barely need to think.

When I finish at ground level I drive one of the cars around as a movable scaffold. I get blisters from scrubbing which pop and heal. My back hurts and gets stronger. It rains and that helps clean the mess away. For the stains that reach especially high I use a ladder.

My cleaning stocks deplete. The street gets clean. I line up the cars just so. It is a wonderful day in my neighborhood. I whistle along to Mr. Rogers as I stride upon my bus battlements, looking down on the ocean. They're piling up again, climbing over their own desperately to reach me. I'm causing this too, which is a kind of needless suffering.

I move to the next stage of my plan. First though, I must leave behind a record.

I find tools in a trophy-maker's shop on 47 th off Madison. Learning how to etch a bronze plate is tricky business, lit by a gas lantern picked up at the Army Surplus on 17 th , but I get it slowly. It's rather like developing a photo. The laser etcher is too high-powered, but I can still use the old stencil-cups and acid.

I set them out and leave the metal to score, while looking out of the window at a batch of posters on the building opposite, for a movie. I remember how hotly anticipated this movie was: Ragnarok III, back when such things mattered. It makes me feel warm to think about it, the memento of a world gone by. What comic artist doesn't love and identify with superheroes?

It takes a few trial efforts to get a plaque which looks moderately professional. It comes with holes pre-drilled, so I don't need to do that. I set it up over the door to Sir Clowdesley.

RIP

Here I committed a g******e of several thousand of the ocean (zombies)

I burned them alive with gas and lighter fluid.

I will not do it again

Come find me at the Empire State Building.

I hesitated for a long time over how to sign it. I could use my name, of course, but that seemed too simple. Banksy was Banksy, like a legend. There was JR and Space Invader and others.

It comes to me on a dime, and I use it. It is, after all, what I am, and the mantle I am assuming. Arrogance be damned. Plus it's fun, and I get to decide.

LAST MAYOR OF AMERICA (LMA)

CHAPTER 20 PIED PIPER

My lighthouse is coming. First I have to make the streets safe.

I go to Yankee Stadium and survey the task ahead. Members of the ocean drift here and there and I avoid them with care.

I ram into the stadium through the glass doors of Gate 1, just like I did in the Police Academy. A few floaters come running and I race ahead, driving my RV around inside with the headlights on, through the broad circular shopping esplanade, until I find the access stairs to the field.

I climb up and emerge. It's gorgeous, a beautiful diSimonnd marked onto the earth like Nazca lines, though already the grass down there is starting to look a bit unkempt. It is wide open though, and empty. It will make a beautiful home. I count the banks of seating, well over a hundred. I make notes on my phone. I know the capacity is 50,000, of course that's for the seats. It doesn't include the ground itself, or all the shops inside. I wager I can get about 100,000 inside, maybe more.

I mark out hospitals on my tourist map; New York Presbyterian on 68 th , Mount Sinai on 57 th , New York Hospital in Queens, Bellevue on 1 st Avenue. I only need to hit one though to get over a hundred generators, Bellevue. They are tucked away in a huge dusty storeroom in the basement. I load them up in the back of a construction truck I find at the building site down at Coney Island, where they were redeveloping the amusement park. I tip out its sand and fill it up with gas drums siphoned from a tanker parked by the Shell station at the east end of 23 rd . I raid two electric shops to pick up all the stereos and CDs I'll need.

It takes a few days to get them all in position, spread out throughout the Yankee Stadium stands, the shopping area, and a few down on the field. I stand on the pitcher's mound and look around at this stadium I've only been to once before, when it was alive, and pick out all my little black hi-fi installations. Banksy never did anything like this.

I drive my RV down to 23 rd . The throng clSimonring for my brains has only grown more massive, spreading over multiple blocks. It's getting quite difficult even to get in through the embassy backdoor. They're starting to pile up in siege mounds of the fallen everywhere.

I turn up the music, pumping out of several big speakers I've strapped to the RV's roof. For this part of the journey, I've selected a long-loop of the Beatles discography: Let It Be, Abbey Road, Help, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, the White Album, and so on. It's over two hundred tracks on my phone, feeding the system via Bluetooth. Modern technology is beautiful.

I have a pretty good idea where the main clumps of the ocean are. Now I just need to go pick them all up.

The music kicks in and I crank it to maximum. The ocean turn. More than ever, they look like zombies now. It's been nearly a month and they're wholly gray. Their skin is gray, their hair is gray, even what ragged clothes they still wear are faded almost completely gray after constant exposure to the sun. They are a gray tide, slowly emaciating, with tight rictus skin and those glowing white eyes.

If anything though, the loss in weight has made them faster. The first few come off after me like whippets. Great. I pull away.

Weaving a path through New York now is like a massive game of Centipede. I can't double back on my own trail because I'll run into them, and there's not enough ammo in the world to spray them all down. I can't stop because they'll catch up to me. I can only go on and on, and pray this whole thing is going to work.

It is exhiTaliating. My heart yammers like a drum and bass line. Fresh air blasts in through the RV's open windows, and the Beatles pulse out from the speakers. John Lennon sings about peace and imagining a new world, and those crazy bastards rise up from their floating haunts around the downtown quaysides to follow me. Ringo does his Yellow Submarine bit and they shuffle away from the killing fields of Times Square, where they have since respawned.

The music calls to them like the Pied Piper, and they follow. These brilliant, hideous, kelp-like floaters float my way, and I lead them in their thousands. At times when I double-back on myself, switching from eastward to westward a few blocks north of my earlier track, I can see the centipede trail of them stretching far behind.

They go on and on. It is the conga line of the century. It's one for the Guinness Book, surely.

"Come on!" I shout out at them. "Lots of candy at grandma's house, come on!"

They come on. Some of them peel off the pack and come straight for me, cutting up 7 th or 8 th Avenue.

"The more the merrier, bring it on!"

I lead us onward and they follow. I weave the gridiron streets of Manhattan like I'm darning a sock, east to west and west to east, always heading north. When I come across a horde I circle around it to the north and add it to my centipede's mass.

Twenty thousand now? Fifty? I have no way of knowing. It's a goddamn sea of bobbing gray heads back there, stretching to infinity.

I pull up to Yankee Stadium. I park the RV around the side, near the bank of three buses I have set up to seal the doors, and turn the music off. I'll need this baby to escape.

I stand in the entrance of Gate 1 and watch the leaders of the pack sprinting for me. Good. I wave. I reach up to the spot where I've mounted the speakers overhead and fire up the generator. It gutters to life, and one hundred decibels of Taylor Swift boom out at the entranceway.

I duck under it and head in, stopping at each of the wall-mounted generators in this trail of crumbs through the lobby to punch them all on.

They gurgle, spit smoke, and the music dials up.

I run on, circling the shopping mall that runs the whole stadium's periphery, flicking on switches as I go. Gap streams by on my left, a McDonalds, a Burger King, a TGI Fridays. My feet clap on the marble floor and the interior echoes with the raucous yawling of dozens of simultaneous pop tracks.

At two hundred and seventy degrees around I stop, not daring to look back, and ascend up the Gate 12 steps into the open air of the stands. There I do the same thing in another grand clockwise circuit around the seats, switching generators and stereo systems on behind me, so they blare out discordant, mismatching music. I had to take whatever CDs I could find: vintage Kanye, The Sound of Music soundtrack, Prince.

Halfway around the stadium I spot the first of the ocean emerging tentatively, like woodlice, back into the light. They turn left and follow the trail of sound around the stands. Pretty soon they're a flood. They halt to hammer at the first machine making the noise, locked in a large dog cage, but that only forces them to bunch up. They fill up the rows and ranks of seating beautifully around it as they all try to get closer.

Finally the cage breaks and the music halts, and they spread on past it. I couldn't have planned this any better. They follow my trail around, slaves to the music, and crumb by crumb the stadium fills. At the two-seventy degree point I stop again, and now I climb down from the stands and onto the field.

I run out to the middle of the diSimonnd and fire up the clutch of speakers on the pitcher's mound, which I've locked inside a much larger steel equipment cage used for holding computer servers. The Beatles blare out on endless repeat, one of my favorite tracks: Here Comes the Sun.

I turn giddily and watch the stadium fill up with gray ocean matter around me, like lines of blood in a drip tube, inexorably leading to a vein. It is beautiful, rhythmic, and masterful. It is a zombie mandala, emblazoned on the earth. You could see this s**t from space.

They fill it all up. They fill it up doubly, driven now by the impetus of their own sound and movement. They prowl like animals, looking for a way to get down to me. How long will it take, I wonder, for the whole thing to fill? How far back does my centipede trail go?

It's like watching a sand egg timer. More of them flood in until they're so crammed that they start to fall, popping over the edge of the stands like firing popcorn. They bounce off the sponsorship boards around the field, then get up, awkward-limbed and twisted, and start for me and the Beatles in the middle, performing in the park.

It's like watching a sand egg timer. More of them flood in until they're so crammed that they start to fall, popping over the edge of the stands like firing popcorn. They bounce off the sponsorship boards around the field, then get up, awkward-limbed and twisted, and start for me and the Beatles in the middle, performing in the park.

The beer from the generator-driven fridge is cool. I c***k Bud Lite and drink. I eat some Cheetos, and treat myself to a burger I rustle up on an electric grille. It is a perfect viewing point to see the stadium fill far beyond capacity.

It turns gray. I have kegged the ocean, and it is filling still.

I let an hour or two go by. I watch the center grass fill out like an inflating balloon. The stands are packed now, it hardly matters that most of the stereos and generators have died. A few of them even blow up and start minor fires, but without gas to drive them on the flames soon die out.

The speakers in the middle are still playing. It drives the ones nearest crazy, and they thrash like rockers in a mosh pit. To be honest, it looks like they're having a great time. In time they pack in too tight to move at all, squeezing up against the railings. It'll buckle under the pressure at some point, like my Mott Haven block's door, and the Beatles will be forever stilled.

It's getting late. Five o'clock, and dusk is coming. I take the trail back through the building, walking on a private owner's access route above the outer skin, filled with hot dogs stalls and shops. I look down and see this layer of the circle is utterly packed too, like gray cream in a donut. Happily though the thread of stragglers pushing their way in through Gate 1 seems to have diminished.

I exit through the owner's door. It's empty around there. I pad around to Gate 1, and the few who are coming in are making so much noise themselves, they don't notice as I get into the bus. I drive it slow and steady across the smashed-open entrance, crushing hardly any of them, shouldering the vehicle up against the walls.

The few stragglers whack against the glass windshield, and I leave through the back emergency exit, as planned. I pull two more buses around, sealing the stadium up like a powder keg.

That's for them, now. That can be their new home.

I get in my RV and drive away. I'm grinning like an insufferable fool. I hardly killed any, and now the streets are far emptier than before. The hordes are just not there. They can wander and moan and just get on with their lives, maybe even do some shopping.

I start to sing Yellow Submarine at the top of my lungs, feeling irrepressible. This is how it should be done. Now I just need to put up a bat signal for the living.

ONE MONTH LATER

A month passes while I work, until my lighthouse is finished and I'm ready to say farewell to the zombies of New York, because I'm not meant to stay here forever.

The horde is waiting for me in the stairwells of the Empire State Building, as ever. I rappel down past them like a ninja, nudging the occasional one with the muzzle of my AR-15 when they lean a little too close. Boom, I imagine. The report would ring out and the recoil would sway me like a pendulum, right into their waiting arms. Ocean brains splatter somewhere that no one will ever see or care about, and my brains will quickly follow.

It's all a kind of art. But I don't need to, so I don't.

I hit the ground floor and glance around at all the discarded supplies lying on the tarpaulin sheet: another twenty cans of industrial-strength paint, both blue and white, the fumes of which I've been faintly high on for weeks, plus ammo, weapons, ropes and harnesses, a few generators, gas barrels, and lots of window-cleaning equipment.

I don't need them now. Maybe I'll come back for them in years to come, like my own private geocache, but I doubt that. I don't think I'll ever come back to New York again, there are just too many shitty memories.

Floaters lean over the railings above, reaching down through the gaps and out of the security gate I've locked across the stairway base. They're so easy now. I don't kill them if I can avoid it; it'd be like shooting fish in a barrel.

I kick through the ammo and pick up a few grenades that'll fit my M320 launcher. I found that in a military bunker inside city hall. If I come across a horde they may be useful as a distraction. Blowing gouts out of the horde itself would only smash up the road and make it impassable for me, but I can shoot out a nearby hilltop or gas station, and they'll go busy themselves with that.

I check my belt for gear and find a few paint rollers still slotted in there. I was using those for the upper floors, where I last finished up. It was nice to use the graffiti cans in the early days, like following in the footsteps of my heroes, but they were really just a marker. To really ensure my cairn stays visible for the longest time possible I had to paint the exterior, in the same kind of thick industrial paint they use to make traffic markings on the road.

It's been a hectic month. It took two days just to get the window-cleaner's carriage to work, providing power and figuring out my safety protocol if it cut out. It took the rest of that week to spray on the outline to the Empire State's exterior, with me getting a deep appreciation for how hard any largescale art must have been for the ancients, like Easter Island. It's been the best part of a month since, coloring it all in.

I read about cairns in a book on how the social media layer has changed our world. It talked about how the augmented reality of geo-locked apps like the system that made me mayor of Sir Clowdesley built a new kind of cairn; a way of leaving information, supplies and advice behind for those to follow.

Cairns were used primarily in the Arctic, back when those icy wastes were unexplored and the men who adventured there had to fight for every mile they took, where having a Snickers bar in your back pocket, or laid up and waiting for you in a little stone pile ahead, could mean the difference between life and death.

Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, all the greatest Arctic and Antarctic explorers used them. They were tiny fingerholds of civilization in the desolate white wastes, the world's first geocaches, crammed with maps, logs, coordinates, food and water, whatever could imaginably be useful; enough to allow those earliest souls to drag themselves out to the poles and back, thus mastering another facet of our world.

We don't master anything now. The cities and the oceans and the airwaves and even our own bodies and minds are lost to us. We are divided and scattered, if any people yet survive. We badly need cairns again, to help us claw something back.

So I've built one. I'm going to build a trail of them, like a dragnet belt across the country. If there's anyone left alive in America, in this whole northern continent, I'm going to dredge them up and give them a place to go.

I roll out through the Empire State gift shop, snatching up a token key ring at the dim register, in the shape of the building itself. I'm thinking I'll collect these at every city on the way out West, then make a collage of them; a museum to mankind's greatest achievements in bric-a-brac miniature. Carl would get a kick out of that. I'm still providing fulfillment with the best.

I step into the daylight of the cleared street and blink in the hot sun. Funny how the smell of baking asphalt brings me right back to reality every time, and I think of days long gone by, when becoming mayor of a tiny New York coffee shop was about the limit of fame my poor little mind could take.

Now I'm the self-proclaimed mayor of all America.

I stride east along West 34 th street, kept company only by the rustling of old newsprint trapped in doorways and gutters. It still impresses me how much paper remains from our old life, carrying headlines two months out of date, reporting on a world long dead. I imagine them blowing west across the country like flyers announcing my coming tour.

At the intersection with 5 th Avenue, surrounded by huge video screens suspended on the buildings, all blank now, I stop by my JCB construction vehicle. It is bright yellow and ocean-proofed with welded grille plating around the cab.

Beside it I climb onto the roof of a Subaru SUV, one link in a perimeter chain of parked cars I created a month ago in advance of this endeavor. Back then I just wanted a clear stretch of road to walk along without needing to shoot out straggler floaters all the time.

Now it's my own rat-run maze across the city. I've cleared about a mile of streets in total, from Sir Clowdesley to here, the culmination of so many plans. After filling up Yankee Stadium it was easy, just driving and parking, like moving blocks around in Deepcraft. It was advanced valet work. I herded away any floaters trapped inside, killing only a few recalcitrant loiterers.

Now they bumble up against the flanks of the car-walls, unable to figure out how to climb over, at most gathering two or three deep. There aren't enough of them anymore, and I've given them no clear space to mass. Rather they line my route and wave to me as I come and wave to me as I go between here and my base in Sir Clowdesley. I've grown to quite like it, like my own daily ticker tape parade.

In all there are probably tens of thousands of them still, but they're spread all over. There must be millions in Manhattan, but most of them will be in apartment blocks, locked into cells that were once their homes. For that I can only be thankful that the switch happened around midnight, with the streets devoid of the daily crush of tourists and workers.

From the dust-marked roof of the Subaru I look over the heads of the nearest floaters toward one of the wandering herds, up on 5 th Avenue somewhere near Bryant Park. Some of them do this too, wandering like the ghosts in a game of Pac-Man. I suppose whatever adaptive behavior has evolved into their brainstems, it rewards a hunting approach of both nesters and roaming hunters.

At first I watched these developing packs carefully, but they rarely massed at a barricade. The most I've had to contend with in a month is the odd one or two somehow finding their way onto my parade route, like lost sheep.

None of them have died yet. I look down at their sun-bleached gray faces and ice-white eyes, and they look back up at me like groupies to a rock star, as ever. A few feet closer and I'd be torn apart, but standing here all they can do is strain, like blind Venus fly traps. Their hair is coming out now and they're very thin, many of them are sporting old wounds that don't heal; bites and broken bones. They're draped in ragged clothes crusty with old blood and bleached pale by the sun, but still, they're looking remarkably well. Not one of them can have eaten in months.

I wonder, as I often do, if they will eventually die, or if this is some kind of holding pattern they're capable of maintaining forever, perhaps metabolizing carbon directly from the air like plants. For all I know they could be cannibalizing each other at night, or eating moss, or anything. I know I eat far less now too. We're linked in that, at least; perhaps having a brain in the spine is a more efficient way to run things.

I climb down from the wall and get into the JCB cab, firing up the engine.

I make a pointed effort to not look up at my work on the Empire State Building. I have a spot all picked out for that.

The JCB rumbles over the asphalt on its caterpillar tracks, and I lean my hand against the lever taking us south toward Madison Park. This has been my daily commute for a month now. As the streets amble by, accompanied by the grind of my vehicle's heavy metal treads, I go over my checklist another time. There are two vehicles in the convoy pulled by this earthmover, one a battle-tank filled with weapons, water and supplies plus my living space, and one a delivery truck full of gas and all the painting supplies and other stuff I'll need to stock up my cairns.

I'm not worried. I've cleared my route out of the city already, a few days work pushing cars to either side on 34th street and through the Lincoln Tunnel. It was like grinding out experience points in World of Warcraft, a game I used to play when I was a kid; little reward but a sense of hard work done. I'm certain there are plenty of supplies out there across the country, enough to feed me for a thousand years, but it's better to be prepared.

I haven't spoken to another living soul since Carl died. It's just been me and Io and the ocean.

The streets ramble by. I pull up to Madison Square and take the JCB over the curb and down the walkway of the Park, toward the Admiral David Farragut monument in the middle.

My convoy is waiting beside him, already linked up and bristling with weapons. I climb to the battle-tank's roof, actually a yellow school bus I fitted with M240 machine guns pointing out the windows, plus a Bluetooth relay hub to operate my big speakers. I settle myself on a bright orange beanbag I liberated from a Tommy Hilfiger window display. The sun is starting to set over the city and country, leading the way to the west.

I pop a beer and lie back with snacks at my side. I hardly need to eat or drink anything these days, just like the zombies, but these things still taste good. At last I look up at the Empire State building's south face, and see my art.

f

LMA

This is my work, a gigantic white 'f' on a blue field, blazoned across each face of New York's most iconic tower, covering the windows and the outer walls. It is ten stories high and nearly as wide as the building itself; a symbol for our modern times more potent than a cross or flag or sickle moon.

We are all one, it says. We are all friends under Zuckerburg. I chuckle, because while it's ridiculous it is also patently real. No one will see that symbol and be scared, because no one thinks evil cannibal-survivors have that kind of sense of humor.

It's given me a purpose, and perhaps, if there's anyone else alive out there, it will give them a purpose too. It's my lighthouse to guide the others safely in, to the lobby of the Empire State building where they'll find my social media supply cairn; a mayor giving out free coffee, transposed to the real world.

I hung a billboard inside, where anyone can post their name and date of arrival on, with my new LMA tag and date at the top. I wrote my map and directions of where I will go across the floor; a plan of the entire journey and every step that I will take, with coordinates of all the cairns I plan to leave behind along the way, so they can follow. I left a big tray full of USBs with every point of the map marked out inside too. There's no shortage of laptops now, so I left plenty of them to read the USBs by, laid out like display units in an Apple store. I left GPS units too, and solar panel chargers, and in the basement below are a dozen RVs with enough gas and supplies stacked in their backs to take anyone clear across the country.

Of course there's coffee too. Down one wall there are ten Nespresso machines, in case there's a crowd, each stacked with its own brightly colored pile of refill pods, packaged in neat little boxes like shotgun shells.

If there's anyone left alive they will see this trail I've left for them. Perhaps they'll follow, and find me, and then I won't be alone anymore and neither will they.

I sip my beer, a craft brew I rescued straight off its microbrewery production line in Yonkers, and admire the giant 'f'. My work looks crisp and neat hanging in the sky above this abandoned city, visible for miles, the graffiti tag to eclipse all other tags. I can relax; the first step is done.

It feels especially meaningful seen from this viewing point beside the Admiral David Farragut. I read about him in an encyclopedia in a book store; a lot less convenient than Wikipedia, but just as useful. Like Clowdesley he was a naval officer, the first full admiral in the US fleet. He distinguished himself in the civil war Simonngst numerous other naval campaigns, though he was most fSimonus for his quote: "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"

I have adopted that catchphrase now, in light of modern events, and adapted it. It's the sweltering summer of 2019 and no one uses torpedoes anymore.

Damn the zombies, full speed to the West!

I wrote it on the floor of the Empire State Building foyer in the same thick paint I used for the 'f'. I wrote it here at this ancient hero's feet and signed it with my new tag in full, Last Mayor of America, LMA for short. These words will last for decades, maybe centuries, long after I'm gone. All these marks I'm leaving will be a symbol for others until the Empire State Building comes crumbling down and New York is left as rubble and dust for the ocean to frolic in.

That makes me feel better, and helps still the gnawing loneliness that bites at me every night. I lie back and wait for dark, listening to the comforting sound of the ocean lapping against the barricade. Tomorrow my odyssey begins. It might take a week, it might take a year, but at the end I'll settle down to watch the pre-release reel of Ragnarok III in LA's Chinese theater, beside the Wall of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard, and wait for the others to come back, because I can't truly be the last in a l l o f America , in all of the world , left alive.