The Last Mayor

Part 4

CHAPTER 21 SORRY

The Lincoln Tunnel is empty of the ocean, and the road out of New York is a peaceful affair, bar the rumbling of the JCB's treads thrown back at me by the dark tunnel walls. I flip the hinged window out and enjoy watching the dot of light up ahead getting closer, like a distant vision of the world at the end of an impossibly long birth canal.

It has been a nightmare. I have done things I never thought possible. I have been so evil I had to kill myself, and I've been so good I'm still on a high.

I burst up into the light. A toll bay tells me to stop but I go straight through. Some rules, like road tolls and parking violations, just exist to be broken. The metal barrier rail bends backward then snaps off its hinge, clattering to the side. The JCB is so wide it strikes sparks off either side of the gate.

We rumble on. There are more cars here, where the tunnel bleeds into Weehawken and up to the 495. I circle the on-ramp loop, keeping an eye on my convoy, but they're well tethered and none as wide as the JCB.

I put on my music, signaled remotely from my phone via Bluetooth, and the first song from my painting mix kicks, Katy Perry's Roar from 2014. Fitting. I stop the JCB on a corner of the looping highway, and climb up to stand on top of the cab. From here the view back across the Hudson River to New York is truly panoramic; the fabulous glittering city as seen in so many movies. From here the corruption at street level is invisible, and the buildings glisten like crystal shards.

There's my 'f', right in the middle.

The lines are crisp and sharp. It feels like I'm wearing my Deepcraft goggles and seeing an overlay placed atop reality. In reality f*******: was never a place or a real thing, it was never something you could reach out and touch, but now it is. The digital spaces that once connected us now have to be real.

I take pictures; they'll go in future cairns. Then I get back in the cab and rumble out, heading west.

The city recedes behind me, and the convoy maxes out at about twenty miles per hour. It feels good to be moving. A warm summer wind blows stickily through the open window, and I strip off my shirt to enjoy it. Out the window I see urban gray resolve into bright green foliage, old forests that would have stood back when the Native Americans hunted the land.

would have stood back when the Native Americans hunted the land. I smell cedar and applewood on the air, mixing with fresh grass pollen and the comfortable tang of hot blacktop. There are weeds beginning to shoot up in the cracks at the highway's verge, Simonngst the off-cast strips of tire rubber and desiccated chip packets. Moss grows on a low surface coating of windblown dust.

I rumble on. Forest gives way to farms interspersed between little towns, bound northwest on I-80. This road will carry me clear across the country, through Pennsylvania and Ohio, Indiana and Illinois into Iowa, close to my parents' house. I think I'll stop in, though I'm not sure what I'll do if I find them there.

Maybe I'll open the door and let them wander free. They shouldn't be cooped up, like the girl I left in the box. They should be able to feel the sun and go naturally to the earth when their time comes.

I rumble through little settlements swallowed up in woods, and my music draws the ocean out like a tide. There's probably a few hundred in back now, creaking along on their leathery legs, drawn like moths to a flame.

The music's not for them, though. I'm hoping it'll draw in the living, whether they're cannibals or Satanists or just decent people. The battle-tank is well equipped for any eventuality, but I don't think it'll come to that. Resources are not scarce, so there's little reason to fight.

I roll on. Hours go by and I hum my way into them. The road twists contentedly, unfolding the vistas and trees of New Jersey until I exit through a clutch of red maples in Worthington State Forest, where a sign tells me:

You are now entering Pennsylvania.

A minute further on, there's a semi-truck with a long white trailer sprawled diagonally across the road, punched through the median strip to block most of the four lanes. Across its side there's a message graffitied in thick red letters, and my heart begins to pound.

SORRY

I stop the JCB and read the letters again. They are slightly faded, dim as though they've been there for a few weeks and drizzled by rain, but they can't be something from before. They must be fresh.

This jack-knifed trailer is not an accident. Somebody did this on purpose.

On the instant I'm on high-alert. I never prepped for this. With the crowd of the ocean in back, I'll have a hard time backing up. I can't go through.

Shit. Is it a trap?

I scan the road and the sides, but see nobody. They could be in the forest to the left, watching me even now through a telescopic sight. God knows why, but they could be. I'm a sitting duck.

And 'SORRY' for what? For what they're about to do?

I have to move that truck before the ocean engulf me. I tap the music to a halt and there is only uncanny silence, but for the rumble of the JCB's engine. I turn that off too, then grab a shotgun and climb out of the cab, still in my pants with the hot sun tanging at my skin. s**t, the ocean in back are already lurching my way. I run out onto the grass median to get a better look at the truck's cab. The door hangs open.

"Hey," I call, but there's no answer.

Shit s**t s**t. My heart is hammering now. For a second I'm torn; run back and fully gear up, by which time the JCB will be over-run, or try and move the truck, maybe draw the throng away so I can come back at my own pace?

It's a gamble either way. I decide and run.

The truck's cab is empty. The red leather driver's seat has faded in the sun where the door has been left open; must've been a week at least. I take two steps up the metal ladder rungs and reach for the ignition, but the keys aren't there. They're not on the seat, on the floor. I lean further in and flip the glovebox, but it's empty.

Shit!

Something touches my back, and I screech. I kick off without looking, my foot bounces off a bark-rough chest, and then I'm scrabbling into the cab with a handful of floaters at my back, thwacking.

"s**t, goddammit!" I curse at them. I point the shotgun their way and shoot, and a couple go down, but it's not enough. More are coming, and I can only think that this is stupid, a really stupid way to die. I look around the cab but there are no other weapons, and no extra shotgun shells. I have one left in the double barrel and no choice at all.

I open the passenger-side door and look out. The coast is clear. My mind flashes back to the good old days, when I ran Janiqua and her mom around the sofa, and I figure that maybe I can pull the same trick here, using the trailer. I think it and lock the program in place, then lean back toward the driver's side and yank down on the air horn.

HOOOOOOOOOONK.

Yep, that works. My head rings with it. s**t. I pull it again and again, and steadily the ocean line up in front, trying to slap their way in. I check the other door again. Thank God, still none of them coming that way. I drop down to the hot tarmac and dash silently down the trailer's flank, peeking every now and then to see the ocean's wasted gray legs toddling along on the other side. As I go around the back of the semi, squeezing between the back corner and the highway fender, some guy jumps on me.

I yell, and toss a wild elbow into his head. He rocks to the side. Once he must've been a buff young guy, wearing a Harvard sweater so faded I can barely make out the lettering. There are a few others nearby, looking up at something, but I haven't got time to check that out because he's lunging now.

I blow out his throat and head with the shotgun. He makes a cracking sound, like I've felled a tree, and powder spumes out of him. It's not mist anymore, its dust like a seedpod bursting.

There's too many in the way now, blocking me from my JCB. Shiiiiit. I'm surrounded, and the ones clustered here are coming, but the back doors of the trailer are open behind me. I catch a glimpse of something hanging down from the trailer's roof, then I'm scrabbling backward. I have to let go of the shotgun to get a grip, and it clatters to the floor.

Hands paw off my back and I lurch up, ringing my elbow hard off unforgiving metal. Thank God I'm n***d, or they'd have yanked me down by my clothes. I roll into the trailer and scuffle backward desperately, away from the hands as they reach up, away from the only way out, and away from the thing hanging in the open trailer's doors.

Shit. It's a body.

CHAPTER 22 SOPHIA

Shit. It's a body.

It's a girl, hanging. For a moment I think she's about to open her eyes and talk, but she's too pale for that, and her feet are not even touching the floor, and she doesn't have any eyes at all.

I feel myself begin to come apart. Electrical cable has been worked around the metal light fixture of the storage cab's interior, dangling tautly down to bite into her throat. Her head is at a sharp angle, bloated and rotting, with the eyes already pecked away and long trails of b****y tears down her cheeks.

The smell is strong. She smells like the dead, before they became the dry and crusty things they are now.

"No," I say. Beneath and beyond her, the ocean are filling up, but I don't really notice that now. I envision myself getting up and grabbing hold of her legs, trying to lift her up to take off the pressure while crying out frantically, 'Somebody cut her loose, somebody call an ambulance!'

I don't do it. She's dead. I slide a few feet back on my butt, lost in fear and horror.

This is what she's sorry for? For jack-knifing her truck? For trapping me? For killing herself?

The fight goes out of me, and tears come to my eyes.

She survived. I can say that without a doubt. Like me, she rode out the apocalypse. She didn't join the ocean. Then she did this to herself. She broke her own neck to make it permanent, probably jumped off the trailer's roof.

"Wait," I say feebly. "Wait a second."

She doesn't answer. Her dead eye sockets, eyeless now and squirming with fat white maggots, stare back at me.

I am too late. I can't look at her. I can't look at the ocean as they gather and reach up their gray, skinny arms to her as she slowly, steadily revolves in the breeze.

Counter-clockwise. Clockwise. The power cable creaks. I turn my face away.

The trailer's inner gloom is not what I expected.

It is plainly her home. With the ocean lapping closer behind, I scan for weapons. She's got a sofa at the back, a generator of her own with a few gasoline tanks nearby and an ad hoc chimney to carry the fumes through the roof. There are lots of wires and fat blocky transformers plugged into cable extenders, leading to a music system, a huge flat screen TV, a bed, a fridge. I pad inside and open the fridge door. Bottles of clotting milk stare back at me in the dark. I wonder if she actually milked a cow, or this is reconstituted stuff from powder.

There are about twenty bright red boxes of a sugary kid's cereal stacked by the wall. It's little details like this that sting. On the rug there are reefer papers. I suppose she'd been lighting up a few spliffs. Why not? I find a stash of her tobacco and dry fine-grain w**d in a pouch by the coffee table.

There are no weapons. No ammo. I barely even find a sharp kitchen knife.

Shit.

I sit on her sofa and look back at the world outside. I guess she sat here a few times, thinking about what was to come. The thought makes me guilty. The guilt makes me laugh. It's that good old craziness again. I thought I had it licked; buried under purpse and work, but no. A few good strokes down the back with a floater's hand, and I'm right back in the thick of my g******e madness.

This is all so stupid. A dozen thoughts ricochet through my head, of what I'll do differently if I'm ever in this situation again. Don't leave the JCB. Always carry more weapons. Clear the horde in back before I ever step out the door.

Fine. None of that helps me now. My heart is yammering away, and that's doing me no good. The ocean don't seem able to climb in. Maybe they're distracted by her, anyway, dangling there.

I have some time to think. In that time, her w**d starts to look mighty good.

I haven't rolled a fat one since college, but I do it anyway, navigating by muscle memory. I light it up and smoke it down. It tastes like s**t, but it helps with the stress. I start to giggle, but this is a good honest w**d giggle, not straight up madness.

I go through her stuff.

Sophia, her name is. I find it on student ID in a purse. She was a pretty blonde girl, maybe twenty-three. There's also some change, odd pennies and dimes. It feels sour to hold them in my hands. What did she think she was going to spend these on? Alive this would have been a funny thing I could have teased her about, and maybe she'd make the point that they might still work in a vending machine, or perhaps they remind her of the past, and our best presidents.

Like this they feel like unfinished stories, so thin and vulnerable, her whimsy remaining as a pathetic reminder of her failure.

I find some whiskey and drink it to help the high buzz on. I look out at the ocean.

Sorry, she wrote on the side of the semi. That's what gets me now. It makes me think about stringing up my own cable and joining her.

What the hell am I doing this for?

She said sorry, though she'd seen no one in months, known no one for all that time. She killed herself with the ocean at her feet, looking out over them and the glorious view, hanging there with her feet kicking and…

I lapse deeper into guilt. I shouldbe trying to escape, get back to my convoy, but some part of me doesn't care about that now. The bigger part. That part wants to feel this way; that I didn't do enough, that I should have been out here a month ago, two months ago, instead of playing my silly games with the Stadium and the Empire State. Maybe if I'd found her then we could have helped each other, even saved each other, but I didn't do that. I didn't lift a finger to save Carl either.

I haven't done a damn thing that matters.

I languish in the guilt. I smoke another doobie in her sweltering, stuffy tin can of a home. I sit on her sofa, where she must have sat a thousand times chewing vaguely on food packed by hands long-taken by the ocean, and look at the TV. She's got great choice in DVDs, a lot of Bill Murray. Groundhog Day is one of my all-time favorites.

Outside it gets dark. The ocean are packed in now, like in my old apartment, mostly just breathing. I guess that's peaceful. I imagine myself running out along their heads, bouncing off withered shoulders until eventually, ultimately, they drag me down.

I find her journal, and read it by the light of my phone. It is a litany of hope dashed. She went to her parents but they were dead. She went to her boyfriend but he was dead. He attacked her and she had to kill him with a frying pan and a skewer through the throat. She went to town and everyone was dead. She tried to press on. She even brought her medical books; she was studying to become a doctor, and tried to make some headway with the ocean. She dissected a fully dead one, studying its brain and brain stem as best she could.

The brain stems were engorged, she writes, thicker than normal, and pressed sharply against the windpipe, which caused their characteristic breathing sound. It's fascinating. The brain itself is alien, the normal structures altered with thick new nerve fibers running through the normal folds of gray.

I sit back and think.

'Transmitter?' she has written next to her diagrams of this new structure. To me it looks like a circuit board of flesh. Her notes ramble on in bizarre theories, about the purpose of this new structure. She too was aware of how quickly the infection spread, faster than any disease we've ever seen before.

'Receiver?' it says on another diagram. If I'm reading her ideas correctly, it seems she's suggesting the brain has been completely repurposed as a twoway signal box. Signals go out, signals come in. It could explain some things, I suppose; how they work so closely together, how they know I'm there even when I'm silent and invisible. How the infection started nearly instantaneously.

It makes me think that maybe Carl was wrong. Maybe it wasn't Talia and I that caused it. I think back; the twinge on our date was already coming away before we got back to the apartment. Maybe there was some external signal happening, picked up by the receivers in our brains, though it affected them and me in different ways.

So it wasn't me?

I don't suppose it matters. My brains. Their brains. We're all screwed up. I wonder if there are any unaltered survivors still, up in the Arctic perhaps, living on isolated islands where the signal never reached. They must be really confused about now. Anyone they send to find out what happened will probably never come back, as the signal changes their brain and transforms them, too.

I read on. Her journals get darker. She had glimpses of hope, though it doesn't seem she really believed them. She was headed for Lewington, the next big city over, where she thought maybe they would have an electron microscope. She was hoping to study the spinal tissue in more detail, perhaps with some hope that the condition could be reversed, despite the massive changes to the brain. She outfitted the semi-truck for survival, just like my convoy.

But she couldn't kid herself enough. She didn't even make it very far. The looming road defeated her and the loneliness tore her up. All these brains around her were lost, along with personalities and everything that ever made them human. She wasn't going to be able to help them, and watching Bill Murray on the TV screen alone in a nightmarish world of the dead just wasn't enough for her.

SORRY

she writes in her final journal entry, addressed to other survivors she couldn't know even existed.

I wish I could do this. I feel like I'm letting you down. But I can't do it anymore.

She left everything neat. She parked the semi across the road not to trap me, but because she couldn't bear to go completely un-noticed, even in death. She craved to be seen to the last, to be witnessed, to be held and remembered.

She craved to be seen to the last, to be witnessed, to be held and remembered. I stand beside her dead body, thinking that I will remember her for as long as I live, because I know exactly how she feels. I feel I have let her down too. I want to tell her that, tell her I'm sorry too, but I can't. I have come too late, and there is nothing I can do.

But maybe I won't have to carry that memory for too long. I don't know how much longer I want to survive.

I fire up her generator and I watch her movies. It riles the ocean up, but the trailer's too high for them to climb in, and they don't seem to have the strength to stack themselves anymore.

I watch 'Groundhog Day'. The part where Bill Murray kills himself again and again hits home hard. I can't stop crying when he finally makes a meaningful connection with Andi McDowell. He's earned it, by this point. For everything he's done and all the changes he's made, he's earned it.

I lie in her bed in the darkness after, listening to the lapping wheeze of the ocean, and think about the comas. She'd survived them too. She'd come so far, and built this semi-life with ingenuity and luxuries I never considered, so resourceful, but at this final stage she fell. Her dream wasn't strong enough, the propellant in her jetpack not potent enough, and she just couldn't push through the emptiness in those empty skulls.

It is somber and sobering. I go to sleep and dream of Carl's phone call, and the seconds after when the line went dead, when I knew I'd never talk to him again.

Robert. Sophia. Talia. I've left them behind like they were nothing, always moving on. I have no meaningful connections left, and any moves toward that have been kidding myself. Signs left behind mean nothing if there's no one there to see them. The world is empty, it's lonely, and it's going to stay that way for the rest of my life.

CHAPTER 23 IO

I wake with a revelation that I don't like.

I know how to get out. It's stupidly simple. I can't believe I didn't think of it earlier. Now I stand at the tailgate and look back over the ocean, thinking about if I want to do it.

What for, I wonder? More SORRIES splashed across America? Is that what I'm leaving, is that what people are going to feel when they see my messages? My LMA tag will look ridiculous to them. They'll rifle through my stuff like I went through hers, and it'll just make them want to kill themselves more.

Shit.

I could just jump. Dive, like Carl, and let their arms gather me in. It would be easy. I wouldn't be alone. I think about that for a while.

Then I take out my phone. Still plenty of battery left. I double-click.

"Io," I say, "play the Beatles."

"Playing the Beatles," comes her reply. The signal goes out by Bluetooth, and out comes the roar of the speakers from the top of the battle-tank, fittingly the first line of 'Help!'

The ocean start to turn. They tune into the sound. They amble away. Oddly that makes me sad.

I stand there and listen while the Beatles save my life, thinking that dammit, I do need somebody. I need somebody right now.

"Good job, Io,"

I whisper. "My pleasure, Simon."

After that, it's easy, and I am blank. They prefer the music to me. I fetch a pair of bolt-cutters from the battle-tank, accessed easily now through the roof hatch, and cut Sophia's cable. A few floaters watch as I lift her over my shoulder, but they don't come running.

In the forest, I dig her grave. The dirt here is loose, bar the tangles of slim roots, but the shovel blade cuts through them brightly. It doesn't take long. I leave a marker of two sticks fastened into a cross with twine. It's not much.

With chains, I use the JCB to drag the trailer back, until it's no longer blocking the road. The ocean slap the convoy up and down, and a few go under the wheels, but it's pretty hard to care.

I pull away. I leave Sophia behind. I've never felt lower in my life.

The road passes by in a daze, and miles go by. I play my music half- heartedly through forests and over hills, through little towns and past a million strip-malls, running by flag-pole signs for various fast food burger joints, pancake huts, ice cream stands, all of which would have once spun and flashed to catch my attention.

They look so foolish. They don't mean a damn thing.

I stop to fill the JCB's tank from my barrels. Floaters run toward me but I have time. I eat a cold hotdog on the battle-tank roof. I could cook it but why bother. It's bland and slippery. I bring up my phone and scroll through past messages; to and from Carl, my mom, my other older friends. The record goes back years, all my mail. I eke myself forward with these pathetic memories.

I look at my photos. There's my work on the giant 'f', happy deluded selfies, like what I was doing was actually worth a s**t, like posting on the side of the Empire State was anything like posting on a digital wall.

No one will see it. If they're anything like Sophia they'll already be dead. I see her loss eating into me, I can feel it crushing my spirit, but there's nothing I can do to stop it. I don't have the resources anymore to buoy myself along. I need outside intervention, but there is none. It's a real boulder crushing me down, and I can't fight it alone.

I double-click my phone just to hear Io's voice, but she only talks when I ask her questions, and half the time she can't understand what I say anyway. She's just programming, imperfect code made by people who are all dead now.

Shit bits, Carl would say. It's all s**t bits, one step away from glitching through a shelf.

I put the phone away because it's a fantasy. I turn the music off too, because I'm kidding myself. I've been kidding myself since the massacres. That was the reality. There is only kill to live now, kill the ocean every day to live, and I don't know if that's enough.

I rub my eyes. My head aches from thinking these same things. Sophia has done a real number on me.

I drive on. Rain comes at me over a hill, a drumming wall of gray passing across the land and I plunge into it. I bull through the wreckage of a bus torn in half. Torn bits of the ocean reach out to me, from the twists of melted slag and rubber.

I pass through towns that are completely empty. The old guilt surfaces now and then, that maybe I did this. If I'd just kept my d**k in my pants the world might still be here. I would see Talia every day in Sir Clowdesley, from afar but at least she'd still be alive. Then I remember the twinges, and how shitty it felt to live like a prisoner beneath them, and for how long it went on.

I feel the weight of the country pressing down on me. Three thousand miles is such a long, long way. And what's even waiting for me at the end?

I remember as a kid I'd wake up to hear the night freight train pass by on the tracks a few miles distant, past Meller Creek. There was something so lonely about lying awake in the small hours listening to that long high whistle, calling out its passage.

Now I'm the last train, roaming a barren world and playing my music like a whistle that nobody will hear. I'm so hungry for contact; I'm just as bad as Sophia. I'm leaving my sad little cairns with such miserable hope it makes me sick.

They'll find me dead too, and they'll see my pathetic record of events, photos of what I did, my zombie comic, my vainglorious strain for a connection, and it'll only make this feeling worse. I can't win.

I am too alone. I am going crazy with it. s**t s**t s**t, I can't take it away. I can't do anything.

I drive on.

CHAPTER 24 IOWO

Hazleton, Danville, Lewisburg. I pass through and I don't stop. There are floaters staggering everywhere. There are baby carriages left standing idly on street corners, spatters of dry bone strewn across the gutters, cars lying like strange colorful mushrooms in the road, sprouting around with veiny ivy. The ocean get thinner and grayer, but still they rumble out to greet me.

More of them are n***d now; their clothes have slid or worn right off their skinny frames. They are walking skeletons, rasping at the air.

I pass from Pennsylvania to Ohio, watching the landscape change. I see a few Boston Markets interspersed Simonngst the Burger Kings and McDonalds. There are more Krogers, for some reason. I find myself wandering through a J. C. Penny, I don't know why. I shove the floaters that lap near. I pick out a new pair of jeans and put them on. No rips, they feel good. I was starting to look like them.

There are signs for Pittsburgh, signs for Akron. Somewhere in the distance Cleveland, Toledo, and Chicago pass me by. I'm through Ohio to Indiana, bound for Illinois. I follow the road like a train track, my music off now. I don't leave any of the cairns I'd planned to. It seems pointless. Nobody will see. At times I look at photos of the big 'f' I left in New York, and try to decide if this is good thing or just the same as poor wilted Sophia's 'SORRY'.

I keep her student ID to t*****e myself with. She is pinned to the JCB cab. I start to fantasize about her at night, lying in my battle-tank and staring into her eyes, dreaming of her voice and her touch, of teasing her about her kiddie's cereal while she cries out for me, for me.

Each time I finish I feel pathetic. I am pathetic. I push her picture far away, like I've sinned against her and myself. I go to sleep mired in guilt, and when I wake I have to climb through it just to breathe. I see my failure everywhere.

I get out my M320 and start to blow things up; billboards at first, then chain restaurants. They crunch and explode, sending bin doors, deep fat fryers and bright plastic chairs flying out in beautiful sprays. These can be my cairns. Let them read like Braille across the country, a story of loneliness and loss. I can only be honest.

I make slow progress, so much it feels like a crawl. I am constantly nudging other vehicles out of the way, stopping to herd floaters. I can only drive at the speed of the convoy. Once I come upon a herd of the ocean near South Bend, tramping across the landscape from east to west like a river, and I wonder where they're going. Then I rev the earthmover and nudge through them.

I don't think I kill any. They are like a bad storm raging around me, hammering at every inch of my convoy, beating for a way in. I turn the music up to make them go crazy. I consider getting to the top of the battle-tank and letting rip into their ranks with my M240s, but I'm beyond that now. I'm not in this to get revenge or cause pain.

I just need to get through. I won't give up like Sophia, not yet, but I can't promise what I'll do when I reach the West Coast. Maybe I'll swing there too, last mayor of America taking in the view.

I rumble over bridges and down a hundred Main Streets, through little towns cored by the move to Yangtze same-day delivery drones. As I swing through Indiana, I remember why my country is so religious. The vast empty expanses of flat overgrown cornfields spread to either side like endless yellow skies, and the loneliness here is palpable. Maybe I too can sense God, in these fields.

I enter Iowa on a Thursday, at 9:56 in the morning. I keep my phone charged with batteries and solar rechargers. Without it I would have no idea of the date, but Io remembers. This is my land, my home state. The megachurch thirty miles past the border is still there, sprawling like a holiday resort; the mass capitalization of faith and loneliness. I consider going in and alternately praying or shooting up the place.

I do neither. I'm like flat soda left out in the sun. I eat sugary cereal and don't taste it. I drive. After Des Moines I pull off I-80, bound for the little town I come from, where my parents may be even now; Creston. I pull in a day later, wondering if this experience will defeat me, like it did Sophia.

The neighborhood is unchanged, bar nature growing out of control. I pull up to the house, all typical Americana; a swing on the sheltered porch, mosquito nets on the doors and windows, woodwork painted pale lime and white. My folks don't actually have a white picket fence, but the neighbor Mr. Connors does.

The grass is wild on the front lawn. Dad loved his John Deere and would never have abided that. Just seeing this makes me start to cry. Of course I know they're both dead already, but seeing this damn grass makes it real. Maybe coming here was a mistake.

I start up the music and get out, drawing a few floaters to the truck. I trail the shotgun barrel noisily behind me, scraping a line up the concrete path, then stop at the door. I actually have a key. It feels so strange in my hand, like a piece of magic to access this world, so far away.

It slides into the lock, I turn it, and the door opens.

Inside it smells of slowly baking mahogany and cedar. It's a timber-framed house and they've got dark wood furniture throughout.

"Mom," I call, into the musty corridor. Plenty of light radiates in through the windows. "Dad."

To either side are chests of drawers, one adorned with a few petite Chinese-style vases. Mom loved these, and would often boast of them to friends and neighbors, though they were plainly reproductions probably cast a few miles down the road at the hippy commune near Shenandoah.

I go down the hall, past the neat kitchen, to the den. Nothing is touched or has been changed. Wooden ducks fly across the wall above the TV, still a thick old CRT model. I'd been meaning to buy them a new one before the coma hit. I run my fingers through the dust on the kitchen table. We used to play games of Rook here when I was little, me on my Mom's side, Aaron on Dad's, and it doesn't hurt to remember that, though it feels like ancient history.

I wander through the living room, where the coffee table is still piled neatly with mom's women's magazines. In the back room the piano rests silently. I play a few notes.

"Mom," I call again, but no answer comes.

Up the beige-carpeted stairs, I look in on each of our bedrooms one by one. Theirs is plain and unadorned; large cupboards, a dresser, a full-length mirror, veils on the windows.

The guest room, which used to be Aaron's room, is barren, with nothing of him left here now. My room is empty too, though it still bears many of my teenaged decorations, like a time capsule. I stand in the middle and look at this hollow space in the air, thinking there must be millions of rooms just like it across America, emptied out.

I open my drawers, looking at my collection of old Transformers toys. I run my fingers over their plastic shells, their holographic stickers, so colorful and bright. Perhaps if I cared about these things now, I'd be like Sophia. They would be my flimsy roots, too easily plucked up and exposed to the air, wriggling weakly. Loss of them might break me, seeing them like this could hurt me, like she brought her movies and her kid's cereal along for the ride.

I don't need them. They don't mean anything to who I am now. I've died so many times between then and now I can hardly remember. This room is a shell I've grown out of.

The basement is the same. It was my prison for a time. I sit on my old bed and look up at the door, imagining Carl in a place like this while his mother hammered her way in. She brought him into the world and she took him out of it.

I go out into the yard and wander through the long grass. A few thick hotdog reeds have sprung up at the edges, where the rainwater always collects and tries to make a pond. Bulrushes? I can't remember. Io can't tell me.

My folks aren't here. I could roam around and study shriveled peanut faces looking for them, though there seems to be a flow these days in the ocean, heading to the west. My folks are probably a thousand miles distant by now, and even if I found them, they still wouldn't be here.

I put Sophia's ID card reverently on the kitchen table, alongside one of my favorite transformers, Megatron himself. That's enough of that, now. All of this is a farewell, and I've felt guilty abusing her poor, lost image for so long. I am a seed of a long-dead plant, caught on a wind and untethered by any trailing, unmet desires, and that's fine.

I get in my cab and drive off, to the west, on a pilgrimage with the dead headed God knows where.

CHAPTER 25 ENDLESS

In an endless landscape of corn, I run out of gasoline.

The battle-tank is empty of supplies. It's not that I planned it wrong, or I forgot to fill them up. There were countless opportunities to resupply; I could have siphoned any of the tankers I've passed, I could even have rigged a pump to bring it up from the depths beneath a gas station. I have those kinds of skills now.

But I didn't do any of that. It is a clear-headed but entirely passive choice. I rumble the convoy on until it stops, the engine gutters, and goes silent.

Hot sun bakes down. I leave my phone behind on the seat. I contemplate taking all my clothes off and going out n***d, but there's no need for that. It will happen itself, when time has thinned me down like the rest of them, and the sun has baked and worn them so much they slough off.

I want to wander free like the herds that fill out this land. I'll finally belong again. I want to face it, the same fate that I gave to them all. I'm just so tired of being alone.

I climb out of the cab. I don't need guns or music now. It's all right. I start walking. The sun is hot and the corn is indescribably beautiful. I've never seen it grow so out of control before. The stalks get thick and tangled, interweaving like unkempt threads in a greater organism.

We are all like this, I think. I take step after step and feel lighter with every one. I am walking into my freedom. If Sophia had been brave enough she would have done this too. Yes there will be pain, but then it will be over. Like my parents there'll be nothing left to find because I'll be gone.

I leave no message, no 'SORRY' scrawled hastily over the battle-tank's side, because I am not sorry. This is reality and I'm not ashamed. I am not willing to kill a single floater more to survive, for this. My life is not worth it. I'd rather run with the herd, hunting down buffalo in the wild, feeling the hot blood gush down my neck and chest, swallowing, swaying together like kelp on the tides.

I get misty-eyed thinking of it. It seems like a beautiful life, and I am proud that I finally see that. Life is nothing lived alone. I don't want to be in my basement anymore, I don't want to hide away in my cab afraid and clinging to the past. My eyes are open.

A member of the ocean peels out of the corn. Just one, and I wonder at his long and winding journey to reach this place, a bit of jetsam tossed upon the golden waves, like megolden waves, like me

His leg is twisted and he can't run. So much the better. We can dance together one last time. I walk and he walks behind me. We walk together, and I slow my pace to let him keep up. It can even be beautiful, a harmony of kinds. I turn once at a rise and see my convoy so far behind, so small.

We are all so small. Like Aaron always taught me, the key lies in seeing that smallness and knowing it. You have to see the reality or you are lying to yourself, and I can't be Sophia. I want to go forward as boldly as I can.

We walk together, the floater and me. Its body is so shrunken I can't tell the gender anymore; any hint of genitalia has shriveled up into the body. I start to cry, and now it is a release. Tears flood down my face. I'll walk until I run out of strength, then I'll turn this body over to the flood. That at least is honest. It's facing death down and accepting it with open arms, hiding no more.

I reach out and stroke the ears of corn, fat and yellow. I pluck one and eat it as I walk. The natural sugars are ripe and rich, sweeter down my throat than any of the processed, canned s**t I've been on for months. The air is so clean. I look back to make sure my friend is still coming.

It's been joined by another. They both hobble along, neither of them running. I don't know why this is, they don't look injured, but I'm grateful. They will run me down, but with respect. I will give myself up in the same way. I duck them a low bow and we go on.

I toss the corn back into the field. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. It was a grand dream, really. I no longer feel bad about my New York cairn. Perhaps others will come, in time, and it might help them. They'll take strength in what I've left for them, and they may even make it to the West Coast alive. It won't matter that I'm not there when they arrive, if they've already made it that far. They can build their own destination. I just made a starting point.

I'm smiling as I walk. Happiness rises in me like a flood, withheld for so long. Now I feel proud again, and it doesn't matter that no one will witness my death, because I'm here. I don't need the others for this moment, I don't need to apologize or to be witnessed, because which one of us goes into death with others by our side?

We all go alone. Carl went alone, Aaron went alone, my parents went alone, but we all go the same way. This is a path so well trodden it is worn into stone, and finally, I feel the company of all these ghosts in the air around me.

I'll run with Carl and my parents, with Aaron and Talia and them all.

I walk through the day, until there is a crowd of dozens behind me. Not a one of them runs, and with each one added to the slow trudge my heart fills a little more. This is my audience. They will leap upon me and tear me apart, and we're going to do it together. I am giving them my body for their sustenance, and in turn they are making me one with them.

Who ever said birth was pain-free? Life is hard and it hurts. The first thing a baby feels is a slap to make it breathe, and the indignities keep on coming. Lost love, lost friends, broken bones, all of it part of the tapestry of life. I am part of it too. I started this thing and finally it's caught up to me.

The cornfields don't end. At some point nearing dusk, when my feet are growing weary and my vision blurs with the heat and exhaustion, so tired I can barely take another step, I stop and I turn. There are hundreds of them now, all my brothers and sisters, and now I am sorry.

I'm sorry for the family I locked within their home in Mott Haven, and for the mall cops I killed with monitors above Sir Clowdesley. I am sorry for the thousands I burned and the thousands I mowed down with bullets and the tens of thousands I locked into the stadium. I would take all of it back if I could. Why should I have any more right to the world than them? Why should I be the one to go on, clinging to a past that is no longer real?

I spread my arms, and the gray tide draws in, folds around me, and I am encompassed. Their limbs and their skins find mine, tenderness reigns, and we are all rolled into one in the blackness together.

CHAPTER 26 COMA

I remember my coma. It was terrifying; I was a child again surrounded by colors I couldn't recognize and shapes I couldn't distinguish, shifting constantly like warping reflections on a soap bubble.

Have you ever seen a coma victim blanche so completely? I mean, they always lose their color in a week or two, it drains out of them, but this?

It was overnight.

I've never seen the like.

I 'hear' the words coming to me through gusts of color, like digital brushstrokes, 130-point font and meaningless.

His brain activity is off the chart too. Something is happening in there.

But what?

But what.

I rumble and roll forward on an ocean of bald skulls, so many shades like a million disconnected eggs. These are all heads and their thoughts twist together like twine in a bungee cord, like sausages bulging into life.

He may hear us. He may not. The eyes are the thing that get me though.

It looks like they're lit from behind. How is that possible? Some simple phosphorescence, like a jellyfish. Whatever he's got inside him, it's changing his metabolism.

Are we talking an infection?

Not any infection we can see. It's a disorder of the entire nervous system. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say something is remaking him.

His DNA shows no change, at least none we can be sure of. We didn't have his sequence from before.

So don't look at the genetic level, then. Look structurally. Look at the alterations in his brain pattern over time. It's been remapped completely.

The voices distend and balloon into curious clouds, into animals folded out of meat and bone. They bend in and out of time around me, drifting on a breeze of scent.

My mother's perfume, I'd recognize it anywhere. It stumps up and pats me on the head.

My dear boy. My darling boy.

Later, much later with time as a food I chew on and s**t out, she speaks again.

Not again, please. Not him too.

I breathe in my body and breathe it out again, flapping like a sail on the ocean of the dead. There are great canyon-walls all around me made of bodies which are zombies, people lost and reanimated, reaching up for me.

Father.

They say.

Mother.

I reach out to them. I want to help them. I scoop their bodies up on my tongue, listen to them etching words across my skin, growing older and changing by the minute. I reach out and feel the barrier of this dream flex and twist, like an image trying to bend its way out of a television screen.

Whatever this thing is, it's beyond our control. It's not a virus like any we've seen before, not bacteria, it's something physical that's rewriting him.

Like nanobots?

Ha. If that technology existed out of a Crichton novel, I'd say yes, but it doesn't. This seems to be natural. It may even be evolutionary, a key that was always waiting in the brain to be turned.

I said his brain looked like an infant in the womb's. It does. Have you compared the stills I showed you? The telomerase counts are all getting reset at a mitochondrial level for brief periods, so for each of those brief periods it lasts, he isn't aging. That's undeniable.

He's the fountain of youth. Your paper argues

I can't publish that paper, not yet. I need more. But he's waking up.

Drive him under again! Put him under and we'll see.

I am pushed back under, lost to the world beneath a layer of forget-menots, when all I want is to rise. They put me down and I'm scrabbling up a tower of a thousand bodies of the dead, fighting for breath.

It's stopped. Whatever it was, it isn't working any more. If anything it's starting to stunt him in ways that look necrotic. It's eating him alive. If we keep him under any longer he'll die.

It's stopped. Whatever it was, it isn't working any more. If anything it's starting to stunt him in ways that look necrotic. It's eating him alive. If we keep him under any longer he'll die.

Directives say we study, collect the ones we can, but not this one. His parents are kicking up a mighty media storm. We can't keep him and keep this a secret. As for your paper, they already said

Forget what they said! So let him wake up. We'll lose the greatest scientific breakthrough in the history of our race.

I think that's a bit

What? Histrionic? Do you not see we're making history here? His brain was resetting itself, in different ways to all the others! He was getting younger before our eyes! He's at the forefront, and it's more than just a few papers in decent magazines now.

And now it's stopped. Whatever it was, it was wonderful, but it's over now and it's starting to curdle. We have to let him go. There are plenty of others to look at.

So wake him up. Screw you, and wake him up.

I rise. Everything hurts, from the back of my tongue down to the sound of my own pulse. I am inside out and upside down. I don't know where I'm thinking, what taste I'm seeing, everything is a jumble.

"It will be hard for a time," a voice said. How long had I been unconscious? There was cotton wool in my mind, fogging me up. "You've been in a coma for two weeks. We have no idea what happened. How do you feel?"

The first of the twinges got me then, that new and persistent companion. It got me good and hard and it laid me out. I didn't know, and I don't know now. Others?

My thoughts chuttered and jolted like a faulty boiler, sweating like burned toast. I reached out against the glare and the movement tore new sinews in my mind.

My mother was there. My father was there, and I grew calmer. My doctor came and went, a new voice, an Indian with red glasses. I liked him, I trusted him, because the red and Carl chimed perfectly together, though they did look a bit ridiculous.

"Think of it like diabetes," he said to me, days later. "Once you have it you can't go back, and one lapse can lead to serious complications. You have to clinical in everything that you do. Boredom is your bandage."

Now I remember my bandage, and how I tore it off. I remember Talia. I remember reaching out to reality, and what it became, and what I am now, surrounded by the dead.

I wake surrounded by them. They are everywhere, pressed up against me skin to skin, their gray faces in the still repose of sleep, their white eyes closed, lying beside me like family, like lovers, like breakers in some almighty, unknowable weave.

I am alive. I jolt and start up. I look down on my chest and belly, study my arms and my legs, pat my face and my neck and my shoulders urgently, but there are no bites. There is no blood, there are no wounds at all.

I am alive.

The deep wheeze of their breath is everywhere. It is dark but starlight shines over us. I am sitting on the road where I stopped, the corn swaying in a warm wind on either side like walls of water waiting to descend, and all around me are the ocean.

There must be thousands of them. Their bodies stretch from me into the distance, on the road and into the corn, all lying down, all skin-to-skin, all asleep, and in that moment I understand a truth that changes everything.

They don't want to kill me. They never even tried.

Guilt, sickness and joy fall within me like stones plummeting down a deep well, each chasing the other and hammering off my heart on the way down, pulling me in and out of balance. Their breath wheezes like a tide in time to the clanging bell of my heart, lapping at my sides, ringing in the change.

They are touching me. They have their arms across my body. They have oriented themselves with their heads closest to me, like a thousand sunflower seeds pointing little dry peanut tips seed-first at me, so I am the center of their mandala, and this is all they ever wanted.

Tears spring from my dry eyes. The touch of those closest to me is cold but tender. Here I am adrift, but for the first time in days I no longer feel lost. I am finally reaching through to the truth, and seeing it with open eyes.

I killed so many of them. I burned them, I trapped them, I taunted and slaughtered them, I laughed while they died, and I never once waited to see what they wanted. I never even tried.

Waves of shame pulse through me. Waves of joy chase them, tsunamis that cleanse all my sins away, because they are here now, with me. They are around me still, my brothers and sisters, and all they want is the very thing I have wanted for so long, and fought for, and killed for.

Belonging. Acceptance. Forgiveness.

More memories slot into place, that I never saw them kill a single person, that though I fought them many times, and their bodies clashed with mine and their mouths grazed against my chest, they never once bit down. They never tried to infect me.

Because I had already infected them.

"Oh God," I whisper, the sound escaping me like it has been torn free. I was the first. My body began this evolution or devolution or whatever it is, and in doing so rewrote them all. I incubated them, I made them, and then I killed them.

I rise to my knees. It's like Times Square again, only then I couldn't see it. I should have. I look over the expanse and silently give thanks. I have done such terrible things, and now I will do better. I will help them in any way I can, and I will bring all those left alive with me.

"Thank you," I tell them. They are asleep and dreaming whatever strange dreams the infected see, but I hope they can hear, as I heard every word uttered by my bedside in the days of my coma. They are in the wilderness, and maybe I can help guide them home.

CHAPTER 27 WILDERNESS

I walk, and like sleepwalkers in the midst of a shared dream, they rise and walk with me. They buoy me on. At some point I wander through a barn, and fish out a keg of fuel. I carry it until I reach the convoy. Returning to it is like seeing a long-lost friend.

"I'm sorry," I say to it. I pat the JCB's flank. I pour the gas in. I drive the convoy slowly with the dawn, and people part before me, following behind. I leave the music on endlessly. Stimulation hurt me, it made my brain twinge, but I got better. No baby wants to be slapped to breathe. Life is cold and hard, but there are such joys too. It is worth it. I drive the convoy with the JCB door open. It has become a sunny day and the road is clear ahead for miles. I take selfie photos of the endless swarm in the road. I can't stop grinning. At times I get out of the cab and walk Simonngst them, reveling in the touch of something alive that doesn't want to kill me. I film my passage, to show this is real.

"Here I am," I tell some future audience, touching the ocean's shoulders and backs as I pass. "They're harmless. They don't want to hurt us. Look at this!"

I hold my phone's lens up to take in the panorama. It records them reaching their withered arms across my chest, pressing their heads to my arms like affectionate cats. I smile and laugh.

"Hey, not there!" I crow, as one of them pokes me in the nuts. He backs up. A child takes his place and pats at my hand.

"What do you want, buddy?" I ask.

He doesn't want anything. He wants to pat at my hand, so I let him. I let them groom my hair and stroke my skin. I look into their wizened peanut faces and see not killers, but lost, sleepwalking souls. They may be in there still.

"You can hear me, can't you?" I ask a pucker-faced old man. "You're in there still."

His eyes glow. His mouth is a rictus grin, the skin pulled so tightly back. I touch his cheek, the tenderest expression I can think of.

Before I would have blown him to dust.

"What do you think of this?" I ask the phone's lens. I show my posse, many thousand strong, with me in the picture. "Can you believe this? Could you have ever imagined this? Would you like an entourage like this too?"

We drive slowly through the day, moving to be moving. They circulate Simonngst themselves, so the ones closest to me are always new. They gather near, suck in their fill of my presence like blood cells oxygenating, then radiate away. The ocean is breathing in whatever signal my brain is transmitting.

We walk and we drive and we listen to music. I hand out snacks for them to eat. They drop them from hands that have become useless claws. I imagine shooting out T-shirts from a T-shirt cannon. "And if you look under your seats…"

"It's a zombie armada," I tell Io that night, after my first full day as just another piece of jetsam on the ocean. "They're all boats on the waves, not the ocean itself."

"What waves are those, Simon?" she asks.

I shrug. I'm lying atop the battle-tank, weary but feeling more alive than in a long time. My whole body thrills to the sound of their breath below, and the despair is gone.

"Waves of thought? I don't know, honestly. I don't know if they'll ever come back as people, or if they're too far-gone now, but it isn't pain, is it? They're together with each other. They're roaming together, they're following a pattern that I can't understand, and they might still wake up."

Io contemplates this for a time. "I hope it makes you happy, Simon."

I smile, and click her off. It's another misleading response the geeks thought up for her, so she wouldn't have to say something disappointing and banal like, 'I'm sorry, I don't understand.'

I don't care. It does make me happy. I climb down so I can be Simonngst them. I lie down on the still-warm asphalt, and they lie down beside me.

In the morning they are gone entirely. I stand atop the tank and look out.

"Hello!" I call. "Where are you all?"

No reply comes from the tangled corn. I scan every direction but there is truly no sign of them. It is amazing. It touches me in a new way, like when I first saw a flock of sparrows massing and changing direction in the air, driven by the deep imperatives in their tiny bird brains, forming something beautiful, chaotic and Simonrphous, but at once ordered and logical, driven by an invisible calling.

They've had their fill of me. What I denied them in New York, with barriers and walls and locked doors, they've now gorged on, and are moving on. Will it save them? Will proximity to me, to the patterns buried in my immune brain, somehow bring them from their long hibernation?

I hope so. I really do.

It feels empty now with them gone, here on this barren stretch of road, but not lonely. My body remembers their presence, and my hands remember the dry rasp of their skin. They're out there now, wandering the wilds, heading for God only knows what, perhaps the very thing that can save them.

The sun is coming up on a new day. It's July 7 th , 2019, and I know exactly what I need to do. I know what the contents of the next cairn will be, and what I need to put in every cairn after that, because I can't let anyone else kill any more of them, not when contact and time is all they want.

I know where to go. It isn't even that far from here. I get in my cab and I roll back the way I came.

CHAPTER 28 INDIANOLA

The building is immense, a warehouse without any windows, and I pull the convoy up in the staff parking lot just outside Indianola, where my mother used to drop me off. I wasn't allowed to drive, back then. She'd hand me my lunch, sandwiches in plastic wrap, and kiss me on the cheek.

"You're doing so good," she'd say.

Perhaps there is hope for my mother and father. They could have been in the horde that came to me yesterday. Perhaps I touched them fleetingly as I walked Simonngst their ranks. I wouldn't know, but I think they would remember. That makes me feel good.

The JCB engine winds down, and I reach behind me for my shotgun, then stop and chuckle. I don't need that now.

I climb down from the cab and look around. There are none of the ocean here; I haven't seen any all day. There are just trees circling the parking lot, and cars already fading in the sun. Their windows have the white hoar of sunwarp in the glass, and weeds are growing in the dust accumulated against their tire rims.

There's a pink Cadillac, maybe Hank's. I think he used to work a night shift. And that has to be Blucy's little VW Bug. I laugh. When I went to her house to play Deepcraft for the first time, we drove in that.

I walk over and rub at the rain-dust on the side window, holding my eyes to my cupped hands to look in. The glass is hot to the touch. In the back bucket seat are two plastic cartons filled with books.

Vampires of the Amish Plain

I laugh out loud. "No way."

It's one of the covers I did for her. There must be two hundred books branded with my image stacked in the crates. That is crazy. They've been sitting here for months, slow-roasting.

I peel back and look up at the fulfillment center. There is only the smallest of signs to let me know it is Yangtze. This is not a customer-facing location. It is an immense cairn, filled with all the stuff we humans ever needed to survive.

It is a supply depot for me, now. It holds resources I can mine and craft into something better, if I can just get through the zombies alive.

I start across the parking lot. The staff door is metal and red, and the knob is hot in the mid-day heat. Summer has come, and it's a scorcher. The door is unlocked and opens easily, of course. These places never close; they serviced our needs 24/7.

Inside is the corridor through the admin offices; a kind of smaller intestine, snaking past a little canteen, toilets, changing room, staff room, meeting room, supervisor's room, and center manager's office. All of us passed through this system the same way, before heading beyond into the greater intestine that is the Darkness itself.

It's hot and dim in the corridor, and the air smells of linoleum and plasticwrap. I fire up my head-mounted flashlight. It feels strange to not have a shotgun and bandoliers of ammo across my chest, or the familiar weight of my handgun at my hip, but I couldn't bring any of them. I'm too afraid that, in the rush of an ocean charge, I'll use them.

In my pack I have my laptop and my USBs. That's the only heat I'm packing.

I advance. I peer in to the staff room, centered around a circular table where we used to sit, and the others would laugh and tease each other. I'd always try to get in and out fast. There's a soda machine in the corner and a good-sized window onto a square plot of parched yellow grass. I go by the offices and the changing rooms.

"Anybody here?" I call softly as I go. "Blucy, Hank?"

They don't answer, and nobody comes out to meet me. Perhaps they all found their way out. I hope that, but I expect it's not true. They couldn't have opened that metal door, and I've seen no broken windows yet. It means they're still inside.

The entrance to the Darkness is a single swing-door watched from above by a CCTV camera. I give the non-functioning lens a thumbs-up, then push the door open.

Inside the heat dissipates at once, swallowed up in the cavern that is the warehouse, and a cool breeze meets me that smells of dust and packing material. My headlamp illuminates the nearest shelves, flanking the central aisle, but does nothing for the depths. Beyond the faint halo of light lies pitch black

Something is moving out there. There's a rustle that becomes a slapping footfall. I flinch as months of defensive habits kick in. My heart begins to race and a cold sweat breaks on my forehead. I'm still clutching the door, and I want nothing more right now than to put myself back through it and run for the convoy.

Instead I close it behind me. I step out into the center aisle, 'Main Street' we used to call it, and wait.

"I'm here," I say, more loudly than I mean to. "It's Simon." I pause while the slapping of footsteps gets louder, then add slackly. "I'm back."

I catch a glimpse of the figure running, briefly visible as he goes by a slit of reflected light cast through the warehouse shelves, then he's in the dark again. It has to be Hank, tall and skinnier than ever, his footfalls growing louder each second. Others join him, a stampede of bodies running in the Darkness, maybe Blucy, North Korean Bobby, travelling Linda. I stand there waiting for them, with plenty of time to question everything I've seen and think I've learned.

Are they really friendly? Do they really not want my brains?

Hank pops into view at the edge of my flashlight's glow, no more than twenty yards off and charging like an emaciated hipster bull. I take an involuntary step back, because he'll be on me in seconds flat. My fists are itching to fight or run or hold a g*n, my nerves are firing like an M4 Carbine, and it takes everything I have to take a step forward.

His eyes glow like halogen lamps, his feet smack the floor, and I manage a hasty, "Easy big guy," before he hits. His body crashes wholly into mine and we go down hard, rolling and thumping, until his face is against my head, and his hands claw at my back and his shoulder punches my chest, and I think that at any minute the first bite will come that will finally make me part of the in-crowd.

But it doesn't come. We roll and tussle and I manage to push him off me, though he clings close, and he doesn't bite.

I look at him and he looks at me. We're lying there on the cold floor like he's just done a really good football tackle, and we're about to start laughing. My butt and side hurt where he took me down, but that is all the pain I feel. He didn't attack. More than anything he reminds me of a really over-eager dog. I half expect him to start panting and wagging his tail.

"Good to see you Hank," I manage. "You're looking well, considering." He stares at me. I nod to inspire confidence.

"I know, yeah, this is weird. Hang in there. Where are the others?" A second later one of them hits us, connecting like a ground tackle in the small of my back.

"s**t!" I cry out, and turn, recognizing the cannonball behind me by her eponymous blue hair.

"Jesus, Blucy, you could have killed me!"

She cozies up. Hank cozies up on the other side, like I'm the filling in a human sandwich. The next three or four that come pelting out of the Darkness hit into them and not me directly, so that's better because I don't think broken ribs will bother them the way they would me.

"It's good to see you guys," I say, as we all lie there in an orgiastic heap. I feel warm and ridiculous though their bodies are cold. "I never thought we'd all be lying like this in the middle of Main Street. But yeah, it's good."

My wit is lost on them. I pat at them, trying my best not to be condescending. I stop short of saying, 'Good Blucy, there's a good girl.' Instead we just lie silently for a while, breathing together. It's amazing, and despite myself I start to cry. These are the first people I've seen that I actually know since the world ended.

They look bad.

"You look good," I say to Hank's wrinkled peanut head. "It's a good look on you."

Somehow he's managed to get his scarf, an affectation he used to use to 'attract the ladies', since it has little silly kittens on it and was a good talking point, caught in his hair like a turban. I untangle it. He watches me with unblinking eyes.

"OK, cool."

After a while of that I get up. They get up with me. They follow me down the aisles, as I head for the place I've really come for. I explain to them a little what my plans are, and what I've been through. I tell Hank the play I used to 'reel' Talia in, color reading her palm. I tell Blucy how my book cover career was going, and about the big 'f' on the Empire State Building.

She is suitably impressed. I take her hand as we walk. It is a wrinkled bony thing, like a witch's, but it reacts, curling around my fingers like a baby's grip. We walk hand in hand toward the print-on-demand book machines.

This is my plan. Listen closely children, because I'm going to drop some art. It's called

ZOMBIES OF AMERICA

And I'm uniquely placed to make it. First though I need power, and light, and paper and ink, and to understand the book machines, and to make the art and the words, but all that will come. This is a fulfillment center after all, where all your dreams come true.