“No. No panic. Not yet—not while the real danger, as you put it, is still down by the river. Let them get the most vulnerable people up and out of the way. And then, when the panic comes—like we all know it’s going to—then we can all make a run for it, and we’ll all have better odds. Better to get the slow and weak ones out of the way now.”
“Mercenary of you,” he growled.
“Let’s all be mercenary, if it’s like you say—and I believe it is. This time, under these circumstances, in this life-or-death situation, it’s good for everyone. If there’s going to be a stampede, fine. But the fewer in the herd, the better our chances are.”
He was silent, except for the tiny rhythmic squish of his rocking in wet clothes. “All right,” he said. “All right. All for all and one for one. I can see that. I can make that work.”
“Good,” I told him, rubbing at his shoulder.
“As per usual, Eden my darling,” Jamie said, patting me around Christ’s shoulder, “I can’t tell if you’re brilliant, or completely deranged.”
Nick combined an eye roll and a sniff into a gently derisive facial gesture. “Hey cuddle pile, it’s starting to rain again. Let’s get inside if we can, eh?”
“Inside, sure, but not here.” Christ perked up and looked nervous. “Not while the zombies are coming.”
Nick offered him a hand, and despite the fact that both Jamie and I were ready to help him up, he took it. “No panicking the peasantry, remember?”
“I remember. But we can’t stay here, it’s too close. I mean, the river is just a couple of blocks that way.” He pointed to the left, towards the aquarium at the end of Broad Street. From our vantage point we could barely see its outline, a sharp-edged structure made of glass with the emergency lights glowing green and yellow from within.
“Where should we go, then?” I asked him, but I could watch the tweaks and shadows of ambivalence working across his face.
He drew away from us and faced us, looking from one pair of eyes to the next. “What do you think, how far can the water really come up? It’s only a river. How far up can it go?”
None of us knew, so nobody answered. He went on talking his way up to a point that I could see coming a mile away.
“I think they’re stuck there, in the water. I’ve never seen them in water less deep than knee-high. They can’t leave the river, so they can’t go any farther than the river lets them. And if that’s right, then once the TVA gets the locks straightened out—once the rain stops—”
Even as he spoke, a crunching growl of thunder rumbled across the valley.
“Once the rain stops,” he went on, “down goes the water. And down go the zombies.”
“But that’d be a temporary fix at best.” I put my hands on my hips and peered out into the darkness, attaching my eyes to that distant marker of the aquarium. I couldn’t even tell if I could really see it, or if it was just an illusion of exhaustion and hope.
The road between the hotel and the river was straight and dark except for the flashing, thrusting lights of the emergency vehicles and the police blockades with the yellow-striped saw horses. Cops and feds were trying to keep us unpredictable refugees as close to the hotel shelter as they could. They were rounding up strays on the street and forcing them up to the ambulances, inside the nearest open doors. Anything to get us off the streets.
I watched them and felt an urgency different from the one that had driven us all all day long. They knew something we didn’t.
Rather, they knew something most of us didn’t.
I looked back and forth between this weird little group and wondered what the hell we were going to do. Be quiet, sure. Be wary, of course. Wait for the water to go down.
“How long do you think it would take, anyway?” I asked no one in particular. “How long before it goes down?”
“Days,” Nick lifted and dropped an eyebrow and a shoulder. “Weeks, maybe. Longer than we can hold out here, that’s for sure. They’ll cart us away before that happens.”
Jamie folded his arms and squinted into the shadows, same as I was. “That’s not going to work. The river’s going to get higher before it goes lower. Look around. Listen to the radios—can you hear them? They’re trying to talk around it, talk about it low, you know. But if you listen, you can tell.”
“And with the water comes something worse. Even once it goes down, they’ll still be there, waiting.” Christ banged his head up and down against his chest. “It was the construction, what woke them up. It was those apartments, Eden. Your apartments. That money-grubbing ex-mayor didn’t want anyone finding out about what the workers found, so she covered them up again. And they aren’t going to go away now, whether the water recedes or not.”
“Thanks for trying to make this my fault. Thanks. Yeah. I appreciate that.”
“Not your fault personally!’’ he was quick to qualify. “But I’d like to think that you get it now. Not like before, when you were bullshitting me. You get it now, right? Why I did it?”
“Why you did—” Nick started to ask, but before he had the question all the way past his lips, he’d figured it out. “You’re the little shit who set the apartment fire the other day.”
“Big shit, thank you very much. And what are you going to do about it? Put it on the news, motherfucker?”
“I ought to,” he said. I didn’t hear much conviction behind it, though.
“Call the cops on me?”
“Somebody should.” Jamie said it with a smile, though.
“So you’ve known all along?” Nick demanded, and I’d either forgotten or never realized that he hadn’t. So much of my life had overlapped in the last twenty-four hours, I felt like I’d never get it all straight.
“Yeah, I’ve known. I’ve been trying to tell her—” and here Christ pointed a long, accusing finger at my face, “for days. It’s not her fault that there are zombies overrunning the city, but she should’ve listened to me in the first place, and then maybe things would have been different.”
“Why?” I asked. I held my ground even though the rain was coming down good and we were all getting wet again. But I wasn’t keeping anyone but Christ out with me, so if the rest of them wanted to soak, that was fine and not my problem. “Why should I have believed you, not just this time, but ever? You’ve built a lifetime and a reputation on being full of shit, of crying wolf, and generally trying to stir up as much trouble as you possibly can while staying out of jail.”
“Broken clock, bitch, broken fucking clock!”
Jamie took Christ by both shoulders and backed him down, away from me and away from the road. A cop car was trying to pull up and around, using the curb as a lane and weaving a tight trip up to the hotel. “Out of the road, Christ. Out of the rain, everybody. This isn’t doing anyone any good.”
I asked over his shoulder, into Christ’s face, “What do you mean by that, ‘broken clock’?”
Jamie answered for him, or around him. “Twice a day. Even a broken clock is right sometimes. He did a poem on it a couple of slams ago, right?”
“Right,” Christ said. He was trying to muster complaint, but was so flattered that someone remembered his poem that he was temporarily disarmed. “That means I’ve got once more to be right before the day is out, doesn’t it?”
“Metaphorically, I suppose.” A huge splat of water slid off the canopy above us and hit me in the eye. I wiped it away and stepped sideways, trying to crush my way under the shelter but only meeting limited success. “Literally, there’s no way of knowing. And I wouldn’t set down Vegas odds on it any day of the week.”
“Fuck you,” he told me, and there was only a residue of venom there. We were all too worn out to even swear at each other properly.
“Sure, sure. Fuck me. Whatever. Even with all your prophetic warnings, we still don’t know what to do. I think our current plan is, ‘Wait for the water to go down while we sit around with our thumbs up our asses.’ Isn’t that about what we’ve got so far? Anyone want to correct me? Please?”
Even as I said it, I was still peering down that black and yellow corridor towards the river. And I saw shapes there, indistinct and unmoving. Three of them. Side by side in a little line, just like me, Jamie, Nick, and Christ. Catfood Dude. Pat. Ann Alice. Watching us as I was watching them.
Knowing that I saw them.
You are so close, Ann Alice said, jerking her head at Nick.
Pat shook his head. No she isn’t. Newspaper and TV aren’t the same thing.
“Newspaper?” I said, and everyone suddenly looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Nothing. Just. Huh. The newspaper.” The ghosts were gone, and I could once again see the black, back end of the city against the river.
“What about it?” Nick asked. “The newspaper building’s out at the other end of town—back towards the Choo-Choo and a couple of blocks past it. They ought to be high and dry right now. I bet they’re having a field day with this.”
“Like Channel Three?” I said, to the tune of a pot calling a kettle black.
“And Nine, and Twelve, and everybody else. It’s a job, isn’t it? We’re helping how we can. Why do you think I haven’t got a vehicle right now? And what do you think I’m doing here with you, instead of being back up at the Olgiati showing the world what it looks like down there, huh? Why do you think that is?”
“Because you’re a goddamn idiot,” I growled.
Everyone looked startled except for Nick, who looked like he’d expected it. “Truer words were never spoken. Say them again, if you like.”
“No, thanks. I didn’t even mean it that way—”
“Point is, I’m here now. You’re here now. These two schmucks are here now.”