The Apocalypse Started Today, but I've Lived It for Ten Year

Midtown Run

Dale took ten seconds to find his legs and another five to stop apologizing for needing them. I used the time to look at the street through what was left of the front window.

Seventh Avenue looked like someone had picked it up and shaken it. Cars sat at angles across the lanes with their doors hanging open and their engines still running. A taxi had climbed the curb and pushed its nose through a phone store window. People ran in every direction, which is the worst way to run, because half of them ran straight into each other. The purple sky made everyone's face look bruised.

Something yellow was drifting down between the buildings, slow and fine, like pollen. The Spores.

"Do you have a rag?" I asked.

"A rag?"

"Anything cloth. Wet it."

He pulled off his apron without arguing. I soaked it under the bar tap, wrung it out, and tied it over his nose and mouth, knotting it behind his head. He looked ridiculous. He also looked like a man who would still be breathing in an hour.

"The dust is what infects you," I said. "Wet cloth cuts how much gets in. It won't stop it, only slows it. We need to find a pharmacy before it catches up."

"I'm not sick."

"You will be, if we stay out here."

He didn't ask how I knew. I was starting to like that about him.

We went out the back and came around to the side of the building, then onto the avenue. I kept the axe low against my leg and my eyes moving. Every few steps I counted heartbeats, and every few steps I changed direction, because the streets that look safest in the first hour are the ones that kill the most people.

"Left," I said, and pulled Dale away from the glass entrance of the bank on the corner.

"What? It looks fine."

"In about four minutes, that atrium comes down." I didn't slow. "A lot of people are going to be standing under it because it looks strong."

A man in a suit stood near the doors with his arm around a crying woman. I shouted at them to move. The man looked at me like I was insane and pulled the woman closer. I shouted again. He turned his back.

I kept walking. You learn that early. You can shout twice, and then you have to let people choose.

We were halfway down the block when I saw the bus.

I knew it before my mind caught up. An M20, white and blue, rolling at an easy speed down Seventh as if the world hadn't changed. The driver was slumped in his seat with his hands loose in his lap. Nobody was steering. And at the bus shelter ahead, one hand lifted to check her phone, stood a woman in blue scrubs with a heavy canvas bag over her shoulder.

In my last life, I had watched this from the cafe window. I had stood there with a dish towel in my hand while a nurse waited at a bus stop and did not look up. I had told myself for years that it happened too fast for anyone to stop. That was a lie. It was slow. I just hadn't moved.

I moved.

"Dale, stay on the wall!"

Agility 15 made me faster than I expected. I crossed the sidewalk in four strides, hit the woman at the shoulder with my arm, and drove both of us sideways across the pavement as the bus mounted the curb. The shelter exploded behind us. Glass rained across the concrete. The bus ground on for another thirty feet and finally stopped against a streetlight, its engine whining, one wheel still turning.

The woman lay under my arm, staring up at me. She had short grey hair and a lanyard that read ADLER, R.N.

"That bus," she said.

"Yes."

"I was standing right there."

"Yes." I pulled myself up and offered her a hand. "We need to go."

She took it. Her grip was dry and strong. She looked at the bus, then at me, then at the axe. When she spoke again, her voice was perfectly steady, which told me more than any speech about what kind of person she was.

"You knew that was going to happen."

"I'll explain on the way."

"Ruth," she said, retrieving her bag. "Trauma nurse, St. Luke's. I have four tourniquets, two chest seals, and a lot of gauze. Tell me where we're going and I'll keep up."

I looked at her for about two seconds. Then I looked at Dale, who was holding the wall like it might float away.

"Pharmacy," I said. "Ninth and Forty-Eighth."

"That's a long walk."

"It's the only way to get there that doesn't kill us."

Behind us, faintly, came a long, tearing crash. The bank's glass atrium folded in on itself like paper. A cloud of white dust rolled across the avenue, and the screaming that followed was the kind I had been trying to outrun for ten years. I did not look back.

Ruth looked. Her jaw tightened, and she said nothing.

We moved west.

It took us twenty minutes to go six blocks. I took us through a parking garage, across a loading dock, and down an alley that smelled of rotting vegetables, because the main streets were full of people who would panic and take us with them. Twice I held up a hand and we froze while something shuffled past the mouth of the alley. Once, an infected woman in a torn dress turned toward us and I killed her quickly, with a single swing, before she could scream. Dale threw up behind a dumpster. Ruth put a hand on his back and didn't say anything.

My ribs ached. The sealed wound pulled every time I breathed deep. But my head was clear, and the old rhythm was coming back, the one I had missed without knowing it: move, listen, decide.

At Eighth Avenue, I stopped.

I should have crossed. The pharmacy lay two blocks past it. But the note was in my pocket, and its first line had been sitting in my head since the cafe.

Don't go to the hardware store on Eighth.

It was on the next block, a long red-brick building with a green awning that said KESSLER'S HARDWARE & SUPPLY in faded gold letters. In the old timeline, I would have been there within the first hour. In the old timeline, it had been empty at noon.

It was not empty now.

I pulled Ruth and Dale behind a newspaper kiosk and watched through the gap between its shutters. The store's roll-down gate was half raised. The windows were clear. And inside, standing shoulder to shoulder at the glass, were at least twenty people.

They weren't panicking. They weren't hiding. They stood in an orderly line with their hands at their sides, perfectly still, all facing the same direction.

Toward the street. Toward the corner. Toward us.

"Ethan," Dale whispered. "Why are they just standing there?"

I didn't answer. I was counting. None of them moved. None of them seemed to breathe hard, in a street where everyone else was running or dying.

Then, in the center of the line, one man lifted his hand.

He didn't wave for help. He raised it slowly, palm open, in the unhurried way you greet someone you have been expecting for a long time.