Dedication
For Adrian, Rakie, Nemesis0, and everyone who was there at the beginning
Acknowledgments
I would be remiss if I did not thank a number of people who helped make this book a reality. Diana Gill, Lyssa Keusch, Kelly O’Connor, Rebecca Lucash, and Jessie Edwards at HarperCollins; my redoubtable agent Russell Galen and the tireless Ann Behar; and Jennifer Dikes for being relentlessly awesome. Thanks, everyone!
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Part 1: The Beginning of the World
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Part 2: The Road West
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Part 3: Camp
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Part 4: Hearth
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Chapter 151
About the Author
Also by David Wellington
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART 1
The
Beginning
of the
World
CHAPTER 1
New York City is still in pretty good shape.
Manhattan, I mean. Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx have all been left to rot—there just weren’t enough people to hold them. So they can be pretty dangerous, not so much because of the occasional zombie you find around the peripheries, but because the buildings are falling down and the water out there is very toxic. Staten Island—well, nobody wants to go to Staten Island. Parts of it are still on fire.
But in Manhattan we have electricity, sometimes, and the skyscrapers in Midtown were built to hold up. The elevators don’t work, but the lowest couple of floors are still livable. On top of the smaller buildings we’ve planted gardens to catch the sun and the rain, to supplement the daily minimum caloric ration the government provides. That’s where most of us work, every day. Even some of the first generation—the ones who weren’t too traumatized during the crisis—work in the gardens. It’s not like they’re much use for anything else. They’re always scared to go down to street level, even though nobody’s seen a zombie in Manhattan in fifteen years.
The second generation, my generation, pretty much have the run of the place. There are still caches of canned food to find—old civil defense bunkers and fallout shelters and supplies set aside for hurricanes or floods or earthquakes that never came. You can’t catch fish off the piers, because the Hudson and the harbor aren’t clean yet. But you can trap eels and crabs in the old subway stations.
That’s what I was doing the day I got my tattoo: subway fishing.
My friend Ike and I headed down early to the West Twenty-Eighth Street station. It was still mostly dark, with just a little blue light frosting the concrete fronts of all the buildings. The Empire State hovered over us in the dawn mist, its dark spire like a line cutting the sky in half. A couple of birds that had a nest on a streetlight were making the only sound, fluttering their wings and screaming at us, warning us away from their territory. We ignored them and headed down a long street full of boarded-up shops. There was nothing in those stores anybody could want—just crates of perfume, and cell phones, and women’s dresses in faded patterns. Every one of those stores had been picked over a dozen times and stripped of anything of real value.
Ike was younger than me, fourteen maybe, with long sandy hair and eyes the color of the mud in Central Park. He was a good guy, if a little morbid. He and I used to scout together, working our way up skyscrapers floor by floor, breaking into old apartments hoping to find food. We never found anything but skeletons, of course. When the crisis started, a lot of people had been so scared they locked themselves inside their apartments and starved to death rather than risk going down to the street to look for fo
od. By the time we found them there was nothing left but bones and empty cabinets—even the rats had moved on. Ike would take out his frustration by arranging the skeletons in rude poses. That never had much attraction for me. Maybe I was just more mature, owing to my age. Who knows? By the time I was a teenager, it was obvious we weren’t going to find any amazing caches of food in the high-rises, just mortal remains, and climbing all those stairs was a pain in the ass.
Now when we went looking for food, we went down instead of up.
At the entrance to the station Brian was waiting for us. Brian was first generation, about forty years old, but still pretty tough. One of the few who wasn’t just sitting around waiting to die. He’d seen it all, lived through it and managed to survive. Now he carried a shotgun around with him everywhere he went—to the public assemblies in Madison Square Garden, to the rare wedding and the much more frequent funerals, even when he went to the bathroom. He wore an old leather biker jacket that he claimed was bite-proof. When I was younger, I imagined him testing it out at night, chewing on his own sleeve just to make sure.
“Ike,” Brian said, nodding at us. “Finn. Let’s get this over with.” As if we had something better to do than checking our traps. He kept looking up one street, then another.
“See anybody you recognize?” Ike asked.
Brian’s eyes shot around to stare at us. There was nobody in sight, of course, not a living human soul. Most people lived farther up, near Times Square, crowded into a couple of dozen safe blocks. That I never understood. People had so much room to spread out in, thousands of blocks in Manhattan. With only about fifty thousand of us to share the island, everybody could have had their own mansion. Instead, the first generation chose to cram together in a tiny little corner of the city.
“Just get down there and check your traps,” Brian said. “I’ll stand guard.”
I shrugged and turned to head down the steps, but Ike was still having fun. “You mean in case a zombie shows up, looking for eel sushi?” He laughed. “What if one of them is down there in the station? Maybe we should have guns, too.”
Brian glanced at the dark stairway. He looked like he wouldn’t go down there if you made him mayor of the city. “Nothing down there,” he said. “It’s flooded.”
“One of them could have come over from New Jersey,” Ike pointed out. “Floated across on a raft of garbage, then got sucked in through an intake somewhere. He could be swimming around in the tunnels right now, waiting to grab our tender young ankles.”
Ike wasn’t going to let up. I’d seen him play this game before. The first generation are all so touchy. They’re all so confused about why they didn’t die, when ninety-nine percent of everyone else did. None of my generation understand it—things are good. Things are safe now. But still you can push their buttons so easily. For some of us, like Ike, it was an endless source of fascination. I found it mostly annoying.
Like I said, I was older than Ike. Maybe more mature. I started down the stairs, but then Ike said something and I stopped because I half saw Brian rush him and grab his arm. I turned around, one hand on the cold silver stair railing.
“Listen,” Brian said, “you’ve never seen a zombie in your whole fucking life. You’ve got no idea.”
He had Ike in a pretty good grip, but Ike just laughed.
“When it came, there was plenty of warning, but it didn’t make a difference. The TV told us all about it but not what to do. People were going crazy every day, shoving other people in houses and then setting fire to them. There were piles of bodies in the street and men with bullhorns and uniforms telling us the same useless information over and over. Nobody was safe, there was nowhere to—”
“Brian!” I shouted. My voice cracked and echoed around the stone façades of the buildings around us. “Let him go.”
Brian stared down at me. I could see he was back there. Trapped in something that happened twenty years ago. The first generation did that a lot.
“We’ve heard it all before. A bunch of times,” I told him.
Ike pulled himself out of Brian’s grip and clattered down the stairs, passing me by. He was still laughing.
“Everybody I knew back then is dead,” Brian told me.
“I know,” I said, trying to sound soothing. Sometimes it takes them a while to come back when they get like that.
“I didn’t know anybody in the shelter. I didn’t recognize anybody. The people I knew all changed. I couldn’t go back home. My old place—I had a car, an old Nissan piece of shit but it was mine, I’d made all the payments, and I just had to—”
“Nobody has cars anymore, Brian. Just the one ambulance.” Which was just an old taxi put together out of spare parts. The government didn’t send us enough fuel for anything else. “We’re in this together.”
He nodded. His mouth was a tight, trembling line. One of his hands was clutching the barrel of his shotgun.
“We’ll be back in a little while,” I told him, and headed down into the station. “Just wait for us, okay?”
“I’ve got your back,” he told me, slapping the stock of his gun.
“That’s—fine. Good. Thanks.” I said it over my shoulder. I’d run out of patience with him. It was hard to listen to their stories, the same stories they’d been telling for twenty years. You could tell it meant so much to them. That they just needed somebody to listen. But I had work to do, you know?
CHAPTER 2
I walked down into the dark, into the sound of water dripping onto a still surface. A little light showed ahead—Ike had brought a torch made of an old chair leg. Its light licked at the white tiles all around us, stained with long, spear-shaped growths of black and green mold. It glared off the glass front of a booth with a sign that read NO SERVICE AT THIS STATION AT ALL. It fell in flat planes across the stairs leading down to the platforms, buried now under tons of water.
The subways weren’t my favorite places, but they weren’t unbearable. Mostly it was just the futility of them. Tunnels that snaked all across the city, up and down the avenues. Hundreds of stations exactly like this one. I knew, in an abstract way, what they’d been for. I’d heard about the silver trains that used to zip uptown and downtown so fast you could get from the Battery to the Bronx in an hour. That was like telling me people used to be able to regrow lost teeth or fly by flapping their arms. I mean, I believed logically that the trains used to run down there. But they didn’t now, and they never would again. So it never felt quite real.
I’d never known a time when the tunnels weren’t flooded. When they weren’t full of black water, rivers of it under the sidewalks. That I could imagine just fine. Maybe too well. It takes a long time to check the traps. Time enough to let your mind wander, to think about what’s down there.
What you can see is this: stairs going down to the surface of a black canal. You can see one or two steps going down under the water, their risers covered now in swaying carpets of brown moss. That’s all. The traps are strung out on ropes that disappear into the dark tunnels. To check them, you haul on the slimy ropes that bite into your fingers and palms, bringing up little lines of blood on your skin. You haul and pull and stretch for another handful of rope. You do this until something catches. And then you wiggle the rope, sometimes for hours, until the traps come free. That’s when you start wondering what they’re caught on. In my mind’s eye I would see silver train cars down there, my ropes tangled in their broken windows. I would see fish darting out from under the orange and yellow seats. I would see barnacles encrusting the line maps like new stations just opened, like whole subway lines newly imagined. I would see octopuses pushing themselves through blizzards of old newspapers and magazines, their arms sorting through discarded drink cups and Styrofoam hamburger cartons, looking for leftovers from the world before.
I shook my head and glanced over at Ike. He was staring down at the
water, grunting as he tugged at his line. Was he seeing the same things I did? Probably not. Knowing him, he was probably thinking about all the dead bodies down there.