The End Is Now

AGENT ISOLATED David Wellington

There were zombies all over Brooklyn, but at the moment the fires jumping from house to house downtown were the real danger.

There was a germ, a prion, going around that turned people into zombies. Somebody had gotten a bad memo. They’d been told that fire would kill the prion. It didn’t. It killed zombies pretty well, but there were just too many of them and they just kept coming. Now the fires were spreading, too.

Whitman stomped on the brakes as the whole front of a warehouse erupted into the street in front of him. He threw the truck in reverse and got it turned around, looking for a safe way forward, any way forward, any direction.

“There,” the woman in the passenger seat said. He didn’t know her name. He wasn’t sure he’d get a chance to find out. “Head south, to Brighton Beach. There are boats there. There are boats coming there at dawn, and they’ll take us to safety.”

He looked over at her. “Boats?”

She had a baby in her arms. There were kids and old people and just people, lots of people, in the back of the truck. Whitman hadn’t stopped to count them, or find out where they had come from. It didn’t seem to matter much at the time.

“Who told you there would be boats?” he asked. There were a lot of rumors going around, of course. The government wouldn’t say anything. Couldn’t, now that the power was out—no cell phones, no internet, no emergency broadcast system. The best information came from finding a soldier, one of the many, many soldiers in New York City that night, and asking them. But Whitman couldn’t afford to do that, not anymore. “I didn’t hear anything about boats.”

Whitman himself should have been a great source of information. He had worked for the CDC. Originally he had been the head agent in charge of this operation, the quarantine and evacuation of New York City. Funny how much could change in twenty-four hours.

If the people in this truck knew who he was—if they knew what he’d done . . . they would tear him to pieces.

He threw his arm across the woman and the baby as he stomped on the brakes.

“Jesus,” the woman screamed.

He’d had to stop short because the street ahead was full of zombies.

Smoke might have made their eyes so red. The dead expressions on their faces might just have been shock. But by now Whitman could tell. He knew a zombie when he saw one. The way they held themselves, the way they moved.

The prion made little tiny holes in their brains, until they couldn’t talk. Until they couldn’t think. They fell back on animal instincts. Flight or, far more often, fight. Humans were predators by design, honed by two hundred thousand years of evolution into brutal hunters. Only the thinnest veneer of civilization lay on top of that. Strip it away, break down everything that made a person human, and what was left wanted very badly to punch you and scratch you and make you bleed.

Which was how you got the prion in the first place. Fluid contact. Blood from wounds, saliva from bites, mucus from anywhere. Nice how that worked out. Nice if you were a prion, anyway.

Whitman threw the truck in reverse, but when he looked in his mirrors, he saw the fire was spreading behind him. Smoke filled the street, smoke full of sparks. There were a lot of warehouses in Brooklyn, and they were all stuffed full of toxic shit. Going backward wasn’t an option.

He peered through the cracked windshield. The zombies stared back.

“Everybody,” he shouted to the passengers in the back, “keep your arms and heads inside the vehicle. And hold on to something.”

“What are you doing?” she said, her eyes wide.

He threw the truck back into first gear and stood on the accelerator.

“We can take Flatbush all the way down to the beaches,” the woman pointed out. Angie. She’d told him that at some point, that her name was Angie. He couldn’t remember when, exactly. A lot of his memories had gotten jumbled up.

He shook his head. He remembered some things just fine. “The Army’s using Flatbush as their main corridor into the city. They’ve got materiel coming in nonstop, all headed toward Manhattan, taking up all the lanes. Flatbush Avenue is strictly one-way right now.” Whitman had his own reasons for not wanting to meet up with any Army units, but she didn’t have to know that. As far as Angie was concerned he was just a nice guy with a stolen truck.

A truck that was now covered in blood and body parts. Whitman could see a finger rolling around on the hood. He tried not to remember the moment he’d rammed through the crowd of zombies. Apparently he hadn’t seen enough horror in the last day to desensitize his stomach.

“How do you know all this?” she asked.

“Just trust me,” he told her.

She shook her head, but she didn’t ask any more questions. He wondered how long that would last. “There are other roads. We can take Atlantic Avenue pretty far.”

He nodded and focused on driving.

Angie ran her left hand through her hair. There was a plus sign drawn on the back of it with permanent marker. Whitman had one, too—just like everybody in the truck. They’d all tried to scrub them off, with spit or with lemon juice or whatever solvent they could find. One guy in the back of the truck had tried to burn his off with drain cleaner, and still it hadn’t worked. None of them had managed to do more than smear the ink around a little. That ink was military grade and it was designed not to run.

Nobody with a plus sign on their hand was allowed into Manhattan. Whitman was pretty sure nobody with a plus sign was going to get on a boat, either. But he was out of better ideas.

He’d had a bunch of good ideas, once.

He’d had the idea, for instance, that they could block all the bridges and make Manhattan a safe space. That if all the healthy people locked themselves indoors they would be safe from the zombies.

He’d had the idea that the Army could move through the city block by block with non-lethal weapons, finding and detaining every zombie they came across. That had been a great idea—until soldiers started getting bitten. After that, nobody talked about detaining zombies. After that, the real guns started coming out.

He’d had the idea that three of the outer boroughs of New York City—Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx—were expendable. The idea that there was plenty of room in Manhattan for all the healthy people, if they crowded together. The idea Staten Island made a great place for a quarantine facility. Those ideas had come thick and fast, when it became clear that his original ideas just weren’t working. That there were a lot more zombies than they’d thought, and that most of the city was already a lost cause.

He’d had the idea that if he could just save Manhattan . . . then . . . something. Something good would happen and the tide would turn.

He’d had another idea, his best, but he refused to think about that. To accept he’d been responsible for it.

He’d had the idea that he was very tired.

He’d had the idea that he had bad information, and it was going to ruin everything.

He’d had the idea he was the wrong man for the job.

And then, when the call had come in from Atlanta, when Whitman’s own name showed up on the database of potential infections—well, then, he’d thrown away every idea he’d ever had, except one.

The idea to run away.

He braked the truck to a stop. “You drive for a while,” he told her.

“What are you doing?” Angie asked. But she took the wheel, her baby still in her right arm, while Whitman moved through the back of the truck. It had been a transport, originally, a CDC vehicle meant for moving squads of clean-suited technicians around. There were benches in the back, and it could comfortably hold about a dozen people and all their gear.

Now about fifty potentially infected people were jammed inside, sitting on each other’s laps, curled up on the floorboards. More held on to the rear end, clutching to the fender so they didn’t fall off. Nobody complained about being crowded.

None of them had gone symptomatic since he’d picked them up. He supposed it was just a matter of time, though. And with even one zombie inside the truck, every single person back there would be at risk. Whitman had no idea how to solve that problem—he’d started coming around to Angie’s plan, which seemed to be to just hope for the best.

After the army doctor had put the plus sign on Whitman’s hand, after they’d told him he was headed for Staten Island and the hell of the camps there, he had just gone crazy for a while. Fought his way free, gotten back to a CDC mobile command center somehow. There’d been nobody there. He’d found the truck and he’d just driven away, with no idea where to go next.

He’d found Angie in the Boerum Hill neighborhood, along with about a third of these people. They’d been standing behind a wrought iron gate that fronted an apartment complex, watching their world go up in smoke.

He’d known right away he’d found his next move. Whitman had never been a doctor, but he’d devoted his life to helping people. To protecting them from deadly epidemics.

So they’d picked up everybody they could find, everybody with a plus sign and nowhere to go. Now those people looked up at him as he checked on them, looked up at him with hungry faces. Hungry for information, or just for somebody to tell them things were going to be okay.

“We’re headed for Brighton Beach,” he told them. “Angie thinks there will be boats there to evacuate us.”

“I heard we was supposed to get to La Guardia, man. You know, the airport?” someone called out.

Whitman shook his head. Both airports—La Guardia and JFK—had been taken over by the military. There would be nothing for them there. “No, the airports are out of the question. And I don’t think there are any boats, either.”

The truck erupted with people asking angry questions. A man wearing a pair of coveralls stood up and pointed at Whitman.

“Angie said there’s boats. So there’s boats.”

Whitman smiled at the man. “You’ve known her long?”

“She’s our neighbor,” someone else volunteered, a young woman with a shaved head.

“Just to talk to, but she always seemed nice,” an old lady replied. “I think she works on Wall Street.”

“Nah, she’s a doctor,” the guy in the coveralls insisted. “She basically runs that college hospital, you know—”

“If anybody knows what’s going on, it’s Angie,” her neighbor said. He nodded happily to himself. “Angie’ll know what to do. She’ll get us some place safe.”

“Why don’t we take a vote?” Whitman asked. “I’m telling you right now there are no boats. How many people want to go and look for boats anyway, just because Angie heard a rumor?”

He was not prepared to see all those hands go up.

“Do you have a better idea?” the old lady asked.

He opened his mouth and realized he had no answer for her. Shaking his head, he climbed back into the truck’s cab, into the passenger seat.

“What the hell was that?” Angie demanded. She looked furious.

“I figured I would give them a choice.”

“Those people are scared out of their minds! Why on Earth would you tell them there are no boats?”

That, he could have answered. But he looked up, then, just in time to see the roadblock come into view ahead.

There wasn’t much traffic on the road, and the military hadn’t committed much to stopping what little there was. Just a single armored personnel carrier with a shovel-shaped nose, sitting so it blocked both lanes. A soldier with a rifle stood in front of it, flagging them down.

Whitman could see more soldiers through the APC’s windows.

“Don’t stop,” he said.

“Fuck you. After that stunt you just pulled, undermining me? I’ll take my chances with the Army.” Angie said. “They can help us—give us an escort down to the beach.”

“Turn around,” Whitman said. “Back up.”

She must have heard the agitation in his voice, seen it in the way he craned forward, peering through the windshield, staring at the soldier with the rifle.

“They’re not zombies,” she said, sounding exasperated. “They’re better than zombies, at the very least.”

“For God’s sake, just back up,” Whitman pleaded. The soldier was coming closer, saying something Whitman couldn’t make out. He tried to give the soldier a cheery wave, an apologetic shrug: Sorry, we didn’t know this road was closed.

The soldier started miming at him. Turning his hand, as if he were shutting off the truck’s ignition.

“Please,” Whitman said.

“You gonna tell me why?” Angie asked.

“Yes! Yes, later, just—”

The soldier raised his voice until Whitman could finally hear him. “Switch off your engine! Then come out one at a time, with your left hand visible!”

“Go!” Whitman screamed.

Angie shoved the gearshift lever hard as she stamped on the pedals. The truck didn’t want to switch directions. It didn’t want to move backwards—took forever to start accelerating, to get rolling away from the soldier and the APC. Through the windshield Whitman could see the soldier raising his weapon. The soldier was still shouting but not at Whitman or Angie, now—he was shouting at his buddies back in the APC. The armored vehicle had enough machine guns mounted on its roof to shred their truck, to turn it into strips of bright metal in the space of a minute. What that would do to all the bodies inside wasn’t worth considering.

He shouted for Angie to hurry up, to get the truck moving.

The soldier opened fire before they’d even rolled back ten feet. His assault rifle tore through the truck’s grille, into the engine compartment. Whitman could hear bullets rattling around in there like BBs in a cup. The windshield starred and turned white.

But the truck moved. Angie stared at her side mirror and spun the wheel and they were accelerating, gaining speed. She fishtailed the truck and got it turned around, and there were more shots, a lot more, and someone screamed.

But they were gaining speed.

The truck died fifteen minutes later.

Whitman had to give it to the truck’s makers—the ponderous thing wheezed and rattled and screamed, but it kept running long after its radiator was shot full of holes. It bled coolant across ten long Brooklyn avenues and got them clear of the soldiers who were chasing them.

Working together, the bunch of them managed to push the truck into an abandoned taxi garage. Whitman felt it was important to get a roof over it, just in case anyone was tracking them with satellites or drones.

“Why would anyone do that?” Angie asked. “Are we so important?”

Whitman shook his head and bent over the steaming radiator again. The guy in the coveralls said he was a mechanic. He’d taken one look at the truck’s engine, though, and started swearing. Now it was Whitman’s turn to stare at the damage and try to pretend like there was something they could do.

Angie picked up a wrench and pointed it at him. “Maybe it’s you. Maybe you’re the one they’re looking for,” she said.

“I’m nobody.” He poked his finger through a bullet hole in the manifold, because he didn’t want to look at her.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Angie asked. “I need to make a plan if I’m going to help these people. To make a plan I need information.”

Whitman rubbed at his head. “I don’t know anything. How could I? I’m out here just like you.”

“You’re lying to me.”

“I don’t know anything,” he repeated.

She lifted the wrench as if she would club him to death. He didn’t even know if he would resist if she tried.

But then, after a second, she lowered the wrench again.

Did she believe him? She didn’t say anything more.

The baby in her arm gurgled and reached for her hair with its tiny fist. A tiny fist with a tiny plus sign inked on the back.

“Your kid’s adorable,” Whitman said. Even to his own ears it sounded like he was trying to change the subject.

“He’s not mine,” Angie said, staring daggers at him.

“No?”

“Somebody left him in a car seat. They just left him sitting on the sidewalk in a car seat and they never came back. I was inside, in my place. Trying to hunker down. But this little guy,” she said, stroking the baby’s nose until it wriggled in joy, “was right outside and kept crying. What else was I supposed to do? I went outside,” she said, “thinking I would just bring him in. That was when I saw Mr. Tydall from next door, limping up the sidewalk. Covered in bite marks. I knew I had to help as many people as I could. That it was going to be a long time before the government came to save us.”

Whitman studied the bullet holes in the radiator. He knew nothing about cars or engines or anything.

“Those soldiers were willing to shoot us all,” Angie said. “They were willing to shoot this baby rather than let us get away. You knew that.”

“I don’t know—”

“You knew.”

She dropped the wrench, and it clattered on the concrete floor. Several of the others looked up at the commotion. Some craned their heads around the side of the truck to see what had happened. How many of them were listening?

He couldn’t tell Angie everything. But she deserved at least a hint of the truth.

Even so, it was hard to start. “How did you get that?” he asked, pointing at the plus sign inked on the back of Angie’s hand.

“That’s not important.”

“Please. It is. One of the guys in the truck, one of the people you brought with you—he said you ran one of the local hospitals.”

“Hardly,” Angie said. She bounced the baby on her hip. “I’m a nurse. An RN.” She shook her head. “Fine. It was about a week ago. A guy from the CDC came through and interviewed all of us. He asked who among us had been exposed to zombies. Well, that was hilarious, right? We’ve been dealing with this epidemic for nearly six months now. You find me one nurse or doctor or orderly or x-ray technician even who hasn’t been bitten or spat on or bled on by a zombie. You find me even one and I’ll be surprised. So this guy from the CDC, he went down the line and stamped each of us. He didn’t even explain what it meant, though we could pretty much guess. It means we’re positives. Possibly positive.” She actually smiled a little. “What a bunch of horseshit, right? There’s no way this thing is that aggressive. No way we’re all infected.”

“No,” Whitman agreed. “It’s not likely. But this thing—this disease. There’s a major problem with it. It’s asymptomatic.”

One of the men leaning around the side of the truck cleared his throat. “What does that mean?” he asked.

“It means,” Whitman said, picking his words carefully, “when somebody turns into a zombie there’s no warning. It just happens. You can’t predict who’ll it happen to, or when.” He threw up his hands. “There’s no way to diagnose it, no test. Nothing anyone can do to say this person is infected and dangerous and that person is clear.”

“So the plus signs . . .” Angie prompted.

“You’re a nurse. You know about reverse triage.”

Angie’s face went blank. All expression just drained away, all at once.

She got it.

“I don’t know about it,” somebody said. The mechanic. “What the hell is that?”

“Normally at a hospital,” Angie said, “we do triage. In the emergency room. We figure out who’s about to die if we don’t help them first. Then we make everybody else wait, all the people who just have bad headaches or they’ve got the flu, or whatever. We focus our resources on the people who need them the most.”

“And reverse triage?” the guy asked.

Angie looked down at the baby. “That’s for when things get bad. I mean, monumentally bad. That’s when you look at the people who are about to die and you . . . you just let them go. You use your resources to help the people who have the best chance of making it. The people with the least threatening injuries. And everybody else can just . . . they . . . you try not to think about them.”

For a while she was silent. Whitman could see, from her face, that she was putting the pieces together. Figuring out just how bad things had become.

“Guilty until proven innocent, huh?” she said. She held up her left hand to show him her plus sign. “Infected until I can prove I’m healthy.” She leaned down and kissed the baby’s head. Then she did it again, and Whitman knew she was trying to hide her face from the others. So they wouldn’t see.

If you had a plus sign on your hand, the government was convinced you were a risk. That meant you had no rights. It meant they could tell you where to go, and how long you had to stay there, and there was nothing you could do about it.

“I saw that ID you have around your neck. And the logo on the truck. You work for the CDC, don’t you?” she asked.

He didn’t deny it.

“You were around zombies this whole time, too. You got bitten, or spat on, or bled on too.”

He looked down at his own hand. His right hand—the one that wasn’t inked. There was a mark there all the same, a red imprint in the shape of human teeth, in the soft flesh between his thumb and index finger. “It happened a long time ago. The very first zombie I ever saw, actually. I didn’t think she broke the skin. But my boss decided not to take any chances.”

Angie took a long, difficult breath. “What happens to people like us? Potential positives?”

“They go to Staten Island,” he told her.

Earlier, back when he was still in charge of something, Whitman had seen what Staten Island had become. They’d flown him over the island in a helicopter. One corporal had even given him a pair of binoculars so he could get a closer look.

Depending on how you counted, there were eight million people in New York City’s five boroughs, or nearly twenty million in the surrounding region. By a rough estimate, maybe twenty percent were potential positives—four million people with plus signs on their hands. Four million people who could turn into zombies without any warning, without any symptoms, at any time.

It was folly to think that the evacuation could run smoothly. That the safety of all those people could be guaranteed. And of course, it didn’t work out the way anyone had hoped.

Ferry boats ran nonstop, moving potential positives over to Staten Island. Dumping their human cargo at gunpoint, then turning around and steaming back for Manhattan or Brooklyn or across the harbor to New Jersey to pickup more. On the shore the evacuees stood in teeming crowds, unsure of what to do—many didn’t speak English, many more refused to follow the instructions bellowed at them by loudspeakers, if they could even hear those orders over the noise of all the helicopters.

It would have been chaos and riots and panic even without the zombies. But these people were potential positives. They had a chance of having contracted the prion disease. Many of them, just by sheer probability, had. And if you extrapolated on those probabilities, if you ran the equation for how many of those people were going to go symptomatic on this night of all nights—

The zombies had cut through the crowds like scalpels through healthy flesh. Even up in the helicopter Whitman could hear the screams. On the ground all he could see was waves, ripples forming in that sea of human heads as people ran and pushed and trampled each other, trying to get away from the teeth and fingernails of the zombies in their midst.

And all the while the ferries kept coming, kept dumping their cargo on the shore.

When Whitman finished telling Angie what he’d seen, he looked up with a start and realized that all of them, all of the positives, were staring at him.

“They can’t do that,” the girl with the shaved head insisted. “They can’t do that to us.”

“They just dump ’em there?” the mechanic asked. “But then what are they supposed to do?”

Whitman couldn’t answer that question. Instead he turned to Angie. “Where did you hear about these boats that are supposed to evacuate us?” he asked.

“From a doctor at my hospital. Just before he walked away from his post because he needed to take care of his family more than his patients. He made it sound like it was a good shot to get out of here. Was he talking about these ferries taking people to Staten Island?”

“I doubt it,” Whitman told her. “They’re not loading from the beaches, just from the piers on the river. Wherever he got that information, it wasn’t from the CDC or FEMA.”

Angie nodded and breathed in slowly. She paced around the room for a while and nobody got in her way. Finally she clapped her hands together, loud enough to make everyone jump.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Whitman asked.

“Okay, so fucking what? Nothing has changed. You never heard about any boats? Well, maybe nobody told you about them. But if there’s even a chance . . . we still need to get down there. To the beach. And we need to get there before dawn.”

“The truck isn’t—”

“We are going to get to those fucking boats. Maybe we can find some cars. We’ll go by foot if we have to,” Angie said, standing up. She looked over at the other positives, all of whom were watching her every move. The mechanic. The girl with the shaved head. The old lady. They hung on her every word. “Get ready. This isn’t going to be easy. But it’s our only chance. If they send us to Staten Island we’re never coming back.”

Whitman looked up. He couldn’t believe it, but listening to her—he half believed. He wanted there to be boats, if only because the idea of disappointing Angie terrified him.

“I don’t know who owns these boats, but they’ll take us—even if we have to make them. They’ll take us somewhere safe, somewhere that at least isn’t on fire or full of zombies. Okay? Everybody with me?”

They were.

There were plenty of abandoned cars in Brooklyn, but there was a real shortage of car keys, and not even the mechanic knew how to hot-wire a car. It was Whitman’s idea to steal bicycles instead. He helped Angie improvise a sling for the baby so she had both hands free. He helped the old lady onto a racing ten-speed and showed her where the brakes were. And then they were off.

They skirted fires in Midwood, and a horde of zombies in Homecrest. Despite the military’s best efforts the infected were out in droves, hundreds of them crouching in the street, their eyes scanning the corners. Looking for the next threat, the next human to attack. They looked less human than ever, their eyes glowing red with the reflected light of the sky.

It was getting hard to breathe by the time they got to the neighborhood of Gravesend. Smoke from the fires was blowing out to sea, right over them, and dropping soot like black snow that flecked their clothes and gathered in drifts in the gutters.

There came the moment when Angie cried out and Whitman stopped his bike. “No, keep going!” she shouted as she coasted past him. “Don’t you see? The sky!”

Whitman looked up. At first he couldn’t see what she was talking about. The sky was red with fire, just as it had been for hours now, red . . . no. No, it was turning pink. They were headed southeast, right into the dawn.

Which meant if her boats were going to land at Brighton Beach, they should be well on their way. They should be getting ready to land at any minute.

Angie’s bike was the slowest, because she had the baby to worry about. Whitman hung back with her, afraid of being parted from her now. She called out to the others, urging them on. The mechanic’s bike was faster than the rest and she told him to get to the beach as fast as he possibly could. The girl with the shaved head poured on speed and passed Whitman by. Maybe not all of them would make it, but some would.

Angie had kept these people alive all night—that had to be worth something, right?

Whitman had no idea what they were going to find. He didn’t know what was going to happen.

It didn’t matter. Just then he would have followed Angie anywhere.

As the dawn light came up, it showed them the soldiers. Warriors in full battle dress, carrying assault rifles. Lines of APCs and transport trucks and jeeps behind them. They stood to either side of the road, an implacable wall that blocked the way forward. There was no way to turn off, and if they tried to turn back now they would never reach the boats in time.

Whitman nearly cried out in rage. To have come so far, only to be scooped up now.

The soldiers moved to the sides of the road, falling back to let the cyclists through. Whitman stopped his bike in astonishment as he watched them make way. A soldier shouted at him, an order Whitman couldn’t hear.

“Just keep moving,” Angie said, coming up beside him. The baby was crying in its sling. “Whatever they say. Whatever they do, just get us as far as you can.”

He understood what she was asking of him. He knew he would do it, too.

But then the shouting soldier lifted his left hand. His unmarked left hand. He pointed at the back of it, then pointed down the road, toward the beach. “All positives this way,” he shouted.

Whitman just kept pedaling. The shouting soldier nodded in encouragement.

It was crazy, but—but maybe . . . maybe there were boats down there. Maybe Staten Island had filled up and they were going to move people to a new location. Maybe some place better than Staten Island. Maybe some place they could survive.

“Come on, you can do it,” Angie told him.

He steered the bike down the corridor of armed soldiers. Their honor guard. And up ahead, not a quarter mile away, was the beach. Ahead of him he saw the mechanic pumping his legs for this last little stretch, this last little race to make the rendezvous with the boats. Whitman’s legs burned, but he poured on more speed.

When they hit the beach, he jumped off his bike and ran stiff-legged across the boardwalk, down a short flight of stairs to the sand that glowed pink with the newborn sun. A crowd of people had gathered on the beach—no doubt they were waiting to board the boats. That had to mean the boats hadn’t left yet, hadn’t left without them. He spun around and looked at Angie and wanted to grab her, wanted to whirl her around in triumph.

“Where are the boats?” she asked.

He turned around and looked, for the first time, at the crashing waves. Listened to the sound they made, that perfect, thundering sound. It was mixed with something else, something like the high-pitched call of gulls.

There were no boats out there. Plenty of people waiting for them, plenty of people with marks on their left hands. But no boats anywhere.

So many people, all around them. People who must have been there before them, people in great crowds, pushing them, shoving them toward the water.

People were standing in the surf, up to their knees. Some up to their waists. Some of them tried to get back to the sand. Some of them staggered back, pushed by the waves.

Some of them were screaming. That was what he’d heard. Not gulls—screaming people.

“Where are the boats?” Angie asked again.

An amplified voice boomed out over the sand. “Keep moving into the water. You will not be allowed back onto the shore. Keep moving into the water. There is no room on the beach. Keep moving.”

“Wait,” Angie said. “Wait—are we—did we come all this way to—”

A big man came stumbling up out of the waves, hands and feet clawing at the wet sand, trying to get purchase. His mouth was a dark O sucking at the air. Whitman thought the man must be a zombie but no, his eyes weren’t red, his eyes were fine—

Shots rang out and blood erupted from the man’s chest. He collapsed into the surf and everyone started screaming, dropping to the ground, covering their heads with their hands.

“Keep moving into the water,” the amplified voice said again. “You will not be allowed back onto the shore.”

“No,” Angie said. “No. I won’t—I won’t just walk out there and drown. They can’t make me! I have rights!”

She had a plus sign on the back of her left hand.

“Reverse triage,” Whitman said. You treated those who had the best chance of surviving. The uninfected. Those who were already exposed, or even potentially exposed, you didn’t waste resources on them.

There had been a saying they’d had at the CDC. A mantra they repeated so they would never forget: Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

“Keep moving into the water.”

The sound of the surf, the screams. Occasionally he would hear the stutter of machine gun fire. Not often. That was why they were pushing people into the water. It was why the military had, he assumed, started the rumor of boats landing at Brighton Beach. Because there weren’t enough bullets for all the positives, but it didn’t cost anything to force people out into the water and let them drown.

“Keep moving into the water.”

Whitman’s head throbbed with horror, with regret, with anger. But maybe—maybe there was still something, some hope . . . his ID card, his CDC credentials, were in a plastic pouch around his neck. He reached inside his shirt and pulled out his lanyard. He held his ID up over his head. “CDC!” he shouted. “I’m CDC! Get me out of here! CDC!”

All around them people stared. People looked at him with hate in their eyes, and he didn’t blame them. He tried to shove through, to get to the nearest soldier, but the people shoved back.

“CDC! CDC!” It wouldn’t matter, he was a positive too. They wouldn’t care, they wouldn’t make an exception. Somebody grabbed the ID and nearly strangled him as they pulled it away from him. He pushed the lanyard over his head, just to stop it from choking him. “CDC,” he said again, “I’m CDC.”

Then he saw who had grabbed the ID. It was a soldier in full combat armor, his eyes hidden behind light amplifying lenses. He stared at the card for a long time.

“You’re CDC?” the soldier asked. “What the hell are you doing down here?”

“You have to get me out of here,” Whitman said. “And my wife and our baby. You have to get my family out of here. He grabbed Angie and pulled her close. She was smart enough to bury her face in his neck, as if they were together.

The soldier grabbed Whitman and hauled him toward the boardwalk. A few positives tried to interfere, but the soldier knocked their hands away with his weapon. Nobody had the strength to fight back.

Up on the boardwalk soldiers were gathered in a line. Whitman and Angie were shoved through, into an open space beyond. Whitman’s ID was cut off his neck and taken away.

Angie clutched at him and he wished he could tell her what was happening. He wished he knew himself. More soldiers came bustling toward them. One of them, with the eagle insignia of a Colonel, had Whitman’s ID in his hand.

“Where the hell have you been, sir?” he asked.

Angie looked up into Whitman’s face. “Sir?” she asked.

“I, uh—I got separated from a reconnaissance group,” Whitman said. “I was looking for my wife and child, here. We found each other but then I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t . . .” He couldn’t finish the lie.

But the colonel nodded. “Emergencies like this, I’m surprised half my troops know where to be, much less the civilian staff. Well, thank God we found you in time. I’ll get a helicopter down here to take you back to Manhattan and the forward headquarters. We need every warm body we can get working on the evacuation. I don’t need to tell you what a clusterfuck this has become.”

“No, Colonel, you don’t. My wife and baby will of course—”

“Mr. Whitman, I appreciate what you’re trying to do. And we need you, badly. We’ve already lost Staten Island and the Bronx is . . . there’s nothing left up there. So I’m going to break regulations and let a positive into Manhattan.”

“Of course, as you should, and—”

“One positive. I know you’re not married, sir. And you don’t have a baby.”

Soldiers came forward then, soldiers with guns and they shoved Angie, they shoved her back toward the sand. She screamed. She screamed his name and she held up the baby like it would change somebody’s mind, like it meant something. The baby lifted its arms, held them up in supplication. Whitman could see the tiny plus sign marked on the back of its left hand.

Angie kept screaming, as they pushed her down the beach. He could hear her screaming, long after they put him in a helicopter and flew him away.

They would let him live. They needed him. They needed him to come up with ideas, ideas about what to do next. Ideas about how to manage the end of the world.

Like the idea that anyone who was potentially positive should be marked, that the back of their left hand should be marked with a plus sign.

That had been Whitman’s idea, originally.

He’d been proud of it.