Titanic 2020: Cannibal City

Prologue: City of the Dead

She was running for her life. Twelve years old, and top of the menu.

Ronni came to New York from London for a vacation. She didn't particularly want to go, but her mother insisted — it would be educational, she said, think of the museums, think of the art galleries, think of that big statue thingy you see in the harbour. Her mother didn't have the slightest interest in education — what she meant was, I'll park you in a museum, then I'll go off shopping.

On the day it happened — it being the day everyone suddenly dropped down dead — Ronni was in the Museum of Natural History, a great, fantastic place, but after four hours she'd had enough, and after six hours, her mother being two hours late in coming to pick her up, she'd really had enough. So she decided, against strict orders, to make her own way back to the hotel. She'd already spent the meagre few dollars her mother had left her to buy lunch, so she had to walk — but almost as soon as she left the museum, people began to drop dead all around her. Well — perhaps it wasn't quiet as instantaneous as that, but it felt like it. What they actually did was start throwing up — here, there, everywhere. It was disgusting. Then they collapsed, too weak to move. Ronni just held her nose and kept walking. But even when she got to her hotel there was no let up. There were people throwing up in the lobby, in the elevator and along the corridor outside her room. She was incredibly relieved just to slam the door shut, lie down on her bed and flick the telly on — only to find that half the channels weren't working, and those that were were showing pictures of people throwing up.

Ronni wasn't stupid — over her few days in the Big Apple she had been vaguely aware of all the talk about this supposed 'Red Death' — some kind of a bug sweeping across America that lots of people were dying from — but New York didn't seem to be greatly affected, so she had supposed it was all being hugely exaggerated. There were a lot of things she wanted to see around the city, and some little outbreak of flu wasn't going to stop her enjoying herself, so she deliberately avoided watching the news after that and remained blissfully unaware that the situation was deteriorating across the whole world.

But now, as she lay back on her bed, she realised how much the day at the museum and the long walk home had taken out of her. Her legs ached and her head was sore. She'd drunk nearly a litre of water, but still felt really hot. Actually, now she felt a little . . .

Ronni dashed to the bathroom and threw up.

And then again.

She staggered back to bed and crawled under the covers. Damn — had she picked up the bug? Or maybe just a little bit of it? No wonder, with everyone being sick all around her. But she was young and strong and she'd soon shake it off. A bit of a sleep and she'd be fine.

In every corner of that magnificent city people were doing exactly the same as Ronni — climbing under blankets, lying down at work, stretching out on park benches and saying to themselves, 'A little rest, and I'll feel better soon.'

Think of it — by 2020 there were eighteen million people living in New York. And one day, they all just lay down for a little rest.

The Four Seasons Hotel was, without doubt, one of the finest hotels in New York, if not the world. Was is the important word here. It was a five-star hotel, luxurious beyond most people's wildest dreams. Now, if you had to decide how many stars it deserved, you would probably venture — oh, minus thirty?

That's minus *****************************

Six weeks after the Red Death struck it was dank, dirty and stinking. The toilets were blocked and overflowing, the stench from the kitchens was overwhelming and rats scampered along the corridors, gorged on decaying human flesh. Rotting corpses lay in the lobby or sat slumped over tables in the dining room. They were tucked in bed or curled up in the corridors. Some were even standing upright in the elevators, eternally waiting for a floor they would never arrive at.

And yet —

Ronni was sick for three days, too ill even to call room service, too fevered to wonder where her mother was or why no one had bothered to come and clean the room. But on the fourth morning she woke — and felt fine. She got up and had a shower and the most disturbing thing about it was that the water was cold. She tried calling her mother's room, even though it was only next door, but there was no response. She decided to let her mother sleep on — at least she could then slip down to breakfast without her mum's usual complaint about her choice of clothes. Ronni had slept for so long, and was now so hungry, that all memories of the Red Death and the collapsing population had been pushed to the very back of her mind. To her it was just another day of her vacation — until she stepped into the corridor and saw the first of the rotting corpses. She screamed and ran to her mother's room and banged on the door, but there was no answer. Perhaps she'd gone out already, and was unaware of what was surely a murder outside her room. Ronni edged past the corpse and rushed to the elevator — and screamed again; the door was wedged open by a woman's blue and bloated body. A double murder! But then as she took the stairs down to the lobby and saw the bodies there, and there and there, memories of reports of the Red Death came flooding back. But what if nobody knew that the hotel had been so badly affected by the plague? She had to summon help! Stop a policeman! She raced across the corpse-strewn lobby and emerged on to Fifth Avenue — and what had been a very noisy city, with bumper to bumper traffic and the sidewalks crammed with workers and tourists, was absolutely and completely quiet. Cars were crashed or abandoned; bodies lay everywhere.

It was horrible.

You might say Ronni was lucky to be alive — but it was 'luck' in the broadest possible sense, because if you woke up with millions of corpses for company, you probably wouldn't feel lucky at all. You'd feel terrified, and distressed, and confused, just like Ronni. But the fact is, she did wake up, she was alive, and now she had to figure out a way to survive.

There was no power in the city, which meant that the fresh food was already off, but there were still plenty of tins and bottles of water, both downstairs in the hotel kitchens, and in grocery stores in the immediate neighbourhood. Ronni learned to ignore the bodies lying everywhere, although she could never truly get used to the appalling stench. By day she explored the streets surrounding her hotel, spending hours in huge department stores like Macy's and Bloomingdale's, trying on clothes, painting her face with make-up, pretending she was a pop star, acting, playing, singing, doing everything she could to take her mind off the fact that the world had ended and she was utterly alone. At night she retreated to her room in the hotel. She cooked her tinned food on a small gas stove she had rescued from a camping store. She spent the hours of darkness staring out of her bedroom window. She slept only fitfully. For the first three or four weeks she actually supposed that she would be rescued, that a helicopter would land and take her away to safety. Yet she knew deep down that the catastrophe that had befallen her, the city, the country and the world was so indescribably huge that there was no possibility of it.

Ronni lost count of the number of times she stood outside her mother's door calling for her to come out, while resisting the temptation to try and break in. As long as she didn't truly know that her mother was dead, she could at least pretend that she was still alive in there and just refusing to talk. Perhaps her mum had been shocked into silence by what had happened or maybe she slipped in and out of her room when Ronni wasn't there, off on her own little shopping trips to the exclusive fashion stores up and down Fifth Avenue. Ronni had grown used to seeing the corpses in the hotel and on the streets outside, but she never wanted to see her mum like that. As long as she stayed on this side of the door she would remember her mother as she was — beautiful, elegant, and very, very bossy.

In what she guessed was her sixth week, Ronni woke hungry in the middle of the night and slipped down to the kitchens. Returning across the foyer with a tin of franks 'n' beans she found herself face to face with a wolf.

A wolf!

She was momentarily frozen to the spot. The creature looked vicious and savage, its teeth were bared and its snout was thick with the rotting innards of the corpse it had been tearing into on the hotel's marble floor.

Ronni and the wolf stared at each other for fully ten seconds, each of them frozen in the narrow band of moonlight streaming through the atrium glass.

Then the wolf snarled and charged.

Ronni hurled the tin at it and spun on her heel. The wolf staggered as the missile struck it on the top of the head. It let out an angry yelp — but it recovered quickly and immediately tore after her. Ronni reached the stairs and began to race up them three at a time, the wolf snapping at her heels. As she reached the fifth floor it finally hurled itself at her, but by luck she had just come to a set of double doors, and as they sprang back behind her they slammed into the creature, hurling it backwards. The respite was momentary. The wolf threw itself through the doors and hurtled down the corridor behind her. As the animal's dripping jaws snapped towards her Ronni finally reached her bedroom and threw herself inside; in the same movement she spun and slammed the door on the creature's jaw. It howled and fell back, leaving three teeth on the floor.

Ronni slid down the inside of the door and rested her head against it. She could hear the heavy panting and painful yelps of the wolf just a few centimetres away. But she was safe . . . for now.

A wolf in the Four Seasons — Mother would have had a fit.

But where had it come from? She knew there was a zoo in Central Park — perhaps from there? If it had been hungry enough and desperate enough to escape, then what if it wasn't alone? Not only might there be a pack of wolves out there, but also animals that were faster and stronger and even more cunning. Tigers and panthers and cheetahs and . . . Ronni shuddered. She spent the rest of the night slumped against the door, sweating through nightmare after nightmare about being torn to shreds by wild beasts.

By the morning, with the wolf gone and the bright sunshine lightening her mood, Ronni had come to a decision. She had spent the past few weeks in the immediate vicinity of the Four Seasons, never travelling further than a few blocks in any direction and never quite letting the hotel out of her sight. But because it was surrounded on all sides by tall buildings she hadn't been able to get a proper view of the rest of the city. What if there were other people out there using lights or flares to attract the attention of a rescue helicopter or a searching aeroplane? What if they were rescued and she got left behind? She had to find out if she really was alone. She thought her best bet might be the Empire State Building — from there she would be able to see every part of the city and far beyond as well. Whether she found other people or not, she knew she would not return to the hotel. It was no longer safe. She packed as many of the clothes she had 'borrowed' over the past few weeks as she could into her rucksack and left her room. She paused outside her mother's door. As she said her final goodbye, tears sprang from her eyes.

King Kong fell to his doom from the top of the Empire State Building. Ronni nearly died just getting there. The big gorilla had the advantage of being able to climb up the outside of the building. Ronni had the disadvantage of having to climb 1,860 steps to the viewing platform on the 102nd floor because the elevators no longer worked. It took her ages and by the time she got there her legs were like jelly and she could hardly breathe. She lay on the platform floor for another half an hour, quite lacking the strength to even drag herself up to look out over the city. At least part of her was thinking: What's the point? In the twenty-five minutes it had taken her to walk from the hotel to the Empire State, she had seen nothing but death and destruction. No hint of human life: plenty of rats, some wild dogs, even an ominous animal roar from somewhere in the far distance, but nothing to give her any hope at all.

Eventually she managed to pull herself up. She pressed her face against the wire fence surrounding the platform and looked out across the city. She knew from reading one of the tourist leaflets lying scattered about that on a clear day she might have been able to see nearly eighty miles in every direction — as far as the states of Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Massachusetts. But today was grey and overcast and she could barely see to the edges of the city. It all appeared so . . . normal. The landmark buildings were all there, and from such a height the cars on the broad avenues below appeared like toys and the people like ants — except it was more like a photograph than a moving picture: there was no motion, no life. By straining her eyes Ronni could just about make out the shape of the 'big statue thingy' her mum had talked about — the Statue of Liberty on its isolated little island. She knew that it had once welcomed immigrants to the Land of the Free. Now there was nobody left to welcome.

She felt suddenly hungry again. There was a restaurant half a dozen floors below which, thankfully, must have closed down before the worst of the Red Death, because it wasn't littered with bodies.

Unfortunately most of the food was off, but she was able to pick up cartons of fruit juice and bags of potato chips. She sat at a table and tried to think about her next move. So long as she wasn't eaten by wild creatures, there was enough tinned food in the city to keep her going for the rest of her life. But what was the point of living if there was nobody else left?

No!

There had to be!

She would search every corner of the city, and if she found no one, she would start looking beyond it. She wasn't alone, she couldn't be alone!

An hour later, with night fallen, Ronni returned to the observation platform. At first it looked as if someone had snatched the entire city away — where it would once have provided a dazzling, neon-lit vista, there was nothing. Then, as her eyes became accustomed to the blackness, she began to pick out the vague outlines of the skyscrapers surrounding the Empire State, but it was as if they had been snatched away, leaving only a shadowy memory behind.

Ronni froze.

There!

Lights!

Mere flickering pinpricks — but against a background of such total blackness that they shone out like beacons.

They had to be at least three or four miles away — but where, exactly? With her pulse racing Ronni hurried along the platfrom until she came to a framed map, displayed for the benefit of tourists so that they would know which parts of the city they were looking at. It was difficult to read in the darkness, and she was half terrified that if she took her eyes off the lights they would be gone by the time she looked back. She finally stabbed her finger down on to the glass. There — Battery Park! That's where they were!

Survivors!

Ronni heard the music first, booming out of the darkness, rhythmic, almost hypnotic, and it filled her with elation.

She'd found a bicycle not far from the Empire State — somewhat squeamishly wresting it from a dead man's hands — and was now able to fly along at considerable speed. Luckily New York was designed in such a way that long avenues like Broadway could take her straight to a destination without her having to remember complex directions.

As she erupted from the avenue into Battery Park itself and got her first real taste of the sea air and spotted the flames flickering ahead of her, she couldn't help but let out a yelp of joy. Just ahead she could see the silhouettes of hundreds of people dancing to the music around half a dozen bonfires! Hundreds!

Ronni leaped from her bike, allowing it to crash away into bushes, and charged forward.

Spits had been erected over the flames and whole animals were being roasted! Fresh food! Huge black pots bubbled away! Ronni's taste buds watered as they never had before. Civilisation!

Just as she reached the edge of the party the people all began to turn in one direction, cheering and clapping excitedly. Ronni wanted to be part of it, she wanted to dance and sing and hug everyone! She ducked down and began to wriggle her way through to the front of the crowd, her whole body tingling with excitement. Then she caught her first glimpse of. . .

... a woman, her hair dank and bedraggled, her clothes torn, being dragged out of a metal cage mounted on a trailer. She had what looked like a dog's collar around her neck, attached to a chain which was being pulled by a burly, heavily muscled man wearing . . . a wolf's head! He gave the chain a hard yank and the woman stumbled down a slanted wooden walkway on to the grass and fell to her knees. The wolf-headed man stood behind her and drew out a long, jagged knife from a sheath on his belt.

The crowd began to chant: 'Kill! Kill! Kill!'

Ronni knew she should have screamed at them to stop. But she couldn't do anything. As she looked around the faces of the people watching she saw a kind of madness in their eyes. They weren't happy survivors of a desperate plague — they were frightened people driven crazy by it. Ronni was suddenly more scared than she ever had been in her life. She began to back away through the crowd as the chanting continued to grow in intensity all around her. 'Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!'

Ronni emerged by one of the bonfires, which was being tended by a solitary old man, slowly rotating a crackling animal on a spit. But then as the creature's head turned towards her she saw with total and absolute horror that it wasn't an animal at all.

It was a human being.

Ronni screamed. She couldn't help it. She screamed hogh and loud and piercing.

The chanting faded.

All eyes turned towards her.

She wasn't one of them.

Ronni ran for her life.

And then so did they.

The chase was on!