After Midnight (20 page)

"You do realize that the door to the control booth is outside the block, right? You won't get the outer door open in a million years." Billy stopped dead in his tracks. I think I saw his shoulders sag.

"The pod door?"

"Yeah."
The pod door is about three or four inches of thick metal with a huge lock.

He was quiet for a long moment. "Fuck," he said heavily, "I didn't think of that." He was dead silent for about ten minutes.

I laid back down and closed my eyes.

"Hey, Benny?"
Billy asked tentatively.

“Yeah?”

"Do you really think we're fucked?"

For a long time I pondered that. Did I? Do I? With the sun high in the sky and birds singing in the trees, the ancient and omnipresent moon illuminating the night and the land standing unchanged, are we...going to die?

Billy must have thought I fell asleep. "Benny?"

"Yeah," I replied, thoughtful, "we are."

June 16, 2013-
Quincy borrowed Long Lost. I could barely even get over to the cell door. He looked even worse, thinner, and his head looks too big for his body. His eyes were sunken and his skin was a weird color.

“Here,” I said, squatted, and slid it across the floor. The
book somehow made it into Quincy’s’s reach.

“Thanks, man.”

Billy was sawing on that same bar again, grinning like he’s fucking crazy.

“Give it up, Billy,” I said.

He didn’t reply. He knew it was a lost cause.

I’ve been lying on my bunk ever since, my stomach gurgling agonizingly and my forehead burning with some
kinda fever. I don’t have the energy to keep this shit up much longer. I take little cat naps, but they’re not doing it. I try not to. I have nightmares. Not about zombies, but about food. I woke up with a boner this morning from a dream of southern fried chicken and biscuits, and I think I masturbated to it.

June 18, 2013- There were about ten zombies down at the fence when I woke up this morning. I watched them out the narrow window most of the day, disgusted and fascinated at the same time. They look so much like normal people from here. I couldn't even see wounds on most of them, except the cop; his guts are hanging out. The gateway’s still open. A few of them are inside, walking in circles. I hope no one left any doors open. The last thing I want is one of those things in here.

June 20, 2013- It was nice and sunny when I got up around two this afternoon, but deep black clouds started gathering in the east sometime around four-thirty. It started raining heavy ten minutes later, thunder crashing and lightning flashing. The wind picked up and hail the size of Ping-Pong balls began plopping out of the sky. The idiot zombies didn’t seem to notice any of this; they just kept clawing at the fence. What retards. They could just come through the gate, but they just…pass it by like nothing. These are the things bringing the world to an end? These stupid, shuffling weaklings? God. They make Romero’s ghouls look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Anyway, I was watching the storm out the window when I saw a goddamn funnel form high in the sky and drop like a Vietcong gook from a tree. It must have touched down in a neighborhood, because within a minute all kinds of shit
was swirling in around it like pagan dancers. I’m pretty sure I even saw a tractor trailer.

“Hey, guys,” I called over my shoulder. “There’s a tornado out here!”

Quincy rolled off his bed and came to his door. “Where’s it at, man? It ain’t comin this way, is it?” He sounded scared.

I wasn’t. I thought it was pretty damn cool. I felt almost alive for the first time in...
God, a week or more.

The swaying trunk moved south, swung back north, and then looked as though it were coming right at us. My heart slammed and fear coursed through my veins. It felt so good. I was lightheaded.

“I think it is!” I cried almost joyously.

“Fuck!”

“Hey, I see it!” one of the guys further down the block called out. “Man, look at that shit!”

The tornado continued our way, striking something that mushroomed in a bright orange ball of fire.

I oooohed, and the guy down the block awwwwed.

“Is it coming?” Quincy
yelled franticly from behind me.

“Yeah.”

“Shit, man! We’re fucked!”

“I hope it hits,” I said, suddenly realizing what would happen, “if it hits it might smash the building open and we can get out of here!”

I was almost literally bursting with excitement…but that turned to horror when I saw our salvation shift again and glide away.

“No! No! No!
Nonononononono! Goddamn it!”

June 23, 2013- The power went out yesterday. It was evening and I was rescanning Relentless when the overhead lights flickered, hummed, and then died.

Everyone groaned at once.

“Goddamn it!” someone yelled from down the block.

When night fell, it was pitch black. There wasn’t even the moon. A couple times someone would get up to use the crapper and fall or knock into something. I banged my shin. That night I had a nightmare where the dead got into the prison and were eating people and it was so dark all I could do was sit on my bunk and listen to people screaming and zombies moaning and chewing.

Today Billy’s been staring into space. It’s
kinda scary. I called his name but he just gazed at the wall.

June 24, 2013- Last page. I gave away some more paper to Quincy. I don’t know what he’s doing with it, but whatever. I don’t need it anymore. There’s no hope. They aren’t coming back. We’re all fucked, just like Billy said.

Billy.

He killed himself last night. Gashed his wrists open with a bit of metal bunk rigging. Now he’s standing at his door, drooling and reaching though the bars at me, his eyes gray and empty. It’s about a hundred and ten degrees in here, and he’s already starting to reek.

Mario Laraza sat in his opulent Midtown office on the afternoon of June 28, a drink in one hand and a Cuban cigar in the other. Before him, looking scared and tired, were his surviving
capos
, six beefy, middle-aged men in expensive suits. There were nine of them at the beginning of the week, but Vinnie was bitten on Tuesday; Fredo shot himself on Thursday; and Tommy was gone, disappeared. Some of his guys said he was planning on leaving the city and heading up to Maine. Maybe he got out, maybe he didn’t. The last Mario knew, the roads out of the city were closed, guarded by the New York militia, and anyone who tried getting through was shot on the spot.

Someone coughed, bringing Mario out of his thoughts. “I’m
gonna make this short and sweet. Outside, right now, dead people are killing and eating anyone and everyone.”

Tony Bagels, nearly four-hundred pounds, winced.

“Alright? And whoever gets eaten turns into one these...zombies or whatever they’re callin’ ‘em. The news says their numbers are tripling every hour. By this time next week, the entire city will be overrun. The police, the hospitals, the...the fucking subway, it’s all gonna be gone.”

The
capos
looked terrorized.

“In short, gentlemen, we’re pretty well fucked.”

Mario sighed. Hopefully they understood the gravity of the situation, or else they’d balk at what he was going to say next.

“Last night, I had a sit-down with the Five Families.”

Carlo Mussa gasped. The Laraza Family had been in a constant state of war with the Five Families since 1985. For the most part, it was a cold war, but occasionally, things got hot, like in 1989. That year, the Gambinos broke up a Laraza bookmarking operation in Washington Heights. In retaliation, a couple of Larazas kidnapped a Gambion
capo
, beat him to death, and then left him in the trunk of a car on Staten Island. In ’92, a Laraza and a Colombo got into a fistfight in a bar in Brooklyn. By the end of the year, eight guys were dead, hanging from meat hooks in the backs of trucks, ground up in compacting machines, and shot in the guts. Until 2005, the Larazas had Fanini and Caramaza families on their side, but both went bust in that same year, leaving the Larazas alone.

“We decided that it would be in our best interest, all of ours, to call a truce and suspend normal operations for now. In the meantime, we’re going to team up. This building has more than enough space for all of us
and
our families.”

Mario paused to let that sink in. “We’re going to pool weapons, food, resources, manpower...we’re
gonna turn this place into a fortress...and we’re gonna survive.”

Three weeks later, the last zombie in the city crumbled and died in Harlem; the government’s “vaccine” worked, surprisingly.

During the massive clean-up operations that followed, the main office of
Laraza Enterprises, a massive twenty-five story building in Midtown, was entered by city police and National Guardsmen. Inside, they found a massacre. Guys were stuffed into broom closets, hanging from the ceilings, chopped up, garroted, shot, beaten, hell, one poor bastard was even drowned in a huge aquarium in the lobby, a sporty pair of concrete shoes on his feet.

Several days later, the chief of police and the surviving remnants of the NYPD’s Organized Crime Task Force went through the building, one of the officers keeping count. 

“We got Larazas; Bonnanos; Luccheses...the gang’s all here.”

The entire New York City mob had killed itself.

“Do you believe in God, boys?” the chief asked, “because I sure as hell do.”

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