Gary shook his head hard and slowly rose to his feet. Looking across at Hoboken he saw nothing but empty buildings and quiet streets. The geysers of poisonous gas he'd seen erupt there were gone, had never been there. Just a hallucination.
He flexed his hands, observed himself for a second. Everything intact and in working order. In fact he felt better than ever - the buzzing had left his head and his hands didn't shake like they had before. Most importantly his hunger was gone. Not entirely - he could feel it looming at the horizon of his awareness, knew it would come back stronger than ever soon enough but for now at least his stomach felt at peace.
He turned around slowly, uncertain how long this newfound sense of health might last or how fragile it might be. Behind him he saw that nothing else had changed - New York was the same as ever. Just as quiet. He saw a pair of boots on the ground by the bodega where he'd fought with the trucker cap guy and decided to investigate.
What he found didn't answer any questions. Trucker Cap was dead. Not kind of dead, not walking dead - just dead, lying there decomposing in the sun. Gary could find no damage to the guy's head, no signs of trauma at all but for some reason the guy had just stopped. Fallen down and stopped, permanently by the look of it.
Gary picked up the hat and turned it around in his hands. Then he dropped it with a start and scrabbled backwards on all fours away from the corpse. Whatever had done this to the big guy might still be around - and he would be vulnerable to it as well.
Not a virus - a virus needed living cells to replicate itself. A bacterium might have done it or even more likely some kind of fungal infection, sure, a fungus spread by airborne spores -
Spores that just happened along at the exact second of Gary's dark epiphany? It made no sense. Gary had told the guy to fuck off and die. To think that some fungus that just happened to counteract the effects of the Epidemic had wafted by at that exact moment was ludicrous. Something had wasted Trucker Cap, though, something had happened right after Gary told him to -
Gary might have contemplated this more if he hadn't heard gunfire nearby. Guns meant survivors. The dead lacked the muscular coordination to use firearms. Some desperate lone living survivor must have been making his last stand somewhere to the north. Up in the meatpacking district by the sound of it.
It wouldn't last.
Gary should just ignore it, go home to his apartment and think about what his newfound ability to control the undead meant and where it might come from. Walking into a firefight was the best way to get shot in the head which was the most certain way - the only way - that his new existence could end.
He'd never been able to resist his own curiosity, though. It was what got him into med school in the first place, his desire to know what made things tick.
Despite his best interests he found himself running northward toward the noise of the shots. They stopped abruptly when he was halfway there but he'd figured out by then they were coming from near the river, maybe on one of the piers.
Advancing carefully he nearly got himself shot. A black girl in a school uniform with a scarf around her head was pointing a rifle right in his direction. He slid down behind an abandoned car and screwed his eyes shut, his arms clutched around his knees, trying hard to make himself small and insignificant. She'd looked pretty serious about her weapon. Like a soldier or a policeman or something. Absurd... but this was a day for absurdities, it seemed.
There were others with her. A whole team of them judging by the noise they made. Their weapons jangled as they moved. He heard one of them talking - a hard, cold voice with an accent to it. She must be from Brooklyn. "I saw movement in there," she said.
No. No no no no no.
"If you shoot now the noise might draw others," another of them said - a man.
Thank you, whoever you are, Gary thought, thank you.
He waited in desperate stillness for a long while, long after he heard them moving off. It sounded like they were headed over toward Gary's old workplace. So much for curiosity. When he was certain they were all out of sight he got up and moved as fast as he could toward the river - away from them. He tried to run but the best he could pull off was a loping walk. When he got to the river though he found another surprise.
A ship stood out in the Hudson, maybe a hundred yards out. Just an old tub with visible rust on its hull and a jury-rigged wooden superstructure. The ship's registration on its nose was illegible, written in an alphabet Gary didn't recognize - a little like Hebrew and a lot like Medieval calligraphy. He peered closer and saw people onboard. Two men leaning on the rail, studying the wharves while a girl in that same costume of school uniform and head wrap stood on top of the wooden structure with an exceedingly long rifle in her hands.
He knew enough to keep his head down this time.
There were... survivors, he thought. Organized survivors with a way to get out of Manhattan. He had no idea what they were doing in New York but their presence meant at least one inescapable, dreadful thing. His decision to transform himself into one of the walking dead, to become this unliving creature had been based on the fact that New York was done, extinct, over. That there was no hope for the human race.
It looked like if he'd waited a couple of more days he might have been rescued.