TheKookroach
Experienced
- Joined
- Mar 14, 2012
- Posts
- 46
Taylor Valentine stared out the sixth floor window of The Dakota (wiki), looking down on Central Park (gmsv). Just below him was the Strawberry Fields Memorial, the remembrance to John Lennon, who had lived in this very building, and died on its steps that tragic day in 1980. Taylor hadn't been born yet, but his mother -- a rabid Beatles and Lennon fan -- made sure he grew up with the knowledge of who the latter was and what he had stood for in his shortened life.
Lennon's death had been tragic, but it was other deaths here in this neighborhood that Taylor was currently concerned with, and specifically one that had happened here in this very apartment.
The Plague had enveloped all of Manhattan and was quickly spreading across the City, the State, and reportedly the Country. And if the plague itself wasn't bad enough, what it was doing to people -- what it was causing people to do to other people -- was simply unbelievable.
People were eating other people!
Taylor had seen it with his own eyes, and now he couldn't hardly get the image out of his mind. He and his girl friend, Lois, had been spending summer break in a Dakota apartment that belonged to his uncle when the mayhem broke out. They stayed behind the doors of the apartment, scared to leave it, despite the security of the exclusive building. Then, two nights ago, the madness came into the apartment, when they opened the door to aid a screaming neighbor and a Crazy -- as people on the street were calling them -- burst into the apartment, slamming Taylor against a wall.
Minutes later, he returned to consciousness and found a trio of Crazies eating on Lois. It was horrible; like some Nature channel wildlife program, the Crazies had ripped out Lois's throat and were ripping her entrails out of her abdomen with their teeth and fingers. Blood was everywhere, and the stench was so overwhelming that if just the sight of seeing her being eaten hadn't been enough to make him retch, the smell would have.
The Crazies were ignoring Taylor, totally intent on feeding upon his girl friend. But when he tried to shoo them away and rescue his girl friend, their attention shifted. Taylor knew that getting her away from them would be like trying to rescue someone from a pack of wolves; he could see that she was already dead, and if he continued, he would be, too. Instead, he fled into another room, locking and barricading the door.
After hours, when the gorging sounds in the next room had finally ended, Taylor emerged to find the Crazies gone and Lois's body almost unrecognizable as human remains. When he had recovered and was finally able to do so, he wrapped what was left of her with a blanket and put her body in the bath tub of one of the bedrooms.
He had spent the last two days listening to the news and watching what little he could see of the city from the corner apartment's windows. Manhattan was a madhouse, and -- whether it was better or worse, he wasn't sure -- the military had isolated the island in an attempt to keep the Plague from escaping. They'd first blockaded, then later destroyed the bridges and tunnels that connected Manhattan to the outside world. It had been a vain attempt, of course; the mayhem was out and, seemingly, uncontrollable.
Through the news reports, Taylor had learned some things about the Crazies. Of course, he had no way of knowing how much of it was truth and how much of it was speculation.
Like a bad vampire movie, they apparently didn't like sunlight. Taylor could believe that. During the day, he saw virtually no one in the streets below. Even though he himself wasn't from New York City -- this was his first visit to the East Coast, in fact -- he found it disconcerting to look down upon the Big Apple's streets and see virtually no people. There had been more clarifying reports, too: one had said that in the shade or inside buildings, the Crazies moved like normal people, if not a bit out of their minds, like a very drunk person; but in darkness they were extremely fast -- one newscaster used the phrase "Olympic sprinter fast" -- and vicious.
Supposedly, water could kill them, or at least deter them. He'd seen a video online of members of the FDNY and civilians using a fire hose to drive back a couple of dozen Crazies. In the aftermath, the camera caught the images of lifeless Crazies, with their skin practically dissolving off their bones. It had nearly made Taylor retch, as he seemed to be doing at least twice a day.
And the strangest thing of all, they didn't like "nature". They didn't like lakes and rivers, which of course fell into the whole water issue; but apparently they didn't like dirt or grass either. And this Taylor could believe, looking out upon Central Park from his uncle's apartment. Using the telescope that the documentary author used to use to view the park below him, Taylor could see that the park was full of people.
And there had been lots of video on line or on television of people congregating in parks, on baseball and soccer fields. Beyond the city, massive tent, camp trailer, and motor home cities were forming in farm fields and forests. The Crazies, it seemed, had a fondness for pavement. One news commentator had speculated that he thought it was because the Plague had begun inside New York City, but the government and Center for Disease Control, essentially, called it bunk. Of course, they didn't have an explanation for what the hell was happening, so no one was listening to them anyway.
All Taylor knew was that for more than a week he'd felt pretty safe inside The Dakota. But, since his girl friend's brutal death, he'd begun hearing what he was certain was evidence that the Crazies were still in the building ... feeding on the tenants. He had enough food to stay here possibly for weeks, maybe months; and he could always try to access other apartments to scrounge for more, but that might mean drawing the attention of the Crazies.
But ... is it better to be out there... in the park? They were still saying it was the safest place to be on the island. But ... people were still dying, of course, because they needed food, too; people had been venturing out of the park back into the buildings surrounding it, and they didn't always come back.
Taylor looked down upon the park, down upon the people beginning to move closer to the buildings as the sun rose higher in the sky, reducing the amount of shady places and sending the Crazies back into their holes for the day. He looked across to the computer, checking the date in the bottom corner: 15 July. That's good, he thought, knowing that this time of the year, with the sun higher in the sky, there would be fewer shaded places during the daytime.
He looked down and saw a pair of men sprinting for the entrance of the neighboring building, carrying all sorts of hand weapons. All he could do was with them, Good luck.
