This Broken City Sky

The eight crept up to the front of the alleyway, just beside the hotel they had been living in for three and a half months. The air around them was arid, crisp, and a brisk wind pressed against them occasionally. The sky above them was a dark grey color, causing their eyes to waver between focused and unfocused. They could hear the groans and sounds from the group of undead that had been in front of their hotel; unknowing that the humans they sought had already made an escape.

Kat marched to the front of the group, her body shaking with a mixture of the sudden cold and the rush of frantic emotions frenzying against her nervous system. With a quick glance behind her to the rest of the group, she peered around the corner, seeing that the group of walkers in front of the hotel was still focused on getting into the building. She could hear their bodies hitting the wooden fence, and the wood giving sharp snaps as it slowly splintered. She sighed heavily, her warm breath coming out as a plume of steam in front of her and she turned to the group.

“They’re still focused on the hotel, so we’ll go the long way, around the block, and then toward the 102,” she whispered, before licking her lips, which had become remarkably dry in the short time she had been outside.

“No way,” Johnny hissed quietly, “we need to get there fast and going around the block would take time we don’t have.” Kat gave him a look before glancing around to make sure no walkers had seen them.

“Would you rather risk having that whole group of infected after us?” She asked him softly before shaking her head and stepping around the group, beginning toward the opposite end of the alleyway, going farther away from the hoard of walkers. The group followed behind her, keeping their eyes peeled for any sign of movement.

“Let’s keep the gun firing to a minimum,” Dylan whispered to Kat, who merely nodded, “only if we have to.”

They were all set on edge at the aspect of leaving their fortress before they wanted to. Everything was a blur to some of them, to others it was crystal clear. The adrenaline had only heightened their sense of focus and their urgency to get to Brooklyn as fast as the possibly could. With the maps and plans fresh in their minds, they slowly pressed on. They passed by abandoned cars, the doors flung wide open their keys nowhere to be found. They passed by the broken windows of upscale clothing stores, dried brown blood coating some of the jagged edges of glass. The further they moved away from the hotel, the quieter the city got until it was completely silent. The only thing they heard was the wind whistling down the abandoned street, kicking up the last dried remnants of their last snowfall and bits of yellowing papers, and their feet falling against the sidewalk beneath their feet.

“We’re not going to-” Ray started in his naturally quiet voice before being cut off by a loud screech from an alleyway they were passing to their left. Kat and Dylan immediately pointed their guns at whatever was producing the noise, Kat almost firing the gun without thinking about it. However, they were relieved, well, as much as they could be, to see that only two infected were stumbling toward them. In the time that had passed without seeing a walker up close, they noticed that they were starting to resemble corpses more than they had when the changes first happened; their skin sullen and an unearthly grey.

Frank, without hesitation, stepped forward and swung the bright red axe in his hands at the much taller walker’s head. It lodged into it’s skull with a sickened crack and the walker immediately crumbled to the ground. Ray, who was clutching his baseball bat tightly, swung hard and connected with the other walker’s knees. The walker, which appeared to be a teenage girl, collapsed to the ground with a hollow thud, just as the other walker nearly took Frank down with the weight of the axe and it’s heavy body. Ray wasted no time in stepping toward the infected and bringing the bat down over and over again onto it’s skull; causing awful squelches and crunches to echo off the alleyways.

Soon, the flurry of movement stopped and Frank stepped over to the infected and placed his foot on it’s neck, pulling the axe with great difficulty from it’s head. The others were left watching the streets carefully, to make sure there were no infected nearby that could corner them.

“Fuck,” Kat hissed as she glanced at the bloody mess Ray and Frank had made of the alleyway and the two infected. Quickly, she slipped her arms out of the backpack she wore and hastily unzipped it. Her fingers grasped around the bag until she pulled out a plethora of multicolored scarves she had collected, should they ever be needed. “Here,” she said, beginning to hand out the scarves, only to be met by curious glances, “take one and wrap it around your nose and mouth. We don’t want to risk blood getting into them even if we don’t know…” She let her voice die off as she realized she was down a scarf. Letting out a heavy sigh, she glanced up to Gerard, since he was the last one to receive something to cover his face with. The others were too busy tying their scarves around their faces to notice.

“You keep it,” he said softly, pushing her outstretched hand and scarf away from him. She merely sighed and unzipped a pocket of her leather jacket, producing a faded, small, leopard print bandana. It was something of her mother’s, her birth mother’s; the only little bit she had left of her beside the blood that ran through her veins. She handed it to Gerard, biting her bottom lip.

“It’s a bit old and musty…not to mention thinner than the rest of the scarves, but it should do,” she told him softly as she handed it to him. He took it hesitantly, knowing from the look in her eyes that this bandana meant something to her, and tied it around his nose and mouth as he watched her do the same to the gaudy paisley scarf she had.

“What were you going to say, Ray?” Lily asked softly, looking around nervously. She was worried that if they stayed dormant in one spot for too long, the infected would eventually catch track of them.

“I…I-uh,” Ray’s voice died off a bit, slightly muffled by the thick fleece scarf he had wrapped around the lower half of his face. His brow furrowed as he desperately tried to focus his scrambled thoughts on what he was going to ask. “Oh, I was going to ask why we weren’t going to try a find a car to travel in.”

“Too much noise,” Frank said, shaking his head as he glanced around the group. “We’d attract too much attention if we traveled by car.” Dylan looked to Frank before sighing a bit.

“It’d get us to the Lincoln Tunnel faster though…if you think about it,” she said softly, briefly meeting eyes with Mikey, then Kat.

“There were cars all in front of the entrance to the turnpike, Dylan,” Lily reminded her with a poignant look, “we wouldn’t be able to get very far after that.”

“I thought you guys had this shit planned out,” Johnny grumbled, shooting a dark glance to his sister.

“Look,” Gerard cut in before Kat snapped at her brother, “we can’t just stand here until we figure it out, it‘s too dangerous. If we can find a working car, we’ll take it as far as we can. For now, we’ll travel on foot.” And that was all that was said as the eight of them continued down the abandoned streets of New Jersey. They had a very vague idea of where they were going; the familiar places seeming so different than they had been before. The state they knew was dead; no beeping horns of cars, no angry shouts of commuters, and no sound of tires crunching along the pavement. A few times, they managed to steer clear of a few infected, avoiding confrontations with them as much as possible. They all knew that the further away they were from the walkers, the more likely they would survive the day.

The reached the street that lead to the 102 around midday, having moved slowly and carefully through the network of streets. A few abandoned cars had been checked for keys, and one had been found, only to have them discover that the gas tank was completely empty. A noise reached their ears, one that sounded not too unlike the noises they had heard outside of their long forgotten hotel fortress when they had stayed there. Sending nervous glances to one another, they paused just beside a tall building, hoping that whatever was around the corner wasn’t what they thought it was. Mikey peeked nervously around the corner and his face quickly blanched as he pulled away again, shaking his head.

“It’s bad, you guys,” he whispered, slightly out of breath from the rush of adrenaline he got when he saw what was around the corner, “there’s at least a hundred of them…maybe more.” Glancing nervously to one another, they all mentally debated on what was the best for them to do.

“Then the 102’s out of the question,” Kat finally spoke up, all eyes going to her, “we’ll just take the Belleview turnpike until we get to the New Jersey turnpike and follow it to the Lincoln Tunnel.” When no one moved she drew in a deep breath, feeling the cool, dry air fill her lungs. “I had a feeling something of this sort would happen…so I had a few backup plans.”

“We’re still going through the Lincoln Tunnel?” Dylan asked as they all began to move again, mindful not to make much noise lest the infected just yards away hear them. Kat curled her dry, cracked lips in and bit them as she gave an indifferent shrug.

“We should at least just see how that is. If any infected are following us, or if we hear any in the tunnel, we’ll find another way around,” Gerard said softly, flexing his numb, half-gloved fingers. It seemed that the temperature had dropped since that morning, or perhaps that the wind just gusted harder against them. The sky, however, lightened up a few shades and was now a medium shade of grey. It calmed their worries of having it snowing again. Snow meant that it was really as cold as it felt and their footsteps would be audible under the snow drifts. Taking the Belleview Turnpike meant they would be back tracking a little, risking the infected that had noticed the eight humans roaming the streets finding them once again. However, a few walkers were nothing compared to the hundreds that mysteriously blocked the entrance to the 102.

They finally reached the Belleview Turnpike around 3, or so Frank said, since he was the only one of them with a watch. The roadways were blocked, bumper to bumper with empty cars on both sides, leaving the eight to make their way on the small, glass and car part laden shoulder in the hopes that they wouldn’t encounter any more walkers. They knew that those hopes were foolish, especially after ten or so had them cornered as they checked a car to see if it still ran. They had nearly lost Mikey, had it not been for Kat shooting the thing before it sank it’s teeth into his arm. That incident had put them all on edge, but none so much as Gerard. After he recognized how close things had come to going from bad to worse, he had wild, paranoid sort of look in his eyes and appeared to be more pale than normal.

As they neared the silhouette of the tall, Manhattan skyscrapers in the distance, the sense of unease they had multiplied tenfold. The sky was steadily darkening, not with the increase of cloud cover, but with night. They knew then they’d have to find a safe, secluded place to stay for the night. No way in hell would they try and brave the Manhattan, let alone the Lincoln Tunnel at night. No doubt, the streetlamps wouldn’t be on to light their way, and the light of the few flashlights they managed to grab wouldn’t shed light on enough to make them feel safe enough.

“What about one of these stores?” Lily suggested as they passed by another empty store front. Dylan shook her head as they quickly passed the store.

“It’s too easy for the walkers to get in,” she explained, readjusting the heavy shotgun in her hands. They all slowed to a stop and glanced around. They could see Manhattan fully now, just past an ominous, black river that they prayed walkers wouldn’t miraculously know how to get across. Their eyes wandered the area; across the green and white signs that pointed them in the direction of the Lincoln Tunnel, peering into deserted homes and cars, searching for a safe place to rest as well as they could for the night.

“Parking garage,” Frank said suddenly, his eyes fixed on an open concrete structure across the street from them, “there’s a white van on the top floor of it and there’s at least two ways out of it should any infected find us there.” There was a short-lived silence among the group as they glanced anxiously to one another.

“Sounds like a good deal,” Kat murmured and they all set off toward the parking garage, just as the light began to dim to an almost dangerous lack of light. Thankfully, after a thorough check of the three floors of the small parking garage, they had only found one infected and quickly got rid of it. The eight of them stood on the fourth and top floor of the garage, glancing down to the streets below just to be sure no infected had heard them.

The doors to the van had been locked and there were no sign of keys in the ignition, nor outside of van. Dylan quickly remedied the unlocked doors by taking the butt of her rifle and unceremoniously busting out the driver’s side window and unlocking the doors. Johnny and Mikey were the first to pull open the doors to the two benches in the back of the van. They settled themselves into the seats, in a van that smelled remarkably new.

“I’ll stay guard all night…just to be sure,” Kat said, gripping onto her hand pistol tightly. Dylan bit on the inside of her cheek as she glanced to the blonde before letting out a heavy sigh.

“That’s not fair. I’ll take over at about one so you can get some sleep too,” she said, nodding a bit. Frank glanced over at her for a moment.

“I’ll watch with you. Two people on watch is a bit safer than just one,” he said softly before biting his bottom lip. Dylan merely gave him a nod and climbed into the van, followed by Lily and Ray. Frank gave a wily grin to Gerard, despite how desperate their situation actually was.

“It’s just like old times, eh, Gee?” He joked, causing Ray to let out a small chuckle from within the van. Gerard, who was in no mood for joking, gave Frank a sharp look and a nod before turning to Kat. Frank gave a sigh and climbed into the van, settling in between Ray and Dylan easily.

“I’ll stay up with you too. My mind is too fucking busy to get to sleep right now anyways,” Gerard murmured, only to get a short nod in return from Kat. Lily glanced between the two of them and gave them a small, wavering smile.

“See you guys in the morning,” she said before closing the van doors to try and conserve as much heat they possibly could. Kat merely stared darkly at the door handle before turning and climbing onto the hood of the car, her feet dangling an inch or two above the bumper. Gerard watched her for a moment before following her lead and sitting just beside her, his arm just barely touching hers.

“Thanks for saving Mikey today,” he murmured after a few moments of dead silence between the two of them as Kat fished a flashlight from her backpack and clicked it on. It only lit up about 25 feet in front of them in an eight feet wide circle. It wasn’t enough, but it’d do. In the dim reflected light from the flashlight, Gerard could see Kat nod tersely, not bringing her eyes to his but keeping them focused on the concrete beneath the van. She balanced her hand gun on her knee and reached out in the darkness, lacing her fingers tightly through Gerard’s as she rested her head on his shoulder.

“I’m so scared that it’s not going to be there, Gerard,” she breathed into the still, frigid night. “That we’ve put ourselves up for a blind death because of some stupid radio broadcast. For all we know, those people who made the announcement could be long gone.” Gerard rested his cheekbone on the top of her head and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze.

“I have a feeling things are going to be alright, Kat,” he whispered, eyes turned to the flashlight that cut through the darkness around them. “We’ve just got to get there and everything will be fine.”

“I hope you’re right,” Kat replied simply as she looked out into the night.