SIXTEEN
GEORGE LOOKED OVER his shoulder, then back at the woman in front of him. She was still wearing the sweats and tank top, but had pulled on the hoodie and a pair of what looked like combat boots. “How the hell did you get ahead of me?”
“You are wasting your ten minutes,” Karen said.
“Seriously,” said George. “I walked straight out here and you didn’t pass me. How’d you get down here so fast?”
“I went down the side of the building. It was the most direct route.”
He looked up at the pastel building and considered the columns of balconies. There were over a dozen of them, one on top of another. “No, really.”
The corners of her mouth went up. Just a bit. “Perhaps I chased you in the next available elevator, then.” She stepped to the side so they could walk next to each other. “You now have nine minutes, fifteen seconds.”
He fell in next to her and they walked down the street. “Why am I getting another ten minutes?”
An older couple approached them from the far end of the block. Karen tugged her hood down another inch. The shadows against her dark skin hid her face. George found himself thinking it was kind of a creepy look, but she pulled it off.
After the couple had passed, she raised her head. “Forgive me,” she said. “It is sometimes difficult for me to have a private conversation. I would prefer if this one remained so.”
He looked around. “Paparazzi or something?”
She gave the front of the hood another tug. “There were two outside the hotel, and a third on the street. They did not see me leave, but I could still be recognized by regular citizens.”
“So,” he said, “why are you here?”
“The matter of George Romero’s monsters intrigues me,” she said. “As I told you, I am not well versed in matters of popular culture. However, I have studied several mythologies and folklores from across the world and have near-perfect recall. It is unlikely I could not come up with at least a comparative name for these cinematic creatures, yet I can think of no name for them.”
“If it makes you feel better,” George said. “you’re not the only one.”
“The dreams you spoke of with these monsters? You are having them?”
“Yeah. Me and a few other people.”
“Interesting,” she said. “Are you a fan of Romero’s work?”
He shook his head. “I’m more of an action-movie guy. Some comedies.”
“So you have not seen these films, or others like them?”
George thought about it. “I’m pretty sure I haven’t, but I seem to know a lot of them. Maybe I was at a party or something and they were on in the background.” He gave her a look.
“What?”
“I just think it’s kind of interesting that I blabbed on for ten minutes and the thing that got your attention was realizing you didn’t know something.”
“It was not the only thing,” she said.
“What else?”
She didn’t answer him. They walked on for a few more yards. Eight concrete slabs passed by under George’s feet.
“Is this counting toward my ten minutes?” he asked.
“In the past eight years,” she said, “I have received over one hundred marriage proposals of a semi-serious nature. I would estimate close to seventeen thousand men and women have professed their love for me in e-mails or on various web pages. There have been substantially more declarations of a strictly sexual nature.”
“That sounds like more of a reason to avoid me than follow me,” George said.
“You did not make any such statement,” said Karen. “You stated that we were supposed to be somewhere else. Our togetherness was a secondary factor.” She took in a slight breath to continue speaking, then walked past three more sections of sidewalk.
“And?”
“When we said good-bye … your hand felt right.”
Something fluttered in George’s chest. He felt like a teenager asking the head cheerleader to the prom. “Sorry?”
“It felt right to hold your hand,” said Karen. “It bothered me when you let go.”
They walked for another half-dozen slabs. Part of him hoped she’d reach out and take his hand again, but her fingers stayed tucked away inside the pockets of her sweatshirt. They walked past his Hyundai and continued down the street.
“Why do you believe we know each other?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I noticed posters of you before I knew your name, but probably anyone could say that. To be honest, this girl I met told me you and I are in love and … well, she’s been right about a lot of stuff.”
“I see.”
“Does that sound like me professing my love for you?”
She looked at him. “Are you, George?”
He counted another three slabs of concrete in the sidewalk. “Your hand felt right, too,” he said.
They reached the end of the block before she spoke again. “This young woman is having similar dreams?”
He glanced both ways and they crossed the street. “Yeah, but she seems to remember a lot more than me. At least, she remembers it a lot clearer than I do.”
“Does she know the answer to your George Romero question?”
“I haven’t asked her. Her name’s Madelyn Sorensen.”
Karen blinked as they stepped up over the curb. “Dr. Emil Sorensen’s daughter?”
“Maybe,” said George. “I met her dad on moving day. He came across like a professor. Do you know him?”
“I know of him,” she said. “He is a renowned biochemist and neurologist. He was expected to be awarded the Nobel Prize in 2007, and some felt he was more deserving than the team that received the honor. Why are you so averse to being called a saint?”
A muscle behind his eye twinged. “What do you mean?”
“When my father compared you to St. George, you closed your eyes and lowered your head. When I referred to you the same way, you reacted as if the words caused physical pain. And just now the muscles around your eye contracted.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Madelyn called me that, too. It just feels strange, people calling me a saint. And she keeps telling me I’m supposed to be a superhero.”
Karen’s eyebrows went up. “I beg your pardon?”
He looked ahead. “Yeah. According to her we all have superpowers. That’s how we fight the monsters. I’m supposed to be super-strong.”
It occurred to him he was spewing out a new level of madness, so her response caught him off guard.
“Are you?”
“Sorry?”
She looked at his arms. “Do you have superhuman strength? You said she has been correct about many things.”
Something twinged again. “Maybe? Why, do you?”
Karen Quilt straightened her back and looked at the sidewalk ahead of them. “From a very young age, my father trained me to be capable and independent. Circumstances required that he was absent from my life for many years, but I continued training on my own.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She turned to him. “I saw the look on your face back at the hotel, George. You know who my father is.”
His lips twisted before he could stop them. He pushed them flat again. “Yeah.”
“With that in mind, what do you think he would consider ‘capable’?”
“Jesus,” he said, “you really are a superhero.”
“If I decided to follow such a path, I could be, yes.”
George decided not to dwell on what other paths her father might have been training her for. He took in a deep breath. “I think I lifted a dumpster the other day,” he said. The words made his head flare with pain, but it felt good to say them.
Karen looked at him. He couldn’t read her expression. “You think you lifted it?”
“I was having a migraine,” he said, “and I think I may have been seeing things.”
“Things such as dead people who continue to walk?”
“Yeah.”
“How high did you lift the dumpster?”
“I … I couldn’t get under it,” he said. “Somebody saw me. I got it to here.” He held his hands out a few feet above the sidewalk and mimed lifting something.
“Was it difficult?”
He shook his head and cleared away some of the pain. “Not really. I lifted a couch the other day, too. One with a hideaway bed built into it.”
“Impressive.”
“Did you really come down the side of the building to catch me?”
“I did. It is a Parkour technique.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the tall hotel and the columns of balconies. “Wow.”
Karen tilted her head, then reached up and touched her nose. Her fingers came back spotted with red. “Pardon me,” she said. “I seem to be having a mild headache of my own which is causing a nosebleed.”
Across the street, just behind Karen, a trio of men headed for them. One wore a suit, the other two had dull jackets. The paparazzi had spotted them. Their conversation was over.
Then George saw the pale skin and chalky eyes. One of the men raised an arm that ended just past the elbow. Another wobbled on a leg that had two round, ragged holes near the knee. They stumbled off the far sidewalk and into the street.
In the blink of an eye, the world changed. Dust covered the cars on the street, and spiderwebs of cracks blossomed across several of their windshields. Leaves spread across the pavement in drifts. Weeds had forced their way up between the sidewalk slabs.
He glanced over his shoulder. Four more monsters staggered on the sidewalk behind them. The two in the rear of the quartet looked a lot like the older couple he and Karen had passed a few minutes earlier.
“We should speak more with Madelyn Sorensen,” said Karen. She dabbed at her nose again, then wiped her fingers twice against the cuff of her sweatshirt. “If she does remember more of this alternate world, she may have information she does not realize is relevant.”
George glanced at her. “So you believe me?”
“It would seem I have little choice.”
“How so?”
She pointed down the street ahead of them. “There are three people walking toward us who all appear to be dead.”
The blonde in the lead had frizzy hair. A large clump of it had been torn out to show a patch of bald bone on the dead woman’s forehead. Glasses hung from one ear of the next corpse. The last one’s face had been burned or scraped down until there was nothing left but teeth and eye sockets. George wasn’t sure if it had been a man or a woman.
“Ahhh,” he said. “So you can see them, too?”
“Yes. Three in front, three to the side, four behind us.”
“Good,” he said. “I was thinking there was still a chance I might be crazy.”
Karen’s feet shifted on the pavement. “Do they have any notable strengths or weaknesses?”
“They’re kind of slow,” he said. “They like to bite. Head and neck injuries seem to put them down pretty fast. Don’t worry, this has happened to me a few times now and I can …”
His voice trailed off as she grabbed his arm. For a brief moment he pictured Karen half swooning against him like the love interest in some old movie poster. It made him feel a bit heroic.
Then her other hand grabbed the top of his shoulder and pushed down hard.
She swung up and over him like a gymnast vaulting off a horse. Her boot lashed out at the trio in front of them and caught the blonde in the jaw with a solid crack of bone. Karen twisted her body, brought her other foot around, and slammed the heel into the dead man’s head. The glasses shattered. She landed in a crouch, spun, and swept the legs out from under all three monsters.
George turned to the side and found the dead thing with the severed arm was a yard away. He stepped forward and slammed his palm into the corpse’s chest to shove it away. He barely felt the impact, but the creature flew back as if gravity had shifted and dropped it down the street. One of its flailing arms struck another shambler and spun it around. George threw a punch and another dead thing’s chest collapsed.
Karen grabbed George’s shoulder again with both hands and vaulted up, over, and behind him. She drove her heels into the two creatures there and rode their skulls down to the ground. Her open hands batted away the withered fingers that grabbed for her, then knifed out efficient strikes to the jaw, throat, and spine. Two more dead things collapsed and gave her room to snap another neck with a spin kick.
In the moment he spent watching her, one of the last monsters, an emaciated woman, sank its teeth into his hand. He felt it clamp down with its jaw, heard the teeth grind against the bones of his palm. He yanked his hand away and drove his fist into the dead woman’s face. The head snapped free and bounced down the street.
“Are you injured?” asked Karen. Her hood had fallen back to expose her face. She looked at his hand with wide eyes. Not scared, but very focused.
George held up his palm. “Not even scratched.”
“Or maybe invulnerable,” he said.
“Perhaps,” she said. “Increased strength would be of little use without an epidermis and skeletal structure which could support additional mass.”
“I was joking,” he said.
“I was not.”
He looked at the circle of bodies around them. A few of them still wiggled their jaws. The fight hadn’t even lasted a minute. Karen had put down three of the creatures for every one he’d stopped.
“I’m guessing most supermodels can’t do that?”
“No others I am aware of. The city has changed as well.”
She pointed down the street. There were a few crashed cars in the middle of the road that looked like they’d been there for a while. A few bodies sprawled on the pavement, too. One building was a burned-out husk. Another looked like it had been barricaded at one point, and the barriers torn down.
“Yeah,” said George. “At first I just saw the monsters, but now it’s spreading to everything.”
“You did not mention that earlier.”
“I was trying not to sound too crazy.”
She raised an eyebrow. Then she gestured down the street. In the distance, a half-dozen figures were staggering toward them. “How long do these altered states last?”
“This is my third one today,” he said. “The last one was half an hour.”
“We should retreat to the hotel. The lobby is not safe, but the higher floors should be defendable.”
“If you say so.”
They stepped over the dead monsters. A few of them snapped at their feet. George stomped on one and crushed the skull to paste. They walked back up the sidewalk with quick strides.
Karen glanced at him. “Are you a violent person?”
“What?”
“Are you prone to acts of violence?”
She looked back over her shoulder. “You did not hesitate to destroy these creatures, even though they had once been human. Most people would have a natural reluctance to overcome.”
He shrugged. “It just seems clear they’re not people anymore.”
“If Madelyn is correct,” she said, “you may have more experience dealing with them than you remember.”
“Maybe,” George said. “So this hasn’t happened to you before? The dead things and everything changing?”
Her head went side to side once. “It has not.”
“You’re sure?”
She gave him a look. “I am quite certain.”
“Does it strike you as odd that you’re diving into this full force?”
“How do you mean?”
“I’ve been having little glimpses and flashes of the monsters for a week or two now,” he told her. “They kept building and growing. It’s only been the past two days that the world started to change. But you’re starting right where I am.”
“Perhaps because I am with you,” suggested Karen.
They turned the corner and saw the entrance to the Four Seasons. The burned hulk of a limousine sat in the driveway. It stretched back far enough to block one lane of traffic. Two dead things shuffled around it.
Karen looked in his eyes. The muscles of her neck tensed. He clenched his fists and felt strong.
And then the world flickered. The streets cleaned out and the wrecks vanished or were made whole again. The restored limo lurched into motion and pulled into the hotel. A man standing near it snapped a few quick pictures with a small camera.
“It appears to be over,” Karen said.
George glanced behind them. The bodies were gone. The weeds had vanished. “Yeah, I think so.”
The man with the camera stared down the street at the two of them. Karen flipped her hood up and turned her back to the man. “I have been recognized,” she said. “Give me your phone.”
The man took a few steps toward them, gaining speed with each step. His camera rose. “We will have to continue our discussion later,” she said. “I will give you my personal number. Call later this evening. We shall make plans to meet tomorrow.”
The idea that a supermodel was forcing her phone number on him crossed George’s mind. He bit back a chuckle as he pulled out his phone. She took it and her fingers danced over the keypad. She went to hand it back to him and paused.
“Your phone is a Katana LX, manufactured by Sanyo.”
“Yeah. I’ve been meaning to get a new one, but I’m kind of stuck in my contract and—”
“It is five and a half years old,” she said. “This model should no longer be supported.”
“It is, though.”
She handed him his phone and pulled her own from the sweatshirt pocket. It spun in her hands to reveal a sunken keyboard. “The T-Mobile G1,” she said, “with the new Android operating system. It was given to me as part of a promotional deal for a series of print advertisements.”
“You’re right,” he said. “That blows my phone away.”
Karen shook her head. “It does not. This phone was an early release in autumn of 2008. It is also five years old.” She looked at him. “Why would I still own a first-generation phone which is half a decade old?”
The photographer snapped off half a dozen pictures of them examining the phones. In a wide shot, it might’ve looked like they were holding hands. George imagined pictures of him and Karen Quilt with provocative captions showing up in magazines between shots of pop stars and hot actors.
Then he realized he couldn’t picture a single actor or actress who was considered the new big thing. He couldn’t name a new song or the person who sang it.
There was a plague. It broke out in the spring of 2009 and wiped out most of the world.
“What’s the last new song you heard?”
The phone spun and collapsed in her hand like a quick-draw artist with a pistol. “I thought I had made it clear I follow very few popular—”
“Anything,” he interrupted. “Anything at all. Can you name one song that’s come out in the past couple of years?”
She shook her head.
“Movies? Books?”
Her head moved side to side again. “I cannot.”
“No new phones,” he said. “No music, no books. Do you see any new cars?”
Karen scanned the street. “All the models I can identify are 2009 or earlier. With the economic downturn, this is not an impossible occurrence.”
“In this part of town? At this hotel?”
The photographer was close, barely fifteen feet away. Another one ran down the street to join him, and a third not far behind. “We shall talk later,” she said.
She turned and spun the sweatshirt off her shoulders and into her arm with the practiced grace of a runway model. The cameras focused on her as she strode away from George and back to the hotel. George was pretty sure the first guy had already taken at least a dozen photos of them together, but he still used the chance to slip back around the corner and head for his car.
His 2002 Hyundai. Over ten years old.