“Shit,” Valny said, coughing as he lurched forward. He turned to his companion. “Nitsky, there—”
“—We already dealt with this on the way here. The prongs up front work just fine.” Nistky coughed. “Calm the fuck down.”
Up ahead, through the truck’s windshield, Zelen could see figures shambling through the streets. The sidewalks were mere suggestions to them. It was anyone’s guess as to what they were. Were they saboteurs—desperate civilians, seeding their beloved city with traps and tripwires, in hopes of stalling the military’s advance? Were they mothers and fathers scrounging around for scraps of food or stores of potable water? Were they plague victims, wandering the streets of a city they no longer recognized, trapped in their collapsing minds as their bodies sought out sound and movement wherever they found it, ready to bite and spit and claw?
Or, perhaps, they were ghosts. Though, if Valny could see them, they probably weren’t—or, at least some of them weren’t.
Zelen glanced at where Ekatrina had been. She was gone.
For now.
“Both of you are infected, you know,” he said.
Nitsky cough-laughed. “No,” he said, in rich humor, “ya think?”
“They won’t hurt you,” Dr. Slavaa said. “You’re already dead.”
“I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about the fucking car.”
Zelen didn’t reply to that, and the conversation petered out. The vehicle’s headlights shone on the figures up ahead. One of them twitched like a spider that just caught a fly and started running at the car. The engine roared in Zelen’s ears as Nitsky sped up and ran right over the lonely zombie. The poor sod never stood a chance. His body cracked like a dry egg. Spores sprayed out in every direction, but quickly parted down either side of the car.
Zelen’s eyes widened at the sight of an old woman standing in the middle of the street. Her ruddy gold hair matted sheets over her tired face. Her red and gold scarf fluttered in the wind. Dr. Slavaa nearly lurched upright in shock, only to remind himself that she wasn’t really there. His new companions didn’t see her, and that was all the proof he needed. They didn’t stop for her. The car drove straight through her, her phantom body decaying into mist as it phased into the car.
A few zombies ran toward them as they passed through an intersection. The virologist almost felt bad for the things. They were horribly fragile.
Is this all that’s left? Ghosts and glass zombies?
Zelen was too afraid to ask the question.
Truth be told, Dr. Slavaa was petrified. He had no idea what was happening to him. The compulsive hunger? The impossible powers to move things with his thoughts? And most of all: he didn’t feel human anymore. He was turning into something new and different. Stress no longer slicked his skin with sweat. His heart had stopped beating not long after lunch. But, whatever he was becoming, it could still feel fear. It was just that his fears had to make themselves known through more subtle means. Zelen Slavaa’s fears announced themselves in his meek silences and his constant furtive glances. His gut (assuming he still had one) told him that, personable though they seemed to be, the two mercenaries would probably shoot him on sight if they found out what he was. And Dr. Slavaa preferred to avoid that. It would probably hurt—a lot—and, possibly even worse, he’d seen enough to know that he might not die, even if they killed him.
Looking back, I wished I could have been there. At the very least, I could have told him what was happening to him. True, it wouldn’t have made things better, but I’d like to think it would have at least given him some solace and reassurance. I did end up meeting him face-to-face—well, snout to snout—but that was still several weeks out. I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.
At this point in time, what mattered was that, over the din of the not-too-distant artillery fire, the three men heard a noise. But Dr. Slavaa didn’t just hear it. He felt it. It resonated in him. The sound was a foghorn melodium; a plaintive organ, muted but vibrant. Other, similar sounds rose up in response, and at the moment, Zelen knew it wasn’t just a sound. It was a call.
A cry.
Looking up through Valny’s window, behind the mercenary’s head, Zelen glimpsed a serpentine silhouette flying through the air, backlit by bomb-light flashing on smoking artillery fire. And Zelen knew this was real, because Nitsky and Valny froze stiff when they heard it. Yet none of the three men said a word, and Zelen wondered whether that was because they already knew what it was—and, maybe, even what it meant—or, perhaps, it was because they just didn’t want to think about it. Either possibility seemed equally likely.
Whatever the reason, they sat in silence as Nitsky kept on driving. Coughing and driving.
The artillery fire got worse after that. It boomed more often. Flashes lit over old townhouses.
“Alright, there it is,” Valny said, a little while later.
Nitsky turned a corner. Ahead, the old, narrow streets of the city center and the University grounds branched out into a four-way intersection in the middle of a considerably broader boulevard. Directly in front of them, on the opposite side of the street, the road passed beneath a splendid gate. It was a fanciful, ostentatious construction—like everything from the Tsarist period—wrought from iron, bronze, and gleaming brass. The boulevard stretched left and right, girding the edge of a massive park. The gate’s reticulated latticework continued in fence-form, following the boulevard all the way around the grand old space.
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“The Imperial Zoological Gardens,” Nitsky said.
Built by the last Tsar of Odensk, the Gardens had decorated Stovolsk with their splendid repose for almost two hundred years. Halfway through that stretch of time, the decision had been made to bulldoze half of the Gardens and build Stovolsk International Airport (SXA) in its place. There were many reasons for this; all were horrible—myopic to the extreme.
As the old joke went, revolutions came and went, but the real change in Odensk was in the architecture. The bulk of Imperial Zoological Gardens’ gardens had been sacrificed to make way for a concrete airport and its asphalt airfields. The sacrifice was completely pointless, and made the Zoo worse in almost every conceivable way, poisoning it with noise, pollution, and all the stress that came with it. It drove the animals mad and mangey—the birds plucked out their feathers; the tigers gave themselves blisters rubbing their heads against their habitat’s walls—and the oligarchic plutocrats that ran the Odensky Directorate didn’t care one way or the other. They did what they wanted with their ill-gotten wealth, whenever they wanted to do it, because anarchism was the purest expression of capitalism, or something like that; I could go into further detail, but it would just upset me too much. I’d rather talk about the Green Death than ancap nonsense like that. That whole school of thought always was—and, truly, always would be—just a scantily clad excuse to give a blank cheque to the Will-to-Power.
Valny looked back to Zelen. “You should brace yourself, Dr. Slava.”
An empty, shamelessly modern kiosk stood guard on one side of the median strip that later generations had placed in the middle of the street, once the automobile had finally conquered the horse-drawn carriage. The gates themselves had long since been left permanently open. The kiosk’s barrier arm made for a poor substitute.
Nitsky gritted his teeth, and then pressed the gas pedal all the way down.
The engine screeched.
Before Dr. Slavaa could react, the SUV rammed its way through the barrier arm, bursting past the feckless kiosk and going straight into the Zoological Gardens. The vehicle jittered as it rolled across the old, stone-paved path. The window panes shook in their slots.
“What the hell?” Zelen yelped. “The airport’s on the other side of the park. We just need to drive around to get there. Why are we—”
“—By now,” Valny said, his voice shaking along with the car, “Paldi’s forces will have made it over Dnepo Hill. They’ll have snipers posted up there with long-range guns. The way Ognoss Boulevard curves around the far side of the park as it passes close to the river makes it into a shooting gallery for the snipers up on the hill—and that’s before we consider the possibility some do-gooder set up traps or mines on the Ognoss Boulevard.”
“Long story short,” Nitsky said, gruffly, “it’s quicker to go through the park.”
But by then, the Gardens’ state had captured Zelen’s attention.
In better seasons, the Zoological Gardens would have been a picturesque enchantment—an oasis in the desert of snow, sleet, and mud. Once upon a time, the Gardens were an arcadia of manicured grass and tamed wildflowers that yawned open with the coming of spring. The trees that peppered the Gardens’ gently rolling hills would have been lovingly cared for, and kept neat and clean. The Zoo itself was a sprawling place, the aristocracy of all carnival grounds, filled with gilded cages, sweeping gallerias, and expansive enclosures, furnished in marble and shimmering opal, the glint of real gold leaf, and the secret stuff from which dreams are made. And when Night came, lampposts lit up—green, and floral—lining the Gardens’ wandering paths, daubing the landscape in their tinted, lambent light. Children flocked to the Zoo from all across the world, to get a chance to see the marvelous creatures: the seals and the lions, the tigers and the giraffes, the barbed tailed stonebacks and the feathered raptors, and—above all else—the famous Stovolsk Penguins.
But, however much the Zoo’s wonders had suffered under the Directorate and the Oligarchy that Paldin had just overthrown—and they had suffered terribly—the NFP-20 fungus outmatched them all. Electricity was failing all across the city, causing the Garden’ lampposts to flicker in the Night’s darkness, an eerie, unwanted sight. Fungal tissue wove thickly over the frigid, dusty, grassless earth. The pestilence crawled up the trees, swelling their trunks like balloons, making the bark ulcer and weep where the fungus split it open and emerged. Winter violets dotting the sloping grounds had swelled into luminescent puffballs, ripened to the point of bursting.
“Holy shit!” Nitsky screamed.
The flowers’ petals stretched out into wings that fluttered in panic as the SUV drove by. Dr. Slavaa just managed to glimpse the violets uproot themselves from the earth and take wing before they passed behind the vehicle and out of sight.
“What the fuck was that?”
“Beast’s teeth,” Zelen muttered. “What happened here?”
“You really haven’t been out, have you, Dr. Slava?” Nitsky said.
“It’s Judgment Day,” Valny added. “The gates of Hell have opened wide, setting all the Night’s terrors loose on the earth.” He chuckled sardonically. “And, to think, today’s Celdmas.”
“The Moonlight Queen has a very strange sense of humor,” Nitsky retorted.
That’s right, Zelen thought, it’s a holiday.
The pandemic had made this years’ Celdmas festivities a foregone conclusion. To think, the world was ending at Celdmas time: the holiday meant to commemorate the souls damned to Hell, and to remind the people of the very real horrors that awaited infidels and the unrepentant after death. Last year, the horrors were just costumes and jump scares in commercial haunted houses. This year, though?
Everywhere Dr. Slavaa looked, he saw corpses. Most of them were human, though, here and there, he saw animals among them. The bodies were scattered all around; some lay off the paths of pitched stone; others slept forever beneath moldering boughs. But these were not restful deaths. Many of the corpses were little more than frames, especially the animals. Their bodies had been carved out or torn to pieces. Entire sections of bodies were missing. The human corpses fared little better. They’d taken root, the fungus within sprouting in alien outcroppings of darkling colors with expressive forms, like antlers or balloons. The growth’s bulbous crowns glowed with golden bioluminescence; new lampposts for a new dream.
Zelen looked away, not wanting to stare at the bodies. For a split second, he saw something move in the shadows, beyond the reach of the headlights, though he couldn’t make it out. Then, out of nowhere, a thought occurred to him.
“When the Green Death hit the city,” he asked, “what do you think happened to the zoo animals? And the penguins?”
Like most adults his age, Dr. Slavaa was forever fond of the Stovolsk Penguins that had delighted him as a child, though—unlike most—Zelen Slavaa wasn’t too proud to admit it.
Valny glanced out the window. “Dead, if they’re lucky.”
“Maybe they merged with the fucking plants,” Nitsky said. “How else do violets grow win—”
—A mottled mass galloped out from the shadows between two trees and leapt onto the hood of the SUV. Its flesh writhed against the windshield, a collage of feathers and fur and minute, twig-like limbs. Many jaws bit and snapped, framed by muscled tentacles that beat into the dull red engine hood. A wicked scythe-claw bashed into the glass, followed by the swipes two spiny, ulcerated paws as big as a man’s face.
One moment, Zelen saw Valny bend down and heard something click over the creature’s roars, and then the mercenary pulled out a semi-automatic rifle and fired at the creature almost point blank. Fractures spiderwebbed across the windshield glass.
“Fuuuuuuuck!” Nitsky screamed as he turned the car hard left.