Legends Of The Multiverse #14 - Trapped In Old New York

dber (66)in #fiction • 7 years ago (edited)

Wet palms, hot with fever, slathered their sweat all over Alex's skin.

The disembodied hands, bright white mottled with puke green, left streaks of phlegm wherever they touched. Alex tried to yell out, but one giant appendage was clamped over his mouth. Alex raised his head up, pushing through the rat king of writhing fingers, and saw a mouth made of shadow consuming his right hand.

It was Alex's own muffled scream that woke him. A rough cloth gag made him choke and instinctually Alex reached up for it with his right hand. His forearm came up, passed the point where his hand should have found his mouth, and kept going. The cauterized stump on the end of Alex's arm left behind a light dollop of cloudy puss where it brushed against his chin. Alex ripped off the gag with his left hand and allowed himself one full throated scream.

Some Wall Street surgeon had done a number on him, but at least had the decency to stop the bleeding. Losing the hand was frightening, but not final. As long as he made it back to the Heights, Alex would have another hand by the end of the week.

Unfortunately, Alex had bigger problems. The alleyway he was in was mostly shaded, but the powerful heat and moisture of a 100 day had sucked a lot of life from him. Even a sleeping man, in shade, without personal coolers or water, would succumb to a 100 day within 12 hours. The math was ubiquitous and well known, but, Alex thought ruefully, calculated for an adult male whose arm had not just been amputated by flesh traders.

Alex's head ached terribly. Some combination of dehydration and shock. If he didn't get some water, and back into climate control soon he was a dead man. Just another corpse dragged out of lower Manhattan by high tide.

With herculean effort Alex got to his feet. He looked around for portable shade and stopped on a fetid square of cardboard. His skin was still sticky and wet, which was a good sign, but no hon a day like this. When the humidity and temperature both broke 100 no amount of sweat could cool a person down.

With the bendable cardboard folded over his head with his left hand, his fresh, dribbling stump to his right, Alex stepped out of the shaded alleyway and onto Fulton street.

Hollowed out cars covered in barnacles littered the streets. Not another human being was in sight. No one, especially old city folk, would be so stupid as to be caught outside before nightfall.

"Fulton street." Alex muttered the words outloud to himself, trying to picture the map of the old city in relation to the heights. Fulton was downtown. Way the fuck downtown. There was no way he would make it north by foot - Even with his right arm and at peak health, the heat would take him.

That left only the tag. Every citizen of the Heights had one for exactly this purpose. Simply think the correct passphrase, carefully visualizing each word, and the tag would transmit an emergency beacon. Armed evac would cost three months salary, but there was no alternative.

Watershed, Grant's Tomb, Rivulet, Alex began thinking the six passwords, carefully envisioning a drop of clear water or the great lakes, which Alex saw once before encapsulation. Oak Tree, Breakfast Cereal, Gallows.

A small male voice spoke inside of Alex's head. "Emergency Beacon activated. Insufficient range. Please find higher ground."

It was the skyscrapers that were fucking him, rising on all sides. The ancient, inefficient monstrosities were filled to the brim with stray dogs and old city folk waiting for night to fall. Each skyscraper was a land unto itself, guarded fiercely by it's residents, day and night.

Only one building remained open to visitors. Alex sucked his front teeth and looked up at it, taller than the rest. A giant broken glass spire 500 yards in front of him, studded with antennae, solar panels, wind mills and air conditioners of every conceivable make and model.

"Shit."

Without another word Alex set off for the frankenstein building - the one skyscraper in the old city as infamous now as it once was famous - run by Boss Gar and overflowing with desperate human life. When Boss Gar refused the edict to evacuate and took it over, she kept the building's original name. Boss Gar was a sadist. She felt the name was fitting, and fucking hilarious.

Slowly, one heavy step after another, Alex made his way towards the base of the Freedom Tower.

[Photo Credit]By David Shankbone (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons