Central Park welcomed me with the bite of its 15 degree frost-laden air. I was in the throes of delirium, with only my ex’s flannel for warmth, and socks that were already tattered during my brief flight from my apartment, back over on 5th Avenue. My muscles burned in protest, and my extremities stung with numbness, but my home was no longer my sanctuary. Emanating from my flat, the police station, Coney Island, and through every congested street of the city, was a pall that hung in the atmosphere. Somehow I could just tell, this biohazard was an event that was going to change the course of humankind; even if that meant we were careening to a dead end. My mind was erratic with the terror a cat might experience while fighting its way out of a burlap bag, after being hurled into a lake. The human faculties that proudly developed over the course of 6 million years flickered in my being, like the ostentatious Sony billboard that could be seen all the way from 42nd Street.
I had to find some place to hide in this squalid, rectangular woodland. Existential despair threatened to halt me in my tracks, but I pushed it to the gnarled, ugly cellar of my disintegrating mind. My feet might be taken by frostbite before sunrise, but I didn’t feign a flowery smile through years of fear from Russian ICBMs, only to fall apart before this new, shapeless fear.
Or was it actually new?
I guess I should start from the beginning. My name is Ellie Marsh. I grew up in Winnfield, Louisiana. I thought about going to Tulane for Journalistic studies, but decided New York City might be the change of pace that I needed. Summer and Fall ran their courses, and even though the city was ragged with homeless colonies and needed a fresh coat of paint, there was a certain rugged hominess to this crazy, neglected city. I felt like here, history was constantly being rewritten. What more could a journalist ask for?
It was shortly before Valentine’s Day, when entire cities became derelicts. First, it would start with a few missing persons cases; a drifter here, a few college students there. Through the course of several days, the population would plummet by tens of thousands. Downward that number would spiral, until it flatlined. This happened all over the world, too - Hong Kong, Morocco, Shinjuku, Dallas, Rio, Birmingham, the list went on. Police were stretched tight enough to snap, trying to address the disappearances while also maintaining order among the destabilizing populace. Looting reigned supreme, between the business and residential districts. Arson, murder, and a general state of anarchy danced over the jaded cityscapes. The police couldn’t even bother with the blockades for the highways leading out of town, which allowed the smart residents to escape.
Later on, deserters would be questioned by authorities, and their testimonies would make no sense. Regarding family or friends that didn’t escape, they wanted those people dead instead of rescued. Media experts were blaming it on a mass psychosis, a symptom of the as yet unexplained phenomena that was striking cities on a global scale.
There was no pattern to how these cities were hit. No cult had this level of mass influence. No known virus could cause this, no matter how unstable the mutation. It seemed the only alternative left was too preposterous for me to entertain.
As soon as New York’s population began to get culled, the other field journalists and I set out to investigate our scoops. Was this really how I was meant to get my Pulitzer? By leveraging an international panic and attaching it to an alien invasion? I went to the police, just to look into missing persons cases.
Much of the force was out in the streets. They screeched away from West 20th, in the direction of a plume of fire that sprouted northwards. Every car I passed was free of tickets; apparently the police actually had real problems, for once.
I entered the station’s foyer. There were so few cadets and interns compared to usual, but the air was frenetic and tense. The receptionist was livid with stress as he was keying data into one of the latest IBM computers. He was terse and completely disinterested in indulging me with any sort of interview or comment. As I was being turned away though, I spied some officers going through the fire escape with tall stacks of paperwork. I trusted my intuition and came out to the side of the building.
I bumped into a young man, possibly too young to even drink. He was quite apologetic to me, even though I was the one that sent his stack of paper and files tumbling. I knelt down to assist him, but also took the time to skim his paperwork for anything of interest. The idea that lept in my mind was rather mean, and might even cost him his job in a typical crisis, but I had to get unfiltered and reliable information. Thankfully the others were too wound up to assist him as I had already volunteered for it, and they dashed back into the station to fetch whatever remained of their files to be stored in the armored van next to us.
Taking my share of his papers, I placed them on top of his stack as he held it in waiting. Then, I leaned in close and left a light kiss on his cheek, telling him to keep up the good work in my best Southern drawl, before I teasingly dragged the brim of his hat down over his eyes, using his brief surprise to reclaim the stack I gave him.
The cadet let his stack tip over again. Perfect.
I promptly left the station behind me. My heart was racing out of control as I took the papers to the nearest alleyway. I sank against the wall, waiting for my palpitations to calm down, gripping the wadded up notes in my fist. There was a hobo curled up beneath some newspapers, but I wasn’t too concerned about him ratting me out. Trembling, letting my breath get steady in the cool air, I finally sorted out the notes in whatever passed for sequential order.
There was a healthy garnishing of the usual destabilizing incidents that characterized this panic. However, two detective reports that made me stop breathing as I read were the following - One, Mayor Cochran had apparently murdered his entire family at his estate. He had been moved to the hospital to be treated for his injuries before awaiting questioning from authorities. The other was an unexplained wildfire that was currently razing Yankee Stadium to the ground. There was much less information available on this fire, but judging from the clouds turning charcoal black on the horizon, that seemed to be from Yankee Stadium.
It was clear at this point: I had to assume I only had the time to chase one of these leads. With the nature of the emergency at the stadium, everyone in the city would probably be clamoring to get a look at the action. Naturally, any sports journalists that were in the area would already have a front seat to their scoop. It seemed like it would be a wasted gesture to report on it from the back of the crowd, only to write on what most of the other editors would already be preaching at greater depth; I’d be stuck with crumbs whether I went there or not.
The mayor’s family massacre definitely made for a byline that would practically write itself as a virtuoso. But getting to question him held an equally steep level of difficulty to the stadium, though with far fewer elements - he was under armed watch as the key suspect.
Stopping briefly at a local bistro for the strongest cup of Colombian coffee they had, I gulped it down with cream and made my way back to my apartment. I phoned up a friend of mine that worked at the hospital as a registered nurse, named Alison Sinclair. The incredulity of her voice was not hard to pick up on as I asked her to lend me a nurse’s uniform, so that I could sneak into the Mayor’s hospital room unopposed. I knew quite well how much I was jeopardizing her career, but I was amazed to see she relented. Perhaps she was also curious as to the nature of the Mayor’s meltdown.