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  I hugged everyone. I’m sure I cried. They had all come out and the plan was that they’d surprise me at the church, we’d have dinner at the historic wharf house—Tina and Dirk had helped with the set-up—and then we’d all head back in on the one and only night boat, under contract with the historic board.

  It was while we were all kissing and hugging and laughing that I suddenly felt the floor give way. For a moment, I was weightless. And then I knew that I was falling. Into darkness. I screamed, terrified as I pitched downward. I fell on something wooden; it cracked as I fell, easing the impact. I gasped desperately, needing breath, as all that had been was cleanly swept away. I inhaled a strange and musky smell and I knew—not even needing the flicker of light that came in through the broken floorboards—that I was in a crypt. The coffin I’d landed on had broken. But I’d rolled, and the coffin had fallen, and I was lying next to a dead man, mummified, worm-eaten, flesh stretched taut where it was, bones glistening where it was not.

  I screamed again.

  “Oh, my God!” I heard Maria cried out.

  “Lenore!” Stephen called my name.

  Shaken, shocked, frozen, I could only think in sarcastic terms.

  Brilliant. Let’s restore the art. Oh, yeah, the art is in a structure…

  “Help, help!” The sound of my own voice was weak. It grew stronger. “Oh, my God, help me! Dead people, dead people—everywhere. Oh, God!”

  “Stay still, stay where you are—everyone, careful. Don’t move!” Stephen said. “Cell phone lights on!”

  Light shone down. I could see them all, faces eerie as they pushed their lit phones toward the hole.

  “Careful moving,” Stephen commanded. “The whole thing is about to give. Lenore has been working here alone. This much weight… all of us… too much!”

  And it was. There was a horrendous crashing sound.

  Suddenly, they were all down there, crashing onto coffins and bodies, all of us, entangled, hurt, bruised, terrified and screaming.

  “Hey!”

  And then all sound abruptly stopped—Jeff had that kind of authority in his voice.

  “I’m a doctor, guys. I see dead people often. Okay, so these are deader than the ones I usually see. They’re just bodies. So… we figure how to get out of here!”

  “Yeah, we get out of here,” Stephen murmured. “Ooooh! Happy birthday, Lenore. Happy birthday!”

  Chapter 2

  Stephen

  I love my friends. I’ve always loved my friends. I am, beyond a doubt, one of those people who wants there to be good in everyone.

  I started out life with two strikes against me—as some might see it.

  I’m black.

  I’m gay.

  Some people want to dislike you for one, the other, or both. But I’d decided to look to things like affirmative action and to surround myself with people who were just good and loving.

  I found such a strange group of friends, but, that’s exactly what they were.

  Lenore was the best. Such a beautiful and talented woman. From the first time we met—eighteen-year-olds, just stepping out into the world—we were instant friends.

  She’s the opposite of me—blue-eyed, blond-haired, lean, tall, and absolutely stunning. We were probably an odd pair together, but neither of us cared. We gave each other help on our projects in school, and, as we went on in life, helped get each other work now and then. I always knew that she had a terrible crush on Dr. Jeff and never figured out how he didn’t know it.

  Or why nothing had ever come of it.

  Anyway, that year, when she was working on the historic project out on that island, practically alone, I thought I could give her the best present possible—Jeff.

  Get him out there with just the group of us…

  Party, party!

  But, go figure. Cities! Hey, let’s restore that art—the floor? Oh, should we have worried about the floor?

  When I saw Lenore crash through, it felt as if my heart was being torn out of my chest. I couldn’t breathe—which, in a way, made sense. For seconds, we stood in a cloud of dust that all but enveloped us. Then, Lenore was screaming about corpses, and we knew she was alive, just desperate to get out.

  Then, we were all in pile of dusty, decaying, incredibly creepy corpses.

  The light from our cell phones made the images around us more distorted and macabre.

  “Lenore is the lightest,” Maria noted. “We can push her up.”

  “And then?” Ali asked.

  “And then, rope!” Lenore said. “I have plenty of rope—we were eventually going to have to get scaffolding up, and we needed rope, so…”

  “You and me!” I told Jeff.

  “Yep, gotcha.”

  “Thank God that the gay guy and the straight guy are both in great shape!” Tracey murmured.

  “Hey, I’m a guy!” Ali said.

  “And you’re kind of in shape,” Tracey granted him. “Oh, come on, guys, lighten up, please!” she begged.

  She was right, of course. We all tried to do a bit of laughing, making creepy noises, and trying to get each other into a birthday mood again.

  Jeff and I hiked Lenore up to the hole in the floor; she managed to crawl out. She found the rope and sent it down to the rest of us.

  We crawled up, Jeff and I waiting until last to make sure we—muscle-bound straight guy and muscle-bound gay guy—got them all up first. Once they were all up, we looked at each other and shrugged. Then I insisted he go first.

  “You’re the doc,” I said to him, “and someone might have cuts and bruises.”

  There were a few cuts and bruises. Miraculously, no one was hurt more than that.

  “But we have a doctor!” Ali said.

  “And a nurse—anesthetist, but, hey, an RN,” Tracey reminded us all. “And I’m going to recommend—”

  “An anti-bacterial cream,” Jeff interrupted her. “Hey, a doc trumps a nurse.”

  “Wow. That was heavy,” Tracey said.

  Edging away from the now giant hole in the floor, we wound up staring at one another—and laughing. We were covered in crypt dust.

  Bone dust, probably.

  The rot and ruin of two hundred years of death.

  “I do believe we’re all going to need to shower before… well, before anything!” Lenore said cheerfully.

  “The boat captain will freak when he sees us all,” I said. I looked at Lenore. “You should sue the historic people! The City of New York. Someone.”

  “Hey, we all should!” Ali agreed.

  “Don’t sue people who deal with history—there’s never any money to actually preserve things as it is! And, we can head on up. That little office was also a home at one time. There’s a full bathroom there,” Lenore said.

  “If any of us had been hurt…” Jeff began.

  “But we weren’t,” Lenore said quickly. “Birthday present to me—let’s just all laugh about this. There’s something that resembles a makeshift bathroom off one of the choir rooms, but really, better facilities can be found up at the office.

  “But we’re just guests here,” I said a little awkwardly. It hadn’t been difficult, really, to reach Dirk Van der Ven—one of the historic board people who worked up at the little office. He’d been okay. So had the girl there, Tina. But I also got the feeling that they cared about Lenore—who didn’t?—but they were still just being tolerant. They really weren’t all that crazy about us being on the island; they would allow it because it was Lenore’s birthday. When we’d arrived—needing instructions to sneak around a back path in order to surprise her at the church—Dirk had definitely given Ali a long and doubtful glare. Ali was Arab. He looked Arab. Dirk didn’t like Arabs.

  He probably didn’t like blacks, either. But at least I wasn’t a black Arab!

  “Hey!” Maria reminded us. “We’re guests who crashed through a floor. Owned by the city. They owe us some cleanliness, at the very least—or else we should sue.”

  “Okay, okay�
��let’s clean up, wait for the boat and we’ll have a great time back in the city tonight,” Lenore said.

  “Here, here!” I agreed. “But, young lady!” I commanded Lenore. “You call those historic people you work for and tell them what happened here.”

  “Sure.”

  “Guys, walk along the sides here—there are support columns beneath us,” Ali said. He was one of our friends who wasn’t what they termed a “visual” artist—he’d been at Pratt working toward design, architecture, and engineering.

  “Gotcha,” Maria said. She started along the side of the church, stepping gingerly at first. She was a pretty girl. Dark haired, dark-eyed. I’d met Maria soon after I met Lenore. We’d spent a lot of nights drinking beer and talking about life. Maria had assured us that it wasn’t all that easy for a Cuban Jew to get a date. I told her to try being a gay black man.

  “But, you’re so cool looking,” Maria had said.

  “Yep, just like ebony silk,” Lenore had agreed. And we’d laughed—if I ever gave up art and became a porn star, my name was going to be Ebony Silk.

  One by one, we carefully left the main structure of the church.

  Lenore was last out. She was frowning. I looked at her with concern and she quickly explained, “No one answered. I tried about five people with the historic board—no one answered!”

  “An undeclared holiday?” I asked, shrugging. I slipped an arm around her. Doc Jeff was up at the front of the column, talking to Nurse Tracey. They weren’t arm in arm or anything—they almost seemed to be arguing about something.

  Tina was standing at the front of what was now the George Island Development Office when we reached the old dock structure. She looked concerned.

  “What happened to you?” She demanded, staring at us all with horror.

  Dirk came out to stand behind her. He looked like his name—as if he could be a damned Viking. He was super-tall, blond, bronzed, and a bit like a Nordic god. Van der Ven—his family probably went back in NYC, to the days when the Dutch—not the Vikings—had ruled.

  Too bad he seemed to be such an ass. The way he looked at Ali scared me.

  “Tina! The entire floor of the church gave!” Lenore said.

  “Ah, damn it! I knew we should have said ‘no!’” she exclaimed, looking back at Dirk. “They’ve wrecked the place.”

  “Hey!” Ali protested angrily. “You have a death trap going, and you’re angry with us?”

  “First off, we don’t have anything going. But, things aren’t open because they’re all under restoration!” Dirk snapped.

  “So—if we hadn’t been here, Lenore could have been killed! She could have fallen down into the crypt with no help. She could have—”

  “Stop!” Lenore suddenly screamed.

  We all looked at her. She was staring at her phone. She looked up at all of us, her eyes mirroring a fear and horror such as nothing I had ever seen before.

  “Look!” she whispered, and her voice barely found substance. “The news, the news, oh, God!”

  There was no way we could all crowd around her little camera phone. A number of us began to pull out our own phones.

  And we didn’t understand what we were seeing.

  “A movie?” Maria asked, confused.

  “Promotion for a TV show—you get one great zombie show, and all of a sudden there are zillions of bad copies,” Ali said, shaking his head.

  “Zombies?” Tina asked.

  “It’s New York City. It’s just …” Wu spoke, but his words were a bare whisper.

  “Well, the… they look like zombies,” I said—because they did. They were people, of course, moving along the streets of New York City. On whatever cable channel I had dredged up on my phone, they were showing a lovely redheaded anchor up on some kind of a platform. She was above the chaos on the streets. People screaming… and then just falling. Then other people falling on the fallen people, and then …

  “Oh, God. Oh, God, it can’t be real—it can’t be!” Lenore said.

  The same words echoed in my mind.

  “For the love of Allah!” Ali cried.

  Wu was chanting something in Chinese.

  “Zombies! It’s got to be the bloody Arabs!” Tina screamed.

  I was afraid of how Ali might react. It was Lenore who swung around on her. “How dare you? How dare you call yourself American, and condemn any one people?”

  “It’s all right!” Ali cried.

  “It’s the Russians!”

  I don’t even know who said that, but thoughts were running wild through everyone’s heads—and they were being spouted out just the same. Arabs, Russians, Cubans, the Chinese, the Japanese, North Koreans, the Jews… feisty people? And, hell, it could even be the Mexicans, pissed about the wall … God only knew!

  We were starting to fight. I think it was Dirk who suggested that it might be the Darkies out of Africa. Half of us were ready to start swinging at the other half.

  I have to admit—I was one of those who wanted to start swinging.

  The video we all saw seemed to grow more and more bizarre.

  But it couldn’t be real; it couldn’t be real!

  Just as we all stared at our cell phones, fighting and screaming and puffing up like a ridiculous pack of peacocks, there was a tremendous shudder in the earth where we stood, and the sound of a rock-hard slam, wood splintering, the dock and the ground exploding.

  The ferry had come. The ferry had come—to take us all back for the night.

  But the ferry had not docked.

  It had slammed straight into the wharf with such impetus that it had actually seemed to hurtle itself clear onto the land.

  Chapter 3

  Jeff

  When you’re a doctor, people believe you have to be smart. Except for other doctors, of course. They know it’s all a matter of memorizing the right things and understanding the human structure and the function of our organs, just the way an architect knows and loves the way buildings are put together and how nails and pilings and whatever else might work.

  Put us—doctors, I believe, based on myself—in the middle of chaos, we’re just about the same as everyone else. We go by instinct.

  We panic.

  Our panic, however, was almost as slow as the movement—we were still too confused, too stunned. Smart? Slow-witted was far more like it.

  I thought about the fact that it had been difficult for me to get away from the hospital that day. People kept coming in with the flu. I hadn’t paid that much attention.

  There was always a flu going around.

  But now…

  It was a joke; it was some kind of terrible joke. We had to be seeing a drama of some kind on the television—hell, recent elections had proved that no one just reported the news anymore!

  And the ferry captain…

  He had to be drunk. That would explain it.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked around. It was Lenore. Her eyes were steady as she stared at me.

  I was the doctor—the macho man. Panicking. And Lenore…

  Down to earth, ever level Lenore. The woman was ready to love anyone and everyone—she was someone who wanted only good in the world.

  I cared about her. I always had. And, to be honest, I’d played on the fact that I knew she had quite a thing for me. Oh, I didn’t take it to the end run, so to say. But, I had used it. When I was alone. When I was angry with someone else. When a lack of recognition was getting me down. I called Lenore. We’d go to dinner. I’d talk biology and chemistry and she’d describe some of the finest art in the world. You see, I knew I could have a whole damned smorgasbord at the time—no way in hell that I’d look that way at Lenore. Nothing wrong with her—as even my well-educated buddies were prone to say, I’d do her in a heartbeat.

  Except that I never had. Somehow, I’d been smart enough to preserve the friendship—and not do her for a heartbeat.

  “Hurt, yes, hurt,” I said.

  “Hurt!” Tracey said, and I turne
d to look at her. Hurt, dammit, yes, she was a nurse, I was a doctor. Hurt!

  Lenore was already running toward the crashed boat, calling out.

  That was when the first of them stumbled out. He’d been a first mate, of something. I don’t really understand how boats—ferries—work. I mean, seriously, they had come to pick up a few people off an island. Just how many cooks did you need in that kitchen?

  Then the captain, I imagine—from his hat. His back had been broken; he moved in a doubled-over position. Then there were some kind of stewards, two of them.

  To be fair, honest, and—sadly—cut down on the nobility of our coming actions, they were slow as hell. I still had a very, very bad time believing what I was seeing.

  Yes, people had become zombies.

  They stared with sightless eyes as they moved; and they let out some kind of noise. It was awful. It was a groaning—it was a death rattle. They weren’t breathing, but something was moving through their lungs.

  One by one, they stumbled off the beached boat.

  I was about fifteen feet behind Lenore. She was in complete denial. “We’ll help you!” she called out. “We’ll help you!”

  And it was wrong. I knew it was wrong. I knew before she reached the first one, clutching his arms, looking into his eyes, telling him again that they could be helped; a doctor was coming.

  I watched as that first of the boat—zombies or whatever the hell they were—reacted to Lenore. I watched his mouth open, his jaw tight, his teeth…

  He bit her. Bit into her flesh hard, ripping and tearing.

  She screamed; she wrenched away, sending a blow against the thing that had once been a man.

  I thought about Lenore. The laughter in her beautiful eyes, the way her hair swung around her like a cascade of silk when she walked. The way she moved, grace and elegance in her every smile, twist, and turn.

  I thought about all the sex we never had, and never would.

  While I was thinking, Stephen rushed by me. He’d grabbed up some kind of gardening tool that had been left by the porch, and he swung.