City of Whispers (City of Whispers #1)

City of Whispers

Katherine
Sorin

Copyright 2011 by Katherine
Sorin

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the author.

The characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious. Any similarity
to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the
author.

1

I never liked Manhattan
to begin with. After the outbreak, on days when I felt particularly snarky, I
sometimes told the other survivors that I liked Manhattan better than before. It was less
crowded, less noisy, and, I liked to claim, friendlier. We had to joke about it
or we all would have gone crazy. Some people went crazy anyway.

One thing that never improved about Manhattan was the smell. There was nothing to
get my day started out right like turning the corner and inhaling a big breath
full of rotting flesh.

When it was no longer safe to be in the streets, I
holed up in my apartment with my best friend, Beth. Before joining me in my
apartment, she had lived on the 23rd floor of a high-rise a few blocks away.

We chose my apartment because it had a fire escape,
which provided an extra way out in case we needed it. I wasn’t about to stay
with Beth and find myself in a situation where the two of us had to fight our
way out of the building through dark hallways and down twenty-plus flights of
dark stairs.

We didn’t have time to plan. Our government can be
incredibly quick and efficient when it wants to be. The military blew the
bridges and tunnels before we even knew what was happening. Then, the public
parks became infernos.

The vampire bodies burned in the sunlight, so those
were not a problem. The human bodies were either doused in gasoline and burned
in the streets, or taken
en masse
to whatever designated park was
closest and thrown into shallow fire pits. The sky was dark with smoke and the
whole city smelled of burning flesh.

The night after we lost our only means of escaping Manhattan, the power went
out and we lost cell phone service. That’s when shit really hit the fan.

Helicopters dropped pamphlets about staying indoors,
staying calm until the situation was under control, and by the way if you try
to take a boat or swim across either river you will be shot, no questions
asked. That day—the day of the pamphlet drop—we stopped going outside, and
began avoiding the windows.

In the early days, it was hard to look away. The
action in the streets was constant. During the day people looted, and when they
found vampires, the people dragged them out into the streets and watched the
vampires scream in agony as they burned.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was what
the people did to each other. They did it right there in the street. I don’t
like to think about it.

Early in the evenings it got interesting. People began
to head indoors as the sun started to set. Only the real bad-asses stayed out.
Or at least they must have thought they were bad-asses. I theorized that many
of these people were the same people that did the terrible things to other
humans during the day, so I found myself rooting for the vampires when they
went after those wannabes—and those guys were always the first among the humans
to be picked off.

There were about thirty to forty minutes between the
time most people went indoors and the actual sunset. During that time, the
looters continued their looting and generally ran amok in the streets. Many of
them openly mocked vampires and the rest of the city. They taunted anyone who
was afraid to come out. They even called on the vampires to come out of
hiding…and the vampires didn’t disappoint.

The vampires never came out one at a time, either. At
first they came out by the dozen, later the numbers seemed to dwindle along
with the human population. It was as if they woke up just before sunset and
waited in the safety of whatever dark tombs they had created for themselves.
They waited for that moment as if they all somehow internally felt the sun go
down, then flooded onto the streets. They came out in packs.

In those days, the vampires were newly turned and made
no effort to stay hidden or quiet on the hunt, and they didn’t have to. There
were so many of them that their sheer numbers could overwhelm a group of
humans. The vampires were careless back then. If a looter was lucky and
skilled, he could pick off a good number of vampires before he was inevitably
torn apart.

Before we lost power, I heard on the news that the
virus was transferred via vampire bite. I assumed that most vampires were
created by being attacked by one or two vampires, because when the packs
attacked people in the streets, there was nothing left to transform. The
vampires didn’t actually eat the person, but with so many fighting for body
space to get a drink of blood—it just wasn’t pretty. The strongest vampires
would attack the neck and more often than not, the head would become completely
severed.

Then the sad part of the evening came, when the
partially transformed vampires came out.

Often they were very old or very young. They looked
awful. Instead of bright yellow or green eyes, they had dull, bloodshot eyes
that looked orange in color. Their hair was grungy and their skin an old
yellow.

They clearly had the virus, but instead of making them
killing machines, it made them weaker and more pathetic than they had been in
their human lives. These half-vampires feebly tried to lap up the remaining
blood of the corpses left behind by the first round of vampires.

Often, the looters who were left picked off the
half-vampires, though it was hardly necessary. Sometimes, the weak,
pseudo-vampires just lay down and died next to a body as they tried to drink.
Closing the curtains was easy then.

2

One week into the epidemic I killed someone for the first time. Although I
lived on the fifth floor of my building, we weren’t safe. When things got bad
on the street, we used my coffee table to try to board up the window by the
fire escape.

A few months earlier, I had made one of the best
purchases of my life, a hatchet. Living in New York, I had always kept a knife and
pepper spray by my bed, but a co-worker had once suggested a hatchet. I thought
it was a great idea, so I bought one for myself, having no idea at the time how
useful it would become.

We had only half finished boarding up the window when
someone tried to break in. He was a young, scrawny guy, maybe twenty-one or
twenty-two years old.

I was terrified. He was invading my space. My safe
space. I would have been scared at any time, but knowing I couldn’t call the
police amplified my fright and my resolve to kill the intruder.

While he was still on the fire escape, Beth dashed to
the front door where she grabbed my pepper spray. She ran back to the window
and pepper-sprayed him while I grabbed a knife from the kitchen.

I discovered then that stabbing someone isn’t as easy
as it looks in the movies. You don’t just stab someone and bam, he’s dead,
unless you do it right. I knew if I didn’t act fast the man would climb into
the apartment. I knew he might kill us, but a part of me still hesitated as I
brought the knife down into his chest. As a result, the knife didn’t go in very
deep.

The man screamed. I pulled the knife out of his chest and
raised it again for a second go. The man grabbed my arm, but I managed to break
free. I stabbed him in the neck with all my strength. I vowed I would never
hesitate again.

I felt a pang of guilt standing there, watching the
blood leak through the bars of the fire escape. I didn’t know for sure why he
had been trying to get in. Maybe he was scared himself. Maybe he was running
from something, or just trying to find somewhere to stay. But this was about my
own survival.

We pushed the skinny man off the fire escape, for the
vampires to do with as they saw fit.

The second, much larger intruder came the next
afternoon. He made it halfway inside before getting caught on some of the
boards we had used in an attempt to secure the windows.

I had already learned my lesson with the first man and
I didn’t hesitate. I stabbed him in the throat with the biggest knife I had. He
died almost immediately.

And then there he was, disgusting and soaked in blood,
lying across our window, half inside and half out, and the sun was setting.

“Oh God, what do we do?” Beth asked. “He weighs more
than both of us combined.”

“I have a baseball bat under my bed,” I replied,
“maybe we could use it to prod him the rest of the way out and off the fire
escape.”

Beth went to go look for the baseball bat while I
watched the window.

It was too late.

As I leaned over in a fruitless attempt to roll the
man off our windowsill, I saw it through the bars, climbing up the fire escape.

Slinking, crawling—I don’t know how to describe the way
it moved. It was a female, maybe middle-aged. Like all the other freshly
infected vampires in the street, she wasn’t very stealthy. It was obvious what
she was. Her skin was pale, hair matted, eyes narrowed, fangs out for everyone
to see.

As if all this weren’t a dead giveaway, her neck was
torn open on the right side. The skin had been ripped away and there was still
some dark, old blood in the gash. These weren’t two little polite puncture
wounds—someone had really gone at her.

I almost felt pity, thinking about the poor woman who
had been attacked…how she must have felt the terror I was feeling right now. I
wondered if she remembered it, or if the human in her was gone, replaced by
some other creature that had taken hold of her body.

I thought I had mentally prepared myself for that
moment, but I had not. I’m not sure one can. I felt as if my stomach were full
of dry ice.

I backed away from the window. “Beth.” I thought I
screamed it, but it may have only come out as a hoarse whisper. “Beth! Please Beth
come in here now.”

Then the vampire-woman looked at me, casting away any
and all pity I might have felt a moment earlier. I had never looked one in the
eye before. It was horrible. The vampire’s bloodshot eyes looked at me as if
she wanted nothing more than to tear my throat open.

I felt a hand grip my elbow and my head spun for a
moment, but it was Beth. She held two of our homemade stakes in one hand and
the baseball bat in the other. I took a stake. I took a deep breath, inhaling
the metallic smell of fresh blood and the disgusting smell of death that had
come to characterize the streets of Manhattan.

I took half a step forward and couldn’t go any
farther.

“He’s still fresh,” Beth whispered. “Maybe she’ll just
have some of him and move on.”

As if understanding Beth’s words, the vampire looked
away from us and began to lick up a little of the blood. At any other time in
my life I would have found the scene revolting, but at the time I felt
relief—better his blood than mine.

“What if she doesn’t finish him fast enough?” I said.
“What if the body attracts more of them? You’ve seen them from the window,
they’re like sharks. A fresh body draws them like a magnet.”

“Let’s not risk it,” Beth said.

With the knot still tight in my stomach, I began to
inch my way toward the window. Beth followed.

After getting a taste, the vampire went for the
corpse’s neck, which happened to be hanging into the living room. As soon as
her head was in I hissed, “Hit her.”

“What?”

“Hit her with the bat, right in her head. I’ll stake
her in the back, through the heart.”

And Beth did. She gave the vampire a good hard bash on
the head. Beth couldn’t have held back a thing. She almost caught me off guard
with the ferocity of her blow. As the thing screamed and tried to turn around I
plunged my stake into her back—going for the heart.

Turns out that staking someone is even more difficult
than stabbing. We had made sharp points out of the legs of my end table using
my hatchet and this helped, but I still didn’t kill the vampire on the first
try.

To be honest, I didn’t even know if a wooden stake was
necessary at the time. I had seen it in movies and I saw people using them in
the street, so I figured I’d better be safe than sorry.

I also decided that cutting the head off was necessary.
So I did. Though my staking wasn’t perfectly executed, it helped get the
vampire incapacitated enough to chop her head off with the hatchet.

They don’t bleed like we do, but they do bleed. It’s
just slower, and darker. It’s more like oozing—disgusting.

“Let’s get her out of here,” Beth said.

“Wait,” I said. “
maybe
we
should keep her.”

“You’re sick.”

“No, she might be the best protection we can get.
Think about it. Who’s going to mess with us if we have a rotting vampire body
on the fire escape?”

Beth was silent for a moment and then nodded.
 

We prodded the bloody mass that was the second intruder
off the fire escape, and let it fall onto the street. He fell with a thud and I
saw three vampires rush toward him before I turned away. We kept the vampire
and her head facing down through the fire escape grate so that everyone below
could see her when they looked up. We covered her with the lining of my shower
curtain so that she wouldn’t burn too quickly in the sunlight.

Thank God we still had running water because I must
have showered for an hour.

Before I stabbed the two intruders and staked my first
vampire, I was the nice quiet girl at the office. Some of my coworkers liked to
joke that I must have a hidden vicious side that no one knew about. It was funny
at the time, but it turned out to be true.