The Ghosts in Their Boroughs

Chapter 3

Copyright © 2022 Wayne Kyle Spitzer. All Rights Reserved. Published by Hobb’s End Books, a division of ACME Sprockets & Visions. Cover design Copyright © 2022 Wayne Kyle Spitzer. Please direct all inquiries to: HobbsEndBooks@yahoo.com

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Author’s Note

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These are stories of the Flashback, the time-storm that vanished most the world’s population and returned the world to primordia, and thus are all connected. They are not, however, told in a linear fashion, but rather hop around the timeline at will (as is appropriate, perhaps, for a world in which time has been scrambled). Therefore, a certain nimbleness on the reader’s part is assumed. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

—WKS

I was in the Lou Zone—gazing between the burnt-orange Pin Oaks and dying Black Locust trees at Central Park Tower (or rather the dazzling white, seemingly too-large seabirds gathered along its roof), trying not to look at the sky, when Sylvia nudged me.

“Do you hear that?”

I looked around the spacious, high-ceilinged cab: at Sylvia with her trademark blue scarf and Wayfarer sunglasses (which seemed huge on her diminutive, small-boned face); at Professor Pratt in his ridiculous, vinyl sauna suit (he’d been jogging when the proverbial s**t had hit the fan); at the back of Madsen’s head. “What is it? Why have we stopped?”

“Shhh,” whispered Sylvia. She rolled her window down the rest of the way and listened, studiously, raptly. “Do you hear it? The carnival music?”

“Central Park Carousel—it’s got to be,” said Pratt.

“In this blackout?” I shook my head. “Not likely.”

Madsen ground the gears. “We don’t have time for it, whatever it is. Not while our ticket across the Hudson is just sitting—”

“Look, Maddy,” Sylvia unhooked her seatbelt and picked up her Nikon. “You’re Super Prepper, I get it. And I know you’ve been planning for this; getting out of New York, I mean, in the event of, well, whatever this is.” She laughed. “That’s why I interviewed you, and why I’m here now. But I’m still a photojournalist. And if you think I’m just going to ignore a carousel spinning at the end of the world ...”

And then she was out; she’d thrown open the door of the truck—a customized 1997 Stewart and Stevenson M1078 LMTV, the “toughest truck in the world,” according to Madsen—and was climbing over the block wall next to the road; over it and into the bushes—into the ferns and lycophytes, which swallowed her.

I sighed.

“Then again,” said Pratt, “we don’t actually know it’s the end of the world. It might just be something local; that is, exclusive to Manhattan. I mean, we haven’t established anything yet other than—”

“We know this,” snapped Madsen. “And that’s that most the people on the island seem to have just up and disappeared—wouldn’t you say? And that the power’s out ... and all the cars are stalled ... like there’s been an EMP burst. Isn’t that enough?”

I looked back and forth between them. Ah, man overboard?

“No, because we don’t know that. It’s like Sagan said: ‘absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence.’ Or if you’d prefer—”

“I’ll get her,” I hissed; then pushed Sylvia’s seat forward and reached for my rifle (one of three AR-15s Madsen had stockpiled and distributed between us), gripped the door handle.

“Look, we know what they’ve been planning—for all of us—what they’ve been planning for years. And we know they’ve got super-weapons; things like neutron bombs and HiJENKS and—”

“Ah! Ah! Cue the Zionist space lasers ...”

“Take a look at that sky, asshole. And tell me again how—”

I climbed out and slammed the door.

The silence was deafening.

“Sylvia?”

The bushes were still. I looked at the tunnel we’d just passed through, which was choked with abandoned vehicles—the fact we’d managed to squeeze through was a miracle in itself—then west down 65th Street. Nothing. More empty vehicles. A red sportscar, which had run into the opposite wall as though its driver had fallen asleep. A Spectrum utility truck, which had been rearended by a minivan. The page of a newspaper—which skittered past like a tumbleweed. And, of course, the light—that queer, ethereal light—which lay on everything like a shroud, like a coat of green snow (although it wasn’t green at all, not really, that’s just the best I can do considering it was of a color I’d never seen).

And finally I looked at the sky, at that primeval swirl of red and yellow and brown, like something from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. At that twilit chiaroscuro draped with green (but not green) light—a curtain, a cloak, a phantom borealis. At that familiar yet threatening dome which now felt foreign and artificial—a place for vague, unidentifiable aircraft and Zionist space lasers. The Backdrop of Armageddon.