First Activation

“The guy had jumped out head first onto the sidewalk. We saw him again when we left the apartment to come and meet you. Chris blamed himself for Deb’s death. If he hadn’t rolled away, then she would still have been alive, he said. I tried to reason with him saying it was a natural reaction to avoid something like that, he wouldn’t listen. He kept repeating it over and over again until late into the night. He wrapped Deb’s body in a blanket from the spare room and sat with it all night. I don’t think he knew her at all, but he had started to lose control.”

“I suppose different people react in different ways,” I said, without giving it much thought.

Lea stared at me for a few seconds, and then continued.

“I didn’t get much sleep that night; I was too scared to close my eyes. In fact, I haven’t really slept at all since landing. Next morning, Chris and I were both completely worn out and he was making me despair at our situation. I felt like we were going to be killed at any moment, more in desperation, I checked twitter and saw your reply. Your tweets had been the only ones I received that stood out as being genuine. Chris was in a mess, I needed some confidence that I could actually get through all of this in one piece. That was when I replied and agreed to meet you at the bridge.”

We all nodded.

“Chris didn’t want to leave the apartment, but I convinced him that we needed to find more people if we wanted to survive, he eventually agreed. I found a map in the apartment and the bridge wasn’t far—”

“I’ve been waiting to hear this,” Bernie said.

Lea rolled her eyes.

”We crept along to the bridge and it was pretty quiet, but within fifty yards, I saw a man walking across the bridge from the Manhattan side. He jumped into a car and started driving through the stationary traffic away from us. There was no way I could warn you. Sorry.”

“It’s okay, Lea, we probably wouldn’t have recognised a warning even if you tried,” Jack replied.

“We waited to see what would happen as I knew you might be at the other end. I heard a shot then a long blast of a car horn. We sprinted back to the apartment and I still didn’t know if you had survived or were even genuine.”

“Well, here we are. What did you do after that?” I asked.

“Back at the apartment, I started to feel really desperate, and sent another tweet without much hope of reply. Chris had become manic, saying that we were going to die and that our last hope had gone. He wouldn’t eat and seriously considered just wandering the streets to find Mike. We agreed to stay in the apartment, purely because it seemed safer than any alternative.”

“What alternatives did you consider?” Bernie said.

“Not that many really, we were thinking about getting a boat and anchoring in the harbour, or heading to the end of Long Island. But once you replied on twitter, I wanted to hook up in Elmhurst regardless of what Chris wanted to do. I had a map that covered the area and was just about to send you another tweet confirming I was on my way, when the power died. Chris refused to leave at first. I ended up slapping him and shouting that he was risking both our lives by wanting to stay. If he wanted to do something stupid, I told him, he could do it after we had found other people.”

“So he went along with it?” Bernie asked.

“When I asked him what Mike would have wanted, he agreed to leave with me and head to Elmhurst. We didn’t come across anyone while making our way over the Queensboro Bridge, although we did manage to get an automatic each from a crowd of corpses.”

“You know how to use one?” Jack said.

“I have used guns before. An ex-partner had a weird obsession with them and used to take me to a range.”

“And when you crossed the bridge?” Bernie replied.

“We crept along following the directions on my map. When we turned towards the heart of Elmhurst and walked a couple hundred yards, the music started a few blocks away. Chris decided that it must have been you letting us know your location, and that you were guiding us in. Just in case, we checked our guns. I let off a shot by accident.”

“I think we heard that.” I said, it was probably the shot that caused Bernie and me to start running from the scene of the trap.

“We crept up to the parking lot, you know the rest.”

We all sat in silence. While telling us her story, Lea showed she obviously had strength, otherwise, she wouldn’t have made it this far, and the incident in the parking lot when she shot the killer had proved that. Lea had shown no hesitation when the danger became clear.

“So why didn’t you leave the parking lot after the killer shot Chris?” Jack asked. “From what I saw, you just knelt in the same place until Harry arrived.”

“I thought I was on my own. Also, I figured that I’d been fooled on twitter by a killer, and Chris’ death was my fault. I didn’t know what to do next.”

“You know now it wasn’t your fault, and you’re not on your own either. You’re welcome to stay with us,” Bernie said.