The leader has a handgun strapped to his thigh; the other man has one on his hip.
Ava says to the woman. “Where’s your weapon?”
The woman turns her head in every direction to look over her body. “Come on. I must have dropped it out there. It’s usually right here.” She points to her back.
Ava says. “This will take a second.” The woman picks up her hands, Ava thoroughly pats her down. Lou and Youngblood do the same for the other two men. Youngblood gathers all their weapons and places them by his seat.
The Prophet has a red scarf unwrapped around his neck and long brown hair down past to his shoulders, he ties it to a ponytail waiting for someone to talk. The other man takes off his baseball cap and fans it in his face; the woman leans towards him and says. “Let’s just keep going.” Intentionally loud enough for Ava to hear.
Lou says. “Where’re you all heading to?”
The man with the cap says. “Mexico, for the beaches and mamacitas, if the Mexicans were hard workers when alive, I can’t wait to see the dead versions of themselves, they probably can jump over the border wall with their super strength...I’m just kidding people...hopefully we can find more survivors. Though tonight I’ll settle for a little conversing with different people who’re not sick and break a little bread. I have some more goodies in this bag.” He picks at his bulbous tip nose.
Ava says to the balding man. “Mexico, it has to be like Mad Max down there with cartels and all that firepower to protect their drugs.”
The man says. “We can all get high and die happy. Wanna come?”
Lou points at the woman. “What happens if she gets pregnant on your road to paradise? The man says. “I’m one frustrated traveller, if you catch my drift.”
Lou smiles and waves them to sit on two broad logs in front of the fire and him. Ava touches her heart and says in a mockingly sweet voice. “So, I’m Ava.”
The man says. “I’m Job, not job. This is my wife and that is the Prophet...oh he said that already. He hugs one arm behind his wife and shakes the Prophet’s shoulder. The Prophet says. “It’s his nice way of calling me a know-it-all.”
The Prophet has his hands in front of him as he explains. “I used to be a scientist.”
Ava says. “You don’t look like one.” The Prophet puts up one finger, indicating one second. He then puts on his glasses and his group smiles and nods their heads.
Job says. “Enlighten these kind folks. It’s never too late to learn.”
The Prophet says. “Fine, I like to first ask. What is a nice girl like yourself doing in a place like this?”
Ava looks left and right. “What the hell are talking about?”
The Prophet pauses and Job looks at him and breaks out laughing uncontrollably. The Prophet says over his laughs. “Sorry, he gets a kick out of that every time.”
After a minute, the Prophet looks over at him and says. “You done?” Job continues to laugh as his wife smiles in embarrassment, leaning away from him.
The Prophet then says. “I ask that once, to gauge people’s perception of reality of the situation. Meaning, how did we all get here, not only through chance, bad luck, but also by our lack of morality.”
The Prophet looks at Ava with her eyebrows pushed down. He smiles and says. “Sorry again, I tend to think people can read my mind.”
Ava says. “That’s a nice way of calling us idiots.”
3
“I’ve been dying to use this.”
Davis arcs the M32 grenade launcher, firing a single shot five hundred yards into a parking lot. Cars flip and alarms whine. Indoctrinated by a malevolent prime mover, herds of doom beggars cry out for fleeting satiation and approach from far and away.
He and Coop squat on the hill overlooking the city. A headless zombie is resting across the saddle of Coop’s horse. The horse circles around the cypress tree and bucks his back legs, the rope around the zombie only tightens with each struggle. Coop cups his mouth. “Stop it. It’s your knight in shining armor.”
David furrows his brows. “You sure you want to go in there? I appreciate your gesture, but you can stay up here.”
Coop says, “what’s the plan,” as he slices a piece off the squirrel, spit-roasting over a small fire.
David hands the binoculars to him. “Well, that’s the hospital over there…you can tell by the huge parking garage and the one remaining letter H. All the cold bodies are heading for that burning heap like ants to a picnic.”
The city is a diorama until Coop zooms in and zigzags the binoculars across the city skyline. David empties the smoking shell from the launcher, “I have to travel light. Can you hand me that bag?”
“Is that a good idea?” Coop slips in bullets into his repeating rifle. David puts his Ziplock bag into the black backpack.
David removes his zombie-blood poncho. “I can’t shoot my way out, not enough bullets. You take the assault rifle and ammo.” Coop looks up.
David continues. “Don’t worry your pretty little head, I have my handgun and knife.” Taps his temple. “And this…a problem well defined is a problem half solved.
Coop says. “What do you want written on your tombstone?”
David rubs zombie blood between his hands then rubs it on his face and neck like sun-tan lotion. Coop juggles an object. “Take this just in case.”
David stands up, looking at the motorcycle. “I hope you know how to drive one of these.”
Coop says. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough. Because I’m definitely not running anytime soon. My knees are rusty hinges.” He rubs both to make sure.
David and Cooper stand side-by-side looking at the cityscape. “How are you going to get in and out of the hospital in one piece?”
David says. “Not quite sure yet. I’ll think of something on my feet. Coop if I go down or do not respond to the walkie, don’t come after me. You have to continue on and save the love of your life…you can trust Ava to get you there.”
Cooper does not say anything, so David peers at him. “Promise…This journey has been dangerous and stressful, but I know you will see your wife again. Promise me, before I have to knock you out. Someone needs to walk away a winner after all of this, to give it all meaning.”
Cooper smiles as he puts his head down. “I promise, because I know I will hear your annoying voice again.”
David says. “Besides, it’s a good plan.”
Cooper says. “It’s shit, but what else can we do?” With that, David and Cooper head for the city.
Colors are muted and several buildings stand like picked clean corncobs, others like empty metal shelves stacked back-to-back. With the glass and walls blown away leaving floors jutting out, resembling pagodas not skyscrapers. Invasive weeds are poking out from the ground, burying the old world. The city is crawling with gaggles of zombies on every street corner and crevice, like prostitutes and hobos after dark; dead cars litter the streets as well. David and Cooper navigate mainly on the sidewalks, passing zombies adorned in faded dungarees overalls degusting on pigeons like thick bubble gum. David appreciates the Queen and her clean up crew a lot more now.
Coop turns into a sub-street-level quadrangle that’s full with voluminous layers of garbage like Times Square the day after New Year. The sleeping dead under the trash deluge swim towards the swerving dirt bike; David repeatedly kicks down as if his leg is on fire, rifling the zombies back to eternal sleep. Startlingly, a zombie head-butts the backwheel knocking David off the bike, he disappears within the heap of filth.
He roots his way out and runs up the stairs leading out of the courtyard after Coop. Reams of paper float in the air.
“Coop.” David jumps and points to his right. Coop vanishes to the right. David pulls out the heavy Bowie knife and slices a zombie’s head off before he hits the corner for the alley.
His skin prickles in a scalding sensation. The alley is only thirty feet long with only thirty skinny zombies tightly packed like a can of sardines down the straight wall
s.
I can’t afford to risk turning around and running through the trash plaza. One bite to the Achilles tendon and I lose before the hard part even begins. All exits are dangerous, pick the lesser evil.
Behind David, the courtyard of trash is moving towards him like a humongous blob. Copying Youngblood in the rain fight, he points his arm forward, making it stiff like the spear of destiny and runs head-on for the alley cat zombies, prompting the crowd to shift towards him in unison. The knife rips through the first zombie’s head; the second is stab through the heart and is repelled through the dead like a dirigible shield. Burrowing through layers of flesh, fractured bones cut into his arm lengthwise. He grips the knife and parries the next zombie in the mouth.
Rabbit punching skulls inward, David feels his ear lobes licked and his back scratched. The masochistic zombies mew out in sadistic pleasure. He jerks the body shield forward amassing momentum and courage, in a steady bravura. Knocking the ornery dead back with non-deadly concussion thrusts. He stomps out foghorn moaning with each step. Crows on windowsills take flight to escape the superfluous death.
In the thick of things, David pushes off the doting zombies pouring over him and stumbles backwards onto the sidewalk, exiting his tunnel vision fight. Rolling away from his knife and hapless shield, he ventures off towards a motor rumbling over by the condominiums and away from the gloomy hallway of sanitarium prisoners.
David rides pillion, sun gleaming in his eyes and a lighter in one hand. Bike peels away.
Schisms of zombies are pullulating on all the streets leading deeper into the heart of the city. Disheveled skin and a beatific calm encapsulate the fleshy ghosts of former selfs. The dead begin to walk down mezzanines, terrazzo lobbies, scaffolding, parking lot ramps, and stairs with aristocratic grace. I didn’t expect any less from them.
The wind is picking up and the bike is dipping left and right like a tiny boat, being guided by the sprawling city and not the other way around. All the dead are coming out to wish me bon voyage.
By a hair, a crackly hand misses David’s neck. He swings Coop’s Bowie knife in a delay reaction then touches his face. No blood. Zombies worship exothermic beings and eat them to gain their essence. Not today.
Fireworks, Black Cats, break up the carnival of zombies walking aimlessly on all the adjacent blocks, giving Coop enough time to zig and zag through the slow pacing zombies. David continues to light more Black Cats and pitches them out to create pathways; Coop focuses straight ahead, sweating buckets, a little jumpy. The mania of the zombie is in full force mooning over the men of the hour, crushing the roofs of cars and smashing glass, suppurating green slime on the streets. Coop makes a U-turn and drives straight through a wall of zombies, David handily fires left to right as hard as he can. Human roadblocks crumble.
David throws limbs off the bike, looks behind him, and sees a mile of zombies. He’s awaken the dead. Who’s going to suffer for that?...I’m in the cave with the bear.
En route to the medical plaza, the zombie numbers are swelling, en masse. Coop has to ride over a few cars to get by and David bites down on the fireworks and fires the rifle quashing multiple zombies with single bursts of shoots, because they’re so huddled together, pounding the pavement.
In front of the hospital, David says on the back of the bike. “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” He has one leg on the ground before Coop rides away for the sidewalk.
David says into the walkie. “If I were you, I would park somewhere.”
“Mind your business.”
A spark of hope. David holds onto the weapons on his belt and runs for the hospital. Scrawled on the wall next to the chained front doors in grimy graffiti letters is:
ABANDON ALL HOPE
YE WHO ENTER HERE
He pounds one of the locks with a rock too big for his hand, each hit sounds like a clock tower striking twelve. With one sleeve, he buffs the glass.
“You’re going to go in there, find what your need in a minute and walk out the front. They all think you’re crazy, don’t die and give them the satisfaction of being right.” He stares at his face reflection. There is something behind the glass, so he leans forward. David turns and grates the rock over the zombie’s face, it falls to its knees, and he brings down the rock with both hands on its meat-grinded face. “WASP.”
Lengthened gigantic shadows around the corner catches David’s eye, screams are heighten and funneled by the tunnel. Could be one or hundreds. Rip-roaring from the piazza. He runs too without a second thought because a hospital is about many doors and death.
Zombies inflicted with gaseous limbs and shrunken heads as if done by Jivaroan tribes, claw the walls in pursuit, harboring an inimical craze for the living.
Behind the hospital, David runs up an ascending sidewalk, passing more chained doors. At the turn into a higher pathway, he leaps off the edge. David sticks onto the chain-fence with one hand and dangling legs. Zombies are dragging bloody hands against the concrete building within eyesight. He climbs the fence with only his hands, only a body length from the top. The zombies leap into the fence and roll back into the street. David stretches for the top. The fence bends inward like a bed sheet in the air being punched as he braces the metal and screams.
The sky falls with David. He holds on with all limbs, the fence wobbles more aggressively, flapping in the wind, until it snaps off the poles, causing the fence to coil onto itself, with David wrapped in the middle of it like a readymade snack for the zombies.
David shakes in the metal fence like it’s electrified. “Shit. Fuck. Oh my God.” Zombies vault off the fence cage, like a trampoline when they take the lunge off the edge of the spiraling walkway.
The bundle of steel rests on the backs of three unlucky zombies that broke David’s fall, they’re now causing him to unsteadily shift around as if he’s sleeping on dead logs in the water.
Zombies fillet their faces and fingers as they try to dig through the layers of metallic squares; a parade of faces look at him and icicles of blood swing down through the tiny apertures. David tightly closes his eyes and mouth, cups of coagulated blood flow down his face like dark chocolate. It fills his ears, creating the sensation of being underwater and holding one’s breath. The world gets quieter.
David spits the blood into the legion of eyes drilling into him; disarrayed heads slam into the fence and rebound away like basketballs. He screams at the top of his lungs and rocks back and forth. All the quasi-humans are amassing behind his head. A subdued David and the beleaguered zombies can still perceive each other through the sheets, but no one can touch each other like in a dream.
“La, la, la…Yeah, keep looking Diablo bitches…Boy I hope this works.” Some bored zombies begin to walk away from the ravings of a maniac as if they’ve heard it all before. David raises his neck an inch. Hands glued to his side like a Marine in attention, he restarts his diatribe. “GET-YOUR-ASSES back over here.”
To a beat in his head, David sways, and rocks and rocks, finally slipping off the curb; he stretches his body in both directions and turns his core repeatedly. The fence diagonally uncoils across the width of the street like police spike strips.
Out of his metal coffin, David takes a few steps then falls onto the trunk of a car. In the middle of the street, zombies spin and float in the air like a halo of twittering birds. He stumbles back with the wall catching him. A zombie face-plants in his direction, he stomps down missing by a foot. David grabs the back of the zombie’s shirt and drives its head into the back window. The glass does not break, but the zombie’s torso bends into a canoe shape, with its shoulders resting on its behind.
RAPID GUNFIRE.
David rolls down to the tire with the sandwich zombie in his hands. He hears. “You’re welcome. I’m getting too old for this shit.” David looks for Coop and says under his breath. “You crazy son-of-a-bitch.”
Cooper looks over at David. A zombie swings its arms and whacks Cooper off the bike, knocking the air out of him. The zombie
makes its steady way to its incapacitated supper. David runs towards them both in a curved line, his advancement switches with retreat, he falls back down.
Cooper realizes what just happened as the zombie is in his face, but he can’t even scream, the air is still knocked out of him, so instinctually he grabs the rifle and shoots the zombie in the face, blood rains down on Cooper’s body, he rolls out the way as the zombie falls forward.
Cooper waves a dismissal hand at David and mouths. “Go.” The zombie soured his hero moment.
David raises his hand like a thankful driver. Looks at the hospital as if it’s Fort Knox and releases a here-goes-nothing breath.
4
Job starts laughing again. “I like her honey, you and her could become best friends or something.”
The Prophet says. “Plainly speaking, I created this disaster...Obviously, I don’t mean me only or though cruel intentions, that would be preposterous. You see I worked for a company as a genetic engineer. Global Alliance Industries, a company that had their hand in everything from solar powered products to medicine.”
Job does air quotes. “An evil company.”
The Prophet grins and says. “Are there any other kinds in the minds of the public?”
Job says. “I doubt it. Unless they had tons of stock in it, then it’s a nice company that can do no wrong.” He makes his voice higher, adding insult to injury.
The Prophet says. “I worked in genetics and I wanted to discover immortality through science. Senescence is the problem; genes make us old, why couldn’t genes suspend time for us like they do for turtles or lobsters, who are basically in the teenaged stage for their entire lives. Everyone dies, but what if we could eliminate time as a factor. Time is what connects everyone, we’re slaves to it.”
Job slams his fist into the wood in mock anger and Ava cocks her head to the side, as if to say eh.
The Prophet stands up and speaks like a college professor with self-assurance, scanning the audience, and pacing back and forth in a straight line. “My late father was the man who brought the Neanderthal boy back to life. It was big news for about a week. He did it by first sequencing and then activating the necessary genes in us to resurrect the extinct man in a surrogate volunteer. He also placed a fertilizer egg in an elephant to give birth to the first mammoth in centuries. He was about the dead and so naturally I was about keeping the living alive as long as possible, to outdo his accomplishments at first.”
Genesis Virus Page 41
