The weight of the car against broken bodies outside is stomach-turning. After the fifth second passes the world seems to catch back up to us and everything jerks back into normal time. The sunlight outside blinds me for a few more seconds; I swerve into more bodies and then we’re out. Kel slips down into her seat as if she’s melting and Scott grabs her and pulls her back up.
I look over and start to ask, “Holy shit. Is she—” but Scott cuts me off with, “Just drive.”
I haven’t brought my foot up from off of the gas and we are rocketing forward towards the side of another converted warehouse building. We jump the sidewalk but I manage to crank the wheel all the way left and move us back out onto the actual street.
We smash into something with substance that crunches back. I look in the mirror and see we’ve just taken out a trash can. I watch it bounce back towards my building, but then the mass of bodies pouring out from all the openings of my building catches my eye. Some of them move faster, some of them move very slowly, others have a normal, almost living gate, but they are all after us.
I look forward and see a series of chained-together metal riot pens in front of us. I gun the car’s gas pedal again and break through the shoddy line. The barricades upend and disconnect, leaving them to look like the leftover ribcages of some forgotten metal beast.
Kel is still slouched unconscious in the passenger seat, still holding onto the tablet. Scott is trying to bring her back around and getting odd bursts of consciousness from her.
I drive around Public Square, making sharp turns around the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, past the broken and torched front of the Terminal Tower, the entrance to Tower City Shopping Center, moving towards Ninth Avenue. More riot cages and barricades crumble as we blast through them. I have to jerk the Focus around from left to right to avoid hitting the scattered, abandoned cars. I try to shut out the sound of thuds and crunches as we roll over body bags that are stacked two and three high.
The screen on the tablet is cracked, but the display is still feeding us info on what is happening around the building, the security protocols are off the chart for breaches, but the servers back inside my office are still online.
Kel snaps back into coherence and bolts upright, throwing Scott backwards towards his seat.
“What happened—did we make it?” she asks.
“Yeah, but you smashed your face. We’re out; where are the directions?” I ask while trying to avoid a stray, moving monster. I watch it turn around clumsily and reach out for us as we pass it in the rearview.
Scott lurches forward with a bottle of water and hands it to Kel. She takes a sip and then winces as the bottle comes back from her lip which is currently split into several parts and bleeding profusely.
“I uploaded them here,” she says and taps the screen and the directions I wrote down appear on the screen. She hands me the tablet and I dock it on the dashboard.
“You okay?” she asks back to Scott.
He nods and says, “Yeah.”
I stop the car when we get to the on-ramp for I-90 West.
“What are you doing?” asks Kel.
I point up towards the ramp. The freeway, the on-ramp, the section of the main road that leads up to the on-ramp, and the better part of “as far as the eye can see” are full of abandoned, broken, twisted cars stopped in both directions. I look into the rearview and make sure there’s nothing immediately behind us and then get out of the Focus.
* * *
“What are we gonna do?” asks Scott. He’s facing down Ninth Avenue with both guns drawn, scanning from left to right. Kel is trying to clip her bottom lip back together with a first aid kit she had in her bag. I’m standing on top of the Focus staring at the neverending line of cars in all directions.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly and look back towards him. “I didn’t know it was like this,” I add as I jump down from the hood.
“It’s like this everywhere,” says Kel.
“Well, we can’t just stay here; they’re going to spread back out into the city after us,” says Scott.
“Well, it’s not like we can go back, can we?” I ask him but he doesn’t answer. I see his body tighten up.
“What is it?” asks Kel, but he turns back to us and shushes us.
We hear it before we see it, the sound of moans and wails and screams and feet—lots and lots of feet—as they echo around the empty buildings and alleys of the city. Then a wave of broken bodies begins cresting the small hill below us.
“I think we should get going,” I say but Kel and Scott are already in the car waiting.
I start the car and move it into reverse, turn us around and head straight for the wave.
“What the hell are you doing?” asks Kel, but I concentrate on aiming the Focus straight ahead.
“Thinning out the heard,” says Scott from the back while he scrambles to find his seatbelt. Kel clips in seconds before I smash headlong into the forefront of the surge.
Running over people, whether they are the walking dead, monster men, crooked creatures, the poor infected or whatever else you want to call them is just as gruesome, but not as easy, as you would think. We smack into the unfortunate thing that’s just out in front of the rest of the mob and send it down and under the undercarriage of the Focus. The car shakes and my stomach turns with the dull thud and pop that must have been its head.
The rest of the wave pools around us in a whirlpool of torsos, arms and faces. I had gunned the engine enough before we made contact that the Focus keeps moving, but I can feel the transmission lurching under the stress of giving it all it’s got. The original specs on the car, if it were factory, would never have allowed it to get this far.
Faces slam into the windows with open mouths, rotten teeth and tongues, bloody, shredded palms and fists slap and beat at any part of the car they can get to. More bodies fall under the wheels; more strain is put on the driveshaft and bearings. The tires get caught on a body that’s especially big and grind into it as if we were stuck in deep snow. They spin and shower blood and black goop onto the crowd behind us. I wrench the steering wheel left and right in an attempt to get more traction and finally jump the body. I try to spray wiper fluid over the windshield but one of the monsters gets hold of the right wiper blade and tears it off.
We smash through the back end of the crowd and move back into the city center.
6.
The Focus pushes forward steadily, but I can feel it starting to limp a little. If we get into another jam like that again, we’ll be completely fucked. At this point I’m not even sure it’s going to make it out of the city. Kel and Scott are on lookout, scanning every inch of open space for an exit.
“They bottlenecked all of them into the city center,” says Kel. “They tried to move all the infected into the city center; they were going to wipe it off the face of the earth.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this theory when we were trying to figure everything out before?” I ask her while trying to avoid smashing into anything else in the road.
We’ve gone around the outskirts of the city several times and haven’t run back into any more of them yet. But at this point it’s just a matter of time before we circle back into the mass. I light up a cigarette and crack the window.
“I didn’t know how bad it was. When we were flown in here to get you, the suburbs weren’t as bad as the city center and even that wasn’t as bad as this,” she says.
I stare at the tablet’s cracked screen; it’s still running on satellite with the servers from my office, though even that is beginning to get spotty as we continue to move around. The satellites probably haven’t been triangulated in almost a year and I’m surprised that they are still running as smoothly as they are.
“Try raising Port Clinton,” I say to Kel.
She doesn’t register for few seconds. “We don’t even know that the messages were—”
“Just try,” I add. She picks up the tablet from the dock and starts thu
mbing through the command prompts from the servers back in the office. After several attempts at logging into the network she gets through and taps out a couple of commands and messages. We continue to drive. She plugs the tablet back into the dock and looks out the window.
“Anything?” I ask and she shakes her head no. She moves her hand to her face and wipes at her cheeks. Scott puts his hand on her shoulder and she lays her hand on his.
“I put it on a loop; it’ll generate a message every fifteen seconds.”
We pass by a couple of armored troop carriers and Scott sits upright in the back.
“We should see if there’s anything out there we can use.”
“Do you want to stop?” I ask and look back at him.
He surveys the ground and the carriers, then looks at me and says, “No.”
I look back at him and then back towards the road one more time before everything goes white.
* * *
First it’s white, then it’s yellow, then red, then purple, then after a while there are slivers of sky and starlights in the daytime. At first it’s nothing, then it’s hot, very hot, then it’s burning and you can’t breathe and then it’s rushing wind and your body is trying to suck oxygen into it at any opening. Then it’s cold and black and that lasts for what seems to be an eternity. Then, if you’re lucky, I assume you don’t wake up. If you’re as unlucky as I am, then you do.
* * *
The world is an acid trip. I have no hearing. I can’t move my mouth except in an attempt to flood my scorched lungs with air. The buildings and concrete ripple with waves, whether real from the heat or imagined from the part of my brain that can still produce images is up for debate. Pain shudders through my body in long, tingly, serpentine spasms. I smell what I believe is burning flesh or hair or cotton. It could be all three; I can’t really differentiate the odors from one another. This is the third time I have felt like this in my life. I need to figure out how to stop it from happening.
One way, says my brain: don’t drink whiskey laced with sedatives.
Another way, my brain says: don’t freeze yourself if you think you have cancer.
And the last way, my brain says is: don’t roll over landmines.
I answer my brain back with, Was the last one what that was?
I try to pick myself up off the ground and manage to get on my feet before tumbling back down towards the ground. At least I put my arms out in front of me this time. At least this time it feels like I only shattered my left wrist as opposed to my entire frame.
I’m lying on my face, surrounded by open cans of creamed corn. There are cooked mixed vegetables falling from the sky and landing all around me. Some boiled potatoes to my right look like they have been flash-fried. The ringing comes back, like I’ve been to a concert and stood with both of my ears a few millimeters away from a speaker cabinet all night, a solitary sine wave tone in 360 degrees.
I’m smoking. Not cigarettes. I don’t even know where those are right now. But me, my actual body, my suit, my shirt and hands are smoking. Like steam from a bath or fog in a swamp, I watch ghostly waves of white trail off of my fingers and arms.
I look around and see the Focus. But that’s not right. The wheels don’t go up, the top doesn’t go down, there should be doors and, at this point, though I could be wrong, the front shouldn’t look like a flower that’s just bloomed. I look around with my eyes because moving my head feels like I’m shaking a bowl of pudding.
Where’s Scott and Kel? asks the small amount of me that’s left. I see arms and hands, a pistol that looks melted to the ground.
I see our bags—well, the contents of our bags—splashed about in small piles of undergarments and disintegrated cigarette packs. Loose tobacco is everywhere.
I try and turn myself over and get onto my back. I manage to flop enough that I roll and stare up again into the fading light of the sky. I see a black cloud caterpillar rising into the sky from the tires on the Focus. There’s blood in my mouth so I try and lick around the inside and find that there are two teeth nestled inside of my cheek. I bring my right arm up to my face and pull the teeth out.
The lonely wail in my eardrums is beginning to subside and for a split second, I could swear I hear someone that sounds like Kel crying.
I close my eyes for what feels like a few seconds, but could be hours, and when I try to open them again, I’m being dragged. The face melts from Kel to Scott to Janet to Phil to McMillan to Kel to Janet to Scott, to my father, to me, to Scott to…I close my eyes again. It’s better this way.
7.
The air is cold and I’m shivering. I feel like I’m wet and something heavy hits my left eye as I try and open it. I don’t know what’s wrong with the right one, but it’s not pulling its weight. It’s raining. There are storm clouds in the sky, lightning flashes every second or so. Fucking Cleveland weather. There are little pellets of gravel underneath me; I try to move and my body tells me to just stay where I am. Don’t be a hero. I’m captive to its whims.
I try to call out for Scott first, then for Kel, but there’s no answer. It feels like the whole world is swaying and the wind is ripping at my clothes. I move my right arm as my left is useless, and fumble around inside my suit pocket for my cigarettes.
I pull out the pack and then look for a lighter but can’t find one anywhere on my person. I pull open the pack and put one in my mouth anyway and suck back on it. Maybe it’ll melt in my mouth.
I move my arm over to my other pocket where I felt the bulge and pull out what was in it. It’s the tablet. The electromagnetic touchscreen is completely shattered. I balance it on my chest without putting too much pressure on my ribcage and try my thumb on the screen—motherfucking thing still works. It’s still pinging messages to Port Clinton. That would’ve made a great pitch: “Will take a direct blast from a landmine.” I smile and let it flop on my chest.
I move my head up enough that I can look around and notice that I am in the sky. Not literally, not floating, but I’m up high, high enough that I can make the tops of other buildings that are on the same level as I am. I look around and see a figure slumped over on the gravel. I’m pretty sure it’s Kel; she looks bad. Her hair is singed and her face is scarred and bloody. Her left cheek is melted and drooping. There appear to be large protrusions coming out of her side; they look like the police riot cages but are grey and white and bloody instead of rusted and metal and silver. I try to say something to her, but I don’t know what I could say. She’s staring back at me and if it wasn’t for the fact that she’s blinking every once in a while, I would have thought she was dead.
She has a gun in one hand. The other is twisted in a way that could never be fixed. How the hell did she get me up here? Where are we? The thunder rolls above our heads; it sounds as if God and all the other angels in heaven are beating a garage door, like God and all the other angels in heaven are monsters.
Every time the lightning flashes she blinks, but she never stops staring, never moves her eyes.
I look at the gun and it’s smoking. I wait for the next flash of lightning and see that there is blood and little bits of brain splattered against the brick behind her.
I was wrong; Kel is dead. The rain is pouring down on me.
* * *
I assume it’s morning when I open my eyes again. I have no clue as to when I closed them, though, to be honest, I have no idea as to how long I’ve been up here, nor do I even know where up here is. I try to move my head and it hurts slightly less than I thought it would, so I try and move the rest of my body and it hurts just as bad, but this time I push through the pain and sit up.
I instantly want to puke but there’s nothing inside me to puke, so I hold tight. I look out towards the other building tops but can’t get my bearings so I crawl to the side of the roof and look over. I look down and see the husk of the Focus still smoldering. But then the sight of hundreds of broken monster bodies and faces staring up at me, waving their hands and arms up at me, grasping
for me, makes me reel backwards and lay back down on the roof.
I look over to Kel’s body and decide to crawl to her. When I get there I see that there is a large bite mark on her arm, and then another one on her broken shoulder. I try to raise my arm up and close her eyes, but that only works in the movies, so I tip her over and she thuds to the rooftop. I look around and then check her pockets and find a lighter. I pull out a cigarette from my pack and light up. It feels terrible and wonderful at the same time. I cough up a little blood but as the nicotine rushes my brain, I start to put the events back together. I don’t bother looking back over the edge of the building because I know that if Scott would have survived, then he would be here, too.
I crawl back to where the tablet is lying face down on the gravel and pick it up.
Without the glass it’s hard to read what the screen says. My right eye is still not working right either, so I close it and try to focus on the screen.
I drop the tablet when I finally make out the screen: Centcom.sysadmin.virginia. Sending helicopter to last known GPS relay. Scheduled ETA: unknown. Make sign.
I sit back down and look out towards the horizon, towards the jagged architecture of the building tops and see the smoke from the fires in the distance. I try to crane my neck around and look behind me. There’s nothing but more of the same. My body tells me to stop turning around in circles by shooting pain up and down my torso.
I pick the tablet back up and try to focus on the screen again. Maybe I’ve lost it; maybe the explosion knocked something loose inside my brain and I’m putting words on the screen that shouldn’t be there.
Centcom.sysadmin.virginia. Sending helicopter to last known GPS relay. Scheduled ETA: unknown. Make sign.
I look around the rooftop again: nothing. I put the tablet into my jacket pocket and then push myself up off the ground and walk towards Kel’s body.
She’s still staring up at me, her eyes locked in an expression of fear and pain. I look at the side of her head and the crater from where the bullet exited. The emptiness of her skull, the bite marks and the gun are all too much. I feel my throat start to close and my eyes well up with tears. I try to fight them back. I try to push everything down, deep inside, but can’t.
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