by Mark Tufo
“I knew there had to be one,” he said as a rearview camera screen popped up from the console. “Do it,” he urged.
For whatever reason in this fucked up world, reverse seemed to garner all of the attention of the engine and drivetrain. We were indiscriminately crushing any and all foes that got in our way, and instead of losing speed, we were gathering it in large clumps.
“Mike, just in case you hadn’t realized it by now, we’re going faster in reverse than forward,” Jack said. “Did those fuckers put everything in backward?” he quietly mused to himself.
Apparently the PTZ meter registered in reverse. I didn’t have time to look. Driving by camera, backward, at high speed, in an active warzone, is not high up there in activities that seem all that appealing to me. I was at the max of my multitasking quota, which in essence is one thing. And on top of that, unfortunately the camera did not come with a windshield wiper; I thought after a couple of bumper bashers into some zombies when it was still clear that maybe the camera was high up or well protected, but after the sixth zombie and a stray night runner thrown in for good measure, nearly two thirds of my viewing area was covered in goo and gore. On my ten-inch screen, a fair amount of the top left-hand corner was still clear, and I miraculously had a one-by-one window smack dead in the middle. How long that was going to last was anybody’s guess. We were much like a ship cutting through water; the wake behind us was filling in quickly, but instead of water it was more zombies and night runners, plus the occasional whistler.
“Sooo, about this plan?” Jack asked.
“He said plan!” Trip started guffawing, slapping his knee and all.
“See the stairs?” I asked, not daring to take my hands off the wheel as they were already threatening to be torn from my hands.
“No,” Jack said honestly.
“They’re over on the left, just under about an inch of intestine. I’m going up those and then I’m going to slam the rear end of this thing straight through those doors.”
“What doors, Mike?”
“The ones at the top of the stairs that we can’t see right now.”
“Mike, I’m going on record as not being in favor of this plan.”
Trip guffawed again. “As if he ever had one!”
“Shut the hell up, Trip.” I grimaced as I saw the approaching line of weapon-clad whistlers.
“Mike, those don’t look much like staple guns,” Jack said, peering intently at the screen, trying to make out exactly what we were both seeing.
Might have been easier if the lens wasn’t covered completely in a haze of red. Unlike the staples that made a flat pinging sound and for the most part ricocheted off of metal, what they were hitting us with now sounded like soup-can sized projectiles, and they were being shot our way at high velocities. They weren’t fast enough to punch through, but the noise was deafening inside our own can, and the truck rocked with each hit.
“Glad we’re going backward now?” I asked him.
“Honestly, yes,” he answered. “Who would have thought it?”
One of the soup cans either hit the lens itself or some of the circuitry was destroyed from the impact; either way we were now totally flying blind.
“Is it too late to revise my answer?” Jack asked, slamming a fist against the screen in the hope the technology was from the 1950s and that would actually be effective.
You know how when you’re lost, for some unfathomable reason you need to turn the radio down? Never really understood that phenomenon until right fucking now. It was ear drum crushingly loud in the cab of that truck, I wasn’t completely sure where we were going, and I wanted the damn whistlers to stop making noise for one goddamned minute so I could get my bearings. Makes complete sense now, how loud things can keep you from thinking properly. Much easier to process information in a calm and quiet environment. I wonder if the whistlers would honor a time-out? With the added thumping and the steering wheel jerking around in my hands, I was convinced I’d caught a couple of the ugly bastards unawares. Like most things in this world, this was good and bad.
I’d taken some of them out and we were closer to our ultimate goal, but the further I went into their lines, the more we became surrounded by them.
“Duck!” Jack shouted, just as something that in reality did look a lot like a soup can, albeit without the famous artwork, punched straight into our windshield.
I was kind of thrilled when I realized that the tempered hardened glass had mostly held. Yeah, the front edge of the projectile had worked its way through and the integrity of the glass had been destroyed, but for now it had held.
Jack raised his head up enough to look out. “Not that I’m complaining, but why aren’t they shooting?”
“I once held my breath for over seven seconds!” Trip said proudly.
Was truly planning on blowing him off. In this present circumstance, why even bother answering? And then the fucking thing in our windshield started hissing, it wasn’t so much a missile as it was a canister.
“Gas!” Jack yelled.
Trip had mentioned holding his breath, but if this thing were a nerve agent, that wouldn’t matter at all. We’d be bleeding from our eyes in a few seconds. Then would come the blood-blistering lesions all over our bodies as we pretty much just liquefied. Yeah, right up there with one of the worst ways to go out. Except maybe for poor Cash, surely you remember him, just about to lose his virginity and had his sweet meats devoured by a zombie instead—yeah, that was probably worse. Sure, I suppose it’s also better than getting caught cheating by your wife and having her slice your offending manhood off and stuff it down your throat so you choke and bleed out at the same time, but only marginally. Weird that was the pair of roads I decided to travel down, but there you have it. Jack and I both looked at each other and took a good sized intake of fresh air. Jack leaned against his seat and slammed the flat of his foot into the bottom of the canister four times before he was finally able to kick it free. It plopped onto the hood and then rolled onto the ground. The whistlers paid it no attention—they already had gas masks on—but this was a good sign. It meant that the gas had to enter through the airway.
The bad? Well, I’d never been much of a breath holder. I’d never won a game of deep sea diver. You know the one, seems to be the preferred game of all kids anywhere as soon as they get in a pool together, whether they know each other or not. Cheating was not an option in this version either, no rising up and grabbing a quick breath before going back down. My internal clock said we’d been doing this for about ten seconds. Under optimal conditions, I had another thirty before this started to become a laborious chore. And this was far from optimal; my heart rate was not at a resting level. If I had fifteen more seconds before I felt the extreme urge to breathe, I’d consider myself lucky. My chest was beginning to constrict and my eyes, burning from the gas, were starting to tunnel. Jack looked like he may have had some training in this particular department and could maybe go a solid two minutes. Trip? You want to know how Trip was doing? Looked like he was asleep, like he wouldn’t have to take a breath until the mountains rolled into the sea. Fuck him and his serenity. Maybe if I survived all of this, I was going to have to give yoga a try.
Not so funny that the guy driving the getaway vehicle was going to be the weak link. Jack started kicking at the windshield in an attempt to force it out and get a better air flow to clear out the poison. It was working, but it was slow going. I’d be slumped over the steering wheel long before he succeeded. Twenty seconds, my chest was dry heaving. My tortured lungs demanded air; the survivalist part of my brain was attempting to force my nasal cavities open. I had to consciously work to override that, and soon I wouldn’t be able to. Jack had managed to kick out the corner and we were seeing some of the gas dissipate, but not enough to make taking a breath a safe option. It all almost came to a quick and painful death when the back end of the truck slammed into something, driving my head into the steering wheel. How I hadn’t sucked up a big intake of oxy
gen I don’t know. Hope found a way to stake a claim inside my panicking lungs. We were bouncing around, like kids that had been snorting straight powdered sugar and found their way into a bouncy house. But we were doing so going upward.
I’d managed to hit the stairs. Two seconds later and there was the distinctive noise of the truck crashing through heavy metal doors, and then we came to an abrupt halt. We were lodged tight in the frame of the building. The turret had been sheered clean off. Jack was already on the rise, up into the opening. He must have seen something in my face because he grabbed me by the shoulder and wrenched my body through. I rolled down the back of the truck and struck the cold antiseptic tiling of a research facility. I pulled in sweet oxygen like it was Star Wars figurines on clearance at Walmart. Jack had gone back in to grab Trip, and by the time he deposited him next to me, I felt better. Short of some heavy equipment or demolition, nothing was going to move that truck from its present location.
Luck was one thing, what had actually happened was supernatural. I had driven a truck backward, for over three hundred yards, almost half of that with no guidance help of any kind, and I had threaded a needle by hitting that stairwell. Not only that, I had sealed in our entry point, too. Maybe we had been thrust into a shit situation, but I had no doubts we had a corner man, and a pretty good one at that. Someone who waited in the wings while we duked it out to check our cuts and give us advice when we were in over our head.
“Thanks, man,” I said to Jack.
“Welcome,” Trip said.
Jack had gone back to look at the truck. “They can come in through the windshield and out the turret just like we did. We should probably rig this thing to seal it up or have one of us remain to cover our six.”
“No more splitting up. I’ve got a feeling this is the end game; one way or another we’re leaving, and I’d rather we did it together.”
“Fair enough.” He reluctantly left the back of the vehicle.
“Trip?” I asked turning his way.
“Yeah?” He looked at me with doe eyes.
“Any ideas?”
“All sorts of them.” He smiled.
“Do any of them have to do with our present situation?” Jack asked, looking more than a little perturbed.
It was one thing to deal with Trip’s scatterbrained ways in a relatively normal setting: this was about as far removed from that as one can get.
“Yeah, but they’re not as good as my other ones.”
“Trip!” I shouted.
He tentatively pointed down the long corridor we were in. “Left at the end.”
Jack looked to me as if to ask “Is he serious?”
I didn’t verbally confirm it. I used my feet and started heading that way, Jack quickly in tow; it was Trip who was lagging behind.
“It’s not so bad here, is it?” Trip asked. Just then we were rocked by an explosion, hard to tell if it was inside or out. Lights shook and more than a few ceiling panels were knocked free.
“Yeah, it’s just like Disneyland. Come on,” Jack said.
“I like Disney World better,” Trip told him, but followed anyway.
When we got to the end of the corridor, we could only go left. Jack was looking at me, as I was him. We were trying to figure out how Trip could have known. I opened up that door and the world of nightmares came into view. Dante was close in his depictions of hell, close but not perfect—I was staring at the actual depiction. The stairwell itself I’m sure was fairly normal, though I couldn’t see much of it. The pathway down was packed full of humans—not like they had entered there of their own volition to escape the possible hazards of a rampant tornado, but shoved in every which way while the concrete had been being poured to form the stairs, walls, and ceiling. I don’t think I’ll be able to give an accurate portrayal here, but they were wedged in so tightly that there was no clear line of sight between them. To get through, we would quite literally have to crawl through them as if we were spelunking.
In some places only legs were sticking up, or an errant arm, and there were a fair number of heads with bodies presumably forever encased in steel reinforced concrete. Some of the less fortunate fuckers had a foot or a calf stuck, or maybe half a leg, and had not died instantly from their melding with the inanimate material. In their intense hunger, they had begun to dine on those near them. Some had taken to it with a gusto, cleaning the meat off of their coworkers; others not so much—there would be a few tentative bites and then vast volumes of now sticky vomit coating everything nearby.
“There’s another way, right?” Jack and I were standing side by side when he asked it.
Trip hadn’t yet turned the corner when he answered with a resounding “No.”
“I…no way.” There was a rising dread and panic welling up inside of me, threatening to overwhelm and drown me in its mire. I already had claustrophobia, and that was certainly playing a part, but this was every monster under the bed, every maniac hiding in the closet, every murderous intruder even now silently opening your front door.
“If we go through this bullshit and you pull some crap telling us there was an elevator all along, it won’t go well for you, my friend,” Jack said. “So, is there another way?”
Trip shook his head. If his hands weren’t crammed so far into his pockets, I think he might have sucked his thumb.
“Mike, I’ll go first.”
I know my eyes were wide when I answered. “What makes you think that’s going to make it any better, or even that I’ll follow?”
Our choice of staying here or going through was forced as a staple crashed into the wall at the end of the corridor; we all looked to see a small brigade of whistlers coming toward us.
“This must be the right way, because they seem a little upset that we’re headed in it,” Jack said.
“Or…” I was offering up an alternative. “They want us to go because they know it will be our end.”
“They’re dead, Mike. What’s the worst that can happen?”
“The worst? Well I’m thinking my slipping grip on sanity might finally give way and I’ll have a psychotic snap, and by the time we get through I’ll think Trip is Descartes.”
“Let’s go.” Jack had grabbed Trip from the corridor and shoved him into the stairwell, and then sent a short burst into the approaching whistlers in an attempt to slow them down.
“I’ll not soon forget this,” Trip said to me. “But, you will.”
Wasn’t sure what that meant, but he brushed past me and stuck an arm into a hole barely bigger than your average sphincter and twice as smelly. Hysteria, a word I wasn’t all that familiar with, was making an attempt to be my best friend right now. I incredulously watched as Trip’s arm, then head, then upper torso was sticking out of the human meat puppet. He looked like he was getting consumed by some modern art piece based on the murderous consumerism of man or some bullshit. I thought he was most definitely gone forever when he first pulled his right leg in, then left; nothing more was visible except for the sound he was making through the bodies.
“Mike!” Jack shouted.
He probably said it more times than my sixth-grade algebra teacher as I sat there daydreaming about Annette Henner’s boobs proudly displayed in her oh-so-tight sweater.
“No,” was all I could think to tell him.
“There’s fifty whistlers out there and more are on the way.” Jack must have seen something on my face. “Just say the word, Mike, and we’ll make our stand here.”
Oh, there was a shitload of choice words I had for this particular moment. Then I looked at Jack, a man who very much like me wanted desperately to go home, to be with his loved ones. I would not deny him that chance. Not sure what I swallowed in my throat, it was hard and fibrous and difficult to force down before I could speak.
“I’ll go.” Barely above a whisper. I said it, but I’d yet to take that first step.
“Well, if we’re going to do this, now might be a good time,” Jack urged, looking down the hallway.
Staples were slamming into the wall at the end of the corridor. Placing my hand into the hungry maw of that human monster was worse than any nightmare my stress-induced brain had ever concocted. Past noses, scraping against teeth, into the sticky pools of drying blood, through waves of soft and coarse hair. Against the soft material of a silk blouse and the rough of denim jeans. I wasn’t so much going down the rabbit hole as I was traveling through the Talbot tunnel, and I’ll tell you right now, Alice had a lot more fun taking her funky little pills. I was aware as I plunged my head down, but not really cognizant; I wasn’t thinking about grabbing shirts and heads, legs and arms to help propel me through, it was more of an instinctual type of thing.
There was a tongue though, a tongue that I may never be able to scrape from the folds of my mind. My whole body was inserted into the belly of this beast and I had just grabbed what felt like a sneaker still attached to a foot. I had pulled myself a few inches forward and a slab of something wet and fetid streaked against the left side of my face. I didn’t know immediately what it was, at least not until I had to push even further and I scraped my jaw line against its teeth. Whatever higher functioning had been working at that point just had a fatal internal error. I was done being cautious and calculating with my movements. I was in a frenzy, berserker mode; I needed to get out of that collapsing cave as quickly and by any means possible. I was snapping legs and arms as I kicked, punched, clawed and fought my way through. When I emerged, I was thinking that I was covered in more human material than I had been when I was born. Trip was shaking as he handed me a couple of clean shirts. He didn’t tell me where he’d gotten them, and I didn’t ask. I ripped my old one off, used the other to wipe myself clean as best I could, then wore the third. I was hunched over and panting like I’d just done a half marathon; I was just beginning to catch a normal breath when Jack emerged. Trip went to grab him but Jack pulled quickly away I don’t think he realized who was trying to help. When you are in the midst of hundreds of body parts, you don’t want anything reaching out and grabbing you. He wasn’t as bad as me, but he hadn’t come through completely unscathed either. He was as pale as I’d ever seen a man still standing. Trip presented him with two new shirts, much as he had me.
