The Last 21

by Morrison, Donald

  The younger man nodded. “Will do.”

  “Alright then.”

  A half an hour went by. The noise outside had become less and less over the past week, and now, an eerie silence hung in the air, only the occasional staccato report in the distance reminding the younger man that they weren’t the only folks left alive in Austin. They lived far enough outside of town that they had been spared the most violent part of the outbreak, but had found themselves holed up inside the small apartment that his two friends, one newly deceased, the young prostitute and himself had been chased into. It wasn’t until a few days prior that they had mustered up the courage; through hunger and necessity, to make their way out for a supply run, one that had lessened them one mouth to feed.

  The man’s eyes gazed across the rooftops at the thin streams of smoke that rose in the air; distant cars or houses burning silently.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ he thought to himself before a shuffling sound pulled his attention away from the street outside. He paused, listening quietly for the sound to repeat itself, his hand slowly moving to the handle of the hunting knife hanging from his belt. Then he heard it again. It was coming from the bedroom. ‘The hell?’ he thought to himself, the puzzled look peeling away with a smile. “Looks like Early didn’t do a good enough job,” he whispered, his hand moving from the hilt of the knife to the crotch of his pants. “Guess’n he won’t mind if I finish what he started.”

  He walked towards the room, his hands slowly unclasping his belt, anticipation rushing through him.

  “I’m sorry sweetheart,” he called out as he approached the door, setting his belt and knife on the small table just outside. “Ain’t nothing personal, but there ain’t enough food to go around, and well…” He paused, his hand on the door handle. “Your usefulness has done run its course.”

  He turned the knob and stepped into the room.

  “Hey Rusty, you in here?” the older man called out as he set a case of beer, a bottle of whiskey and some cans of food down. “There’s still a gang of food up in there.” He paused, his hand pulling the front door closed. “Thinkin’ we might just wanna hold up over there for while.” He paused again, his eyes scanning the room. Then he noticed the belt and knife sitting on the table just outside the closed bedroom door. “Oh man,” he said with a grin, reaching down to grab the beer and making his way to the kitchen. “You are one sick fuck, you know that?”

  He opened the fridge door and started pulling the warm cans out and lining them across the empty top shelf. “I saw a family escaping’ the city as I was on my way back here,” he called out, his words echoing in the fridge. “You know what that means right?”

  He stood and closed the door, smirking at the warm beer in his hand as he popped the top to a crackled fizz.

  “We might just find us another pretty young thing to keep us warm for a while.”

  He took a sip and turned to the living room.

  “That is unless you’re still having fun with that one.”

  He stepped towards the couch.

  “I myself… I prefer em’ hot and scared.” He paused, the silence answering his words making him stop. “Yo Rusty, you in there?”

  The sound of scratching on the door embarrassed him with a quick startle.

  “You son of a bitch,” he said, shaking his head “Boy, I am gonna whoop your ass for that one.”

  He started towards the bedroom door.

  “You remember what I said last time you jumped out at me at that truckstop?”

  He approached the door and grabbed the handle, pausing to listen. Again there was a shuffle in the room and nails moved across the door.

  “Rusty?”

  He slowly turned the knob.

  Outside, the warm Austin air drifted by, a thin layer of humidity pressing downwards. A red pickup sat parked in a driveway as the screams of middle aged man being torn apart floated past. Inside, a dead girl got revenge.

  Day 20

  A cool breeze fluttered past the building rooftop, pushing the cotton tufts hanging a short distance overhead slowly past the azure backdrop. Below, the New York skyline serrated the ocean edge, a once bright symbol of liberty holding her torch up to keep the evil at bay.

  Atop the towering building a man stood at the edge, his eyes scanning the crowded streets below, a slow moving mass of corpses flooding the Manhattan concrete.

  “Look Brad,” a younger man with thick rimmed glasses said, his back leaned against the blockaded doorway leading into the building. “I told you, we just needed to stockpile enough food for a week. After that, the military will begin rescuing survivors.”

  The man looking down at the swarm stayed quiet. It had been nine days since they had made their way to the roof. His boyfriend seemed to have lost track of time. It had been nine days since the abominations had overrun the building; since zombies had begun eating their neighbors and forced them to flee to the roof in a last ditch effort to escape. Stanley hated this city. He had told brad that when he had taken the job that uprooted them from their cozy Santa Monica apartment, and reminded him every chance he got.

  “It’s a matter of time until the helicopters begin flying overhead. They’ll see our help sign and we’ll be taken to a safe place.” He paused. “We’ve seen this in the movies a trillion times babe.”

  The city was beginning to smell. The odor of blood and rot rose into the air around them, occasional gusts of putrescence choking the breath in their throats the last two days.

  ‘Not much of a change…’ Brad thought as he watched the walking dead below. The city had smelled of sewage and incense since the moment they had stepped out of the terminal at J.F.K. two months prior. Brad hated that smell. He missed the salted beach air and the occasional whiff of marijuana from the clinics lining the Venice boardwalk. He missed the smell of smog and auto exhaust. Hell, at this moment, locked on their overpriced rooftop with no escape, he even missed his rush hour commute home on the 10.

  “We need to figure out how we’re supposed to get more supplies though,” Stanley said from behind him. “We need to do a supply run.”

  ‘Supply run...’ Brad thought. ‘Like we’re in one of his God damn video games. This is real. This is fucking real.’

  He wanted to scream, to turn and shout at the man who had drug him from safety and brought him to this cesspool of a city, a shit covered metropolis that was now teeming with millions of the undead. He took a deep breath. There was no point.

  ”Look,” Stanley continued. “I’m pretty sure we can at least get to the top floor. Most of the zombies must have cleared out by now. It’s been nearly a week and I doubt there’s any food left for them.”

  The word still stung as it hit his ears—zombies.

  ‘Yeah… He’s forgotten how long we’ve been up here…’

  “We sneak in there, rummage the apartments on the first floor down, and that should give us enough food for the next few days. We can go floor by floor after that.”

  Brad’s eyes shifted to the horizon. He could see streams of black smoke rising into the sky; dozens of ashen tendrils reaching upwards to coagulate with each other as they spread a blanket of orange across the skyline.

  “We will survive this,” Stanley said, his words sounding distant and frail.

  Brad took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, his gaze moving to the crowded street twenty-four stories below.

  “We have to…”

  He felt a tear slowly work its way to the corner of his eye. He had regretted this move. He had regretted leaving the city he loved. He regretted allowing his fleeting emotions to convince him to follow Stanley to the other side of the country.

  Slowly he leaned forward.

  He regretted leaving the man he loved alone.

  “Brad!!!”

  The air rushed past him as the city street grew increasingly closer. His clothing flapped all around him and his eyes begged to be shut, but were locked in horror to the unsuspecting creatures below. As the gro
und rushed closer and closer Brad began to regret his decision to lean forward.

  Stanley rushed to the edge and looked over, shock coursing through him as his shaky hands clasped to the concrete edge. On the street below was a quickly circling crowd of zombies moving towards a sprawled form, an expanding pool of crimson growing outwards through the splashed streaks.

  On the Manhattan rooftop a lone man stood, empty boxes of food and drained containers of water behind him. His eyes were locked to the scene below, gravity and despair pulling him closer to the edge with each escaping sob.

  Day 21

  thump…

  thump…

  The sound echoed off the concrete overpass, the silence hovering just beyond, pressing in against the rhythmic pounding.

  Thump…

  Underneath the back ledge, Jack Thompson sat quietly, slowly reaching into his pack for a half a candy bar he had stored away for exactly this moment; a moment where the sun was directly overhead and the day’s heat made for a more difficult travel. Water was scarce now, and he knew it would only prove harder to find as the days went by. The half a bar would give him the energy needed to wait out the afternoon.

  ‘No sense sweating more than we have to,’ he thought silently as he rubbed his fingers through the long hair of the golden retriever sitting next to him that had its eyes fixed on the crumbled car that was half-wrapped around one of the cement pylons holding the overpass up below.

  Thump…

  He moved a small bundle of clothing aside and felt the crackle of plastic brush his fingers. Slowly he pulled his hand out and held the bar in his grasp for a moment. He stared down at the wrecked sedan below, and the set of fists that pounded lightly against the glass that caged them in.

  He took a deep breath, exhaling slowly as he removed the plastic from the chocolate bar and let it flitter away in the breeze. He’d always been one for recycling, and saving the planet, but that didn’t seem like it would be all that important anymore. The virus had taken care of that. Nature had solved the climate change problem itself.

  Toby twitched his nose at the sweet scent, pulling his gaze away from the pounding below as he locked onto the candy bar.

  “Sorry buddy,” Jack said. “Even with that happening, you know you still can’t have any of this. Where the hell you think I’d find you a vet?” He reached over, patting his companion lightly on the head. “You just hold tight. I’m sure we’ll come across a pet store in the next town. I’ll make sure to grab you a few bags of treats, and maybe something special.”

  Toby exhaled loudly and dropped his head back down onto his extended paws. His gaze moved back to the woman staring blankly up at them from the passenger window.

  He finished eating the bar in a succession of tiny nibbles and then wiped his hands on his pants before reaching back into his pack and retrieving a folded newspaper cover and a handheld radio.

  thump…

  He turned the radio on and hit the scan button, setting it next to him as he unfolded the newspaper. The cover read, VIRAL OUTBREAK, ZOMBIES REAL. REPORTS WORLDWIDE.

  He slowly read the article as he had done so the previous fifteen times since he had picked it up on his way out of town. It had been two weeks since any newspapers had been circulated and nine days since the last radio transmission had gone out. Since then the handheld had been silent. He only pulled it out once a day, long enough to scan the frequencies. Batteries weren’t light. Unnecessary weight.

  Once it had cycled he reached down and turned the knob, switching it off. He shook his head and folded the newspaper back into place, putting them back into his pack as he let his gaze fall back to the car below.

  The couple inside was younger, or at least they had been before the crash. He could see large chunks of flesh missing from the neck and face of the man held tightly against the driver’s seat by the locked seatbelt and pushed in steering column, and it didn’t take a detective to see what had happened. Now they both stared up with the same blank stare—mouths opening and closing as they took invisible chunks from the air between them, biting at the glass that held them back.

  Jack had noticed the two large packs in the back seat and guessed they probably had more in the trunk. Looked like the couple had left prepared. Good for him.

  He sat there for a moment longer before standing up and pulling the bowie knife from the scabbard on his belt.

  “You stay here,” he said, patting Toby on the head as he started down the concrete embankment. “I’ll be right back.”

  He reached the bottom and stopped, looking at the miles of silent freeway stretching in both directions for a moment before moving to the vehicle. On one side stood a forest of trees that stretched against the horizon, the freeway disappearing at a point that the woods came together. In the other direction, the smoke-filled skyline above Seattle.

  As he approached the pounding got louder, accompanied by the rasped moans of the captive pair. The sounds increased to a frenzy as he walked up, stopping at the window to stare into the dead eyes that peered back.

  Both of the zombies were held tightly to their seats by the seatbelts that would have normally saved their lives—if one of them hadn’t been dead before the crash, and the other shortly after.

  He reached out and tugged the back door handle. Slowly the crumpled door opened with a metallic screech as steel folded against steel.

  The moans got louder.

  Jack took a deep breath, wincing against the smell as he leaned in and plunged his blade into the side of the girl’s skull with a wet squelch. He yanked it free and the reached out, grabbing the man by his shoulder length hair and held his head back. He stared into the greyish blue that showed lightly beneath the yellowish film that had spread across and then stuck his blade into the man’s right eye socket.

  The car went still.

  Jack wiped the blade on the back of the seat and slid it back into its sheath. Then he turned his attention to the bag. He opened it delicately, his face blank as he pulled out a few articles of clothing and some feminine products.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” he said with a slight grin as he saw a large bundle of protein bars and energy supplements near the bottom.

  He reached further in and came across a large blue deposit pouch. He pulled it out and opened it. Inside was nearly a hundred thousand dollars in big bills. He scoffed, tossing the bag on the floor with a shake of his head. “Figures…”

  He emptied the rest of the contents of the bag and put the bars and vitamins back inside and ruffled through the other. A couple t-shirts, a few pairs of socks, some more nature bars and a few bottles of water.

  He stood up and made his way around the front of the car to the driver’s side and reached through the broken window. He pulled the small lever and when the trunk popped open made his way back.

  “Whooo boy… Now that, is what I’m talking about. Thank you Mr. Dead Man.”

  Inside the trunk was a loose collection of weapons. A pump action shotgun, a rifle, two pistols and a large military issue machete.

  He gathered the stockpile, slinging the rifle across his back and putting one of the pistols into his belt. The other with the ammunition, he dropped into the bag. Then he turned and made his way back up the embankment.

  For the next few hours he sat, his gaze occasionally moving back to the direction he had come from, and the city skyline in the distance. He knew it would only be a matter of time before the dead started making their way outwards. Eventually they’d run out of food and need to increase their radius. Eventually there would be too many for the city to contain.

  Jack Thompson rose to his feet, stretching his hands out in front of him before reaching down, swinging the loaded pack onto his back and fastening the clips across his chest and waist.

  “You ready boy?” he asked, looking down as his companion rose to his feet, a small wag coming from his tail. “Time to get moving. Can’t stay in one spot too long now.”

  Behind, thick tendri
ls of smoke rose into the air above the city. The sky had begun to turn a deep crimson, lined with burnt violet spreading across the horizon. The freeway leading away was empty, save for a lone survivor and his silent companion as they made their way north towards the thick tree line in the distance.

  Also by Donald Morrison

  Rabid Lands

  The Journal

  Grey Zone

  Ouroboros

  Dawn of the Magi

  Journey Through Thorns

  Revelations

  The Isle of Children

  ENTITY