The building is dark as nighttime except for the little, blue lights that flash on the walls every few feet. Normally I like being in the dark, but this time it gives me goosebumps knowing there could be things in it. I stay really quiet and I listen for any sounds, any at all, but especially the croaking. There's no croaking, which makes me glad, but there is something there. A small sound, a barely-there sound I can't hear unless I'm perfectly still.
Breathing.
Mom and dad get off the elevator, take my hand and lead me away without saying a word.
We go through a door with a big five over it that goes into a stairway. If I walk too fast down them mom puts her hand out and slows me down, telling me I'm making too much noise. Whenever we come to a door we go even slower. Dad checks that it's closed and mom keeps the crowbar above her head ready to smash anything she sees, but her hand shakes like it doesn't want that to happen, like she just wants a closed door, or at least an empty door.
Almost at the bottom dad says, “You see that? That's a G. G stands for garage.”
“I'm not five, dad.”
“Sorry.” He acts like I'm impossible to talk to, but he just hasn't tried before.
We walk around the final bend of stairs ready to go through the door and into the garage so we can get our car and get out of here, far away from here, anywhere but here, but out of nowhere dad stops fast, pushing mom and I back so hard it's like he wants to knock us down, like the elevator all over again. I start to tell him that but he puts his finger out to shut me up. Then I see why: at the very bottom of the stairs, pushed up against the wall and into the corner, a small body hides in the dark. Legs lit up by the dark blue lights. The back of a head I'm not sure is breathing.
Without a word dad takes the crowbar from mom's hand. This time, she doesn't fight him.
He tip-toes down the last set of steps with the crowbar out in front of him. It reminds me of the way people hold crosses in scary movies, just a piece of wood but so much more, it's like the answer to their problems and the saver of their lives all in one.
At the bottom of the steps he stops, looking for breath in the body, and I can't breathe myself, my heart hurting me and my ears pounding and squishing. I try so hard to see if the body is moving, breathing, doing anything at all, but I don't see it, none of us sees it. Without a word none of us think the body is alive.
Dad uses the crowbar anyway.
Mom and I flinch as he swings it down and hits the body in its head. It makes a weird gurgle sound so he hits it again, once. Twice. Three times on top and then from the left once. Twice. Breathing heavy now from the right side once. Twice. Three times. Four times. Five times. Six times, and mom tells him to stop and finally he stops with red all over him and on the wall and on the floor. It spreads so fast he has to step away so he doesn't get it on his shoes.
Dad points to the sneakers on the body's feet and says, “That's Peter. One of the interns. He just joined us last week.”
Mom says, “He was dead already. He was dead when you found him.”
“I don't know, I thought I heard-”
“Isaac,” she says, “he was dead when you found him.”
“Yeah.” He nods. “Alright.” He makes a face I've never seen him make before and puts his hand on his shoulder. Mom asks if he's okay, but he doesn't answer.
We step around the big, dark puddle, open the door to the garage and go through.
**
The blue light-bulbs barely light up the garage. All I can see is the car in front of us and then after that it's all black, except way off at the other end a little bit of outside light comes in. Really quiet, dad tells mom that's where the booth with the keys is. It's hard to tell with so much dark, but it feels like forever away.
Mom hits into a car's bumper with her leg. She curses at it in whispers.
“Your phone has a light,” dad tells her.
“I don't want to attract attention. We don't know who else is in here.”
Her saying that makes it so much worse. Staring into the black, just tires and mirrors looking back, pieces of metal and rubber and shiny glass, right now they all feel like they want to wake up and come after me, which is crazy and not possible, but sometimes things that are crazy and not possible happen anyway.
Without any words we tip-toe through the dark garage toward the little bit of moonlight at the other end. It's so quiet, I can hear dad's breath in his nose-hairs.
All of a sudden, a little too loud, mom says, “Elliot?”
The white shirt looks like it's floating in the dark toward us. When it gets closer the big man's face is above it, sweaty and with big, wide eyes. I don't know what he's going to do, if he's our friend or not, but then he brings his shaky hand up to his mouth, and in barely a whisper, barely something we can hear, he says three words.
“Under...the...car.”
My arms and legs go cold. Dad slowly squats down to look under the car next to us and Elliot shakes his head to tell dad he shouldn't do that. I don't know if dad sees anything underneath, but he stands back up without saying anything and moves us all away from it.
When we're in the middle, where all we can see is the dark, Elliot says, “What are you wearing those suits for? What the goddamn hell is going on?”
Dad says, “We'll explain later.”
“Explain now!”
“Be quiet.”
“Those people are eating-”
“Elliot,” mom says. “Stop. Making. Noise.” He nods to say okay. “We need the keys to my car, are they in the booth?”
He looks confused. “Why do you want those?”
“So we can get the hell out of here, what do you think?”
His face gets serious. “You haven't been outside yet.”
Dad says, “What's outside?”
Elliot starts making a weird sound in his throat. He bends over trying not to cough, but it's so hard to hold in it's like he's choking on it. Mom asks if he's okay. Dad stops her from touching him.
Elliot stops choking. He nods his head and tries to say sorry, or excuse me, or any of the things people say when they cough around other people. But instead of making words, he makes a low, scratchy sound.
Mom takes my hand and starts walking us backward. Elliot sees and says, “What are you doing?”
“Stay back, Elliot. We don't want to hurt you.”
“Hurt me?” He looks from mom to dad, then at the crowbar in dad's hand. “I'm not one of them, I'm just sick. What's wrong with you people? Has everyone gone mad?”
“Maybe,” dad says, “maybe we've lost our minds, maybe we have no right to act this way, but until we get a handle on whatever this is, that's how it has to be.”
Elliot breathes heavier and heavier, his eyes wider, his mouth angry. “You don't,” he says, “I can't,” spit dribbling, moving toward dad.
Dad points the crowbar. “Stop right where you are. I mean it.” Elliot keeps coming at him. Dad tells Elliot that he's serious, that he'll use it, but Elliot keeps coming. Dad swipes the crowbar at Elliot's face to warn him and the big guy steps back, but instead of taking the warning he only looks madder.
Then he does something I've never seen a person do before. His face gets tight and wrinkles in, like a cat's when they hiss, except instead of hissing he makes that sound, the ones the other made.
The croak.
Dad swings the crowbar and it hits Elliot across the face. Mom stays between them and me as Elliot lets out a croak-scream and dad hits him again, like back in the stairway except this time the person is awake and keeps coming at him.
Elliot crouches and jumps. He knocks dad to the ground and I hear myself cry out as the crowbar flies out of dad's hand and slides past us in a long, metal scrape. Dad holds Elliot back by his shoulders. The big guy chomps broken teeth at him, SNAP SNAP SNAP, so close to dad's mask, the red dripping from Elliot's face and onto dad's glass face.
Through Elliot's red and the fog from his breath, dad looks back at me. His
face is a way I've never seen it before, too.
Scared.
Elliot begins smashing his face into dad's mask over and over like it doesn't even hurt him. Smash. Smash. Smash. CRACK. The mask breaks.
The sound of metal scraping again and then the crowbar comes sliding past me and back toward dad. Dad takes one hand off Elliot to grab it. He pulls his knees toward his chest, plants his feet on Elliot's chest and pushes hard. Elliot falls back and dad jumps on him.
Just before mom turns my head away, dad pushes the crowbar through Elliot's head. There's a horrible crack and a squish, and then something soft hits the ground. After a few seconds of heavy breathing inside his broken mask, dad takes it off.
“Thanks for the help,” he says.
“Look at his nails. Just like the others, like he hasn't cut them in weeks.”
Then I hear it: the croaking again, but this time it's louder and coming from every direction.
From all around us.
**
Footsteps in the dark, and they don't sound normal.
People start to come out of the dark of the cars. They walk like the monsters on the TV screens, crouched over, using their hands, their mouths open, letting out those sounds. Mom and dad move close together until I'm between them, sandwiched between their legs and watching the shadows move.
“We can still make it to the booth,” mom whispers.
The monster people sniff at the air but they don't look at us, never look at us. Their eyes stay up at the ceiling and their heads move around. That's when I pull on mom's arm, because I realize something.
“Eyes,” I tell her.
“Cover them if you need to, sweetie.”
I shake my head. “They can't see us.” I point and one of them looks toward me, but not at me. “Their eyes don't work good.”
Mom and dad look around. Dad says, “Some of the lab guys were complaining of blurry vision yesterday.”
Another one looks toward us. It's the words, the sounds. They can't see us but they can hear us. They're closing in on every side now. There's no way out.
Dad hands mom the needle with the blue stuff inside it. “Keep it safe, no matter what happens.”
“Why are you giving it to me?”
“Any doctor worth their weight could synthesize it, improve it. It's not complete but it might be enough to control the worst of the symptoms.” Then he says, “Give me your phone.” She hands it to him, watching the monsters sniff their way closer. “Listen to me, Cait, I want you and Silvia to crouch down, just make yourselves as small as you possibly can and don't make a single sound.” He gives her something else to hold, something I can't see.
Mom pulls me down to the ground. “What are you doing?”
He kisses the top of my head. “Proving how important you are.” He starts to back away from us, back toward the door to the stairs and away from the booth.
“Isaac...”
He turns the phone on. It lights up his face and he looks at me, at mom, a bright smile in the middle of all the dark. His mask is off and his eyes are wet.
The monster people scream.
Dad turns and runs into the dark between two of the monster people as all of them at once see his face and croak and run at him. Mom pulls my head down to the dirty concrete and we ball up tight, as small as we can like dad said, and we don't dare make a sound as the garage fills up with running sounds, some of them right past our heads but we don't speak, don't breathe, and echoing in the big, black garage is dad yelling, “Here I am!” getting further away shouting, “Right here!”
When they're far away, mom picks her head up and pulls me to my feet. We run through the dark that gets less dark as we get closer to the booth and the exit, and we reach the booth and get inside it and she looks through the box of keys on the wall until she finds ours. Then she looks up and sees a big, big car nearby and she puts down our keys and finds the ones with the logo on them just like on the big, big car. We run to it. She unlocks it and we get in.
I ask, “Isn't this stealing?”
Mom takes her mask off, turns the car on and drives toward the way out. “Aren't we going back for dad,” I ask, but again she doesn't answer me.
I look at her hand. In it is my father's watch.
**
The world isn't real.
We come out of the ground into a totally different city than the one we drove through to see dad. Instead of tired people walking down the street, these people are in a rush again. But it's not the normal kind of rush, like when they're late to their jobs, or they're mad at the car in front of them for taking too long to turn, so they honk at them to let them know. It's the kind we felt in the stairway, and in the garage, and I have a feeling the kind we'll be feeling for a long time.
The scared kind.
Mom says, “Silvia. Sweetie. Lock your door.”
The streets are so full it's as if every car in the city is trying to drive at once. Honking. Shouting. Bumpers bumping. Crunching. Turning. Stopping. All around the cars, people run with boxes and things in their hands- supplies- holding onto each other so they don't get lost in the crowd. But around those people, the scared people, the real people, there's another kind of people, less of them and they're not scared, and they're not worried, and they don't carry supplies in their hands.
The real people are their supplies.
Wherever they are they run and jump and knock real people down. They bite into the screams until the screams stop.
A red car gets tired of waiting and tries to cut across the sidewalk. It hits two people, takes them off their feet and keeps going until CRUNCH it crashes into the side of a white van going the other way. One of the people the car hit gets up but the other doesn't. The one that gets up runs to the red car and pulls the dizzy driver out and bites his face.
SLAM something hits the window an inch from my head. It's a woman's pink face, with veiny eyes looking right at me. As her gray tongue begins licking the glass, I look at mom for what to do.
“Put on your seat-belt.” As I click the metal side into the plastic side, she says, “I hope one day you can forgive me for what I'm about to do.” As the monster lady beats on my door with red-covered fists, mom says, “When times are different, people have to be different, too.”
She puts the needle in a pocket inside her suit. Then she turns the big car right onto the sidewalk, and she presses the gas pedal.
People begin to shout as the car comes at them, doing everything they can to get out of its way. The car is so big it barely fits on the sidewalk, the buildings on our left, the light poles on our right. The steering wheel jumps and spins in mom's hands as the tires run things over- boxes, suitcases, clothes, garbage cans. People.
“They're not real,” mom tells me with her voice shaking, “none of it's real, you hear me?” I nod and she says, “Let me hear you say it, Sil, let me hear you say it.”
“They're not real.” As an arm bounces off my window. “They're not real.” As the car scrapes along a hot dog cart. “They're not real.”
A policeman in the street watches our car with his hand on his gun. Usually policemen look so strong, like whatever happens they know they're in charge, and they can do whatever they need to stay that way. This one doesn't look like that at all. His eyes are so wide it's like a train is coming at him. But it isn't a train coming at him, it's a person, and by the time he sees them they're already knocking him down.
“They're not real.”
A supermarket window shatters. People come running out with supplies in their arms.
“They're not real.”
Something pops under our tires.
“They're not real.”
An electric box explodes. A building catches on fire. A girl watches everything.
“They're not real.”
**
It takes a long time, a long time and a lot of turns and a lot of screams, but we reach the bridge out of the city. We can't leave because everyone is trying to leav
e at the same time and the bridge only fits so many cars. We're stuck waiting for the people in front of us to move, but they're waiting for the people in front of them to move, and it's like that all the way up farther than I can see. Some of people are so mad about it they're out of their cars and fighting each other.
The sun is starting to come up behind us. Mom hasn't said anything for a while, so I turn on the radio.
“-State of emergency. If you're at home, please, stay at home. The hospitals are over-burdened as it is, and you're only risking further infection by-”
I press the button for the next station.
“-Do you have to say about the so-called 'quarantine camps' which some say are being erected in major cities across-”
Next station.
“-Absolutely no truth to the rumors that the president has been afflicted by the virus. She has been taken to a secure location in an undisclosed area, where she can assess-”
Next station.
“-Escape his judgment? Did you really think you could go on living the way you have been, allowing sin into your everyday lives without accepting-”
Mom turns the radio off. She takes a big, deep breath as she looks at the cars in front of us.
“I know this has to be confusing for you. I'm confused myself. It seems like we were just at the food store, trying to decide which mustard to buy. Now that feels like a hundred years ago.” She looks at me. “I was wrong to call your father a bastard. It's a very bad word, for very bad things. He had his problems, so does everyone, but he loved you, and he did everything he knew to keep you safe. He was a good man.”
“Why do you keep saying 'was'?”
She looks like she's about to cry, but then she sees something in the rear-view mirror that makes her grab it and move it to see better. She turns in her seat to look out the back and all the color falls out of her face.
“Oh, no. Oh, God, no.”
The Mountain and The City: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale Page 27
