The End of the World as We Knew It

by Nick Cole

  We had chilaquiles.

  I’ve never had chilaquiles before.

  After breakfast, the old man poured a few fingers of tequila into cut crystal glasses for the three of us, then retired to the enclosed porch where he said he would sleep most of the day.

  I sat watching the remains of the gigantic meal being cleared by his daughter.

  When it was done, she nodded from the kitchen, a dishtowel over one shoulder, and led me to the back of the house.

  We lay down fully clothed. Before I could even begin to kiss her lips, we’d drifted into sleep, comforted by the tight warmth we felt as we held onto each other’s bodies for more than just passion.

  For security.

  For comfort.

  For the touch that said life.

  When I woke, she was gone. I lay in her room. There were posters of musicians and cars. There were pictures of her and a young man and a baby.

  I got up and walked to the rear door of the house and went out into the backyard. The afternoon was thick with heat and buzzing insects. I climbed over the fence and found an old trash-littered alley. I left there and never looked back.

  I wasn’t ready.

  And my guess is she wasn’t either.

  It’ll be a long time before anybody is ready again.

  I drank and slept in my hotel room. A day and the next one passed. I wandered the streets looking at the faces of the living, knowing that each face had seen its fair share of death.

  I stood in front of a chain link fence, studying the faces of the missing in the collage that had grown there.

  In truth, I was ready to head south again. I would find Chris and start a new life. A downpour had begun to fall on that last afternoon in L.A., and with its coming, the ongoing festival had seemingly disappeared into the rain-swollen gutters.

  In the early evening, I found an old warehouse that served beer at a bar which kept watch over old and battered pool tables. Rain dripped into strategically placed pans and buckets.

  I was down to my last ten CalDollars.

  Did I ever mention I had seven-point-five-million offshore? It’s not important now. It just seemed funny to me as I stood there figuring how many beers I could get for ten CalDollars.

  It was later, when the thunder started to roll across the city and the rain came down in sheets that a few drunks, nice guys actually, began to talk about the Lady.

  What they said changed everything for me.

  What they said gave me hope.

  Alex is the Lady.

  I believe it now that I have written it down.

  I didn’t believe it before. I’d wanted to. But I didn’t. I listened to all their stories about the Lady. A lot about the battle at City Center. The drunks told me a patchwork collection of short stories, episodes and limited-edition graphic novels regarding a hot chick with a rock star haircut who had risen, led a crew of fighters, fought back, and survived the end of the world.

  Alex was a leader.

  Alex was a fighter.

  She looked like a rock star from the eighties.

  Alex could have had a crew.

  One of them could have been the black guy who used hair care products for the African American male.

  They’d first appeared down in Orange County, rescuing bands of survivors from off rooftops and behind crumbling barricades.

  Her plan had led to the battle at City Center.

  Most of the stories were secondhand accounts. Guys who had been on the fringe or knew some other guy that had been there when she did that thing, or the other thing, that saved the day. One kid had fought right alongside her at City Center.

  “I told myself I’d run when she did,” said the kid.

  But she never did.

  “Someone’s screaming bloody murder down in the machinegun pits. There’s a gunshot. Above all that moaning and growling the dead are making, I can hear some sorry chungo screaming plain as day that he’s bit.”

  The kid paused as he drank from the beer I’d bought him.

  “Then someone says we gotta pull back, there’s too many of ‘em. And I’m thinkin’ to myself, hell yeah, now there’s a sensible man. But she just says, ‘Then leave your weapons and get the hell out of here. I’m not running today. This is it. Right here, right now!’ So, I stuck. And for about twenty minutes, I thought we were done for. We were dumping everything into that avalanche of dead people and they just kept on comin’. I saw a jet come in way too low and strafe ‘em. Then the pilot got creamed all over the side of City Hall and half of Old Town.”

  “But we stopped ‘em. We stopped ‘em right there at the top of the steps.”

  The kid took a long pull off his beer, finishing it.

  “Lady just wouldn’t run.”

  “Where’d she go after that?” I asked. I hadn’t said anything until now. “I mean, what happened after the battle?”

  “She led the Army, the new Army that is, up into the Central Valley. Last I heard, they were advancing on San Francisco. They clear that out and that’ll be something. I never met one survivor that’s come from anywhere north of Bakersfield. I heard its bad up in the northern part of the state. Real bad, in fact.”

  Everyone in the bar agreed.

  It was bad up there.

  I admit, even now, lying in my cot here at our new Reconstruction camp near the AmeriCal Gas Station in Central California, there could be every chance in the world it’s not Alex. But, if there is even the slightest chance in the world it is her, then I’ve got to try and find her. If Alex is the Lady, I’ve got to find her. I’ll tell her everything. And if she’ll let me... I’ll live with her for the rest of my life.

  We start the Reconstruction of Turleyville tomorrow.

  December 17th

  What remains?

  What happened at the AmeriCal Gas Station and Mart in Turleyville could be a...

  It could be the story of what happened to all of us.

  The rotting dead are piled high against the doors of the little convenience market. The windows are boarded up and look rust-stained, though we all know it is not rust that has left these stains on the Big Box Store plywood that someone might have used for a tree house or a room addition if everything that happened, had not happened. Stray corpses wait out near the pumps. Across the road. In the middle of the streets.

  We begin to collect these. Them. We are working systematically. My first corpse is a woman. A girl. Tina Martinez. She doesn’t look Hispanic. Her teeth are black. Bared. Her eyes vacant. There are dark circles where the fever consumed her beauty and then withered what remained. She wears stained jeans and a shirt that must have once been white. There is a high-powered rifle wound, so Ramos tells me he would like to bet, that has taken off the side of her scalp. What’s left of her brain lies along the dry grass median that separates the pumps from the road.

  The Reconstruction team is smaller this time. Only ten two-person teams. Karen, and Guy her right hand man, oversee our work. We work the street corpses for the morning. The corpses that didn’t make it to the barricaded door of the station.

  After lunch we head for the gas station. The dead lay piled inward against the splintered remains of the main door. As though they had all fallen through suddenly. Beneath these are more of them.

  In all, there are almost a hundred. I never would’ve guessed that many.

  We lay them out in rows and settle to filling out our forms, then bagging the personal effects. By late afternoon, we have them stacked in body bags at the rear of the gas station.

  Karen enters the darkened hole that leads into the barricaded gas station alone, and calls out to see if anyone’s in there. She’s holding a pistol and flashlight, even though a bright orange tag indicates the Army has cleared this location. The tag flutters in the afternoon breeze.

  We return to our tent camp in the open field nearby, where spring planting will not be done this year, and already the Ops Tent is lit by the blue glow of computers uploading our forms. The workers
inside stare into screens with that same pasty dead look that the bodies, in many cases, out back wear.

  We get cold showers and a hot meal. But no one feels like eating. Some people play cards.

  I think I’ll turn in.

  I couldn’t sleep, so I took a walk and ended up in the Ops Tent. I looked at the big map. There are markers around the Bay Area. All around San Francisco to our northwest.

  I asked what they mean, the markers.

  Some markers, blue triangles, represent The Army of the New California Republic. Other markers and marks, red ragged lines, red skulls and crossbones, giant red circles, represent the dead in all their various types of groupings.

  There is a lot of red.

  Far more than there is blue.

  Karen tells me Army radio traffic has been quiet for a week. She says she’s nervous about that. Those blue markers are the last known positions of the Army. The distance between us, the gas station town of Turleyville, and those blue triangles surrounding the southern edge of the San Francisco Bay Area, is not very far. They are all that stand between us and a sea of red.

  I understand Karen’s nervousness.

  I wonder which of those blue triangles represents Alex.

  I tried to press Karen for more. But I could see it had been a bad idea in the first place to tell me what she’d already told me. That much is obvious.

  December 18th

  Ramos, myself, and one other team went into the gas station this morning with Karen.

  Our initial assignment was to find out what happened in each section of the “Last Stand”.

  “Siege Event Details” it states on a form at the top of Karen’s clipboard.

  Who survived and how long?

  Who turned and when?

  Who are... I mean were, the survivors, as opposed to the infected?

  There is a section to annotate any personal notes that were left behind by the survivors. These are to be recorded and acted upon in the event other survivors fled to another location. Maybe they’re there now, waiting to be rescued.

  No one believed Karen when she explained that to us. She told us there are probably groups out there who don’t know the tide has turned. That government services are coming back online. They’re still out there surviving. How many years will we go on finding groups like that who’ve lived, thinking like left behind Japanese soldiers on the Islands of the Pacific during and after World War Two, that their world has ended, that the war continues?

  There were more corpses inside the store.

  Most of them were infected. We checked for long-term exposure to the virus and all met the criteria.

  There was one guy, a redneck type, behind the counter, holding a double-barreled shotgun. His head was missing.

  At the back of the store, we found the entrance to the beer cooler. In the beer cooler, we found empty rifles and empty pistols. We also found the partial corpses of the survivors.

  The teams came in and removed the corpses to the parking lot for identification and forms. As they did, we worked through the story with Karen.

  “Survivors?” she asked.

  “None,” she answered.

  “Suicides? Ramos?”

  “I don’t know, Karen,” he said, his Vato accent thick, his voice quiet like he didn’t want to be there. As if he didn’t want to be involved. But then, “It looks like the hillbilly offed himself early on. Maybe he got bit. Then the three in the cooler must have kept fighting until they ran outta bullets. I’d count them as suicides.”

  “Why?”

  “They had the guns and the ammo. That beer cooler door would’ve held forever. But those things would have come through that shattered display glass. Looks like they did too. If it helps with how long they lasted, there wasn’t much beer left.”

  “Okay good. I’ll buy,” said Karen, as she made notes on her clipboard. “But not the hillbilly. If he killed himself, they would’ve wrapped the body up and stuck him on the roof or somewhere else. But the three in the cooler sounds like a likely story. You guys have anything else to add?”

  I did.

  “I found some tick marks on the counter where the hot dogs were sold. Four sets of five and two individual marks. So twenty-two. Might mean they held out for twenty two days.”

  Karen looked at me for a long moment.

  “Twenty-two days.” She nodded as she wrote on her form. “That could be a record.”

  “How’s that?” asked Ramos.

  “How long they survived. Twenty-two days seems like the longest one we’ve found so far.”

  Ramos scratched his head.

  “But they failed. We hold the record, Karen. Each of us here survived longer than that. We’re the winners because we’re still alive.”

  We’re the winners.

  December 20th

  It’s well after midnight. Midnight of the twentieth. But I’m writing this for yesterday. It’s my last entry. I’ll leave this for the record. The record of who I was.

  I’m going now.

  Late on the night of the 18th, Guy comes into the tent.

  “Get up everyone, hurry. We’ve got infected coming in from every direction!”

  For a moment I think he means they’re outside, in the fields and crossing the interstate, shambling across the low-lying fog through the tall dead grass.

  But that’s not the case.

  The Army needs help.

  They’ve been pushed back to a town called Manteca, which is north of here. When we’re all outside, Karen tells us a huge “train” of infected are bearing down out of the San Francisco Bay Area. A last-ditch defense is being set up in Manteca. They load us into the buses and we’re off into the night.

  When we get to the defense, they hand us shovels and tell us to get to work building dirt walls along the off ramps leading back along the freeway, away from an overpass.

  Earthmovers are shoveling mountains of dirt along the off and on ramps of the overpass and into the gap beneath. The plan is to make a small castle using the high overpass as a sort of castle gate. The sides, rear, and directly underneath the overpass will become walls of scrapped dirt towering over pits from which the earth had been taken.

  They plan to “hold the line” here.

  We worked for the rest of that night, shoveling under bright gas-powered construction lights on long poles. Near dawn, we got coffee and cereal bars.

  I couldn’t help thinking it was my last meal.

  The rest of the Army started coming into “the castle” in ragged bands. A small opening beneath the overpass was left exposed while a bulldozer waited by a mound of dirt to close up the gap at a moment’s notice.

  The Army had wounded. There had been an accidental explosion at a bridge over in the hills that lead to the bay. Men and women had been crushed by debris, both flying and falling. Their plan, The Army, had been to set up a defense at the Altamont pass. But the accidental explosion had derailed that plan, and now a huge swarm of undead were trailing the Army as it retreated out of the bay and straight into our “Castle”. If the corpses broke through the Central Valley, all the cleared areas, even Los Angeles, would be wide open for them. Their numbers were estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

  There weren’t more than five-hundred of us in the Castle.

  I helped a truck full of soldiers offload their wounded. The outside of the truck was bloody. The soldiers looked pale and shrunken. Many of them were shaking.

  “What’s SF like?” I asked a girl as we offloaded a screaming man onto a stretcher.

  “It’s a living graveyard. They’re everywhere.”

  “Do you know the woman everyone calls the Lady?” I asked her as she tried to walk away.

  “Not really. I... our team hasn’t been in contact with the main body for days. It wasn’t part of the plan.”

  “Do you know...?”

  “Listen, I’ve got work to do.”

  When we were finished getting the wounded onto helicopters coming
from out of the south, the last of the Army came through the gap. There was even a tank. Seconds later, the bulldozer gassed its engine, belched black smoke, and moved to seal the entrance, and us, inside a “castle” that was about to be surrounded by hundreds of thousands of living corpses.

  By dawn, guns were being handed out.

  We were expecting the dead within two hours.

  Just after eight o’clock, the first of them appeared on the horizon. I was on the right flank, below the wall. The overpass, where the main body of soldiers lay in wait with their guns, was above me and off to my left.

  One of the soldiers was teaching us how to identify the different guns and ordinances we were supposed to use, and how to find and run ammo up onto the overpass when someone called for it.

  The dead came on silently in twos and threes, sometimes alone, almost falling forward in the golden light of morning. Then they saw us and their voices rose into a howl of white noise.

  Behind the leading corpses, a gray patchwork mass stretched off into the distance.

  Snipers began to take out the stragglers, and quickly the call for “Three-Oh-Eight” rounds came down from the overpass into our little supply depot. Petersen, the soldier in charge of us, handed Ramos a case of ammo and sent him onto the overpass.

  “Come back once you’ve dropped it,” he ordered.

  Above us, along the overpass, the gunfire was increasing. Now assault rifles were engaging closing targets.

  “That’d be the three-hundred meter mark,” muttered Petersen. “It’s gonna get a lot closer than that. They’ll start wanting Five-Five-Six, shortly.” He handed me and Karen a crate. “Both of you carry this up when you hear ‘em call out ‘FIVE-FIVE-SIX’. Got it?”

  We did.

  The tank opened up from the other side of the overpass with a roar and a distant crack.

  “We don’t have any extra ammo for that one,” laughed Petersen above the echo of its blast.

  Now the heavy machineguns began to chatter away in the cold morning air.

  “They’re callin’ for it! Go!” said Petersen, tapping us on the shoulders.

  High up on the overpass, a man waved to us.