From Oblivion's Ashes

by Michael E. A. Nyman

  The shade of his wife drifted closer, her hands rising up from the depths. Aaron is sleeping, the darkness whispered. He misses you, but will see you when he wakes.

  They came together, just like the first time they danced at her sister’s wedding. Two souls becoming one, merging into a perfect rhythm that you just know is strong enough to last an eternity. Even were he and Karen to have broken up, torn apart, fallen out of love, this moment would have lasted forever.

  In the endless dark, on a stage made from tears, Eric and Karen danced again like it was the first time.

  “‘Others’, he said,” Marshal insisted, flying a second drone over the ruin that was the Queen/Yonge Street intersection. “The man crawled three city blocks in zombie-infested territory in order to save ‘others’.”

  “Yeah, I heard him,” Luca said, eying the screen warily. “But that guy’s standing with one foot on the other side of the grave. Every second he spends rumbling around in Crapmobile gets him closer to pushing through the rest of the way. How the fuck are we supposed to know if he’s hallucinating or not?”

  “Well,” Marshal said, his gaze locked on the video feed from the second drone, “we’ll know soon enough. It’s not hard to see where he’s been. Zombies may have cleaned up his blood trail, but you can still see where they’ve done it. There’s a trail that leads all the way back to Queen Street. It’s incredible that he got as far as he did before the undead caught his scent.”

  He pointed at the screen. “There. The trail leads there.”

  Luca peered at the image, then scowled.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? It’s a fucking two-foot hole in the ground! The only way there are any ‘others’ in there is if they’re dead.”

  Privately, Marshal had to agree.

  The Queen/Yonge intersection was considered by many to be the heart of Toronto, and was a curious mixture of hundred year old architectural landmarks and geometric, glass-steel, modern style, ten stories or more on all four corners. On the northeast side was the Eaton Center, a shining, super-plex of stores, eateries, and clothiers, spanning for blocks, with several floors of escalators, modern art, and offices.

  The apocalypse had not been kind to it.

  The Eaton Center atrium had collapsed, denying access to the south end of the mall and the subway, although that wasn’t the worst of it. On the northeast corner, the Barton building, all twenty six stories, had fallen, leaving a four story pile of broken concrete, metal, and dust. Marshal realized that a great number of the undead had frenzied into Attack mode from what had been one of the busiest intersections in the city. They must have done enough damage in perforating the structural supports to bring it all down. The dust alone would have been incredible.

  His eyes drifted southwards, towards the city core where the city’s titanic office towers, including the Bank of Montreal building and the CN Tower, were still standing.

  For a few seconds, Marshal eyed them speculatively. Okay. If a Swarm were to decide it was necessary, it could reduce any one of them to powder in less than an hour. But it would take an act of focused intent to bring down one of the big ones. It was incidental contact that had destroyed the Barton building, and that was during a busy pre-apocalyptic day when hundreds of ‘Attack modes’ were going off per minute.

  But zombies in full ‘Attack mode’ were rare these days, as rare as the human population that could provoke them. There was very little that could threaten the titanic structures any more. All at once, it occurred to Marshal that, even with the windows smashed out, he couldn’t see anything on the upper floors. Due to the elevation, everything above a certain level was hidden from him.

  Interesting.

  “Hey!” Luca called. “Wake up! You still here?”

  Marshal shook off his thoughts and came back to the matter at hand.

  “What were you thinking just now?” Luca asked. “You were starin’ off into the distance like you were seeing things.”

  “An idea,” he answered, “but now isn’t the time to explore it.”

  He sighed, turning his attention back to the hole in the ground.

  “We’re going to have to check it out,” Marshal said. “This part of the city is riddled with underground tunnels. You used to be able to walk all the way from College Street to the waterfront without setting foot above ground. What if there’s people trapped down there?”

  “For almost four fucking weeks?” Luca asked. “Marshal, there’s undead all over this place. Remember the trail of blood? Remember how they managed to track down soldier boy over here? You go down there, I don’t know if I can keep them off of you, not with all the drones on the planet.”

  “We’ve lured most of the undead away already,” Marshal pointed out. “Past experience shows that, when they don’t find anything, they’ll just slip back into ‘Search Mode’. That gives us at least a half an hour before any of them wander back. Besides, if we back Crapmobile up close to the hole, we can use the back canopy to shelter the hole. That should give us all the cover we need.”

  “It’s a risk, Marshal,” Luca said. “And for what? A half-dead guy who could be hallucinating back into last century?”

  “No,” Marshal said. “We’d be taking a risk for a man…”

  He pointed at the unconscious soldier.

  “… who would rather pull a gun to convince us there was something worth coming back for down there, than to let us save his life. Think of what he went through, what he was willing to sacrifice! And by the way, when I said we, I meant we. I’m going to need your help getting anyone out if we do find out that this is more than a hole.”

  Luca glared at him for a few seconds, then said something profane in Italian.

  “We’d better fucking get moving then,” he said, “but I’m telling you, Marshal: if you’re wrong, and we die, I will fucking haunt you until the end of time.”

  The dance that would last forever was approaching the end, and Eric knew that he would be asked to make a choice. He could feel it coming, like some people could sense storm clouds. Looking up at the sky, he felt like he could wish upon its darkness. He could see no stars.

  You’ve been very brave, the darkness whispered. I am so proud of you. And now, you are close to the end. Your legs are gone. It is the end of the world, Eric. The country you used to protect is gone, and its people are left to survive off the crumbs. They will struggle to survive, and need every advantage they can get.

  And I have no legs, he thought.

  Slowly, with one last pirouette, Karen’s shade detached from him, pulling away like a ballet dancer flowing off stage. She drifted away into the last, great mystery, still shifting with the rhythm of their dance.

  Time to be brave again, my love. One last time.

  Holding his flashlight up, Marshal crawled on hands and knees into the hole. It was rectangular in shape, formed out of a piece of still intact floor from the Barton building, that had come to lie on top of an embankment and a smaller pile of rubble.

  Behind him, Luca cursed under his breath, muttering something about ruining a perfectly good pair of suit pants. Nevertheless, on hands and knees, he did his best to follow Marshal into the darkness.

  With one hand on the flashlight, Marshal crawled down the steep incline, with only his free hand to keep from sliding headfirst down into the dark. The smell of blood was everywhere.

  “Careful,” he hissed over his shoulder. “There’s bits of broken glass and sharp metal. Looks like it cut our soldier up pretty bad when he was climbing out of here, which explains his blood loss.”

  “Fuckin’ great,” Luca grumbled. “We’ll have to try to clear it up as we go. I ain’t dying of tetanus, just to help you keep a clear conscience.”

  Marshal couldn’t imagine it. Had the soldier had the use of his legs at all? Or had he been forced to drag himself upwards, hand over hand, moving ahead even as the debris slowly cut him to pieces.

  After about thirty feet, the incline evened off, turning into a
n obstacle course of broken rock and shattered glass. At one point, the tunnel narrowed such that there was reason to doubt that Luca was going to fit. But the big Italian just ripped away at the aperture and passed through with ease.

  “You might not want to try that again,” Marshal warned. “Not unless you want to risk bringing it all down on top of us.”

  “Why should you get to choose all the risks?” Luca snapped back. Nevertheless, he became far more careful.

  “Looks like we’re here,” Marshal said. “God! The smell!”

  They came out on an open floor in pitch darkness, with enough space that they were able to stand up. With their flashlights, they took in the scene around them.

  “Fuckin’ graveyard,” Luca murmured, his eyes white in the dark.

  Yes it was, Marshal thought.

  They were standing in a part of the tunnel that had failed to collapse. Bodies littered the ground, as many as twenty in the immediate area. Storefronts, empty and abandoned, were ghostly facsimiles of the thriving businesses they once had been. Cables and wires hung from jagged concrete outcroppings like the entrails of dead and dying buildings they had once powered.

  “Hello?” came a frail voice from ahead. “Is… is that you, Eric?”

  The voice broke down into sobs.

  “Oh please, dear god, let it be you, Eric,” the voice wept.

  Marshal looked up at Luca, who shook his head.

  “Don’t rub it in,” he grumbled, stepping past Marshal. “When you’re right, you’re right, okay? Let’s just go and see who soldier boy was tryin’ to save.”

  The owner of the voice and tears, when the light finally found her, was a tiny-looking, black woman, who looked to be in her sixties. She was leaning up against a piece of the wall that had been padded with spare clothing and cushions and clutching a small flashlight. Her clothes were torn and bloodied, her glasses were cracked, and her body was limp. It was clear that here was a woman who was expecting, possibly even hoping, to die.

  “Eric found us, ma’am,” Marshal said, stepping forward and kneeling by her side. “He’s upstairs in our… our vehicle. If you let us, we can get you out of here. We have a safe space for you, with a warm bed, food, and a shower.”

  Her haunted eyes looked away, as if she was afraid they would see her crying.

  “That sounds… lovely,” she said with a watery voice.

  “Can you walk?” Luca asked, his voice more gentle than Marshal had ever heard.

  “I… I think so,” the lady said, looking down at her bloodstained clothes. “I… I must look a mess. I… I don’t normally…”

  “What?” Luca said, his voice suddenly hoarse. “Are you kidding me? You look beautiful, sweetheart. You’d better be careful, or you’ll be fighting guys off with a stick.”

  The lady responded with a faint chuckle.

  “Don’t you worry, darling,” Luca said, taking her hand. “You got me to help keep ‘em off of you. It’d be my pleasure.”

  “Do you have a name, ma’am?” Marshal asked.

  “It’s… it’s Gladys,” she said. Her voice cracked. “My husband was around here somewhere. He’s…” Her voice cracked. “He’s dead now. Died in… he died in my arms four days ago.”

  Marshal and Luca greeted this with silence.

  “Are we going now?” Gladys asked, pulling herself together.

  “Absolutely, ma’am,” Marshal said. “If you’ll just let us help you up, we’ll take you someplace safe.”

  For the first time, Gladys looked up at them, her eyes frightened.

  “But…” She glanced to her right. “What about the others?”

  They shone the flashlight where she was looking.

  Seven more bodies lay side by side, positioned with care on padded parts of the floor. Five were awake, their sickly eyes gazing back at Marshal and Luca with fatigue. Two appeared to be sleeping, their chests rising and falling gently with the breath that was still in them.

  Angie peeked into Crapmobile. She sighed.

  Marshal and Uncle Luca weren’t back yet.

  She climbed aboard and decided to wait. She had some more exciting news and really wanted to tell someone. Not the new people. Not yet. They seemed nice, if a little silly, but they still felt like strangers. But Marshal was her big brother now, and Uncle Luca…

  She giggled.

  He was Uncle Luca. That was all there was to that.

  She inched her way around the injured soldier, trying not to touch him. The man was covered in blood and messy wounds. It wasn’t that she was afraid of the blood. It was that the man looked so awful, so… nearly dead, that she was afraid that a single slightest contact from her might be the thing that pushed him over the edge. He was still alive now. If she didn’t touch him, he would stay that way.

  Plopping herself down in Marshal’s chair, she watched the screen that showed the surrounding street and waited. She smiled, thinking of the moment she’d be able to tell them the news. Marshal would be so proud of her, and Uncle Luca would laugh and tell her how ‘fucking awesome’ she was. She hoped they’d be back soon.

  A noise behind her made her turn and look at the injured man. He wasn’t awake, but he was stirring in his sleep. His right hand kept reaching for something at his hip that wasn’t there and putting it to his forehead.

  Angie thought this strange, but still a good sign. If he was moving in his sleep, it probably meant he was getting better.

  “We’ll have to bring them back to the apartment in one trip,” Marshal said, finishing the stretcher he was making. Two poles, a canvas banner, and some duct tape were scrounged to do the deed. “There’s too much blood to this place. Now that Vandermeer’s opened up that hole to the surface, the smell is like a beacon to the undead. We might go away and find them all taken by the time we get back.”

  Gladys and the five people who were conscious listened hopefully, though none of them seemed strong enough to comment. Apparently, there had been twenty-two of them in the beginning, after the zombies ate all ones they could find. Each of the twenty-two had been dug out of the rubble by Master Corporal Vandermeer. With one leg in a splint he’d made for himself, he dragged them out into the open space of the tunnel. On willpower alone, he found and rationed food and water, scavenging from the convenience store, the bagel shop, and a few other sources.

  As people began to die from their injuries and infections, it was mainly Master Corporal Vandermeer who’d moved the bodies away from the sick. When sickness threatened to kill the last of his charges, it was Master Corporal Vandermeer who burrowed, with bare hands and slow methodical determination, back up to the surface. Cut up and badly injured from the effort, it was Master Corporal Vandermeer who crawled for three blocks to finally expire on the sidewalk in front of Rothman’s and it’s store of antibiotics.

  “Yeah,” said Luca, who’d been taking stock of the list of victims. “It won’t be easy, but we’ll do whatever it takes. Been talking with our new people, finding out how bad off and who they are. The two unconscious ones, I had to check their ID. You’re going to want to hear this.”

  “What?”

  “Other than Gladys,” Luca said, smiling at the old lady, “who’s used to be part-time nurse, we got us a high school student, a personal assistant, a sales rep, a construction worker, an accountant, an out-of-work musician, and that guy on the end?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s a fucking cardiologist,” Luca said. “An honest-to-fucking-god doctor. Only problem is, he’s the worst off in the whole bunch. He’s white as a ghost, won’t take food anymore, and hasn’t been conscious for the last three days.”

  Marshal bit his lip. “We’ll take him up first,” he said. “They’re all important, but if there’s even a chance-”

  “Yeah, I get it. How’s that stretcher coming along?”

  “Ready to try it out.”

  “Then let’s go. Gladys?”

  The old lady looked up and smiled. “Yes, Luca dear?”r />
  “We’ll be back as soon as we can,” Luca said. “Don’t let any of these losers hit on you, okay? Let me know if they do, and I’ll set them straight, all right?”

  “Okay, dear. Enough of your nonsense, young man. There are people who need saving now.”

  “You got it, doll.”

  It took them ten excruciating minutes and several cuts and scratches to get the doctor up the tunnel. Once they were inside Crapmobile, they lay the doctor down next the soldier and went about making them both comfortable.

  “Hi Marshal,” Angie said. “Who’s that guy?”

  “This is Dr. Edmond Burke,” Marshal told her. “He and seven other people have been trapped under the rubble for three weeks. Sorry sweetheart, but I’m going to have to ask you to walk home. We’re going to be sitting on each other’s laps in here. Will you be okay with that?”

  “It’s okay, Marshal,” Angie said cheerfully. “All the zombies are stupid. None of them can find me, thanks to the things you taught me.”

  “Me?” Marshal laughed. “Seems to me that you’ve taught me more than I ever taught you. But thanks, honey. It’s a really big help.”

  “You found eight people?” Angie asked, sounding a little disappointed.

  “Nine, including the soldier,” Luca said, gently tucking Dr. Burke in snug next to Eric, so there’d be room for the next.

  “Oh,” Angie said sadly.

  “What’s the matter, Angie?” Marshal asked, noticing her mood.

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just… I had something to tell you guys. I thought it would make you happy, but-”

  “Just tell us, sweetheart,” Luca said, looking concerned now.

  “I found more people,” she said. “A little boy. He’s hidden up in the rafters in Simcoe school auditorium. I think there’s others with him, but I didn’t stay to count. Those are the rules, remember?”

  Marshal and Luca exchanged tired looks.

  “It never rains but it fucking pours, eh?” Luca said. “Well, you said you wanted to save the world, Marshal. You just forgot how fucking big the world is.”