by Rich Baker
He shoulders the backpack and slings his rifle. Carmen puts the strap from the lighter duffel bag over her head and under one arm, pushing it around to her back. She has the suppressed pistol on her hip and carries the second rifle D-Day brought from his apartment. He threads the sling under the duffel bag’s strap and helps her get the rifle clipped in.
“There,” he says. “Now you’re looking like a soldier.”
“Awesome, just what a girl likes to hear,” she says. “I guess practice makes perfect.”
He grabs the second duffel and moves to the door. Carmen grabs the handle, and when he nods, she pulls the door open.
The emergency lights along the edge of the hall are throwing enough light on the floor for them to see where they’re going, the strobes over the exits showing them where the doors are. D-Day sweeps left and right but sees nothing else in the hall.
The emergency lights, powered by the solar array, light the way along the floor of the hallway, much like they would in the aisle of a plane. D-Day and Carmen move to the east stairwell and pull the door open. D-Day slides the duffel through and follows it, sweeping up the stairs with the barrel of his rifle while Carmen covers the downward path.
“Definitely smoke,” she says, sniffing the air.
“Yeah. Wait here,” D-Day says, dropping the backpack to the ground and heading up the stairs.
The smoke gets thicker as he climbs. When he gets to the eleventh-floor landing, he can feel the heat coming off of the door. He puts the back of his hand on it and winces, pulling it back involuntarily, hissing at the pain. There’s no doubt now. There’s a massive fire burning on the other side of the door. It’s time for them to leave.
He turns and heads back down to the seventh floor where Carmen waits for him.
“Eleven is burning,” he says. “The door is too hot to touch, so it’s bad.”
“So we have no choice. It’s time to go.”
“Yeah. No grid power, no water pressure, nothing to put the fire out with. It’ll just keep going until it burns itself out, which will be who knows when. I don’t think we want to be here at the end of that scenario.”
Carmen adjusts the duffel bag’s position and starts down the stairs, while D-Day shoulders the backpack once again, grabs the larger bag and follows her. They wind their way down the stairs, coming out in the lobby where just a couple of weeks ago they had won their first skirmish with the dead. Carmen reaches for the door, but D-Day stops her.
“Let’s make sure we’re alone first,” he says. He cracks the door the tiniest bit, and sees the lobby is dark, save for the flashing of the fire alarm’s strobe light. Outside the building, the dead are gathered in a huge group, pressing against the glass and the main outer doors. Their collective weight is making those doors bow in at the top. It probably won’t be long before they give way, then only the inner doors will separate them, and those are not as sturdy as the outer ones.
With all the noise from the undead, there’s no indication of any undead inside the building. If there were any zombies, they’d have come running to the source of all of this ruckus. Confident that there’s no imminent danger from the undead, D-Day pushes the door open a little wider, peeking around the door jamb, looking left and right. He doesn’t see anything, so he pushes the door all the way open and leads Carmen through the lobby to the hallway, around the center apartments to the rear of the building where the covered walkway from the parking garage connects to the building. When the power went out elevators used emergency power to return to the ground floor, so the elevator on the back side of the building rests with the front and rear doors open, letting them through to the garage walkway. D-Day pulls the door open a few inches, doing so with his foot pressed against the base of the door, guarding against someone - something, rather – pushing the door from the other side. Their luck holds, and the walkway is empty.
He leads the way into the hundred-foot-long tube. The walls are solid for the first three feet, then glass all the way to the ceiling, making it feel like a long fishbowl putting the humans on display for the dead. They both crouch down and watch for a moment. Outside the glass, there aren’t many zombies. There’s a steady stream of them headed down the street on the east side of the building, no doubt attracted by the strobing light over the east stairwell exit. He turns and looks above the elevator, and the strobe light flickers, but never fully lights up. Luck favors them again.
He advances down the walkway in a crouch, watching the few undead on the sides of the glass tube, but they don’t take notice of them. With no light inside, D-Day guesses they can’t see through the tinted glass, rendering him and Carmen invisible to the outside world. Nevertheless, he continues moving forward in a crouched position until they get to the far end. On the left, an elevator would take them to the second, third and the rooftop fourth level of the garage. On the right is another stairwell.
“How are you doing?” he asks.
“Okay. The bag’s getting heavy but I’m alright.”
“I’m parked on the second level, in the motorcycle parking near the exit. Can you do one more set of stairs?”
“Yeah, I’m good,” she says and manages a weak smile. “All the time on the elliptical better be good for something, right?”
“Stairmaster would have been better, but the elliptical will have to do. Okay, let’s go.”
He stands up straight and pulls the door open. A zombie falls out of the doorway, its back bent and twisted, legs unmoving, arms grasping at Carmen. She shrieks and starts to raise her rifle, but D-Day stops her.
“Shhh!” he commands. He drops the duffel bag on the back of the zombie, pinning it to the ground. He checks the stairs immediately behind him but finds nothing. The zombie growls, but before it can unleash its wail, D-Day has his knife out of its sheath and shoves it into the zombie’s head, going in just behind the jaw and under the ear. He twists the knife, and the creature goes limp. He pulls the knife out, trailing black ooze and brain matter behind it, and uses the shirt of the creature to wipe as much of the gore off of the knife as he can before sheathing it again.
“Holy shit,” Carmen says. “That was intense. And gross.”
D-Day grabs the big duffel. “Let’s go,” he says, kicking the body out of the doorway so that the door will close behind them.
They climb to the second level door, and D-Day puts the bag down, then helps Carmen get the other duffel off and places it next to the first one.
“Catch your breath for a minute,” D-Day says. “Things might go real fast once we get the door open. Here’s what we’re going to do. My bike is about twenty feet from the door. Once we open the door, we’re exposed. There might be a hundred of them on the other side, or there might be none. We know that someone got bit as they were coming in, because we just met their corpse downstairs, and there’s no one else in here. So whatever got them is out there. We just don’t know what floor, but I think it’s logical that there’s more of them on two than on three or four.”
He pauses, taking a breath, then continues.
“I have hard-sided saddlebags on the bike. It’s the cross-country model, which is lucky for you. That means you have an actual seat to ride on. When we go out there, I’ll focus on clearing any threats. I need you to get these bags into the saddlebags. The smaller one should fit in there as is. You may need to take some stuff out of the big one and play a bit of Tetris to get it all in there. Then you’re going to have to wear the backpack. Once we’re on the road we’ll be dodging all kinds of stuff, so you’re going to need to hang on tight. Got it?”
She swallows hard, and nods, though in the near dark she realizes he can barely see the motion.
“Got it,” she finally says. “Let’s go.”
Eleven
D-Day pushes the door open a few inches, the latch making a lot more noise than he would like. The pre-dawn light is filtering through the open sides of the garage. He sees several shadows moving about on the ramp, some heading down to the fi
rst level, some moving to the edge of the garage closest to the building. There’s an orange glow coming from that direction, no doubt the flames from the fire. He sights the rifle on the nearest zombie, setting the green circle from his holographic sight on the creature’s head, and squeezes the trigger. Even suppressed, the pop draws attention from other zombies. The brass from the first round hasn’t hit the ground when he fires a second shot, dropping the next closest ghoul. He pushes the door and steps through, checking behind it as he does so. There’s another creature there, and he fires two shots, sending the thing to its second, and final, death.
“Clear,” he says in a hoarse whisper. He turns back to the creatures farther down the ramp and to the left of the stairwell. Carmen hustles out behind him, wearing the backpack and lugging the two duffel bags toward D-Day’s bike. There are several bikes in the motorcycle parking, but his is the only cross-country bike with saddlebags. It stands out among the crotch-rockets and European-style scooters. She hears another series of pops as she uses his keys to unlock the first saddlebag, unlatches it, and pushes the smaller bag inside. It just fits.
A few more pops tell her he’s still shooting the zombies. It’s more shooting than she expected, and she hopes that doesn’t mean that there’s a horde of the smelly bastards, or their trip could be a real short one. The second duffel is both too wide to fit in the saddlebag, and too long to go in on its end. She unzips it and puts boxes of ammunition at the bottom, allowing her to collapse the bag enough to stuff it in. She puts her weight on the lid, barely getting it to latch.
She looks up in time to see a zombie reaching for her. She leans away from it, and the weight of the backpack drags her to the ground. She kicks at the creature, slowing it down for a second while she fights to get her pistol free from the holster. The thing growls and falls forward to pounce on its prey, but Carmen puts a foot in its chest and kicks it to the side. It grabs at her right arm, keeping her from getting the barrel of the pistol up to its head. She sees the mouth open as it pulls her arm toward the gnashing set of teeth, the jaw snapping open and shut in anticipation of tearing at her flesh. She keeps her free hand pressed against its throat, just holding it at bay.
A tan-booted foot steps over her and presses down on the creature’s neck. It lets go of Carmen’s arm and starts clawing at D-Day’s cargo pants. With her arm free now, Carmen shoves the suppressor into the dead man’s mouth and pulls the trigger. Brain and bone and black fluid spray over the concrete behind the thing.
D-Day extends a hand and helps Carmen to her feet.
“Sorry!” D-Day says. “I was a little busy clearing a path for us. I didn’t see that one before.”
“Hey, you got here before it was too late,” she says. “That’s all that matters. Are we good to go?”
D-Day straddles the bike and puts the key in the ignition.
“Climb on.”
She throws a leg over the bike, getting her boot settled on the foot peg, grabs D-Day to get some leverage and slides the rest of the way onto the seat.
He starts the bike, puts it in gear and gets it moving down the ramp from the second level to the first. He steers it around the corner, coasting, keeping the noise to a minimum. They roll past several bodies oozing fluids on the concrete. They reach the entrance to the garage, and D-Day gives the throttle a twist, and heads out of the driveway, intending to turn left on Washington Street.
“Whoa!” he shouts when he sees the horde of the dead, several hundred of them, blocking his intended path. He guns it, zipping across the street into the parking lot of the supermarket where he did most of his grocery shopping. He glances in the storefront as they pass by, and sees it full of the undead, some still pushing carts. They reach the end of the lot, and he turns left on Clarkson Street. The undead here are far less dense, and he’s able to move the bike through them without incident.
They go two blocks, and D-Day turns left again, trying to get them oriented back toward Park Avenue. As they approach Washington Street, a zombie – a runner – has a head of steam and is angling toward them. Before he can gun the engine, out of the corner of his eye, D-Day sees Carmen’s arm extend, holding the short barreled shotgun. The blast takes off half of the zombie’s head, and it collapses a dozen feet short of the bike. D-Day hears Carmen rack the shotgun; then she squeezes her left arm around him again.
They cross Washington and head down Court Street, then turn on 24th Avenue to get some distance between them and the burning hotel, which is like a giant candle on a birthday cake for the zombies, drawing them in from three hundred and sixty degrees around. A large horde is heading at them from Tremont forcing D-Day to take the bike off the road, through a vacant lot, hopping the curb and emerging at last onto Park Avenue.
Cars clog the street, so he crosses over and cuts through a series of vacant lots and around the scattered cars in parking lots, jumping the curb and crossing several streets until they get to the three-way intersection of Park Avenue, Arapahoe Street and the diagonal cross street of Broadway. The oversized intersection is a snarl of cars, dead flesh, and undead flesh, but D-Day can get onto the sidewalk and cut through the gap under the gray pole that stopped a big SUV from hitting the office furniture store on the corner. Once past the intersection, the road opens up, and there are both fewer cars and less of the undead. He twists the throttle, and they accelerate, roaring past the big murals on the side of the office supply store depicting scenes from Office Space; Milton and his red stapler, and Lumbergh asking about TPS reports. He dodges around a few zombies, the startled ones turning and following them for a few seconds but losing interest after they pass out of sight.
As they ascend the elevated section of the road, D-Day crosses over to the eastbound side of the street, going against the intended flow of traffic, then stays to the left onto the on-ramp that leads to I-25. It’s as he hoped – the traffic, or rather the lack of it, on the southbound side of the interstate is limited to snarls of crashed cars that D-Day has no problem weaving around. He keeps his speed down, under fifty miles per hour for the most part, and slower when they encounter wreckage. The last thing he wants is for a zombie to lunge from behind the corpse of a Swedish station wagon and knock them over while they’re going ninety. Being turned into roadkill BY roadkill is not his preferred way of leaving this world. As they continue north, they pass hundreds of zombies, wandering toward the interstate from the side roads, on-ramps and the green spaces that border the road. The concrete K-rails that separate the entries and exits to the interstate from the proper lanes hold most of the undead at bay. The few that figure out how to get onto the road, even those that are running full speed, aren’t fast enough to catch them. Some are trapped in the HOV lanes, where there is a mass of cars wedged together in the two walled-off lanes.
As they approach the exchange for Highway 36, D-Day lets off the throttle. The remains of a gas tanker block the entire southbound side of the road. He slows the bike to a stop and leans it on the kickstand. The sun is rising over the buildings to the east, giving them ample light to see that part of the overpass has collapsed, leaving long fingers of rebar exposed, some with zombies impaled on them. D-Day looks around. The same K-Rails that are keeping the zombies off the road have got the two of them trapped on the road. They could backtrack, but there’s a growing number of the undead behind them. He pulls the monocular from a pocket on his vest and sees dozens of them shuffling and walking after them. The runners are out in front, and at their pace, they’ll be here in a couple of minutes.
He turns the monocular forward, looking at the wreckage of the tanker, scanning for any possible way through.
“What are we gonna do?” Carmen asks him.
“I think I see a way. But you’re going to have to trust me. It’s gonna take some Evel Knieveling to pull it off.”
She looks at him with a furrowed brow. “Evel Knievel successfully jumping nineteen cars in Ontario, or Evel Knievel eating shit over the Snake River?”
D-Day chuck
les. “Ontario, hopefully. You know, that jump set a record that stood for like twenty-five years or something crazy like that.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m a Harley girl, remember? And the guy that broke it was riding the very same Harley that Evel rode. Not just the same model, the exact same one.”
D-Day casts a glance back at the runners, now just a few hundred yards away.
“Okay, you’re with me on this?” he asks.
“Do we have a choice? Let’s do it. Please be Ontario.”
They mount the bike again, and he fires up the engine. He puts it in gear and revs the throttle. The bike takes off, D-Day running through the gears as he gets the big cruiser up to seventy miles per hour, headed at the wreckage of the tanker. With fifty feet to spare, revs the engine and turns toward the sloped concrete that runs from the edge of the road up to the bottom of the overpass. The slope must be at least thirty-five degrees, but their momentum carries them upwards while he downshifts and keeps the throttle revved, propelling them forwards. He feels the back end slide on some loose concrete chips, broken free by weeds that have found purchase in the cracks, but then the tire finds purchase again, and they keep moving, losing momentum, but still passing the burned-out tanker shell. He tries to descend the other side in a gradual fashion, but the slope is too steep, and the bike starts to slide, so he steers into the slide, dropping toward the road on the leeward side of the tanker faster than he thinks the bike will handle and still stay upright. With just a few feet to go, he turns the bike back to a shallower line of descent, and they exit the concrete slope perfectly aligned with the interstate.
He brakes hard, the back tire coming off the ground for a split second, momentum carrying Carmen forward into D-Day, and his momentum just shy of taking him over the handlebars. The bike stops inches from the front end of a south-bound sedan. Hundreds of vehicles have stacked up behind the tanker, completely blocking the road. They go back more than two hundred feet, four, and in some places, five vehicles spread over three lanes of traffic. They stretch all the way back to the exit for westbound Highway 36, some even trying in vain to climb the weed-covered hillside between the exit and the Interstate as the drivers tried to escape the death trap that this part of the highway had become. If they go up that hillside to the off-ramp, there’s enough space for the bike to get through – if it weren’t for the horde of zombies advancing on them, blocking their only escape route.
