They Came With The Storm (The Effacing)

by Clark, T. Anwar

  I searched for Ann's car. It was about 50 feet from the rage-ignited pillage, 150 feet from us. Mike ran back into the garage and elbowed an emergency box glass, extracting an axe as the fire hose hit the ground. "I'm not dying today. Let's go." he ordered as he made his way back, the fury and rage in his face, emerging with the screams from people who were being slaughtered by the blood-soaked patients of the devil's carnage.

  I surveyed the area for something to swing. The only thing available was a bicycle chain and lock, probably left by someone leaving in a hurry as the pillage ignited. Anything's better than nothing, I thought. And I picked it up.

  I heard the thud of the steel stairwell door shut, then a low, deep moan.

  We all turned around and seen Fisher. Now he crouched, his shoulders broad, arms stretched to the pavement, keeping his balance on bloody knuckles and bare feet, knees and elbows parallel. His wailing, inward cry continued.

  The stairwell door opened and blood-leaking hospital patients, employees and civilians - all infected - began pouring into the garage, slowly making their way toward us – leaving Fisher behind – their horrid and eerie sounds of purgatory differing from his. They were equally freighting and upmost intimidating, different pitches and length. Their faces were shrunken and frail. Blood leaked from their eyes and soars. Their skin was a yellowish pale. They bore peeling and scabby, leather texture sores, just as the broadcast mentioned; and from the looks of what took place outside, their unnatural strength and ability to consume bullets at will out-shined their cryptic swagger.

  We all watched in silence as they all left trails of blood.

  I watched their arthritis-stricken-like movements, the sway of their bodies in a pain twitching jolt forward, the speed and distance they traveled slowly, and their dragging of the arms.

  Mike rustled, "Ladies, don't scream, you'll just attract the attention of others." he turned to me, "We're getting outta here." he looked at Ann, "Get your keys ready. When we get to the car, start it up and get in the passenger seat. I'm driving."

  We all stared in disbelief at the mob slowly progressing toward us. Their petrifying sounds moved in closer, their voices vibrated the ground where we stood.

  Mike scanned the parking lot. “We stick together,” he said. “And we run like the fucking hurricane winds!”

  “I’m with you… You ladies ready?” I asked.

  The women held hands and took deep breathes before we took flight through the parking lot.

  We got to the car without incident, avoiding the dreadful pillage that surrounded us. Ann did exactly as Mike instructed, and the nurse and I hopped in the backseats.

  Mike scanned back to the garage just before he got in the car, I just couldn’t seem to figure him out. Fisher sat at its entrance crouched, his shoulders broad, arms stretched to the pavement, keeping his balance on bloody knuckles and bare feet, knees and elbows parallel, making eye contact with Mike.

  I shouted for Mike to get in the car, but he held the axe across his shoulder as if he were taunting the infected, keeping eye contact with Fisher.

  From the rear of the car, a blood-splattered patient made his way toward Mike. Fisher's head turned toward the patient.

  Mike looked, swung the axe through the infected patient’s chest, and blood splattered the car and gravel. The patient hit the ground. Then, Mike dashed in the car and focused his attention back to Fisher.

  Fisher was gone.

  THUMP!

  Something hit the car. The patient Mike sliced open was still alive, and he wanted revenge, scraping at the window, smearing his diseased-stricken blood across the glass. Mike hit the gas, and we left the torn and apocalyptic resembling, Warwick City Hospital parking lot, taking out a couple of raging, blood-soaked, patients along the way.

  The moans faded.

  The gunshots faded.

  It was time to leave the city.

  CHAPTER III

  The car fell silent.

  We were in shock; the dead were rising and slaughtering people that we unsociably recognized on a damn-near daily basis, eating away at their flesh as if the world was coming to an end. Mike was the only one who had really kept his cool; he rolled the blood-stained window down to conceal its truth.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the nurse, trying to break the silence.

  Her eyes were glued to the back of the seat; she didn’t answer. I expected Ann to speak up, but after a few seconds of dead silence, she calmed down and finally announced her name. “My name is Maria.” She said.

  “I’m Dale, and that’s Mike.” I answered. Then I thought and said, “Hey, how’d you know we were brothers?”

  “Ann told me.”

  “Yeah, and you two are?”

  “Cousins. She’s older.”

  It didn't matter, I was just digging for information while covertly playing the cards I was dealt. Maria knew too much not to know anything. She told me about the WHO and the RV's with vaccine, but I wasn't buying it.

  The veins in Mike's neck appeared when his voice rose to ask, "How the fuck can you give a vaccine to the fucking dead? Did you see what the fuck was happening back there." looking thru the rear-view. "There's more to it than a fucking mosquito bite! How'd you know about the signal? You were already shaking like a fucking—“

  Ann stopped Mike before he could say anything disrespectful and totally out of character; he would have meant every bit of it. She unhooked her seatbelt and lent toward him like she was planning on screaming in his ear, saying, "Mike, stop. She helped us. She was scared. I'm scared. Let's just get… the fuck… out… the city."

  I looked over to Maria, thinking about the information she acquired by accident. Why would important information that could cause a scare, panic or riot be publicly broadcasted? Her fear was that of an entry level position for a medical assistant. She was more like a trainee, but I could have been wrong.

  "He's right." Maria began.

  Ann backed off of Mike and realized Maria did know something she wasn’t saying. I shifted my sight to Maria, taking heed to what else she might have had to say.

  Mike continued to drive, "I'm listening." he expressed as he looked through the rear-view at Maria, his face wrinkled.

  Maria continued, "I... I only knew of the incident in the morgue. I... I didn't see anything. I was told by a colleague that we shouldn't tell the patients or anyone else. I just started the job a few weeks ago to help pay for college. I didn’t want any of this."

  She was giving her dying sole confession about what had just taken place; like she knew what was going to happen. As if the hospital had their plans all along, and she was forced by her superiors to maintain a vow of silence.

  She continued, "When a doctor had made his way into the morgue, he was attacked by a patient who had died not long before; maybe only three or four minutes. Not only did the doctor make it out alive with just a bite wound before closing the level off, but he told the police Lieutenant, Jacki Trollier, that everyone in the morgue was back from the dead, and that they took the lives of the doctors and the WHO team. I overheard all of this thru the intercom from the nurses’ station on the fifth floor. I called Ann about Sarah, I went to the fourth floor to meet her and overheard the security walkie-talkie inform them of an attack on the first floor, and then you guys came off the elevator." She finished.

  I believed her when she mentioned the attack on the first floor, we were right there in the middle of it. The rest of her story seemed far-fetched and unbelievable. However, it appeared as if we had to take her word for it. After all, she was in the hospital long enough to get the information she had, weather it was correct, or fabricated to the point she was lost in her own words and drowning in her own fear.

  We came up on the interstate and ran directly into traffic. People were standing out of their cars to the side of the road; some had even cut their vehicles off to save gas. Everyone’s expression differed from ours. The little girl in the SUV was smiling and waving when she looked to t
he neighboring car with a playful Pitbull in its back seat wagging his tail. The woman in the expensive sports car sat with her hand holding up her head with the look of exhaust on her reddened face, her male driver intensely squinting upon her, his arm extended toward her bucket seat. I thought maybe he had his fingers up her dress, and her mugging appearance was from pleasure. A young boy with his head lowered to a rolled up window; his parents in the front seats in some type of melting argument. Only if they knew what was going on.

  I knew we had to get out the city, and this was taking too long. Mike knew it. We all knew it. That's probably why Mike floored the accelerator into the emergency lane, put it in reverse and headed back into the city.

  "I know a back road." he mentioned. “It’s just big enough for two lanes. In-between a bunch of trees… Not too many vehicles are ever on it. We can get to the next city from there.”

  *****

  Not too many vehicles? He could have never been more wrong.

  We were twelve cars back from a check point at the edge of the city; a back road Mike said would hardly be occupied. Two large trucks were going in opposite directions along the city limits setting up a 30-foot high fence, escorted by men in flak jackets on top of black camouflage and holding automatic weapons. Warwick City police department was being assisted by the same men at the checkpoint, taking their time going car-to-car, preforming a thorough investigation of each vehicle before turning them back into the city. It reminded me of when I took a field trip to Mexico, passing through border patrol and watching I.C.E. strip suspicious vehicles on the side of the road in search of illegal contraband and such, and then having the unlucky detainee put everything back in place themselves.

  "They’re not letting anyone out." Ann whimpered nervously, squeezing Mike's hand as he held the stick shift.

  "Nah… They’re not," Mike began, "There’s got to be a reason—"

  “Yea,” I said. “And we already saw it back at the hospital. It’s just it doesn’t look like they’re telling anyone about it.”

  “We need to find out what the holdup is.” Ann said.

  As the second car came back in our direction, Mike opened the door and flagged it down, the car stopped. Inside was our neighbor Mr. Kornegay, older man with thinning grey hair, thick grey eyebrows; his eleven year old granddaughter, Alley, her head just underneath the head rest on the passenger side, short blonde hair and a cheery demeanor, holding on to the seatbelt strapped tightly around her, the backseats of the sedan was filled with boxes.

  "What's happening?" Mike asked him, walking up to the man’s window.

  The man's window came down, and he said, "Nothing much. They're just telling us no one can leave the city because of some mosquito virus that came in with the storm. The one near the house is full and to head to another one for a shot or something."

  "There are no mosquitos..." Mike informed him, "It's something else. You can't go to the hospital... trust me. You don't want to go back there."

  “Well, what’s the problem?”

  “Everything! Hey, listen, you should just go to a hotel or something and stay there until this thing blows over…” Mike said. “Seriously!”

  Just then, Alley caught herself from screaming, placing both hands over her mouth before pointing to the blood splattered over the car - from when Mike sliced the bloody patient’s chest with the axe.

  “What the—” Mr. Kornegay said. “What the shit-n-Pandora’s box you did boy?” shook his head, pointed to me and said, “I always knew you two were up to something.” and shot off without another word or warning, almost running over Mike's feet on their way.

  Mike looked at the blood splat on Ann's car. “We’re not going to get far like this.”

  One of the armed military personnel yelled out to Mike, "Hey... get in the car, now!"

  Mike complied.

  "They’re not going to let us out. Not here. Not in this car. We got to go back." Mike finished.

  Then, we were caught off guard by the sounds of automatic fire from up ahead. People began abandoning their vehicles, screaming and running, others briskly turned their cars around, desperately getting away from what turned out to be a massacre. Cars were heading through the woods, and others were heading for the fence that was being constructed. A 4x4 even tried ramming the officers, but was gunned down by automatic fire. WCPD and the camouflaged assailants were shooting into vehicles occupied by defenseless citizens – from single driven cars, to fully-loaded soccer mom vans. And then it stopped.

  We weren’t waiting to see what happened next. We high-tailed it back into the city, realizing that avoiding our unlucky turn of events was going to be harder than we thought.

  CHAPTER IV

  We didn't go home. It was too close to the hospital and too far from our location across town. Instead, we went to Maria's two story brick house just outside Diamond Manor, about 20 miles in the opposite direction from the road block, for temporary shelter and to make a plan of escape knowing that all exits out of the city was being guarded by heavily armed men setting up a blockade, and some type of restraining zone.

  Maria tried to use the land line as soon as we entered her house, but it was dead. Ann sat by the window. I paced the floor, holding the bicycle chain. Mike laid his dry-blooded fire axe in a corner and asked Maria for a map.

  Maria left the room briefly and came back with one in hand. “We should head to the airport.” she suggested.

  “I don’t think so, cuzo.” Ann answered. “If all the exits are blocked off–”

  Maria cut her wisdom, and said, “Well, what about just staying here until everything boils over?”

  Ann began pacing the floor. “I don’t think that’s the best idea, cuzo. The streets are blocked. I’m pretty sure the airport is too.”

  I joined the conversation and said, “Maybe if we could get our hands on some artillery we can get out of here.”

  “Yeah… sure you’re right. Right through the front gate, huh?” Maria sassed.

  I ignored her for a second, and then came out with my own sarcastic idea, “We could stay here and wait for those things and the soldiers to come get us. That sounds great. No, maybe we could fly out of here… use your bed sheets as a cape.”

  Ann stopped pacing. “Cut it out, Dale.” she said.

  I went just a little further. “Are you two really cousins? You never mentioned her before. Or maybe this is why you haven’t. She’s Lulu!”

  Maria carried it by saying, “We are cousins. And she never mentioned me because she just knows I wouldn’t waste my time with a scrub like you,” in one breath.

  “Yeah, I’m a scrub? What do you call your get up?” I shot back. “I wasn’t a scrub when you were all over me in the hospital.”

  “Ughh…” Maria put her index finger in her mouth like she wanted to gag herself, and then said, “You wish. That’s only in your wet dreams, little boy.”

  “Cut it out, cuzo.” Ann said, folding her arms. “I told him to knock it off. We got bigger problems than both of your sex lives.”

  “My sex life is great.” I defended myself, knowing I haven’t had any in a while.

  Maria’s nose shot up in the air. “I don’t have a problem.”

  Ann giggled – laughing at both of us – then walked over to mike. I looked at Maria and she grilled me pretty hard; her lips were tight and small.

  Mike opened the map on the dining room table and the rest of us surrounded it. He read the map and then said, "We're here.” pointing to our location on the map. “There's 112 square miles land and 48 square miles water. We’re at least 10 miles away from anything in every direction... except for the water. Westside Bridge leads out the city but it's out the question. There’s no power in majority of the city. When whatever left of the sun we have does go down, we'll be sitting ducks. The airport would definitely be off limits. I’m sure they’ll have something set up there. But, it’s just a few miles from the docks so it wouldn’t be a bad idea to check it out if possible.
But I propose we should try and get to the docks; the radio signal on the boats there might work. At least there we can get out to sea and escape. It’s smaller, more like two piers put together with just enough room for a few small yachts, a couple more fishing boats, and Owens Sea-Tow Fleet."

  Ann, seated by the window spoke her thoughts and asked questions, "Isn't the docks back near the hospital? We'll be heading straight into enemy territory. And how are you so sure the docks will be an escape route?" then moved toward the map to get herself a better glimpse.

  She was right. How was he so sure the docks would be an escape route? He was my brother, so I trusted his call. Besides, I didn’t have a getaway plan at the time, and Mike was trained for tight situations.

  Mike looked Ann in the eyes and maintained his calm, "You see what we’re up against? These guys aren't going to let us out of here alive. The longer we stay shortens any chance of survival, and a sure-shit way out. All the exits are blocked off; people are coming down with viruses, dying, and coming back from the dead. The laws turned on us, and the city's—" he paused. "How do you think this'll end up for us? And everyone else trapped in the city?"

  Maria mentioned, "We know that two thirds of the city is safe outside the city... what about if we just do as they say, and wait for the vaccine to be distributed?"

  "No way!" I exclaimed, "This is containment. They're locking us down. And from the looks of it they're prepared to close this shit down by lethal force... 10 miles away from anywhere in all directions? Don’t you watch movies? No one’s going to know anything about what's happening here unless someone makes it out alive. There is no vaccine coming. Hell, I don't even believe the WHO was even informed. And we see what they did back on the road. This shit is real."

  Mike cut in, "I'm with you lil' bro. I ain’t dying without knowing the reason."

  Ann said, "We don't know who, or how many of them we're up against out there. We need plenty guns and ammo to give us a safe route through the city, if we’re going to do this. Any Ideas?" she finished sly-mouthed, as if we didn't stand a chance. And she might have been right at that time; we had a couple of registered fire arms along with a couple of tactical shotguns back at the house for protection, but we had to bypass all those blood-dripping patients to get to them.