Search and Destroy

by Jay Bonansinga

  She hurries toward the south side of the lot, Tommy following on her heels, both of them staying low, their gazes nervously scanning the upper floors of the hospital. The main edifice of the downtown campus is a relatively new building—eight stories high—housing the critical care wards, surgical suites, maternity, pediatrics, and in-patient rooms. Lilly remembers coming here once to visit her uncle Mike after his heart attack. She remembers the claustrophobic labyrinth of corridors and the disinfectant smells. Now she sees that the building is a burned-out shell infested with windblown trash, scarred with bullet holes, and still smoldering on some floors from inexplicable fires or explosion. Many of the windows on the north side of the building are shuttered or covered on the inside by blinds or sheets. The upper floors have fared better in the plague years. A few of the rooms above the fifth floor still feature windows that are intact but it’s too dark inside the glass to see what’s going on. The medivac helicopter still sits on its pad like a phantom from the hospital’s glory days. Lilly sees no signs of life in any of the windows but she knows the men are in there somewhere. They have holed up in there among the storage rooms brimming with medical supplies, food, and drinking water. Even if the shelves have been ransacked, hospitals have generators, independent water supplies, working plumbing, hot water, showers.

  Lilly searches for a fire escape ladder or some other mode of entry from the outside rear courtyard. All she sees is a long-forgotten painter’s scaffold dangling on twin cables, hanging down across the fifth floor. She takes a deep breath, turns, and surveys the immediate area of the parking deck. The only shelter is a small, freestanding, glass-encased elevator vestibule on the southwest corner of the lot. Most of the glass is grime-specked and webbed with hairline fractures but still intact for the most part. Lilly leads Tommy over to the enclosure.

  “Gimme a hand with this door,” she says, and the two of them force the powerless automatic door open with their bare hands.

  Inside the vestibule, the air reeks of old urine and decay, and maybe walker stench as well, it’s hard to tell. The twin elevator doors are stuck open about a foot and a half each, the darkness of the shaft behind each gap revealing a forest of ancient steel cables hanging down like vines. The cars must have stopped somewhere farther down when the power went out God only knows how long ago. Lilly looks around and sees a pile of drywall panels and rebar leaning against one corner of the vestibule.

  “Help me with this stuff,” she says to the boy. She leans her assault rifle against one wall. She turns to the pile. “We’ll use it for cover.”

  They start wedging broken panels of particleboard against the cracked glass entrance doors. After a while, they have completely covered the glass and boarded themselves in. Now it’ll be very difficult for anyone to see that the vestibule is occupied.

  Unfortunately, it will be just as difficult for Lilly and Tommy to see any potential adversaries coming toward the vestibule from the outside.

  * * *

  Hours later, as the sun droops behind the cityscape and night closes in, they sit in the darkness of the enclosure, sharing Lilly’s last stick of beef jerky. The stale, dry hank of mystery meat was mercifully left untouched in the pocket of her jeans, undiscovered by the thugs who had searched her earlier that day. Now Lilly and Tommy sit on the floor next to each other, passing the jerky back and forth, each gnawing another mouthful before handing it back, each dreading the fact that this is their last morsel of food.

  “The fact is, we don’t know for sure she’s dead,” Lilly is saying. “What I’m saying is, we didn’t actually see her die. You know what I mean?”

  Tommy nods feebly, unconvinced. “Yeah, sure, she might still be alive.” A single tear gleams on his cheek. “You never know,” he adds with little conviction.

  Lilly studies the boy. “That’s true. You never know. Good things can happen, too. It’s not like everything that happens is bad.”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know, Lilly. Lately, it does seem like everything that happens is bad. Like we’re being punished for something.”

  Lilly looks at him. “I don’t think that’s—”

  “I’m not talking about just you and me, I’m talking about all of us, we got cocky, and we messed up the world with, like, our pollution and war and greed and toxic waste and stuff, and now we’re, like, being punished.”

  “Tommy—”

  “I don’t blame God for punishing us.” He swallows as though trying to digest something far worse than beef jerky, something bitter and harsh and true. “I would punish us, too, if I had the chance. We’re a bunch of dicks, you ask me. We deserve to go out like this.”

  The boy runs out of gas, and Lilly listens to the silence for a moment, thinking.

  For Lilly, one of the strangest side effects of the plague is the hush that descends on the inner city of Atlanta at night. What was once a symphony of sirens, trucks banging around, horns, backfiring exhaust pipes, muffled music, car alarms, voices, shuffling footsteps, and myriad unexplained squeaks and thuds and scrapes and booms now presents itself as an eerie white noise of silence. Nowadays, the only sounds in the city at night are the drone of crickets and the occasional wave of distant moaning. Like tortured animals howling in agony, the swarms of dead will intermittently let their presence be known in warbling, echoing choruses of garbled, bloodthirsty snarling. From a distance, it sounds sometimes like a gargantuan, vast engine revving.

  “I don’t think it has anything to do with what we deserve,” Lilly finally says. “I’m not sure the universe works like that, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Whaddaya mean?” Tommy looks askance at her, and all at once Lilly remembers Tommy’s fundamentalist Christian parents, and how Tommy always told his little brother and sister Bible stories, and how the boy clings to religion in order to get through the long, dark nights. The boy’s face is gaunt and bloodless in the shadows. “When you say ‘universe,’ you’re talking about God?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah. I guess.”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The boy’s brow furrows. “How could you not know?”

  Lilly sighs. “I don’t know what I believe anymore. I believe in us.”

  “Would you still believe in us if we did bad things?”

  She thinks about it. “Depends on the things. There’s a new standard for bad now. You have to be specific.”

  “You want to kill these guys, don’t ya?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you want to get the kids back first? Is that the more important thing?”

  “Yes it is.”

  “What if we don’t get the kids back? What if they’re not here?”

  “Trust me, they’re here.”

  “But if we don’t find them, you’re going to kill these guys anyway—right?”

  “Probably, yeah.”

  “Why?”

  Lilly thinks about this for a moment. In the darkness, she can see the boy licking his dry, chapped lips, staring at her, waiting intently for an answer. When he talks, his mouth makes dry smacking noises. They have no more water. They will survive maybe another couple of days without any, but that’s about it. Finally, Lilly looks at the skinny young man and says with another shrug, “I don’t know … because maybe it’ll make me feel better.”

  She wipes her mouth, wads up the jerky wrapper, tosses it, rises to her feet, and grabs her assault rifle. “We got full darkness now. Let’s move.”

  * * *

  They smell the dead in profusion as they circle around the southeast corner of the tower. Creeping past the deserted loading dock, they stay low, keeping to the shadows. At one end of the dock, next to a cluttered workbench, Lilly sees a door—the top half of it frosted glass—which looks like it leads inside the ground floor.

  They make their way up a short flight of steps and go over to the door.

  The words AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY are stenciled across the milky glass. It’s too dark
inside to see anything through the glass, but the odor of dead flesh is stronger now, as intense as the bottom of a lime pit filled with entrails warming in the sun.

  “Shit-shit-shit,” Lilly mutters after trying the door and finding it locked. She looks around. Tommy waits for her to make a decision. Lilly sees a flashlight on the workbench. “Hand me that flashlight.”

  Tommy grabs the flashlight and hands it to her, and she thumbs it on. The narrow cone of light illuminates a hallway. Lilly presses her forehead to the frosted pane. She can see overturned chairs. She can see a corridor, blood streaks on the walls, fluorescent light fixtures flickering, a generator humming somewhere in the guts of the building. She can see movement.

  Her skin crawls with goose bumps. Dark figures mill about the shadows of the hallway, so many that they brush against each other, elbow to elbow. Distorted by the dimpled glass, the details of their faces and clothing are amorphous and vague—appearing almost ghostly, dreamlike, nebulous—like shadow people.

  “What is it?” Tommy’s voice breaks the spell. “What do you see? Walkers?”

  For a moment, Lilly is morbidly fascinated. There are too many to count. They infest the entire length of the corridor, wandering aimlessly in the flickering light like understudies in a silent film. Some of them seem to be former patients, now clad in desecrated smocks soaked in black blood and bile. Some have decayed to the point of mummification. Many seem to have wandered in from the outside. She watches the gauzy silhouettes as they react to the introduction of light. They start shambling toward the door.

  “Very sly,” Lilly mutters, essentially to herself. “Very clever.”

  “What?” Tommy clenches his fists, fidgeting. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s just a hunch.” She jerks back as monstrous faces brush up against the glass, jagged nails clawing, making horrible muffled scratching noises. “C’mon, give me a hand.” She hurries back over to the workbench and grabs a few stray items—a screwdriver, a nine-volt battery, a box of nails, a coil of thick rope—and starts stuffing her pockets. She gives the screwdriver to Tommy. “Put this up your sleeve, backward, like this.” She shows him. “Makes a pretty damn good weapon if you find yourself in close hand-to-hand with something that wants to kill you or eat you.”

  Tommy nods, swallowing hard. She can tell by his eyes that he’d rather not encounter something of that nature in hand-to-hand combat or otherwise.

  “Okay, let’s check one more thing.” She starts toward the end of the loading dock. “Just want to be sure about something. Follow me.”

  Tommy does.

  It takes them less than five minutes to retrace their steps around the north end of the building, then eastward, past the main campus, and down E Avenue toward the trauma center. They pass more boarded windows along the trauma center’s street-level entrance.

  Through the slats of one window, Lilly sees the ruins of a cafeteria crawling with countless dead. They lumber back and forth in the gloom, weaving between overturned steam tables and tile floors flooded with bodily fluids and rotten, maggot-infested food—all of which confirms Lilly’s original suspicion.

  The basement and ground-floor levels of the entire medical center are completely overrun.

  “It’s by design,” she whispers to Tommy moments later, huddling inside a cement alcove at the corner of E Avenue and Northeast.

  “What is?” His slender face twitches in the darkness as he hangs on every word.

  “The ground levels, the basements, everything below the pedestrian walkways, it’s all crawling with biters, and it’s by design.”

  He nods. “Like, to keep people out?”

  “Exactly. It’s a defensive ploy like a moat or a fire line.”

  Lilly looks up at the glass-encased pedestrian walkway spanning E Avenue, connecting the main complex with the trauma center. Some of the glass panels have been boarded up, the panels dimpled with old bullet holes. Some of the glass is still intact, albeit thick with grime and weather. The monstrous shadows of walkers move to and fro behind the glass like exotic fish in an aquarium.

  She sighs and says in a low, sober voice, “My guess is, it serves other purposes as well.”

  Tommy looks at her. “Like what?”

  “For one, that stench probably does a pretty fair job of masking the smell of human occupants on the higher floors … keeps the hordes away from the building.”

  Tommy gives another nod. “Okay … so now what? What’s the plan?”

  Lilly licks her lips, pondering the elevated walkway and all the horrors sealed within it, when all at once she notices something she hadn’t noticed before on the other side of the street. Above the pedestrian bridge, a few of the shuttered third-floor windows now glow from within with pale yellow light—either from oil lamps or incandescent bulbs—and the more Lilly stares at those windows, the more she registers the faintest flicker of movement up there.

  She turns to the boy and says, “How do you feel about heights?”

  * * *

  The trickiest part is the first twenty feet. From the street-level façade of the trauma center to the top of the pedestrian bridge, there are no footholds, no handholds, no indentations in which to wedge a toe—just a smooth concrete wall leading up to the second-story ledge.

  Fortunately, it turns out that Tommy Dupree is not only comfortable with heights, he also possesses the climbing ability of a large spider monkey. Lilly had suspected as much earlier the previous night when Tommy scaled that enormous live oak north of Haralson with lightning speed. But now she stands behind the cover of spindly shrubs next to the boarded trauma center entrance—neck craning upward—as she watches in complete awe.

  The young man’s nimble ascent takes mere seconds. He reaches the third-story ledge, hops onto the roof of the pedestrian bridge, pulls the coil of rope off his belt, ties it around his waist, and throws one end down to Lilly. She catches it, takes a deep breath, and starts slowly pulling herself up the side of the building.

  As luck would have it, Lilly Caul has lost nearly thirty pounds since the early days of the outbreak. Of course, she was always thin, but the plague diet has turned her downright skeletal, not to mention lean and muscular from all the manual labor. Now she pulls herself up the wall with surprising agility.

  She reaches the roof of the bridge and awkwardly rolls onto it. Her assault rifle nearly slips off her shoulder. She manages to hold on to it and rises to a crouching position, then pulls up the slack. A gust of wind suddenly buffets the bridge, and Lilly jerks.

  “It’s okay, I got you,” Tommy says in a tight little whisper, winding the rope back around his waist. “Just do me a favor, and don’t look down.”

  “Copy that.” Instead, she glances up. She sees the painter’s scaffold hanging down on its steel cables like a massive swing set. The wind makes the cables clang and ring against the wall. The sight of it sends chills through Lilly, makes her dizzy. “Let’s get it over with … before I lose my nerve.”

  They start across the bridge. Moving single file, staying low, inching along, they cling to the roof as the night wind whistles through the glass and concrete canyon around them. They feel exposed, and they can hear the muffled, snarling drone of the undead in the glass walkway beneath them. They smell the death-reek.

  As they approach the west side of the street, Lilly gives the boy a signal to stay down and stay quiet. She sees the light behind the shuttered third-floor window, and it makes her heart start to race. She carefully crouches beneath the window ledge and listens. Tommy kneels off to the right, practically holding his breath.

  Muffled voices come from inside the window. Male. Two or perhaps three people. The venetian blinds are drawn tight. Adrenaline courses through Lilly’s body. She tastes metal on the back of her tongue, the base of her neck humming with adrenaline as she carefully reaches down to her AR-15 and flicks the selector from Safe to Fire. Seven rounds remain in the magazine, one in the chamber. Eight rounds total. Carefully she peers
through a narrow crack between two of the louvers.

  She sees two soldiers sitting in a cluttered examination room that’s been retrofitted as a barracks.

  The observations flash through Lilly’s brain: a pair of cots lined up along one wall of the dusty chamber, shelves brimming with bottles, canned goods, and supplies. A hot plate sits on a credenza and pornographic pictures are taped on the wall. Lilly recognizes one of the soldiers as Bryce’s second in command, Daniels—the skinny, bald, emaciated meth-head—who now lies back on his cot with a dreamy smile on his face. He wears a wifebeater, camo pants, and jump boots, his withered arms sleeved with garish tattoos.

  “Only thing that makes sense anymore is this shit,” he comments in a languid voice to the second man, indicating the traces of unidentified drug left in an EpiPen on his side table. Daniels lets out a little intoxicated giggle. “Everything else is upside down.”

  “I heard that.” The second soldier—his name unknown to Lilly—speaks in a thick drawl as he sits on a cot in his skivvies. A big lump of a man with huge sideburns, huge belly, and huge buck teeth, his gigantic hairy legs stick out of his boxer shorts like gnarled tree trunks. His 9mm Glock sits on a bedside table, a six-inch suppressor like a small black clarinet screwed onto its muzzle.

  Lilly focuses her gaze with feral intensity on that pistol with its silencer attachment. She glances over her shoulder at the boy, takes a deep breath, and then motions for him to stay right there.

  Then she turns back to the window, loosens the strap on her AR-15, and starts tapping and scratching on the glass, careful to make the noise irregular and random.

  * * *

  “What the fuck?” Daniels looks up from his second injection of Nightshade, the tingle from the EpiPen prickling inside his elbow. He hears the noise coming from outside the window but doesn’t really register it fully. It might be the wind or a fucking pigeon or some shit like that.

  He looks down and sees a delicate strand of blood on his wrist, and feels the warmth chugging up his arm and into his cervical vertebrae like the world’s greatest masseuse. Daniels usually needs two blasts of the stuff to maintain his equilibrium at night and get decent shut-eye.