We weren’t the only ones wearing bandanas. The air was thick with the smell of smoke, and a scent I realized later was burned human beings. That smell is almost impossible to describe and one I’ll never forget. It was layered. We could smell the sweet and bitter combination of charred pork, and a sharper, more awful metallic smell like burned liver that might have been overcooked blood or internal organs. That smell made this nightmare more real than anything else had, more than all I had seen, more than the tear in the left side of my face. You couldn’t avoid tasting the smell, unless you wore something over your face. That smell turned my stomach, and made me terribly sad.
Looking north along Grant Avenue all we saw were buildings in flames. At the corner of Grant and California, the grounds of Old St. Mary’s Cathedral were littered with dead Chinese.
We turned south on Kearny Street. We could see a gridlock of abandoned cars choking Montgomery Street a block away.
We saw the dead, many of them. People who had been shot, beaten, dismembered. We saw dead grins and their frozen smiles were grotesque.
A longhaired teenager who looked as if he had stepped out of the Summer of Love was standing on the corner of Market and Montgomery. He had a candle burning inside a water glass, using it like a lantern.
“Dudes, am I, like, so glad to see other living people, man!”
He was wearing a baggy tie-died t-shirt and blue jean shorts, and had the strap of a canvas bag over one arm.
Jillian pulled her bandanna down so it hung loose around her neck. I did the same. When the teenager saw my face, he reached into the canvas bag and drew a Smith & Wesson Police Special, showing he wasn’t quite the peacenik neo-hippie he appeared to be.
“It’s okay,” Jillian said to him, “It’s cool. He’s my husband. He’s not one of those things. Look at his cheek. It’s a wound. He isn’t smiling.”
The kid took a long look. “What’s the capital of Illinois?”
“Springfield,” I said.
The kid thought about that. “Really? I thought it was Peoria.” He put the gun away and looked at my face. “That’s fuckin nasty, man.” He pronounced man as me-yan. “But at least you aren’t one of those things. They’re pretty stupid, you know? I mean, they think, but all they think about is going apeshit on people cause they got the blood munchies.”
“I’m Louis Bellemer,” I said. Sibilants were tough with my cheek wound. The letter S became a hiss. “This is my wife, Jillian.”
“Benjamin Lively.” The kid said. He let out a slow laugh. I looked at his bloodshot eyes. The kid was baked.
“We thought there would be more people here,” Jillian said.
The kid nodded. “Me too. I usually hang out down here with other bike messengers, man. But when the craziness started everyone bolted. I guess people headed home or got out of the city. I didn’t want to risk leaving a safe area so I found an unlocked building and smoked a bowl and crashed on a bench in the lobby. Next thing I know the SFPD are running back and forth and saying the bridges are a no-go, so I’m boned.”
There were seats here at McKesson Plaza, arranged in long concrete steps like seats in a Greek theater. They wrapped around the entrance to the underground BART and MUNI trains. A week ago it was a popular place for local cube rats to get some fresh air and eat lunch, before the world went all to hell. Benjamin sat down and placed the glass holding the flickering candle at his feet.
Jillian sat beside him. “Your family?”
Benjamin forced a smile. “They’re up the coast. Near Eureka. I’m pretty sure they’ll be OK. They’re out in the country.”
Jillian put her arm around him and gave him a hug. A complete stranger. I could never do that.
Benjamin wiped his eyes. He looked so young. He should have been starting college, or partying with friends, not living like this.
“A whole shitload of Army dudes went by a few hours ago in trucks,” he said. They stopped to check a few buildings, I don‘t know what for. One of the guys traded info for some weed. He said they tried to push most of the happyfaces south, all the way to a place called Sweeny Ridge. He said they herded them like cattle. They were singing the theme to some old TV show called Rawhide as they did it.”
Sweeny Ridge is a wilderness area with some great hiking trails through the hills.
“Then they set the fires on the way back. I asked him if they were helping anybody get from the city to the East Bay and he said they weren’t allowed to, San Francisco was now a quarantine zone, cause there are still grins in it. And then they just left.”
I didn’t like that at all. “So . . . we’re on our own.”
Benjamin nodded.
The kid’s candle sizzled and went out, and he cursed.
It began to rain, and the rain came down hard.
“We better get inside,” I said.
Benjamin hooked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the McKesson Building.
Jillian shook her head, and looked across the street, to the Palace Hotel. “If we have to be inside, let’s do it in style.”
We crossed Market Street within the pedestrian crosswalk despite the fact that every vehicle we could see was empty and abandoned.
A gray and white cat was sitting on the hood of a car. It watched us for a moment, and then jumped down out of sight.
Beyond the cat’s hiding place, a naked man was shambling down Market Street, heading south, coming toward us. His skin was patchy and raw, and he holding a stuffed animal in one hand, a tiger.
“Nyih-nyih,” the man said.
Ben took out his revolver. “You know how to kill these things?”
“I bashed one’s head in,” Jillian said.
Ben nodded. “Yeah, just like in the old zombie movies, you can kill them by destroying the brain. The Army dudes said you can also bleed them out, cut their throat or fill their body with bullets, but their blood is as thick as shit and it takes way longer to kill them that way, so—“
The old man began to sprint, running at us faster than I would have imaged was possible. He was grinning and making that same sound over and over, nyih-nyih-nyih, as Ben stepped between us and raised the pistol.
There was a dry click we all heard over the rain.
“Fuck,” Ben said.
He and Jillian darted out of the way. Without thinking what I was doing I drew my sword and swung it in an awkward tennis backhand. I felt a jolt in my arm from fingers to wrist, and saw the old man’s head bounce twice on the road. Blood welled up slowly, pooling on the stump of his neck and then spilling down his pale chest in thick black clots.
Ten minutes later, we were in the lobby of the hotel. We smashed the glass in one of the doors on New Montgomery Street and blocked the opening with a couch and a soda machine. That machine was a heavy son of a bitch, and as we were sliding it in front of the door I saw that the old man’s headless body was still standing in the rain.
It was warm and dry inside. “Much better,” Jillian said. We were standing in the Garden Court under a stained glass dome. Her voice echoed softly off of the old marble floors and ceiling, and the polished columns between them. It was quiet in here. There were no sounds of conversation, footfalls, or traffic on the street. Outside, the rain hammered down, sounding like the end of the world.
* * * * *
We were three when we broke into the Palace Hotel. A week later we were twelve. Thirteen, if you counted the dog.
The Palace was built 1875, and rebuilt after it was destroyed by the fires that followed the 1906 quake. We were staying in room 8064, a top-floor suite overlooking the corner of Market and New Montgomery Streets. It was a nice suite. President Warren G. Harding died there in 1923, while in office. There were rumors he’d been poisoned, but he simply died of heart failure.
As we searched the hotel for other survivors we found eight dead grins and two living ones; both were Latinas in maid uniforms. One was small, one was fat. They were easy to kill, and it bothered me that killing was becoming so easy, ev
en if these things were too dangerous to live. They were still human beings.
The power was out in the city, but there were generators in the basement. Jillian spent about three hours down there on our first night, switching off what she called non-essentials one by one. We were using candles and battery-powered flashlights and lanterns. There was a Walgreen’s a block away. We raided it for everything from batteries to snacks, Tylenol to clothes; sweatshirts, sleep pants, and cheap sneakers.
The first to arrive was a homeless man, hammering on the door after the rain stopped, and it rained for two days straight. He said his name was Randall, and that was the only name he would give. He had a pit bull mix named Clyde. He stank, and Jillian, fully in charge by then, gave him a room number and sent him upstairs to a suite for a bath. “You’ll have to take the stairs,” she had said, from behind the reception desk. The Palace was less than ten stories high, and the stairways were spacious and stylish. “The water is cold, but the beds are comfy. The door will be held open by the security latch when you get there. Use the latch the same way when you leave or you’ll be locked out.”
All hotel room doors have electronic card readers instead of old-fashioned keys. With no power supply, this was a pain in the ass. Without power we couldn’t program new keycards, even if we did figure out passwords to the hotel’s internal computer systems. Jilly was the first to suggest we look for a master key card and use it to open every door we could, and chock those doors open. Sure enough, the master key card we had stopped working a few hours after we began using it. The card readers in the doors didn’t need power, they were battery operated – and rejected all of the now expired keycards.
The doors still worked fine. The card readers were powered by AA batteries. If you had a good card, you could enter a room. Otherwise most doors were still locked tight on the outside, but the locking mechanism only applied to the outer door handle. The inner handle could always be opened, a standard security feature.
Why am I boring you with this primer on hotel doors? Trust me, there’s a reason, one none of us considered until too late.
Randall went up the stairs with Clyde.
“He didn’t even say thanks,” Benjamin said.
I was thinking the same thing. I was also thinking Randall was a bit of an asshole.
“He didn’t have to,” Jillian said.
Two days after that we took in three more strays, an older Japanese man with a boy and girl who appeared to be in the eight to ten year old range. The older man was Isao Yamada. The girl was Haya and the boy was Haru. It seemed the only English words Isao knew were tourist and vacation. The kids didn’t know much more, but like kids anywhere they were quick to learn.
Benjamin had found a long vinyl banner from some corporate event. It was three feet high and thirty feet long. He also found some black paint and a brush. On the stark white back of the banner he painted The Survivor’s Club. He somehow managed to hang the thing from the rooftop cornice so it wrapped around the corner of Montgomery and New Montgomery, and he secured it so it wouldn’t blow away. He did all of this without saying anything about it. I noticed it when I went up to the suite Jillian and I shared on the top floor and saw the damned thing blocking the top half of the tall window.
When I asked him about it Benjamin shrugged and said, “I thought it might help.”
The day after the banner went up three more people came to the Palace.
Soledad and Marisol Morales were sisters from the Mission district. They were in their early twenties, pretty, tattooed and pierced, and nervous wrecks.
The sisters were almost completely dependent on Joe Conaghan, a black guy with a big belly and a shaved head. Conaghan was an electrical engineer for Pacific Gas & Electric. When Jillian heard that her eyes lit up, pun intended.
From time to time we heard gunshots and distant screams. It was so quiet inside and out that we could hear footfalls in the street if someone ran by outside and we were near a window or door. Further inside the fortress-like bulk of the hotel it was as quiet as a forgotten tomb.
Grins passed by from time to time, wandering the streets or sitting on the sidewalk for minutes or hours before moving on. We worked hard to avoid attracting their attention. From the high window of our suite I watched a grin come up Montgomery Street. It was a tall man in a gray suit that was mottled black with dried blood. His torso had been cut open and his guts, now hard, encrusted tubes, hung stiffly between his legs. His blue tie flapped in the hollow below his ribs. He turned south on Market Street and made it another block before falling and lying still.
Unlike the zombies of film lore, these things could die without any intervention. If we could wait it out long enough, attrition though disease, injuries and exposure to the elements would remove infected citizens from the equation. How long that would be was the question.
At the end of our first week in the Palace our group counted a dozen with the arrival of Darryl Haise and Corey Renfield.
Jillian and Joe Conaghan were up on the roof working on an electrical panel. I was with Benjamin in one of many secure storage areas in the basement sorting through boxes and cases of personal items and emergency supplies that had been left behind, when we heard the faint and distant sound of Clyde barking.
The dog was earning his keep, guarding the shattered front door we had barricaded with the couch and soda machine, a safety measure Conaghan had described as half-assed, but he had been smiling when he said it and that made me like him.
We were using two-way radios all set to the same channel, and I asked anyone if they knew why Clyde was barking. No response. Benjamin and I went upstairs. I passed by the Garden Court and saw Isao sitting at one of the tables, reading what had to be a Japanese-English dictionary.
“Good-uh, to meet . . . you,” he said
“Likewise,” I replied.
His boy and girl were behind the reception desk. They were bored. Their MP3 players and phones had dead batteries and could not be recharged, at least not at this time, according to Jillian, so no more games or music for them.
The Morales sisters were probably upstairs in the room they shared, sleeping. They slept a lot. Jillian said it was their way of dealing with the shock of all that had happened and that with luck, sooner or later they would come around. We checked on them often, Benjamin volunteering most frequently for that duty, but we didn’t have time to play nursemaid, there was just too much to do.
I saw Randall slouched in a plush chair on the far side of the lobby. He called Clyde to him when he saw me heading for the door.
There were two men at the door. One was wearing an SFPD uniform. The other was wearing a green coverall. The cop was tapping one the doors with the butt of a Glock.
I unlocked one of the doors from a big ring of keys we’d found behind the reception desk, and let the men in.
“Man, am I glad I found you,” the cop said. And then, when he got a good look at me, “Jesus, what the fuck happened to your face?”
“Cut myself shaving,” I said, when I wanted to toss a dollar at him and tell him to go back out and buy some fucking tact.
I introduced myself as I locked the doors, and that’s when I noticed that the man in the coverall had his hands cuffed behind his back. On the back of the coverall was a logo. It showed a winged insect flying away and looking back in horror. Below the illustration was a phone number with a 415 area code and a web address, and above it was the name of the company, Pest Off!
“Darryl Haise,” the officer said, shoving the handcuffed man toward a chair in the lobby and giving me a bone crusher of a handshake. He had short-cropped blond hair and pale blue eyes and he grinned an all-American grin.
“I must protest,” the man in the coverall said as he awkwardly sat on the edge of a chair.
“Shut up, Renfield,” Haise said.
“We need to leave the vicinity immediately,” the man named Renfield said.
Haise took a step closer to Renfield and his voice turned ugly. �
��I told you to shut the fuck up.”
I asked Rendfield why we needed to leave and Haise snapped a look at me, his eyes narrowing.
“Because they are coming back,” Renfield said. “The infected are coming back by the hundreds if not thousands. And it gets worse.”
Haise gave Renfield and open-handed slap that knocked the man out of the chair.
“Holy shit, man,” Benjamin said behind me.
For a moment I could only stare. The world had gone all to shit, we few survivors had to stick together, and this cop was beating down a man in handcuffs?
Renfield had fallen on his side. It wasn’t a hard fall. The Palace lobby floor was cool marble and plush carpet, and he fell on carpet, but the man was humiliated
I took Renfield by one elbow and helped him into the chair.
“Okay,” I said. “How are things worse?”
“Do not listen to him,” Haise said.
I turned and looked at Haise and for the first time I noticed a light in his eyes that was either insane, dancing rage, or barely contained terror.
“I want to know what’s going on out there,” I said, trying to sound strong and hoping Haise didn’t take a swing at me. I was no fighter.
“So do I.” The voice boomed, reverberating off of marble.
I turned and saw Jilly and Conaghan coming down the stairs, a belt of tools Conaghan had found jingling with every step. Conaghan had an easy smile on his face, but his eyes were dark and hard. Jillian was pale.
We stood together, the six of us tense, until Isao approached, flanked by his children, and announced, “We go to make-uh pee-pee!”
The broke the tension.
Haya looked embarrassed and Haru rolled his eyes. Renfield snorted. I grinned. Haise saw my grin and took a step back. Conaghan smiled again, but he was watching Haise closely.
“Let’s take these cuffs off,” Jillian said.
“That man is dangerous,” Haise said.
4POCALYPSE - Four Tales Of A Dark Future Page 22
