From Oblivion's Ashes

by Nyman, Michael E. A.

  Twenty minutes later, Scratchard left the Rabba Food Mart and then, with a quick check of his watch, ducked into the 7-11 a couple of doors down where a similar conversation ensued. During this time, he recruited eight passing students and paid them each two hundred dollars to assist Donald and Becky, who was the 7-11 manager. He left an additional three thousand dollars with Donald to hire more people, not caring if it got wasted or not, so long as everything got moved.

  Leaving them to their work, he set off at a brisk pace, heading back to the McLennan building. Behind him, Donald was flipping over the ‘back in twenty minutes’ sign, with the ‘twenty minutes’ scratched out and replaced with ‘two hours’. His two store assistants were also busy, ringing up sales and rolling a dolly out from the back room and loading it up with product. The total charge to Scratchard’s card was somewhere in the realm of $23,000 dollars from the Rabba, with another $18,000 from the 7-11.

  He arrived at the McLennan Administrative Office at precisely 1:45, feeling pleased with himself. Things were going better than he could have hoped.

  By now, word of the zombie phenomenon was breaking news on every station, web cast, and Youtube video. Details were still sketchy, albeit sensational, mainly due to the lack of eyewitnesses. The most credible (and incredible) footage came from helicopters and a few, surviving up-linked cameras.

  To his surprise, however, very few people seemed to have appreciated the danger yet. There were animated conversations, disbelief, even alarm, but hardly anyone seemed to realize the true proximity of the threat. Incident reports in Montreal, Boston, Halifax, and Quebec City hadn’t yet registered, and the outbreak was still something that was happening ‘somewhere else’. Indeed, for most people, paying attention to the events transpiring was still something that you did if you weren’t already busy with something else. There was concern, of course, but the timeline of impending threat was still being grossly underestimated. Frightened people still saw no reason to panic.

  Frightened people were so very, very wrong. By Scratchard’s watch, the outbound wave of infection would hit Toronto in no more than an hour to an hour and a half.

  Standing outside the McLennan administration offices, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed, then lit another cigarette.

  “Nick?” answered a woman’s voice, sounding annoyed. “I’m just about to start class. What do you need?”

  “Hello Eva.” Scratchard peered into the Admin office window, watching as Nancy, the office manager, tapped away at her computer. “You’re teaching your 1:30 to 3:00 computational physics class today?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s on the fourteenth floor of the McLennan building, isn’t it?”

  “You know that it is,” she answered. “Jesus, Nick, I’ve got thirty, pissed-off students, every one of whom hate that they have to take computational physics. So please get to the point.”

  “I’m sending some people up to your floor with a huge number of deliveries, and I need you make sure that no one interferes with them.”

  “Go suck a black hole. I’m busy.”

  “Wait, wait!” Scratchard’s thoughts raced. “Bob’s given you the, um… the Sunday thing, right? Something to do with…”

  “Don’t remind me,” Eva snapped. “On-call undergraduate support, office hours, two until four. Essentially, it’s a resource where students who got drunk on Saturday night stop by in hopes of getting me to do their homework for them by Monday morning. It will be the first thing I include in my statement to the judge when I’m indicted for Bob’s murder.”

  “Help me out today,” Scratchard said grandly, “and I’ll take your Sundays for the rest of the month.”

  He could feel her interest battling suspicion.

  “For the year,” she said.

  “Done.”

  “Don’t think I’ll let you out of this,” she said, sounding suspicious. “If I do this, you’re paying up, or I’ll blow up your house. Don’t think I won’t. I know how to build a particle gun.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Scratchard said, dashing some ash from his cigarette. “Listen, I’ve got to run. I’m downstairs at administration. Have you and your class wait for me, would you? Tell them I have an important announcement to make at 3:15, okay?”

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Never better,” he said, hanging up.

  It was 2:00 pm when he entered the administration office, where he bullied his way past various functionaries. Nancy, the office manager, grudgingly let him tinker with the desktop that controlled the school’s public address system, and which fed into the all-weather speakers outside in the square. A few of the curious tried to peek over his shoulder while he worked, but a scowl sent them scurrying away.

  It took almost no time at all to plug in Melissa’s Ipod, wiring its music to feed through the PA system, and then hook its power into the computer’s USB port. It was slightly more complicated to rig it so that it would start up at precisely 3:15pm. He agonized over the timing. Too soon, and it might get shut off. Too late, and…

  He swallowed hard as he finished up, wondering if any of this would make a difference. Looking out the window and into the square, he saw students sprawled on benches to catch the sun or bent over their textbooks in study, and a lump caught in his throat. He gazed at the crappy modern art in the center of the square, where the Eastern European woman always parked her hot dog stand, the youth, flirting with each other in their provocative styles and tight clothing, so different and yet so similar from when he was young. He saw the tourists, and the parents visiting, the bike couriers and the city workers, the dope dealers and the police, and for the first time, his cold, analytic mind went quiet.

  A heavy sadness, like the weight of worlds, almost took him.

  And then, with a deep sigh, he stood up. He’d given it his best shot, taken what he’d concluded was his best chance. There had been no time for anything more exotic. He could have tried to warn everyone, but… to what end? There was no escape, and even if he’d been able to get anyone to believe him, he would have lost precious time in the futile effort. This was the best he could do, and even this was nothing more than a temporary solution, geared towards keeping people alive until help arrived.

  It was 2:45pm, and Scratchard stepped over to the fire hose cabinet built into one of the walls and smashed the glass with his elbow.

  “Everybody, run,” he told the startled office workers, as he removed the fire axe from its hooks. “If you want to survive, I’d recommend getting to the top floor of this building, but even that’s a shot in the dark. Whatever you decide, I want you out of this office in the next two minutes. Good luck to all of you.”

  “What…? What do you think you’re doing?” Nancy spluttered. Behind her, stunned office workers stared at him in shock.

  He walked up to her, and plucked her office keys from the strap on her hip.

  “Get. Out.” He repeated, raising the axe to strike.

  They did not need any further warning, and the room evacuated.

  Scratchard followed them out, locking the doors behind him as he went, while keeping a firm grip on his axe in case there were any heroes.

  All around, the world was beginning to panic. Sightings of undead just outside the city had circulated. The government was issuing state of emergency alerts on all the channels, warning people to travel west as fast as they could. People were running in every direction, uncertain of where the danger lay, while others remained glued to their devices, fatalistically hoping against hope that something would appear that would tell them it was all a mistake. And in the midst of the chaos were the occasional unenlightened, people who, having just emerged from class or some cloistered business meeting, still hadn’t the slightest clue what was going on.

  Through the window, he spotted Nancy running across the square to a policeman on the street, but he wasn’t worried. Ten people were clustered around the cop, begging for his attention, even as he tried to list
en to his radio.

  Purposefully, he turned and left.

  It was 3:00pm when Scratchard returned at last to the electrical room. In the growing hysteria, no one seemed to care about a man with an axe. It was the last step in his plan. Had he tried this earlier, not only would he have been arrested, they would have repaired all his good work.

  KA-CHUNK!

  With one swing of the axe, he chopped the door handle clean off. With a second, he knocked the door ajar.

  This is it, he thought, the foundation of his entire plan. He would need to maintain the flow of electrical power to the Admin office, the top floors, and the freight elevator, which, coincidently, opened up right beside the cafeteria storage rooms. The McLennan building was one of the few buildings that contained a subsidized eatery where students could spend their meal tickets. It was a huge bonus, but it wasn’t the main reason that Scratchard had chosen the McLennan building, during those long frozen moments he’d spent sitting in his office, wondering what to do.

  He smiled grimly as he started playing with the circuits.

  The main thing, the entire reason, was the Earth Sciences Building across the street, and the fact that its power grid ran through the McLennan electrical room. The whole reason. The Earth Sciences greenhouse - an overpriced, twenty-year old, sprawling eyesore located on a low roof – was powered by a solar array, and while the greenhouse was an energy-inefficient piece of shit, it remained nonetheless a very BIG solar array.

  It would probably amount to nothing. Everything in Scratchard’s plan rested on conclusions he’d drawn from what he’d seen on the Internet. The migration of the infection was an outward moving bomb, a wave of undead spreading across the planet as fast as it could. That wave was concerned with global conquest. The monsters they left behind were the ones that Scratchard had to worry about. Those undead hunted their human prey, and once they found a target they hunted until they caught whatever they were hunting, ignoring everything else around them.

  But what if the thing they were hunting could not be caught?

  Well then, Scratchard reasoned, they would be caught like flies on flypaper. It wasn’t much, but it was all he could think of doing at short notice, and hopefully, it would keep him, Eva and her class, Melissa and Todd, Donald and Becky, and whoever else made it to the top floors of the McLennan Building, alive long enough for the rest of the world to come to the rescue.

  He finished up, remembering at the last minute to make sure that the floors holding the laser projectors also had power. He would also have to stop off and pop in the DVDs he’d purchased. High definition video of the actors on those discs, talking, shooting guns, running, fighting, having sex, the whole litany of human accomplishment, down on the walls of the square below, would give the undead something to hunt. Add in the sounds of people singing from Melissa’s Ipod, and like the footage caught by the apartment dweller, the creatures should be too engrossed hunting down on the ground to attack upwards.

  As traps went, it was primitive. Hopefully, it could last a week, or maybe two. Three weeks might be hoping for too much. The crash and thunder of zombies hunting around the base would ultimately bring down the building.

  Then again, if humanity hadn’t found a way to defeat these creatures by two weeks time, it would probably be because it had gone extinct.

  Leaving the electrical room, he tossed the axe aside, lit up another smoke, and made his way to the freight elevator. Pushing the button to summon it to the ground floor, he checked his watch. 3:15pm. As the doors slid open, he could hear the first sounds of screaming in the distance.

  Seven weeks later, Day 51.

  “Professor!”

  Scratchard looked up from his microscope.

  “Ah. Donald.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Wonderful. Just the person I was thinking of. Are you familiar with Jean-Paul Sartre?”

  “Er…” The former Rabba manager hesitated. “Don’t know him, sir. Was he a famous soccer player?”

  “He was a famous French writer and philosopher who opined that Hell was other people. Can you imagine that?”

  “Nossir. There’s something going on down below, Professor. Professor Brodsky says you should come right away.”

  Scratchard squinted at him. Then, he reached for his pack and lit up a cigarette. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Donald admitted. “But Professor Brodsky is pretty certain that it’s to that drone we saw a couple of days ago. Everybody is really excited. They think we’re going to get rescued.”

  “Rescued?” Scratchard frowned. “Really? All right, I’ll be right there.”

  Five minutes later, he was standing at the window on the top floor, trying to peer down through the clouds of dust and debris. Beside him, a woman in her fifties wearing a labcoat stood, tense with expectation. She was middling height at about 5’9, with floppy, flaxen-blonde hair that was showing hints of grey. Large, thick-rimmed glasses failed to hide her attractive features or the intense concentration in her expression as the gazed out the window.

  “Glad you could make it,” she said, without looking up.

  “Well,” Scratchard said, exhaling smoke. “It’s a special occasion, isn’t it, Eva? What exactly is it that makes you think we’re about to be rescued?”

  “Look.” She pointed at the rooftop of a nearby building. It was at a slightly lower elevation than the top floor of the McLennan building.

  Scratchard looked and saw a man in uniform, holding what looked like a sniper rifle getting into position to shoot down from the rooftop.

  “Military,” he grunted.

  “Looks like it,” Eva answered, her arms crossed in front of her tightly as she nibbled on the fingers of one hand. “How he managed to sneak his way up there is beyond me. Maybe he knows something we don’t.”

  Scratchard shrugged.

  “Do you think it was Tori who told them we were here?” she asked.

  “I doubt it,” Scratchard answered, remembering the girl who led a small group of refugees in an attempt to escape the building four weeks ago. He dropped the cigarette and stepped on it with a scowl. “I don’t think they made it much further than out of the building. It’s one thing to sneak into the cafeteria stock room twenty feet from the freight elevator. We’re in the eye of the storm. It’s another thing entirely to get any further.”

  Eva sighed unhappily.

  Scratchard lit up another cigarette, inhaled deeply, and pointed at the would-be sniper with the same hand.

  “And I’ll tell you another thing. I don’t know what kind of rounds he’s using, but that gun of his isn’t going to do him much good. If that’s their idea of rescue…”

  He trailed off as they watched the sniper pause to speak into a radio. After a few more seconds, he put it aside, set his rifle into position, and started taking aim.

  “He’s not aiming at the ground,” Eva murmured, looking afraid. “He’s shooting out our projectors.”

  “He’s what?” Donald half-shrieked. “Is he insane?”

  Scratchard was silent except for another long pull from his cigarette.

  “Or… or is he trying to kill us?” Donald whispered.

  “Nonsense,” Eva snapped. She turned away from the window. “Becky! Becky, where are you?”

  “Coming, Professor Brodsky!” came a voice from across the room.

  Looking tired and pale, Becky ran up to the window.

  “Go and sound out the others,” Eva told the girl. “I want everyone up here, pronto. And I mean everyone. If any of them complain or give you any trouble, tell them that it looks like our rescue has arrived, and if they don’t come, they’ll be left behind.”

  “Yes, Professor Brodsky.”

  Eva turned a frown onto Donald.

  “Go and help her, Donald. Donald! Stop slobbering all over the window and help Becky bring everyone up here. Now!”

  Half petrified, Donald looked over at her, nodded spastically, and ran off.

 
“Thanks for pitching in, Nicholas,” Eva grumbled, turning back to look at the window. “I don’t know how I’d keep the peace without you.”

  “He’s wrong, you know,” Scratchard said, watching the sniper with rapt attention. “They might be here to kill us, of course, but barring the use of helicopters, any rescue attempt would have to begin by taking out the projectors, as well as the surviving outdoor speakers. On the other hand, if they are planning a rescue, they’ll have a short window of opportunity before the creatures start looking around for their lost targets and see the unbroken windows above them. Either way, we’re looking at our last few minutes in this building.”

  “Aren’t you just a bundle of sunshine,” Eva said.

  The muffled sound of the sniper rifle report was faintly heard once, twice, and then three times. Below, one by one, the spectral images of the three movies striking the ruined walls and dusty air abruptly went out.

  “What if…” Eva swallowed. “What if they’re… ill-intentioned?”

  “What human being isn’t?” Scratchard asked.

  “You know, Nick,” she said. “For someone reputed to have been one of the smartest people on the planet, you sure do amaze by having a gigantic rectum where your head is supposed to be.”

  “All part of my charm, Eva,” Scratchard said.

  “What’s this I hear about a rescue?” bellowed a voice. The man who spoke was an enormous man in his late forties, six foot three and fat to the point of looking round. A wreath of short, brown hair encircled his otherwise bald head from the ears going back, and he walked with his big, sausage-fingered hands tucked into a white labcoat.

  “A possible rescue, Samuels,” Scratchard said, not turning around. “The technology that kept all the creatures at bay has just been destroyed by unknown persons. It means either that we’re all going to be rescued or that we’re all going to die in the next few minutes. Whichever one it is, we thought you’d like to know.”