This Rotten World | Book 1 | This Rotten World

by Morris, Jacy

  "What do you mean?"

  "Let's just say these brothers aren't the most social dudes."

  Zeke looked at the man, trying to figure out exactly what he meant. "What do you mean 'social'? Are they drug dealers? Pimps?"

  Lou looked at his feet. "They're all that and more. You might want to think twice before going there. They're not too fond of white folk."

  Zeke laughed. "At this point, the street is full of motherfuckers who ain't too fond of anyone, no matter their skin color. I'll take my chances."

  "Amen to that."

  Zeke stood up and helped Lou to his feet. Then he reached in his pocket for a cigarette. He held one out to Lou, who grabbed one out of the pack, and together they stood on the concrete steps, lost in thought and smoking. When they were done, they tossed the butts on the ground.

  "Well, no time like the present to get a move on," Zeke said.

  They walked quietly down the steps of the stairwell and entered the street. They walked in the shadows of the buildings. Despite the fact that it was morning, there were very few people out and about. The second intersection they reached provided a nice vantage point for Lou and Zeke. They looked down the street which rose to the west as it left the middle of town. Zeke pointed out a couple of burned out cars, and a knot of shambling bodies two blocks down.

  Things didn't seem to be getting better. Despite this fact, the middle of downtown was probably one of the safest areas of the city. It was composed mostly of high-end businesses and office buildings. There were very few residences in that part of town, and most of those were locked up like Fort Knox with iron-barred doors only accessible by keycards.

  They continued their trek. Zeke's hands itched for a weapon. His eyes darted around the street, scanning for potential threats and looking for anything that they could use as a weapon. There was nothing. Even the garbage can lids were chained up tight. At this point, he would settle for a wooden stick, but even that didn't present itself.

  Another block down, amid the canyon of eerily quiet buildings, a car careened past them in the street. The driver ignored them as they flattened against a wall.

  "You have a car?" Zeke asked Lou.

  "No, but I wish I did. I'd get the hell out of this city right now."

  "Yeah, well you and about five-hundred-thousand others probably had the same idea. If that fool gets on the highway, he isn't going nowhere."

  The zooming of a passing car engine had livened up the street a bit. A few shambling people rounded the corner, walking away from Zeke and Lou in the direction of the car. They let them move down the street, and then followed at a slow and quiet pace.

  In a whisper, Lou said, "Let's cut over a block, and see if we can go around those fools."

  Zeke nodded his head. It sounded like as good a plan as any. They crept silently up the sidewalk. When they reached the corner, Zeke leaned around it to see what was ahead of them. The streets were definitely more populated. It seemed the closer they were getting to the center of the city, the more of them there were. Zeke's first instinct was to sit on the ground and die.

  His second instinct was to get pissed. "Let me ask you something, Lou. Are these friends of yours worth reaching?"

  Lou laughed quietly. "I wouldn't say they were worth reaching, but if you want more than just your dick in your hand, then yeah, they're worth it."

  Zeke was tired of playing by the rules. He crossed the street motioning for Lou to follow him. In front of them was a restaurant, a fancy steakhouse from the look of it. It looked like a suit and tie affair, but none of that mattered now. The doors were shut tight when he tried them.

  Still whispering, Zeke said, "We're probably not going to make it a mile without some sort of protection. I bet there's some shit in that restaurant that we can use. Knives, pipes, anything that'll keep those things at arm's length. The other side of town is a little more populated, and I'd rather be prepared than caught with my pants down."

  "I agree, only there's a problem," said Lou.

  "What?"

  "We don't got no ties," Lou quipped.

  "Alright, enough of the humor. When I bust open this window, we're going to have to be quick. A place like this probably has an alarm on it. Grab what you can, and get ready to fight because those things have a one track mind, and judging by how they reacted to that car, they seem to be drawn to sound."

  "I got it. Why don't we just go through the door?"

  Zeke laughed as he said, "The glass is too thick. We'd need a sledgehammer just to get through it.

  Zeke took his shirt off and wrapped it around his fist. He drove it through one of the big glass windows, silently hoping to not cut an artery in the process. The noise was far louder than he wanted. The alarm started almost immediately. With his boot, he kicked out enough glass for himself to crawl inside the window. He crawled in, cutting his hand on an overlooked piece of glass jutting up out of the frame.

  "Watch that glass," he said over his shoulder as Lou crawled in behind him. They made their way to the back of the restaurant. Zeke grabbed a spare towel off of a countertop and wound it around his injured hand. Then they made their way back into the kitchen.

  They didn't have to search long before they found the cutlery hanging above a prep station. Zeke grabbed a shiny, stainless steel cleaver off of a hanging rack and he handed Lou the next biggest knife, a wicked butcher knife that wouldn't look out of place in Michael Myers' hands.

  "Let's go," he said.

  Lou followed him without questioning, which was a good sign as far as Zeke was concerned. All he did was say, "It's a shame we can't stay and cook a steak. I've never had the scratch to eat in a place like this."

  "You can stay if you want to, but you're more likely to become dinner than to eat dinner."

  "Fuck that," Lou said as Zeke pushed his way out the emergency door in the back of the restaurant. He could hear glass crunching underneath someone's feet as the door swung shut behind them. Those things might move slow, but they sure had a way of sneaking up on you.

  Which is why he wasn't surprised when they were confronted by the one-armed corpse of a custodian on the other side of the door. The custodian snarled at him, his jumpsuit covered in old gore. That wasn't the disturbing part though. In the custodian's teeth, he saw bits of hairy flesh stuck between his two front teeth.

  "Alright, Lou. Aim for the head. That seems to be the only way to drop one of these motherfuckers." Lou swung his knife sideways as the wayward janitor reached for him with his one remaining arm. The knife glanced off of the man's skull, filleting a nice flap of skin off the side of his head, but doing little else.

  Zeke stepped in with a well-aimed chop to the back of the creature's skull. The cleaver stuck and the zombie stood there jittering about, but he was still alive.

  "Use it like a spear, Lou. This ain't the damn movies. That thing isn't going to cut through bone like that."

  Lou nodded in understanding and stabbed the knife through the custodian's eye. He fell to the ground and Zeke stepped on his head and pulled the cleaver free, wiping the blade on the cleanest part of the custodian, which took a while to find.

  "Nice work," Zeke said, "now let's move our ass."

  Lou was breathing heavily as they continued their cross-town jaunt. The piercing noise of the alarm from the steakhouse had drawn all sorts of the creatures from out of the woodwork.

  "You up for a jog?" Lou asked.

  "Well, I better damn well better be," Zeke replied.

  They took off running at an easy pace. Weaving in and out of the dead people that had been drawn to the alarm. They managed that for some blocks, and then the years of smoking began to catch up to Zeke. His lungs burned with fire, and sweat poured down his face. His legs felt like rubber, and it was all he could do to keep putting one foot in front of the other. In gasping breaths, he managed to ask, "How much further?"

  Judging by Lou's lengthy breathless reply, he was in much the same situation as Zeke, "Not much further. Only a
couple more blocks."

  They ran down the middle of the street now, which was ideal because it kept any random dead people from springing out at them from alcoves. The sun blasted down at them, the shadows disappearing from the street as it rose into the sky, bringing forth the heat that had disappeared with the night rains.

  Down one alleyway they saw a man fighting ten or more of the things with only an umbrella in his hands. Neither of them slowed their rubber-legged jog. They came to the very center of town. Burnside was a wide street with two lanes of traffic heading east and west. The road was clogged with stalled cars, their doors open, and blood staining the pavement. Smoke curled into the sky from the east, and to the west he could see entire apartment buildings burning. Zeke's mouth dropped open as he saw a person jump from the top floor and plummet to the ground.

  Lou grabbed him by the arm, and they weaved through the traffic jam of empty cars. The dead were everywhere, and the cars were only a minor inconvenience, as they sought to get their hands on Zeke and Lou. They made it to the other side of the street after cutting back and forth through the rows of cars to avoid the dead. It was if they were playing a real-life version of Pac-Man... only there were no power pellets, but Zeke hoped that would change when they got to the place Lou was talking about.

  When they finally made it to the other side of the street, they sprinted down the sidewalk. Lou pulled him towards a squat brick building with three floors. The windows were boarded up, but judging by the squalid look of the building and the neighborhood, he wasn't sure that it was because of the situation.

  They ran around the side of the building, dodging random monsters and their outstretched claws. The entire building was shaped like a letter C. A tall, wrought-iron gate blocked off the empty courtyard while a wing of apartments to the north and south rose above it, blocking out the sun. They scaled the fence, and landed with a thud on the other side.

  Zeke finally took the moment to look at his hand. It was still gushing blood. Behind him, he could hear groaning and the banging of creatures on the gate.

  "C'mon. Let's get inside," Louis said as he strode across the courtyard. The walls were littered with graffiti and empty cans of cheap beer and malt liquor. Cigarette butts covered the sidewalk. Lou walked up to the front door and tried to turn the handle. Nothing happened. "What the fuck?" he said as he tried again to the same result.

  "Nobody home?" Zeke asked.

  Lou stood back from the door and yelled up at a window above the door. "Gary Lee! Let me in! It's me, Satchmo!"

  Lou pounded on the front door, and finally a man opened it, a man with a very mean looking submachine gun pointed right at them. He was big, black, and very muscular. His shirt could barely contain his arms, and his Jheri curl shone in the dim light of the entryway.

  "What are you doing here? How do I know you're not one of them things?" the man asked, waving the machine gun around with an easy familiarity and a dash of irresponsibility. The man made Zeke nervous. There was something about him that seemed off.

  "Gary Lee, it's me, man. Satchmo."

  "Yeah, yeah. I know you, but who the hell is this guy?" Gary Lee said, waving his gun around some more.

  Lou smiled and pointed at Zeke. "That's the man that helped me get away from the cops."

  "You sure he isn't a cop?"

  "I'm not a cop," Zeke said.

  "Fuck you," said Gary Lee, "I wasn't talkin' to you. I'm talkin' to fuckin' Satchmo."

  Lou moved to Gary Lee in an effort to calm him down, "He isn't a cop, man."

  "You guys get bit?" Gary Lee asked, his guard slipping a little bit.

  They both shook their heads, but that wasn't good enough for Gary Lee. He made them show him their arms and legs, and when he had seen everything he needed to see, he said, "Fuckin' motherfuckers. I ought to shoot your asses right now for bringin' them things here."

  They looked behind them to see that ten of the creatures were now at the gates, their arms thrust through the wrought-iron bars, faces pressed against them.

  "Come on in. Get your asses in here. You're drawing a fucking crowd already."

  They entered the apartment building, and for a second, Zeke thought about turning right around. The inside was filled with pungent smoke, carpet that smelled like old urine and vomit, and every inch of wall was plastered with more graffiti. A life-size portrait of Gary Lee with four naked, big-titted women clinging to his legs while he brandished an AK-47 dominated the wall of the stairwell. They climbed the stairs, and emerged in a second-floor foyer which was filled with couches full of sleepy, passed out people. Gary Lee kicked one of them off the couch with his silver-tipped boot. The couch was duct-taped where the worn fabric had split apart. Gary Lee plopped onto the couch and pulled a joint from a shirt pocket.

  He lit it and took a puff, as he began to question them about what they had seen. "So what's it like out there? We had to close up shop last night. One of the girls got herself a nasty case of dead standing on the corner last night."

  Lou related his tale and told the story of how he had gotten picked up by the cops for assaulting one of those things. He told of their escape from the police station, and the harrowing adventure they had just trying to move a mile across town. At the end of the story, Gary Lee just took a puff off his joint, and said, "No shit." Then he got up and walked away.

  Lou led him to a room with some dirty mattresses on the floor. Zeke was dead tired, so he fell on the mattress, despite its stains, and drifted off to sleep. It was a tortured sleep, piled high with screaming drill sergeants, both alive and dead, making his life a living hell. At the end of the dream, he was standing in the bottom of his hole in the sand when bodies began falling on him, burying him under their weight. He awoke screaming.

  Zeke buried his face in his hands and then rubbed the sleep from his eyes. When he took his hands away, the dream began to fade from his mind and he noticed that Lou was watching him. "I'm alright. Just a bad dream."

  Lou was smoking a cigarette while lying on his back on the dirty mattress. He looked up at the ceiling, as if he were daydreaming. He ashed on the ground, as apparently hundreds of people had before.

  Zeke rose from the mattress and shook his head. He was sore, tired, and all he wanted to do was lie in the bed. But he knew that wasn’t prudent. The soldier inside of him commanded him to get up, check out his surroundings and see if he was completely safe. Zeke got to his feet and nudged Lou into action with his boot.

  “C’mon. Let’s go check out the situation.”

  With Lou by his side, they proceeded to walk through the building, stumbling upon sights both horrifying and concerning. In one room, people were smoking crack, about a dozen of them, glassy-eyed, unkempt, and unaware of their presence. For them, it seemed as if the world was turning just the same as it ever was. They simply poked their heads in the room and moved on. They could hear the sounds of sex behind a few of the closed doors; they moved on from those rooms as well.

  “I’m not sure this is the safest place to be,” Zeke whispered to Lou.

  “Yeah, I know. But it was the closest place.”

  “Well, we ought to see about putting this place far behind us. I don’t like the things that are going down here, and it’s bound to end up badly. If those things get in here, there’s not a single person here capable of fighting besides ourselves,” Zeke said as they walked by an unconscious junkie lying in his own vomit, pants half-on and with no shirt.

  “I agree, it’s not ideal, but all we have is a butcher knife and a meat cleaver. We’re not going to last long out there if we don’t upgrade.” They came to a stop at the landing. They peeked through the curtains and through the boards on the windows. It was still daylight outside, but you wouldn’t know it from inside. The courtyard was still empty, except for trash and graffiti. More of the creatures had gathered at the gate to the courtyard. The gate bowed inward, the weight of the people outside straining the gate to its limits. It was only a matter of time before it gave way
completely, and then the flimsy wooden doors downstairs would be next.

  “Well, we better make our move quick. Or we won’t be able to move at all.” Zeke turned to Lou and said, “How much do you care about these people… Satchmo?”

  Lou looked around the landing at the flopped bodies, litter, grime, and sadness. “I don’t give two shits about these people. They’re dead already. When that fence goes; this place goes.”

  “What about Gary Lee? You guys seem to have a history.” This part was important. How Lou answered would influence how he would proceed.

  Lou nodded his head and said, “Me and Gary Lee go way back. He used to look out for me. But over the years, he became more about Gary Lee, more about the hustle. Truth be told, he was more likely to blast a hole in us than to let us in here. If he gots to go so we can go, then he gots to go.”

  That’s what Zeke wanted to hear. Zeke had no illusions about what it would take to get out of here alive and move to a more advantageous position, preferably somewhere outside the city, with a thick wall and plenty of ammo.

  “At the very least, we could use his gun, and any more he has lying around. If he won’t cooperate, then he’ll have to go.” It all made sense to Zeke. As he looked out the window one more time, he saw the fence give just a little more. “Let’s go find Gary Lee.”

  Lou led the way through the trashed out halls and up some stairs, past tweaked out junkies and crack whores. They came to a room at the end of the north wing. A skull was painted on the door in blood.

  “This is it,” Lou said, “Gary Lee’s room.”

  “Let’s do this quick,” said Zeke. He reared back and with his right leg he kicked the flimsy door open, splintering the doorjamb. They rushed inside to find Gary Lee completely naked and in mid-thrust on a chained up woman. They grabbed Gary Lee and threw his naked body to the ground. Zeke held the butcher knife to Gary Lee’s throat. “Don’t move a muscle, or your headless body will be flapping around here like a chicken with its head cut off. You make a sound, and it’s your last.”