This Rotten World | Book 1 | This Rotten World

by Morris, Jacy

  Now what? The road lay before her. The sun rose higher in the sky. She had been cruising the streets for hours, turning left and right with no destination in mind. There was surprisingly little traffic, if you didn't count the shambling dead who were even now closing in upon her. They seemed to be everywhere. In the distance, a skyscraper burned, its top floors engulfed in orange flames, black smoke spewing forth from the inferno.

  More clouds of smoke joined it from various other locations in the city. Where was the fire department? Where were the people who were supposed to fix things? In the air, she saw helicopters hovering in the sky, looking like dragonflies in the distance. Katie glanced down at the gas gauge on her car. Half a tank... that wouldn't get her far, not in her gas-guzzling SUV.

  The real question was would there still be a gas station that was open? She jumped as a creature pounded its open hands on her windows, smearing gore all over them. She looked at the creature's face. It had been a woman once, blue-eyes, cloudy and empty. Parts of her lips were missing exposing half of her teeth, which made it look as if it were smiling crookedly. Her green cardigan sweater was covered in dried gore, and the wedding ring on her hand glittered in the sunlight. Katie hated her.

  She threw the car in reverse, and watched as the woman stumbled after her, her arms outstretched. She put the car in drive and pressed forward slowly. The creature was pushed backwards but couldn't keep pace with the slow advance of Katie's Durango. It went under, and the vehicle rocked as Katie drove over the woman in an effort to extinguish the crooked smile forever. Just to make sure, she threw it in reverse and backed up a few feet, bumping gently into another creature behind her. Fuck him too.

  Over the hood of her car, she saw the woman trying to crawl towards her. Some key components of her body were broken, but still she crawled. Katie lined up the creature's head with her driver's side tire, and then she stepped on the accelerator. She saw the creature's hand come up as if to try and stop the car, and then it was gone. The car shook violently, the vehicle's steel frame rattling as she drove over the creature's head. Katie pulled the Durango in a wide circle to come around one more time if she needed to. She didn't. The creature's head was smashed, the insides oozing onto the hot morning concrete. She felt better.

  Katie pressed on, weaving in and out of the dead who wandered the streets. Where were they all coming from? How many people had died in the night? She turned on the radio to clear her mind. She punched a button and tuned the Durango's radio to her favorite station, a pop station that played light, forgettable fare punctuated by obnoxious DJs who thought they were more hilarious than they actually were. There was nothing, just a hum. Katie punched the seek button on her car stereo and waited for it to find a different station. The first station that it stopped on was a station that she typically associated with oldies, old white boys singing about girls and summer to the accompaniment of guitars, bass, and drums. It was not her scene, but today there was something else on the radio. Instead of the usual thoughtless tunes, a recording was playing. She listened intently as the deep male voice dropped information in a loop that ran for a minute before playing over.

  "This is a public service announcement. The city of Portland is under martial law. All citizens are requested to remain inside. If you have need of police, fire, or medical service dial 911. Do not, under any circumstances, leave your house. Stay in your home, barricade your doors and windows, and listen to the radio for further updates. Citizens on the street are putting their lives at risk. Stay inside."

  The message started again from the beginning. Stay inside... what a joke. There was no way Katie was going back to her house to sit by herself, replaying the final moments of her family in a house that was now filled with nothing but memories. Lost in thought, she pulled into a gas station and threw the car into park.

  She didn't know why she did it, but she sat in the car waiting, as if a gas station attendant were going to come out at any moment and pump the gas for her. She pressed the seek button again, and another station came on. This time, she found a talk radio station. She didn't pay attention to the words as she looked around. The lights on the gas station's mini-mart were still on, and around her, creatures were moving. She could feel them closing in on her, their eyes drawn to her movements.

  She opened her door and stepped out of the car, lifting the lever that popped open the little door to her gas tank. She stepped up to the pump and lifted it off of the hook. She unscrewed her gas cap and was greeted by the pungent odor of gasoline. She pressed the yellow fuel selector button and breathed a brief sigh of relief as she felt the magic liquid course through the hose, down the nozzle, and into her tank.

  Katie kept her head on a swivel as the machine pumped, numbers ticking by and pumping mechanisms clicking. Outside the quiet environment of her car, she could hear the horror of Portland. In the distance, a fire crackled and there were scattered batches of gunfire. The moans of the dead filled the city and made her skin crawl. She could see them, moving towards her, getting closer with every second. She had never wanted a Prius more than at that moment, a nice electric car that didn't need so much gasoline... she would have been out of there by now.

  The doors to the gas station slid open, and an attendant came out, his blue work shirt covered in his own blood. He was closer than she wanted him to be, so she pulled her gun free of her jacket. She thumbed the safety off, just as Fred Walker had showed her, and she aimed the gun at the attendant, his pale face locked in a scream. She didn't want to fire, not standing next to a gas pump which was connected to who knew how many gallons of gasoline. What good was surviving if you just blew your ass up at the first opportunity?

  When she reckoned that the man had gotten close enough, she pulled the nozzle out of her car and placed it back on the hook for the next lucky customer. After screwing the gas cap back on, she held the gun up to the attendant's head and pulled the trigger, hoping against hope that she wasn't giving herself a funeral by fireball.

  The man fell over, and the dead faces in the street, if they hadn't yet turned in her direction, had done so by now, drawn by the loud crack of the revolver that left Katie's ears ringing. She hurried inside the store and grabbed some necessary supplies. Then she hustled over to her car door and hopped into the driver's seat, slamming the door shut behind her. She turned the engine on and cruised away. That was simple, she thought.

  The voices on the radio droned on in their librarian tones. It was a local program, and they were doing their duty. Despite the fact that they probably had family in the city, they were sticking it out, behind their consoles, probably dreaming of some sort of glorious journalism award. How altruistic of them.

  A man with a deep voice proclaimed, "Everything is going to be alright. The military is here, and things will be under control soon."

  His counterpart, a man with a nasally voice said, "Remember to stay off the streets. If you absolutely must leave your home, head to the rescue station at the Memorial Coliseum. The highways are locked up tight with stalled and abandoned vehicles. For now, there is no way out of the city, except by air or by boat."

  Rescue... rescue was as good a proposition as any she had heard. She punched up directions to the Memorial Coliseum on the GPS sitting on her dashboard. It was an underused birthday gift from her husband... her husband. Maybe they could rescue her from her own thoughts, she mused as she stepped on the accelerator, dodging the bodies that clogged the streets.

  Chapter 3: Pretty Big Balls

  The problem was present. It had to be dealt with. Thirty or forty bodies moving through the dilapidated tenement, adding more to their ranks with each step they took. The undead were tireless. Groggy junkies waking from a night of abusing their own bodies were no match for a mass of indefatigable automatons searching for one thing and one thing only... live flesh.

  Zeke planted himself against the door, his ear to the cheap wood. Behind him was a scene that would be considered a nightmare in ordinary times. A large black man l
ay on the bed, a bullet wound through his head, his brains splattered on the dirty mattress. Blood ran down the wall. A naked woman in chains rotted on the mattress next to him, her fingers frozen in a claw that was mid-dig in the man's dead body. The twice dead girl's eyes looked at him, accusing. He had put the bullet hole in her forehead, and he would have done it again.

  He didn't know how the girl had wound up there. Had she died of an overdose? Had she always been a prisoner? Zeke didn't want to know. It wasn't his problem. He looked over at the man that occupied the room with him, Lou, the son of the man lying on the mattress. Lou had put the bullet through his father's head himself. Zeke respected that. Lou could have left the task to Zeke, and he would have done it gladly, but he had cleaned up his own mess. Sure, Gary Lee's depravity wasn't caused by Lou, but it was still his mess. We're all responsible for our families in one way or another.

  As he was thinking, he heard their approach. Muffled screams could be heard from other parts of the building. When the wrought-iron fence out front had failed and the dead had flooded the courtyard of the tenement, Zeke knew they only had one chance. They had to stay put at the farthest end of the building and let the mass of the undead spread out. Alone, they could be dealt with. As a mass, even the best-trained soldier would find himself outnumbered and overwhelmed by the throng of unyielding dead.

  The moans and screams came closer. The sounds of scattered gun shots echoed through the tenement's flimsy walls, but they didn't last for long. Zeke pressed his hand to the shattered doorjamb, holding the door as closed as he could. He looked over at Lou. He was harder than he looked; harder than a lot of soldiers he had encountered in his own time. There was nothing quite like a youth spent on a street full of danger with a twisted, drug dealer for a father to temper a man's steel. Zeke had seen the man's mettle for himself in the police station that they had escaped from, a station that now was likely little more than an animated morgue.

  The moans and screams were closer. He heard feet pounding down the warped wooden floor in the hallway.

  "Help!" a man screamed.

  Zeke looked over at Lou and shook his head. The man couldn't be helped, he was a liability, an unknown. Survival was number one right now. If Zeke gave the go-ahead, Lou would save the man without hesitation, but there was no way of knowing if the man was bit or sick. One bite. That's all it seemed to take. It wasn't worth the risk. If they let the man in and he was bitten, there would only be one thing to do, put something to the head... either a bullet or a boot. Either way, that would bring attention that they didn't need. They heard banging on a door down the hallway from where they hid. They heard the splintering of wood, and then they heard more footsteps, different from the ones that came before. They were shuffling movements, sliding through the refuse of the tenement's hallways. Then the screaming came.

  They stood in silence as an entire building of people became an entire building of the dead, except for the two of them. Zeke didn't know how long they stood in the quiet, but the room had heated up as the sun rose, baking the corner apartment on the third floor. The smell of decaying corpses had grown, and his body was covered in sweat. They had to get out. It was time.

  "You ready?"

  Lou, who had been silent for most of their watch, nodded his head, sweat pouring off the smooth brown skin of his bald head. Zeke pushed the door open slowly and stepped out into the dimly lit hall of the tenement. Though it was the middle of the day, most of the windows had been broken and boarded up. Sunlight and heat filtered into the hallways in scattered rays, and the dead lingered. Zeke breathed deeply, trying to rid himself of the odor of the nightmare they had left behind. The smell in the tenement hallway wasn't much better; it still smelled of urine and the deceased, but it wasn't nearly as strong.

  Through the narrow corridor, they moved like cats stalking prey, Zeke taking the lead. He inched forward, heel to toe, avoiding the scattered refuse that littered the floor of the hallway, discarded syringes, empty baggies, and fast food wrappers. The door to the first room they came to was boarded up. That was good. They slid past it, watching where their feet went.

  As they approached the next door, they heard the sound of it first. A subtle creak in the floorboards, a disturbance in the air pressure, something was in there, and the door was hanging off of its hinges. This must be the room where the unlucky screamer had tried to hide. Zeke brought the sight of the gun up to eye level, and turned quickly, taking in all the information he could, as fast as he could. Three bodies, two squatting over the form of another, their backs to the door. Good, he thought. Let's keep it that way.

  Zeke glided past the door, his gun at the ready, and then he motioned Lou forward with a wave of his hand. His breath caught in his throat, as Lou moved past the door, but he made it without incident, and he exhaled silently through his nose, a long deep breath. If the zombies didn't kill him, the damn stress would.

  They continued through the hallway, approaching the landing of the third floor, a murky square room that had been populated by drug-abusing trash on couches with stained cushions and exposed stuffing the last time they had come through. Down the hallway that led to the other half of the third-floor, Zeke could see one of the dead, standing in a corner as if it had done something wrong. The sight of Zeke's gun never deviated from its head, even when he chanced a peek around the corner to scope out the landing.

  There was no one there. The things seemed to appreciate the path of least resistance. There were few of them on the third floor, but you could be damned sure the second floor and the first floor were literally crawling with the things. Zeke heel-toed out into the landing, sweat beading on his brow, Lou two-feet behind him, the way he had told him to be. The wild part of Zeke, that instinctual being that was locked away in his brain, screamed for him to lay the creature out, lay them all out. He knew it wouldn't be any good. They were in a city of the dead, with a few handfuls of ammunition and nowhere to run.

  He moved forward across the stained, red carpeting and looked over the edge of the landing, trying to see what was awaiting them. There were none on the stairs; that's all he could tell. When would this end?

  Zeke crouched low, and inched forward down the stairs, resisting the temptation to go down head first so he could see what was waiting in the next room. It wasn't long before he no longer needed to worry. He was halfway down the stairs when the first moan alerted him to their presence. The landing was populated by four of the creatures, fresh and bloody, and there was nothing he could do but squeeze the trigger.

  His ears rang after the first shot. By the time he had pulled the trigger a fifth time, he could barely hear it. Lou was firing his pistol as well. Their accuracy was shit. Lou was no marksman, and a submachine gun wasn't necessarily the type of weapon Zeke would have picked for precision. Nevertheless, the dead died again, and as their feet hit the second landing, they picked up their pace, knowing that whatever was lurking in the building was now most likely after them, honing in like sharks on a bleeding fish. They would not be an easy meal.

  "Let's move our asses," Zeke said, the bullets freeing him from all restrictions on speaking. He sprinted to the next stairwell, past corpses that would now stay dead forever, their brains splattered all over the abused couches, walls, and floor.

  "I can't wait to get out of this place," Lou whispered, though by now it was unnecessary as the moans of the dead filled the hallways. At the top of the stairs, Zeke looked down and put his finger on the trigger, squeezing off rounds as the tide of the dead surged up from the bottom floor. The dead fell but were replaced by more faster than he could shoot. When his gun clicked empty, he stepped back to reload. Lou stepped into his place and fired more rounds. By the time, Lou's gun was out of bullets, the battle was already lost.

  The dead were an unstoppable force. Zeke slammed the new clip home, and pulled the cocking mechanism back, while Lou fumbled with his handgun. Zeke was thankful that it wasn't a revolver. The stairs were hopeless. Zeke could see that now. He
turned and was about to tell Lou the same thing, when he spied movement out of the corner of his eye. With Lou focused on reloading, he hadn't noticed the gnarled fingers of a skinny woman with pale skin reaching out for him from behind, her mouth already open and ready to ruin Lou's day.

  "Down!" he yelled. Had Lou hesitated for even a second, he would have been dead or well on his way towards it. But he didn't. He dropped to the ground immediately, and Zeke leveled his gun at the woman's head, firing several rounds to make sure he got the job done right. The pink mist that erupted from her destroyed eye was proof that he still had it, the ability to kill, the ability to react to a shitty situation without thinking about it. Lou jammed the clip home in the handgun as he popped up off the ground, and they moved down the hallway as the first of the dead reached the landing. There was no time to formulate a plan. There was no plan to be formed. This was pure survival. He could taste its metallic flavor in the back of his throat, his heart beating as if it wanted out of his chest. More dead lined the hallways of the second floor, slowly advancing on them.

  Lou cocked his gun and fired as Zeke took out another one of the dead. They moved through the hallway, putting down six of them, their aim improving with every shot, but they were still burning through ammo, and there was no time to refill the clips. They moved to the end of the hallway on the second floor, leaving bodies in their wake. Zeke looked over his shoulder, and shuddered at the mob that was approaching. They had put some distance between themselves and the mass, but they would be here in another moment.

  Zeke tried the handle of the door. When it didn't budge, he took a step back and kicked the door with every ounce of strength he could muster. It flew inward. On the bed, a skinny man in a wifebeater sat up, a needle hanging out of his arm. Now was not the time for hesitation. Zeke didn't care if he was alive or dead, so he put a bullet through his head.