by Morris, Jacy
Clara was there next to her, bashing the window with her fists. Joan could feel them closing in on her. Their moans and groans grew in intensity. She wondered if they could still salivate. She felt the first outstretched hand grasp at the back of her shirt, pulling her towards it. She spun around to deliver a blow with her rifle, when the creature's head exploded, blood, bone, and brains spraying out the side of the infected's head. It fell to the ground, and more took its place.
More gunshots followed, their sound echoing off the cold walls of the hospital. There was no time to look and see where the gunshots were coming from. The mass was too thick. Clara and Joan still had to fight. As soon as one infected's head exploded in pink mist, another would step up over its body, hands outstretched. The best they could do was shove and push them back, shuffling along the wall of windows towards where the shots were coming from.
It seemed like the shooting and the shoving went on for hours. Clara's arms felt like spaghetti noodles that had been boiled for ten minutes. There wasn't much strength in them, and she could see Joan failing out of the corner of her eye, wedging her rifle between herself and the infected in front of her, leaning back, just out of arm's reach, like a bully tormenting a smaller child on a playground.
"It's clear! Run this way!" yelled a voice.
Clara risked a look. The way was mostly clear. At the end of the waiting room area, she saw people in green and brown camouflage. Some on their knees, others standing behind them, rifles aimed and firing. They stuck to the wall as they advanced, their ears ringing with gunfire. It was going to happen; they were going to escape. Tears came to Clara's eyes.
"Not that close," a tall man wearing sunglasses yelled, a five o'clock shadow blanketing his jaw. They stopped against the wall. The man looked at them, his mood a mystery due to the sunglasses. "Strip."
The command was simple. The ability to fulfill it even simpler still, but they hesitated. Where were they? In what world was it ok for a man to tell them to strip? To take off their clothes and expose themselves? This was not normal. All of these thoughts ran through Clara's head, but all she managed to say was, "What?"
The man looked at her, shouting above the gunfire, "Strip or you ain't coming with us. We've already lost too many men to people that have looked fine, only to have some hidden wound. So take your clothes off, or take your chances with them."
Clara looked over her shoulder, seeing Joan's worried face and behind her, the still moving stream of infected that were pouring out of the hospital's cafeteria. Clara also knew there were more below. If her best chance of getting out alive was to take her clothes off, then fuck it, off they came. She pulled her shirt over her head, and dropped it onto the floor. She bent over to undo the Velcro straps on her walking boot, and then she slipped that off as well. As she did, she noticed that Joan was just standing there.
"Do what they say, Joan. It's our only way out of here." Joan still hesitated. Then she lowered her voice to a whisper, "For all we know they'll be dead soon, and it won't matter if they've seen you naked."
Joan began to disrobe, quickly, with a minimal amount of sexiness. When they were both standing there, fully naked, the soldier spoke up again, "Spin."
They twirled about letting the soldier eyeball them, while the other soldiers continued firing. Clara wondered how their nightmare could get any worse.
"Alright, put your clothes back on. Is there anyone else alive in this hospital?"
Clara pulled her jeans on, balancing on her one good ankle. "Not that we've seen."
Joan spoke up, as she pulled her clothes on at a lightning pace. "But we haven't been everywhere. There could still be some trapped in the rest of the hospital."
The firing had stopped. Behind Joan and Clara was a sight that neither hoped to ever see again. The floor was littered with the dead. Some were patients, some were hospital staff, there were even a few policemen in the pile.
Behind the soldiers, the door to the stairwell burst open, and a stream of the dead poured through it, cutting off their escape and startling the soldiers at the same time.
"Move!" the soldier in the sunglasses yelled. "Martinez, get us out of here."
A tan soldier ran down the path through the middle of the waiting rooms, hopping over bodies, and put his assault rifle to his eye. He fired three shots at the thick glass windows, shattering them. The other soldiers fired into the mass, backing up in an orderly manner. Still the dead swarmed.
Martinez pulled a rope from his backpack and looked for a place to tie it off. "There's nothing to tie it to, sir!"
The soldier in the sunglasses looked at Martinez, and with ice in his voice, he said, "Then tie it around yourself."
Martinez looked at the mass of dead headed their way. He knew how much ammo he had, and he knew that the others must be in the same boat. They were running low, this could be the end of him, but he did his duty. He tied the rope around his waist, and braced himself against the lip of the wall. It was only about two inches tall, but it was enough to give Martinez something to brace against.
One of the soldiers was the first one down. He hopped on the rope, and slid from view, Martinez' black combat boots braced against the wall, the tendons in his neck tight and bulging from supporting the soldier's weight.
"You two are next," the man with the glasses said.
Joan let Clara go first. She grabbed the rope in her hands and backed out into the air. Her arms were already tired from shoving away the infected, and climbing down the rope put even more strain on them. She was halfway down when her strength gave out. She slid uncontrolled for the last ten feet of the descent, the rope shredding the skin of her hands with heat and friction. She screamed in pain as she thumped onto the ground, her ankle taking the brunt of the fall. "Clear!" a soldier yelled while he helped her up off the ground. She limped to the side, her hands balled into fists and stinging.
She looked around her to see that they were not alone. Though the mass of infected were not nearly as concentrated as in the hospital, their presence was still felt. Even now, they homed in on their position. Joan was the next one down. She had no problem lowering herself down the rope, and Clara envied her with her unsprained ankle and her hands that still had all of their flesh. Two more soldiers slid down the rope, their gloves preventing them from sustaining the same injuries as Clara.
Clara looked up to see Martinez standing at the window, shadows converging on him from the darkness inside the building. He fell to his chest and swiveled his legs into the air, before shoving his whole body out the window. He hung by his hands, and then he dropped to the ground, smashing into the concrete, the rope still tied about his waist. He screamed in pain as he hit, and the other soldiers snatched him up off the ground and headed straight to a green military vehicle. It was tall, and Clara needed a boost to get into the back of the massive vehicle. She felt the soldiers shoving at her hindquarters as they lifted her up. She was too tired to feel anything but relief for the hands on her backside. She collapsed on one of the metal benches. The soldiers worked together to lift Martinez into the back of the truck, and the soldier in the sunglasses was the last one in.
He sat at the edge of the truck, and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. He offered one to the groaning Martinez, who had blood pooling on the leg of his trousers. Martinez took one from the package with a shaky hand, and the man with the sunglasses lit it for him with a plain, stainless steel Zippo. He pulled one out of the pack for himself.
"Can I have one of those?" Clara asked.
"Me too," added Joan.
As they drove away smoking, Clara caught sight of the window they had escaped from. The dead poured out of it onto the concrete below, rising to follow after the truck. Clara took a deep breath from the cigarette. Menthols... it figures, she thought.
Chapter 5: A Numbers Game
"Wake up, motherfucker! Time to go to school!" It was his father's voice, yelling at him, the slurred voice sounding almost playful.
&
nbsp; "Get the fuck up!" The voice changed, the way only an alcoholic's voice can. He just wanted to sleep. He just wanted to close his ears, his eyes, and his mind and let him go away. But that's not how alcoholics work. Even if he gave him what he wanted, he would probably be offended by that.
He sat up, his head filled with cotton, and he opened his eyes to find that his father was not there. Instead, sitting across from him was the man he had met the previous night, the man that had gunned down three of the monsters and prevented Mort from overdosing on Ambien. The nightmare of the previous day caught up to him, through his foggy mind, and he closed his eyes.
"Don't do that, man," his savior said. "Don't go back to sleep. Plenty of time to sleep when you're dead, and that'll be soon enough if we don't move our asses out of here."
Shushing the call of oblivion, Mort opened his eyes back up. He was lying on a respectable couch, newish, but not so new that Mort felt bad for sleeping on it with his homeless dirt and dust. He ran his brown hands over the velvety brown couch, sharp angles, cushions without holes; it was probably the best bed that Mort had slept on in a year or two. He sat up, and tried to rise from the couch, but he fell back, gasping in pain. His knee was swollen, and as the fog of the pills wore off, he held his leg out straight in front of himself and pulled up the leg of his jeans. His left knee was monstrous-looking, twice the size of what it usually was. The cop had really done a number on it. The cuts and scrapes on his body were nothing compared to the heat and pain radiating from the swollen hunk of flesh that was supposed to be his knee. It looked like the knee of an elephant.
The man across from him saw the shape his knee was in, and he got up out of his chair. He returned with an ice pack in a towel, and handed it to Mort. "This ought to help," he said in a twangy voice. It reminded Mort of Texas. He had spent some time down there decades ago. It was a brutal experience, living free, alternating between blistering heat and downpours of rain that soaked everything to the bone.
"Thank you," he said.
"You might wanna save that thanks for later, when we actually get out of here."
"What do you mean?"
The man looked at him. He had hollows around his eyes. They were deep-set, but a vivid twinkling blue that Mort could only describe as sniper's eyes. They seemed to see right through him. His square, narrow jaw was covered in stubble, and he moved easily, his cowboy boots seeming to be an extension of his feet rather than clunky things that were meant only for a straw-covered floor at a barn party. The big, brass belt buckle spoke of American glory, the eagle's claws clutching a bundle of arrows. "How much do you know?" the man asked him.
"I don't know much about nothing," Mort told him. "I'm not sure that I haven't lost my mind at the moment."
The cowboy squatted across from him, and stared him in the eyes, those sniper's eyes locking him in. "The world is fucked. We've got to get out of this place. That shit you saw last night? That shit that you can't believe? That was just the beginning. This thing is everywhere."
"Everywhere?" Mort said, barely able to believe what he was hearing.
The cowboy stood up and grabbed a paper cup off of the ancient wooden coffee table. He spit a wad of tar-filled spit into the cup, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, "They called in the military. They've declared martial law."
Mort felt a sudden rush of relief. "Well, then that's it. We just sit tight and wait. It will all be taken care of."
The cowboy smiled at him, white teeth with sharp canines that were yellowing near the gum line. "You'd think so, right? You'd think that America would be able to handle its shit, but think about it this way. There are around 1.5 million troops in the American armed forces. At any one time, 20% of them are overseas. That leaves 1.2 million soldiers to clean up this mess. Now, on the news, they're claiming that this epidemic, this whatever it is, is happening all over the world. That means that every city in America is going through what we went through last night. It don't matter how big the city is, people are dying and getting back up. Now, if 1.2 million troops seems like a small number to protect the entire country of America, then you'd be right. Even if they just protected the top fifty most populous cities, that means they're sending out 24,000 troops to each one of those cities... and there are hundreds and thousands of other cities and towns that aren't receiving any help. Let's say those top fifty cities are saved... then you're talking about at most one-fourth of the country's population. That means that potentially there could be two-hundred and fifty million of those things out there. Think about New York. You're sending 24,000 troops to safeguard a city of eight million... you think they can pull it off? It's a numbers game, man, and we don't have 'em."
Mort leaned back on the couch. Trying to make sense of all the data the man had spewed at him. He understood the gist, although the numbers were staggering and had stopped making sense to him soon after the man had spoke. "Well, none of that matters, does it? We're not in one of those cities that isn't getting help. We're in Portland."
"Yeah, well. Within a fifty mile radius of this place, there's three million people. Three million people who have the potential to turn into one of those things out there. For everyone one of us that dies, one of them is born. You think 24,000 troops are going to put a dent in that?"
Mort didn't like what he was hearing. What kind of world was he living in when you couldn't rely on the police or the military to protect you? Well, he was used to the police not protecting him, but the military?
The man with the sniper's eyes stalked over to the window to look outside, his boots clunking on the wooden floor. "On top of that, how many people do you think chose to report for duty when this all happened? Would you abandon your family with this shit going on? This place is a trap," he said. "Things will get better, for a time, and then it's going to get worse, and after that... it's going to get even worse, and after that, it's going to get about as bad as it can get."
"What do you mean?"
The man swung his piercing blue eyes in his direction. "Think about it. What do you do when you're in a hopeless situation?"
Mort shrugged his shoulders. The cowboy looked at him, and then seeing that Mort wasn't going to give him an answer, he said, "C'mon, man. When they see that it's hopeless, they're going to bring out the big guns."
Mort thought about all of the hopeless situations he had been trapped in last night, escaping from a cop car, using his head to bash his way out, escaping a group of the dead on a shopping cart, and finally winding up trapped in a bathroom with no way out except for the arms of the dead. He had been in the process of overdosing on sleeping pills when the cowboy had showed up... bringing out the big guns. He was going to kill himself rather than turn into one of those things. "They're going to bomb the place," he said. "Kill everyone before they can turn into more of those things."
"Bingo," the cowboy said.
"Jesus, we've got to get out of here," Mort said, his voice rising in panic. Mort stood on his leg.
"Not so fast, my hobbled friend," the cowboy said. "We've got to form a plan first."
"Wait, wait, wait. Before we start planning here, I need to know something."
The cowboy looked at him and said, "What?"
"What's your name?"
The cowboy smiled his white-toothed smile and held out his hand, "My name is Blake. Pleased to meet you."
Mort shook his hand. Blake had a strong grip, vice-like. "My name is Mort. Thanks for helping me out last night. So what sort of plan did you have in mind?"
"Step one... we need weapons."
Chapter 6: Getting Wheels
Ace stood in the street, shading his eyes from the sun. In his hand was a black, police-issue revolver. He looked at it, pondering his course of action. His band of freed prisoners had mostly dwindled once they escaped the police station. Some left for home, some were put off by the weird ways of Ace himself, and some had actually died. There had been nineteen men. Including Ace, five were left. They were mean men, much b
igger than Ace himself, but he had something they didn't have. He had charisma. They followed him. They did what he said. It was the way it should be.
When they broke into a Subway to make sandwiches, they had made his first without him having to tell anyone. He had eaten a six-inch sub piled high with lunch meat and a bag of chips that was more salt and oil than anything else. The meal was more than enough to fuel his 130-pound frame. As he chewed, he listened to his men talk. Worthless conversation, the mindless chit-chat that spews out of those that have empty heads.
"Did you see that one cop? 'No! Don't hit me!'" the red-bearded man said in a mocking voice.
"Baked chips are weird," the man with the shaved head said.
"I just want to find some weed," said the tan man with the teardrop tattoo.
The chubby man with the funny-looking goatee said, "I wonder if my mom is still alive."
It was all worthless chatter, just noise to fill the silence. Noise to push the fear back. Halfway through their meal, Ace heard the crunch of broken glass, the glass they had busted to enter the shop. Somewhere, a silent alarm was going off, but there was no one to watch the monitors, no one to call the cops, and no cops to come even if the call were made.
Ace swiveled in his chair to see a woman struggling through the light of the doorway. She wore a dress, a floral patterned number. She was covered in blood. Her halting, herky-jerky steps were the trademark of the dead. Ace wiped his mouth with a napkin, while the others droned on. He wondered how long it would be before the men noticed the dead apparition moving through the restaurant, the floral pattern somehow seeming classy compared to the restaurant's horrid yellow and green paint-scheme. Ace sat there, sunglasses on his face, watching.
She passed right by him, not even sparing a glance his way, drawn towards the idle and meaningless chatter of his escape-mates. She shuffled towards his men, his tools. The chubby man with the funny-looking beard jumped out of his seat when her cold hands settled around his neck. They tumbled to the ground together, and the man skittered away from the woman as she tried to rise from the ground. The other men hopped out of their seats. They picked up the stools they had been sitting on with their hands and began bashing the woman with the unwieldy weapons.
