This Rotten World | Book 1 | This Rotten World

by Morris, Jacy

  "Gimme a gun. I'll do it," Chloe said.

  Amazingly enough, one of the soldiers handed his rifle to her. She looked down the sight of the gun, lined up her shot and squeezed the trigger. She handed the rifle back to the man who had lent it to her.

  The soldiers ushered Rudy and the girls to the trucks. Already a crowd had gathered around them. The soldiers dragged the man in charge after them. "You ok?" one of the men asked him.

  "Yeah. Yeah, I'm alright. Just stings a little."

  They climbed up into the back of the truck, a large two-ton beast that guzzled diesel and looked like a mechanical ancestor of the covered wagons that so many had used to emigrate and make their lives in Oregon over a hundred and fifty years ago.

  They sat on the metal benches that lined the sides of the truck. The man in charge leaned his head back against the tight green tarp of the truck. "Send Silva up here," he bellowed. A man with sickly, yellow brown skin stood up and rushed to the man in charge. He began washing and cleaning the wounds, water mixing with blood and falling to the floor of the gurgling truck.

  "Can I have my gun back now?" Chloe asked.

  The man looked at her, smiled, and said once again, "You're not going to need it." Sweat gathered on his brow, and Chloe heard his stomach grumble as they bound his wounds. "Don't worry. You'll be safe," he said, before coughing weakly. "Hurry, up with that bandage, Silva. I don't have all day."

  Rudy and Amanda watched as the man in charge paled. Their hands were interlocked. Rudy turned to Amanda and asked, "Can I have one of those beers?"

  Chapter 10: Safe

  Katie had driven towards the river and into one of the more industrial parts of town. She saw few people. If they were there, they were hiding. The only signs of life she had seen had been other cars passing on side roads, there for an instant and then gone. Large warehouses, some seemingly as old as the city itself, rose into the sky, most of them thirty or forty feet high. The views were terrible, but due to the lack of housing in the area, she could almost forget that they were in the middle of a potential apocalypse event. Her Dodge Durango purred along while the voice on the radio droned on.

  A shelter, she thought. Would it be enough to keep them out? Would it be safe enough? She thought of the time she had spent in the old man's house, Fred Walker. She thought of the relentless banging, the untiring assault her dead husband and child had put on the door of Fred Walker's bedroom. That was only two of them. What would happen if there were a thousand of those things? What would happen if there were twenty-thousand? What place would be safe from that sort of attack?

  A helicopter buzzed overhead, firing a rocket into the day. The explosion rattled her windows. She couldn't see what had been blown up, but she hoped the explosion had taken plenty of those things with it. She halted the vehicle at a stop sign, more out of habit than anything else. Other than the noise of the helicopters in the sky and the haze that crept through the city, it seemed like nothing more than an ordinary day in Portland. What would she be doing now if this were just a typical day in June? She'd probably be making lunch for Kevin while her husband bashed away on his laptop, trying to craft some sort of young adult fiction novel that would sell in the millions, so he could quit his job. He said he knew the formula. He said he had cracked the code. She believed him, though there was no proof that he held within his head the code to capture the hearts of millions of teenage girls.

  She would probably be putting together some sort of sandwich assortment, ratcheting up the air conditioning, and fighting the temptation to open a bottle of wine. Kevin would be in his room playing video games or down the street playing street hockey with one of his many friends, dirty little things whose noses always seem to be runny. There she would be, fighting the urge to get drunk by slathering mayo on generic, grocery store bread. The new world wasn't all bad, she guessed, as she grabbed the open bottle of wine off the seat next to her and took a long slug from it. It was one of those single-serving bottles. Just enough for a good pug in the car. There was a pile of them in a shopping bag on the passenger seat.

  Sometimes, in the world before, Katie would pick up a couple of them, and knock them back in the car while waiting for Kevin to finish up with soccer practice. Soccer... there was one thing she wouldn't miss. A bunch of kids running around kicking a ball for ninety minutes while over-aggressive parents rooted on little Johnny as if he were actually something special. Kevin was nothing special. She knew that. She was realistic. He probably would have grown up to be a banker or a sales rep somewhere, something average, something soul-sucking. Katie lowered the window and tossed the empty bottle out of the window. She grabbed another one and was concentrating on opening it up when a garbage truck flew by her parked car and plowed into the steel loading door of a warehouse across the street.

  She managed to twist the cap off of the bottle of wine, and she knocked it back. Nothing like a little Crane Lake chardonnay, while you watched your favorite new soap opera, How the World Stopped Turning. She watched the legs of a dead thing jitter back and forth as it tried to extricate itself from between the shredded steel of the rolling door and the now destroyed van. On the back of the van was a smiling plumber in blue overalls holding a toolbox. "What are you so happy about?" she asked.

  There was no answer, so she stepped on the accelerator. Memorial Coliseum was only a few miles away, but she had already gone through the easy part. Now she was entering North Portland, a vastly more populated area of the city, home to hotels, convention centers and the two big arenas in the city, the Memorial Coliseum and the place where the Blazers played. That building's name had changed so many times, that she wasn't sure what to call it anymore. For the first decades of its life, it had been called the Rose Garden... everyone still called it that, though the rights to the building had been dealt to some corporation or other. No one cared. It was still the Rose Garden, and it was far larger and more secure than the Memorial Coliseum.

  She drove down Grand Ave. to get there. She was familiar with the road, due to the fact that every time Kevin made the honor roll, he would inevitably get a coupon for a free Blazers ticket. Only his ticket was free; whoever accompanied him had to pay. Most of the time, her husband would go, but she had wound up being forced to go a few times. Kevin loved the Blazers, as did seemingly every boy that grew up in Portland, and most of the girls too. Katie found them disgusting, self-involved, and sporting egos that seemed to barely fit within the confines of the Rose Garden. But she loved her son, so she went, spending exorbitant amounts of money on beers as she sat and watched Kevin root his team on, arguing every call, and cheering with every basket.

  Grand Ave. was not empty. In normal times, Grand Avenue was a wide street, several lanes across that ran south to north through Portland. It was a couple blocks removed from the Oregon Convention Center, and it was lined with hotels, office buildings, and restaurants. Some sort of convention must have been going on, because many of the people she saw were wearing lanyards with credentials around their necks. They were dead, of course, stuck attending a convention for the rest of eternity. They blocked the road with their large backsides and cheap suits, blood staining their generic, button-up shirts.

  As she wove through the people, she wondered what sort of convention they had been attending. They didn't look like comic book geeks or auto enthusiasts. Maybe it was a boring conference, like one of those one's that Jason sometimes attended, flying off to some boring town in Iowa or Missouri to attend a conference about teachers and teaching. Katie never understood why he even bothered; it wasn't as if he was going to learn anything new.

  She decided against a teacher conference as she dodged a plump man, his belt lashed on too tight to create the impression that he had a double gut, one above the belt and one below. His belly smacked off the side of the car and he tumbled down onto the hot pavement. There were too many men for it to have been a teacher's conference, she thought.

  She swerved left and cruised down Multnomah St., ignoring
the red lights. The concentration of helicopters was thicker here, and she could hear their noise through her windows and the blast of the air conditioner. She passed underneath I-5. As she zoomed under the road hanging fifty feet above her, she saw bodies falling onto the pavement behind her. Presumably, they were the dead who were lurking on the elevated highway above.

  Katie crossed over the Max tracks, and skirted around the Rose Garden. The dead milled around the front of the place, the windows to the Rose Garden were smashed beyond belief, revealing a yawning black cavern. It gave her the chills, so she continued past, her Durango speeding past the outstretched arms of the dead. She hung a right on Interstate and continued around the block, circling around to the Memorial Coliseum. The dead were thick here, and she couldn't avoid bumping some of the out of the way. She had to slow down or risk damage to her vehicle. The last thing she wanted was to be trapped just yards away from the Memorial Coliseum with hundreds of the dead between her and her goal.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, she toyed with the thought of backing up and trying to find another way out, but she plowed ahead, her mind fixated on the possibility of normalcy, on the possibility of being rescued. She looked in her rearview mirror to see that the dead had closed in upon her. She accelerated forward, shoving them, moving them aside; a few fell under the wheels of her vehicle, and she bounced around in the cab of the Durango, smacking her head against the window as she rolled over their bodies. Then she saw it, a chain-link fence blocking the road. Soldiers stood on platforms behind the fence, rifles at the ready. They were firing.

  Christ, she thought. How the hell am I supposed to get in there? Bodies dropped around the car, and she saw one of the soldiers pointing with a red flag to a section of the fence that had been opened for her. Soldiers stood blocking the entrance, mowing down anything that got between her car and the opening. The ride to the opening was awful. Her SUV jounced over the bodies on the ground. She could taste it in her mouth, the breath of freedom that the fence represented, the freedom from the world of death that surrounded her. Hope made her floor the accelerator, and her head bounced off the headrest behind her as the vehicle accelerated. A dead man stepped in front of the car, and his body went flying. Immediately, the sound of the SUV changed. Instead of the wonderful purr that she had fell in love with at the dealership, the Durango now emitted a clunky, grating noise. Steam began pouring out of the hood of the vehicle, and she could barely see five feet in front of her.

  Katie skidded to a halt, just in time to avoid running over two soldiers who had their hands out in a halt gesture. The steam billowed from the vehicle, but she didn't care. She was alive. She was safe. Katie unfastened her seatbelt, and popped out of the driver's side. She spun around to look behind her as the soldiers swung the gate closed, securing the gate with heavy chains and padlocks.

  The dead were there almost immediately, their faces pressed up against the chain-link fence as if they could chew their way through. "Fuck you!" she screamed at them, her middle finger in the air and tears streaming from her eyes. She dropped to her knees sobbing. It was some time before she realized that she was being gripped by the arms and dragged toward the Coliseum.

  She watched the faces of the dead shrink as they pulled her away. I made it. I fucking made it, she thought. Now what?

  Chapter 11: Riverside

  Lou had thought it up first. The military man just went along with it. Helicopters swung through the sky, but Zeke wanted nothing to do with the military. Lou didn't know why, but he could sense that. Zeke was military; Lou would bet his soul on that fact. It was the way he carried himself, quiet, confidant, almost robotic. But there was something else going on in the man. When they had been handcuffed to the bar in the police station, Lou had been sure that the man had left him for dead, all hell breaking loose around him, people dying, coming back to life, and then eating each other. When Zeke had slipped his handcuff and walked out of the station, Lou had thought he was dead. The cold look in his eyes as he walked away was enough to tell him that. But then he had been there, kicking at the wall with him as things in the police station became even more desperate. He owed Zeke.

  So he had come up with a plan, a way to get out of the city. The world's oldest highway ran right through the heart of town, and all they needed was a boat to take advantage of it. They ran towards the river after their escape from the apartment. The dead stumbled after them. They had their guns in their hands as the afternoon sun beat down upon them. It was the middle of the day and it was hot.

  The four blocks down to the riverfront had been essentially danger free. The dead were about, but they ran hard past them every time they appeared between themselves and their goal, a boat, a ticket out of town. Maybe things were shitty everywhere, but at least on a boat, they could get away from the thousands of dead that littered the city's streets... unless they could swim. Lou didn't want to think about that.

  They reached the green strip of grass on the west bank of the Willamette River. It was a wide open space, which suited Lou just fine. He had experienced enough of the dead popping out around corners, arms clawing at air as they attempted to take bites out of his flesh. This was much better. Nice green grass, water to your left, and the ability to see any threat that could come at you. It was, in fact, a walk in the park.

  Lou gripped his gun tight and tried to keep from counting the dead that were spread out on Portland's front lawn. That's how Lou thought of Waterfront Park. Up ahead of them, the Burnside Bridge loomed above them. Lou could see shapes at the top of the bridge, looking down at them and flailing their arms.

  "Heads up," Lou said to Zeke as the bodies began tumbling over the railing and onto the grass below. Some of them fell and stopped moving, others rose, and came after them. They saved their bullets, choosing to run instead, looking downriver to see if they could see anything that could be considered a boat.

  They ran under the shadow of the bridge, and when they emerged into the sun, there was more sound behind them as more of the dead fell to the soft grass behind them. It was a long fall, maybe thirty or forty feet, but the dead didn't care. They could break arms, legs, even backs and keep coming. A surprising number of them seemed to function perfectly, even with their ribs sticking out of their chests. They were like drunks in a car accident, Lou mused. Too far gone to think to brace themselves, they tumbled loosely to the ground and stood up.

  "We're building quite a following," Lou said.

  "I always wanted to be famous," Zeke said, smiling. It was the first bit of humor that he had heard from the man. It eased a lot of the apprehension that Lou felt about the man. He was capable, cold-blooded, but there was a human in there somewhere. Two miles south, Lou spotted what he was looking for, the furled sails of boats at dock. They sat on the river, looking like toys in the distance. Lou wanted to be on one; he wanted to feel the wind running over his bald head.

  The park ran parallel with the river, the city's buildings reaching into the sky to their right. From among the tall structures to their right, Lou watched as a family burst onto the green grass of the park. They were a good quarter-mile ahead of Lou and Zeke. The father ran with a young daughter held in his arms. His beard was reddish-brown in the sunlight, and his pale legs flashed with lean muscle where his khaki shorts ended. The mother was in a dress, holding it in her hands, as she dragged along a teenage daughter. The dead poured out of the city chasing them. They reminded him of a sluggish comet tail, their excited bodies shambling after the family. The family had no weapons, and it looked like they had just made their own personal trip through hell.

  "Oh, shit," Zeke said. Their path had become significantly more difficult thanks to the family and the creatures pursuing them. Lou looked over his shoulder at their own comet tail. It seemed as if nothing would ever be easy again.

  Between ragged breaths, Lou said, "We gotta get past those people, man. If we get caught between their tail and the one we have following us, we're dead meat."

  Zek
e looked at him and then looked over his shoulder. He saw the sense in Lou's words, and without speaking, they picked up their pace to a quick jog, not fast enough to tire them out, but quick enough to let them overtake the family. Lou kept his eyes on the family as they moved, trying to keep sight of them through the mass of the dead that followed on their heels.

  Lou felt the impact of each step in his knees. It had been a while since he had done so much running, first from the police station where he had almost dies and now from a horde of the dead that were locked in on them. The sun beamed down on his head, and he reached up to wipe away the sweat that collected and hung in drops on the fine black hairs of his eyebrows.

  He watched as the family ran underneath the Morrison Bridge. A new problem presented itself. The dead began tumbling over the sides. Unlike the Burnside Bridge, the Morrison Bridge was built lower. It was still a twenty-foot fall, but those ten-feet less made a difference. Most, if not all of the dead that tumbled over the side of the Morrison Bridge got back to their feet after smacking into the soft green grass. As the family ran through the decrepit basketball courts under the bridge, they emerged on the other side into the sunlight, and another wave of the dead fell off the bridge, crashing into the ground.

  There was now an army of rotting dead between Lou and Zeke's destination. Lou watched as the red-bearded father tumbled to the ground, spilling his young daughter onto the hard pavement. They scrambled to get to their feet, but there was nothing that could be done. Lou couldn't hear their shrieks over the moaning, but he knew that they were screaming. Lou didn't know why he did it, but he held his gun into the air and pulled the trigger. The gunshot rang out through the city, echoing off the tall building to the west and the river water to the east.

  For the first time in his meaningless life, Lou had an audience. He also had stage fright. Hundreds of the dead turned and headed in their direction, temporarily forgetting the family frantically trying to gain their feet. Lou felt good about it. He was likely to die because of it, but the family had enough of a reprieve to collect themselves and continue their flight. It felt good in his chest.