This Rotten World | Book 1 | This Rotten World

by Morris, Jacy

  He could see that some of the others were in much the same shape. The other black man in the group, the one that had the telltale signs of homelessness about him, was hop-limping up the road, a heavy bag of guns thrown over his shoulder. The white cowboy stuck close to his side, his head constantly scanning from side to side. Zeke moved forward calmly, he seemed indestructible.

  To his right, he saw Rudy huffing and puffing, digging in his bag for something, and Lou thought, He isn't long for this world. Except for Clara, Joan's somewhat hobbled friend, the women of the group seemed to be in much better condition than the men. Funny how that worked.

  "Hey!" he yelled to the girl slung over his shoulder. Her sobbing had lessened, and her arms hung slack. "Hey!" he yelled again. "You think you can walk? We're never going to make it if I have to carry you the whole way." The others looked over at him, the small bit of conversation seeming out of place among their mostly silent group as they weaved around the dead.

  The girl said nothing. "I need you to wake up, girl. This is life or death now; we ain't got time to be sad."

  "Shhh," Katie yelled at him from the front of the group. Lou didn't appreciate the command to be quiet. He was about to say something, when a sudden noise shut him up. It was the sound of engines. They held their ground as the sound became louder, and that's when they saw it, the vehicle that had destroyed the fences, rounding the corner, its headlights shining directly on them. There was a line of cars following the vehicle, less than there had been at the Coliseum. Lou hoped that they had lost a good amount of people.

  Lou set the girl down on the ground, and said, "Playtime's over, girl."

  "Be ready," Zeke hissed.

  Chapter 36: Not Enough Beer to Go Around

  After they had torn down the fence, they had circled away from the Coliseum. Ace stood in the turret, trying to make sense of everything that was going on. At that point, he wished he could fly up in the air, grab a bucket of popcorn, and watch the carnage. He couldn't see everything, but the things that he could see were hilarious to him. First, he knew that the rescue center was thoroughly fucked.

  The Turtle bounced and rocked as they drove wherever the hell they pleased. Slutty Rivets wheeled the vehicle about, and Ace watched as the line of cars they had brought with them, slowed to a crawl, damaged by the bodies they were smacking into, stalling on piles of bodies, and generally driving to their own doom. There had been some thirty cars, and as they circled around, Ace liked to imagine that he could see their faces through the windows of their vehicles, cursing him for leading him to their death. They were fools for following him.

  He heard shattered glass, gunfire and screaming, a symphony of death that was music to his ears. They sat in a grassy strip away from the Coliseum, but close enough to see what was going on. The giant floodlights showed him a roiling mass of arms, heads and limbs advancing upon the soldiers in front of the Coliseum.

  The soldiers fired their guns. The line of cars achieved varying levels of success in escaping the Coliseum, and they stacked up behind him, still intent upon following him to their own doom, though he had already led half of the to their death. Ace cared nothing for them; he was merely interested in seeing how long they would stick around. The majority of them had believed that they were going to the refugee center for safety, and that Ace was some sort of apocalyptic hero trying to save as many people as he could.

  Ace laughed atop the Turtle. Ace didn't save people. It was up to people to save themselves. He was safe, he was insane, and he was chaos. As he watched the confusion and the mess, a white sedan broke free from the dead, zooming past the Turtle. Where would they go? The answer came to him instantly. Nowhere.

  Ace maneuvered the turret on the machine gun and blew the car apart. Its tires popped, and the rounds from the fifty caliber machine gun mowed through the car as if it were made from cheap foil. The car swerved into a concrete divider and tipped up on its side. He watched, as a man inside struggled to get out of the vehicle. He heaved himself out of the driver side window, and stood on top of the car, looking around to see what had happened.

  He spotted the Turtle's headlights, and it was as if the man instantly knew who was responsible for his situation. Ace waved at him, before he pulled the triggers of the machine gun again. The man was blown to pieces and Ace laughed.

  "You're a madman, Ace," Slutty Rivets yelled from inside the Turtle.

  "Don't you forget it!" he yelled back.

  From somewhere, a new noise emerged. It wasn't the screaming of the dead, the occasional honking of a horn from someone fighting for their life strapped into their car, or the muted gunfire of the soldiers inside the Coliseum. "That's our signal!" Ace yelled over the noise, as a helicopter appeared in the night sky.

  Ace banged on the roof of the Turtle, and it lurched into motion, causing him to bash into the back of the machine gun turret. It was pain, but pain wasn't necessarily a bad thing, just something to remind you that you were still alive, unlike the poor bastards in the Coliseum.

  Ace sat on the metal bench in the back of the Turtle, a smile on his face and a cigarette in his hand. Pudge handed him a beer, and asked, "How was it?"

  Ace didn't have the word for it, so he said, "It's like when you're with a woman, and you get to that point, and POP!" Ace held up his fist and mimicked an exploding gesture. "You know what I mean?"

  "Orgasmic?"

  "Sure," Ace said. "I like that. Orgasmic."

  ****

  Ace was drinking from a warm beer when Slutty Rivets yelled, "We got some action up here. Looks like some rats are trying to leave the sewer."

  Ace drained the rest of the contents in the red, white, and blue can, crushed it, and tossed it on the ground where it clanged off the deck of the Turtle. He then moved to look out the front window of the vehicle. In front was a group of people, their eyes round with fear, their bodies covered in sweat. They were bathed in the headlights of the Turtle. Behind the Turtle, the cars were stacking up. There were maybe ten left according to Pudge, who actually seemed to care about these things.

  "What do you think?" Slutty Rivets asked.

  "There's not enough beer to go around," Ace said. "Run them over."

  "You're a sick fuck," Spider said while laughing.

  "The world's sick. We're the cure," Ace said.

  Slutty Rivets threw the vehicle into drive, and stepped on the accelerator. Ace grabbed a handle that was riveted to the steel frame of the vehicle, as the tires squealed on the ground. He smiled again, and then the Stryker exploded.

  Chapter 37: The Third Time is the Charm

  Zeke stood ready to move. Whoever was behind the wheel of the Stryker was not the type of person that could be trusted. They stood there, waiting. And then Zeke heard it, the telltale sound of rotors chopping air at 292 revolutions per minute. It was close, and behind the buildings in the distance, he saw an Apache appear.

  Then two things happened at once. The apache flashed a bright orange as the Stryker's tires began to squeal.

  "Get down!" Zeke yelled, shoving his band of survivors to the side. Zeke watched as the tires bit into the asphalt and the Stryker lurched forward, and then it exploded into a hail of metal and shrapnel.

  The concussion of the blast knocked him backwards, through the air, but it wasn't fast enough to prevent an inch-thick piece of the Stryker's armored plating from catching up to him and puncturing his abdomen. He landed on the ground, the air knocked out of him, and a piece of jagged metal sticking out of his stomach.

  He tasted blood in his mouth, and he couldn't see out of his left eye. He lay down on his back and watched as the Apache banked around to his right and began firing on the line of cars behind the Stryker. The sky lit up like the 4th of July as cars exploded in geysers of flame and metal. He mused, Would there ever be another 4th of July?

  Then the pain hit him. It wasn't the type of pain that says, "Hey, you're hurt, but if you slow down, you'll be alright." This was the type of pain that said, "You're
hurt real bad, but your body is shutting down now. It'll all be over in a bit."

  He rested his head on the pavement, still warm from the day's heat. He listened to the exploding of cars, the chop of the apache, and the screams in the night. His legs seemed to not exist.

  Then hands were lifting him up. Lou was there, his face a cloud of concern. Katie was there too, her eyes cold and hard. Zeke was sad he wasn't going to be there to break that hardness down.

  They stood him up and draped his shoulders over Lou and the cowboy. Blake he'd said his name was. Zeke wondered if the man's hearing would ever come back. They ran down the street, Zeke's feet dangling uselessly, bumping and scraping across the pavement, dragging through pieces of shrapnel and bits of burnt and charred flesh.

  His head lolled from side to side. On one side, he saw a row of flaming cars, burning in the night. On the other side, he saw a horde of the dead advancing towards them, their slow, plodding progress unfazed by the helicopter above as it dropped metal shell casings onto the pavement with each pass. The smell was familiar. War smell, drifting through the summer night.

  Time stopped for Zeke, and he saw it all. His life was spread before him, like a picnic blanket set with memories. Over here, in an ice bucket was the first woman he'd slept with, skinny, breasts that were barely there, a starter chick if ever there was one. On the other side resting on a plate was a small picture of his father, beer breath and shirtless in the July sun. Around the blanket, the dead crawled like ants, small, unceasing, and ready to devour every single memory he had ever had.

  When he came to, he was lying on the ground, people around him. There were no tears for him. They hadn't gotten that far. They were sad, muted, but there would be no tears for his passing. If only he had enough time, then maybe he could have built those relationships, made up for the years of time he had frittered away polishing guns, drinking beer, and making sure his lawn was green.

  "What are you guys looking at? You act like you've never seen anyone die before." He laughed, coughing on his own blood. Then he was gone.

  ****

  Lou watched Zeke pass. His last words... man that was hard. He would miss the man. When Zeke was there, he always felt like everything was going to be alright, like nothing could stop the man. He was like the fucking Terminator, muscles, brains, hell, he even had the looks. Now he was gone, and the truth dawned on everyone, as if at once... If he can die, then so can we.

  Conversation was at a minimum. They sat in silence, ten survivors in a world that was quickly running out of them, and they were trapped at ground zero. What was the next step? What were they going to do? Without Zeke, there was no leadership. There was no nothing. He was the common denominator. They were fractured, spinning in a void with no end in sight that didn't include winding up in the teeth of the dead.

  Thoughts of suicide slid across his mind. Lou looked at the girl he had carried, her emotionless face, the sadness buried deep inside of her. How would she ever recover? Three days ago, she was living in an apartment in Portland with a sister, a mother, and a father. Hell, she probably even had grandparents, maybe some uncles, aunts and cousins. Now she had nothing. She had Lou, an ex-hustler who never amounted to anything. She had Katie, the cold bitch that had gunned down her father and sister in the name of survival. She had Rudy, 300 pounds of meat with asthma, just waiting for death to come calling. A homeless man, a cowboy, a doctor, and an aspiring lawyer for a justice system that had all but become extinct.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. His head was beginning to hurt.

  "Lou."

  He didn't want to hear it.

  "Lou."

  Go away.

  "Lou!"

  He heard the rustling of the fabric, the low moan, and he died a little inside. When he opened his eyes, Zeke was there, his one good eye open, his arms rising off the ground as if they were tied to puppet strings. Rudy handed him the sword he had liberated from the pile of confiscated weapons in the Coliseum. Lou felt its weight in his hands, a heavy weight, the weight of a friend. He swung the blade in a sideways motion, like a baseball player. It caught on the thick bones in Zeke's neck, and Lou struggled to pull it free, putting his foot on Zeke's chest and tugging with all his might.

  Zeke's head lolled to the side, black blood oozing down the side of his neck. Lou swung again, and the head hung a little further. He was able to pull the sword free with just his hands this time, and the old adage proved true. The third time was the charm. Zeke's head rolled onto the floor.

  Lou looked around at the people around him. Their faces were slack, sad, hopeless. They were all going to die in here, a movie theater shrouded in darkness. Outside, the dead banged on the doors. If only the electricity were on, they could put on a movie and take their minds off the dead snarling in the hallway.

  Lou spotted motion out of the corner of his eye. "Goddamit!" he yelled, as he stabbed downward at the still moving head. The sword went into Zeke's remaining good eye, and it was finally still.

  The banging outside intensified.

  Chapter 38: We All Fall Down

  In the comms room, the report came in. The Coliseum was lost. By the time the helicopters had gotten there, their guns were of little use. The soldiers, outmanned and with their defenses blown wide open, had held for a while, but eventually, the tide of the dead had broken over them and they were forced inside the Coliseum.

  The Coliseum was crawling with Annies, and the Apaches were now on their way home, but not before they had destroyed the convoy that was responsible for getting 2,000 of McCutcheon's men killed. The pilots reported that the zone was too hot to attempt a rescue without blowing the lid off of the Coliseum. Three thousand soldiers... eaten. The thought shook him, worse than any tragedy he had ever experienced in his long career with the army.

  "Jesus Christ," he said as he folded his hands on top of his head and looked at the ceiling. At that moment, he was no longer a general. He was a man experiencing the worst that the world had to offer. He left the comms room without a word and stepped outside of Warehouse #206, waiting for the rest of his boys to get back.

  From the roof of the warehouse, he could hear the snipers' rifles popping with regularity in the night, no doubt assisted by night vision scopes. It was somewhat comforting, except for the fact that the pops were coming all too often. McCutcheon pulled a cigarette from his pocket, put it to his lips and smoked it.

  Over the noise of the pops from the roof, McCutcheon could hear the rotors of the Apaches as they returned. He shielded his eyes as they set down, and he ground out the end of his cigarette with his fingers, tossing it on the ground. He was watching the men disembark, when one of the communications officers caught his attention.

  "Sir, there will be a communiqué from POTUS in one hour."

  "Yeah? Well record it for me. I need to talk to my boys."

  McCutcheon walked onto the pavement, and left the communications officer behind. Whatever the message was it could wait. He wanted to talk to the men that had run the mission. As the apaches' rotors fell victim to gravity and friction, he walked up to the nearest one and greeted the pilot as he began to undo the straps on his harness. "How was it out there?"

  The pilot looked at him, a blank look on his face. "It was FUBAR, sir."

  "Come again."

  "There was nothing we could do by the time we got there. The Annies had overrun the place. We couldn't land, we couldn't even fire, for fear of killing our own, sir."

  "Do you think they made it?"

  "Sir, I don't think so, sir. There were too many of them. Even if we had opened fire, we would have run out of ammunition trying to take them out, sir."

  The news was worse than McCutcheon had imagined. "Get yourself squared away. Tomorrow, we start thinning out the herd."

  "Yes, sir."

  McCutcheon wasn't a chain-smoker by any means, but the news left him wanting another one. He gave in to the temptation, and walked back inside the warehouse. The whole situation bothered him, bu
t the thing that bothered him the most was how ineffective the whole operation was. There weren't enough soldiers, and they were spread too thin. But how do you fight something that kept popping up at every turn, like some sort of deadly whack-a-mole game? Portland wasn't his biggest regret; it was lost and he knew it. His biggest regret is that he had been away from his family while trying to save the families of others, and he had lost everything in the process... Portland, his wife, and his daughter. All he had was the cigarette in his hand and some semblance of authority.

  "Shit," he said as he tossed the cigarette into the coffee cup where it hissed itself to silence. He dozed at his desk until the communications officer shook him by the shoulder. He looked at the solider with fire in his eyes, but to his credit, the officer didn't slink away. "What?"

  "You need to see this, sir."

  The communications officer had a look on his face that would stick in McCutcheon's mind for the rest of his days. It was the face a child might make when told that Santa didn't exist... because he had been executed by his own elves for unsafe labor practices. It was the face one makes when they realize that all hope is gone, and nothing was going to get better.

  McCutcheon rose from his chair, cracked his back, and stood up. There were more people than usual in the comms room, and McCutcheon shouldered his way past the radio jockeys, satellite uplink personnel, and the eggheads who worked on encryption software so that no one who was listening would be able to make heads or tails of what was coming in and going out of the comms room... not that there were a whole heck of a lot of people listening these days.

  Their jaws were slack, and most of them sported the same look as the officer who had woken him up. He saw what they were looking at, took a second to lock onto the words that were being spoken, and then he too produced the same face.