by R. M. Smith
“The exit’s right by the Sports Authority football stadium,” he told me. “You can’t miss it.”
I asked him if he knew where to go since he was giving me the atlas. He tapped the side of his head and said “It’s all in here.”
He added, “Today is September 25th. Give us one month. If you don’t hear from us by Halloween, you might as well figure we’re either dead or staying in Worley. I wish we had a better way to communicate, but please, spray paint a note on the exit sign if you leave. If you don’t leave, don’t leave a note.”
“Sure thing, Mason. Thanks.”
“You take care of your lady.”
“You take care of yours.”
He nodded.
“Take care, Vera.”
She nodded.
“Oh, and you might need this,” Mason said. He rummaged through some of the stuff packed on the back of his bike. “Here it is.”
He handed me a large flashlight.
“Thanks again” I said.
They left.
We watched them until they were out of sight; then we turned and headed toward Denver.
The road was quiet.
We made it into Denver around noon. Inside the city, the roads were a lot harder to maneuver through. Cars were parked sideways on the highway or were flipped onto their sides. Some buildings in the suburbs were burned; others had collapsed. There was a lot of smoke in the air as well. From time to time I could see the downtown skyscrapers in the distance.
We took the exit that Mason had marked on the map. Indeed, it was right by Mile High Stadium. The stadium was badly damaged but we could still make out its oval shape. The highways were severely cracked and had large pieces of cement lying all over the place. The road looked to have been jack-hammered. As we headed into the downtown area, backed up sewage filled our noses. The stench was overwhelming. Mindy and I both gagged as we drove through looking for the tower.
We finally found it. It was on the corner of 18th and Broadway. The main entrance was blocked by more burned out vehicles. We drove the motorcycle around the whole building. All of the entrance doors we found were either locked or barricaded.
We made our way up some ramps which led us to the building’s parking garage. There were a lot of burned out cars in here as well. I noticed that most of the burned out cars were luxury sedans. I finally saw a set of doors that weren’t blocked by anything. They turned out to be doors to a closed elevator. To the side of the elevator I saw another entrance through some broken windows. There were stairs leading down and across a sky bridge to an outdoor lobby.
I really hated to ditch the motorcycle, but the revving of the engine was so loud and it echoed badly. I really didn’t want to draw attention to Mindy or myself – I also didn’t want to leave the bike sitting out in the open because it was our only transportation. There were some bushes along the ledge of the raised parking lot. I pushed the bike behind one of the bushes, but it really wasn’t hidden from sight very well.
I took the key from the bike and pocketed it. I felt the butt of the pistol Mason gave me as it sat in its holster around my waist. Taking Mindy by the hand, we ran across the sky bridge into the lobby.
There were a few dead bodies lying around. One was a woman who had been ravaged by zombies. Her body was ripped apart. Dried blood had pooled around her.
I saw a sign pointing to a stairwell.
We went in - the door shut quickly behind us. It was pitch black in there. It stunk. “Shit. I forgot the flashlight,” I said. “Let’s go get it. It’s too dark in here.” We went back to the bike. The flashlight had been tucked into our sleeping bag.
On the way back, Mindy asked me if I had smelled the smell in the stairwell. I said yes. I didn’t want to scare her, but it did smell like zombies.
I told her it was probably just mildew.
Stupid me. I should have known better.
Back in the stairwell, I clicked the light on. I shined the light at the door we just came through. “Floor 3,” I said. We mounted the steps.
In complete darkness other than the flashlight, we made our way slowly up the stairwell. We found the fourth and fifth floor exit doors jammed shut. I didn’t know if the pole shift had caused it or not, but it seemed strange that such a new building would have broken doors.
“What’s that?” Mindy asked, her hand gripping mine.
“What?”
“At the top of the stairs…something’s hanging over the edge.”
I pointed the flashlight up the steps. There was something sitting on the top step. It looked like it was teetering there on the landing of the 6th floor.
We moved closer. “It’s a head!” Mindy almost screamed. She moved closer to me as we moved up the steps, slowly.
“It is a head,” I said. “It looks like it got cut off.”
We stepped around it, tried the 6th floor exit door. It was jammed, too.
“Let’s keep going up,” I whispered.
As we came to the 7th floor landing Mindy said “Oh my God…” but God was garbled as she put her hand over her mouth. She pointed to the ground. There was a man lying on his side totally ripped apart. Everything else inside his chest was gone. His eyes were glazed open. Lying by his side there was a bloodied axe.
I tried opening the exit door, but it too was jammed shut.
“How many floors does this place have?” I asked as we stepped around the ripped man.
“I think there’s 78 floors.”
“Damn.”
“I’m going to take this,” Mindy said as she reached for the axe.
“Not a bad idea,” I said. “C’mon let’s keep climbing.”
The doors were all jammed. Eighth floor. Ninth. Tenth. All jammed shut. It was slow going. We had to concentrate as we climbed the steps. It was so dark. As we reached the 11th floor, the flashlight blinked off, then right back on again.
“Oh shit. Don’t do that” I told the flashlight.
Mindy looked at me with deep concern in her eyes.
The flashlight went off.
I hit the flashlight on my open palm but it didn’t come back on. We were in complete darkness. I hit it more but it didn’t matter. The flashlight was done.
“Ok don’t move,” I told Mindy. “We need to let our eyes adjust to the darkness. There has to be light somewhere.”
“K.”
We stood there on the 11th floor landing, waiting.
“There is no light,” she said.
“Yea.”
“If Vera were here, we could use her lighter,” Mindy said
I knew we had to be near a door. I needed to find a wall first just to verify my surroundings. Mindy was right behind me. She had her hand on my waist. I reached out blindly to find a wall. There is was, to the right! It was cool to the touch, smooth paint covered brick.
“Let’s sit down with our backs against the wall, right here,” I told Mindy.
“Ok.”
We both blindly sat down. It felt so awkward.
Mindy was next to me.
I knew the door was to my right. In front of us, the stairs would be going down. To our left, stairs would be going up.
“Let’s wait a few minutes,” I said.
“Ok.”
We waited again. Mindy’s hand was grabbing mine very tightly. She was very scared. I was trying my best to stay composed. This was utterly dark, utterly black. I couldn’t see anything at all.
She put her head on my shoulder. “I’m scared, Dan.”
“We’ll be fine, just give it a minute.”
In the complete darkness, my mind started trying to make shapes even though they weren’t there. I thought I saw a dark shadow move in front of us. I thought I saw Mindy stand up, but she didn’t. I closed my eyes. I leaned my head back as I looked straight up.
Mindy was starting to breathe faster. I heard her grasp the axe with her other hand. There was a slight clink as she slid the axe across the concrete.
“Be careful
with that,” I said.
“I am. I’m just going to keep it closer to me.”
I tried to click the flashlight back on, but it didn’t do anything.
“This is really scary, Dan. I’m afraid.”
“I am too,” I admitted. “I don’t know what to do.”
“We’ll fall if we try to go back down the stairs,” Mindy said. “And if we try to go up, we’ll trip over…something maybe.”
I was trying to think of something, anything to do. It was so black.
So dark.
Finally I had an idea. “Mindy, slide away from me but hand me the axe. I’m going to try to chop a hole in the door.”
“I’m afraid to move,” she said.
“Just keep your back to the wall. Slide to your left as far as you can go.”
“Come with me.”
“I’m going to stand right here. I’m going to swing at the door with the axe. I don’t want to hit you by accident. You’ll be ok, just slide over there.”
“Ok.”
“Keep talking to me, though. I want to be sure you’re ok.”
“Alright.”
She started to slide away from me on the floor. “I’m sliding now,” she said. “Still sliding on the floor…still going…going…Ok, I’m against the other wall.”
Leaning down, I felt for the axe in the darkness. I found the handle. As I stood back up, my balance was thrown off. I stepped forward trying to steady myself. I reached for the wall, thinking that it was right there, but it wasn’t. I stepped forward again and as my foot came down, there was nothing there. I went head first down the stairs with the axe.
I was swimming in darkness. Then light erupted in my brain as my left arm found the first step as I fell. My wrist broke when I hit the step. The pain was so huge.
My fall continued.
I rolled onto my left side, hoping to avoid further pain or injury. That was a bad move on my part. The axe came to a clanging halt, sharp edge up. As I rolled down the next steps, the axe slashed my shoulder. It wasn’t a deep cut, but bad enough for the aroma of fresh blood to fill the stairwell.
Mindy heard the axe clang on the steps. She asked “Dan? Are you ok?”
I finally came to a stop on the landing between the 10th and 11th floor. The pistol fell out of the holster on my fall, too. I had no idea where it was.
I said “I fell, Mindy.”
“Oh shit! Are you ok?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh Jesus…where did you go…Dan? Dan!”
“I’m down the steps. Mindy don’t move or you’re going to fall, too.”
I heard her sliding, feeling around in the dark. In a few moments, she was sliding down the steps. I heard her coming down the steps like a toddler would – one step at a time on her butt - afraid to fall, but determined to get down no matter what.
The axe was still on one of the steps, blade pointing up.
“Be careful of the axe. I dropped it.”
The next thing I knew, I felt her hands on me. “Where are you hurt?” she asked.
“I think I broke my wrist.”
“Can you move it?”
I tried. Bolts of pain shattered my arm when I tried to move it. “No, it hurts way too much.”
“Let’s get back to the bike. We need to find something for the pain.”
“How?” I asked. “How are we going to do get anywhere? It’s too dark to see anything.”
“I got to you, didn’t I?” she asked me sternly. “If I can do it, you can. Don’t give up on me, Dan.”
“I’m not, believe me, I’m not.”
“Ok just slide to the steps on your ass. Go down one at a time on your butt.”
“Like a kid would” I added.
“Exactly.”
We slid over to the steps. One by one, we went down. With each drop, the pain in my wrist screamed. I was trying very hard to keep all of my concentration on the climb down and not on the pain in my arm.
Each step, Mindy held my arm, too. She was trying to keep it straight, but it was actually very uncomfortable.
We made it to the landing of the 10th floor. I told Mindy that I needed to rest. She told me to take my time.
I’m not sure how long the climb down took us, but I know it was a long time.
We made it to the 7th floor. We bumped around the dead man, skidded over the dried blood on our butts. It was sort of a sticky feeling, not a wet stickiness; more like sliding over a rough painted surface. I expected the man to reach out and try to grab us as we passed, but he didn’t move.
Sometime later, we made it to the door we first came through. Moonlight poured through the door as we opened it. It was very bright even though it was nighttime. It took a minute for our eyes to get re-adjusted.
We went back to the motorcycle. I asked Mindy “Can you drive one of these?”
“I don’t know how.”
“Ok, the key is in my right pocket. Can you get it?”
She stood behind me as she reached into my pocket. “Got it,” she said.
We got onto the bike. It was so hard for me to do it. The pain was throbbing in my swollen wrist. My back was covered in blood.
I drove back out of the downtown area screaming inside as we hit every bump in the road or as we swerved around anything blocking our path.
The pain was intense, but I had to ignore it. I didn’t have a choice.
Several times I told Mindy that I needed to stop because the pain was too intense. She told me to stop whenever I wanted to. It took us a long time to get away from the stench of the backed up sewers. I was driving very slowly.
Heading back the way we came, Mindy told me to stop at the first gas station I saw. Mindy jumped off the bike as I pulled up to the main gas pumps. Without a care for her own safety, she ran into the store. Inside she looked for any kind of medical supplies, but there were not a lot that she could find. She did find some elastic bandage wraps and some samples of Bayer aspirin up front near the cash register. She brought those items out along with a warm bottle of Gatorade. I swallowed three packs of the pain pills as she wrapped my wrist in the elastic bandages. I told her to do it as tight as she could even though I cried out in pain several times as she did it. She said she was sorry for hurting me.
We had passed many hotels on our way into the city. I drove as far as the pain in my wrist would let me – about a mile. We pulled into a Sleep Inn hotel at the next exit heading north away from downtown. It was a three story building. We went in, climbed a short set of stairs, and took the 4th door on the right. We locked the door behind us.
The room was messy, but I didn’t care. I was exhausted. The aspirin really wasn’t doing much for my pain, but still I slept.
I lived with severe pain for the next two weeks. There wasn’t anything I could do to alleviate the massive pain. I lived on pain killers. All they did was take the edge off.
Mindy took care of me. She went from room to room in the hotel in search of any kind of relief for my pain. In one room she found a small piece of luggage with all sorts of medication in it. We looked through the whole bag, but there wasn’t anything for pain. It was all heart medication.
She also brought food from some vending machines on the floor below us. I really hated to see her rummaging through the hotel alone. I was afraid for her. She insisted that I stay still in bed and keep my wrist stable. She wanted me to heal. That was her number one priority.
She kept the room clean. She would change the sheets on the bed every other day with sheets from a housekeeper’s cart down the hall. She also found more clothing for us to wear in another room on one of her runs.
There was no ice for the swelling in my wrist. The swelling ran its own course. My wrist was black and blue. I didn’t know what kind of break it was, but it felt like both of the bones in my arm connected to my wrist had broken. I felt the pain the most in the lower part of my wrist back up to the elbow. I wondered if I tore a muscle in there, too.
; My back was cut, but not in need of stitches. Mindy washed it and poured some peroxide on it that she had found in one of the other rooms in the hotel.
When she wasn’t on looting runs, Mindy sat next to me on the bed. We looked out the window at the dead world surrounding Denver while we talked. Mindy told me all about herself, her family, her sister Cindy who she missed dearly. She talked about her love for children and how one day she hoped to have several. She talked about the schooling she had planned to go through to become an airline stewardess – if she would have gotten the interview.
We talked about the future of the world – what was going to happen now? Was it the end of humanity? Would nature fix itself and rid the world of the MCON virus – if it was even real. Were there still soldiers alive in Moses Lake? Did the nuke that we lived through make a second ring of death on the outer ring of the first and kill everyone in it – except us; well, and Mason and Vera. We talked about them, too. Vera was so quiet – did she have a different agenda? Was she an insider for the Moses Lake soldiers? Was Mason undercover, too? We talked and speculated about everything as I laid there, my arm still, my wrist wrapped, the pain throbbing.
We talked about the zombies. We wondered if they even felt anything or even knew that they were alive. We wondered what drove them to keep moving forward even if they had broken legs to walk on. We both agreed that we didn’t want to be eaten alive and we were going to do everything humanly possible to avoid such a thing.
We also made plans. What was our next move? Were we going to go back to the Trango Tower? If not, should we leave a note for Mason like he asked us too? If we did go back, we’d need a trustworthy flashlight. We’d need to get my gun. We’d need to get the axe.
Mindy was such an interesting woman to know. Just listening to her talk I loved to hear the way she thought out loud; and the way she shared her feelings with me. She was so smart and so articulate and so beautiful. I knew I loved her. As we talked over those long days, I grew to love her even more. She was a girl that I always dreamed and hoped to meet.
She made me feel alive. Not dead.
Nights later as she lay next to me on my good side, her head on my chest, I whispered to her “Mindy will you marry me?”
