Alive! Not Dead!

by R. M. Smith

  She looked at me, her eyes darting back and forth. She began to cry. She nodded. “Yes Dan. I would marry you every single day for the rest of our lives together.”

  Smiling, I held her tight; then I cried with her, too.

  MITS

  There was a Wal-Mart a few blocks down from the Sleep Inn. Inside we found some neon yellow spray paint and a 6 foot aluminum ladder as well as some other items.

  “You sure you feel ok carrying this on the motorcycle?” I asked.

  “It’s not that heavy and it’s not that far anyway,” Mindy said. “We need to let Mason know what we’re doing in case they come back early.”

  I drove the motorcycle back up onto the highway to the exit leading downtown. Mindy was a real champ holding the ladder off to the side of the bike. I knew it probably got heavy for her, but she didn’t complain.

  I stopped the bike on the side of the road next to the exit sign.

  “What should we write?” Mindy asked.

  “Well, we’re not going back up into the tower – we decided that already. We really need to find somewhere safer than the hotel. We need to find a higher place to look down on the highway to see whose coming.”

  “Oh, like a lookout tower.”

  “Yea. Let’s just leave this stuff here and go look around.”

  Looking away from the downtown area we saw other taller buildings in the vicinity.

  Mindy asked “What if they come by here today? They’ll think we’re in the tower. We need to let them know we’re not in there.”

  “Write ‘wait’ on there.”

  “Wait?”

  “Yea, we’ll just come back here and write something different after we figure out what to do.”

  “Ok.” Mindy set the ladder up, climbed it, shook a spray can and wrote in large letters:

  WAIT HERE!

  She stepped off the ladder, took two steps back and admired her work. “Not too bad,” she said.

  “You know, we could go to Denver airport. I bet there’s a lot of food in there.”

  “We could go check it out.”

  We got back onto the bike. Backtracking northward to highway 70, we made our way east toward the airport. An hour later as the white pointy roofs of the airport came into view, we saw that along the road dead people had been tied to telephone poles. They had been tied about half-way up with barbed wire.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered bringing the bike to a stop.

  It didn’t look like the people were zombies. In the few seconds that I looked at the hanging people I noticed that they were all nicely dressed. One man wearing glasses was tied around the waist with barbed wire. His dead weight hanging on the barbed wire had cut deeply into him causing his blood to soak through the slacks of his three piece suit all the way down to his shined shoes. He was grotesquely leaned forward at the waist. His arms dangled.

  “Go back, Dan. Quick!”

  Without a second delay, I pulled a fast u-urn in the median. My wrist squealed in pain with the speedy turn – it wasn’t quite all the way healed. I throttled up the motorcycle and we sped back down the highway.

  “Don’t go back to the hotel,” Mindy told me over the roaring bike.

  I took the next exit into the suburbs.

  Three blocks in, Mindy pointed at a road sign as we passed it. It was a blue hospital sign. She hollered in my ear “Hey let’s check out the hospital.”

  Driving up to the hospital we had to maneuver through a lot of vehicles. The streets were jammed with cars. It looked like there had been a mad rush for help when the pole shift came through.

  I imagined how bad it must have been – the hurt people, clamoring for any kind of help, not knowing what had just happened. People screaming. People fighting for a doctor’s attention. The roads around the medical complex were simply overflowing with cars – some were even up on the sidewalk – some were parked in the grass, too, at odd angles.

  There was no sound except for a slight north wind and the howl of the motorcycle as we swerved in and out of the cars. The engine echoed off many single story look-alike brown brick office buildings in the area. The noise seemed strange and loud to me. It sounded almost doubled.

  The hospital, like so many other buildings in the area, was brown. It was a five story brick building. The upper floors of the building had shifted to the side and collapsed onto a sky walkway between the two main buildings. There was debris all over the street. Cars were smashed and trees had toppled under the collapse. Bricks were thrown everywhere. The road under the walkway had been blocked by the collapse. The only way back out of the area was the way we had come in. I didn’t like the feeling of being stuck in a dead end.

  We followed signs to the main entrance. This was the Rose Medical Center. Right inside the front door there was a gift shop, a pharmacy, and hundreds of dead bodies. As soon as we pulled the automatic doors open, the stench of death nearly overwhelmed us.

  There were dead people everywhere. Some people had sat down along the walls as they waited to be seen or waited on news of friends or family members. There were children huddled next to their mothers, one boy dead with his thumb in his mouth. A woman held a newborn baby in her arms - newborn but now dead. Waiting room chairs were overfilled with people who had been waiting. A nurse’s station was overcrowded with people who had fallen dead onto the desk. There were gurneys lining the halls with dead people under sheets. Inside the pharmacy, shelves were empty or knocked over, contents lying on the ground. Behind the pharmacy order window, I could see more dead people lying on the ground or leaned against walls. There must have been at least 300 people just inside the main doors of the hospital.

  Many of the dead were bloated. The heat had caused the inside of the hospital to heat up like an oven. Odd discolored bruises looked to have been dripped on their heads from above.

  These were not zombies, though.

  All were dead.

  Mindy and I were speechless as we made our way into the pharmacy. The thoughts of the dead people hanging on the telephone poles by the airport had totally slipped our minds. Here, we had to physically step over people’s legs and arms to get past them. Mindy was pinching her nose closed as she stepped. The smell was so strong, it made our eyes water.

  Shelves full of pain relievers had not been touched inside the pharmacy. There was a wide assortment of all kinds of over-the-counter pain relievers. Mindy whispered “Let’s try to find you some of the good stuff” as we went a little further back into the pharmacy. It was darker back here. I wished we had a flashlight.

  It looked like people had only gone after drugs that would fight off infection or flu-like symptoms. All of that type of medicine was gone. Mindy found some bottles of Tylenol 3 as well as some Motrin 6.

  “I found this too,” she smiled as she held up a wrist brace. “This should fix you right up.”

  We looked around some more for some other medicines that we might find useful. We put them in a Rose Medical plastic shopping bag. Mindy smiled as she put a pregnancy test into the bag as well.

  “What do you need that for?” I asked with a smile.

  She rolled her eyes. “You never know.”

  We laughed quietly.

  As we started making our way back out of the pharmacy, we heard voices.

  Quickly, I whispered to Mindy to sit down against a wall next to some of the dead people. “Act like you’re dead,” I whispered to her.

  We sat down next to each other and quietly waited.

  After being brutally raped and beaten by a group of three men, Rachel Manning was dropped on the side of highway 90 just east of Missoula, Wyoming. She was left there to die.

  It was night when she was pushed out the back of an old rusted pick-up truck. The men laughed as they drove off, the muffler banging and wheezing. One of the men in the bed of the truck hollered “Have a good night out there, Red!” as he kicked her out the back of the tailgate-less truck. The other two men brayed in laughter as they drove off into the night
.

  Seconds later, scraped, bleeding and ruined, she passed out.

  When she came to early the next morning, Rachel managed to get up bit by bit. She limped slowly back to Missoula. She wept most of the time as she walked; covering her naked body with her scraped and bruised arms.

  When she started making her way down the exit ramp, she heard motorcycles approaching. She thought about hiding in some bushes, but at the time she really didn’t care; nor did she have the energy to fight anyone else off.

  If these people wanted to harm her, too, then let them. She felt more dead than alive now anyway.

  The people were riding two motorcycles. One was driven by an older man who wasn’t wearing a shirt. He introduced himself as Mason Lauxmann. The other was driven by a lady with long gray hair. Her name was Vera. She was Mason’s wife. She also smoked. Rachel asked if she could please bum a smoke off of her. Vera gave her one.

  Mason got off his motorcycle, dug around behind the seat in a storage container, and pulled out a blanket. He wrapped it around Rachel.

  They helped Rachel get on the back of Mason’s bike. They drove into town and up to an Inn on Broadway.

  Vera offered Rachel another smoke and a plastic jug of water. Rachel laid on a couch in the lobby of the inn, her face bloodied and bruised. Her lips were cut and her left eye was swollen shut. Her back ached from being raped on a pool table in her ex-boyfriend’s pub. Her legs, sides and ribs were also sore.

  Her pride was also severely damaged. Her dignity as a woman was crumbled.

  Mason asked her what had happened as Vera wiped Rachel’s forehead with some hand wipes. Vera also offered her some pain killers which Rachel swallowed painfully but thankfully.

  Rachel began to cry. “I was raped. I was beaten. The guys who did this to me left me to die on the side of the road.”

  “You need help,” Vera said, comforting her. “I know what it’s like to be raped, honey. It kills you.”

  “Yes, it did kill me,” Rachel said.

  “You get some rest here. We’ll stay with you today and see if we can round you up some clothes, some food, ok?”

  “That would be very kind of you.”

  Vera took the pack of cigarettes out of her jacket pocket. She put them and her lighter next to Rachel on the couch. “You can take these, too. I have more on my bike.”

  Rachel gave her a painful smile.

  “You rest now.” She looked at Mason. “Let’s get something for her to eat.”

  Rachel said “There’s a bed and breakfast down the road. Just take a right on Jackson. At the end there’s a place called ‘Goldsmiths.’ There might be some food there.”

  Vera nodded. “We’ll check it out, hon.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Let’s go!”

  When they left, Rachel burst into tears.

  Outside, Mason got on his motorcycle. Vera got on hers. They picked up another bike in Wallace on their way back from Worley. Vera had been complaining about no room with all of their stuff jammed behind her back, so they found another bike. Plus Mason got a large plastic container that he was able to secure on the back of his bike for storage.

  Worley had burned to the ground. Their home was nothing but burnt planks sticking out of the ground.

  As Vera cried, Mason tried to comfort her, but she was very distraught. They slept on the outskirts of town that night in their tent. The next morning Mason asked Vera if she was ready to go back to Denver.

  She nodded. There was nothing for her here now.

  They restocked provisions at the half-buried hotel in Coeur d’Alene. The next night as call girl Rachel Manning was being raped on a pool table in Missoula, Mason and Vera were setting up camp.

  ‘Goldsmiths’ had disintegrated. In the back of the smoldering building he found a padlocked air-tight freezer half buried in splintered wood. Making sure that Vera was clear, he shot the padlock off with his shotgun. Inside the freezer, there were stacks of freezer packed food items, a large Butterball turkey, two twenty pound hams, and an assortment of frozen concentrated juices. Everything was still frozen. The turkey and ham were soft on the outside. The middles were frozen solid.

  Mason said “Oh we’re going to eat good tonight!”

  He drove his motorcycle around to the back of the collapsed building. They put as much of the food as they could into the storage bin on the back of the bike and drove back to the hotel.

  That night they had turkey and orange juice.

  When they were done eating, even Mason enjoyed an after dinner smoke.

  “We’re going to Denver to meet up with some friends,” Vera told Rachel as they ate. “You’re welcome to come along with us.”

  “That would be nice,” she said. “I have no reason to stay here any longer. My boyfriend was killed during the – whatever it was that ended the world.”

  After a few days of rest, Rachel felt well enough to ride along with them on their motorcycles.

  There were some things she wanted to get from her place before they left. They drove back to her apartment building where she was able to loot through the destruction. She was able to find some of her belongings. She packed them in an overnight bag.

  On the road south, call girl Rachel Manning sat behind Mason as they drove, her long curly red hair blowing out behind her.

  I saw three people come through the open sliding doors of the hospital. I quickly ducked down next to Mindy. There were two men and a woman. All of them were carrying weapons. The woman looked like she was carrying a machete.

  They came into the hospital. “Holy fuckin hell it smells like shit in here.” one of the men said. He was wearing overalls.

  “No wonder – they’re all dead,” the other man said.

  “Jesus” she said.

  They slowly came into the hospital, stepping over the dead much like Mindy and I had minutes before.

  The woman asked “You sure you saw them come in here?”

  “I was right behind them when they drove into the fucking parking lot,” one of the men said. “It was a dude with a chick.”

  “Skin wants a chick,” the man in the overalls said.

  “Mits is a chick,” man one said. “Why don’t he want Mits?”

  “Cause she’s been had by everyone else.”

  The two men laughed.

  The woman said “Fuck you!”

  “Aww c’mon Mits, you know we’re just fucking with you,” man one said.

  Mits didn’t answer.

  They were quiet for a little while as they stepped through the dead. One of the men said “Jesus how many fuckin people were trying to get in to see the doc?”

  Mits said “Would you shut up, Cab! Jesus, you’d wake these stiffs up if they wasn’t stiffs already”

  Cab didn’t answer.

  The other man said “Wonder where they went?”

  Mits said “In here somewhere, dumbass.”

  “Well no shit. I know that, bitch, but where in here?”

  “How the fuck am I supposed to know, motherfucker?”

  “Maybe we ought to split up,” Cab suggested.

  “No we stay together” the other man said.

  They came into the pharmacy. Mits came in first. She was a young black girl about 18. Her hair was dyed orange. She had it tied up in a bun above her head. Her top lip was large, chapped, and covered in acne. When she talked you could see that her teeth were almost as orange as her hair. She had on a long khaki dress which was very dirty. She had a white glove on only one hand. In that hand she held a machete. Her other hand looked dirty like it was caked with something.

  Second was Cab. He was the man wearing bib overalls. One side of his overalls was unbuttoned on the top so that the bib was hanging down on one side. Underneath he wasn’t wearing anything. Stretch marks could be seen low down on his belly. He had a shotgun. His bottom lip stuck out further than the rest of his face. I thought to myself that he looked like he was mentally retarded.

  The thi
rd guy was thin with greased back black hair. He wore a white wife-beater t-shirt with tight black skinny jeans and cowboy boots. Most of his upper body was covered in snake tattoos. He had a diamond earring in his right ear. He was carrying a machine gun.

  Mits said “We could probably use some of this shit,” as she looked around through the pharmacy shelves.

  “Skin said we find the girl. That’s all we’re after,” the thin guy said.

  “This place is dead,” Cab whispered. He walked right over in front of Mindy and I. His back was to us. The back of his overalls was covered in dried shit. He reached back, scratched his ass and the smell got worse.

  “I could use some Tylenol,” Mits said. “My tooth’s been hurting.”

  “Ya better hide it before we get back,” the thin guy said. “Skin don’t like people bringing in extra shit.”

  “I’ll swallow em now, dumbfuck,” she said.

  “I got something you can swallow,” Cab said as he grabbed his crotch and laughed. He farted right above our faces.

  “You wish,” Mits said as she chewed three of the Tylenol.

  “This place is empty, Gordo,” Cab said. “Let’s check out the gift shop.”

  “Alright, let’s go.”

  Mits said “You two go on over. I gotta take a shit.”

  Gordo said “We ain’t separating.”

  “You two sickos aren’t gonna watch me take a fuckin shit,” Mits said. “Get your asses over to the gift shop.”

  They snickered as Cab led Gordo out the door of the pharmacy.

  Mits was standing no more than 4 feet away from us. As soon as the men left the room, she hiked her khaki dress up. She wore nothing underneath. She squatted and started pissing on the floor. She grunted. It hurt her, I could tell. Bracing herself against one of the fallen shelves, she pooped on the floor right next to us.

  Mindy exhaled in disgust.

  Mits quickly jerked her head in our direction, squinting. She was staring at a dead man to my right.

  My eyes were open, staring straight ahead. If I blinked, I would be a dead man, too.