The Reaper Virus

by Nathan Barnes

  Phil shouted over the side of the coal car and eagerly beckoned for me to climb. I started up the shallow rebar ladder while the second zombie regained its footing. Needing both arms to climb, I sandwiched the bloodied weapon under my right armpit. Three-quarters of the way up though, the fallen reaper had made it back to his feet and well within lunging range. He let out an unsettling screech and leapt towards my dangling body.

  I swung the Kukri in a wide left handed grip and twisted on the ladder to match my swing. The zombie’s temple caved at the strike and the blade became embedded within its skull. I felt my body being pulled towards the ground as the creature’s legs went limp.

  “Holy fuck!” I didn’t release my hold on the weapon fearing that if I did, the blade would fall into the river still stuck in its victim. Panic filled my brain. I shook my arm hoping to dislodge this vile anchor. The eye closest to the wound was missing and the other stared back at me with an unholy blackness. Another shake caused an unctuous crimson mix to bubble past the zombie’s jagged teeth and drip down its chin. The sight of this alone caused bile to begin traveling up my esophagus.

  The few seconds in which this all transpired felt eternal. My right hand started to lose its grip, so I looped my arm around the ladder. “Come on, you dead piece of shit!” I shouted at the fully dead man spewing tar from his gaping mouth. The weight was pulling my upper body down and contorting me in ways I was never meant to bend. This was it… I knew I had to let go of the Kukri or I’d end up in the river.

  My hand relaxed and a tear mixed with the sweat beading my cheek. Although it was nothing more than a piece of metal, the Kukri had acted as my only source of control. It had made me feel confident and empowered enough to remain amongst the living. With it I felt safer than I had with any gun and strong enough to make it home. Even during the apocalypse it had not failed me. I was overcome with the thought I was about to fail it.

  I felt another pressure on my arm. I followed my first instinct and looked before defending myself. For once not being a trained combatant came in handy, because if I had struck the situation would have become unthinkably worse.

  Phil dangled from the cusp of the coal car and grabbed hold of my upper arm with both hands. I became the rope in an unholy battle of tug-o-war. Most people would have exploited this relief to let go of the weight and climb to safety, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I took the extra strength and contorted myself enough to bring my left boot to the place the Kukri was lodged.

  I let my foot follow the track of the blade and kicked. Tread met flesh and I pushed until the Kukri was freed. A trail of viscous fluid dripped from the weapon down to where to heap of infected man dropped. My arm was so numb I couldn’t feel it any longer. I swung it around and pushed on the ladder’s rung with my wrist. After a minute of shaky climbing I collapsed onto the pile of jagged coal.

  * * *

  1632 hours:

  My chest heaved. The coal was like lying on a bed of nails, but I’d never felt anything more comfortable. I stared up at the waning light and realized how close our deadline drew. Phil sat on the edge of the car, waiting for me to signal that it was time to move on again.

  “Thanks,” I said between shallow breaths.

  “Don’t mention it. You almost got pulled off the ladder… why didn’t you just let go of your sword?”

  “It means a lot to me.” There was no point in going into detail about anything – even with someone whose life I saved and who probably had just saved mine. “Also I don’t think it’s a good idea to let go of a weapon right now if you can help it.” Phil nodded lightly in agreement. “So, I guess this makes us even now doesn’t it?”

  He let out a chuckle. “Not even close, Nathan. I’ll have to do a lot more than that to not feel like I’m in your debt.”

  “We can settle this later. But right now we’ve got to get moving.”

  Phil had already gotten to his feet on the foot wide lip of the train car. He stared past me at the overhanging arched bridge. I looked at his expression, hoping that he was trying to find options for us to climb up. Frankly, I was so overcome with ache and exhaustion that anyone else taking charge would come as a relief.

  A smile cracked his lips. “Good thing I have an idea then, eh partner?”

  He pulled me to my feet and we started navigating our way across the few coal cars that separated us and the bridge. The vertigo that raced through my brain from looking to my left quickly stabilized my wobble. I had no desire to allow my tired legs to send me tumbling off the ledge to the gravel or river below. We had to navigate two breaks in the balance beam where another car coupled onto the metal serpent. More time was spent with paranoid checks of the area below than was spent climbing down and up again.

  I don’t know about Phil, but I felt like a child pretending the ground was hot lava whenever we got close to the gravel. The train cars may be filthy, dangerous, and uncomfortable, but they were also elevated. There was a level of comfort associated with being lifted above the reach of the undead. All the while I was thinking about how Maddox would be so jealous of my super cool train car clubhouse…

  Soon we were immersed in the cold shadow of the high rising bridge. I plopped down and dangled my legs over the side of the car. There are only a few times in my life where I had felt that much debilitating pain. Flipping my pack around, I quickly found a snack bar, water, and ibuprofen. “So… what’s your idea for getting up there again?”

  “I thought you were trained to look for details like this man?” he said with a wry laugh.

  “Ha! Low blow my friend.” I quelled my embarrassment and followed his pointed finger. Then I saw it – a ladder. On the far side of bridge pylon was a metal rung ladder. It looked sort of like the rebar ladder we first used to climb on top of the train. The only problem was where the ladder was in relation to us.

  “Alright, since I spotted it,” Phil said, “you get to figure out how we get to it.”

  I let out a disgusted chuckle and surveyed the situation. It felt like a twisted geometry problem. I flashed back to a high school memory of me being my typical smartass self and telling the geometry teacher that her class was pointless. She refuted this by saying “Geometry has a lot of real world application. Now, if you have one more outburst you’ll be getting a demerit.” Zombie or not, I bet she was laughing at me now…

  The ladder was positioned just past the water’s edge. If the James River were in less of a flood stage it might be above dry land. However, the current high water level placed it a few feet past the shore’s mark. The water wasn’t what troubled me though. Our real problem was reaching the ladder. From where I stood the bottom rung was a few feet above the level of my head. That put it almost two stories above the ground. Whoever designed the access ladder was either stupid or sadistic… maybe both. I furrowed my brow in frustration. This was at least the second time in the last few hours that a path had been made needlessly overcomplicated. Evidently my dampened spirit was visible to Phil.

  “Don’t look that way,” he said sternly while fiddling with his pant leg again. “You’ve still got that rope don’t you?”

  It was almost like I hadn’t heard his question; I was curious about why he kept touching his leg. “Why do you keep messing with your leg, Phil?”

  He sounded irritated. “It’s fine… just a little itchy alright? Stop worrying about that and pass me the rope.”

  “I’m not sure you noticed this about me, but I’m not exactly Indiana Jones.” He chuckled. “I don’t think God ever intended me to do anything as heroic or athletic as swinging from a rope. I may have police training, but I was always very comfortable behind a desk and a radio. This whole plunging a sword into things that look like people mess is not a natural action for me.”

  We both shared a laugh at my expense. I was alright with being a self-admitted pariah when it came to physical ability. Embarrassment meant nothing in this new world. As long as a person could stay alive it didn’t really ma
tter what they were seen as a month ago. A moment of shame pitted my stomach with that thought. No matter what was going on in the world, I still knew the things I had done to lead me to where I now stood. In the end I wondered what would separate a newly odious person like me from the undead I’d been battling.

  Phil took the rope from me and began to unravel it. I watched as he skillfully knotted strategic points along the length of the line. The sky continued to darken. It looked as if the realm of the bridge’s shadow began to blend with the rest of the world. Our time was quickly running out.

  “Looks like you’ve done this before,” I said.

  He nodded. “My girlfriend…” He paused for a moment and stared blankly at the coal. “She and I used to do long camping trips. We made sure a lot of them had some kind of climbing involved.”

  “Good, so this should be easy. I don’t want to rush you, but we have ten, fifteen minutes max until the sun is down,” I said in as serious of a tone as I could muster. “I’m almost positive these things hunt better at night. I want to be where they absolutely cannot reach us by then.”

  “I get the point. I’m just about done,” Phil said while again scratching at his leg.

  His motions were skillful and swift. It was comforting to watch him and feel that he knew what he was doing. He finished the last thick knot then dropped the tangled mess. “Help me look for a larger chunk of coal that might be good for throwing that far.”

  I didn’t need any more explanation to know where he was going with this. We both rifled through the black mound. Our movements began to reflect the fearful desperation that radiated from the fading light. I held up several of the dusty shards only to have Phil give them a disapproving frown.

  “How about this one?” I hoisted up a larger one and waited for my busy partner to reject it. It was jaggedly cylindrical, maybe six inches long and an uneven width.

  “Perfect!” The volume of his excited outburst startled and irritated me. I should give up our stealthy ruse, because honestly, how stealthy can two guys walking on top of a train be? “Give it here!” He said while grabbing it and busying himself at the rope. Thirty seconds later he proudly held up a raggedy rope rigging tied to a crumbly hunk of coal.

  “Uhh… Phil,” once again I was too tired to hide my real thoughts, “I don’t think that’s going to hold me.” I was so defeated in my pain and exhaustion that I was ready to sleep there in the train car.

  He smirked. “Then it’s a good thing I’m going first.”

  Chapter 18

  Ascent

  1655 hours:

  Phil’s confidence level impressed me. This was a good thing too, since I had become so completely drained. Normally, I would be anxiously watching as he secured a knot around the shard of coal turned grappling hook. Now I simply sat atop the painfully uneven pile of black rocks and attempted to muster up the strength to care again.

  “You going to be able to do this?” Phil asked, noticing my lack of enthusiasm. “Because I have no idea where to go once we get up that bridge. I’d also really, really like to get some sleep and the middle of that bridge looks as good as a Holiday Inn.”

  I smirked and chuckled. “Is a Holiday Inn a good thing to you or a bad thing?”

  He let out a short, but dangerously audible laugh. “I’m more of a tent or back seat of my Saturn kind of guy so… it looks like a damn good thing.” He looked over his shoulder at the fading light. In my mental master planning I had visualized already being in a safe place by now.

  “You drive a Saturn too?” I asked, forcing myself to rise. The pain in my chest was severe. If several of my ribs weren’t cracked, then they’d suffered one hell of a bruise. “I’ve been a Saturn man for years. I have a feeling you and I will get along just fine.”

  By then he had already turned to prep the rope and said, “Hey, I stopped worrying the moment you pulled me out of the water.” This comment embarrassed me with the realization that Phil had far more trust in me than I did in him. Long ago I had been an overly trusting person; after years in the criminal justice field, I waited until trust was earned. Even while watching the man whose life I had saved, who had already saved me once, and who likely would be saving me again in the next few minutes… I knew that any trust he thought I had in him was false. For some reason, I could not bring myself to trust my new companion.

  With this, Phil held the rope with a good foot and a half of slack between his hand and the anchor. He spun the rigging around in a clockwise circle to build momentum. My heart ceased while observing this display. The infernal pessimist inside my brain kept poking at my thoughts with a visual of the coal flying off and the two of us being stuck on the train. After thirty seconds reality shot my thoughts down when Phil released the line.

  The coal flew out in an arc that took it inches from the ladder’s lowest rung. Fortunately for us, the rope stuck with the rock even when it splashed to the water below. Philip hastily pulled the line back. We let off a simultaneous sigh of relief when we heard the chunky anchor bouncing along the side of the coal car a couple times, before it appeared at our feet.

  Our eyes started adjusting to the lower light as sunset shaded us with doom. I started to become aware of a flashing light that came from the other side of the rail bridge. Running parallel to our targeted river crossing was the main highway bridge for the Powhite Parkway. Until just days before I traveled this ten lane bridge twice a day for my commute to and from work. Knowing how the other main roadways turned into deathtraps I could only imagine what this one was like. My guess was that the flashing was coming from an array of hazard lights throughout the bridge.

  The whizzing of the rope spinning pulled my attention back to my partner. He released the line again. I heard a clink and was ecstatic. Then it fell downward with a splash and my short lived hopes were dashed. Thanks to the fading light I couldn’t see how close it came. I assume it was closer since he uttered, “Almost, God damn it!” a split second after I heard the clink above the rapids. Phil once again reeled in our lifeline. We held our breath until the coal anchor was within reach. He turned to me and said with an overconfidence seemingly aimed at convincing us both, “This time it will work.”

  I was too anxious to respond. It was now officially dark out and my heartbeat overcame the babble of the river. My eyes had adjusted enough to see the immediate area and some distant shapes. The river had a way of reflecting ambient light to the point of an eerie self-luminescence. Philip went ahead with a third attempt. We both paused and awaited the splash of rope entering the murky James… only the splash didn’t ever come. The rope remained taut at an oblique angle that indicated being affixed to the bridge’s bricked tower.

  “Hell yes!” Phil shouted. He spun around and grabbed my aching hand to excitedly shake it. I knew we were being too loud, but couldn’t care less. This was the first good thing that had happened since he and I met. If all went well we would be out of the reach of any infected that were drawn by our brief jubilation.

  “Is it stable enough to support our weight?” I cautiously asked, prying my hand from a handshake that had gone on long enough to venture into the realm of uncomfortable.

  He gave the rope a little slack then pulled it taut again. It was like he had been fishing and knew a whopper was on the other end of the line, now he just needed to set the hook. “Yeah, I think so. Do you have a flashlight?” I pulled one of my flashlights from a snug corner of the survival pack. It had been there ever since I was with Lance and Brad on Franklin Street. I clicked it on while my left hand stifled the beam. A red glow showed through the translucent skin between my thumb and pointer finger. The brightness caught our dilated pupils off guard and we shared a wince.

  “Okay, if you hear me call out just spot the light where my voice comes from,” he said. “I’ll find a way to get the line back to you.”

  “What if the rope snaps or the coal gives?” I asked half rhetorically and half with concern. I tried to convince myself that that didn’t make
me the poster child of assholes everywhere. With the inevitable awkwardness of any “you are probably about to die” situation, anything you say would come across as rhetorical.

  Phil chuckled. “Then you can get your wish and sleep on the train and I guess I’ll be right back where you found me.” I laughed in response. Perhaps my mistrust in this newfound friend was just paranoia?

  He stepped to the lip of the coal car and pulled the rope tight. Both hands were tightly gripped a good two feet apart on the line. I watched Phil shift his footing for a moment then he was gone. For a split second I saw his body float into the blackness like he was flying. I was left breathless at how quickly it all happened. It may have been my imagination filling in the blanks as it had enjoyed doing recently, but I could have sworn that I could see his silhouette swoop over the rippling glow of the river. By the time I recognized the distinctive sound of creaking rope I heard a slap followed by a muffled curse. My heart palpitated and stomach acid churned as I waited to hear him hit the water, but the splash never came.

  I didn’t care if I was telling all the zombies around that dinner was ready; the tension was too much. “Phil!?!” I hollered in the loudest whisper I’d ever uttered. Silence followed. “Come on, man… tell me you’re still with me!” Still nothing… My heart ached at that point. After a minute I was positive that once again I’d been left to fight through this hell alone. Despair took the strength from my legs and I sat hard. Topping it all off was the pointed piece of coal that greeted my fat ass.

  I buried my face in both hands as I compressed my throbbing muscles to curl into a ball. With everything that had been going on I completely forgot about my bandaged forehead. The contact shot searing pain from the covered laceration above my eyes straight through my skull then bounced down the length of my person. I arched my back and winced at the sudden bombardment of razor sharp stinging. Every other woeful muscle screamed back at the sudden jostling. The advantage to having multiple injuries is that any specific pain is dulled into a generalized agony.