Among the Roaring Dead

by Christopher Sword

  The gas light came on. Looking down the road Jess noticed that more and more apartment buildings were starting to pop into view, meaning that he was moving deeper into the heart of the city again.

  He was nervously excited, hopeful that he would find his family in good health. He pressed down heavily on the gas pedal, dodging the dead cars that littered the avenue.

  “Jess.”

  “Yes Orson, what’s up?”

  “I was just a little curious so I was checking as many signals as I could and I picked up a GPS signal that seems to be moving with us.”

  “English Orson, not techspeak. What are you talking about?”

  “I think there’s a second GPS unit in this vehicle that has been transmitting our location.”

  Jess looked behind them with the mirror again and saw something moving in their trail. It must have been a vehicle, for two small lights followed them around corners and up and down hills.

  “Daniel, you should get your seatbelt on.”

  As it got closer, Jess saw that it was another van, just like the one they were driving. He jammed gas pedal down as hard as he could. Looking in the side mirrors he saw that it was rapidly gaining on them. They were jolted momentarily out of their seats as the other van collided into them from the back end. It felt like their van was lifted off the ground. Jess lost his composure briefly - his feet lost the pedal and the van started to turn towards the ditch. He righted the vehicle with a powerful swing of the steering wheel only to see that the other vehicle had pulled up alongside them now. The driver had familiar long brown hair flowing behind him and brandished a gun raised in one hand.

  The van seemed to rock suddenly, which was followed up by a loud bang. Jess turned to see that the window of his door suddenly had a circular fissure in it like a spider web.

  His raised his head just quick enough to see three cars stopped in the road up ahead of them. Roscoe went straight into them and out the other side. The other van seemed to careen on two side wheels for a moment and then collided with a guardrail presumably designed to stop such out-of-control vehicles from plunging down into the valley.

  Jess didn’t stop to find out what was to come of Roscoe. He slowly drove around the pileup and then hit the accelerator until the scene was but a small dot in his mirror.

  He looked down at his arm, which suddenly felt hot. He peeled open his jacket and saw blood underneath, soaking his shirt.

  “My name’s Daniel,” the kid said from the back. “Daniel McCluskey Junior. I don’t want to die!”

  “Okay, kid. Okay! Roscoe’s gone. Orson, can you see if you can hack or jam that GPS signal.”

  “Working on it.”

  As Jess drove on, he discovered that the noises had drawn creatures from the nearby ravine. There were several at the side of the road, moving towards them. There were also a few other survivors as well, looking to thwart those with vehicles. It was difficult to tell them apart at first, since even the survivors were not in great physical shape. But they shouted and screamed and were generally faster than the walking corpses. He considered stopping for one, until he saw that the woman’s face was covered in hideous blisters. The shock of the sight caused him to continue on and she walked slowly after the vehicle with her arms outstretched as though she could reach out and grab them. Daniel had disappeared. Hiding in the back was less furnished but generally more blanketed from what was happening around them. The kid didn’t seem overly eager for a front row seat of the lunacy they were evading. The windows barricaded, the back of the van was largely dark.

  Jess had to watch for blockades and traps as he drove along. As a result, his driving speed had slowed to that of a man on a bicycle.

  The car ran for a good 10 minutes with the gas light lit on the dashboard. When it gasped in thirst, it did so with some large clanks, as though rocks were rolling around inside the engine. Jess rolled the vehicle to a stop at the side of the road and woke Daniel from an exhausted sleep. They started out on foot as Jess saw a plaza up ahead with various cars parked out front. The apartment that had earlier seemed so close was now again a speck on the horizon. He was sure they could have spent the night feeling fairly secure inside the van but he was hungry and didn’t want to wake up to a trek with an impoverished pang in his belly and an injured youngster as a companion.

  While the sword had been lost somewhere in the earlier commotion Jess was able to retrieve a crowbar from the back of the van. It was heavy in his hands and would be sure to bring anything living or dead to its knees with a strong swing or two.

  The plaza was nothing unique. Your typical tiny, cramped variety store and a beauty salon were side-by-side. A bar with dark windows anchored the end of the plaza. There were suburban pockets like this everywhere within the city – nothing but house upon house for dozens of blocks and then you’d come across a more industrialized area with manufacturing plants and decrepit strip malls and the like. There may have only been 50 buildings in this part of town. The rest of it was comprised of generic brown brick buildings with fences going right around the property. Thoughts of stockpiled food and H-gas in an abandoned store plagued his thoughts, but he was pretty sure that they were already likely pillaged of any usefulness.

  They had brought along a few light items. Boxes of crackers. Bottles of water. They wouldn’t last.

  Still he investigated the plaza and found some candy packages and a package of Band-Aids that they pocketed for later.

  Daniel walked incredibly slowly. He held his arm to his body like it was a fragile piece of glass.

  Not surprisingly, the next recognizable building they came across was a gas station. Its walls were formed with crude cement – the uneven finish was painted white and two-foot high letters were hung over the only open garage bay, spelling American Gas. It looked like it had been sitting here since the 1950s or earlier. A sign was hung from a frail-looking door. The sign only communicated a few choice words: Have Gun, Know How to Use It.

  There was one pump, and it was empty.

  Jess turned his attention to the open garage. It might have been a mistake to go inside. There was no light source inside. The lone light bulb seemed to be smashed on the floor and he didn’t have any other way to illuminate the area since both of them had long since dropped their flashlights. Without a way to see, he would be at a distinct disadvantage if there were anything inside waiting. But at the same time, he wasn’t going to get far by foot and he needed H-gas. He knew he had to check every square inch of the gas station before leaving it behind. He didn’t want to, but he knew he must.

  Daniel seemed to know what he was thinking. “I’ll stay back here, where I’m not being threatened by guns.”

  “You do what you need to kid, I’ll see you on the other side.”

  “Wait,” Daniel said. He held out the smartcard Jess didn’t understand. When Daniel held it up to his face and turned on the screen Jess got it. It served as a poor but usable light in the dark.

  The crowbar was heavy in his hands. At first, that weight was what made it feel like a good choice for a weapon. Now he had to wonder if it was just going to slow him down if he was surprised.

  He moved forward slowly. A few steps, stop, look around. Nothing was inside the garage apart from a wall of basic tools like wrenches and an air hose. A half dozen tires were stacked up in the corner. There was a single door at the back that had a union jack hanging over it. He grabbed the cold metal handle and opened it as slowly as he could, but still it made a horrible creak. He waited in position, in the dark, for two full minutes, listening for a sound, before moving again.

  Pulling open the drapes from the lone window of the room let in just enough of the dim night in to make a difference. It was enough to see that he was in a small office. A large table with a matching chair and a bench for guests were pulled in tight. The room seemed a little too pristine. He expected garages to have nothing but oil and grease and soot.

  A good dozen pages of loose leaf paper were lined up squa
rely on the desk. A metal coffee machine sat on a small table in the corner. Jess pressed the button on the front. It made neither noise nor any other indication that it was working.

  “I’d kill for a cup of coffee right now,” he said to no one.

  Even from grind that’s two weeks old.

  Jess noticed that the table beneath the coffee machine was solid. There was a silver streak along its front that turned out to be an indented handle. Inside was a fridge, still slightly cooler than the rest of the room. He opened it and saw the outlines of some shapes that looked familiar. A container of orange juice that he knew he dare not drink. A small container of milk – which would be in even worse condition. There was also a glass bottle of lime cordial. Jess unscrewed the cap and put his nose to it. It didn’t smell bad. He raised it to his lips slowly. It tasted both bitter and sweet somehow, but not bad. It was like fizzy lime juice mixed with liquid sugar.

  There was also a small box of fruit crème cookies. Jess decided to take a chance and popped a whole one in his mouth. It seemed okay, even though it was strangely soft and chewable. The thought that they had slightly gone bad didn’t much faze him. He figured it would take a long time for mass-produced cookies like this to go bad enough to make you sick. They sat on store shelves for weeks and weeks, presumably.

  God bless preservatives.

  There was little else of interest in the office. A smartcard that appeared to have melted. A miniature vial of champagne in the desk drawer. He opened the latter and downed it in one big gulp. With the taste of pure liquor warming his throat, he took the crowbar in one hand and the box of cookies in the other and walked back outside.

  The usual twilight-like colour of the sky had darkened since he went in the gas station. By the time he reached the car large raindrops were falling from the dark clouds. Daniel was asleep in the passenger seat and Jess felt calmed by the drink, happy knowing that he at least had something to fill his belly with for the moment. He decided he too would sleep and explore the rest of the town when the sun came up.

  When he awoke, his driver’s seat was as reclined as it would go. Daniel slept in the seat beside him. Something was tapping on the roof above. Tiny crumbs of half-eaten cookies littered the front of his shirt. He grabbed the crowbar and stepped outside, quickly turning around in case anything was on the roof. As if they were frozen or coated with something heavy, leaves were falling like bombs from nearby trees. When they hit the van it sounded more like hail than a leaf.

  The sky had again turned grey and along with the downpour of leaves were more flakes of dirty ash that had covered the car’s windshield. From the inside, it looked like frost had covered the entire exterior of the car.

  It appeared to be early morning, although it was difficult to tell. The skies were still sullied with hovering ashes. Nearly everything was varying shades of grey. The ground, the trees, even the distant buildings were speckled with black and grey and other hues in-between.

  Daniel’s face had begun to sprout round white zits.

  “Hey kid, wake up,” Jess said.

  Daniel didn’t move, not even when Jess repeated himself, louder.

  Jess sat up in the driver’s seat and tried giving the boy’s shoulder a gentle shake. His head lulled to the side. Jess grabbed his hand and felt that it was ice-cold. It had been chilly in the car but not cold enough to freeze them solid.

  Jess grabbed him by the jacket and sat him up straight again then proceeded to smack him in the face several times.

  “Wake up! Daniel, snap out of it!”

  Finally, there was a barely perceptible shudder in the boy’s body. His arm twitched. His eyelids fluttered. After about a minute of these diminutive shudders, Daniel’s eyes opened. Jess couldn’t recall if the boy’s eyes were blue or brown or green yesterday but they certainly were not glazed over in white like they were now.

  The boy’s arms came up slowly and grabbed Jess’s jacket. Daniel tried to pull himself up but was acting like he was drunk. Jess knocked his arms away and backed out of the car, slipping in the ash. Daniel crawled out of the car head and hands first. He fell out, his chin colliding with the ground below him with an audible thud, yet his eyes betrayed everything: pain didn’t register.

  And then his mouth opened and Daniel moaned in such a familiar way that Jess could have cried if he weren’t so scared.

  Jess’s brain told him to run. Just turn and leave and don’t look back, but he had made the boy a promise.

  He walked to the back of the van and retrieved the crowbar.

  Chapter 15

  Although there were several dozen businesses in this area of town, none of them looked particularly inviting.

  Jess had no alternative but to search them all, at least until he found what he needed so that he could continue.

  The next structure he came to was a dilapidated store operating out of the first floor of a traditional 1950s-style house, but no more rundown-looking than the gas station. He was clearly making his way through an old part of town whose inhabitants didn’t have a lot of money to waste on aesthetic things like paint and decoration. The place was nestled between an area so entrenched in buildings of a certain style that each had about a foot or two at most between it and its neighbour.

  The roof of the one he eyed was dark brown – seen only in small spots since it was also covered in fallen ash – and the once white wooden planks that covered the outer walls were both peeling and filthy. The closer he got to it, the worse it looked. A nearby tree had branches that hung down like protective arms. Every opening into the dwelling – windows, doors and what may as well have been unnatural holes – were black with mysterious interiors.

  The front of the house was simply designed. The porch was non-existent, at least when compared to houses of the day. It had an open walkway that was abnormally wide, without anywhere to sit or rest. The porch had an overhanging rooftop that was divided in half by a single wooden pole that presumably kept it from falling down on visitor’s heads. Like so many other shops in the area, there was no bright neon sign like you might expect to find elsewhere. These were business signs that had been inviting customers in for decades and decades.

  A lone sign was strung underneath the overhang. The letters were bright yellow. The wave-like oval rings of the wood underneath seemed to be bleeding through the coat of paint. Sam’s Supplies had apparently spent a good number of years meeting the needs of the neighbourhood.

  The first floor was like an ancient pharmacy or convenience store; a discarded museum of general-use drugs and household supplies. He was able to grab a still sealed bottle of Tylenol and a small working LED flashlight. The shelves were in disarray and there was little else of any use. Sofas in the back appeared to be ancient and were apparently there to allow customers to wait in comfort for their orders to be readied. They were covered with a fine layer of dust. Bizarre props aligned on the service counter all seemed to have eyes that stared out at you through an unnerving alien sentience. One such ornament was a metal butler in a tuxedo with a few medicine bottles on a carrying tray who swung precariously from side-to-side, if you gave him a little nudge. Jess did so with the gentle push of a finger and watched as the cut-out see-sawed back and forth on an invisible pendulum.

  The upper landing of the building was in even worse shape. The ceiling was peeling, perhaps from the moisture of the ash on the outer ledges of the rooftop or from the greenhouse-like moisture vacuumed inside the husk of the house. There was a large, lone room up here, perhaps at one time used as a storage area. All that remained now were two large wall portraits. One was a torn poster from an old science fiction movie release and the other was an old painting of a man in a suit. Jess knew it was old because there wasn’t a speck of colour in the photo – just black and white and faded beiges. Every wall had the decaying wallpaper of times gone by hanging by frayed edges. It was clear that there was an old fire that had burned in the center of the room at one time. Bits of ash and paper cascaded outwards from
the center as though it had exploded in one last blast.

  There was a door in a tiny kitchen at the back of the building that led down one more flight of stairs. Jess aimed his flashlight down the entrance way but the beam of light seemed swallowed up in the darkness below. Each step down receded into increasing levels of darkness. There was nothing to be seen but wooden planks leading down into a pit of unknown.

  Jess tried to talk himself out of going down. He could move on to the next building, where perhaps the chance of finding something that would help him rendezvous with his family was greater. There was also the chance that he would be going down into the dark cave of something vicious or defensive. There was something about the fact that the light got swallowed up into nothing that made him feel like he should close the door and turn around.

  The only thing that made him doubt his natural inclination to turn and run was that his children were out there somewhere, perhaps not too far ahead, in a spot that was perhaps attainable from his current location. If they weren’t at the apartment, he would need fuel and supplies to venture any further. Though Jess angered at the thought of a God having a place in this desolate world, he still quietly prayed for the safekeeping of his children.

  When both his sons were born, he would buy a bubble bath concoction for babies that perfumed their skin like lavender and chamomile and he continued to use it long after they stopped being babies.

  Jess was surprised to find that one of the things he missed most as a result of the separation from his family was their smell. He was sure it must have been a Wednesday or Thursday when the apocalypse happened. A mere two days from his weekend rendezvous with his sons. He had always looked forward to midday grilled cheese sandwiches on sour dough bread and a couple old Twilight Zone episodes courtesy the legendary Rod Serling. Up until a few years ago, one of them would lean up against him as they watched a movie. Michael distanced himself from leaning in too close to family first, being that he was the eldest child. Dustin had only recently shown signs of needing his own independence but the boy slept like the dead, even in the middle of movies and Jess would pull him in close and sniff his hair as he slept. It allowed him to remember when he was just a babe and could be cradled in the crook of his arm.