“Hell yeah, I ride for mine, I die for mine!”
He swings around the corner. Before he even sets his foot down, I’m lacing him with bullets and Tasia is doing the same. His body convulses as he absorbs the rounds and falls backwards against the wall, dead.
“What about you, last man standing, you ready to ride and die for yours?” My confidence is soaring. And I don’t mean confidence in a cocky sort of way. I mean confidence in my ability to protect my wife and daughter, my confidence in my ability to stare down adversity and to survive.
There’s the sound of heavy breathing. The metallic sound of a magazine being unloaded and loaded. The sound of a round being chambered.
“Aight…aight, I’m coming out. Don’t shoot me, bruh, you win, aight, goddamn, you win.” He tosses the machine gun into the hall and then comes around the corner with his hands raised.
I don’t recognize him, but with their gold embroidered shirts, their grills, and the constant sneers they wear on their faces, I could never really tell them apart anyway. I stand, holding him in my sights. “Tasia, get Alisa, tell her to keep her eyes closed till ya’ll get to the stairs, I don’t want her seeing all this mess.”
There’s a thick silence that develops between me and the grimacing gangster. Maybe it’s the sight of his dead homeboys or the fact that he’s been out gunned by a man twice his age, but his reverence quickly turns into rebellion. “You gonna pull that muthafuckin trigger, old man? You gonna smoke me?”
Tasia goes slinking by me, guiding Alisa by one hand.
“Oh, you better pull it, ya hear? I got somethin’ for your ass. I got something for her ass too.” He thrusts his crotch towards Tasia as she rounds the corner towards the stairwell.
“You sure you want to disrespect my wife while I’m holding a gun on you?”
“Man, you ain’t gonna do shit. You can’t protect a dime piece like that. You wait; I’m comin’ for your ass, old timer. And then I’m gonna be comin’ on her ass.”
There are certain things we do and we’re not quite sure why we do them. Our body just reacts to some invisible signal from our brain. And as hard as we might try, we’re never able to trace it. All we know is that something happened and we reacted. That’s how it is as I pull the trigger. I feel disconnected. I don’t notice any spike in anger. My finger simply compresses that little bit of curved metal, as if acting outside my will.
The gangster makes a sound as if he’s been punched and the wind has been taken out of him. His eyes go wide with surprise. His hands come to the center of his chest, trying to plug the massive leak that has just erupted there. He crumples to his butt, teeth chattering as he goes into shock.
I stand above him and watch him die.
Me and mine, we will survive, no matter what.
8
I stop on the ninth-floor landing, but Tasia keeps on going.
“Babe, hold up!”
She halts, jerking Alisa back. “What?”
I point the barrel of my rifle towards the door. “My mom, we can’t leave without her.”
She huffs anxiously, looking to the railing. For a moment, it looks like she’s going to ignore me altogether and just keep on going. “Don’t you think your mom would have tried to get out?”
“We won’t know for sure unless we check.”
“Markus, listen, you can’t protect everyone. If she stayed behind…well…I’m not sure there’s much we can do for her. We’ve got to get Alisa out of here.”
“Did you forget about all the guys waiting outside with guns? We aren’t just running out the front door. This will give us more time to come up with a plan.”
“You really want to put our daughter in additional danger?”
“Every step we take in this building is additional danger!”
“Guys!” Alisa let’s go of Tasia’s hand and steps between us. “Stop fighting. I want to go and check on Grandma.”
“Fine,” Tasia is exasperated, “let’s go check on Grandma.”
***
There aren’t many sick ones in the hall. I put down one and Tasia puts down another, but everyone else seems to be either dead or gone. I still stand by the theory that they’re following the food source down, chasing after the survivors.
The door to my mom’s apartment is wide open. Her television, like so many others, is still blaring away. I find her on the floor. Her throat is all ripped open and there’s a butcher’s knife sticking out of her eye socket. I can tell by her skin that she’d turned. I suppose the knife was self defense, probably from one of her neighbor friends; it wasn’t all that uncommon for her to have company over to watch the evening news with.
I don’t cry.
I’m not some callous bastard, I can promise you that. I loved my mom dearly. I don’t really know what it is, to be honest. There’s just so much horrific input flooding me from every angle. I haven’t had the time to process any of it. I’m sure when all of this is over and I get some time alone that I’ll do my mourning. But right now, with everything that’s on the line, its better that I just keep it together and keep us moving.
“Grandma!” Alisa hunches over at the waist, her hands flying over her mouth in shock.
“Don’t look at that, sweetheart.” I pull her to me and hand her off to Tasia. I pull the blanket from the back of the couch and drape it across my mom’s body.
“Babe,” Tasia says softly, “we really need to get moving.” She’s handling me with kid gloves.
“Yeah, be right there.”
***
“So, what next?” Tasia asks once we’re back in the hall.
It’s a question that has me stumped as well. “We’re screwed both ways.”
“Well, we can’t just sit in here and wait to die; didn’t they say an airstrike is on the way?”
Alisa looks up at us, her eyes squinted. “What’s an airstrike?”
Tasia just pats her head, waiting for my response.
“If there is an airstrike, the shooters outside are gonna want to move back before it gets here, they’re not gonna want to be in the blast radius. That should give us some room to move.”
“But they’ll have the roads blocked off.”
I close my eyes, trying to maintain composure. I love Tasia, but sometimes she can be overwhelming. I like to take things one step at a time, checking off the boxes as I go. Tasia likes to pile on the problems and then sort through the mess. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. What we really need to do is hook up with some more people and figure out something; the more of us working together, the better.”
***
We’re making some ground now, winding our way down the stairs, watching the numbers tick away with each new landing.
8
7
6
I’m a few steps away from the fifth-floor landing when the wall in front of me explodes. The concussion takes me off of my feet and throws me back up the stairs right into Tasia and Alisa, knocking them over like bowling pins. The building shakes as the two flights of stairs below us disintegrate along with the wall in front of us and to our left.
I’m coughing the debris from my lungs and bridging a hand over my eyes, trying to see through the sunlit dust cloud hanging in the air as the noise from outside floods through the newly created gap in the building.
Gunshots.
Men shouting orders.
People screaming for their lives.
I’m back on my feet as the dust cloud clears. We move backwards, making our way up to the sixth-floor landing, keeping our eyes focused on the hole, dangerously curious about what’s on the other side.
It’s a battlefield. There’s a line of soldiers moving in time with a tank, going right up the middle of the street in front of the building. They are rolling over and marching past a mass of fallen bodies, wading through pools of blood. I’m assuming the tank is responsible for the facelift my building just received; perhaps it was a misplaced shot. Or perhaps they just felt
like blowing some shit up.
A chorus of shouts fills the air. I can see them, a sea of black faces coming up the opposite end of the street, going right for the armed soldiers. I can’t help but think the crowd is made up of my friends and neighbors, folks I came up with. I can’t tell if they’re sick. They don’t seem to be. They’re moving fast and steady. Not like the sick ones I’ve seen. Some of them have their fists raised up in the air. I can hear a few of them chanting, “We will not be silenced! We will not be chained!”
One of the soldiers raises a microphone attached to a loudspeaker. “Go back to your homes! For your safety, and the safety of your neighbors, you’re being ordered back to your homes! Failure to comply will be met with lethal force!”
“We will not be silenced! We will not be chained! We will not be silenced! We will not be chained!”
“This ain’t gonna be good.” I crouch down, white knuckling the railing, watching the scene unfold between the bars.
“What are they thinking?” Tasia crouches beside me.
“They’re desperate, they’re not thinking. Maybe they don’t want to die caged up in these boxes. Maybe they want to go out on their own terms.”
Tasia shakes her head. “That ain’t gonna be us, Markus.”
“Damn right it ain’t.”
“Open fire!” the soldier with the loudspeaker orders.
Tasia covers Alisa and closes her eyes.
I watch.
Bodies falling. Clouds of pink mist erupting.
“Cease fire!”
The soldiers fan their weapons back and forth, looking for movement. Slowly, they begin to move forward again, the tank taking up the center, squishing and kneading the bodies in its path with its rumbling treads. Some of the soldiers pause to shoot anything still twitching.
“We gotta move.” I lift Tasia and Alisa, their knees shaky, and move them towards the door to the sixth-floor hallway.
Once inside, I move ahead, sweeping the area with the barrel of my AK.
Nothing moving.
“What now?” Tasia asks. “The stairs are destroyed. Elevator is down. What the hell are we gonna do now?”
She’s starting to unravel.
Hell, we all are, she’s just letting it leak through.
“They only took out two floors; most of the staircase is still in one piece.”
“Oh, that’s great, we can just jump down to the third floor and hope we don’t break our goddamn legs.”
“Tasia, really?”
“What?” Tasia looks down at Alisa. “Everything she’s seen today and you’re worried about my language?”
“Alright, whatever, we ain’t got the time to quarrel. I’ve got an idea to get us down where we need to be.”
I turn right into the hall. There’s no resistance to be found. My target is straight ahead of me, carved out by the sunlight; the window. Tasia doesn’t know what I’m thinking and I don’t figure on telling her just yet. It’s going to be hard enough getting her to agree to my crazy-ass plan and getting her in place is half the battle; I’ll take the easy victories where I can get them at this point.
“You want to tell me what you’re thinking?” she asks.
“Just stay close. Clear left and I’ll clear right. Let’s make sure we’re alone before we do any more talking.”
There are doors that have been left ajar and there are bodies on the floor, there are televisions and radios filling the air with muffled noise. Nothing stirring. I take a knee by the window and wait another minute just to be sure.
“Seems quiet,” Tasia says.
“Seems that way.” I raise my head above the window sill. Three feet in front of me is the brick wall of the neighboring apartment high rise. Seventy feet below me is the floor of the alley that separates the two buildings. Directly above my head is the pipe for the sprinkler system. “We need a sheet.”
“For what?”
I look down into the alley again.
Tasia catches on. “You’re outta your damn mind!”
“You got a better idea?”
“Then jumping out of a window? I’m sure I can come up with something.”
“It’s not jumping out of a window. The staircase is out. There’s no other way down.”
Tasia sets the stock of her AK on the ground, cocks a hip, and waves her finger in my face. “I’d rather sit here and chance an air strike then send Alisa out there!”
“Would you? Would you, really? Cause guess what, if they are sending an air strike, we’re dead, all three of us. At least this way we have a chance.”
“What’s an air strike?” Alisa’s curiosity refuses to die.
I squeeze her shoulder. “It’s nothing good, sweetie. But you don’t need to worry about that.”
“There’s got to be a better way.” Tasia’s eyes are welling up. She’s feeling the press of desperation.
“If there is, we don’t have time to think of it. We’ve got to move.”
“Okay,” Tasia sucks a deep breath in through her nose and exhales through her mouth, fighting off the encroaching tears, “you’re right. Let’s do it.”
I double check the doors to my left and right, both are open. “We need two sheets. We’ll link them together, tie one end around that pipe, and climb down.”
“Let’s get as many as we can and get down to the ground.”
I shake my head. “Too many moving pieces; I don’t want one of them coming loose on us. Plus, I don’t think she can hold on that long.”
“I can too!” Alisa protests.
“You stay here with her. I’ll get what we need.”
Tasia nods. “Hurry back.”
“Holler if you need me.”
I choose the door on the right. No particular reason except that I’m a few steps closer.
These apartments are cardboard cutouts. The layouts are always the same: cheap carpet that sheds like an old cat, flimsy kitchens with broken appliances and peeling tile, faulty light fixtures, and cramped bedrooms; just enough to keep our stomachs from rumbling, just the scraps, nothing more.
Things have been moved around and thrown aside. The couch has been toppled over. There’s no blood. Could have been a struggle. Could have been a desperate dash towards freedom. The cabinets in the kitchen are thrown open, the shelves are bare. Lucky for me, when I get back to the master bedroom, the sheet is still intact. It’s the same story in the kid’s room as well.
I return to Tasia, my bounty in hand.
“Do you even know how to tie a knot?” There’s a condescending flavor to her voice.
I am sitting on the ground, legs crossed. My daughter is crouched next to me, watching with curiosity as I attempt to link the sheets together. “Everyone knows how to tie a knot, Tasia.”
“This isn’t just some knot, this is a lifeline. Your daughter is about to climb down that thing.”
“Well aware of that, sweetie, well aware.” I’ve always had rather clumsy hands, go figure. Not a good thing when you’re a mechanic. Despite all the years I’ve put in under the grease-stained hoods of the rust buckets of the inner city, my hands still get torn up on a daily basis. My palms are too fat, my fingers are too short. But I’ve always gotten the job done and I’ve always gotten on well with my boss and because of that I’ve been able to keep the paychecks rolling in, meager as they may be.
“Just give it here.” Tasia yanks the sheets out of my hands and reverses what little progress I’ve made. She shakes them out and begins again, looping them over and around each other with such grace and speed that my eyes lose track of what is where. She gives a final pull. “There we go,” she says with a satisfied nod of her head.
I can’t hate. It’s a damn fine knot. “Well, alright then. Looks good.”
“I know.” She tilts her head towards the pipe. “Lift me up.”
I set my AK beside hers, crouch down, and hug her around the thighs. “Look out, baby. Don’t get kicked.”
Alisa shuffles out of the way.
/>
Tasia feels damn near weightless compared to the tools and parts I’m used to hauling around all day. I lift her in one swift motion and hold her in place without breaking a sweat. She has the sheet secured in seconds and gives me a pat on the head to let me know she’s finished.
I make my way back to the window and press my face against the glass, trying to see if there’s anyone in the streets to witness our attempted escape. I can’t really see, but no one has shot at me yet, so I take that as a good sign, an omen that we should keep moving forward.
The wooden window frame shivers beneath my grasp as I force it up, kicking years of dirt and rot away in the process, it groans, it stutters and stops, but it moves. Eventually, the opening is big enough for me to squeeze through. “I’m going first.” I pick up my rifle and prepare to step backwards out of the window.
“You sure?” My wife grabs the sheet.
“If it can hold me then I know it’ll be able to hold ya’ll. Besides, I want to make sure everything is clear.”
She nods and lets go of the sheet, giving me a peck on the lips. “Be careful.”
“Always am.”
Alisa wraps her arms around my right leg. “Be careful, Daddy.”
“I will be just fine, sweetie. I need you to keep an eye on Mommy, okay?”
She steps back and holds up the hatchet, giving a determined nod. “I will.”
“I love you girls.”
I throw the sheet from the window and then dip my head out to follow its descent. It’s barely long enough, dangling midway down the third-floor. I step backwards, my right foot now hanging above the alley. I’m clutching the sheet and the stock of my AK with both hands. “Here goes nothing.”
“Oh my God, oh my God! Lord Jesus, help him!” Tasia’s eyes are like a pair of dinner plates.
Alisa just stares, fascinated, excited, a smile threatening to break at the corners of her mouth. Maybe she doesn’t quite understand that my life is literally hanging by a couple of cheap-ass threads and an old water pipe. Maybe she’s just got a lot of faith in her old man. I’m just glad she’s not freaking out.
Tower of the Dead: A Zombie Novel Page 6
