by Bryan James
He couldn’t move.
He wanted to help, but he couldn’t.
Then he realized why.
He wasn’t that guy. Never had been.
He was the wrong guy to go into a dark basement with. He wasn’t up to the task. He cared about one person: himself.
Even amid the scuffling attack, which had now lessened from a wrestling match to what sounded like a scraping or even a muffled humming, he realized he was numb from the shock of what he had seen. But he managed to back up slowly, eyes drawn to the faint line of red light shooting through the slightly opened door. Even in his fear and bemused confusion, he was careful not to place his body between the light and the scene in front of him, careful not to make himself a target.
Antonio had been foolish. He had been too sure of himself, too willing to work for the solution with too little information.
But you couldn’t find the solution without knowing the cause.
And now he had found the cause. Or rather, the cause had found him.
In the darkness, Tiny moved.
Or maybe Antonio, although Louis doubted that.
A sound like someone sloshing through spilled paint or a puddle of water cut through the silence, and the movement of feet came toward him.
He turned, finally, and ran forward, nearly tripping as he reached ahead and pulled the door back as quickly as he could, sprinting through the opening and up the stairs. His breath came in short bursts, his chest thumping in near panic.
Suddenly, he skidded to a halt.
The door.
The deadbolt was thrown, keeping it propped open. Tiny had been trapped in there for some reason, maybe not knowing where the door was, maybe not knowing how to open it. But Louis and Antonio had fixed both of those problems.
He stood on the landing between the basement and the first floor, noticing for the first time the very faint sprinkling of dark liquid near the far side of the stairs, leading up from the basement past the landing.
Blood.
Tiny wasn’t alone.
Louis was frozen, panic overtaking his urge to flee.
There were more of these … people. Someone had found that note in guard booth. Someone had come down here.
And someone had bled for the effort.
Louis held his breath as the door moved slightly, as if something heavy had fallen against it. The door opened into the basement, so perhaps the thing inside couldn’t figure out how to pull it. Maybe it was still trapped.
A rasping sigh, wet with fluid and loud in the echoing space, ripped through the silence of the stairwell. Above Louis’ head, the final red emergency light flickered once, plunging the stairwell into a flood of darkness before reigniting in a sputtering staccato. His head whipped around furiously until the light came back, and his eyes flashed back to the basement as a gentle creak of metal against metal sounded in the confined space. Below him, the door swung open, swinging back slowly, like a mouth savoring the first bite, darkness inside the basement hiding the beast within.
He fled. Feet furiously pounding against the cement and steel stairwell, heart racing. His mind was a scattering of images and sounds.
A head frozen in time above the shoulder of Antonio. Antonio’s triumphant smile as his flashlight illuminated the threat unseen behind him. The blood and the tearing.
His own cowardice.
He blinked back a single tear as he flew into the doorway to the first floor, yanking back the heavy metal and flying through the doorway.
He leaned back against the door, hearing the metal click satisfyingly into the frame, and gulping air into his lungs.
That’s when he heard the screaming.
***
It was stunning how quickly society seemed to disappear.
Under throngs of teeming, bloody bodies, amid fires and screams and the popping of gunfire and explosions, the world seemed to ignite.
On a normal day, in a normal world, it is easy to lose sight of how tenuous everything really is. It has been said that any society is merely a few missed meals from revolution.
What about when the society is the meal?
When the power goes out and men with guns are no longer a phone call away, to whom do you trust your security?
Social norms and societal security are constructs of a larger truth: that people live within the rules and operating instructions of other people, out of a knowing sense of vested self interest.
But the system in which society exists is not natural, and it is far from infallible. In fact, it can fall within just twelve hours.
And it did.
The world lost many people on that day. But it lost many other things as well.
Hot showers and hot meals.
Cold beer and iced tea.
Roads, bridges, telephones.
Police.
Fire departments.
Airplanes.
Safety.
Hope.
When that curtain of illusory safety is pulled back by throngs of the living dead, the world becomes a much more serious place. A place inhabited by the walking dead, where the the living are an endangered species.
***
Bridget started to worry when the emergency lights began to flicker out, one by one, on the bottom floor. She checked her watch, noting absently that it was nearing dawn. Her fingers were sticky with blood and she drew several more tissues from a generic brand box on someone’s desk.
Behind her, Beverly had stopped crying, and now drew ragged, pained breaths. The small crowd was silent, sitting in a ragged ring around the injured woman, eyes darting nervously around the cavernous space, ears perked for any sign of movement or disturbance.
Ty lay down on his desk, eyes staring into the distance, shaking slightly.
Bridget had tried to ask him what he was doing upstairs, why he had come up to join them. But one look at Beverly had sent him into his current state, and none of the others had any idea. They hadn’t noticed him leave, as they huddled anxiously in the cubicles, waiting for news or salvation.
Someone’s breath caught loudly as another light flickered and died, plunging the entire northeast corner of the building into darkness. Bridget cursed under her breath and stopped scrubbing her hands ineffectually. The blood had caked into the small grooves in her skin, and underneath her fingernails, and she knew it was a losing battle. But she’d be damned if she was going to risk the bathrooms.
“Should we go check on them,” asked a quavering woman’s voice from a cubicle near the end, referring to Antonio and Louis.
A quiet guffaw cut through the oppressive silence, one of the men who had gone to the front door earlier. Someone else spoke sharply, the words indeterminate, and the man fell silent.
No one answered the question.
Bridget looked at Cam, whose skinny form was the only one caring for Beverly as she lay on the floor between two cubes, skin pallid and cold, breath shivering and shaking her frame. Her eyes were staring into the distance of the cavernous ceiling and Bridget swallowed a sigh.
To die in this building. There couldn’t be a fate much worse than that in life.
From across the vast empty floor, the sudden sound of something falling heavily against the ground near the stairwell split the silence, and Bridget heard several loud gasps. Bodies moved behind her in nervous agitation, even as a loud, droning sigh breathed out from Beverly.
It had been her last.
Cam reached down to check her pulse, as two of the men from customer relations moved tentatively toward the noise, stopping merely feet away from the group. The lights were failing fast, and as another sound filtered through the echoing space—this one from closer to the group, near the main entrance—another red light died.
The space was nearly completely dark, now, with only three lights remaining. Two were on the wall nearest the stairwell to the basement, while the last remaining light glared like a single red eye, staring at the huddled employees from above the main entrance.
“Do you see anything?” Cam said softly from behind her.
“Is she alive?” Bridget said quietly, eyes staying locked forward, searching for the noise.
He waited several seconds before answering.
“No.”
Bridget nodded, unsure of how to deal with the death. Unconsciously, she began scrubbing her hands again before sticking them firmly into her pockets. She wondered whether she’d ever get to wash her clothes again. Surely, the blood would remain.
“We should move the body, we don’t know if she …”
The rest of her sentence was drowned out by the loud clanging of a slammed door, and a body flew out from the basement doors, pressing itself against the door as it shut again.
Almost simultaneously, her ears rang with a scream of pain as Cam erupted in a blood-curdling yell. She flew from the desk top and away from his scream of pain, staring at the site of Beverly’s pale face latched on to Cam’s cheek. Even as he screamed and pummeled her with his fists, the skin of his face peeled slowly away from his jaw, and Bridget felt bile slam into the back of her teeth as his teeth showed through the jagged tear.
From across the room, someone yelled loudly, their voice a frantic plea for help.
And that’s when things got interesting.
Unknown to the people inside the large, windowless building, the power in the building had been cut after a large tractor trailer, traveling at nearly ninety miles per hour at the time of the impact, had sheered a power coupling in half four blocks away. The resulting impact severed the power feed to the building, and the large grid within which the building was situated.
However, the massive hospital one block away was a priority for the local government. In an admirable feat of governmental responsiveness, utility crews were dispatched—even during the initial confusing hours of the outbreak—to bring the hospital, and the rest of its grid, back online. Those crews had worked diligently, suspended high above the city streets in several different vehicles, to restore power and give the doctors and nurses of Harbor Island General the ability to help as many people as they could.
Tragically, these brave workers—many of who would ultimately perish from thirst or starvation suspended above the city streets—worked long after the results of their labor were in vain.
Harbor Island General was overrun merely two hours into the epidemic.
But the power was restored four hours later.
Precisely at the time that Beverly heard Cam scream.
Precisely at the time that Louis appeared from the basement below.
As the last two red emergency lights began to wane, and as Louis called across the cavernous space, the fluorescent lights far above the heads of the assembled night shift began to flicker. Simultaneously, five hundred computer hard drives began to hum within their housings, and five hundred monitors showed the static, monochromatic emblem of the installed operating systems. Bathroom lights illuminated empty stalls. Air conditioning systems began to spool up. A radio that had been playing softly on someone’s desk before the outage hissed its static rage. A clock on the wall far above their heads illuminated large red numbers.
And the outer doors, manually armed on a separate circuit but hardwired to reset when power had been restored, clicked softly in their housings. Steel beams retracted from the heavy frames and a horn blasted once, from inside the building. Outside the building, massive external floodlights—also programmed to automatically illuminate the entrances to the large building—shone on hundreds of assembled bodies, churning against the doors, and each other.
Inside the building, near the bottom of the large flight of stairs leading to the second floor, the man who used to be Rajesh pushed his broken, bloody frame up slowly from the dirty carpet. His dead eyes moved slowly in their sockets, and he fumbled to right himself on an awkwardly angled leg.
Had Rajesh been alive, he would have screamed in dire agony, as the shattered leg crunched with the effort. Shards of bone scraped against the carpet, catching in the weave as he slid forward on his two hands and one leg, bent over himself as if stooped with great age.
He didn’t know pain.
But he knew hunger.
Across the room, shouts drew his attention briefly. His nose sniffed at the air, and his ears rang with the sound of the screams. But he was motivated by immediacy, and the sounds that drew him now were those funneling through the doors so close at hand.
Had Rajesh been alive, his eyes would have read the words above the doors.
Exit.
He slid forward slowly, singular of purpose.
Had Rajesh been alive, he would have appreciated the simplicity of the locking mechanism.
He leaned forward, his crippled body weight pressing the bar of metal back into the door, and releasing the final latch from inside the building. The door opened slightly, a blast of putrid air wafting inside.
Rajesh stopped, knowing that no food called from this direction. He turned, moving toward the screams.
And as fingers found the space between the door and the wall and pulled the heavy door outward, his people followed along with him, the bright lights within the building now guiding their way.
***
They were motivated by food. That was what drove them forward. It is what moved their stiffened limbs and bloodless faces and forced their jaws together reflexively, in spasms of hunger and desire.
Although they couldn’t see as well as the living, their other senses appeared to be unaffected by the infection, and their hearing seemed to have improved—possibly as an effect of their ear canals becoming more rigid in death.
They moved slowly, but they were unrelenting and implacable.
They were not deterred by exhaustion or fear. They could not be reasoned with, and they could not be deterred.
***
Louis blinked in the brightness, eyes flashing to the ground in pain before adjusting to the new-found illumination. A relieved breath caught in his chest as he briefly allowed himself the joy of hope; the satisfaction of a brief certitude that life had not irrevocably changed.
Behind him, fists hammered on the door, and he yelled in surprise, falling forward and catching himself. He ran, making toward the assembled group he could now see milling head and shoulders above the cubicles.
As he dodged chairs and desks running toward his colleagues, he noticed the disarray. Two men were struggling with a third person while the rest huddled around something on the floor. As he approached, and cleared the last obstacle, his words of warning froze in his mouth.
They were here, too.
Beverly thrashed on the floor, bloody teeth gnashing in vain as she tried to escape from the power cords tied tightly around her hands and feet. The two men stood up slowly and backed away, eyes wide.
In the cubicle next to her, Cam’s eyes were wide open, and staring at the ceiling, his mouth torn open from the cheek and face covered in blood and spittle. A large, motherly woman cradled his head in her lap as a widening pool of blood stained the carpet beneath her.
Bridget’s hand grabbed his arm in a vise-like grip, and his eyes snapped back to her face, dirty and smudged, as if someone had painted dark red war paint underneath her eyes. Eyes that had been staring toward the front of the building, watching what no one else had yet seen.
“What did you do?” she asked quietly, even as the others began to yell. Feet churned against the carpet as the assembled workers began to run through the narrow corridors.
“I … we couldn’t …”
There was no answer. None that he could give.
None that he could give, and remain a man.
Then, he saw what she was looking at and realized why she had asked the question.
And he too, began to run.
He heard her follow, as they both passed the bodies of Cam and Beverly, weaving between the cubes and into the straight pathway to the rear of the building. There were four stairwells, one on each side of the building. One led to the base
ment, while the other three only went up. But within each stairwell was an emergency exit door, leading to the outside.
Behind them, hundreds of people crowded into the large building through the single open door. Hundreds of people who had been drawn by the crowd—a crowd that had begun to form when a single cellular phone made a single ring inside a darkened building. A crowd that, for the most part, had filtered out of the opened, shattered and bloody doors of Harbor Island General Hospital next door.
It was a crowd that hadn’t existed several hours ago—a crowd that used to be people but were now mindless and desperate. A crowd that was always hungry.
Bridget and Louis sprinted, their thin legs and bodies unused to physical exertion growing weary before they reached the opposite side of the building. In front of them, Ty had reached the stairwell door and slammed it open, several women close behind him. He flew to the exterior door and slammed his shoulder against the thick metal, his hip pressing the latch and unlocking the mechanism.
Louis reached the stairwell door first, and between gasps for air watched as Ty pushed the door hard, meeting resistance from the other side. Too late, he croaked a weak “Stop!”
From outside the door, several hands lashed into the open space, pulling the young man through the gap and into the dawn beyond. Off balance and plunging forward, he could scream only once as he was pulled forward, headlong into a waiting crowd outside. Bridget screamed as she reached the doorway, watching as more flooded to the opening, quickly overtaking the large, motherly woman whose dress was still stained with Cam’s blood, and dragging her to the ground. Ty’s garbled and wet screams tore through the air, and the sounds of moans outside echoed in the stairwell. A single, detached hand flew against the door and fell sloppily to the cement floor as Louis backed out of the doorway.
Creatures stumbled on the two bodies, and the clusters of people around them, falling in clumsy heaps near the open door. Louis and Bridget scrambled back, heads whipping around, looking for the last stairwell.
It was across the building, but the crowd from the front was still filtering through the cubes toward where they stood now.
