by Bryan James
They didn’t speak.
They didn’t have to.
As one, they tore across the carpet, exhaustion and breathlessness forgotten, adrenaline pumping through their veins.
Their feet slammed against the cheap flooring.
Their breathing echoed against the incessant walls of plastic and tin.
Behind them, the crowd streaming in from the front doors had split. Nearly half of the creatures had followed the rest of the group to the other side of the building. Against the far wall, a small man named Joe, whose wife was expecting their fourth child, and who had been laid off from his job as an attorney merely weeks before and had gotten this job to pay the mounting medical bills, opened the door Louis had slammed behind him minutes ago. He was pulled into the stairwell, where Tiny waited with a large new friend, flaps of skin hanging uselessly from his large frame. The man who had been Antonio reached hungrily forward.
In the shadow of Robert’s screams, amidst the moans and the guttural cacophony, Louis ran.
In a men’s bathroom near the main entrance, an older woman named Peggy huddled crouched upon a toilet sprinkled with urine. The smell of waterless urinals invaded her fortress as she whimpered slightly in fear. Peggy, whose husband had so recently retired and who had dreamed of traveling across the United States in an RV, and who had only days left until her own retirement, cried alone in an empty men’s room. She thought of her six month old grandchild, and of her small dogs.
She thought of her life before. And she wept.
Outside the unlocked bathroom door, several creatures, slowed by the mass of flesh at the doors, heard her soft whimpers.
She screamed once when the door to the bathroom opened.
As Peggy’s cries for help echoed in the brightly lit madhouse, Louis ran.
In front of Louis, tears streamed down Bridget’s pale cheeks, streaking what was left of her makeup and making trails through the crusted remnants of Beverly’s blood. She tripped once, but pulled herself up, crying as she heard the sound of footfalls on her left.
The remaining half of the herd of creatures was paralleling Louis and Bridget’s headlong flight, hemmed in by a wall of cubicles. Merely ten feet away in some places, their ruined faces and bloody arms tracked the two as they sprinted for their last hope, which was drawing inexorably closer.
Louis watched as at least five of them dragged down the last of the customer retention reps, who had tried to hide in a cubicle but had been discovered. Multiple bite wounds adorned her arms as she pinwheeled onto the floor, overtaken and overwhelmed. They fell on her like lions on a gazelle, and a fountain of blood—Louis assumed it to be from a severed artery—streaked into the air and against the flat screen monitor several feet away.
He wiped the bile from his mouth, pushing himself the last ten feet. Ahead of him, Bridget fell against the last door, merely twenty feet away from the first of the large group that were staggering forward through the line of cubes. The door blasted open and slammed against the wall of the empty stairwell, and Louis fell through, nearly catapulting himself over the railing as he flew into the relative safety of the hardened walls. He turned to the door, pushing it shut against the hydraulic arm, and cursing as it moved too slowly.
Bridget reached the external door and paused.
“How do we know …” she began, but he simply shook his head.
They didn’t know, but this was the last door. They had no way to see, to look outside and tell if Ty’s fate waited for them. No way to determine if safety existed.
“Fuck it,” she spat, slamming her hand against the lever and pushing the door outward.
It stopped only inches from the frame.
“Shut it, shut it!” he screamed, even as the first body hit the door to the stairwell behind him, fists and hands and feet and mouths and teeth grinding and slamming into the metal from the other side. The door slammed him in the back as Bridget managed to pull hers shut, neatly severing a single pinky finger that fell to the floor of the stairwell landing. She cursed and looked at him struggling against the tide of creatures behind him. Hands were snaking into the gap between the door and the frame, arms pushing through, then faces. Moans sliced into the empty stairwell.
“Up,” he said, gasping for breath, and then leaping forward, watching as her blue-haired form climbed the first set. He fell forward, gashing his hand on the cement floor and struggling up the first several steps.
Behind Louis, the door slammed open, several bodies falling through and a stench of foul body odor and the copper smell of blood filtering into his protesting nostrils.
He followed Bridget up the stairs and through the door to the second floor, listening to the innumerable footfalls behind him.
“What now?” he said, voice high and panicked. She was looking around anxiously, watching as several heads bobbed clumsily on the far side of the floor.
Shit. They were upstairs.
“Gotta be the skylight,” she said curtly, still short of breath. She didn’t pause, didn’t stop. She started to run toward the center of the building.
“Shit god dammit,” he said under his breath before following. Bodies slammed against the door behind him as he realized that this was it. If they couldn’t get through the only window in the building, the game was over. The building that had for so long crushed his soul, would now reave it from his body. He wanted to scream with the hopelessness of it all.
Bridget disappeared into the small room in the center of the floor, and as he stumbled in, watched her as she pulled the single table underneath the spot of daylight. She left the table and grabbed the fire extinguisher near the fridge, climbing to the table top and barely pausing before flinging the heavy metal tube toward the window pane.
Cheap glass shattered and she flung her hands to her face, showered by shards and small pieces of dirty window.
“You have to go first,” she said quickly, crouching down on the table, and looking over his shoulder at the opening stairwell door, head whipping to the side as the second smaller group started to shamble toward the room.
He was leaning over, gasping for breath and struggling for air. She punched him hard on the shoulder, and he stood up.
“What? Why?”
She grimaced and grabbed his arm, pulling him up after her.
“Because, fuck-tard, I don’t have enough strength to pull myself up or help you up. I can help boost you, and you can pull me up. Don’t argue, just get up there.” She webbed her two hands together and crouched down, signaling to him to step in her clasped hands.
Louis looked up, noting the distance and taking a breath. It wasn’t impossible, if she helped. If she pushed him up, he could probably do it.
He had never been an upper body strength kind of guy. He couldn’t even do ten pushups. Shit, he could barely hold himself up while making love to his girlfriend.
Not that that happened that often anymore.
“Louis! God damn it! We…are…going…to...die!” She screamed each word, emphasizing the last, and he looked over her shoulder. The creatures were barely fifteen feet away.
There were so many. So much blood.
Some carried pieces of other human bodies. Others bore gaping wounds where their limbs—or organs—had once been.
So much blood.
He stepped into her hands and he flew upward.
His hands grasped broken shards of glass and he screamed, but held on, blood running down his arms immediately. He cringed as he felt it run in rivulets into his armpits, following the contours of his upraised arms.
Below him, Bridget screamed and pushed, giving him the inertia he needed to do a single, life saving pull-up. He scrambled to the gravel surface of the roof, and turned around quickly, the small of tar and asphalt thick in his nose as he lay stomach down on the already warm black rooftop.
Below, Bridget’s blue hair flashed as she whipped her head around, facing a threat yet unseen from his vantage point and screaming. From directly below him, a he
ad lashed forward, teeth flashing and arms pulling. The creature took her leg out from under her and she tumbled to the table top. She thrashed, legs kicking and slamming into the face of a man in a bloody suit. Her foot connected with the jaw, and she stood quickly. He reached down, and she jumped, her hands grasping his wrists in an iron grip. A grip that was clearly informed by the fear of impending death.
The creature surged forward, even as three more staggered through the doorway, stumbling against one another in their urge to find their prey.
He started to pull her up, and she thrashed about, struggling to keep her legs from being grasped by the many hands below. She swung in his arms and he yelled, unable to make his arms pull the moving weight. He felt himself move forward slightly, as the faint incline of the roof began to betray him. Louis was slipping toward the opening.
Below him, Bridget screamed suddenly, her voice betraying an agony not contained to physical pain. He watched as the man in the suit bit into her captured calf, her pants affording no protection as he pulled the thick chunk of flesh from her bone, seeming to detach from the body in slow motion. Trailing streams of blood, the creature leaned its head back and saw Louis, opening his mouth as he did so and giving Louis a view of Bridget’s death knell.
Bridget had never known such pain. Never in her life had she imagined that she could be hurt like this. So primitively, so primal. She screamed in pain, and in fear. She watched Louis’ eyes change. She watched his face as his eyes pronounced her death sentence. She heard him whisper the last human words she would ever hear.
“I’m so sorry.”
His fingers released her forearms and she grasped for the last few seconds of life until the blood on his arms made her lose her grip.
Then, Bridget fell.
Louis turned his head away as they took her. He saw a flash of skin as her shirt was ripped from her torso, nearly twenty creatures crammed into the room as her stomach and breasts were exposed to the ravaging, hungry horde. Her shirt was shredded, and her pants lasted merely seconds longer. Hands darted in, broken nails and jagged teeth, shattered on unknown surfaces, tearing into her soft flesh.
He began to cry, even as she screamed.
Her agony lasted longer than the others. Whatever was done to her was done slowly, without death coming quickly, amongst at least twenty of the creatures. He eventually moved away from the skylight, toward the vast expanse of roof. He moved away from her pain and her death.
As he stared out over the suburban dawn, he watched absently as the slowly winding smoke of distant fires rose to the sky with the same consistency as his tears fell to the ground.
A blossom of flame spun into the air several blocks away, eventually adding to the countless fires burning fitfully in the distance.
Louis sat down heavily on the gravel roof, and for the first time, focused on the mass of humanity clustered below, swarming against the sides of the building. Hundreds streamed from the streets around the building to join their brethren in their hungry vigil. The smells of a new world greeted him with each change of the wind.
Smoke. Chemicals. Blood.
He even though that he could smell fear. Fear and desperation.
He wondered absently about his girlfriend, realizing now that he had never loved her.
But he was sad about the dog.
Fancy that.
Then, he began to laugh. As the sun rose on a ruined city—a city so quickly brought to its knees by uncontrollable circumstance and a collapse of the normal and routine—Louis laughed. The peals of mirth rolled down the cement walls of the bleak bank building.
The laughter filtered over the heads of hundreds of creatures, many of whom turned their heads to this sound of humanity.
To the sound of food.
And still he laughed, as if nothing else remained of the world—or in it.
As if it could fill the void of lost souls.
As if he were the only soul remaining, and his laughter would keep the darkness at bay.
***
As the sun rose on the new day, from Maine to California and from Washington to Florida, cities were burning, and people were dying. Some news stations were still broadcasting, and some roads still open. Some areas would even hold off for days before succumbing to the plague. But the major cities were falling fast, and no response was, or could be, effective.
Thousands of miles from Harbor Island, in a hospital in New York, an orderly was administering a heavy dose of sedative to a well-known patient. The dosage should have been enough to kill a normal man.
But it didn’t.
Days from when Louis emerged onto the roof of the large banking building, this man would awaken into a world that had drastically changed.
A world that was burning.
A world that had for eons belonged to man, but that now belonged to the dead.
###
Scroll down for more zombie goodness, and for a note from the author!
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A Note from the Author
We all wish that we would be the hero. The Antonio, not the Louis, right?
In a time when tragedy strikes or chaos takes over, we all imagine ourselves as standing up for what is right and doing what is necessary. It is a comforting thought, one that makes us snuggle up cozily in our sheets, and keeps us warm and fuzzy in our mental comfort zones. But is that realistic? I would argue that it isn’t.
Throughout history, massive populations of people—millions, not just hundreds—have been cowed into doing what was easy, not what was hard. They have been convinced that their mortality trumps their morality, and that survival beats conscience like rock beats scissors. And are they wrong? They have survived, and in many times and many places, those who stand up for what is right end up dying for it.
Because what is right to do—to be the hero, to sacrifice for others, to be the strongest and the selfless—is not, strictly speaking, a natural impulse. It couldn’t be, or else many of the worst atrocities in history couldn’t have occurred and there would be extortion or sweat shops or genocides. There would be only altruism.
And we all know that ain’t the case.
A friend recently pointed out to me that studies have been done where individuals lay moaning in apparent pain on the ground in high traffic, public places across the world, and out of thousands of people, only a handful stopped to investigate and to ask those people whether they were in trouble. Out of thousands.
I would put to you that this is a face of humanity.
So why go into this tangent? Well, I’m pretty sure that most folks are not going to be fans of Louis. And I get it. I wrote him that way for a reason.
Louis is a real guy. He’s the guy next to you at work, or the woman in the carpool with you. He’s the guy in the drive-through who’s so polite to the woman behind the window, and he’s the man who always gives a little more at church. He is the man or woman who is comfortable in society, and plays by the rules. He is, in reality, all of us. At least in the baser sense. He is our impulses and our primal being.
Now you’re saying to yourself, “Self, I think he just called us a spineless jackal! Are we going to take that?”
Calm down.
I think the real point is that some—not all, and not a majority, but some—of humanity have this hero-gene, or this savior-impulse, or whatever it is that motivates war heroes and our great leaders and our civil rights icons, and any number of others who, backs to the wall, make the hard choices.
To sacrifice for others and to be the person who does, not because it is easy, but because it is necessary. Not because it is natural, but because it is important.
Are you that person?
Am I?
We’ll probably never know. I would venture only one in a million people ever get to prove themselves in that way.
But here’s hoping that it stays that way. Because I for one am quite comfortable not knowing.
I hope you enjoyed the story and keep on stayin’ alive.
Bryan
