Degeneration

by Pardo, David

  "Are you sure it was a shot?" another one said.

  "Sure. And then I saw a light go out," the young guy who saw me from Justiniano's house seemed pretty sure of himself. "J.R., that house has the windows on the bottom floor covered. I'll bet you €100 that we find someone inside."

  "For God's sake, J.R.," said someone with a hoarse voice that appeared to be middle-aged. "Maybe your idiot nephew is right and there is someone in there, but I don't think they're going to go very far... and that little slut in the last place got me hard."

  I supposed the "little slut" he referred to was Elena, Justiniano's daughter, a very flirtatious and attractive girl despite her young age: she couldn't be more than eighteen years old. I then came to the conclusion that those perverts weren't people Justiniano knew and that they had broken into his house.

  "Boy," I heard the hoarse voice again, "you keep an eye here. Your uncle and I have a few things left to do in that hick's house. If you see movement, shoot to kill."

  I then heard footsteps and the slamming of car doors. The motor started up and I heard them skid off at top speed, getting lost in the darkness. Those guys didn't have a conscious: they were capable of anything. I preferred not to imagine what they might do to us if they were able to get in. When I decided to stay there instead of going to the safe houses, I swore to do anything in my power to protect my family – and that included killing human beings if necessary. I didn't have a choice: I'd have to get rid of those perverts before the situation got out of hand. The night and the village were on my side. It was a do-or-die situation: them or us. Their deaths would be more justifiable.

  The guy they left guarding my house couldn't be very smart. From where I was, I could make out his silhouette leaning against the brick facade of the house across the street. He was an idiot for not hiding or seeking cover; or maybe he underestimated me. In any case, his carefree attitude would make things easier for me and, silently, I left the rifle and crawled to the door to go back into the house. I went downstairs, into the garage, and took the Browning, making sure the shotgun was loaded. I then proceeded to go out to the street through the back door so that he wouldn't be aware of my presence until feeling the cold metal of the barrel against his empty head.

  The air was dense that night. The stench of death and decomposition insistently intruded my nasal passages. The fog and darkness were my allies. The shotgun was a continuation of my arm. I peered around the corner and saw the boy. "Poor bastard, you've come to screw with the wrong guy," I thought as I watched his motionless shadow just 20 yards away. I slowly walked towards him, sticking close to the wall and camouflaged by the fog.

  "Don't move! Get on your knees and don't look up from the ground!" I shouted aggressively when I was just a few yards from the boy. "If you try anything, I'll blow your fucking brains out!"

  "Please, don't shoot..." the boy begged as he got on his knees on the wet ground. He had a pistol in his hand that he probably didn't even know how to use. I was disappointed by his submissive attitude; I thought he'd put up more of a fight.

  Without taking my aim off him, I turned on the flashlight and shined it on his face. He was nothing more than a young, scared boy who had been given a more adult appearance than what he should have by shots of testosterone.

  "Don't shoot, sir," sobbed the boy with his hands in the air and his eyes on the ground. I didn't do anything. I only travel with them.

  "Put the gun on the ground, carefully.... How old are you and what's your name?" I asked. At that moment, I began to feel mercy for him. But there wasn't room for forgiveness in this hostile world, laid waste to by the zombie epidemic – not, at least, if I wanted to survive and protect my family.

  "Nineteen, sir. My name is Ricard."

  "What brings you guys to my village?"

  "We've been traveling for months," the boy responded, "since the living dead ran a rampage on the safe house in Barcelona. I've lost all my family, my friends... I only have my uncle, Juan Ramon, left."

  "Who else is with you? The guy with the hoarse voice seems dangerous..." I was interested in knowing firsthand what I was going to be up against.

  "They call him Rico," Ricard answered. "We met him at the safe house and he helped us escape when the hoard of zombies crossed the army's perimeter. He's crazy and he has no human compassion."

  "Hold on a second. A hoard of zombies?" I asked, surprised. "They travel in packs?"

  "Hundreds, thousands maybe," Ricard nodded. "They attacked us halfway through the night. The army couldn't do anything to contain them. It was a massacre. We weren't allowed weapons in the safe house and we found ourselves defenseless to the zombies. They pounced on us. God... I watched them tear apart my mother with their jaws and I couldn't do anything to stop them. My father tried to help her, but a zombie bit him in the arm. That's when my uncle Juan Ramon and Rico showed up with an army jeep and we got out of there without looking back."

  "And your father?"

  "Dead," Ricard answered, saddened. His crystalline eyes let out a tear. "We stopped in a rest area on highway A-7, near Sitges. The wound on his arm was infected and let out a sticky, yellow pus. A few hours later, he had become one of them... Rico took care of him."

  "Did you go through Valencia?" I asked with despair. "What's happened with the nearest safe house?"

  "There are no safe houses nearer than the one in Valencia. We were there a few days ago, it was a graveyard, I'm sorry to say. We only found bodies and zombies."

  I looked around to be sure that there were no decaying monsters nearby and gestured to Ricard with the gun to begin to walk. The boy got up with his hands still raised and began to march in the direction I had ordered him to. I doubted whether to execute him or let him live, so I decided that we would drop in on his uncle Juan Ramon and his friend Rico. I wanted to find out just what those guys' intentions were, and what better way to do that than by surprising them in Justiniano's house with Ricard on the intimidating end of my semiautomatic shotgun.

  "Walk," I told him, “and don't be an idiot: if you try anything I'll blast a hole the size of a basketball through your back.”

  That night the moon was waning and it barely lit the village. There were no zombies in sight and Ricard walked without looking back. The flashlight made it hard for me to comfortably handle the gun, so I stopped a moment to attach it to the barrel of the Browning with duct tape. It wasn't the best solution, but that improvised tactical light would guide me as I crossed the village until we got to our destination.

  "You talk well despite your brainless thug look," I said as we navigated the streets of Navarrés, which were terrifying under that blanket of darkness. Honestly, I was surprised by the correctness of his speech.

  "My life is destroyed, sir. I've lost everything. I should be studying journalism in Barcelona this year, but the epidemic squashed my dreams. A person toughens up out there. I've seen horrible things since we escaped from Barcelona... at night I try to forget to get some sleep, but I wake up every morning and those memories again consume my thoughts. There is no hope left in the world, I assure you that all is lost."

  "There's nothing left?" I asked him, troubled.

  "Nothing... no matter where we've gone, we've only found death."

  That night, the village was submerged in a worrying calm. I didn't like that feeling and I was worried by the silence, a bad premonition began forming in my stomach. During the journey we came across a few zombies. For some strange reason, there were more and more coming. Although they were dangerous, they were dazed; and this helped us to easily dodge them so that we could creep to Justiniano's house without making a sound.

  The boards on one of the windows at ground level had been ripped off and, through the window, we were able to get into Justiniano's garage. I was the first one inside. Once there, I pointed to Ricard and made a gesture with the shotgun for him to follow me. The boy stood near the stairs while I scanned the garage: I didn't find anything alarming.

  "Go upstair
s quietly and take me to them," I said to Ricard, shoving the barrel of the Browning in his kidneys. We immediately went up the narrow stairs to the next floor. Once there, Ricard pointed to the left, where the living room was. What I found there was hideous: Justiniano lay dead on the couch – he had been hit in the head with a blunt object until he died, the recurring impacts spread his brain matter all over the upholstery. Josefina, Justiniano's wife, came to rest on the floor with a puddle of blood around her, her throat slashed. She had probably been killed in front of her husband.

  "Sons of bitches..." I muttered when I saw the lifeless bodies of the couple; these guys’ intentions immediately became clear to me. "Where are they? Where the hell are they!?"

  Enraged, I gave Ricard a hard blow with the stock of the shotgun right in the face. The boy dropped to the ground like lead. I then kicked him a couple times in the ribs to see if he reacted, but he had lost consciousness. Without wasting another instant, I looked for Juan Ramon and Rico on the first floor but I didn't find them. I ran upstairs to the second floor and there, in a bedroom whose walls had been plastered with posters of well-known pop groups, I found Elena's naked body.

  "Shit...." I said, astonished by the sight of the girl thrown on the bed. Those bastards had raped her until her vagina tore up. Afterwards, they stabbed her dozens of times all over her body until her sweet life was taken from her at the hand of the knife. There was blood all over the room: on the bed, the stuffed animals, the curtains. That horrific, cruel image, which seemed to come directly out of the mind of an insane asylum patient, left me affected. That was the moment in which I lost faith and all hope in humanity.

  I went downstairs, distraught, confused, my mind a blank. I was not able to think for a few minutes. I left the shotgun on a table in the living room and I sat down on the couch, next to Justiniano's Body. I didn't even realize that I had let my right hand fall on a heap of his entrails. Blood-curdling images flashed before me, rocking my consciousness and sending me on the verge of a nervous breakdown: Justiniano pleading for mercy while they slit Josefina's throat; me, afraid in the freezer at the supermarket, furiously bludgeoning the skull of the association president until it exploded; Rico killing Justiniano with a hammer, spreading his brain matter all through the living room, splashing walls, furniture, and the ceiling; the body of Rafael brutally run over by my 4x4, all the bones of his body shattered yet him still trying to get up to bite me; poor Elena being raped by those wild beasts and later killed, as if she were an insect and her life meant nothing. There, sitting on the couch of that little house of horrors, I finally understood that there was no longer room in this world for good people.

  "For the love of God!" I shouted, grabbing Ricard by the lapel of his jacket and picking him a few inches up off the ground, all the while slapping him in the face with the other hand, trying to make him react. "Where are those sons of bitches?"

  "I don't know, sir..." he said, opening his eyes slightly.

  "Tell me where the hell they're at or I'll kill you."

  "I'm sorry, sir. I'm just following Rico's orders, if I don't, he'll kill me.

  "Where are they!?" I shouted again, grabbing the shotgun with one hand.

  I let the boy fall to the floor and put the barrel of the Browning to his face. Ricard started to cry like a child sacred of the dark, and then he cracked.

  "They've set a trap for you, sir," he said between sobs, "they've lured you out of your house."

  "No... no..." I stammered.

  At that very moment, I heard the sound of a shot in the distance that seemed to have come from my house. That made me fear the worst.

  Enraged, I shouted and shot Ricard in the right thigh. The boy writhed with pain. He had a gaping hole in his leg of such magnitude that the limb was barely hanging on by some small strands of flesh and muscle. Not wasting another moment, I ran out of the living room.

  "Kill me, sir! Don't leave me like this!" I heard Ricard scream; meanwhile, I went downstairs. "Kill me, for the love of God!"

  "God doesn't exist, you bastard," I thought as I jumped to cross through the ground-level window and get out on the street again. More and more zombies wandered through the village. Navarrés was becoming a hostile, dangerous place.

  I desperately ran in the direction of my house, afraid of the thought of those mindless fools having been able to get inside. I heard another shot, this time closer. I was surprised by a group of zombies when I turned a corner. They tried to grab me, but I shot round them and continued my race. When I got to my house, I saw that someone had pulled the boards off one of the downstairs windows. I shouted the names of my wife and child, but nobody answered. Another shot, this time two streets down. I had a small shimmer of hope to find them alive. I started to run in that direction.

  "Beatriz! Beatriz!" I shouted, desperately straining my vocal cords with heart-wrenching screams. When I turned the corner, there was Beatriz, shooting at several putrefied beings who were trying to pounce on her. The sound of my Browning thundered in the low streets of the village, as I slowly plucked off, one by one, each of the zombies who had dared attack my wife.

  When I had killed all the zombies that wandered in the zone, Beatriz sat down on the asphalt and broke out in tears. She had lost her nightgown, her legs were dirty, and her silk negligee was covered in blood. I walked over to her and wrapped her in my arms, feeling her body shake as she babbled incoherently.

  "It's all over, dear," I said to her, sitting by her side, “it's all over...."

  "I can't find him, I don't know where he went," I tried to understand between her sobs.

  "What was that, darling?" I asked, puzzled, and then my stomach turned upside down. "Where who went? Sebastian? Where's Sebastian?"

  I stood up and brought my hands to my head. I looked one way, then the other... but Sebastian wasn't there.

  "Sebastian!" I shouted, desperate. "Beatriz, where's the kid? Where's our child, Beatriz!?"

  "You left us alone... you abandoned us."

  "No, no.... No!" I replied insistently. "I wanted to protect you, darling; those guys were going to...."

  "I killed them, I killed them, but Sebastian ran away and now I can't find him," she repeated over and over again. "I can't find Sebastian."

  And that's when I saw a strange, bloody wound on my wife's neck: tooth marks that had pulled a piece of flesh out by the roots. I closed my eyes and shed a tear.

  "What happened to your neck?"

  "You abandoned us," she said again.

  That's when Beatriz got up and, between inconsolable cries, began to hit me in the chest. I reacted violently and grabbed her dirty, blond hair, which had been splashed with the blood of those monsters. I threw her to one side and was able to see the wound clearly. Beatriz was starting to sweat profusely: a cold sweat. I touched her forehead and felt that her body had started to boil. Just then, a shadow caught my eye.

  "Sebas... Sebastian," I said, terrorized, as I saw my son turn the corner, wearing his Superman pajama and covered in blood from an open wound in his arm. His steps were erratic; he wobbled, staring off into space. His weak legs could barely withhold the weight of his body; he tripped over a curb and was about to fall to the ground but he managed to keep his balance and continue coming toward us. His mouth let out chunks of coagulated blood mixed with a thick, dark liquid that dripped down his chin. He let out some inaudible moans: the cries of a poor child who had become a living dead, a decomposing being.

  "My child," Beatriz got worked up when she saw Sebastian slowly coming towards us. I tried to keep calm, to be strong, but I wasn't prepared to see my little guy that way. Nobody in their right mind could be prepared for such a thing. Over the last few months, I had made it my mission to hunt the zombies that prowled through the village – and I had enjoyed doing so. But that was my son, my little boy. That's when I wished I could put an end to my nightmare: to Sebastian, to Beatriz, and to myself. That night, Navarrés became a darker, more sinister village.

 
; 4

  My heart and soul have been dyed black. Now I'm looking for my place in Hell.

  An upstanding man's life, a family man's life, revolves around protecting his own. But I failed at that fundamental aspect of my existence. You may think that there is nothing harder in life than seeing both your wife and son die, but I assure you that that pain is nothing compared to the contradictory feeling that you get when you see them become zombies. I want to find Beatriz and Sebastian in those mutants, but their faces have lost their shine and now have a bluish tint, almost green. Their skin has developed wounds, blisters, and bloody ulcers. Their mouths slowly rot as time passes. That thick liquid they vomit is corroding their teeth. Their bodies have slowly decayed to become sacks of pus. Their guts are bloated. I hypothesize that the swelling stems from the same dark fluid that flows from their bodily orifices. At night, I turn to our photos and videos to remember them as they were and to be able to get to sleep; I try to get lost in remnants of a past life and forget, even if it's just for a moment, those grotesque beings that they have become.

  I look at them every morning through a window: they don't recognize each other. They are no longer mother and son. They're two strangers locked in a bloody, fifteen-foot by fifteen-foot cell. They trip over each other, moan, look at each other, and continue drunkenly lurching around the garage. Every day I wonder if I should have stopped their suffering that night. I know there's still time to do it. Sometimes I sit on the stone bench in the yard, rest the stock of my Browning on the ground, and delicately load it with three rounds; but I never have enough courage to pull the trigger. They are monsters, I know, but they're still my wife and son. As the weeks go by, I become consumed in, and agonize over, the blame for having abandoned them.