Zee reaches for me. I can feel his outstretched hands flailing, grabbing at the loose straps on my pack. I have the rifle, but it’s no use. Zee is on top of me. Stop and turn and I’ll be overrun before I can squeeze the trigger.
My heart pounds in my throat as I fight madly against the swamp dragging me under. I’m too short. What’s difficult for Ferguson is impossible for me.
A hand grabs my pack and I’m jerked backwards. Instantly, I drop, using the sudden tension on the bag to allow me to wriggle free from the shoulder straps, and I lunge forward, swapping the rifle between hands as I slip free.
The rifle is useless at such close quarters. I’m shaking so badly I couldn’t hit Zee even if I had an hour to line up a shot.
Another zombie lunges at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch his wake through the water and without breaking my stride, I slam the butt of the rifle into his head. He recoils backwards and sinks beneath the waves.
“Come on!” Ferguson yells from the pylon. He’s climbed up onto the concrete footing and is leaning down with his hand out, ready to pull me up. “Faster!”
I can’t run any faster through the water. The thick mud beneath the surface holds me back. My heart is about to explode out of my chest.
Bony hands grab at me, clawing at my back as my legs pump against the weight of the marsh swirling around me.
Spindly fingers pull at my hair, yanking my head backwards. Fingers seize my neck.
Dozens of hands tear at my clothes, grabbing my arms, my shoulder, wrenching my left hand back and behind me, but on I struggle, fighting for life.
“The rifle,” Ferguson yells. “Throw me the rifle.”
Throw is a misnomer.
As I’m dragged backwards under the water, I lash out with the rifle, sending it clattering into the concrete footing.
Dark water washes over me, drowning me.
Gasping for air, my head breaks the surface as shots ring out.
Blood stains the water.
Ferguson fires again and again, cycling through rounds with the lever on his rifle. Dead zombies float on the marsh, slowly drifting beneath the muddy waters. I scramble up onto the pylon coughing and choking. Water sprays from my mouth as I gasp for breath. A hand grabs my collar, yanking me to one side as Ferguson drags me higher.
Zombies swarm around the base of the pylon, but Ferguson has stopped shooting. Their hands reach for us, clutching at the air just inches away. One false step—to slip even slightly, is to be dragged into the marsh below.
I need to catch my breath, but Ferguson pushes me up against the steel frame, urging me to climb. Mud drips from my clothes.
The old bridge is made from steel girders with crisscrossed sections that form a latticework, allowing us to climb above the swamp. The cross sections are set at forty-five degrees, which means my boots tend to get wedged.
“Keep moving,” Ferguson growls from below, nudging my boot so he can get a hand hold. The zombies have made it onto the concrete footing.
I’m soaking wet. Water drips from my hands, making the metal slippery. Within ten to twenty feet of climbing, my arms are burning, but I dare not slack. I’m not sure who I’m more afraid of—Zee or Ferguson.
Rivets line the steel column, pinning the frame together. They’re slippery. My boots can’t get any traction from them.
Feet pound above us on the wooden planks lining the bridge. A small walkway runs parallel to the train tracks, and for a moment I think we’re saved.
Zee growls.
I stop below the steel rails. Hands reach through the wooden sleepers trying to grab me. Ferguson clambers up next to me, wedging his rifle into a gap in a steel cross member so he can rest by sitting on part of the frame. He’s closer to Zee than I am, but he doesn’t seem bothered by the snarling.
“Damn, that was close.”
“Was?” I ask, looking at dozens of hands reaching for us. I’m out of breath and unable to say anything else.
Below us, the horde is mainly on the shoreward side of the pylon. Those zombies that venture out into the river are quickly swept away, disappearing beneath the rapids. The rain over the last few days has caused the river to swell. Bodies drift facedown in the distance, and I’m reminded of my dad’s insistence that zombies are alive. If they can drown, they’re not dead to start with.
The bridge has been built with maintenance platforms appearing every twenty feet along side the train tracks. Zee is using them to harass us, but he can’t get us so long as we stay on the other side of the bridge. Although it’s unnerving looking at the drop below us and the raging, dark water flowing swiftly by, there are plenty of handholds allowing us to climb across to the far side of the river.
After what seems like forever, Ferguson says, “Well, I’m not getting any younger.” And we start working our way along beneath the rails. Although it’s easier than climbing, I take my time as the height has me shaking. I can’t bring myself to rush, moving only one arm or one leg at a time, always making sure I’m anchored and not about to fall. Ferguson doesn’t seem to mind the relaxed pace after all we’ve been through. I’m not sure what we’re going to do when we get to the other side.
Chapter 05: Thunder
A light rain begins to fall. The wind is cold, chilling us to the bone. My fingers ache. The bandages I had around my palms have fallen away. Blood and pus oozes from my blisters.
As we reach one of the support struts on the far side of the river, Ferguson yells.
He slips and falls.
I turn and see him hanging from a girder. His legs swing out from below him as his rifle sails through the air, clattering on the rocks by the bridge footing.
“Hang on!” I yell, working my way over to him, but the rain makes the steel slick. Flakes of rust come away in my hands. My boots slip and my shins slam against the unforgiving steel. I cry out in agony, but I have a good handhold, saving me from plummeting fifty feet to the rocks below.
Zees screams with excitement, seeing us in trouble, but Zee is trapped on the far side of the river or up on the walkway. Below, water rages, swirling over rocks and boulders.
Ferguson kicks with his legs, grabbing with his arms and trying to get back onto the girder, but like me, he’s weak from all the exertion. My teeth chatter. Hypothermia is as lethal as any zombie, and we’re both struggling with the cold.
I climb down to him and lie flat on the girder, reaching out my arm to help him.
Ferguson slips.
He grabs at my wrist, but I’m not ready for his weight. He’s far heavier than I expect, and I find myself pinned to the girder by his weight. Having grabbed me, he’s fallen lower. He can no longer reach the girder. Rather than helping, I fear I’ve made things worse.
“I’ll swing you to the beam,” I say, trying to get him close to one of the metal struts rising out of the bridge footing, but he’s too heavy. My best effort makes barely any difference. We’re both tiring fast.
Ferguson squirms, shifting his weight, and almost pulls me from the girder. His fingers grab at the vertical strut making up the footing on this side of the river. He swings, letting go of my wrist and grabbing for the far girder with both hands, but the downward force is too great. He doesn’t make it. I watch in horror as his body falls rapidly away and crashes with a sickening thud on the rocks below.
“Nooooo!”
I’m manic.
I have to get down there.
“Ferguson!” I yell, but there’s no response. His crumpled body lies prostrate on the wet rocks surrounding the bridge footing. One leg is bent awkwardly, twisting at an unnatural angle in the center of his shin, having been snapped like a twig.
“FERGUSON!!!”
Swinging hand over hand, I rush down the pylon, constantly calling his name. My feet slip, and I come within inches of joining him on the rocks, but I can’t slacken my pace.
“Can you hear me?” I yell. “I’m coming.”
As my boots finally rest on the concrete footing, I hear him groaning f
rom the rocks. He’s alive.
“Hold on,” I say, but I’m not thinking straight. Hold on to what? He can fall no further. Hold onto life.
Blood seeps out onto the rocks. The brilliant red trickle brings a dash of color to an otherwise drab and dreary day.
I clamber down next to Ferguson. Sweeping my wet, sticky hair behind one ear, I try to assess his injuries—broken leg, busted collarbone, god only knows what internal injuries he has or what damage there is to his spine. Blood seeps from the back of his head. What can I do? It pains me to realize I’m helpless. There’s nothing I can do for him. Nothing.
Carefully, I remove his backpack. Our eyes meet. He knows.
“We’re going to get you out of here,” I say.
We? We who?
Ferguson lets out a single laugh. Blood trickles from the corner of his lips.
With the best of intentions, I want to help. But he’s not going anywhere without two men carrying him on a stretcher, and he must realize that before I do as he smiles at my sentiment.
With his left forearm, he pushes against the rock, wanting to get up. His right arm hangs limp by his side.
“Stay still,” I say, not sure what to do but suspecting movement is going to make things worse.
“Help me sit up,” he says, ignoring me.
I grab him under the armpits and help him lean up against the concrete bridge footing. Rain falls from a dull grey sky, coming down in a drizzle.
“What a shitty day to die,” Ferguson says, spitting blood to one side.
I can’t speak. Just a few seconds ago, he was fine. Just moments ago, he was fitter than I, more capable than I, and yet now he lies here bleeding to death.
“You need to go,” he says. “There’s another bridge about two miles downstream. It will allow you to work around their flank.”
“I’m not leaving,” I say, surprised by the emotion welling up inside me.
“You’re a good kid,” he says, reaching out and resting his hand on my cheek. He runs his fingers along the side of my jaw. I can feel the warmth of the blood soaking his fingers.
I rummage through the backpack. There’s a box of bullets, a couple of magazines for the handgun, a canteen, some wet, soggy beef jerky and a first aid kit along with a bunch of rags and a roll of compression bandage.
I have to do something about his leg. It can’t be good having it bent back at such an angle. Blood soaks through his jeans, suggesting the shattered bone has pierced the skin. A wooden fence paling has been washed up by a flood, caught in the weeds to one side. It’ll have to do as a splint.
“This is going to hurt,” I say, grabbing the wood and lying it beside his leg.
“Everything hurts,” he replies.
I don’t want to touch him, not because I’m squeamish but because I don’t want to cause him any more pain, but this has to be done. I take his leg with both hands and twist it around, straightening it and laying it on the fence paling.
Ferguson screams, grabbing at his thigh with his one good arm.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I repeat, gently lifting the paling as I wrap the compression bandage around his leg, anchoring it to the wood. Through it all, Ferguson never swears. He grimaces. His lips are pulled so tight they turn white. His jaw flexes and clenches as his nostrils flare, but he never swears. I would.
I pull the canteen out, open the lid and hold it gently to his lips. Ferguson sips at the water. He must be in excruciating pain, but it doesn’t show. I busy myself, opening the first aid kit and looking at the supplies—bandages, scissors, gauze, some old medical tape that looks like it’s been used a half a dozen times already, and a packet of over-the-counter painkillers. I pop some of the painkillers in my hand and hold them to his lips.
“Save them,” he says.
“Take them,” I insist, forcing them in his mouth and following up with the canteen.
“Hazel,” Ferguson says as I screw the lid on the canteen and put it to one side. I stop what I’m doing. I don’t know that he’s ever said my name before. I tend to get talked at rather than talked to by most of the adults.
Ferguson swallows a lump in his throat as he says, “For me, this is the end of the road.”
“I can make a crutch,” I say, but the look in his eyes tells me I’m not being realistic. Even if I could help him walk, we wouldn’t make it more than a quarter mile before Zee was on us.
“I’ll go for help.” That isn’t realistic either, or so the grave look on his face says. And I know he’s right. He’ll be dead before I make it back to the commune, if not from his injuries, then from the cold. He won’t last a night out here in the open.
“You know what I used to do for a job?” he asks, shifting his weight and dragging himself back a little so he can sit more upright.
I shake my head. I can’t imagine Ferguson doing anything other than killing zombies. It’s hard to imagine there was a time before all this madness.
“I was a tailor.”
I’m dumbfounded.
“Well, tailor is being a bit too generous. I worked in the men’s department of JC Penny.”
I slump to the cold, damp rock, sitting crosslegged as I face him.
“I never actually tailored clothing, but I’d measure men for suits, send away for orders, stuff like that.”
“Huh,” is all I can say.
“Yep,” he says. “That’s me. That was my life before all this. Can you imagine it? A young man like David or Steve walks in and some old fart like me comes up to them. Can I help you, sir? Just looking? No problem. Well, we have just received the fall selection, and we’ve got tweed jackets on special. If I can be of any assistance to you, please let me know.”
I’m silent.
Ferguson laughs.
“Can you believe that horse shit? Ha ha ha. All this stuff we used to care about. All the things we thought were so damn important. All the crap we’d stress about. Car payments, mortgages.”
With a gauze bandage, I daub at the blood on the side of his neck, cleaning some grit out of a deep graze.
“Someone wouldn’t show up for a shift. Men’s would be down to one, and I’d carry on like it was the end of the world. Hah! If only I’d known.”
He hands the canteen back to me. Up until now, I haven’t thought about drinking, but I’m insanely thirsty. I gulp down mouthfuls of water. I don’t care about the water running down my neck. I’m soaked anyway.
“Where were you?” Ferguson asks.
I wipe my mouth, knowing what he means.
“I was young,” I begin. “Six or seven. I’m not really sure. I was at school, I know that.
“One minute, we were doing math. The next we were in lockdown. There was no clanging fire alarm, no noise, nothing. Ms. Carter saw the silent alarm flashing above the door, a tiny blue light informing her she needed to secure the room, I guess, but she was really calm. She asked us to line up at the back of the room and then got us to sit down as she locked the door. She told us it was just a drill, that there was nothing to be afraid of, and then the gunfire started.
“Everyone was so afraid. We thought there was a shooter. Ms. Carter barricaded us in at the back of the room, turning over desks and chairs, keeping us out of sight from the door. She was so brave, but I don’t think she made it past that first day. Not many people did.”
Ferguson nods, saying, “So how did you escape?”
We don’t have time for this. I can see dark shapes moving along the riverbank in the distance. Their motion is chaotic. I don’t think they’ve seen us yet, and suddenly I’m acutely aware of the wind direction. Smell, sound, sight—it’s pretty much the opposite of how we function. For us, it’s sight, sound, smell. There’s a gentle breeze drifting downstream with the rapids. It won’t be long.
“I had the day off,” Ferguson says when I don’t respond. “I’d worked nine or ten days straight and was supposed to be at the mall, but I’d had enough. I didn’t care that there was no one to cover my shi
ft. The store manager should have figured that out instead of running me into the ground. Strange, huh? Being a stubborn bastard probably saved my life.
“I lived in a rundown apartment about two miles from the center of town. Not a good place to be at the best of times, let alone during the outbreak. Forty units built in a square around a decrepit old swimming pool. I was on the second floor backing onto the main road.
“Cops were going crazy that day. Sirens went off non stop. Damn annoying is all I remember. Then I heard yelling and screaming down by the pool. I step out onto the walkway and there’s a dead body floating face down in the water, only he ain’t dead. He’s writhing in pain.
“The complex manager stands by the pool with a Mossberg shotgun held to his shoulder, unloading buckshot into this guy’s back. The manager can’t pump that baby fast enough. Empty shells skid across the wet tiles. The water is brilliant red. I mean, like, bright red. Almost as though this is a movie set and they’re using food coloring or something for fake blood.
“Marvin, I call out, running down to stop him from killing this guy. Marvin’s got a pocket full of shells and is reloading as fast as he can. Marvin, what the hell?
“Run, Ferg, he says. Still remember those words. No one’s ever called me Ferg. Not before. Not since.
“Run!
“I’m confused. I’m trying to calm him down. Just give me the gun, I say, holding my hands wide and showing him I’m unarmed. A cop car races past, sirens blaring, lights flashing, but it doesn’t stop.
“You need to run, he says again, only he’s calm. He’s too calm. There are bite marks on his arms.
“The guy in the swimming pool drags himself onto the deck. His eyes. They’re bleeding, but he doesn’t care. Marvin fires from the hip, hitting the guy on the side of the neck. He’s dead. No one could survive that, but he does. He snarls and it’s only then I see there’s dozens of them. They’re everywhere. Breaking windows and dragging people out of the ground floor apartments.
“Run, Marvin says, and I run. I run and I don’t stop.
“It’s madness on the streets. They’re everywhere. They turned so fast in those early days, but I run. It’s all I can do.
All Our Tomorrows Page 8
