For a long moment there was silence, then Russell’s face reappeared. “Come on!” he called down impatiently. “Let’s do this. You wanna eat or don’t you?”
Sal started to follow, but Kyle and the other boys shoved past, nearly knocking him into the water. Whether empowered by Russell’s confidence, the prospect of food, or the thought of that arm lurking in the water below; suddenly they couldn’t get up fast enough. “One at a time,” Sal said. But they weren’t listening to him at all—the old ladder was almost coming to pieces from their combined weight. Stupid jerks. “Everybody stay together,” he called after them as he tested the rungs.
Sal emerged to find the boys standing at the edge of a weedy lot, reveling in the glorious, slightly queasy sensation of dry land. It looked like no-man’s-land—the vacant area beneath a highway bridge. On one side was the flood-control berm—a high rock dam separating them from the city—and on the other a fenced tugboat landing and some condemned-looking buildings. Huge concrete pylons rose above them to Interstate 195. It was all reassuringly deserted.
As Sal joined them, Russell asked him, “Where to now?”
“Well, we gotta cross under the highway and follow the road here through the floodgate. There should be businesses and things on the other side.”
“Let’s do it.”
Following Russell, who was following Sal, the boys trooped quickly and quietly down the road, picking up any likely-looking weapons they happened to find—mostly rocks and chunks of brick. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me. Sal wished he could find a good stick. He looked up at the highway bridge, imagining that the little girl’s arm must have fallen from there, picturing the awful scene: the girl in the backseat of her parents’ car, the Xombie lunging in and grabbing her arm, dad hitting the gas—nasty.
They found the tremendous open doors of the flood barrier and cautiously followed the road through. On the far side was a waterfront area of chic clubs and condos, and across the river an immense Gothic cathedral that was the electric company, webbed to the rest of the city by flowing skeins of wire. It was all dead, all out of commission, yet almost perfectly preserved, as if loyally awaiting the future return of humankind. Everything had gone down so fast, there was no time for looting and destruction.
Dodging from one shadow to the next, the boys did what they could to keep a low profile. “I don’t get it,” Kyle said, eyes wide with tension. “Why aren’t there any Xombies?”
“Be glad there ain’t,” said Russell, gingerly touching his bruised neck.
“It’s gotta be that viral thing they talked about—viral progression,” Sal said. “The cities got so full of Xombies, they reached, like, critical mass. Once there was nobody left to infect, there was no reason to stay, so they scattered outward across the country. Maybe there aren’t any left here.”
The boys’ chests swelled with hope. “Is that true?”
“I don’t know. It’s just what I heard.”
“God, I hope you right, man.”
Staying off the exposed waterfront, they followed a shaded inner street with fewer doorways. This led them to a second highway underpass, one older and darker than the first, a sunken hollow, its corroded iron girders busy with roosting pigeons. There were peeling psychedelic murals on the walls, ads for funky-sounding businesses: CAFÉ ZOG, OLGA’S CUP AND SAUCER, ACME VIDEO, Z-BAR. Cars sat dead in the road, their windows broken and doors wide open to the elements. Pigeons were roosting in them, too. This was not a good place to be; it didn’t feel safe. The boys could be cornered there in the dripping wetness, trapped amid the rust and rank birdshit. “We shouldn’t have gone this way, man,” said Kyle. They walked faster and faster, trying not to panic, not to run . . .
. . . and emerged in the light of spring. Before them was a tiny hillside park with a veteran’s memorial, benches, and maple trees. Dew glistened on the grass. But the boys hardly noticed any of that. They were more interested in what lay just beyond: a bright red-and-yellow gas station—a Shell station—with a sign reading FOOD MART.
Now they ran.
The coolers were dead, the ice cream melted, the milk curdled, but nearly everything else in the place was edible, and the forty boys made a valiant attempt to eat it all. It was a treasure trove more welcome to them than King Tut’s tomb, and as perfectly preserved, not in natron but sodium benzoate:
Snack cakes and pies, puddings, nuts, cookies, crackers, canned meats and cheeses, beef sticks, jerky, pickles, salsa, pretzels and potato chips galore. Candy! Whole cases of chocolate bars, chews, sours, mints, gum. And drinks: bottled beverages of every kind—energy drinks, soda pop, fancy sweetened teas and cappuccino, Yoo-Hoo, or just plain water—all free for the taking. It was a teenage dream come true, an all-you-can-eat paradise of junk food. All the cigarettes they could smoke, too, if they wanted them, and a few other vices besides.
“Can this stuff make us sick?” Freddy Fisk asked through a mouthful of minidonuts. “It must be pretty old by now.”
“I doubt it,” Sal said, munching Fritos. “There’s enough chemicals in this stuff to last until doomsday.”
“Then it’s definitely expired.”
What they didn’t eat, they stuffed into ditty bags they had brought from the sub. They sacked the store until all that was left was money and auto accessories. Sated, idly scratching lottery tickets, some of them were already starting to feel that perhaps it had been a mistake to eat so much, so fast. Of that junk. Damn.
“I don’t feel so good, man.”
Sal was consulting the selection of maps. “Well, don’t croak yet—we still have a ways to go to get back.”
“You guys go ahead, I’m staying here—urp.”
“I think we all staying here,” Russell said. Something in his voice made them turn around to see what he was looking at. The front windows of the minimart overlooked the little memorial park and the elevated highway just beyond. Until then, the boys had not been in a position to really see Interstate 195—it had been an abstract concept, no more alarming than the underside of a bridge. For the first time, they had a good view of it. Freddy G vomited—whulp!
The highway was a river of death, a glacier of stalled metal, curving away as far as the eye could see. Thousands upon thousands of cars and trucks jammed bumper to bumper, all dead silent, the diamond bits of their smashed windows glittering in the morning sun. The interstate had become a colossal junkyard, a graveyard for humanity’s mobile aspirations . . . when graveyards no longer stayed filled.
Silent, dead, but not entirely still. There was darting movement there. Not the movement of cars, but of bodies—naked blue bodies. Catch them in glimpses: the wink of shadows scurrying between the lanes, a flash of scary Zuni-doll faces. And darker shapes looming beneath the overpass—jumpy silhouettes blocking the light, flushing out the pigeons. Rushing down the on-ramp. They were everywhere.
Feeling his insides turn to water, Sal thought, No way, no way, dude. Nuh-uh, no way, oh, no, no, no, please, no . . .
What he said was, “Guys? Can we, uh, get moving?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walter Greatshell has lived in five countries and worked many odd jobs across America, including painting houses, writing for a local newspaper, managing a quaint old movie house, and building nuclear submarines. For now, he has settled in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife, Cindy; son, Max; and cat, Reuben. Visit Walter’s website at www.waltergreatshell.com.
Xombies: Apocalypse Blues Page 34
