One of them pointed his machine gun at Alex; the other was holding a silenced sniper rifle: he didn't raise it but you'd think twice before challenging him to do so.
The one with the machine gun asked Alex about his business. Alex explained that he was a survivor like his friends who lived nearby and that they'd love to join the Castle inhabitants. He added that their considerable fighting experience could make them helpful to Castle defenders and that they had no intention of becoming an obligation to anyone.
The one with the machine gun listened and answered that they didn't need people. He then commanded Alex to back off and never come back, promising to shoot if he disobeyed. His composed answer devoid of emotions brought the threat home. Alex knew better than to object.
He never blamed the Castle inhabitants: they'd done the right thing, and anyone would've done the same.
"Just imagine that you have it all nice and safe: a strong fence, security and unlimited food supplies. Along comes an unwashed tramp with a gun and begs to take him in, and his fellow bums into the bargain! He was only right to send me packing, if you think about it."
Just as he was leaving, Alex imagined he heard children's voices coming from behind the wall. He never went back, and asked his fighters not to approach the wall and the gate. It wasn't worth the risk. Until the Hospital massacre he didn't know much about their actual force, but from the very start he'd sensed that he was wise not to take their threats lightly.
He kept wondering though why Castle had attacked the Hospitallers when they had — and not, say, when Cholera and his henchmen, all panache and fireworks, fought the White Brothers. Castle's motives remained a mystery. Previously laid-back and uninterested, they exposed themselves in a loud and scary way.
For lack of knowledge, Alex had to second-guess. The only explanation he found relatively convincing was that possibly, having destroyed their other rivals, the Hospitallers turned their sights to Castle, aiming to capture it and become the sole active force in the area. It's possible they'd laid down their conditions, or even tried to attack Castle first. I'm still none the wiser, but this sounds like the most logical scenario.
Alex fell silent. I presumed that he'd finished his account of the local communities, and Lord, did it leave me dispirited. Whatever the circumstances, man strives to live up to his fame as the Earth's most dangerous predator, infection or no infection. I'm not the one to judge, but isn't a mutated spirit worse than a mutated human body? And Alex had told me enough about mutated spirits, minds and morals.
For a while we didn't speak. Then — unexpectedly, as was always — a loud mumbling came from below, growing into howls and growls.
Zombies. They must have sniffed us out but what with their challenged reasoning, they couldn't work out where exactly we were hiding and how to get themselves there. To do so, they had to find the fire escape door and open it, and that was impossible: Alex had made sure he'd bolted it the moment we'd gone in. Not strong enough to break down a steel door, they had to scream their discontent.
I don't think I'll ever get used to their screaming. It's not that you never expect it, not even the sheer force of it or the hatred that fills it; no, the scariest thing about zombies' screams is that this chilling gobbledygook unlike anything else in nature is produced by human vocal cords. The gift of human speech, which you'd normally use to converse, negotiate, lecture, recite poems and declare your love, now produced a sad travesty of itself, as if man had forgotten the very idea of language, including the most basic sounds and exclamations that convey emotion. The worst thing about zombie voices is that their mindless groans don't resemble anything in the animal world, either. Although sometimes they seem to convey desperation, anger or sadness, you don't feel any sympathy for them: nothing but fear and disgust. Their voices sound utterly alien: possibly, like screams of abandoned, long-starved mental patients, or else like extraterrestrials from a world far removed from our own.
Alex rose. He came to the camp bed, reached below it and produced a weird-looking rifle. It had a long, thick muzzle and it had a strange thing resembling a TV camera mounted where the scope sights normally were.
He came to the very roof edge and explored what was going on by moving the barrel this direction and that. The sights cast a greenish tint onto his face making it look sinister.
"Can't see a bloody thing!" he finally exclaimed and put the rifle away. The undead must have attempted to enter the building through the main entrance with its multiple elevators, and if so, they must have been concealed by the thick concrete canopy over the entrance.
Cheerful as ever, Alex announced that seeing as we couldn't shut the zombies up, we could try to drown them out. I looked at him, dumbfounded: was he really suggesting we should outscream them? That was plainly impossible: devoid of conscious control, a zombie's voice is abnormally loud and no human being can beat him in a shouting game. And anyway, what would it look like? Thank God we've not lost our minds yet.
But his idea was better than that. He rummaged through his Aladdin's crates and produced a radio. As soon as he flipped the switch, heavenly music filled the air, and I recognized the theme: it was Mozart's Divertissements. Alex turned the knob full on. It was a good quality radio, so the sounds flooded everything around, and we could hardly hear the screams below.
This new touch of Alex's magic entranced me as I savored the broadcast when all of a sudden I jumped, as if electrocuted: what broadcast? Where the hell was the music coming from? This was live: it meant somebody had to actually sit in a studio and play Mozart records for their unseen audience!
Puzzled, I asked Alex if my mental picture was correct. But, after giving me a moment's hope for the restoration of civilization somewhere, somehow, Alex took it away and sent me back into the depths of frustration.
He and his friends called this bandwidth Radio Mozart. They'd discovered it a few months ago when they'd found a radio in an abandoned house. Radio Mozart was the only functioning station: the rest of the FM range was just crackle and white noise. The station worked nonstop, broadcasting all sorts of Mozart's symphonies, serenades and short pieces, nothing but Mozart. There were no breaks, apart from a few-second pauses between tracks. Nobody spoke, as if there was no one present in the studio at all. The program ran a three-day circle, after which it repeated itself ad infinitum.
I conjured up the image of an abandoned sound studio where a surviving computer had switched to reserve batteries and kept playing one of its files, which ironically contained Mozart's full works: eight good-quality MP3 disks, if I remember rightly.
The studio itself could be anywhere; didn't really matter if there were no living people left there. The program was nothing more than a cultural relic — a monument to an era now gone. If some observer wishing to find out whatever had happened to humanity decided to check the entire radio range of the electro magnetic spectrum, he'd discover that the whole world had nothing left in it but Mozart.
The night was over in due time. We spent the rest of it stargazing and listening to Mozart's magic while infinitely below, ex-human creatures howled their hatred, helplessly craving to get close, tear us to pieces and devour.
VIII
Exhausted by lack of sleep, we did doze off for a couple of hours closer to the morning. When I opened my eyes, the sun blazed away up in the sky, opening a new day that promised us nothing but more trouble. I remembered the adage ascribed to Henry Ford who supposedly said at the dawn of the car engineering era, "You can have your car painted any color you want, so long as it's black". Widely speaking, the maxim befitted the situation: events could take any turn that day, so long as the turn was bad.
We had a quick breakfast out of tins while Alex hurried to finish his story, whatever was left of it.
After Hospitallers' defeat he gave in to lethargy, as he'd lost his main driving force: revenge. Some heavenly tables had turned, and the criminals had received punishment as well-deserved as it was unexpected; but Alex had had no part in it, wh
ich is why now he didn't know what to do with himself. His partner, Valentine Ivanovich, helped a lot: he didn't even try to bother Alex by talking, but his silent presence offered better support than any words could offer.
When Alex revived a bit, they faced the classic Russian-literature question: what was to be done next? They decided to leave. Although Alex had put a lot of effort into making the place feel like home, he'd never loved it. Negative memories filled every corner of it: beginning with his boss's betrayal and all the massacres that followed. Valentine Ivanovich, being a newcomer to the area, hadn't bonded to any of it.
They were just about to leave when a new complication put a lid on their plans. Or a new burden, rather.
In a cellar of a nearby house, they discovered a girl. Still alive, but in a bad way: sick and emaciated. It took Alex some time and effort to recognize her. The girl was English: she'd appeared in the settlement about a year before the outbreak, having arrived from the UK to work as a governess for a well-off businessman two plots away from Alex's boss. Everybody in the settlement called her Masha.
It must have taken a miracle for her to survive on her own. Masha's employer had left her and three more staff behind to fare for themselves, and they had all died apart from Masha who'd managed to lock herself in the cellar. She'd stayed there the whole time, surviving on whatever came her way — could be cat food for all I knew — and licking droplets of water off leaking boiler pipes. She could watch the unfolding nightmares through a tiny barred window, and knew better than to come out.
But one day the boiler stopped leaking: all of the water must have leaked out by then — so she was forced to come out. By then, she was so weak she could hardly walk. Tormented by thirst, she forced herself out of her shelter and lay on the lawn in front of the house, where Valentine Ivanovich finally discovered her.
Masha's sufferings had erased all previous knowledge of Russian from her mind. Once cheerful and outgoing, she used to chat with Alex in her self-confident, albeit halting Russian. Now she was little more than a pale skeleton, barely able to breathe.
Alex couldn't leave her behind, but he couldn't take her along, either. They had no other choice but to stay a little longer, in order to try and save her life.
As the weeks went by, the girl started to recover. The fresh air, combined with relatively good — considering the circumstances — food and care provided by Alex and Valentine, gradually worked. Alex managed to lay his hands on some sort of vitamin capsules and syringes to go with them, worked out a treatment plan and gave her regular vitamin shots.
It's possible that by caring for her, he tried to suppress his guilt for not having saved the children. It was not his fault, of course, and there was no way he could have foreseen or averted it, but he believed that he should have expected the Hospitallers to attack, and thus blamed himself for everything that had happened. Before, planning his revenge had kept his mind off it. Now it was Masha.
It turned out that Valentine Ivanovich could speak rather decent English. He'd retired from his job with the foreign ministry which came with quite a bit of travelling. It seemed ironic that something as useless in the new world as language skills suddenly proved their worth. Gradually, he succeeded in drawing Masha out; she came to trust him and they spent long hours talking, much to Alex's desperation as he didn't understand a word of it. Tactful, Valentine often briefed him on what was being discussed, and at other times, Alex joined their conversation while Valentine served as a translator.
Alex hoped that with time, whatever Russian she'd known would come back to her, but it didn't happen. Her mind seemed to have blocked out the once-active language skill. Good job she could speak at all, albeit in English.
Masha told them about her last two-week stay at home in England, just before the outbreak began. As she left Moscow, nothing yet forespelt trouble. Apparently, the first cases of contamination had been reported in the US and from there, the infection spread all over the world. Because of its position in transatlantic travel, the UK had suffered one of the first. By the end of Masha's vacation, the country was shaken by riots, and the government was about to introduce martial law and enforce quarantine. Masha thought it wiser to sit it out as far from home as possible, especially as she was due back to her Russian employer, anyway. Her parents, especially, insisted that she left and, almost against her will, took her to the station.
She still had a few days of her vacation left, so she decided to visit a few friends down in France. She was lucky enough to get on board one of the last ferries that ever reached the Continent. She told them how she watched her parents disappear in the panicking crowd as her train left the station ahead of schedule, the train drivers choosing to save theirs and their passengers' butts rather than wait for the station master's signal. The train was taking her away as she looked out of the window, tearful, not yet knowing she wasn't going to see her country or parents ever again. As the express gained speed, zombies chased it, running along the tracks, dozens and hundreds of them, like in a horror movie.
Immediately after that, the Channel was shut and all communication stopped. They'd only got out thanks to the train drivers' quick thinking. One thing that shocked her most was that although the Tunnel had been closed down, airlines kept flying, spreading the infection all over Europe and beyond.
By the time Masha got to Paris, there was no way she could go about seeing her friends; she barely made it to Charles de Gaulle airport and left for Russia.
Here, the media had created the atmosphere of expectant curiosity: they assured the population that the disaster only affected the Western world, and we could sit it out safely. Her employer's chauffeur met Masha in the airport and took her to their country estate, explaining that the boss was away on business and about to come back soon; his family was missing, too, and none of them answered their mobiles. She'd spent several days waiting for something to happen, right until the events Alex had told me about the night before.
At the time of our encounter, their little group numbered five men: two newcomers had joined about a month after Masha, in addition to Alex and Valentine Ivanovich. Alex promised me to arrange a meeting with the latter, so Valentine could tell me his story, and gave me a meaningful look. I had no idea how he expected me to react, so I didn't say anything.
Alex wavered, unwilling to go on. Finally, he spoke. Those two men, whom he hadn't mentioned before, worried him a lot. They'd come by themselves and asked Alex's permission to join them. The elder one seemed to be in his sixties and the younger one, in his early thirties. Alex took an instant dislike to them but he couldn't come up with a decent excuse to get rid of them straight away, and later it became not quite so easy: a relationship, however strained, started to form, and you couldn't just point them to the door any more.
I asked Alex what exactly he didn't like about them. He didn't answer and kept talking. The two kept their distance from the rest, as if bound by some secret only they knew. Sometimes they looked like father and son although they bore no resemblance, neither genetic nor even ethnic, because the older one looked like a Northerner, and the young man had quite a touch of the tar brush about him: a Georgian, possibly, or Armenian.
"Surely it's not a crime?" I confronted Alex. He hesitated. Finally, he explained. Alex suspected them to be ex-Hospitallers who survived the massacre either by escaping or, more likely, by being away on a looting expedition in the abandoned settlements. Now that they'd realized their inability to survive on their own, they either decided to join another group or even infiltrate his group on purpose, in order to lull them into a false sense of security first, then kill everybody off in the dead of the night and take their shelter, equipment and food stocks.
Alex had no direct evidence, but he pointed out many petty signs that seemed to corroborate his theory: a strange slang the two used; their prison-themed tattoos, and especially their backstory that didn't seem to make sense. According to them, the two used to work at the railway before the epidemic broke ou
t and were the only survivors of all their friends and co-workers. Whenever Alex had tried to double-check their story, they ended the conversation or changed the subject.
They seemed to laugh up their sleeves enjoying the fact that Alex couldn't call their bluff. Finally, he'd come to hate them but couldn't do much without them giving him a good excuse to do so. They didn't even try to make passes at Masha, something a true jail bird was unlikely to resist: they didn't seem to notice her much at all, treating her like a sick pet: if it dies it dies, it's only a pet after all. Such open indifference to human life had added to Alex's mental list.
Theoretically, with Alex's special forces background, he'd have had no trouble liquidating them, but it didn't feel like the right thing to do, especially as he could be mistaken. He didn't want to kill two Hospitallers only to discover they'd been innocent outsiders to begin with. He didn't have much experience with railway workers — what if this was how they actually spoke and looked like?
Valentine Ivanovich had chosen to remain neutral, up to his ears in nursing Masha; Alex started to feel himself cornered in his own shelter. He couldn't sleep properly, wary of those two attacking them in their sleep. The only other solution, to leave the group, didn't sound right, either: Alex felt responsible for Masha's and Valentine's lives.
Responsibility! By then, the meaning of the word had been lost on me. Since the day when I'd finally realized that I'd lost my family, I didn't feel responsible for anyone — much the less so for myself. I lived like an animal, one day at a time. Once you got used to it, life became truly simple. Mind you I didn't say easy — it could still be bloody hard, but — simple. Man introduced so many unnecessary complications into his life!
But now, a twitch of that forgotten feeling stirred in me — or most likely, I simply felt indebted to Alex, with his trust in me, his story, and his meal. Also, he hadn't killed me when he could've done so easily — this alone made me feel obliged to show my gratitude or even do something for him.
Call Me Human: A Zombie Apocalypse Novel Page 7
