by Jay Smith
Harris helped me over to where his wife Ellen and son Zeke were sitting. My sergeant had to help clear a path up the aisle where people had been huddled and hiding from the things they witnessed out the windows. Harris and Ellen shared a moment of that unspoken psychic conversation you only find in older married couples and she understood that she was to keep an eye on my goofed up, loopy self on top of her little boy. She didn’t seem to mind and tried her best to project a look of sympathy and optimism hiding a worried, exhausted mother in desperate need of some sleep and a pack of cigarettes. Granola, Marlboros, a Harley and light beer in a tall can. That’s what I thought of when I met Ellen.
Zeke is a little younger than my one cousin Dale. Like most kids, he was in shock and didn’t move from his mother’s arms. He has his father’s face – without all the mileage on it – which suggested that Harris was once a Prince Charming of a character before his wrestling career took off. Ellen met him in the 1980s when she was paid to wear a leotard and pretend to beat the crap out of other girls in leotards, sometimes in some type of slippery fluid. I’m glad I missed the 1980s sometimes, by the way. She and Harris hit it off and the rest – like the modern civilized world – is history.
Ellen carried a few tattoos on her arms that my drug-induced happiness had me asking about. Sadly I can’t remember much more than my attempts to control my giggling. Given the mood of the bus, laughter earned me some dirty looks and sneers from the sick, sad mass of people around me. Ellen gently guided me to sit back and told me about her “ink .” It was like a bedtime story and I found myself lulled to sleep by stories of thorny vines and flowers, two dragons wrapped up in each other’s wings, and a withered corpse with butterfly wings ascending to heaven by way of Ellen’s left boob.
The bus was quiet. Most of them saw something of what happened to my bus, watched the eaters swarm inside and slaughter everyone they found. I don’t know if you could call it a sacrifice or just a lucky break for them that the herd focused on my bus and did not overrun the second the same way. This second bus had the same weak front folding doors, the same shitty, sloppy armor plates and no cattle scoot to move eaters out of the way. Fortunately, once we were over the hill we were away from the herd and could speed up a little bit.
We moved slow, but steady along a road littered with bodies. The bus kept a safe speed and tried to avoid hitting them, but we bounced and shook a few times as we reached a point near where a big rocket bomb had exploded minutes…hell, maybe hours ago as far as I knew. I started my day in a dorm room with plans for the weekend. I ended my day on a bus surrounded by strangers, soldiers and a sea of walking corpses. And there was my Sergeant – standing over me with a canteen of water and a lost look on his face. He took a swig and offered some to me, then Ellen and Zeke. I wanted to grab it and gulp it all down. But I was good. I let a bit trickle into my mouth before a large bump caused it to splash across my face. It was cold, but it washed some of the blood off.
He reviewed Harris’ handy work and gave a thumbs-up. “You’ll be picking your nose again soon,” he promised with a forced smile. “How’s your leg? Can I get it cleaned up a little better?” The drugs had done me a favor, but through the haze, I could feel a dull throbbing in my foot. My head and face ached, though I couldn’t really feel my nose. I felt a little self-conscious, but my sergeant said something to the effect of “you clean up nice.”
Oh, my sergeant. If you only knew…
The ringing in my ears was still pretty bad, so I drifted away from my sergeant’s attentions and I looked for the stars outside the bus window. I wondered what happened to the moon. It would have been nice if someone held my hand, if only to reassure me I was alive. I didn’t really know anything about infection. Would I know it if I were? Would I know it if I died? Are the people these things once were still stuck inside their bodies? Do they see out from their rotting faces, feel the pain? My sergeant answered my thoughts with an abrupt “Yes, Lieutenant!” …which I thought was odd considering I wasn’t one.
An Airborne lieutenant started talking about strike zones and another “Gap Band” incoming. Soon, I was alone again, though my ankle felt a little better despite that ghostly feeling of a dead hand clamped to it.
My sergeant, a medic and the lieutenant in the back of the bus communicated with the driver up front. I would learn later that they had confirmed the third bus in the convoy was lost…as in they couldn’t raise it by radio and could not stop to wait or go back into that herd to attempt a rescue. Their orders were to continue on and hope the others got out of there alive. The strike that had landed nearby was aimed at a giant shipping warehouse along the Interstate that had become a mobile surgical hospital and refugee camp. If I’d been picked up two or three hours earlier, that would have been my destination. It had been overrun by the herd. Airborne units scouting ahead of us reported we were heading into an even larger herd blanketing the open land running from the warehouse across the highway and down into a bowl of open farmland.
The bomb or missile or whatever was guided to a tiny remote control helicopter suspended over the farmer’s field which allowed the device to explode less than a hundred feet in the air over the largest concentration of eaters. What wasn’t incinerated was pulped by the blast wave or crushed in the debris of farm equipment, masonry, timber and concrete. The road, more or less, remained intact. The scouts did not report in after the strike and did not meet us afterward.
Fortunately, the only people who saw the hundreds of bodies flattened and burnt were wearing night vision goggles. I just remember woodsmoke, sulfur and a hint of bacon.
Drifting away again, I saw Harris crawl up over the back of Ellen’s seat and kiss her on the top of her head. He brushed his son’s face with the back side of his hand and pulled his dirty straw hair from over his closed eyes. They’d been on the road a long while, since long before it forced them onto a bus. Ellen settled in and glanced over to check on me. She caught me looking because she looked a little like I’d caught her in a private moment. I felt my cheeks heat up and I closed my eyes.
The next time I opened them, it was to the sound of the lieutenant wishing us all a good morning and welcoming us to some shithole town called Wishwell and the cold early fall morning at a site called HG World.
CHAPTER TEN – A STUDY IN COLLECTIVE TRAUMA
Dear Diary: Tonight was a relative feast up on the roof of HG World. Harris found a big box of these little Brand-X freeze-dried turkey sausages from an “undisclosed location.” I have to admit that the phrase “CDC and FEMA Certified” on the thick plastic packaging threw me off a bit. Given our situation, those agencies hardly represent the pinnacle of disaster containment and control. Since freeze dried turkey sausage sounds about as tasty as old car seat stuffing, Harris grilled them up and slathered them in thick, red hot-wing sauce. I guess they couldn’t find ketchup.
Harris passed portions around to the Constables as they chatted and gossiped about the latest stupid or insanely dull things going on down below in the warehouse. There was a story about a guy “the one-armed bandit” who stole some food from kids over in Plumb District by threatening to show them the stump where the eaters had stopped gnawing off his arm. Krantz offered a story about catching two teenagers in The Lofts in the middle of nature’s spring calling. The happy couple made a little love nest for themselves inside the lumber stacks about thirty feet up. Sixteen he is and Nineteen is she…romance in captivity. No charges were filed, but Krantz was a little too detailed in his descriptions, leading Harris to ask him how long he watched them before telling them to stop. Krantz’s only answer was to blush and dig back into his plate.
David gave the eater mob report for the day, having come off a long shift of staring out into the wasteland. He said he didn’t see any new eaters in the parking lot again today. I asked why that was notable. David replied that they tracked new eaters like astronomers track…or track-ed asteroids. They looked for clues in new eaters – patches on uniforms, school jacket
s, even the condition of the body – so they could start to forecast how the eaters were getting up here from one of only two access roads to the south. The valley is surrounded by a largely steep and treacherous ring of mountains, so the eaters here now had to find their way up the Erie Highway Bypass to Main Street and up the access road, or along the Forsythe River from along the Susquehanna. It’s not unusual, David continued, for an eater or twenty to follow a scent hundreds of miles. Before I could dig a little deeper into how he knows all this, Krantz called “BORING” on the entire topic. David wrapped up the serious part of the evening by concluding that the cold weather was slowing down the eaters and maybe we could look forward to having just the same hundred or so monsters lurking outside through the winter months. Cold comfort, indeed.
Hoping to add a little “fun” to the conversation, I asked why they don’t bring rifles up on the roof and start killing off the eaters. Harris replied that it’s a mixed blessing to have them. “It’s protection from marauders and insulation from other survivors we wouldn’t let inside anyway.” They’ll save their bullets for anyone stupid enough to try to run the gauntlet of wrecks and eaters or try to sneak up to set an IED near the doors or loading docks.
Before I could probe further, Jeb got his share of dinner and his warrior-poet soul inspired him to describe the dish as "Bloody Stool .” Unfortunately, the name stuck. “Would you like another helping of bloody stool, David?” “Why, yes, Harris. I don’t think I could get enough of that old fashioned bloody stool.” “Nobody makes bloody stool like my gram’ma.”
In an instant, the serious world over the edge disappeared. Such is life on The Roof.
The Roof, to many people living down inside the building, is like the penthouse suite: a place only a few people are allowed to see if they have influence or power. I got up here because David and I hatched this little plan that involved starting a community newsletter to combat a lot of the rumors and misinformation we hear in the warehouse. Jenny Jo LOVED the idea (especially after David fed her the line about writing about herself) and I was given access to a word processor in the office upstairs and (sarcastic gasp) the password to the copier and supply cabinet! My first story? “Up On the Roof” – a horribly titled essay on what really goes on up there all the time.
The Roof – not counting the things beyond the ledges - is actually pretty dull. That’s not to say it’s unimportant to everyday life. It’s where the farm of solar panels and garden of wind turbines keep the lights going down below. There are always maintenance people here checking on connections and ball bearings and things. There’s also a fenced-off area with black plastic sheets stitched to the chain link. It looks like they’re building something over the loading dock area, but I couldn’t make out what. When David caught me looking thoughtfully at the piles of wood and blanketed crates near the work area, he urged me not to think too long on that and offered me dinner.
For the constables, it’s a sort of watchtower and escape in the same way the garden section is a breath of fresh air for the refugees – sorry, backspace – residents of HG World. To be honest, it’s like an employee lounge meeting a campout. If it rains, they sit over on the east side near the solar panel farm in a rather nice gazebo. When it gets too bad, they huddle in David’s little cabin on the south side and take turns walking the edge of the roof. They’re looking signs of a herd coming up the access road, marauders, other survivors…and sometimes they’ll see people who live in the valley between the Western and Kulstruck…Coldstone…Kudsucker… whatever mountain the old man on the radio lives on.
I had been reluctant to walk up to the edge. For my first hour on the roof, I parked myself on an upturned paint bucket around their little charcoal pit. I tried to ignore anything below the horizon of the building’s ledge and enjoy the gray-blue sky and fresh air. Soon, though, talk of the eaters and the groans and bleats that rose with the smell of grilling meat drew me out to see the parking lot on the south side of the building.
When I first looked out over the ledge I wanted to run inside and hide somewhere. I know that’s pretty stupid considering we are at least five stories over their heads. Even so, when I looked down, it wasn’t long before they started looking UP. I’d forgotten the sharpest points of their appearance that had dulled over the intervening months. Over time, the ugly reality of their appearance softened in my imagination. I saw rubber latex and stage blood. Seeing them again reminds me that each of them used to be a real human being and the long gashes and gouges in their bodies are never going to heal but fade, tear and wear out like the signs out near the access road. They’re still out there bleaching under the sun, clothes turning green and black with mold, bodies bloated by the rain, debris, and all the rotting flesh they’ve tried to ingest. They may be slow and stupid but they continue to hunt. Alone they seem almost sad and tragic, but in numbers like this… it’s like a bad summer storm that will never end. There is no hate, no sympathy, no joy…just hunger.
The parking lot is littered with wrecked or abandoned cars. They make a maze of steel and fiberglass through which the eaters wander like drunken mice. The maze of wrecks prevents them from really forming a herd, but there is nothing to keep the hundreds of eaters out there in the lot from climbing up over each other toward us. It would take hundreds…maybe thousands to reach the roof, but… how many eaters are out there right now catching our scent in the breeze, turning away from their meal and heading our way? How long until this place is surrounded by ten times the herd that flooded our buses?
When Harris grabbed me by the arm, I jumped and pulled away from him. I didn’t scream, but I did cry out and that stirred the eaters below us into a chorus of impatient groans and howls that spread out into the mob across the lot. It was the same haunting, lost noise that I remembered from the road. It made it harder for me to remove myself from that moment. I stared at the gravel under my feet, to the sky, then put my face into my hands but in every instance I saw the dead glaring at me, their voices on the wind told me they knew I was there and they were coming…coming for me at last.
It was David’s look of concern that brought me out of wherever I’d been. My heart was pounding and I was short of breath. Jebediah told them to get me the hell off the roof before the whole parking lot got excited, but I was able to get ahold of myself and the other constables were able to talk Jeb down.
Harris told me I’d been staring down at the mob for a good five minutes and I kept moving closer to the edge. I didn’t hear them talking about me, or telling me to watch my step. When Harris grabbed me, I was leaning over the side. I don’t remember any of that and I thought I’d only been looking down for a few seconds.
I wanted to get outside so badly, but seeing the dead – so many of them staggering around, tripping over dried remains – it destroys all fantasy about clinging to the world we knew. Down there? That’s us. That’s who we were as a people and who – one day – we’ll all become: Undead. Rotting. Savage.
“How can you stand being out here,” I asked no one in particular. I tried a bit of Bloody Stool and someone handed me something that smelled like paint thinner to wash it down. After the first bite of the wing sauce, I had to take a sip. I’m sorry I did because between the tastes and burning I felt like my face was being embalmed. At least the pain grounded me. When I recovered, Harris was there to answer my question.
“We see it every day…the eaters down there. I think it means something different to everybody. To me, it reminds me why I do my job – to protect my family. To Jeb, it’s an audience of things to toy with, animals to torture. I think Krantz and David are real good at keeping their reasons to themselves, but it gets them out here. Kind of like you don’t want to be stuck inside a metal box surrounded by monsters. You worked your way back onto a roof and realized that there’s no way off this time.”
What he said wasn’t comforting, but it was true. Another sip of paint thinner and I was ready for sleep. Maybe it’s best that I’m in here. This place is wor
se than the bus, worse than a jail. It’s a tomb.
Post Script: Now that I’m back inside, sitting here on the steps of what they call “The Mayor’s House” it’s like a spell has been broken. Maybe it’s that little buzz I feel from Jebediah’s moonshine, but I’m actually thinking pretty clear right now. I thought I’d been fighting it, but I didn’t realize how hypnotized I’ve been…how we all are down here. We’ve painted our trees into the cinderblock, put little tool sheds into rows along the concrete floor and called it Main Street… and we’ve collectively agreed to make this place into something it could never be. I look around at my neighbors…really strangers…and I see dead faces, I see rot and ruin. I see people who are as dead and empty as the things walking around outside. The only difference is that we haven’t started eating each other. Yet.
