by Russ Melrose
I called his name once softly, whispering his name across the room, but Alex didn't respond. I headed to the linen closet in the hallway and found a wash cloth and went back into the living room and stood in front of the chair. His mottled, grayish-white skin seemed to have thinned or tightened in some way because I could see the subtle outline of veins and arteries just beneath the surface of his skin. The weave of arteries and veins fed from his neck into his face and skull, making my brother look like a ghostly illustration from an anatomy book. And with his body positioned in a fetal curl, he looked utterly vulnerable. Leaning in close, I still couldn't detect any semblance of breath coming from his chest or mouth.
I placed the tips of my index and middle fingers in the center of the wash cloth and placed them in the area of Alex's carotid artery. I gently pressed down and searched for even the slightest tremor of a pulse, but I couldn't feel a thing. The only thing I felt was the intense heat from Alex's fever. I pressed my fingers more firmly into the artery and closed my eyes and focused all my attention on the tips of my fingers. And then I felt it—the slightest hint of a pulse, barely perceptible. And then I felt it again. Alex's pulse was weak, but it was still there.
I relaxed but kept my fingers pressed against his carotid artery. I wanted the tangible reminder that Alex was still alive, still with me. Alex was so weak though, I wasn't sure how long he could last with the intense fever.
I continued to monitor his pulse when it suddenly vanished. I'd lost it. I repositioned the wash cloth but still couldn't find it. No matter how hard I pressed my fingers into the area of his carotid artery, I felt nothing. And just like that, Alex was gone.
My brother was dead and I was struggling to understand how I felt about it. I kept my fingers and the wash cloth pressed against Alex's neck, hoping for a miracle. I felt deflated and numbed, and just as I was about to remove my fingers and the wash cloth, I thought I felt the hint of a vibration strum through Alex's artery. At first, I thought it was nothing more than wishful imagination, but I felt it again. The pulses came more frequently and settled into a normal rhythm, and I felt energized and thrilled by the feel of my brother's blood pulsing through his arterial vessel. I could feel the movement of life within him and it excited me. I felt an incredible sense of relief knowing my brother was still alive. But just as quickly as my mood had shifted, Alex's pulse quickened and I could feel the blood in his artery thumping wildly against the tips of my fingers.
His head twitched sideways and I jerked my hand away from his neck and took a step back, the wash cloth falling silently to the floor. His head twitched again and his shoulders shivered in a short-lived spasm. Then Alex relaxed and I could hear a subtle exhalation of breath like a muffled hiss escape from his mouth. He was quiet for several seconds before his body stretched ramrod straight and began convulsing wildly. His legs had stretched out onto the floor and the heels of his boots kept jabbing at the oak surface, and the way my brother's body quivered with such intensity made him appear as if he were being given electroshock therapy. I had no idea what I should do for him or how to help him.
Saliva oozed from the corners of his mouth as his convulsing subsided into a subdued trembling. And while the worst of it seemed over, a shadow of realization crossed my mind. My brother was turning. I'd deluded myself into thinking my brother was different from all the other infected out there. I hadn't wanted to face this moment because of what it meant for me and for Alex. And even now, as his body stopped trembling, I stubbornly noted to myself that he hadn't actually turned yet. Then he opened his eyes.
Alex's eyes were red-rimmed and jaundiced, having taken on a sickly yellow cast, his pupils no bigger than a pinhead. A flicker of dull awareness registered in Alex's eyes. He looked toward me and let out a deep reverberating moan that echoed through the room.
I instinctively moved backwards. Alex lunged from the chair and took a swipe with his free hand at my face. He snapped back toward the radiator and stared uncomprehending at the handcuffs.
I'd ducked my head out of the way and stumbled backwards, tripping over my feet. My tailbone landed hard on the end of the coffee table. I hit it with such force it threw the other end of the table up in the air like a teeter totter. The Glock 17 catapulted past me as I slid off the coffee table and onto the wood floor. The keys and the Ziploc bag tumbled onto my chest.
Alex reached toward me with his free hand, a desperate guttural moan rising from within. The handcuffs kept him at bay. After his third or fourth swipe in my direction, he looked back at his handcuffed hand. He tugged instinctively at it with his free hand. Then he used both hands to tug fiercely at the handcuffs. Each tug increased in intensity. Alex kept looking back at me and moaning fretfully as if he were afraid I would leave.
The old water pipe began to groan and creak from Alex's efforts.
I was on the floor on my buttocks, the keys and Ziploc bag still resting on my chest. I inched backwards, using my hands and feet to propel myself away from my brother. Each time he looked back at me, a mix of frenzy and desperate longing in his gaze, I'd stop my movements, afraid he'd become even more frantic in his efforts to free himself. But it didn't matter. The water pipe suddenly squealed loudly and surrendered, and a wide fan of water sprayed across the room. Alex took one more powerful tug at the handcuffs and they slid off the fractured pipe. His effort created a momentum that carried him backwards, off balance, and his broad back slammed hard into the coffee table, splintering the table in half as if it were made of balsa wood.
Everything slowed down. As Alex clumsily disentangled himself from the wrecked coffee table, I found myself unable to move. My stomach and chest trembled in short, uncontrollable spasms. My legs were wooden, my mouth parched and spitless. I tried to swallow but couldn't. All I could do was watch Alex as he tried to coordinate the movement of his arms and legs. His breathing was a deep guttural rasping and he looked puzzled and disoriented.
Alex finally righted himself on his hands and knees and fixed his dull lifeless eyes on me. I hardly recognized him. The light ash-gray skin on his face was drawn tightly inward and was nearly translucent, exposing a network of dark blue veins and crimson arteries that forked upwards from his neck. His jaw was slack and his mouth agape. Whatever minimal level of awareness he possessed was of a primal nature, and his only focus seemed to be on me. He rose determinedly to his feet and stretched his right arm out toward me as if he were trying to reach for me. He groaned in anticipation and staggered forward.
I scurried backwards across the floor as fast as I could, heading for the far wall, jolted out of my fear-based inertia by a powerful will to survive—a will that surprised me with its raw fervency. A surge of adrenaline helped me crab backwards as fast as Alex was moving toward me. I knew I was running out of room.
Just before I hit the wall with the back of my head, my butt connected with the Glock 17 and it scudded across the floor and into the floor board. Instinctively, I reached back and searched for the gun. As I felt the butt of the gun, Alex lunged at me. He fell awkwardly and heavily to the floor but was close enough to snag the pant leg of my jeans above the ankle. I tried to pull my leg away but his grip was too powerful and he began to pull me away from the wall. I lost contact with the gun and repeatedly kicked him in the face as hard as I could.
I kicked him one last time with every ounce of strength I could muster and twisted my head and body around to find the Glock. In one motion, I reached for the gun, spun around, and fired three shots into my brother's gray face. The back of his head exploded, sending fragments of bone and brain matter flying through a misty spray of dark crimson that momentarily hung in the air.
Alex's angled head lay at my feet, his pale eyes staring into nothingness. A trickling of blood seeped from the close-knit entry wounds in his forehead, dripping rhythmically onto the floor. He looked nothing like my brother. I set the gun down next to the Ziploc bag and keys. They'd fallen from my chest when I twisted my body to grab the Glock. Alex's hand still gri
pped my pant leg. I took a surgical mask from the Ziploc bag and used it to pry his fingers from my leg without having to touch him.
I moved backward till my back rested against the wall. I drew my legs up to my chest and hugged my legs with my arms and began to rock back and forth. I closed my eyes to shut everything out.
I sat there rocking, mesmerized by the movement of my body. I took solace in the movement, in the rhythm of it, in its simplicity. It was as if my body were chanting the same simple prayer again and again, though I had no idea what the words were or what they meant. All I knew was that I felt comforted and wanted to prolong the feeling as long as I could. I didn't care that somewhere along the way my consciousness had gotten lost amidst the metronomic movements of my body.
After a time, a quiet muffled vibration began to echo in my head, and my rocking fell into rhythm with the vibrations. It felt so natural. It stayed like that for a while. Then the vibrations intensified, lost their rhythm, and took on a frenetic cadence. That's when I heard the moans and realized the sounds weren't coming from my head. I stopped rocking and sat perfectly still, listening.
The sounds were coming from the area of Alex's picture window. They were muted but were becoming clearer as the moments passed. I got up to investigate, circumventing my brother's body and the large pool of blood near his head. I watched every step I took, meticulously avoiding the blood splatter which fanned out from Alex's body in a wide, irregular arc.
The picture window curtains were partially opened, exposing a two-foot wide gap. I stood a couple feet back from the window and watched as an infected man rammed his bald head into the window, took two steps back and did it again. And while his steps were awkward and his body stiff, he butted his head into the glass with great ferocity. Blood pulsed out from a two-inch gash at the top of his forehead and channeled down through the features of his face. A cloudy, rosy smudge had formed on the glass where he'd rammed his head into the picture window again and again. The man was pudgy with wide shoulders. His face had the same taut appearance as Alex's with arteries and veins in shallow relief behind a thin mask of ash-gray skin. Rivulets of dark blue veins on the top and sides of his head made it appear as if his skull cap were cracked by deep, dark fissures. He'd been joined by several other infected who were frantically pounding on the picture window with their fists, moaning and rasping loudly.
Their moans increased in intensity when they saw me standing in front of the window—their shrill cry a wailing grumble filled with desperation and longing. A dozen of them were gathered at the window, pounding and moaning and pressing against one another. Two more infected trundled into the front yard. They headed for the window where they joined the others. A young woman standing next to the pudgy man began headbutting the window too. She kept slamming her forehead into the window in piston-like thrusts, grunting and screeching with each headbutt.
I stood in a haze watching them. It was like one of those moments where you were outside of yourself watching things unfold as if you were disembodied. You were perfectly safe because you weren't really there.
More than anything, I was mesmerized by them, and I watched them with a childlike curiosity.
They were a motley group—senior citizens, teenagers, children, working adults. Some had bite marks on their arms or necks or legs and some didn't. One boy, maybe twelve, was missing most of his left arm. The ones behind the front line of infected were stretching their arms out toward me, clamoring to get closer. While most were dressed for summer, there was a slender young man in a blue blazer and loosened mauve tie, his shirt flecked with dried blood. I'd have thought he would have struggled in the early evening heat with the sports coat on, but it didn't seem to bother him. And the heat didn't seem to bother an elderly woman clad in a suffocating beige pant suit. They didn't seem to pay any attention to how hot the July sun was. The only thing they seemed to notice was me. Each pair of wild jaundiced eyes were riveted on me. No doubt, I was the apple of their eye.
I suddenly realized I was standing in water. I was fairly certain the water hadn't been there when I first came to the picture window. But it was there now, and that made me wonder how long I'd been standing in front of the picture window. The water pipe must have been leaking for some time now, and a quarter-inch film of water covered over two-thirds of the floor and had found Alex's feet. But it didn't matter, because none of it was real. Not the water, not my brother's diseased dead body, and certainly not the crazed groupies outside.
As the water spread across the floor, a sudden, aberrant sound woke me from my dream. A distinct, short-lived tinkle. The sound of glass cracking. The moaning stopped for a fleeting moment, then resumed at a feverish pitch. A six-inch vertical crack now dissected the rosy smudge, and that's when I realized this wasn't some illusory dream I'd imagined. The pudgy, infected man was now ramming his head into the window with savage intensity as was the infected woman next to him. The rest of them furiously battered the picture window with their fists, and the window clattered noisily from the barrage.
My senses had awakened and I felt the same adrenaline rush I'd felt earlier. Despite the aroused energy, I couldn't seem to get myself to move. A vicious headbutt from the stout pudgy man cracked the window further. The crack forked outward in random directions like lightning. A couple more blows and the window would shatter. The only way out would be the door to the backyard. I was panicked but lucid at the same time. I looked back at Alex as if he might be able to help, but he remained motionless on the floor with a gaping hole in the back of his head. I noticed the Glock lying close to Alex, but my feet remained pinned to the floor. My body was riddled with fear and simply wasn't responding to the alarm my mind was sending out. Then everything happened at once.
I heard the glass crack and break and I turned my head to see a large slab of glass come crashing down to the floor where it shattered and exploded. I took a step back, but a few shards ricocheted off the floor and into the pant legs of my jeans. The pudgy man and the woman next to him tried to climb over the window sill, and the other infected were trying to climb over them to get in. They were in a frantic state.
A great urgency swept over me and gave me the impetus to move, but my mind and body were still out of sync. In my haste to get to the Glock, I stumbled and fell and landed in the water next to Alex. Alex's eyes were remarkably still and there was nothing he could do to help me. Pudgy man was halfway into the room, only being held back by the others trying to climb over him. I grabbed the gun and the surgical masks and scrambled to my feet. I hustled toward the hallway as pudgy man landed with a thud onto the floor, splashing water across the room. His gray face and bald head were a crazy network of veins and arteries and smeared blood. He reached toward me and tried to get up at the same time.
I ran into the dining room which separated the living room from the kitchen where the back door was located. A sudden inspiration had me tipping over chairs in the dining room to create a barrier between the dining room and the kitchen. I raced to the back door and heard pudgy man slosh across the living room floor as I opened the door to the backyard.
I locked the back door and slammed it shut. And while it made little sense to lock the door from inside, it somehow, quite illogically, made me feel safer. The infected had shown no aptitude where doors were concerned and they'd made no attempt to get in the house through the front door which I suddenly realized I'd left unlocked.
Being out in the open, I was able to breathe and clear my mind. The backyard offered me a respite I needed. If the infected didn't know how to open a door, then it would be difficult for them to get into the backyard. There were only three windows in the back, one above the sink in the kitchen, a small bathroom window with thick, opaque glass and another window in Alex's bedroom. Alex kept his bedroom door shut, so the kitchen window seemed the only possible entryway into the backyard.
The infected weren't going to give up. They'd shown themselves to be determined and relentless. Suddenly, I heard moans that see
med inexplicably close. I strained to hear where they were coming from. A sudden crash and the sound of wood splintering answered my question.
I ran to the side of the house and saw one of the vertical wood planks in the fence cracked at its midpoint. They must have followed the sound of the back door being slammed shut. Two of them were ramming their bodies into the fence and more were on the way.
The fence was flimsy and had been that way for years. The six-foot wood fence had turned gray from twenty-five years of neglect. It hadn't weathered the years well at all.
I fit the surgical masks into the back of my jeans but kept the Glock handy. I headed for the back fence. They continued to pound away at the fence.
Getting over the fence was more of a struggle than I imagined. When I reached the top, the fence groaned under my weight. Though I landed softly on the grass, I felt a sharp pain in my shin. I pulled up my pant leg and discovered a thick red welt where a glass shard had struck my leg. The surgical mask bugged me, so I removed it.
I heard the fence buckle and the excited moans of the infected become amplified.
It took me several hours to get home to my condo apartment limping through two miles of backyards. The adrenaline created a kind of frantic edge that gave me the energy and alertness I needed to make it home. And as long as I was careful crossing streets, I knew I'd be okay. After an early incident with a German Shepherd, I steered clear of backyards with dogs. I didn't have to worry about people. I never came across a single person hanging out in their backyard. I imagined they were glued to their televisions, mesmerized by coverage of the crisis.
It was dark by the time I got home. My arms were so sore, I could barely move them. My shin throbbed with pain and I was a mess. But I welcomed the soreness and the pain. I was even grateful for it. They provided me with a distraction I desperately needed.
