After twenty minutes of wandering around in that hell, Pritchenko and I collapsed, panting, into a deep hole in the middle of the devastation. At the bottom of that hole was a large pool of rainwater. We drank like camels, then lay down to catch our breath, with the sun on our faces and a breeze in our hair. Spring had arrived in all its glory. We were glad to be alive.
ENTRY 70
March 12, 10:41 p.m.
I’m sitting next to a small campfire. A tasty chicken vegetable soup is bubbling away. Across the flames, I can see Pritchenko’s familiar silhouette wrapped in a blanket, snoring so loud he could wake the dead. For the first time in weeks, I’m in such a good mood I can even joke about this.
Yesterday we left that burned zone after languishing there for three days. Prit and I were completely exhausted. Fortunately, the Ukrainian had quickly spotted a place to take shelter and recuperate, which undoubtedly saved our lives.
It was hot at the bottom of that hollow. The sun in a cloudless sky beat down mercilessly as we lay like lizards next to a pool of rainwater that was evaporating before our eyes in that stifling heat. It was so hot the air vibrated. Debris seemed to tremble. The silence was complete, broken only by occasional snaps and pops from the ruins and crumbling buildings and the drone of flies. Once we heard dogs barking in the distance, but the barking stopped after a few minutes.
Prit and I tried to build a tent out of a torn sheet, but we had nothing to prop it up with. We were too weak to perform any feats of engineering.
Bottom line, our situation was pitiful. We were alone, essentially unarmed, lost in an abandoned, half-destroyed city, exhausted, hungry, with just dirty water to drink, surrounded by thousands of undead. Not exactly a tropical vacation.
We were sweating like pigs in that torrid heat. I walked to the edge of the puddle of water, made a bowl with my hands, and drank some water. I smiled ruefully at my reflection. Pritchenko and I looked strikingly alike. After all we’d been through, we both had beards; our hair was matted and dirty; our clothes (in my case, a swimsuit and a ragged shirt, since I’d stripped off my wetsuit in the storeroom) were in tatters; our skin was greasy and smeared with soot; our hands were dirty; our nails were broken; we had that sharp, bony, hungry look and, I suppose, a foul smell. A beggar from before the apocalypse would look like a movie star next to us.
I told Prit that if a client could see me like this, he wouldn’t recognize me. Laughing, he said that Siunten probably wouldn’t hire him looking like that.
A while back, I’d considered asking him what the hell Siunten was. That company didn’t sound familiar. I hardly knew anything about my friend, except that we’d spent three terrifying days together, and twice he’d saved my life. Just as I started to ask, the Zaren Kibish sirens thundered again, breaking the silence of the dead city.
That hoarse blast spread throughout the city. It’s amazing how sounds travel in absolute silence. We city dwellers are surrounded by thousands of sounds, so we don’t realize that. In such silent surroundings, the sound of an engine or a radio could be heard miles away. They probably heard the ship’s horn all over Vigo and in neighboring towns. The fools on the Zaren Kibish kept mindlessly blowing the siren. Bad idea. They’d draw all the fucking undead in the entire region right to us.
We had to move on. If we stayed where we were, we’d starve or die of sunstroke or God knows what. My questions for Pritchenko would have to wait. We dragged ourselves to our feet and crawled back over all the rubble and the charred remains of cars and buildings.
The smell of burned flesh hung over everything. Occasionally we saw piles of scorched bodies, but there was no way to tell if they’d been humans or undead, trapped in the voracious fires that devoured parts of the city.
I was stopped in my tracks by the terrifying thought that the VNT office might’ve been burned to the ground. If it was, we could kiss that mysterious package good-bye unless it’d been wrapped in an asbestos box. I tried to calm down. I reminded myself that when I scanned the city from the Corinth, the part of the city the office was in looked to be intact. Still, that was even more reason to hurry to our destination. Although it would only take a few hours to get there, we couldn’t travel at night, of course.
As the afternoon wore on, the temperature dropped. Soon Prit and I were shivering. Spring nights in Galicia can be chilly, no matter how hot the days are.
Prit and I hesitated at the edge of the burned-out zone. Before us stretched a wide two-lane street covered with dust, dirt, and soot, but unscathed. Maybe because of rain or a sudden change in the wind, the fire had stopped there and hadn’t continued down the street, devouring the city. From that point on, the rest of Vigo was intact, but dirty, abandoned, and infested with undead. Walking among the ruins had been torturously slow and difficult, but at least we were sure we wouldn’t encounter any undead. Now the road would be easier, but considerably more dangerous.
We had no choice. We stepped on to the street, trying to pass unnoticed. I couldn’t read the street sign; it was covered in soot. Night was falling, and the light was fading.
Although we were just a few blocks from the VNT offices, we had to stop and hide. It would be suicide to walk around, unarmed and unable to see where we were, in an unfamiliar area infested with those creatures. We hadn’t come this far just to fuck up as we turned a corner. Plus, we’d pass out if we didn’t get something to eat. Our growling stomachs would scare a bear.
Suddenly, a smile lit up Pritchenko’s face. He stopped and pointed. I breathed a sigh of relief. It was turning out to be a good day. He’d had found a great place to spend the night.
It was a small tavern sandwiched between a ransacked bank and a video store with bloodstained windows. Its facade was covered in dirt and soot. Hanging over the door was a rickety Coca-Cola sign with the bar’s name painted on it: THE OLD VINE.
To call it a corner bar would be generous. It was really a dump. Before the apocalypse, I wouldn’t have given it a second glance. The door was secured by a hinged gate that reached all the way to the ground and had a large, rusty padlock. Between the gate and the door was a pile of old, yellowed newspapers dating from before the epidemic and a lot of flyers, faded from months of exposure to rain and wind.
That hole-in-the-wall must’ve closed long before everything went to hell. It was unlikely we’d find undead in there, but we wouldn’t know that till we went inside. Our options were dwindling fast. It was getting dark; soon we wouldn’t be able to see past our noses. The sky was clouding up; a storm was about to break. There wouldn’t be any moonlight. Every minute we stood in the middle of the street increased the chance that unwanted company would track us down.
The door to the bank had been blown off its hinges. Judging from the scrapes on the wall and pavement, someone had dragged the ATM outside with a powerful vehicle. Probably looters during the chaotic days at the end. One thing was for sure—we’d be no better off sleeping in that bank than in the street. I wasn’t crazy about entering the video store, with all the blood on its windows. And I certainly didn’t need to rent a movie.
So our best alternative was the bar. While Prit fiddled around with the padlock on the gate, I peered in the window through ads, faded posters, and a list of local soccer matches. In the dusty, dark interior, there were bottles were lined up neatly behind the bar. Suddenly, I was obsessed with the idea of drinking a frothy beer, sitting quietly at a table. We had to go in.
Walking a few yards from the demolished area, I picked up a piece of cement rubble that weighed about ten pounds. I gathered my waning strength and threw it at the window. The thud startled Prit, and he jumped to one side as shards of cement rained down on him. I gave him a sheepish look, silently apologizing. The Ukrainian shook his head, still shaken up. The window was shattered, but not broken.
Safety glass, but bad quality. If it’d been high-quality safety glass, I could’ve thrown that boulder a hundred times and it wouldn’t have scratched the surface. But this was a seedy bar,
not a jewelry store. After few well-placed blows, what Pritchenko called “the old Soviet way,” the window finally gave way, leaving a gap big enough for Prit and me to slip through.
There was dust everywhere, and the place smelled musty. I laughed at myself when I automatically reached out to turn on the light. Some habits never die. Prit leaned a table against the window to cover the hole, transforming the bar into a fortress against the undead. I slipped behind the bar to take stock while some light still remained. The cash register was empty, and the moldy carcass of a lemon was rotting in a bowl next to a rusty knife. I found a Bic lighter. Pritchenko pulled some heavy curtains across the window to block the view from the street. Perfect.
By the light of that lighter, we looked through the drawers and finally found a couple of candles. Once they were lit, we opened one of the refrigerators. In less than two minutes, Pritchenko and I had chugged half a dozen bottles of water and a couple soft drinks, sitting with our backs against the bar. You could almost see all that liquid running through my body, reviving me. My tongue rehydrated with each bottle of water, and I could feel my cells soaking up that blessed liquid up like a sponge.
Once we’d quenched our thirst, hunger became our next priority. As I was writing some lines in this book, I heard Prit tinkering in the little kitchen at the back. I was too weak to help. After a few minutes, he reappeared, smiling, carrying a huge pile of cans. The kitchen was pretty well stocked and relatively intact. It wouldn’t feed an army, but it would feed a couple of survivors for a few days.
That night we slept soundly for the first time in a week. When we awoke, sunlight was filtering through the curtains. After we washed up a little with bottled water, we assessed the situation. After some discussion, we decided to stay in the bar for another day to get our strength back. Through the curtains, we saw plenty of undead moving down the street, headed for God only knows where.
ENTRY 71
March 13, 7:30 p.m.
This morning we finally ventured outside again. The street was drenched. It must’ve rained during the night. As the Ukrainian and I traveled along the sidewalk, hiding behind abandoned cars, a weak sun began to emerge. Wisps of steam rose off the pavement as the humidity burned off. It promised to be another sultry day, but right then it was still nice and cool.
Pritchenko carried a huge kitchen knife hanging at his waist. I’d grabbed a small meat cleaver. It wouldn’t do much good against a horde of those creatures, but it made me feel a lot more confident.
To be honest, we got overconfident, and it nearly cost us our lives. We were less than ten minutes from the address on the receipt when we turned a corner without taking the time to scope it out and stumbled upon the girl.
She was in her twenties and quite tall. She had a spectacular blonde mane halfway to her waist and a nice figure. She wore a top that left little to the imagination and skintight jeans that fit really well. Her features were delicate, and she wore enormous rhinestone earrings. She was very pretty. A really great-looking girl. The only thing marring her beauty was the ugly wound that ran along her shoulder blade, leaving a messy trail of blood down her bare back. That and the fact she was a damned undead.
I didn’t see her coming, and before I knew it she was on top of me, struggling to bite me. Her saliva dripped on to my chest as she locked me in a deadly embrace. I shuddered. If she scratched me, I’d end up like the Pakistani guy. I cried for help from Pritchenko.
Prit coolly situated himself behind the girl, who had me backed against a wall. With a quick, expert gesture, he grabbed the girl by the hair with one hand and began to methodically execute her with the knife in the other hand.
It was a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. Black blood gushed from the girl’s neck as Pritchenko methodically sawed through muscles and tendons. When he reached the trachea, the knife made a scraping sound as it tore the cartilage. He was like some mad butcher. Blood gushed all over Prit and me. I couldn’t get free of her deadly arm, which held me against the wall. The woman twisted around, trying to attack Pritchenko, but now it was my turn to grip her tight. I could clearly see the hole in her esophagus through the blood clots. I was mesmerized.
When Pritchenko’s knife reached the vertebrae in her neck, it hit bone. He pulled out the blade and stood back while I shoved the girl’s bloody, trembling body into the middle of the street. Her head hung at an impossible angle on her back.
It was my turn. I hauled back and brought my cleaver down, trying to hack through the remaining piece of the thing’s neck. Her body swayed backward, and the blade struck her collarbone. Now she was bouncing around wildly in the middle of the street, her head hanging by a thread, her arm half severed. It was something out of a gory movie.
I whacked her neck a second time. My aim was true this time, and her head rolled on the ground. Her convulsing body collapsed.
Pritchenko picked her head up by the hair and gazed at it, deep in thought. It was creepy. That fucking head was still snapping its mouth and gnashing its teeth. It made no sound since it had no larynx or lungs, but if it could, it would’ve been screaming with rage.
With all his might, Prit threw it down the road. The head flew through the air in an arc, hit the ground with a thud, and rolled into a corner. If no one touched her, she might stay there until…when? How long can these beings live? Are they eternal? Questions and more questions and not a fucking answer.
Pritchenko and I were bathed in blood.
That episode gave me something new to think about. Prit had meticulously, patiently beheaded a girl in cold blood. His pulse didn’t even seem to rise. Calm and professional. I asked myself: Who the hell is this guy? A bit uneasy, I studied the Ukrainian as we got back under way.
The VNT office was just around the corner. I was sick of it all. I wanted to get out of this damn city as fast as I could.
Fifteen minutes later, we were surveying the wide street that stretched out before us. Plastic bags fluttered wildly on hot, thick air from one end of the street to the other while dust swirled in intricate patterns. Separating the two lanes was a median where nature was urgently reclaiming its place. The flowering plants that once grew there had succumbed to weeds. Vines, ferns, and brambles coiled around trees no one would prune again. Shoots of grass were poking up through cracks in the pavement.
Dozens of vehicles were parked on the shoulder or abandoned in the road. There were a lot of cars, some vans, and even a couple of huge, heavy trucks. The cab of a monstrous eighteen-wheeler was embedded in the window of a women’s clothing store. Dried blood trailed from the driver’s door.
Tattered curtains flapped through open windows. Windows in every building were shattered, and the pavement was covered by a thick layer of broken glass. The huge explosion at the port must have blown out all those windows.
There was no sign of life apart from dozens of rats and countless gulls hovering overhead. It’s funny. Since all this began, I’ve seen dogs, cats (my Lucullus), rats, and gulls, but not a single pigeon or horse or sparrow or any other animal. I wonder if this epidemic affects other living beings. One more question to add to the growing list.
Prit and I had taken up a position on the cab of a massive dump truck. It had a busted windshield and four flat tires and was parked partway up on the sidewalk on the corner. It had a perfect view of the street.
There wasn’t a single monster around, but drag marks in the dust on the pavement were unmistakable. We spotted a few tottering figures about two hundred yards away, at the far end of the road. Too far for them to see us, but still too close.
The ground was covered with trash and dirt, along with dozens of rotting corpses, all with gunshot wounds. Pritchenko thought they were the undead killed by the raiding parties from the Safe Haven. I didn’t know what to think. I was starting to suspect that the collapse of law and order in large cities like Vigo had been more terrible and chaotic than in small towns. Thousands of civilian sightings of the undead must’ve overwhelmed the security forces.
Then it was every man for himself. Those bodies might be proof of that.
Across the street was VNT’s home office. It was in a mediumsize building with a glass door and a huge window on one side, where the offices were located. On the other side, a large black metal gate with the company’s gold logo painted on it sealed off the van parking garage. The place appeared to be closed up tight and deserted.
In the back of the eighteen-wheeler was a huge load of building materials. On its last trip, they must’ve been planning to install a pipeline; about fifteen PVC pipes, four inches in diameter, were stacked in the truck bed. Behind the cab were a number of tools, including a crowbar. We could use that to open the office door.
Several months ago, our firm defended a small-time thief. He gave us a detailed lesson in the art of breaking and entering. The guy was a real pro who’d been caught in flagrante after he’d cleaned out at least a dozen apartments, so we couldn’t get him off. He was probably in jail when all this hell began. I wonder what’s happened to that poor thief, and everyone locked up in prison. I shudder at the image of entire wings of starving prisoners. Even though they were criminals, I hoped at least some of them survived.
Grabbing the crowbar with both hands, I quietly crossed the road, Pritchenko on my heels, to try out what the thief had taught me. Knowledge never goes to waste.
It was easier than I expected. I struggled briefly and took a couple of chips out of the door frame. Then the door sprung open with a loud crack that chilled me to the bone. The sound probably didn’t carry more than ten yards, but in that silence it sounded like a gunshot.
Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End az-1 Page 20
