After several months of neglect, the area was starting to look really bleak. The houses peeped out from behind overgrown bushes and weed-choked gardens. On one driveway, a fire-engine-red tricycle lay on its side, gradually being consumed by hedges. With all the humans gone, nature was reclaiming its place. Almost no cars were abandoned on the shoulder. Maybe their owners had fled in them, trying to escape the inevitable.
There were dozens of undead in that area. Their occupation of the city didn’t seem to follow any pattern. There were wide avenues where you only saw a couple. Then, around a corner, you stumbled upon dozens, even hundreds, of them, wandering around or staring off into space, waiting for prey. What motivates them or draws them to one place or another is a mystery to me.
That neighborhood was a hot zone. There were dozens of those things at every intersection, in every garden, some in good shape, others horribly maimed or disfigured. I’ve gotten used to them; their smell doesn’t even disgust me. I know what they are, and they know what I am. Period.
Prit zigzagged, dodging undead. He drove awfully fast, as usual. With each turn, the tires screeched, shaking us around like peas in a can. The undead appeared in greater and greater numbers. Prit performed heroic feats behind the wheel to keep from ramming them. We had to slow down, and the mob pursuing us was more abundant. It didn’t look good.
Out of the blue, a middle-aged guy appeared suddenly in the middle of the road. He was about fifty, heavyset, his shirt open to the waist, wearing lots of gold chains around his neck. Half his face was a bloody, tattered mess; he was deathly pale like the rest of them. We didn’t have time to dodge him.
Just seconds before, Prit had swerved to avoid a group of undead crowded together in the middle of the road. What happened next was inevitable. He didn’t see the guy until we were on top of him. With a loud thud, the monster’s body struck the front of the van and was thrown to the side, completely limp, leaving a clump of putrid blood on the windshield. Prit swerved like crazy, trying to regain control, but the heavy van skidded out of control, dragging several of those monsters in its path as ominous noises came from its engine.
Doing a spectacular 360, our car finally stopped in the middle of the road, enveloped in the acrid smell of burning rubber. For a moment there was silence. I exhaled; I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath. Once again I was glad to have the very talented Ukrainian at the wheel. He’d kept us from crashing and made sure the van didn’t stall. That would have been absolutely fatal.
But the motor sounded like it was falling apart. A thin trickle of steam wafted through a gasket mangled by the impact. The radiator had a leak—and not a small one. That motor’s days were numbered. It was a miracle it was still running.
Slowly putting the van in gear, Prit got us going again, this time more slowly. We weren’t laughing it up anymore. If the engine broke down in that infested area, with all the houses closed up tight, we’d be doomed to a certain death in seconds.
The next twenty minutes were endless. Both tires on the right side had blown out, so we inched along through the subdivision, wrapped in a cloud of smoke, with the temperature light on. We were forced to slow down to a lousy ten miles an hour as dozens of hands pounded on the sides of the van.
Suddenly my window exploded into a million pieces. It had been cracked by a previous blow, so a punch from one of those things shattered it. A young woman tried to climb through the smashed window, trying to grab me. She reached in and touched my face. Her touch was cold. Cold, wet, and dead.
I panicked, almost like when this whole nightmare started. Paralyzed with terror, I could feel her trying to slip inside the vehicle as Prit shouted hysterically in Russian and Lucullus hissed inside his carrier, baring his teeth.
When she put her hand on my thigh, I finally shook off my stupor. I grabbed the AK-47 and bashed her temple with the butt. She raised her head and hesitated for a second, staring at me with dead, bloodshot eyes. I hit her in the face again. The woman slipped back out the window, unable to hold on, her face completely mutilated.
Drenched in sweat, grimacing, I turned to Prit. One look around told me that either we got out of there immediately or we’d be dead men in minutes. The resilient Ukrainian nodded and wrung a little more out of the damaged, groaning engine.
Once again, our luck held out. Just five hundred yards away, half-hidden by the weeds, was a sign pointing to a ramp to the nearby highway. Just a little farther, and we might be saved.
With one last push, Prit turned on to the highway. There, the van picked up speed, though the damaged motor was still making some very scary sounds.
At last we were on the highway. We felt relieved. We didn’t know the worst was yet to come.
The highway looked like a ghostly lunar landscape. I’d made this trip a million times, every time I had business in Vigo. Back then this stretch of highway had been packed with traffic. Now, it was deserted.
With the van making a deafening noise, we drove as fast as that battered motor allowed. We passed a few cars abandoned in the strangest positions. Some of them were ringed with blood. Others looked like they’d rammed into something—or someone. Aside from a couple of corpses rotting in the sun, we saw no sign of humans.
I tried to imagine the scene. In the first days of the epidemic, dozens of undead turned up suddenly, staggering down the middle of the road. Startled drivers tried to dodge them. Some couldn’t avoid running over them, and they crashed. Some caring people, unaware of those monsters’ true nature, must’ve stopped to help what they thought were badly injured pedestrians. Either way, the drivers’ fate was fucking awful.
A mile or so down the road, we came upon the first serious accident. A Nissan SUV had slammed into the concrete median, knocking it down. The Nissan had bounced back into the middle of the road and collided with a couple of cars and a small delivery truck. All those vehicles were now a huge pile of bloody plastic and steel lying in the middle of the road, blocking all the lanes. We stopped, stunned by the scene. Rising off that mass of iron was the foul, sickening smell of corpses that had been rotting in the sun for several months. The smell of death.
Those people had been in a brutal accident and no one had come to their aid. They hadn’t even removed the bodies. My God!
A small space on the left allowed us to continue on our way. Prit drove deftly through the narrow gap, leaving some of our paint behind in the process. I wondered whether that lane was there by chance or whether another survivor had been there before us, moving the wreckage aside.
After two or three miles, we saw another major accident in the opposite lane. It was a huge pileup of about forty or fifty cars, buses, vans, and trucks. They had collided in a chain as they sped along, running from those things or just trying to dodge them. As a gauge of how hard the impact was, I saw a small Smart car folded like an accordion under the cab of a truck.
Those who weren’t killed in the collision had died in the fire that followed. The heat was so intense that pieces of asphalt had melted. A couple of blackened skulls stuck out from the charred frame of a car. The scorched remains of several more bodies were visible here and there. A shocking scene, right out of hell.
This was not a highway. This was a graveyard.
Six miles later, we saw undead again, reeling down the road. Prit said this meant we were getting closer to an urban area, so we’d better be prepared. My frowning friend ordered me to buckle my seat belt, and then he floored it. Bad idea. Something under the hood exploded with a thunderous bang, causing a sizable dent. Thick black smoke poured out of the engine. My heart almost flew through my mouth.
The Ukrainian looked at me, chagrined. “A rod,” he said laconically, as we came to a standstill. “The engine kaput.” He let the dying van roll slowly down an exit ramp.
I couldn’t read the highway sign, so I didn’t know where the hell we were. For the first time, I was totally disoriented.
We were wondering how the hell we were going to make it witho
ut the van when chance smiled on us again. The ramp was steep, so the van coasted to the bottom of the hill, right in front of a small industrial park with fifteen or twenty warehouses. There, in front of us, as if it were expecting us, was a huge car dealership with the familiar logo of the three-pointed star enclosed in a circle.
This was fucking great. I smiled and asked Prit how’d he like to drive a brand-new Mercedes. The Ukrainian’s beaming smile spoke volumes. We’d be traveling in style.
Momentum had carried us about 150 yards from the dealership. We could see several undead in the distance, but we’d passed by them unnoticed, since we’d driven the last half mile in neutral.
We got out of the battered, smoldering van and grabbed everything we could carry in one trip. We couldn’t risk coming and going, drawing unnecessary attention. I put the soldier’s knapsack on my back and the speargun across my chest and held Lucullus’s carrier tightly in my arms to keep him from escaping. The last thing I needed was to chase after my cat through an unfamiliar industrial park full of monsters eager to sink their teeth into me.
Prit carried the AK-47, the heavy box of ammunition, and some of the food from the Russian ship in one hand and the notorious briefcase in the other. The rest, unfortunately, we had to leave behind.
Loaded down like that, we didn’t think we’d ever reach the dealership. When we finally got there, we were out of breath. In the shade of the huge entrance gate, I collapsed exhausted against the giant glass window. Prit glided along like an eel, pressed against the building, searching for a way in.
As I waited, I took a swallow from the canteen and rummaged around in the backpack. At the bottom, I found a pack of crushed Chesterfields. I remembered putting them there when I left home. Kicking back a little, I lit a cigarette. After all this time, the first puff was like a shot of heroin to a junkie. Everything seemed simpler.
The muffled sound of breaking glass shook me out of my trance. I jumped up like lightning, the blood pounding in my temples. I gripped the speargun, braced for whatever might come next.
Suddenly I heard the metal door open behind me. I was terrified. But then I saw Prit’s amused smile. He’d slipped inside through a bathroom window. Hot damn!
I lumbered through the entrance to the dealership, loaded down like a mule, with Lucullus scampering around at my feet and Prit standing guard. Once we got inside, he closed the gate again and threw the bolt to secure it.
Prit and I stood still for a long minute, trying to determine if anyone—or anything—was in there.
I stood there dumbstruck. The interior was dark and cool. Somehow, this dealership had been spared by looters. I could make out neat rows of vehicles in the shadows. I smiled. Time to go shopping.
That darkness felt really good. After a long day on the run, my muscles relaxed for the first time in hours. I’d started the day on the Zaren’s deck staring down the muzzle of an assault rifle. Now I was lying on a leather couch in a Mercedes dealership, puffing on a cigarette, thinking how wonderful it would be to sleep for three days in a hotel bed. And drink a cold beer. And get a foot massage from ten girls in sexy lingerie…I’m not shitting you. I sat up with a groan, every muscle pinging. I’d never been so tired in my life.
We quickly checked out the dealership. Nothing. All the doors and windows were closed and barred, except for the bathroom window Prit had broken. It was too high and narrow for those things to sneak in, but we wanted to take every precaution.
We wrestled a panel from one of the cubicles against the broken bathroom window. It wouldn’t withstand a heavy blow, but it would do for the short time we’d be there.
Bone tired, we collapsed in a room that adjoined the manager’s office. It was a room with no windows, stacks of files, a tiny bathroom with a shower and, surprisingly, a fold-out bed. What the hell was that bed doing there? Prit snooped around the room like a bloodhound. He picked up something from underneath the cot. With a sly smile, he held up some wadded-up lacy burgundy panties.
Well, well. This must be the manager’s bachelor pad. Way to go, you bastard. It’d been some time since that guy got laid. If he were still alive, he had better things to think about.
Overflowing with newfound energy, Prit tossed every drawer. I stepped into the bathroom and peered into the mirror. Out of habit I turned on the tap. To my surprise a stream of rust-colored water gushed out, popping with all the air built up in the pipes.
I figured the dealership had its own water tower, so it still had running water. Running water! If there was water, there had to be a gas or battery-operated water heater somewhere. I went back to the bachelor pad, where Prit was stretched out on the bed, leafing through a pile of old magazines. I left my friend comfortably settled there and started my search, armed with a flashlight.
Behind the hallway that connected the offices to the garages were some steep stairs that disappeared into the darkness underground. I got up my courage and started down the steps, my back pressed to the wall, a cocked speargun in one hand and the flashlight in the other. The basement was cold and dry. It looked like a very old repair shop that had been completely renovated.
Surrounded by a thicket of cobwebs and tons of boxes of old brochures was a large modern water heater hooked up to an orange bottle of butane gas. Once I was sure the basement was safe, I climbed down the rest of the way. I shook the bottle. Empty. The pilot light had been on for weeks and used up all the gas in the bottle.
Disappointed, I turned around in the dark. As I started back up the stairs, I hit my knee so hard I saw stars. I shone the flashlight on what I’d run into. It was a mesh cage containing half a dozen sealed bottles. Fucking great!
Parting the cobwebs, I replaced the empty bottle with one of the full ones and pressed the button to purge the system. When I pushed the power button, a flickering blue flame appeared. I shouted for joy. We had hot water!
I raced up the stairs as Prit came walking out of the office, carrying a box full of keys to the Mercedeses. In a cheerful mood, we went into the showroom, where dozens of vehicles waited, neatly parked, ready to drive out the door.
As we strolled around looking for our new car, Prit and I had a little argument. He had his heart set on the fire-engine-red CLK cabriolet. He said it was a rocket, perfect for escaping at full speed. I finally convinced him that even though that convertible was fast, it wasn’t the wisest choice for driving on roads infested with undead.
I pragmatically chose a huge GL, the largest SUV Mercedes made, with four-wheel drive and lots of horsepower. We could drive off road in that beast if we encountered an accident blocking the road. Plus, it could push aside more undead than the sports car.
Prit grumbled and accepted my reasoning, casting a longing look at the convertible. We set to work and exchanged its battery for a brand-new one we found in the garage. Then we loaded our stuff, including an increasingly restless Lucullus.
A sudden, loud noise made us jump out of our skin. I threw myself on the floor, feeling around for my speargun, as Prit cocked the AK-47. We looked around for the origin of the sound. A couple of yards from us, beating on the armored glass window, were two undead, watching us with empty eyes, roaring with rage.
It was a gruesome sight. Since I’d offed my poor neighbor, I hadn’t had an opportunity to study those monsters up close when I wasn’t running or fighting for my life. I eased up to the glass, an arm’s length away. That drove them nuts. They wanted me. They wanted my life. My blood. Fucking bastards.
Something dawned on me. A newly transformed undead, my neighbor for example, had pallor mortis, thousands of burst veins visible on its skin, bloodshot, vacant eyes, and homicidal behavior. The two men outside, though covered in bumps, cuts, and scratches, looked exactly the same. Those guys showed no trace of putrefaction, unlike a normal corpse. No rigor mortis, no decomposition…nothing. Amazing. They were dead. No doubt of that. The terrible gash in the neck of one of them was proof. But something kept then moving…and stalking.
C
lothes worn thin from months outdoors was all that indicated they’d been that way for a while. I was sure their appearance hadn’t changed one iota since they were attacked. That had some disturbing implications. Over the past few weeks, I’d entertained the hope that over time these bodies decayed or even “died.”
That didn’t seem to happen. The passage of time didn’t seem to affect those monsters. I didn’t know what to think. Maybe they stay that way for months, even years. Maybe they’re eternal. How the hell should I know? I’m no scientist. I don’t have any data on their condition. I just know they’re somewhere between life and death. If I didn’t want to end up like them, I had to keep on the run and not get caught.
A bitter taste rose in my throat. As a species, a race, a planet, we were really screwed. I punched the glass in rage, right on one of those monsters’ faces. He didn’t flinch.
Prit watched me in silence, guessing my thoughts. Finally he came over and tried to calm me down. He said that when we got his helicopter, we’d find a place the monsters hadn’t gotten to.
I shook my head bitterly. Nice words. We had a long way to go before I’d feel completely safe.
We parked the SUV in front of the gate. Prit checked the tire pressure while I took my first hot shower in many weeks. It was heaven. The jet of water hit my back and my head. Clouds of steam curled around my body. I stood there for about twenty minutes, enjoying that wonderful feeling. Then, with scissors and new razor blades I’d found in a bathroom drawer, I shaved the beard I’d had for weeks. I didn’t look like a bum anymore. Something so ordinary before the apocalypse was now a real treat. That’s how far things had slipped.
ENTRY 78
April 16, 10:24 a.m.
When I got out of the shower, I found Prit in the manager’s office, hard at work. He’d cleared off the desk and set the black Samsonite case on it. He’d discovered a ton of tools in the garage, including a battery-operated grinder and a blowtorch. The Ukrainian was determined to open the damn case come hell or high water.
Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End az-1 Page 23
