Dying to Live

by Kim Paffenroth

  "Franny, come on!" Jack shouted, as two zombies pressed their mangled, flayed hands up against the plexiglass.

  "Just give it a minute!" she shouted back.

  We were still inching upward, but now there were several zombies pressing on the side of the chopper, making it drift more and more to the side. I didn't understand the aerodynamics of it, but I had visions of us toppling off the roof, to die in a fiery explosion on the pavement.

  I looked at Frank's baby. I guess calling a baby beautiful is kind of pointless: I mean, I think it's really the idea of a baby that's beautiful—the thing itself is usually pretty unattractive, unless it's your own. Regardless, I looked at her little crying mouth, her face so wildly pink, her eyes scrunched shut, and her little fists quivering as she held them up, and I knew the only thing I wanted in the world right then was for her to live.

  I hadn't prayed during all the various horrors of the previous months, but sitting next to a baby girl on a helicopter that was tottering six stories above the street, with a growing crowd of the hungry dead banging to get in—it seemed like a good time to start. I didn't have the words, which wasn't surprising, as I'd never been much for praying before this, so I just went with the direct approach: "God, let the kid live, please." I tried to stop myself from finishing the thought with other inconvenient details, like, "Unless you haven't killed enough kids already." No sense getting off on the wrong foot when you're praying for the first time in years, and you think you're about to die a horrible death.

  I looked back out the window. We were about two feet above the roof and right at its edge. The walking dead were not only moving the chopper to the side, they were causing it to spin slightly to the right. The zombie pushing right on the nose of the chopper—oblivious as ever to the dangers around him—tumbled off the edge of the roof.

  In the rear, the tail rotor was swinging around toward the zombies behind us. There was a shriek and a slight jolt, and a forearm flew up through the air. A second later, a huge shower of red shot along the side of the chopper as it took the face off another one.

  Franny moved the stick, spinning us the other way, and we finally started to lift faster. But then there was another, bigger jolt, and we tilted down to the left. The main rotor tore into the crowd of zombies, throwing four of them back with their heads nearly torn off. Franny fought the stick and finally righted us, getting us moving straight up and out of their reach.

  "Get them off! Get them off!" she shouted. "They're throwing us off balance! The others are getting a hold of them and pulling us back down!"

  I looked down and saw what had tilted us so dangerously at the end of our lift off: two zombies were hanging off the left landing skid, and the others on the roof were clutching their feet.

  "Everybody grab hold of something!" Jack shouted as he slid the door back. He himself had his right arm wrapped in a seatbelt and was reaching back to me with his left. "Grab my arm! You've got to lean out to get a shot at them!"

  Suspended about twenty feet over a crowd of mindless cannibals has to be high on anyone's list of nightmares, way ahead of being in a spelling bee naked. But, if I was going to ask God to help out, I guess it was only fair to pitch in.

  I grabbed Jack's forearm and he grabbed mine, then I leaned out the open door with the Glock in my left hand. I aimed at the zombie in front, which looked like it had been a doctor, with a bloodstained white coat. It was hard to aim because the zombies were rocking the helicopter and Franny was fighting with the stick. My shot hit it in the shoulder. It let go with that hand, lost its grip with the other, and tumbled back into the crowd below.

  I turned to the other zombie, a young woman in a ragged dress, the left side of her face and neck chewed off. Her head lolled around, making it difficult to get a shot. I fired and hit her in the chest, but she wouldn't let go.

  To hell with the head shot.

  Her hands, with their death grip on the skid, were definitely not moving, so I aimed at her left wrist and fired again. Her arm ripped away from her hand, which refused to let go. And as the dozens of zombies pulled on her from the roof, her right wrist tore apart too. She fell, leaving her two hands still tenaciously gripping the skid.

  The helicopter jerked to the other side as we were freed from the mob's grip, but Franny quickly righted us and pulled us up. We slowly angled off to the north, as Jack slid the door shut. We were all panting from the final crisis of taking off, and the baby was still crying uncontrollably. Frank was trying to calm her down.

  "What's her name?" I asked.

  "Zoey."

  I almost always thought it sounded stupid when someone said that a name sounded pretty, but I couldn't help smiling and saying, "That's a really good name."

  * * * * *

  We were flying north over the city when I saw, far in the distance to the left, a thin line of smoke. I pointed it out to Jack.

  "Wow, we go months without finding anyone, and now two sets of survivors in one day! Too bad we can't check it out." He leaned over Franny's shoulder. "Low on fuel, right?"

  She nodded. "Very. I was just looking for the truck, and then we got to get back to the museum."

  "There they are," Jack said, pointing off to the right. "They're on the bridge."

  Down on the bridge that went to the north of the museum, we could see the truck. The crowd of undead from the hospital was closing on them, but was still forty or fifty yards away. I couldn't believe they hadn't moved farther while we were in the hospital, but I could see now that our ordeal had only lasted a few minutes.

  Jack got them on the radio. "Guys, I don't want them following you back to the museum. See that bus in the street, with all the stiffs milling around it?"

  "Sure do," came the reply.

  "Put a HEAT round in it and then get the hell out of there."

  "You got it."

  A man stood up in the back of the truck, and a fireball blasted out behind him. There was a huge explosion as the projectile hit a bus in the street. The gas tank of the bus exploded, and a few seconds later, so did another in a vehicle nearby. The dead were trapped among the vehicles, staggering about, wounded, burning, and collapsing to the pavement.

  The truck pulled away, across the bridge and back to safety. We followed them, landing on the roof of the museum to the cheers of the community. Jack was basking in his accomplishment, and even had the unexpected prize of two new survivors, one of whom was an adorable baby. I was glad Jack didn't have to run for election, or the whole scene would have crossed over into obnoxious grandstanding.

  Though the whole thing had been a complete success, I did not feel as optimistic as I had on the two previous nights. I suppose I should have, since we had saved Frank and Zoey from certain death by starvation, or worse. But there was something in the things we'd seen that tinged the whole day with a weird, diseased melancholy, a glimpse of just how bad things could get, of what was lurking right at the edge of our consciousness, of how much had to be sacrificed and stomped into a bloody mash just to give one child a chance to live on the slightly scorched outskirts of hell, rather than right in the middle of the lake of fire. If we had seen the eighth circle, it only served to remind me that we were, at best, living in the first circle, what Dante would've called "limbo," a shadowy land where those who weren't damned, but who could not be saved, spent eternity in hopelessness and sadness.

  As Frank, Jack, and I sat down with a purloined bottle in the frontier cabin that night, my foreboding grew, because I suspected that hearing Frank's story of how he had survived those months would be much worse than I could imagine.

  Chapter Thirteen

  We didn't push him. I'm sure even Jack, as optimistic and cheerful as he was by nature, could feel the dread that hung over that man. I'm sure it was why we didn't invite any others, besides the fact that we needed Sarah to baby-sit Zoey. At first, we talked about the mechanics of survival. It was always a safe topic, as everyone had some story of how they'd found food in the most unlikely ways or p
laces, and everyone was always proud of their own resourcefulness, thrilled and amused by their own good luck.

  Frank had barricaded himself in their apartment, throwing all their furniture down the stairway that led to the street. None of his neighbors were home when the attack started, so he kicked down their doors and piled their furniture on to his barricade too, till he had a jumble of wood and metal, all the way from the street entrance up to the second floor. I could imagine that it must've been quite formidable when he was done, thousands of pounds of furniture and other household items filling the stairwell. Apparently, it was the only entrance, and he felt secure that at least the undead couldn't get in.

  But he could easily see that his fortress would also be a trap, especially with a baby on board. "I was proud of what I'd accomplished, of course, to build a place that was safe for Zoey and me, but I was really worried about food and water. I put together the food supplies from all the apartments, and it was a pretty good supply, but there was nothing for Zoey. We'd had a little bit of formula on hand—they give you these goodie bags full of different stuff at the hospital when you take the birthing classes—but no one else in the building had an infant, so I had to find something for her fast."

  Apparently, after the initial outbreak and complete victory of the dead, the area around the hospital had been pretty quiet, so Frank got the rather dangerous idea to cross over to the hospital roof—like all of us, he had just done what he had to; it only seemed dangerous or heroic afterwards. On the roof of his apartment building, he found some scaffolding and other equipment for cleaning windows and painting tall buildings, including the ladder that he used as a bridge between the two buildings. Like anyone would, he got excited at this point in his story, because it was the kind of plan that would've scared any of us into paralysis before all this happened, but which had saved his baby.

  "I knew the sixth floor of the hospital was pediatrics," he said, "since we'd taken the tour before Zoey was born. I'd seen the things, the dead people, on television and down on the street, so I knew they were slow. All I could do was hope there weren't too many of them up on the sixth floor, and I could just grab some formula and run back to our apartment. I was just hoping to get enough for a few days, until help arrived. I got across to the hospital and didn't see or hear anything at all. The whole town smelled like hell—you remember it was summer when it happened."

  "Yeah," Jack grunted in agreement, "like Satan's asshole." I couldn't help smiling at him: he probably didn't know the religious concept of the axis mundi—the center or navel of the world—and how some writers had inverted it to the anus mundi in describing places like Auschwitz. But, as usual with Jack's deep reserve of common sense, he had rightly intuited it as the aptest label for our situation.

  "That's about right," Frank nodded. "But oh my God, the hospital was worse than anywhere else. You could barely stand it. So many different smells of decay and sickness and death, but with disinfectant and chemicals mixed in. You'd never have been able to imagine it before. It made you gag constantly. I was wearing a bandana over my face, to try to help with the smell, and I was carrying an aluminum baseball bat. I must've looked like some kid playing a game, dressed up like that.

  "On the sixth floor of the hospital, I saw one of them there, but I ran right at it and hit it with the bat, and it went down. Another one came out of a room, and I smashed that one, too. And then it was all quiet and still again. There was a bunch of cans of formula right out where I could see them, and I grabbed those and ran. I felt so good. I'd saved Zoey. I thought now we were okay. I could just wait until help arrived."

  He paused and drank before continuing.

  In the days after his first trip to the hospital, Frank realized he was in this for the long haul. It was then that he wisely secured the top floor of the hospital, as we had found it, so he wouldn't have to fight zombies every time he needed supplies, and so he could retreat if his building were overrun. He had killed the few zombies on the top floor and locked the doors into the stairwells with padlocks and chains, then heaved the dead bodies out a window. In the process of clearing the floor, he had found the same locked room of horrors that we had, but couldn't do anything with it, other than leave it alone.

  As with his barricade, Frank was understandably proud of his arrangements, even now, months later. He had everything he needed for his baby girl, months and months worth of diapers and formula, and he had a fallback plan. But now he could see that food for himself was going to be a problem. With ten apartments in his building, he gathered quite a bit of non-perishable food. But it wouldn't last forever, and now he didn't have any plan or expectation of being rescued, and he had effectively trapped himself in the building.

  Water would've been an even more immediate problem, but Frank had found lots of bottles of that electrolyte stuff that they give babies, and there were also quite a few five-gallon water cooler jugs over there, though God only knows how he nimbly skipped across that ladder, carrying a five gallon jug. I would've passed out from fear. He had found a couple soda machines in a nurses' lounge and had taken all the pots and pans from every apartment up to the roof to collect rainwater. All told, he was set for liquid for months, but much less so for food.

  "I remembered the first floor of our building was a fancy restaurant," Frank continued. "But how could I get down to it? And if I did, I was pretty sure from watching the dead people come and go out front that they had broken in down there. I had one crazy plan, and if it didn't work, I didn't know what I was going to do. I thought if I got in the very back of the apartment right above the back of the restaurant, maybe I could pull up enough floorboards, smash through their ceiling, and make a big enough hole to drop through. Of course, I didn't know the layout of the restaurant, so it'd take a few tries to find their storage room. And all that assumed that when I found it, the storage room wasn't also full of dead people."

  "I keep telling Jonah," Jack put in, "the only reason any of us survived is a million little coincidences and lucky breaks. You had your share."

  Frank looked thoughtful. And still depressed, but maybe just a little less so. "Yes, I suppose I did. Or it's more like I think that Zoey had hers. I think they were all for Zoey. I didn't want them or ask for them, except for her."

  So while his infant daughter slept, Frank got to work on his next insane plan. The dead in the restaurant obviously heard him, but couldn't devise their own plan to kill and eat him, so they just kind of milled around beneath him. "I could hear them as I worked, and when it sounded like there were a lot under me, I'd move to another part of the floor. I was working on a spot, and I hadn't heard any under me. I thought that was good, so I kept trying to get through there.

  "Finally, I kicked through the restaurant's ceiling, and one of them grabbed my foot. He was the only one in the room, thank God, and I shook him off. It was a part of the kitchen where all the shelving had fallen across the doorway and kind of trapped him in there. He looked like he worked there—white coat, white pants, like a chef, but all covered in blood. Hell, he's probably still there now."

  Before covering up the hole he'd made, Frank had looked through to estimate how far the next wall was, so he could figure where to break through the ceiling again. And when he did, he finally broke into the big storage room with the restaurant's non-perishable food. And it was untouched by the undead. Frank worked quickly and quietly and got everything upstairs without the other restaurant guests ever bothering him. It had been tough on him, but he'd made it and found a way to survive with his daughter.

  It was an uplifting, almost inspirational story, but we all knew we couldn't leave it at that. It was another Pandora's box, only this one was now a part of our community, so he had to open up. Maybe only once, and then Jack and I could cover for him and tell people to leave him alone, that he'd been through a lot; but he'd have to tell us, at least. And I'm sure he needed to tell his story, no matter how horrible it was. I was pretty sure Jack was going to make me be the one to
ask, so I began. "Frank, was Zoey born right before the outbreak? She looks the right age."

  "No, she was born right after. In the apartment." He knew where it was going.

  "So your wife was with you in the apartment. You didn't mention her."

  He sighed. It was the equivalent of the thousand yard stare, containing all the resignation and regret a human soul could bear, and then that little bit more that it couldn't. Maybe that signal of pain was enough. Maybe I could've told him to forget about it. But we knew that wasn't how it would go. "Yes," he said, "she was, but only for a day after the outbreak."

  "What was her name?" I asked, almost in a whisper.

  "Mary," he said. It was almost a sob.

  We both knew it had to continue. "Frank, what happened to Mary?"

  "I don't know if I can tell you. I don't know if I should. Some things are too horrible, even in this world. You'll think I'm crazy. You might even think there's something wrong with Zoey. I don't want that. Blame me. It was all my fault."

  "I don't know there is any blame, Frank. We've all done horrible things. I'm sure you know that."

  Another sigh. Then he began in earnest. "We were coming back from lunch and looking at baby stuff. We were so happy, and Mary looked so pretty. God, she was so big then, so unbelievably huge, but so pretty. We were almost to the apartment. And this guy in a hospital gown was coming toward us. He had bandages all over him, and he was all bloody. I thought he was a crazy person. He was shoving people out of the way, and it looked like he was snarling at them and lunging at them, but they were just running away and screaming.

  "I looked around for a cop or something, but I didn't see anyone. He came closer. I could see then that his eyes weren't right—you know how they look, milky and dead. He grabbed Mary. It was summer, you remember, and she had on a short-sleeved dress. And he sank his teeth into her arm. Oh my God, her scream, it was horrible. And I grabbed him by the throat, to pull him off her, but as I pushed him back, I could see the big chunk of her arm in his teeth, blood gushing down his chin, and I could feel the spray of blood across my face as she spun away from us.