Sparrow Rock
Page 5
I guess maybe that’s why I ignored the medication line for now. I probably should have pushed it, but I was way past rational thought by then. And anyway, knowing Sue, she wouldn’t have told me anything more until she was ready. That girl was stubborn.
“I know one thing for sure,” I said. “If we get out of here, there’s going to be some plum jobs opening up at Walmart.”
Sue didn’t say anything at first. Then she started chuckling. It began low and slowly in her belly, and grew from there, until it became the kind of gripping-your-stomach-with-both-hands, rolling-on-the-floor-crying sort of laughter. She did it all silently enough, but before long she got me going too, and both of us were rocking back and forth on the bed like idiots, laughing our asses off at the end of the world.
Ain’t life grand?
PART TWO:
FALLOUT
“The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”
—John F. Kennedy
CHAPTER EIGHT
Days passed, and what can I say? We just kept going, kept busy. I waited for my hair to start falling out, or sores to grow in the palms of my hands and roof of my mouth, and every time I went to the bathroom I looked for blood in the water. But nothing happened, and after some time I started thinking that maybe I’d dodged a particularly nasty bullet. Maybe the big guy upstairs had decided that being trapped down in a hole while the world crashed and burned was bad enough.
But it wouldn’t be long before I found out that God was just getting started—and he had one hell of a sick sense of humor.
We only had a few outfits between what we’d brought and the spare stuff we’d found in the closet, so we found ourselves washing our underwear in the sink each day, and trying to keep clean enough not to start to stink. There was deodorant in the bathroom, at least, and things like sanitary napkins for the girls when it came to that. As time went on, as strange as it sounds, we spoke less and less about what we were facing. It was a survival mechanism. After the inventory, we knew that we had enough food and water to last us several months or more. Judging by the notes and logs we found in a notebook on the shelf, there was enough fuel to keep the power on for at least that long, longer if we were careful. We checked the radio several times a day, but there was never anything but static.
Intent on living as if we were dealing with a small inconvenience, we played cards, drank what beer there was to drink, smoked pot and listened to the CDs that we found on the shelf in the bedroom. Most of them were classical or jazz, stuff that none of us had ever cared about before. The music seemed more complex by that point though, deeper and more meaningful. I don’t know how the others felt, but I began to listen for the individual instruments in each recording, separating the strings from the percussion and the winds until I could hear each note. Then I would begin to reconstruct the music by adding each sound in, one by one, until the symphony was whole again.
I suppose the cracks in each of us were showing even then, although none of us was with it enough to notice. These cracks were all different, of course, based on what we feared the most. Let’s face it, we’re all a product of our own pasts, and more often than not, it’s the past that trips us up when we face down a crisis, rather than the crisis itself. I know that’s true for me, as much as anyone.
Maybe that’s where the jokes come from too. Understanding people. You have to know what makes them tick, before you can make them laugh. But I missed the warning signs with Jay, and some of them with Jimmie too. Hell, I even missed them in myself, I guess.
We were all waiting, you understand. Waiting for Godot. Waiting for some kind of sign, some kind of miracle. Waiting for the sound of someone knocking at the hatch. What eventually came for us was nothing like what we’d expected, but a nightmare that was a hundred times worse.
It was a little over a week after the strike when we heard the scratching in the kitchen.
That day I was sitting in the front room with Tessa and trying to remember what the sun felt like. The walls seemed to be closing in lately, and my hands and feet had begun to tingle. I didn’t like that feeling at all, and so I tried to imagine the exact opposite of where we were. The sky, stretching out in a great blue expanse far above my head, and the ocean reaching up to meet it at a distant horizon.
“Did you hear that?” Jimmie said, coming into the other room from the kitchen. I knew he’d been scrounging for food, even though our schedule strictly prohibited any eating beyond the set mealtimes. We were trying to make everything last now, and Jimmie knew damn well that he was breaking the rules. Still, I didn’t have the heart just now to say anything to him. The beach was still in my head, complete with rolling surf and the cry of gulls wheeling overhead.
I touched the CD player. “It’s called music, numb nuts,” I said. Tessa laughed.
“Don’t be a jerk, eh,” he said. “I thought I heard something in the walls. You didn’t hear it?”
I shook my head and Tessa did too and I wondered, privately, whether this was the moment his mind had finally snapped for good. But I went to get the others anyway, and we all gathered in silence in the kitchen.
For a few moments there was nothing, and then we all heard a sound like something chewing. It seemed to move around behind the cabinets.
We all looked at each other. “Mice,” Dan said. But it was too loud for that, and I think we all knew it. We stood and listened to the thing moving around inside the walls. The concrete must have been two feet thick, so I don’t think any of us were really worried that whatever it was might get in, at least not at that point. But the sound of something else alive after all this time was strangely unsettling.
Finally the sound seemed to focus in an area behind the fridge. It would stop, as if listening, and then start again, a deliberate sort of scratching.
Like something trying to get at us.
I felt a chill. I looked at Dan, and he nodded. Sue put her hand on my arm, as if to stop me, and then let it fall.
We each took one side of the fridge and slowly slid it out from the wall, a few inches at a time. What we all saw took our breath away.
Behind the fridge was a steel door. It was riveted into the concrete like the entrance to an airlock.
“What the hell,” Jimmie said. His voice had a strained, choked quality to it that I didn’t like. Being down in this hole had changed him; already high-strung, now he was beginning to look not quite right, as if there were thoughts going on just beyond those eyes that would leave us all screaming if he spoke them out loud. Like I said, the cracks were showing, and I wish to hell now that I’d paid more attention. Maybe things wouldn’t have turned out any differently, but then again, maybe they would have.
“My grandfather would have built another entrance that came from the house,” Big Sue said from behind us. “A tunnel. He would have kept it from everyone. I know how he was. It would be just like him.” Her eyes brightened. “Maybe that’s him, the noise I mean. He’s hurt, trying to get in.” She looked around at all of us, and I could see the hope blooming within her.
Jay shook his head. “Sue—”
“No, listen,” she said. “It’s possible, isn’t it? He survived the initial blast, but he was injured. He got into the tunnel but couldn’t make it to the door. Until now.”
Nobody said anything. I mean, it was crazy. There were countless reasons why it couldn’t be Sue’s grandfather behind that door. Even if he had survived the multiple hits from the warheads that Dan and I had witnessed, there was the matter of clean food and water, the days that had gone by without a sound.
Plus, if it were he, why didn’t he just open the door?
We heard the scratching again. It was close. I picked up a fire extinguisher attached to the wall and held it like a club, feeling like an idiot. We all watched the door. Silence for a moment; muffled thumping; then the handle moved just slightly, as if someone were on the other side, testing the latch.
She reached for the handle.
The next few seconds seemed to pass in slow motion. I heard the handle click and a slight sucking sound as the door’s seal was broken; someone shouted, and Jay lunged at Sue, but he was too late.
The door swung outward, revealing a narrow concrete hallway. With it came a surprising amount of light cast from fluorescent bulbs set into a drop ceiling, and a moment later, a slight puff of air carried in the sticky sweet smell of rot.
A man’s body lay on the floor of the hallway about twenty feet away.
He lay on his stomach. He wore a black T-shirt and jeans, and they were soaked with the liquid of decay. The body had swelled up like a purple balloon. One arm was stretched out toward us, as if reaching out for help, the hand puffy and nails broken in several places.
His face was missing. That was my first reaction, looking at him. I could see white bone and gristle where his nose and eyes should be. It looked like something had been chewing at him, and had gotten a good bellyful before losing interest and moving on to something else.
As we all stared in silence and shock at the body, something moved at the edges of my vision, but when I glanced at the spot, whatever it was had disappeared.
If I’d been thinking more clearly, maybe I would have wondered what exactly had made those scratching noises, and what the hell had moved the handle on that door. I might have said something, sounded a note of caution if Sue hadn’t let out a shriek right then and run into the tunnel. I grabbed at her arm and missed, but Dan was quicker than I was and before I could move he was after her. She got maybe five steps before he had her around the waist and held her back.
This was a good thing, because even before I heard Sue screaming his name, I knew that the dead man was her grandfather, had recognized him even without his face. I thought about her cradling that stinking, slimy head in her hands and wanted to be sick. Whatever had happened to him, it was clear he was beyond saving. But Sue wasn’t going to hear that now.
I stepped out into the hallway too, Tessa right behind me, and as impossible as it sounds, I thought I saw Sue’s grandfather’s leg twitch.
That was when they attacked.
It all happened blindingly fast. One moment we were alone, and the next the hallway just beyond the body was full of rats.
At least it seemed full to me. There were probably at least thirty of them. They were huge bastards, about the size of small cats, and their fur was matted and missing in places so that their grayish pink flesh showed through.
I didn’t know where they’d come from, or how they had appeared so suddenly out of nowhere. Sue was still screaming and struggling in Dan’s grasp, and strong as he was, she was nearly free. I don’t think either one had seen the creatures yet. I shouted something at them and then turned to go back inside the shelter, only to find that one of the little fuckers had flanked us and was now standing on its hind legs in the open doorway, baring its rotten teeth.
Jesus. The thing actually took a hop-step forward like that, and I tucked Tessa behind me and held up the fire extinguisher like a weapon, glancing back in time to see a whole battalion (that was what I thought then, that they looked like hundreds of little animal soldiers) moving in tandem to surround Sue and Dan and cut off my retreat.
We all froze. They were so goddamned quiet. At the sight of those things moving like that I almost lost it. My bowels felt loose and my legs began to shake. I’d never seen anything like it before, the way these animals were acting. One rat is bad enough, thirty of them are even worse; but to see all thirty act as if they had a plan for you, and it involved turning you into steak tartare: that was enough to make any man want to run away screaming like a little girl.
I looked at the open door and saw Jimmie standing just inside with Jay right behind him. I caught his eye for only a moment and saw the pure, naked fear there before he swung the door shut, and I heard a thunk as the latch clicked into place.
“You fuck,” Dan said from behind me. I turned to look at him. He’d seen what Jimmie had done, and his face was purple with rage. Sue had stopped screaming now, but it wasn’t because she’d calmed down; she’d seen the rats. She stood rigid in the center of the hallway, not moving one muscle, staring bug-eyed at the things slowly advancing on us all. The closest one was less than five feet from her leg and I could tell she was about to bolt.
Dan noticed it too. “Stay calm, both of you,” he said in a low voice. “Don’t make any sudden moves. They’re just hungry.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said.
Tessa had her back pressed up against me, and she reached down and clenched my free hand with a grip like a vise. I looked back down at the one closest to me, near the shelter door. It had dropped back down to all four feet and had closed half the distance between us. I could have reached out and tapped it with my foot.
“We look like lunch to you?” I said, taking another couple of steps backward until I was close enough to Sue and Dan to touch them.
“Knock it off, Pete,” Dan said. “They might be carrying some kind of disease.”
“They’re huge,” Sue said, her voice high and trembling. “Do something, please.”
When the actual attack came, they moved so swiftly and with such purpose it was almost impossible to believe. Several of the largest rats broke rank and skittered along the edges of the hall, making us instinctively step closer together, while the center of the pack actually moved backward like a wave, drawing our attention for a split second longer. I didn’t understand what they were doing at first until I heard movement above us and realized that more of them had crawled into the space above the drop ceiling.
We’d been herded like sheep into a tight ball, then distracted long enough for some of them to move into position.
“Dan,” I said, “I think maybe—”
A ceiling panel above our heads exploded downward, and half a dozen furry, writhing bodies with slippery tails came along with it. Sue screamed and ducked. I raised the fire extinguisher like a club and batted one away, but it was hard to swing freely with Dan and Sue and Tessa so close to me. Two of them bounced off my shoulders to the floor, where they scrambled to their feet. Dan slapped at others as they fell and grabbed one that had landed in his hair, tossing it against the wall where it hit with a splat and slid down, leaving a wet streak of gore.
One of them had managed to grab hold of the back of Sue’s shirt, its claws digging in, and I almost creamed her with the extinguisher before coming to my senses. Instead I held out the hose and tried to pull the trigger, but nothing happened.
Dan shouted something and swatted it off her back, and at the same time I felt them at my feet. I glanced down. The others had moved in from all sides now, and the floor was a seething, writhing carpet of fur and teeth and claws.
I stomped down on two of them, feeling the crack of bones snapping and soft internal organs popping like water balloons, then kicked out at more. I felt myself slipping into total panic, adrenaline lighting up my body like an electrical shock.
The smell coming off these creatures was like a sewer filled with rotten meat, and they were everywhere. I was gagging with it, the stench filling my nostrils and making my eyes water.
“Don’t let them trip you!” Dan shouted. “They’re going at our legs. If we go down, we’re finished!” He and Sue kicked and stomped on more of them, and Tessa got her share too, but others just moved in to take their place. They were relentless. I saw a huge one leap over the backs of the others and fasten itself against Dan’s right pant leg before he pulled it off and hurtled it down the hallway.
As I watched it bounce away and quickly regain its feet, I saw something else: all around us, those rats we had crushed underfoot were still moving. But they weren’t trying to get away. Even no
w, with cracked bones and burst organs, they were trying to get at us.
The pin. I’d forgotten I had to pull it from the extinguisher before it would work. I grabbed the yellow ring and yanked it free, then held the hose out and pulled the trigger.
This time, a fierce shot of white mist and foam covered the backs of the rats on the floor. I aimed more carefully and pulled the trigger again, and this time the spray knocked them back a couple of feet and slowed them down. I stepped into the opening and sprayed in a wide circle and in brief, concentrated bursts right into their little rat faces, as many as I could hit.
It gave us room to get out from under the hole in the ceiling. I glanced up and saw more of them getting ready to leap at us, and I gave the little bastards a blast with the hose to push them back before clearing a space to the shelter door. “Stay behind me,” I said. “And move fast.”
It was like the sons of bitches heard me. They came at us with renewed fury, like a hundred furry little robots with a single, focused purpose. There was something else strange about the way they moved, but I couldn’t put my finger on it right then. We’d probably squashed at least half of the original group by now, but more seemed to appear out of nowhere. I knew we wouldn’t be able to hold them off much longer.
I let Sue and Tessa go ahead and then turned to spray the rats again. Dan kicked and stomped beside me, keeping them away while Sue pounded on the door. “Open up!” she shouted. “Please!”
I could only imagine the struggle that was probably going on inside between Jimmie and Jay. I knew Jay wouldn’t let Sue stay out here, but what if Jimmie had done something to him? Was that really all that crazy a thought? After all, he’d locked us out here alone to cover his own ass. Didn’t seem like much of a stretch to imagine him putting a broom handle across Jay’s temple.
Just then I heard the door open, and Tessa’s whimper of relief. I glanced back to see Jay grabbing Sue by the shirt and hauling her inside. His face was sweaty and his glasses sat crookedly on his nose. There was no sign of Jimmie.