by Morris, Jacy
On the day that everything had changed, Mercy had strolled into the backdoor of P.F. Chang's with nary a thought in her head for the apocalypse. She was thinking about whether or not she should take her smoke break before she even went inside, before there were customers, before all the suit-wearing perverts with fat faces and wedding bands on their fingers tried to flirt their way into her pants.
She decided to save it for later. She wasn't a big smoker. She had always been gifted with the ability to quit whenever she wanted to, but she never fully wanted to quit, so she allowed herself one a day, and somehow, she kept to it. Inside the restaurant, a few things caught her attention. One, it was oddly quiet. There was always some sort of chatter going on between the dishwashers and the chefs. But the only person she saw was Marco, throwing vegetables into an industrial slicer and dumping the remains into plastic bins.
"Hola, Mercy," he said, smiling at her.
She liked Marco. He was always pleasant, always smiling. He never seemed to have a problem with his station in life, something she admired. She herself hadn't mastered that art quite yet. She still had dreams of being an artist, a painter who could spend her days standing at an easel and somehow make a living off of it. It was a pipedream, and day-by-day, it seems to recede further and further into the realm of impossibility, and every day she came to admire Marco more and more.
"Where is everyone?" she asked.
Marco shrugged his shoulders.
"Is Neil here?"
He pointed to the manager's office. The door was closed. She hated when Neil sat in the office. A good manager kept their door open; that way, you knew they were working as hard as you were. But Neil was a five-foot-six lump of shit. She moved to the door and readied to knock on it, but the door opened before she had the chance, startling her. It wasn't the sudden opening of the door that had startled her as much as it was the look on Neil's face. His flesh looked gray like there was something really wrong with him. His eyes were ringed by dark circles, and she could see the veins in his cheeks. He looked terrible.
"Oh, Mercy," Neil said as he brushed past her. "I'm glad to see that someone showed up." He coughed into his hand, and Mercy noticed a white bandage wound around his palm, blood seeping through it.
"What happened to your hand?"
"Some drunk, homeless bastard attacked me in the parking lot of my apartment complex."
"Did you call the cops?" she asked.
"No. I kicked his ass and left him lying in the parking lot. May have gone a little overboard, if you know what I mean. No reason to call the cops."
The thought of Little Neil actually kicking someone's ass made her laugh inside. The guy must have been drunk out of his mind if Neil could kick his ass.
Neil sighed and looked around the restaurant. "Where the fuck is everyone? Is it a fucking holiday that no one told me about?"
"Not that I know of."
"I'm gonna call some of these, fuckers, see where the hell they are." Neil grabbed a plastic cup off a rack and filled it with Dr. Pepper from the soda fountain. "Mercy, get those tables set-up, and then come see me when you're done."
She nodded, tying her hair into a quick bun. She loaded up a cart with plates, silverware, and condiments. She wheeled the cart through the swinging door and into the dining area. Bright daylight streamed through the windows into the darkness of the dining room, making it hard to see outside.
She was halfway through setting the dining room when she heard a clatter from the kitchen area. She didn't think anything of it. People spilled things all the time back there. She was setting a table next to a window when she was startled by a face thumping into the glass. The face belonged to a woman, stringy hair going every which way. She bashed her face against the thick glass of the window. It seemed like the woman wanted to get at her. Her flesh crawled just looking at the woman's blank stare.
"Neil!" she called, receiving no reply.
As she backed away from the window, the crazed woman's eyes followed her. Just then, her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she jumped. Jesus, if I get scared one more time today, I'm going to fucking lose it. She pulled the phone from her pocket, keeping an eye on the woman still bashing her face into the window. She looked at the name on the display, Duane, her husband. She rejected the call. She didn't have time for Duane right now. The woman at the window was giving her the creeps. Maybe Neil was in the mood for kicking another drunk person's ass.
She pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen to find a nightmare. Neil stood with his back to her, and Marco lay on the steel prep table, blood gushing out of a wound on his neck. His legs twitched, softly thumping against the metallic table. Neil turned to look at her, and he was… chewing something. She didn't stay to look any longer. She ran out of the kitchen and through the dining room. She fumbled in her pocket for her phone, pausing at the front door. She had to call 911.
Behind her, the swinging door slammed against the wall, and she turned to see Neil standing there, squinting his eyes against the bright light streaming in through the windows. He spotted her and moved in her direction, blood dripping from his chin.
She forgot about the phone in her hands. Right then, her only impulse was to escape. She pushed through the front door and stood on the sidewalk looking left and right for someone that might know what to do. She sure as fuck didn't know what to do at that moment. The lady from the window appeared from around the corner, and Mercy's jaw dropped. The woman's leg bled down to her bare feet. She caught a glimpse of ivory bone amongst all of the crimson, and her mind couldn't make sense of what her eyes were telling her. It didn't add up. Am I asleep? Is this some sort of nightmare?
Her phone rang in her hand again, and she moved away from the woman, her slow stumbling gait tickled something in the back of her head, something from a movie Duane had made her watch some time ago. It had been a stupid movie about the dead coming back to life and eating people. No. No, that was ridiculous. She ignored the buzz of her cell phone and ran back to her car. The parking lot was emptier than she had ever seen it at that time of the day. By now, there should be dozens of cars and half-a-dozen, tired-looking, minimum-wage employees hustling down the sidewalks with coffee in their hands.
She was running now, so fast that she slammed into the driver's side door of her car, halting her progress with her hands. She pulled on the door handle, but it didn't budge. Her keys, her purse… they were still inside the restaurant.
Her phone rang again, and she swore out loud, ready to dash it on the ground. She spun around and saw the injured woman coming after her. Duane would know what to do. She swiped her thumb across the phone and held it to her ear. "Duane, something's wrong…"
"Mercy, you need to get home right now," Duane said, and for a moment, they were talking over each other.
Duane continued to ramble about her getting home, and eventually, in her panicked state, she shouted at him. "Shut up for a second! I'm in trouble over here."
"What is it, baby?"
Mercy moved backward, away from her car and deeper into the parking lot, keeping as much space as she could between herself and the woman with the damaged leg. Behind the woman, she saw Neil staggering in her direction as well. "I think there's like… dead people coming after me, like in that movie we watched."
"They're not dead, Mercy. It's just some sort of disease or something, but you need to get home."
"I can't. My keys are in the kitchen, and Marco's dead."
"Marco's… he's what?"
"He's dead. I saw Neil eating him, just like in the movie."
"This can't be happening."
"What do I do?" she pleaded, her own brain spinning too fast to come up with a plan.
"Are they fast or slow?" Duane asked.
"Slow, so far."
"Then you got a chance. Just keep some space between you. Don't be afraid to run. Don't be afraid to fight. You go around them, get into the kitchen, and get your keys, then you get your ass back home."
S
he nodded at his words, though he couldn't see it. His words gave her strength. Go around. Get the keys. Get home. She could do that.
"Ok, I'm going to hang up now."
"Alright. I love you."
"I love you too," Duane said.
She wiped the tears from her eyes, repeating Duane's words in her head. Go around, get the keys, get home. Mercy bounced in place, trying to pump herself up. It's no different than playing tag when you're a kid. Don't get touched. She took a few quick, short breaths, and then she went for it. She ran fast, faster than she'd run since she was in high school and she had been forced to do such things. Fear drove her to run even faster. She dodged around the woman with the damaged leg, and then she moved around Neil, his short, plump arms reaching out to her as if he wanted to hug her.
She ran around the side of the restaurant, her feet pounding on the concrete, and she slammed into the back door of the kitchen. She pulled the door open and stepped inside. There, her purse hung on the rack, waiting for her. She snatched it from the rack and began digging through its contents. She needed to find her keys. She would run to her car with the key out and ready to go. Her purse, bulky and heavy, was filled with all sorts of items, more lip balms than she would ever need, tampons, mints, gum, piles of receipts that she kept meaning to sort through, but where were her damn keys? She looked deeper into the purse, and she thought she saw the glimmer of the keys somewhere in the bottom. That's when her head was jerked violently to the side. She dropped her purse, lip balms rolling across the linoleum floor. Someone spun her around by her hair. She screamed to see Marco, blood pouring from his neck wound, standing there with a fistful of her hair. His mouth was open, his teeth and tongue layered in blood. He was trying to bite her.
She backed away from him, pulling her head back as far as it would go, though it hurt her scalp to do so. She didn't want anything to do with those bloody teeth. Mercy slapped at the man with her hands.
"Stop it, Marco! Let go!" she commanded through clenched teeth. In their struggle, they backed into a metal rack, upending it and sending up a frightful clatter as metal mixing bowls, plastic pitchers, and porcelain plates tumbled to the ground.
Mercy spun, her head pulled low, her hands searching for anything to stop this nightmare. Her ass bumped into the edge of the prep table, and she remembered the knives that hung on a magnetic strip above the metal surface. With her head held low, and Marco groaning in anticipation, she pawed blindly at where she thought the knife would be. She couldn't reach, not at the angle she was at. She yanked her head backward, and she heard a ripping sound, the sound of hair being pulled from a scalp. Pain made lights flash in her eyes, but she was able to stand up straighter now. She shoved Marco backward. Marco was short, but his body was thick with muscle from a lifetime of manual labor. He only moved back a few inches, and she realized she wasn't strong enough to push him away. She turned her back to him, spied what she was looking for on the prep table, and spun around, a razor-sharp carving knife in her hand.
She didn't give him any warning. She knew she didn't have to at this point. She hacked at his outstretched hands, opening new wounds that seeped blood onto the linoleum floor. She chopped at him, dancing around the prep station—just a little further.
She moved backwards, the knife still slashing at someone she had considered a friend. When she had backed into the furthest part of the kitchen, she dashed past Marco, twisting and contorting to dodge his clumsy grasp. She sprinted to her purse and scooped it up off the floor, stepping on random lip balms and squeezing their contents onto the floor. With her purse and a knife in her hand, she fumbled at the handle for the back door. Then she was in sunshine, pain radiating from her scalp, and her heart trying to beat its way out of her chest.
Little Neil rounded the corner of the restaurant, and she spun around and went the other way, pushing her way through the decorative foliage that ran around the east side of the restaurant. She received a few scrapes and cuts from branches that needed to be trimmed, and then she was at the front of the restaurant. Her car was in the distance, the woman with the injured leg between her and it.
The knife quivered in her hand. She managed to sling her purse over her shoulder without stabbing herself. Then she ran. Her legs felt shaky, but not as shaky as her mind. The world bounced before her, and she began to feel light-headed. She dodged around the woman and then skidded to a stop in front of her car. She set the knife on the roof of her white Toyota Corolla, and she began digging furiously through her purse for her keys. She threw lip balms and tampons on the ground, and then she pulled the keys free. She pressed on the fob to unlock the doors, and then she grabbed the knife and plopped inside the vehicle.
After pounding the button to lock the car's doors, she threw her purse and the knife on the passenger seat. She looked out her window to see that the woman was coming, but she saw no sign of Little Neil. She fumbled with the keys for a moment, then started the engine. She turned on her wipers for some mysterious reason that she couldn't explain, and then she threw the car in reverse, spinning the wheel at the same time. As she backed out and turned at the same time, the front, driver-side fender of the car slammed into her female pursuer. The woman flopped on the hood, one of her legs completely broken.
Mercy's first instinct was to get out of the car and check on her. Surely, she would be too injured now to be a threat. But as she sat with the engine idling, the woman began clawing her way up the hood. "Fuck that," she said to herself. She stomped on the gas, her head rocking back against the car seat. She reached 30 miles-per-hour, and then she slammed on the brakes. Her tires squealed on the warm pavement. The woman slid off the front of her car just as Little Neil came around the corner of the P.F. Chang's building. She spun her wheel so she wouldn't run over the woman and spared a second to give Little Neil the finger; then, she was off. Her eyes scanned the streets with a feverish intensity. There were cars everywhere. She exited the Streets of Tanasbourne and took a right onto Cornell. A traffic snarl loomed ahead of her.
Mercy tried to turn on the radio in her car, but all the antenna-less car could pick up were a few staticky channels, and she wasn't able to consistently make out the words. Still, she pressed the seek button hoping for any sort of update. The car moved slowly, inching along the busy street. Where were all these people going?
It looked as if the entire cities of Beaverton and Hillsboro were on the move. She saw trucks piled high with coolers and camping equipment. She saw the faces of scared children in the back of a vehicle. The fear on those faces spread like a disease. She looked down at her phone and called Duane again.
"Where are you?" he asked immediately, foregoing a greeting.
"I'm on Cornell Road. Stuck in traffic. There must be an accident or something up ahead," she said.
"Can you go around them?" he asked.
"No, we're stuck," she said.
"Isn't there a bike lane or something, a turning lane? Don't look at the road thinking about the lines and the laws; look at it for what it is, drivable space. Is there any drivable space that you can use to get home faster?"
"What is going on, Duane?"
"I think the dead are coming back to life."
She was about to say, "You're crazy" when a naked woman stumbled out from the woods to her right. The three fingers on her left hand were gone, and she had a vacant expression on her face. Mercy sat completely still, hoping that the woman would pass her car.
"Mercy, are you there?" Duane asked. "Mercy?"
In the back of the SUV to her front and right, the children with the scared faces saw the woman, and they began to scream. The woman turned in their direction, unmindful of her own nudity and the blood dripping from her hand. She began bashing on the back windows of the SUV with the kids inside.
"Mercy!" Duane yelled.
The SUV lurched forward, trying to get away from the lady, but it didn't have enough room to maneuver. The woman banged on the glass with her fists, and she wondered how long it wo
uld be until she could break through.
"Mercy, answer me, goddammit!"
She scanned the road to her left. There was a turn lane that she could use to move. The traffic from the other direction was lighter. Not many cars were interested in going back into Portland. If what Duane said was true, and she had no proof that it wasn't, Portland would be the last direction she would head in.
"I got this," she said to Duane.
She spun the wheel, pulling her car to the left. And then she floored it, knowing that as soon as others saw her breaking the law, they too would follow. She tried not to think of the crashing sound of broken glass or the scream that came from the SUV as she zoomed off. She was not a rubbernecker and had no interest in seeing bad things that she could do nothing about.
Her car flew up the turn lane, and she couldn't help but feel as if she were doing something wrong. She was going 40 miles-an-hour, the cars rushing by on her right and left, creating a whoosh sound with each one she passed. Ahead she saw the cause of the snarl—police cars. Lights spinning. People stumbling around. Blood. She saw other cars pulling into the turn lane behind her. She turned on her hazard lights. Maybe the cops ahead would think that she was having an emergency and ignore her law-breaking. She hoped this was so. As she neared the wreck, she realized that she needn't have worried. The cops were pre-occupied with fighting various injured forms. As she flew by the accident, her car squeezing through a gap between police cars and her tires crunching over broken glass, she watched one of the officers lose a chunk out of his neck. Then the scene was behind her. In her rearview window, she saw trucks driving over curbs, bouncing over the rough grass on the side of the road.
