by Bobby Adair
After a time, I softly asked, “Murphy?”
Murphy didn’t move.
I listened for movement in the house. I heard only silence.
The only infected in the house were those Murphy had killed in the back bedroom. Whether those infected had killed his family or whether they were his family was the burning question.
I shuddered at the thought. Murphy wasn’t like me. He loved his mother.
For the moment, Murphy was frozen by grief.
Shots had been fired. If any infected were near enough, they would hear, and they would come. One of us needed to get back in the game and that had to be me.
I hurried into the kitchen, stepped across the avocado-patterned linoleum floor and peeked through the window above the sink. There was no movement on that side of the house.
I hurried to the front of the house and pushed aside a homemade curtain to get a view of the street. “Mother fucker.”
Our Humvee was rolling away from the curb.
I ran to the front door and flung it open.
From behind, Murphy called, “What?”
I ran into the front yard and saw the Humvee disappear into the smoke. “God damn it. God damn motherfucking criminal bastard fuck-shits.”
Then Murphy was beside me. He bellowed curses up the street and pointed his weapon.
I put a hand on the barrel and pushed it down. “Don’t. It’s pointless.”
I looked around to see if we’d drawn any attention. In the small circle of the world that wasn’t obscured by smoke, I saw no movement. I heard none of the infected’s usual noises but I heard something. I heard a noise that didn’t belong.
With neither of us swearing at the moment, Murphy heard it too. "What's that?”
I looked south, toward the sound. It was a combination of a rumble and a rush of wind, growling and coming closer. The uniform gray smoke hanging over the houses started to glow in patches of orange and red.
"Shit. Murphy, we need to move. The fire is coming."
I ran a few steps and noticed that Murphy wasn't following. I stopped. "C'mon, Murphy. What the fuck?"
Murphy was fixated on the glow of the fire through the smoke. "We can't outrun that."
His voice was flat. Despondent.
Oh, no.
"I'm not quitting now,” I yelled at him. “I'm not dying here. Let's go.” I took a few more steps.
Nothing.
Fuck.
Suddenly, Murphy was back. He shouted, "We need a car."
"No time,” I argued.
"It's our only chance."
Damn.
Murphy was right.
I ran toward a car that sat in a neighbor’s yard with the driver’s door swung open. The front seat was a gory mess, but I jumped in. The keys were in the ignition. The windshield was spider-webbed with cracks.
I cranked the engine. The starter groaned rhythmically, but the engine didn't fire.
"Shit," I shouted.
I cranked again.
Nothing.
It must have run out of fuel with the engine running after its driver had died. I was out of the car in a snap. Murphy was nowhere to be seen.
I looked around.
I heard a car engine crank and made out the shape of another car through the smoke across the street. I ran toward it and saw Murphy's big silhouette through the shattered driver's side window.
Just as my feet hit asphalt, the engine rumbled to life.
Murphy spun the wheels as he backed the car off of the curb.
I jumped and slid over the hood as the fire ignited the leaves of the oak tree shading above me.
A billow of heat singed my skin and seared my throat. Every tree I could see was engulfed in flames. It was all happening impossibly fast.
Beneath that flaming sky, I landed in the passenger seat and Murphy stomped on the accelerator.
The car fishtailed up the street. Embers from trees rained down from above. Lawns, bushes, and houses ignited.
Murphy pulled the car through the first left-hand turn and plunged us into thick smoke at thirty, forty, then fifty miles-per-hour. The oaks’ thick foliage crumbled into embers as the fire raced through the treetops in front of us. Visibility shrank to a deadly small margin for the speed we were moving. But with death's greedy hands grasping at our flesh, wild-eyed flight and long odds were our only chances for survival.
Murphy kept jerking the car from side to side to get past obstacles seen at the last moment. Four blocks passed before we got out from under the racing blaze.
I cast a morbidly curious glance at the conflagration behind us. "Jesus."
Murphy hit a hard right turn and then a quick left, angling across the path of the fire, but still moving away.
I was nervous about the choice. "Do you know a way out?"
"That dude with the bunker, his house isn't far. If we can get there ahead of the fire, we'll be safe." Murphy was tense. We weren’t out of danger.
"There’s a lot of hope in that plan," I told him.
"Do you have a better idea?" he asked.
“Drive like a mother fucker ‘til we run out of road?” Yeah, that seemed like the best choice to me.
“Once these streets burn, we’ll never find that bunker in the mess.” Murphy cast a quick, knowing glance at me.
“Shit.”
Chapter 9
Murphy stopped the car in front of a dilapidated two-story house with a chain-link fence falling down around it.
I looked back in the direction of the fire. Knowing what to listen for, I heard the distant roar but I saw no evidence of the glow. We had time—not a lot, but some.
Murphy grabbed his rifle and jumped out of the car.
I hurried behind. "Are you sure this is the place?"
"Yep."
The front door of the house was hanging on a single hinge. We ran inside.
The house had been vandalized to the point of worthlessness. Every window was shattered. The carpet was ripped from the slab. There were holes in the walls and holes in the ceiling large enough for someone to fall through. There were dirty, worn cushions on the floor, and graffiti on the walls.
Trash lay everywhere. Torn clothes were scattered with bones. The house stank like an overflowing port-a-potty.
We passed through the kitchen, which had been destroyed by vandals and copper tubing thieves.
Murphy flung open a door that led into the garage.
Infected.
“Shit.” I stumbled over my feet trying to back away.
Murphy, still full of pent up rage, wasn’t fazed. He barreled forward and popped off three rounds before swinging the butt of his gun around to work on the skull of one who was close enough to catch his fury.
I regained my footing and fired six shots at movement in the darkness.
Then it was still. My eyes adjusted and I saw eleven dead infected among the junk. That didn’t make sense. Some of them must already have been there. I also saw something very unusual. In the floor, there was a heavy, misshapen steel door. The rusty lock and handle had the look of having been pried open.
Murphy, pointed to my rifle, and pointed at the door in the floor.
I stood back and aimed my M4.
With one hand on his weapon, Murphy bent over, grabbed the door, and pulled.
It clinked on something, but it didn't open.
Murphy pulled on it again. It rattled in its frame.
It was jammed or locked.
Damn it.
How much time could we have?
He kicked it hard, and yelled, "If anyone's down there, get back. I'm blowing the door and then I'm coming in."
Murphy pulled a hand grenade from his MOLLE vest and placed it with both hands near the door's locking mechanism.
He looked up at me.
I needed no instructions. I ran back into the house and headed for the furthest end from the garage.
Murphy's heavy breathing behind me told me that I understood what was going
to happen next.
We got to the end of a hall, and before I could get into the bedroom, the grenade's blast rocked the house.
I stopped and turned.
Murphy was already running back toward the garage.
As we passed the open front door on our way back, I saw the orange glow of the fire above the roofs of the houses across the street. All of our chips were on this one bet.
Time for delays and caution were gone. If the grenade had failed to do its work, we were dead.
The garage was full of floating filth and rearranged junk.
I coughed, inhaling more dusty crud.
It was hard to see. We made our way toward the center, where we knew the door lay on the floor. It had been swung open by the force of the blast, more bent than before.
Murphy looked at me for confirmation.
I nodded. What other choice did I have?
The first step creaked under his weight.
Chapter 10
No surprise; it was dark.
I’d expected a doomsday bunker that would generate its own electricity. It either wasn’t doing that, the light bulbs were shattered by the grenade’s concussion, or an ambush awaited us below.
The darkness implied only negative outcomes, hence my lack of surprise.
Murphy flicked on the flashlight mounted on the barrel of his M4, pointed the weapon into the gloom, and hustled down the stairs.
I let my M4 dangle from its harness, drew my Glock, shined my light over his shoulder, and followed.
The room was maybe a dozen feet wide and twenty or thirty feet long. It had a concrete floor and shelves with dusty boxes and unidentifiable equipment stacked within. At the far end of the room on the left wall, another door was shut. The mechanism was torn up. Someone had gone through that door as well.
And there were bodies. Some were clearly infected. Of others, I couldn’t be sure.
Murphy looked back at me. “If we can, we need to close that outer door. The fire will be here soon.”
“Yup.” I bounded back up the stairs, positioned myself on one end of the door, and lifted. Good God, it was heavy.
Murphy came up to help.
The hinges had been bent by the explosion, making it very difficult to swing the warped door up off of the garage floor.
As we got it back over the hole, in a position where gravity would close it once again, Murphy and I hurried down the stairs, chased by the roar of the approaching fire.
We ran to the far end of the bunker.
The second door hung slightly open, a fact I hadn’t noticed moments before in our hurry to check the room and reclose the outer door. We were carelessly racing into uncertainty, betting our lives on a guess that the bunker was safe.
We had no choice. The alternative was immolation.
Murphy took up a ready position outside the door. I put a hand on the handle. He nodded twice and on the third nod, I swung it open.
I jumped back and looked for movement in the blackness. I listened for sounds.
Nothing.
No, wait…I heard something.
I cast a fearful glance at Murphy. He looked back the way we’d come. The fire had to be on the house. Its roar filled the room.
Necessity drove us down the stairs.
In the beams of our lights, the room appeared to be a match for the one we’d just left, ten feet deeper in the earth, and set at a perpendicular angle.
No movement. That was good.
Murphy stopped at the bottom of the stairs and kept his rifle pointed down the length of the room.
I pulled the door shut behind us.
“Don’t worry about that,” Murphy said.
“No, we need to seal it if we can.”
“The fire?” he asked.
“I don’t know if it’ll suck all the oxygen out when it passes over,” I said, “but I don’t want to find out the hard way.”
“Do what you need to do.”
The door appeared to have a good rubber seal, but the door handle was missing and the metal around the hole was bent. That left a large gap for air to escape.
I shined my light on a nearby shelf and grabbed a handful of a rotten sleeping bag material and stuffed it into the hole. A fortuitously handy cinder block served to keep the door closed. “That’ll have to do.”
With the door sealed, the fire’s roar diminished significantly. I heard disturbingly familiar noises from the far end of the room.
Suddenly frightened and angry for having missed the infected in the darkness, I shined my light down the length of the bunker.
The room had rows of bunk beds along one wall, what appeared to be a kitchen area at the end, and the remains of some living room furniture in the middle. I counted three bodies but I saw no movement.
Where were they?
I scanned the room again, ready to shoot anything that wasn’t Murphy, but my light revealed nothing in the dark corners that it reached. No movement at all.
Still, I heard the sounds of the infected.
“There.” Murphy shined his light on the far end of the room, near the left corner. “Another door.”
“How big is this fucking place?” I asked, out of frustration.
With the fire roaring overhead and our situation stable for the moment, I should have been relieved, at least.
The door jiggled in its frame and the animal sounds of the infected behind grew louder.
They knew we were there.
I laid my flashlight on a shelf and pointed it down the length of the room. I ran a reassuring hand across the full magazines stored in my vest. I holstered my Glock and in a smooth, comfortable motion, I raised my M4 to a firing position.
I told Murphy, “We can’t beat that fire outside, but I’ll bet my ass that we can kill every brain-fried infected that funnels out of that door.”
“Make your shots count,” he told me.
“At this range, I can hit anything.”
The Ogre and the Harpy.
We stood in our ready poses for at least five minutes while the door rattled, the infected moaned, and the roar of the fire crescendoed above.
As time passed, I grew impatient. “I wish they’d just open the fuckin’ door and come out.”
Relaxing his stance, Murphy looked at me and in a hushed tone said, "I wonder if they're locked in."
I shrugged noncommittally.
Murphy said, "I'll bet those are folks from the neighborhood that hid down here when everything started. I’ll bet they bolted the door shut, not knowing that some of them were infected already, and now they’re all too stupid to figure out how to open it."
I said, “If I say I agree with your deduction, don’t call me your dear Watson.”
“Who’s Watson?” he asked.
“Murphy, there are some cultural gaps in your education that we need to discuss some time.”
“I take it Watson’s not a rapper,” he said.
“Whatever.”
Murphy said, "That must have been a nightmare when it all went down."
"Yeah,” I agreed. “The next time I start complaining, remind me about this and about how good I have it.”
“I will.”
“I know. So, what are our options, do you think?" I asked.
"We could stand here and wait for Whitey to come out.” Murphy half smiled. “That might take a few minutes or it might take a few days. They might never come out."
I asked, "Any other ideas?"
"Just bad ones."
I asked, “Like?”
He said, “We could try the grenade thing again, but if the shrapnel didn’t kill us, we'd get knocked senseless by the blast. Then, if we regained our senses in time, we might get to die while the infected down there eat us alive.”
“Yeah, I’m not a fan of that one.” I pursed my lips and thought for a second. “I’ve got an idea.”
“Yeah?”
I said, “We could block the door.”
"Not we," Murphy corrected.<
br />
"This isn't a good time for you to get lazy," I told him.
"Not lazy,” he said. “Smart. One of us can pile enough of this junk between the wall and the door to keep it jammed shut. The other one needs to keep a rifle trained on that door in case the infected figure out how to get it open. Having us both standing around with boxes of crap in our hands when a hundred infected come pouring out…well, that won’t have a happy ending."
"Not for us, I guess." I said.
"Nope, not for us,” Murphy agreed with a laugh.
Chapter 11
The door was blocked.
I was exhausted.
Murphy and I made ourselves comfortable at the opposite end of level two, at the foot of the stairs that led up to the first level. The infected finally calmed down, and not much noise came from beyond the door. After what sounded like the collapse of the house above us a few hours before, all the noise of the fire had gone away as well.
I left my flashlight turned on and sitting on a shelf to provide some light in the gloomy space. At least it provided enough light so that I could see whether the bag of chips I pulled out of my bag were potato or corn.
“What do you got there?” Murphy asked.
I looked back in my bag. “Mostly chips, soda, and some donuts for breakfast.”
“Man, all I have are cupcakes, Peanut M&M’s, and three Dr. Peppers.”
“I’ve got like six bags of chips,” I said. “I’ll trade some for M&M’s.”
“Cool.”
“I need to find a watch,” I said, through a mouthful of corn chips. “I don’t want to burn up the battery on my phone by checking the time, but I hate not knowing what time it is.”
“There’ll be plenty around,” Murphy responded. “The trick is getting one that doesn’t require a battery.”
“Yeah. How do you tell?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Find one that looks old, I guess. Speaking of which, how’s your battery holding up?”
“Less than half. I need to get a solar charger for it.”
“That’s pointless, dude,” he said. “I don’t know when the cellular network will fail, but I know it will. I doubt that there’s anybody interested in keeping that stuff running anymore. The electric grid will fail, too. You can charge your cell phone in a wall socket until then. Besides, when the electric grid fails, the cellular network will go at the same time. So a solar charger for your cell phone is pointless.”
