by Bobby Adair
Empty skyscrapers would be tombstones to our dead cities. Satellites would fall from the sky. When the blood of our dead was washed away by time, the rusting carcasses of a billion cars would again stain the earth red.
How much of that would I live to see? Did I want to see any of it?
Did I want to face a future alone among the mindless monsters?
Alone.
Lost in the blackness of my mood, my scavenged cell phone buzzed in my pocket, teasing me with evidence of another life that would soon come to a violent end.
I wanted to cry, but the Ogre and the Harpy had beaten so, so many tears out of me, and nothing seemed to anger them more than a little boy’s tears.
I felt like I was twelve years old again, alone and imprisoned in a heartless world with countless days of pain in my past and endless days of fear in my future.
And I knelt at Amber’s body while Russell’s wails vocalized my pain.
The cell phone buzzed again.
And Jerome—cowardly, lying, useless Jerome—killed for no reason at all. What the fuck was that?
Was there a path forward, a road out of the darkness? Could I once again find in myself the strength that stood me before the Ogre’s wrath so many years ago, or would life’s cruelty finally prevail?
As I searched my heart for that answer, the cell phone vibrated for half a second, then cut short.
Whether the battery in the phone, the life at the other end, or the hope of the caller—something else had just died.
Chapter 5
I thought about a buddy of mine from seventh grade, Benny Clark. We met after school one afternoon to settle with our fists some little something so trivial that memory misplaced it almost immediately once it was over.
We fought that afternoon, or more accurately, we boxed. But I didn't try; not really. Benny was a smaller kid than me, and that made a real difference at that age. And though we were fighting, he was my friend, and I had no desire to hurt him. He wasn't big enough to pack a punch that could do more than bruise. So, the fight was destined to go unresolved.
But assistant principal McQuig, being much more observant than I’d have given him credit for, caught us both and hauled us to his office. He laid a choice on the table: we could take the paddle, or he would call our parents to explain the suspension.
Well, that was a no-brainer for both Benny and me. He opted for the combo pack—the call and a suspension. I asked to the point of begging for the paddle.
Paddling was punishment with an end. I'd bend over the desk and McQuig would haul back for a baseball-style swing and lay into my ass with all his gray-haired might. There was no defined number of swats for fighting, nor for any offense. Punishment ended when McQuig's temper settled, or his back and shoulders grew tired. This usually happened between three and five swats.
It was a difficult dynamic to predict. In the mornings, McQuig was full of energy and ready for five; not so much in the afternoon. But in the afternoons, his temper was short from a long day of dealing with the likes of me, so he was more inclined to shoot for five.
I took five that day. Perhaps my frequent flyer status was built into the equation somehow.
In spite of paying the price, however, I was too naïve at that age to understand how things really worked in the world. At the time, Dan was an assistant principal at another school in the district. I guess it only made sense that he knew McQuig.
Perhaps McQuig called to tell Dan of the favor he'd done him by tanning my hide. All I knew for a fact was that when Dan got home from work that day, he felt compelled to bellow at me for what seemed to me to be a thousand times, "You wanna fight? You wanna be a boxer? Is this what you wanna do? You wanna embarrass me?"
Of course the questions were all rhetorical. They were not to be answered with my words, nor Dan's.
The answers were in Dan's knuckles.
He beat me all the way through my fear and my pain, leaving only a crusty residue of anger and hate that I carried to school the next day, where a hundred snickering laughers pointed at my bruised face. Humiliation is such a powerful motivator in seventh grade.
So on the fourth day, when Benny returned to school, I found him in the hall. He smiled at me the way he always smiled when he saw me. I didn’t smile back. Instead, I beat him down. With each pound of my fist, Dan's anger rolled through me and down to Benny. And when I was done, Benny looked like me, with fresh blood running from his mouth and nose. He had hollow, helpless eyes that understood something new about cruelty in the world.
I got eight swats from McQuig that day. Perhaps a new record. I got suspended, and Dan beat me daily until I went back. But what the fuck; he probably would have beaten me anyway.
What I should have learned about catharsis that day was the lesson that eluded me every time I ever let my anger run free. Catharsis is a bullshit concept.
Benny had been my best friend for years before that fight. After I beat him in the hall, he never spoke to me again. All that catharsis did for me was cost me a little piece of my humanity.
Slaughtering Whites for what Mark did to Amber was like that. When the rage flowed and the Whites died, it felt like something, something with a frightening name. But after, I felt like a death camp Nazi who’d finally looked into one too many pairs of sunken eyes.
And now I sat in a humid charnel house of my own making, having tried to assuage a vindictive rage with the murder of the wrong people. Mark had to die for the world to ever be right again. In my mind, it was a necessary step. But I knew that it was also an indulgence of the darkness, a choice to forever cultivate a hate. It was a backward path. And to chase Mark down that path, the easy path, was to shower myself in the blood of the Whites until my luck ran out and I was as dead as the pile of infected at my feet. And would Mark be in that pile? Not likely.
But what real choice did I have? To move forward instead? To what?
I’d only ever been an isolated spectator to an endless parade of tragedies. Being alone in the dark was all I knew. All my life I’d collected acquaintances and discarded them before they became real friends, before they became too much of an emotional risk. And as much as I had needed to find Amber, as much as I needed now to know what had happened to Steph, in my choices, I’d scraped off Murphy, Mandi, and Russell and isolated myself again. The cycle of my habit was at work under the guise of rational choice.
So what was forward for me?
That hard path was to pick up the fragile pieces of a nascent chance at life, a life that I’d very handily scattered across a dying city. That path seemed so difficult and so urgent, but the hard part, if I was still alive at the end of the day, was to chance a real relationship with another person, with other people.
And I know I didn’t think it through at the time that I let Russell latch on to me, but maybe that was Russell’s value. Non-judgmental, silent, and simple, Russell wholly accepted and needed me. He took those intangible but important parts of a relationship and put them on the table while asking for nothing in return. Was it possible that in helping Russell to stay alive he would unwittingly help me to take the baby steps of learning how to fit into normal society, or at least whatever might be left of society when this was all over?
Were the first few steps of the hard path forward to ironically be illuminated for me by Russell?
Perhaps.
So with Russell’s help, I chose to move forward, and all those parts that I was good at planning for came together in a snap. I was ready to go, alert and back in the present. My eyes were open and I was aware of my surroundings.
Three infected lurked near a support column at the top of a ramp, fixated on me, puffing up their courage. Their faces were gaunt, their hands very busy at invisible nothings that needed desperate attention. Their eyes were alert and shifting from focus to focus, but always finding their way back to me.
They looked hungry, but were unaware of the feast that awaited them for free, if they’d only follow the parking garage’s
ramps up another three floors. Maybe they were just lazy. Maybe they thought I looked like I was dying, infected like them, but an easy meal.
I laid my machete across my thighs, its grip slippery in my bleeding palm. I decided that I wasn’t going to slaughter the three skinny Whites, and neither was I going to be eaten by them. But their hunger was going to make them do something stupid, very soon.
A step on the path forward was control and I was going to take it by bringing the situation to a head. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the concrete wall. I calmed my breathing.
It was time.
The infected couldn’t resist the temptation that my closed eyes presented. Just a moment after closing them, I heard the sound of a half-dozen feet running across the concrete floor.
And by choosing the path forward, my old mantra was outmoded, but still effective.
The Ogre and the Harpy.
I drew a sharp breath, opened my eyes, and jumped to my feet just as the three stepped within machete range. Their eyes widened as they each struggled to halt their momentum. Even their malfunctioning brains were able to register surprise.
My machete swung up as I straightened and slashed deeply across the belly of the leftmost of the trio. Pushing my blade’s momentum in the same swing, I ripped it through the jaw of the one in the middle. Both went down and the third jumped back.
The first infected hit the floor immediately, unconscious and rapidly bleeding to death. The one with the jaw injury was flailing, half silly from the blow to his head, splattering blood in every direction.
I roared and charged at the last one still on her feet. She turned and ran.
Victory.
Chapter 6
When my feet hit the street that ran between the hospital and the garage, the infected on the upper floors of the were still in a tizzy over their lost meal, though many had fallen silent, perhaps feasting on their dead brethren instead. At street level, there were infected loitering and resting in shadows, and others gathered around the doors into the hospital, drawn by the promise of warm flesh upstairs.
But something was profoundly different. The world felt a little more dead than it had just hours before.
Was it me, or was I sensing something real?
I looked out across the street. All of the hospital windows were dark. The giant full color sign in front of the basketball arena had no advertisement for upcoming concerts. It was black. Its lights were out. The traffic signal at the corner flashed red in an unflinching rhythm.
Looking back into the garage, I saw that the overhead lights were out. The lights in the stairwells were off.
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket. No cellular network. No data.
No, wait. There was a bar…then it was gone. I slowly waved the phone through the air, trying to catch a signal, but it would only come for a second or two at a time. It was out there, but it was weak. I concluded the only thing that made sense.
The power grid had failed.
Mankind had just taken another giant step backward.
Soon the batteries that powered the flashing stoplights would go dead, and the rapidly weakening batteries on the cell towers would follow. If the virus itself wasn’t the beginning of the end of civilization, the failure of the power grid surely was.
I pocketed my cell phone. It was no good now as a communication device, but it was still a pocket-sized computer, though I’d need to find a solar charger for it.
Looking back toward the hospital, I had a clear view of the glass stairwell that I’d shot to hell earlier. Nearly every pane on its glass walls was shattered. Bloody bodies of the infected lay on the stairs, hung out over the edges, or were piled on the ground below. At least a hundred Whites greedily fed on those bodies.
Still, there was barely any movement to be seen on the stairs themselves.
Perhaps an opportunity lay in that carnage.
With blood still glistening on the scarred blade of my machete, I hefted it in my right hand, drew my Glock with my left, and walked across the street toward the feeding infected.
They were noisy. They were sloppy. They tore at clothes with their hands, and with their teeth, they lacerated flesh that seethed with the same virus that had scorched their brains. All around, crimson painted the grass and pooled in the dirt. In the blood, bits of bone, eyeglasses, and shoes were strewn.
The infected paid no attention to me.
At the moment, I was one of them, a white beast from a child’s nightmare, strong and deadly, not worth a second thought when the ground was covered in a bounty of bleeding human meat.
At the bottom of the stairwell, I stepped through a shattered glass wall into the epicenter of the slaughter. The big fifty-caliber bullets had smashed the tempered glass into thousands of razor sharp bits of crystalline shrapnel. Every white body was broken, shredded, and bled out, dripping down the concrete steps. Agonized mouths stretched across broken faces. Bones splintered through skin. And the smell of death, blood, and everything ripped from stomachs and intestines was heavy in the air.
Up I walked, careful with each placement of my foot, lest I slipped. Live infected were among the bodies on the first few floors, feeding on the scraps of their brothers and sisters. By the third floor, their numbers thinned. By the fifth, there were only one or two per flight, faces buried in the work of gorging themselves on newly dead remains.
That made my task easy as I went to work with my machete, hacking at the backs of necks and severing heads. I wanted no breathing White nearby when I got to the top.
I passed the sixth floor and killed three. I passed the seventh and killed two more. Between the eighth and ninth, there were four. One struggled and attacked. As a result, I wore more of his blood than I did of the others.
When I finally reached the top of the stairs, I had to climb over a makeshift barricade of hospital beds, chairs, and cabinets. The barrier had no hope of stopping any infected from climbing over, but it did serve the purpose of slowing them down, and more importantly, it kept them from massing and pushing their combined weight on the door.
Once over the barricade, there was enough room for me to stand in front of the steel fire door. Above the doorknob, about eight inches wide and two feet tall was a long rectangular window.
Through the reinforcing wire mesh in the glass, I saw two soldiers standing across the hall with dispassionate faces and nervous eyes, aiming their weapons at me.
I shouted, “Hey.”
The soldiers shared a glance, but didn’t respond.
“Hey, listen,” I said. “I know you’re kind of freaked out about seeing me out here, but I need to talk to someone. Can I count on you not to shoot me?”
One soldier looked nervously at the other. He said something that I couldn’t make out through the heavy door.
I shouted again, “Look, I’m not going to stay out here all day. It’s only a matter of time before the infected hear me up here and come. So go talk to whoever you need to talk to and let me in. I’m not a danger. I won’t stay long. I need to talk to Steph.”
“Go away,” the previously silent soldier ordered.
I huffed. “Look, man, don’t be a dick. Go get your boss or whatever you need to do, but hurry up about it.”
“If you don’t leave, we’ll shoot.”
I guess I should have been happy that they didn’t start the conversation with bullets, but I wasn’t. I was impatient. “Look, let me be clear about a couple of things. First, there aren’t any infected out here. All the ones in this stairwell are dead. At least until you get down to the third floor or so. Second, I’m going to come in there and see Steph. I don’t mean anybody any harm, but I gotta tell you guys, I’m already tired of fucking around about it. I went to a lot of trouble to get here and if I’d wanted to hurt you, I would have just blown the door open with a grenade, come in, and shot your dumbasses.”
I pulled a pin from one of my three grenades, slipped the pin into my pocket, and then held it up to the gla
ss for the soldiers to see. “You see what I have here, right? I know you’re thinking that you really want to shoot me through the door now, but if you do, this grenade goes off. The door gets blown open, and the infected come running. Do you know what happens after that? You do, don’t you? All of you die. But that’s not what I want and I know that’s not what you want. I just want to come in and talk to Steph. I don’t mean anyone in there any harm. I sure don’t want anybody to harm me. Just open the fuckin’ door. I’ll come in, and then I’ll leave.”
I peeked through the glass. The soldiers were talking again. As I watched, one ran off down the hall.
The other soldier said, “You’re infected, right?”
“I’m a slow burn.” I nodded. “I am infected. Aside from that, I’m just as normal as you.”
The soldier said, “You could infect us all if we let you in. Do you want that on your conscience?”
“Isn’t that what you’re doing already anyway?” I asked. “Infecting yourselves, trying to find the immune ones?”
“How do you know that?” he asked.
“Because I’ve been talking to Steph on the phone about it.” I glared through the window to be sure he saw my anger at him. “She’s a nurse. Cute, with red hair, about five-foot-five.”
The soldier asked, “The network is still up?”
I shook my head. “No. I think the power grid failed. I think there are batteries in the towers, but I guess they’re dying. I couldn’t get a signal when I checked.”
The soldier nodded. “The emergency generator here kicked on a few hours ago.”
With no more questions on his mind, the soldier stood and watched me.
