by Morris, Jacy
Andy closed his eyes, tears rolling down his cheeks. I wish I'd never come to Portland.
****
"This sucks," Rudy said.
The others just looked at him, as if to say, "Tell me something I don't know." They were all sitting in the dark, huddled around the square of light that filtered down from the hatch that led to the rooftop. There were no lights anywhere in the theater. Whatever power the emergency lights had been running on had long since gone away. Now, they were stuck in a cave of blackness. The darkness tended to have two effects on the survivors. It either made them sleepy or grumpy. In Rudy's case, both.
Here he was in the middle of a movie theater. Everything that he could have wanted around him, movies, junk food, popcorn, those little crappy containers of movie theater nachos that never had enough cheese, and he couldn't have any of it. He felt like a prisoner with his face pressed up against the bars, staring at the keys to his cell hanging just out of reach on a brass hook. The projectors didn't work, the lights didn't work, the soda fountain didn't work. It's as if they were all waiting to die, and Rudy was tired of it.
He stood up, dusting off his pants.
"Where are you going?" Amanda asked.
"I'm going up there," he said.
There was no response from Amanda or Chloe, so he began his ascent. He paused every couple of steps to pull his pants up. Over the course of the last week, they had loosened somewhat as his life became more and more about survival and less about video games and stuffing his face with junk food. At first, he hadn't noticed, but whenever he walked through the darkness of the theater, a flashlight in his hand, he kept having to reach behind himself and pull his pants up, something that he had never had to do before.
He wished he had a belt. He had bought his pants to fit, and they were snug when he tried them on. Rudy had never really lost weight before. He had always been in a constant state of growth. Now, he ate for survival. Though there were racks of candy in the theater's lobby, he knew that the food wouldn't last long, not with eleven people having to eat each day. It had only been two days, but already the racks were starting to look bare. Soon they would be down to the pure sugar items, the things that were literally just comprised of gelatin, sugar, and artificial flavoring. If you would have told Rudy ten days ago that he would soon look at a package of Gummy Bears with disdain, he would have laughed in your face, posted something shitty about you online, and pretended to throw punches at your face when you weren't looking.
Things were changing. Rudy had embraced that fact wholeheartedly rather than wallow in it. In his mind, he replayed the escape from the Coliseum over and over again. There he had been, standing side by side with fierce examples of humanity like Zeke, the always composed Blake, and the brutally efficient Lou, and he had done his part. He had been every bit as good as they were. Sure, he had to stop and take a puff from his inhaler at the end of it all, but he had come through. He had pulled his own weight, and there was a lot of it to pull.
The muscles in his arms were still sore from the jarring force of swinging a crappy souvenir sword at living flesh and bone, but he pushed through the pain and managed to climb the ladder anyway, hiking his pants up once again when he reached the top. He wondered how much weight he had lost, but then he thought, maybe he was just dehydrated. Maybe if he found a steady source of water, he would balloon up again right to where he was when this all started.
He shook the thought out of his mind and walked over to Lou who was leaning with his back against some shiny metal ductwork. Lou fidgeted with his hands, and his eyes looked far off. Rudy could tell that he was in no mood for talking, so he moved to the side of the roof and looked down. He remembered his improbable escape from his apartment building, the vertigo he had felt at climbing out of his window and setting both feet upon the fire escape, a rickety concoction of metal, bolted into crumbling brickwork. His head had spun then, just as it was now, rocking side to side. It was so bad that he didn't even pay attention to the legion of the dead that had gathered below them.
He knew they were there. They weren't the type of thing that you could put out of your mind. As soon as he had stepped onto the roof, they had assaulted his senses. The smell was the first thing you noticed; it was the smell of a slaughterhouse combined with a tannery. The bodies below were rotting, the organs inside turning to mush. Their skin was doing the same, but in a different way. The skin was becoming tanner, harder, almost like leather. The sun was drying them out from the outside, but the inside was like a soft putrescent center. They were like Rolos. As soon as the thought crossed his mind, he vowed to stay away from the Rolos when it was time for dinner. There probably weren't any left anyway.
Another building burned in the distance, and Rudy turned away from it, as it reminded him of his near-death experience. He had almost tumbled to his death when the fire escape he was using had collapsed beneath him. It was just one of many near-death experiences that he had lived through in the past two weeks.
Rudy focused on the nearest building to the movie theater. It was a mall. Lloyd Center they called it, perhaps the worst mall in Portland. It was the type of mall kept open by outlet clothing stores, cell phone kiosks, and a food court. There were always empty shops inside. The upper levels of the mall were a black hole of commerce. People came there for the food, and the clothes, and little else. There were other malls around Portland, but Lloyd Center was the oldest. He wondered what was inside there now. Had the mall fallen while the stores were open, or had all of the gates been lowered and locked by the time the dead had taken over the city?
The question was purely philosophical time filler. The distance between here and there was too great for them to make a trip to scout it out. It was only a hundred yards or so, if that, but the amount of dead that would see their group would be somewhere in the hundreds. He might as well have been looking at the moon. Heading over to the mall was nothing short of a one-way ticket. There was no getting around it. They didn't have the amount of ammo that they would need to fight their way back through the tide of the dead.
The dead were slow and unwieldy. Their greatest strength resided in the fact that they had the numbers. How badly did they outnumber the human race? In Portland, just looking at his own situation, the only situation that really mattered to him, it looked like a twenty to one shot. There were eleven of them, counting that Andy guy, and easily a few hundred of the dead just below them.
In the distance, he could see the dome of the Rose Garden rising up. Unseen, on the other side of the Rose Garden, lay the Memorial Coliseum, once a refugee center for Rudy and the other survivors. Who knew how many of the refugees from the Coliseum had been killed on the day they escaped. No matter the number, it had probably been quite a swing in the favor of the dead. Rudy looked at the mall again, to avoid the uncomfortable speculation that came into his mind. The mall...
He had been there a few times. From what he remembered, the stores in the mall would be mostly useless as far as their needs went. There were some fast food joints inside, but most of the edible food would have spoiled or gone rotten by now. There were some clothing stores, and he could definitely use a belt, perhaps even some new pants. Rudy sniffed inward. Underneath the smell of the dead, he could get a whiff of his own funky body odor. He had a couple changes of clothes in his possession, but each item of clothing now had four or five days on it. Yeah, he was due a new change of clothes.
"Don't even think about it, kid."
"Think about what?" Rudy asked.
Lou looked at him sideways, his eyes still focused on the distance. "I see you eyeing that mall. Ain't no way we're going into that place. There's nothing we could use in there anyway."
"I suppose you have a better idea," Rudy said.
Lou said nothing.
"Well, we can't just sit here."
Silence.
"We'll die." Rudy looked over his shoulder at Lou.
He merely shrugged his shoulders.
"You think th
e military will help us?" he asked, more to break the silence than anything else.
"You mean the way they helped us when we were trying to get away from the Coliseum? Blowing shit up? Getting everyone killed?"
Rudy gave up. If Lou wanted to wallow in defeat let him. They hadn't seen a sign of the military in two days. The last they had seen was a handful of helicopters flying east. They had never returned. It was beginning to feel like they were the only people on the entire planet. Rudy began to count the dead.
****
Katie sat in the darkness of the theater, her mind boiling with emotions that she couldn't control. She held her revolver in her hand, Fred Walker's revolver, used to kill her child and her husband. She had recovered it in a room in the bowels of the Coliseum just before the fences had come down and all of the refugees and soldiers had turned into a giant buffet for the dead. When they were escaping, she had used it to kill another child, someone else's child. That child's sister was sitting in the hallway, at the bottom of the ladder, next to the square of light.
She wanted nothing to do with the light or the child. The looks that girl gave her were enough to send anyone running. The mental looks that she had given herself were even worse. Katie, the real Katie, the one who had always existed but who had never asserted herself until the world had turned to shit, floated in a sea of doubt. She felt the fake Katie there battling with her, filling the real Katie with guilt, suspicion, terror, and the sense that maybe she had done something wrong. Maybe, when Brian had bitten his youngest daughter, she should have let it sort itself out. Maybe she should have let the little bastard turn into a mini-cannibal. But she hadn't. She had done what she felt was right. Why then, now, in the darkness, did it feel so wrong?
There was a distance between her and the other survivors, not just Jane, the sole-surviving member of Brian's star-crossed family. Everyone had the same look. It was equal parts questioning and accusatory, as if they wondered if they could have done the same thing. Of course they couldn't. They were still playing by the old rules. The fake Katie would have never done such a thing. Hell, the fake Katie would have never had a gun in her hands in the first place. But the real Katie did what she wanted, and the real Katie did what was right.
She had done so when her family had turned. She had done so when Zeke had made advances on her. She didn't regret a thing. But the old Katie did. The old Katie lived in fear, the fear of being judged, the fear of being deemed worthless.
Katie cocked the hammer of her gun in the darkness. In the silence of the movie theater, the sound seemed appropriate, reassuring. She eased the hammer down with her thumb, and then she cocked it again. It helped her think. She thought about the bullets in the pocket of her jeans, which she still thought of as her mom jeans. She thought about the film on her teeth from days of eating nothing but junk food without a toothbrush. She thought about the look on Zeke's face when Lou had...
No, she didn't want to think about that. She cocked the hammer again, enjoying the play of tension against the tendons and muscles in her thumb. She lowered it again, and thought some more. It was gone. The image... that image, of Zeke's head lolling to the side as Lou chopped at the thick cords of muscle in Zeke's neck. But then it was there again, his eyes blinking in his severed head, his jaw opening and closing as if he were trying to say something.
She cocked the hammer again, and this time she hesitated, her thumb off the hammer instead of on it, daring it to come crashing down onto the primer and erase all of her thoughts. It was dark, so she let the tears come. They came silently and rolled down her face. She didn't know who the tears were for. She didn't know if the tears came from real Katie or fake Katie. She didn't know if they were for her husband, her son, Zeke, or that girl's dead sister and father. She just knew they were.
They started out hot, and then they rolled down her cheeks, which had become pinched faded things. The look of them had made her feel queasy when she saw her face in the bathroom mirror earlier that day, looking to see if she had changed. She had. She had changed a lot. Her hair was an unkempt bird's nest full of tangles, stringy looking. Her eyes had dulled, the luster erased by the world that they now lived in. Her lips were pale, thin things that seemed to her to belong to an 80-year-old nun with no patience for bullshit.
What was she now? What were any of them? Katie lowered the revolver, putting her thumb on the hammer and easing it back down into the resting position. She thumbed the safety back into place. With her free hand, she rubbed at the spot where the barrel of the gun had pressed into her temple.
Maybe tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow she would be able to do it.
****
Blake sat in the darkness, his eyes closed. He willed himself to hear something, anything. But there was nothing. It was as if he were living underwater. Fear, something he had never really known had become the dominant aspect of his life.
During their escape from the Coliseum, Blake had stuck close to Mort, relying on his own eyes and Mort's ears to navigate their way through the city streets. For the first time in his life, he had known fear, true fear. Not just of dying, but of dying and becoming one of the undead. The last thing he wanted was to turn into one of those cursed souls, stumbling through the street, looking for his next meal in a never-ending cycle of rot and instinct. As they moved down the street, at a pace that was quicker than it was safe, his head had turned from side to side, his eyes never able to take in enough visually to assure him that one of the dead wasn't sneaking up on him. At any moment, he had expected a hand to grasp him and pull him down to the ground, biting and ending his life, only to rise reborn with whatever virus or disease was dwelling in the saliva of the living dead.
But it hadn't happened, and now he sat in the darkness, not in the rectangle of daylight drifting in from the open roof hatch, but near enough to it, just in case. Just in case the fear that consistently rumbled in the pit of his stomach were to erupt and take hold of him. He was near enough that he could run if the hands of the dead came reaching out of the darkness for him.
His days in the theater had been solitary moments. He absent-mindedly brushed his shirt pocket where a small notepad and pen rested comfortably. It was the only way others could communicate with him, not that anyone was talking all that much. A malaise had spread over the group, blanketing them like a bird in a cage. They sat, they ate, they did little else.
Blake wanted to talk to the others, but doing so would require him to use more of his paper, something which had become increasingly valuable to him since he had lost the ability to hear. Part of him wondered if he wouldn't have been better off dying in the explosion that had taken his hearing. Sitting in a dumpster, surrounded by the horde of the dead, he and Mort had done the only thing they could. They had tossed a couple of hand grenades outside. The ensuing explosion had left Blake dazed, concussed, and without one of his senses. At least it wasn't my sight. He wondered how many blind people were left in the world.
Mort had saved him and pulled him out of the dumpster. How Mort had managed to get him onto the rooftop, he still didn't know, but he had done it, and for that Blake would be eternally grateful. He looked around to see where Mort had gone off to, but he was nowhere to be seen.
He had come to rely on Mort, and despite the fact that he could no longer hear what the man said, he still felt a connection with him. If he had more paper, he would have no problem spending hours talking to Mort, using his notepad to see Mort's words, no matter how poorly he managed to mangle the spelling. It only made him like the man more.
Blake's heart jumped in his chest, and his right hand gripped the stock of his rifle as a shape began to coalesce at the edge of the darkness. But it was only Mort returning with a handful of colorful packages. Candy, the same thing he had been eating for the last couple of days. He felt his hand relax on the rifle, somewhat embarrassed by his jumpiness. But he had to be ready. He had to be. He had always been one to be ready, even before the dead had inexplicably given up the desire to lay do
wn and rot.
Blake had been a member of the National Guard, not because he felt any real desire to protect "freedom" as some people liked to claim, but because he had needed the training to be ready. For what, he hadn't known, but he was thankful now. When the call had come in to report for duty, Blake had simply hung up the phone, loaded his rifle, and waited. He watched the news, bearing witness to confusing reports of violence and looting. On his own street, he watched as people he had never seen before shambled up the lane, clawing after the cars that swerved around them. When he saw a man missing an arm, he knew he had made the right decision.
His first instinct upon seeing the armless man had been to get out and run, but as he had learned in his training, first instincts were usually the wrong instinct. First instincts were essentially panic in brainwave form, misfired neurons reacting like a pinball machine's bumpers when a negative stimulus was introduced. He was lucky. His training had prevented him from hopping in a vehicle and trying to escape the city.
As he had heard it from a soldier at the Coliseum, the highways had become parking lots where the dead roamed; they were now the world's biggest mausoleums. Had he followed his first instinct, he could be one of the dead, wandering among the forgotten Pontiacs, BMWs, and Priuses. It was the second instinct that Blake had grown to trust.
That first night, as the city began to fall under the spell of the dead, he had waited, venturing out into the street to do a little field study. His first shot at one of the dead had been a clear hit. The bullet had hit the creature, a neighbor that he had recognized from his frequent dog-walking forays, right in the chest. It staggered but continued forward. He swore, pulled the bolt back on his rifle, and aimed again. It was dark; the streetlights only lit certain pockets of the street and even though he was sure he had hit the man, it was always possible that he had missed. He waited until his neighbor was underneath one of the streetlights, and then he fired again. The second shot hit his neighbor in the chest with visible force, and the creature tottered in the street before regaining its balance and starting forward again. Still, it came at him, blood running down the man's shirt. When the man was a hundred feet away, despite a massive chest wound, Blake's second instinct kicked in. The head. It had to be the head. And if a bullet in the head didn't take the man down, then they were all fucked anyway, unless they could invent a bullet that would sever a human's legs and arms. He sighted, pulled the trigger, and smiled in the darkness of the street as the back of his neighbor's head exploded, creating a fine red mist under a streetlight. He crumpled to the ground, and Blake smiled like a wolf in the night.
