This Rotten World | Book 2 | Let It Burn

by Morris, Jacy

  ****

  Mort wiped the blood off of his hammer using the shirt of a dead body in the middle of the road. He had clonked more than a few of them dead things in the skull with his hammer, and many of them had gone down permanently. His gun was useless for him outside of a certain range, which was about ten feet. Even then, he had to stand still and concentrate to make sure he hit what he was aiming at. It would have to be the hammer for him.

  Sweat poured off of his brow. It wasn't hot out, but it was hot enough, and they were all breathing heavy. When they had broken through the crowd at the front of the theater and made it to the other side of the wall of the dead, he had wanted to jump with elation, but he was simply too tired. The arm holding the hammer hung down at his side. He was tempted to tuck the handle of the hammer into his jeans, but he wanted it ready, just in case something came up.

  Right now, visibility was excellent. As they stepped onto the first rail of the train tracks, they could see a good distance away. The trick would be moving during the day, and staying hidden at night. It was going to be a long trek, and his knee had not fully healed. It was still at fifty percent, and he found himself hobbling every now and then, as the pain in his knee began to increase. He didn't want to think about how bad it would be at the end of the night. Joan, the doctor, had said it was only a sprain, but it was about the worst sprain she had ever seen. It would get better though, and he was glad about that. He didn't want to be a one-legged man in a world where most of the things on two legs were out to eat him.

  Mort was glad to be on the move again. Truth was, he had never wanted to stop in the first place. It simply wasn't in his nature. He had always been a mover. Whenever he felt the urge to be gone, he had gone with it. But now, he couldn't survive on his own. He needed other people. So when Lou had brought up the idea of escaping from the movie theater, he had backed him. Maybe it was a selfish move, but Mort would rather die moving than rot away in some movie theater. Plus, with the death of that little girl and the big man, he was pretty sure the place was cursed. Mort wasn't the most educated person, and he knew that some of his thoughts and ideas bordered on the superstitious, but they had never led him wrong.

  The amount of dead in the city was a bad thing, a sign of some sort of change. Something in the world had gone wrong. He didn't know what, but he knew something was severely out of whack with the world. When he was little, his father, during one the more lucid moments of drunkenness had sat him down and told him about the dead, about how when people died, they didn't just leave the earth. They ranted against it. They railed against it. When something bad happened to you, that was just the dead taking their revenge on you. Right now, the dead were ready to take their revenge on the entire world. Even the ones that had been put down for a second time, like Zeke and that little girl, they were still around. He didn't want to be near their presence. It was always better to move on.

  For a while, as they walked, weaving through the dead, he wondered what had happened to his father. Had he died? Was he out there, making life miserable for someone. Or was he better now? Was he the person that he always should have been now that he could no longer drink? Then an uncomfortable thought skipped across Mort's mind. What if he had died long ago? What if Mort's constant need to move, and his uncanny knack for survival were his father's way of helping him in death, in a way that he never could have in life?

  It was a ridiculous notion, but he wanted to believe it. His father had been a mean son of a bitch, but there had never been any doubt in his mind, that in his own twisted way, his father loved him more than anything else. Yeah, he probably would have killed Mort at some point, but that didn't mean he didn't love him. The world was messed up that way, which is why he had always preferred to be on his own.

  The train tracks were silver and embedded in the black asphalt so that the rails were even with the pavement. They took a sharp turn to the north after they had gone three or four blocks. They turned with it. They jumped at every sound and conversation was nonexistent. Mort looked over his shoulder to find that the crowd of dead they had waded through was following behind them, their groans catching on the wind.

  Shit, he thought. That's going to be one hell of a crowd to escape from in the morning. The plan was to move as far as they could throughout the day, and then find someplace to hole up once the sun started going down, preferably a place with multiple exits. By the looks of the crowd they had gathered, they were going to need as many options as they could get.

  Mort stopped looking behind him, and as he turned his attention forward again, he caught Joan looking backwards as well. She was chewing her lip, obviously nervous, her eyes wide with fear. They shared a glance, and then Mort shrugged his shoulders as if to say, "What are you gonna do?" They kept walking.

  Chapter 5: Into a Building

  It was the ones trapped inside that bothered her the most. Being dead and still walking around seemed like a terrible fate. Being dead and trapped inside a building with locked doors somehow seemed even worse. She could see their faces in the lobbies of the buildings they passed. There wasn't a single building that didn't have one of them standing there, their faces pressed up against the glass, hands screeching down the smooth panes in an effort to escape and do what they needed to do... feed.

  Joan hoped that, if she ever did get turned into one of those things, it would at least be outside somewhere. She would rather be completely dead, but if she turned, then she would want to do so in the fresh air. She doubted it mattered. From what they had seen and heard, the dead seemed to retain no memories of their former lives. Clara had been first hand proof of that. When she had ushered Clara into the quarantine room with her boyfriend Courtney, there had been nothing, not the slightest glimmer of recognition. The only thing that Courtney had recognized was a meal. Her face flushed red at what she had done to Clara, using her like a guinea pig.

  The only good that had come out of the whole situation was this: she was sure that the dead were truly that. Despite her surety about the memories of the dead, on the off chance that some of them did retain their memories somewhere in the back of their heads, she decided that if she was ever bitten, it would be outside. Watching the dead stand behind the glass, slowly rotting away made for a pitiful sight. She could only imagine the frustration and sadness she would feel if even a sliver of consciousness remained.

  Dammit! she thought. You have to stop thinking of them as people. But that was harder than it was supposed to be. The only person who seemed to be able to operate at that level was Katie, and that was only because she was off the deep end.

  Joan had seen her face this morning, the dark circles, the unkempt hair. There was something seriously wrong with her. The death of Jane didn't help matters. Two weeks ago, if Katie had walked into the hospital, she would have sedated her and pumped her full of anti-depressants. But this was a different world. Depression would have to go untreated, and sedation was a death sentence when, at any moment, those things could find a way into your hiding place no matter how secure you thought it was.

  They walked down Holladay Street. It was the type of street in the city that everyone forgot about. There were a few office buildings on their right, a hotel, a church, but nothing of any interest. There were no stores. Even the dead seemed to have forgotten about it, with the exception of the horde that was dogging their footsteps.

  The road was a wide thoroughfare with enough room for cars to drive in both directions on the same route that the MAX travelled. Every couple of blocks, there were stops identified by neat rows of hedges and sturdy but not dominating lean-tos for waiting passengers. There were no passengers waiting that day, just a few stray cars, with crumpled and dented hoods and the doors sitting open.

  They were able to skirt around the dead on the wide open street, dodging them as if it were some sort of macabre game of tag. But this was the easy part of their trip. The MAX tracks would take them within blocks of the Coliseum, the place where they had all almost died a week b
efore. Joan was keeping her fingers crossed that the horde that had surrounded the Coliseum had broken up and spread out in an effort to find more food. But she was just theorizing. She had no idea. For all she knew, there could still be thousands of the damn things within sight of the Coliseum, waiting for something living to come along to begin anew their quest for flesh.

  They passed by a broken down Passat. The blood covering the hood of the car combined with the giant dent in the grill gave them all a good idea of what had happened. Blake walked over to the car and began searching through it. Mort stood with his rear against the car, protecting Blake's back should one of the dead pop up out of nowhere. They could do that. They had seen it all too much. One minute you think you're in the free and clear, and the next, there's a rotting corpse trying to gnaw your face off.

  The rest of the group moved on, but at a slower pace. Joan hung back, and Clara stuck with her. Standing and waiting for Blake to finish his search was not an enjoyable sensation. With every second she stood, the horde got closer. It was a good two blocks behind them now. But what was that really? Fifteen minutes? Ten minutes, if that?

  Joan looked down at the handgun she held. It was heavier than she had always imagined guns to feel. She felt like she was holding a living viper, one that could turn around and bite her any minute. She made sure the safety was on for the tenth time. She had been practicing with the thing for a week, trying to build the feel of turning the safety on and off into her muscle memory. Her hands were delicate things that she had always admired. She had small hands with dainty fingers. They were perfect for performing emergency surgeries, but for holding a gun, they were woefully small. The safety was on, so she let the gun fall to her side as Blake emerged from the car, a half a bottle of water in his hand. There was a look of disappointment on his face.

  Joan turned to find the horde had advanced quicker than she expected.

  "Let's jog," she said to Clara, and then they loped forward to catch up with the group. In the distance, she could see an overpass, with a hundred tiny shadows waving back and forth like a field of grass in the wind.

  "Do you see what I see?" Clara asked.

  Joan nodded her head, and resisted the urge to ask Clara if they were playing a morbid game of I Spy.

  To their right, the front window of a hotel lobby broke, and a stream of the dead poured out, led by the mangled corpse of the concierge, her brass nametag shining in the sunlight. Though the dead were some twenty feet away, it was still too close for her liking. She raised her gun and leveled it at the concierge. She attempted to pull the trigger, but it stubbornly stayed in place. "Shit," she muttered before she began fumbling the safety off.

  They moved backwards as the swarm of dead surged towards them. How many people had died in that hotel, she wondered, her feet sliding backwards across the pavement.

  From up the street, Lou yelled, "Forget them. We've got bigger problems."

  Joan turned and ran towards the rest of the group. Immediately, she could see what Lou was talking about. The dead on the overpass, excited by the action down the street, were cascading to the ground, a waterfall made of limbs and rot. Their options were limited The dead came at the them from ahead, behind, and to their right. To their left was an office building, the kind of nondescript place that no one would ever think to hide in. The building was modern. Hundreds of thick glass windows dotted the front of the structure.

  "There!" Lou yelled. They all followed, their eyes keeping tabs on the advancing dead as they ran to the front door of the building. The train from the hotel was closest, close enough that Blake felt compelled to put down the frontrunners. The gunfire echoed through the street, likely acting as a homing beacon for the dead.

  The doors were locked, and Joan barely had the time to read the words "Teller & Associates" emblazoned on the blue glass door before it burst apart, the glass shattering and cascading to the ground in a wash of noise. Gun smoke curled up from the barrel of Lou's machine gun, and they stepped inside, the glass crunching beneath their shoes.

  They hustled into the lobby, their boots and sneakers squeaking on the marble floors. To Joan it was as if they had travelled back in time. The lobby was pristine, the floors polished to a shine, the wooden reception desk gleaming with varnish. Sunlight filtered through the windows. The only clues that anyone would have that something wasn't right in the building was the extreme heat and the smell. An image of a rotten squirrel carcass popped into her mind, just a twist of bundled up gray fur, blood, and animal guts covered in crawling maggots. The smell was the same as that of the rotting squirrel she had discovered in her backyard all those years ago... only magnified by a power of ten.

  "We got dead in here." Lou said. "Watch your corners."

  "Keep your eyes peeled," Blake added, not having heard Lou's previous warning.

  They ran past the elevators, not even bothering to give them a try with the power out. As they approached the door to the stairwell, the smell became even stronger.

  "Wait!" Joan yelled, but it was too late. Lou threw open the door to the stairwell, and there they were, the cause of the smell. The smell intensified to the point that Joan's eyes began to water. It was almost the worst thing that she had ever smelled, but you tend to encounter a lot of nasty shit in the E.R. Still, the smell was easily in the top ten, and she had to fight her gag reflex.

  Clara and Rudy were not so lucky. They doubled over immediately, vomiting up partially digested candy bars and water, even as the first of the dead poured through the doorway to the stairwell. It was impossible to count how many there might be, and Joan brought her handgun up and began firing away, careful to make sure that no one living was between her and her targets. A quick glance over her shoulder showed her that they didn't have much time. The dead were pouring in through the broken doorway, catching on the frame and each other in their attempt to reach the survivors inside.

  "We have to kill these things or we're going to die," Clara yelled. They all knew it though. Nothing needed to be said. Death was bearing down on them, like an avalanche descending upon a climber halfway up a mountain. A convergence of three random collections of the dead. It was the new order of things. One minute you were safe, rooting through an abandoned car for supplies, and the next, the dead appeared out of nowhere, pursuing you relentlessly wherever you went. They had come six blocks, and already their plan had been shot to shit. Joan had no idea how they were ever going to make it out of the city.

  "We got your backs! Clear those things," Mort yelled, gripping his hammer in one hand and a handgun in the other.

  Joan would like to think that she was being helpful, but she missed more often than not. Her hands were jittery, and panic was welling up inside of her. She wanted to scream and bolt, dodging her way through the dead. Her breathing was hectic and intense, and she felt as if her vision had dialed in, her peripheral vision turning black and indistinct. She knew what was going on. She was panicking, and just like that she was back into being a first-year med student, looking down at her first emergency patient, a 13-year-old boy who had been crumpled up in a car accident thanks to some drunk driver. She did as she had done then, and pushed her emotions to the back of her mind. She was not holding a gun. She was holding a scalpel. She was not killing the dead. She was performing surgery.

  Just as she started finding her rhythm, her gun clicked empty. She stepped backwards and leaned against the wall, fumbling for the extra magazine she had in the pocket of her jeans. She watched as Lou fired into the mass at the stairwell. Chloe stood to his right, her own gun in her hands. Smoke stung her eyes as the smell of cordite filled the hallway. Amanda, Andy, and Rudy stood just behind the survivors with firearms, their weapons in their hands, boobing up and down like a prizefighter before the bell rings. A lot of good a night club, a sword, and a sharpened mop handle would do them, Joan thought. Katie fired away as well, her face a complete blank as she dropped the dead. She hadn't said two words since Little Jane had died. As Joan slid the magaz
ine into her handgun, she wondered if Katie truly felt anything or if she had just given up on feeling completely.

  She cocked her handgun, and, as she was about to fire another round, the flow of the dead from the stairwell ceased.

  "Come on!" Lou yelled.

  He hopped over the sprawled bodies on the ground, stepping on backs, arms, and torsos in order to climb the stairwell. The dead were nothing now. There was no more reverence in being dead. Corpses were no longer honored and treated with respect. Now they were treated like what they always were... just bags of meat waiting to return to the earth.

  Chloe, Amanda, and Rudy were the next ones through. Then Clara and Joan climbed into the stairwell, a utilitarian structure filled with pipes and electrical conduits. The cold gray stairs rose into the air, turned and then disappeared upward.

  Joan called over her shoulder to Mort and Blake, "Move your asses."

  Lou and Rudy began dragging bodies out of the doorway, but the corpses were too tangled to get the door shut. Joan cringed as they put their hands on the dead. Who knew what types of diseases they held in addition to the one that would turn a dead person into a mockery of a living one.

  Lou and Rudy moved aside as Mort and Blake squelched their way through the rotting mass on the floor.

  "Forget it, man," Blake said to Lou. "We'll just go up a flight and barricade the door up there."

  Lou and Rudy dropped the corpse they were dragging, just as the sliced and broken hand of one of the dead appeared on the door jamb.

  Then they were pelting up the stairs, the groans of the dead, echoing through the stairwell, propelling them onward. Rudy, holding his pants up with one hand, and his sword with the other one, narrowly missed slicing Chloe open with his sword as he turned a corner.