This Rotten World | Book 2 | Let It Burn

by Morris, Jacy

  "We've got a problem..." she began to say, but then the window fell completely out of the train and slammed to the ground. The cracking sound continued as another window fell out. The beams of their flashlights wandered across the train. Bodies began to spill clumsily out of the train and onto the concrete platform of the station. Ahead of them, the dead began to get to their feet.

  "They don't make 'em like they used to," Blake said.

  Seeing that they were trapped with the dead in front of them, and who knew how many trailing behind them, they only had one option. "This way," Katie yelled as she ran towards the stairs that led up to the surface.

  Clara stepped over severed arms and legs, the ends rough and shredded as if a wild animal had torn them apart. She spotted a head in the corner blinking at her. As she emerged into daylight, she put her hand up to her eyes to shield herself from the bright sun. Clara caught sight of the lion disappearing into the woods. Behind her she heard a strange noise, it was indescribable, but it spoke of warning. She turned to see an ape of some sort perching on top of the building that housed the MAX station. Its face featured distinctive blue and red markings, and it had the look of something that didn't much care for her presence.

  She stepped out into the road that led past the MAX station and into the zoo. The streets were strewn with pieces of bodies, and as the others emerged from the underground stairwell, a great trumpeting sounded from the forest. "What the hell is going on?" Clara said aloud.

  ****

  It had been a week since Lila had discovered that the world was falling apart. She sat on the roof of the gift shop, enjoying the warmth of the day. She held the rifle in her hands. Her work here was done. Her heart was broken. The amount of animals that had died under her watch was devastating. She thought of the snakes she had let die, simply because this was not their environment. Unleashing poisonous snakes into the wild would be as irresponsible an act as any one person could manage, an act of ecological terrorism.

  But the other big animals... they were loose now. She had devised the plan of release on the third day, after killing the infected man. She had first-released the non-predatory animals in the hopes that they would leave their homes and journey somewhere far away from the remaining predators in the zoo. A few marsupials, some vegetation eating apes, and more had been released into the environment.

  She hoped they didn't wind up as food for the dead that seemed to roam the land. The plumes of smoke from the city had become more and more pronounced, until a haze seemed to hang over the entire zoo.

  Opening the enclosures had been the easy part. Chasing the denizens out had been a little more dangerous, but she had managed the job. The aviary had been the most difficult part. The aviary was a bright, round building with glass windows all around. Even the roof was composed of glass windows. She had tried throwing things at the windows to break the glass, but it was a little more durable than that. After an hour of searching the maintenance shacks, she had finally found a ladder that was tall enough to get her halfway up the side of the aviary. Working inside, she had climbed up the ladder with a hammer, and systematically busted out all of the windows. The whole process had taken five hours, and by the time she was done, her arm was dead tired. Each pane of glass had taken a minimum of five hits from the hammer that she had found in the maintenance shacks.

  When she was done, the birds sat in the trees waiting, as if she were going to feed them. At that point she had run around the aviary, her arms in the air making screeching noises to drive the birds off. Many of them left, but not all of them. She supposed that would have to be good enough. Sooner or later those birds would get hungry and then they too would leave, their survival instincts sending them on to greener pastures.

  From there, she had cut down the netting of the outdoor aviary for birds that were native to the Northwest. Even with the netting down, many of the birds were loathe to leave their nests, but she saw a few take flight, and her heart was warmed as she took the time to watch them fly through the air.

  On the third day, she had finished freeing all of the gentler animals. She sat in the security room eating a snack of junk food that she had cobbled together from gift shop treats and some hot dogs that were still sitting in a freezer in one of the concessions booths. As she ate, she planned how to go about releasing the larger animals, the lions, the tigers, the bears... and then she saw something in one of the monitors. It was Sy, carrying a rifle and a thermos of coffee under his arm.

  The old man walked up the road as calmly as if it were a typical day and he was merely heading to work. Only there was no work anymore. Now there was only freedom, and the chance to let the animals live. She didn't want Sy there. She didn't trust him. Oh, he seemed like a nice enough old man, but what if he had the disease? She still knew next to nothing about the man, and she had experienced no more human contact since the first diseased human had attacked her. Sy could be one of them. Sy couldn't be trusted. She decided to greet him at the gate and tell him to go home. Perhaps he would just turn around. That would be the best case scenario. The worst case scenario would be that he shot her, and the animals died, but she decided to go through with the plan anyway.

  She walked through the gift shop and out into the entrance area of the zoo. The gates were locked, the metal turnstiles frozen in place. Sy stood on the other side, his free hand wrapped around one of the gray metal bars of a turnstile. She felt as if she were looking at a man in prison. He wondered if Sy felt the same way looking at her.

  "There you are," he said, smiling underneath his battered Oregon Zoo hat.

  Lila said nothing. She just looked at the man wondering what he wanted. Sy was an older gentleman, 60, but wiry, still strong. His rifle was pointed at the ground.

  He must have seen her regarding it. Sy looked at it self-consciously and said almost sheepishly, "You can't be too careful these days, not with those things out there."

  "What things?" Lila asked.

  Confusion crept across Sy's face, and he looked obviously shocked. "You mean you don't know?"

  "Know what?"

  "The dead are out there. The dead are walking through the streets."

  Lila couldn't believe the words coming out of his mouth. The dead. How preposterous. But the way he had said it, there had been no doubt in his voice. He hadn't seemed like he was trying to pull a fast one on her. He honestly believed what he was saying. "That's impossible," she said.

  "No, it's not. I'm lucky to even be here right now. I lost everything," he said. He looked as if he were remembering something horrible, and then he re-focused on her. "What about you? How have things been up here?"

  She didn't know why she did it, but she spilled the entire story to him, about the man that had attacked her, about her releasing of the animals, and her fears that the cops were going to come and take her away before she could finish her work.

  "I don't think anyone's coming, Lila. Unless it's one of the dead." He looked at her from the other side of the turnstile and said, "You want me to help you? I don't really have anything else to do. Those things got into my house, and when I escaped, my neighborhood was crawling with them. I really don't have anywhere else to go."

  She pulled her keys from her pocket and unlocked the turnstile. The fact was that she could use the help. If he was willing to help her, she was willing to let him in. Besides, he was an old man, as kind as any you'd ever come across. He stepped inside, and Lila locked the gate behind him.

  Once inside, Sy took a deep breath of air, and then exhaled as if he had never breathed in such clean air before. "This is the first time I haven't been scared for my life in days."

  Lila said nothing.

  "What do we do first?" he asked her.

  "We need to knock down one of the walls around this place so that the animals have some place to escape to."

  "Sounds simple enough."

  ****

  Lila and Sy stood looking at the concrete wall that surrounded the zoo. It was thick, seamles
s, and completely impenetrable. With shovels and hammers, it would take a lifetime just to make an opening through the damn thing.

  Sy pulled his battered gray hat from his head and wiped his sweaty brow with his forearm. "I hate to say it, but the only way to make a hole big enough in this zoo for these animals to escape is by tearing down the front gate."

  "But that leaves us completely exposed," Lila said.

  "Exposed to what?" Sy asked.

  "Exposed to anyone, anything."

  With his hat in his hand, Sy scratched at his head. "You're not planning on staying here forever are you?"

  Lila looked at Sy, his wrinkled face screwed up in her direction. "Why not?"

  "I mean, once those animals are gone, what purpose is there to staying here? You don't have any weapons, and from what I heard before the news went out, things aren't going too well in Portland. There must be thousands of those thing in Portland, and you're sitting right on the edge of it."

  Sy raised some doubts in her plan, but she wanted to be near if any of the animals came home. She knew how ridiculous that would sound to Sy, so she just asked, "Do you know of a safer place?"

  Sy looked at her, sadness on his face, "I don't know of any place that's safe. This thing is happening all over the world." He looked off into the distance. "It's as if the earth itself was turning against us."

  In the end, she decided that the front gates were the only way to ensure that the creatures they released would actually be able to escape. The zoo was a large property, but with all of the animals competing for food in the same general space, sooner or later they would have to leave and learn to survive out in the wild.

  The day after Sy arrived, they found a nice Zoo shuttle and decided to drive it through the front gates. Sy had volunteered to drive the thing through rather than risk Lila in the collision. They had argued about it back and forth before Sy finally said, "You're young. My time's almost up. If something happens to you when you try and bust down that gate, it would be a waste of your life, and mine would mean nothing."

  He truly meant it. Lila couldn't believe that he could care so much for her, though they barely even knew each other. She watched as Sy revved the engine. The tires squealed as he accelerated, and within a few seconds, he was crashing into the middle of the zoo's front gates. The noise was horrendous, the crunch of metal, the squealing of tires as the van lost control, the screech of bending metal as the gates were torn from their moorings, and then the scrape of metal on asphalt as a piece of the metal turnstiles caught the undercarriage of the van and tipped it over onto the driver's side. It slid to a stop, and Lila ran to the van.

  She stood in front of the vehicle, unable to see inside due to the deployed airbag. White powder from the air bag's deployment still hung in the air. She kicked at the windshield of the van with her steel-toed boots. The glass shattered under the force, but clung together, until she kicked some more. Not fearing getting cut, she reached in through the hole she made and pushed the glass away, cutting her hands in the process. She climbed in, swimming through the remains of the air bag to find Sy lying on his side. His eyes were closed and Lila pulled on his body, trying to get him out of the van in case it burst into flames or something. He moved a few inches, and then he didn't budge. She found the latch to his seatbelt, and undid it before trying again. This time, she managed to pull him further out of the vehicle, but then something stopped her once again. Sy awoke, screaming in pain.

  The shock of Sy's voice caused her to drop his hand. He was clearly in pain. His nose was bloody from where the airbag had hit him in the face, but she didn't see anything else wrong with him. "What's wrong, Sy?"

  "My damn arm is trapped," he said. "I can't even feel the damn thing." Lila crawled inside the van to see what was wrong. She spotted the problem immediately. Below the elbow, his arm disappeared underneath the metal of the van. His arm was trapped, twisted and broken. As the realization of what had happened to Sy's arm dawned on her, she began to feel faint.

  "You gotta get me out of here, Lila," Sy pleaded, genuine fear on his face.

  "I don't think I can. Your arm is trapped underneath the van."

  Sy's face filled with panic at the news. "You gotta get me out of here!" he yelled. "Those things. They'll be coming. That type of noise will draw them, sure as Sunday. You gotta get me out of here!"

  Down the street, from the direction of the highway, she could see distant shapes moving in their direction. They were human, but if Sy were to be believed, they were most likely dead humans.

  Sy must have seen the look on her face because he said, "Oh, God. What is it? It's them ain't it? Get me outta here!"

  Lila looked down at Sy, and she had no clue what to do. He was trapped underneath a van that she had no chance of moving on her own, and the dead were making their slow way towards them. There was nothing she could do.

  "Lila. Listen to me. We need a knife, something, anything to get me out of here."

  "You want me to cut your arm off?" she asked.

  "I'd rather have one arm than be one of those things. C'mon, hurry, Lila. Find something."

  Lila avoided thinking about what she would do as she ran back into the zoo. Her sole focus was to find something sharp to cut through the remains of Sy's arm. But what about the bleeding? She would worry about that when she finally got him free. She burst into the gift shop, her eyes looking for anything that she could use to free Sy. There was nothing. The shelves were lined with stuffed animals, toys, junk food, and things that most people would put in a Goodwill box after their kids forgot about them a month later.

  Adrenaline ran through her body, and her brain was racing fast. There was nothing here. Nothing. Sy was trapped in the van, and she couldn't think of anything to free him. Then she remembered the maintenance sheds... there could be something in there. She ran to them, feeling every single second tick by.

  She threw open the doors to the shed and sunlight spilled into the darkness. She flipped the switch. Nothing. When had the power gone out? She stepped inside, her boots, scrubbed and washed until the blood on them had been nothing but a memory, clopped on the smooth concrete floor. A rack of garden implements sat in the shelf. A weedwhacker, something that looked like an electric carving knife, a lawnmower, none of these things would help. Then she spotted them, hanging on the wall across the way. Pruning shears. Her stomach turned at the thought of using them, but she really had no choice. She grabbed them off the wall and ran back to the entrance to the zoo.

  The dead were closer. She could hear Sy grunting in the van, screaming in pain as he tried to pull his arm free. She was reminded of the story of the rock climber that had cut off his own arm with a pocketknife when it became trapped under a boulder. If he could cut his own arm off with a pocketknife, she ought to be able to sever someone else's with garden shears.

  She ran to the van, ignoring the slow procession of the dead as they made their way up the hill from the freeway on-ramp. How long had the dead been there? Had they been sitting down there this whole time, just a few hundred yards away, waiting patiently on the freeway? She knelt down and crawled headfirst into the van, the shears held out before her.

  "Oh, God," Sy moaned.

  "It's the only thing I could find. Lean to your right. This is going to hurt like a son of a bitch." She undid the clasp and the shears snapped open. She maneuvered the blades around the trapped and twisted skin of Sy's arm, then she closed her eyes and snapped the shears shut as hard as she could. Closing her eyes didn't help. She could still feel the resistance of Sy's skin and then the even tougher resistance of the bones conducted up the 8-inch blades of the garden shears and into her hands.

  Sy cried out in pain. Lila felt warm blood splash her hand. When she opened her eyes, Sy was squirming in his seat, but he was still stuck by a small flap of skin that she had missed with the shears. She watched in horror as he pulled with his body, the skin stretched, blood sprayed the interior of the van, and then that final flap of skin broke f
ree. She thought she was going to throw up.

  Quickly she backed out of the van. Re-swallowing her lunch of potato chips and strange animal-shaped lollipops, she turned back around and helped drag Sy out of the car. He was bleeding badly and looked as if he was going to pass out at any moment. She propped him up against the side of the van.

  The first of the dead was only ten feet away. She could see that the person was most definitely dead. The left half of the woman's face looked like it had been clawed off at some point, and large patches of her scalp were gone. She groaned as she got closer, and bloody saliva dripped from her mouth.

  She fumbled with Sy's belt as his body sagged against the van. She managed to undo the clasp, avoiding the awkward feeling that swept through her at undoing an old man's belt. In one smooth motion she pulled the belt free. She wrapped it quickly around Sy's arm, pulling it as tight as she could. She handed the loose end to Sy and told him to pull it tight.

  Lila bent down and ducked under Sy's arm. She half-carried, half-dragged Sy down the street. He moaned in pain, and Lila suspected that he was quickly going into shock. His footsteps became less steady, and soon she was full-on carrying him towards the entrance of the zoo, through the wreckage of the front gate.

  She wasn't moving quick enough. When she looked over her shoulder, the woman with the bloody mouth had gained significant ground on her. A clank to her left drew her attention, and she saw that Sy had finally passed out, letting loose his grip on the belt. It had fallen to the ground, the buckle scraping against the ground. Blood drenched his side as red poured from the stump of his arm.

  Lila set Sy on the ground and ran to find his rifle. He had perched it up against the wall of the gift shop before hopping in the van to destroy the front of the zoo, a move that might very well cost him his life. She picked up the rifle and pointed it in the direction of the dead woman, if that's what she truly was. She pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. The trigger wouldn't pull.