This Rotten World | Book 2 | Let It Burn

by Morris, Jacy

  This can't be happening. She leaned backwards and took a deep breath. It's just the stress is all. Too much stress, not enough eating. It was bound to happen sooner or later. People get sick all the time because of stress. But she knew it wasn't. She remembered the horrible first months when she had been pregnant with... what was his name? It didn't matter. He was dead.

  Katie rose from the toilet bowl and bent down to look at the cabinet underneath the sink. She saw a toilet brush, a few spare rolls of toilet paper (Those would come in handy.), and one of those abrasive bathroom cleaners that she had grown up applying to her parents toilet until she moved out with her husband. What was her husband's name again? She supposed that didn't matter either. He was dead too. What good was a dead man's name?

  She sat on the floor and looked at the cleaner in her hands. Inside would be coarse granules of blue powder. She could smell the harsh odor coming from the cardboard cylinder. Suddenly, she felt hungry. She could end it all, her own life and the life within her... if there was in fact a life within her. She could end it all now while the others were searching through the building, looking to make their last meal. That's how she always thought of scavenging and scrounging. They were all just looking to make their last meal.

  They probably wouldn't even miss her. They would just go about their day, and she would be another casualty in a holocaust that had no end in sight. They would probably forget about her in a matter of days, the way they had all forgotten about that father and his kids... and Zeke. She remembered his name. She remembered how he had made her feel.

  The canister tumbled from her hands, and she rushed over to the toilet to throw up some more. She remembered his name. She didn't want to, but it was there. Inside of her, she possibly carried all that was left of him. If she killed herself, it would die too. But would it stay dead? Or would she curse the damn thing to a life stuck in a womb, its barely formed appendages wiggling in a rotting prison for the rest of eternity? The thought was too repulsive, and Katie sat on the floor next to the vomit-filled toilet and cursed herself for being stupid and weak. She cursed Zeke for being so strong and charming, and gentle... she couldn't forget the gentleness.

  "Fuck you, Zeke." She didn't mean it. It was the type of swear that one threw out when they had given up trying to change anything. For Zeke she would carry the baby. But when it was out of her, and she was sure she could kill it and make sure it stayed dead, well, then it would be bye-bye world.

  Katie rose to her feet and pulled rolls of toilet paper from under the sink. She stuffed it in her bag and said, "No wonder I've been pissing so much."

  ****

  Clara sat on the roof of the building. From outside, the zoo's gift shop and administration building looked bland and uninteresting. Inside, it was more of the same, but she found that the roof appealed to her. The sun beat down on her as she reclined in the loose gravel that covered the roof to help keep it cool.

  It was a clear blue day. The temperature was somewhere in the high eighties, but it wasn't that uncomfortable. There was a wind blowing in from the east, and it only slightly smelled like burning buildings and charred humans. She could deal with it.

  She thought about the way of the world and wondered about its future. These were mere exercises in thought, as she knew perfectly well that the world was beginning a slow process of rot and decay. She imagined a future where humans huddled inside stone fortresses, raining down rocks and boulders on a never-ending horde of dead things. Would the human race survive long enough to dispose of all those that had come before?

  Clara wondered about the dead in the water, like that Chloe girl must have become by now. Would a shark eat them, or would they float endlessly in an ocean, perhaps washing up on some shore somewhere for humans to discover when the world had reset itself? How long could the dead stay animated?

  They looked bad. They smelled bad, but they didn't seem to actually be wasting away. Something was holding them together. Something was keeping them active. Perhaps whatever virus was coursing through their blood was shutting down all unnecessary systems and keeping the bodies just functional enough to allow them some sort of motility. Of course, the idea of a thinking virus or bacteria was frightening in and of itself. The dead's behavior spoke of instinct, not design. They wanted to eat, nothing more. Perhaps their brains had just rotted to the point of only knowing endless hunger.

  Clara rolled over on her stomach, her backpack underneath her head. It was so nice out. She could easily fall asleep if it weren't for the buzz and bang of the dead underneath her. She tried to block out the noise, but doing so just led to thoughts, thoughts led to feelings, and from there, it was anybody's guess what would happen next.

  She didn't want to guess what would happen next. She knew that her time, and perhaps the time of the others, was a limited commodity. She had some now; that's all that mattered. She didn't want to think too much about the future. She didn't want to think about the next time she had to step foot on the road and walk towards her own demise. She felt like it was out there somewhere, just waiting for her. It was hunched over around the corner of a building or around a bend in the road. It was hunched up and waiting. Here, Clara... come here, Clara. We've got something for you.

  No, all that was just bullshit. The sun. That's what she had now, the sun and time. Her solitude was interrupted by another presence. Clara lifted her head up enough to see Katie perched on the edge of some metal ductwork, sitting and looking into the distance. She didn't look so hot.

  "You alright?" Clara asked, despite the fact that she wanted nothing to do with the woman personally. The cold-blooded efficiency with which she had dispatched Brian and his kids was still a recurring part of her nightmares. Brian dying was bad. Brian biting his daughter was bad. Katie just killing them like they were nothing more than target practice... that was just inhuman. She knew it was what Katie was supposed to do, but still, a hesitation, some sort of remorse would have been nice. But Katie didn't have that gene. She did what she did and expected nothing from anyone else.

  "Yeah. I feel great," she said as she smiled up at the sun, her hand above her brow.

  Katie didn't look great. She looked scary ill. Whatever was wrong with her, Katie wasn't going to talk about it, so Clara just hoped that it wasn't contagious. Silently, she cursed the woman for interrupting her alone time. That's one thing that she definitely missed... just sitting alone without people wondering where you were, if you were ok, or if you were turning into some sort of monster out of their sight.

  She missed that solitude, the time to herself, sitting on her bed and just enjoying the silence without the need to make smalltalk or give a shit about what someone else had to say. Of course, Clara knew that she could head out right now and find a whole world full of solitude, but that's not what she wanted either. She didn't want to be alone; she just wanted a day or so to collect herself, sit back, relax, and put everything that had happened so far into perspective.

  Clara buried her head in her arms again, blocking out the brightness of the sun. She wondered how Rudy and Amanda were doing. Had Rudy awakened? Was he heading toward them right now? She didn't know how Rudy and Amanda would make it on their own, but stranger things had happened.

  Underneath the moans of the dead, she heard the receding sound of gravel crunching under boots. Katie must have found her bad company. Good, she thought. Clara thought the same of Katie. When they had rounded the corner in the city, Katie had been the first one to shoot. Of that she was sure. Those men might have been bad, or they might have been survivors just like Clara and the others, but Katie hadn't even given them a chance. For all she knew, she was still alive only because of Katie's actions, but a part of her thought those men had just been regular men, survivors like them. Clara still saw it clearly, Katie raising her gun and squeezing off rounds without even pausing. She supposed she would never know if the men were good or not, thanks to Katie.

  Tiring of the ground, Clara sat up and walked to the edge of th
e building. Heights were not her forte and looking down sent her head spinning a little bit. The walls went straight down to the ground. She was looking down at the side of the building, small rectangular openings showed her where the second floor ended. The dead were below her, their arms bashing into the wooden walls of the building. They were two-deep around the whole structure, and there were more inside. Clara scanned the faces to see if there was anyone she knew.

  She had known a lot of people, but she only knew what had happened to one of the people she knew pre-clusterfuck. That's how she liked to think of the time before the dead had started to rise and bite the faces off of everyone. She had been there to see her boyfriend get chowed down on by one of the dead. Was he still in the hospital, lashed to his bed, grunting and straining, or had he broken free by now? Perhaps he had strained so much that he had finally ripped his hands completely off. It was a comforting thought to imagine Courtney wandering the hospital hallways with no hands. Maybe he would make it outside, and enjoy some of the glorious sun.

  She shook her head a bit, in the same way that she had when she was younger and fantasizing about her latest crush, some boy that older her would be embarrassed to admit that she had ever found attractive. But that's the way teenage crushes were... dumb, misinformed, completely, agonizingly embarrassing. Of course, Courtney wasn't doing that. He wasn't under the sun sharing the same experience that she was having. He was lying on a medical bed in the dark, his arms and ankles bound to a bed. He was dead. He was rotting. She would never see him again.

  Clara bent over and grabbed a handful of gravel and tossed it as hard as she could at the dead people below. The dead just looked upwards, somewhat annoyed by pieces of rock bouncing off the top of their heads. They groaned and scratched at the wall, hoping to defy gravity and physics and reach Clara. She felt guilty.

  These were someone else's "Courtneys," and here she was throwing rocks at them like an impetuous five-year-old. These were the fathers, mothers, lovers, and children of someone out there. Why wouldn't they just lie down and die?

  Clara turned her back on the dead. Her happiness and thoughtfulness had disappeared so quick that it was almost as if it had never been there to begin with. It was all a big delusion. Every time she thought she could get clear of reality and get to a cleaner, brighter place, this world dragged her back in. There was no escaping this rotten world.

  ****

  Lou climbed up through the hole that had been chopped into the ceiling of the building that they were in. The dead woman on the floor must have been responsible for that one. A red fire axe still sat in the corner of the security room, along with bits of plaster, gravel and scraps of wood.

  The woman's rifle lay on the keyboard of the security console, tossed there as an afterthought. Lou had looked everywhere for ammunition for the damned thing, but there was nothing. It was doomed to be just another rusting, rotting piece of metal in an abandoned room that might never be seen by human eyes again. He stepped backwards as a pair of sneakers dropped down, blotting out the rays of sunshine.

  It was Clara, her face like a January storm. "How is it up there?" he asked.

  "Rotten," she said. "Help me down. My ankle is still sore."

  Lou reached up and grabbed Clara by the waist, and then lowered her to the ground. Lou knew to leave well enough alone. If there was one thing that he was good at, it was reading people. A life around junkies and dishonest dealers had given him that much at least. He could read people the way others could read books. Clara was alright. She might have her down moments, but she spent more time up than down. Katie was the one he worried about. She could put them all in jeopardy at some point, one crossed wire, one wrong word, and then she could snap or do something that couldn't be changed. Lou smiled at the word "jeopardy." Who ever thought he would be using that word about his own life. Until this summer, the word had meant nothing to him. It had just been the name of a game show. But now it was a condition, a condition that he and the others were struggling to escape from.

  He let Clara slink away without saying another word, and then he climbed up on the roof of the building. What a way to see the zoo, he thought. It had been here his whole life, just sitting up in the hills that he had never seemed to notice. His whole life had been down in the valley. It had been made of concrete, steel bridges, and rivers that seemed to keep you confined to your own particular part of town. He could have walked to the zoo in a day... and yet he had never had the desire or the chance. Hell, he had never even had the thought.

  That life, that zoo-going life, that was for them. Remember the them? What a laughable concept that was now. Here he was, a dead end, someone that in the eyes of "them" would never amount to nothing. But he was alive, and most of "them" weren't. On top of that, he was leading his group. No one had ever even bothered to listen to what he had to say before the world ended. He supposed that's why it was so important for him to do this right. For the first time in his life, he was respected. He mattered. He should never have let other people decide that for him, but that's just the way the world worked.

  Now he was in control, of his fate and the fate of the others. He didn't want to let any of them down. Underneath the bright, yellow sun, he walked to the edge of the building, laying down and surveying all of the options. In the distance, he could see the squat, square structure that sat over the train station. Beyond that, the ground sloped downwards to the highway. That was a kill zone. That was a place that none of them would come back from. The line of the dead stumbling up that hill wasn't as bad as some of the things they had seen in the city, but it was steady enough to let him know that the highway here was the same as in Portland, a graveyard filled with the dead.

  The noise of the dead banging on the walls was drawing them there, slowly but surely. If they waited too much longer, they would most definitely be trapped. It might already be too late, but he didn't want to think about that. Giving up was the last thing on his mind. He had never done it before, though the world kept trying to get him to lay down. He saw no reason to give up.

  He scanned to the right, looking at the lush forest that led down to the parking lot. A hill rose almost straight up. It was the type of hill that could be climbed, but you would have to basically crawl face first at a 70-degree angle to scale it. The hill was covered with a deep blanket of ivy, underneath sparse pine trees, their trunks bent upwards as if they had sprung straight from the hill itself. He looked up at the top of the hill, trying to see through the tree-tops. He had no idea what was at the top, but it presented a better option than crawling around in the MAX tunnels or heading down to the highway to end up as a roadside snack.

  The hill it was. They would have to leave most of their equipment behind. Oh well, if it had to be done, it had to be done.

  He was just about to go tell the others what he had decided when he thought, Dammit! What about Blake? He laid his head on his arms, switching cheeks when he felt the pain from the stitches in his face. Blake... there's no way he could climb up that hill with his hand the way it was. Even if he could, it would wind up so infected that he might still lose the hand.

  The tunnel or the highway? That was all that was left to them... well, that and the third option. But he didn't like the third option. That was for other people, not Lou. He wouldn't ever go out like that. But maybe some of the others wanted to. What am I thinking? The truth. It was just the truth. There was no reason to hide it, not from himself. They all knew the truth out here. It was there clawing you in the face, saying, "Hey. You're just one broken ankle away from dying." He had to consider all options. While it was his least favorite of the bunch, suicide was indeed an option. But bringing it up to the others... that was unrealistic. That wasn't something that he would ever suggest. If the others went there on their own, then they would discuss it. Until then, it was all life all the time.

  In keeping with his theme of life first, Lou decided that they would have to make their way into the tunnels again. Blake couldn't climb. Ka
tie's hand was all messed up too. All they really had were working feet, and that meant crawling through the tunnels some more. He didn't like the idea of running through the darkness again, but it was only a short distance until the tracks surfaced again in the city of Beaverton. At least there, they could see and escape anything that came their way.

  He never even considered the highway. He had overheard horror stories at the Memorial Coliseum of people who had escaped the highways. They were gridlocked death traps, swarming with the dead. Lou had seen it all before while running. He had seen waves of the dead tumble off the sides of freeway overpasses, dropping to the ground only to get up, twisted and broken, and chase Lou and the others.

  He doubted the highways in Beaverton would be much different. According to Joan, who knew the West Side best, they probably still had five or six miles to go before the traffic would have eased up... and then it would be there before them... the open road, a way to freedom. That's all he wanted. He wanted to sit down at the shore, miles of visibility all around him, and just start a fire in the sand, like he'd seen people do on commercials and TV shows.

  For all of the time he had been alive, he had never once made it down to the shore. If the zoo had been Mars, then the beach was like Pluto, so far away and so alien that it was ridiculous to even think about it. His dad certainly wasn't going to take the time out of his busy drug-dealing schedule to take him to the beach. He had asked him about the ocean one time when he was young. His father had just laughed and said, "They don't want no black folk at the beach."

  Lou shook his head. That was all over. Soon, he would be sitting on the beach, eating stuff out of cans, and inhaling the cleansing smell of wood smoke while planning what to do next. They would all be there, every single one of them. Lou scooted backwards and then stood up. He was ready to tell the others his plan. He knew it would take some explaining, but they would have to go along with it. He could smell the wood smoke already.