The Oasis of Filth - Part One

by Keith Soares

  From these infrequent visits, a seed was planted. Rosa began to firmly believe that The Oasis, in some fashion, was real and existed in the western part of South Carolina, along the border with Georgia. Multiple hints and rumors talked about a vast emptiness outside the eastern walls of Atlanta, and a similar emptiness west of Columbia, South Carolina. In that sprawling expanse where someone should have been straggling, surviving, scraping by, the government wasn’t seeing anyone. The occasional zombie, yes, but never any people. If our estimates were anywhere near correct — and I’m sure the government had much better numbers — there were still those 100 million people who should be around. But no one was ever sighted in that region. The area Rosa focused on had big lakes, some parkland, and plentiful forests. And it was just north of Augusta, a city that had been walled for about three-and-a-half years before falling apart. The government would admit to nothing, but the prevailing rumor was that Augusta fell because of some internal rebellion.

  In Rosa’s mind, the countryside was perfect, the rebellion in Augusta spoke of a starting point and possible resources for a new community, and the empty swathes told her something was different there. In only a few weeks, she became sure that The Oasis was real, and sat about 500 miles south of us down Interstate 95. Her growing certainty had two simultaneous effects on me: It was intoxicating, making me want to believe, and it terrified me. Had this person I’d come to care about so much lost touch with reality and pinned her hopes on a phantom?

  As a man of science, I tried to offer alternate, more rational theories. It was possible that some other disease could have ravaged the area. Or there was radiation or some other contaminant that made it unfit for human habitation. Or maybe the reports were just wrong. Rosa would listen to my counterpoints, but she was headstrong. She’d parry every argument. Why wouldn’t any of those other reasons bubble up from her information channels, she wondered, especially with a government that wanted to be in total control and typically left nothing to mystery? Shouldn’t she have heard something?

  There was more to be concerned about. Neighbors and coworkers slowly began to realize that she was plying them for any information. She would laugh it off and say she was just talking nonsense to pass the time, but when it happened repeatedly it was harder not to notice. At least one of the government messengers paused, gave her a long look, and then left her building without saying anything. Was her obsession putting her — perhaps even both of us — in jeopardy? It made me hesitate.

  As I said, we spent most nights together, but not all. So it was not that unusual if I declined her invitation. I found myself turning her down sometimes for no good reason, although now I’m ashamed to admit that. I think her fascination with a fantasy made my older bones and older mind tired sometimes. And that’s why on May 23rd, a date I’ll always remember, I wasn’t there when they took her.

  6

  You know how you could tell the government cars on the street from anyone else? Because only the government had cars anymore.

  It was a picturesque spring evening, the weather cool but not cold, the bright sun beginning to set, making for long shadows and brilliantly illuminated west-facing walls. I was walking home, and a sense of guilt forced me to pass Rosa’s street and pause to look in the direction of her apartment. I spotted a black vehicle just as its doors closed and engine revved, and watched it race northward. Immediately I knew what had happened. I ran to her apartment building as fast as I could and scaled the stairs more quickly than a person my age should. My heart, already pounding, stuttered when I found her front door open, no one inside. I ran to the window and craned my head to see where the car was going. But I knew. Everyone knew where they took you. Just as everyone knew you never came back.

  Bolling Air Force Base, on the banks of the Potomac River. It was in Southeast, just over the bridge. They’d go north, turn east on Pennsylvania Avenue, cross the river, and then go south. I didn’t hesitate.

  Tucked behind her building, Rosa had a bike; it was an old, black, metal contraption. Since no one had cars, bikes with baskets were the preferred alternative when getting supplies. She liked to ride hers to work most days. With no sense in my head, I grabbed it, jumped on, and headed after them. Neighbors ran into the street to gape at me, the lunatic. I’m certain they believed they were seeing me for the last time. Rosa, too. So be it, I thought.

  I could never catch up to the car, but knowing they were heading to Bolling was all that mattered. I kept going. I turned east onto Pennsylvania, pedaled as fast as my old ass could. The car was barely visible ahead.

  Minutes later the black government sedan swerved left, then right. It went off the road just before the bridge and slammed into an abandoned fast-food joint. I wasn’t close enough to see much detail. There were people spilling out. One ran for the river. My God, was that her?

  It was. Rosa ran toward the river as shots were fired. One clipped a tree near her head, and my heart leapt into my throat. I stopped the bike. One of the men from the car ran after her, while another spoke into a handheld radio, probably calling for a slew of backup that would soon clog every road and pathway in the area.

  But no one knew I was doing anything wrong. Sure, the local civilians gathering around the accident looked at me in that awful way reserved for strangers, but I could just ride home and be done. Go back to my life.

  The hell with that. At that point, at that age, Rosa was my life. I would go with her or die trying. I turned the bike down a side street and raced for the river. In two blocks, I spied the government agent who was chasing her. I took the risk and biked up to him.

  “You looking for a dark-haired woman?” I panted. “I think I saw her running up 11th.”

  He looked at me with a sneer of disgust and suspicion. “Why are you helping me?” he asked.

  “Hey, I scratch your back, maybe you’ll scratch mine,” I said.

  “You people, always the same,” he said. He considered it for a second, then asked, “Where on 11th?” I mentioned a spot a block north. Enough to get him out of the way. The sun dropped behind the horizon as he thought about it.

  “You realize what happens to you if you’re lying to me.” It wasn’t a question. I nodded. He pulled out a device and pointed it at me, presumably taking my photograph. Then he walked off toward 11th Street.

  I waited for him to get out of view, then jumped back on the bike. I figured I could outrun Rosa if she was just following the river south. I was right. I had to jockey the highway, but I caught up to her on Water Street, just off Maine. She was walking as nonchalantly as she could manage, only occasionally looking over her shoulder. I stopped the bike and she saw me.

  “Go home. Please,” she said, walking even faster.

  “You know I’m not going to do that,” I said.

  “Don’t waste the rest of your life on me!”

  “The way I see it, you were pretty much the only enjoyable thing in my life this past year, so if you don’t mind, I’m just going to stick with you. Where are we going?”

  She stopped and looked at me. A combination of incredulousness, relief, love, fear. “I have no idea,” she said.

  “Okay, then I do. Come on.”

  7

  We headed for the waterfront near the old, abandoned monuments. I had an idea that, while even dumber than racing after Rosa on the bike, might just work. We passed all of the boats docked on the Anacostia River, because while they would do the job, they were big, excessive solutions. But more than that, I had no idea how to start any of them. It was a long walk, but eventually we arrived near the Jefferson Memorial, neglected and forsaken by a country that had turned its back on its highest ideals.

  I stared up at the rounded marble hulk, thinking about how far we had come from the days of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, founding father of a great country, now a sad, besieged city-state terrified of zombies and mold and its own citizens. If it weren’t all so terribly true, it would have been funny. I
remembered walking under the dome, many years before the outbreak, and I recalled the words inscribed there: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” If true, Jefferson, a founder of our government, would now be that same government’s sworn enemy.

  I made my way around the Tidal Basin to a tiny dock that once offered boats for tourists — small craft, easy to control, from what I remembered. The tourists were long gone, but a few of the boats still bobbed on the sick, oily water. I stared. Paddleboats. Really? Was this another cruel twist of fate? Couldn’t we just escape in a canoe, or something a little more… respectable? No, we found only abandoned paddleboats. I was wondering if my so-called plan was turning out to be a joke after all. But we chose one, quite at random, and got aboard. Thankfully, despite 10 years of being ignored, its pitted fiberglass hull stayed afloat, and we started to pedal. But it was dirty. It terrified us to touch the thing. There were layers of filth, beyond anything we’d seen in years. I had visions of contracting the disease simply from touching the boat. But we went onward.

  My God, the boat was loud! How would we escape the city without being detected? Water slapped with every movement of the pedals. Our hearts sank. We may as well have shouted, “We’re escaping!” every 30 seconds to add to the sonic overload.

  As it turned out, no one cared. DC had become a walled city to keep zombies out, but it seemed to bother very little with keeping anyone in. I suppose when you could avoid having one or two extra mouths to feed, you were fine with people disappearing. What a model of efficiency. Our government had created a society so organized that it knew that losing a citizen could actually make caring for everyone else easier. How shrewd! But we had yet to realize all of this, so we tried to paddle quietly, slowly, over to Northern Virginia. It must have made a comical scene, the most ridiculous escape in history, although I suppose no one ever saw it. Or if they did, they didn’t care.

  We reached Arlington in full dark. The only lights were behind us, in DC, since Arlington, Alexandria, and the other surrounding cities had largely been abandoned in the pullback. Stepping off the boat, onto land, with Arlington National Cemetery spreading up the hill to our right, overgrown but still recognizable, we felt like astronauts taking their first steps on another world. I’d been here before, many times. But 10 years of changes... well, it was a lot to take in.

  We took one look back at DC.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “Good question.” I scratched my head. “Jesus, there could be zombies anywhere. We can’t just sit here all night.” So we moved.

  I remembered — and, like I said before, it’s funny what you remember — that Interstate 395 was right there, just to our left. In the daylight, we could follow that to 95, our path south. But for now, shelter was the only concern. Too nervous and bewildered to go far, we walked straight ahead, to a marina in front of the Pentagon. It was dark and seemingly inactive, but filled us with an unbearable fear of the unknown. We found a boat that was still afloat and thankfully wasn’t overrun with untold grime, and we climbed aboard. In minutes we were both asleep, lying above deck, close together in the cool evening air of spring.

  * * *

  Hours later, with the moon gone and darkness all around, with DC’s light shimmering so near and impossibly far away, we awoke to a sound. It was a scraping, a scritch-scratching on the dock. It could have been a raccoon — it should have been a raccoon. But I felt it in my bones before I even saw anything. It was a zombie.

  We propped ourselves up quietly. It hadn’t noticed us yet. I got the feeling that scanning the dock might be part of its nightly routine, but who knew. I’d never sat so close to one of these creatures and just... studied it.

  If it hadn’t been for its rather feral motions, it would have been hard to declare it anything other than a human being. It — she — was female. Maybe mid-40s, Caucasian. But she could have been in her 20s. Age was hard to tell. She looked ragged. Her clothes were too filthy to clearly recognize, but looked like a button-up shirt, possibly flannel, and jeans, torn and covered with layers of dirt. The skin on her face at this distance appeared... bumpy. Her hair was a tangled mess, and her shoes seemed to be long gone. She breathed with the labored rasp of an upper respiratory infection, and cocked her head to one side. She was agitated but not enraged. Her eyes had a milky appearance and she didn’t seem to see very well; she spent a lot of time scavenging with her hands, which were clearly deformed. We watched, terrified and amazed, finally laying eyes on the monster we’d feared for so long.

  And she stopped. With an almost casual manner, she turned toward us. Slowly, twitching, she shambled to the foot of the pier where our boat was tied. She took a step out onto the pier, wincing and licking her lips. She stopped, sniffed the air. I stiffened, willed myself not to breathe, felt Rosa next to me do the same. I stole a glance at her; she was frozen with fear. I thought Please, Rosa, just stay still and be silent. And my right hand, the one propping me up, slipped. I caught my slide with a dull thump, my elbow hitting the deck. The zombie flinched, looking right at us. For a split second, it seemed I got away with it. The zombie looked confused. Then that expression gave way to pure fury, her lips pulling back to expose rotted teeth. As Rosa and I scrambled to get out of the way, she lunged.

  Her gnarled foot stepped off the pier, toward the boat. And she missed. Rage filled her face, just inches from us, as she fell into the water with a loud splash, followed by a solid thud — possibly her head hitting the hull of the boat. She splashed with even greater hatred, with increasing wildness. It was like she wasn’t trying to get out of the water, but just trying to get all of it off of her. Again and again, she fell below the surface, then shot up with loud, liquid gasps and panicked splashing.

  We scanned in every direction. Nothing we knew could have prepared us for this, sitting alone, outside the city walls, with a zombie making enough noise to wake the dead. Would the zombie’s terrible bleating bring more like her? We stood on the boat, too terrified to get off, too afraid to turn our back on the drowning zombie, and too fascinated by this intense experience to do anything but watch.

  It seemed like eternity. The zombie finally gasped, splashed, and sank for the last time. For a long while afterward, we felt like we could see her face underwater, staring up at us with icy hatred. We kept scanning the marina. No other zombies appeared. Maybe there were none close enough to hear. Maybe they simply didn’t care, each locked in their own dementia. And yet part of me, the primal fear part, thought they were just waiting until we made a move.

  We spent the rest of the night sitting back to back on the deck of the boat. We both dozed off momentarily here or there, but each time we awoke with a start, not only jolting ourselves but scaring the holy hell out the other. We never truly rested again that night. When I did sleep, I dreamed of deformed hands emerging from cold, black water.

  8

  The next morning, our eyes were glued to the water as we stepped back onto the pier. The Potomac isn’t terribly deep, but it’s muddy as hell, and the water was usually greenish and murky. I may have seen something down there in the muck. I didn’t want to dwell on it. After we passed over the gap, we kept walking to dry land and didn’t look back.

  We walked down the George Washington Parkway to the ramp for 395 and turned toward the right, away from DC. There was no wall on the south side of the city, facing us, because the river provided enough of a natural defensive barrier. I might have given the city one last look, but I don’t recall, and actually would be surprised if I had. Funny, not knowing if I’d ever see it again, and not sparing it a memorable last look, not even up there on the highway, where you could take in the whole city. I guess survival and movement seemed more important at the time. We knew zombies weren’t just creatures of the night, so we proceeded quietly and kept looking around. Walking in the middle of a wide highway gave us some solace, because we felt that at least we would see if something approached
. There were cars abandoned here and there that blocked our view and made for potential zombie hideouts, but most of them were on the other side of the highway, heading toward the city. Either those poor saps made it in or they didn’t, there was no way to know.

  We made our way southwest. A short while later, as we walked in the middle of the three empty traffic lanes, we crossed under a pedestrian bridge. Two zombies appeared on the bridge, probably 20 feet above us. The bridge was walled by a chain-link fence they couldn’t break through, or so I hoped. The one closest to the fence noticed us first. He looked to be a young black male. As we got closer, I could see he was missing one eye and bleeding from both hands and his face. Our presence enraged him, and he leaped at the fence to get to us, crashing into the woven metal again and again. It was pointless. A pedestrian bridge over a major highway is going to be designed to prevent suicide jumpers as its first priority. Flailing, the zombie bloodied himself even worse. We moved to avoid the splatter, which was disgusting and difficult.

  From the other end of the bridge, the second zombie heard the commotion and ran in our direction. He also was male, but bigger, with dark, matted hair and a white t-shirt emblazoned with a day-glo logo I didn’t recognize. As the first zombie railed against the fence trying to get to us, the second one launched into him, and they both collapsed to the deck of the bridge. We passed under as they carried on a brutal fight, tearing at each other. In minutes, the larger one had killed the other, standing up with blood now coating his t-shirt, hands, and face. He continued to circle the body, swatting and kicking, making guttural noises, shaking his head. We continued farther down the road and out of sight as quickly as possible.