by Burgy, P. J.
There was a room in the back which may have been a break room at one point. No couch this time. Instead, Kara found an opened safe and piles of dried, fragile paper dollars. She knelt down and was able to turn some of the money into a fine dust in her fingers. Trap sat next to her, panting, until she continued to explore. There was a bathroom, awful and trashed. ‘NO PUBLIC’ was painted on the door. Next to it was a storage closet with old, expired batteries. No good. She could bring back the cases, and they could use them perhaps, but she didn’t find it prudent to overload her backpack. She passed on them, shutting the door.
When she was satisfied with her level of inspection, she switched to the white light and called Trap over. She shared some of her food and water, then made preparations to sleep. She had to rest on the floor this time, on her side. There was no door to the break room, so no candles could be lit. Instead, she had to hide as far as she could in the corner of the room, curl up on her blanket, and hope that the night went by quickly.
The night before had gone smoothly, but this far into an area with so many hiding spots, Kara knew there would be Wailers out hunting. Other than the fox, and the birds, she’d seen no other animals which either meant that the area was teeming with the Infected or that the Infected had been forced to move on. She wasn’t sure which it would be.
For a long time, maybe an hour, she waited on her side, eyes open. Outside, it was sure to be dark, the sun setting. She heard the dog breathing, licking his chops, panting. She could hear her own heart, and the sound of the building groaning. Kara began to drift off. A shriek in the night jostled her awake, and she heard Trap shifting and beginning to growl.
“Shh.” She pet the dog gently.
A series of low, mournful wails echoed from somewhere far off in the night. She could tell that the Wailers were not close enough to present any immediate danger, but she had to keep Trap quiet. Petting his head, she exhaled in relief when he settled down and stopped growling. She was able to fall asleep again as the cries tapered off and grew quieter.
The next morning, they set off again. Stopping briefly, she found a small trench of running water cutting across the street and down into the ground. She tested the water, finding it clear, but ran it through the filter anyway to refill one of the bottles. Nearby, in the corner of a building and behind a car where the trench ran close, she washed herself off again as Trap wagged his tail. Dressing quickly, they carried on.
As she alternated being jogging and walking, she took time to look up at the buildings around her, some spanning many stories into the sky. A library caught her attention, the sign still present and easy to read. Now and then she would see a tree growing up through the sidewalk, the roots huge and breaking through the cement. Along one strip of the roadside was an uprooted tree, dead for years, while saplings grew in the dredged up earth. White birds with long necks walked on the roofs of smaller buildings, or perched on the remains of ledges. Small birds, smudged with gray and black, flew around clumsily making odd cooing, trilling noises and huddled in small bunches on some of the ledges.
She wondered how easy being a bird would be in a place like this. A Wailer would eat a bird if it could catch one, no question. During the night, the birds would have to find a place to perch, and if the Wailers could climb up to the roofs, they’d gobble the poor little things up fast. Maybe the birds flew high, high up, and rested on the tallest rooftops, far from the ground. She looked up and nearly got dizzy from the height of the buildings on either side of her.
It occurred to her that the buildings had been getting taller and taller, wider and wider. She found a half enclosed bench on the side of the street up ahead and paused for a look at it. There was a bus schedule inside, with a layout of the area all drawn out. Patches were missing or ruined, but she could see a few street names and numbers, all laid out in a grid. ‘MIDTOWN’ was written at the top.
She groaned. She was still in midtown.
“Dammit,” she grumbled and made her way back to the street to continue on her way. Trap followed after her, blissfully unaware of her frustration, excitement in his eyes at their adventure.
It was midday when Kara saw the street ahead begin to widen. A guardrail with a central, grassy median started up again, and the number of abandoned cars increased tenfold. It was along this road that she began to see the graffiti again, fresh, in black and red paint. Cars had been tagged, the sides of buildings, faded road signs. Anything that had a surface. She recognized the red handprint, crudely painted onto a giant, fallen road sign, the pole it had been welded to crashed over like a fallen tree. As they passed by, Trap suddenly began to growl. It was still light out, but she was unnerved regardless. She looked around, seeing nothing, and calmed the dog down.
She saw broken metal bridges above her, the bulk of them now in the street. Kara saw their skeletons still trying to connect two buildings like an archway many feet high, withered tendons left to dry in the sun. Some buildings were made entirely from cement, others from panes of glass, most of which were broken or shattered. The roofs of smaller buildings were caved in, the structures cleaved open and exposed, and one had entirely collapsed close by, the debris flowing into her path from the left. She had to step over the rubble.
She noticed that the street to the left was blocked by the ruins of the fallen structure. Then, looking right, she saw that another building had toppled, spreading out to block that way. There were overturned cars, some on top of one another, in the midst of the debris on both sides. Grass grew in the crumbling asphalt, and flowers bloomed.
As she walked, she saw a tall blockage ahead. She frowned. The rusty husks of many cars had been piled on top of one another, somehow, laid like huge metal bricks. They blocked the entire street, extending out across and butting up against the buildings on either side, twenty feet tall, like a bizarre wall. She considered climbing but first ran down the street the way she’d come. She had to go through the last intersection, further down, to try that way to go around, but found the road ahead blocked by another pile of cars.
She went the other way, and found that road blocked as well. Someone had put a lot of effort into closing off the road. There had to be another way in, but the idea of wasting time wandering around to look didn't appeal to her very much. Instead, she went back and looked at the tall blockage. Trap made a noise next to her, and she glanced at him, brows furrowed. He whimpered.
The cars had been crushed nearly flat; she couldn't just go through one door and out to the other side. How someone had crushed a car, she wasn't sure.
Kara turned to her right, looking at the building. The front windows were shattered, the door missing. She tilted her head to the side and then looked back up at the blockage. Backing up, she saw that there was a building on the other side, separate from the one directly to the right of her. She also saw the fire escapes and ladders built near the windows. She narrowed her eyes.
Her flashlight illuminated the floor inside of a lobby in shades of red. It felt off to be inside, in the dark, but she had no choice. Climbing meant leaving Trap behind, and Kara wasn’t about to do that. Trap followed her into the shadows, making low, unhappy noises in the back of his throat. She didn’t like that he was already on edge, and she could smell the faint odor of rotten meat and sweet, coppery blood. Pausing, she shone the light around, saw nothing but a front counter, a closed stairwell door and an open elevator shaft, the blackness inside deep and frightening.
“Come on, boy,” Kara called to Trap softly as she made her way to the closed doors. Trap followed after, but kept his head low and his tail dipped toward the ground. Clearly, he was upset and fearful, for he whimpered when she opened the heavy, metal door and shined her red light up the first flight of steps. The building was falling apart, pieces of plaster broken on the stairs.
Kara went in, Trap behind her, and the door shut. She went up the steps, walking as quietly as she could, her footfalls seeming to thunder and echo in the stairwell. At the next floor, Kara found ano
ther door and opened it, finding a hall with rows of open doors on the right side. She tread carefully down the hall, listening to Trap whine the entire way until they reached a window at the far end of the hall. That was what she had been hoping for.
Finding it hard to resist the temptation to run down the hall, her body tensed until she reached the very end. She struggled only briefly to open the window, glad to see the fire escapes directly outside, leading down to another platform, and then down to the ground below on the other side of the blockage.
She helped get the dog out and onto the first platform, and then they worked their way down, Trap having some issues with the short ladders that Kara had to carry him down. He wasn’t too heavy, but he squirmed madly. By the time they’d reached the ground, he was fighting his way out of her arms and she had to drop him. Trap ran about ten feet and then stopped, lolled his tongue out, and trotted right back over to her. Then, he began to growl, staring down the street.
Kara took in a slow breath, and she smelled it again now. Much stronger here. It was the smell of the Infected, sickly and pungent, like wet, moldy death. She came around into the street from where she stood in the alley between the buildings, going to where Trap was bristling. Her steps felt heavy, her lungs drained of air, as she saw things that she didn’t understand, that she didn’t want to understand, many yards ahead of them.
Tall, thin wooden crosses had been erected in the road. There were bodies, hung upside down on each one. Red and purple, slender bodies. They were tied to the crosses by their wrists and ankles, thick wire ropes digging deeply into their skin. It took everything in her to approach, Trap at her side and shaking, growling like mad.
Kara's face screwed. “What is this?”
The bodies were those of the Infected, their black oozing mouths hanging open. They had been burnt by the sun, dead for many days by the look of their state of decomposition. No insects or animals would touch them, and so they rotted and fell apart over time, left alone to wither into dry husks in the sun, or, if left somewhere dank and dark, turn into a vile, thick liquid paste dripping from bones.
She put her mask on, taking it from her bag, before she dared to go forward. Trap didn’t want to follow at first, but then relented and caught up with her. She walked between the crosses, of which there were five, and kept going down the street. The buildings were massive, looming above her. Some were falling apart, in varying stages of decay, and others had already collapsed, forcing her to climb over their piles of broken cement and steel beams.
The picture of those things lingered in her mind as she pressed on. She felt sick at several points until the smell became faint, long behind her. Still, it was a stench that found a way to stick to the inside of one’s nose, and when she remembered the look of the Infected corpses combined with their smell, she had to stop and lean on a car, dry heaving as she took off her mask and hunched over. Several moments passed before she shook herself out of the daze. Lingering could cost her.
She straightened up, seeing Trap wagging his tail at her, and looked around. There was some graffiti on the brick building to her left, and it was such an odd drawing that she had to take a second glance before approaching for a closer look. It was a poorly done child’s painting of a person in a long coat. No, not a person. The figure had a bird's head and was wearing what she assumed to be a top hat. In the crudely drawn hand, they were holding a long stick. She squinted and then went on her way, confused over the strange image.
Further on, she found dead Infected on the street, these on the ground and not hung up on display. Trap growled at them and she kept him going, leading him deeper in. What she was looking for, she wasn’t sure. She kept going straight though, hoping for a sign, or a clue. The sun was beginning to drop lower in the sky when she found something, a crumpled up lump of fabric in the middle of the street. She ran to it, picking up, and saw that it was a small, woven cowl very similar to the ones that Annie would make. It was something that Annie would have thrown across her shoulders, wrapped around her neck. It smelled faintly of cinnamon, like one of the scented candles that Annie would light in her house. Kara clutched it to her chest, eyes darting around the immediate area.
“Annie…” Kara whispered.
She kept the cowl, rolling it up and shoving it into her bag before moving ahead. She felt a renewed sense of purpose, her energy high, her mind racing. They had come this way. Fear and apprehension remained in her heart, but hope was steadily creeping back in.
It would be time to start looking for a place to hide soon, and she was dreading it now. There were Wailers out here, in this place. This had to be the city, and it had been cut off for a reason. The crosses had been put there as a warning, to scare people off, she was certain of it. Deciding to make finding a hiding spot her priority, she made her way down the street and looked for any place with a door. As she walked, Trap snarled, looking back and forth between the buildings.
As she searched, she found a parking garage, massive, tall, with many levels. She imagined hundreds of those things in there, waiting in the shadows. Every door she saw was either missing or hanging open, and, becoming desperate, she chose one of the latter. Trap was growling and wouldn’t get near the little shop that Kara approached. She shined the red light in, aiming it around the room, and nearly cried out when she saw it.
Between the shelves in the corner of the shop, nestled between boxes, a Wailer hid curled up, lean, muscular arms wrapped around its knees. Pale and red in her light, it breathed hard, the long hair spilled out across its bare shoulders. A female, barely dressed anymore. It had been caught in its daylight hiding spot, and it sensed Kara in the doorway. It looked over with its bloodshot eyes, made a low, shrill shriek at her and then turned away, trying to burrow deeper into its little nook away from the sun. She stepped away from the door. It had not charged at her, and though the sun was still out, it should have at least run at the door. Instead, it had reacted to her like she'd interrupted a nap.
Trap bristled, and she led him away.
Finally, Kara found a shop with a door still intact, and after she did a thorough search with Trap, she locked the door behind her. Trap was content here, and she found that she could move some tall shelves to cover up the missing parts of the windows. She assessed the back of the store, finding the bathroom but no break room to hide in. Forced to go back out to the tiny shop floor, she studied her surroundings more closely. This had been a strange store filled with a lot of different glass items, like pipes and large oddly shaped vases. Some were still whole and she studied them in her hands. The posters had been ripped down and the displays smashed.
For all of the glass in the place, the broken glass was isolated to the counter and displays toward the back of the store. There were also piles of clothing on the floor laying near metallic stands. Items still hung on the long, extending arms. She held up a shirt with multiple swirling colors and a little dancing teddy bear in the center. She had a look at a few of the others and found nothing she could use. When she found a pile of bandannas on a shelf, she dusted them off and looked at the colors, shining her flashlight on them. She tied a black one around her neck, flipped it up along her face, and flattened it back.
She also found jeans, long sleeved shirts, and dresses. The dresses were useless, but there was a small, dark brown long-sleeved shirt. She considered the choice for a moment and then traded out her sweaty, stiff camo for the dark brown number. Trap sat up at attention, made a noise, and Kara looked over at him, still sliding her new shirt on. He made another sound, staring at the back of the store, and Kara frowned. He was focused on a rustling sound from behind the counter.
She went to check, keeping the light white. It wasn’t an Infected. It couldn’t be. When she got there, moving around the counter, a squirrel came bounding out, ran across the floor and then zipped in circles around the room. Trap exploded, trying to catch it until the thing ran up the shelf and disappeared out through a hole in the glass.
Exhaling,
she walked over to the dog and patted his head. “Chase the squirrels on a different day.”
The night was clear with a bright moon, she could see it through the bit of window that was exposed behind the shelf. It felt safer with the window covered, but she heard Trap growling already, the dog’s fur standing on end. He could smell them. She comforted him and the growling stopped. They were curled up on a pile of clothes in the shop, a shelf turned over onto its side next to them, another little blockade to make her feel a bit safer during the night. This night, she thought, was going to be different, worse somehow. They were out there, their cries faint but audible, carrying in the wind and giving her goosebumps. A closer howl caused her to tense.
She hoped that she would be able to sleep through this one. The sooner day came, the better, and every moment she lay awake listening to the screams of those creatures outside, the harder it became to fall asleep. Horrors played out in her mind over and over, reminding her of the way the Wailers spat up black bile, sprinting fast toward their prey, climbing over anything they could, sometimes on all fours. She remembered seeing one push a car out of the way. Those mad, lost eyes. The gaping, drooling mouths.
Even with the wailing outside, she felt herself winding down, growing too tired to fight it any longer. The images faded, the world feeling softer, more comfortable. Trap was growling softly again, but she tried to ignore it. If he grew too loud, she would pet him again, whisper to him. She closed her eyes, the clothing against her cheek as she melted into the pile under her.
“Help.”
Her eyes snapped open and she stared ahead. It had been a human voice, from somewhere close. Out on the street? She swallowed, hearing Trap growl.
“Help… me.”
It was a woman, the voice wavering, afraid. Kara slowly sat up. Clenching her jaw, heart beginning to pound in her chest, she forced herself up to her feet. She tried to ignore Trap as he huddled up into a tight ball and growled, licking the front of his sharp teeth and staring forward.