I take a deep breath and look into Robert McMillan’s beady and evil eyes, and then tap the screen to continue playing the video. Robert McMillan sputters into life and begins.
“My fellow Americans, if you can hear me, or are seeing this message via global satellite, then I am Robert McMillan, the new President of the United States of America.”
Whiskey and food begin to pile up in the back of my throat and I have to take another drink just to keep everything I ate from coming out.
“As you all know, many of the states and cities and communities that you are currently in have come under attack by what we believe to be a chemical and biological agent that is causing those infected to quickly die and then come back to life with only one apparent goal: to spread the disease.”
I want to stop the video, grab the screen and toss it out the fucking window. I want to find a way to time travel back to the day that he came to visit me and, even if he had an army of roided-out suited ape-men, shoot him in the face. I turn away and look back towards the lumbering and violent mass of bodies trying to get into the building.
“But I have good news. After many months of planning and fighting, we’ve established several safe zones around the country.”
I quickly turn back to the screen; Scott pauses his game to get up and walk over.
“The following is a list of safe and secure locations that, if you are listening to or watching this, I pray you are able to make it to.”
I watch as he signs off with a teary-eyed “May God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.” The screen fades to black and scrolls the list of secure zones.
I pause the screen when I see the location that is closest to Cleveland: Camp Perry: Port Clinton, Ohio.
PART THREE
1.
“So, we’re going then?” asks Kel.
I can’t say that I blame her for being skeptical.
“I’m going. You two can come along if you want,” I say back to her as I start to pack a messenger bag full of underwear and toiletries. I figure it’s roughly eighty miles or so to Port Clinton; I have it mapped out on a piece of copy paper. We’ve been having this conversation since Kel and I figured out that the messages weren’t automatically sent. Someone must have seen us power up and log on to whatever was left of the satellite networks.
Scott is still trying to finish out the last level on Castlevania, but every once in a while he pauses the game and interjects. “Dude, you don’t even know if that base is still operational,” he says trying to get up the steps on the screen so he can finally face Dracula one-on-one.
“Look,” I say, “we don’t have enough food or water to last us a lifetime here.” I put my toothbrush away in the bag and then decide against packing it up just yet. I can always grab it in the morning before I leave.
“Yeah, but we have enough for right now,” Kel starts to say but I don’t let her finish.
“We can’t stay here. You guys can’t stay here, and I can’t stay here. We don’t even know how much power—here—has left,” I say. It’s a blunt enough statement to make Scott get up and look at me like I just told him his dog, his mother and his fiancé just died.
“What the fuck do you mean? The other day you said—”
“The other day I said we have enough and the other day you were both holding guns to my head, so, you know, I may have lied.”
I inspect a stick of unopened deodorant and then start to put it away in the bag when Scott rushes towards me. I look up to see a massive wall of anger coming straight at me and I barely have enough time to try and raise my arms and brace for the tackle. He slams into me and we hit the floor and both bounce. Pain shoots up and down my spine; he flies over me and rolls out a few inches away.
Kel starts yelling something, but before she can reach out to stop him, he grabs hold of my shirt collar and pulls me back down to the floor.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, man? Are you seriously the biggest asshole in the world?” he yells at my face. Little flecks of spit hit my mouth and I move to try and wipe them away. Skinny Scott pushes my hands down at my sides, but Kel grabs him before he can hit me.
“Scott, get off him,” she tries to say, but he snaps at her.
“No, Kel, he needs to learn that he isn’t the fucking world anymore,” he says and shakes her off.
I watch as he pulls his fist back and my mind instantly jumps to the replay of him slamming his hand through the head of one of the monster men in the garage. This is going to suck, tremendously.
“He never was,” she says as she slaps him across the head with her hand.
We both look up and say, “What?” then he pivots his waist around and looks at her like a confused child. Scott gets up and I shimmy out and pull myself up.
“Thanks, but what the fuck are you talking about?” I say back to Kel, but she just stares back at me for a while.
“You’re welcome,” she says finally, and then ads, “You might want to sit back down now.”
I look around and then pull my chair from behind the desk and sit. After a few long seconds of staring, Scott moves his way back towards the couch. He sits back down, lights another cigarette and un-pauses the game.
“You’re right: you’re not a monster. You’re a patsy,” she says.
She looks at me as if she’s about to tell me something massive. I hold up my hand, move to the bar and fix myself another four fingers of Bushmill’s, then move back and sit down in the chair light a cigarette and say, “Proceed.”
She frowns for a second and then says, “You’re not a monster; you’re just someone they could use. Jeff, you never even had cancer. McMillan was supplying you pills that kept giving you bronchial infections to make you think you were dying. He was just using you. He had you spotted and pinned ever since you started the company.”
I feel my eyes bulging out of my head; I feel my blood pressure go up; I feel the rock glass slip through my hands, see it fall to the floor and then hear it break. My cigarette is hanging limp on my lips. I move to pull it away so I can ask for an explanation, but it pulls away a small piece of flesh and the raw spot burns for a second so I say nothing.
“Your whole company, all your money, your marriage…everything was a lie. Robert McMillan planned everything out, the funding for your app, your business decisions, your contracts. Your whole life, Jeff, was a complete lie. And when you started to get too big for your own good, do things that they couldn’t control or predict, they wanted to get you out of the way, so they told you that you had cancer because they figured you would do something stupid.”
I’m listening but I’m not. I hear what Kel has to say but I don’t. I’m staring at her, watching her small lips move, her hair as it shakes slightly with her head. The hurt and pity in her eyes as they gleam out at me like emotional tractor beams, trying to reel me in and tell me she’s sorry. But I don’t actually listen, or hear, or see anything except my life flashing in front of my eyes.
Living and starving in my first apartment with Janet and talking to her father about the app, him introducing me to potential investors. The puppet companies for McMillan, the funds they miraculously raised for me to develop the app. I’m watching the shaking hands, the broad, knowing smiles pointed like knives at my face. I’m seeing the wedding reception; McMillan was there, too, literally. He showed up and put a check into the money well we had made shaped like a tablet computer. 20,000 dollars’ worth of a gift, signed For a better future.
I see the company on the cover of Wired, Time, Newsweek and Rolling Stone. I see Phil coming to represent me; the carnivorous eyes of the dead on the screen to my left were nothing compared to Phil and Janet and McMillan. My doctor’s initial tests and the diagnosis, the idea of cryogenics, the immortality they promised me. But it wasn’t the immortality I wanted. I’m the man who ended the world. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds, and McMillan gets to stand like the risen fucking Christ. I slump forward a little and bring the cigarette up to my mo
uth and stare at the glass on the floor, then over to the deodorant.
“Jeff, I’m so sorry,” she starts to say but I hold up my hand and stop her. I think about what she said while I pick the deodorant up off the ground and then get up and start packing again.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m leaving,” I say back, but my voice is hollow and far away.
“But what Scott said earlier is right; we don’t know what the state of that base actually is. We just know that someone is there.”
I stop packing and look up at her; the vacancy signs in my eyes make her take a step away from me, as if she’s afraid.
“I’m going to leave, find McMillan, and then I’m going to kill him,” I say.
Kel takes another step back. I know she thinks I’ve lost it, that I’ve snapped, but I haven’t. In fact, I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life, ever.
“And what if he’s not—what if he’s already dead?” she asks.
“I’m pretty sure he’s alive,” I say and point at the screen that still has the Port Clinton location pulled up on it.
“You have no idea—”
“But we know someone is there, so they should know where he is and, like I said, I have no idea how long the power is gonna hold. Besides, look at it outside. You said it yourself: we fucked up.”
We both look at the screen we dedicated to the cameras since Scott and I rammed my Focus into the main garage door. The massive tidal waves of bodies are still surrounding the building, smashing into the doors and windows with their hands. Every once in a while a large section of the group will turn their faces towards the sky or the cameras, and look right at us, though I don’t think they’re doing it on purpose. From what I can tell, they have no idea what’s going on outside of the new instinct to spread whatever it is that they are supposed to spread.
“I know, but look at them,” she says. “There’s just too many of them for us to even attempt an escape.”
I look at the screen again the deluge of bodies coming to the building has turned into a slow trickle, but they keep coming nonetheless. If I had to take a guess I would say there are already close to five thousand out there, maybe more.
“I know, but my Focus is—” I start, but this time Kel stops me.
“Your Focus is as close to a tank as we could possibly get, I know, but still—it’s just a car. I’ve seen ten of those things overturn a car twice your Focus’s size.”
“Then we’ll have to distract them, won’t we?” I ask, and she gives me another look that says she thinks I’ve lost it. I’m starting to think she only has that look.
“And just how do you suggest we do that?” she asks.
So, up until now, I pretty much figured that I would just leave. As stupid as that sounds, it was my plan. I had actually forgotten that there was a mass of bodies waiting to tear us apart if we tried to leave. I stop packing more clothes into my second messenger bag and look up at her, and then over to Scott. He looks like he’s calmed down a little or, at the very least, he’s lost himself in the distraction of fighting Dracula.
“I don’t know yet,” I say back to her.
“So your plan was to just drive out there, where there are God knows how many of those things waiting, and what? Hope they didn’t figure out how to tip the car over?” she asks.
“Pretty much,” I say back as I finish packing the last of the two other suits that I want to take.
“I can’t tell if you’re the world’s biggest asshole, or just the dumbest motherfucker I have ever met,” she says smiling.
I stop packing, zip up the bag, look into her eyes and say, “Both.”
2.
We’re eating another meal of canned chicken, rice and mixed vegetables in silence. Kel keeps pushing the little white clumps of processed chicken around on her plate and making a dam that holds back her rice.
Scott eats like a ravenous animal and strips his plate clean twice. The guy’s got an appetite no matter what; I almost envy him for his ability to compartmentalize what’s going on. He’s completely content with just playing games, drinking, smoking and eating. It’s like the power isn’t ever going to go out, it’s like he’s in shutdown from reality.
I look down at my own plate, already cleared but not enjoyed in the slightest and wonder if leaving is the right thing to do. We can’t stay cooped up in here forever because, one, we have no idea as to how long the power is going to hold out, and two, as much as I want to deny it, I fucked us over by ramming the car into the garage door.
The horde of bodies hasn’t grown since the last time I looked at the screen, but it hasn’t thinned out any either. They slam their hands and fists into the building, the doors, the windows, anything in a pathetic attempt to try and figure out where the noise was coming from until all they have left are ragged stumps on the ends of their arms. If you are completely still and silent, you can hear their cries and moans coming from below; you can feel the small vibrations rattle up the insides of the building.
“I have to leave,” I say to both of them but neither one acknowledges me right away.
Kel looks up from her half-finished construction site on the plate, sighs and then says my name in a way that reminds me of my mother. “Jeff, I know you’re dealing with a lot right now,” she starts to say but I stop the conversation dead in its tracks.
“No offense, Kel, but you have no idea what I’m dealing with.”
I’m about to start tearing into her, but stop when I hear Scott.
“Let’s fucking do it,” he demands.
Kel and I turn and look at him; he’s sitting back in his chair smiling and smoking a cigarette.
“What?” asks Kel. He leans in and takes a drink of water.
“It’s just like Castlevania,” he says, and then adds, “We’re like Simon and McMillan’s like Dracula. It’s just something we have to do.”
Kel shakes her head, then gets up from the table and takes our plates into the kitchen.
“I’m in,” says Scott.
I don’t know what to say, so I nod my head. Kel comes back over to the table and puts a beer in front of Scott and then opens a second one. I get up and get the bottle of Bushmill’s.
“Okay,” she says with a sigh, “How the fuck are we going to do this?”
* * *
We go back and forth for what feels like half the night. I look over towards the windows and the night sky is illuminated by the moon and stars. There isn’t any light in the city except for the fires and my office, so the sky sparkles like a shattered jewelry store display case.
“Do we have any heavy ordinance left?” asks Scott.
“Nope,” says Kel, “just a couple of clips for the pistols.”
“What about you?” asks Scott and I pull away from space.
“The only thing I can think of is that they move in a crowd, so we could open the front doors to draw as many of them into the lobby as possible, then slam through the garage door and try to make it through the rest of them,” I say.
“That might work,” says Kel looking up from her beer. “How are we gonna open up the front door, though?”
“We could do it by remote from the Focus. It’s networked to my office,” I say back.
“Still gonna leave a fuck-load of ‘em out there for us to try and get through, though,” says Scott. We all nod our heads in agreement.
“You two don’t have to come if you don’t want to. We could secure the doors to the bottom floors and you could stay here if you wanted to.”
Kel asks, “What are we gonna do when the power runs out? Or the food or—”
I shake my head to stop her from going on. “I was just saying it’s not really your fight.”
“It is now,” says Scott, and I realize why he and Kel have made it this long.
“I think the door plan is as good as any,” he says, then adds, “When are we doing this?”
“We should get as much food in as many bags as
we possibly can into the car, get whatever else might be useful together and leave. So…one more day?” I say.
The gravity of the situation passes around the table as if it were a living cloud of doubt and acceptance. Each of us goes through the same set of faces and emotions as we think about the fact that tomorrow night will most likely be our last night on the face of the earth.
“One last thing,” says Kel. I put my head down on the table. My hair has started to come back and it feels like a thousand separate pin pricks as I run my hand over my scalp.
“Yes?” I say from the tabletop.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Sorry for blaming you.”
From the corner of my eye I see Scott nod his head in agreement. “Yeah, sorry, dude.”
I pick my head up from the table and look at them to see if they’re joking or not, but they both smile at me in the way that apologies demand awkward silences and I say, “Thank you,” back to them in that weird way that acceptance brings relief.
We agree to go to bed and get as much rest as we can, try to sleep as long as we can, because we’re leaving first thing in the morning exactly one day from now.
I lie in bed for another hour or so and stare out the windows. From the loft I can see the sky and the frozen light of the moon. I fall asleep to the slow and steady vibrations of the masses outside beating on the building and thinking that, whatever happens in the next two days, to those stars out there in the cold vacuum of space, none of this really matters because we’re already dead.
3.
I wake up to the now familiar smell of coffee and cigarettes, biscuits and chicken. But as I come down the steps, the air in the office feels different. It feels as if someone opened a window, though I know that’s totally impossible. Kel is cooking and Scott is staring out the window, the smog and clouds and grey have lifted from the surrounding area and the sky is a vast and clear expanse of cerulean. The sun beats down on him, and he casts a long shadow over the floor.
“Morning,” he says as he hears me come down the metal stairs.
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