Aberdeen

by James Bierce

  His plan, when he thought that Mike was coming with him, was to take a shortcut straight down the hill from the hospital, instead of taking the street that runs alongside of it. He figured that the chances of coming across someone was less likely in the overgrown pathway that winds through the wooded area just above downtown. When he exits the hospital and stands out in the parking lot, the cold wind pounding his face with rain drops and debris from the trees across the road, he looks up at the main tower above and realizes that Mike is probably watching him. To dispel any suspicions, he decides that taking the more visible route might be safer for Christine, even if it places him in more danger from the lingering residents of the city. Already feeling the dampness making its way through his coat at the shoulders, he trudges through the mud puddles that cover the paved lot, then down the street that leads to downtown, trying to stay clear of the massive maple trees that grow next to the roadway and hang overhead, their trunks and limbs jerking violently in the high winds as he passes under them.

  "Larry, are you there?"

  Hearing Christine's voice on the radio, he fumbles around for it in his pocket, then looks up at the waiting area windows above him — but he can't see anything due to the rain and the glare off of the glass. "I'm here — are you okay?"

  "I'm fine, but we can see some people on the street ahead of you. They're moving slow, but they're coming toward you."

  "How many?"

  "It's hard to say for sure, at least three or four though. I have to go, Larry."

  "Okay, thanks. I'll see you soon."

  Shielding his eyes with his hand and peering into the distance, he can see several dark objects lying around on the sidewalks and road surface, but none of them appear to moving, and he assumes that they're either the scorched remains of someone, or rubble that's fallen down from one of the nearby damaged buildings. It's only when he approaches the first cross street that he can hear the sound of something being dragged over the pavement, even over the howling wind that's blowing leaves and trash through the neighborhood. When he reaches the intersection, he crouches down behind a pickup and looks to the east, spotting a group of a people walking mindlessly down the sidewalk. One of them is dragging a children's bicycle behind him, which under different circumstances might look somewhat comical, but they're also creating a noise that can probably be heard blocks away from here. Larry considers simply walking right past them, figuring they're probably the same type of infected people they've seen in most of the places they've been to, almost incapable of causing harm out in the open because of how slowly they react to anything — but as they get closer, he sees a few differences that make him reconsider.

  These people, five of them in all, are fully clothed — just like the people that they witnessed in Grayland. Worse than that, he can see one them talking to the others, and the others nodding in response. Their movements are stiff and painful looking, dragging their feet on the sidewalk as they stare straight ahead in the direction of Hoquiam. Larry crawls underneath the pickup that he's hiding behind and waits as they pass by, hoping to stay hidden from their view and avoid a confrontation — but when he looks up and sees their faces, with the skin badly scarred and their eyes swollen and hazy, he realizes that every one of them has been horrifically burned in the fires, and have most likely been blinded as a result.

  When he climbs out again and continues down the street, he feels a sense of relief when he's no longer in sight of the hospital and under Mike's watchful eye. On both sides of the road, regardless of the building construction or age, the damage from the blaze has been devastating. Piles of crumbling debris from the buildings above are lying everywhere, blocking wide portions of pavement and forcing Larry to find a way around them. Ash and soot cover virtually every surface of the city, but here in the heart of the inferno it looks almost like a thick layer of fresh snow on the roadway and sidewalks. It takes him nearly a half hour to reach the block where the supply center is located, and when he finds the exact address his heart instantly sinks. He sees the supply center, or what's left of it anyway — but the only part of it that remains is the sign out front, and even that's been damaged in the flames.

  He pulls the radio out again, wondering how he should break this to him. "Mike, this is Larry, come in..."

  "This is Mike. Are you there yet?"

  "I'm almost there, not quite though. As long as I'm down here, is there anyplace else I should check?"

  "There's a small pharmacy to the west of there, but I doubt they'd have much. Just clean out the supply center for now."

  "Yeah, got it."

  He looks to the north as he crosses the street and heads further west, making sure that Mike can't see his location and where he's going. The rain is coming down heavier now, and on the flat ground only a few blocks from the harbor, the unassisted drains are now spreading raw sewage and blackened trash into the blocked gutters and low spots in the parking lots, adding yet one more thing for Larry to avoid.

  The pharmacy that Mike was talking about turns out to be three blocks away, and is fairly isolated from the surrounding buildings by a large parking lot that's still filled with cars — some of which are charred and indistinguishable from each other in their current state. As he passes by each one of them on his way to the store, he glances through the windows and open doors and sees nothing but bones and melted plastic inside. The walls of the store look undamaged for the most part, showing only minor signs of heat damage on the awning over the front entrance. Noticing that the glass door is already partially open, Larry takes out his gun and looks through the windows that line the front of the store, seeing shelves tipped over and items scattered across the floor and ripped open. Pushing the door open with his foot, he steps halfway in and listens closely for a sound of any kind, but the only thing he can hear is the wind outside, and the rough waves from the harbor only a short distance down the road. Only a few steps in, however, he can hear and feel the floor giving way, cracking and moaning under the pressure of his weight. Scanning the area around him with his flashlight, he can see that the surface of the flooring has been blackened from the fire in spots, turning the old boards into crumbling pieces of charcoal.

  "Is anyone in here?" he yells, walking carefully down the main aisle toward the pharmacy counter in the back. The disarray lessens as he makes his way through the store, but when he reaches the pharmacy and jumps over the counter, he discovers that the medication shelves have been largely destroyed as well — the pills and powdered contents now spread out over the tile floor in front of him. In the corner of the room sits three countertop refrigeration units, which are also open, and the contents of which are also spilling onto both the counter and the floor. He glances at his watch, which shows 10:42AM, then begins sorting through the syringes and bottles, until he finally comes to an empty one labeled 'Insulin Suspension'. Searching through the other nearby bottles, he finds more than a dozen more, all of which are empty — but with their seals simply broken and their lids replaced, he wonders if they've actually been dumped out on purpose. Looking around at the rest of the room for a minute, and wondering whether or not Mike might be easy to bluff, he grabs ten dry, clean bottles and takes them to the front where he sets them down in a nice, perfect row. Next, he grabs a jug of saline from the floor and opens it, emptying the clear fluid into the insulin bottles and then closing them up and packing them into his bag. He knows they won't do Mike any good, but they probably won't harm him either — although at this point it doesn't really matter to him one way or the other. Getting Christine back in one piece is the only thing that matters to him.

  He hops up onto the countertop again, then starts to swing his legs over the side, but he stops as soon as he hears the door up front closing. Only a moment later, as he jumps down from the counter and positions himself behind an overturned shelf, he stops and listens again as the sound of security gates come crashing down. A single set of footsteps can be heard, walking from one side of the entrance to the other as they c
lose even more gates.

  Larry stands up and shines his flashlight across the aisles, seeing a man with his back turned away from him next to the entrance. "Stand still, I have a gun!" The man stops momentarily, then continues down the row of steel gates as Larry inches his way toward him. He can see burns on his skin, especially his forearms, but unlike the severe injuries that he saw earlier in the day, this guy's face looks untouched. "Did you hear me?" Larry screams. Then he hears a loud rattling cough, followed by a raspy breath and more footsteps — all of them coming from just a few feet behind him. He spins around quickly and aims his gun at the dark figure that's now standing in front of him — but before he gets an opportunity to use it, they grab his arm instead and wrestle him to the ground.

  With the wind temporarily knocked out of him, Larry struggles to catch his breath and fight for the gun at the same time, his attacker still relentlessly clawing at his hands as he tries to aim it in their direction. He manages to free himself from their grasp, but then he hears the other man in the room running up behind them, giving him just enough time to fire a single shot into the man's face. As he crumples down on top of the other infected man, Larry can hear something underneath all of them give way, and a moment later he feels the sensation of falling as everything around him fades to black.

  CHAPTER 11

  Aberdeen: March 30th

  With much of the city covered in a thick blanket of misty rain, fog, and smoke that's rolling in from across the harbor, Aberdeen appears perfectly normal from the waiting room of the ICU — aside from a few blackened buildings that are still rising up through the murkiness of the weather outside. Hidden are the burned and collapsed structures that are spread widely across the area, and the streets littered with the corpses of the former residents, many of which were probably dead long before the fire started. Aberdeen's chronically foul weather is well-known throughout the northwest, as it is for most of the Washington coastline, but as Christine tries to peer through the thick layer below her and catch a glimpse of Larry somewhere on the other side, it occurs to her that in this one instance, the rotten weather is an improvement over the death and decay that they could see from this view only yesterday.

  Trying not to make eye-contact, she glances over at Mike and sees that he's still pacing back and forth on the other side of the room, his mood becoming more nervous the longer that Larry is away. Although he promised to let her go as soon as Larry left the hospital, he immediately broke that word when he tied her arms and legs to a chair in the waiting area, leaving her strapped to it for nearly two hours already. The restraints that he used are padded and lightweight, obviously intended to secure patients without hurting them, but so far she hasn't been able to loosen them in the slightest, and she's finding it difficult not to have a full-blown panic attack.

  After saying almost nothing to her all morning, Mike suddenly approaches and sits down beside her, staring out at the vast nothingness of clouds over the harbor. "Where did you say you were going again?"

  "East," Christine replies simply, not remembering just how much they had shared of their actual plans.

  "Olympia, right?" he asks nervously.

  "I think so."

  "Listen, I know you probably think I'm some horrible person for doing this, but I'm really not. Having that insulin is life or death for me…"

  "I know," she replies back, afraid of saying something that might set him off. "But there's no reason to keep me tied up like this — I'm not gonna try anything."

  "I've taken in three people since the outbreak, before you two showed up… The first two came together and stayed for a couple of weeks, then moved on, stealing a bunch of shit before they left — but that was fine, there's plenty of stuff around here to go around. The third guy I found downstairs, close to death after being attacked by a bunch of those infected pricks."

  Christine can see the agitation growing as his physical expressions become more animated — and there's no doubt in her mind that he's talking about Jake.

  "I wasn't even sure he was alive when I found him," he continues. "When he woke up, he immediately wanted to leave, I finally had to sedate him in order to keep him from leaving."

  "What happened to him?"

  "It turned out that he was sick, but I never checked him out for bruising." He rolls up his sleeves and points to his forearms just below the elbow. "Right here, and on the face, that's where they show up… He had them all over his arms, but I never bothered to look until it was too late. He ended up tying me up in one of the rooms downstairs, sliced me open with a scalpel, then took off with every trace of amphetamines we had. He said he'd been on them for months."

  "So he's the one that trashed the pharmacy downstairs?"

  "Probably, who knows… It could've been any of them." He stands up again and faces her, then leans in close. "The reason I'm telling you this, is to let you know that I won't be taking any more chances. It's a dog-eat-dog world these days, and we're all capable of some pretty evil shit — me included."

  "You said yourself that he was infected…"

  "Right — but he wasn't the one that killed that guy downstairs when he had his back turned to you…" He steps back and looks outside again, where the rain is coming down even harder than before. "For your sake, I hope your friend doesn't decide to take off."

  She watches him walk away, heading back down the corridor, then she turns her attention back to the water streaked glass pane in front of her. After a few minutes, she can hear what sounds like footsteps far off in the distance. It's only when she hears someone sitting in one of the chairs behind her that she realizes they weren't so distant after all. Very slowly, trying to act as calm and unsuspecting as possible, she casually turns her head to the side, and can see someone seated in the next row — someone who isn't Mike.

  "Shh…" comes a voice in Christine's ear. "We wouldn't want him hearing us…" they whisper in a small voice.

  Christine recognizes the voice, and her entire body tenses up as she tries to decide whether she should scream for help or not.

  "Where did the fat guy go?"

  "Larry? He went to get something for Mike."

  "Mike won't be alive long enough to need it."

  "Amanda, he's really not that bad…"

  The girl laughs quietly behind her. "The guy who put a gun to your head and tied you up isn't that bad?"

  "I… I mean, he isn't…" she mutters, hearing another set of footsteps behind her, this time louder than before — and when she turns her head and sees Mike walking into the room again, Amanda is nowhere to be seen. Without saying a word to her, Mike picks up the radio from the window sill and then heads back down the corridor to the main desk area. She listens closely, expecting at any moment to hear screams coming from down the hallway, but aside from the raindrops hitting the window, the hospital is eerily quiet.

  Mike sits down at his desk and sits back in the chair, feeling his heartbeat throughout his entire body as he tries to calm himself down. He was certain that Larry cared too much for the girl than to just leave her behind, but after hearing nothing for the last two hours he's beginning to wonder if that's exactly what happened — which leaves him with two possibilities, neither of which he's looking forward to. The first is to either hurt her over the radio, or at the very least coerce her into acting hurt, in the hope that Larry will hear it and change his mind. That hinges on whether or not Larry is even listening to any messages, which he probably isn't if he's actually decided to run. The other possibility is taking Christine with him to find his medication, using her as a lure to draw attention away from himself. Eliminating her afterward would be unfortunate, but it would also be necessary to protect himself from retribution in the future.

  Looking at his watch for the third time in the last ten minutes, and seeing that it's only a few minutes past eleven, he switches the computer monitor on and loads another game of solitaire — a more or less mindless game that's served as a useful distraction for months now. After losing
a hand, he reshuffles the deck just as the lights go out, including the computer. Overhead he can hear the ventilation system slowing down to a halt, and the emergency battery lights on the smoke and CO2 detectors have come on, which can only happen for two reasons — the generator has finally run out of fuel, or somebody has shut it down. He fumbles around on the desk for his flashlight, then checks his pocket for his gun before standing up and shining the light around the room. As he pans it toward the corridor that leads to the waiting room, he sees a sudden flash of movement as someone runs from the other side of the desk and into the hall. Aiming his gun ahead of him, with sweat now dripping from his forehead, he slowly and cautiously steps forward, well aware of the fact that Christine has more experience on the outside than he does. He already went through the trouble of locking her guns inside one of the lockers, which only he knows the combination to — but there are still plenty of things lying around the rooms that could be used as an effective weapon.

  He passes by each one of the patients rooms carefully, making sure that every door is closed before moving on, but when he finally reaches the waiting area, almost fully lit from the subdued sunlight outside, he sees Christine sitting in the same chair as before — with her back turned to him.

  "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he demands, aiming his gun at her as he approaches her from the side. When she turns her head toward him, and he sees the surgical tape that's now covering her mouth, and the restraints still wrapped around her arms and legs, he takes a few steps back and begins looking around the rest of the room. "Larry… if you don't show yourself right now I'm gonna shoot her… I mean it!" He looks down and sees Christine crying and shaking her head at him, then he hears someone laughing from back down the hallway. He walks up to Christine and rips the tape off of her lips, tearing some of the skin off in the process. "What the hell happened?"