by Rich Baker
“DAD!!” Carmen screams. She pulls at him, but he won’t let go of his undead wife.
Elizabeth opens her mouth, her black tongue pulsing and moving like a demented snake. A growl begins in the back of her throat, and her lips pull back from her teeth.
D-Day has his rifle raised, but can’t get a clear shot. He walks sideways, trying to get clear.
Carmen is frantically pulling at her father’s right arm crying for him to let go of her mother.
Elizabeth lunges at George’s neck, sinking her teeth into his flesh and tearing open his carotid artery. Blood spurts in thick streams in time with his pulse.
“NO!” Carmen screams. “NO!!”
D-Day grabs Carmen in a bear hug and pulls her away from the attacking zombie.
“Let me GO!” she screams at him, her feet kicking at the air.
“Carmen, you can’t do the same thing he just did! There’s nothing you can do! They’re both gone!”
She stops struggling. D-Day loosens his grip, and she grabs him, holding him tight. She watches her mother struggle to get out from under the limp form of her father.
“There’s one thing I can do,” she says.
She pulls free from D-Day, draws her pistol and walks over to the thing that used to be her mother. The creature growls at her, and Carmen raises the pistol, squeezes the trigger and puts a bullet in the middle of its forehead. Its body goes slack. She moves the gun to the back of her father’s head. His hand twitches, showing the first signs of re-animation. She presses the barrel against his head and pulls the trigger.
Turning away, she wipes away tears.
“At least that bitch is dead,” she says.
“Well…not exactly,” D-Day replies. He walks her over to the edge of the building and shows her where the crazy woman dangles helplessly.
“Does she know we know she’s there?” Carmen asks.
“I don’t think so.”
“Can I have a few minutes? Make sure she doesn’t get loose, ok?” she asks.
“Take your time,” D-Day says. He wants to work on how they’re going to get out of this situation, but he also knows she needs to deal with the death of her parents. He sits on the edge of the parapet and peeks over the edge to see if Melissa is figuring out her problem. So far she’s just struggling with the rope, trying to work it loose, but whatever she’s done seems to have wedged it good. If she had the strength to lift herself and get the pressure of her weight off of the rope and harness, she could probably work it free. But apparently, she doesn’t. She struggles, tires herself out, and just hangs there.
He turns back to Carmen, kneeling by the bodies of her parents. He knows she’s in shock. Everything happened so fast. D-Day has dealt with the suddenness of death while in Afghanistan and Iraq, and though he’s not immune to the emotional impact, he can at least turn it off to complete the mission. He knows Carmen has no such training to fall back on.
As if she can hear his thoughts, Carmen stands up and walks over to him, wiping tears away as she nears him.
“Do you think there’s any point in trying to go back down there?” she asks.
“I was thinking about that. We checked all the floors from eight and up. All of them are overrun, and on each floor, we saw some of the residents had been turned. I don’t think there’s much left to check on. But…”
She interrupts him. “We didn’t check seven and below.”
“Exactly,” he says. “It’s worth a shot.”
“Will you help me carry my parents to the edge?” she asks.
“Of course, but are you sure? I mean, if we’ve lost the building, we don’t need to…”
“They would want this. Just help me, please.”
D-Day gives her a quizzical look, but they go and grab her mother’s body, and he doesn’t say anything. He starts heading for the side of the roof where they have been disposing of all the bodies, but Carmen pulls him toward the spot where Melissa has gotten stuck. “Help me lay her down on the edge of the parapet,” she says. With her mother in repose, she steps to the side and leans over.
“Hey, you psychotic bitch!!” she yells. Melissa cranes her neck and looks up. When she sees Carmen, she scowls and flips her off. “My mother says hello!”
With that, she pushes her mother’s body over the edge and watches it tumble in the air on its way to Melissa.
Melissa’s eyes go as wide as pie plates as the body drops straight at her. She doesn’t have the necessary reaction time to try to get out of the way, and the body hits her, snapping her head back but not killing her. Carmen swears she hears her neck snap all the way up on the roof. As the body of Elizabeth Bustamante falls away and continues to follow the pull of gravity, Melissa’s arms and legs go slack. Her head lays back at an awkward angle, her eyes looking forever upward. She blinks and moves her mouth, but no sound comes out.
“What’s that?” Carmen calls out. “I can’t hear you! You’ll have to speak up!”
A faint voice is carried up by the wind.
“Kill me.”
Carmen looks at D-Day.
“We can just cut the rope,” he says. “Or if you want to get your dad…”
“No, I think he’s good up here,” she says. Leaning over the edge, she shouts “An easy death is too good for you! You can die slowly, dehydrating in the breeze, staring at the sky. Enjoy the view, and have fun thinking about the fact that ultimately, it was my mother who killed you. You fucking psycho bitch.”
She turns from the edge of the building and looks at D-Day.
“Now what?” she asks.
He stares at her, making a mental note to never get on her bad side.
“D-Day?” she asks again.
“Sorry. Now, we check the seventh floor and lower. If they’re not overrun, we can check apartments, looking for anything useful, and then we decide if we want to stay in the building knowing that there are hundreds of zombies above us, or we leave.”
“How do you propose we leave?”
“We go out the back,” he says. “The walkway to the building from the garage is covered and secured by badge readers. I don’t think any zombies will be there. Once we get to the garage, we beeline to my bike and get the hell out of here.”
“And go where?”
“North. Away from the city, less dense population centers, fewer zombies.”
“What if the whole building’s overrun?” she asks.
“Then we come back up here, get another rope from the maintenance room and rappel down the side of the building to the top of the walkway to the garage and use it to get to my bike.”
“Can we wave at Melissa on the way?”
“Sure thing,” he says.
The pair heads back into the maintenance building and pulls the pry-bar from under the stairwell door. D-Day opens it and listens. It’s quiet.
“Well,” he says, “Let’s get moving.”
Eight
D-Day pushes the door to the seventh floor open a few inches. It’s quiet on the other side, so he pushes it all the way open and steps through, sweeping left to right with the rifle. Carmen follows him, gun at the ready, but there is no threat.
He turns to her. “Do you need a few minutes?”
“You don’t need to baby me. We need to figure out what we’re doing. I can grieve later.”
“Okay then. It’s the age old question. Should we stay, or should we go? We can still find supplies here on the lower seven floors. I’m sure we can go two or three weeks before all the perishables are beyond eating. Then we can get into the canned stuff. We can store enough water to last us a long time, months, and maybe we can be comfortable with the undead all around us in the building.”
She considers this for a minute. “Anywhere we go, the undead will be all around us. That’s the world we live in now.”
“True, but if we can make it up north, there are fewer people, which means fewer zombies. There are parts of Wyoming, Montana, hell, even in the mountains here in Colorado
where there are so few people you’d be hard pressed to see anyone, let alone a zombie. We’d have fresh water, fish and animals to hunt.”
“If,” she says. “Getting out of the city is a big if, let alone getting north of here. Remember, I drove across town when this started, and…oh my God!”
“What?” D-Day says, spinning, rifle ready to fire.
“This is all my fault. If I hadn’t lost control of my bike, the west stairwell wouldn’t be full of zombies, and that bitch wouldn’t have been able to let them in! I got everyone killed!” Carmen’s breath is coming in gasps now, and she’s on the verge of crying.
“Carmen, Melissa was crazy. She would have gone and let them in even if they weren’t in the stairwell. I had everyone out collecting supplies, or they would have been safe in their apartments. You can’t dwell on all the things that led to this. What matters is what we do next, okay? Don’t come apart on me now.”
She takes a few deep breaths, collecting herself. When she’s back in control of her breathing, D-Day says “You were saying? You rode across the city to get here. What was that like?”
She looks at him with eyes still moist from her near-breakdown.
“It was chaos,” she says. “Under the best conditions, rush hour traffic clogs the roads out of Denver, and that’s not with a city full of the undead on people’s tails. I was coming from Federal Boulevard, maybe four, four and a half miles from here. I probably had to drive ten miles to avoid the traffic jams, the hordes of undead. I cut through that park across the street to avoid traffic and had to dodge several cars just to cross the street. I bet the roads are impassible now.”
“Okay, so I hear a vote for ‘stay here,’” D-Day says.
“At least for now, I think we need time to come up with our escape plan, don’t you? I’d rather not go out there without some idea of what the hell we’re going to do.”
“It would be better to have a plan, yes.”
“Okay, then we agree. So what now?” Carmen looks at D-Day with tired eyes. The playfulness from earlier in the day is gone. She’s tired, and grief weighs on her.
“We need to get some supplies together, some water, and I’d feel a lot better if I could resupply our ammo.”
“How can we do that? The tenth floor is overrun! We’ll never get back to your apartment.”
“I have some thoughts on that. Here, follow me,” D-Day says.
He leads her down the hall to apartment 714 and runs the master key through the lock. They enter the room with guns ready, covering opposite sides of the room as they go. The apartment is empty but in disarray. Whoever lived here packed their essentials in a hurry, with kitchenware and clothing strewn everywhere. D-Day walks over to the living room window, which, like in his apartment, is divided into three panes and is floor-to-ceiling.
“I'm going to go to the roof, rappel down to my apartment, breach through the window, get my gear, lower it down here to you, then rappel from the tenth floor to here. Then we’ll be better prepared no matter what the future holds.”
Carmen knits her brow in worry. “Is that safe? I mean, can you do that and not get hurt?”
“There always a risk, but I’ve got a lot of time in a harness, and there’s plenty of equipment on the roof for the window washers. Our murderous friend didn’t know what she was doing, but I do. I’ll be fine.”
“Okay. But please be careful. I can’t deal with any more loss today,” Carmen says. Her eyes are welling up with tears as thoughts of her parents’ demise pass through her head.
D-Day turns to the window and fires two rounds into the glass. He grabs a floor lamp, unplugs it, and slams the base into the window. The glass gives way, the base punching a hole through the laminated layers of glass. He hits the glass around the hole, making it bigger until finally the whole pane of glass breaks out of the frame and tumbles eighty feet to the ground. The smell of death and rot, much stronger than it was on the roof, invades the apartment. Being sixty feet closer to the ground than they were on the roof, the noise from the undead is clearer too. Their growling, feet shuffling, their unfeeling bodies hitting the sides of cars and other immovable objects, and a periodic far off gunshot accompany the odor of death.
“Ugh,” Carmen says, wrinkling her nose. “Get moving so we can go to a different apartment.”
D-Day takes off his rifle, checks the magazine to make sure it’s full and lays it on the coffee table.
“In case anything happens, you might need this.” He takes extra magazines from his vest and puts them on the table. Carmen frowns at him. “I have another rifle I’m going to bring. I don’t want to wrestle with two.”
“Come back to me, D-Day. It’s not a request.”
“Hold the fort, keep the home fires burning and if I’m not back in twenty-four hours, call the president,” he says with a smirk.
Carmen smiles. “One of my favorite movies,” she says.
“You’re kidding me! I knew there was a reason I like you!”
“Will you go already? Lo-Pan isn’t going to kill himself.”
D-Day leaves the apartment, impressed she knows Big Trouble in Little China well enough to quote it. It would have been nice to know her under different circumstances.
He goes back to the stairwell and climbs to the roof, again. He heads to the equipment room and grabs a harness, a pair of gloves and a pair of ropes. As he exits the building, he catches George Bustamante’s dead body out of the corner of his eye. He drops the rope and walks over to the edge of the roof overlooking the paralyzed form of Melissa, the psycho killer. Her eyes are shut, but she still has the pink hue of blood in her cheeks. With her back arched, straining against gravity, he can see a dark stain in her pants where she’s urinated on herself. With her broken neck, D-Day is sure she has no idea unless she can smell it. There’s a light breeze making her sway a little and bounce into the building. Her eyes flip open, startling D-Day. Even paralyzed from the neck down, her glare is malevolent. If looks could kill, he’d be mortally wounded right now.
He pulls his pistol from the holster and takes aim, firing two shots. The first clips her ear, making her eyes flutter and a raspy gasp escape her throat. The second one hits her in the forehead, and her eyes shut forever.
He holsters the pistol, turns and grabs the harness and the rope, and heads to the opposite side of the roof. Peering over the edge, he finds the shattered window from apartment 714 on the sidewalk twelve stories below. Using that as his landmark, he finds the tether point closest to it. He ties off both ropes and throws them over the edge, then climbs into the harness.
Since the window washers keep their personal gear with them, he just has a carabiner for his descender. He’s not going far, and with no other options, it will have to be enough. He clips in, checks the rope one more time, then climbs onto the parapet. He leans back, feeding rope until he can get his feet firmly on the side of the building. Looking down, from this angle he can see the windows two floors below. He walks his way down the twelfth-floor window, and he can see he’s lined up with the left most windowpane rather than the center. Again, it will have to do.
He passes the eleventh floor and stops for a minute to catch his breath. He can feel his heart pounding in his chest, his adrenaline pushing through his system. He takes a few deep breaths to calm himself and proceeds to the tenth floor. If he’s done everything right, he’s about to enter his living room and not his neighbor’s. He ties off the line so he can hang freely without using his brake hand, and draws the pistol. He fires shots at each corner of the window and several in a circle about a foot away from the center. He starts to holster his pistol, then thinks better of it, changes the magazine, and puts it away.
It's the moment of truth. He pushes back from the building, hoping he’s damaged the window enough to break through it. He extends his legs, and they crash through the glass, but he stops at about mid-thigh. He wiggles his legs, trying to get them loose from the laminated double-pane, but he’s unable to get free.
A bolt of cold fear runs through him. Something grabs his foot, but through the shattered glass and tinted laminate, he can’t see through to the other side. Now, something has a hold of both of his feet, and pulls him hard, through the glass and into his apartment. He releases the rope and drops to the floor, staring up a trio of zombies.
Nine
D-Day kicks his leg free of the creature that has a grip on him. His pistol is already in his hand, and he fires several shots, perforating torsos and limbs, releasing the foul smelling spoor. The zombie that had ahold of his leg drops dead, a third of its head missing after one of the rounds tears a path through it. He kicks at the side of the knee of the second one. Dead or not, the knee is still the weakest link. It drops on the carpet next to him, and he puts a round into its head at point blank range. Lights out.
The third one grabs D-Day’s hair. He jerks away from the thing’s grip, grateful he keeps his hair short, and the revenant can’t get a better grip on his locks.
He spins on the floor, locking his legs in the zombie’s legs, and twisting. It loses its balance, falls to the left, and takes out the remainder of the window as it tumbles out of the building and falls one hundred feet to the sidewalk.
More zombies are coming. D-Day sprints to his open apartment door and slams it shut. The noise no doubt alerts the undead in the hallway to his presence, but even with a suppressor on the pistol, the commotion with the terrible trio no doubt had already done that.
With his back to the door, he counts four more of them homing in on him. He puts two down before the slide locks back on his pistol. He barely has time to free his knife from its sheath when the third one is on him. He kicks the side of its knee, sending it to the carpet, and steps to the side of number four. Its momentum carries it to D-Day’s left, the bloodied and broken hand passing a fraction of an inch past his face. He grabs that arm and pulls, driving the knife into its ear and pushing it into the hilt. The creature’s power goes out, and it collapses, dropping to the carpet and rolling against the door, taking D-Day’s knife with it.