Infected, Zombi The City of the Zol

by Hernández, Claudio

  ‘Exactly,’ he replied back with a gasp. ‘If they go or not.’

  The clock’s small hands passed faster and faster on their circular route, and the zombies began to crowd more and more, pushing against the entrance door and the San José Tower wall. The wood from the door, that the town council had considered restoring, was beginning to splinter, and would give way to the zombies at any moment. Meanwhile, the zombies began to groan and moan louder and louder.

  ‘And where are the bloody reinforcements announced from the helicopters?’ Where the bloody Hell are they? Javier said, holding his rifle up in the air, its steel shining in the sun like a diamond.

  ‘They’ll come eventually,’ Juan said, turning his back to him instinctively.

  ‘Clearly!’ Álvaro said. His chubby belly was beginning to sweat copiously.

  The seagull hovered back and forth near them, overhead but at a low height. Close enough to see the insect that it carried in its mouth. Or perhaps it was another blue finger?

  They averted their gazes and the seagull flew away like a white paraglider.

  ‘It is clear that we must help ourselves,’ Diego finally announced. ‘Who knows how long it will be until reinforcements from Lorca will come?’

  The young, Asian man closed his eyes, turned around, showing his large sweat stain stretching across his back, and returned back to the group of tourists awaiting him.

  Diego began to walk down the central aisle and towards the central cistern.

  ‘Juan, join me. Let’s inspect this castle a bit more and see what has survived throughout the centuries,’ he said, pointing towards Juan, before adding, ‘Why not?’

  Juan walked towards him with a smile hidden under his beard.

  LXX

  The five-year old girl woke up with a yawn and started the day asking for some milk. The two women looked at her compassionately, looking into her eyes and seeing that she could barely understand the concept of evil that was currently unfolding before their very eyes. A child’s mind is different and sees the world differently. They see the world through rose-coloured glasses.

  ‘I would like a glass of milk,’ her voice sounded, soft and thin.

  The seven-year old boy also woke up, stretching his arms and opening his eyes half-way, asking what had happened.

  ‘We had to leave our hiding place because of the bad woman,’ the blonde said, covering her shoulders, oblivious to the child.

  ‘Oh! The lady who wanted to piddle…’

  The little girl, named Silvia, elbowed the boy, who complained.

  ‘You cannot say that word!’ The little lady, with her arms crossed and forehead furrowed, said.

  The blue-eyed woman with curly hair smiled with reminiscence, forgetting for a moment her back pains and Carla, the aforementioned “bad woman”.

  ‘And why is she not here with us now?’ She asked, with her pinkish brow furrowing.

  The plump man stared at the blonde woman and the curly-haired Moroccan woman. For a moment, silence had invaded the group, until a voice broke the ominous silence.

  ‘She’s gone,’ the blonde woman responded.

  ‘Where has she gone?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe she went to find her brother.’

  ‘Does she have a brother?’

  ‘Of course! Just like you, right?’

  ‘I have no brother,’ she stated, and pointed to the seven-year old boy, adding, ‘He is not my brother.’

  The little boy opened his eyes wide, showing off the hollow sockets of his eyes.

  ‘If you say so!’ He exclaimed.

  ‘You are a naughty boy!’ The little girl responded back.

  The boy moved to sit next to the plump man on the floor.

  ‘And what about everything else? What is happening?’ The little boy asked, making the plump man and the two women uncomfortable with this question.

  LXXI

  Father Martín was ahead, directly in the centre, and surrounded on both sides by Father Guillermo and Father Isidoro. Father Martín was the most talkative of the three, with his bony arms inter inside the sleeves of his cassock. The wooden image of Christ still gleamed at them, hanging from his narrow neck, and one side of the cross leaning into a hole in the wall made by a bullet shot at point blank range. Though, the bullets mattered not. The heart was just physical, but wasn’t important to life. Eternal life didn’t need it. Carriers were also immune to head-shots. Their bodies kept moving and, until their very jaws dropped off, they could talk.

  They also walked faster than the infected zombies, with their cassocks fluttering in the air. People passed by, looking at them with shock, and some laughed, thinking that they had seen people dressed up for the carnival.

  ‘Soon… ’ he said, pointing a bony finger to most of them, ‘… you will all soon be mine, forever,’ Father Martín said with people laughing at him in confusion.

  ‘Oi oi! What a cool costume!’ A young man shouted, having a good morning. ‘They are zombie priests!’

  Father Martín smiled perversely.

  ‘No, not now. Now is not the time,’ Father Martín said to himself has he continued talking down Luís Prieto Street, with the intention of entering the mortuary. He would begin with the dead, he would take care of the rest later…

  Father Guillermo smiled under his opaque quite eyes, and Father Isidoro’s eyes glared with fury.

  They continued their march towards the mortuary through Martí and Castellanos Street before reaching the Virgen de la Piedad Mortuary, where three deceased persons, rigid as bones inside their coffins and pale as death, would soon be presented to the world.

  LXXII

  The horde of zombies was now making its way to Hornillo and Cocedores Beach, near the city limits of Águilas. They had already passed by the long Parra Pass, a passage of about three kilometres, shambling and dragging their feet wearily on the road, facing cars that came in front of them, passing them without stopping, with the addition of an alarm that sounded like a police siren. Some thoguth that they were just drunkards, but the zombies had already set their gaze the night before on the other beaches, as well as the Colón neighbourhood, slowly limping towards them, moving their mouths, catching chunks of moist air between their blood-stained teeth...

  And dragging their entrails, naturally.

  LXXIII

  The father spotted the Northern Health Centre building, striking the hard cement pavement with his cane. To his left were the yellow bungalows of Virgen de Fátima Avenue, closed off by fencing in order to avoid robberies by the Romanians who lived right next to them in a building of seven floors, all white, and with spots of brown, as if the building had been caught in the middle of a crossfire.

  They took Blasco Ibáñez Street and took a left, all in a silent row, under a burning sun. These people were dark complexed, but upon facing the health centre, their faces suddenly went pale.

  Like many others, they were panic-stricken.

  ‘Prepare for your shots,’ the father announced, halting and raising his cane again, pointing at the façade of the health centre.

  Behind him, there were murmurs.

  ‘There are a lot of white people, no?’ One of the young men noted, with his knife still in his hand, open and curving from the handle to the sharpest point of the blade.

  ‘Correct, there must be an epidemic in the city,’ the father said, clutching his dark hat with his fingers, full of gold rings that glittered in the sun, and placing it on his sweaty head.

  Suddenly, a man with a thin beard and drool hanging from his mouth like the mucous of a snail, crossed their path, looked at them, and, with a furious look, opened his mouth.

  The father leaned back and the trembling man’s teeth grazed his aquiline nose.

  ‘What is happening here?’ the father exclaimed, sounded broken and almost muted. ‘What is wrong with this man?’

  One of the young men with a knife held it up, watching i
t shine in the sun, stood in between the man with opaque white eyes and the father.

  ‘What the Hell is going on here?’ His voice sounded alarmed, judging by the tone. ‘Who are you?’

  That was when he saw it.

  There was blood on his neck and at the corner of his mouth. The blood was dry and his eyes were very white, with a hint of fury and violence.

  The young gypsy man, with his long, curly, dark hair showed him the edge of the knife with a trembling hand. The man let out a moan and began to drool blood and pus.

  ‘This bloke wants to hurt us!’ The young man exclaimed, with his voice rising in volume until he could be heard by the others at the end of the unofficial line that had formed behind them. ‘Come at me, come here and I’ll spill your guts!’ The young man became more and more nervous, watching the man’s slowness, his raised hands, and his fingernails that were now covered in blood. ‘I’ll bloody kill you! I’ll shoot you or stab you!’

  The man approached the young gypsy and opened his mouth towards the edge of the knife. The young man gave the other a hard shove with his arm, and noticed how he put up no resistance to being pushed. Though, rather than complaining, the man just kept looking at him with that same rage filled gaze.

  ‘You bloody motherfucker!’

  The young man though that the tirade would have finished when he punctured the man’s heart with the knife, though this did not stop him. The father leaned farther back and wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief that he had taken out from the pocket of his jacket, sealed with eighteen carats of gold, with hundreds of grammes of gold shimmering off his fingers.

  ‘All of you, I’m not liking this at all!’ The father exclaimed, putting away his now damp handkerchief.

  The other young man, who was also long-haired but sported a ponytail and also sported a knife in his left hand, being left handed, stuck the drooling man in the heart again, who continued moving to everyone’s astonishment.

  ‘This son of a whore, what is it?’ The young man with the ponytail cried out, staring at the blade of his knife.

  He had stuck the heart, he was sure of it, but his mind refused to accept that the man, who had now received several stabbings, did not succumb to instant death, collapsing to the ground. On the contrary, the man still remained on foot, and began to approach them alarmingly, with hands outstretched and opening his mouth. It was not possible, that man shouldn’t possibly be alive. Though, it had never occurred to them that it could be a zombie. They were unfamiliar with these types of things.

  ‘Away, white man!’ The father’s voice sounded gravely. ‘Everyone get away, this man is dangerous!’

  Like a row of black ants, they all stepped back a bit with a great murmur. The others behind the group could not see what was happening there at the beginning of the line.

  Little by little they began to disperse. The men began to take out their knives and others shiny guns. The women protected the children, little by little witnessing the entire event.

  They saw two gypsy men pinning down the white man who refused to die on the asphalt. There was an immense cloud of uncertainty and ignorance that pervaded them, like a dark cloak in which the sun’s rays could not penetrate.

  With their eyes wide open, they watched as the two young men stabbed the white man from all sides, while the languid man, with his outstretched hands, grasped the knife’s edge. The man pulled him in close and stuck his teeth in his ear.

  ‘You’re dead now!’ The young gypsy with the ponytail shouted, bringing his hand to his ear which now began to bleed like an open faucet. ‘My ear is gone!’

  The drooling man had the ear between his teeth, his expression unchanged.

  The other young man, with the loose hair to his shoulders and a sweaty forehead, began to tremble in front of the white man and considered retreating more than once without saying a word. Though, there he stood, with his long knife at the ready, on that August morning, on the day of the Águilas Carnival.

  This was just the beginning.

  LXXIV

  ‘Can you hear that?’ The plump man noted, resting his finger on his lip. His hair was nappy and dirty, with a beard now forming around his face. It was a real beard.

  The two women sharpened their ears by tilting their heads slightly to one side, as if they had been method acting.

  ‘I don’t hear anything,’ the five-year old girl exclaimed, who was now sitting between the two women, still sans a glass of milk.

  Both women silenced the little girl with a whistle to the lips.

  ‘They can hear us!’

  The little girl looked at the women with her small, blue eyes, and lowered her head in silence.

  ‘They look like walkers,’ the man whispered.

  ‘What you do you mean? Like, hikers?’ There was a brief period of silence, before she added, ‘Is there any other, better, way to describe them?’

  The other woman shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘They’re zombies! I have seen them in the movies!’ The young boy interjected, who was sitting next to the man.

  ‘You talk so much!’ the little girl replied back, crossing her small yet dirty arms. ‘They will hear us!’

  ‘Yes! Of course!’ The Moroccan woman with the hijab wrapped around her head responded.

  During what was an interminable two minutes, they remained silent under the exit ramp of that building. They were at the end of the plaza of Pablo Iglesias Streets. The sound, which sounded a lot like belching and dry purring came from the opposite side, from the entrance, near the Repsol Petrol Station on the Lorca Motorway, the high street that connected everything to the Águilas city centre. Between the entrance and the exit, there would be about two hundred metres of plaza and a street that divided the One Hundred and Fifty Houses building, also known as Ángel María de Lera Road.

  The plump man raised his head from above the paved floor of the plaza, intending to not be seen, but whatever the problem was, he still did not know that the zombies had no vision. They were guided by smell alone, specifically the smell of blood, and the beating of the living heart. He saw them, and he ducked his head immediately under the ramp again.

  ‘They’re here…’ he whispered.

  The Moroccan woman put her hand to her forehead and grabbed the little girl tightly. She opened her eyes in surprise. She had heard the pistol being shot, and heard strange noises that seemed to sound like a torn jugular, though it was unintelligible. She had no idea what was happening, even though what the boy had said made sense to her. She only knew that things were bad and that they needed to get away.

  ‘Are they bad?’ The little boy asked in a soft voice.

  The blonde woman squeezed him tightly in her small but dirty hands. The little girl was silent, as if she had understood something.

  Suddenly, a voice could be heard, as if it were a greeting, a custom in Águilas. Could it be a human? One of them? The plump man did not peek out, for shortly after, he had heard a scream. The four of them listened carefully. It was a howling scream. The children looked down, ears covered, but their expressions remained the same.

  ‘Bloody Hell, you son of a whore! You have bitten me!’ And with that, the voice faded as grunting noises took over from the zombies that had now descended onto that part of the city, which, at the time, was not very crowded.

  They were now getting closer.

  A group of them had now descended upon Barcelona Avenue.

  LXXV

  ‘I think that it would be a good idea if we went to the health centre,’ Antonio said to his father, who was rather dizzy and had a dubious pain in his chest. He kept stroking his chest area, on the left side, with his fingertips.

  ‘No, I will be fine,’ Ángel responded to his son.

  Antonio shook his head and his voice locked onto his lips, finally speaking back up.

  ‘Nonsense, dada. It is better for everyone. The doctor will tell you what is wrong with you,’ Ant
onio responded with pale and dry lips.

  ‘Ángel, maybe it would be best to let the doctor have a look at you,’ his wife, Carmen, responded back, while her eyes opened up like plates. ‘I swear, you are more afraid of shots than a cat is to water.

  ‘Carmen, don’t start… ’ Ángel’s head twisted abruptly to one side as if it were attached to a string like a spinning top.

  Just then, José, the second eldest son, peered out the window and gasped, ‘Mama!’

  There was no one out there, but the entire street was completely stained with blood and already dried.

  ‘I’m agreed dada, let’s go to the doctor. I’ll join you,’ Mario said, another one of the older children. This one was especially strong, weighing in at over a hundred kilogrammes, unlike the other two older brothers, who were thinner and pure nerve. Their facial similarities were apparent, with long faces, dark eyes, and broad chins with thin lips that crossed their faces. The eldest of the group, Antonio, was the tallest, weighing in at about eighty-three kilogrammes.

  ‘Listen to your children, Ángel!’ Carmen scolded, touching her hair that was tied up. Her husband had always loved her long, wavy mane that was as black as a night without stars.

  ‘There is no one outside for the moment,’ José announced, turning to his brothers, who were all grouped in the dining room, including the women.

  Suddenly, there was a noise at the windowpane. There were two blows produced by a set of knuckles. José turned quickly, already nervous and on edge, but when he had seen who it was, he had relaxed.

  It was Porringui.

  ‘Open the window! It’s me, there’s no one out here!’ A muffled voice said from behind the glass. His grey, hazy hair was thin, showing his scalp, and his face was round. He was short, barely reaching the window.