The elderly couple stopped screaming and began to moan in a similar fashion as the zombies. Their eyes became an opaque white and the stopped breathing in a matter of seconds.
Still sitting there in their wicker chairs like two inert dolls, their zombification processes had been completed and their mouths opened. Always miserable looking, they let loose streams of foam and saliva.
Akira gave a jump to the ground that sounded more like a splash and headed toward one of those lights at great speed, ripping out a cry from her rotten throat.
The other infected zombies came in droves to where she was while a few managed to keep up with her.
More lights were turned on and some doors were opened for the night. To their curiousity, and terror.
A woman dressed in a pink nightgown, no more than fifty years old, was one of those that turned on the light of her dining room and left the door open. In slippers and white hair pulled back into a ponytail, she snooped around looking outside at the district, which was much narrower and only 9 metres above sea level.
Akira turned towards her with the same speed as something rolling down a hill. She ran very fast and on the way down she left a few toenails from her right foot on the asphalt of the road, separated by different phases of development.
The white-haired woman dreadfully opened her eyes and released a cry to the heavens like a halo of smoke that got lost in the air.
Akira jumped on her and pushed to the ground in a brutal tackle which caused the woman to hit her head against the floor of the entrance to her house.
After smelling the foul smell coming from Akira’s mouth, the woman felt a stabbing pain in her head. From the back, towards the nape of her neck, Akira looked with fury at the woman and lifted up her claw like fingers, showing off their black paint, and buried them right in her neck.
The blood filled the hand of the woman who, under the light of the entrance, was incredibly frightened. Akira cupped her hands and lapped up the blood coming from her neck. She then proceeded to scratch her chest.
The woman’s nightgown was torn in two, and one of her breasts appeared with the nipple turned inwards. Suddenly, the blood coming from her torn chest covered her body in blood. Akira proceeded to scratch the woman’s face, drowning out the woman’s cries, having still been stunned by the sudden brutal tackle. Her eyes were open like saucers, extremely frightened.
Akira sat on the woman’s belly with her legs open, and clawed at the woman against, blood splattering the ground and her own face. A dark tongue came out of her mouth and she proceeded to like the sprinkled blood on the edge of her mouth and on the woman. The woman began to convulse on the ground and her eyes forever changed.
Akira then got up, leaving the woman for forgotten.
A flock of infected jumped into various terraces and smashed the glass of the sliding doors, going into dining rooms with the lights still on, traversing the broken shards of glass. They grasped their prey and chewed into their necks.
Some gnawed on their eyes.
CLIX
After listening to the story for the fourth time, Sebastián took in some moist sea air and began to cough. It was past one in the morning and they had enough to eat and drink, what with the industrial quantities of food in the bunker. Everything was canned, there was nothing natural, but they also had a fireplace with the torches crackling on the wall. The chimney led to one of the subsections of Águilas, possibly below the cliff of the skirt of the castle, which was lit by large spotlights pointing to its rocky walls.
The zombies walked around the castle, in all directions, without knowing where to go. They were irrational, Sebastián said for the thousandth time, while belching over a can of lentils.
‘If they, that’s to say, the infected, manage to penetrate this shelter, we will have to leave via the long tunnel and hide out in the second refuge that is even larger than this.’ He coughed a few more times, before continuing. ‘I, however, am too old to walk such distances, which is why I have chosen this as my first refuge. It cost me a bit to fill it up.’ It was obvious that he was referring to the food, as the water came directly from the walls, but there were other soft drinks and dozens of books and scrolls that he kept in secret, studying for years.
‘Sebastián, how old are you?’ Diego asked while chewing on some sausage, even after filling himself up.
‘What does it matter?’ Sebastián replied back. His eyes were old and tired. He had given them hot soup to remind them of that.
‘You’re right, Sebastián, it doesn’t,’ Diego said, swallowing the last piece of sausage.
‘What is the plan now?’ Juan asked, stroking his beard continuously, like a special hobby of his.
‘We wait,’ Sebastían replied back, entering into a coughing fit.
It was nearly two in the morning now, and silence reigned over the entire refuge. Neither had Javier continued his habit of complaining.
The hands of the clock continued their clockwise march, marking the minutes.
CLX
The panicked crowds and screams had not ceased throughout the Parra Pass, after almost two hours of uncertainty and fear. It seemed that, after all was said and done, there were still people left behind, drunk or ignorant, refusing to accept the events as real.
But it didn’t matter, because they had taken to the streets of Águilas from the north to the south, east to the west, and the infection was spreading like enormous tentacles. Some were converted into zombies and others were infected. Both were equally dangerous, regardless. The zombies were silent but slow, but the infected were like wild animals.
The latter allowed those crushed in the crowds to rise up again when the virus was introduced into their blood via scratches or bites.
This makes the first serum of life moot, as they had the serum in their very veins multiplied like a virus that could be transmitted to the dead, like Father Martín and the nurses’ syringes.
But this was an afterthought.
One thing led to another.
Only Sebastián knew all of the details and the process of zombification, in depth, in each case, in every moment, and what was really happening. Sebastián had, after all, already read King Hin A-Akila’s diary.
The acolytes, in the light of the moon, were still breaking open the tombstones in the cemetery and injecting the serum of life into the corpses, though it would have been enough for the infected to simply scratch them or bite them to get the same effect. These acolytes, however, did not know that.
Nor did Father Martín know it.
He had found the first book of King Hins A-Akila, but he couldn’t find the second book. The newspapers had already spread the new of what was happening.
They continued praying.
‘Even the dead shall recognise me…’
In the crowds of panicked people, shouts and confusion reigned, death and life, and no one knew what to do about the zombies and infected. Everything was just chaotic gibberish that no one could think in the panicked city of Águilas.
Neither could the Lorca and Murcia security forces, who had already cut off all access via the main roads via an avalanche of alarms. They couldn’t understand, they only had orders.
No one could leave or enter the city of Águilas.
That was an order.
CLXI
One of the many vehicles that circulated the RM-11 motorway that joins Águilas with Lorca, saw with surprise as a row of other vehicles, with red lights illuminating the night, were bumper to bumper, drivers felled and hunched next to their cars. The majority of them quite young. The idea was to get to Águilas for the carnival and get pissed, nothing more.
However, the civil guard was preventing it. The road was cut to the movement of vehicles and several cars had their blue lights lit, shining in the night. Several civil guards were walking along the motorway on foot with their bright uniforms, and a few others were right in front of the barrier that had been extended.
The agents’ intercoms talked continuously and there was even a string on the asphalt full of metal skewers.
Something strange is happening, several of the drivers thought to themselves. But what caught their attention was the presence of firearms in their possession. There were g36 assault rifles, Beretta 92’s, and some other, more recent, 12 calibres.
‘Officer,’ a young man began, leaning on his Peugeot 206 with his arms crossed and his face illuminated with bursts of blue and yellow lighting. ‘What is happening here?’
‘Traffic has been cut off, sir,’ the officer replied back without even a hint of a smile.
‘I can see that, sir, but…’
‘Right now, all entry into and out of Águilas is restricted. Soon we shall proceed to detour all cars to Andalusia and, otherwise, a return to Lorca via this same motorway,’ the officer announced, with the same face as before.
‘But what has happened, officer?’ The young man asked the officer with the intercom, clearing his throat.
‘I am just following orders, sir. Please, get back in your car,’ he replied back coldly, lowering his lights before continuing, ‘It is necessary to protect yourself. Get in your car, lock the door, and roll up all windows.’
The face of the young man was stunned.
And the officer, with a G36 assault rifle hanging over his shoulder, was summoned and walked away from the young man with the crisp, yellow vest.
The young man opened his car and took a seat. Inside, the other occupants, three boys and a girl, were smoking marihuana.
‘Are you bloody daft? Can you not smoke that shit in front of the bloody police and state agents that are surrounding us on all sides?!’ The young man shouted, his voice reverberating in the interior of the car.
His friend, Rubén, a young man with curly blonde hair, offered hi m a hit of the joint. He took it, and with a grimace as close to a smile as possible, gave it a whiff.
‘So, what is happening outside?’ The girl asked from the back seat, between two of the young men. None of them more than twenty years old, and in the boot of the car there were several litres of whiskey and rum with some coca colas.
‘Nothing! They just said that we cannot enter into Águilas,’ The young man informed his mates. ‘They are going to detour us out of here.
‘Then why the deployment of road safety and these guards with the automatic weapons?’ one of the other young men, sitting next to the girl, asked.
‘How should I know?’ The young man replied back. ‘They are the civil guard from DGT and the Spanish civil guard, and they have closed off access for nothing.’ The young man let out a giggle. ‘Who are they again?’
‘I don’t know,’ Rubén replied back. ‘I can only see the local police from the DGT, nothing else.’ He said with a laugh.
Suddenly, the purr, or rather, the roar of an engine flooded the skies. It was a civil guard helicopter that lit up with great focus on the cars below. It was flying low.
CLXII
A group of them were entrenched in the water reservoir in Los Collados. There were at the edge of the reservoir, in pyjamas or in pants, with the fresh ocean air hitting their sweaty bodies. They were shaking. Luckily, the infected couldn’t reach the area, for the time being. They were armed with broom sticks and chairs to scare them off. In addition, they had thrown down the metal ladders that had allowed them to climb up to the top of the reservoir. It was a platform of about 50 square metres. More than enough for a group of about twelve people, the ones who had made it.
At the moment, they were safe, but others were not so lucky.
The whores were among them.
Although they were located near the entrance to the Los Collados district, in the lowest part and in a small residence high up in the hills, those infected by Akira Hins were all over the place.
The clock marked two in the morning and the infected group was divided into two groups. Akira ran back down the road to Calabardina, toward the roundabout at the entrance to Águilas, which led directly to the shopping centre, right next to the Hornillo cinema and the auditorium. She ran along the asphalt, letting her toenails fall off to the road and oozing greenish liquid that marked the ground where she had gone.
The group ran in the opposite direction, not back to Águilas, but rather to Calabardina. Before that, however, that had arrived to the whorehouse in the middle of the road with customers inside.
One of them, with a red wig and a kilogramme of makeup caked upon her face to cover up bruises inflicted upon her by her pimp with his fists was on the edge of the road to Calabardina. Every time someone passed by, they would scream something to her signalling her to leave, with repeated honkings.
Eva, known as Tasmania to her clients, just gave them the finger.
She did the same to other cars that passed by to warn her. No one saw these gestures, as they were driving at full speed.
She wore a miniskirt so short that you could see her vagina if she bent over a little. She wore no panties and her top was a bright blue sweater that showed off the crack of her two large operated breasts. She had a beautiful face, though she had very pronounced teeth that looked very donkey-like.
She had a bag that was decorated with many shiny stones, plastic, obviously, garish red lipstick, and a dozen condoms.
Ten euros for a blowjob.
But as the night went on, the cars didn’t stop as usual. She figured that everyone was too drunk from the carnival. It was the night to party, afterall.
From where she was, she had not heard of anything happening in Los Collados. Though, she did see many lights flashing in the distance.
A group of infected had hot the apartment-hotel building, which was just in front of the whorehouse, and the prostitute suddenly heard a lot of noise and shouting. Among them was one in particular. It was this moaning like a thousand ghosts, sobbing through the night. When many lights starting coming on, she became concerned.
She didn’t know what was happening.
Though, there was no need.
She was there.
There was an unbearable stench in the air and a strange whisper, like a purr in a throat full of phlegm. She had heard it perfectly.
She turned around, only a half turn was enough to see it. At first, she said nothing, and her eyes widened more as it approached. She assumed that it was a drunkard in costume, but she said nothing.
But it looked at her.
Only for a few seconds.
The mouth of the infected was opened, searching for her neck. The whore’s eyes popped open this time, for she smelled no alcohol, but rather a rotting stench, like when someone suffering from a stomach virus farts.
She also saw its eyes, and noticed that it wasn’t breathing. She knew that those eyes weren’t normal, nor human.
Suddenly, she felt a pain in her neck that was so intense that she screamed like a siren. She felt something warm flowing down her neck and sliding up her breasts. Now the smell of shit was mixed with the sweet smell of blood and metal, like copper.
She put a hand around her neck and felt something flexible, like a rubber band, hanging from it. It was her jugular.
The infected looked at her with watery eyes, and something between its teeth.
It was part of her jugular.
She shouted again, but under the petty light of the moon, in the darkness, suddenly her heard started skipping a beat, beating wildly under her ribcage. She felt cold and hot at the same time.
She was frightened.
The infected turned its face and ran down the road to Calabardina, towards the beaches, towards other districts. With a noise that sounded like claws against the asphalt.
She heard it, but had already lost all of her sight, and the pain was slowly going away in a pleasant way.
Her heart stopped.
She stopped breathing.
And ceased to be a whore.
Five minutes later, she got
up and entered the whorehouse, where she was received by her companions with faces of horror upon seeing all of the blood on her.
‘What has happened to you?’
She didn’t answer back.
CLXIII
At two thirty in the morning, when everyone had already disappeared and the streets of the carnival had been suspended, there were still some drunks lying around on the streets, those who had started their pilgrimage through alcohol from mid-afternoon until now, oblivious to everything that was happening, were confused, lying about the ground, with grand headaches, and others, the more absurd, dancing to the lack of music.
Three of these were at the entrance to the Águilas shopping centre, leaning against the glass door, two of them dancing with a bottle of rum in their hands, singing something unintelligible and releasing a barrage of belches.
Akira Hins, guided by smell, was directed towards them.
‘Look at that dog,’ one of them said, the tallest and gauntest of the group.
‘That’s not a dog, you idiot,’ another said.
And the third one let out a belch that tore apart the silence of the night.
‘Well it seems to be running towards us,’ the first one spoke.
‘Don’t be stupid, it could be a police officer,’ said the belcher.
‘Have you even seen any police tonight?’
The other two shrugged, passing the bottle of rum for more drinks.
‘And the music? Where is the music?’
‘There is none.’
Akira Hins approchaed like a wild animal towards them, coming ever closer, running like a leopard. She was now leaving behind her very toes on the asphalt, as well as a green slime that smelled of dead dogs.
‘Blimey, that’s not the police,’ one said.
‘Not an officer.’
‘Since when do the police dress in white?’ one of them glimpsed while taking the bottle to his mouth.
‘It’s a girl,’ the belcher said, letting out another burp, opening his mouth as much as he could so that it vibrated the very air.
Infected, Zombi The City of the Zol Page 28