by Thomas, Jack
I was still weak, better than before but overall still weak, but my will was stronger than my weakness. I wasn’t going to die there. Not after all the other junk I survived the last few days.
I forced my body through the dizziness and weakness to finish the third lap around the room, and a sharp left turn into the hallway followed. It was a narrow hallway that could fit maybe two people side by side, the infected struggled to get in all at once but eventually they seeped through, one at a time. I kept my pace up while I approached two turns up ahead. One went left and the other went right. I made a quick choice and turned left. It was the wrong choice.
The left turn led to a dead end too far from to get back from. The infected already took the left turn too by the time I realized I needed to turn around. I was trapped. I couldn’t go back through an impossible number of runners. I could barely outrun them; there was no survival in a head on collision with them. I kept my pace down the hallway till I hit the wall at the end and became completely trapped. With my back against the wall I noticed something over me when I stared at the stampede of infected headed my way, a ventilation system that opened directly overhead. It wasn’t a dead end after all. And the ceiling was low enough for me to reach it with a good enough jump. On the first hop I knocked the protective cover out of the way and on the second one I grabbed a hold of the edges and went up. I barely made it in.
The infected crashed the wall and brushed against the bottom of my sneaker as I entered the vent. I moved down the ventilation system. It would be a matter of time before I found the way back to the surface with the use of the vents.
I crawled through until I reached more darkness. So many runners being in one location at the same time was a concern for me. I refused to take an exit downwards. I feared I would fall back into another large number of infected and not be able to get back up. Although I could have apologized for having crashed their party and asked them for help back into the vents since I’m sure they would have lent a hand out of the kindness of their hearts. But that was more of a last resort.
The ventilation system looked endless through my eyes. I crawled and crawled but found no way out. It still managed to be safer than travel below, with all the runners gathered up. My search for an exit was useless, now I faced death in a vent somewhere in the middle of nowhere important. Not only was there something obviously wrong with me to the point that I kept pulsing health and sickness back and forth, but to crawl in such a tight spot took away energy I wanted to save too. I stopped crawling and laid down to sleep. It was a comfortable spot to sleep in and regain some energy; tight and protected. The exception to the pleasantry of the vent was the cold from the outside that flowed through, but considering the circumstances, I could live with sleep in the cold. After all, I’ve managed worse conditions in the days prior.
The cold woke me back up. I didn’t dream a thing. Time no longer mattered, especially not in the vent of the public transit system. But even if I made it outside, the time was no longer important, day and night, that’s all that mattered. I felt great again, but the last time that I felt great lasted a short while before I felt like I would die again. My power nap gave me enough energy to move for a bit longer. Who knew how much rest I had? I was going to avoid sleeping in the vent again; I needed to make some progress in my travel.
I manage to make it to a climax point in the story of The Vent and Me. But it wasn’t exactly the climax I looked for. Two paths were ahead of me, but it wasn’t left or right. The choices I came across were to either climb twenty or so feet upwards, without anything to hold on to, or go straight down into no-man’s-land. Clearly I chose the impossible climb upwards. But because they were located one directly over the other, if I messed up on the top it meant I would crash down to the bottom and end up where I didn’t want to go in the first place. I moved to the edge and looked up. The passage was narrow enough for me to press my beck against one side and my knees against the other. This would allow me to crawl up with ease, but if I slipped from such a height in a spot so tight it would surely kill me. So many doubts and second thoughts came to my mind while I analyzed the situation. Nothing would suck more than to die because of a fall during the zombie apocalypse.
Once I was convinced that going down involved the likelihood of infected waiting for me, I got into position to go up. Back against one side and hands and knees against the other; it was time to climb. (Look ma, I broke gravity!) For obvious reasons this was a painful position to be in, but I sucked it up and gradually climbed for what seemed like forever, limbs tired and burned from so consistently rubbing against the sides of the vent on my way up. Eventually I reached the top and left the vent into an alley.
Walls surrounded me; there was no way to get to my current location without the vent which I just used or by going down the ladder that sat in front of me. With no other exit options, I went over to the ladder and climbed it to the top of a one story building. It was flat but long enough so that I couldn’t see what was on the ground on the other side of it. As I reached the opposite side of the building I saw where all of the infected in the tunnels and railways come from. I was at one of the train stations and below me on the ground, hundreds upon thousands of infected stood around with no purpose or direction.
I was reasonably safe on top of the building. I assumed it was the train station entrance which I stood on but there was no way I could know for sure from up there. As I focused on the crowd I mapped out a route to successfully move around them and work my way out of the area. To anyone else, including me, it would have looked impossible to make a move through such a thick crowd.
The headache returned but it wasn’t accompanied by dizziness so it went ignored.
I rehearsed the path in my head that ached: Jump off of the building into the trash, out of the trash and under the car, away from the car and around the bus stop; wait a second while they catch up, double back to the car and use the car as a boost to the truck behind it, over the fence by the truck and clear. Now how simple was that? It made complete sense and I was convinced I could get away with it but I wasn’t convinced my mind was being honest with me about being convinced. Yeah, it’s confusing.
I took my attention away from the mass of infected and looked for a safer and more invisible way to get away from all of the infected but the lack of light and the fact that I didn’t know my surroundings well left me with no results. It was just a sea of infected below me. I sat on the edge of the building and looked around at everything in my visual range, not much.
“Hey, you!” a boy’s voice came to me from somewhere in between the infected and pierced the silence. “Hey! Down here!” and again the voice of a child I couldn’t locate, but all I needed to do was watch the infected till they led me to the source of the sound, which they did. The infected closed in on…each other. They were all headed for the middle of the bunch.
At first my thoughts didn’t make much sense. Maybe there was some sort of invisible person that stood in the middle and asked for help. I mean, a zombie apocalypse just occurred; would it be much of a stretch to believe invisible people could exist too? I think not!
Shortly after my burst of irrational thoughts I spotted a slightly opened manhole on the ground where the infected walked. There was something that held the passage to the sewers open while the infected stepped all over it.
“Is it safe on your side? Are there any infected in the direction you came from?” A glare shined the little bit of light back at me, two circles, glasses.
“I don’t know. It’s open in the building from which I came, and it isn’t safe in there!” I yelled out. Some of the infected became interested in me and walked towards the wall below me.
“Okay. Don’t mind that! To your far left is a fire escape that leads down here. You will hear a small explosion in a moment. When you do, make your way to me, and we will take you to a safer location,” the boy told me. What did he mean by ‘we‘? How many others were still alive?
“Okay, I
got it!” I stood off the edge of the building and tried to see the fire escape the kid mentioned. When he said far left, he meant far left. It was at the other corner of the building. I went down it and reached the ground level. But there wasn’t much for me to do once I was there, other than wait for the explosion. I questioned how large the explosion could be and mid way through the thought a loud “boom” interrupted. Question answered. It caught me off guard so I flinched and took a cowardly yet somehow defensive pose, with my arms over my head as though I would somehow be harmed by the explosion. It was loud enough to assume a bomb went off, a car exploded, or someone kept a grenade handy. I kept my back to the ladder just in case I needed to go back up but that moment didn’t come. The infected moved as a unit in the direction of the explosion, and I took that as my chance to make a run for the manhole.
Most of the infected were already on the other side of the manhole. I slowed my pace so that upon my arrival to the manhole, they would all already be clear of it and I could enter successfully. The plan was executed with ease and I made it safely and unharmed to the manhole. It opened entirely and the lid was slid onto the ground next to the hole. A pale white boy with short black hair and thick rimmed glasses greeted me at the entrance to the hole. “Alright, come on,” he said as he went down the ladder he held on to.
I followed and grabbed a hold of the ladder and made my way down a bit before I grabbed the manhole lid and tried to slide it closed, but didn’t manage to close the hole entirely because of the white piece of a cement brick in the way. The same brick that held the manhole open while the infected walked over it. I continued on my way to the bottom and when I arrived the boy with the glasses was standing next to a Hitler perfect teen with a lantern. Short spiky blonde hair and aqua blue eyes, with light skin as well. I started to believe that anyone even slightly tanned was killed or infected. I hadn’t come across anyone with dark skin for a while at that point. It became a pasty white world.
“Hurry up. We need to get back over ground before the infected overrun this tunnel,” the blonde guy said as both he and the boy with the glasses commenced their stride down the sewers.
The sewers were as expected, like anything you’d see in a movie. Roundish tunnels with small waterways in between small sidewalk-like ground on either side of the tunnel.
“Who are you guys?” I asked.
“Edwin,” said the boy with the glasses after he turned around and faced me.
“Strobe,” said the blonde.
“That’s not really his name. He hasn’t told any of us what his name is. I’m guessing Strobe is his last name or some lame nickname he came up with.” Irrelevant bit of information the Edwin boy wanted share with me.
We didn’t walk too far before we came up to another manhole. Edwin went up first and waited at the top. “Come on,” he told Strobe and me.
“You go ahead. I’ll follow,” Strobe told me with an insane lack of emotion in his voice.
I gave him a nod and went up ahead. As I came out of the sewers, the inside of a warehouse became visible not too far from the subway station from which I came out. In fact, it was part of the subway station. Trolley carts and flatbeds were in the warehouse. The warehouse wasn’t completely sealed off though. It contained a few open entrances. There were no infected inside as far as I could tell. The survivors must have found a way to keep the infected away. Although it was also possible there were infected in the warehouse that left in search of the explosion.
Strobe came out of the sewers shortly after I did. He led the way with the lantern. The power in the warehouse was gone, like everywhere else. Strobe led us to a trolley cart that was half inside the warehouse and half outside. He opened the back door to it and stepped inside. I stepped in next and Edwin followed me in. The first thing I noticed once I entered the trolley was the rest of the survivors in this small group.
There were three other people inside the trolley car. It must have been their home for the time. The window on the opposite side that I came in through had a line of sight that reached all the way to the roof where Edwin spotted me. My conclusion; they are the ones who set off the explosives that allowed my safe passage.
“Look what we found,” Edwin said as he walked passed me towards the other three survivors.
There was a man and woman both in their mid thirties and a younger girl a few years older than Edwin.
“Welcome to our box,” the older man said. He walked over to shake my hand. “You can call me Mishayelle. If it’s too much of a hassle, feel free to cut it down to Misha.” He had a large smile on his face and confidence that overwhelmed rational thought. I was under the impression that he thought himself the reason this group was alive, or maybe even the leader.
The woman and younger girl sat on the same seat together. The young girl ignored my very existence but the older woman acknowledged my presence and waved kindly. “Make yourself at home,” she said.
Although it would have been great to sit and talk to people instead of move around in an attempt to stay alive, there was a reason that was currently my life. It was safe to assume these people lived in this town before the outbreak, so they must have known how to maneuver it. “I need to return to a friend of mine. We were separated in the transit tunnels.”
The older woman and girl instantly stood up as I finished.
“How far from here are they?” Misha asked, no longer holding up that smile on his face.
“I’m not sure. He can’t be too far. We were on our way to meet a larger group when we were split up.
That larger group has been moving through unpopulated areas to avoid casualties.” I explained to Misha. The woman and girl walked over next to Misha and listened in.
“How can I help?” the woman asked. She liked the idea of not living in a steel box for the remainder of her life.
“There isn’t any way to help,” Misha’s words shared the harshest truth of survival. There is no way to help, there is just a different sense of security with people.
It would turn out to be a journey in the dark, aimlessly in search of Marcus. And that is all without mention of the infected we would have to pass on the way back.
“There is one thing we can do.” I knew it was a terrible plan but it was also our only method to find the rest of the survivors.
“What is it?” Strobe at some point joined in the conversation without being noticed and became impatient as he waited for me to tell him what my plan was.
“We have to go back into the subway station, the same way I came out and find the guy that can lead us to them,” I said and waited for their reaction.
“That seems simple enough. What’s the catch?” Misha responded.
“It’s filled with the infected, the ones that can run…” I said. If they didn’t agree on going after Marcus, I would have no option but to travel the streets on my own and continue my path to the school. Doing that alone would be much scarier after being around people for the last two days. There weren’t many other choices.
“If I can get your help, we have no time to spare before the man we track goes out of range.” I hoped someone would assist so that I wouldn’t have to go with plan B and abandon Marcus.
“I’ll do it! I don’t want to die in here,” the older woman spoke up.
“Me too!” the younger girl followed.
“Everyone, hold up a moment! Let’s think this through.” Misha tried to control the impulsive decisions that everyone made.
“There is nothing to think of, old man. We need to get out of here and this is our ticket to freedom,” Strobe said.
“I guess I’m in too. I don’t want to be stuck in here alone,” Edwin put in his two cents.
“Haste decisions like this will get us all killed!” Misha’s voice straight as he held back a hint of anger and the want to yell.
“So be it. We can’t stay in here for much longer. We don’t have food or water and eventually the infected will return to this area. I’m not waiting for that,�
�� the older woman spoke up.
“Lizbeth, there has to be another way,” Misha responded to her.
“They picked what they want to do. We can’t waste more time, Misha. We need to get a move on. Do what you want. Die here if it’s your dream come true, but let everyone else make their own choice. I’m going back. If anyone plans to come along, keep up because it’s a pretty confusing path,” I tried to speed things up. This Misha guy became a pain in the ass. It was a new world and this man needed to get with the program and adapt to the methods of survival for this new world.
“Come, Mara. We’re going with him,” Lizbeth said to the girl.
“This is not the wisest choice at the time. He can be like the other people we’ve run into and strip us of whatever we have left!” Misha expressed his concerns for what my intentions could be. Immediately after he expressed his concerns he picked up his jacket and put it on to come along with us. Although he annoyed me rather fast and was somewhat of a cry baby, he wasn’t stupid. He knew when to be scared and when to make a move.
“We have nothing left to take! All that’s left is for us is to die here, if that’s what you intend,” Lizbeth replied with her own concerns.
It became clear that people were being faced with similar circumstances to what Marcus, Jason and the other survivors faced. It was the fourth day and already there were looters and robberies going on. People turned on each other for survival. Humanity can’t cope with itself, how did it ever expect to survive the apocalypse? The holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the multiple world wars, the multiple civil wars, slavery, homophobia, racism, holy wars; the vast stupidity of repetition. The fact that we have records of these events and yet a threat other than ourselves comes along and we still attack each other in such a repetitive and primitive fashion. The apocalypse didn’t start with the infection; it started at the birth of humanity, the infection just made it obvious.