by Paula Guran
But where was the Minister?
I shifted as the restraints would allow, and there was no sign of Dogwood. Some medical personnel were dickering nearby, a woman and middle-aged man. I overheard, “—what Phillips says it’s a miracle they survived this long, but we’ll soon sort them out.”
“You can’t threaten me!” I shouted, channeling the stern hybrid spirit of Clint Eastwood and Charlton Heston. “I deal with scarier things than you in my shoes every morning, and that’s only the stuff that’s real!”
He knelt down beside the stretcher then, one of those paternal doctors you just want to dose with something vivid and enduring, then set free in a shopping mall. We’d see who’s so smug then.
“My poor boy,” he said truculently. “What have you been doing to yourself?”
“No negotiation with terrorists, doc! Return my Minister to me immediately, and we’ll be on our way.”
“In your current state, you’ll poison any Reanimates who bite you!” he laughed, rotund and jocular.
“Ha. Ha. Yes. I fucked your daughter.”
I could see this statement displeased him as he backed away, so I tried to figure out these restraints now that I lacked his gaze. Curses! The Minister was much more talented than I in this area. I fiddled and tested and pulled, only to overhear:
“—flush their systems and clean out the muck, straighten them out good and proper.”
“Wait, what?”
Silence and blankly hostile faces. The Fear began to rise in me from some chill and murky underground well.
They couldn’t do that! They mustn’t! I was so close to being Twisted I could taste it in the very air. A few more months! That was it! The Minister and I had started on this path long before the zombies provided a reason.
We were ahead of the game!
It became obvious that I was thrashing and probably yelling when they came with glinting unfriendly needles to silence my uncomprehending horror.
I howled out, “The drugs are good for meeeeeee!” before icy oblivion climbed up a vein, put the chairs on the tables and turned out the lights.
I woke to the smell of smoke, who knows how long later, under a sense of vague, watery sedation. Unrestrained, which meant they were getting careless or trusting, but confronted with a mutinously solid door. However, I guessed that the smoke meant that the Minister was nearby, and about to teach them Proper Caution.
I dragged myself upright and everything felt wrong. The criminals had leached the drugs from my system and replaced them with weakness—fat and heavy metals, weighing me down. Peering through the door’s little window, I banged and hollered as best I could: “Fire! You can’t leave me in here with this maniac! Fire!”
A disorganized pack of people came and let me out, suspicious but fundamentally uninformed of my basic nature. There was something on the air along with the smoke, some primal trapped terror and confusion. These people had far bigger problems at the moment than even myself and the Minister could provide. It was at that moment I remember thinking that we might get out of this yet.
We’d had a lot of practice dealing with panic and disorder as it all came down, and this felt like a flashback or a sequel. First thing’s first, however, I had to locate Dogwood. I harnessed my rescue crew with a cry of “Dear Lord! Smoke!” and ran towards it, leaving nothing more than a startled, “Hey, wait!” in my wake. I figured they’d be keeping the Minister nearby, and that if I could keep these people off-balance enough, they’d forget to be too suspicious.
The smoke coincided with frantic hammering on a heavy door. I turned to the confused pack following me and cried, “What are you waiting for? Get the poor man out!”
Dogwood tumbled to the concrete and linoleum-tile of the corridor through thick smoke as the door opened, half-naked and wheezing, grabbing my leg.
“They tried to kill me, Horse!” he coughed. “Locked me in and left me to burn!”
“No more of that ‘Horse’ garbage, understand?” I hissed in his ear before straightening to proclaim, “This man is ill and my responsibility—”
But my words were interrupted as the Minister coughed till he was sick on my foot.
“Look,” a haggard youth said, unshaven and reeking of The Fear. “We don’t care about whatever line of bullshit you’re trying to spin. It doesn’t matter. And just trust me when I say you’ll fight with all the rest of us when the time comes.”
I nodded busily, grinning in what I hoped was a manner that spoke of agreement and total comprehension: “Indeed! Fighters, us. Stern repose. All that stuff.”
It seemed that we’d been less clever than I’d thought, but they really believed something terrible was coming. It seemed best to trust them on this, and just focus on getting the hell out of Dodge before it arrived. The Minister caught my attention again with another coughing fit, making me pull my foot out of range. His eyes rolled pink like an agitated lab-mouse, wearing nothing but boots and jeans, both legs torn raggedly so that one ended above the knee and the other courted indecency.
“Where are your clothes, Minister?”
“Burned ’em. Had to start somewhere.”
Of course he had, but it couldn’t be helped. Definitely time to be moving on, away from this foreign place and its aura of doom.
Wait, where are we, I thought?
The Minister and I staggered from the concreted area of our incarceration—gray, glass and steel—only to find ourselves on the third story of an incomprehensible madhouse, when we could see the ground. Vast walls and fences surrounded an area of something akin to four blocks, teeming with shanty structures and fetid masses of humanity. Buildings, clearly pre-existing the Reanimates or whatever these guys called zombies, hauled themselves up out of the complicated mass below. Few people were left at ground level, seeming to prefer to get as high as they possibly could.
What kind of lunacy was this?
Why were they all trying to get off the ground? It looked safe. Or were they looking out over the walls, and if that was the case, why were they freaking out so much?
The furled edges of a conclusion touched my mind, but I will admit that Dogwood got there before I did and saved us the trip upstairs to investigate.
“They’ve got zombies. A scorching case.”
Of course. All of Chantal’s weird behavior and the incomprehensible drug-theft treachery could fit if these misguided cretins were from the past, and simply hadn’t noticed that pattern. Morons.
This was something out of Mad Max. Razor-wire and gun-emplacements at the top of the wall, never mind that the repetitive noise would bring them in like nothing else. Well, excepting the smell of legion overheated unwashed humans, or maybe concentrated brain-radiation, or whatever it was they homed in on.
In any case, this place was sun-ripened spam in a can.
It was time to run away.
“You’re right, Minister! My god, these people are going to get us both killed!”
“Bad scene, man,” he grated on a smoke roughened throat. “Irresponsible.”
“Indeed! We need to get to the ground and get out before the zombies arrive.”
“What if they’re at the gates already?” he clutched my arm. “We might smell of food!”
A chill went through me, reminding me of how physically dissolute and watery I felt, sapped of Power and Resilience. A conundrum.
“These people will stockpile gear, Minister. For one thing, they’ll have ours. That should be enough to get free of this place. We must find it!”
The two of us slinked and reeled down sets of stairs to reach the ground, passing or jumping barriers across the stairs when we found them. We were straight-sober for the first time in living memory and the experience was ghastly, stripping away all the filters sane humans need to function and setting us loose like panicky rats under snake-eyes. There was nothing on these levels but shoddy hotel-sized units turned apartment shanty-towns. Not what we needed. I remember peering over banisters and scanning around for
a structure that would predate the Big Zs. It’d be run down and blocky. Utilitarian. Just scream “police.”
In the end, the Minister found it by falling down the stairs. He came to rest and, when the swearing died down, reported that there were low windows at the street, containing a six inch view of what looked like cells. And the Minister knew cells.
Breaking into police stations turned out to be surprisingly easy when all the police are AWOL for fear of flesh-rending horrors. I was bent on getting the lock picked or finding something to chisel the hinges when the Minister kicked in one of the ground windows and climbed inside.
“Minister!” I said, scrambling down to the window. “We want to avoid jail cells, and you don’t like them. Been very clear on that in the past . . . ”
“Door’s open, Horse . . . ” came the muffled response.
I dislike crawling over even the most tidily broken glass, but truly these were Desperate Times. Dogwood was missing, as happened frequently in times of stress and confusion, but would not stray far. I could hear him scuffling around somewhere beyond the cells, which were indeed open.
I called, “Find anything?”
“Cops stop filing when the world starts to end. Guess it’s been ending here for a while.”
The man can be a poet when he wants, when the demons aren’t soiling that part of his mind, or riding him around the city like a radioactive jet-propelled scooter bent on mass destruction.
The real question was, where would they have put our stuff? Or failing that, where would they have been keeping other people’s stuff, which we could then get into and abscond with? The search took some time, from memory, leading two increasingly desperate men—both of whom were in the early depths of different flavored DTs as the sedation wore off—through a plethora of pathologically dull police rooms. By a process of elimination we found an evidence lock-up, and it was there that the dark gods smiled upon us with their blackened grimy teeth and decided we’d suffered enough. If the cops had still been in a filing mood we might never have found it, but getting into all the lockers and drawers meant that we located bags that looked suspiciously like our supplies. The Minister was even reunited with his fractal-blade, still rusty with monster juice or—in retrospect—soldier blood. He returned it to its thong, and to the gap it left in the tan around his neck. All of the Safety Drugs were there, tagged and dated in little plastic bags.
And then we noticed all the other stuff in the locker. In little plastic bags. And in the lockers next to ours.
They say when it rains it pours, and howling crackbaby CHRIST but it was beautiful. My mouth went dry as the Minister began to laugh a low, dirty chuckle.
It was more than we could carry by a significant margin, such riches that to take all of it would have been lamentable greed. The Minister and I were and are pillars of the global community and would not dream of it.
“We have to try some of this . . . ” the Minister said.
“Indeed! It’s medicinal! Choose your weapons and see what you can find by way of a wheel-barrow or box mover, something wheeled.” I grabbed a decent chunk of acid and some speed. “Take what you want, Minister; we’re making up for lost time and need to be safely wasted by the time the zombies get in.”
He rooted in the bins and suddenly looked up. “They’ll be agitated when they arrive. Won’t matter if we’re wasted so long as we’re moving!”
A relevant, alarming point. “True. Drugs, a barrow and a stolen car, Minister. We have our mission.”
We didn’t find anything so useful as a wheeled box conveyance, but I did find some decent back-packs and a roll of carpet from the adjoining office, which I figured might be useful for getting over any barbed wire. However, in the time it took me to return, the Minister had chosen to plunge us forward once again into Interesting Times.
Different shades of upholstery fabric crawled detectably up each arm and stained his torso, with a third mounting one leg. His eyes were intense and manic, shining with an unwholesome inner light.
I shudder thinking about it, even now. Little will make a grown man more foolhardy, unstable and depraved than mixed, conflicting Tweed. And from the way the cloth pattern stain was spreading, all were unusually high doses.
The plan had changed, although the overall mission remained the same: complete all objectives before Minister Dogwood became a portal for horror and bad confusion to enter this benighted world.
How long could I keep control of my own demons, I wondered? The gust-front of the acid was curling through my brain like a serpent returning to a comfortable lair, and pretty soon it was going to take the wheel.
Here I was, responsible for Minister Dogwood, currently the human equivalent of a dirty suitcase-nuke with a low timer and nothing but red wires. The two of us trying to get out of an armed compound before an unspecified number of the undead—an unknown distance away—broke inside, and all before the acid-snake took me for a joyride.
It is challenges which make us grow.
A susurrus of voices and the sharp taps of gunfire carried in the air when we managed to get out of the police station. The cell windows were much too high to escape from the inside, so we had to use the door. Far above, I could see the arms and gestures of the milling throngs as they surveyed their impending doom arriving on implacable rotting legs. No idea how long we had, so safest to assume not much time at all and then work from there.
“Minister,” I declared, trying to keep him focused. “Look for vehicles.”
I was aware myself of the incipient dust melting into an iridescent sheen and climbing slowly up our legs.
Dogwood’s gaze was fixed on the balconies above, apparently on a once-fat woman with sagging bundles of flesh holding onto a malnourished Pomeranian.
“Dogsa darkmeat, yeh?”
Sinking feeling, or was that the melting dirt? Our downward spiral begun so soon? Had to keep him focused, and that would be increasingly difficult.
“No good, Dogwood. Too many bones.”
“Can’t trust the bones, no.”
“Cars, Minister! Focus.”
We were attracting attention and shouts from the people above, but that wasn’t the real concern. I had to think. Cars would be outside the camp to give them space and since zombies wouldn’t damage them, so we had to seek a way out of these hideous walls. The Minister was following me and I wasn’t worried about anyone here interfering with him. Mostly naked except for lopsided torn pants, clashing upholstery patterns crawling under his skin and mixing in his torso, brightly maniacal eyes and a fixed grin . . . He was obviously far too crazy a person to mess with. The Tweed patterns were a biological warning to predators, part of how the world declares Do Not Disturb. He was like some feral fusion-powered couch-based Frankenstein lurching around this little settlement in defiance of God’s laws, and daring polite society to form a mob. Fortunately, polite society had bigger concerns.
Our wanderings lead us to a change from concrete to hurricane fencing, beyond which the horizon could be seen behind indistinct humanoid figures in the distance. Progress at last! I climbed up enough to throw our carpet over the sharp wire, then hurled the gear bags I was carrying over the fence to the other side. I hoped the Minister would follow my lead, but I was beset by traitorous whispers. Setting him loose here would be like throwing a sack of weasels into a kindergarten; it would definitely afford time for my own escape, but I couldn’t do that! He was my Minister, and the crazy bastard for all his faults didn’t deserve that. And these poor misguided swine didn’t deserve him, not in this state.
I climbed the fence, the wire under my hands throbbing with a giant, slow heartbeat and singing in a phantom wind. I was aware of hostile attention from the crowds above and hurried, aiming to cajole Dogwood across once I was on the other side. As I reached the dirt I saw him throw his arms wide and look up at the crowds before booming, “Don’t worry, citizens! We’re not the undead!”
Thank you, Minister. I remember thinking. Succinctly put
.
“Come on, throw me the gear and climb over,” I yelled. I could see Chantal moving our way through a growing crowd daring the balconies of the lower levels, but ignored her. Dogwood, however, was confused by my interruption.
“What? Why are we leaving? Have you caved in to these people?”
“Over the fence, you animal! We don’t have time for games!”
Dogwood glared intensely and began to climb, still carrying all his bags. He fought his way up to the carpet, his underskin patterns growing out behind him as membranous fabric wings while my pulse roared and sang in my ears.
Hold it together, I thought. Maintain! I thought.
Lose control now and the two of you will be lost in the storm.
When the Minister came down, the carpet came with him. Shrieking, he rolled in its embrace, punching and biting. I hauled it away and Dogwood looked up at me with huge, mad eyes.
I dragged him bodily away from the fence and looked for vehicles. As I did, the community’s situation became clearer. They were in a box-canyon, so the gunshot echoes would summon zombies for miles. The initial forerunners of the undead horde dropped like ripe rupturing fruit as they reached the range of the guns, but that was a finite solution at best—particularly given their thickening crowds. Despite the pace they were being cut down, the mob was still making visible if very slow progress towards the walls. And then they’d start to climb each other.
The two of us had seen this before.
Well, not with the whole Mad Max walls and gun-emplacement thing, but otherwise we’d seen it.
The car-pool was dusty and some of the vehicles looked dilapidated, but that’d never stopped us before. I unleashed the Minister and directed him to the nearest jeep. He was always better with hotwiring than me, even while chemically unbalanced.
I watched the man plunge beneath the dashboard and rip into the wires there with a high, tearing scream of laughter. Perhaps, I thought, this time he was too far gone. Yet this was negative thinking and of no purpose. The jeep had some big water tanks strapped to the side which sounded full, and a pile of silver-wrapped food packs in the back. Food and water would be useful if we wanted not to have to drink our piss before we reached civilization.