Her legs flailed along with her arms and her approach was a lot less impressive than her previous run and jump. She fell much faster than she anticipated. It was much higher than it appeared.
“I’m dead,” she thought with surprising calm. Scenes of her life flashed through her mind at light speed. The concrete stairwell of her apartment complex seemed to hog the scenes. She’d played there as a child and young girl, but she’d hardly thought of it since she’d moved away.
Her feet crashed into the back of the head of one of the men who’d been holding on to the front grill of the truck. She almost felt bad for him because he’d been wedged there when the truck made its final run. Her sandals carried the man into the edge of the hood and she almost screamed her apology, but instead tipped forward and slammed hard onto metal beyond the reach of the people below. She slid a few feet until she rammed the bottom edge of the windshield.
With a tired lift of her head, she looked through the glass to the man behind the wheel. “I made it,” she said to her own surprise.
He rolled his window again and screamed at her. “Get on the top. We can’t open the doors.”
With Death stalking her, the pain of her knees, elbows, and hands became a minor distraction. She was willing to endure any pain to make it to the other side of the glass. She got to her feet and scaled the cracked windshield so she could pull herself to the roof. The blue light bar gave her something to grip for the final pull up.
The engine roared as the driver gunned it in reverse. The crowd shouted in unified anger and washed alongside the truck as it continued into the middle of the street. With a little space in front of them, the driver folded back the control arms for the wall, and she could see her image of a forklift had been correct, the metal bars raised until they stood straight up. A couple of the people from the crowd rode the bars almost to the upright position before they fell off.
The gears ground loudly as the driver worked from reverse to forward. It sputtered and almost stopped, but he managed to keep it running. When he finally caught first gear, she allowed herself a brief feeling of relief. She’d ride the roof in comparative safety until the police got her out of the mess. She’d get to a phone and tell Yuri of the betrayal of his security team, then he’d have her airlifted out. If she had to leave Moscow, then so be it. Anything but the chaos and nastiness continuing around her.
She felt something on her ankle and looked down to where a hand was reaching for her from the passenger side of the truck. The fingers closed around her, the arm yanked, and she felt air beneath her.
The truck rumbled away as she fell between the rioting hoodlums. Her descent didn’t stop until she felt the pavement of the old Moscow street. With her face.
13
Horrible dreams filled with blood, swarming crowds of confused people, and incessant air raid sirens streamed inside her mind until she came back into the moment.
Her voice was suitably groggy. “Yuri? Is it time to get dressed?”
Yuri always got up before her. Often he sat in a nearby cushioned chair with his laptop so he could work until she woke up. He’d told her how much he enjoyed watching her sleep.
She giggled like a little girl, flattered he would tell her such a thing.
Her hand reached out in her sleepy state, but her head shot up when her fingers found something wet and warm.
“Aww, shit. The cat threw up again.”
In the next second she became aware of a splitting headache behind her eyes and a dull pain in her neck, and the real nightmare came rushing back.
The pile of slimy goo next to her might have been any number of horrible, disgusting things. Cat puke would almost be pleasant.
“Yuck!” she screeched.
It wasn't feline. She yanked her hand back and brushed it on the pavement to try to get that stuff off. Satisfied most of it was off, she got to her knees.
The street was nearly empty, save for the bodies. As far as she could see in every direction there were people lying in the two- and four-lane avenues, though they were spread far apart. It reminded her of an old movie about the trails left by herds of animals in Africa. The stragglers brought down by predators littered the dry scrub lands as the herd moved on.
To the north of her, bodies were piled around the wall where it had been dropped to the ground. The buildings in every direction had been violated through their first-floor windows, the contents of stores scattered across the streets.
She gingerly felt the painful lump on the side of her head.
Her camisole was ruined. As in, totaled. The shocking part was the dark blood stain across her breasts and down to her stomach. The same shape of stain was on the pavement in front of her.
She resisted the urge to feel her neck.
Where her top wasn’t bloody, it was black with stains of tar and road grime. Moscow streets weren’t known for cleanliness.
She leaned back while on her knees so her butt was on the backs of her sandals. The leather pants were a similar picture of ruin, glistening with blood.
She turned her palms up. The right hand still had bits of whatever was in that puddle. The left was scraped to hell, like she’d been dragging it on the ground.
After a few minutes of miserable staring, she turned the hands over to look at her nails. The peach swirl polish mixed with blood, dirt, and god-only-knows. The tips of all the nails were sheared off, except for her thumbs. They mocked her. Silent witness to whatever had happened to her, unwilling to share what they knew.
She reached for her purse.
“Screw me!” It was back in the boutique. She desperately wanted to clean up. And not just out of vanity. The next police background check would be her salvation. She'd get shot if she tried to approach as a blood-covered hooligan.
Getting to her feet was no simple task. Her head injury was worse than she realized, and she swooned from side to side as she got about halfway up. She crouched back down until the feeling passed.
“Why is it so noisy?” she remarked to her nearest dead neighbor.
An annoying buzz rose and fell in her ears. It reminded her somewhat of the noise the electric buses made when they sparked the wires above them. When she covered her ears, the sound didn’t diminish.
“Uh, oh.”
Still with hands over her ears, she got to her feet. A brief moment of nausea passed mercifully fast. Voices seemed to call out, and she wondered if those were real.
Pulling her hands down, the voices continued from somewhere close by. Covering her ears one more time, she could still hear them. Her brain had to be damaged. Nothing else could explain it.
While the strange sounds continued nearby, the beats of war droned from far away. The thud, thud, thud of heavy weapons echoed in the streets, making it impossible to know where they came from. Explosions boomed with a similar lack of direction, but she felt those shake the earth below her just enough to get her on the move.
A female scream rose and fell, trailed by echoes. It was the final encouragement she needed.
She tried to be smart about what to do next, but thirty seconds later she surprised herself by realizing she was going back to the boutique. A part of her imagined it made good sense, but deep down there was a begrudging acceptance she really wanted her makeup. It felt ridiculous to say it. But the men made sure she had no gun. No weapon of any kind. The key to survival now was being found as Liza Saratov, not Liza the vagabond.
She still refused to touch her neck.
A gun!
In a flash of insight she searched the bodies in the street for a gun. There were numerous police bodies, but she only found disappointment. All of their guns had been taken. She settled for a grimy baton taken from near a riot officer. His helmet had been removed; the baton had been used to beat him. Even wiping the tuft of hair from the end didn't make her wince.
She wandered up the street, toward the wall, following the path of the battle in reverse. The heavy baton shook in her hands as she shivered in fear
.
Walking past the wall gave her a new perspective on the desperation of the citizenry. Dead rioters lay in a heap, all the way up to the middle of the block letters written in the middle. The wall itself was now almost uniformly red. Or maybe purple. The blue of the metal had been coated by those who washed up against it. How they let themselves get crushed to death in front of the metal barricade she’d never know, but the victims she felt most sorry for were sticking out in pieces from underneath the barrier—right where it had been dropped.
That stopped her in her tracks. A scan of the roadways took ten seconds, but she didn’t see the truck.
“They left me behind.”
She added sadly, “I was so close.”
14
She walked along the street and turned right. She stepped around numerous dead policemen on the sidewalk, their shields tossed like blown leaves. Nothing could make her look directly at any of the hundreds of bodies in the street—many burned to a crisp. In a few minutes she stood in front of the shell of her car, right where she’d started this visit to the trendy shopping district because she had demanded it.
“What a crack security team,” she yelled to the empty street. “You let me come downtown to witness the end of the world.”
She conveniently left off the argument she’d had with Ilia that very morning. He advised her to stay put in the penthouse, but she pulled rank and went right to Yuri. To his credit he tried to stop her, too, but she could see the whole city from atop his skyscraper. There was, she assured him, nothing to worry about. He was in nowhere, Siberia. How could he tell her it wasn't safe outside her own window?
She dug her raw fingernails into the palm of her hand, remembering Ilia's insult that she never talked to her own husband. Really talked. And the bastard was right.
After her smug chat with Yuri, she put Ilia on the phone and his confident demeanor changed to one of anger as she stood there gloating. All that had been forgotten once they got to the boutique. She even had an hour of uninterrupted time to pick outfits and have chai with Constance. It was all part of the dance of getting all the items she wanted—which, she remembered with sadness, was pretty much everything.
“And you killed Constance, too,” she said in a softer voice.
Dammit. Why didn't he stop me?
Constance’s boutique fared little better than most other stores she could see. None of them had any windows left intact, though some at least had the window frames. Others had been completely picked apart by the incoming riot. But her place had been totally demolished in the front. She was in the Rover when it happened.
She stopped at the remains of her car, wondering if she could salvage anything. She kept some water and a sleeve of tissue in her glove box. Those would have been nice to have.
Sadly, the doors were smashed. Along with the rest of the car. It wasn’t quite as flat as a frying pan, but it was pretty close.
A young woman caught her attention as she turned to go into the shop. She approached from the same direction as the original riot, as if she was an hour late and trying to run to catch up. Her sweatpants and running sneakers were at odds with her business suit top. In a few seconds she’d run right up to Liza, seemed to smell her up and down, then continued on.
Liza watched in silence. At the next block the youngster seemed to consider options of which way to go, but in the end she kept going along the main avenue. She ran like a fast sprinter in the Olympics, but never in a perfectly straight line. Sometimes she was on the sidewalk, but she’d angle back into the street. The runner was many blocks away—almost at the river—before Liza stopped watching.
At least I could run away, she thought. Like her.
She laughed to distract herself. The inside of the store was shadowy and spooky, especially after she’d seen so many dead bodies. Constance lay where she fell. Her fate now seemed obvious as one of the first victims.
I made her come in.
The low light of the Moscow dusk did little to dispel the ghosts of her imagination.
The important thing, she noted with renewed confidence, was the black Rover was gone. Ilia and Pavel must have come down the steps again, got in, and drove away.
“Good riddance,” she hissed. She never wanted to see them again—
Except. She kind of did.
Life had been generous to her. She had well-connected parents. A good education. The trophy-winning genes required to land a big fish like Yuri. And the wherewithal to handle him in the ways that mattered. However, it all came with a price.
“What the hell do I do now?” she lamented quietly, realizing it was going to be dark soon. She twirled the riot baton to keep her hands busy.
For a long time she stood right where the Rover had been parked. It was the last link she had to her protectors. To Yuri. It was wrong to think it, but she could almost take whatever Ilia could dish out if it meant she’d be in her husband’s arms soon thereafter.
A sound caught her attention, even over the static hum that continued to dog her, though it had gotten less noticeable. Someone was in the changing area at the back of the store.
The rioters were gone. Ilia was gone. Who would be in the changing area of a boutique? Would it be someone like her? A friend? Though frightened, the thought of finding another sane person drove her right back there.
“Who is it? Will you help?” she called out, a little softer than she’d like. It made her sound deathly frightened, which was accurate but not helpful.
“Can I help you,” she offered.
More noises, but no reply.
She picked her way through several piles of tops, bottoms, and shoes. When the vehicle had crashed into the shop, it pushed all the racks to the back of the store, where they had tipped over.
She tried to turn the lights on in the changing area. No result, but in the dim light from the front, she caught sight of herself in the full-length mirror.
“Oh. My. God.” She burst into tears and fell to the floor, unwilling to look at herself again. The truncheon thudded at her feet. All care of why she’d gone into the room in the first place dissipated.
In that brief glimpse she’d seen herself as any of the beaten and bloodied rioters she’d been avoiding. Her long blond hair might as well have been a bob. It stuck to her scalp because she’d been splashed with blood.
The cami was blackish red. Her pants were ripped and covered in muck. Her feet looked like little gray ferrets poking out from the bottoms of her pants. They were as filthy as the streets.
But the real shock was her neck. She gingerly touched the terrible wound under her right ear. She hadn’t just been splashed with a trauma hospital’s worth of blood, a lot of it was hers.
“I’ve become one of them,” she said, wallowing in her tears. “I’m hideous.”
While she desperately wanted to cover her eyes with her hands, she didn’t dare put them anywhere near her face. The light wasn’t dim enough to ignore the gore she’d picked up.
The tears were still falling when she heard another person crying, almost as an echo of her.
She wasn’t alone in the dressing room.
15
Liza was paralyzed with fear; the weeping was very close, from somewhere over her shoulder.
Her own crying stopped. Slowly, with as much deliberation as she could muster, she turned.
“Hello?” She waited for a response.
a form took shape, deep in the shadows near the rear corner of the room.
“I’m hurt. Can you help?” she called out while slowly pivoting on her knees. After a pause: “I won’t hurt you.”
She imagined at how injured she must look. No one would think of her as a threat.
Still, nothing from the visitor.
Liza tossed the baton away from her. “See, I don’t have a weapon. I’m unarmed.”
Wanting to prove it, she put her palms out to the shadows. Only then did she notice there were others.
“God, help me-me,” she stuttered.
They remained in the back.
She rose to her feet, always keeping her eyes on them.
“I’m—I’m, injured.” She did her best to portray a limp, even though it was her neck and head giving her the most pain.
That brought them out. They crawled into the middle of the room. There were three men with dark, long hair and heavily stubbled faces. Their eye sockets were dark, sunken holes, but it was the bloody tears that solidified their alienness. More seeped from their noses and mouths.
One of the creatures sniffled, sucking up wet, bloody snot. Her stomach turned in response.
The men were on all fours, low to the ground like they were caught inside an invisible tunnel. They were all dressed dull gray coveralls, like they were industrial workers, or shit haulers.
She took a step back but held the sickening gaze of the middle man.
The men were laborers, the types of men often seen in the alleys near construction sites or leering at her from their ill-maintained trucks on the Russian roadways. Yuri had once joked they were the men who kept modern Moscow running, but you wouldn't want to eat dinner with one.
Standing there after what she'd just been through she saw them without a trace of condescension.
“Wh-why didn’t you run away with everyone else?” The rioters were almost all resident Muscovites, by her estimation. They wore track suits and smart dresses and coursed through the streets like they’d gotten orders from the radio. But there were a few non-conformists, she remembered. People that ran on all fours, almost as fast as the others. Her mind’s eye tried to visualize those stand-outs, wondering if they were the same as the similarly dressed workers in front of her now.
There was no effort at a response.
She took a step toward them, desperate to make contact with the survivors.
One of the flanking men made a loud hiss, which sent her six inches off the floor in a fearful hop. When she touched the floor again she moved backward a few steps and fell into one of the tipped clothing racks. It was like falling into a bathtub full of blouses.
Still, she cried out in a burst of fear, surprise, and despair.
For a long minute she stayed there, frozen. Eventually her heartbeat came off the roof and she collected herself.
World of Zombies Page 5