by J. L. Harden
I ignore it. I focus.
I reach out to the chair. I hook my foot around the leg and drag it over.
I grab the chair and stand up, keeping my weight against the door. Pushing harder. Pushing so hard I hear the bones in the infected man’s arm snap. Despite the broken bones it still moves and thrashes around. It is still reaching out for me. It does not feel pain.
I have the chair in my left hand. My right shoulder is pinned against the door. I swing the chair back and forth, building momentum. Building speed. Building force.
Force = Speed x Weight.
Another documentary. More long lost information.
I throw the chair and it smashes the mirror and the glass shatters and I now have a way out and I now have seven years bad luck.
But I don’t care about the bad luck.
Things can’t get any worse right now so I just don’t care.
I.
Just.
Don’t.
Care.
Now for the hard part.
I need to run to the mirror and jump into the next room. Once I start running, once my weight is no longer pushed up against the door, the infected will barge in. They will chase. With single minded aggression and unimaginable ferocity, they will chase.
I won’t have long. Seconds maybe.
I prepare myself for this.
For the chase.
For the flight.
I take a deep breath.
I move away from the door.
I run towards the mirror.
Chapter 2
I don’t make it.
Not before the door flies open and practically flies off its hinges. The door shatters and splits in half and splinters into bits of kindling. I take two big steps towards the mirror, towards the next room.
But I don’t make it.
The infected barge in. One infected man. He was too close.
He.
It.
Whatever.
It was too close.
I realize in an instant that I am not going to make it. Not unless I fight back.
But I have no weapons.
The infected man, the one that was reaching through the gap in the door, the one that had brushed his hand against my hair, my pixie cut, the one with the arm that was surely broken, a man who was a soldier in a former life, runs at me, sprints at me. It wants to eat me. He wants to eat me. The Oz virus wants to spread. It has this primordial, primeval need to spread, to consume and eat.
And I have no weapons.
There is broken glass. Mirrored glass.
I see a large triangle of sharp jagged glass, and as I am running for the next room, I bend down and pick it up, cutting the palm of my right hand in the process. The glass is so sharp, it slices my skin easily and effortlessly and instantly. I don’t feel any pain. If I didn’t see the blood, I would never have known I’d been cut.
As I raise the piece of glass up, blood drips down the length of my forearm.
The infected man is almost on top of me.
Everything is happening in super slow motion, like my mind has realized I’m about to die a horrible death and it’s soaking up these last few seconds of existence. My mind is not taking this moment or anything for granted.
The infected man’s hands are now on me. That’s how close he is.
His jaw is wide, wide open. It’s so wide open, I think to myself that his jaw has to be dislocated. It has to be broken.
But it’s not. His jaw clamps shut. Snaps shut. Inches from my face.
The clack of teeth makes me flinch and the hair on the back of my neck stands up and I have goose bumps. I think to myself that maybe the only worse sound in the world is fingernails on a chalkboard. But then again, maybe not.
The infected man is still coming forward. Still charging. All of his weight and all of his strength and energy is directed at my body.
The virus is so pure. Pure death. And this is perhaps its greatest advantage. It is not complicated. And it is never distracted. It wants and needs one thing.
Food.
Hosts.
It needs to spread.
It causes aggression. Single-minded aggression.
The Oz virus is simple and pure and deadly.
And this infected man is almost on top of me.
He wants to feed on me.
He wants to eat me.
He is running and moving faster than humanly possible.
Doctor Hunter, or was it Doctor West? One of those guys said that the Oz virus stimulates the adrenal glands. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it sure as hell looks like it.
Anyway, the speed, the weight, the force.
This actually works in my favor.
The shard of glass in my hand is a knife. And his force, his weight, his speed, allows the glass shard to slide into his eyeball, right into his brain.
It also slices the hell out of my palm in the process, and I finally feel pain.
And the pain lets me know that I am alive and that I am not infected.
Not yet.
I let go of the piece of glass because I can no longer physically hold it. It is stuck into the infected man’s eye socket, into his skull and brain. The infected man goes limp but his weight and the force of the collision carries us into the next room. We flip up and over the window sill where the mirror used to be.
I land on broken glass.
The infected man is on top of me and I am cut up and bleeding and I can feel pain.
It is excruciating.
But I keep moving.
If I stop for a second, to catch my breath, to check my injuries, to stop the bleeding, I am dead. I roll the infected man off me, and I jump to my feet. I cut my hand up even more on the glass on the floor.
I ignore the pain and the blood.
I keep moving.
More infected pour into the interrogation room, they jump through the window where the one way mirror used to be. One of them jumps through and falls over. They thrash around on the floor, around on the glass, like a shark out of water. One of them gets jagged on a large piece of glass as they jump through the window. The piece of glass was protruding from the window sill. The shard of glass pierces his abdomen, slicing his stomach open. He is stuck in the window sill, guts falling out onto the floor.
And I keep moving.
I get to the door and I try and open it with my right hand because I always open doors with my right hand. I have never had to think about this before. But I can’t open the door because my hand is covered in blood. I can’t grip the handle.
I use my left hand and I finally open it.
The door opens up into a corridor.
To my left the corridor is empty. It is a long, long corridor. I can’t see the end of it. A long line of fluorescent lights flicker on and off. The corridor is so massively long that I can’t see the end of it and it eventually disappears into darkness.
I look to my right. To my right is a crowd of infected people. A horde. A swarm. I can feel their energy. It is simply incredible.
The horde is a mix of soldiers and research scientists and civilians. I tell myself in that instant I need to stop thinking about what these people used to be. I can’t think of them as soldiers or civilians or people. Because they are not people. Not anymore. They are infected. They are zombies. They are the living dead.
I can’t afford to give them my sympathy, but I am only human and I can’t help it.
The former soldiers and scientists and civilians are all trying to squeeze through the door into the interrogation room at once. The door that I was just barricading with a table and my body weight. The sheer number of infected people and the narrow area of the corridor and the doorway have created a bottleneck.
But then they see me.
And I turn and run into the next room. And we’re going to rinse and repeat. We are going to do this all over again.
For a second, a split second, a nano-second, I think, what’s the point?
There is nowhere to run.
Nowhere to hide.
No escape.
I am underground. I am trapped.
I am trapped in a prison within a prison.
I am surrounded by the infected.
For a split second, I think about giving up, leaving the door open, letting them in, giving myself to them, to the Oz virus. But then I walk through the door. I enter the room. The doorway leads to an office. The room looks like it belonged to someone important. There is a desk. It has paper strewn all over it. A computer. A bookshelf full of files and folders. Two chairs in front of the desk.
And crouching behind the desk, is a man.
He sort of looks like a businessman. He is wearing a white, long sleeved shirt. A black tie.
He looks middle aged.
Why the hell is he wearing a tie?
The top button of his shirt is undone, his tie is loose, like he’s had a rough day at the office.
“Shut the door!” he says. “Lock it!”
I do as he says. I do it quickly. I shut the door. I lock the door.
“Did they see you?” he asks.
I nod my head.
“How many?”
“Too many,” I answer.
“The door has a dead lock. It should hold them for a minute or two.”
“Maybe less,” I say.
I push my weight into the door.
And I know it won’t hold for long.
Chapter 3
It takes exactly three seconds for the infected to reach the door and slam into it with all of the weight and force of a freight train. I count the seconds in my head and I see the seconds fall away on my death watch.
One, one thousand.
Two, one thousand.
Three.
Bang.
The door is rocked and the whole thing shudders and buckles. But it holds. The man was right. The dead lock will buy us some time.
At the moment the man is crouched behind the desk. He is rummaging and scavenging and looking through the draws. The desk is covered in paper and files.
Architectural blue prints.
A layout.
A map.
He reaches into the draws of the desk and retrieves a small box. He has the box in his hands. The box makes a rattling noise.
It is ammunition.
9mm bullets.
The bullets are for a handgun. Most probably a military standard issue Berretta. Or a police standard issue Glock. All these facts and figures run through my mind because Kenji has burned these facts and figures into my mind. In the weeks and months of walking through the Australian bush, and then the desert, we spent ninety percent of the day scavenging for food and water and ammo.
And in the time when we weren’t scavenging, Kenji taught me the basics. For example, most military handguns, like the Beretta, use small 9mm bullets. 9mm refers to the diameter of the bullet. Not the length. Larger rifles use larger bullets. The most common size being 7.62mm. This sounds like a smaller bullet, since it has a smaller diameter. But it’s not. It is longer and heavier and contains more gun powder.
Kenji taught me how to load a magazine. He taught me how to load each bullet individually. It’s not like in the movies where The Hero unloads with a never ending magazine of ammo. A hundred rounds. A thousand rounds. It doesn’t really matter. As long as The Hero saves the day and gets the girl. And then when he re-loads, he throws away the magazine. Never pays it a second thought. But you need those magazines. You really, really, really need them.
Kenji even taught me how to cut the head of certain bullets with a knife in a way that would make the bullet break apart, and balloon open on impact. You can only do this with bullets that are non-full metal jacket. This technique allows the bullet to create massive internal damage. And this proved to be most useful when killing infected people. When you need to kill a monster by delivering a death blow to the head. Where you need to destroy the brain. Shred it to pieces.
I wish Kenji was here right now.
But he’s not. And I need to focus.
The man’s hands are shaking and he drops the box on the desk, bullets spill everywhere. He bends down and picks them up.
“Who are you?” I whisper.
“Who am I?” he answers. “Who the hell are you?”
Rebecca. I say in my head. Rebecca Robinson.
From Brooklyn, New York.
From Sydney, Australia.
Survivor of the Sydney Harbor Massacre.
Survivor of the Oz virus.
The Australian Apocalypse.
The Secret Apocalypse.
The only person who had escaped from Australia. Made it all the way to LA, the city of angels.
A fool who chose to come back.
I say this in my head.
“Introductions can come later,” the man says.
He has a name tag. It reads: ‘George Walters. Prison Administrator’.
“George,” I say.
And he looks at me like he doesn’t know how I know his name. But then he grabs his name tag, clutches it, like it means something, like it’s a part of who he is, like it’s his actual identity and he figures it out.
George Walters. Prison Administrator.
The name tag has a little passport sized ID photo. Below this is a barcode.
“Yeah,” he answers.
He places the box of ammunition on the table and there is a thump at the door. A loud, forceful thump. George jumps and flinches at the noise.
“Where is everyone?” I ask. “Where are the prison guards?”
“They’re dead. They’re all dead. I’m the last one.”
I just knew he was going to say that.
“What’s your name?” he says.
“Rebecca.”
“Rebecca, we need to barricade the door. The deadlock will buy us some time but we need to reinforce it.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
The infected are banging on the door. It won’t take long. We need to move fast. George pushes the bookshelf over to the door. And I stay pressed up against the frame for as long as I can. Together we slide the bookshelf against it and reinforce the barricade with the desk.
We do this as quickly as we can.
The infected continue to smash into the door.
Boom.
Bang.
The door holds.
The barricade holds.
We have bought ourselves some time.
We have bought ourselves some breathing room.
And this is the first thing I do. I breathe.
In and out.
Just breathe.
George says something. But I don’t hear him. The sedative that the man in the gas mask pumped me full of is still flowing through my body, my veins, my arteries, my blood stream. Every single one of my muscles feels weak and lethargic and heavy.
“So, who the hell are you?” George repeats. “What are you doing here?”
Another bang on the door. Another thump. It sounds like the infected have begun using their heads as battering rams. The wooden door begins to splinter. They know we are here and they won’t stop.
They are relentless.
“We have to get out of here,” I whisper.
I’m whispering because I’m under the impression that we need to be quiet, even though the need to be quiet has long since passed us.
I look around the room.
It’s a concrete box
There is only one door.
One entry.
One exit.
It’s a concrete box. It’s a prison. Within a prison.
And we’re trapped.
I’m still trying to figure out why I haven’t given up yet.
Why don’t I just quit?
I could let go. Right here.
I could die here.
I could let the sedative take over. I could rest my eyes.
I don’t know why I haven’t given
up.
Is it a survival instinct? Is it self-preservation?
Maybe I am still in denial about this whole messed up situation. I look at my watch. Maybe I am still in denial about how I’m going to die in exactly fifty-three hours and fifty-two minutes.
The man climbs on top of the desk and he reaches up to the long life fluorescent lights. They are so bright they hurt my eyes and I am momentarily blinded.
The lights are built into the ceiling panels.
Ceiling panels.
The ceiling is not made of concrete. Not in this room.
One of the ceiling panels has been slid out of place.
“Turn the lights off,” George says. “I don’t want to get electrocuted.”
The light switch is right next to the door and I hesitate.
I can see the door moving with each thump and head butt. Each blow nearly knocks the door completely out of its frame and nearly knocks the book shelf over. The wood continues to break and splinter.
“Come on!” George says. “We don’t have long.”
I switch the lights out and the room turns black. I am completely blind and the darkness amplifies the noise of the infected. Their moaning howls. Their screams. Their assault on the door. It sounds like they are about to break through. They sound like they are about to destroy the door.
George, the prison administrator, turns on a small pen light. He places the pen in his mouth, between his teeth. He slides the loose ceiling panel further out of the way and pops another one out to reveal an air-conditioning vent.
The grate of the vent has already been unscrewed. The ventilation shaft is our escape route.
George shines the torch at me. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“Where does that lead?”
“These are the air-conditioning vents. We can climb through it to get to my office. Come on.”
I climb up onto the desk as George climbs up into the vent.
“Give me those bullets,” he says.
I reach down and give him the small box of ammo. It feels disappointingly light.
“And those blueprints,” he says as he shines the torch on to the table.
I see a couple of rolls of long paper. I hand those up to him as well.
George then offers me his hand and I climb up into the ceiling, into the air-conditioning vent. And just as I climb up, I see the book shelf fall over, I see the door splinter and break apart. I see the infected on the other side. I see their bloodied heads. Their bloodied and disfigured faces. They are literally smashing their faces and skulls into a bloody pulp just trying to get in here.