Among the Roaring Dead

by Christopher Sword

  “Orson, has the date for that stock car race passed yet?”

  “It was scheduled to happen yesterday.”

  “That’s too bad. Would have been nice.”

  “I know the boys would have enjoyed it. May I ask what you’re doing here? Do you really think there’s a chance you’ll find anything useful here? It seems like this house has been deserted for quite some time.”

  “I have to check Orson. By the way, how are your batteries doing?”

  “Getting a little low.”

  “Why don’t take a nap. I’ll wake you when I need you.”

  “Very well.”

  Time was of the essence. Jess didn’t know where the boys were. They could have made it halfway around the world or worse, but sitting around and avoiding frightening basements wasn’t helping him get back in contact with them any sooner.

  Cool air wafted up from the dark depths below. It gave him the momentary hope that food could be found down there, sufficiently chilled to still be edible. The thought of a fresh find, like chocolate or canned pasta or even potatoes was enough to get him to test the stability of the first step. It held up well, as did the crude handrail attached to the wall.

  The flashlight did a poor job of illuminating his descent. It emitted a single ray of light that showed a very small area at any given time. But, it was better than nothing at all. Jess swore to himself that if he ever got out of this and back to some semblance of a civilized world, he would go into business designing a powerful LED flashlight that would have different settings, such as a wide or narrow beam.

  As it was now, the light projected out in a very specific and contained area; illuminating very little at any given time. It gave everything an undersea-like blue hue and his eyes had difficulty separating the monochromatic scene before him.

  The wind whistled through the building as though there were several open drafts coming from places unknown. Air bristled past his ear and Jess pointed the light to follow the movement.

  It was like looking at shadows upon shadows. Your eyes could so easily play games as you tried to scan the darkness. You think you’ve caught something as you’re swinging your light around and by the time you move it back to the spot you thought you were looking at, the shadow you were looking for was gone.

  There was no food to be seen down here, and no fuel either. But there were several bottles of wine that hopefully had avoided all radiation that could have infiltrated the walls. Jess realized he was beginning to lose hope as the prospect of getting drunk became increasingly attractive.

  Jess tucked several bottles in his jacket. There seemed to be a small door in the far end of the room that might have led to a closet or a storage area. Designed to be out-of-the-way and barely noticeable, it had almost achieved the effect. Jess gripped the handle, feeling it for some kind of sign, thinking back to when, as a kid, he was told that if he was ever caught in the middle of a house fire, that he should test door handles before opening them.

  The handle was cold.

  Jess was suddenly tackled from the side and thrown to the ground. The flashlight was thrown from his hand and it rolled away to the edge of the ground, continuing to burn its small pure-like radiance in a single, focused beam against a portion of the wall.

  Some creature, small but ferocious and berserk, had wound up on top of him, clawing and roaring like a tornado of limbs and teeth. Jess kicked and punched in retaliation and managed to push the thing backwards to the point where it smacked against the far wall.

  It didn’t stay down for long. It was back up on its feet like a thing demented. The flashlight bounced and rolled again to the edge of the floor and pointed at an empty corner of the room. The creature positioned itself for another attack and Jess saw just how small it really was. It had to be a child or a really small person. It stood on two legs and had long hair but seemed barely able to stand higher than his waist. He reached for the wall behind him for some kind of a weapon. A glass bottle half-full of screws and nails. He hurled it at her.

  Missed.

  It smashed against the wall, snatching away its attention for a brief moment.

  He reached back again and grabbed something else - a hammer - just as she jumped atop him again. A howl coming from her throat somehow sounded like a little girl’s demented play-like scream. They both went down and Jess started swinging with the tool in his hand while the girl’s jaws clamped down on the shoulder of his jacket.

  It was a heavy hammer he had grabbed and he brought it down upon the side of her head. It made hard whacks against the bone. He swung rapidly and not very strongly, but she was reacting to the blows. Her hands ignored the hammer and continued to reach out to try and get him.

  When she didn’t retreat like a normal person would have after having been struck so viciously, he swung down hard with blow after blow and the strength of her attacks noticeably slowed. The girl rolled off him, moaning and clutching her head with both hands.

  She wasn’t dead and after a brief moment, she rolled and squealed and thrashed against the wall. Her arms were alternating between tearing at the open wound in her forehead and scratching at the open air before her. Jess got to his feet and held the hammer aloft, moving forward with slow steps. The girl seemed a blind animal now. Her face seemed as grey as the ash in the sky and her skin was cracked and withered. Her eyes were lifeless white things and part of her nose seemed to be missing. Off to the side of the room he saw several shapes. Half-eaten bodies, by the look of it.

  He brought the flat end of the hammer down upon her face and she fell to the ground and he swung it down again and again against the round shape of her head until it fell in upon itself.

  She twitched a little, one arm shaking out the last signals from her brain and then she came to be completely still. Jess kicked at the body to make sure before the flashlight’s batteries seemed to die. It was pointed against a curtain and the beam of light was so bright that it almost seemed like it might catch afire before it went out completely.

  He picked up the flashlight and smacked it against the palm of his hand. It lit again and showed that the girl wore clothes that were tattered and blood-stained. One of the bodies off to the far end of the room appeared to be in two pieces, its lower half about a foot away from the rest of it, ragged red meat staining the space in-between.

  She had ripped a hole in the shoulder of his jacket but had not broken the skin. He was about to leave and head for the stairs when he noticed light reflecting from within the hidden door, which somehow got knocked open during their struggle. He leaned in closer, training the light upon the spot and saw several red plastic bottles sitting within a small closet. He pulled one out, unscrewed the lid and lifted it to his nose, inhaling.

  It was H-gas.

  Jess carried the two bottles he found to the car. It wasn’t a lot of gas, but it should be sufficient to get him to the apartment, he thought.

  Chapter 16

  The part of the city where Toni and the kids lived wasn’t as densely populated as some other sections in the city, but once Jess reached the general area there were dozens of apartment buildings and he started to notice more creatures coming out from the streets to find out what the noise of the van was. He decided to park a number of blocks from the apartment. He poured half the containers of H-gas into the van but the gas gauge hadn’t even gone up to half a tank and was starting to drop again.

  He pulled the van over to the side of the road a few blocks from the apartment building and decided to walk the rest of the way. Being a more suburban part of town, there were more vehicles sitting in the middle of the road, and more worrisome, there were more creatures about. He scrambled the rest of the way, or at least as much as possible. His knees were hurting, which made running out of the question. He walked as fast as he could and lightly jogged when he heard a noise – often made by his own bumbling, that attracted other creatures curious enough to find out what he was. He heard lots of noise on the way; things getting knocked over; d
ogs barking and then painful screaming coming a minute or two later. He didn’t see anything else on the way back. He didn’t hang around long enough to find out what was out there.

  Since getting deeper into the city, the roads became more and more clogged with wreckage and so many abandoned vehicles that the streets were largely congested. Some cars were still running, their engines chugging and spewing out black vapour from their tailpipes. One was flipped on its back with its front wheels still slowly turning. A bloodied arm hung out the driver’s window.

  Even a bicycle would have been useful but there weren’t any lying around, and those he did see were chained to fences and bike racks. Thus he walked with his destination in mind, propelling him on. There were several large apartment buildings in the area, one at the top of the hill that was visible from a great many vantage points that had served as a good way to gauge his progress. The building where Toni and the kids lived was older and smaller but the roof was visible for several kilometres out.

  The snow-like ashes had stopped falling about an hour ago. It was one thing to be thankful for. They covered almost everything, from the ground to local houses and shops and even Jess too. He was constantly wiping it from his hair and his forehead. When it mixed with his sweat it seeped into his eyes and stung like lemon juice in an open cut. His feet and fingers were chilled. He knew that if he didn’t get there soon, he would probably freeze to death.

  His feet were starting to hurt as well, and there was no doubt in his mind that they were likely badly blistered. The roadblock of disabled vehicles was starting to lessen a little. Toni and the boys had lived on the outer fringe of the downtown area since the divorce. It was far enough away from most of the non-stop energy of the big business downtown core, but close enough that there wasn’t a long commute for Toni.

  As he got closer to the apartment, he realized just how quiet it was. Usually you heard noise all the time, cars and planes, or the humming of electric machines or even just bugs in the grass. Now all of that was silent. It was so dark that moving quickly was difficult. The lack of light was disconcerting on several levels but there were signs of electricity. Possibly leftover surges still moving along the wires but some transformers and wires above were buzzing and popping in places.

  At one point an electrical wire let loose a loud zap! and came tumbling down like a wild thing a few dozen feet in front of him. The going was not as quick as he would have hoped. But he needed to know that his family was okay.

  The apartment building didn’t look a whole lot different than usual. Tall and beige with an orange overhang that sheltered the front door, it was so close to the lip of the valley that at times it seemed that all it would take was a heavy rainstorm to send it sliding down the hill.

  They once had a little house out in the suburbs when the kids were younger. At the time, Jess would have to remind them all not to leave lights on when they left a room or to not turn the taps on full blast when brushing their teeth. The kids were very young in fact, and to leave them alone for even a few minutes invited all kinds of disaster. In the blink of an eye one of them would try to flush a toy down the toilet or throw something at the television.

  There was always something breaking and Jess told people that he should have just bought a deep dark well that he could throw his money down.

  But the truth was that those were the good years. He blew more money on beer and booze feeling sorry for himself than he did on that house and he had everything he had ever wanted - the wife he had always coveted since high school and two beautiful, intelligent boys. But there was always some pain inside that he had to patch with alcohol. Just like an open wound that was so damn painful, you sear it shut with something even worse and numb it into submission. That was a fact that Jess had learned long ago, was that you can overwhelm your senses when they don’t want to behave. Have an itch on your skin that just won’t go away? Pinch the skin so hard that it hurts and the itch won’t come back again. Have memories and fears that keep you up all night? Drink yourself through it.

  For whatever reason Jess just couldn’t do what he needed to do to keep their family together.

  “You had your choice,” Toni used to say.

  They lived in that house for about seven years before Toni decided that she had had enough.

  In one of their last conversations as husband and wife she said that the loss of their nice home was a sensible trade for her personal dignity.

  “All you do is pace and complain about this and that. Do you know what it’s like to live with someone like that - what it does to your soul?”

  She said this at the end a phone line before one of her friends grabbed the device and said goodbye for her.

  “You’re not going to stalk her are you?”

  It wasn’t the last time they talked - but future discussions either took place at the designated times that they transferred the boys back and forth or they spoke where lawyers were present.

  She moved with the boys into this 15 storey apartment building beside the valley about dead center in the city.

  It wasn’t very nice. Michael said that there were frequently cockroaches in the kitchen. Lift a pot from the counter and five of the disgusting insects would scatter for refuge.

  Jess had stood there for so long on the front lawn of the building that the darkness became perceptible. Jess could see that there was a body near the front entrance, its form twisted and misshapen, presumably having fallen from a balcony. The dead man was shirtless, and his face was turned away from Jess but one of his legs was clearly missing; there was only a bloody torn pant leg where the limb should have been.

  A wave of worry hit him at that moment. He had lost Daniel and the rest of the world seemed to be worse than just dead. He was suddenly afraid to go upstairs, but knew he had to.

  As he approached the building, several shuffling figures hustled as best they could to descend upon him. Jess made it to the front doors and slammed them shut behind him. There was a mop beside the door and he jammed this between the handles, ensuring that none of them could enter without first breaking the glass but all they seemed capable of doing was slapping it with their open palms or trying to bite it, but both types of efforts were largely in vain.

  Though they seemed largely unintelligent when alone they moved like other animals did when together - there was always one who first noticed prey or predators and the others followed suit.

  These creatures were no different.

  There was an almost unfathomable mish-mash of limbs, desperate hands and roaring faces pressed against the glass. Jess feared that the glass would give way against their weight or shatter from one of their banging fists but it seemed to be holding. He was reminded of being at the zoo, a big thick plate of glass separating him from a tiger three times his size - but all the same he was unnerved then and now at his proximity to something so ferocious and capable of extreme violence.

  Jess backed up away from the doors into the shadows of the foyer. After a few minutes the things started losing interest. One by one, they slowly turned away, walking around the front grounds of the building aimlessly as if they had forgotten the entire incident where he squeaked through the doors.

  It was a strange scene - each of them walked with an odd sense of balance. Their heads were pronounced much more forward in comparison with the rest of their frames and their arms were perpetually out in front of them, in anticipation of something, or perhaps to balance themselves. There were dozens of these things walking in random directions.

  Some were kids, though most were considerably older. Some wore uniforms from their place of work. Some wore pyjamas. One middle-aged man was completely without any clothes at all.

  They crossed the front lawn as if lost deep in thought. The last of the ones at the glass finally turned his ugly head away and seemed to wander off, unsure what to do.

  When this last man moved away there was someone a few feet behind him in the darkness, just standing there. The position of her b
ody made it seem like she was staring at the front door. Jess moved a little closer, a sickening feeling filling his stomach as he might have recognized the woman’s shape. Though her arms were lifeless at her sides and her head lolled to the side there was no mistaking it.

  Dressed in her blue nurse outfit, her hair matted against her long and thin head, she looked upwards, as if smelling the wind.

  Jess sprang for the doors, trying to unblock them. Toni’s face bolted to his position and she slammed her body hard against the glass, her hands and white glossy eyes searching frantically for a way in.

  “Hold on!” he yelled. “I’m trying to open it!”

  But in mere seconds, the rest of them came back, each with eyes as vacant, hands and faces thrust against the glass as though it were keeping them prisoner.

  “Toni,” he said, putting a hand up on the glass near her position.

  This just seemed to agitate her – she seemed to be trying to bite the glass.

  There were a few dim lights here and there inside the main foyer, just enough to keep the inside of the building out of complete blackness, casting it instead into a deep orange glow that was probably enough to make him just visible enough to keep their attention on him. The backup generator was presumably running. Installed for emergencies. He walked backwards, keeping his eye on Toni, trying to fight back the grief that was threatening to explode out of him.

  “Oh God!” he said and fell backwards, rolling over onto his stomach. He covered his face with his hands.

  “Jess,” Orson said. It wasn’t so much of a question as the paused beginning of a sentence.