Clack.
In her mind, twenty undead swiveled at the sound.
She didn’t have enough hands. She wanted the baseball bat, the pistol, and the flashlight. She withdrew the gun from her waistband, pulled open the door a few inches, and stepped back. She aimed the gun into the gap.
The crying had started again. Or it had never stopped, but had grown too faint to penetrate the door. The child—she was sure now it was a child—was nearby.
Fuck me, she thought, and switched on the flashlight.
* * *
She stepped into the hallway, then jerked the beam of light left, then right. The corridor was empty. A smell like burnt rubber hung in the air.
The crying came from her right, toward the Trujillos’ apartment. Their door was ajar—not a good sign. She knocked on the door, causing it to glide open farther, and played the light across the tiny foyer. “Vivi? Hernán?” The crying suddenly stopped. Ruby needed to go inside and turn the corner before she could see into the rest of the apartment.
Go on, she thought. Turn the corner.
“Vivi, Hernán, it’s me, Ruby. From down the hall?” There was no answer. “I’m coming in, okay?”
She took a breath, then swung around the corner, gun and flashlight aimed in front of her. A body lay facedown on the floor. It was a small woman, in khaki pants and a dark T-shirt. No: a white T-shirt with dark stains. Her back was hunched, as if she were praying, or holding her stomach. It looked like Viviana.
She swung the light around the room. The little breakfast table had been overturned. The bookshelf was still standing, but the shelves were half empty, and many of the books and CDs and knickknacks—Vivi loved porcelain Precious Moments figurines—had been dumped to the floor.
Something moved in the bedroom doorway. Ruby shouted and jerked the light toward it.
A short, paunchy man raised one arm to shield the light from his eyes. His other arm was wrapped in a bloodstained towel.
“Stop!” Ruby yelled. “Who the hell are you?”
She couldn’t tell whether he was living or dead. The man shook his head. Ruby said, “Who the fuck are you?”
The man said something in Spanish. His face was wet with tears.
Ruby said, “Where’s Hernán?”
He seemed to recognize the name. He pointed toward the body on the floor and made a wheezing, high-pitched sound, a thin peal of grief.
Ruby edged toward Viviana’s body. “Vivi. Can you hear me?” She nudged Vivi’s calf with her toe. Vivi didn’t move.
Ruby moved around to the side, holding the gun on her. In a zombie movie, this is the way the stupid person gets bitten. The undead, playing dead. Vivi’s face was slack, staring. There was another body under the woman’s.
Ruby would never describe what she saw, nor will that happen here. It was clear, however, that the mother and son were dead. Maybe Viviana had killed her son, then herself. Maybe they’d been bitten and would be resurrected as LDs in a few hours. Or maybe they’d been killed by the man in the bedroom.
Ruby pointed her H&K at the man’s face. “What the fuck happened here?” She was yelling, and sounded a little crazed even to her. The man shook his head and she said, “What the fuck did you do?”
The man cried out then, and pointed behind her. His fear was so raw she didn’t doubt him; she spun toward the apartment door, gun raised.
A zombie: gray face, black mouth, a dark bandage covering its head. Ruby fired and the gun kicked up. The second shot went into the ceiling. The zombie, stumbling backward, fell against the wall.
Ruby reset her aim, bracing with both hands as Alice had taught her on the firing range. She fired again and the zombie yelled, “Jesus Christ, Ruby! Stop it!”
“Who—how do you—?”
The zombie looked down at his chest, then poked a finger at a new hole there. Ruby shone the light on his face. He looked up, squinting. It wasn’t a bandage he wore, but a bandanna.
Ruby said, “Uncle Stony?”
He got to his feet—slowly, slowly. “The second shot always goes to the head,” Stony said. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”
“I’m new at this,” she said, and Stony laughed. But of course Mom and Alice had taught her everything they could, and everything about Stony. She’d never talked to him, and never even gotten a letter from him. Once a year, however, she received a mystery birthday card, unsigned, always from a different address.
“You can stop aiming that at me now,” he said. His skin seemed eggshell white in the glare of the flashlight. His eyes were silver dimes.
She lowered the gun and aimed the flashlight at his feet. He started to say something, then seemed to notice what was behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. Oh, right: the lump of bodies on the floor behind her, and the paunchy man still standing in the bedroom door.
“Ruby, I have to tell you something, and I don’t want you to panic.”
“I’m not going to panic.”
“Right.” He thought, Please don’t shoot me again. “There are lots of LDs on the ground floor of your building, and those gunshots are going to draw them up here. We’ve got to go. The city’s burning, and there’s no one to put out the fires. Do you trust me?”
“Okay,” she said, her voice unsteady. Then: “Okay.”
Stony nodded past her. “Is your friend coming with us?”
“He’s not my friend,” Ruby said. “Yet.”
Stony walked toward him, hands out. Ruby swung the light onto the paunchy man, and he stayed planted in the doorway.
Stony indicated the towel wrapped around the man’s arm. “You were bitten?”
The man didn’t answer.
Stony said, “Your arm. Bite? Mordedura?”
After a moment the man said, “Yes, bite.”
Ruby was surprised he answered honestly. The man said in a thick South American accent, “My name is Oscar.” He said it with great formality, though his voice shook. He was terrified.
Stony said, “Oscar, do you know what’s going to happen to you?”
“Soy meurto. Dead. Yes.”
“You’re going to be all right,” Stony said. “Comprende? I’ve seen people go through this. Do you want me to help?”
Ruby said, “Help him how?”
The two men stared at each other. Finally Oscar nodded, lips pursed, as if he were receiving religious instruction.
“Yes,” Oscar said. He nodded toward Ruby. “Good-bye.” Then he turned, went back into the bedroom. Stony followed him.
Ruby said, “Where the hell are you going?”
“Just a second,” Stony said, and closed the door.
“You can’t just—” But there was nothing to be gained by raising her voice. She backed up to the wall and turned the flashlight on the front door to the apartment. She was careful not to look at the bodies on the floor.
There was no noise from the bedroom.
After five minutes (no, it only seemed like five to her; in reality it took less than a minute), Stony opened the door.
Ruby did not ask, Where’s Oscar? She did not ask for explanations. The important thing to do, she thought, is to think about the next thirty seconds, and the next thirty after that. The important thing is to keep going.
“You have a car?” Ruby said.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Stony said. “We’re going to go down the stairs to the first floor. I have a van waiting. If you stay close to me, you should be fine.”
“And then what?”
“Then we drive out of the city.”
“But what about Aunt Alice? We’ve got to get her.”
“Alice wouldn’t come with me. She’s at the hospital, working the emergency room.”
“But she’ll die!”
“No one can make Alice do anything she doesn’t want to do,” Stony said.
Well, Ruby thought, he’s right about that. She let him lead her into the hallway. He went right, away from her apartment.
Ruby said, “Wait, I have stuff in my apartment—”
“You won’t need it.”
“Fuck,” Ruby said, but hurried to catch up to him. When they were a dozen feet from the stairwell, the door swung open. Ruby and Stony stopped. Ruby lifted the flashlight, but kept the gun down.
It was a woman. Her head was bent sideways, lying flat on her shoulder, like a smashed pumpkin on a front porch. Her mouth opened and made a low, sad noise.
Stony said, “Stop!” The dead woman paused, then swiveled slightly so that her eyes were on them.
“Go back!”
The woman turned and pushed against the door. Ruby said, “How the fuck are you doing that?”
“You don’t need to swear so much,” Stony said.
“Oh, I think I do. Shit.” The zombie woman suddenly fell to the ground, knocked down by someone coming out the stairwell door. Another dead person, a large man wearing no shirt. More bodies clamored behind him. The shirtless man saw Stony and Ruby and started toward them in a stumbling half run.
Stony yelled, “Stop! Sit down!”
The man hesitated, but now other zombies were charging past him: six, seven of them. Ruby shouted something—undoubtedly another curse word—and stepped behind Stony. An LD reached Stony and tried to shove him out of the way. Stony pushed him backward, into the people behind him, and they shuffled aside and let him fall to the ground.
Stony said, “Maybe we should—”
The group surged forward and Stony went down, smothered in bodies. They weren’t attacking him; they were trying to get through him, to Ruby. The woman with the broken neck emerged from the pile and threw herself forward. She grabbed Ruby’s right arm and yanked her toward her. The flashlight went flying, the beam bouncing crazily. Ruby screamed in pain; the dead woman’s fingers ground into her.
With her other hand Ruby raised the H&K, squeezed the trigger—but the trigger wouldn’t budge. The safety. The zombie woman bit at Ruby’s gun hand; Ruby jerked her arm back, thumbed the safety, then shoved the barrel of the gun into the woman’s jaw. She fired, and the woman’s face—
But you know what happened to the woman’s face.
Ruby backed away in the pitch-black hallway, shouting Stony’s name. She was blind, afraid to fire for hitting Stony, and afraid not to fire. Then something grabbed her shoulder and she jerked away from the touch, brought the gun around.
“Back the other way,” Stony said out of the dark. “We’ll circle around—”
“No!” Ruby said. “My apartment. There’s another way out.”
Ruby turned and ran for her doorway. She couldn’t see anything, but she trailed a hand against the wall, counting door frames. She almost fell into her apartment when she reached it; the door was wide open. For a wild moment she thought, They’re inside. Then Stony pushed her inside and slammed the door.
“Open—” she said, fighting for breath. “My door was open.”
“What?”
“They’re inside.”
“No,” Stony said. “That was me. I left it open when I came looking for you.”
“Would you just check the fucking living room?” she cried.
“I’m holding the door shut.” As if in reply, something banged against the metal. The zombies were trying to get in.
Ruby reached past him, fumbling, then found the deadbolt and the chain lock. “Now check it.”
“Fine. Watch the door. But please, don’t use the gun unless you absolutely have to.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“You’ll disfigure these people, or kill some of them permanently.”
“Fuck you,” Ruby said. “They’re trying to fucking kill me.”
“For now,” he said. “It’s temporary insanity. And I know you’re stressed, but you don’t have to keep saying the F-word.” He slipped past her then, and Ruby stood next to the door, her hand on the surface so she would know when it started to open. The metal shuddered with each bang. The undead wailed as if frustrated.
Suddenly Stony was back. “We’re clear. Now where’s this other way out?”
“Just a sec.” Hoping the door would hold, Ruby went to the hall closet and retrieved her loaded backpack. It was heavy with ammo, an extra flashlight, batteries, food. Thank you, Paranoid Aunt Alice.
Ruby slung it onto her shoulder and went through the dark to the back window. Wedged between the sill and the top of the window frame was a block of four-by-four that held the air conditioner in place. She felt for the block, then whacked it with the side of her fist. Then she whacked it again and it popped free. “Grab the air conditioner,” she told Stony, and then pushed up against the sill. The wood shrieked. “And don’t let it drop.”
“You’re kind of bossy,” Stony said. He pulled the air conditioner from the frame and set it on the futon. In the hallway, bodies slammed against the door.
The window overlooked an airshaft. Below was a black pit. Above, the bellies of clouds flickered from fires across the city.
Ruby reached down to the floor beneath the window and found the stack of cloth and plastic that had been sitting there, unused, since she had installed it a year ago.
“What is that?” Stony asked.
“Alice said never live anyplace without an emergency exit.” She tossed the rope ladder out the window. The base of the ladder was bolted to the floor.
“I—I am so proud of you,” Stony said. He leaned out the window. “No LDs below. At least that I can see.”
“Me first then,” Ruby said.
A year after the epidemic, it still wasn’t clear how many agents Calhoun had planted in how many cities. The sheet of names and airport codes that Mr. Blunt had discovered in Calhoun’s Atlanta offices included over eighty locations, but many more might have been off the book.
In most of the cities, Calhoun’s agents struck at retirement homes and hospitals. They worked in pairs. Two LDs would enter a facility and begin shooting, using automatic weapons and small arms. As each roomful of people were executed, the LDs would deliver a quick bite. Killing by hand was inefficient. It was certainly much too slow to bite a living person and then wait for them to die.
The old and sick were perfect subjects for conversion. They couldn’t run away, they died quickly, and their age made no difference in their effectiveness when they were reborn. In some instances, the LD agents were shot down by police within an hour of the start of the attack. But in a few cities, the agents moved on to second- and even third-tier institutions.
In any case, within a few hours the police had far too many living dead to handle.
The first reported attack was on the Grand Oaks Retirement Village in Columbus, Ohio. Two gunmen entered the main building of the village at 8:10 p.m. eastern. They killed and bit over eighty residents by the time police were able to corner the men in a third-floor wing of the building. The gunmen leaped from the window. The police did not figure out that the men were undead until the first of the elderly patients began to move again, and reports from around the world began to pour in.
The attacks were so widespread that local governments could not coordinate a response. By morning, when Ruby and most of the eastern United States learned of the outbreak, the Big Bite had taken on the mathematical shape of the equations Stony had worked out years ago. The infection rate soared into a hockey stick graph. The outcome for the planet was certain; only the specifics remained to be worked out.
Chicago, for example. By dawn after the first nighttime attacks, the city was teeming with fevered LDs. By the time Stony reached Ruby’s apartment at 3 a.m. of the second day, the infection had reached a saturation point. According to the models (and later, it seemed that the models fit reality reasonably well), 90 percent of the residents were dead or bitten, and of the bitten, most had already turned. The streets were crowded with fevered undead.
Stony led Ruby into the street. They were both forced to do terrible things on their way out of the city. Zombies—that is to say, people—were kill
ed and maimed. You could tell this story yourself. You know the ingredients:
Shadows.
Smoke.
Dimly seen figures shambling through shadows and smoke.
Sudden realization that heroes are surrounded by hundreds of zombies, including the following: zombie in uniform (policeman standard, extra points for nuns, referees, and clowns), child zombie, zombie with no legs.
Screaming.
Screaming while firing gun.
Recognition that adjacent zombie is a friend/relative/loved one.
Near-fatal hesitation to kill zombie who is friend/relative/loved one.
Zombie beaten back with improvised blunt instrument.
Race to the escape vehicle. Someone trips, then is helped up.
Fumbling with doors. Passenger side unexpectedly left locked, must be opened from inside.
Victim saved by unexpected, off-camera shot by companion.
Vehicle door shuts just as zombie reaches it. Window smashed in.
Multiple zombies run over as van accelerates.
Victim says, “I think we’re in the clear.”
Victim realizes they are definitely not in the clear.
Et cetera.
But you crave sensory detail. A vivid description of how it looks and sounds and feels to run over a human body. A simile that conveys the pattern of blood and viscera spattering the windshield. Maybe some sound effects? Ka-thump. Bang. Cra-ack.
Or maybe you’d like to have described to you the peculiar beauty of the sun coming up on an interstate littered with bodies, the rays glinting off chrome and broken glass.
“Battlefield sunrise,” Stony said.
Ruby was slumped in the passenger seat, eyes closed but not asleep. They were on I-88 now, heading west. Stony drove fast, slipping past stopped vehicles, slowing only when the way was blocked and he was forced to nudge and scrape past the abandoned cars. The interstate was most congested near the toll plazas. The police had tried to turn them into roadblocks, but that hadn’t worked for long.
Raising Stony Mayhall Page 31