“Shinji” I scream down the left-hand tunnel. “Shinji!”
“GO!”
The water’s up past my elbows, just inches from my chest. “No!”
Micah shoves me aside and heads down the right-hand tunnel. Brother Matthew sloshes up behind me. “He’ll be okay,” he says, trying to reassure me. “You won’t be though, unless you move. Now!”
He gives me a shove that nearly sends me sprawling. I get to my hands and knees again, flinging water and muck from my face, and yell, “Shinji!” and somewhere in the darkness—I can’t tell from which branch of the tunnel—I hear him bark.
“He’s this way!” Micah yells back. “Come on!”
I launch myself after him, banging my head on the low ceiling and blinking away the tears of pain. Water laps at my neck, soaking the rest of my shirt up to my collar and getting into my hair and ears. I move and water splashes into my mouth. I purse my lips and raise my head to keep from getting that ugly thick, black muck into my eyes, but it’s no use. It splashes up and into my nose and splatters into my hair. It runs down my cheeks and it feels gritty and thick and smells like shit.
The water clings to my chin like sticky mud and doesn’t let go. Now I crawl with my head tilted to the side and the water still rises and the roar increases until I can’t even hear the thunder or Shinji’s barks or even myself as I grunt and scream at my body to move faster. I’m practically swimming now.
A hand grabs my leg and pulls. Out of fear and adrenaline, I kick back and feel my foot connect.
“Ow!” Matthew bellows. “Turn left! Here!”
“Micah!” The roar swallows my voice. “MICAH!”
We reach the opening, but there’s no sign of Micah. Now the water laps at my right ear and there’s barely enough clearance to keep my nose above it.
Brother Matthew grabs my shirt and yanks it to the left, urging me into the tunnel. There’s no sign of either Micah or Shinji, but now the water is getting into my nose and the opening is somewhere up ahead and I don’t know if we’ll make it before we drown, but I know we will drown if I wait even another minute more.
I push against the wall of the tunnel and plunge into the offshoot. The water is rushing like crazy past us and it feels more like plunging through oil than wading anymore. Debris catches in my clothes and scratches my face. Muck flows down my shirt, scratching my chest. My body is too buoyant; my hands lose their traction. Matthew pushes on me. He’s got longer arms, longer legs, so he still has traction. But we’re both nearly out of room to breathe.
I push on, aided from behind. I push on, half-swimming, half-wriggling, and the water rushes past, rising even higher until I’ve turned my face nearly all the way around and only my nose and mouth are above it and my hands are on the walls and I’m nearly on my back. I’m so desperate, so focused that I almost pass the widening where the shaft rises. Brother Matthew grabs my leg again and pulls me back. Water is gushing down like a waterfall, but he climbs up into it, finding the ladder on the wall and pulling himself up.
Only then do I see the faint gray of the sky above us, shattered by the metalwork grid. I sputter into that column of muddy water until I find a narrow ribbon of air, and I take in a wet lungful and cough and breathe again. Matthew pushes against the vent, and as I stand there waiting for him I see why he’s having trouble with it: there’s a thick tree branch lying across it, blocking us in.
I look below me and see that the water has risen nearly to the top of the tunnel we’ve just crawled through. And neither Micah nor Shinji are here.
Movement beside me makes me turn my head. Matthew steps up a rung as he tries to get more leverage on the vent cover. If it were Reggie, he’d have flung the thing off without a second thought, but Brother Matthew doesn’t have the same upper body strength.
“Hurry!”
He grunts and strains, but the vent cover won’t move more than a few inches, and now the tunnel beneath me is completely gone, just a vortex of brown water, rising fast into the shaft.
“Hurry!” I yell, but my mind screams for Shinji. And then the water next to me explodes and a body plunges out of it. Micah rises up, standing and gasping, scaring the crap out me. I grab him and hold on as a mixture of relief and grief and hope and bitterness flow through me. His body shudders as he coughs and chokes.
“Where’s Shinji?” I scream.
He shakes his head and spits up muddy water, but he doesn’t answer. I want to shake him. He pushes me away and turns and tries to look up through the falling curtain of water.
“Micah!”
And now he grabs the ladder and climbs it.
“Micah, where’s Shinji?”
Matthew steps to one side to make room, and now it’s two of them pushing, both of them not half as strong as Reggie. But then the vent does move and Matthew yells and strains. Their fingers are bone white, skeletons laced into the metalwork and they push and the vent moves an inch, then two and the opening above us widens: three…four…eight inches.
“Shinji,” I sob. I think about the rebreather cartridge in my pack and I consider diving down into that river of mud, but then a hand reaches down and lifts me up.
“Jessie! Come on!”
But I don’t. The water has reached my waist and I can’t climb. I want to find Shinji. “He’s going to drown!”
“You can’t stay here!” Micah screams back at me. He practically flings me against the ladder and orders me to climb.
So I climb. Five rungs, six. I lose count. Hands grab for me and pull me from the shaft and drag me onto the street where the water gushes from all around and flows into the hole like a tub draining. I’m drowning in despair as the sky above us weeps. The ground bleeds so much water that it seems like it might be dying. There’s a brilliant flash and the clouds heave a hollow groan and fracture. The world is dying. I’m dying.
I’ve lost my friend and I’m dying.
But even here, there’s no time for that. As I lay here sputtering and spitting and crying, Micah reaches over and tries to yank me to my feet. I scream at him to leave me alone, but he gets right in my face and tells me to move.
I don’t want to. I won’t.
“Move!” he screams. “Now!”
And in the next flash of lightning, in the vacuum of sound that slips into the space before the next thunderclap splits the day and turns it into another nightmare, then I see the reason for his fright: we’re surrounded by the Undead.
PART TWO
Mould Me Man
Chapter 11
There were times when I considered suicide. As painful as these memories are to dredge up, they are what come to me now, now as I sit here clutching my side. Now, as the blood leaks through my fingers and soaks into my shirt. Now, as the insidious infection spreads its poisonous strands through my body and leaches into every cell that once was me. Thoughts of ending my own life, even as something much more permanent and resembling nothing like death strips those thoughts away from me.
“I guess I’ve made a mess of things, haven’t I?”
Noise grows. It surrounds me, voices raised in defiance and dismay. No one responds to my query.
I don’t even remember what the argument was about, that first time I gave suicide any serious thought. I was fourteen. I do remember that much. And I remember that it was triggered by something my mother said.
Or did.
Or, maybe, something she didn’t do.
A birthday? Did she forget my birthday?
I can’t seem to remember any of the details. I guess that should mean something, but for the life of me I can’t figure it out.
I do, however, remember standing at the base of the Stream transmission tower at the end of the block. I remember staring up at it and hearing the buzz of electricity and thinking how easy it would be to climb right up and reach out and…
And I don’t want to die. Remember?
But even as these thoughts come to me, from somewhere in the deepest recesses of my rational
mind, I know that I am. Dying. I’ve just been bitten. I’m going to die and then I’m going to come back. There is no cure for it, no stepping back from this precipice. No treatment or antiserum. What a false hope they turned out to be. I know that now. No matter how much I wanted to believe over the past few days. We’re all dead; we just don’t know it yet.
How fucking ironic that it should end this way.
I think about how easy it should’ve been, all those times—a razor in the tub, an overdose, the intentional ‘accidental’ step off the curb and into the rush of traffic on Hansby Way where everyone speeds and nobody gives a damn—and how much pain I could’ve avoided if I’d only just gone ahead and done it. Just once. In all the times I’d contemplated ending my life—seriously contemplated it—I just couldn’t do it. I never had the guts.
The gun presses into my back. One bullet. Kept with me from the very beginning. I guess I always knew. Huh. One single solitary bullet, carefully aimed, and everything that ever caused me such pain in this hell of a life will be nothing more than a footnote in someone else’s memory.
But my hands don’t move from my side. They’re useless, unable to stanch the flow, unable to extract from the wound the poison.
Who will mourn me? Eric? Strangely enough, it’s he who will hurt the most by my passing. He always loved me, unconditionally, even though we’d never gotten along growing up—he with his unreasonable devotion to our absentee mother and that inexplicable smoldering disaffection for our long-dead father. He of the strange, almost sympathetic, obsession for the Undead. He who was the only one to ever stand up against my grandfather. The resentment they bore for each other was always evident, yet never explained.
I doubt that either my mother or grandfather will mourn for me. Not much, anyway. Mom will drink her way to forgetfulness. And Grandpa…
I don’t think he has the capacity to mourn. Maybe that’s what hurts the worst. I struggled all my life to connect with him. We touched each other’s lives, but only as if through a crazed pane of glass, he on one side, me on the other.
Then there’s Kelly. He’ll mourn me in his own way, I suppose. Or maybe it’s too late for that. I think it might be. I wonder if the infection raging inside of him, the one that makes him harder and faster and stronger, that steals from us both what was uniquely ours, will leave just that one little shred of humanity inside of him.
Or maybe it’ll just smother that into oblivion, too.
In a way, his own living death will be a greater loss than my own. He has a family who needs him. His parents love him and depend on him. Kyle depends on him.
Like Shinji depended on me.
Poor Shinji. I couldn’t be what he needed: a family, torn asunder by this tragedy.
Now that death is a certainty, I wonder how it was that I could ever consider wanting it. Right now, right in this very moment, I want nothing more than to live as I find the pistol in my hand and my finger on the trigger, squeezing.
The scene around me is utter chaos. The plaintive cries of the Undead mask the cries of those remaining few yet living. Yet, through it all, one sound rings clear:
Chapter 12
“Shinji!” I cry, as his weak, wet bark cuts through the din of the storm raging around us. I stumble to my feet, but Micah grips my arm and yells into my ear to leave him.
“No! I can’t! I promised.”
“There’s no time!” Brother Matthew roars, kneeling beside me, grasping. His fingers slip. “The Elders—”
But I tear my arm away and turn toward the drain in the road. Another bark rings forth, gurgling. It gets quickly swept away in the wind and by the roar of the downpour, and terror grips my heart.
“I have to save him!”
Micah tries again to grab me but my clothes are soaked and sticking to my body and his fingers scrabble over my skin, yet gain nothing for their effort.
“Shinji!” I extend my head over the edge of the manhole and look down.
The road is a river and it’s all draining into the opening and at first I don’t see him. Suddenly he appears, splashing frantically to stay afloat. He lets out a strangled bark and muddy water rushes into his mouth. I let out a cry and try to reach him, but I can’t. My arms just aren’t long enough.
A hand grabs my shoulder, vise-like and painful. For just a fraction of a second, I see Jake back at the Jayne’s Hill complex. I see the IU biting him on his shoulder and my body suddenly has all the electrical energy of a lightning bolt. I let out a scream and spin away, nearly slipping into the hole head-first. But it’s just Micah and he shouts at me to get up and that he’ll get Shinji, and he must be able to tell from the look that crosses my face that I don’t believe him, not for one second, because he practically throws himself down the manhole to prove me wrong.
“Go!” he yells, though I can barely hear him above the din.
I spin around to locate Brother Matthew. The rain is falling so heavily now that I can barely see ten feet around me—a mixed blessing, just like the noise that masks us from the IUs that have come out in droves—but I’ve lost him in the deluge.
A body pushes against my thigh and gives a weak bark. Micah’s head emerges from the hole, then his shoulders an instant later. He pulls himself out and snatches up Shinji in his arms and tells me to run, shoving me vaguely in a direction that seems to me to be no better than any other.
Arms reach out at us from all around. I stumble a few steps, nearly trip, before beginning to sprint.
Out of the gray the figures materialize, torsos following arms, heads following torsos. The long dead Undead, out of their hiding places, out while the glaring sun can’t burn them. And I want to scream with fright, but then I notice that they seem not to notice us as we pass, confused by the roar and the rain. They look aloft, their chins held up into the air and their mouths open. They invite the drowning rain into their mouths and their gullets fill with the water as if it were air until it spills over their blackened lips. Rain splashes off their unblinking eyes; it floods the hollows below their necks. Their serenity—this tempered and unearthly ecstasy—stops me cold and all I can do is stare at them in wonderment.
Until Micah slams into me.
I tumble into the closest one and it turns and moans, seemingly unhappily at the disruption. The timbre of its cries changes. It raises its arms and clicks its rotting teeth. Soon the others are beginning to turn. Their moans are no longer the moans of tranquility but of hunger. Their jaws snap in time, a wretched, clattering chorus of clicking frogs. The rain no longer holds their attention, we do.
“Get up!” Micah growls into my ear.
The IU I’d knocked steps toward me; I cringe downward and scramble across the broken pavement until I can get my feet beneath me. I look for an opening and head for it, Micah holding Shinji, both of them staying close at my heels. I don’t know where Brother Matthew is. I don’t care. Right now I need to stay out of the grasp of the Undead.
I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die and then live like this.
The grayness in front of me deepens and my first instinct is to turn away from the hulking shadows, but reason takes over and tells me these are buildings and with buildings comes shelter. So I head straight for them.
Many of the Undead turn as we pass, alerted by the groans of their brethren that trail behind us. Genderless, ageless, timeless. They are all the same now: Mindless hunger. They turn with the darkness of wanting in their minds and nothing but death in their eyes, and water flows down their faces like tears, shed for lives lost and lives stolen.
They come. But we are faster, faster and more agile, and the rain masks our noise so that the hungry, moaning, clumsy Undead are quickly left behind.
Yet still we run, weaving about the praying figures.
The shadow before us materializes into a wall looming up out of the darkness and Brother Matthew flashes past in front of it. I hurry to follow him, holding back because I don’t want to leave Shinji behind. We hurry down the sidewal
k and pass more of the Undead. Matthew steps out of a doorway and nearly into my path. He grabs my arm and yanks me into darkened shop. Objects glitter in the dim light deeper inside the store, but I head straight for the large display window and look out.
Micah tumbles in, gasping. He sets Shinji down, who shakes himself off. Brother Matthew quietly closes the door, turning the latch to lock it. Water pours from our bodies and puddles onto the floor. I’m shivering, but not from being cold.
Shinji presses against my leg and whines.
“Check that out,” Micah says, disgustedly. “I save the mutt and carry him here and look who he goes to.”
“He’s not a mutt!”
I bend down and wrap my arms around him and bury my face deep into his matted fur, not caring that it smells strongly of wet dog and weakly of shit. I can feel his heart rattling beneath my cheek. I close my eyes and count the beats, but I quickly lose track so I think only of breathing as he breaths and stands patiently until he’s sure I’m finally safe and that I’m going to make it. Only then does he lick my face.
“We’ll stay here until the Elders go back to sleep,” Brother Matthew says. I hear him shuffle across the floor. I hear the clink and clatter of him moving things around.
Micah crouches beside me and gives me a thin smile. “You okay?”
I raise my arm and place it around his shoulders and draw him into my embrace. Traitor or not, whether he remembers who he really is or thinks he’s our friend, it doesn’t matter right at this moment. Right now he has proven to me to be nothing but the truest of friends. He saved Shinji, and in doing so, saved me.
Chapter 13
“You knew this shop was here?”
Brother Matthew nods at my question, then turns back to the bike pump and attaches it to the stem of the tire he’s inflating. “Why do you think I came this way? You thought bikes would be the fastest way to get to Brookhaven. It reminded me of this shop. I knew it had bikes and that I could get into it.”
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND, Season One Omnibus Page 67