“Hey,” he snapped suddenly.
Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to look outside in time to see the boy sprint away. He had been outside the bank looking in.
Matt was the first one out the door to chase him, followed quickly by everyone else. This was their last chance to find Chris, and they could not afford to lose him, not now, not when they were so close. But the boy was fast. His little legs carried him with the speed and agility of fearful prey, like a deer running from a hunter after being shot. Matt wasn’t able to keep up, not at the pace the boy kept. Not with the boy’s knowledge of the streets. Fortunately, Tara sprinted past to tackle him. She missed as he turned hard left into an alleyway. She hit the sidewalk with a heavy thud and slid several feet. The impact dug the plastic clip of her rifle sling deep into her chest and caused the butt of her rifle to smack her in the back of the head. She laid on the sidewalk, wondering how someone so small could move so quickly. The rest of the team followed the boy as she gathered herself.
The boy ran across parking lots, dodged cars, and cut through shops with hidden passageways the team would never have found even if they had decided to stay in the city for the long term. This was the boy’s home, and he knew the city inside and out. All they could do was keep up and hope he led them home.
It wasn’t until the boy ran into the police station that they all stopped and realized where home was for the boy. And, as they stood outside the massive two-story complex, Matt realized he was staring at the place Chris had more than likely been taken.
Matt limped up from the rear holding his side as he gasped for air and stood next to Steve. Tara also limped, a single hand pressed to her chest where the clip hit her. Her knuckles and face were road-rashed with bits of gravel embedded in her skin and little droplets of blood seeping out. Her cheek had a rather large circular patch of flesh missing.
“Where did he go?” Tara asked through gasps of breaths.
“Little fucker ran inside, through a side door,” Steve said as he pointed to a tinted glass door with the words “Employees Only” etched on it.
The team took a moment to gather themselves and formulate a plan. The station was nothing short of a fortress, and to go inside was a risk. But a risk needed to be taken if they wanted to find Chris.
“Imma say this is probably that boy’s home,” Greg said as he looked over the structure with amazement. “We got a lot of ground to cover in there. Don’t know how many are inside so…” His words trailed off. “Well, just be alert.”
Matt walked up to the door and pushed on the crash bar. The door swung open without any resistance. The hydraulic door hinge had long since stopped working and caused Matt to fall through the threshold, completely exposing his body. The sound of the door slamming into the wall might as well have been gunshot. They expected the boy had already made his way to his family and told them he had been chased. But fumbling through an entry to immediately announce your presence was no one’s idea of a tactical entry.
Steve and Tara stepped through the threshold immediately after Matt, their bodies silhouetted by the bright morning sunlight. It was up to them to run point with everyone else trailing behind to conduct the search. They walked into a large conference room with long tables bolted to the floor in rows and sections. It smelled of sewage and rot, like a dead carcass left on the side of the road to bake in the summer heat. It was putrid. What little light trickling in through the tinted glass windows that made up most of the wall illuminated dark, grotesque stains on all the tables, the floors, the walls. As they cleared the room, they found piles upon piles of human remains scattered throughout. Most were cleaned down to the bones, some still fresh with chunks of maggot-infested meat clung to it. The floor was stained with blood, bits of carpet saturated in urine, vomit, and other substances that sank under the pressure of their weight. A trail of small footprints led out a pair of double doors and deeper into the facility.
At first Matt pictured the prints belonging to his brother as he ran away from him after a failed game of hide-and-seek. Then, he thought about Chris running away from his captors. The thought of both boys made his heart sink with sadness. But he pressed on, reminding himself that those prints belonged to a boy he knew nothing about. A boy who was leading him to where he needed to be.
Steve nodded to Tara, who quickly broke away and strode toward the doors as the rest of the team fanned out inside the room of carnage. Steve protected her with his body as she advanced.
“Ready,” Tara announced in a hushed but commanding tone.
Steve and the group moved over to the doors to join her. Jody stepped up, knelt down in front of Tara, whose gun was aimed above his head toward the opening, and pushed the door open. It led into a small hallway and corridor with a pair of bathrooms to their left. A large front desk shaped like a crescent moon sat against the wall in front of a series of glass doors that had been chained and locked from the inside. The glass had been spray-painted black. A set of stairs led from the open corridor to a second floor. The tiny prints, stained in red, trailed toward the stairs. They followed the tracks.
Steve entered first. He didn’t want to pass the bathrooms without clearing them first, but they needed to move quickly, and it seemed obvious the boy ran up the stairs. So, he took point and cleared the corridor. Tara was right behind him and cleared the stairs from the open space between the desk and the doors.
“Clear,” Steve announced in the same hushed tone Tara had used earlier.
“Room clear,” Tara responded.
The team entered and went to the second floor. The boy’s bloody footprints ended several feet from the stairs but left enough of an impression that it was clear he’d gone up. Matt took point and stepped onto the second-floor platform. He wasn’t prepared for what he saw. Tara was a step behind and was met with a scene of mayhem so vile, so horrid and revolting, it caused her to lose her balance and collapse backward. Steve caught her by the back and pushed her upright.
“Whoa there, girl, you okay…” His words trailed off as he saw the massacre.
Silence hung in the air as limply as the bodies that had been strung up for carving in the room labeled “Squad Bay.” Carcass after eviscerated carcass hung from ceiling. Maggots festered on the rot. Dried blood pooled on the faded blue Berber carpet underneath the meat of man, woman, and child alike. Arms dangled, fingers dragged, and several of the torsos spun, showing them the path of the boy. The smell of fresh death mixed with old and rotten. Matt was filled with pure hatred now, for both himself and the animals who had done this.
“What the fuck?” Matt said.
It was obvious the boy lived among cannibals. The carnage inside the old police station painted a clear picture of survivalism at its lowest. Humans who murdered humans for their own need. Selfishness, desperation, and weakness in a world that had lost all form of morality and ethics.
To Matt, to survive did not mean slaughtering the innocent. He would die before he ate his own kind. It wasn’t that important to him—not anymore, anyway. Life had begun to lose its appeal. It had begun to sting and burn more than anything else. Life, however, despite his own loss of lust for it, carried value in others, and that was worth salvaging. It was a cause worth protecting at his own sacrifices. He knew in that moment Chris was dead, but he needed to see for himself.
“Steve and I will take this,” Matt said, then paused to consider the rest of his words. “The rest of you get outside and get back to the motel. Grab the rest of our gear and meet us at the first-mile marker outside the town north on the 15. Steve and I will catch up. If we haven’t made it back to you all by full sunset…” Matt looked at Steve, who returned his gaze with a solid nod of approval. “Leave.”
“You crazy, boy? Going on a goddamn suicide mission. For what?” Greg asked angrily.
“It ain’t suicide, Greg. But this—this is fucked up. And, I ain’t going to let people I care about, my fucking family, risk their asses for something that’s my fault.
Now let me do this.”
Matt’s eyes welled up with emotion. The guilt of Chris being taken weighed on him regardless of whether he was to blame or not. None of them blamed him, but he would blame himself forever, and Greg knew that. So, he bit his lip disapprovingly and nodded.
“Come on, all,” Greg said. “Let these boys work. We’ll see ’em by dinner.”
“Oh, it’s okay for us to leave, but not Steve? If this is your fault, Matt, then why not send us all out, huh?” Tara snapped.
Steve answered for him. “Because he knows I won’t let him do this alone. It’s okay, Tara. We got this.”
She turned to Steve and pulled him in by the back of his neck with a single hand and let her forehead gently touch his.
“You got this, right?” she asked.
“Damn right, we do,” he said with a smile. Then he kissed her.
It was the first time anyone had seen them display any real affection toward each other, ever. And, it made them all happy for the briefest of seconds before she, Greg, and Jody ran out the way they had come in. Then, Matt and Steve moved deeper into the devil’s lair.
Matt took point. They waded through bone and bodies like a butcher in a slaughterhouse. They pushed through the hanging corpses, stepped over intestines that collected maggots. Flies buzzed around their heads as they moved. Skulls were stacked in pyramids on the floor, some with faces, eyes wide open, separated like shellfish at a buffet.
They made their way to the back of the room to a single door made of steel with an electrical key padlock for entry. The sign on the door read, Cellblock. No weapons beyond this point.
The door was ajar. Steve pushed it gently. The weight of the steel allowed the door to open fully with no effort. It was pitch black inside with no windows to allow in light, just reinforced cinderblock walls to keep the inmates in. They walked through a narrow passageway on sticky tile. The smell in the cellblock was worse than that of the kill rooms. The silence that had filled the outside rooms was replaced by low groans of agony—cries of hunger from the undead.
A hand slipped through the single inch of space between the floor and the base of the iron cell doors. Steve jerked his foot back and fired off a single burst of three rounds. The blast was deafening. The groans grew with ferocity. The heavy thuds of lifeless bodies slammed into cells. Their withered arms stretched and groped eagerly for a meal, their fingers barely scraping at Steve and Matt as they rushed through the gauntlet.
“Fuck, man, what’s keeping these cells closed?” Steve asked.
“They’re locked. Someone has a key. We need to get through here now,” Matt commanded.
They walked as cautiously but as quickly as possible as they navigated the dark maze of imprisoned withered zombies. They turned left into a dead end. More withered waited in cells. They reached out and pried at their flesh, grabbed small bits of clothing and pulled. Steve and Matt yanked back, moved faster, and backtracked. They passed the small hall of cells they had come in through and continued forward. Cells lined the wall to the left. To the right were speaker boxes with red buttons. They stopped at a T-intersection to the right—more cells. To the left was a single cell but also a small stairwell with an open door that led down. They took the stairwell down. As they hit the bottom of the stairs, the lights flickered on, followed by the static hiss of an intercom.
“Leave now, and you will be spared. The boy you seek is dead. You will not find his body. It is among the dead, gutted and roaming the cells with the withered. Leave now.”
Matt looked at Steve, whose face was screwed up in an angry scowl.
“Fuck that,” Steve spat. “We didn’t come this far to be bullied out.”
Matt didn’t respond. He brought his rifle up enough that he could peer over his sights but not look directly through them, then continued forward into another passage of hallways.
The static of the intercom filled the air. “If you will not leave, we will make you leave.” Then silence. Then multiple buzzes filled the air followed by the clack of metal and steel disengaging from their locked position.
They ran forward into a dimly lit maze of cinderblock walls painted white and stained with blood. They turned right, only to find withered as they poured out of cells. Matt stopped so abruptly Steve slammed into his back.
“Shit, turn around,” Matt barked.
Steve went back toward the hallway they had come from, but the dead from the cells had already begun to flood in.
“Not clear,” Steve said, panicked.
Withered approached from their front and back. They groaned as they stumbled over one another toward their potential meals. Matt turned around and fired off several rounds into the closest of the dead.
“This way,” Matt said as he headed back into the white-and-red-splattered passage.
He turned right, down another long hallway that zigzagged for what felt like a mile before it turned hard right and led to an elevator and a stairwell. The dead began to pick up speed as they worked their way to Matt and Steve. Matt didn’t wait for the dead to catch up, he ran up the stairs with Steve a step behind him.
A pair of steel doors, exactly the same as the others, was propped open. Matt pushed the door the rest of the way and ran inside. It was a massive garage, large enough to fit two full-size buses and still have space to move around. On the far side of the garage, two bay doors ran from ceiling to floor. There was enough space for them to slide under.
The dead piled up at the base of the stairs as Matt and Steve slipped out.
Chris would never be found, and Matt would never be the same again.
Part II
15
The Memories Will Remain
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
Matt lifted the ax with a strong, two-handed grip high above his head, then brought the sharpened two-toned blade back down, striking the pine log with one final blow. Thwack. The wood split in two. Each half jumped off the snow-covered stump in opposite directions and landed in the snow with a soft thump.
He had enough wood now to take a heavy armful back inside the cabin, but he wasn’t sure he was ready to go back inside. A few more minutes of peace and solitude would settle his mind and make the unease and tension a bit more tolerable. Just a little while longer.
With the ax in one hand, the wind chilling his face, and his legs buried knee-deep in the snow, Matt decided to stand there and listen to the wilderness speak.
Between the howls of the wind as it snaked through the naked trees of Aspen, Colorado, and the distant growls of the grey wolf, Matt heard the voices of the dead. They growled hungrily, angrily, impatient at his unwillingness to die and join their ranks. Tim and Sean, Chris, so many others. Their voices were whispers riding on the wind. Everywhere he went, they followed, forever plaguing him by the persistent illness of mortality.
Solitude was futile. He was better off inside where he could be of use. The tension and unease were his own. So, he gathered the splits of wood, stacked them high enough to impair his vision plus one he palmed for good measure, and began his journey back to the cabin. It took longer than the walk out. The snow had dropped several more inches since he’d ventured out to collect the first loads. They needed enough to get them through the night and possibly through the next, depending on the duration of the storm.
They had been held up in that cabin for the better part of two weeks. The warm summers of the desert were long behind them. The memories and faint cries of the dead trailed along with them like angry shadows.
Matt neared the door and fumbled with his load as he tried to grip the handle and push the door open. It was a failed attempt that forced him to resort to kicking the door with the toe of his boot.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Three kicks in rapid succession, hopefully signaling someone inside he was in need of assistance. As he went to kick the door a fourth time, it swung open. A massive gust of wind swooshed in behind him and sent Matt’s map flying off the walnut-stained oak coffee table int
o the dying fire crackling in the fireplace.
Jody popped up from the floor and pulled it out before the edges cooked.
From behind, Steve pushed the door shut. The winds howled in protest at the closure of their passageway.
“Got-damn, it’s getting bad out there,” Greg said, his teeth chattering.
“Ain’t that bad once your body gets used to it,” Matt said.
“You mean goes numb, son. Ain’t no getting used to that. You just lost feeling in your flesh, is all.”
“All the same.”
Matt dropped the wood next to the brown stone fireplace, then stacked the logs into a neat pile. The walls were still decorated in the previous owner’s décor. A family photo hung on canvas. The coat rack was still nailed to the wall with a few dust-covered and moth-eaten jackets hanging from the hooks. A large mirror in a distressed wooden frame hung over the fireplace. The bar was still well-stocked, or had been until Jody and Greg had rummaged through it, pouring heavy-handed bourbons and ryes nightly to keep warm.
The snow seemed to be endless. It had been snowing continuously since they’d hit the 70 in Grand Junction. At first, it had come down in light flurries, melting as they landed gently on the ground, occasionally sticking to cars and other rubbish. But as they’d moved farther northeast, the temperatures dropped, and the snow kept dropping with it.
But the snow wasn’t their only problem; the withered had begun to mass. A horde had worked their way through the traffic congestion on the 70 East. It was monstrous in size, stretching for what seemed like miles to the north and south, covering every bit of open ground and forcing them to take an alternate route down the 82 South. As they’d worked their way south through Aspen, another horde approached them out of the mountains. Hordes of withered to the north. Hordes of withered to the south. And lots of snow and freezing weather all around them. They had no choice but to hunker down, and Aspen seemed as good a place as any.
A Thousand Miles to Nowhere Page 15