This Rotten World (Book 3): No More Heroes

by Jacy Morris

  The lobby of the building was a nightmare. Bodies lay along the polished marble floors. Dried streaks of blood were only slightly concealed by the literal ton of shattered glass that covered the floor.

  Bill Epps imagined that the building must have been pretty impressive before this had all happened. The lobby was huge, open, and before the world had died, it had been plastered with a thousand different panels of glass. But those had all been shattered. Fallen soldiers, their bodies decaying, lay in puddles of dried gore all around, and flies buzzed in the air. The smell was nauseating, and he fought back the urge to vomit. Allen, his partner in the odious task of carrying the fat civvy, was not so lucky, depositing his canned-food breakfast on the marble floor.

  On the other side of Epps, Allen simultaneously dry-heaved and continued to drag Rudy along. Epps stepped on spent brass with his boots and kicked shards of glass to the side. The man between them was covered in sweat, and he could barely put one foot in front of the other. This was the fat man's boot camp.

  "Up the stairs!" Tejada commanded, his voice ringing out like a gunshot.

  Epps didn't want to, but he looked up anyway, dreading the chore of dragging the boy's dead weight up the stairs. Rudy looked on the verge of passing out. If he did that, he was a dead man.

  "Don't pass out, man. Or we're going to leave your ass here," he said. He didn't say it to be mean. He just didn't want the man's death on his conscience if he did wind up slipping into the big black.

  The man was gasping, his chin fluttering as he tried to suck in breath. "In-in..."

  "What the hell is he trying to say?" Allen asked.

  Epps had no idea, but then the man's friend showed up with a canister in her hand. "He needs his inhaler," Amanda said. They stopped for a second as she held the inhaler up to the man's mouth, losing precious ground to the nonstop parade of the dead. Rudy took a deep breath, and she slipped the inhaler into the front pocket of his pants.

  Behind them, they could hear the dead shuffling their way through the broken glass and bullet casings. Most of the men had reached the top of the stairs by now, and they were lagging behind.

  "Come on, you two! We haven't got all day! Get your asses up here!" Tejada yelled. Epps and Allen dragged the man up the stairs, as the other soldiers arrayed themselves on a catwalk that overlooked the whole lobby. The first shot made him jump, and though he thought he had used up all of his adrenaline, another round of the neurotransmitter dumped into his body.

  The sound of gunfire reverberated like thunder in the lobby of the building, but even though the sound was resounding, he could still make out the groans of the dead.

  "Move your asses!" Tejada yelled, and they did, as fast as they could drag the big man. Thoughts of boot camp again filled Epps' mind. He recalled sweating in the summer as the drill sergeant busted his balls for doing everything too slow. Only, if he fucked up here, he didn't do more push-ups; he died.

  "I can't make it," the fat man wheezed.

  "No one truly ever makes it," Allen said.

  "Stow the philosophy, Allen." To Rudy, Epps said, "I didn't carry your ass all this way just so you could die on me. One foot in front of the other; that's all it is. One foot in front of the other."

  The man seemed to listen to him, so Epps repeated the phrase over and over until they reached the top of the stairs. As soon as they set foot on the catwalk, they stopped to catch their breath. The men around them continued to fire on the dead.

  "Epps, Allen. Nice work. Brown, Ramirez, take over."

  Epps leaned the fat man against the railing, and then bent over, his hands on his knees, sucking up as much air as he could.

  "No one wants to see your ass, Epps; get your finger on the trigger." Tejada pointed towards the offices on the opposite side of the catwalk. "Let's get somewhere," he said moving toward the offices.

  Epps watched as Brown and Ramirez both swooped under the flabby arms of the civilian, dragging him off after the other men. He knew the look on their face. Every man in the military wore that look at one time or another. It was a look that said, "Why me?"

  Bill Epps didn't particularly care at the moment. The smell coming from the guy would have been enough to make his eyes water if the world hadn't been filled with so many other smells, chief among them the rotting flesh all around. He figured he should have gotten used to the smell by now, but it was impossible to get used to. There was something almost evolutionary in that. His body was hardwired to be disgusted by the death around him. Maybe it had something to do with the diseases that dead bodies spread. Maybe it had to do with old memories of dead animals in the forests of Georgia that he had roamed as a child with his brothers. Maybe, when it all came down to it, they just smelled worse than anything he had ever smelled before.

  He brought up the rear with Allen, and they moved backwards, their feet sliding through more shattered glass. The railings of the catwalk used to be covered in glass, but all of the panels had been shot out. How long ago now? How long had it been since the world had gone to hell?

  Memories were painful these days. He tried not to think of all the men and women he had seen die in the last two months, but it was impossible not to think of them from time to time. That the military had failed so utterly still gnawed at him. For three years, he had felt invincible as a cog in the biggest, greatest machine that had ever been assembled, and then it was gone almost overnight.

  When the order had come down, and they realized that the military was no longer a thing, he had sat on an empty ammo crate and watched as Uncle Sam's big green machine splintered apart. Some men followed General McCutcheon to Colorado. Some just bugged out completely. One of his buddies had asked him to hop on a chopper, but when he asked where they were going, they had no idea. He didn't want to sign up for something like that. He needed a purpose. He needed someone to tell him what to do.

  In Georgia, left to his own devices, he had gotten up to so much trouble that the army had become the only option left to him. He was a bad man when left on his own. Dangerous some would say. But with the right guidance, he could be a good person. That's what the army had taught him, and yeah, he had killed a few people overseas, but they were people that deserved it. Without the army, it were as if he had been stripped naked and left to rot in the sun.

  He would probably still be sitting on that ammo crate or walking around as one of the dead if it weren't for Sergeant Tejada. He had been sitting almost comatose on that ammo crate for two hours when Tejada, in the process of leading a group of soldiers somewhere, the men he now counted as friends, had happened to walk by.

  "What'r ya doin'?" Sarge had asked.

  All he could do was shrug his shoulders as the other men looked on.

  "That's it? Just a shoulder shrug?" The Sarge looked at his other men, and Epps saw something on his face that he'd never forget. It was pure, unadulterated concern. Epps had always been a tough guy to love. He was, for lack of a better description, kind of an asshole. The only other people that had ever looked at him like that had been his parents and his grandparents. Even his brothers had never cared that much for him.

  "You just gonna sit there and die?" Sarge had asked him, confusion in his voice.

  "I was thinkin' about it," Epps had said.

  "That's a load of bullshit. Stop that fucking moping, grab your gear, and follow us."

  "Why?" Epps had asked, knowing in his heart that any answer would have been good enough for him. Sarge could have said, "Because we're going to go hang ourselves by our dicks from a tree," and Epps would have gone along.

  But he didn't say that. All the square-headed man had said was, "Because we got some killing to do."

  That had been good enough for him, and right now, he was neck-deep in killing. His rifle boomed in the lobby of the skyscraper. More blood splattered against the walls. Another shell clanged as it ricocheted off the marble floor.

  "Fall back into the offices," Tejada yelled between rifle shots.

  Epps didn't b
other looking behind him. There were a bunch of soldiers with well-honed trigger fingers back there. He concentrated on what was in front of him... a wall of the dead, clawing their way up the stairs, knocking each other over in their hurry to get at the soldiers above them.

  "Wish we had some grenades to blow this catwalk," Allen said from his right.

  "Just keep shooting," he replied, as the dead tumbled off the stairwell to the ground below.

  Behind them, they heard more gunshots, small arms fire. Still loud, but not like the thunder he and Allen were playing.

  "Get in here!" Tejada yelled.

  Epps took one more shot, smiled as it blew through the skull of a Latino dude with one eye, and then he turned and ran. Ahead, he saw Tejada waving him on. He moved as quickly as he dared amid the broken glass shards and spent shells, leaping over dead bodies still spilling their brains onto the catwalk. He had to turn sideways to slide into the opening that Tejada had left him. Once he was through, Tejada slammed it shut behind him.

  "Three blocks down," Epps crowed. "How many more we got left Sarge?"

  "Aw, hell, Epps. I didn't know you could count to three. You learn something new every day."

  The men all smiled at Tejada's joke, with the exception of the civvies who were sitting on the floor and gasping for breath. Man, they are out of shape. Homeboy over there is like a pile of Jell-o with bones in the middle. But he was alive. That was impressive. If he had lived this long, maybe he would have a chance.

  ****

  Amanda felt better with the door blocked off. She had tried to help the soldiers block the door, but the men had just told her to stay out of the way. Rudy sagged against the wall of the office, still trying to catch his breath.

  In the corner, Tejada and a couple of his men were pouring over a map of Portland. Amanda was grateful for the respite, though not so much for herself as for Rudy. As he prepared to doze off, Amanda forced a bottle of water into his hands.

  "You need to drink this," she said.

  He grabbed the water bottle from her and dutifully began slugging it down.

  "Not so fast. Small sips. You don't want to make yourself sick." He nodded his head, the skin underneath his chin waggling up and down in response. "You alright?" she asked. He said nothing. He was too tired to talk. "Finish that water, and then see if you can't catch some sleep."

  "I feel like I've slept long enough," Rudy said.

  "You need to rest."

  Rudy lapsed into silence, too exhausted to argue the point.

  Andy sat away from everyone in his own little world. Amanda watched as he listened to the soldiers' conversations intently. He was as transparent as the row of windows that lined the wall. He wanted to be one of them so badly. He wanted to be a badass. He wanted to be in control. He was going to get himself killed, or worse, someone else. It wouldn't be so bad if he got himself killed. That was Darwinism, right?

  She smirked in her mind. The concept of Darwinism seemed so ridiculous to her now, like saying the sky was green the earth was flat. She looked around at the room, and what she saw spat in the face of everything that Darwin had ever written. The strong were not surviving. They had dropped like flies. They had gone the way of the dinosaur. What was left now were the pathetic, those that were good at playing hide and seek, the cockroaches of humanity, sprinting about an apartment looking for crumbs while the apartment's owners were away. Rudy... according to Darwinism, he shouldn't be here. There was nothing special about him, nothing special at all. He had almost died a dozen times since this whole thing had begun. Yet, he was still here, though he wasn't the fittest, he wasn't the smartest, hell, he wasn't even the most likeable person out of the group. Somehow he was still kicking.

  Darwin... what would he write after an event like this one, one that had taken over the whole world? Would he continue to trumpet the virtues of "survival of the fittest" or would he massage his hypothesis to account for people like Rudy... someone who clearly didn't fit the profile of the "fittest."

  Perhaps Darwin had it wrong. Perhaps it wasn't the fittest that survived, but the luckiest. She looked around the room and had to hide a scoffing laugh. If they were the luckiest, she would hate to see the unluckiest. But wasn't that what had happened? Wasn't it just luck that had led her to find Rudy and Chloe? Wasn't it just luck that had brought them to the Memorial Coliseum when the rest of the world had been dying around them? And what about meeting Zeke and the other survivors? How had she known to check on Rudy when Chloe had been about to smother him to death?

  She supposed she was lucky. They all were. She just hoped that the luck held out. You might flip a coin ten times in a row and get heads every time, but sooner or later, that motherfucker was going to come up tails. Perhaps that was when Darwinism kicked in. Maybe she hadn't even been tested yet.

  Amanda regarded the lumpen form of Rudy and pondered his own survivability index. Overweight, just woke from a coma, asthma. He was marked for death.

  She wished she had never been forced to study anthropology and biology in college, two fields whose relevance had become extinct within the last couple of months. When her time came, and she knew it would come, she just hoped that she wouldn't choke.

  She peeled the wrapper off of an energy bar and bit into its sweetness. Never had an energy bar tasted so good.

  ****

  Israel Allen sat on the floor of the office, running his hand across the carpet. He only half listened to the Sarge trying to plan his way out of the situation because he already knew what would happen in the end. They would be rappelling out the damn windows. It was the only way to get out. They didn't have enough ammo to blast their way out through the lobby, and that left two options... suicide or leaving through the windows, and no one was ready to die just yet.

  He leaned his head against the cool wall. It was still August. Still hotter than a bare inner thigh. Yeah, that's a good one. Izzy, or Allen as the other men called him, fancied himself a writer. He had joined the army to get some life experience, a move that seemed naive at this particular point in time.

  All the best writers had served. Tolkien, Hemingway, Cummings Whitman, Orwell, and dozens of other without the cachet of the ones he could name. What a plan... what a gloriously stupid plan.

  Allen was almost embarrassed by what he had done. Where would he be if he hadn't joined the army? He'd probably be dead, but if by some stroke of God's mercy he had managed to survive, he would most likely be in his parents' farmhouse, drinking moonshine with his father as they sat on the roof with rifles in their hands. He wasn't the best shot, certainly not good enough to get accepted into sniper school, which was fine by him. As he understood it, there was a lot of downtime for a sniper. The urge to pull out his notebook and scribble down a line or two would have been too great. It probably would have gotten him killed.

  He could picture his father on top of their Missouri farmhouse, sitting in the tangerine orange sunlight as it sloped its way across the horizon, the Annies shuffling like a child on its way to an unwanted rendezvous with their bed. He could picture the mist that erupted from their heads, making the Annies look like land-bound whales trundling across the plowed earth as his father gunned them down.

  His old man, now there had been a sniper. Once the fields were worked and dinner was eaten, he and his old man had sat on the roof as it cooled to a temperature that didn't threaten to sear their skin off. His old man would balance an ice-cold bottle of MGD between his legs, stare down the sight like a priest seeing God for the first time, and kill whatever dared to mess with his crops. There was no need for a scarecrow at the Allen farm; his dad took care of that.

  Allen's mother would be downstairs washing the dishes by hand and setting them on the tacky drying rack that had been a staple of the kitchen since before he was born. He could picture her skinny hands now. He imagined the tendons in those hands flexing, popping out as she worked, threatening to lift out of her skin to reveal that she was just a puppet being worked by an unseen forc
e in the heavens. Her wedding ring would be gleaming on her finger, draped in suds that sparkled only half as much as the diamonds set into the golden metal.

  Somewhere, there would be an apple pie, sticky goo dripping out from the latticework of crust layered on top, like a trellis knocked over on its side. He would be there too, secure in the fact that he was with his family while the world was ending. To die fifteen-hundred miles away from his parents was enough to make a man want to howl. But he couldn't do that, not here, not in this tiny office with the men covered in sweat and fear, like those god-awful body sprays that the younger men wore when they were given leave. The smell so strong and so thick, that even after they left, leaving you in the barracks alone, you could still taste them in the back of your throat like the first signs of sickness.

  In his mind, an image of those little green plastic army men blossomed, only this time the shapes were different. Instead of sitting on one knee with a bazooka on their shoulders or talking into a radio, they were fleeing, their green faces turned to look over their shoulders, their mouths open in a scream that would last for all time or at least until the sun blew up.

  He opened his eyes and looked around the room. It was a monument to the old way of the world, before the Annies, before the dead refused to be a part of the cycle of life. There were desks, bits of flair spread upon them, camouflage to prevent the worker from seeing how pointless their lives really were, blinders in the form of happy calendars, Post-It notes scrawled with in-jokes, reams of files that would never be opened again. There was a cardboard cutout of a movie star standing in the corner. Allen could only imagine the hi-jinks that it had gotten up to.

  "Who is that?" Allen asked Epps.

  "You don't know who that is?" Epps asked. He was continually amazed at Allen's complete lack of pop culture knowledge. "That's the Dancing Dude."

  Allen just shook his head, not understanding what Epps was referring to.

  "He was in Step Up, White House Down, 21 Jump Street, any of these ringing a bell?"