Brink of Extinction

by Nicholas Ryan

  When it was done at last, the men formed themselves into a crude line near the hood of the truck, loosening their belts, laughing quietly between themselves, and staring down at the spread-eagled naked form of the woman with bright leering eyes. Gideon left two guards standing watch over the rest of the prisoners and wandered away onto the porch, and then into the darkened gloom of the house.

  At first the woman’s screams were inhuman – piercing and gut-wrenchingly raw so that the cords in her throat became shredded and her mouth filled with blood and her cries of pain and degradation became pitiful whimpering gasps, until the horror turned to insanity and at last she fell into the dark silence of unconsciousness. There were fourteen men, and when each of them had finished with her they went back and re-joined the end of the line.

  In the darkened gloom of the house Gideon Silver heard it all. It went on for a very long time.

  * * *

  Part 1:

  The weary old bus came from out of the north, wheezing down the expressway, and trailing a greasy black scar of diesel exhaust that hung in the gentle breeze. The roof-racks were piled with luggage: cheap cardboard suitcases, battered old boxes, and bundled rolls of clothing bound with string so that the vehicle sagged heavily on its suspension.

  The bus lurched around an old shell crater, and then swayed to the side of the road in a squeal of worn brakes.

  The driver crunched the vehicle out of gear and left the engine idling, then he furrowed his brow and glanced reluctantly up into the eyes of the tall grim-faced man that was standing beside him.

  “You sure about this, mister?”

  The man peered out through the grime-spattered windshield. Just up ahead, between built up grassy embankments on either side of the blacktop, spanned a highway overpass, its iron guard railings warped and twisted, the metal corroded brown with rust. On either side of the expressway stood a ragged fringe of stark brown maple and elm trees, their branches plucked bare of leaves by the frigid fingers of winter. Far away, sullen on the remote horizon, he could see the bruised blue silhouette of the Chicago skyline, hunched and hazed beneath a bleak grey sky that was the color of beaten lead.

  The man nodded. “Yes. This is the place,” he said quietly.

  The bus driver was an old man, his aged face crumpled into soft pouches of flesh so that his features seemed blurred. His eyes were rheumy and red-rimmed. He raked a gnarled dirt-encrusted hand through his lank silver hair and then scratched at the whiskers on his jaw.

  “What about the boy?”

  “He’s coming with me,” the man said.

  The bus driver cast a bewildered glance back out through the wide windshield. The afternoon was bleak and forbidding, tendrils of snow clung to the long brown grass and patched on the muddy gravel shoulder. His voice rose an octave, and there was a little quaver in his tone when he spoke again above the surge and clatter of the running motor.

  “But there’s nothing to see,” exasperation crept into his words. He made a helpless fluttering gesture with his bony hands. “The whole place – it’s been a wasteland ever since the apocalypse. There ain’t nothin’ around these parts any more.”

  The man drew his eyes away from the view out beyond the glass, and glanced down at the driver in his seat. The man’s lips pressed together in a thin pale line of resolve and determination. He shook his head and for just an instant there lingered the hint of a humorless smile at the corner of his mouth. “Yes there is,” his voice was suddenly gravel-like, made thick in his throat by a strain of emotion. “There’s a lesson to be learned.”

  Turning his head slowly, the man looked back through the crowd of faces aboard the bus. The windows were fogged with the breath and body heat of fifty ragged passengers, and the air hung thick with the smell of their sweat and the heavy pall of their despair. He saw pinched sullen faces, haunted eyes that stared with vacant desolation – the mark of those that had survived the nightmare existence of the refugee.

  A woman on one of the front benches sat nursing a child, the infant swathed in a bundle of grubby blankets as the mother bowed over him, rocking gently. The woman’s dark dull hair hung awry, her lips pursed in an expression close to pain. There were deeply etched lines of sickness and anxiety at the corners of her mouth. She seemed to sense that the man was staring at her, and she lifted her chin and held his gaze for a nervous instant. Her eyes were dark, hollow pits, underscored by shadows the color of old bruises, and her skin was grey with fatigue. The baby in her arms made a small mewling sound and she looked away.

  Several seats behind her, two men sat crowded close together on a narrow bench. The heavier and older of the two slumped with his eyes closed, his mouth slack and his forehead resting against the cold glass of the window. In sleep, the man’s face twisted as if in the grips of a nightmare and his frail old hands shook with a palsy of tremors. He was hunched down in a filthy overcoat, stiffened and crusted with dry mud at the elbows. The younger man beside him had his feet stretched into the narrow aisle, his arms folded, his face heavily scarred and his eyes deep-sunk. He had long black hair that hung to his shoulders and a dark smudge of a tattoo on his neck. He saw the tall man at the front of the bus looking in his direction and he glared back with a kind of prison-yard defiance.

  The tall man looked through the faces, blind to the stories of tragedy and suffering and trauma that could be read in their expressions, and saw the boy at last. He sat slouched in the far corner of the back seat, his strapping dark features already taking on the form of manhood. The lad’s expression was truculent. They locked eyes and the man gave a curt nod of his head. The boy got to his feet and hefted an old duffel bag onto his shoulder. He stood, belligerent for a long final moment… and then came rigid and stoic down the crowded narrow aisle towards the front of the bus.

  “Let us off,” the man told the driver. He thrust a hand into the pocket of his jeans and handed across a few crumpled notes. The driver blinked his eyes and took the money. The door of the bus swung open with a hiss of compressed air, and the biting cold breeze came hunting through the bus. At his feet lay a canvas carry-bag, and as the man stooped to retrieve it he caught a sudden glimpse of his own reflection in one of the bus mirrors. The shock of it stopped him dead for a long moment. He stared at himself with a strange reluctance and saw the dark taciturn face of a lost soul, a stranger, eyes empty, the features gaunt and haggard above the thrusting stubbled jaw and grim unsmiling mouth.

  The man and the boy stepped down off the bus, onto the shoulder of the road. The gravel crunched under their feet. The afternoon air was crisp and fresh. The man felt the sting of the breeze, like a slap against his cheek, and then the bus doors closed and they heard the grind of gears, followed by the rising bellow of the old engine. Diesel fumes filled the air. The man glanced one last time through the door at the driver and saw the pitying expression on the old man’s face. Then the bus pulled out onto the expressway, seeming weary with exhaustion as it slowly picked up speed. The man and the boy stood and watched until the vehicle had disappeared around a bend in the road, and the echo of its rattling engine had bled and died away into heavy oppressive silence.

  The boy shifted the strap of his duffel bag on his shoulder and kicked at the muddy ground. “Why are we here?”

  “Because we have to be somewhere,” the man said.

  “We could have gone on to Chicago. There would have been food, shelter…”

  The man shook his head and turned his face into the cold biting breeze. The overpass was a couple of hundred yards ahead. He fixed his eyes on it. “No,” the man’s voice was emphatic. He turned up the collar of his old leather jacket and began to walk, his stride purposeful and determined. “This is exactly where we have to be.”

  * * *

  They reached the shoulder of the overpass and then trekked into the fringe of trees until the incline was shallow enough for them to climb. The embankment was overgrown with long brown blades of coarse grass, the ground beneath them treacherou
s and muddy. The man clambered up on to the edge of the roadway and then turned back to offer a big brawny hand to help the boy, still breathing hard in sawing gasps of foggy air. The boy’s face was narrowed into an expression of hostile determination. He looked up into the man’s eyes above him, set his jaw dourly, and dug the toes of his boots into the slippery slope. He reached the crest without assistance and they stood on the verge of the tarmac, a little apart from each other, drawing deep grunting breaths.

  The exertion and strain had hurt the man’s back again and he twitched the tail of his shirt from out of the waistband of his jeans to run his hand up his back, feeling the notched ridges of his spine, and then exploring by touch until the tips of his fingers found the lumpen half-moon mutilations that ran like grotesque lacework all the way up to his shoulder blade. The healed scar tissue felt silken and slippery under his touch. The man hunched his shoulders, bent at the waist, and sensed the tight tug of flesh as he flexed the stiffness away. He straightened slowly and at last turned his eyes to the scene that was spread before them.

  To the south the land stretched like a rumpled blanket of muted winter browns and greys; a patchwork quilt of woodlands and parking lots and suburbs that were stitched together by the dark bisecting ribbons of road, stretching into the far distance where the shadow of the Chicago skyline was made soft by the low grey cloud. But to west the ragged undulating terrain looked stark and torn and tattered – a wasteland of ugly scarred earth and stunted trees that stretched as far as their eyes could see.

  The man stiffened, and beside him he heard the boy draw in a sharp breath of shock. They stood, overcome with an uneasy, unsettled sense of disquiet for long minutes before at last the man found his voice. The words, when he spoke, were scratchy and seemed to come from far, far away.

  “We were on the brink of extinction,” the man said. He made a wide sweeping gesture with his hand that seemed to encompass all the devastated broken land, and then he clutched at the rusted guardrail as if overcome by a sudden sway of vertigo. “The undead swept across the skyline and our Army had chosen this place – this land around us – to defend Chicago. At that moment mankind as a species was on the verge of being wiped out. This was where our Army and Air Force chose to make their last stand.”

  The boy beside him said nothing. The man reached into his canvas bag and found the binoculars. He polished the lens with the tail of his shirt, and then lifted them to his eyes.

  For long minutes they stood in silence, the boy’s expression cold and flat and detached, the man twisting his body slowly with the binoculars pressed to his face, following each churned ravaged contour until at last he felt his eyes water and he had to blink and look away. He offered the binoculars to the boy who curled his lip disdainfully and shook his head. The man sighed, the sound of it like an exclamation of pain, or maybe despair.

  “The apocalypse was twenty years ago,” the boy said. “I wasn’t even born then.”

  The man let out another long slow breath and then turned towards the youth to study him. The boy was on the cusp of adulthood, his arms and shoulders already thick with muscle definition, his hands hard and strong. His hair was a dark unruly tangle that curled over his brow and into the clear green eyes – the same eyes as his mother, the man recognized with a dull and long-faded pang of remorse. She was there too in the shape of his nose and reflected in the flawless perfection of his olive skin. Then the man looked at the sullen pout of the mouth and experienced a flicker of irritation. The mouth was wide and turned down at the corners in churlish annoyance.

  “Yes,” the man said simply, his tone almost weary. “The war ended twenty years ago.” He was going to leave it at that, but suddenly he felt compelled to go on, and as he did, the passion came into his voice and the words became a plea for understanding. “But the world we live in was forever changed by the rise of the undead, and the heroic bravery of the thousands of boys and men and women who stood against the zombies right here,” he stomped one of his feet with a flare of the dramatic. The sound echoed in the silence like the crack of a distant gunshot. “They sacrificed their lives so that the world would go on – so that we could rebuild… and so that young men like you could re-shape our future…” He fell silent suddenly. He had heard the pleading timbre of his own voice and it had appalled him. Words alone would never make the boy understand.

  The boy arched his eyes in an arrogant pantomime of incredulity. He glowered at the man and for long seconds the damp moist air between them seemed to hum and crackle with an electric charge of antagonism. Then the boy turned away, and the man’s hands fell limp with impotent frustration to his sides.

  * * *

  “We thought the war was over,” the man began to speak. Once more he had the binoculars to his eyes, as though the disconnection between himself and the boy somehow made the words easier to find, and America’s dark history easier to explain. “When our armed forces drove the undead back through the southern States and into Florida, the military established a vast containment perimeter. We thought the worst of it had passed… We felt like we had been standing on the brink of the End of Days, and survived. We were wrong,” the man’s voice became doom-laden. “It wasn’t over. Eighteen months later the world was plunged back into the apocalypse – the zombies broke out through the containment line and there seemed no way to stop the re-infection. By the time the great undead tide had swept this far north, over eighty-four million Americans were dead… or undead.”

  Through the binoculars, the whole western skyline was brown raw earth. It reminded the man of the old photographs he had seen of the gruesome Belgian battlefields from the First World War, where the land had been stripped of trees and grass and life by the endless barrage of high explosive shells and then turned to a quagmire of mud and blood by the incessant rains. The view through the lens looked so chillingly similar that he shuddered involuntarily.

  He heard the soft scuff of footsteps nearby but did not turn. The boy had come to the rusted guardrail at last. The man glanced sideways surreptitiously. The boy was resting his hip against the steel, his arms folded across his chest, staring away into the murky afternoon light with a far-away, curious gaze.

  “Why does it look like that?’ the boy’s voice was brusque, as though he resented the need to ask any question. “If the war was twenty years ago, why hasn’t the grass grown back?”

  The man lowered the binoculars.

  “Nothing grows where the undead have been,” the man said. “The infection – it poisons the earth.” In the foreground stood a grove of gnarled stunted trees, their trunks black, on a crater-pocked rise of mud. The man pointed. “The last of the trenches were dug along that line,” he muttered, “and the forward defensive trenches were twenty-feet wide and dug in a zig-zag chain from there…” he pointed to the south west, “…right across to there,” he swung his hand ninety degrees towards the north. “It was a crescent-moon of ditches filled with tens of thousands of young men behind tangled barbed wire.”

  There was another long silence before the boy finally asked. “What happened?”

  The man’s mouth twisted into a macabre grim-reaper smile. His eyes were dark and shadowed. “The undead massed across the horizon, spilling over the skyline like ants swarming from a nest,” the man said. “They crested the rise in a solid phalanx of death. That was when the first Air Force bombers came flying in from over Chicago. The sky was dark with them – massed formations of everything we had left that could fly. The bombardment… the fire, the explosions… the earth heaved and the world filled with smoke and the stench of burning flesh. It carried on the wind to the men in the trenches, thick and cloying with the fumes of corruption… and still the undead came on. There was no end to them,” the man shook his head, his gaze vacant. “And above the deafening cacophony of the bombing was always the shriek of the undead – the high screeching wail of their maddened voices and the thunder of their stampeding feet – so many of them that the earth trembled like it was
in the grips of an endless earthquake.”

  The man blinked suddenly and lurched, as though waking from some hypnotic spell. His eyes came back into slow focus and he saw the boy staring up at him curiously. The man looked away and pointed quickly to where a dark angular indentation of scarred earth was filled by the shadow of the lowering grey light of late afternoon. “You can still see one of the hollows,” the man said. “That was one of the defensive trenches. It’s been filled in over the years by erosion, I guess, but beyond that you can still see a few of the posts.” He handed the binoculars to the boy again and this time he accepted. He held them up to his eyes and the man waited until the boy found the trench line in the magnified lens.

  “Can you see the posts?” the man’s voice was suddenly gentle.

  The boy nodded. “A few,” he said. “Fence posts. They look kinda like scarecrows.”

  “They were the posts for the barbed wire,” the man explained. “The Army strung miles of it – thick swathes of wire in front of every trench. It was a tactic the military had developed during the first outbreak of the infection. When the zombies reached the wire, they would become entangled. It was simply a matter then for the men and the machine guns in the trenches to open fire.”

  The boy lowered the binoculars. He was frowning, his lips pressed into a thin pale line as though there was a question he refused to allow himself to ask. The stilted silence between them stretched out like a thin brittle layer of ice.

  “The soldiers in the trenches worked their weapons with the fevered desperation of men that were fighting for their very survival. The undead hit the wire and tens-of-thousands of them became ensnared. But there were so many of them… so many…”

  “They got into the trenches?” the boy couldn’t help himself.

  The man nodded. “They swarmed over each other, snarling and gnashing. Nothing stopped them except a bullet to the brain. The zombies that were entangled thrashing in the wire were trampled by the stampede of undead behind them. It was an avalanche – a relentless heaving wave that swept up to the wire, then surged over it. They broke into the trench line in a dozen places and overran the men there.”