The Human Spring

by Hollingsworth, David

  The two of them darted to the fence, Ehsan leading the way. He cautiously opened the gate. Nothing. The entire street was barren. Ehsan crept across the lawn as Fatima followed. They headed up the street in the general direction of the clinic, north. They decided to keep going until they reached the houses on the route to the clinic, as they knew that area better than anywhere else, then go east from there.

  They saw zombies as they moved further up the road. They darted up the street, avoiding most of them, until they arrived at the house beginning a row of walkways. Ehsan couldn’t see the other side of the house with the walkway from the direction they came from. He realized it could be gone. Still, they had little choice. They entered with caution and tapped on the walls. Nothing.

  Ehsan breathed a sigh of relief as they searched downstairs. All clear. They crept upstairs. Also clear. They made their way to the room with the walkway. They opened the door. No walkway.

  “Well, at least we are safe for now,” Fatima said without conviction, setting down her machete. She grabbed a tape dispenser and threw it into the street in case any zombies had seen them run inside.

  “Yeah.” Ehsan also sat his weapon down.

  “With the walkway missing, however, we-”

  The door opened downstairs. Ehsan froze. He exchanged glances with Fatima, her eyes wide with terror. Ehsan could feel his heartbeat in his throat. They grabbed their weapons but stood frozen in place, unsure of whether to investigate or hide. Ehsan wanted to do the latter.

  They heard knocking on the walls. Someone from the school.

  “Oh thank goodness,” Fatima sighed, her shoulders relaxing.

  All the weight and dread Ehsan had felt moments prior evaporated as if by magic. “Let’s go see who it is.” Fatima nodded.

  The two of them opened the door and walked to the stairway. They briefly exchanged glances, elated. They made it to the staircase and halfway downstairs before a familiar face turned the corner to greet them: the one-armed trenchcoat zombie. The Viking zombie with the missing lower jaw appeared right after, barely able to fit through the doorframe behind it.

  “I thought that might work,” stated the trenchcoat zombie in a deep, scratchy, matter of fact voice.

  “SARAH, HELP PROTECT THE CHILDREN! FATIMA, EHSAN, KEEP MANAGING THAT HORDE!” Cecilia roared. She turned in the direction of the kindergarten area. “HECTOR, HELP WITH THE CHILDREN! KEN, KEEP PICKING OFF THE CLIMBING ZOMBIES!” As much as Sarah wanted to be near Mateo, she thought she had a real shot with Ehsan and Fatima at closing the other rear bus doors. If they could do that, they could help stem the tide at the gates right after.

  Sarah looked toward the front of the school. Josue kneeled near the lunch tables, breathing heavily, almost toppling over with each swing. Sarah could also hear the gasps and sobs of Marcus even from where she watched. She looked toward the medicine rooms, seeing Cecilia and Deon defend against the growing horde. All of a sudden Sarah understood. Evacuation might be necessary, even if they somehow closed all the bus doors, and Cecilia wanted them ready.

  She sprinted toward the classrooms behind the library. She reached it in time to help Mateo take out a few more climbers. Sarah turned around to see Emma and Julie peeking their heads out of the doorways of their rooms, which Manuel stood right in front of. Sarah and Mateo exchanged glances. He smiled, happy to see her. She wanted to kiss him, but thought better of it.

  Hector arrived seconds later, a grim look on his face. “Josue’s already…”

  “Damn it,” Mateo replied, filling in the blank.

  “Things aren’t looking good,” Sarah observed, finishing off another climber. Hector nodded. “I think it’s time to leave.”

  “But the school-” Mateo began in protest.

  “Isn’t as important as our lives.” She turned to everyone watching from their rooms. “We need to go in small groups or they’ll notice us. Who wants to evacuate first? Hector can guide you to the front corner of the school so you can slip out safely.”

  Manuel volunteered. “I can help ‘Ector,” he decided, raising his shovel. He, his kids, and Hector departed toward the front corner of the school. Mateo went to go take care of a few zombies that’d made their way from the blacktop to the library while Sarah stayed with Julie, Emma, and the rest of the kids. Seeing Mateo leave greatly upset Ana and Estefanía, who called for him to come back.

  “Mister Mateo will be okay,” Sarah heard Julie reassure them.

  “What about us?!” Estefanía cried, who Sarah could tell by voice alone verged on tears.

  “Miss Sarah is right here, and Mister Mateo isn’t far. You’re safe, sweetie, I promise,” Julie answered with great warmth. Estefanía said nothing more.

  Four more zombies made their way over the fence. Sarah ran over to take care of them as Mateo battled the zombies at the other end of the hall by the blacktop. She took them out easily, using her speed and misdirection to set up attacks to the neck of each zombie. She finished just as Hector returned.

  “The coast is clear,” he informed her. “I can take another group.”

  “Go ahead and take Emma and the clinic kids, and stay with them.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Mateo and I can take Julie and the rest of the kids.”

  Hector nodded and thanked her. He wasted no time in escorting Emma, who wielded a knife in her right hand, and the clinic kids. Emma held Andrea while Lucero and Juan stuck next to her. Sarah turned around to see Mateo finish the last zombie right in front of him, though more approached from about fifteen feet away.

  “Damn,” Mateo said. At first Sarah assumed he meant the additional zombies from the blacktop, but she realized he was looking toward the back of the school. He turned to Sarah. “More zombies around the corner. They just cut off Ehsan and Fatima, who were already being chased by sprinters. They’re running to the playground. I think we’re on our own.”

  “Shit.” Sarah turned to Julie. “Okay Julie, we should-”

  Another zombie jumped the fence. Sarah went to go take it out.

  “The sprinters are charging here now!” Mateo informed them. “We gotta go.”

  Julie led Sebastian, Ana, Estefanía, and Andrew out of the class and down the hall toward Sarah. As they ran over, however, Ana and Estefanía stopped without Julie noticing and looked toward Mateo. They ran to him, tears in their eyes.

  “Ana! Estefanía! Get back here!” Sarah commanded as Julie stopped, realizing what happened.

  They didn’t hear. They kept charging toward Mateo, now sobbing. Mateo saw them only seconds before they reached him, just as the zombies who had earlier cut off Ehsan and Fatima also reached him. Sarah looked on in horror. Mateo swatted them away with his ax, Ana and Estefanía balled up behind him. Mateo kicked one into the two directly behind it, giving him a moment to collect himself. He seemed determined until he glanced over his shoulder toward the front of the school. He went pale. Suddenly, they heard shouting in the distance.

  “HEY, ZOMBIES, OVER HERE!” Sarah recognized it as Fatima’s voice. She saw some of the zombies in the crowd turn toward the back of the school while Mateo fought those directly in front of them.

  “Looks like they pulled through after all,” Sarah declared with a sigh of relief.

  “Yeah,” Mateo muttered, his face still pale. The grin Sarah expected from him didn’t materialize. “Let’s go.”

  Sarah led Julie and the kids toward the front of the school. She tried to push concerns about Mateo’s odd behavior out of her mind, careful to make sure nothing tried to surprise them as they rushed to the front. She glanced back. Four more zombies had just jumped the fence, blocking Mateo’s exit, while others approached him from behind. She hesitated.

  “Go! Go!” Mateo’s voice commanded.

  Sarah decided to trust him. She resumed running and didn’t look over her shoulder, confident Mateo of all people could handle himself. She worried more about everyone who’d left before them. She picked up the pace, wanting to do
what she could to make sure everyone made it to the library safely.

  “Go! Go!” Mateo told Sarah. He raised his ax to attack, but one of the climbers stopped walking forward and raised its arms to block. An intelligent one. Mateo cursed under his breath. He backed up to assess the situation, but heard shuffling footsteps behind him. He turned around and saw the other zombies closing in. He led the girls to the nearest classroom and locked the door as they entered. He then took them to the common area between the classrooms and locked that door, too. Mateo collapsed to the ground.

  Cecilia got bit. He saw it right before Fatima started yelling to distract the zombies. He couldn’t believe the grace with which she had taken it, glancing at it for only a fraction of a second before throwing the zombie to the ground and stabbing it as if nothing had happened. But it had. He envied Cecilia’s resolve.

  He hadn’t told Sarah and the others about her bite for fear of further panicking them. With Josue and Marcus dead, he knew the news of Cecilia would be too much. He stifled his tears for the woman he’d built their community with, not wanting to concern Ana or Estefanía any more than he had to.

  “What’s wrong, Mister Mateo?” Ana asked with big, round, still-misty eyes.

  Mateo forced a grin and shook his head, his throat tight, trying to keep the emotional dam intact. “I’m just sad about our school, girls. We worked so hard to make it feel like a home. But we’re okay. We’re okay,” he repeated with a trembling voice.

  They hugged him and he hugged them back. His hands shook. A single tear rolled down his cheek, but he succeeded in preventing more from falling. The loss of Cecilia brought him back to his first assignment as a fresh-faced firefighter at the Rancho Madero Fire Department. Captain Frank, a gruff man with a mustache thicker than his Texan accent, got the call about a house fire in a residential neighborhood. He joked about how no one ever calls the fire department for doing something smart, then mobilized his team and boarded the truck. Mateo couldn’t believe how casually everyone acted. He felt like an imposter. Upon seeing Mateo’s nerves as he climbed aboard, Captain Frank told him ‘don’t sweat it, son, all we gotta do is put the wet stuff on the red stuff.’

  The ride over consisted mostly of Captain Frank and another firefighter, Tiet, making jokes and one-liners about being firefighters. Mateo’s favorite was ‘100% satisfaction guaranteed or your fire back.’ The drive took about ten minutes. By the time they arrived, the fire had escalated dramatically due to active winds and the dry surrounding environment. The fire roared out of control, the weather conditions progressively worsening as time went by, gusts of winds bringing the fire so close that at times Mateo thought his skin might cook like juevos con chorizo. His hands couldn’t stop shaking. Preparing to fight fires and actually fighting them, with real lives on the line, including his and his team’s, were two vastly separate endeavors. At one point a building collapsed and almost killed Tiet, who brushed it off. Mateo’s trembling worsened.

  ‘To be human is to be scared,’ Captain Frank told him after the building fell, a swashbuckling grin on his face. ‘We’re all scared shitless, Mateo. We just fight it, same way we fight these fires.’ Mateo took a closer look at his squad. Beyond their determined expressions and puffed out chests, Mateo could now make out the terror that subtly widened their eyes and tensed their shoulders. Even Captain Frank’s grin had an anxiety to it, present just at the very corners of his mouth and the way his eyes strained ever so slightly. Mateo wasn’t an intruder among innately special, fearless demigods, but rather one among very human, very vulnerable people who relied on each other to do what they could. Mateo’s hands continued to tremble, but far less violently.

  The fire took over eleven hours to contain. Mateo felt an exhaustion incomparable to anything he’d felt up that point in his life, the combined physical and mental exhaustion of putting everything on the line against the unknown, an exhaustion only ever rivaled thereafter by his first zombie horde encounter. He approached Captain Frank afterward to celebrate their success and that fatigue, which he felt oddly proud of.

  He stopped, however, when he saw Captain Frank’s face after another firefighter gave him a report. Captain Frank’s playful heroism dissipated. All that remained was a stiff, brooding melancholy, his eyes straining from a weight only he could feel. He told Mateo that, in those eleven hours and forty burned houses, three people had died. Mateo deflated entirely. He looked back at the charred remains of the fires they’d extinguished. All that work for nothing.

  ‘What’s the point of all this if people still died?’ Mateo muttered, staring at the ground.

  Captain Frank put his hand on Mateo’s shoulder. Mateo looked up to see a then-unfathomable pain in his eyes. ‘The point is to do our damnedest to keep that count as low as possible.’

  Mateo never forgot those words. He looked down at Ana and Estefanía and held them for a few more seconds, reveling in every moment of it. He had to get them to that library, no matter what. He stood up. He returned to the classroom they’d come from to check if they could escape through that row of classes. He heard zombies right outside the window. He crept back to the common area. For now, he had to wait for the proper time to move.

  Cecilia would’ve been proud of his patience.

  Ehsan dropped Dragon Hair upon seeing the trenchcoat zombie. His legs went numb. He stumbled backward, falling onto the steps, staring ahead, speechless.

  “Y-you are not…” Fatima began, unable to finish, the weight of her words causing her to choke on them.

  “Human? No,” it answered in that same tone, a stoic voice somehow both primal and mechanical. It held a sabre in its left hand with a dark blue hilt that matched its trenchcoat. It stood in place, unfazed, its stern eyes studying them. Behind it the Viking zombie waited, watching them hungrily, though its missing lower jaw meant it couldn’t bite them. The trenchcoat zombie spoke without turning to its companion. “Capture them.”

  Ehsan scrambled to his feet, legitimately concerned his erratic heartbeat might result in what happened to Josue the previous night. Ehsan and Fatima rushed up the stairs and toward the bedroom. As Ehsan shot through the door he realized he’d left Dragon Hair behind. Too late now. He slammed the door and locked it, just in time to hear a loud thud against the bedroom door. He then heard a crunch as it slammed its body into the door.

  Ehsan and Fatima sprinted toward the walkway. Still gone. Ehsan cursed under his breath. In all the chaos, he’d forgotten entirely. He and his sister exchanged glances. “We have to jump,” he whispered, wishing she feared snakes or spiders instead.

  “I know.”

  Ehsan climbed onto the window sill and looked down. Fortunately, a shed below meant only a drop of about seven feet. A crashing noise ripped behind him. The Viking zombie had broken in.

  “Shit.” Ehsan hopped onto the roof of the shed. He looked up to his sister, who grimaced as she looked at the drop to the shed. She threw down her machete, which Ehsan picked up for her. He heard thundering footsteps behind her. She closed her eyes and cringed, dropping from the house to the top of the shed.

  The Viking zombie reached down and caught her by the hair.

  Fatima howled in pain. Ehsan moved to grab Fatima from its grasp, but there was no need. After a moment of panicked flailing, Fatima regained just enough composure to pull out her kitchen knife and stab it in the hand. It let go and glared at them as Fatima fell, its eyes far more lucid than the average intelligent zombie. Had it not been for the decaying flesh and unmistakable smell thereof, Ehsan could’ve mistaken it for human.

  Ehsan handed Fatima her machete. The two of them hopped from the shed to the ground, then sprinted from the side of the house to the front. Ehsan glanced back to see the trenchcoat zombie standing on the porch, patiently studying them, entirely unfazed by their escape. Ehsan turned his gaze forward. Only four zombies stood in the street, scattered, none of them fast or intelligent. They ran right past them and turned the corner as fast as they could. None on this
street. Ehsan realized all of the nearby zombies were at the school, just like with the pier. Still, Ehsan didn’t want to risk the trenchcoat or Viking zombies catching up with them. They didn’t slow down. As they turned the next corner they saw Manuel and his kids powerwalking cautiously up the front yards of the street, Manuel’s shovel at the ready.

  Not wanting anymore sentient zombies to hear them, Ehsan and Fatima chose not to yell to get their attention. They jogged along the front yards. Manuel eventually turned around and pulled back his shovel when he heard them, ready to strike, but smiled in relief upon recognizing them. Gustavo and Natalia turned around right after, Gustavo looking like he got a second wind, Natalia looking only slightly less terrified. Fatima held her finger to her lips to make sure Gustavo knew not to make any noise.

  The five of them crossed the street and ran into the first house. Fatima tapped the walls, Ehsan at a complete loss at what to do without Dragon Hair. He despaired both at being without a weapon and at no longer having anything to remember his friends at the Costco with. He had picked that shovel as his weapon at the suggestion of the girl he had a crush on at the time, Fatima’s best friend Rachel, and doodled on it frequently with his friend Miguel.

  “Are you okay?” Fatima asked Manuel as his kids clung to him.

  “Sí, pero, no sabemos si…” He stopped himself. For the first time since Ehsan had met him, he looked frustrated. “We no, ehh, know where the others are.”

  “Do you know where the public library is?” Ehsan asked. Manuel tilted his head and furrowed his brows. Ehsan tried to remember what little Spanish he knew. “Uhh, la… biblioteca?”

  “Sí. Vámonos.”

  Ehsan, Fatima, Manuel, and his kids reached the library parking lot without any confrontations. Ehsan spent most of the journey staring at every window they passed, anticipating the eyes of the trenchcoat or Viking zombie in every one, but saw nothing. As they crossed the parking lot, Ehsan examined the library. The building was a vast, pale grey, stone rectangle with a triangular archway at the front that read RANCHO MADERO PUBLIC LIBRARY. The windows were tall, tinted, and square, blockaded with bookshelves and furniture from the inside.