Unarmed: A Post-Apocalyptic Thrill Ride (The Main Event Series Book 1)

by Russ Munson

  “Jesus,” I said.

  A broken stick. It would have to do. I summoned every last bit of energy and let out a war cry. Which was probably more of a cry of desperation at this point than a call to arms. I charged up the stairs. I gripped that wooden handle with both hands as if I were about to unleash the fury of Excalibur and swung for their kneecaps.

  I swung hard and followed through across their legs as if I were swatting a stick at the slats in the fence alongside my father’s property and running down to the pond, taking a menacing delight in the rat-tat-tat, pretending there were warplanes swooping down from the clouds and I had to make it down to the banks to take cover.

  It was cognitive dissonance. My mind went to a happier place and I saw my body crouch, push off the wall, and sweep a hooked leg back in the other direction, skimming right along the edge of the top stair and knocking them over, one after the other.

  I stepped a leg up onto the railing and launched myself over them. They had too much gear to get up quickly and they struggled under the weight of those tanks. Their hands were still occupied with their axes and they swung them wildly. I watched myself flying through the air, the blades chopping like a rototiller under me.

  I landed and rolled on the other side. Then the demon left me and the energy drained. I snapped back to myself. I was me again, back in control of my body, and filled with despair.

  I stood, my legs wobbly.

  Another explosion. The door blew off its hinges and hurtled toward me. I raised both palms as if a truck were bearing down on me and braced myself. It struck me head-on and sent me flying backward. I flew right over the firemen and landed in a heap on the stairs below, the door on top of me. A fireball licked the broken window, the wires holding it together glowing hot. Through the singed glass, a film of soot, I could see the billowing, twisting, blobs of fire. They were eating each other, bubbling and growing, black and orange. The fireball reached all the way up to the ceiling of the flight above and the firemen were consumed.

  Behind me, the mob kept coming. They didn’t care about the heat. They’d be incinerated, but it didn’t stop them.

  I had only one chance. I grabbed the twisted metal door and used it as a shield and gathered what shreds were left of my tattered strength and ran up the stairs, straight at the fire. The fire singed my knuckles, but I climbed, climbed, and stepped over the firemen. Their faces were contorted in agony under their face masks and their burnt bodies crackled under my feet.

  The door was getting too hot to hold. Past the firemen, I crouched down, turned around, and balanced the door on my back. Then I climbed the next flight of stairs like a turtle in its shell.

  The higher I got, the air cooled down. Finally, I made it to the halfway landing and let the steaming door slide of my back. It bump, bump, bumped down the stairs and disappeared into the flames below.

  I lay down on the concrete. I wanted to keep going, but my back was burnt and my knuckles were bubbling.

  I took off my gloves and unwrapped my hands. The burnt tape came off like wrappings from a mummy, stiff and black, and I dropped the blackened scraps on the floor.

  Then I crawled. I was on my hands and knees, the duffle bag trailing behind me.

  One step. Then another. And another.

  With my last bit of energy, I dragged myself onto the landing and lay there, face down, breathing hard, my lips on the dirty concrete.

  The thirteenth floor.

  Whoever was coming out that door would finish me.

  Chapter Nineteen

  No one came.

  I waited. I stared at the door handle.

  My mind wanted me to get up, but my body had reached its limit. Behind me, there were no sounds but the low rumble of the fire.

  I stared at the door handle so hard and so long that I could have sworn I saw it jiggle.

  But the door did not open.

  My heart was thump, thump, thumping against the concrete landing. It was not beating fast, but working hard, pushing blood through my system all at once, like trying to force air into the neck of a tight balloon.

  I needed adrenaline. Artificial, even. An injection, maybe. If I was going to get back to my feet and go the last mile, I needed help. On my morning runs, Brian would drive the truck beside me and yell out the window: “Screw your body! Push it past the wall and you’ll get a runner’s high.”

  But not me. My body didn’t work like that.

  My heart never got excited. I never got a runner’s high.

  So I lay there. Helpless. Worthless.

  Below, the mob had taken a break. They were waiting for the flames to die. It didn’t take long. The fireball receded and the mob was on the move again. Their hearts were working overtime and their collective huffing moved a mass of hot, humid air up the stairs.

  “Get up,” I mumbled.

  I pushed myself to my knees. I knelt there on the landing and stared at the door handle as if in prayer. The concrete was hard on my knees and my shins. I sat back on my heels and there was a painful stretch in my thighs and over the top of my feet, my tailbone aching.

  I didn’t beg the universe for anything. This was the top level. I had played enough video games to know that whatever waited on the other side of that door was far worse than anything I had fought so far.

  And yet I was not afraid. All I needed was energy.

  Thinking of Suzie had helped me when I was trapped under the concrete, so I closed my eyes and tried to picture her face.

  But it wouldn’t come. Not the details. All I could see was a vague outline, the shape of a Valentine’s Day candy.

  I had learned from watching Saving Private Ryan that if you wanted to picture someone, you had to think of the context. I had watched that film on the night before I went to enlist in the Army. I was a mental masochist.

  But the next morning, on my way to the recruiter, I ran into Brian. At that point, I hadn't seen him since junior high, not since we had dreamed of stringing up the heavy bag in my father's basement, of punching it until our knuckles were raw and bloody, all while we played the Rocky soundtrack for motivation.

  Brian was walking on the sidewalk and that withered arm of his was cradled in a sling. He had started wearing the sling whenever he went out in public. It was easier to hide the arm and answer the occasional question about what had happened rather than endure the stares. The worst were from the children. They looked at him as if he were an octopus washed up on the shore and one of its eight arms was cut off at the elbow, the pink tentacle lying limp on a bed of rocks.

  I had slowed my father's truck and offered to give Brian a ride. On the way to the recruiter, we talked about life after high school. He told me how he couldn’t find any work in our small town. “Ever try keeping the paper bag open wide enough to fit a bag of potato chips inside with only one arm?” he had said. “It’s almost impossible. Especially when the grocer’s got a stopwatch.”

  It was then that I knew that my success could be his success. Every time I climbed into the ring, I could fight for something bigger.

  Kneeling there, staring at the door on the thirteenth floor, I saw his face exactly. The dark curly hair. The boyish cheeks. The pasty skin, so pasty you could see a little network of veins spidering across his cheeks. The images were as good as a slideshow projected on the inside of my forehead, each slide in sepia tones on vintage stock, the de facto tint for memories, my having been so brainwashed by the movies.

  Context was exactly right. If I wanted to see Suzie, I had to think of something specific.

  I thought of her parents’ basement. Of the discarded yellow couches from the 1970s. Of the fraying blankets. Of the washing machines. Of the moldy stack of Playboy magazines that her father left splayed out in the open, a delight for the teenage boys who came to visit, but a constant source of embarrassment for Suzie. She had gotten good at laughing off her frustration, but there was always the edge of hostility in her voice whenever she saw one of her guests peek at one of the unfurle
d centerfolds. Sometimes that hostility would sneak out as a quivered snap whenever her father, wearing nothing but tightie-whities and a wife-beater, came down the stairs looking for an extra pair of tube socks.

  “We’re busy, DAD.”

  “Don’t get TOO busy,” he would say.

  And I remembered the old television. The 13-inch tube in the gray box with the vents on the sides that required a turn of the knob to navigate to the desired channel, a television born before the advent of the remote control. I also remembered the jury-rigged network of cables, the RF converter that had to send the signal from the old NES gaming system through the antenna jack because the television predated RCA cables.

  Suzie and I would sit in front of that idol for hours. We would play CastleVania and Contra and Kid Icarus, the volume cranked to the max to mask the creaking floorboards and the cuss-laden shouting and the slamming doors and the breaking dishes overhead

  That basement was her refuge, her escape to a strictly Newtonian world, one where Max Planck had never been conceived. In video games, there was a firm order to things. A predictability.

  And all you had to do to succeed was figure out the creator’s pattern.

  I remembered that first time in junior high when I walked my fingers down the back of the couch to put an arm around her shoulder.

  "Stop it, Jake. You’re gonna make me die.”

  I could see her face now, her front teeth set against her lips in concentration, that dirty blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail so it didn’t distract her from the game. The basement was always ten degrees colder than upstairs so she always wore a sweater and I could still remember walking my fingers underneath that fuzzy weave for the first time, up the delicate curve of her spine, and discovering she wasn’t wearing a bra.

  “Stop it, you’re gonna make me die,” she said.

  Behind me, the mob was only half a flight away.

  She was my princess. I had to save her.

  I stood up. I straightened. I opened the door and stuck my head into the hallway. It was empty. Quiet.

  I slipped through and closed the door behind me. The stairwell was at the end of the hallway. I hobbled past the broken elevators and stumbled down the hall.

  Behind me, the mob scratched at the door. It would only take them a few minutes to get it open.

  The hallway was pink and blue, but gray in the yellow emergency light. It stretched ahead for only ten yards and then there was another set of doors.

  They were closed. A sign overhead said MATERNITY.

  The ringing in my ears had finally quieted and I wanted to sit down with my back against the wall and close my eyes and take a moment.

  The handle moved. The door opened. The mob, in their collective discombobulation, funneled through.

  Another sign on the wall said, Press Button to Gain Admittance. It was an intercom. You had to get special permission to get inside. It was supposed to cut down on baby snatching.

  I thumbed the button. It was dead. Of course. No power. I grabbed the handle and rattled the doors. They were locked. Past them, through the windows in the doors, I could see the nurse’s station. It was empty. No one was sitting there to let me in. Past that, a gaping hole where the back half of the building had been blown away gave a view of the charred city.

  I rattled the doors.

  “Come on! Open up!”

  The paramedic was at the head of the mob. I could see him in the reflection in the glass, getting bigger, bigger. He was holding the shotgun by the muzzle, wielding it as a club. He ran at me, ready to crack my head open with that 12-gauge tomahawk.

  I waited until the very last second and then I slipped to the side, under the arc of the weapon, and delivered an elbow to his gut. He doubled over and I wrenched the shotgun from his grip. Then I put my whole body into a shove and sent him reeling to the other side of the hallway.

  Before he could recover and come at me again, I raised the shotgun and jabbed the butt through the window. The glass shattered. I cleared away the broken shards and pulled out the wires and shoved my whole arm in. The glass cut me up, but I was able to reach the handle, and I opened the door from the other side.

  The mob was swarming now. I slipped through and pulled a mobile EKG cart in front of the door to block it.

  They rattled the door, but it held.

  The wind whipped through the hallway and whistled through the jagged edges of the giant hole. Papers and bandages and cinders swirled in tiny eddies at my feet.

  I hobbled down the hall. I needed something to keep me going. I stopped at the nurse’s station. A woman lay on her back on the other side of the desk, a deep gash in her forehead. She wasn't moving.

  I turned the monitors around and punched the keys, but they were all dead. On the wall, I found a hanging clipboard. It was a list of names. Of rooms. I grabbed it and ran my finger down the list. My finger stopped on the name Susie Quintet. Misspelled of course.

  She was here. Room 1304.

  The nurses’s break room was off to the side. I rounded the desk and hobbled inside. There was no emergency light inside and it was darker than the hallway. I pawed over the counter and found a sink. I turned the faucet. No water. I felt over the shelves looking for something, anything really. I was looking for the pork chop hidden in the wall, the power-up that would get my heart going and restore my energy. An injection of pure adrenaline, maybe.

  My hands found a cylindrical shape. A bowl. A coffee pot. The caffeine would have to do. I drank straight from the pot. It was cold and bitter and made me wince. I downed the whole pot.

  I was so depleted, the caffeine hit me quickly. My heart gave an extra flutter. My eyes opened wide. It was better than nothing.

  A large shape passed by the door, nothing but a blur in the corner of my eye. The moment I turned, it was gone. I tossed the pot into the sink. The leftover impression was that of the same shape in the cemetery. It was the same height, the same fluid lumbering.

  This whole time, my brain must've been working subconsciously to figure out that familiar gait, and I had a sudden flash of exactly who it was. I thought of the tapes that Brian had shown me.

  It couldn't be. There was no way. No way in hell he had followed me here. My brain must’ve been playing tricks. A real dick move.

  If it was who I thought it was, I was a dead man.

  I left the nurse’s station. I stepped cautiously through the broken glass and the spilled package of markers and rounded the counter.

  Back at the doors, the mob was banging on the windows, their faces pressed to the glass. A cold wind whipped down the hallway and glowing embers twinkled on the air. It was almost pretty, considering.

  I hobbled down the hallway, glancing in each room as I passed. They were all empty, evacuated, or worse.

  1302. 1303. 1304.

  “Suzie?”

  Chapter Twenty

  In the room, a shape was squatting by the grayness of the window. For balance, she had one hand on the back of a pull-out chair, the type that husbands or boyfriends could sleep in when labor lasted through the night.

  I was neither.

  She was reaching under the gown between her knees. Her face was twisted in agony. Sweat had matted her blonde hair to the side of her face like a helmet.

  "Suzie?" I said.

  She looked up. She was breathing hard and trying to control the pain. Her giant belly was heaving. There had been no one here to help her through the labor. Given that she was on her feet, I figured the explosion had hit before she got an epidural.

  "My God, you have to lie down," I said.

  She grunted. Another wave came and she breathed in. Out. In. Out. Her breaths were long and controlled. Instead of answering me, she grimaced and pushed. The vein popped on her forehead and the muscles tensed in her neck, but she kept that one hand open like a claw, ready to catch the infant as he tumbled from her tunnel.

  The contractions eased. The baby was still not there. She caught her breath.


  “Please. Lie down,” I said. “Let me help.”

  “What can you do?” she barked.

  “I don’t know. I can hold your legs or something.”

  “You think you’re better than gravity?”

  She had a point. I was useless. All this fighting to get here, and the birth was entirely out of my control. All I could do was stand and watch.

  “Let me help.”

  “If you want to be useful, get me some water.”

  I thought of the bottle of water I had finished under the rubble. I should have saved her some.

  “The sink doesn’t work. Where?”

  “Jesus, Jake. How am I supposed to know?”

  I tossed the duffle bag on the side of the bed. “I brought you some supplies.”

  She nodded and gripped the back of the chair again.

  “Breathe,” I said. “Get ready to push.”

  “Shut up. I’m fine.”

  “I watched some YouTube videos. I’m not a complete idiot.”

  “Water!”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll look for a vending machine or something.”

  I turned for the door, but something grabbed me from behind and yanked me out the door frame. I caught a last glimpse of Suzie’s face twisted up in pain and then I was sliding down the hallway, squealing on the linoleum, headed right for the jagged hole.

  I stopped at the edge. The wind was strong and hot. Thirteen floors of nothingness loomed behind me.

  I looked up to see him standing in the hallway. He was rimmed by the orange light of the blazing city, exactly the person I feared I had seen.

  Bonecrusher.

  Jon, the Bonecrusher, Cushing. The man whom Brian had refused to let me fight, the one whom the media had dubbed the next champion if only I’d be willing to give him the chance.

  "What are you doing here?"

  “Where is here?”

  "Arlington Hospital."

  He said nothing. His eyes looked sympathetic, frightened, but his body said different. He stood tall and rigid, his arms at his side, his fists clenched, every muscle in his arms and chest tense and ready for the fight. He stood three inches taller than me, but was more toned, more limber. He was shirtless and wearing Union Jack trunks, his fists wrapped and ready, his black body gleaming.