by Morris, Jacy
She watched from the corner of her eye as Joan tried unsuccessfully to pull the gun out of the man's hands. The dead, swollen fingers wouldn't budge, and Joan put more effort into pulling the gun free. She struggled for a few seconds and then backed away. "I can't," she said.
Clara couldn't believe her. "You're a doctor. Didn't you have to deal with shit like this all the time?"
"No, I never had to pull a gun out of a dead man's hands. Most of my patients weren't rotting with the backs of their heads blown off."
Clara wiped a hand across her mouth and said, "Fine. I'll do it." She got to her feet, feeling a bit shaky. She tried to tuck her mind away, to go somewhere where she wasn't aware of what she was doing. She wanted to go to that place where people go when they drive to work in the morning, that place where you're still capable of doing what needs to be done, but you don't actually remember it. Next thing you know, you're in a parking lot, and you have no idea how you made it from point A to point B, but somehow you did.
It didn't work though. If anything, trying to become unaware made her more aware, and every detail of the office jumped out at her. The smell of the dead man, the taste of the rot in her mouth, the sickly brown stains, the buzz of flies and the maggots swimming through the man's remains. She focused on it all, but the most horrifying thing to her was the coldness of the man's hand as she tried to pry the handgun away from him.
His hand was locked in place. There was no way to free the handgun from him without breaking his fingers, so that's what she did. She pulled the telephone handset from its cradle and bashed the man's hand, gritting her teeth, but keeping her lips tightly pursed should any gore or filth fly at her face. Ten times, maybe more, she brought the telephone down on the man's hand, groaning inwardly at the violence that she was doing to the corpse. Would he have killed himself if he knew that someone was going to come along and begin bashing on his hand with a telephone handset? Probably. Eventually, after several crunching sounds, she was able to unlace the man's cold, clammy fingers from the handgun. She held the barrel pinched between two fingers like a mother picking up her child's dirty, smelly gym sock.
"You have any more of that hand sanitizer on you?" she asked Joan.
"Always," she said as she set her backpack on the ground and rummaged through it for the small plastic bottle. Clara set the gun on the table and flicked the safety on. Then she held out her hands to Joan, who tipped the bottle upside down and squeezed until a drop of alcohol-smelling sanitizer hit her hands. Clara rubbed her hands vigorously, and then held them up to her face, breathing in the alcohol sent. At that moment, she thought it was the greatest thing that she had ever smelled.
Joan dumped some sanitizer on the handgun, and they rubbed it around the handle, hoping to kill off any corpse germs.
"You want to go through the drawers?" Clara asked.
"I just want to get out of here," she said.
"That makes two of us."
They left the room, the gun in their possession, and closed the door behind them. In the main room, they sat on the ground and watched the others search through desks. Without speaking to each other, they both knew that they were done scavenging for the day.
The wind whistled into the office through the broken window, bringing with it a refreshing breeze despite the smell of smoke and decay that hung in the air. To Clara, the air was revitalizing compared to what she had been breathing in the office of the dead man. Then a thought hit her. What if the man had smokes? A man high-strung enough to own a gun and put a bullet in his head... well, he had to have a few other vices as well, right? She would do anything for a cigarette. She had run out a week ago. She was no longer addicted. The first few days in the movie theater had been fine until she ran out of reasons to go up on the roof. Her cigarettes had run out, and then each day had seemed like a torture session of longings and cravings.
Those days were gone, but hey, it never hurt to check it out. Clara stood up and moved towards the office. Joan grabbed her arm and asked, "Where are you going?"
"I'm just going to check something out." Joan had a concerned look on her face, but she released her, and Clara walked over to the office. She took a deep breath, and then stepped back inside. She didn't throw up this time. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe she could get used to the smell. If there was one benefit to smoking, it was that it helped deaden one's sense of smell. Clara could go for that. God, this guy better have some cigarettes or else this will all be for nothing.
She moved behind the desk, trying not to look down at the back of the man's head, where she saw maggot-white movement. She pulled the drawers open, hoping to find what she was looking for, although she already knew that if there were smokes anywhere in the office, they wouldn't be in some drawer.
She rifled through the drawer, finding a fairly graphic nudie mag underneath a bunch of files. It was a good sign. Anyone that could close their office door and rub one out would likely take more risks in their life. This man had no pictures on his desk. His face was too disfigured with rot to be able to tell if he had been handsome or not. Based upon his porn collection and the fact that he had chosen to ventilate his head, she guessed he had probably been average at best. She searched the bottom drawer, finding nothing out of the ordinary.
Then she sat back on her heels, trying to guess where they might be. She looked doubtfully at his business pants, tight gray with some neat pleats and a large dried bloodstain. She would search the jacket first.
She reached into his jacket pocket, first the left and then the right. She came up with some keys and a pack of gum. At first, she was tempted to pull the gum out and share some with her fellow survivors, but the thought of chewing something that had been sitting in a dead man's pocket for a couple of weeks was too much for her to stomach. But some of her survivors could definitely use from fresher breath. She pocketed the gum anyway. She certainly wouldn't be partaking, but what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them... and if it made their breath smell less like dog shit, then it would all be worth it.
She found some car keys in the other pocket, but nothing else. She looked at the car keys. A Ford. In her mind, she tried to calculate the odds of being able to find this man's car out on the street. There wasn't much parking on the street in front of the building, but perhaps behind it. She stood and took a look out the window.
Below her, on the backside of the building, there was indeed a parking lot. Three lone cars sat in a cracked, asphalt parking lot. She aimed the key fob at the cars and clicked the lock button. She had hoped to hear a horn blast or see some flashing headlights, but there was nothing. Maybe she was too far away. She shrugged her shoulders and put the key in the pocket of her pants.
She turned her attention back to the dead man and threw his jacket wide open, avoiding the brown stains. There was an inner pocket. Digging her fingers into it, she could feel cold metal items at the end of her fingertips. She knew what they were, so she dug deeper, keeping her mouth closed to avoid tasting the rot of the man.
Eventually, she pried the bullets free, 4 brass casings that were as good as gold used to be. She threw them in her pocket as well and then looked down at the man's pants. There was no getting around it. She would have to go through the man's pockets. She squatted to her knees, and went through the right pocket. She pulled out a useless chunk of metal and plastic.
It was a cell phone. She pressed the power button, but there was no response. Even if it had a full charge, it wouldn't have worked. The towers and networks and satellites required to keep the modern-day cell phone network running had long since broken down. There was no one to fix them. She slid the phone back into the man's pocket. It was his. It was personal. Perhaps he had pictures of his family on there.
She walked around the desk and squatted down on the man's opposite side. It was now or never, she thought. She reached into the pocket, cringing at the feel of crusty brown fabric on her skin. Mentally, she kept her fingers crossed. Then she touched it, a box covered in plastic
. She grasped the box with her fingers and pulled it free. She could have cried.
She held the green box in front of her, and then she flipped it open. There they were. Cigarettes. She pulled one out and rolled it between her fingers, savoring the feeling of just having one in her possession. The white stick rolled back and forth, then she held it up to her lips.
"Fuck." Clara looked up at the acoustic tiling on the ceiling, as if, just on the other side, God might be there, ready to listen to her justification for using foul language. "Now I just need a lighter."
Chapter 6: Not Quite the Way It Was Planned
It was dark in the office. The sun had passed over them and now hung in the sky to the west, casting shadows throughout the building. With the darkness came the silence, of the people at least. The world around them was still full of noises. Distant gunfire echoed through the city, the wind howled through the broken windows, and the thumps and groans of the dead assaulted them from the stairwell.
They were now trapped, at least until morning. Trying to escape at night, in a pitch black city where not even the moon was shining thanks to the veil of smoke and haze that had descended upon Portland would be suicide. About that one thing they had all agreed.
Everything else was up in the air.
"I found these keys," Clara said.
Rudy looked at the keys dangling in Clara's hand. "What are we supposed to do with those?"
Clara shrugged. "I don't know. It's just another option."
Andy, having been silent for most of the day finally spoke up. "Yeah, well it's an option for maybe four of us. Five at the most."
"Dibs," Amanda called. The group looked at her without amusement. "What? How else would we choose who gets to go and who doesn't?"
"None of us is leaving without the others," Lou said. "There's strength in numbers. If we get separated, we get weaker."
"Yeah, well, we had a shitload of numbers at the Coliseum, and that certainly didn't seem to help. Maybe it would be better if we all split up and went our own way," Katie said.
It was a sobering thought, and there was some truth to what Katie had said. At the Coliseum, the numbers had actually worked against them, drawing the dead like flies to shit.
"No," Rudy said. "I've been on my own. I don't want to experience that again."
Chloe tossed a sharp look in Rudy's direction.
"I'm not keen on being out there on my own either," Blake said. "Especially since I can't hear anymore." Much of the conversation was lost to Blake, but he was learning to pick up on more than just the lips of the speakers. He was beginning to be able to factor their body language into the equation as well. He was still lost for the most part, but not completely.
"Listen. If I decide I'm better off on my own, no one is keeping me here. Got that?" Katie said, aiming a stern glance around the circle.
Lou just shook his head. It was clear that things weren't going as he planned.
"Together, separately. I don't give a fuck. I just want to get out of this building," Chloe said.
Mort added, "Yeah, let's focus on getting out of this place. I can't stand all that banging and groaning."
Half of the group looked subconsciously at the stairwell, their minds filling in the horrors that they couldn't see through the door. They listened as the dead played the walls like a brigade of tireless bucket buskers. Then they began to talk again, their minds all too happy to argue about things that mattered and things that didn't, even if it was just to drown out the noise of the dead beating on the walls.
When they were done and a plan had been formulated, they all went their own separate ways, or as separate as they could be in the third floor of an office building.
Joan, Katie and Mort passed around the bottle of whiskey that they had found in one of the offices. Katie drank from it with greed. Amanda and Rudy tried a sip, and then made faces that made the others laugh. Lou took a sip and then sat alone in an office chair, his hands behind his head, staring up at the acoustic tiles above.
Blake sat in the corner, cleaning and loading the guns, of which they had plenty. Ammunition not so much. Clara, deciding that she could stand it no longer, had asked Mort if he had a lighter. He did. Now they stood next to the window smoking. Chloe ate what she could, knowing that she would need to keep up her energy.
Then they all laid down to sleep. The tumult from the stairwell continued. The only other noise was the snoring of Blake as he drifted off to sleep. For everyone else, the noises kept them up until the sun rose, more orange than usual as the sunlight fought its way through the haze of smoke that clogged the city streets.
With some reluctance, Mort shook Blake awake, and mouthed the words, "It's time," to him. He nodded his head, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, and sat up.
"We still got any of those cigarettes?" Blake asked.
Clara clenched the package tight in her hands, and then with some hesitation, she handed one over. What the hell? she thought. He was the one risking his life.
****
Mort could barely watch. He felt useless. He should have been out there with him, but he was stuck inside because of his knee. There was no way he would have survived the jump. He eyed the distance between the outcropping from the second floor, ten feet below them. He would never be able to make that leap with his knee in the shape that it was in.
But Blake had done it easily, even with his rifle slung over his shoulder. Mort's stomach had dropped just watching Blake make the jump. He landed on a section of roof that jutted out from the back of the building. The impact looked brutal, and Mort winced just watching it. Ten feet over and ten feet down. Mort didn't have the math knowledge in his head to figure out how far that was, but it was a pretty good drop.
From there, Blake did another drop onto the pavement of a loading dock behind the building. This drop was even longer, but Blake was able to hang down from the roof to lessen the impact. It still looked painful as hell. The other survivors crowded around the window, their guns in their hands, though few of them had anything that was reliable enough at the range that Blake was now at.
As he hit the pavement, the dead bodies turned immediately, their arms stretching into the air, their growls picking up in intensity. Blake's boots skipped across the pavement, and he moved quickly, but efficiently, checking al around him.
Then Lou followed, jumping the gap from the third floor to the second, and then dropping down onto the loading dock, his machine gun hanging from a strap around his neck and shoulders. Mort wanted to yell, to cheer them on, but this was not the world that one yelled in. That world was gone. So he watched silently as they sprinted across the parking lot, Blake twenty feet ahead of Lou, and Lou keeping a watch on Blake's back from a distance. He could only imagine the fear and tension they were experiencing. Mort thought he was going to have a heart attack just watching them.
As Blake neared the three parked cars, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the keys that Clara had found. The survivors watched as he pressed the button on the fob, but nothing happened. He neared the closest car, and held it out again. Still there was nothing. They watched as he dodged around the clumsy grasp of one of the dead and headed towards the second car. Even from the window, they could see him pressing the button over and over again, holding it out like a gun, hoping for any sort of response from the cars.
There was no flash of headlights for Blake to see, so he changed direction and headed for the third car, never hearing the machine gun fire from Lou's gun as he popped a handful of skulls.
"Come on," Mort said, "be the one."
Blake ran to the third car, certain that it must be the one. He skidded to a stop and held the keys out to the vehicle, jamming on the unlock button. There was still no response. He pulled on the door handle of the car, but it wouldn't open. He even went so far as to try and jam the keys in the lock, but they wouldn't fit.
He threw the keys down to the ground and unslung his rifle, his back against the car. Lou finally caught up to hi
m and they turned to look at the mass that was following them. The dead, sensing live prey within their grasp were spilling out of the Teller & Associates building, and there was now a solid wall of rotting bodies between the survivors and their two lost lambs.
"Run!" Mort yelled, hoping that Lou could hear him, and knowing that Blake could not. "Get out of there!" The other survivors echoed his pleas.
Lou looked back up at them, regret on his face. He pulled Blake by the shirt, an ancient white T-shirt that was more brown than anything else these days. Blake shrugged him off and started firing into the mass of the dead. Lou grabbed Blake again and pulled him away. Blake looked up at the survivors, and Mort liked what he saw there. The look on his face said, "I'll be back." Then they were off, scrambling across the parking lot and picking their way among the dead.
He hoped he would see them again... and soon.
****
"Well that was a giant clusterfuck," Chloe said, drawing a dirty look from Mort.
"Do you think they'll make it?" Amanda asked.
No one said anything. There wasn't anything to say, not anything that people would want to hear. They stepped back inside, away from the windows, where the dead, having been thwarted in their chase of Blake and Lou, now turned their attention back to the survivors in the building. They were trapped. They were slower. They would be easier to eat.
Now the building was thoroughly encircled by the dead. Initially, the majority of the dead had crowded around the front of the Teller & Associates building, around the entrance that the survivors had used to come in. They had all taken careful looks by hanging out of the broken window and looking down. Now, they were more evenly distributed. It was perhaps the only positive development of the entire ordeal. If they had to run, if they had to get out, they would have a better chance now.
"My only questions is are they going to come back for us?" Katie said. It was a dark thought, but one that they had to start thinking of. Food was already an issue. They were living on candy bars. They were fine with whiskey and water, but sooner or later, they were going to have to find some more food. They could spend days waiting for Lou and Blake to return, if they actually managed to survive.