by Morris, Jacy
He spotted the leader of the military men, Sergeant Tejada. Now there was a man that knew how to get things done. Using the bridge as a base of operations was a terrible idea in Andy's estimation, but Sergeant Tejada seemed like the type of dude that knew when to cut and run. Maybe they had a place for him here. Whatever decision he was going to make was going to have to be made quick. The survivors were gathering... their time on the bridge was almost done.
****
Sergeant Tejada watched the survivors drag their sorry asses out into the middle of the encampment. They were about as prepared for their journey as Sergeant Tejada was to put down his rifle and call it quits. They shuffled their way into the circle of cars, their faces matching the look of that blonde girl as she had stood on the edge of the bridge waiting for her punishment to be meted out. They looked like they were getting ready to march to their death. Maybe they were.
"I see you've all made your decision," he announced. The soldiers not at their posts turned and regarded the survivors, temporarily halting their card-playing, reading, and, for one soldier, his tanning.
The bald black man, Lou the man had said his name was, stepped up, nodded his head, and said, "Yeah, we've decided to move on."
"Well, that's just fine," Sergeant Tejada said.
"Most of us anyway..." he said, hesitating as if there were more on his mind.
He already knew what was coming. Life in the world of the dead wasn't so complicated. It was all about making it through the day and waking up strong enough in the morning to make it through the next. "I figured you might say that."
"Thing is, we wanna know, if we leave some people here with you, are they going to be safe?" the tall cowboy said. Sergeant Tejada spared him a glance. That one didn't say much, but when he spoke, everyone listened.
Sergeant Tejada waved his hand around, imploring the survivors to look around. "You can see we're well armed. If things get bad, we'll move what we got and fall back, either to the west side of the river or the east side."
The mean-looking broad, the one with the dead eyes, said, "That's not what we're talking about."
He knew perfectly well what they were talking about. He just wanted to see if they were going to say it. "I won't let them get hurt on my watch." That was as good as he could do. If he could help it, nothing would happen, but should he fall... well, he couldn't very well be responsible for that could he?
"That's how it has to be I suppose. We got two people that are staying. Rudy, the unconscious fellow in there and Amanda. When Rudy wakes up, if he wakes up, they're going to follow after us," Lou said.
Sergeant Tejada's mind boggled at the implication. The idea of that girl and that red-haired boy walking through the city to find their friends was ridiculous. They wouldn't make it two goddamned Portland blocks. He just nodded his head.
"I'm staying too," said a young man. Surprise washed over the other survivors' faces, except for the woman with the dead eyes. From what Sergeant Tejada had seen of the kid, he was quiet, always off to the side, an outsider amidst the survivors.
"And why are you staying?" Sergeant Tejada asked.
"I don't know that I want to head through the city just yet, that's all," the kid replied.
That wasn't all. Sergeant Tejada knew fear when he smelled it, and this boy stank of it. It was understandable. The justice of the new world had a way of shattering one's illusions. Maybe he figured he would be safer off with the military. Maybe he would. "And how long are you planning on sticking with us, kid?"
"As long as I can," I suppose.
"Or until something better comes along," Sergeant Tejada smiled. "I get it." Sergeant Tejada turned to the other survivors, six of the sorriest looking mugs he had seen in some time. He might as well be looking at six Annies. He sucked air through his teeth and then said, "Before you go, I'd like to give you something. Follow me."
He turned smartly on his heel and marched to the trunk of one of the abandoned cars. The lock had been punched out by the screwdriver of one of his soldiers some time ago. Now it was held closed by a small length of military-grade rope. He undid the knot, his rough hands making short work of it, and lifted the trunk. Inside, he had his men store all of the survivors' weapons and provisions, what little they had brought with them.
Lou stepped up and looked inside smiling. "It's all there."
"Of course it is. Me and my men can fend for ourselves, we don't need to be taking stuff from women and men like yourselves. I just wanted to make sure you guys were alright before I gave them back to you. Plus, it prevented any chance of a stray bullet flying around and taking out one of my men. Help yourself, and go with our blessing."
The survivors crowded around and began pulling their supplies and weapons out of the trunk. He watched as the girl, Amanda, grabbed the big man's things, opened it up, checked the functionality of an inhaler, and then slung the bag over her soldier. The cowboy pulled his rifle out and looked at it the way a certain Sergeant Tejada had once looked at a miss Emily Rodriguez, but that was a long time ago. Then the cowboy reached inside the trunk one more time and pulled out a small handgun.
He held it out to Amanda and said, "Here. It's yours now."
Amanda looked at the gun and shook her head. "I don't want Chloe's gun."
The cowboy turned to her, grabbed her hand, and wrapped it around the handle of the handgun. "You killed the owner. Now it's time to take responsibility."
It was a hard sentiment, but Sergeant Tejada didn't fully disagree with it.
Lou pulled Sergeant Tejada to the side by the elbow and then said, "Thank you for this. We appreciate it. At first, we didn't know what to expect. Things at the Coliseum weren't the best. Not everyone there was... like you, I guess."
Sergeant Tejada slapped Lou on the shoulder and laughed, "There aren't a lot of people out there like me."
"No, I guess not," Lou laughed. He held out his hand, and Sergeant Tejada shook it. "Well, I guess this is goodbye," he said.
"Don't count on it," Tejada replied. "I have a feeling we'll see each other again. Like the girl said, guarding this bridge is suicide. When that boy of yours wakes up, we may just follow in your footsteps."
Lou just nodded. "Sounds good."
The survivors loaded up their gear, and with the sun still low on the horizon, they took their first steps down the Burnside Bridge and into the west side of Portland. The buildings that were left standing jutted up out of the ground like the jagged teeth of a dislocated lower jaw.
Chapter 12: Parking Garage of the Dead
When they reached the west side of the Burnside Bridge, they immediately took a narrow stairwell that led down to the floor of the city. Lou was in the lead. Blake and Mort picked up the rear, and the three women, Katie, Joan, and Clara filled in the middle. Lou moved as he had seen Zeke do. He watched where he stepped, moving heel to toe, gliding forward his gun in his hands.
Not all of their weapons had made it with them. Some had been broken in the jump from the office building, some had never made it to the back of the truck. Only Mort's hammer, Lou's machine gun, Katie's handgun, and Blake's rifle had made the journey. When Lou had checked the magazine on his machine gun, he found a full clip, another gift from Sergeant Tejada. Clara and Joan carried blunt instruments that might repel a lone zombie, but which would make them dead meat if they had to actually fight to survive. Lou didn't think they had the arm strength to put down any of the dead with sticks and chunks of rebar.
Finding weapons was a priority, but not as big of a priority as getting out of the city. Once they were out and into the suburbs, weapons would be more readily available. Hell, maybe there were even some living people out there. The more the merrier.
They walked along the MAX tracks, picking them up again where they wound their way through the heart of downtown. The streets were quiet, eerily so. Every once in a while, Lou would think he saw something out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned to look, there would be nothing there. He figured
there should be dozens of the things in the streets. The gunfire from the bridge should have drawn them like bees to honey. Maybe there were less of them on this side of the river than he thought. Maybe all the noise at the Coliseum had pulled them across the river.
He decided to stop thinking about it. The reason why didn't matter. It was just another stroke of luck that worked in their favor, just like the truck and the military men on the bridge. It was best to not think about it. He moved forward, his muscles tense to the point where he could barely stand it anymore.
Behind him, the others walked silently. They felt like they were walking through a ghost town. They had gone a full city block before they saw the first of the dead, wandering aimlessly down the middle of the street. It saw them. Its arms, which were hanging by its side at first, now raised parallel to the ground in the universal sign of "I want to eat you" that they had all come to know and fear.
They moved to the side of the street, as far from the dead thing as they could. Lou didn't want to shoot it if he had to. Bullets were too precious now, and the noise of his gun would draw more of the dead to them. They were around. He could feel it.
They marched past the man, for they could see that it was a man now, and it turned slowly tracking them. The blonde hair of the man was red in spots from dried and crusty blood, and his ear was missing. The skin of his lips had shriveled up, revealing large teeth and rotten gums. He must have been thirty-years-old when he died or close to it. He wore a fashionable dress shirt, the buttons ripped off the lower half so his gray abdomen, now just skin on muscles flexed with each step it took. He was unremarkable, but for his shoes, fancy leather shoes that probably cost ten times more than any pair of shoes that Lou had ever been able to buy for himself.
It would follow them. It would follow them until it lost sight and sound of them. It would pick up others, and a horde would begin. Hopefully, they would be long gone by the time that happened. The sight of the man enraged him. He wanted to kill it, prevent it from hurting anyone. It was only one dead human; they should easily be able to take it out. But who knew if one of them would trip and stumble in the process. The last thing they needed was a hobbled survivor on their hands. Clara and Mort were already limping as it was. Mort had been limping ever since Lou had met the man at the Coliseum. He had said something about an accident when it had all begun, but he never went into detail. Clara had been dealing with a bad sprain for weeks, and her jump from the office building had only exacerbated the injury. It wasn't as bad as it had been, but she wouldn't be winning any races anytime soon.
No, it was best to leave them alone if you could. Lou lifted his eyes from the immediate area and scanned the road ahead of them. The city rose to meet the hills in the distance, and he could see scattered shadows and forms stumbling in the streets. Abandoned and wrecked cars littered the street. They didn't bother to search through the vehicles. This was not the type of place where one took their time scavenging and looting. Five minutes of standing still might be all it would take to have the dead clump up around you, and then you would have to fight, drawing more of them to you in the process, causing you to fight some more. It was a losing battle, a slippery slope that was almost impossible to overcome. The treasures hidden inside the cars would have to wait for another day, perhaps a day when all of the dead were gone.
Perhaps they would all rot away. Lou flipped a glance over his shoulder. It was still there, the blonde man with the missing ear. It still followed them. It showed no signs of slowing down. None of these things showed any signs of slowing down. He wondered if they ever would. Was there an expiration date on these fuckers, or were they bound to roam the earth for the rest of their days, clawing at the air and waiting for an unlucky human to come along and be their next meal?
He was no scientist. He didn't know the answers to any of his questions. No one did. The only answer he had were his feet. One step forward followed by another. Get from point A to point B, and so on, until there were no more points to get to. That's what the coast was, the end to all of this, a chance to begin again.
In the distance, the dead had noticed them. They moved toward them at a steady pace. They passed Third Ave, and Lou looked down the side streets. To the south, a large pocket of the dead milled around. To the north, there were fewer shapes scattered amid wrecked and abandoned cars. He thought about what Zeke would do. Zeke would probably zig and zag around the buildings, preventing the dead from maintaining a line of sight, but that could backfire as well if they rounded the corner and bumped into a horde. Then they would be trapped by the ones following them as well as the dead in front of them. Lou preferred to see what was coming. If they had to duck down a side street, they could.
They moved through the intersection, and the dead to their right and left disappeared. The buildings of downtown became taller, and a sound intruded upon the shuffling of the survivors' feet as they walked down the abandoned pavement. At first, Lou couldn't place the sound. It almost sounded like thunder in the distance. Then Lou looked up.
"What is that noise?" Katie asked, breaking the silence that they held close to their chests.
"It's the dead, banging on the windows," Lou said as he watched a tiny form with bloody hands slap upon the glass of the building that rose to their left. The sound intensified, and Lou saw more forms at the windows, banging and smearing blood on the windows. This was not good, he thought, and then the glass of one of the windows broke.
"Get in the middle of the street," he yelled as one of the dead tumbled from the fourth story of the building to their left. Glass showered upon the ground, followed by the thump of the dead upon the pavement. The fall would have incapacitated a living person, but the dead woman just stood up, her shoulder hanging limp, while her one good arm reached towards them.
In the street, the thundering noise rose until it sounded like the stomping of a thousand feet on the floor of the bleachers at a football game. Then glass began to break left and right. The dead tumbled out of the buildings around them. Glass showered the survivors, and in Lou's head, he could feel a clock begin ticking. It would only be a matter of time before things escalated to the point where they would have to run pell-mell through the streets.
"What's the play, Lou?" Mort asked, his eyes all whites as the cascade of the dead continued.
He didn't have an answer. All he knew was that he wanted to get away. He wanted to run. "We take a right at the next street," he said, going against his own instinct to flee. It was going to be a long journey. They were still a mile from the outskirts of the city, and conserving energy was the most important thing for them right now.
"That's fucking crazy," Clara said. "Those things are all around us."
"We turn the corner, they can't see us. Some will still follow us, but we'll lose a bunch of them as well. You ok to run?" Lou asked.
"I'll do my best," Clara said.
They rounded the corner, their pace quickened to halfway between a jog and a fast walk. Their heads turned left and right as they scanned the street in front of them. There were more dead here. They would have to fight their way through.
"Alright. Just put 'em down. We don't need to kill 'em, just get through 'em." Lou didn't wait to see if they understood him or if they were going to follow him. They either listened or they didn't. He would find out on the other side. Above them, they heard more rattling of windows, as the dead trapped inside the buildings attempted to find their way out to the food down below. The sound gave Lou a new appreciation of the term death rattle.
Lou swung the butt of his rifle and connected with the cranium of a dead woman. She fell to the ground, and Lou slipped through an opening, not stopping to see what was happening to the others. First rule of survivoring, when the dead are around you, look out for yourself. Rule number two? Keep moving forward until there are no more dead in front of you, and that's exactly what Lou did.
He swung his machine gun left and right, connecting with the skulls of the dead and sending them tumbl
ing to the ground. He felt like those third-world guides on the nature shows he used to watch on PBS when his dad left him alone for long stretches of time at home. He remembered seeing the small men with the brown hands swinging machetes at the jungle and opening up a path for the white men talking to the camera. They were the real stars, those men with their machetes, shaping nature to their own desires.
Now Lou was the star, bashing his way through the dead, sending their bodies sprawling to the ground around him. Whether they were permanently dead or not didn't matter to him. All that mattered was that they were out of the way, and he was a couple steps closer to the clearing on the other side. Above them, the death rattle grew, and then came the shower of glass, followed by the thumps of the dead landing on the asphalt.
"Stay in the middle if you can!" he yelled over the groans of the dead. He knocked down a priest with a bloody stump for a hand, and then he saw open air. He sprinted forward, but his lower thigh bumped into something. He looked down and saw dark brown hair. It was a child, or at least, it used to be one. He pushed the thing away from him, disgusted by it. It flew across the street, and Lou looked down at his pants to see if the thing had managed to bite him through his jeans. There was nothing. The fabric was still intact. He looked over at the small creature and saw why. The creature snarled at him as it got to its feet, and he saw that it was missing its teeth. They must have fallen out recently, the adult teeth permanently locked in the child's jaw.
The sight shouldn't have bothered him, but it did. There were so few children among the dead. The only reason he could think of to explain the phenomenon was that the parents had killed most of them... or the alternative, that they had died and been devoured so badly that they couldn't physically rise to walk with their parents.
The speed of the virus meant that most of the adult victims could escape their attackers, even after being bitten. But children were smaller. The wounds and bites of the dead could do more damage to their tiny frames. None of that mattered now. He leveled his gun at the kid, hesitated, and then let it drop to his side.