by Morris, Jacy
Mort looked straight at Blake while he talked. Blake was becoming better at reading lips, but he needed to see you from straight on to be able to puzzle out the words. Mort pointed to the residential street and said, "Up that way, that's the way I want to go. Plenty of sunlight, some houses to hide in if we need to, and everything we need hidden away in cupboards and drawers."
Blake nodded at Mort. Then he whispered, "Plenty of dead hiding in the closets and basements too."
He waved his hand at Blake, resentful that he would even question his strategy. Blake was supposed to be his guy. No matter what they were supposed to stick together. That he thought differently pissed him off.
"Well, what do we think?" Lou asked.
"The houses, man. There's food, shelter, whatever we need," Mort answered. Mort looked around for agreement, but all he saw were chewed lips and doubt.
"I don't know," Clara said, "there's probably a lot less of those things in the tunnel."
"Yeah, but in that tunnel, we don't got no place to go," Mort countered. He did not want to go into the tunnel. He had a bad feeling about it. "I'd rather go the freeway route than the tunnel route, but I 'm telling you, that neighborhood is the way to go."
Joan was the next to add her two cents. "It seems to me that we have enough food and water. Our main goal should be to avoid those things at all costs. We know they're going to be on the freeway. We know they're going to be in those houses." Joan pointed up the hill, where the tops of fancy houses could be seen poking out of the tree tops. "In the tunnel, there might not be any. I'm all for a day without seeing any of those things."
"You and me both," Katie added.
"Nah, man. I don't wanna go in that tunnel," Mort said, almost on the verge of panic. "I'm telling you, that way is death. Ain't nothin' in that tunnel but death." Mort could feel himself losing the battle. He turned to Blake and said, "Tell 'em, man."
Blake looked at Mort, as if to say, "I'm sorry." Then he looked at Lou and the others. Blake didn't talk as much as when Mort had first met him, but when he did speak, everyone listened. "I gotta agree with Joan on this one. The tunnel. It's less reward, but less risk as well, and if there's one thing we have plenty of, it's risk. So I say tunnel."
"Alright. Tunnel it is," Lou said.
Mort felt panic rise up in his chest. His instinct told him not to go into the tunnel. There was something bad in there. He knew it. He stood at a loss for words. He searched his mind for something to say, anything that would make the others choose a different route. Hell, they could take the highway if they wanted, just not that tunnel. The words weren't there, just that sensation in his chest, a weight that seemed to want to drive him straight down to the ground. He felt like giving up. He felt like lying on the ground and waiting for the dead to eat him.
Blake put an arm around his shoulder and said, "It's going to be alright. That's what I'm here for."
The words didn't make Mort much better, but the feeling of panic lessened just a little bit. He took a deep breath, and then he was ready. The others were looking at him, Katie with a cocked eyebrow. "I'm ok," he said. "We can do this."
"Alright, first thing we need to do is grab some flashlights. Let's search these cars up here and see if there's anything we can use. I don't wanna be stumbling around in the dark," Lou said.
It made perfect sense to Mort, and it delayed the inevitable, which was fine with him. Hopefully, at any moment, a horde of dead things would come pouring out of the tunnel, cutting off that avenue of escape. Then they would have to go through the neighborhood. Lou walked up to the cab of a pickup truck and peered inside. There was no one in it, so he pulled the door open and climbed inside. The truck smelled clean, perhaps a little dusty, but clean.
He leaned across the seat and pulled open the glove box. He ran his hand through the papers, tossing them on the floor. They were useless now. No one needed to register their car. There was no one left to pay off a car insurance claim. If you wrecked your car now, you just hopped in another abandoned vehicle, hoped the battery wasn't dead, and then turned the key. Mort wondered how long that would last.
How long would the cars of the present make it without the constant maintenance needed to keep them running. Was there anyone left who could still repair a vehicle? He supposed somewhere there was, but it wasn't anyone in their crew. He slammed the glove box shut and hopped out of the vehicle, Blake stood next to the door, his eyes off in the distance, watching every methodical step of the dead that were following them from the city. Mort watched his fingers re-grip his rifle, and he knew that their break from running, however brief, was almost over.
Lou stepped up to the next car, a silver SUV. The door hung wide open, but smudges of brownish blood were dried on the window and the seat, so he walked around to the passenger side and pulled it open. The inside of this car didn't smell all that great. He wondered if the driver had died inside.
The keys still hung in the ignition. Whoever had been driving this car had most likely waited in line like everyone else, caught in a traffic jam that was never going to clear. When the dead had crawled through the city, the driver had joined them. Mort ripped open the glove box. He was only delaying the inevitable by fantasizing about the past.
In the glove box, Mort found an actual pair of gloves. How about that? Mort thought. An actual pair of gloves in the glove box. What were the odds? He took out the gloves and shoved them into the pocket of his olive drab military jacket. If they didn't fit him, maybe someone else could use them.
Underneath the gloves, he found more useless papers that he tossed on the floor of the SUV. Then he found what he was looking for, a small black cylinder, heavy, with a button on the end. He pressed the button, and a brilliant, blue-white circle illuminated the interior of the vehicle.
"I got one," he said triumphantly, though that meant he was just one flashlight closer to having to enter the tunnel with the others.
****
They stood at the entrance of the tunnel, having refreshed themselves in the search for flashlights. In the end, they had all come up with flashlights. Katie had even found a bag of chips sitting in someone's car. They passed the crinkly bag back and forth. Mort savored the salty, crunch of the chips as he plopped a few in his mouth, before passing it off to his right, where Blake did the same. By the time the bag had all gone through them the fourth time, they were gone. Katie crumpled the bag up and tossed it on the ground.
"Hey, careful there. Don't want to get a ticket for littering," Clara quipped, though no one laughed. Behind them, a line of the dead was making its way down the hill in the distance. Time was running out.
The tunnel was a yawning maw of blackness. Mort shuddered as he looked at it. There could be an army of those things just waiting in there, and they wouldn't even know it. They could be marching down that tunnel right at them, one of the hordes, ready to drift out of the blackness, arms raised in desirous want.
Mort held the small flashlight in his hand, and then clicked it on. Its beam was woefully inadequate, and the blue-white light seemed to be swallowed up by the blackness about ten-feet into the tunnel. The other flashlights weren't much better.
For a while, Mort thought they were all just going to stand there, but then Lou stepped forward. If it wasn't for Lou, Mort would have stayed glued to the ground, but once he took that step, the others followed suit, and unless Mort wanted to endure the apocalypse alone, he had to follow. So he did.
He marveled at his own stupidity, and wondered when he had become so dependent upon others. Mort had always been a lone wolf, which was easy when your whole goal was to turn away people and be left alone. People were violent. People were mean. They would stab you in the back at a moment's notice.
And yet, he found himself drawn to these other people. Maybe not Katie, but the others, they were alright. They didn't look at him the way that people used to look at him. He used to be a piece of garbage, something that other people ignored. Now he had value. He could kill those
things. With his hammer in his hand, Mort could bash in the skull of the living dead and send them to the ground permanently. For the first time in his life, he was wanted. He had value, and he liked it.
If he left the others, he would be worthless again. A wandering zero who would most likely wind up as a meal for the masses. He could leave; everything in his body screamed at him to take off, turn back around, and never look back. The screams in his head became louder as he stepped into the shadow of the tunnel, his skin chilling instantly in the darkness.
It was cold in the tunnel. The footing was dangerous, and he was tempted to keep his flashlight trained on the ground to avoid tripping and falling. That was the last thing that he needed with his knee. It was still recovering, and he had made a point of stretching it whenever he woke up, or whenever they had a chance to take a break. Stretching helped relieve some of the stiffness, but at the end of the night, it was always swollen and aching. He had burned through his supply of pain pills, swallowing the last in the movie theater. What was left was a dull ache that always throbbed at the edges of his mind.
Shiny rails ran down the middle of the tunnel, crossed with treacherous concrete ties sunk into jagged gray rocks, that slid under his feet. He alternated between shining his flashlight into the distance and looking down. The last thing he wanted was to aggravate his knee or break his ankle.
They walked slowly in the darkness, and time stretched out before him, spreading like a blanket in the darkness. Though they moved at an even pace, he noticed that his breathing became labored, as if he had been speed-walking through the tunnel. The temperature seemed to cool the further into the tunnel they went. Bits of moisture drifted down the walls of the tunnels, and the clack of sliding rocks echoed off those glistening walls with each step they took.
There was no sign of the dead. Maybe they were just as afraid of the dark as they were. He hoped so, he really did.
Mort stuck close to Blake, knowing that should anything happen, they would probably hear it first, everyone except for Blake and his damaged ears. He regarded the man out of the corner of his eye. He never thought he would be friends with someone like Blake. He was a country boy, but not the "good ol' boy" type of country. To Mort, he was like the forest; he was the gentle strength of trees rising up into the sky, spindly but strong because of their deep roots. He didn't know where the words came from, but it was the only way he could think to describe the man.
Their bond had grown over the last month. Mort considered him a true friend, something that he had never actually had. His life had been about self-preservation, looking out for himself, and that meant avoiding others. But now, he looked out for Blake too, and even the others. But should he? Would it get him killed? It was a question that made him uncomfortable. It was a question he was unable to answer.
He was not operating under some misguided notion of nobility. Giving up one's life for anything was a crime as far as he was concerned. Life was the only thing he really had. The ability to breathe and run and survive... that's the only thing a person could ever own. To give away that ability so that another person could keep their own breath, so that another person could sruvive... that was inconceivable to him. Yet, when he asked himself if he would save Blake's life at the cost of his own, he thought the answer was yes. He thought that was something that he could do.
As he began to wonder about the others in the group, his flashlight illuminated something unexpected. A glowing, red light shone back at him, and then was gone. He moved his flashlight to find it again, and there it was. It was the reflective taillight of a train. As they moved closer, the train's outline coalesced out of the gloom of the tunnel. Its white metal fairly glowed in the blackness of the passageway.
They stood regarding the obsolete machine as if it were the fossilized corpse of some extinct beast. In the cold of the tunnel, their breath billowed in front of them.
Lou stood in front of the group and turned around, pointing his flashlight at the ground. "I'm going to go check it out," he whispered. "You guys stay here, but be ready."
"For what?" Katie asked.
Lou had no answer; he just shrugged his shoulder and turned his back to the others. He leaned around the side of the train, keeping his flashlight low. The train was meant to dock at a platform, so the doors of the train came up to his shin. The windows were at chest level, so he crouched low and leaned to the side, shining his flashlight at the doors of the train. They were closed. That was a relief. Finally, things were going their way.
He stood up, breathing easier, and then jumped as a loud thump resonated from inside the train. It was followed by more thumps as he raised his flashlight to see inside the windows. Faces... dead, rotting faces pressed against the glass. Mort watched from the side as Lou panned his flashlight down the side of the train. Holy shit! Mort thought. That's a lot of dead people.
The train seemed as if it were packed with the dead. Behind the faces, clumsy hands pawed at the glass as if they could press their way out of the train. Brown blood smears obscured the faces in the train, but they were there, pounding against the glass of the MAX train. The tunnel reverberated with the noise.
If any of the dead were lurking in the tunnel, this noise would surely draw them in their direction.
"Come on, man. Let's go. Waitin' around ain't gonna do us any good in here," Mort said, panic rising in his voice, as his sweat turned cold on his body. Lou just looked at him. Nothing needed to be said. The group moved swiftly past the train. Mort tried to not shine his light in the windows, but he couldn't resist. The dead faces moved past him, slightly blurred by his own speed and the blood smears on the windows of the train.
The entire train began to rock side to side as the trapped mass of rotting flesh became agitated by their passing. Then they passed it by, and the train receded into the past, a time capsule that no one would ever dare to open. How long would that train sit there, the dead standing inside, waiting for a release that would never come, standing shoulder to shoulder, forever locked in a vision of hell. Mort's mind reeled at all of the ways that one could die and be trapped on the planet now. Before, dying was bad enough. The thought of not existing was a terrible one. The thought of existing in a diminished way, trapped in something you couldn't escape from... that was somehow even worse than not existing at all. Nowadays, the way you died was almost as important as the fact that you died. Had a heart attack in a port-o-potty? Good luck smelling shit for the rest of your life. Got hit by a car? Have fun being trapped under that wheel for eternity. Accidentally get your head cut off? Hope you enjoy the view.
Mort's mind was flooded with horrible ways to die, and then a new one presented itself right in front of them. They had been steadily climbing upward for the last 15 minutes, stumbling over the rock-strewn floor of the tunnel. His calves and thighs burned as the tunnel pitched upward, slicing through the hills that separated Portland from the surrounding suburbs. Out of nowhere, his flashlight caught the flash of a pair of yellow eyes burning in the darkness. A roar soon followed.
"What the fuck is that?" Mort said.
"It sounded like a lion," Katie replied.
Chapter 14: A Day at the Zoo
Days ago...
Where was everyone? Lila Bathgate sat in the zoo's security room, staring at the blank monitors. The zoo had been quiet the last few days, with very few visitors, but today it seemed positively dead. As the on-site caretaker of the Oregon Zoo, she was used to getting up early in the morning and doing her rounds, feeding animals, checking enclosures to see if its occupants were up and about, and various other duties that usually involved a shovel and some bio-degradable plastic bags. Usually, by the time she was done with her rounds, the park would be populated by handfuls of early-rising animal lovers.
She looked up at the sun in the sky. Today was a perfect day. Warm, but not too warm, and yet there was no one in the park. In fact, she hadn't seen another human for the entire day. When she called her supervisor, a dumpy lady with impossib
ly wide hips who had hired her straight out of college, there was no answer. There hadn't even been a chance to leave a message. All she had heard on the other end of the phone had been silence. It was as if her supervisor's phone simply didn't exist.
Maybe it didn't, she thought. Maybe her supervisor had changed phone numbers when she hadn't been paying attention. Lila wasn't particularly adept at keeping up with people in the first place. Animals were her only concern. But when no one had showed up to the zoo by eleven in the morning, not even any of the employees, Lila knew that something was up.
She only knew of one other person that was as dedicated to the job as she was, Sy the security guard. What he did in his booth was his own business, but in the three years that she had been taking care of the animals at the zoo, she had never known the man to miss a shift. At ten at night, he would stroll into the zoo, ring the buzzer, and relieve the day shift. Under his arm, he always carried a thermos, a paperback of some sort, and a thermos of coffee. That's all he needed to perform his duties, which consisted of watching the monitors she was now staring at and calling the police should any adventurous college kids break into the zoo and attempt to free the animals. It happened more often than you'd think.
Lila looked at the empty swivel chair in front of the monitors. He had never been here. When was the last time that Lila had seen Sy? She tried to think back, but the days were all a blur to her. She existed in the zoo. That's all she lived for. The animals were the only friends that she had ever needed, and though some of them would just as soon kill her as look at her, she didn't mind. They were animals. That's what they did.
From Ranger and Strike, the zoo's cheetahs to Kinny the mandrill, Lila had always found the animals more fascinating than the humans at the zoo. They were her charge, her reason for being, and now something was seriously amiss. She needed to find out if her animals were in danger, so she scanned the monitors to see if anyone was around. She had to fiddle with the controls of the monitors to see all throughout the zoo, keeping her fingers crossed that she didn't mess the equipment up. She shouldn't even be in here, but there was no one here to tell her what to do. Just when she thought was about to give up hope, she saw someone standing next to the seal exhibit, swaying back and forth, head swiveling back and forth as Kaya swam in the clear water of her enclosure. As she watched, the man threw his leg over the railing.