This Rotten World | Book 2 | Let It Burn

by Morris, Jacy

  With Mort by their side, they headed back to the entrance of the zoo. Blake's head began to swim as they neared the buildings in the front of the zoo. Their path was blocked off by a new stream of the dead, fresh from the highway. They must have heard the gunfire.

  Blake saw Lou race past him. He stopped ahead of them and waved his arm, calling the rest of the survivors into the building. They ran inside the busted glass doors of the gift shop and filtered their way through the racks of junk and into the back of the building. It was dark inside, and when they closed the back door of the gift shop, it was even darker. Flashlights came on, and then Joan was there, looking at Blake's hand.

  She probed and she squeezed, and the pain almost drove Blake to his knees. He couldn't look at it. One look had been enough, so he looked at his surroundings. He sat on a plain wooden floor, his back leaning against the upper part of a stairwell that curled around to his left. There were a few chairs and a table in the room, and it felt unused, as if no one had been able to think of a proper use for the space.

  Joan pulled the notepad and pencil from his shirt pocket. The others shined their light on the pad, and Joan ripped the first page free as it was wet with blood. His own or the polar bear's, he didn't know. She scrawled some words on the page and held the notepad out so that he could see the words. "Do you want me to cut it off?"

  Blake looked at Joan as if she were out of her mind. "Are you fucking kidding me?"

  Joan wrote some more on the pad. "It's never going to heal right," the next note said.

  "I don't give a fuck. If it doesn't need to come off, then I want it."

  "The pain is going to be tremendous, and it will probably never go away," she wrote.

  The others jumped as the first bang on the door rang throughout the space. It was a wooden door, nothing special, the type of thing you'd find in any office around the world. It wouldn't last long. "I'd rather have the pain," Blake said. "At least then, I know I'm alive."

  Joan shook her head in disbelief, as a parent does when they let a child make a mistake that they know is just plain stupid.

  Blake smiled at Joan, "If it makes you feel better, we can cut it off later if it continues to bother me."

  She shook her head, annoyed by his pigheadedness. Then she looked upward. From the way that the others looked up as well, Blake knew that there must be something above them. He felt Mort's arms disengage from him, and he sank to the ground. He wanted to tell Mort not to go up there. He wanted Mort to stay with him. But he was too exhausted and damaged to say anything. Mort pounded up the stairs, Lou following close behind. The loss of blood was too much for Blake. His head slumped, and blackness closed in.

  ****

  Mort didn't want to leave Blake behind, but the noise from above meant that work wasn't over yet. Surviving wasn't over yet. There was still one more thing that needed to be done. Mort was still running on adrenaline, and he felt like he wasn't quite thinking straight. That tends to happen when you're fighting for your life at the end of the world and your best friend is being mauled by a giant polar bear. He still couldn't believe he had gone after the thing with a hammer. He only wished he had been quicker. Maybe then Blake's hand wouldn't be all messed up.

  He climbed a plain stairwell, towards where the sound had come from. He felt more than heard Lou behind him. The noise had sounded like a thump, the type of thump one hears when a body falls to the ground. The upstairs was a little brighter, as the hallways and the rooms had small rectangular windows built into them. They were too tall to see out of without standing on a chair, but they provided just enough light to see by.

  The stairs creaked under his foot and he cringed. Then he cringed some more when he heard a sudden cough from one of the rooms. They approached the door where the cough had come from. On a plain black placard, it read "Security Room." Lou moved to the left of the doorway, and Mort stood front and center. As he reached for the doorknob, and noise boomed out and a splinters of wood sprayed Mort in the face.

  A small hole appeared in the door. Mort had only a moment to grasp what was happening, and then Lou tackled Mort and sent him crashing to the ground.

  "Oh, shit," Mort said, as Lou rolled off of him. He kept repeating the phrase as he checked his body for holes. He patted down his chest, his legs, everything he could think of, and in the end he found nothing. He didn't know how that could be. The bullet should have gone right through him. Somehow it had missed.

  "Are you alright?" Lou asked.

  Mort was confused. He knew that he was alright, but he didn't understand how that could be. "I think so."

  "Are or are you not?" Lou asked.

  Mort shook his head, "Yeah. Yeah. I'm fine."

  Lou patted him on the shoulder, his head dropping. Then he held his gun up and leaned back against the wall. "Whoever the fuck is in there better come out right now."

  A strained voice yelled back, "Fuck off." It sounded as if the person on the other side of the door was choking on something.

  "I'm going to count to three, and if you're not out here by then, I'm going to fill that room full of bullets."

  "I can't move," the woman's voice said.

  "Bullshit," Lou said, checking his clip.

  "Believe what you want. I'm dead anyway."

  Lou and Mort looked at each other and shrugged. "Then throw your gun against the wall," Mort said.

  "I don't even have the strength to do that. You're going to have to come in here and take it from me."

  "Man, I am not going to get shot. You want to just lock her in there?"

  "She's the one that shot at Blake, man. We can't just have her running around," Mort said, slightly angry that Lou would even consider leaving her alone.

  "Come on in," the voice said. To Mort, the voice sounded weaker. "I'm not going to shoot. I'm going to die, and when I do, I don't want to wind up like one of those things out there."

  "You believe that?" Mort asked Lou.

  Lou shrugged. "I don't see what choice we have. I don't have a whole lot of bullets. I'd prefer to keep the ones I do have."

  "Fuck," Mort said.

  "What's going on up there?" Katie yelled from the hallway.

  "There's someone up here. She sounds hurt," Mort yelled.

  The response from Katie was typical. "Just kill her and get it over with."

  "Alright, we're coming in," Lou yelled at the doorway.

  There was no response from the other side. Lou nodded at Mort, and they stood up. Lou held his gun at the ready as Mort reared back and then kicked the door open. The doorjamb splintered as the door itself was flung inward. Lying on the floor in a pool of sunshine was a woman, at least Mort thought it was a woman. She was covered in dirt and filth, and blood was bubbling out of her chest with each breath. She raised her head slightly and smiled at them. "It's good to see people again," she said, "even if it's only for a little bit."

  Lou relaxed his gun hand. He could see the light fading from the woman's eyes even as she spoke. "What happened here?" he asked her.

  "The animals. They needed to be protected," the woman said. "I was just trying to protect the animals."

  Mort couldn't believe what he was hearing. This lady had almost killed his best friend for the sake of some damn animals. He wanted to hurt her. Mort had never been a violent person. The only time it had ever come to that was when someone had tried to hurt him. This lady had hurt Blake, but he found it made him just as mad as if she had been shooting at him, perhaps even more so.

  The woman's breathing hitched, and she looked at them and said, "Will you do it? Will you do it when the time comes?"

  Lou squatted down across from the lady, a look of sympathy on his face. The look made Mort sick. "Just shoot her," he said.

  Lou said, "She ain't dead yet."

  "I don't care. She could have killed us," Mort replied.

  Lou just sat there, ignoring Mort and his words. "Fuck you. I'll do it." Mort reached to take the gun from Lou, but Lou pushed him away.
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br />   He held up a hand and said, "Hold off."

  "Hold off? For what?"

  "Look at her. She's going."

  "Man, what do I care?" Mort was furious. She needed to pay for what she had done, but Lou just wanted to sit there and watch her die. "You're just gonna let her go out like that? She could have killed us," he yelled.

  Lou ignored Mort more. "Man, I'm talking to you!"

  "Just let it be," Lou said in a whisper. "Just let it be."

  Mort saw that he was talking to the woman, and before he could say anything else, the woman let out one last breath. Her eyes closed, and Lou held the gun out to him. "Here," he said. "It's ok now."

  Mort snatched the gun from Lou. "What do you mean it's ok?"

  "It just is," he said as he brushed past Mort who was standing in the doorway. Mort held the machine gun in his hand, feeling its weight. He looked at the woman slumped against the wall trying to understand what Lou was trying to tell him. He knew there was something there, something deep, but he just couldn't get it. He held the gun and pointed it at the woman's head. He waited. When her eyes opened, he pulled the trigger. Mort allowed himself to look up at the sun peeking through the hole in the roof of the building.

  Chapter 16: Like Worms in the Sun

  Amid the pounding of the dead, Joan watched Blake with a worrying eye. He was sleeping now, but things could go from bad to worse. She had cleaned, bandaged, and stitched his wounded hand as best she could, but the chance for infection was great. Who knew what type of bacteria was residing in the mouths of those polar bears.

  "Is he gonna be alright?" Mort asked.

  Joan honestly didn't know. She said nothing.

  They were in the downstairs offices, sitting on the floor and in some swiveling chairs that they had liberated from a pod of cubicles. Clara sat in one of the swivel chairs, looking somewhat nervous. Joan understood. The banging of the dead wasn't necessarily loud, but the incessant nature of it tended to grate on the nerves after a while. They had been listening to it for hours.

  It sounded as if the dead had no intention of going away. The pounding hadn't ceased; it had grown.

  "How many of them do you think are out there?" Clara asked.

  Katie smirked, an evil sort of smile, and said, "Enough." Then she went right back to looking at her hand. The blood had stopped flowing, and the stitched remains of her fingers were crusted with scabs that had turned reddish black.

  They lapsed into silence amid the monotonous banging against the walls. Lou sat in the corner, a towel to his now scarred face. He was lucky he hadn't lost an eye, and Joan once again wished for more medical supplies. Some antibiotics would be handy right about now. She had cleaned the wound as best she could with some soap from the office bathroom and some bottled water, but the amount of crap floating around in these uncleaned spaces was enough to lead to infection.

  Joan was tired, but she knew that Lou's face was going to need stitches. She sighed heavily and began rooting through her bag for the proper equipment. She was down to her last suture needle, and she was almost out of sterilizing iodine wipes. They would have to keep their eyes open for more first aid kits, although most home-bought first-aid kids didn't come with suture needles. She would save this last one and boil it in some water if necessary. It would be better to seal a wound with a possibly infected needle than it would be to leave a serious wound open.

  "Come here, Lou," she said.

  Lou stood up and walked over to her like a child walking over to their parent when they know a whipping is in order.

  "Have a seat," Joan said. "Can I get some light over here?"

  Clara shined her light at Lou's face, and he squeezed his eyes shut in the dim room. "Lean your head back," Joan said. She held the suture thread in the flashlight beam, twisting and turning it as she threaded the needle. When she had finished, she looked Lou in the face and said, "This is going to sting a bit."

  She grasped the needle in her right hand and inserted it into the skin. Years of practice on bananas and then people had made her fairly gifted at suturing. She had always joked with her co-workers that when she was done being a doctor, she could get a job as a seamstress. She drove the needle through the skin and then pulled it tight. She placed her left hand on the back of Lou's head as he jerked backwards. She knew it must hurt, so she decided to distract him with conversation. "What do we do next, Lou?"

  He winced as she pulled the suture tight and inserted it into the opposite side of the first claw mark. She had started with the topmost wound, as it was still bleeding at a steady pace. Lou hissed inward and then said, "Step one is to get the fuck out of this place."

  "How do you propose we do that?" Katie asked. Her bitterness and darkness had become more and more prevalent over the last couple of days. Joan was worried about her, but not from a physical level. There was nothing in her bag that was going to heal Katie. She didn't even know if time would. She was fundamentally broken.

  Without moving his head, Lou looked at Katie from the corner of his eye and said, "There's a hole in the roof. When Joan's done closing me up, I'm going to crawl up there and see what I can see. Maybe there's a way out."

  "And then what?" Clara asked.

  Joan pulled the stitch tight. She was halfway through the first claw mark, her fingers were both sticky and slippery with Lou's blood.

  "Then we continue like we said we would. Get our ass to the beach, find some margarita mix, and go to town," Lou answered.

  Katie scoffed at Lou. "You act like it's so easy. Well, we've already seen how easy it is, and it's fucking impossible. We're lucky we're not all dead right now."

  The room was silent, and Lou barely winced as Joan inserted the needle once again. Joan could see his eyes teared up with pain, but he didn't even flinch. He just said, "I know it's bad, but we're all still here. We're all talking. We're all walking. It's gonna get better. Once we get out of civilization, it's gonna get better."

  "I hope you're right," Clara said.

  "Even if I'm not, what other option do we have?" Lou hissed as Joan started on the next claw mark. "If we had stayed where we were, we'd be dead. If we stay here, we're dead. We got to keep moving. It's gonna get easier. It's got to." Joan could see the hope in Lou's eyes. It was good enough for her.

  "Can we please be a little more detailed about this plan? All I've heard so far is the beach, the beach, the beach. Don't just tell me the end destination; tell me how we're going to make it happen," Katie complained.

  "Cut him some slack," Mort said.

  Katie said, "Mort, if there's one thing we don't need right now, it's slack. We need to be tight as tight can be, because the moment we relax, we're dead." She looked at Lou again. "We need food. We need supplies. We need ammo."

  "And medicine," Joan said as she closed the second of Lou's scratches.

  "I need cigarettes," Clara said.

  "I thought you were going to quit," Joan said.

  "I have quit, but it's from lack of availability, not from choice. Besides, I figure if they're always going to be this rare, then you might as well smoke 'em when you find 'em."

  "Speaking of smoking 'em when you find 'em," Joan said, "why don't you guys go through this place, see what you can find."

  Without a word, the others spread out. From other rooms, they could hear drawers opening and closing. Blake snored gently on the floor, his body beaten, battered and bruised from his encounter. Joan finished her work in silence, and Lou said nothing. He just looked off to the side as she did her work.

  "You're doing a good job," she said.

  "Yeah, well it doesn't feel like it," he answered.

  "No, I'm serious. No bullshit. You're doing a fantastic job. Like you said, we're all still alive. We're all still kicking."

  "Blake doesn't look like he's kicking. Katie lost some fingers. My dreams of being a model are over."

  Joan laughed. "Everyone's dreams of being a model are over, Lou." She pulled the last stitch, and the final wound was c
losed. She cut the suture thread and said, "There you go. Good as new."

  "How does it look?" he asked.

  "I think it's going to look pretty badass when it's all healed."

  "You think it's going to get infected?"

  Joan bit her lower lip, thinking. "It's too soon to tell. We cleaned it, but you never know when you're using hand soap and bottled water. But it would be a good idea to get the hell out of here and find a pharmacy or something soon. For him more than you." Joan nodded her head at Blake.

  "Got it," he said as he rose to his feet. He turned to go upstairs but then stopped and said, "Thanks."

  "Oh, it's nothing," Joan said.

  "No, not for that. For making me feel like less of a failure."

  ****

  Katie looked at herself in the mirror. She could hear the others moving about the building, underneath the din created by the dead. The dead were out there, those poor souls like her husband and her son. She didn't thought about everything they had gone through that day, and she didn't know how they were still alive. It wasn't amazement at having made it; there were actual holes in her memory.

  She looked down at her mangled hand. Her pinky and her ring finger were gone. The wound was still oozing blood around the stitches, but it had slowed down considerably. She didn't mind. She doubted she would ever get married again.

  Katie shined the flashlight on her face and looked at herself in the mirror. She saw a stranger looking back at her. "Who the fuck are you?" she asked. She hid the laugh and smile with her ugly hand.

  A strong feeling of nausea came over her, and out of pure instinct, she threw open the toilet lid and vomited into it. Stomach acid and jagged remnants of potato chips splashed into the bowl. Dammit. We could have drank that. She held her hand up to her head, wondering if she was getting sick. Having the flu while running from the dead was the last thing she wanted. Her forehead was warm, and her body was covered in a cold sweat.

  It was almost like when she was pregnant with... no. It couldn't be that. Katie threw the lid of the toilet down and sat on it. It couldn't be. It had been how long since? Shit... shit... shit. Katie squeezed her eyes shut and put her hand to her head, not even noticing the pain of her ruined fingers as they brushed against her greasy scalp.