by Morris, Jacy
"Can Blake come?" Mort asked.
"We should probably leave him here."
"Then I can't go with you."
Mort's answer surprised Lou. Things were going a little too far. "You have to, Mort. If you stay here, you're going to die."
"Maybe I should die."
"I don't want you too, man. We need you."
Mort said nothing.
"Blake would understand," Lou said, taking a shot in the dark.
"What if he comes back?"
"He's not gonna come back. You did your job. Blake's gone. He's safe now. Now we need to do the same for ourselves. We need to make ourselves safe. Can you help me with that?"
Mort nodded his head, slowly.
"Good, come on." Lou rose from his squat, his knees popping again. He turned to walk up the stairs, but Mort didn't follow. "I thought you were coming with me."
"I'll be up in a second," Mort said. "I just... I just want to say goodbye."
****
Mort waited until he heard Lou's footsteps upstairs, then he turned to look at the now rotting body of Blake. He wanted him to get back up. He wanted Blake to rise up the way he had always done, on the rooftop in Portland when he'd lost his hearing, in the Coliseum when it had collapsed, in the streets of Portland when things had been going to shit. How was this possible? How was it possible that the best and the brightest could be taken down so easily?
On the streets, he often heard the other homeless folk talk about the strongest surviving whenever they lost one of their own. It wasn't an occasion for sadness. It was an affirmation that those that were left were stronger and more capable of life on the streets. But the saying now rang untrue to Mort. Blake had been everything that he himself was not. He was likable, he could kill one of the undead from a hundred yards out, and he could run all day.
In all ways, Blake had been stronger than Mort. But it was Blake rotting on the floor and not himself. It didn't seem fair to him. Mort had never known anyone that had died personally. Sometimes another homeless person would pass away in the night, but it was never anything more than a passing acquaintance, someone that he had known for maybe a couple of weeks. Even when Zeke had died, he had known him for maybe the course of an evening. No, this was the first death that had struck close to Mort's heart, and he didn't know what to do.
He couldn't pinpoint the source of the pain. He had often heard of broken hearts, but his pain was not located in his heart. His hands clenched and unclenched seemingly without his own knowledge, as if they were trying to physically pull Blake back from the dead. His eyes blinked often, heavy with moisture. His mouth hung open, as if it were searching for the words to some sort of mystic spell that would revive his friend. His mind was a cloud, a roiling mess of emotions and thoughts that came unbidden to his mind.
I could sit here for hours, he thought, but that's not what Blake would want. And that's what made Mort move on, the idea that Blake would not want Mort sitting there feeling sorry for him. He would appreciate the sentiment, but in the end, he would most likely crack some sort of joke that would hit just to the right of funny, and then they would move on. And so that's what Mort did. He stood, grasped Blake's rifle, and headed up the stairs in the hopes that somewhere Blake was there, looking down at him, and smiling.
At the top of the stairs, he paused and looked at Blake's body. "I hope I see you again someday."
****
Clara and Joan were busy dragging a small couch from the other end of the upstairs offices, when Mort appeared. He looked better than she had expected to be honest. Clara felt the loss of Blake, his smile, the easy confidence that he showed in everything that he did, those would all be missed. But there was no way that she could feel the loss like Mort did. She wanted to reach out to him, to let him know that everything was alright, but she didn't know if it was her place or if he even wanted to hear it. She could only imagine if she lost Joan, the one person she knew in this world, the one person who knew everything that Clara herself had gone through.
He turned sideways, sliding past them, and disappeared into an office, the ravages of mourning etched on his face. God, I hope I never experience that sort of sadness. She had lost Courtney, sure, but etched along the sadness of his loss was a sense of bewilderment. Everything had been new, strange, disorienting. That odd feeling had cut the sadness, making it almost acceptable. It still sucked, and she still had nightmares every other time she actually managed to sleep, but it wasn't what Mort was experiencing. Mort was experiencing the total loss of hope combined with the effect of having to gun down the one thing that seemed to give a shit about you.
At least she'd never had to shoot Courtney.
"You in there?" Joan asked.
She broke out of her brief trance and said, "Yeah."
"Good, you can help me move this couch then. It's killing my back."
"Relax, it's not that heavy," Clara said as they stopped at the top of the stairs. They tipped the small sofa up on its side and sent it sliding down the stairs. They followed it down, ignoring the body in the corner. They pushed the couch up against the door that led to the zoo's gift shop. It wasn't much, but it should slow down the progress of the dead.
At the top of the stairs, Lou appeared with an office chair in his hands, his arms straining with the weight of it. Clara noticed for the first time that the veins on his arms were standing out as he exerted himself. When they had first met, Lou's forearms had been thicker, meatier, and there had been no sight of the veins in his arms. Clara looked down at her own arms, and noticed a difference there. They were harder, bonier.
The world was shaping them to survive. Soon they would all be caveman hard. Clara stifled a giggle at the phrase. She kept the thought to herself though, as no one else seemed in the mood for laughter.
Lou pitched the chair down the stairwell and it came to a stop at the bottom. Clara jumped as a sound rang through the office. A scratched and bloody hand punched through the door to the offices. It grasped and pulled at the wood around it. It ripped chunks of the door away with a crunching sound.
"Shit," Clara said. The dead seemed to have impeccable timing.
"We're gonna need some more furniture!" Joan yelled up the stairs.
Mort appeared, and began throwing chairs down the stairs. Lou and Clara had to jump out of the way as chairs desks and electronics fell down the stairs, creating a racket that barely drowned out the noise of the dead.
How long had they been listening to it? That unceasing slam of fists upon walls. How long had it been? It was dark inside, the space only lit by their flashlights as they moved around. Joan and Clara were content with moving furniture and piling it up against the door. A gray blue arm ripped at the cheap wooden door. Clara picked up a light office chair and began swinging it at the arm.
Her attacks didn't do much, scratch up its skin, maybe break a few bones, but it still came. It still tore at the doorway. Outside, she could see the chest of a large man in a faded blue workshirt. "Herb" the nametag said. Clara continued to swing the chair at his arm as she wondered if that was really his name or if it were some sort of ironic hipster thing that he had thought up.
"Remember hipsters?" Clara asked Joan as she piled another chair upon the pile of junk that they were slowly building in front of the door.
"Ugh. How can I forget?" Joan plopped the chair on top of the pile and then backed away, wiping an arm across her sweaty brow. More chairs tumbled down the steps behind them. "How many do you think are still out there?"
"The dead?"
"No... hipsters," Joan said.
Clara just laughed and said, "They probably all died when they ran out of PBR."
"That or they all just killed themselves to be ironic." A metal cabinet full of electronics tumbled noisily down the stairs. Together they picked it up and placed it against the pile of junk that blocked the door.
They could see the hand of Herb fishing through the furniture, but the pile wasn't going anywhere. Herb could get no leverage, and eve
rything was jammed tight. Joan and Clara climbed the stairs and sat in the hallway. There were two rooms apiece on the left and right of the hallway, but the floor was good enough for Clara. Besides, from the way things looked, they had already shoved all the chairs downstairs.
The banging was less insistent upstairs, dulled by distance and walls. She could almost pretend that she was sitting in her own apartment, trying to ignore noisy neighbors. From the room on the right side of the hallway, Clara heard grunting. She leaned sideways and saw the feet of the dead woman disappear into a hole in the ceiling. Mort pushed her feet upwards, and she assumed Lou and Katie were above hauling the rest of the corpse up onto the roof.
Clara sat up straight and the scene in the room disappeared. Joan plopped down next to her, and they sat, breathing heavy. Now that the immediate work was done, her mind began to focus on the impossibility of the situation and the dread of having lost another good person. The morning couldn't get here soon enough. Clara closed her eyes for a brief second. She was almost asleep, her head resting on Joan's shoulder when Mort shook her awake.
"Come on," he said. "I need your help."
Clara didn't ask what he needed help with. She just followed him without thinking, down the stairs and over to where Blake's body rested. Mort bent down and hooked his arms under Blake's armpits. "Grab his feet," he said.
She bent down and lifted Blake's feet by the well-worn heels of his boots. Together, they maneuvered him upstairs. Her ankle screamed at her as she climbed the stairs. It was now an everyday pain, something that she had decided she could live with. She didn't know if it would get worse, but it didn't seem to be getting better. She could run on it if she had to, but whenever she stopped, the damn thing throbbed like it was going to explode at any second.
In the old security office, the room now empty of furniture, Mort propped Blake's body up. "Lift with me," he said.
Clara squatted down, and they raised Blake up off the ground. She saw Lou appear at the entrance to the hole, reaching downward with his hand. Blake's body was just out of reach. Mort hugged Blake's body chest to chest, lifting him in the air as high as he could, but it wasn't high enough.
"Get his arm up to me," Lou said.
The task was left to her to help with. She grabbed his arm and tried to point it straight upward, but gravity and Blake's limp arm conspired to make that technique useless. "Shit," she muttered, the second time his cold, dead arm flopped over her shoulder.
Mort grunted as he set Blake's body down gently on the floor. "Couldn't hold him up any longer," Mort said apologetically as he doubled over, his arms hanging limp.
"That's alright," Lou said. "Take a breather. We'll try again in a few."
Mort sat on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chest. Clara walked around looking at the pile of disconnected wires on the ground. "Why don't we just leave him here?" she wondered.
"No way," Mort said. "There's no way we're leaving him here. I don't want those things poking around him if they get in here. He'll be better on the roof, in the sunshine, away from those things."
Clara just shrugged and picked up a length of electrical cord; she sat next to Blake's body and looped some of the cord around his wrist. She pulled the cord taut and then tested it out. It wasn't perfect, but it might hold long enough for Lou to get a hold of Blake's hand.
"Ready to try again?" she asked.
In reply, Mort stood up and walked over to Blake's body. "Lou! We're gonna try again." He wrapped his arms around Blake's waist, and then hugged his body, lifting it up as high as he could go, which was still some two feet below the hole. Clara grabbed the loose end of the cord and tossed it in the direction of Lou who was once again hanging down in the hole. He grabbed the wire with his hand and then stood up, pulling backwards.
"Help me out with this," he said, and then Katie appeared, tugging on Blake's dead body. He rose upward, as if God were calling him to heaven, and then his boots disappeared over the edge of the hole in the roof. He was up there now.
Clara walked back to her spot in the hallway. Joan was leaned completely over, her eyes closed. She sat back down next to her and closed her own eyes. She was asleep in no time, dreaming of the pounding of a steel drum as bodies rose in the sky above her, drifting away up to a light in the sky.
Chapter 18: A Hooptie for Us
When the sun came up, the temperature in the building rose instantly. It was going to be a scorcher. Joan sat on the roof, soaking up the sun as it rose overhead. They had agreed to leave at noon, come hell or high water... well, hell was already here, so that just left high water.
They waited in silence, like monks mediating in the courtyard of a monastery. Flies buzzed around the entire building, just as the dead themselves buzzed around it. Their exit strategy involved more of that famed, "Let's jump off of this" strategy that they had become known for. By the end of their journey, Joan fully expected to be over any fear of heights she had ever had... or she would be dead. She wanted to laugh, but then she remembered what had happened to Rudy the last time they had jumped out of a building.
Had he woken up yet? Would he follow after them, or would he and Amanda just sit tight with those military boys? It was a crap shoot in the end. She had only known Rudy for a couple of weeks, and for the most part, he seemed like a typical young adult... meek, lacking confidence, and completely enamored with Amanda. A guy like him could easily fall in line under that Sergeant Tejada. But she had sensed more in him than a meek follower. Joan was sure that there was steel underneath those fleshy limbs. The apocalypse might actually be a good thing for him.
Hell, it might be a good thing for her. Joan looked over at Clara, feeling an odd sense of possession. That was her friend. How long had it been since she had been able to say that? College maybe? Even then, those had been friends of convenience. We go to the same college, so we might as well grab a drink after class. Once they had graduated and gone their separate ways, there had never been any thought of staying in touch.
Joan was a self-absorbed individual. She always had been. Becoming a doctor was just about all she had ever dreamed of. Even when she was helping people, it wasn't actually about helping people. It was about solving a puzzle. How do I make this human operational again?
It would have continued like that until she was an old creepy cat lady if it wasn't for the mess that they were currently in. But now she had a friend. Now she had people to talk to. They were all messed up, but they were all sort of together, working for the same cause. That was a comfortable thing, a good thing, and she reminded herself that she wasn't necessarily perfect either.
She didn't like the pain, but that was part of the deal, the good with the bad, the feeling of belonging with the feeling of loss when someone had died. Watching Mort gun down Blake was something that was going to stick with her for the rest of her life. Not because it had been brutal, which it had, but because of the pain that Mort had to go through. That was the toughest part; watching Mort end it all and say goodbye to his friend.
Joan looked over her shoulder and saw Blake's body leaning up against the metal machinery on the roof. Mort sat next to him, whispering in his ear. Joan quickly spun her head forward and looked up at the sky. "Not much longer now," she said to no one in particular.
"Are you in a hurry to get out here?" Katie said.
"No. I'm just not very good at waiting."
"That's all life is, girl. Just waiting to die and filling up the moments in between."
Joan scoffed at the idea. "You haven't been living if that's all you think life is."
"Oh really? Then what do you call getting married, having a kid, and surviving this long?" Katie asked.
"Jeez. Forget I said anything," Joan said. Katie walked off, peering over the side of the building. That lady was crazy; Joan was sure of it. She had been extremely moody ever since they had become trapped inside the building. Her eyes, normally dark, seemed almost black set amidst her brooding face. Katie was ready to kill. She actua
lly seemed to be looking forward to it.
Out of everyone, Katie seemed the most out of place. She simply didn't belong. She didn't smile. She didn't have a sense of humor. All she did was walk around with that gun of hers, ready to shoot dead anything that she judged a threat. Joan wondered if she had always been that way. The woman didn't talk much about her past, and Joan wondered if she ever would.
She was damaged goods. She had seen the type before in the E.R., those women with that gun-shy look in their eye, their hulking, looming husbands standing next to them, making sure that they said the right thing. Of course, the right thing was almost always some bullshit story that simply didn't stand up to inspection. The more troubling ones were the women who just sat there and said nothing having given up on their lives long ago. That was Katie.
"Alright, it's time," Lou said.
Mort stood up and walked over to the bloated corpse of the zoo employee. They had never discovered her name. In her pockets, she had nothing but a pocket knife. She was a complete mystery to them. Had she been feeding the polar bears? Or had they been eating the dead of their own volition?
Mort bent down and grabbed her underneath her shoulders, propping the stiff body into a sitting position. Lou grabbed the dead woman by the feet, and they began to swing her from side to side, her body bowed in the middle. Lou counted down from three, and at zero, they tossed her body off the roof. Joan watched as, for a moment, she hung suspended perfectly in mid-air, her bloody hair hanging extended outwards as if it were trying to escape her skull, her legs trailing behind her front half, and her arms lifted slightly up to the sky as if she were beseeching the heavens above to come and collect her.
Then the body was falling, and below they heard a thump. The banging on the side of the gift shop decreased immediately. Shuffling feet crunched over the trampled foliage surrounding the building, cool ferns and natural Oregon plants crushed underneath the mindless feet of the dead. Joan stood next to the others and poked her head over the side of the roof to see down.