by Howard, Bob
Yuni wasn’t able to stop the shaking that started with her knees and moved upward. She was afraid she would cry out loud or gasp again, and as the debris hit the bottom of the stairwell, the infected dead did what they always do. It moaned.
In the few moments it took for Yuni to be left alone on the landing, she was so focused on the source of the sound that she forgot how far she was from the top of the stairs and where the door was. She was so disoriented that she became sure she was closer to the door than she had been. She reached with her left hand for the door and only found empty air. She pressed hard with the toes of her right foot to see if she was standing on the top step or on the landing. All she felt was solid floor, and she no longer knew where she was.
Debris moved again, and this time she anticipated the next thing she would hear. Her mind saw an infected dead feeling its way along the floor and dropping one step at a time like a wet sack of flour. It couldn’t see any better than she could, and as far as she knew, they couldn’t smell a living person. That was one thing she didn’t want to find out firsthand.
She was just starting to wonder how the others could have left her in the stairwell when she felt something touch the front of her shoe. At first it just bumped her, but then it came forward and put its weight on top of her foot. It was pressing down on her toes like someone had stepped on her foot with a round heel.
Her mind told her that the infected dead had been crawling, so it couldn’t have stepped on her foot. If it had, that meant it had pulled itself upright at the railing, and now she was standing face to face with it.
She tried to smell the air in front of her to blindly see if she could sense a face in front of hers. There was a dusty smell with a wet taste, and her mind said it had to be there because she could feel it standing on her foot. She shut her eyes and pictured herself pushing out with both hands. She saw the vile creature fly away from her and bounce off the railing as it fell down to the next landing. She had to make herself do it, or she would die.
Even though she couldn’t see, she had become sure of how the monster was standing. The weight on her foot made her sure she was facing the side of its head no more than an inch from her face, and it didn’t know what she was about to do. It was time.
Yuni only bent slightly at the waist as her hands shot outward. The force made her exhale in a grunt as she expected resistance to meet with her palms. She still had her flashlight gripped in her right hand, and it was slippery with sweat, but she was counting on the weight of it to help knock the infected over. Instead, it flew out of her hand into the darkness.
The weight was still on her foot, but her arms were out in front of her like a basketball player who had just shot a free-throw. Her mind couldn’t fill in those blanks.
The door opened and spilled light into the stairwell. The horror that crossed Sora’s face was a stark contrast to the confusion and fear on Yuni’s. There was no infected dead standing in front of her, and her arms were reaching out into the blackness.
It seemed like her head would only move with the greatest of efforts as she tried to look at her husband. The rest of her body was still paralyzed, and she felt weakness coming over her as the adrenaline faded. Then she saw the dirty mop of hair below her waist and what used to be a human face as it lifted upward to meet hers.
The thing she had feared most was really there, and it was leaning forward on one skeletal arm that was missing from the elbow down. The round end of the bone in the upper arm was pressed into the top of her shoe, and the face was bending toward her leg.
Yuni had resisted when her husband told her they would be working out at the gym every day, but he convinced her she would be doing it for him. He needed someone to practice his martial arts with. What she didn’t realize was that he had been trying to teach her to react rather than to make a choice before moving. There was no time to make a choice now, and the time to react had passed. She tried to kick out with her left foot and swung at the head at the same time, but the teeth felt like hot metal as they tore open her leg above the knee.
She didn’t know anything could be so painful, and she didn’t think she could stop screaming. Sora’s foot came up under the chin of the rotten skull and sent it flying down the stairs.
They picked Yuni up and carried her into a room they had checked before realizing she was missing, and Iris gave her a shot of morphine from their medical kit.
Sora eliminated the infected dead in the stairwell, but afterward he was a mixture of grief and rage. He blamed himself over and over for not staying with her. He was so sure the threat was inside the rooms, and he was doing his part to help them find a boat. It would have been better for him if the stairwell had been full of the infected so he could burn out the rage.
Iris checked the wound and saw that it was deep. They knew what the bite meant, and the most humane thing they could do for Yuni was to let her bleed. They tried to get Sora to go with George to search the rest of the ninth floor. That would give Iris time to give Yuni a merciful end, but he knew what they were doing and insisted that the honorable thing for him to do was to stay with her. He wouldn’t let his wife become one of those things, and he wouldn’t pass off his responsibility for ending it.
The others couldn’t deny him his honor. He was already so damaged by leaving her in the stairwell that he would never forgive them for not allowing him the chance to do his duty to his wife. It was still difficult for Iris to believe he would be able to stop there. It was against her better judgment, but she took George and Sherry with her, and they left the Tanakas alone in the bedroom.
“What do you think he’ll do?” Sherry asked Iris.
George took Sherry by the arm and whispered something to her. They left Iris sitting on the sofa in the living room. They were all worn out, and this had taken the last of her energy.
******
Iris woke up at sunrise. The balcony of the suite faced the northeast, so the sun wasn’t right in her face, but close enough. There was an armchair pulled up to the big sliding glass door, and George was comfortably watching the sunrise. Sherry was stretched out on a mattress between him and the balcony. She didn’t doubt that he was protecting her.
George lifted a cup toward his face, and she couldn’t believe the smell that drifted from it.
“Is that coffee?”
He nodded but didn’t say anything. He just got up and poured her a cup. She saw that he had found a box of sterno and kept the fire going long enough to heat up the water.
She accepted it gratefully.
“How long did I sleep?”
“You were passed out on the couch before we got back from searching this floor, so my guess is nine or ten hours.”
“Don’t look so guilty,” he said. “You really needed it.”
George was a little rough around the edges sometimes, but Iris could see why Sherry loved him. Besides being a little rough around the edges herself, Sherry had found herself a guy who was aware of other people’s needs.
Iris was afraid to ask about Sora. She glanced toward the closed bedroom door and then back at George.
“Is he still in there?”
“As far as I know. We didn’t go in when we got back.”
“You’ve been awake all night?”
“No, my lovely wife let me get a few hours first. I guess it’s time to move out, but you might want to see this first.”
George walked over to the balcony and slid the door open. Iris followed him outside, and she saw what he wanted to show her almost immediately. He had been right about the view. The seawall that served as a breakwater along the front of the marina was in clear view, and there was a sailboat tied to it. The masts had been taken down and were lined up down the center of the boat, just waiting for someone to come along and sail her away.
“One problem,” said Iris. “How are we supposed to reach it?”
“I can swim that far.”
“Sure you can, but are you forgetting what’s in the water? If you
drained this marina it would be full of the infected and blue crabs.”
“I wouldn’t go out through the marina. It’s deep water out there. I could go out on the beach, swim to deep water, and then swim back to the boat.”
“You’ve been thinking about this, I can tell, but there has to be another way.”
“Another way to do what?”
Sherry came out onto the balcony and leaned against George. She took his coffee from him and took a big swallow.
“He wants to swim out to that sailboat on the other side of that seawall.”
“Of course he does,” said Sherry. “Why not just jump from here?”
“That’s one option,” said Iris, “but I think we can get out there without having to get in the water first. Let’s check on Sora and then decide what to do.”
Opening the bedroom door was like going to a funeral. None of them wanted to face Sora and tell him it was time to leave his wife, but it was time. It was also time to admit that what they found was what they all expected.
They were side by side on the bed. Sora Tanaka must have known that he had to get it right, or he would have to recruit one of them to do it for him. He also must have known they wouldn’t agree to do what he wanted.
They could tell he wasn’t sleeping, but he was so well placed next to Yuni that they couldn’t believe he had done it himself. It wasn’t until they had gotten closer that they were able to see that Sora had placed a long knife under his own chin and shoved it upward. They could only imagine the grief that would give a man so much determination that he could kill himself that way.
George helped Sherry from the room. She could hardly keep her legs under control long enough to take a step. Iris found it difficult to move at first, but she broke free from her shock and moved to the bed. She lifted the covers and drew them over the faces of Sora and Yuni Tanaka.
She was wiping a tear from her cheek as she shut the bedroom door behind her. George was comforting Sherry, but he watched Iris closely. When she didn’t say anything, he worked up the nerve to speak.
“It’s my fault.”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” she said more forcefully than she intended.
“Yes, it is,” he insisted. “Ever since we arrived here I’ve been trying to take control. You got us out of Wilmington despite the odds, and you helped us keep our heads together underground for over five years. I should’ve trusted you to tell me how to do this right. I got Yuni killed.”
“Shut up, George. I don’t want to hear another word. People are going to die, and sometimes we can’t stop it. Yuni should have moved when we did. We’ve talked about this before. When the group moves, everyone moves just like we were trained to do.”
Iris knew that George understood because they were both ex-military. Sora and Yuni weren’t trained military, but Iris and George had taught them that a team moved as one.
“Besides, what’s done is done. We need to focus on keeping ourselves alive, or we’re next. How do we get to that sailboat?”
“I’ve been giving that some serious thought,” said George.
“Serious thought that doesn’t include you swimming out to it, I hope.”
He nodded. “We only need to find something that can float that far. Something that might not be seaworthy but floats well enough to reach the seawall. I think that pontoon boat on the other side of the marina will work.”
George walked to the balcony as he told her about it. Iris scanned the pile of wrecked and burned boats and saw the pontoon boat half buried in the mess.
“I guess we won’t know if it will float until we get there,” she said. “There’s also the probability that we won’t be able to get all the junk off of it.”
They redistributed the supplies the Tanakas had been carrying and got ready to go without saying much. The sadness of losing their friends had put a dark cloud over them that was hard to ignore.
Iris checked the hallway and then moved to the stairwell. The infected that had bitten Yuni was a heap in the corner, and she resisted the urge to kick it as they went by. She didn’t doubt that George wanted to do the same.
They stayed close to the walls as they circled downward, but as they came to each new landing, Iris checked to be sure the doors were still shut before they went by. They had briefly considered using ropes to leave the hotel by climbing down the balconies because it eliminated the need to be in the dark stairwell again, but it added other risks. George was sure he could shoot any infected that happened to be in the rooms below, but Iris wasn’t convinced. For one thing, there may have been groups of people in the rooms, and they could be mobbed. Then there was the chance of falling. There was no way to eliminate that risk.
They reached the first floor quickly but not soon enough for any of them. They had entered the stairwell fast the day before, so they didn’t know if they should expect company on the first floor. The stairwell door opened outward because it was a fire door, so it opened into a small alcove where it couldn’t hit people who might have been escaping the building during a fire. Someone had decided it didn’t need a little window, so all they could do was hope there wasn’t anything waiting for them.
Iris opened it just far enough to be able to see, and she was glad the light from outside the building reached the alcove. Nothing was outside the door, but something fell in the distance. It came from the direction of the main entrance of the hotel and was far enough away for her to know they had to move now.
She whispered a warning to George and Sherry but let them know they were moving on three. George put himself behind Sherry to bring up the rear, and on three Iris went. The same thought probably went through all of their minds.
“This is how we should have done it last night.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Stranded
Year Two of the Decline
Janice leaned against the door with her face and screamed until she couldn’t scream anymore. All she could see when she shut her eyes was the rats, and in the darkness of the crew’s quarters she was sure she would find herself surrounded by the brown creatures. They were worse than the dead people that tried to bite them. At least they were slow.
David had called the dead people biters, zombies, carriers, and everything he could think of when he was killing them, but the news had called them infected.
It suddenly dawned on her that she really didn’t know if she was alone in this dark room. There really could be rats scurrying around her feet, and she wouldn’t know it without lights.
She stopped screaming and listened, but all she could hear was the ringing in her ears from her own screams. She couldn’t even hear her own breathing, and she hadn’t been able to get that under control. If her life depended on her being totally quiet, she would be dead because her breathing was so loud.
She didn’t dare to move. She just kept her face pressed against the door of the dark room. Her forehead was cooled by the metal, and there was only the faintest of smells. The place had been closed up for a long time was all she could guess. Still, nothing had bitten her exposed ankles, and she didn’t feel any furry bodies by her feet. Nothing groaned or dragged itself toward her….and that smell. It wasn’t the ammonia smell from rat urine or droppings.
Her breathing grew more shallow and less ragged. Eventually she began to believe she was in a safe place, and that made her think of David. It made her remember that he had just died outside. She kept her forehead on the door as the tears streamed down her cheeks, and for the very first time since it had all begun, she was alone.
Her thoughts drifted away, and it felt like she was going to sleep. She was so tired, but in her mind she saw bright sunshine and sandy beaches. David was trying to catch something in the water but kept falling down. She was laughing and making fun of him. She could remember wishing it wouldn’t have to end. That their honeymoon was almost over, and they were going to be getting on a plane in less than twenty-four hours to fly back to their real lives.
“Why c
an’t people just run away from all of their responsibilities and be happy doing nothing but sunning on beaches, swimming, and spending nights with the one they love? Why does it have to end?”
Somehow she took her heft hand from where it was pressed to the smooth surface of the door and lowered it to where a doorknob should be, and to the left of doorknobs on that side there was supposed to be a light switch. Her rational mind told her that’s where light switches were in the real world. She felt the sill around the door and moved her hand onto the wall and upward. She almost couldn’t believe it when her hand hit the flat plastic plate that surrounded the switch.
In one motion Janice Parker pushed the switch upward and spun around to face the attackers that would be able to see her now that the lights were on. She screamed again.
Her own reflection was more than she could stand. It didn’t look like her, but she was startled just because it was a living, breathing person. A full length mirror was hanging on a door across the room, and it had appeared to be rushing toward her because she had turned ready to fight. She was also a mess. Her tear streaked face would have been right at home on the head of a zombie.
As her back pressed against the door, she slid into a sitting position with her knees drawn up to her chest and cried for a second time. This time it wasn’t despair, and she wouldn’t have called it relief. It was more like the confusion of finding herself in a room that was nicer than their honeymoon suite had been.
The living room felt like it had been used as a recreation area for a group of people because it was so large. It reminded her of a fire station she had visited once. There was room for a lot of people to live together without getting on each other’s nerves.