36 Hours (35 page)

“We saw you running,” I said. “That must be our guy. He didn’t chase you. He had to have seen you.”

“Then why didn’t he come?”

Hannah answered, “He probably thought
you
were one of them.”

She swallowed. “That’s scary to think about.”

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“I’ll have to check,” I said. “Hannah, take Ashlie back to the storage room, just in case.”

Hannah nodded. “Okay.”

“Ash, don’t let her fall asleep.”

“Why?”

“Look at her arm.” She did and turned away, revolted, stomach turning. “If she falls asleep, she’s as good as dead. We need some antiseptic and some bandage to prevent anymore blood loss.”

Ashlie tore at her sleeve, and began to wrap Hannah’s arm. Hannah said,

“Genius.”

“Guys, go, okay?”

Ashlie was still doing the bandage as she and Hannah headed back up the hallway.

Taking a breath, I moved through the lobby, quiet and dead, hearing nothing but the raindrops. The bathrooms. The great window looking in at the pool, utterly empty. All those cars, no one was here. I entered the play area. Several glass-walled rooms with mats and couches and blank TVs, pool tables and foosball tables. And then I heard the wind; I followed it to the source; one of the glass windows in the play land was shattered, and the door of play land was wide open.
We’re exposed
.

I wanted to run. Wanted to return to those two I had left. But I reasoned,
There’s no glass on the inside of the play land. They broke it leaving. All the
infected piled out of here.

Who had Ashlie seen?

A yell shuddered through the complex. I spun around as the shout dissipated, waning in the darkness.

I ran past the bathrooms, towards the lobby – it had sounded like a girl’s shout.

It came again. Behind me. I spun, nearly slipping in my wet tennis shoes. The noise was coming from the men’s bathroom. I turned and grabbed a chair off the floor, the same chair Hannah had been sitting in last Sunday during that oh-soawkward few moments. The bathroom door jerked open as I barreled through, wheeling around the corner and past the lockers. A bloodied woman in a YMCA work shirt was climbing up one of the stalls. I let out a shriek, ran up; she turned her head, hissing at me; a deep bite wound had been delivered into the back of her neck Anthony Barnhart

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and it bled all down the back of her shirt. I smashed the chair into her back; she released, clumsily falling down. I beat the chair down on top of her; she yelled and hollered, clawing at the chair; she grabbed the legs and held on. I fell backwards into a weight scale.

The woman threw the chair into the wall, pushed by muscles unknown. She launched upwards, hurling her arms at me, knocking me and the scale down. The scale pinned my arm, sending shockwaves of pain rustling through me. She punched me in the face, my jaw bellowing. She raised her arm again, delivered another; I spit out blood. Her head came down; I tried to block it with my hand, wrenching at her curled hair.

The stall door opened; a man came out, and he kicked the woman in the rear, hurling her over me. He grabbed the chair. I pushed the scale off of me. The woman was getting up. The man said something about a girl named Mary, and slammed the chair down on her head. The woman fought it off, but his own muscles growled and he hurled the chair into her face over and over until blood soaked the carpet and her skull shattered. She lay still; I watched from a sitting position, hand wrapped over my mouth. He dropped the chair next to the still corpse.

I removed my hand. Mucus mixed with blood trailed after my palm. I spit out a tooth.

The man offered a hand; I took it, and he helped me up. “Boy am I glad to see you,” he said.

He looked familiar, and I placed him. The janitor who worked the night shift!

We often saw him during our youth activities, and he would yell at us for ruining his work. He saw me and he laughed. All of that was pointless, funny even.

“How you doing?” I asked, breathing hard. My lungs still hurt from Hannah.

“A lot better than you. She jacked you good.”

“I’ll be okay. My friend is hurt a lot worse. Is there medical supplies anywhere?”

“Of course. This is a gym.”

“Let’s take care of that first.”

“All right.” We moved around the body, for the door. “She’s the only one left in the building, I think. Most left through breaking the glass. Drawn to some big explosion, I don’t know what that was.”

“Really. Interesting.”

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“I owe you one.”

“Pay me back with a plane ride?”

He laughed. I feared it had all been a lie. “Of course. The keys are in my pocket.”

He took us over the desk in the lobby, into the back, through some cupboards.

“What’s her problem?”

“Nasty wound to the arm.”

He paused. “Not a bite, is it?”

“No. It was cut by barbed wire.”

“How’d that happen?” He found a Red Cross kit.

“It wasn’t a walk in the park to get here.”

“Weren’t you just across the street?”

I laughed. “Yeah. It was.”

I led him into the back gym, and we entered the storage room. “It’s okay, it’s me. Hannah?”

A figure came towards me. “Right here. Who is-I know you.”

“You’re the girl with the nice voice. I have some gauze here, some antiseptic, some needles and thread… I don’t suppose you can do stitches?”

“I never got to medical school,” she said.

“We can still bandage you up.”

We all sat in the storage room as he poured antiseptic in the wound and began rapping it. Hannah grunted as the cloth rubbed her skin back and forth. The wound was bone deep, exposing muscle and several layers of skin tissue. Finally he clipped it tight and said, “Just don’t take it off. It’s going to itch. Don’t scratch it. We can get stitches later.”

“Later?”

“We’re going West. The infection hasn’t really got en there yet. Everything is under martial law, sure, but they’re letting planes in. As long as you’re clear, they give you medical treatment and a place to stay. Scientists are working on a cure, or at least a vaccine so that those bitten won’t, you know, not stay dead.”

“So the West is fine?”

“For the most part. West of the Rocky Mountains things are really looking bright. The east got slammed. Hah. I should’ve stayed in Montana, I had a job there in automobiles. This is like a walk through Hell.”

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Medical attention, a place to stay, sleep, vaccines, hope! I looked around. Color was returning to faces. We felt like we were almost home, on the doorstep to Heaven. “What about the rest of the world?”

“There are sects holding out everywhere, I’m sure, but the news is really sketchy. TV programs and radio are mostly just garbled junk no one can understand. But I guess in Africa the problem isn’t so bad, but China and Japan are almost completely gone.” Hong Kong. Nagasaki. Beijing. Swarmed with the infected. No, it was impossible. “India has no hope. Europe is fighting like we are, especially with a lot of shelter in the mountains where the infected can’t really make it. See, they’re like us, except they don’t feel pain. They can do anything we can do – but they’re limited as we are. People have discovered this, and so they’ve been hiding out on islands and such, where the infected won’t be able to get because of the water. I hear Alcatraz is now a community resort. South America, no one knows, but Mexico is falling apart as we speak. Canada is doing fine in its northern regions, where there are only a few isolated settlements, but Quebec is trashed, Montreal is burning. The world is crumbling. But if we can get to the West, things will be fine, I think.”

“You have a plane?” Ashlie asked.

“Yes. We get inside it, we take off – we’re there.”

A fire ignited within me. “Let’s go now!” Reasoning had left me empty. I stood.

The janitor frowned. “I don’t know if that’s really going to work.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve already looked. There are infected everywhere. The roads are trash. There’s a plane burning on the main runway. The garage door to my plane is locked, and only the administrator has a key. I don’t know where they are. It’s not so black-and-white. If we just ramped up and left, it’d take an act of God to get us through. We’d be playing God with our lives.”

Everyone was silent. The West, so beautiful, an ideal of salvation, out of our reach.

The man said after a while, “What do you think they are? Think it’s a virus?

Alien invasion? Judgment Day?”

“I don’t know,” I said, suddenly so mellow.

“You guys are Christian kids. Is this Judgment Day? Is this what the Bible talks about? The Day of God’s Wrath?”

“I don’t know,” I said again.

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Hannah remarked, “If it is, we’re screwed.”

“Maybe God is separating the weeds from the wheat.”

“My parents are dead,” I said. “They loved God like nothing else. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“But what are they? They aren’t humans. They look like us, sure. Except they’re bloody and cryptic.”

Mom:
Get away from me.

I looked up. “Janitor Shelley? What did you say?”

“Sorry.”

“No. What did you say?”

“They look like us, except they’re covered in blood and that vacant stare. And they stink of death.”

I grinned. “We’re flying.”

1:00 a.m.

“He doesn’t remember.”

Primal Instinct

The Airfield

They demanded to know what foreign and god-forsaken ‘clever’ idea I now had up my sleeve. A grin covered my face. I imagined those beer commercials where the cut-out figures are saying, “Genius! Genius!” at the Miller-lite draft, and that’s how I felt, running down the hallway, oblivious to the fact that a zombie might be around any corner. Ironically, that’s what I was looking for; one moment avoiding certain death, another moment praying for its grisly encounter.

Janitor Shelley croaked, “What are you doing???”

I spun around, breathless. “Hannah. Give me your knife.”

She handed it over. I turned and kept running, knowing they wouldn’t leave me. I ran past the lobby, those yawning windows, through the patter of fervent midnight rain, and reached the bathrooms. I looked at the bloody knife. Hannah asked what I was thinking.

“Wait out here,” I told her. “With Ashlie. If anything happens, give a shoutout. Shelley, with me.”

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We entered the quiet, darkened bathrooms. I was used to seeing naked men –

what a gross sight! – in towels changing, hearing the patter of kids’ feet as they slipped and slid to the pool. Now we rounded the corner and saw instead a woman’s corpse, still bleeding, on the floor. I hunkered down next to her, with the knife.

Shelley peered towards the pool corridor, and muttered, “Please tell me what you’re doing.”

Pointing to the woman, “Did you know her?”

“She was my friend.”

“Look away.” I drove the knife down into her chest, ripping it downwards, splicing open the innards. A sprocket of blood spit upwards, staining my dirtied clothes. A horrible, gut-wrenching stench shot out of her guts, and I wanted to vomit. Shelley launched backwards, turning, staring at the lockers. I took a breath and set the knife at my knees, and reaching inside, closing my eyes, felt the ribcage, the warm muscles, the gook and ooze of the body, and tore at the flesh until I ripped open a huge cavity exposing muscle and tissue. Shelley didn’t know what to say, so astonished. I said, “Remember when you said that they looked exactly like us, except they were covered with blood, empty stares, and that god-awful stench? We can get to that airfield. We cover ourselves with blood, we look stoned, and we move like they do, and make our way to airfield, climb over – awkwardly, with indefinite precision – and get to the hangars, get in the plane, and fly off. We won’t act like their prey.” It sounded strange, calling myself and others like me
prey
. “We won’t smell like their pray. We will be like them in every way. They’re dumb brutes, they won’t know the difference.”

“No. You’ll get infected.”

“You only get infected through the bites.”

“There’s blood in their bites – haven’t you seen their mouths?”

I looked at him hard. “Yes. But it’s their saliva, I think, because blood alone won’t do it. You might die through a placebo effect, but you won’t change. No, you have to be bitten, because for some reason, the poison or virus or venom, whatever, travels through the saliva.”

“Is that a fact?”

“I hope so. If I’m wrong, we’ll know in a little while.”

He stirred. “What if they don’t fall for it?”

“Then we’re dead, and we’ll know much sooner.”

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Hannah’s shout: “Austin! Austin, quick!”

I grabbed the knife and we rushed out of the bathroom, rounded to the lobby. Ashlie was turned towards me, crying. I asked her what was wrong, and she didn’t answer. Hannah stood in the middle of the lobby. She heard us coming and said, “Look.” She pointed at the window.

Les stood behind the glass, staring at her. I moved into his view, and his head jerked, and he glared at me. His flesh was purple, eyes sunken, lips furled back. His chest heaved with each breath, and his neck and face were drenched with blood, still pulsing down onto his shoulders and shirt, steaming in the drizzling rain.

His hollow eyes focused on me, and I said silently, “Does he remember?” I approached the window; Les didn’t flinch; but was it Les? I knew it wasn’t. We stared at each other from either side of the glass. His hand reached up. I followed, and pressed my palm against the cold glass. He threw his arm against the glass and shrieked, hurling himself against the window; it shook and rattled and he fell back, did it again, drawing deep lines and welts of blood over the clear surface. He reeled back to do it again, but seeing the mourning expression on my face, seeing he wasn’t getting through, he stopped. A presence behind me. Hannah said, “He doesn’t remember.”