36 Hours (45 page)

Shelley pounded on the door, begging to be let inside the Starbucks coffee shop. The scattered refugees inside shook their heads no. He banged louder, cried, “Please, dear God, please!” Someone had pity and ran towards the door. The owner shouted No!

“There’s too many!” I yelled, swinging the stick. One of them grabbed it, tore it from my hands. I turned and saw them coming from around the Beatle. The door flashed open; Shelley: “In here!”

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36 Hours

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We raced inside; the infected smashed at the door; together, the three of us and the good Samaritan shoved the door shut. He locked it tight and we jumped back. The infected banged at the window. It was soon to break. The owner shouted, “Morons! Morons!”

We raced between the small tables, the planted pottery, the coffee bags on sale. We jumped behind the counter. I yelled, “Hide! Hide! If they don’t see us, they’ll forget we’re here!” There were about six or seven other refugees, including the owner and the one who had opened the door. We all crowded behind the counter, surrounded by jugs of coffee flavoring, mixers, napkins and plastic bags. The infected continued to harass the windows. Someone muttered,
Sure about this?
No. But I didn’t say that. There was a rumbling sound and the banging ceased. They were diverted. The sounds of the murders and reawakening were muffled beyond the door. Shelley gave out a splendid thanks.

“Thanks for almost getting us
killed
,” the owner growled.

“Just stay down,” I said. “They’ll forget.”

“Your accent,” a woman said. “Not from around here.”

“Ohio,” Hannah said.

“I hear that’s bad.”

“Not as bad as this.”

She sighed. “This is bad. My family is at home.”

“Why didn’t you stay with them?”

“Starbucks is 24/7, rain or snow,” someone barked.

I glared at the owner. “Rain, snow, dead walking the earth… It’s all the same, right?”

“How are you so sure they won’t get in here?” the owner spat.

“I’m not,” I retorted. “But they seem to only possess short-term memory.”

Les. I said nothing.

“Oh my gosh, I hope my family is okay,” the woman muttered. An explosion outside rattled the windows. Boxes and bottles quivered on the shelves.

The sound of a door slamming. Everyone looked at each other. The owner:

“The back door!”

A shadow flitted around, and two little children ran inside. We gawked at them behind the counter. They were frazzled, a little girl and a little boy, their eyes swimming. The poor things were quaking like an earthquake. Anthony Barnhart

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They saw the compassion written all over our faces and cried out, “Jesse and James and Christine are chasing us! They killed Danny!”

No one knew what they were saying; one of the workers grabbed the kids and pulled them down beside them. The girl’s frilly dress rolled up and there was a bite on her leg.

She moaned, “Christine bit me! I told her to stop! I told her that it wasn’t a fun game!”

Hannah gasped, “Oh my gosh…”

The little girl wailed, “It hurts! It’s bleeding! It won’t stop bleeding!”

The owner yelled at the boy, “Are you bitten?”

He shook his head. “No. She is, though. She needs a band-aid.”

Someone said, “We have to kill her.”

The girl said, “Me? I just got bit!”

“Kill her. Kill her now!”

The woman with kids yelped, “No! She’s just a baby!”

“She’ll turn into one of them! We have to kill her!” He scrambled towards a drawer.

“What are you doing?” the woman cried out.

He opened the drawer.

The girl said, “It doesn’t hurt
that
bad! She just bit me! She barely cut me!”

“It doesn’t matter,” the man by the drawer said. He pulled out a stirring knife. The woman yelled, crawling after him.

The man fished, “Stay back! Angela! Back!”

“You can’t! It’s not a bad bite, it’s just-“

“It’s a bite! She’s going to turn! She’s going to become one of them!”

The little boy said, “Mister, is this part of the game?”

The owner grabbed the boy and held him back. The boy tried to weave away. He held him tighter. “Don’t move, boy. Let me see you.” He began inspecting his skin. “Little boys like to lie, don’t they?”

Someone tried to open the front door, but abandoned it.

“I’m not bit!” the boy said. “They didn’t get me!”

“Where are they?” Shelley asked. “Where are your friends?”

“They’re outside somewhere! We ran away and lost them! They’re probably looking for them. I’ll go find-“

The owner gripped him tight. “Stay here! Don’t move!”

The man with the knife edged towards the little girl. “Someone hold her!”

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36 Hours

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Hannah turned her eyes. I pressed my head underneath the counter, counted to ten.

The woman was shedding gallons of tears. “Brian! Gosh, Brian, you can’t-“

He wedged past her. “Someone hold the girl!”

A co-worker grabbed the girl, but refused to look her in the eyes. The girl said, “Let me go!” She only gripped tighter.

Angela grabbed at Brian’s heels. Brian shimmied past me, raising the knife before the girl.

The girl pushed away at him with frail arms. Her blonde hair danced around her angelic face. “Mister…”

“Brian!”

Her cry turned to a scream as he drove the stirring knife into the girl’s eye. The little girl let out a muffled gurgle and fell over onto the floor. Her body thumped on the ground. She opened her mouth, letting it open and close like a fish’s mouth. Blood seeped from the wound. Hannah began to cry. My own throat swelled. This wasn’t right. The little boy was crying. Angela was crying. Brian fell backwards, shaking all over. The little angel’s body went into a rhythmic seizure, bashing on the concrete. She let out guttural sounds. Brian fell back, gripping at his hair. The owner held the boy tight, just stared at the girl’s shaking body.

A shadow fell over him. He swirled around. Three children stood there, fingertips and jaws dripping with blood. They looked at him with a façade of disinterested lust. The little boy wailed, “He killed her!” But the children didn’t respond. They jumped at the man, biting and ripping at him. The owner screamed, crying for help. Everyone fumbled away; someone fell on top of the little girl’s body, blood from her eye staining her work clothes. The children snarled and hissed; blood trickled down the owner’s face as he cried, groping at the air, weighted down by the weight of Jesse, James and Christine. I wrenched to my feet, mortified at these children of the corn. Infected outside the front windows saw the sudden movement and hurled themselves against the glass. It shattered and they fell inside the coffee shop. They ran towards the counter, knocking over tables and pottery; the pottery shattered, the plants falling out and dirt spreading everywhere, blending with the blood on their shoes.

We all ran past the owner who was being gutted by the children. Following the way the children had come, we discovered an open back door leading a Anthony Barnhart

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backyard surrounded by wooden fencing, holding a dumpster, fallen metal trashcans, a gritty trail and overrunning plants. Angela, stunned, was silent as the infected clawed at her, peeling away the skin of her youth. Brian tried to escape but tripped on the little girl’s bloody; he fell right into the arms of an infected rounding the desk; he pushed at the fiend but more jumped over the counter and joined in the feast. His arms waved in the air as his sides split and burned and his guts flipped all over his feet. He tripped over his intestines, fell against the wall, felt dizzy, light-headed; the agony felt distant, and he slipped into the netherworld, surrounded by blurry shapes and shallow pain striking every corner of his body.

We ran through the overgrowth. Infected poured from the back of the building. It was me, Hannah, Shelley, and three other employees. One of the employees crawled into the dumpster; the infected spotted him and crawled inside. The dumpster shook. A chain crossed the ground. One of the other works tripped and fell on top of a spiral spike; the spike shot through her chest and out of her back. Her hands smacked the ground and she groaned, spitting up blood. The infected rushed past her, running after us.

The other co-worker turned, ran backwards: “There’s an alley!”

He led us between two towering wooden walls. The infected were right behind us. We kept getting snagged in the foliage. Trash littered the ground.

“Grab something!” Hannah yelled, picking up a brick. I grabbed a spike for holding a dog’s leash, cast over the wooden walls, I imagine. The Starbucks employee snatched a hammer; Shelley fumbled around in the long grass but couldn’t find anything. Hannah was trailing; an infected hit her and she smashed the brick in the girl’s face. The brick smashed the front of her nose, but she wasn’t stunned.

Running backwards, Hannah’s heels snagged on a snarl of weeds and she flailed backwards, dropping the brick. The woman jumped to fall on top of her; I shoved the spike outwards, pointing up, and her head fell on top of it. The tip of the spike poked through the skull. Her body was heavy. “Go, Hannah.” She writhed from underneath. I dropped the spike. Infected climbed over the body. I grabbed the brick and threw it at them, and ran after Hannah to join the others. The alleyway widened and hit the back of an apartment complex. Shelley tried the door. “God, no…”

“Back up!” the employee yelled. Shelley obeyed.

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I picked up a trashcan and hurled it at the dozen infected coming through the narrow alleyway; it pushed them backwards, and they fell over each other. Hannah patted me on the back. “Nice one.”

“I work out,” I said off-hand. Weird.

The worker smashed at the handle with the hammer. “This isn’t working.”

“The window,” Shelley brightened.

The infected climbed over the trashcan. There were no more. I grabbed some beer cans and started throwing them. I hit one in the head and he stumbled, dazed. It was almost comical. Hannah: “Austin! Help!” I turned. She was grabbing at a tetherball pole laying in the grass. I picked up the other end and we turned it around, the sharp end for the ground pointing into the narrow alley. The worker was smashing a window. Glass was falling everywhere.

“One, two, three!” Hannah yelled.

We ran the pole into the alley; the sharp end drilled through the gut of one of the creatures, out the other end. We kept going; the infected were packed tight together and the pole pierced the stomachs of four of them. “Drop it!” Hannah yelled. We dropped it and stepped back. Blood covered the pole from the torn guts. They pushed and touched the pole, moving back and forth. The infected behind them tried to pass, but they were blocking the way. Shelley: “Stop having fun!”

“Having fun?” I breathed.

He and the worker crawled through the window. Hannah and I ran up. “You first,” I said. She went through. I looked back. The infected weren’t going anywhere. I joined her inside the apartment. Shelley and the Starbucks guy grabbed a high-backed chair and shoved it against the wall, then took the TV

and sat it on top.

“It won’t hold for long.”

“They’re pinned up for now,” I said. “Can we take a moment to breathe?”

The worker peered out of the smoke-and-beer-rank room, into a hallway. “I don’t know.”

8:00 a.m.

Shelley’s Downfall

Simply Suicide

Anthony Barnhart

36 Hours

284

Waters of Salvation

Stained porno magazines covered the floor, and Playboy posters drenched the walls. Now I had no attraction to any of it; my hormones were drowned in fear and panicked adrenaline. The Starbucks guy paved the way through the grimy hallway; there was a kitchen at the end of the corridor, but there were several open doors and rooms along the way. He checked each room. Hannah and I moved behind him, keeping close together. I grabbed a piece of broken glass from a pitted picture frame, held it nimbly in my hands. The first room was a bathroom, completely empty. Then a bedroom. The next room-The worker stopped, even cut his breathing.

Shelley pushed him away. “Oh man.”

I shadowed behind them. A kid lay on the bed, his throat stuffed with model cement. It had hardened in his throat and he’d suffocated to death. Metal ica and Slipknot posters drenched his walls. The Starbucks fetish grunted, “I’ve never seen anything like that. How could someone do something like that? They’d have to be crazy.”

“Who isn’t crazy?” Shelley whispered in his ear. “Tell me
that
.”

It was strange, not seeing the kid’s chest moving. You don’t notice those things till you’re in the quiet. And the quiet seemed foreign… For the past two hours we’d been submerged in screams and gunfire and car accidents. A roaring noise of clutter and death and civil warfare. Now it was quiet. The war had been won. We were the losers. San Francisco had completely drowned in its own waste. The subways, the streets, the sewers were teeming with the infected. Every nook and cranny spotted out. Five million people turned into monsters. San Francisco was a ghost town.

The worker led us into the kitchen. The bathroom door was open, revealing stacked beer cans, some empty ones scattered the dirty tile. Cockroaches skittered at the echoes of our footsteps. A card table served as a dining room, and two leaning chairs made up the sitting room. The bay windows were boarded up. The owner probably boarded them up for fear of break-in. Who would’ve guessed that now it concealed us from the very beings of bloodshed?

“Let’s rest here,” Hannah said. “Just for a moment.”

“No,” Shelley said. “No.”

“Where else can we go? Where is safe?”

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“We’ll just rot here. All he has to eat is stale bread, some cinnamon toast crunch, and beer.”

The worker grinned, “I’m fine with the beer.”

Shelley didn’t find it funny. “We press on.”

“To what avail?” I demanded. “When can we stop?”