Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End (22 page)

Pritchenko jumped up almost in front of the AK-47s and shouted, “
Head, head!
” like a man possessed. It was a miracle they missed him, but he got the message across. The Pakistanis corrected their aim, and in less than a minute a dozen undead lay on the ground, definitely dead now, with some ragged holes in their heads.

I’m really hardened. Just a month ago, the sight of carnage like that would’ve made me vomit my guts out. Now I looked on the scene as detached as a child tearing the wings off a fly. It’s natural, but I don’t like it one bit.

Time was running out. That shooting spree had gotten the attention of every ghoul in the vicinity, and they were headed right for us. It was just a matter of time before they’d congregate there. I got into the driver’s seat, while Pritchenko and one of the Pakistanis tried to jump the van’s motor with the Volkswagen’s battery. I don’t know if it was an easy process or if Viktor was forced to reapply the “old Soviet ways,” but he suddenly signaled for me to turn it over. The van’s motor sputtered a couple of times and stalled, but at least the dials were lit. We had a battery, but something was wrong with the fuel.

I could hear a violent exchange in Russian and Urdu across the hood. They couldn’t understand each other, but they finally came to some agreement. They looked up at the same time and signaled for me to try again. This time the motor started with a powerful roar that echoed through the narrow street. They slammed the hood and raced into the van. We were ready.

Just in time. An enormous mob was pouring around the far corner. I shuddered to see that that mob had closed off all our escape routes, while the engine sounded increasingly uncertain. If I turned it off, we were done for, trapped in the tight space in the van forever.

The sight was terrifying. The street was three hundred yards long. A high brick wall on one side and the back wall of a huge warehouse on the other formed a corridor about six yards wide. At the far end of the street, near the Seguritsa gate, an armored van, crammed with seven people, sat panting after sitting for more than month and a half. The other corner of the street was packed with undead. In a word, hell.

Shots from the AK-47s had saved Pritchenko’s and my lives, but the noise they’d made had drawn all the undead around. A tidal wave of hundreds of those creatures was headed down the narrow street right for us. The motor’s backfire drew them like a moth to a flame.

The din was deafening inside the van. The four Pakistanis chattered nervously, nonstop in Urdu, pointing at the mob headed our way. Pritchenko was pale, crouched in a corner staring, beads of sweat on his forehead. I’m no shrink, but I’d guess he was recalling his last moments in the Safe Haven. This time he had nowhere to hide. Kritzinev sat next to me, pale as wax, his eyes wide as saucers; the veins on his nose stood out like a map. Seeing those things through binoculars from the safety of the
Zaren
’s deck was one thing; it was quite another thing to be there
with nothing to keep them from coming at you. I was scared, very scared, like everyone else. Fuck ’em all, I couldn’t help thinking.

Kritzinev shook my arm, shouting fast and furious in Russian. I shrugged. I had the same panicked look on my face. I wasn’t sure what to do. You’re never prepared for something like that. I released the handbrake, put the van in first gear, and let it roll slowly toward that roiling mass that took up the whole street.

The van’s engine panted noisily as the wall of flesh, bone, and bloodlust closed in on us in the middle of the street. At a hundred yards, we saw the first undead. We could guess at the mass behind them. It was like trying to clear a path through a demonstration or drive through an audience at a concert.

My mind worked feverishly. Adrenaline and panic urged me to charge the crowd. It was an obscenely inviting idea—floor it and mow down row after row of undead and then drive someplace where no one’s ever seen those things, not even in a picture.

The rational part of my mind got me back on track right away. Charging that shambling crowd wasn’t an option. A body projected against a windshield, no matter how dead it is or how shatterproof the windshield is, was still a 150-pound bundle thrown against glass. It could do a lot of damage to a vehicle. When I say a lot, I mean a lot. A broken window in the middle of that crowd was a death sentence.

I recalled forensic reports I’d read about people struck by cars. In most cases, the victim died, but not before doing serious damage to the undercarriage, suspension, tires, and steering of the vehicle that hit him. Real life is very different from movies. Cars aren’t indestructible; they break down easily and suffer serious damage, not to mention flipping over or crashing.

We had one option, but it required cool heads. I let the van move slowly toward the crowd just twenty yards from us as I quickly explained my plan to Viktor. We’d move through the
crowd, practically idling, at the speed of a person walking. I was sure we’d gently part the crowd of undead. If any of them fell under our wheels at that slow speed, I didn’t think it would do any damage, considering we weighed more than three tons. To the van, that is; damage to the fallen creatures was another story.

The downside was that we’d be surrounded by those monsters for a very long time. I speculated that they’d hit the sides and windows of the van many, many times. If it weren’t for the armor on the vehicle, we couldn’t do it.

At that moment, those mutants—hundreds of them—engulfed us. Seeing their faces plastered to the glass was deeply disturbing. I assumed it was high-security glass, impossible to punch through. Still, I shuddered every time a fist hit the windshield. They saw us clearly, and that drove them crazy. They surged toward the vehicle with a hungry look in their dead eyes. The smell of urine filled the van. Someone had pissed himself in fear. Not a surprise. It was the most terrifying experience imaginable.

Purring softly, the van slowly penetrated the crowd until we were surrounded on all sides. We’d bet it all on that card, putting our trust in the weight and the armor of our vehicle-shelter. In there we were safe and secure. For a moment, I even felt a little confident.

The dense crowd plagued us from all sides. From time to time, we felt a jolt as we ran over one of those things that didn’t move fast enough or didn’t have room to get away and ended up under our wheels. It was gut-wrenching.

I noticed my vision was blurred. I rubbed my eyes and realized I’d teared up. I was crying out of sheer terror. We were going three or four miles an hour down the middle of a huge crowd of corpses in varying degrees of decay. They were all ages and all kinds. I saw middle-aged women, young men, the elderly, children...they were the most unsettling.

A girl about eight years old, with a dark stain on her torn Bratz T-shirt and a deep cut on her head, her dirty blonde hair plastered down with blood, stayed glued my window for about ten minutes. With one hand, she gripped the rearview mirror, and with the other she hit the window, moaning furiously. Up close like that, we got a good look at her dark mouth and her pale skin, riddled with dark, broken veins. After a while she started hitting her head against the glass. She seemed frustrated to be so close yet not able to reach me. At one point I heard the
clack
her teeth made against the armored window. God, I still shudder when I remember that moment.

I feel better, calmer. I want to leave a written record of every moment I’ve lived through, but some situations come back so strongly, it makes me nauseous. That half-hour ride in the van is one of them.

I was talking about the little girl. After ten minutes she let go. Maybe because she got tired (do these beings get tired?) or because a huge, muscular guy about thirty years old pulled her away. That bastard was right out of a nightmare. Half his body was burned and blistered from a fire. He was missing three fingers on the hand he pounded against the windshield as he clung to the hood with the other. With each blow, he let out an inhuman bellow. He hit the windshield with such fury that after a while his arm turned into a mass of red pulp that clouded the window. The bastard finally turned loose when the truck shook and squashed one of those things. Thinking about him made my hair stand on end long afterward.

Those are just two examples. I remember twenty or thirty more and could describe them perfectly, but I just can’t face it right now. It’s too scary. Hundreds of those creatures were all around us, shouting, wailing, and beating on every inch of surface of the van. The shouting outside contrasted sharply with the deathly silence inside the van, broken only by the monotonous, guttural whisper of the Pakistanis praying in Arabic. I was amused by the idea of praying to God when we were in hell, but I kept that thought to myself.

Kritzinev, his eyes bulging, clung to his flask like a drowning man with a life preserver. From time to time, he knocked back a long, deep gulp that made his Adam’s apple bob up and down. Pritchenko was pale and scared, but behind his huge blond mustache, he calmly studied the scene. I concluded he was the only guy in that van I could rely on if I wanted out alive.

All went well for about thirty minutes. Each time the vehicle threatened to go belly up, it put the fear of God in me. If the vehicle overturned, we’d be as good as dead. Either those mutants would kill us, or we’d die of hunger and thirst in the van, surrounded by an impassable crowd of undead. The best solution would be a shot to the head. Frankly I didn’t relish ending my life in a modern-day version of Numantia. At least in 133 BC those early Iberians were fighting noble enemies, the Romans, and not some freakish undead.

Occasionally the van rocked violently as several undead were crushed at once. More than once we nearly tipped over, but we managed to continue our slow, tortuous pace. Until we reached the tunnel.

It wasn’t really a tunnel, but a passageway under an intersection. I remembered driving through it on the way to a meeting. It was three hundred yards long and very narrow, with a lot of support beams. And black as midnight. I didn’t know what
was inside. If it was blocked, I’d have to back out in the dark with that crowd around me. I’d probably crash into a beam, and we’d be stuck there forever with a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving. I wouldn’t go in there even if Kritzinev held a gun to my chest.

So I told Pritchenko to translate that to Kritzinev. While Viktor talked, I watched the first officer’s reaction out of the corner of my eye. He shrugged and mumbled something in Russian, not taking his eyes off the crowd howling around us, pounding on the windows nonstop. Kritzinev was too out of it to make a decision. I gave the orders here. That made me feel more confident—maybe too confident.

If we didn’t drive through the tunnel, we’d have to use the overpass that was just two hundred yards away. The crowd had thinned out a little. For the last mile or so, we’d been able to speed up. We were driving on wider streets, dodging abandoned vehicles. That worked in our favor. Our pursuers had to maneuver around those obstacles. That slowed them down and gave us some time before they reached us. But they’d catch up with us in a few minutes.

We drove onto the overpass until we came to the middle of the bridge.

I braked hard. Across the middle of the road was a car crashed into some concrete blocks that had once been a roadblock. Some poor devil had driven too fast, fleeing God knows what, and been hurled into those blocks, wrecking his car. There were bloodstains around the chassis and the footprints of someone or something who’d splashed through puddles getting away from the car. If the guy had survived the accident, he soon suffered something truly horrible.

Kritzinev shook off his stupor when he discovered we weren’t surrounded by all those undead. He roared something to Viktor,
who rushed to translate for me. “Ram that abandoned car,” that thug said. I shook my head. I told him he’d seen too many movies. It would destroy our van. He roared again, getting red in the face, spewing frothy saliva, screaming, choking. A drunk, scared, angry Ukrainian is a sight to see. That Ukrainian was calling me names that were anything but pretty. Viktor deftly edited out the worst parts and told me to change seats with Shafiq. He’d take the wheel.

I don’t make a habit of arguing with someone pointing a gun at my chest, so I gave my seat to Shafiq. In the process of switching seats in that narrow cabin, he and I got all tangled up. I ended up sitting in the middle seat of the van, with Shafiq on one side and Kritzinev on the other. I barely had time to turn around and tell Viktor to hold on tight, then turn back around. I fastened my seat belt just in time.

The Pakistani floored it and launched the three-ton van against the abandoned car, like a ram butting its head against a wall. I braced myself against the dashboard. The impact was terrible. I figured someone in back was thrown forward violently. There was a hard blow against the partition, followed by a long howl of pain.

I didn’t have time to find out what had happened. Putting the van in reverse, Shafiq disengaged from the wrecked car, which had moved about twenty inches to one side, and rammed it again. I held on tight as the heavy van lurched forward.

This time, the blow was accompanied by the sound of iron grating against concrete. The car spun around like a top, leaving a space open. Shafiq let out an excited shriek that drowned in his throat a second later. In the impact, the van veered to the left and skidded against the railing of the bridge. With a nasty crunch, the heavy vehicle splintered the aluminum railing and hung for a second from the bridge’s parapet, swaying. After a few agonizing seconds, the van fell twenty feet to the pavement.

Most trials involving traffic accidents have something in common: the injured parties narrate the incident in great detail. They say, “It felt like everything happened in slow motion.” It had always sounded like a cliché before, but when the Seguritsa van skidded out of control toward the railing, I experienced that feeling firsthand.

The aluminum railing tore like paper when the van skidded into it. One of the tires exploded as it ran over an uprooted post. Sparks flew off the concrete as the van swept along the bridge, dragging fifteen feet of the railing. It struck one of the concrete beams and came to a stop, swaying, its rear end suspended in the air.