Dark Days (Apocalypse Z) (18 page)

No sweat. It’s a beautiful day and I don’t mind walking.

A lot of people were walking up and down the same road. Until a couple of weeks ago, there would’ve been a fruit and vegetable stand by the side of the road, but the Government of the Republic had decreed that collective farming would increase yield. Time would tell if that strategy would pay off. Lucia couldn’t be bothered with that at the moment. She had more pressing matters to focus on, like how the hell to get more drugs for Sister Cecilia on the black market.

Lucia visited Sister Cecilia every minute she could. She was devastated at the nun’s wan, bandaged face that blended into the white sheets where she lay motionless.

The week before, Lucia had sold a pair of diamond earrings that had belonged to her mother. It was a miracle she’d been able to hold on to them for so long. Selling them broke her heart. They were the last memento of her former life, a reminder of the girl who got on that bus a thousand years ago and embarked on this difficult life. She thought bitterly,
These new times forced people to grow up so fast. Back then, a seventeen-year-old girl was still a kid. Not anymore.

In exchange for the earrings, that sweaty guy who worked at the Port Authority had given her a half dozen ration coupons; for Sister Cecilia, she’d gotten one of the rarest, most expensive items on the island—four boxes of morphine. The doctors had already used up two of those boxes. Lucia wondered what would happen when the nun’s meager allotment of analgesics ran out.

That wasn’t the only problem. The doctor said Sister Cecilia badly needed a drug called mannitol to reduce the swelling in her brain, but the medical board had ruled that her friend was a lost cause and precious vials of mannitol would be wasted on her. But Lucia didn’t lose hope.

She’d been walking for twenty minutes when the driver of an overcrowded bus with a ridiculous-looking fuel tank bolted to the roof took
pity on Lucia’s group and picked them up. At a little past one, the girl finally arrived at the hospital.

Health services had totally collapsed. There were five hundred physicians on the island at most, and that number included med students from the University of La Laguna whom authorities had rushed to graduate.

In the lobby was an endless flow of patients, medical staff, and people claiming they had the most ridiculous ailments. Being admitted to the hospital guaranteed three meals daily and a break from the oppressive Mandatory Labor Service for a few days. Every day, exhausted doctors weeded out the fakers from among the genuinely sick.

She entered through the employee entrance, nodding at the armed guards manning the metal detector. With a quick, practiced gesture, she pinned her badge to her lapel. The guards knew her and gave her a quick glance, then turned their attention back to the relentless stream of people trying to finagle their way in. Security was no laughing matter at the island’s only functioning hospital. There’d been several attempts to rob the pharmacy. On the black market, medications were the most valuable currency.

“Hi, Lucia!” The nurses’ aide who greeted her was a real pistol, barely five feet tall. She was making eyes at one of the guards as she pinned her ID to the neckline of a blouse that was better suited for a bar than a hospital.

“Hi, Maite! How’s it going?” With a knowing smile, Lucia walked up to the girl she considered her good friend. They’d only known each other a couple of weeks but survivors made friends amazingly easily. Those who’d emerged from that Undead hell desperately needed to interact with other people to feel alive.

“Great!” Maite replied with a mischievous grin. “Fernando’s taking me out to dinner tonight. We may even have some wine! He’s got some special ration coupons.”

“Fernando…who the hell’s Fernando?” Lucia asked, but one glance at the guard and the starry-eyed look on Maite’s face explained everything. She shook her head. Her friend had a new boyfriend every week. They all promised the eternal love Maite was so desperate for. Of course there’d be a new guy the next week, but that didn’t matter.

Life goes on
, Lucia thought as she pulled on her uniform in the locker room and listened to her friend chatter away.
Despite all the shit
we’ve been through, we still fall in love and have dreams. Even living the way we are, we survivors are fairly happy. Incredible, but true. Our will to live is so strong
.

“… Cecilia?”

“What’d you say, Maite?” Lucia abruptly turned from her thoughts.

“I asked you if there’d been any change in your friend’s status.”

Lucia thought for a moment, with a bitter look on her face. “No change. I’m going to go see her before my shift.” She wanted to say,
No fucking change. She’ll probably be a vegetable forever, but I can’t accept that. If I did, I’d start to lose her and I’m sick of losing the people I love
, but she checked herself and forced a smile, as she took Maite’s hand in hers and made a pouty face. “Will you come with me? Please?”

“Sure,” said Maite. “First let’s swing by the nurses’ station and get some of that crap they call coffee, okay?” Maite gave Lucia a loving hug and walked out of the room, not knowing that in less than half an hour, she’d be dead.

27

MADRID

Madrid was dead.

There was no one left in a city where almost six million people once lived, breathed and dreamed. Nobody, except
Them
.

The metropolis extended for miles; not a sound broke the silence. The SuperPuma flew really low over streets and plazas as it crossed the city at top speed. Prit said we’d be less visible that way since the engine noise would ricochet, making it harder for those monsters to locate its source.

Passing so close to those rooftops made me extremely nervous, especially in such an unreliable helicopter. Everywhere the scene was the same: wide, empty streets; here and there a vehicle lying across the road. Trash, broken glass and worm-eaten skeletons were everywhere.

Retiro Park, located in the heart of Madrid, had once been a showcase. Now it had become a jungle. Weeds had devoured its walking paths. Its little lake gleamed in the sun, almost buried under tons of algae that gave it a greenish cast. On the lake’s banks, the Crystal Palace was just a skeleton of steel beams and broken glass.

La Castellana, the main thoroughfare through the heart of the city, looked ghostly. Massive clouds of dirt rolled down that ten-lane road, rattling the few streetlights still standing. It was completely free of
cars, since it had been closed to traffic right before the final collapse. A lone Volvo SUV with bars on its windows looked out of place on that deserted avenue. Why had its driver stopped in the middle of nowhere?

Here and there we spotted mounds of mummies and decaying skeletons where defense forces had taken a stand against the Undead. In every case, those mounds were surrounded by empty, shiny copper shell casings. Unfortunately, all those dead Undead were just a drop in the vast ocean of Undead that infested the streets.

It was a chilling sight. Sidewalks and roads were crawling with thousands of those creatures who were stopped in their tracks as if in a trance. It was like looking at an aerial photo of a street, frozen in a moment of normal city life. But the crowd’s torn, blood-stained clothes destroyed that illusion—those who still had clothes, that is.

Only when the noise of the propeller blades and the shadow of our helicopter passed over them did the Undead awaken out of their trances.

“Look over there!” Broto shouted in disbelief, pointing to a spot on the ground.

We were passing by Santiago Bernabeu Soccer Stadium. Heavy vehicles and huge, steel, industrial containers blocked all the entrances. The number of worm-eaten bodies littering the sidewalks around the stadium was even greater here. Scaffolding ran halfway up the south facade, connecting two open holes in the side of the stadium, but none of us understood why.

Clearly large crowds had mounted a resistance there, but the stadium was deserted now. Tumbled-down shacks lined the bleachers, and torn plastic bags were caught on rusted iron poles and floated in the air like ghosts. The grass playing field was a vast quagmire; dozens of small irregular lumps covered more than half of it. In a corner, where goal posts should’ve been, someone had spelled out
HELP
with seats ripped from the bleachers.

“What the hell’re those mounds?” I asked pointing to the lumps in the grass.

“Graves,” Marcelo muttered grimly. “It’s a graveyard.”

We were all speechless, in shock. I imagined the anguish of the people holed up there. As the months went by, their supplies ran out and no one answered their silent cries for help. They must have felt despair every time one of them died from hunger, disease, the Undead, or God knows
what. For a moment I felt that suffocating panic. As time passed, they realized they were doomed. No one was coming to their aid.

“Look,” Pauli said. “The graves on the end are almost level with the ground.”

“Maybe at the end they didn’t have the strength to dig an actual grave,” someone muttered.

“Think there’s still someone there?” I asked.

“I doubt it,” said Marcelo. “Anyway, we can’t stop to find out.” He stared into my eyes. “You know as well as I do—this isn’t a rescue mission.”

I didn’t say another word. Marcelo was right, but I refused to accept it so coldly. I knew if I hadn’t left my house in Pontevedra, I’d have gone insane, wallowing in my misery, a prisoner in my own home. I imagined how I’d have felt seeing a helicopter overhead and not be rescued. I put that thought out of my head.

“Ready back there?” Tank’s voice boomed over the intercom. “We’re here.”

I craned my neck to see where we were and instantly regretted it. The massive buildings of the La Paz Hospital rose sharply on the horizon, like monoliths. Amid the shattered remains of what once had been Safe Haven Three, a roaring mass of Undead turned toward the noise that had awakened them out of their lethargy.

We waited. I couldn’t imagine how we would get through that crowd.

“How the hell can we land there?” Broto’s voice quavered. “They’ll make mincemeat out of us before we even get out of the helicopter!”

“Take it easy,
che
,” said Marcelo, curiously calm. “Don’t worry. We’ve got it covered.” He nonchalantly lit a cigarette as he kept an eye on the crowd below.

I wanted to be as calm as he was, but in my heart I was convinced the computer guy was right. As Prit flew lap after lap over the hospital parking lot, the situation grew worse. A crowd of five or six thousand Undead milled around below us. More monsters converged upon the parking lot by the minute.

The main door looked like the exit of a stadium at the end of a match. Dozens of those beings were crammed together, staggering and stumbling, trying to get out.

I watched in horror as some of them fell out the shattered windows and plunged to the ground. When the swarming mass on the upper floors saw our helicopter hovering overhead, their desire to reach us was stronger than their sense of survival. Thirsting for our blood, they threw themselves out the windows in an attempt to grab us. They somersaulted in the air, like bags of dirty laundry and crashed to the ground with a thud, some twenty feet below.

“I don’t fucking believe that!” Pauli muttered, nudging Marcelo. “That bastard’s still moving after falling from the tenth floor!”

The Argentine craned his neck to see where she was pointing. The poor devil was a young guy, naked from the waist up. His spine must’ve broken in the fall, because he was stretched out on the ground, dark liquid oozing from his body, probably his internal organs that’d been crushed upon impact. He jerked around, struggling to stand up. Too bad he hadn’t broken his skull and ended that nightmare.

“Don’t worry, Paulita,” Marcelo said matter-of-factly. “His days are numbered.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked. “What the hell’re you going to do?

My question was interrupted by Tank’s scratchy voice crackling over the intercom.

“That’s good! Most of them should be out of the building. Go ahead, Group Two!”

The helicopter traced a long ellipse, away from the plaza. Before I had time to wonder what the hell was going on, a raspy sound cut short all conversation in the cockpit. The helicopter leaned slightly as the entire crew moved to the windows, trying to spot the source of sound.

After a few seconds, I spotted two small dots in the sky heading right for us at top speed. As the dots grew larger, we could make out all the details of those planes that purred along, chewing up the distance between them and the plaza.

Totally amazed, I uttered a loud
Fuuuuck
. “What the hell are they?” I stammered. I felt like I was in a really weird dream.

“Buchones!” David Broto cheered, pressing his nose against the window. “
Damn!
Look at ‘em go! Incredible.” The computer guy bounced in his seat, pointing at the propeller planes as they made a graceful turn around the hospital tower.

“Will someone please tell me what the hell a Buchon is? Where did they come from?” I asked over the uproar in the helicopter. Everyone was talking and shouting at once. It was a madhouse.