Dark Days (Apocalypse Z) (2 page)

But everyone agreed on one thing: Whatever it was, it was very contagious and deadly. Anyone who got infected spread the disease.

That crisis, which had been described briefly in the news just two weeks before, finally reached Spain. The point was driven home to our lawyer the day he saw King Juan Carlos on TV declaring martial law, dressed in his military uniform the way he did during the attempted coup d’état in 1981.

Then, of all the misguided plans those governments came up with, they picked the worst. In keeping with overriding medical logic—isolate the healthy from the sick—they decided to concentrate the healthy population into enclosures around the country called Safe Havens, huge sections of town, surrounded by security forces. By then everyone understood that contact with an infected person ended very badly.

What our lawyer chose to do next turned out to be the best move. He didn’t want to go to a Safe Haven; it sounded suspiciously like the Warsaw ghetto. When the army’s evacuation team swept through his neighborhood, he hid in his house. Everyone else left, but he chose to stay behind. Alone. But not for long.

In a matter of days, the world began to crumble. Electricity and communication systems began to fail as crews didn’t show up for work or simply disappeared. Soon TV channels worldwide emitted only pre-recorded shows interrupted by news briefs that hysterically ordered everyone to gather in the Safe Havens. By then, censorship was completely breaking down. Officials acknowledged that infected people somehow came back to life after they died and became extremely aggressive toward the living. It was like something out of a B-movie and would’ve been laughable, if it weren’t true. And if the entire world hadn’t fallen apart in a matter of days.

That little monster accidentally freed from its test tube twenty days before finally showed its true face.

What happened in forty-eight hours was hard to explain. Infrastructure was falling apart everywhere; the electrical grid was failing all over the world and no one had a global vision. Safe Havens proved to be death traps; the noise and activity of the humans congregated there drew the Undead like a magnet. When hordes of Undead besieged those Safe Havens, panic broke out and those centers fell, overrun by the monsters. Most of the refugees were changed into Undead. The official message on the few surviving TV channels changed dramatically: Stay away from the Safe Havens.

But once again, that message came too late. The situation was beyond anyone’s control.

Our lawyer, isolated at home, in a deserted neighborhood, with only his Persian cat named Lucullus for company, watched in amazement. When the Internet finally shut down, he braced for the worst.

And it came quickly. Less than forty-eight hours later, the first Undead wandered down his quiet, suburban street in northern Spain. He was trapped in his own home. Over the next few days, he watched the relentless parade of Undead in terror from his window.

A few days later he decided to head for the Safe Haven in Vigo, the closest major city. He was desperate to see other humans, plus he was
running out of food and water. He had two choices: Try to dodge the Undead to get some place safe, or die of starvation at home. Despite the warnings, a Safe Haven became his only option.

So he headed off on a perilous journey and for several days his life was in constant jeopardy. He drove through destroyed villages to the Port of Pontevedra, veering around car wrecks no one had cleared away. From there, he sailed for Vigo in an abandoned sailboat. When he finally reached the Vigo Safe Haven, his last hope collapsed—it was in ruins. No one was alive there and thousands of Undead wandered aimlessly.

He was seriously considering suicide when he spotted a rusty old freighter, the
Zaren Kibish,
anchored in the harbor, with a ragtag crew of survivors huddled onboard. Its captain recounted the horrors of the last hours of the Vigo Safe Haven and how it fell, like so many places around the world, from hunger and disease and the assault by the Undead.

Once again, fortune smiled on our lawyer. Aboard the
Zaren Kibish
, he met one of the few survivors of the Vigo Safe Haven, a Ukrainian guy named Viktor “Prit” Pritchenko. He was a short guy in his forties, with a huge, blond mustache and ice-blue eyes. He turned out to be one of the Eastern European helicopter pilots the Spanish government had hired every summer to fight forest fires. Another solitary man trapped far from home and family. Pritchenko decided to befriend our lawyer.

After several terrifying weeks facing the Undead and the
Zaren Kibish’
s despotic, mentally unstable captain, they finally devised a plan. They would try to reach the Ukrainian’s Sokol helicopter that was parked at the forest ranger base camp a few miles from the port. From there, they’d fly to the Canary Islands. Because those islands were so isolated, they were one of the few places in the world that had escaped the pandemic. According to the last news reports, remnants of the Spanish government and a few survivors had gathered there.

The only problem was they had to evade the deranged ship’s captain and his armed crew, who were obsessed with their plans to save their own hides, plans in which Prit and the lawyer were just pawns to be sacrificed. After a risky journey across the ravaged city of Vigo, they finally escaped with high hopes.

But one last test of their courage remained.

In an abandoned car dealership where they’d taken shelter for the night, Pritchenko suffered a freak accident while handling a small
explosive device, causing second-degree burns and the loss of several fingers. In the past, that wouldn’t have been a life-threatening accident, but in those difficult days, it was. With his friend on the verge of dying, the lawyer scoured Vigo for a hospital. He knew he wouldn’t find a doctor and most likely any hospital would be infested with Undead, but he had to find the medicine his friend needed.

He didn’t figure on getting lost in the bowels of a huge, abandoned hospital, surrounded by Undead, its dark corridors, halls, and stairs a death trap.

Just when the situation seemed hopeless, Lucia came to their rescue. Seventeen, tall, slender, with long black hair and deep green eyes, she was the last person they’d expected to find in that cavernous building. Finding her in that grisly nightmare was so incongruous, our heroes thought they were hallucinating. When the girl told her story, they realized she was also a terrified survivor that fate had mercifully set down there.

During the migration to Safe Havens, Lucia had gotten separated from her family. She’d wandered around the area, trying to locate her missing parents, and had ended up there. Like thousands of people adrift in that confusion, she didn’t find her loved ones, but she stayed on as an aide to the exhausted doctors stubbornly trying to keep the hospital up and running.

When masses of Undead converged on the building, Lucia retreated to the safety of the vast basement of the hospital. It was well provisioned and watertight; its doors were heavily reinforced. Her only company was Sister Cecilia, a nun with training as a nurse, who volunteered to stay at the hospital until the end. They’d been holed up in the basement ever since, waiting for rescue teams that never came.

When Lucia heard gunfire and human voices ricocheting through the halls, she left the safety of their shelter to investigate. She was equally surprised to come across the lawyer and the pilot. Instead of a battle-hardened rescue team, she found a pair of dirty, hungry, lost refugees, one of them gravely injured, both on the verge of emotional collapse. She sprang into action like a much older, wiser woman, dragging the two survivors and their orange cat to the basement, where Sister Cecilia, the only living nurse for hundreds of miles, tended to the Ukrainian’s wounds. After weeks of terror, the lawyer and his friend had finally found a true safe haven.

The next few months passed like a dream. Comfortably holed up in that basement, fortified with electrical generators and enough food for hundreds of people, the four survivors found some peace and respite in that underground existence, hoping to find a way back to the outside world.

But another surprise forced them to leave their cozy den and revive their plan to fly to the Canary Islands. A powerful summer thunderstorm started a fire a few miles from the hospital. With no one to fight the blaze, it burned out of control, across that deserted landscape of flammable debris and dry brush, right up to the hospital doors. The four survivors escaped that firestorm with barely enough time to grab their gear.

Two days later, they topped off the helicopter’s fuel tanks, stored drums of fuel in a cargo net hung from the chopper’s belly, and headed for the Canary Islands, where they thought they’d find vestiges of humanity. They had just one goal. To survive.

1

“Prit! Prit! Can you hear me?” I asked. “You crazy Ukrainian,” I cursed under my breath. The damn intercom had cut out for the third time since we took off from Vigo. I grabbed a bracket on the wall as the heavy helicopter hit another pocket of hot air and lurched. Unfazed, Prit steered through it at top speed. Though Prit couldn’t hear me through the intercom, I could hear him happily humming his dreadful rendition of James Brown’s “I Feel Good.”

I set Lucullus in his carrier. I envied the way that orange ball of fur could fall asleep, oblivious to the roar of the engines. How the hell could he stand it? Even muffled by our helmets, the noise was driving me crazy after five days straight. Cats can adapt to anything, I guess.

I peered behind me into the passenger cabin. Sister Cecilia was belted in tight, praying in a monotone voice as she slowly fingered her rosary. In her spotless habit and huge red helmet, the little nun was quite a sight, marred only by her slightly green face and her worried look every time the helicopter hit some turbulence. Flying didn’t sit well with the nun, but she’d been stoic, not complaining once.

Lucia was sound asleep, stretched out in the front seat, a vision even in frayed shorts and a tight, oil-stained T-shirt (she’d gotten dirty helping Prit at our last stop). I brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes, trying not to wake her.

I sighed. My feelings for that girl created a big problem and I didn’t know how to resolve it. Over the last five days, Lucia and I had been
stuck together like glue. I couldn’t deny that I was deeply attracted to her olive skin, long legs, her curves, and cat eyes, but I was trying to keep my cool. For starters, it wasn’t the time or place for an affair. And then there was the age difference. She was a seventeen-year-old kid and I was a thirty-year-old man. A thirteen-year difference was no small thing.

Lucia moved in her sleep and muttered something I couldn’t make out. The look of pleasure on her face made me swallow. I needed some air.

I inched down the narrow corridor connecting the cargo bay with the cockpit and dropped into the seat beside Pritchenko. The Ukrainian turned, flashed a big smile, and handed me his thermos. I took the thermos and knocked back a long drink. Tears filled my eyes and I coughed, trying to catch my breath. That coffee was about fifty percent vodka.

“Coffee with a kick.” The Ukrainian snatched the thermos out of my hands and chugged half its contents. He didn’t even blink. Then he pounded on his chest and belched loudly. “Much better for flying.” He passed the thermos back to me. “Yes sir. Much better.” He smacked his lips, satisfied. A big smile spread across his face. “In Chechnya, my squadron drank our vodka straight… but it was colder there,” he said with a laugh.

I shook my head. Prit was a lost cause. Inside the hot cockpit, the Ukrainian was shirtless, drenched with sweat. He was wearing worn fatigues, a huge black cowboy hat he’d found in a bar, and green mirrored sunglasses. His imposing mustache was the only part of his face I could actually see. He reminded me of a character in
Apocalypse Now
.

There was no doubt that Prit was an impressive pilot. In Vigo, he managed to get that chopper into the air, even though it was loaded down with tons of fuel in its tank and several more in drums hanging under its belly.

Images of that trip played over and over in my mind. Every day, we grasped the true scope of the Apocalypse. And what we saw convinced us that human civilization had gone to hell.

The first few hours were the worst. As we’d headed south along the coast of Portugal just a few hundred feet in the air, we gazed slack-jawed at the widespread chaos and desolation.

The light caught our attention first. The air was unusually clear, almost transparent since factories had been closed for months and no
cars were polluting it. If it weren’t for the smell of rotting flesh and trash all around, you’d have thought you were in an untouched wilderness from five thousand years ago. One look at the stiffs walking around everywhere shattered that illusion.

The highways were completely impassable. The twisted remains of cars dotted the pavement every few miles, and monstrous pileups often blocked the road entirely. We even saw a couple of collapsed viaducts and highways completely covered by landslides. An especially steep stretch of the highway that linked Oporto to Lisbon had become a wild, raging stream several miles long. Water from a broken dam flowed freely, creating little peaks of foam as it careened against reefs made from the remains of cars.

Nature was slowly reclaiming her terrain. Proud human constructions, wondrous feats of engineering, were slowly being devoured by weeds, water, earth, and whatever else God put in their way.

A crackling in the helmet’s intercom yanked me out of my daydream and back to the Sahara. The fucking radio had decided to work again.

“The fuel tank is almost empty.” Prit’s voice sounded metallic in my ears. “I’m going to take a pass over this area. Look for a good place to land.”

And keep your eyes open
, I told myself.
We don’t want any more fucking problems, not when we’re so close.

The other pit stops had gone reasonably well, but we couldn’t be too careful. I had to remember what happened the day before.

2

In a God-forsaken place between Portugal and Extremadura, a desolate region in western Spain, Prit landed the helicopter in a parking lot next to a roadside diner. The entire expanse of cement was empty except for a rusty Volkswagen SUV and a Fiat hatchback with four flat tires. The restaurant looked abandoned and lonely, its neon sign covered by a year’s worth of dust.