Judgment (10 page)

              Reading Margie’s face, I could see the regret and disgust. “It had to be done Margie.” She nodded understandingly to me as she wiped some sort of nasty looking body fluid off of her cheek. Then the door behind me creaked and groaned under the pressure from outside. The angels had heard, and were on us again.

              Steve grabbed his pack and the pipe and headed for a window. “Shit!”

              Margie did the same, trying to open a second window. “Damn lock is stuck.”

              Slowly backing away from the door, I watched the cracks forming around the hinges. Any second it would come bursting in. “C’mon guys. Get the fucking windows open. We need out of here.”

              Steve’s window opened first. “Freakin’ second floor man. That’s a long drop.”

              Margie answered him as she continued struggling to open her window. “Throw your pack down first. Land on it if you have to.”

              I turned and saw Steve shoving his backpack out through the window. Then he began climbing out. “C’mon…lets go,” he yelled, and disappeared through the window, dragging the curtains out with him.  I heard him hit the concrete below with a slap, and he yelled out in pain. Margie abandoned her stuck window and headed for Steve’s.

              Suddenly the door burst inward, and I turned to see an angel push the pieces of door aside and enter the apartment. Margie and I still had to get our packs out through the window, and both of our bodies, before getting grabbed.

              We’re not going to make it.

              Suddenly behind me a bright flash of red light erupted, reflecting off the walls and ceiling, as hot embers hit the back of my neck. Margie rushed up alongside of me, thrusting a flare forward towards the angels coming through the door. “Here, give it to me,” I urged her. “Get our shit out the window.”

              “No, you go.”

              “Gimme that fucking thing!” and I forcefully took it from her hand. “Go on. Get the packs out.”

              Two angels had entered the apartment, and a third stood in the doorway.  They paused when the flare came out, stopping in the foyer. Fire was the only thing that seemed to hurt them, and the only thing they seemed to acknowledge as such. They took several steps forward, and spread apart as if to get around me from two sides. I thrust the flare forward at one of them, and he didn’t back up but he paused for a moment, then tried to circle around me again.

              I heard Margie go out the window. “C’mon! I’m out!”  A second later I heard her feet land on the ground outside. I would have to drop the flair to get through the window, and I knew they could grab me before I got out. In a desperate move I lunged forward with the flare and touched it to the angel’s wing as he reached for me. The feathers instantly caught on fire and in seconds both wings were in flames. The Judge made a loud screeching noise and began spinning in a circle, crashing into the walls and furniture. Everything it touched caught on fire and the room was quickly becoming engulfed in flames. I backed to the window and dropped the flare on the floor in front of me before climbing out.

              Steve was right, it did look like a long drop. But feeling the heat of the fire building behind me and hearing the screeching of the Judges as they caught on fire, I jumped. Twenty feet below I landed on our packs. I rose quickly and found Steve leaning on Margie’s shoulder, holding one foot up off the ground. “I think he sprained an ankle. Or worse broke his foot,” Margie announced.

              Great.

              Looking up and down the street, I could see several maledicted wandering towards us from both directions. “We need to go find someplace and hunker down for a while. All this noise and excitement is going to bring more attention that we don’t want.”

              Margie grabbed her pack, and I grabbed mine and Steve’s. I reached over to help Steve, but he pushed my arm away. “I think I can walk.” He did, but barely, with a severe limp.

              “This is really going to slow us down. We shouldn’t go too far. Let’s just get Steve settled in somewhere and see how his foot is in the morning.”

              Margie agreed. “The bank. Let’s go back to the bank we were at last week. Just up the street. There’s hardly any windows and we can always lock ourselves in the vault if things go bad.”

              “I’d rather be up off the ground level,” I started, thinking hard about the decision. “But it will do for tonight.”

              A couple nods of agreement, the shifting of backpacks, and we began slowly making our way down the street. Margie kept reaching out to Steve for him to lean on her, and he finally relented. Behind us the tenement building was now an inferno that engulfed the entire building. The plume of smoke rose high into the air. I saw Judges high above, circling the area. “We need to try to go faster. I’m not feeling good about this right now.”

              I could hear Steve wince in pain with every step, but he hobbled along as quickly as he could. Half way to the bank, we passed several maledicted. One was sitting on a stoop, just staring mindlessly into the street, yelling at cars that weren’t there. Another was talking gibberish into a pay phone; a phone I was sure wasn’t actually working. Fortunately they hadn’t noticed us as we went by on the other side of the street. They were entirely unpredictable, their brain-dead insanity causing them to react to the living with anything from laughter to aggression. You just never knew.

              A half a block more and we were at the bank. A single set of double doors at the top of some steps, and two front windows too high to reach from the sidewalk were the only access points from the street. I went in first with my bat to make sure it was clear. It was getting dark inside, the afternoon sun beginning to sink behind the buildings across the street. It was clear, with no traces of dead body smell in the air. I made a few noises to draw out any undesirables, but the room answered with nothing but silence.

              Once the three of us were all inside, I slid a table in front of the doors and stacked a few chairs on top of it. If anyone tried to come through the doors we would hear the noises of the furniture moving. We set Steve and our packs down behind the teller’s windows, up against the huge steel vault. Margie insisted that if anything came in after us we could seal ourselves inside the vault, but the claustrophobia of getting trapped in there made me nervous. She swore we could open it from the inside.

              We sat for a long time just resting in silence, and after a while Margie and Steve both fell asleep. Someone always had to stay on watch, so I didn’t sleep, but I couldn’t have even if I wanted to. In my mind I kept seeing Jennifer lying in the street twelve stories below me. I could see the look on her face right at that last second as she reached out for my hand; the moment she knew she would fall.

              I should have done something else to save her.

              Over and over I heard her body smack on the ground. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I rose to my feet to walk it off, and looking out one of the front windows I could see the building down the street still smoldering. A dozen or so maledicted were milling about in the street in front of it, attracted by the spectacle. It looked as though one of them had caught himself on fire, and he was just standing there in the street burning.

              Suddenly Margie came up behind me, startling me. “You okay?” she asked, before apologizing for making me jump.

              “Yeah. I’m good.”

              She reached out and handed me a Snickers bar that had been severely squished. “Sorry, I landed on it when we jumped out the window.”

              I chuckled a little. “It’s fine. I’m not very picky these days. Thanks.”

              “Yeah. I guess none of us are. You sure you’re okay? I’m really sorry about Jennifer.”

              I remained silent for a minute, searching for the right words. I shuffled my feet. I rubbed my hands. I stared at the ground trying to fight off the emotion I felt growing inside. “She looked to me to protect her. When it really mattered I failed her.”

              “There was nothing you could do Adam.”

              “I should have listened to her when she said she couldn’t do it. I shouldn’t have forced her to jump. I should have gotten her down off the roof another way.”

              “You made the best decision you could at the time. Everyone’s life was at stake. You did the very best you could. I don’t know what else we could have done. We all barely made it out of there.” Neither one of us said anything more for several minutes, both of us just staring quietly out the window. In the darkness of the new night, the smoldering building emitted an eerie orange glow that reflected off the clouds above.

              After a while Margie finally broke the silence. “Do you think we’re gonna make it? Is anyone going to survive this?”

              I thought for a while, and then gave her the only answer I had. “I was having a dream this morning, when you woke me up.” She said nothing, but looked at me, waiting.

              “It was weird, like all dreams. I was in central park and it was like none of this was happening inside there. I walked around for a while in peace, almost forgetting about all this. Then I found my father there, sitting on a bench. He’s been dead since I was twenty. He talked to me for a while, before it all went wrong.”

              “What did he say?”

              I paused, breaking the rhythm, taking a long time to answer. After swallowing another bite of Snickers, I answered simply “He told me I would be okay.”

              Margie gently nodded as she turned and stared back out the window. “I hope he’s right.”

              “He usually was. C’mon, let’s get away from the window. We all need some more sleep.”

              Back by the vault Margie gave Steve’s ankle a quick inspection. “It’s still really swollen. Hopefully it will be better in the morning. Why don’t you lie down, I’ll take first watch.”

              “Nah,” I answered, “I’m still a little wound up. You get a couple more hours than you can take over.”

              Margie reluctantly agreed, and after fifteen minutes or so she fell back asleep. A short while later the power grid went down, plunging the entire city into a black abyss. I knew it would happen eventually, and now I could only ponder how screwed we were, and how long we could survive. Every day the world sunk deeper into apocalyptic chaos. I sat for a long time staring into the darkness, listening to the sounds outside. Every so often I would hear maledicted shuffle by on the sidewalk, mumbling to themselves or crying out for help. Too many times I heard the wings of a Judge on the roof above us. Once I heard a man, a survivor, screaming way off in the distance somewhere in the dark as his running came to an end. Ours would end soon too. The wrath of God was closing in on us faster than we could run.

              But through all of that, there was only one sound that haunted me for the rest of the night. I heard a woman calling out my name in the darkness. Jennifer, unable to die despite her fall and now maledicted, wandering the street calling my name. “Adam. Adam please help me. Where are you?”

              I heard her crying, somewhere in the alley just outside the back door. I listened for hours, her crying slowly turning into a strange sort of laughter as her dying brain lost its grip on sanity.

Chapter 7

The Hospital

“And they brought unto him also infants, that

he would touch them.”

~ Luke 18:15

              I awoke the next morning behind the bank teller’s counter, my head down against my knees. Sometime during the night I had fallen asleep to the sounds of the street. Steve was across from me near the vault, wrapping his ankle tightly with strips of cloth. “Morning sunshine,” he said, followed by a coughing fit. He covered his mouth with his hand and tried to stifle his coughs, but it did little good. His lungs were a mess.

              I said nothing, rising to my feet and dusting myself off. Margie was at the front window standing watch. I joined her, noticing the tenement building down the street was still smoldering, as were several bodies in the road. “Sorry I fell asleep.”

              “You needed to. I woke up about four. A couple maledicted were trying the door. I don’t understand what they think they can get from us.”

              “I don’t think they know. They’re all insane. They want to die. They want their pain to end. They want to take out their frustration on the living. I guess I might too.”

              “I wonder what it feels like to feel your body die. To stay conscious through it all, right through to rotting away.”

              In the distance I heard growling and barking, and looking to the right a few buildings away saw a pack of dogs attacking a maledicted. It was a teenage boy, from his appearance and behavior he was definitely already dead. He seemed to be ignoring the dogs as he tried to continue walking along, until they knocked him over, biting and tearing at his limbs.

              “It’s really getting crazy out there,” Margie said,

              “Yeah. I think the maledicted get worse over time. It seems the longer they’ve been dead the more violent they become. They’re as dangerous as Judges now.”

              Margie just nodded, watching the feral dogs tear the boy apart. It seemed to not faze her in the least. We were becoming immune to the nightmare around us. I paused for a moment, not sure if I wanted to say what I was thinking, but it came out before I could stop it. “I heard her last night… Jennifer.”

              Margie nodded again. “Yeah. I did too. She was close by for a long time. Then her voice trailed off as she wandered up the street.”

              “I don’t want to see her out there.”

              “I’ve been thinking about that. I think we need to move away from the city. Now that the power is out it will be far too dangerous at night. I can’t see a maledicted two feet in front of me in the dark. There’s no water running anywhere anymore. Any working freezers are off, all the food will rot. We need to find Steve some inhalers and get out of the city. I bet there’s far less Judges out in the rural areas, it’s got to be safer out there. We might even find more survivors. We haven’t seen anyone alive around here in days.”

              I thought about it for a few minutes, while I watched a couple of maledicted stumbling around in the street a half block away.

              She’s right.

              I began to add to her plan as Steve wheezed in the background. “All these cars out there have gas in them. I know we can find plenty with the keys still in them. People were abandoning cars all over the place. We might need a battery, but we can find those anywhere.”

              “You’re not getting a car out of the city. Every street is jammed up. I’m sure the bridges probably are too. There are cars everywhere but they’re no use here. We’ll have to get out on foot. Maybe find a car outside the city when the roads open up better.”

              Right, again.

              “First we need to get him some asthma medicine. Some inhalers or something.”

              “Yeah. How about that hospital, that one we saw the other day, just south of here. We’re going south right?”

              Margie nodded as she was thinking. “South, southwest. I want to hit Staten Island and look for my brother. From there we can cross through Jersey and reach Pennsylvania. Then it’s all countryside as long as we avoid Philly.”

              Steve came hobbling up from the back and stared out the window for a few minutes at the pack of dogs tearing apart the boy in the street. He turned to me and I sensed from his look he was going to talk to me about Jennifer. I looked back and we managed to read each other. I just gave an understanding nod, as did he, and the subject went back to the future plans. “Where are we going next?” he asked. “Are we going to Margie’s brother?”

              “Yeah,” I answered. “But first we’re going to get you some asthma medicine.”

              “The hospital?” he asked as he stared back out the window. Suddenly up the street near the smoldering building several Judges landed in the middle of the road. “Maybe we should wait ‘til its dark. I can’t run too well and those bastards can see us too easy in the daylight.”

              “I wonder if they can see in the dark,” Margie added.

              I thought about it for a minute. “I don’t know, maybe. But they sure as hell can see us in the light. I say we go with what we know, and we’ll find out about the dark later. Steve’s right. If we get caught on the street now, he can’t get away fast enough with his ankle the way it is.”

              We all agreed we would leave at dusk and head for the hospital. Once there we would find Steve some inhalers, scavenge any other supplies we could and then head for Staten Island.

              The day seemed to go on forever. We took turns taking naps, while a bizarre parade of Judges and maledicted sporadically appeared outside of the bank throughout the day. We often heard Judges land on the roof, and with maledicted banging on the front door, more than once we thought about locking ourselves in the vault.

              Once the sun began to set, we loaded up our gear and headed out the back door into the alley. All I wanted was to get away from the area without seeing Jennifer. We left just before dark, with still enough light to make it to the hospital before we were on the street in total darkness.

              The hospital was a little further than we had remembered, and dodging maledicted with Steve’s bad ankle made the going slow. Nightfall came quickly, and by the time we were about a block from the hospital we were in the dark. The sounds of the city echoing through the blackness were terrifying. The rambling of the maledicted, calling out to loved ones or just screaming insane nonsense seemed to come from every dark alley. The wings of Judges could be heard flying overhead, often landing on nearby rooftops, unseen in the darkness. Once in a while we could hear people, survivors like us, fighting for their lives. They fought the Judges, the maledicted, and each other. For most, maybe fortunately, their struggle never lasted long.

              Mixed into it all was the low rumbling of a generator at the hospital. From a block away we could see lights inside, the only lights visible anywhere around us, as the generator’s engine echoed loudly off the nearby buildings. We were extremely glad to see the generator running, but assuming it had kicked on the night before when the power grid went down, I had to wonder how much fuel it had left. If we could just find asthma medicine and supplies and get out before the hospital went dark again, we’d be good.

              Hurrying the rest of the way up the road to the hospital, we entered the lobby quickly, eager to get off the street. I had great apprehension though of what we might find inside. A hospital was the place where the sick and dying went and that made it a likely place to find maledicted. Upon first entering, I was relieved to find the lobby deserted. The lighting was dim, as the generator only fed power to some emergency lighting. It was just enough though to see the chaos that must have occurred here.

              The lobby floor was covered in ashes, footprints tracking through it in every direction. Human, angel, or maledicted, I couldn’t tell. We moved forward cautiously towards the reception desk, scanning all around us as we went. Most of the areas were dark, the emergency lighting illuminating generally only the hallway areas. On the wall a little sign for the ER pointed down the corridor to the right, so we headed in that direction.

              The corridors were littered with toppled gurneys and medical equipment. There had been a lot of activity here; a lot of chaos, a lot of death. At first we passed mostly administrative offices. Further down, closer to the ER, we began to pass patient rooms. I could feel my nerves getting on edge as we noticed maledicted in several of the rooms. One or two were still lying in their beds, hooked up to IV drips that had long gone dry. It was as if they didn’t even realize that they had died. They just lay there, collecting dust, waiting for nurses that would never come.

              In one particular dark room we passed, I could see the silhouette of someone standing beside the bed. The hair stood up on my arms as she called out to us, “Doctor…doctor…”, and by the broken sound of her vocal chords I could tell that she too was dead. We tried to move away a little quicker, and looking back I saw her wander from the room into the hallway, dragging the disconnected wires from a heart monitoring machine behind her. She could see us moving away down the corridor, but barely able to walk, she stumbled and fell as she tried to follow us.

              We quickly moved on into the ER, stepping through a carpet of ashes the entire way. The main nurses’ station was buzzing and blinking with a console full of frantic little lights; medical gas alarms, heart monitors and bed call buttons all powered by the generator and screaming out to anyone who would listen that something was wrong. There was no one there to hear the warnings though, except for the piles of ashes where nurses and doctors used to be.

              Searching through each of the little curtained treatment rooms, we were relieved to find all empty, only the dust of the judged lying on the floor in piles. Margie also found an entire drawer full of asthma inhalers, and Steve was quick to become intimate with one while she stuffed the rest into his backpack. We spent several more minutes scrounging around for whatever seemed useful, until Steve called out. “Hey…you hear that?”

              I turned to see him standing close to a stairwell door in the hall, his ear pressed against the door, intently listening to something on the other side. Margie and I froze, listening quietly. All I could hear was the droning of the generator outside. Looking at Steve I simply shrugged my shoulders and mouthed the word “what?”

              Steve waved us both over as he slowly pushed open the stairwell door. Moving closer with the door open, Margie and I both heard it; a baby, crying somewhere upstairs. Margie looked at me wide-eyed, and for a few moments we all just stood there listening. Somewhere up above us a baby was crying furiously, its wails echoing through the empty hall upstairs. Next to the door I noticed the sign on the wall, ‘Maternity 2
nd
Fl.’.

              “What do we do?” Margie asked, looking directly at me.

             
Crap.

             
Steve answered before I could. “I don’t want to do anything. We should get out of here. We got what we came for.” As if on cue, he took a big hit off his new inhaler.

              Margie was visibly disturbed, as if some subconscious maternal instinct was pulling at her. “We have to go see. We can’t just leave it. Adam?”

             
Crap.

              “Okay. We go see. But then we get the hell out of here.”

              Steve gave me a look of disapproval as Margie started up the steps and we began to follow. The stairwell was very dimly lit, only every other landing having a generator powered light. I noticed that the stairwell also went down into some sort of basement level. It was quite dark in that direction, and I was relieved that at least we were going up and not down. We crept slowly up the stairs, the persistent crying of the infant growing louder with every step. As we neared the second floor landing I could see the hallway door was open, a large pile of ashes scattered beneath it.

              Standing in the doorway Margie peered around the corner into the corridor. Looking both directions into the dimly lit hallway, there was nothing but more ashes and toppled equipment scattered all around. All was quiet except for the endless crying of the baby that now sounded just a short distance away. Slowly we made our way through the corridor, following the direction of the crying around another corner. Past the first room, then a second, and at the third room it was obvious the baby was there.