One Blink From Oblivion (22 page)

***

              Vinny shuffles along the mall’s service corridor trying every door along the way. So far, his luck has gone the way of the Dodo and every door has either been locked from the inside or he could here tormented screams passing through the solid doors like osmosis from the other side. The few times he’d happened upon such a door he wasted no time dallying about. He quickened his shuffle and moved on in search of less adventurous passage.

              The booties he wears do little to protect his feet from the hard cold cement beneath him but he continues to feel no pain. Neither his shoulder nor his practically bare feet even enter his mind. Earlier he had stubbed his toe on a discarded base from a rolling suit rack. Only then was he reminded of his nearly naked feet and the lack of pain he felt. He attributed this to residual effects from the morphine drip he had been given. Now that he is thinking with a clear head, he comes to the conclusion that morphine must have been the pharmaceutical in use given its attributes as a pacifier.

              Vinny turns a corner into another protracted twilit corridor of icy concrete and intersecting ventilation pipes. He pauses momentarily to look and listen for anything that might pose a threat –biters and soldiers alike. The thought that the soldiers may pose a threat reminds him that he wears a yellow band on his wrist. He inserts a single finger between his wrist and the plastic band and pulls until it breaks free. He examines it briefly and lets it fall to the floor below.

              Just ahead, Vinny sees several promising doors in close proximity to one another. He approaches the first of three on the left side of the passageway. He reaches for the knob but comes to a sudden halt. Tilting his left ear toward the door, he can hear the faint sound of advancing footfalls. He immediately moves beyond the door in question and tries the next and the next. No joy with either. The expansive hallway starts to shrink in on him.

Beginning to feel cornered by the approaching footsteps he hears himself say, “
Time to move!”

As soon as his feet get the message to prepare for takeoff the door behind him crashes open and a guardsmen comes roaring through. The soldier’s eyes are wide and his mouth is contorted into a toothy grimace. Unable to arrest his momentum the soldier slams hard into the wall opposite the door. He takes the collision in stride and transfers his energy forward and into Vinny’s direction.

“
Fucking Biter
!” Vinny exclaims as he wills his feet to shift into another gear.

He starts to move but the soldier overtakes him seconds later. The six-feet one hundred ninety pounds of bulldozing guardsman slams into Vinny at locomotive speed sending him pin-balling off of the wall and eventually spread eagle onto the hard concrete. Rattled and defenseless Vinny tenses in expectation of what’s next. His pulse batters his eardrums like a possessed percussionist and he lays face down, motionless, waiting. The sound of footsteps continues and he lifts his head to see the guardsmen moving away from him and down the corridor. The soldier reaches for his sidearm, draws it and turns back toward Vinny.

‘This biter is going to shoot me!’
Vinny instantly knows the thought to be irrational but still is unable to rationalize what’s transpiring.

The soldier raises his weapon and squeezes off four quick shots. Vinny makes himself as small as possible and braces for the white-hot daggers of jacketed lead. Once again, he lays motionless, waiting for what feels like an eternity –in reality less than a second.
‘Either this biter is a lousy shot or…’
He never completes the thought. Something whispers by overhead with only the lightest touch to the tips of his hair. The feeling sends a chill down his spine like someone walking over his grave. He looks up in time to see a rabid biter tackling the guardsmen to the floor and tearing his shooting arm from his body. ‘
No mistaking that!
’ Vinny is up in a blink. Any remaining effects from the morphine have been dissolved by his overwhelming sense of self-preservation. He turns and bolts for the splintered door and the opening behind it. He is chased by the blood-drowned cries of the soldier whose own personal war is at its end.

***

Max wakes with a jolt, his body still in fight mode. He is flat on his back and staring hazily up at the spider’s web of pipes obscuring the ceiling. ‘
What the hell just happened?
’ the last thing he can remember is turning around and coming face to face with the oversized and underestimated hulk. He blinks and feels something sticky matting his lashes. He sits bolt upright and gathers a fistful of his shirt to wipe it away. When he pulls his shirt back from his face to investigate the tacky substance, he finds a copious smear of blood. Out of fear of infection, he performs a hurried inspection of his face as well as the rest of his body. He releases a sigh of relief with the realization that he is still fully intact and –aside from a splitting headache and possibly bruised rib- uninjured.

With his eye free of obstruction and his self-diagnosis complete, Max allows his view to widen and eyes to adjust to the dim glow dripping into the shop through panes of jagged broken glass. The abstract shards throw translucent shadows of mountains across the room. Max scans the range and to his dreadful amazement discovers it populated with the bloody remains of his fellow captives. The head of the thin forlorn father from his neighborhood lie severed with eyes open and still wet from tears. His expression almost seemed to be that of a man who has found peace at long last. Max turns his face away from the spectacle only to be met by far worse. The remnants of the hulk are folded at Max’s feet like an offering of fresh towels in the morning. His body is bent unnaturally backward at the waist and his twisted lower jaw lay upon his chest. The top half of the man’s head is a dimpled mass with two eyes staring off in the opposite direction away from their body. They appear either unwilling or unable to take in the visage of their own bloody ruin.

Max scoots backward and away from the broken gift and scrambles to his feet –headache be damned. He does a three-sixty to verify that no danger is immanent and then takes a moment to drink-in the carnage of the room. Every single person lies dead –most dismembered- throughout the room, except for him. If the biters had broken through and lay waste to the other occupants, why had he been spared? He catches another glimpse of the big man and the way he had been presented at his unconscious feet like a sacrifice of sorts. Then he pans around the room again and takes note of the contrast. Every other victim is no longer complete. One piece or another has been amputated from every single victim in the room. Realization does a queasy back-flip in Max’s stomach, ‘
The freeway-man
’.

***

Brooke enters the small black hole of space and clears the doorway for the others that it sucks in behind her. The room is already occupied by shelves lined up in rows running from front to back that are filled from floor to ceiling with shoeboxes of various colors and stamped with a variety of logos. The room fills quickly and Brooke knows if an outlet isn’t found or created posthaste then the room will truly live up to its black hole moniker, as they will be crushed under the stampede of panic.

              With only sporadic light flickering through the open door during rare breaks in the flow or refugees, Brooke is finding it difficult to maneuver through the room. The shelves loom in the darkness like tall spires stretching into the heavens and surveying every move she makes. Brooke feels along the walls immediately on either side of the door for a light switch. In her frantic search, she snags a nail in the wall bracket of a fire extinguisher. She has always kept her nails relatively short to facilitate easy cleanup after tending to her beloved houseplants. In this case however, the lack of nail length made for a more severe mishap than she would have suffered otherwise. The short nail of her right index finger is broken and dangling by a thin remainder of cuticle. She winces from the pain but dares not cry out for fear of attracting the wrong sort, the sort that rather feed upon the small trickle of blood that now oozes from her fingertip instead of bandaging it.

              Despite her pain she continues to cascade her hands up and down the wall until finally, “
Got it!
” she exclaims and flips the switch upward.

              The room is instantly bathed in a cool yellow haze of incandescent salvation. She takes a quick inventory of her surroundings and does her best to memorize a route free of obstacles that will lead her to the rear door of the area. The room continues to crowd with panicky aliens as they continue to cross the border from the ballistic badlands to the greener grass of trample hill. The narrow center aisle quickly fills beyond capacity causing some of the women to retreat vertically. Some climb the shelves while others rush the hallway access door like an angry mob. Two ladies that were clinging to each other for both emotional and physical support are knocked sideways and wind up under the feet of the frenzied mob. The two ladies scream for their lives and an uncaring heel to the abdomen causing a temporary shortness of breath periodically interrupts their cries.

              Brooke sees the two women being slowly stomped to death and tries to weave her way to their rescue. More and more women rush up the shelves of the center aisle in an attempt to avoid the same fate. They push closer and closer to the top as likeminded newcomers replace their lower positions. Brooke pushes her way through and is just about in reach of the first of the downed women when the sound of rumbling fades in from below.

A slight jolt is felt just before a female voice cries, “Aftershock!”

              The room explodes into a cacophony of flying boxes and ladies’ shoes. The metallic creak of twisting metal, like a bridge on the verge of collapse, induces an exodus from the surrounding area like so many rats from a drowning ship. The shelf that was designed only to support the relatively light weight of ladies’ shoes is buckling under the thousands of pounds of strain that was thrust upon it and compounded by the wrenching affects of the after shock. The temblor knocks many off of their feet. Brooke only has time for a backward lean before the racks of shoes and unsuspecting women alike come crashing down on the heads of the captive mob, shattering the single ceiling fixture and bathing the room in midnight.

              The lucky ones are pelted by shoes and cardboard that’s comparatively softer than the free falling females, disconnected metal braces and splintered plywood that strike, break, crush, impale and lacerate most. With the exceptions of painful groans and the settling of debris, the room goes deadly silent as a cascading shock takes hold. In this brief gap in sound, the approaching screams of the newly infected rise to a fever pitch. Pandemonium erupts once more in the small room that now promises to serve as a crypt for its occupants. Helpless yelps join hopeless screams as a new mob scrambles across the interwoven mix of women, shelves, steel and blood in a mad dash for the rear door.

***

              After tucking and holding for the mid-size aftershock, Vinny searches the large maintenance room for a makeshift weapon, anything to stave off the attacker outside the door. The room is fitted with shelves that are filled with buckets and bottles of various chemicals.
‘If Max was here he could probably make a bomb out of this stuff.’
He quickly moves beyond the shelves and locates an alcove with multiple rolling buckets and mops. Although disappointed that the maintenance men in the mall have apparently had no need for assault rifles he decides that a mop handle is better than nothing. He picks the sturdiest of the bunch and unscrews it from its base. During this entire process, he has been listening for the biter from the hall, in expectation that it would appear at any moment. He is guiltily pleased that the biter is taking its time with the unlucky soldier and affording him some much-needed time to gather himself.

              Weapon in hand, Vinny heads to the forward door of the maintenance room. He doesn’t dare another trip through the back halls that are now occupied by at least one infected and in a short while possibly two. The space was too confined for flight from an attacker and the sheer number of locked doors reminded Vinny of the absolute death of a roach motel, ‘
we check-in but we don’t checkout’
. He reaches the door and notices that the knob has a key lock on the inside –probably a precaution to keep the youngish crowd that frequented the mall from locking themselves in and doing what comes naturally. Vinny switches the mop handle to his left hand, and reaches out with his right to give the doorknob a gentle wiggle. If the wrong sort were to see or hear the moving handle from the other side of the door then this would truly be the last knob he cranked. This double entendre causes Vinny to laugh aloud and he immediately slaps his right hand over his mouth while cursing his good sense of humor. He reaches for the knob again –this time intending to crack the door slightly and take a quick peek. Just as his hand grabs hold, the door launches inward causing him to stumble backward and off of his feet. The long, inadequate, wooden pole -his sole means of defense- is flung from his left hand as he lands hard on his rear and it skids across the floor. The backlighting from the mall silhouettes three civilians, shoeless and in tattered clothing, standing silhouetted in the doorway. Their yellow eyes burn like beacons, reaching out into the darkness of the storage room and piercing Vinny down to his very marrow.

***