The Wanderers (12 page)

“
There could be water,” said David.

“
The cisterns?” someone asked.

“
They would have evaporated by now. Moreover, it wouldn’t be a great quantity of water,” answered Isabel.

“
There’s no other way, Isabel.”

“
Let’s put it to vote. All those in favor of crossing with the plank?” said Mary, a fragile looking blonde girl, raising her hand. Isabel looked around and let out a sonorous snort. She was the only one against it.

Later that afternoon, after a frugal meal of canned meatballs in tomato sauce, they put the plank idea into practice. The day was favorable: calm, and there was an absolute absence of wind.

“
I’ll go,” said David. “I’m the skinniest of us...”

Mary looked at him with growing panic; she was just as or thinner than him, and even smaller. But David gave her a reassuring look.

“
I’ll go... ok?”

She smiled at him, visibly relieved.

They carefully pushed the plank out of the window and set it on the other building’s windowsill. They tried it with their hands, putting pressure on it.

“
It looks pretty strong,” observed Arturo.

“
We’ll see,” commented David, helping himself up with a chair to climb up to the window. Once there, he hung onto the window frame and put pressure on the plank with his feet on several points.

“
For God’s sake, be careful, David,” said Isabel. She always called him
David
, pronouncing it as one would in English.

He crouched on all fours, and slowly began to move forward. The plank was not very wide, barely thirty inches, and it did not help give him confidence. He tried not to look down, where the dead dragged their feet as a worn out mob.

No one said anything. Arturo and another boy held the plank in place when David had moved a short distance away. He moved a few inches each time, first one knee, then the other. He noticed that, as he gained ground, the tension increasingly overpowered him. He felt his face redden. He did not want to sweat, but he knew himself too well, and acknowledged that in a short time his hands would leave a damp trail on the wood.

“
You’re doing good... you’re almost there, man,” they encouraged him from behind.

But then a menacing sound filled the air, ominous, terrible. It gripped their hearts. Isabel let out a little scream. It was the plank: it was making a sonorous cracking noise.

“
Come back!” his friends called, beside themselves. “It’s breaking, David,
it’s
breaking
!”

David held his breath. His arms were as tense as cables, and his stomach was a tight and painful muscle. Very slowly, he turned his head back, trying not to lose his balance. He saw the faces of his friends: they were a map of the barren lands of terror.

“
Uh, it’s alright...” he said, trying to smile, but he did not have time. The plank creaked again, a strong and definite
crack
, followed by a sound similar to a large caliber revolver shot. The plank split into two, raising a cloud of white dust. David plunged into the void, with his arms spread wide. He fell down a couple of floors lower, into the middle of the alley that separated the buildings, and broke both arms and both legs when he landed hard. His mouth spat out a grotesque spurt of blood.

Isabel was screaming. Arturo remained, hanging out of the window with his arms extended; he had not been fast enough to grab him by his feet. He was looking down; to the disjointed bundle that his friend had become. He still could not process it
... it had been
so fast.
The roar of screams reached him from behind, as if a pillow was muffling them. Someone was crying. Mary, was it Mary? Through the mind’s mist that covered the whole scene, Arturo believed he understood what he was seeing below... they had thrown themselves upon him; they were on his friend’s body. At first one, then two... they pulled at his extremities, sinking their foul mouths into every wound. Arturo was shaking his head, but he
could
not
look away from this Dantesque spectacle. With growing horror, he became conscious of the sound of a siren that rose in a
crescendo
from below, from the street. Then he understood it all too well. It was not a siren. It was David, he was still alive, and still screaming, screaming with such intensity that Arturo had to close his eyes, cover his ears and make his way into the interior of the house.

Six little piggies. One had been devoured, and five were left.

Chapter 14

Malaga was dying. Wretched agony traveled its streets like an infectious germ, necrotizing its inhabitants. The wanderers were everywhere; they united, forming groups, and lay in wait at doorways and blocked the roads. There were accidents and overturned cars on every corner. On the highway, the drivers suffered accidents trying to dodge the haggard bodies and other wrecked vehicles, and their occupants died in the collisions. The survivors who did manage to exit their vehicles did not get too far either: the wanderers quickly caught up with them. Either way, in only a few hours, all of the deceased came back to life with vacant eyes and only one motivation: to hunt down the living.

Locked inside the La Victoria Church, Father Isidro had prostrated himself before the altar, as he had every day during the past weeks. There he prayed at all hours until fainting at night, but even then the nocturnal noises of an agonizing Malaga frequently awoke him and the nights were a living nightmare that he experienced in intervals of wakefulness. There was no more electrical light, but he still counted on a practically endless supply of candles and censers that were all around. The air was dense, intoxicating, penetrating.

Father Isidro was an incredibly thin man. He had hardly eaten during the last weeks, since the dead had begun to wander the face of the Earth and he had lost weight with astounding speed. Kneeling at the altar, he sweated profusely: his forehead and his whole neck were pearled with a myriad of tiny drops of sweat. Sometimes he broke down in tears, his eyes tightly closed, his lips articulated, silently praying and pleading to his God.

“
Lord!” he suddenly exploded, lifting his gaze to the altar and calling furiously. “We are prepared, Lord, fall upon us and judge your impious people, Lord!”

He, however, did not come, nor answer Father Isidro’s prayers. Moved by a feverish impulse, Father Isidro stood up and moved towards his Bible, open on the lectern at a passage he had read and reread innumerable times.

“
Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out, those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned. During those days men will seek death, but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.”

Father Isidro trembled fervently when he reviewed those lines. It had finally happened: God had called the righteous and the sinners and convoked them to the Final Judgment. The dead had abandoned their graves and had come back to life, and it was a matter of time until He would judge them all. He would descend from the heavens and give each his own according to their deeds. Did Paul the apostle not prophesize this in the New Testament?
“For the Lord himself will come down from heaven”
. He was ready, and prayed, oh how he prayed, in preparation for His arrival.

However, the days passed, and He did not come. The anxiety devoured Father Isidro like a degenerative disease. He continuously consulted the Bible, passing the pages forwards and backwards, reading random paragraphs. From time to time, he would dry the sweat from his brow with his cassock’s sleeve and read a paragraph with a trembling voice, nodding while he did.

“
For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these words...”
He stopped, his eyes wide open, reflecting a few seconds about what he had just read.

What if he was not among the Righteous? And what if He had found him undeserving? He shook his head vehemently, as if he were trying to throw those thoughts far away, out of his head. No, he had done what was necessary, what had to be done, what He would have wanted. He had closed the temple doors and had kept them all out; those who had wanted to escape the Final Judgment, those who did not want to be judged. Sofia and the others. How they had run to him, and hammered the large double doors when he closed them in their faces. They had screamed when the resuscitated had gotten close, instead of feeling the joy and happiness of the glorious moment of finding themselves pure and redeeming their sins. They had deceived him, for so, so long. He had thought them to be righteous men and women, servants of God, devout believers, but the dead had come for them all and had found them
... guilty. They had ripped apart their torsos, swollen with sin, separated their heads from their bodies, and dismembered them.

What joy he had felt when the path he must follow was illuminated. He’d run to the altar, kneeled and stayed there, surrendered, praying and opening his heart to Him until his legs tingled so much that he had to let himself roll onto his side and weep in pain until he was able to walk again.

“
What should I do, Lord?” he implored, his voice broken, diluted in a pitiful sob. “Lord, tell me what I should do!”

But the ominous stone walls did not answer him, the night did not bring a sound expect for the constant
swishing
of the living dead waiting outside; the sign he was waiting for did not arrive.

Sudden doubt assaulted him, and that doubt came mixed with a hint of hope
... what if He was waiting for him? And if He, in his infinite wisdom, praised be in His Glory, oh Lord... awaited a testimony of his faith and devotion? A display of his Love? What if He... ?

A spark alighted in his troubled mind, a spark that detonated with an almost audible
click
. His eyes opened as widely as they could. There, behind his pupils, the seed of madness danced, infatuated by the absolute certainty that his celestial Father required him to submit himself to the Judges, that he surrender himself to the resuscitated deceased, that he too comply with the Final Judgment.

He burst into tears, his heart beating so rapidly that he was forced to lean against the wall. How grateful he felt, oh merciful Father, for that unexpected revelation. He asked himself how he could have taken so long to discover the Straight Path that would lead him to Eternal Salvation. He looked towards the temple doors where he had piled up all of the pews and even one of the confessional booths to prevent the entrance of the deceased.

“
Oh Lord... how blind I have been...” he said aloud, quickly moving towards the pews. “I’m coming Lord, I’m coming...” He removed them easily and they fell to the side with a racket. He dismantled the barricade in spite of his extreme frailty, consumed by an unrestrained fervor. He finally removed the last bar and pushed the doors wide open.

The night received him, filled with the stench of the congregated cadavers. The cold and unexpected night breeze dried the sweat on his forehead. The light of the interior of the temple, which was illuminated by several dozen candles, spread over the sinister forms that waited outside. Beyond, there was only darkness: Malaga was a spectral cloak barely illuminated by the starlight.

Father Isidro, with his arms wide open, offered himself to Them. They would judge him; purge their sins with the saintly sacrament of redemption. He looked up, expecting to be brought down at any moment. Inside his tortured mind, he repeated only one incessant message:
I’m coming, Lord, I’m coming Lord, I’m coming...
His filthy cassock fluttered in the threshold, its hem reduced to tatters.

It could have been a product of his particular perception of things in that moment of unconditional surrender, but in the gloomy Malaga night, time stopped with the sound of an old movie reel. Father Isidro held his breath; the silence was so dense, so intoxicating, that for a moment he felt transported. He thought, incoherently, that everything had already happened, that he had died, and that he was ascending to the heavens to reunite with his God. The stars seemed to come out to meet him.

He then lowered his head, and looked.

He saw hundreds of pupilless eyes that bore into him with laser precision, and he saw dead mouths. Then he had contradictory sensations: he felt weakness, and without intending to, he withdrew a step. However, at the same time, fueled by a strength that was born from the depths of his religious belief, he fought to remain, stay and serve the plans that he believed he had received from the heavens.

“
Oh my God... my God please, help me...”

He whimpered, feeling his lower lip trembling convulsively. Despite this, he managed to stand firmly, closing his fists and clenching his abdominal muscles. The breeze began to blow stronger.

As puppets moved by invisible strings, the dead began to move ungainly in unison. They swayed from one side to another, bumping shoulders, and throwing their arms forward.

He stood still, frozen in an eternal moment.

The dead surrounded him
...

They passed him by.

The dead surrounded him, brushed him with their white bodies, and began to enter the church, searching, suffering from frenetic spasms. Father Isidro blinked, incapable of understanding what was happening. In a matter of seconds, he was buried in a swarm of cadavers, as if he were one of them. He looked around, feeling a mixture of nausea, terror and
... relief.