The Wanderers (19 page)

He pulled her hand towards the door without taking his eyes off hers. She followed him, docile. Isabel came behind, covering her mouth with both hands. They reached the door and Roberto opened it carefully. On the other side, the living dead wandered aimlessly, some to one side, others to the opposite side, without any order or harmony. He looked at the girls one last time, took Mary’s hand, breathed deeply and stepped outside.

He did not even want to waste a second on trying to plan out a route among the zombies; he simply ran to the right, in the direction of Cervantes Theatre. Fear, and their escape had caused an intense heat in the area of his chest and temples, and his heart was beating rapidly.

Halfway there, he noticed that the street was blocked. There was a barrier of cars forming a row, most of them police cars. A couple of vehicles were upside down and piled on top of the other cars, apparently crashed into each other, the bodywork tangled in a shapeless disarray of metal. On the farthest side, the façade of one of the buildings had fallen off after a massive fire, judging by the black and scorched walls. The rubble and beams had fallen on the barrier of cars, forming an insurmountable barrier.

“
Shit!” Around him, the dead began to react.

“
That way!” Isabel screamed.

They ran though the west side of the Plaza de la Merced, among the abandoned cars. Mary trotted behind, pulled along by Roberto. The expression on her face was unreadable. All over the place, the dead were reacting and increased their speed, accelerating their steps to head their way. One of the zombies, sporting a t-shirt that still read FATALLY SEXY, rushed towards them with unexpected speed. It almost caught them. Roberto was able to hit its open arms at the last moment, knocking it away.

When they got to the corner, they turned to the right, taking Alamos Street. Where they were going? None of them seemed to know. Roberto just wanted to get them far away from the dark leader that commanded the legions of living dead with tired biblical verses. Against normal zombies, they still had a chance. Against an intelligent being, none. They ran some six-hundred feet, dodging the few zombies without much effort. Most of them came from behind, in a slow but relentless pursuit.

“
I ca-c-can’t go ON!” Isabel exploded. Roberto looked at her. She was holding her side with a hand, her complexion pale, her hair stuck to her sweaty forehead and her wide-open eyes announcing the terror she felt in each and every one of her pores. Mary was panting heavily, her mouth opening and closing like a fish left on the sand, but she seemed to be in better physical shape than Isabel.

The Mexican looked around. There was a pair of zombies barely thirty feet away. One of them had a kitchen knife still stuck in its right clavicle, the wooden handle jutting out like the pinnacle of a monument to madness.

They stopped for a moment, and Isabel bent over her knees, coughing and panting as if she was trying to drink in all of the air in the world. Mary sat on the ground as soon as they let her loose, but Roberto roused her by the armpits, standing her up again. They had to be prepared to run again at any moment.

He looked at his bare hands, surprised by his own lack of foresight. Why had he not taken some kind of weapon? An iron bar, a broomstick, anything? When had he ever thought of jogging through the streets of Malaga without any way of protecting himself from the living dead?

“
Are you feeling any better?” he asked. His own voice seemed shrill to him, as if reaching him from inside a box. But Isabel was hyperventilating; her control over her breathing had been nonexistent during their mad dash, and now her heart was pumping wildly, uncontrollably.

The two specters were practically on them already. Roberto moved out of their way, took the kitchen knife handle and pulled hard. It surprised him how easily he was able to extract it, there was barely any resistance. The sound was watery, bubbly. The blade was covered in blackish goo and a sudden putrescent stink took his breath away. He had encountered that smell before; it had the asphyxiating peculiarity of the smell that dead leaves produce when left in a heap to decompose, only much, much worse.

He adjusted his fingers on the handle, squeezed it tightly, and stabbed it in the middle of the specter’s forehead with a terrifying scream. He continued screaming for a few seconds afterwards. The specter blinked, shook with a couple of spasms and collapsed to the ground.

The second zombie stepped over the first, putting the knife out of his reach. Roberto looked at it. It was tall, very tall, and it looked at him from above with crazed eyes. It did not have any lips; the teeth were exposed and, around them, the skin had retracted forming a blackened layer full of creases.

He stumbled, prey to a sudden wave of panic that went over his whole body, rising hotly from the pit of his stomach. As the adrenaline was still coursing, Roberto had an intense feeling of dizziness. In the distance, a horde of specters came from the beginning of the street, their animal-like grunts sounding to him as a promise of death.

Like a horrendous mechanical doll, the zombie thrust its hands towards his neck. It was so fast that he could feel the horrible pressure of its tense fingers even before he could try releasing himself. He found himself immobilized, feeling that no air was reaching his lungs, watching those lifeless eyes that stared at him with such stark hate that they seemed hypnotizing to him. Without being conscious of it, Roberto was trying to free himself from the mortal grip, but it was useless: his adversary had iron arms and the determination of a locomotive at full power.

He felt himself go... he heard screams, women’s screams, but they were becoming increasingly remote. A white mist clouded his sight, softening his attacker’s features. He saw its silhouette, but it was gray, and behind, there was no longer anything. Absolutely nothing.

Chapter 21

Moses and Cripple moved forward at a good pace. They had found the street unusually empty, and moving among the buildings was no longer a tortuous journey full of dangerous situations. Most of the time they could simply slip among the erratic figures without resorting to confrontations, which was preferable; they had learned some time ago that engaging any of them had a progressive reaction in all of the specters in sight—they became riled up and it attracted them like a magnet.

In a comparatively short time they reached Alamos Street, which stretched four-hundred yards to the east where it opened into the Plaza de la Merced. When they looked in that direction, they stopped abruptly. A horde of living dead, of a size they had not seen in a long time, was coming from that direction, an enormous commotion of arms and foul smelling mouths that moved in unison like a nightmarish wave.

“
Dear Jesus...” Moses murmured, unable to look away.

“
Let’s go, let’s go Mo...” said Cripple, suddenly hoarse, taking short backward steps.

Moses grabbed him by the arm and pointed with his own hairy one.

Cripple saw them as well. A short distance away, a man was driving a knife into the face of one of the specters. The zombie shook with spasms and collapsed on the ground, turned into a useless heap. A second specter hurried over the fallen body and confronted the man, enraged, like a predator about to pounce on its prey. Behind them, they saw two young girls.

Before they could react, the specter thrust its hands towards the young man’s neck. The boy bent backwards, waving his hands wildly.

Coming out of his stupor, Moses ran towards them, wielding his bar. Cripple felt a profound sensation of danger, but nevertheless jogged behind his friend, favoring his short leg. Finally making use of the momentum of the sprint, Moses charged the assailant and knocked it to the ground. The young man fall backwards and remained on the ground, tracing an arc with his back, the wind knocked out of him.

Moses quickly stood up. The specter was
awakening
; he saw this in its iridescent white pupils. It was the threshold that the dead seemed to pass through before becoming
runners
, and that was not something that Moses wanted to see. It seemed that it was about to pounce, as if triggered by a spring. However, Moses was not going to wait around for it; he lifted the iron rod over his head and brought it down hard. The rod hit the cadaver’s cranium with a muted, ominous thump. The specter shook with a final spasm, and remained immobile, its pupilless eyes fastened on the leaden sky.

Cripple saw to the young man who lay on the ground. He had horrible lacerations on his neck and breathed with difficulty, but he would survive.

“
Are you alright?” Moses shouted to the two young girls behind them.

“
Ye... yes...” said one of them. They stared at him incredulously, a sensation that Moses understood very well; only God knew how long it had been since they had seen other human beings. “Th-thanks... Thank you!”

“
Where... ? Where the hell do you come from?” Moses asked.

“
I... we-”

“
We have to move, Mo,” interrupted Cripple, without taking his eyes off the mass of specters that moved towards them through the street.

“
Yes... ok... how is that guy?”

“
I think he’s good... come on, up!” he said, helping the young man stand up. He stared at them with a strange expression on his face, somewhere between gratitude and fear.

“
Can you follow us?” Moses asked. “Can you
run
?”

“
Y... yes, yes... of course...” said Isabel, firmly taking Mary by the hand. Roberto nodded, still panting.

“
Let’s go then,” said Cripple, “if they see where we hide nothing will stop them—there’s too many of them.”

“
Is she alright?” Moses asked, pointing at Mary. The girl seemed a little slow to him; she was staring with amused fascination at an old public lighting cable that crossed the street.

“
Yes, she’s a little... it’s just that John... and David...” Isabel stammered.

Moses instantly understood and stopped her. They began to run through the street, taking the same way back that they had covered moments before. Moses was in the rear, concerned about the rearguard. He knew that
runners
came out of large masses, and he also knew that they could hardly protect themselves from something like that armed with just an iron bar. He now understood why he had seen so few specters before; for some reason they had all gone to the Plaza de la Merced.

“
This way!” Cripple would yell every so often as they ran. Occasionally, he had to give a zombie a good shove, knocking it down to ensure the group could pass. Most of them were clumsy enough to allow the group to disappear from the scene before they could stand up again. They finally reached the entrance and they all entered, panting and gasping, but profoundly relieved at having been able to escape.

“
Thank you, thank you guys,” Roberto was saying, with tears in his eyes and his lower lip visibly trembling.

Moses embraced him.

Some hours later, the group was settled on the small sofas Moses and Cripple had in their apartment. Mary was taking little sips of water from a glass she was holding in her hands as if it was a bowl of warm soup, and Isabel and Roberto were trying to explain all of the traumas they had lived through lately. Cripple was still suffering from his toothache but, at Roberto’s instruction, he had managed to alleviate the pain considerably using a garlic clove that was miraculously still fresh in the kitchen.

“
Tell me about that guy again,” Moses said.

Isabel sighed, but it did not seem to bother her. Each time she told it she added new details, and Moses realized that, with each repetition of the story, she seemed to feel a little better. Each time it was easier for her to situate herself outside the plane of the events, and relate them as if they were an old story, which she had already overcome.

“
It’s incredible,” said Cripple, “I have never heard anything like it.”

“
How the
hell
could he have done it?” Moses asked.

“
Do you realize,” said Cripple, “that what... what I want to say is, that if we could achieve that he did... to be able to walk among those zombies, that would be... that would be definitive...”

“
A priest...” Moses was saying, more to himself than to the others.

“
There was something in his eyes that...” Robert said, with his gaze lost in some undetermined point. “I don’t know, they were crazed, his whole face, his expression, maddened, completely out of it. You should have seen him... he was so skinny.”

“
Do you remember that old movie,
Poltergeist
?” Isabel asked. All of them nodded. “Not the original one, but the second or third part... there was this cadaverous guy with white hair... well our priest is his fucking twin brother.”

“
Shit, yes... that guy made my flesh crawl,” said Cripple.

“
Be that as it may, crazy or sane, priest or not, he’s an enemy,” said Moses, standing up. “By what you said about his words, I believe he thinks that all of this is the proverbial Judgment Day, and as the Bible tells is, you know, it’s when all souls, the living and the dead, are invoked before Him and subjected to judgment.

“
Fuck...” said Roberto.

“
Fuck, yes. He’s taken it literally, and although we don’t know how he does his particular little trick, he’s using it to feed his sick fantasy.”

“
Well,” interrupted Isabel, and all eyes were on her, “I mean to say, and what if we were to say, that all of this about the dead coming back to life... I don’t know, what if it was
true
?”