The Wanderers (3 page)

Television was not much help either. On Channel 1, there was talk of a wave of international violence. Scenes that showed fires, commotion, and harrowing attacks jumped on the screen in a frightening succession. In Madrid, Barcelona, Beirut, London, Libya. In one of the images, a uniformed officer fired at point-blank range at another officer whose shirt was ripped. On Canal Sur 2
[1], the unexpected sight of cartoons made her blink for a few moments, trying to understand. It later changed... Antenna 3, Telecinco... Canal Sur. On every channel, the newscasters spoke of irrational attacks, generalized widespread chaos, and an uncontrollable wave of terror.

Susana watched the images for twenty minutes, unable to react. Later, she abruptly turned the old television off, and walked for a long time throughout the house.

Later, on that same day, the electricity began to fail.

At first, the electricity worked intermittently, and some areas were more affected than others, but it was not long before the electricity went off for good. By then, nobody went to their respective jobs, the roads were empty, and the night air brought strange noises that seemed to come from everywhere at once. This made the new reality harder for them all, because nobody knew what to do or how to face the situation. Susana had seen almost everyone leave. Even last night, two families had hurriedly run along the wide avenue carrying sizeable suitcases, and finally disappeared down the garage ramp. They told no one where they were going. But Susana stayed at home. She was folding summer clothes, carefully putting them away until it was too dark to see. Every once in a while, she would lean out of the terrace to look around. It was disturbing to see how silent the avenue in front of her had become. The newsstand downstairs stayed closed, causing her much uneasiness, because it was not Wednesday. Nobody walked on the wide sidewalks, and Susana had the terrible feeling that everyone had already left, that everyone was somewhere else, except for her, and that the city was going to swallow her if she did not do something soon.

But Susana had not wanted to face reality. She still unhooked the telephone every so often, trusting that she would be able to speak to someone once the technicians at Telefonica fixed the breakdown. The surrealism of the scene, the monotonous and decelerated message
“please try again later” had become a future promise, and Susana called and called. She fell asleep at six-thirty in the morning, wrapped in turbulent dreams. At a quarter past ten, an ugly nightmare woke her with a start. She got up for a drink of water but discovered, much to her dismay, that the faucet was dry. She spent the rest of the day trying to get a signal from the telephone. Nobody invited her to try again anymore.

At the end of the afternoon, when the dark was already devouring the eastern sky, she finally saw them. They appeared on the corner that led to the hospital. One wore a white lab coat. The other one was big and muscular, but he moved as if he were suffering from painful spasms. They walked together, slowly advancing through the halted traffic. They crossed the street in an awkward manner, torpidly dragging their feet with exasperating leisure, and finally disappeared behind the corner of the buildings on the other side. Susana watched them with incredulous fascination. They were
those things
. The ones on television. They were dead people. Dead things. The living dead. Now she had seen them. They were down there. That was the reason why the avenue was full of abandoned cars. That was the reason why everything had stopped working, why there was no running water, the reason why her dreams were plagued with wet claws covered in clotted blood.

Shortly after ten, muted knocks on her door shook her out of her detachment. Susana ran to open it, as if the solution to that whole inconceivable situation were on the other side. But the pale and drawn face of her neighbor, who awaited her wrapped in a cream colored shawl, discouraged her once again.

“
You’re still here...” commented her neighbor with a neutral tone. Susana didn’t know if it was a question or an affirmation. The flattened hair on her forehead and the ashen color of her face gave her neighbor a disheveled look. Her fazed eyes, revealed that, somehow, she had transgressed some time ago the limits of her ability to adapt to the new circumstances.

“
Yes.”

They stared at each other for a few moments, uncomfortable, on the floor landing.

“
Don’t you want to come?” her neighbor finally asked, as if it had just occurred to her. “We’re leaving.”

“
Where are you going?” asked Susana, doubtful.

“
Well... somewhere else. In the car... someplace where there are people. There’s no electricity here, nor water...”

But at that moment, Susana
knew
. The certainty that going somewhere else was as useless as cutting water with a knife became so clear, that its comprehension almost fit in her mind with a sonorous
click
. She refused the offer, and something in her gesture made her neighbor understand the truth in her negation. The neighbor retreated two steps, watching her with bleak eyes, and disappeared down the hall without another word.

Chapter 5

By dawn on the seventh day, things had gotten much worse. The bathroom gave off a persistent stench of feces and urine, so penetrating that when she opened the door she felt nauseated. She had to resort to holding a rag drenched with alcohol to her nose in order to continue using it. In the kitchen, all of her provisions had run out. The dishes were piled up in rows on the counter and the sink, the emergency candle were all finished, and the excess wax had been scraped from the ashtrays in an unsuccessful attempt to reuse it.

Susana looked outside to the street. She still heard an incessant and monotonous murmur, a blend of voices, some high screams, and a far away resounding similar to heavy machinery. But with exception of one car that cautiously passed, the street remained mute and still.

She sat on the couch, facing the fact that she had to go down to the street. She was thirsty. She had drunk all of the juice, the wonderful syrup that conserved canned peaches, the milkshakes and all of the milk. She still had butane gas, but there wasn’t anything left to warm up. The pasta, beans, all of the stored rice
... it was all gone, devoured during the long hours of anguished waiting. Her last meal had been last night, and had consisted of a bland can of mussels that were similar in size and color to the buttons on a little communion suit.

She was on the landing in front of the door, mentally going over the scores of reasons why she shouldn’t abandon the safety of the house. She convinced herself, however, that it would be best to do it soon, before she became consumed with fear. She took a deep breath and finally opened the door. The darkness of the hallway welcomed her.

Susana scrutinized the exterior; it was dark and inhospitable, and did not remind her at all of the warm and familiar place she had called home. Looking back produced the same unpleasant sensation: she suddenly realized that her house was like a dark mouth, an unfamiliar pit. Motivated by that new awareness, she began to descend the stairs. One hesitating step, then two
... and soon she was trotting down, until she finally reached the outside.

She inhaled the cool October air. The sky was a beautiful landscape of blue and gray hues. From a distance, the first rays of sunlight burst into orange streaks among leaden clouds. From the street level, Susana could contemplate the spectacle that she had been observing from the windows of her house in its whole magnitude. She remembered a scene from a catastrophe movie: abandoned cars in all four lanes, on the median strip, on the sidewalk, with open doors; newspapers and bits of paper blown about by the wind, a shopping cart had fallen on what looked like a bundle of clothing. Looking to the right, Susana saw an enormous trailer stopped in the middle of the immense roundabout. And over the buildings that surrounded her, the air was fouled, as if the wind was too heavy to blow away the last traces of an extinguished fire.

She slowly made her way north, being sure to avoid getting close to any of the cars. They bothered her; so abandoned and still, they indicated that everything was wrong. Nevertheless, her short walk was without incident, and she almost started to feel better until she turned the corner and faced a scene she wasn’t prepared for.

The hospital’s access area was blocked by an irregular barricade of white and brown sacks. There were several of what appeared to be Army trucks
—they were dark green and had large open beds covered with green canvas, and a number of police cars. On one of them, the siren lights were dim, but still flashed. There were boxes, piles of sheets and white clothes, a large desk that was partially destroyed, several chairs, and some large abandoned shelves piled on the side. On the ground, there were cans, bottles, magazines, cardboard boxes, plastic containers, and other debris. She hadn’t yet assimilated this tremendous jumble, when she also saw the dead bodies on the ground. They were piled in a little garden, forming a horrifying amalgam. There were also a few limp bodies in several other places: next to the barricade, on the entrance stairs, in the middle of the ramp. One in particular, was no more than a naked torso in the middle of a hair-raising puddle of black blood. To complete the scene, most of the windows along the whole façade were broken.

Susana observed the cadavers with growing apprehension. She knew perfectly by now what had caused that whole situation. And by that stage she could imagine why the hospital had become a battlefield; it was where people had gone once they got hurt, or when they had started to feel sick. They died there either because of their wounds, or because they were attacked by the
things
that were already there. She thought about all of the sick people in their beds, in the morgue, in the autopsy room. So many corpses that had suddenly come to life. Consequently, so many people came back to life after dying, then in turn infected others...

She shook her head, horrified, while imagining the halls infected by the living dead. Dead people visiting the beds, where the sick had not been able to escape or defend themselves. Then she finally broke down, bitterly, yet silently sobbing, which she muffled with her hands covering her face. She finally wept, after a week of mute horror, surrounded by the defeated remains of a fight for life. Her tears were good
... they partially dissolved a malign and swollen knot that had sprouted inside her during the whole journey.

About twenty minutes later, a discarded piece of paper which flew with the wind from one place to another, found Susana in the same place, still leaning against the wall, her countenance was altered; serene, and her eyes absent.

Chapter 6

A few weeks before Susana finally cast out her little demons, a corpulent Moroccan with an aquiline nose, beautiful sparse beard, and sharp features walked at a resolute pace through Beatas Street, right in the middle of the city center. It was a pedestrian only street even before most of the streets in the city center were made inaccessible to cars, but at that time, dusk, it was too empty. All of the streets were empty, because these were not good times, although the winds of Moses’ life had never blown any differently.

Since he’d been fourteen years old, Moses had tortuously navigated through the black channels of addiction. Soft drugs, hard drugs, designer drugs. He had taken heroin, crack, pot, LSD
... and he had drunk himself unconscious with alcohol almost daily. Addiction turned his life on and off like a switch. When it let him be, he earned his way scheming, like the rest of his friends. Then he worked hard, no matter what type of job it was; but when his disease brought him down, he ruined everything again. He would spend the night dragging himself through the street, or sleeping on a street corner drenched in urine, poisoned by hallucinogens or alcohol. And he spent daybreak shivering, feeling that his soul was getting cold.

He had been in the clink
once, and he learned more there than he would have liked to know, not all of it good. The first six months were the hardest. He did not understand a thing: jail talk, the codes for human relationships. He had to learn who could be spoken to and who could not. He learned to listen to up to ten conversations at the same time without opening his mouth, while wearing his poker face. But most of all, he learned who feigned being a friend, and who really was.

It was there that he met Cripple.

Cripple was mostly obstinate. Life continuously showed him an ample range of horrible miseries, and he insisted on smiling, shrugging his shoulders, and continuing on. The procession had started early on. The same capricious yet idle pursuit had desired when he was two years old that his father, who was stuffed with barbiturates drenched in alcohol, would want to smother him. He still remembered the soft suffocating feel of his own hot breath inside his mouth, uselessly open as widely as he could keep it. He did not remember why his father stopped; why he never finished what he had started. But from that day on, his mother and he had lived elsewhere, and he never again saw or asked about his father.

Thirty years later, when his mother was exhaling her last breath, she looked up and whispered to Cripple,
“There’s another.” Cripple did not immediately know what she meant, but he gave it thought because it seemed to him that words said while slipping into the oblivion of death must be important. He conjectured that it might have well been a sibling; his mother’s life had been very unorganized when she was young, but it could also be another father, a biological father. He did not care much either way. His family environment had not helped him value blood ties, but on several occasions he surprised himself by toying with the idea of having a brother, someone like him, someone who understood the inherent darkness of his genetic legacy that was so hard for him to control.