The Wanderers (7 page)

As he began his journey, Juan thought about the last men he had seen alive in Rincon. It was a group of individuals that had made the streets their own, riding four wheel drive vehicles through the streets. They were armed with chains, rifles and some sort of spears that they used to skewer the cadavers from the backs of the trucks. Juan did not trust them from the start; he already knew gangs dedicated to looting, so when he saw them for the first time, he knew by their callous behavior and violent ways that they were not people that he would like to expose himself to. Whenever he would hear them arrive with their powerful motors and cowboy shouts soaked in crack, he tried to hide and observe them.

There were nine, all of them young and strong. They were generally drunk, always with bottles of vodka or whisky in their hands. At first, they seemed to manage themselves surprisingly well: he did not know where they hid when they were not out revving up their motors and charging at zombies, but he knew that they enjoyed blowing the specters’ heads off with their automatic guns and running over their bodies. Both trucks were equipped with big wide wheels and they easily passed over the bumps made up of the fallen bodies.

The afternoon before Juan decided to try to reach Malaga, the group made a fatal error. They had left the trucks on the sidewalk and had climbed up a small single story repair shop. From there, they dedicated themselves to drinking alcohol and shooting the specters. They shouted, laughed, and threw the empty bottles at the specters. Juan saw them arrive; hidden behind the metal railing of the supermarket he went to stock up on provisions. He liked it because it had a discreet entrance in the back that he always secured upon leaving, so he would know if it had been forced open, and therefore infected by wanderers.

It was the first time Juan had seen them transform. It was a gradual process. At first, the dead perambulated erratically on the street, as they always did. Juan observed them thoughtfully while finishing a bag of ham-flavored chips in the safety of his hiding place. Occasionally, one would bump into another and change direction. All of a sudden, one would stop and stupidly stare at a drainpipe, or a silent air conditioner. When the cars arrived, Juan observed a change in the specters. They began to walk a little quicker, disturbed by the noise. They lifter their hands erratically, and their dead mouths opened, perhaps anticipating the attack. Juan saw them get down and use the vehicles to climb up to the roof. By then, the noise of the doors slamming, their hoarse and mocking voices and the shots they fired had induced a notable state of excitement in all of the living dead. By now, all of them were moving towards the cars, some clumsily, but others were perceptibly tense.

Within the hour, the men were devoted to the task of drinking and shooting a multitude of specters from the adjacent streets. The shots excited the wanderers more and more. Sometimes, one would be hit in the head and drop, completely limp, to the ground. But the violent sound of the shots startled and infuriated them. The clamor of their guttural voices was reaching higher levels; they were lifting the hands that had become dead claws towards the men and attempted, impotently, to trap them.

Juan knew instinctively that he could not try to leave the supermarket at that moment. By that time, he did not care much. He had enough food and drink around him to survive for months, and wondered to himself how the situation would end. The street was packed with enraged specters, and they were
fast
. Very fast.

While he lost himself in his thought, the pilot light of one of the vehicles exploded, sending a small cloud of plastic splinters flying. Juan did not know if that marked a path for the others, but all of a sudden, the vehicle was being attacked by a horde of arms that were grabbing, ripping and beating. The car started shaking and rocking dangerously, the sheet metal roof bent and the front windshield exploded.

The men on the roof were screaming and shooting into the horde of living dead, but Aranda could not tell if their shots were having any effect: there were too many to discern if any of them were falling to the ground. The clamor caused by the crowd’s hoarse, dead rattles deafened the besieged men’s voices.

There were more shots, more broken glass, and when it seemed that the horror could not go any further, one of the specters rose above the others, triumphant, and climbed up on the dented four-by-four’s roof. It immediately received three shots, all of them in the chest, but they only ripped shreds of cloth off its back when the bullets went through its dead, dried flesh. Juan, terrified by the unrestrained violence of the scene, tightly clutched the shelf that held the bags of chips until his knuckles were white.

Successive shots reached their objective: the specter fell backwards, arms extended, and disappeared among the group of assailants. However, that one specter had opened the way for the rest, and immediately three zombies jumped on the vehicle to climb up the building’s cornice.

The men faced the assault the best they could. At some point, Aranda noticed that there were no more shots, probably because they had already exhausted all of their ammunition. They repelled them with kicks and chains, although they were not very effective since this particular enemy felt no pain.

Aranda observed with certain fascination the terrified grimaces the men’s faces showed. Livid and pale faces at dusk on any given day, in a small town with several thousand inhabitants, all of them living dead. It was only now that they became conscious of the fact that the situation had totally gotten out of hand, and that the zombies would never cease their attack. They did not need to rest, and would not stop to talk, or agree to a truce or surrender. They would go on with superhuman tenacity day and night, showing the same unrestrained fury in their efforts to rip the life out of the bodies of the living men.

Then an arm that had turned an unhealthy purple color caused by death managed to clutch the ankle of one of the defenders. The man lost his balance and fell backwards to the ground. He screamed like a pig in a slaughterhouse, yet did not receive help until it was too late. The living dead pulled at the man, and before anyone could react, he had already fallen on the vehicle’s roof. There, four stooping figures immediately pounced on him, and there were screams
—screams so high-pitched and horrifying that Aranda had to cover his ears tightly to avoid losing control. He had a lump in his chest so hard, that for a minute, he thought that it was breaking in two.

The rest was just a matter of time, and Aranda made a concerted effort not to look. Suddenly it was tremendously hot and he was sweating profusely; his hands were trembling as if they had life of their own. The specters finally managed to climb up forming a human column, and Aranda could almost see their expressions of rage and the tendons in their necks, as tense as steel cables. The men were not able to defend themselves at all and were taken down and subdued with amazing and voracious speed. Their viscera flew off into the air, and even a leg severed at the thigh, the white bone dyed with blood was as blunt as a sinister scepter. The extremity was reason for dispute among the crowd that waited below, but there was no biting, no zombie was interested in eating the flesh, just in ripping it to pieces.

Aranda had seen similar horror scenes before, but he still had not managed to be numb to it. Maybe that was precisely why he was still alive: there was still some humanity left in him.

The zombies did not immediately calm down. They howled and screamed like hysterical and barbaric old women. Nonetheless they dispersed, some running up the street as if they had detected something somewhere else, others moving away in erratic directions, hitting everything in their way with their fists: vehicles, light posts, mailboxes, containers.

Aranda lay down, exhausted, in a corner of the supermarket among the toilet paper and the cardboard life-sized silhouette of a woman that proclaimed
“SMILE WITH ALL OF YOUR TEETH”. He curled up into a ball on the floor in the fetal position, hugging his own legs to his chest. His arms and legs hurt, his muscles were stiff due to the tension he had subjected them to. He tried to close his eyes, telling himself that he was safe there, but he was very conscious that his safety was only apparent, and depended solely on not being discovered. He knew that, if they realized that someone was alive in there, nothing would stop them, not the metal grille, not the safety doors, and not the bulletproof windows. While he felt that he was falling asleep, which he only managed to do because of his subconscious and intimate wish to escape from the situation, he told himself that it was only matter of time until those things would end up cornering him like all of the others. He had to leave, look for someone else. He had to locate other survivors, organize a group, and receive each new day with controlled possibilities of surviving.

The next morning he awoke, alone and sweating, in the dense stillness of the supermarket. A look at the street allowed him to verify that everything had gone back to normal. The cars were destroyed, and there was blood and unrecognizable pieces of flesh everywhere. He vomited, unable to control himself, losing the bag of chips he had ingested the day before, but afterwards he felt a little better. He had one sole message blinking with bright neon lights in his mind: he would wait not a day more; he was going to Malaga, in search of people. Surely he would find more people there, organized people who had the situation under control. He took some provisions, some bottles of water and departed.

It was an enormous effort to move forward, and each kilometer he gained was an achievement. The road was crammed with abandoned cars, arranged in sinister rows. There were vehicles that had been knocked over, some were completely burned, and most of them were wrecked to some degree. There were vans loaded with suitcases whose contents had been scattered all over. And there were bodies, real cadavers, lying on the ground, on their backs and sides, eyes open, fixed forevermore on some horrifying scene that had been etched into their opaque retinas. He also found zombies, dragging their dusty feet through the iron and ash filled cemetery, but there were many less than he had expected.

The Foreman Quad proved to be a valuable vehicle, mostly due to Juan’s prodigious ability to drive it. When the vehicular chaos made it impossible to continue in any direction, he abandoned the road, driving up a dirt embankment and moved forward at a good pace through the countryside. No pass was too difficult, no hole in the terrain was too deep, and the Foreman met every obstacle.

He had barely reached the overcrowded neighborhood of El Palo, a seething mass of humanity filled with tall buildings, when he turned towards the beach. Once there, he advanced as far as he could. He explored the horizon as he drove; the color of the sky was mixed with the pearl color of the sea, which was choppy with small crests of white foam, but once again the total lack of ships saddened him. It was really as if
no one else
were left, although his heart and mind screamed at him that it was impossible.

Then the Quad crackled, emitted a hoarse noise and stalled, and silence fell upon the beach as if it had never left.

Instinctively, Aranda tried to restart the vehicle. He managed it once, but it stalled again almost immediately. An intense wave of anxiety began to grow inside him, so intense that he began to sweat. He looked around. There were a few figures moving in the distance, but as at the beach in Rincon, there were not many wanderers in sight.

He looked at his treasured machine, disconcerted, and then it dawned on him: the gasoline indicator’s needle was completely horizontal, marking absolute zero. Out of gas.

“
Idiot... STUPID!” he said, feeling his heart accelerate. He cursed himself for not having noticed it before. “What the hell is the MATTER with me?” he shouted, to no one in particular. He knew that his survival depended on the great autonomy and maneuverability the Foreman afforded him. When he recovered his calm, he looked towards the North. The boardwalk was deserted except for a couple of those things, and they did not seem to have noticed his presence. Both walked slowly towards the East, maintaining a distance between each other. A little farther away, there was an opening to a small street with beautiful trees on both sidewalks, shady and dark, and he could make out the slow wandering of a greater group of zombies. There were also a couple of cars. Cars, perhaps with gasoline inside.

He stood a few seconds trying to decide what his first move would be. He was not going to risk advancing into the streets; he knew perfectly well that they constituted a mortal trap. No, he needed something different; to think in a different way, see the problem outside of the box, as his father had taught him. He tried to compose himself, breathe normally and concentrate. He extended his hands downwards, and looked around. Details, he had to pay attention to everything, the tiniest thing could be the key, the solution to the problem. He noticed the decrepit sign of an old abandoned refreshment stall that read
“OUR SPECIALTY IS SANGRIA”, a fallen lamppost with its highest extremity resting against an open window making a thirty-degree angle, scattered bodies all over, already dried and softened by the sun, a Berlin Circus poster, trash idly swept by the soft breeze from one place to another, the wooden fishing boats whose paint was beginning to crack and bend where the grooves had appeared in the wood... the rowboats...

He stopped
... and quickly turned around. There was the solution, an enormous extension of freedom where there was
nothing
: the sea.

There was an old rowboat that did not look too bad. It was not too big, and it was not far from the shore: he could push it if he found the rollers. Rollers and, if the good fairy of providence had a good day, maybe he could get a couple of paddles. He looked towards the interior and there, close to the boardwalk’s railing, he saw an anglers’ hut. Even from his position, he could clearly see that it was securely closed with chains and a padlock.