This Rotten World (Book 2): We All Fall Down (2 page)

Katie sat at the intersection,
the engine of her red Dodge Durango idling quietly. She was at a crossroads,
literally and figuratively. Around her, bodies moved, drawn to the promise of a
fresh meal by the quiet putter of the engine. She had no intention of letting
that happen. She felt the comfort of the silver revolver in her jacket pocket.

Now what?
The road lay
before her. The sun rose higher in the sky. She had been cruising the streets
for hours, turning left and right with no destination in mind. There was
surprisingly little traffic, if you didn't count the shambling dead who were
even now closing in upon her. They seemed to be everywhere. In the distance, a
skyscraper burned, its top floors engulfed in orange flames, black smoke
spewing forth from the inferno.

More clouds of smoke joined it
from various other locations in the city. Where was the fire department? Where
were the people who were supposed to fix things? In the air, she saw
helicopters hovering in the sky, looking like dragonflies in the distance.
Katie glanced down at the gas gauge on her car. Half a tank... that wouldn't
get her far, not in her gas-guzzling SUV.

The real question was would
there still be a gas station that was open? She jumped as a creature pounded
its open hands on her windows, smearing gore all over them. She looked at the
creature's face. It had been a woman once, blue-eyes, cloudy and empty. Parts
of her lips were missing exposing half of her teeth, which made it look as if
it were smiling crookedly. Her green cardigan sweater was covered in dried
gore, and the wedding ring on her hand glittered in the sunlight. Katie hated
her.

She threw the car in reverse,
and watched as the woman stumbled after her, her arms outstretched. She put the
car in drive and pressed forward slowly. The creature was pushed backwards but couldn't
keep pace with the slow advance of Katie's Durango. It went under, and the
vehicle rocked as Katie drove over the woman in an effort to extinguish the
crooked smile forever. Just to make sure, she threw it in reverse and backed up
a few feet, bumping gently into another creature behind her.
Fuck him too.

Over the hood of her car, she
saw the woman trying to crawl towards her. Some key components of her body were
broken, but still she crawled. Katie lined up the creature's head with her
driver's side tire, and then she stepped on the accelerator. She saw the
creature's hand come up as if to try and stop the car, and then it was gone.
The car shook violently, the vehicle's steel frame rattling as she drove over
the creature's head. Katie pulled the Durango in a wide circle to come around
one more time if she needed to. She didn't. The creature's head was smashed,
the insides oozing onto the hot morning concrete. She felt better.

Katie pressed on, weaving in and
out of the dead who wandered the streets.
Where were they all coming from?
How many people had died in the night?
She turned on the radio to clear her
mind. She punched a button and tuned the Durango's radio to her favorite
station, a pop station that played light, forgettable fare punctuated by
obnoxious DJs who thought they were more hilarious than they actually were. There
was nothing, just a hum. Katie punched the seek button on her car stereo and
waited for it to find a different station. The first station that it stopped on
was a station that she typically associated with oldies, old white boys singing
about girls and summer to the accompaniment of guitars, bass, and drums. It was
not her scene, but today there was something else on the radio. Instead of the
usual thoughtless tunes, a recording was playing. She listened intently as the
deep male voice dropped information in a loop that ran for a minute before
playing over.

"This is a public service
announcement. The city of Portland is under martial law. All citizens are
requested to remain inside. If you have need of police, fire, or medical
service dial 911. Do not, under any circumstances, leave your house. Stay in
your home, barricade your doors and windows, and listen to the radio for
further updates. Citizens on the street are putting their lives at risk. Stay
inside."

The message started again from
the beginning. Stay inside... what a joke. There was no way Katie was going
back to her house to sit by herself, replaying the final moments of her family
in a house that was now filled with nothing but memories. Lost in thought, she
pulled into a gas station and threw the car into park.

She didn't know why she did it,
but she sat in the car waiting, as if a gas station attendant were going to
come out at any moment and pump the gas for her. She pressed the seek button
again, and another station came on. This time, she found a talk radio station.
She didn't pay attention to the words as she looked around. The lights on the
gas station's mini-mart were still on, and around her, creatures were moving. She
could feel them closing in on her, their eyes drawn to her movements.

She opened her door and stepped
out of the car, lifting the lever that popped open the little door to her gas tank.
She stepped up to the pump and lifted it off of the hook. She unscrewed her gas
cap and was greeted by the pungent odor of gasoline. She pressed the yellow
fuel selector button and breathed a brief sigh of relief as she felt the magic
liquid course through the hose, down the nozzle, and into her tank.

Katie kept her head on a swivel
as the machine pumped, numbers ticking by and pumping mechanisms clicking.
Outside the quiet environment of her car, she could hear the horror of
Portland. In the distance, a fire crackled and there were scattered batches of
gunfire. The moans of the dead filled the city and made her skin crawl. She
could see them, moving towards her, getting closer with every second. She had
never wanted a Prius more than at that moment, a nice electric car that didn't
need so much gasoline... she would have been out of there by now.

The doors to the gas station
slid open, and an attendant came out, his blue work shirt covered in his own
blood. He was closer than she wanted him to be, so she pulled her gun free of
her jacket. She thumbed the safety off, just as Fred Walker had showed her, and
she aimed the gun at the attendant, his pale face locked in a scream. She
didn't want to fire, not standing next to a gas pump which was connected to who
knew how many gallons of gasoline. What good was surviving if you just blew
your ass up at the first opportunity?

When she reckoned that the man
had gotten close enough, she pulled the nozzle out of her car and placed it back
on the hook for the next lucky customer. After screwing the gas cap back on,
she held the gun up to the attendant's head and pulled the trigger, hoping
against hope that she wasn't giving herself a funeral by fireball.

The man fell over, and the dead
faces in the street, if they hadn't yet turned in her direction, had done so by
now, drawn by the loud crack of the revolver that left Katie's ears ringing.
She hurried inside the store and grabbed some necessary supplies. Then she
hustled over to her car door and hopped into the driver's seat, slamming the
door shut behind her. She turned the engine on and cruised away.
That was
simple,
she thought.

The voices on the radio droned
on in their librarian tones. It was a local program, and they were doing their duty.
Despite the fact that they probably had family in the city, they were sticking
it out, behind their consoles, probably dreaming of some sort of glorious
journalism award. How altruistic of them.

A man with a deep voice
proclaimed, "Everything is going to be alright. The military is here, and
things will be under control soon."

His counterpart, a man with a
nasally voice said, "Remember to stay off the streets. If you absolutely
must leave your home, head to the rescue station at the Memorial Coliseum. The
highways are locked up tight with stalled and abandoned vehicles. For now,
there is no way out of the city, except by air or by boat."

Rescue... rescue was as good a
proposition as any she had heard. She punched up directions to the Memorial
Coliseum on the GPS sitting on her dashboard. It was an underused birthday gift
from her husband... her husband.
Maybe they could rescue her from her own
thoughts
, she mused as she stepped on the accelerator, dodging the bodies
that clogged the streets.

The problem was present. It had
to be dealt with. Thirty or forty bodies moving through the dilapidated
tenement, adding more to their ranks with each step they took. The undead were
tireless. Groggy junkies waking from a night of abusing their own bodies were
no match for a mass of indefatigable automatons searching for one thing and one
thing only... live flesh.

Zeke planted himself against the
door, his ear to the cheap wood. Behind him was a scene that would be
considered a nightmare in ordinary times. A large black man lay on the bed, a
bullet wound through his head, his brains splattered on the dirty mattress.
Blood ran down the wall. A naked woman in chains rotted on the mattress next to
him, her fingers frozen in a claw that was mid-dig in the man's dead body. The
twice dead girl's eyes looked at him, accusing. He had put the bullet hole in
her forehead, and he would have done it again.

He didn't know how the girl had
wound up there. Had she died of an overdose? Had she always been a prisoner?
Zeke didn't want to know. It wasn't his problem. He looked over at the man that
occupied the room with him, Lou, the son of the man lying on the mattress. Lou
had put the bullet through his father's head himself. Zeke respected that. Lou
could have left the task to Zeke, and he would have done it gladly, but he had
cleaned up his own mess. Sure, Gary Lee's depravity wasn't caused by Lou, but
it was still his mess. We're all responsible for our families in one way or
another.

As he was thinking, he heard
their approach. Muffled screams could be heard from other parts of the
building. When the wrought-iron fence out front had failed and the dead had
flooded the courtyard of the tenement, Zeke knew they only had one chance. They
had to stay put at the farthest end of the building and let the mass of the
undead spread out. Alone, they could be dealt with. As a mass, even the
best-trained soldier would find himself outnumbered and overwhelmed by the throng
of unyielding dead.

The moans and screams came
closer. The sounds of scattered gun shots echoed through the tenement's flimsy
walls, but they didn't last for long. Zeke pressed his hand to the shattered
doorjamb, holding the door as closed as he could. He looked over at Lou. He was
harder than he looked; harder than a lot of soldiers he had encountered in his
own time. There was nothing quite like a youth spent on a street full of danger
with a twisted, drug dealer for a father to temper a man's steel. Zeke had seen
the man's mettle for himself in the police station that they had escaped from,
a station that now was likely little more than an animated morgue.

The moans and screams were
closer. He heard feet pounding down the warped wooden floor in the hallway.

"Help!" a man
screamed.

Zeke looked over at Lou and
shook his head. The man couldn't be helped, he was a liability, an unknown.
Survival was number one right now. If Zeke gave the go-ahead, Lou would save
the man without hesitation, but there was no way of knowing if the man was bit
or sick. One bite. That's all it seemed to take. It wasn't worth the risk. If
they let the man in and he was bitten, there would only be one thing to do, put
something to the head... either a bullet or a boot. Either way, that would
bring attention that they didn't need. They heard banging on a door down the
hallway from where they hid. They heard the splintering of wood, and then they
heard more footsteps, different from the ones that came before. They were
shuffling movements, sliding through the refuse of the tenement's hallways.
Then the screaming came.

They stood in silence as an
entire building of people became an entire building of the dead, except for the
two of them. Zeke didn't know how long they stood in the quiet, but the room
had heated up as the sun rose, baking the corner apartment on the third floor.
The smell of decaying corpses had grown, and his body was covered in sweat.
They had to get out. It was time.

"You ready?"

Lou, who had been silent for
most of their watch, nodded his head, sweat pouring off the smooth brown skin
of his bald head. Zeke pushed the door open slowly and stepped out into the
dimly lit hall of the tenement. Though it was the middle of the day, most of
the windows had been broken and boarded up. Sunlight and heat filtered into the
hallways in scattered rays, and the dead lingered. Zeke breathed deeply, trying
to rid himself of the odor of the nightmare they had left behind. The smell in
the tenement hallway wasn't much better; it still smelled of urine and the
deceased, but it wasn't nearly as strong.

Through the narrow corridor,
they moved like cats stalking prey, Zeke taking the lead. He inched forward,
heel to toe, avoiding the scattered refuse that littered the floor of the
hallway, discarded syringes, empty baggies, and fast food wrappers. The door to
the first room they came to was boarded up. That was good. They slid past it,
watching where their feet went.

As they approached the next
door, they heard the sound of it first. A subtle creak in the floorboards, a
disturbance in the air pressure, something was in there, and the door was
hanging off of its hinges. This must be the room where the unlucky screamer had
tried to hide. Zeke brought the sight of the gun up to eye level, and turned
quickly, taking in all the information he could, as fast as he could. Three
bodies, two squatting over the form of another, their backs to the door.
Good,
he thought.
Let's keep it that way.

Zeke glided past the door, his
gun at the ready, and then he motioned Lou forward with a wave of his hand. His
breath caught in his throat, as Lou moved past the door, but he made it without
incident, and he exhaled silently through his nose, a long deep breath. If the
zombies didn't kill him, the damn stress would.

They continued through the
hallway, approaching the landing of the third floor, a murky square room that
had been populated by drug-abusing trash on couches with stained cushions and
exposed stuffing the last time they had come through. Down the hallway that led
to the other half of the third-floor, Zeke could see one of the dead, standing
in a corner as if it had done something wrong. The sight of Zeke's gun never
deviated from its head, even when he chanced a peek around the corner to scope
out the landing.

There was no one there. The
things seemed to appreciate the path of least resistance. There were few of
them on the third floor, but you could be damned sure the second floor and the
first floor were literally crawling with the things. Zeke heel-toed out into
the landing, sweat beading on his brow, Lou two-feet behind him, the way he had
told him to be. The wild part of Zeke, that instinctual being that was locked
away in his brain, screamed for him to lay the creature out, lay them all out.
He knew it wouldn't be any good. They were in a city of the dead, with a few
handfuls of ammunition and nowhere to run.

He moved forward across the
stained, red carpeting and looked over the edge of the landing, trying to see
what was awaiting them. There were none on the stairs; that's all he could
tell.
When would this end?

Zeke crouched low, and inched
forward down the stairs, resisting the temptation to go down head first so he
could see what was waiting in the next room. It wasn't long before he no longer
needed to worry. He was halfway down the stairs when the first moan alerted him
to their presence. The landing was populated by four of the creatures, fresh
and bloody, and there was nothing he could do but squeeze the trigger.

His ears rang after the first
shot. By the time he had pulled the trigger a fifth time, he could barely hear
it. Lou was firing his pistol as well. Their accuracy was shit. Lou was no
marksman, and a submachine gun wasn't necessarily the type of weapon Zeke would
have picked for precision. Nevertheless, the dead died again, and as their feet
hit the second landing, they picked up their pace, knowing that whatever was
lurking in the building was now most likely after them, honing in like sharks
on a bleeding fish. They would not be an easy meal.

"Let's move our
asses," Zeke said, the bullets freeing him from all restrictions on
speaking. He sprinted to the next stairwell, past corpses that would now stay
dead forever, their brains splattered all over the abused couches, walls, and
floor.

"I can't wait to get out of
this place," Lou whispered, though by now it was unnecessary as the moans
of the dead filled the hallways. At the top of the stairs, Zeke looked down and
put his finger on the trigger, squeezing off rounds as the tide of the dead
surged up from the bottom floor. The dead fell but were replaced by more faster
than he could shoot. When his gun clicked empty, he stepped back to reload. Lou
stepped into his place and fired more rounds. By the time, Lou's gun was out of
bullets, the battle was already lost.

The dead were an unstoppable force.
Zeke slammed the new clip home, and pulled the cocking mechanism back, while
Lou fumbled with his handgun. Zeke was thankful that it wasn't a revolver. The
stairs were hopeless. Zeke could see that now. He turned and was about to tell
Lou the same thing, when he spied movement out of the corner of his eye. With
Lou focused on reloading, he hadn't noticed the gnarled fingers of a skinny
woman with pale skin reaching out for him from behind, her mouth already open
and ready to ruin Lou's day.

"Down!" he yelled. Had
Lou hesitated for even a second, he would have been dead or well on his way
towards it. But he didn't. He dropped to the ground immediately, and Zeke
leveled his gun at the woman's head, firing several rounds to make sure he got
the job done right. The pink mist that erupted from her destroyed eye was proof
that he still had it, the ability to kill, the ability to react to a shitty
situation without thinking about it. Lou jammed the clip home in the handgun as
he popped up off the ground, and they moved down the hallway as the first of
the dead reached the landing. There was no time to formulate a plan. There was
no plan to be formed. This was pure survival. He could taste its metallic
flavor in the back of his throat, his heart beating as if it wanted out of his
chest. More dead lined the hallways of the second floor, slowly advancing on
them.

Lou cocked his gun and fired as
Zeke took out another one of the dead. They moved through the hallway, putting
down six of them, their aim improving with every shot, but they were still
burning through ammo, and there was no time to refill the clips. They moved to
the end of the hallway on the second floor, leaving bodies in their wake. Zeke
looked over his shoulder, and shuddered at the mob that was approaching. They
had put some distance between themselves and the mass, but they would be here
in another moment.

Zeke tried the handle of the
door. When it didn't budge, he took a step back and kicked the door with every
ounce of strength he could muster. It flew inward. On the bed, a skinny man in
a wifebeater sat up, a needle hanging out of his arm. Now was not the time for
hesitation. Zeke didn't care if he was alive or dead, so he put a bullet
through his head.

They stepped inside of the room.
It was a crash pad, a stained mattress on the floor, a rotting body, and a beat
up old loveseat in the corner. "Help me!" he yelled to Lou as he
hastened to the loveseat. They dragged it across the scarred wooden floor and
pressed it up against the broken door. It wasn't much of a barricade, but it
would give them the time to reload.

Zeke pulled out the empty clip
he had put in his pocket and began thumbing in rounds of ammunition that
floated in his other pocket. He pulled the half-empty clip from the machine gun
and did the same as the sound of the first fist on the door hit. More fists
followed, and the cheap wood vibrated with the force. When he finished loading
the second clip, he saw that Lou had done the same, back against the loveseat
and his legs dug into the ground, preventing the dead from forcing their way
inside.

Zeke ran to the window and threw
it open. The apartment opened on the backside of the building. The ground below
was solid concrete, but it was clear. Still, a twenty foot drop was not a thing
to be taken lightly. He thought about throwing the mattress out the window to
break their fall, but when a rotten fist punched through the wood of the door,
he abandoned the idea.

"Looks like we're going to
have to jump. You want to go first or second?"

"You go. I'll be right
behind you."

"You sure you don't want to
go first?"

Lou looked at him as if he were
from another planet. "Man, are you scared?"

Zeke looked out the window.
"It's a long way down."

"Get out that goddamn
window, before I shoot you myself." Zeke smiled at Lou as he threw the
window up and leaned out.

Zeke rested his gun on the
ground. "Before you jump out, toss this bad boy down to me. I don't want
to damage it in the fall." Lou nodded his head. "Man, that's a long
way down," Zeke said as he climbed out the window. He dropped down,
clinging to the windowsill to lessen the distance that he would have to fall.
The cracked and dried paint dug into his hands. He had the feeling that this
was how his life was going to end, and then he let go, dropping the fifteen
feet to the ground. He landed with a thump, his heart landed a few seconds
later. He was alright, though he still felt the impact of the drop in his
knees. He looked up in time to see the gun falling towards him. His hands
reacted out of instinct, protecting his face from the falling chunk of metal.
He managed to catch the gun and not shoot himself in the process.
Not too
shabby,
he thought.

Lou appeared at the window, the
gun tucked into his pants. He put his legs out the window first and then sat on
the edge. From the ground, Zeke read Lou's moving lips. He thought he made out
the words, "Fuck this," but he could have been wrong. Lou hesitated
and paused, looking up at the sky before he dropped out the window, fear frozen
on his face.