Wasting Away (11 page)

“I’m
still not sold,” she said.

“So
you’d rather stay here and starve?”

“It
seems like a better option than being ripped to pieces,” she replied. “So where
did you go after the dead followed you from the ocean?”

“I
tried to find a place to hide.”

“That’s
it?” she asked.

“
It
was starting to get dark …
” I began.

Chapter 10

In
the beach areas, the roads are narrow. There’s just enough room to get two cars
through the alleyways that divide the homes. I fled and ran right into the
middle of a horde. They were tightly pressed against each side of the garages
and when I turned the corner, I was stuck. Behind me, another mob had gathered,
following from the beach.
Ahead, there was nothing but a raging mass of deathly faces.

Thinking
as quickly as I could, a leapt up on a trashcan and grabbed a rain gutter that
was fastened to the side of the house. I pulled myself up as the downspout
shook, slowly releasing from the stucco. When I was high enough, I looked back
to a sea of flailing arms. I pulled myself up onto the roof. As I lay on my
back, knotting the pain out of my hands, I stared at the sky and the light that
diminished past the ledge.

My
entire body screamed from the exertion. When the adrenaline starts to fade, all
you’re left with is pulled muscles and this feeling of emptiness. My head was a
mess; I couldn’t get my thoughts straight. The world kept spinning around me
and I couldn’t get my bearings. And the dead kept moaning down below. It was as
if they were begging me to give up, screaming at me to fail.

In
my life before, I had been prone to failure. Maybe I missed a big account or
couldn’t manage my credit card debt. I had even felt like a failure when I
couldn’t get my wife pregnant. There were all sorts of failures. And I really
didn’t mind all that much. That’s what makes the world go ‘round. For every
success, there are thousands of failures. Not everyone can win.

But
this was different. I couldn’t give up. I just couldn’t let them get the better
of me. I refused to lie there any longer, letting the pain in my body win out.
I pushed myself up on all fours, panting through the cramps that settled in my
arms. I stood on the roof and looked down at the creatures. They stretched for
blocks, as far as I could see. I ran to the far side of the house and gazed
down at a relatively empty street. There were only a handful of them down on
the other side and they were moving off to join the others. I waited for a few
more minutes until there were only a couple of them and eased my legs off the
side of the roof, searching for the railing of the second floor balcony. I felt
the rail with the tips of my toes and I swung my body over and let go of the
flashing. I hit hard and the impact knocked the wind out of my lungs. It seemed
like an eternity until I caught my breath again. I stumbled to my feet and
gasped for air. The smell of salt and sea and tepid death came to my nose,
forcing me forward.

I
had knocked over a table and was afraid the sound would bring them back. I
looked down at the sand in the front yard, only ten or twelve feet below, and
leapt. It was probably one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. I didn’t
think about twisting an ankle or breaking a leg, I just threw caution to the
wind and jumped. I rolled when I hit and that’s probably what saved me. I was
up as soon as I hit the sand. I didn’t look back, I just ran. I ran for
everything I was worth as the dead moaned just a block away.

I
picked a direction and zigzagged through the streets, turning as much as I
could without straying from my set path. I headed southeast and stayed away
from the main roads.

I
could hear them all about me as the sun began to fade into darkness. They were
everywhere and I was the thing that didn’t belong in their world. This was a
new frontier where death was everywhere and reigned supreme.

As
slow as they were, it was their numbers that brought death so swiftly. The new
reason to live became threaded in how fast you could run and how well you could
hide.

Deep
in the city, I found another place where the police had stood their ground and
the blood was dried brown, staining the concrete. I wondered how many places
there were like this. How many barricades had been broken? How many outpost and
compounds overrun?

Bodies,
too badly eaten to rise, lay heaped along the road; hallow ribs and gleaming
bone chewed until only the white remained. A few rats strayed from the bodies
when I approached. Cockroaches oozed from the gaps in between. I held my breath
to keep the stench at bay, but I could only hold it for so long until I gasped
and brought the putrid decay back into my lungs.

I
searched like mad, trying to keep myself from losing what little remained in my
stomach. I finally came upon a holster that laid in the gutter, shining rounds
all about the belt, and I took it and thumbed out the ammo and left the belt
there to rot with everything else. I put the ammo in my pack along with the
other rounds I had gathered.

Darkness
was settling across the sky and I could smell the faintest hint of fire on the
wind. The sky was blotched red above grey smoke.

The
dead moaned in the distance. The sounds they made hinted at pain, it played
with my instincts, to reach out, to help those that cried in such misery.
Somehow, it seemed as if there was something still human about them, that if I
tried hard enough, I could bring them around. These thoughts were illusions,
but it really did seem like they would snap out of whatever it was that made
them that way.

I
was so utterly alone. I stopped in the middle of a vacant lot and thought,
really took my situation into account. I was running, but wasn’t getting any
closer to home. The people I loved were gone and I was another nameless husk
amongst so many others. The only thing I knew was that I didn’t want to die. I
decided at that moment that if I were to get back to my wife, I was going to
have to put aside my disgust of the dead and do whatever it took to bridge the
distance.  

I
must have walked for hours because the sun began to drift up over the
mountains, deep lines of purple and red lay triumphant along the clouds like a
trophy to the sleepless.

 
“So you ran from the beach and
kept going until morning?” Mary asked.

“As
unbelievable as it sounds, yes.”

“You
had to be close to falling over.”

“That,
I was,” I said. “I’ve never been so tired. I had pushed myself farther than I
ever had before. My entire body tingled with exertion.”

There,
across the dirt and asphalt, a city cast its gaze toward the skies. Even from
miles away, I could tell this place was like all the others. I had only been
through this city a handful of times, always on my way to somewhere else, never
stopping for anything more than gas or a quick bite to eat.

I
went into the city. A mass of wrecks lined the streets. The smell of burnt
chemicals had drifted away with time, but the husks still remained. Like a
junkyard through time, a scrapbook filled with scenes that pointed out each
massacre in turn.

We
have become the trash discarded by the unfurling of gnarled hands, I thought.

I
slept away the day in the second floor of a blown out building. With my pack
cinched tightly against my back, I climbed the rubble. Broken chunks of
concrete blocked the only door from what had been an office. I tucked myself
beneath a desk and placed my pack under my head. I heard explosions from far
off in the city. I heard the dead scream below. I listened to the building
creak as I placed my arm over my eyes and began to drift away.

It
was dark when I arose. Moonlight played at the shadows of the wreckage below,
creating deep crevices of darkness between the slabs of wall that had toppled
from the building.

I
slowly made my way back down to the street, negotiating through jagged rebar
and sheered of water pipes. A layer of dust covered me from my descent. I wiped
away the dirt from my eyes and followed the light that seeped through the
clouds. 

Through
the rust and ash, I could see the bodies shuffling along littered streets.
Hunched over, they seemed like haggard drunks with shallow, sunken faces. Each
one was a testimony to defiance. The natural course of life and death had never
come for them.

I
was alone, but my prison was no more. I had thrown off my fear of those things
and emerged a new man. There was something transcendental about it like shedding
skin. I felt free for the first time since this had begun.

Over
time, I discovered what they were, what made them tick, what made them want me
dead. No breath escaped their lungs; no heart beat within their rotten chests.
They were everything and nothing to me, they were the symbols of a new life, a
new way of thought, and a new world just waiting to be had.

I
watched, waiting for them to move away. They never stayed in one place for too
long. They were thirsty for blood; they were hungry for flesh; they were
ghoulish things constructed of fear.

As
soon as they were out of eyeshot, I made my move and sprinted from behind the
wreck I used for cover to a partially collapsed building at the other side of
the street. Above the building, I caught a glimpse of a power line that ran to
the park, glistening slightly from the moonlight and dew. I took cover in a
pile of fallen bricks from the building to my side and held my breath for fear
of them hearing me.

The
clothes I had scavenged from the sporting goods store were covered in filth,
saturated in waste and sweat, torn by my ordeal. They were the image of how far
I had gone, and everything I had been through. I wore them like a badge of
courage.

The
dead made their way across the street, a block away and down an embankment to
the park below. They moaned and wheezed as they shuffled along, haggard beggars
in search of spare change and loose skin. A gentle wind brought their stench
and I wanted to vomit from the smell. Their odor was like piss and shit and rotten
fish left to bake in the midday sun. I held my breath for a moment before I
made my move.

Through
the building I used as cover, I found an opening in the ruined outer wall and
crawled through. Blast marks singed the sides of the hole. I passed a door on
the first floor and made my way to a set of stairs. I leapt over a corpse at
the bottom and continued upward. At every landing, I waited, concentrating on
the groaning sounds of the building, hoping to filter through the sounds of the
dead that might have been in there with me.

At
the top of the third floor, I peered through the broken out window that
overlooked the street below. In the distance, they swarmed a particular area of
the park and I strained my eyes to see what had gotten them in such a fuss.

There
was a shadowed form, huddled atop a platform of a water tower at the far side
of the park. I could see the shape move slightly as the bodies screamed below.
Their voices were like twisting metal; shrill and unnerving.

From
my pack, I pulled a small pair of binoculars and gazed at the shape on the
catwalk. I could see tufts of hair poking out from underneath the hood of a sweater.
The figure moved their head to the left and I could finally see a face. She was
a young girl, probably in her teens. Dirt stained her face and streaks of clean
skin appeared beneath her eyes and along her cheeks from where tears had washed
away the dirt.

The
way she looked made me think of the time before. I had pulled off the freeway
on my way home and saw a young man holding a sign that simply read HUNGRY. His
hair was caked to his head and he wore a long face and scruffy beard, splotched
about his cheeks and chin. I thought he couldn’t have been much older than
twenty. But it was his clothes that caught my attention. Youth is a time to
rebel and what better way to show your distaste for society than to wear black?
His shirt and pants had faded to a dull brown, bleached by the sun. On the
other side of the overpass, I saw a young girl. She kept an attentive eye on
the guy holding the sign. And she looked just like the girl on the water tower.
Everything she was or would be had been faded into a dull brown.

It
was hard to tell how many of the dead were
there. They resembled a writhing
mass of shadow, but I gauged at least a hundred bodies at the foot of the water
tower and several dozen more approaching from around the outer banks of the
park.

I
descended the stairs, hopped over the corpse at the bottom and checked the door
I had found on the first floor. The knob turned easily in my hand and I slowly
pushed it inward.