Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End (24 page)

About twenty minutes ago, Waqar started death rattles. The gruesome wound on his arm is still oozing smelly pus. His insides must be getting worse. A reddish fluid is flowing from his intestines; he lost control of his bowels a long time ago. His panting sounds like a steam freight train climbing a mountain. He stops breathing suddenly, then gasps for breath as if he were drowning. His agony has put everyone on edge.

I take some comfort in knowing that he lost consciousness a couple of hours. If he were awake, his suffering would be horrible.

I feel absolutely helpless. A human life is ending before my very eyes, and I have no drugs or knowledge to prevent it.

Usman and Shafiq recite
suras
monotonously, clutching a Muslim rosary. If this is hard for me, it must be terrifying for them. They’re thousands of miles from home, watching a friend die. I saw disgust in their eyes when Waqar started shitting blood.

Violent death isn’t a pretty sight like in the movies, where the hero falls with a smile and some last words for his beloved. Death is terrible, dirty, and very painful, if you’ve got what Waqar has. Those guys don’t seem to know that. I didn’t know that either a few weeks ago, but I saw a few dead on the way here, and that hardened me.

Viktor and I have a very serious problem. We know, or suspect, what will happen to Waqar in a few hours, but we’ve decided not to do anything for now. In the first place, we’re unarmed. That severely limits our possibilities. In the second place, neither Usman or Shafiq will shoot Waqar. Not surprising. He’s their friend, after all.

I laughed bitterly at that. The group from the Safe Haven must’ve felt the same way when they left that poor devil locked in the bathroom. Now, thanks to their “love for their fellow man,” we have this freak show on our hands.

Kritzinev is totally drunk and out of it. He keeps mumbling incoherently in Russian. From time to time, he laughs, doubled over with tears running down his cheeks into his beard, as if someone’s told him an extremely funny joke. At one point he screamed like a madman at the gate, where the undead are still pounding away outside. He pulled out his gun, but Pritchenko leaped up like a deer and grabbed it before he could shoot. Kritzinev glared at him and then collapsed, unconscious, drunk as a skunk. Just as well.

Now we have a weapon. Neither Usman or Shafiq made any move to take it away. That’s something.

The undead are still out there, mercilessly beating against the door. It’s an awful, grating sound. I think their numbers are growing, but I have no way of knowing for sure.

Waqar’s death rattles are becoming more frequent, one every ten minutes or so. The end is near.

The sun is coming up. Faint rays of sunlight filter through slits in the metal gate. From time to time those things’ shadows block the light as they wander back and forth. The store smells of blood, shit, sweat, fear, and pus. Waqar died ten minutes ago in terrible agony. Usman and Shafiq are reciting a funeral oration that sounds like a mantra. They keep watch on the body with one hand on their AK-47s and the other on a Koran. Pritchenko and I are keeping watch, too, but for other reasons.

Waqar will rise again any time now. Or something that looks like Waqar. There are no words to define our anguish as we wait. My hand is trembling as I write this in my journal. It looks like a six-year-old’s handwriting.

Viktor and I are breathing fast, and our hearts are racing. We know we’ll see one of those things born from a comrade-in-arms, if not a friend. When he returns, he’ll be the predator, and we’ll be his prey.

Waqar’s agony has been horrific. Two hours after he lost consciousness, small purple spots, the size of a dime, spread all over his body. Waqar’s circulatory system failed. It couldn’t send oxygen throughout his body, so he slowly suffocated.

Three hours later, something creepy happened. Delicate capillaries and veins in Waqar’s circulatory system became visible on his skin. You could trace them perfectly, like in a med-school drawing. I had no way to measure his blood pressure, but I’d estimate he was running hot. His heartbeat was wildly irregular. Sweat poured off him, but I wouldn’t let Pritchenko dry him off without gloves. If the Ebola virus is transmitted by contact with sweat, this disease must be too.

The sad truth is, nobody knows shit about this disease. In another time, in a better world, this kid would’ve been fighting for his life, quarantined in an ICU, monitored by a regiment of doctors and nurses. Now he lay there in agony, in his own excrement, on the floor of a looted, dirty store in the middle of a city abandoned and dead. Like all of Europe and the whole fucking world.

At three and a half hours, his veins became visible; the vena cava and aorta were like thick cables. Excessive blood pressure burst the small, delicate veins under his skin. Waqar was starting to look an awful lot like the things that have tormented me for months. By now, we all knew, even the Pakistanis, that Waqar was becoming one of them.

After four and a half hours, he lost consciousness and started bleeding profusely from the mouth, ears, and eyes, and I suspect the anus and penis (no one had the courage to check). Except for Kritzinev, who was passed out, we watched that terrifying spectacle, frozen, not saying a word, too scared to react. In the background, a chorus of groans and thumps against the increasingly weakened gate greeted the birth of a new member of the legion of the undead.

At four hours and forty minutes, Waqar shook with spasms that looked like an epileptic seizure. His body arched to incredible heights, and his limbs flailed away on the ground. His head pounded rhythmically against the concrete. We couldn’t do anything. With each contraction, with each jolt of his limbs, he sprayed blood mixed with pus and excrement into the four corners of the room. Unless I’m mistaken, if even a drop of that goo came in contact with an exposed part of the body, it could be lethal.

I ordered Pritchenko and the Pakistanis to stay back in the front room while I used an old Plexiglas display case as a shield and observed this horrible death. I don’t know if Waqar could feel anything, but I prayed his mind was long gone.

Four hours and fifty-five minutes into the coma, Waqar’s body lay still. Even after ten minutes, I didn’t dare leave the precarious protection of Plexiglas to approach the still-warm body. He didn’t seem to be breathing. I wasn’t sure. I decided to get a little closer, just six feet. The body lay motionless in a pool of red liquid. The smell was nauseating. I squatted down beside the body to see if he was breathing (not for all the gold in the world would I have knelt in the middle of that mess). He wasn’t.

Suddenly, Waqar’s gummy, bloodshot eyes flew open. He opened his mouth and let out a deep death rattle. I got the fright of my life. With panicked scream, I jumped up, took a couple of steps back, and fell on my ass on the concrete. I was terrified that Waqar’s body would get up.

But nothing happened. As I tried to calm the runaway beat of my heart, Viktor, Shafiq, and Usman peered through the door, drawn by my unmanly shriek. I didn’t feel one bit ashamed. Anyone in my place would’ve been scared shitless.

I sat up and scanned the body again. That had been his last gasp. It was so violent and unexpected, I nearly died of fright. Waqar was dead. But for how long?

That was the least of our problems. The only way out of this place was the front door, and that crowd of monsters had no intention of leaving. That door would give way sooner or later.

I write this by the light of Victor’s flashlight. The last twelve hours have been worse than when those things turned up at my house, a million years ago.

Twelve minutes after Waqar’s last gasp, his body did a number of things that definitely weren’t natural. His chest wasn’t moving. I guess those things don’t breathe. His entire right arm shook. He was dead, and yet his arm twitched. It was incredible.

If that weren’t enough, his gummy, bloodshot eyes flew open and started moving spookily from side to side, not focusing on anything. The tiny broken veins in the whites of his eyes gave him a ghoulish look.

The tremor in his right arm spread to other limbs. After a few minutes, his entire body vibrated as if an electric current were running through it. In an ominous way, its body was coming alive. I say “its body” because Waqar’s soul, spirit, or whatever you call it had flown far away. A monster inhabited that body now.

We watched that unnatural spectacle, mesmerized. Usman was terrified. Tears rolled down his face, and he sobbed loudly and soulfully as he clung to his AK-47. The guy was about to lose it. It was too much for him.

Shafiq seemed unwilling to accept that reality and stubbornly bobbed forward and backward, sort of catatonic, obsessively reciting prayers from the Koran in a muffled chant that gave me the willies. In the background, we could hear the sound of hell—undead roaring and pounding at the gate.

Viktor gripped the huge gun he’d taken from Kritzinev with both hands. With a determined look on his face, he took a deep breath, cocked the rifle, and aimed at Waqar’s head. The thing was wobbling as it attempted to stand up. I shook my head and grabbed his arm to lower the gun. I wanted to see. I needed to know. Will he recognize us? Can we talk to him?

Kritzinev suddenly appeared at the door, staggering around, half-asleep. That crazed scene took him completely by surprise. He’d come to take a piss. On the way to the john, he came upon his two hostages now armed, two of his men totally
overcome by the situation, and the third mutating into one of those things.

For a moment he didn’t grasp the situation. Then the light went on. He ran over to Shafiq and snatched his assault rifle. By then, Waqar had managed to sit up and was looking around, dazed and bewildered. A new monster had been born, twelve minutes after he died. It was scary. Kritzinev went up to Waqar and aimed, his hands trembling. His voice cracked as he shouted something in Urdu. Waqar didn’t respond and continued to try to stand up. He shouted again. This time Waqar, the monster, glared at him and let out a terrifying groan, revealing a dark mouth filled with blood and pus.

That was too much for Kritzinev. He took a step back and pulled the trigger. The AK-47 was set on automatic, and it jumped in his hands, unleashing a hail of bullets. Waqar’s head was instantly turned into red pulp, like a watermelon hit by a truck, soaking Kritzinev with brains and blood.

All hell broke loose. One of the Pakistanis threw up noisily. Waqar’s body fell backward, convulsing. Kritzinev was enraged. He jumped over Waqar’s body and pointed the gun at our heads. For a second I thought he had the DTs from all the alcohol he’d drunk and was to going to blow us all away. That would be an absurd, ironic end: survive the apocalypse and hundreds of undead, only to be killed by a hallucinating drunk in the back room of an abandoned grocery store.

Fortunately, Kritzinev got a hold of himself and didn’t fire, but he kept the gun pointed at us. Barking at Pritchenko in Russian, he forced us against the wall. He snatched the gun from the Ukrainian, who made no effort to resist. Smart move. Hearing the gunfire, both Pakistanis snapped out of their catatonic state and stood behind their boss, guns in hand, glaring at us, ready
to pull the trigger if we made the slightest hostile move. The best thing was to look innocent and roll with it.

Kritzinev pounced on Pritchenko and violently punched him, sending him crashing against the wall. With a look of sadistic satisfaction, he turned to me and raised his arm, ready to give me my share. I cringed, bracing myself.

At that moment, the unsettling sound of ripping metal ricocheted through the store. The gate had given way. Kritzinev forgot all about punching me. He shouted something in Urdu to the Pakistanis and rushed to the front door with them right behind him. I hung back with Pritchenko. I heard them drag shelves over to build a barricade.

I helped Prit stand up. He had a bruise on his cheek and spat out some blood, but nothing that would kill him. No time to think about that. I went up to the storeroom door. The Pakistanis and Kritzinev had barricaded themselves in behind the metal gate, which was coming loose on one side. Each time the crowd hit it, plaster and rubble fell from the door frame. Some monsters had already stuck their arms through the cracks on the side and were pushing against the shelves. One of them even tried to push its head through. That gate would only hold for a few minutes.

Kritzinev turned, pointed his rifle at us, and ordered us back to the storeroom. He clearly didn’t trust us and didn’t want us in the middle at that fight. I didn’t want any part of it either. The Pakistanis were chanting what sounded like a hymn of martyrdom in Arabic. Shafiq had tied a piece of green cloth around his head and seemed calmer.

I shook my head. Fuck. It was getting ugly. Two guys who aspired to martyrdom and a crazy, drunk Ukrainian. I waved Pritchenko back to the storeroom and desperately looked for a way out. There was nothing. No window or back door or vent! Nothing!

Once again, life wasn’t like the movies. There were no back doors or windows that opened onto vacant lots or secret tunnels or trapdoors. Just a grocery store with brick and concrete walls too thick to kick in. We were trapped.

Suddenly Pritchenko dragged me behind a counter. Above a heavy table was a trapdoor built into the wall. Leaning a chair against the table, I climbed up and slid the door open in the foolish hope of finding a tunnel out of there.

Toilet paper. Dozens and dozens of rolls of toilet paper and paper towels neatly stacked. This was where the owner had stored items that wouldn’t fit on the shelves. I frantically pulled down package after package of paper as we heard the first shots in the front of the store. The final assault was starting.

It only took thirty seconds to empty the whole storage area and another thirty seconds for us to climb inside a space that was claustrophobically small, but safe and hidden. We had a liter-and-a-half bottle of water, two flashlights, a chocolate bar, and my journal. Absolutely nothing else.