Remains of the Dead (11 page)

Still grasping the handle he looked up to the next balcony.

“Onwards and upwards,” he sighed.

He repeated the climb and made his way to the next balcony. But again the window was firmly closed.

He waited for a moment to regain his strength. Above him was the final floor.

He didn’t know what he’d do if that window was shut. He looked over at the adjacent terrace of balconies. The gap was too wide to jump but he’d seen a movie once where the hero had jumped diagonally, landing on the balcony one level down and across.

But Ali’s leg throbbed, his joints ached, and he didn’t feel much like an action hero.

“One last climb,” he said.

He saddled the guard rail and started his third ascent.

In a few seconds he’d repeated his climb and was standing at the top floor balcony. He was delighted to see the window was open a crack. But the initial thrill evaporated as he tried the handle. This window too was locked shut.

Undeterred, Ali wedged his fingers in and pulled. The window didn’t budge.

Ali berated himself for losing his steel pipe in the throng below; with a little leverage he might be able to pop the window open.

As he stared at the adjacent apartments, contemplating his chances of successfully leaping the gap, the metal baluster in his grasp twisted slightly. Ali’s mind sparked. Bending down he methodically checked each of the thin metal struts that joined the decking to the handrail. The four on each corner were sturdy structural columns with the ones between forming a safety screen to prevent someone from accidentally falling. Some of these were loose. They turned in their seating.

Ali examined the construction of the balcony. If he could buckle the handrail up he should be able to pop out some of the metal bars.

He lay down on the deck, his head wedged against the wall, his fingers stretched down to find purchase through the gaps in the deck, and then he kicked out hard. He smacked the underside of the handrail with his heels. The metal rattled but nothing gave. Ali stuck his left foot through the bars and twisted to lock himself tight against the recoil of the kick.

This time Ali lashed out with one foot. With his more secure position, more of the energy went into its target. Ali kicked again and this time he felt something yield. Furiously he kicked and kicked again and with each strike he felt the metal buckle.

With a dozen more angry boots the handrail started to budge. Ali squatted in front of the misshapen baluster. The light metal welds had snapped and some of the bars were detached. Ali grasped hold of the most likely candidate and twisted. With a few good yanks the three-foot metal rod was dislodged.

He wasted no time in slotting the bar between the window and the frame. He took a square stance and purposefully pulled back with both hands. The plastic frame started to creak and deform. Ali kept the pressure up, leaning back and pulling with all his might. Something started to give—he could feel movement through the metal shaft.

Invigorated by the prospect of success, he found more strength and pulled harder. There was a sudden crunch and the makeshift crowbar was catapulted out of the Ali’s grasp. The bent metal bar flung off into space, slicing through the air like the blades of a helicopter to land in the zombie-carpeted street below.

The tension suddenly released, Ali stumbled backward where he collided with the damaged handrail. He threw his hands out, grasping for anything before his momentum carried him over the railing.

Unable to stop, he flipped over the balcony. As the sky flashed overhead his grip found purchase. Then came a jolting wrenching through his shoulders as the momentum yanked at the joints. He hung there for a spilt second before his fingertips slipped free.

Ali started plummeting again. He was watching the balcony above fly away. As he fell a couple of the loosened bars burst free and were sent tumbling to the ground with him.

Ali flailed his arms out, trying to grab hold of anything to arrest his fall. His arm connected with something impossibly solid. The force of the impact was numbingly violent. His whole body twisted from the impact and he collided hard with the metal deck of the balcony below. The two metal bars that had fallen with him clattered off the decking and continued their journey to the crowd of zombies below.

Ali started laughing. Like an action hero, he’d survived by a piece of miraculous luck. Granted, it hadn’t seen him favoured enough to get him to the adjacent apartments, but he was still thankful. He laughed until he realised just how much pain he was in. The laughter turned to coughing, and when that subsided, Ali groaned.

After an age and a couple of aborted attempts, Ali hauled himself up to sit against the wall. His injured leg throbbed and now his shoulder did too. There was a lump on the back of his head and a massive headache to testify to the force of the impact. He looked down at his hands. They were bloody and scratched and now he noticed the nail on his index finger had been ripped off about halfway. He felt sick looking at the raw pulp of his nail bed. He dropped his hand out of sight, grateful that the pain from elsewhere was masking his missing fingernail.

He looked out over the thoroughfare packed with undead. They filled the road from here to the offices across the street. The front windows were smashed in and the zombies were packed inside just as thick as outside. To his right he could see the plaza they’d been trying to get to. The helicopter and its promise of rescue were long gone. And still there was no sign of the people who’d been shooting earlier.

Up to the left, back towards the warehouse, Ali could just see the odd patch of tarmac. The zombies were thinner on the ground up there but there were still thousands of them. The odd waft of grey black smoke drifted across the street, some of the petrol bombs were still burning and hopefully still incinerating zombies.

“What now?”

He could climb back up and try the window again, but even if he forced his way inside there would be nothing of use to him. All the food and weapons had been scavenged from here years ago. Could he survive until the helicopter came back? And what if the helicopter never came back?

Ali looked across at the dilapidated office block, its sandstone walls grimy with soot and moss and all the other discolouring that five years of the apocalypse and a lack of maintenance had accumulated. The maintenance crews, the cleaners, the office workers and a hundred other careers had all amalgamated into one profession: denizen of hell. Most of the undead that had congregated wore the same uniform now: tattered brown rags, pale blue skin and a gormless open maw.

Here and there Ali could still pick out the odd noticeable individual. A soldier in a bio-chemical suit with his gas mask torn off, a hiker with his backpack still secured by its shoulder straps his thick jacket with white puffs of stuffing poking out from the rips, and Ray—

Ali shook his weary head and let out a lonely sigh.

Among the zombies gawping up at him was Ray. There were raw chunks of flesh gouged from his body where the zombies had ravished him. His familiar glasses were missing and his face was caked in his own dried blood, but it was unmistakably Ray. Ali’s friend these last four years was now reduced to a mindless corpse.

Even with a hundred hungry ghouls feasting on his bones he had revived before the ravenous mouths had time to consume him. And no matter how fresh the kill, once they had reanimated no zombie would eat them.

“I am truly sorry, my friend,” Ali said.

He closed his eyes.

“What the fuck happened here?” Cahz said, stepping over a dead body. Once through the broken gap in the makeshift defences, he had been confronted by an extraordinary scene. It looked like the stairwells had been barricaded and sealed off. The office furniture piled up to block the entrances and the space created by their absence resembled a campsite. There were tents, camp beds and piles of provisions all laid out in an orderly pattern. The only thing that wasn’t orderly were the blood splatters, bullet holes and dead bodies.

“Defence in depth,” Cannon said absently, looking at the make do redoubt.

“What are the tents for?” Elspeth said absently.

“Privacy I guess,” Ryan offered.

“The Whisky Deltas break in?” Cahz asked, looking round the breached stronghold.

“Nope, not a single W.D. in here.” Cannon nudged a corpse with his foot. “These poor bastards have rotted to mush. The roaches and flies have seen to them.”

“W.D.?” Ryan asked.

Cannon answered without acknowledging Ryan, “Walking Dead.”

Cahz continued to prowl round the site, occasionally pulling open the flaps on tents with the muzzle of his rifle. He prodded at a flap of leathery skin on a cadaver’s skeletal rib.

“That’s an exit wound,” he observed, looking at the shattered bone. “This guy died from a shot to the chest. What the hell happened here?”

“When we found this place,” Ryan looked across at Elspeth, “What, four years ago?” Elspeth shrugged. “Well, the corpses were in better condition. You could see some had their throats cut, others shot.” Ryan gestured to a stack of crates. “There was food and water and guns and ammo and everything you’d need to hold up for months. Ray called it Masada.”

“Masada?” Cannon asked.

Cahz stepped back to the group. “First Jewish uprising against the Romans in something like fifty A.D.”

“Ray reckoned the same thing happened here,” Ryan added.

“Do one of you want to fill me in? I ain’t that clued up with Jewish history,” Cannon grumbled.

“There was a Roman siege at a place called Masada. The Romans built a massive ramp to breach the defences. It took months to build but when they finally got over the wall everyone was dead. Even though they had plenty of supplies, rather than being captured and crucified or sold into slavery they decided to commit mass suicide.”

Cannon kicked a corpse with a gunshot wound to the head. “Yeah, well, nobody shoots themselves in the cheek to blow their brains out.”

“At Masada they drew lots,” Cahz said. “Each man would kill his family and then they in turn would kill each other until only one man remained. Then he would be the only one who had to commit suicide.”

“So you’re saying the same thing happened here?” Cannon asked. “It was Jonestown massacre all over?”

“That’s how Ray and Sarah saw it,” Ryan answered. “Surrounded with no way out, they committed mass suicide.”

“It’s a bit unlikely, isn’t it?” Cannon wonder aloud. “Could it not just as easily been looters?”

Ryan shook his head and pointed at the crates. “There were still a ton of supplies when we found the place. Kept us fed for a month. No way looters would have broken in, killed a group of heavily armed people, and then left without ransacking the place.”

“They all drank the Kool-Aid,” Cannon said reluctantly. “Still it’s a bit sick.”

“Technically it was Flav-R-Aid,” Ryan mumbled.

“Hell, Cannon, we’ve seen a dozen things just this fucked up over the years,” Cahz pointed out.

Cannon chewed his lip. “Suppose.”

“Well, let’s make this place secure,” Cahz said. “We need to be sure we can get to the roof and check it’s suitable to land a chopper. Ryan, you know this place better than us.”

Ryan nodded his agreement.

“You and Cannon check that out. Go scout things out up there. I’m going to start making an inventory of what we can use in here.”

“No point,” Ryan said. “We gutted the place of anything useful.”

“I want to know that for sure. You guys might have missed something. Now get a move on.”

Cannon gave a nod and turned for the stairs.

“Cannon,” Cahz said. Cannon stopped and whipped round. “Go up one staircase and down the other. Don’t go onto the other floors, but keep your ears open for other residents. We’ll sweep the place clear only if we need to.”

“Got it boss.” Cannon made a salute and jogged away.

Ryan hesitated. He looked at Elspeth and the child she cradled.

His daughter was still whining, her cheeks flushed, the scratch down her face puffy and prominent. Elspeth looked cold and grey. Her skin had a waxy sheen to it and her eyes looked sunken. Ryan had seen that pallor so many times before. The condemned look of the infected.

“You comin’?” Cannon called back.

Elspeth was Samantha’s mother and they shared the same hair and the same eyes. And now Elspeth shared the same haunted expression Ryan had seen on Sam when she’d realised she was going to die.

“Yeah, sure,” Ryan said softly and turned to follow.

Cahz slung his carbine behind him and marched up to the crates.

The various wooden and plastic boxes weren’t as ordered as he’d first thought. Cahz guessed that at one time they had been neatly stacked, but that Ryan and his friends had seen no need to tidy up after their foraging.

He squatted down on his haunches and gave a huff before opening the first one.

Inside was an array of bandages and other basic first aid.

“Here,” Cahz said, offering a Mepore dressing.

“Oh, what’s the point?” Elspeth sighed.

Cahz nodded and tossed the dressing back.

“It doesn’t hurt now anyway,” Elspeth said.

“Gone numb, huh?” Cahz didn’t look back to make eye contact. Instead he opened the next box.

“After all this time…” Elspeth sucked in a sharp breath. “I mean... Well, I don’t know what I mean. We’d survived all of this, Samantha and me.” She looked down at the sleeping child in her arms. “It was a shock when she died. I thought I could console myself with my granddaughter. There was always a reminder of Samantha. But she reminds me too much sometimes. It’s all so unfair. I mean, who dies in childbirth these days...” Elspeth paused for a moment. “I mean, no one should die in childbirth in this day and age, what with the medicines and machines and doctors. If we’d have had them Samantha wouldn’t have died. She’d be here to look after her baby girl just like I looked after her.” Elspeth looked up, her eyes wet with welling tears. “That’s how things are supposed to be. Not this nightmare.” She took in a deep breath that transformed into a sob. She started crying.