As
I slid past the third floor I heard that familiar scream of a Sprinter and knew
one must have been in the building and had now locked on to me. I quickly slid
the rest of the way to the street and scanned the area around me. To the north,
a large group of dead that had already passed by the bank had been alerted by
the Sprinter’s scream, turned, and were beginning to head back in my direction.
I
quickly dropped the rope, adjusted my pack, and began running east and then
north towards the balloon park. I knew the Sprinter inside the building would
be out on the street within minutes and wanted to put as much distance between
me and it before it got outside.
I
got three blocks before I heard the crash of a window letting me know the
Sprinter had made it out onto the street. It screamed in rage as it scanned the
area for me. If I were lucky, there was enough buildings between it and me to
shield my from it.
It
screamed again and I could hear it take off towards me. I guess I wasn’t lucky.
I took off at a full run but knew I was not going to get away from this thing
by running. So as soon as I could, I rounded a corner and pulled out my pistol,
attached the silencer, and waited for the it to come running around the corner
with a horde of its buddies.
I
guessed it would come around a burnt out pet store and aimed where its head
should pop around the corner. I guessed wrong and it came around behind me. If
it hadn’t screamed when it saw me I would have been a goner. But it did and I
had just enough time to spin around nearly losing control of my bowels as the
thing tore down the street towards me.
I
froze for just a second as I took in what used to be a young girl screaming and
racing towards me. She must have been about twelve when she was bit. Instead of
slowly rotting into a shuffler, she had a strain of the virus that both kept
her from decaying as rapidly, gave her that fucked up tracking ability, and
kept her really, really fast.
She
was wearing what was left of a pair of green daisy duke shorts, yellow tank top
over a black halter top, and somehow, even after what had to be months of
chasing and eating the living, a blue baseball cap that was stuck to her short,
blond streaked hair. Her skin was pale, she had button nose, braces, and faded
yellow-green eyes. She was beautiful and I put two bullets right into her
forehead blowing that ball cap back off of the ruin that was now her head and
onto the street.
I
didn’t even stop to consider anything but running now that the rest of the dead
had been alerted to my presence. I ran harder than I had since leaving Los
Angeles. I ran past the shufflers careful to keep an opening always ahead of
me, and keeping the dead from surrounding me and suddenly I was there. A sign
shot by on my left saying Balloon Festival Grounds one quarter mile ahead on
left. My legs were burning, my lungs were on fire, but I had broken free from
the larger groups of dead, now many yards behind me.
I
nearly wept as I ran across a huge parking lot, past a broken down chain link
fence and into the Balloon Park. The area was wide open at least a half mile on
each side. I didn’t stop running until I was in the dead center. Then I
stumbled to a stop, dropped my gear onto the ground, and fell to my knees
panting and watching the black spots swirl around my vison. I waited for the
sound of a chopper coming from the distance, coming to take me up and out of
this forsaken dead valley.
But
nothing came.
I listened, strained my ears,
but heard nothing but the sound of approaching footsteps. I didn’t even bother
getting up or grabbing my weapons. He would already have me in his sights,
waiting for me to lung at my pack, “Hello, James.”
“Hello
Thomas! God it’s good to see you old friend,” he said with genuine warmth.
I
finally opened my eyes and saw him standing there in the early morning light, a
rifle pointed at my head. James did not look good. In fact, he looked near
death, In
fact
, fact, he looked dead.
“I’m
not going to tell you it’s good to see you too,” I said wearily, James flinched
a bit but shook it off.
“Yeah,
boy. I don’t look so good, do I? Let me tell you why: I’m infected. Been
infected since we left Los Angeles. When I fucked Pix after she was dead, my
condom broke. Ha, ha! Pretty fucking funny, huh? A necro-venereal disease. So
after Pix, I never bothered with protection again. And man did I fuck a lot of
dead chicks. Tight and rough! Just how I like it. Yeah! Why I didn’t totally
turn? I have no idea, but the dead paid a lot less attention to me, Mostly.”
“So
I made it all the way up to Sandia. Oh, yeah, I beat you up there by a few
days. What the hell were you doing anyway? You move slower than old people
fuck. Jacking off out in the desert somewhere? What, like, every hour or
something? Good god, man, I’m surprised you’re not blind.”
“I
went east at Las Cruces instead of heading north. Added a few weeks to my
trip,” I said wondering if the folks from Sandia had just given up on me.
James
did a little dance there in the dead grass of the field and said, “Fucking
east! I knew it! Through Alamogordo and then over to Socorro! I knew I should
have gone that way. Fucking nearly died heading straight north. Fuck! That
would have saved me a lot of hate and discontent.”
“Well,
water under the bridge. So I get up to fancy fucking pants Sandia and they put
me in an isolation facility and pulled a sample of blood. Well, old boy I knew
the gig was up right there and then. Waited for them to punch my ticket and
send me out of this world but there was nothing I could do but wait for the men
in the armor to come put a bullet in my head. Except they didn’t! Can you
believe it? Those dumb mother fuckers let me loose! Said that technically I was
still alive and it would be wrong to kill me! And they let me go!” he said
laughing until tears streamed down his filthy, pale face, “Dumb. Ass. Mother.
Fuckers!
“But
I digress. Can I tell you something, Thomas? I’m proud of you. You made it all
the way from Las Cruces here without me and you dropped that Sprinter like it
was a sack of potatoes,” he said as he dropped his pack on the ground, set down
his rifle, and pulled out a huge handgun, “But you left me. Left me like a
rabid dog so now it’s time to put you down,” he said and aimed his gun at my
belly, “But not in the head, oh, no, pal. Now it’s time for you and me to
wander the deadlands forever old buddy…” he said as he pulled the trigger.
But
the sound of the shot never came. Instead James just looked down at his chest,
confusion crossing his face as a gout of blood shot out of his mouth. I
followed James’s eyes to the large metal bar sticking out of his chest, “Whada
fuggg…” he said looking at his blown open chest as he fell forward.
Behind
him, a quarter mile away, a sleek black helicopter hung silently above the
trees. It glided towards me without a sound until it was nearly on top of me
and James’ body and only then I could hear the air rushing around us. The
stealth copter set down and four heavily armed troopers came out and circled
James. They adjusted the bar sticking out of James’ chest placing large locks
on his chest and back locking the bar in for good.
One
of the soldiers saw me watching and said, “Tracking device. We figured we’ll
let him wander around for a few years decaying away like he wanted to do to
you. It only seems fair.”
I
wept as they soldiers gather my gear up and helped me towards the copter. The
dead were beginning to take notice of their small party and were moving into
the field from all sides. I saw James’s pack lying next to his body which was
now beginning to reanimate. I grabbed it and hopped into the copter. I’d like
to think it was my scavenger instincts kicking in and grabbing what I know
would be useful. But I knew better, James had said he had something to show me.
I opened the pack and looked inside.
Carefully
wrapped in plastic was a digital video recorder, a large supply of blank tapes,
batteries, and a little solar panel charger. And about a hundred tiny tapes, each
one neatly labeled with a date, a time, and a name. I knew what these were:
films of James’s exploits and I knew if I dug towards the bottom what I’d find.
A tape, a little dirtier than the rest, with a name neatly written inside the
paper cover: Pix.
Underneath
all that I found a small, metal box. I opened it up and saw a bundle of blond
hair tied up neatly with a piece of string. The roots of the hair still had
bits of flesh and dried blood on it as thought it had been torn from someone’s
scalp. Someone like Marti. I put the metal box back in James’ bag unable to
consider what it mean.
The
copter lifter off and hovered above the field, watching and waiting for James
to reanimate. He did a few minutes later and screamed at us. Satisfied, the
copter floated over the field, the highway, and burnt out buildings of
Albuquerque and brought me, at last, to Sandia.