He’d considering breaking through the Sheetrock to the next room but didn’t want to make the noise. The people in the room would open the unlocked door well before he would be able to get through the wall. But now he had a chance.
Cooper moved slowly into position so he could put his weight behind the knife. He planned to pierce the wall several times until he cut through it. It took a long while, but he finally managed to cut a hole he thought he might be able to squeeze through. There was still the wall on the other side, and he would have to cut through that too. He started to work when the door clicked open. He reached back and pulled it shut. Whoever was trying to open it didn’t stop, but they weren’t putting a lot of effort into it either. He reached up with his free hand and found a belt. He wrapped the belt around the knob and held it with one hand to keep the door shut as he started kicking in the wall in the back of the closet. Noise wasn’t an issue anymore. He broke through easily. He just hoped the next room was still empty.
He dropped the belt and dove through the hole. He wasn’t sure if the closet door opened and didn’t care. He was through the wall and in the closet of the guest room. He was relieved to see that the room was empty. The door to the room bulged in the frame from the crowd in the hall, but it looked like it would hold.
This room had a window, and he immediately opened it and looked out. Things were clear. It looked like the party had moved on over the last few hours. He climbed out, free of the infected for now, and walked away with no plans and no supplies.
He walked among the aftermath of insanity. The orgy of thousands had left a thick, revolting mixture on the ground for as far as he could see. It was a collage of clotted blood pools, torn clothing, shoes, jewelry, body parts, large swaths of vomit, handguns, empty bottles and cans, a sofa, and several corpses. A gelatinous goo, formed by the churning of the various byproducts of the massive orgy, coated the street.
He walked carefully between piles of clothes, puddles of blood, and larger pieces of broken glass. He avoided the puke and bodies totally. He thought he recognized a white mound of flesh as an old lady from down the street; another was some guy he didn’t recognize. He was lying on his back in the gutter, staring straight up with a creepy smile on his face. His innards spilled from a rip in his side. It looked like a car had struck him. All the other bodies were unrecognizable for one reason or another. A few houses down the street and the ground cover only worsened. Then things cleared up for many blocks. It seemed most of the city wasn’t inhabited at all. He walked many blocks before he came close to downtown. There were suddenly more streets that looked like his did, and there were many more people walking around. He started looking for a house he could get into where he could plan his next move and maybe get some supplies. He wanted to avoid having to cross paths with anyone right now.
He had noticed over the past few days that as people came out to party in the streets they tended to wander downhill. The infected sought out other people, food, and drink, so they headed downtown, where it was in abundance. Gravity also played a part in their downhill movement. As they partied, they tended to stumble and walk downhill. Most of the neighborhoods emptied of the infected quickly. He couldn’t imagine what the downtown area must look like now.
He found an empty house. It seemed that the occupants had wandered away from home to party and left the door unlocked. This house had a great view of the bay and most of the city. Fires were scattered about, smoke rose in thick columns, and a haze hung over the entire city. The city seemed empty, quiet—dead. He saw the movement of a few vehicles leaving town in a line. He watched for an hour, but there was nothing more to be seen.
After a few hours of unsuccessfully trying to rest, he decided to take a ride down the hill to check out the city. He found the keys to the Range Rover parked out front and drove down steeply sloping streets that wound through tall trees and nice houses. Monterey was covered in a variety of trees, mostly the famous redwoods that grew along the California coast.
He drove to downtown, which was at the base of the hill. He was the only one out driving as far as he could tell. There were still several people wandering about the neighborhoods, some nude, some not, arm in arm and smiling. No one was really dancing or acting out anymore. The few standing seemed to be dragging their bodies to the point of absolute physical exhaustion. As he got lower on the hill, there were more bodies on the street. Many looked as if they were dead, while some twitched with what remained of their physical energy. He drove around several fires and through heavy smoke. He tried to use his shirt to filter it out but with little success; he coughed and his eyes watered, making it hard to drive.
As he drew closer to downtown, he came upon streets that had been bulldozed clear. The sides of the streets were piled high with corpses. Some looked blown to pieces. Every face he saw was smiling. Several of them were still moving. He saw open eyes, turning heads, feeble attempts at movement. It was probably the creepiest thing he had seen yet in his life.
He knew with all the shooting that people were probably dying, but the bodies stunned him. On one street all the bodies were bulldozed into piles at least ten feet high on both sides. The thousands of bodies formed walls that ran along several of the streets for blocks. A particularly high wall of corpses encircled several blocks of the downtown area. The massive wall had only a few openings, and at each one was a checkpoint with four soldiers. He could only think that there had to be many people he knew in the piles. He drove through one of the gaps in the large corpse-wall and ran across his first checkpoint.
He’d heard on the emergency radio that all law enforcement agencies and military personnel across the country were out in force. From small towns to large cities, the country was blanketed with uniforms. A curfew was put into effect and all travel suspended. Noncritical personnel were asked to stay indoors and keep their radios tuned to the emergency broadcast system. Only emergency responders, medical staff, law enforcement, and government officials were allowed to travel to work. They were halted at numerous checkpoints—shot without question if they didn’t stop when and where they were directed. Many people were detained for ignoring the curfew, and several looters were shot.
But even tight martial law wasn’t enough. The infected continued to fill the streets in large numbers, doing whatever they pleased. Some roadblocks were overrun, as many soldiers couldn’t shoot smiling, laughing people. Others mowed down the smilers in vast numbers. In short, it was insane to be on the streets.
So when Cooper pulled up to the soldiers at a checkpoint like he was ordering a Big Mac, it made sense they would look at him like he was batshit crazy. The soldiers were wearing heavy-duty breathing apparatuses that covered their head and neck, and there were hoses hooked to devices on their chests and backs. Their faces were clearly visible through the clear plastic. They flagged him down. Two held rifles level at Cooper’s head, one manned the turret in a Humvee, and a fourth approached his car.
“Where are you going?” the soldier was shouting through the heavy mask.
“Just riding around,” Cooper said with a smile.
“Just riding…” The soldier’s eyes could be seen through the mask, and the expression of disbelief completed his half-spoken question.
“Sir, there’s some serious shit happening… Sir, you need to get home. We are shooting the smilers. The only reason we didn't shoot you is because you don’t have a big, shit-eating grin on your face.”
“Oh, OK.” Cooper was just staring, thinking.
“Seriously, go straight home. If someone else were on duty you could have been shot. Technically, I am supposed to detain you.”
“So there’s no getting out of the city? What about…”
“No, and you need to leave now, or I will have to detain you. If that happens, you will end up in a federal shelter and believe me, you will be more comfortable at home.”
“I am just worried about my sister. She’s up north in…”
“You will never make it through the checkpoints. The roads are blocked by wrecks and massive pileups. Your only option is home.” The soldier was out of patience. “Now drive, or I will drag you from the car.”
Cooper thanked him and took off but not toward home. He wanted to get out of the city more than ever, but that seemed less likely now, given all the obstacles and roadblocks. Things had gotten so quiet that he was very hopeful that soon all the checkpoints would be disbanded and the wrecks cleared from the roads. Soon he would be able to drive up and check on his sister. Until then, he wasn’t sure what to do with himself.
§
Later that night he was in another house, another home with an unlocked door that seemed to have been abandoned by its owners. He lit a candle, ate food from their kitchen, and then settled down with a book he found. He planned to read to keep his mind busy. After a few hours there was a soft, persistent knocking on the front door. A very soft knock that dwindled down in intensity, then started up again, only to dwindle down once more. It was as if the person knocking kept forgetting what they were doing and had to restart every few seconds. He peeked out to see who it was.
It was a guy about his age just standing there smiling, looking at the door and knocking. Cooper noticed large silver boils all over the guy’s body. He wasn’t wearing any clothes and had dried vomit and blood all over him. He never stopped smiling and knocking. After twenty minutes, which felt like two hours, he turned and walked off down the street.
Those boils disturbed Cooper but didn’t really surprise him. He thought it was foolish to write off anything that had such a powerful effect on the mind and body as harmless. It baffled him that people were so quick to label something as harmless, even beneficial, before all the facts were in. The CDC couldn’t even classify the thing, other than to say it was a virus. Yet people were quick to accept it as a good thing, simply because happiness was one of the side effects. Seeing those horrendous boils made him wonder if there was anything new on the emergency broadcast channel.
He found a radio and turned it on, but it was silent. He noticed the radio had its own generator. There was a crank on the side that tightened a large power spring like the ones that powered old clocks. This spring could turn a small generator and keep the radio going for almost an hour at a time. He cranked up the radio and listened. Apparently, the infection had taken a new turn.
In the past day or so, the infected had reached their physical limits. Their bodies were physically exhausted, and they were either passed out or barely moving. And there were new symptoms. Large boils had begun to manifest on their bodies over a period of a few hours. Then they started to burst.
It was unlikely that they were consciously aware of the pain, given the degree of brain damage they had suffered as a result of the high fever. But apparently their bodies reacted to the excruciating pain of the erupting boils. For a few hours, they felt the pain of the cuts and tears, broken bones, burns, and other injuries they had sustained. But the pain of the erupting boils clearly eclipsed them all. The pain was apparently so intense it caused some people to pass out or even die.
The streets were filled with thousands of bodies that thrashed and screamed in pain. A few people were still in the earlier stages of the infection and wandered about smiling. They watched the commotion like a child watching a cartoon. But soon their boils started to burst, and then there was no more euphoria, only pain and screaming.
After the boils erupted, the infected began to collapse and drift into a comatose state. At this point, the infected were surely on the brink of death. It was only a matter of time before they all passed. So ravaged were their minds and bodies there was nothing left but a husk. They barely had the brain function required to keep them alive in the most minimal sense of the definition.
Later that night, Cooper heard the first of the screams on the wind blowing in from the bay. The screams multiplied. The whole city seemed to shake with the shrieks and howls of the tortured. For each of the bodies stacked up downtown, there were thousands more all around the city, shrieking and screaming.
Cooper’s attempt to leave the city had failed, and he wasn’t sure what he was going to do next. Attempting the trip on foot was out of the question, as walking in the world right now was just insane. He had been a Boy Scout, made the rank of Eagle Scout too, which was no small feat, and he felt unprepared. He’d hiked and camped under many harsh conditions, but never had he done it alone and in such dangerous circumstances. Even under perfect conditions it would take a day or more of constant walking to get to San Jose. And when he got there, the number of the infected would be immensely more than here in Monterey. For now, he needed to rest, and he couldn’t do that hearing the screams of the dying. He found an iPod, put in the earbuds, and turned up the music. He felt comfortable staying in one of the bedrooms with the door closed. He lay on the bed, held a pillow over his face, and fell asleep.
4.
Every heartbeat was a hammer to his skull. His stomach was a sack of quivering sickness that threatened to explode from his mouth. Sal was flat on his back. He wished he had died and thought,
Maybe I did die, and this is hell.
His stomach contracted involuntarily, forcefully rejecting the poison from its system in a hot gush that burned his throat. The puddle of sick lay on top of older puddles he didn’t remember creating. He snorted, spat, and dropped back to the floor. He felt better briefly, his body momentarily relieved, but the hammering resumed promptly and so did the desire to die.
He regretted the drinking, remembered his wife, and started crying. He reached up to the table, trying to move as little as possible, and grabbed the second bottle of rum. He sucked down a third of it, spilling another third down his face and neck to pool on the floor under his head. He put the bottle down on the hardwood floor and closed his eyes. His stomach turned, flipped, and violently rejected the booze again in another painful spray.