I blacked out while I stared at the floor in front of me and listened to the hell unfold, but it was time to move. If we stood there any longer we would end no differently.
I looked over the contained, Marcus and Strobe waited for one of us to look over at them so Marcus could let us know what the next move would be. When he noticed me he waved so I would know he was going to give instructions. One finger pointed towards the ceiling above him, he pointed at me and then towards the top of the building we were in. He wanted us to move to the roof. But these building weren’t the same small size of the buildings in the other towns; this was an actual city that earned the title through the compact of many buildings and skyscrapers, a makeshift New York City.
I nodded at Marcus and snuck away from the container, Marcus did the same with Strobe. For us to get to the roof of the building we needed to either exit the store and go through the door next to its entrance where the one to the apartments were, and their staircase would lead us to the roof or we needed to go through the back and bring down the fire escape ladder and head up that way. I walked over to Edwin and told Lizbeth and Mara to come follow. Once we were together I told them what Marcus wanted us to do. We talked it over in whispers and came to the conclusion that no one was willingly to exit through the front and risk getting caught by the infected. So the noisy fire escape route was our only other choice. We knew once we made the ladder drop down, the sound would attract the infected and we’d have to double time it up. (More fire escapes, more roofs. I know high up is safe, but I wouldn’t have hated some variety.)
We went to the back of the store and tried to find the exit that would lead us to the fire escape. Around this time Edwin stepped on some scattered plastic toys that made him slide directly into a shelf of cheap wine glasses. He knocked them all down. Glass crashed into the floor and shattered all over. The sound it made was loud enough for the infected to notice. We all looked to the front of the store in panic. The infected stopped their sporadic randomness and fixed their eyes on the dollar store, on us.
We failed to sneak out. That being said, the infected rushed into the store. They broke through the glass that made up the front door and windows.
“GO!” I yelled. We searched for the door to the back but took so long the infected were seconds from us.
“OVER HERE!” Mara yelled from the further most left corner of the store. This prompted us to run to her and try to open the door with no success. We were screwed if we didn’t get out that moment.
I hit the door twice with my body and Edwin joined me for the third hit. We broke off the lock that held the door shut and flung it open. We ran through the door and closed it behind us. “I’LL HOLD THE DOOR! GET THE LADDER DOWN!” Edwin yelled out. His small body wasn’t going to do well as the only thing to hold the door closed.
The fire escape was too high to jump and grab it to bring it down which is why we needed the time that silence was going to afford us.
We needed to boost someone up and force the fire escape down from the top to allow the rest of us to go up the ladder and get out alive. Lizbeth jumped into action and put her hands together to help boost up Mara but there was nothing for Mara to hold on to till she was high enough to grab onto the ladder and pull herself up without falling. That’s where I came in. I set the lantern next to Lizbeth and joined her in the effort to get Mara up higher.
“Hurry up!” Edwin said. He struggled to keep the door closed.
Mara pulled herself up but she was too petite and fragile to rush deliver that ladder to us. We ran out of time. On my way back to the door to help Edwin, the infected overpowered him and push the door open. It slammed Edwin into the ground. I couldn’t make it back in time to keep the door closed but I managed to pull Edwin up quick enough to still run.
“KEEP GOING UP! WE’LL MEET YOU ON THE ROOF!” I yelled out to Mara.
We ran till we caught up with Lizbeth who picked up the lantern.
The runners were right behind us and they didn’t plan to get tired anytime soon. We were going to need some way to slow them down. To make things worse, the alleyway was a dead end up ahead, a brick wall too tall to climb. The reason for the wall was no more than to inconvenience people in this situation, I would guess, and we were well aware that it was pointless to be there since the end of the block wasn’t behind it. It was there just to screw us over when we needed somewhere to go.
We caught up to the dead end but fortunately Edwin spotted an open door in time to save us. One of the buildings that connected to the same alleyway had the door open and Edwin’s perfect vision caught sight of it through the dimly lit alley. The light of the lantern didn’t even reach that far for it to have helped him see any better. But the light of day was near and it did continue to make things brighter, buildings stood out, street signs reappeared, streets were no longer black voids, thankfully.
A left through the door and we closed it behind us. It was an apartment building from top to bottom and we came in through the back door which landed us directly in front of some stairs to the other floors and to the roof, a lucky break. Lizbeth, Edwin and I ran upstairs to the roof. We weren’t sure how tall the building was but by the time we made it to the second floor, the infected ran through the door downstairs. Although two or three runners couldn’t figure out a door, a large enough group of them was unstoppable by pretty much anything. The strength in numbers they possessed made them the unstoppable force they were. They ran up the stairs, trampling and shoving each other to continue their hunt.
We made it to the top floor and ran down the hallway at the top to find the door to the roof bolted shut by a special security system to prevent people from going out there. We tried to get the door to budge but it wouldn’t even shake. It was solidly closed. We needed to go back to the other side of the hallway and make it into one of the apartments and use that apartment’s fire escape to work our way to the roof. This was easier said than done with the infected being one floor below us, ready to close the rest of the gap between us. There was no time left to think before the infected would be face to face with us.
“Come on!” I said. We checked the apartments for open doors, Edwin on one side and I tried on the other. None of the doors were open. Our luck ran short again.
“If we three run full force into the door for the last apartment in the back we can take it down and make it through!” Lizbeth said, no questions asked, we all lined up. The footsteps of the infected on the edge of the stairs on our floor reminded us we weren’t brave enough to look back and make sure they were there; instead we made a run for the door together and slammed into it breaking it down falling to the floor on the other side. We scrambled to get up.
“Find the fire escape!” I told Edwin and Lizbeth. They ran through the apartment looking out through each window while I grabbed the broken door off of the ground, putting it across the door frame and leaned my body against it for support.
Because the door wasn’t perfectly aligned, there were gaps through which the infected could fit their hands though, but not so big they could squeeze their bodies in. The infected were already on the other side reaching my ankles through the bottom gap. They pushed the door and attempted to get in, soon enough they would.
“IT’S HERE!” Edwin yelled from somewhere in the kitchen. I kicked off the infected that grabbed at me from beneath the door and sprinted into the kitchen. Now there was no door to keep the infected away.
Edwin broken through the window but the moans, screams and footsteps on the other side of the door I held up made it impossible for me to have heard it.
Edwin and Lizbeth both made it to the other side of the window and I went last. I crawled out and my ankle was once again grabbed by one of the infected but I flipped over and kicked my feet repeatedly till I managed to push it into the infected behind it. I stood back on my feet. I dashed up the stairs on the fire escape to the roof and met up with Lizbeth and Edwin. Mara was further ahead, she probably thought we kept going but slowed down once she looked back so we could catch up. All the buildings were the same height and connected through their roofs which made it easy for us to get back to Mara and made it easier to locate Strobe and Marcus that also kept up with Mara in hopes the rest of us would be wherever she led them, but the family reunion was far from close. Although they struggled to make their way up the fire escape, the infected killed any chance there was to catch our breaths, the chase was on again. We weren’t going to have many buildings left to run on if we kept going, and there wasn’t much other than runners in the city. They chased us to make things worse.
Regardless of what was obviously going to happen, we decided to not go out without giving it our “all”. We reached a point where the building didn’t connect with any other roof; we were at a dead end. It was either we take our chances with a ten foot jump to the next building (which none of us would make) or stand our ground and hope for the best. No one jumped. Lizbeth, Mara, Edwin and I all lined up with our backs to the edge of the building and came close to each other as we waited for the infected to push us off, to kill us before we would give them a chance to infect us and turn us into more of them.
“BEHIND YOU!” a voice shot out from the distance, Marcus’s. We all turned around, an older man stood on the other building with a long wooden plank much longer than ten feet and a foot and a half wide (Where does one even find such a plank of wood? The plot convenience store is where!). He lined it up with the edge of the building he was on and told us to move to the sides. When we did he dropped the plank and it fell perfectly across the gap between the buildings, it was transportation to the other building, a way away from the infected.
“Hurry!” the old man cried out. He rushed us over to the next building. Mara went first, she made sure to not lose her balance then Lizbeth went, followed by Edwin, all the while the infected closed in on us. They were too close for comfort. The moment Edwin made it off to the other side I jumped on and raced my way across.
I tried my best to not look down, the risk of getting dizzy as a way to introduce a plummet to my death now that there was hope for survival didn’t sit well with me. What an ironic death that would have been. Not to look at the ground below the plank while l looked at the wooden plank itself, harder task than you’d think. The temptation to change my line of sight even the slightest was immense but I tolerated to the best of my ability, which apparently wasn’t good enough so I looked up for a moment as I came closer to the other side and when I did, the infected made it to the edge of the building I was leaving and ran right off, some tripped over the edge of the building and landed on top of the plank before they lost their balance and flipped off of it, down to their death, for the second time.
Every impact from the infected on the plank jiggled it, I’d freeze in place till I got my balance back and I could move again. The wooden plank was not strong enough to hold too much weight at once which is why we took turns going across, but the infected weren’t the smartest of things, they weren’t concerned with the weight minimum. Then again, to walk off the building wasn’t the brightest thing they’ve done either so there should have been no surprise. The number of infected behind us thinned as they continued right off of the roof. I took my first foot off of the plank and onto the next roof; in that moment one of the infected successfully made it half way across the plank and fell right in the middle. The plank snapped and made me lose my balance in the wrong direction. I fell back off of the building but the older man grabbed my hand in time and pulled me back over to the building.
I took a moment to breathe after I nearly lost my life which turned out to be a regular occurrence.
Me and my impossible mission to not undergo an anticlimactic death, during a zombie apocalypse! If only I knew it was going to be this difficult.
I’m not sure if anyone knew what happened but at some point the quiet dead city became a city of the dead. The difference is that not all of the infected were dead as far as we knew. Instead, they were just crazed, cannibals which was less desirable than just a good old fashioned slow flesh eater. To make things worse, we just came across another survivor which although saved my life meant we had someone else to keep alive since there was no way we were going to leave the man behind.
The infected didn’t have the particular intellectual characteristics it took to get them right back down the building and up the other one, so they just continued to thin out their numbers when they ran off of the building like if it was some sort of cartoon where they didn’t realize there was no more ground to run on. But they didn’t have that pause that occurred in cartoon midair; rather, they just plunged straight down. The sound of the impact their bodies made with the ground below was one of the most disgusting things I’ve heard in my life. It was almost bad enough to help me forget the horrible things we witnessed moments before getting chased by the infected. Too bad it wasn’t.
The man that saved us led us to the door that would take us back into the building. “Wait for us there!” Lizbeth yelled out to Marcus on the building across the street, without much option, Marcus nodded and took the moment to relax.
The man led us down the staircase and waited for us behind the door. We weren’t sure where he was going to take us but we were willing to trust him. He didn’t seem too dangerous; in fact, he looked more like he would have kicked the bucket long ago with the things that were going on. The man was either in his late fifties or early sixties, somewhere in between, and his age showed.