Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
I turn and head toward Atlanta. Something tells me that we won’t find much of a community in the suburbs this far away from Atlanta. If they hit this community, then they no doubt hit all the undefended communities ahead as well. It makes sense too. It has been over a year and those who are desperate to find food that isn’t coming from humans are going to be stretched to find food elsewhere. Their raids have to expand if they want to survive. I look toward the southwest where I can already see the rigid horizon of buildings that indicate the city. I’m going to have to go closer to find supplies.
Lindsay hops out of the guard’s window and looks at the sign. “Fuck these psychopaths,” Lindsay spits at the sign. “Fucking religious people.”
“Not a Christian?” I try to joke with her, trying to ease her frame of mind. She just glares at me as she walks past me.
“God doesn’t give a shit about me,” she says angrily, “so I don’t give a fuck about him.”
Atlanta is as silent as a tomb. I look at the growing height of the buildings and wonder what has happened here. There’s nothing to give any indication that there is life inside the sprawling urban area of greater Atlanta. It’s hot here—humid, especially after the rain that fell the previous night. I walk ahead of Lindsay who has once more taken to being distant from me. I don’t hold it against her. I can’t imagine a more despicable person right now than me. I let her keep away from me, harboring her ill outlook toward me. All I have to care about right now is finding a vehicle that can get me south of here.
I lost the hose when we fled Cartersville. I lost the gas containers and pretty much anything that might help me make the journey outside of finding a car with the keys in the ignition and a full tank of gas. Every vehicle I find has been completely and utterly destroyed. The tires are either slashed, removed, or the whole vehicle has been lit on fire. I’m growing more and more suspicious of this place, the deeper we move into the city. Every few minutes, I stop and listen, waiting for the sound of glass breaking or something falling. There’s nothing. There’s just the sound of the breeze whistling through alleyways and through the buildings. People were clearly here at one point, but there’s nothing now.
The streets are practically empty. I think back to Detroit and the chaos that I found there. There were bodies everywhere, slumped against buildings, lying in the streets. People just sort of walked as far as they could before collapsing and slowly dying in the street where they fell. There were bodies in all of the buildings and the stench of rot was so heavy that it became palpable. It felt as if death was walking around every corner. The devastation had been immense. It had been unbelievable. Debris had been all over and there had been ruin and chaos in every building, alley, and street. Here, there were no signs of that. In fact, it looked as if the storm had blown everything out of the streets, rather than shoving it into little crannies all over the city. This was not a city that looked familiar to me.
Atlanta looked as if the people who lived here had simply vanished in the twinkling of an eye. It looked as if they all snapped their fingers and wiggled their noses before they disappeared, cleaning up after themselves. There was no paper, no strewn clothes, no musty books, no tipped over trash cans, and no abandoned cars. Every vehicle that we found had been incinerated or it was impossible to get it moving. Everything about it seemed strange. There were no bullet holes in the buildings and there were no broken windows. I had never seen so many windows intact since before the panic and the insanity of the collapse. Somehow, Atlanta looked like a ghost town and not a former major city of America.
“Is this weird to you?” I stop and call back to Lindsay.
She looks at me and then back to the buildings, continuing to walk on, ignoring me. There’s nothing left for me to say to her. She doesn’t want a thing to do with me and everything I try is failing. I want to turn south and leave her. If she wants to be a spoiled brat, then let her rot alone in this worthless city. But the deeper I go, the more I realize that I can’t just let her wander alone. This place is a haven for something strange and the more I look, the more horrifying it truly is.
There’s a giant white stretch of cloth hanging down the front of a shop, covering the door with a veil of soiled white. Down the middle of the cloth is a black line and then another crossing two thirds of the way up. The enormous cross immediately reminds me of the dead men that we found at the wealthy part of the town. I look at the banner and then around at the empty, vacant buildings and wonder just how much of this town has been looted and ransacked by these cross-bearing murderers. I wonder if there are any more nearby.
Truthfully, I’m beginning to wonder if we’re the last people left in the world. For so long, all I’ve seen are Zombies. Granted, we’ve stuck to ourselves and haven’t gone looking for signs of life in the towns that we passed, but still, I haven’t seen a single sign of life here in Atlanta. I almost want to scream for someone to answer. Did these religious people find and round up everyone? Is there some sort of compound deeper into the city where survivors have banded together? I think about the old Preacher in Detroit and how comforting the idea of religion had been to me in the beginning. How many people would undoubtedly go flocking to one who claims to speak for the Almighty? Maybe there was a revival and those who banded together under the cross decided that they needed to fight for their right to remain in this world. Maybe those up on the hill, surrounded by wealth and opulence, were some of the questionable, horrifying, cannibalistic hunters that we ran across so many times in the past. What if they were just purging their city of those who would feed upon the chaos and drive those who are desperate farther down the road to Hell?
We come across the first sign of activity. In the passing storm, the pile of ash and cinders was flooded and washed away, leaving a long, black smear across the sidewalk where the pyre had been built and then consumed. I stop at the sight of it and kick through the ashes, listening as my boot overturns pieces of metal. I kneel down and pick through the soggy blackness. Eventually, I find what I’m looking for and pull out the remains of a rifle. I hold it up and look at it. Someone has taken a hammer to the weapon, making it impossible for anyone to use it without malfunctioning or backfiring. I find pistols and more rifles in the enormous heap of blackened ash. As it dries, it’s nearly a rock hard layer and I wonder if whoever burned the guns knew exactly what they were doing. They had to have. They beat the weapons into useless hunks of metal and then burned them so that no one else could find a way to use them.
“What do you make of this?” I ask Lindsay, who is peeking through a window. I look over my shoulder at her and see that she’s completely ignoring me. I might as well have died and become a ghost to her, lingering with her as she walks. I feel anger flushing through me, but I try to keep calm, try to see it her way. “It’s just like up at the hill,” I say, kicking through the ashes as I rise. “It’s like they’re gathering up all the guns and getting rid of them.”
“Stupid of them,” Lindsay mutters.
Life. I smile at the first sign of it and keep walking onward. There are bodies heaped into a large pile at an intersection with pages glued to the ground all around where the pyre was built for them to be burned. They were thrown onto a mound of books before being set on fire. I don’t understand. Why the books? Why the guns? Whoever the dead are isn’t important to me. Their blackened faces, emaciated by the flames until only blackened skin and scorched, pink flesh peeking through; they mean nothing to me when I look at the books. Dead people are everywhere in this world. Burned books, that’s some Nazi shit right there and I don’t like it. It makes me feel uneasy about the whole thing.
Lindsay keeps her distance from the pile of dead bodies. I don’t blame her. There’s something intelligent about this. There’s almost a feel of a ritual here. I wonder if there are still people here. These bodies have been burned and abandoned some time ago. There’s nothing that implies that they’ve been here since then. I don’t know how many days it’s been, but probably more than a week. Death has abandoned this place a long time ago. I step away from the dead and start moving toward the southeast.
The first sign of true life is like a candle in a blackout. We stop at an intersection when I spot them and immediately rush to the corner of a brick building, gazing down the street at the strip mall that has drawn my attention. Outside of the strip mall, a small pair of Zombies stumble about, looking up at the sky and swaying their arms as they walk. I’m not sure if they’re sniffing for something or if they’re just brain dead at this point. Maybe the dust has completely eroded their nervous system, leaving them little more than shambling vegetables. I look over my shoulder at Lindsay who comes up behind me, placing her back against the wall and drawing an arrow out of her quiver. Nocking it, she steps out from behind the corner, takes a second to aim, and fires without saying a word. With my back to the wall, I’m watching her as she stands perfectly still, her eyes narrowed behind her sunglasses as she watches the arrow hit its mark. She’s focused and determined. She’s proving to me that she doesn’t need me.
I should let her go. I know this now more than ever. She’s good on her own. No, she’s great on her own. All I’ve ever done is slow her down and endanger her life. She used to find enjoyment in killing the Zombies or risking her life, but everything has changed now and she’s soured to the whole situation. I don’t like it and the one who is poisoning her is me. It’s not the world that’s tearing her down. What I have done to her is the anchor that is sinking her soul. If she finds morbid delight in such things, then God forbid I be the one that takes that away from her.
She nocks another arrow and draws back the bowstring, aiming for only a breath before she releases the arrow and it hisses away like a thin little missile. Slowly, she lowers the bow and starts walking, leaving me where I am. I blink and look back down the road we’ve come. That’s my road out. It’s time to end this.
While she collects her arrows, I veer off toward the strip mall, listening as she wrenches her arrows out of the twitching bodies of the Zombies. She finishes them off with her knife, but I don’t stay to watch. I make my first stop at a dollar store, pushing open the sliding door and stepping into the musty stink of the vacant building. It hasn’t been overly looted, but the freezers in the back are filled with long rotten and dusty decay from the food that was there. I walk to the cash register and remember the first job I ever had, working at a small grocery store in northern Michigan. I don’t miss those days. Every night I closed up the shop at midnight alone, counting tills and leaving when there wasn’t a soul awake to keep me company.
The shelves where once there was food have long since been looted. The food that’s left has rotted or turned to a disgusting mush of stale dust that’s coagulated from the humidity. There’s nothing here that is worthwhile. I step across the shriveled Mylar remains of long deflated balloons that once bobbed across the ceiling of the shop. I walk all the aisles, looking for something that might be of value. The only thing that I find of use is a face mask used to keep from inhaling paint fumes. I figure that it might be useful when the storms pick up.
I look out the front doors as I stuff the pack of seven into my bag and stare out the front doors of the shop where Lindsay is standing with her arms crossed, looking around to keep watch. It’s now or never. I’m not going to keep walking through this freaky city with her if she isn’t going to talk to me. I sling my pack over my shoulder and head out into the warm, stale air of the city. I can hear birds somewhere to the south of here and it makes me uncomfortable. They sound like ravens or gulls. Standing in the sunlight, I whistle at Lindsay.
“Let’s check the pizza place for food,” I call to her.
She turns and looks at me, nodding weakly before heading with me toward the restaurant next door. I pull open the doors and hold it for her as she enters. The place reeks of rot and decay as well, untouched since the fall. Whoever hit the dollar store had definitely ignored this place. I wrinkle my nose and look around at everything, disgusted. Lindsay is heading for the counter when I decide to stop her.
“We need to talk,” I tell her. She stops at the sound of my voice and I can see her whole body slump as if she’s been waiting for this moment since we had our sit down at the dining room table. Slowly, she turns around to face me, taking her time. I’m not sure how to read her in this moment, but it has to be done. “I think this is as far as I’m going with you,” I say to her. “There is something seriously wrong with this place. There are no cars here to speak of. But the biggest reason, above all, is that I’m not sure I trust you to have my back.”
“Typical,” she shakes her head.
“What is?” I press, feeling my temper sizzling away.
“You,” she answers. “I’ve had your back since the moment we met and now you’re looking for a reason to bail, so here you go. Don’t feed me that shit, Charlie. If you want to go, just say it.”
“I don’t,” my voice is a sharp, angry whisper. I’m too afraid to yell at her. I don’t know what’s waiting for us in this city, but I don’t want it to come find us. She looks at me with wide, confused eyes. She crosses her arms and leans back against the counter. “I don’t want to leave,” I say again. “Lindsay, you are a survivor. You’re as tough as they come and you are so full of drive and life that I don’t know if I’m going to make it out there without you, but I will not play games with you. I’m sorry if I offended you or hurt you in any capacity, but you have to see that it was not my intention. Now, if you want to keep playing the pissy silent game with me, then you’re on your own. Good luck and I’ll see you on the other side when this is all over. But if you’re willing to keep going forward, then I’m more than happy to keep going forward with you.”
“Charlie, you don’t have to apologize to me,” she says in a low voice. “But I told you that I love you and the best you could give me is silence. A person doesn’t just spring back from that when there’s only a handful of people left in the world. I’m sorry that I can’t laugh and joke with you, but I need some time to myself.”
“So then where does that leave you?” I ask her. “Because I’m heading south and before we step out of these doors, we’re going to have a plan and we’re going to stick to it.”
She’s silent for a moment and then quickly her eyes widen. I know the look well enough that there’s something dangerous nearby. Dropping down into a crouch, I follow her lead and turn around, looking over a plastic red bench at the windows that are smeared and tarnished from the year of neglect. I see immediately what it is she’s looking at.