Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
“Surrender.” The old man’s voice doesn’t waver. “You will never escape this city. We have you entirely surrounded. No matter where you turn, you will find us. You are only delaying the inevitable.”
“So why don’t you tell me where your leader is?” I take another step forward. “I’ll go have a chat with him, confess my sins, and we’ll talk about the path to redemption. I’ll even let him burn me alive if he thinks I need to go through all of that.”
“You will burn,” the old man says to me. “You must die for the lives you have taken.”
I swing my machete and knock the knife free from his hand, it twirls through the air and clatters on the ground next to the dead man with my machete implanted into his face. Unarmed, alone, and now taking a step back from me, the old man seems to understand that he’s not escaping from this ordeal. I move in on him, lifting my bladed stump for him to get a good look. “I lost this in an alleyway back in Ohio,” I tell him as his eyes feast on my stump. “Bound the tourniquet and survived all the way up to this point,” I lie to him. Lindsay saved me. I had nothing to do with this. I would have been dead in that alleyway still if it wasn’t for her. “I’m great at taking off pieces of people and keeping them alive. So what do you feel like getting rid of first?”
“I’ll never tell you a thing.” The old man shakes his head.
Charging him, I knock the old man to the ground with an impact to his chest with my shoulder, connecting with a loud crunch that topples him. Standing over him, I kneel down and pin him to the ground with my bladed stump across his shoulder, holding my machete close to his face. As I place the blade flat against the side of his cheek, the edge tickles his ear, slowly starting to draw blood as I press it harder and harder against his skin and cartilage. The old man winces, squeezing his eyes tight as I press the blade harder and harder.
“We’ve got a torch right here,” I tell him. “I’ll just cauterize the wound, maybe drag you away and deal with you in a building so your friends can’t interrupt our playtime.”
“Please, God, no!” The old man is praying. He’s not begging for his life. His lips are moving as he voicelessly offers his prayers to whatever abomination of a deity he calls his own. This annoys me and I push down with all of my weight, watching the man’s ear peel off and fall to the dusty asphalt. The man screams in agony before I hit him on the side of the face with the butt of the machete. The man is dazed, his eyes flutter and he looks around with blood trickling out of his lips. The bastard bit his tongue. I shake my head and grab him again. “God, protect me,” he mumbles.
“Where is your leader?” I growl.
“In the Orchard,” the man mutters softly. “Please, spare me, my child.”
“Where’s the orchard?” I press down on his chest.
“No, you cannot know,” the man shakes his head.
“God damn it!” I shout, swinging the machete down on the old man’s arm. There’s a loud scream of metal against concrete before the old man buckles and his eyes widen, clearing with the sudden wash of pain over his body as his left hand detaches from his body. I can feel the warm pool of blood growing around my knee as I look down at his open, voiceless mouth. “Where’s the orchard?” I growl at him as the old man’s head slowly turns and tries to see what just happened. I block his view with another punch to the face, this time my knuckles start to bleed as I split open his upper lip and feel something crack and crunch beneath the thin layer of flesh before the hard teeth give out. The old man chokes on his broken teeth. I don’t need him to talk, I need him to point. “Where is it?”
The old man lifts his right hand and points to the east, deeper into the city. So be it. I push myself up with my left hand, sinking my bladed stump into his chest. The old man gasps as the blade pierces through his lung. Standing, I look down at him and the rivulets of blood coming out of his stump and feel nothing for him. Fuck him.
That’s all the sympathy I have for you, old man.
They truly are everywhere. The death in the park went unnoticed, as far as I can tell. I head east as quickly as I can, but the journey is getting harder and harder with each passing street. There is a mask over this city, a whitewashed lie. There isn’t a body in the street that hasn’t been placed there on purpose. Some of the intersections have their pyres of flesh and bone, but overall, there is nothing in this city like Detroit or the other towns. The lack of debris or chaos has made me stand out like sore thumb without any cover.
Wrecked cars, broken down busses, and destroyed buildings are all missing from this city. It looks like Atlanta has been blasted with a dozen sandstorms and that was it. The psychotic fanatics have cleared every last bit of debris from the streets. I don’t understand it. The idea of wasting time, cleaning the ruins of a dead city seems completely pointless. If the world is dead, why do they need to make it pretty? It’s like cleaning a mausoleum.
They have a plan. That much I know. Looking over my shoulder to see if she’s following me, I check myself. No. She’s not there anymore. I have to accept it. I have to come to terms with it. I look back at the intersection where the dead have been heaped and burned, hopefully they were dead when this happened. There’s a moment in my mind where I think that I could just break into a building and stay there, holed up for a very long time before they find me. But then I remember the Zombies.
They’re everywhere. The ground floor of everything is boarded up, locked away at this part of the city. I know what’s inside of these buildings. I can hear them, sniffing behind the locked doors, screaming from deep within the heart of the buildings. I can hear some of them clawing at the windows. Whoever these zealots are, they caught on to what Lindsay had told me. They locked up those who started showing signs of the poison sinking through their skin and into their blood. I stop at the building I’m lurking by and listen to the breathing inside. There’s a layer of shattered glass around and under my feet. Behind the boards, I know that there are hungry eyes, searching for me. How do you just lock up those who start showing signs? Did they do it in groups? Did they find those who started shivering and trembling and decide that they’d put them all in one building? Was it a volunteering thing? It couldn’t be. There’s no way that they could find those who knew that they were becoming monsters and resign them to their fate being locked inside of a department store with twenty others who would inevitably turn into walking horrors. They had to have taken them there, by force, dragging them into the darkness and locking them inside. Maybe it saved countless lives, explaining how they had a legion of fanatics to hunt across the city after me, but I can’t help but feel for those poor souls locked inside. And why didn’t they resist? Why didn’t they try breaking out before they were too far gone? Or did they all understand?
And why don’t they burn the buildings? Why do they lock them in a hopeless house and just let them tear at one another? That has to be the idea, right? If you lock flesh-eating horrors together, they inevitably turn on one another. I had seen it plenty of times on my road to this devilish city. So I suppose they let the problem solve itself. Let the horrors kill off one another. But as I think about it, that’s not the case. No, every time I found the Zombies killing one of their own, it was because the dying one was, in fact, dying. Maybe they understand one another. Maybe they have some sort of silent, wordless pact not to kill one another until they’re proven to be dying.
If that’s the case, then they’re just locked inside all of these buildings, left to starve. It’s disturbing. Are they that far gone that they don’t see that as murder, a crime against their own religion? Or does their god just sit back and shrug it off when they lock their dying kin away to starve to death? Bunch of fucking hypocrites. I’m being hunted to be burned alive for giving the bastards a quick death and they’re giving it to them slowly, calling it the right thing to do. There’s no more right and wrong in this world and if these psychopaths think that there is, well, then they’re more delusional than I’ve been giving them credit for. I can’t stand these people. I want this city to burn. I want them all to go up in flames like a pyre to their sick and demented god. If the military still existed, I’d send them a letter, telling them to nuke Atlanta off the map. Hell, these freaks would probably like that. They might call it some sort of divine cleansing. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want them to die that way. I don’t want there to be poetry in their extinction. I want them to simply cease.
I look over my shoulder before crossing the street.
She isn’t there.
Across the street, there’s nothing to indicate that there’s another hunting party looking for me. I think I’m making progress, or at least it feels that way. From what I can tell, they’re all behind me, spreading out in every direction like a growing perimeter of bloodthirsty crazies. I think I prefer the cannibals and the Zombies to these nut jobs. At least with the cannibals it made sense to me, they were hungry and thought I looked like a good meal. These guys have a different train of thought. What I’ve figured though, unlike the cannibals, these zealots have to have an epicenter of madness. They have to have somewhere to rest their heads at night while the other parties go out and search for innocent travelers. So where is that? Where do they nestle down when they’re most vulnerable?
Creeping around the corner, I’m confronted by the problem of more hunters. These idiots have dogs that are barking in the wrong direction, hunting for something that clearly isn’t me. In fact, how are dogs supposed to help them at this particular junction in their dilemma? They don’t have my scent and if I do smell like something, wouldn’t I smell like the wasteland I’ve been stuck in for ages? Maybe they’re using them for hearing. Maybe the dogs have sharper eyes in the dark. I sneak around my corner and get off the main street, sticking to back alleys and little pathways between the buildings. There are dumpsters here that have stewed and baked in the harsh, concrete cooker that is the city, and no longer smell like anything at all. They smell no more terrible than the rest of the world. Or maybe they do and I’m just numb to all of it.
If the dogs or the zealots find me, I can always just drop down into one of the dumpsters. I don’t care about the baked horrors inside. It’s not like I’m here to impress anyone. The alleys are my friends. They’re dark, and as the sky above begins to lighten, I begin to notice that one by one the stars are beginning to be extinguished above me. The day is coming and I’m beginning to lose my cover. When the sunlight is beating down on the city, I have no doubt that they’ll be in full force, still hunting me. I need somewhere to hide, and soon. I look up at the buildings around me. They’re five to seven stories high. If I could find a small closet or a bathroom in one of these buildings to hide in, then I’ll be in luck. Reaching the street, I notice that the buildings around me aren’t boarded up. There aren’t horrors locked away inside the dark depths of these buildings. Instead, I’m greeted with the dusty, tarnished windows of a hundred forgotten businesses and shops. I look up and down the street at the dead cars with flattened tires in the waxing light of day.
It’s almost as if they cleared this street and then just abandoned it. Looking down at the heart of the street, I notice that there is a thick layer of dust that has been mixed into a layer of mud, that reveals hundreds and hundreds of footprints going up and down the streets. I step out of the alleyway and stand on the hardened mud that covers the sidewalk. There has been an army marching up and down this street. Looking up, I search the windows above me, looking for any faces that might be staring back down, or someone with a rifle trained on me. I grip my machete tightly and take another step forward. I must be getting closer to their lair.
The orchard, that was what the dead old man had said. When I stepped away from him, I had yanked my machete out of the face of his lackey before leaving him there to die, his lungs filling with blood while the rest spilled out of his arm, all across the concrete beneath him. Maybe I had found it. All I had to work with was a shaking, gnarled finger pointing east. Ducking down behind the car, I peek around the corner at the muddy heart of the street. The majority of the footsteps are heading north. If they’re heading north, then that means I’m heading south.
Whoever these fanatics were, they had unleashed an army upon the rest of the city in an attempt to hunt me down and to bring me to whatever justice they found to be worthy of my crimes. They had killed Lindsay in the process and now I was on the trail of their home. If legions had marched into Atlanta, then I’m tracking them back from where they came. God, I wish I had a gun right now. One of those multi-barreled mini-guns from all those stupid action movies. I could just mow them all over with a tsunami of hot metal.
Several blocks to the south, I find exactly what I’m looking for, but I never expected it to take on the form before me. I figured that Georgia was the peach state, so the Orchard was probably some ritzy hotel in the heart of the city, but no. It’s very much not a skyscraper hotel waiting for me that I find. What I find is not nearly as compact and stacked as I had imagined. No, it’s sprawling and vast. It’s something that I could never hope to destroy.
The Orchard is the remnants of what I assume was Atlanta’s largest park. Surrounding the park is a vast network of cars that have been tipped over on their sides and stuffed together to make a large wall of steel and iron and rubber. Peeking up from this enormous wall of cars are several watchtowers that have been erected with lumber that the zealots have stripped from lumber yards and construction sites, no doubt. I know that it’s them the moment I see the first watchtower. Hanging from the sides of it is something that catches my eye, a long white cloth with a black cross painted on it. At the sight of the symbol, I feel my phantom hand curling its fingers into a fist, squeezing, but it’s not there and I’m alone here. There are people in the watchtowers, but none of them spot me at the moment, so I slip into the doorway of the building next to me. In the door well, I look at the wall and wonder what’s behind it. I can see the towering, dead trees beyond the wall with their skeletal branches reaching up like monuments to a perished world.
I try the door handle, only to find that it’s firmly locked, which annoys me instantly. What kind of a post-apocalyptic wasteland has locked doors? I knew that this might be the case, so I slip back out from the door well and back into the street where the cars prove to be my cover once more. I work my way back to the alleyway as the sun bursts over the horizon and fills the sky with pale blue light, submerging the world in sunlight as happy as a summer day should be. I hate the apathetic sun, indifferent to the suffering in the world. No matter what happens, the sun shines on.
In the alleyway, I find the back door to the corner building and reach for the handle. It turns and I push it inward, only to find that it’s blocked by something. Trying again, I give the door a heavy, blunt blow with my shoulder and feel the pain rattling in my ribs. Deciding that this isn’t the best way to go about my business, I step back and plant a heavy kick on the door, right above the handle and lock. The door pushes in a little more. I freeze in the middle of the alley, looking at both entrances to make sure that no one is coming for me or drawn to the sound. Holding my breath I listen, hearing only the heavy pounding of my heart before I kick again as hard as I can, feeling the blow ricocheting through the bones in my leg until it reverberates in my pelvis. The door gives way more and there’s enough room that I think I can squeeze in. Checking the entrances once more, I push my bag through the gap in the doorway before I squirm into the crack, trying my hardest to slip through the door and the wall. There’s a mass of chairs and a table blocking the hallway at the back of the building. I shove the chairs and hurl them backwards, helping me clamber over the table that is tightly jammed at an angle into the hallway now, thanks to me. There’s no way the door is budging any more, unless I break the table. Thankfully, I don’t need to. Stepping onto the top of the table, I slip through and push the door closed softly before grabbing the chairs and jamming them down into the gap between the door and the table so that no one will ever get through that door again. Dropping down off the table, I’m surrounded by darkness and can only hear my own panting. Taking a deep breath, I reach down for my pack and find it in the darkness.
I set it down on the table and open up the pockets until I find one of the flashlights I’ve hoarded away. As I click the button, a cone of pale light pierces the darkness around me, showing me the world that I’ve come to be a part of. I’m in a hallway that leads to a looted and ransacked kitchen that looks to be large enough to be a restaurant. I search for the swinging doors before carefully pushing them open and stepping out into a lounge that has been empty for a very long time. Somehow the dust is getting into the building because everything is caked and covered with the stuff. I step out onto the dark carpet and look at the empty tables that look like they haven’t been touched since this place was locked up and abandoned.
Making my way to the foyer of the building, I find it flooded with the filtered light of the outside world. It’s coming in through yellowed, dusty windows that have been tarnished over the year of neglect. I can see the exterior world through those dingy windows, but I’m fearful of it. I’m close to the zealot encampment and I don’t feel safe. I feel naked. Even here.
I find a desk in the foyer and discover that this is a sort of swanky lounge and hotel that looks like it’s more of a bar and lounge than hotel. I find the stairs that lead up to the hallways of rooms. They’re dark and my flashlight peering down the corridors only creeps me out. I’m expecting to find Zombies waiting for me, but there’s nothing. I stand completely still on the second floor, listening to the world around me. I don’t hear any shuffling or scratching behind the closed doors of the hotel. I don’t hear sniffing or groaning. They didn’t lock them inside this hotel’s rooms, which actually surprises me. Or maybe it doesn’t. That would be completely stupid to lock those horrors up so close to their encampment. If anything happened, then it would be an army on their doorstep.