Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
Making my way all the way up to the top floor, I blindly search for what I’m hoping is the southern face of the building before I try the door handle. It’s locked. Of course it is. Heading back to the dark stairwell, I make my way back down to the front desk where the keys are hanging on the wall behind it, next to the mail slots. I like that. It’s old fashioned. If this was a newer or more secure hotel, then I would have to resort to kicking in the door, which would make way too much noise for comfort. I barely got away with getting in here. I stop on the stairs on my way back up and listen, paranoid that someone might have heard me and is now trying to get into the building. No, the building is silent. I’m its only guest.
With a handful of keys, I make my way back to the door I originally wanted to enter and look at it, wondering what kind of hideous secrets lurk behind it. To be honest, it takes a moment for me to actually build up the courage to open the door. I slip the key into the lock and turn it, wrapping my hand around the knob before twisting and pushing open the door. I anticipate the inevitable Zombie charging me, so my bladed stump is ready and waiting, but nothing comes for me. Picking up my flashlight on the floor, I push open the door a little more and shine it across the room, searching for someone or something waiting for me.
There’s nothing here. There’s absolutely nothing in this room. In fact, it hasn’t been tossed at all. It looks like a room that you might find at a hotel designed for people to rent rooms for an hour or two only. It’s very chic and very well decorated, but there’s a shady vibe to it that makes me feel like the mattress is saturated with dry sperm.
Peeking behind the curtain, I get a glimpse at what I’m dealing with and I am definitely not ready for it, not in the slightest. The park is entirely surrounded by the wall of cars, except for the few entrances that have been opened up for their legions of psychopaths to escape from. Behind those walls are hundreds and hundreds of tents, all lined up in rows, forming a sort of shantytown neighborhood with streets and intersections. But I can see deeper and deeper into the park, from my perch, that there is a huge tent, the kind that makes me think of a circus. It’s enormous and all around it are crosses that stand nearly as tall as my perch. Hanging from the crosses are those white banners that hang from the watchtowers. This is a city built within a city and it freaks me out. There are so many of them. There is no way that I’m ever going to be able to take them. There’s no way I’m going to ever be able to stop them. The only way I could kill all of them would be with an airplane and a very large bomb.
Below me, there is a patrol returning and I can see patrols circling the park on the empty, abandoned streets on the outside of the walls. It seems so naked to me. If they had any enemies who could stand against them, they could just take to the surrounding buildings and assault them from above. They truly are fearless. They must have completely annihilated any form of resistance long ago. I’m alone in this fight. I realize that and the true depth of that statement as I look out over their headquarters and feel the cold hands of reality.
“Kill them all, Charlie,” I can hear her saying to me as if she’s standing behind me. Maybe she is. I can smell her. I don’t dare look over my shoulder. She isn’t there. She’s dead. But her voice is as clear as a bell to me. “Kill every last fucking one of them.”
“There’s too many of them.” I hold the binoculars up to my eyes and scan the perimeter once more. I see that the patrols around the encampment aren’t necessarily ordered or disciplined. Mostly they just walk in circles around the park, talking to one another and looking at the buildings to make sure that there’s no one on the rooftop. Of course, they have a sort of confidence that makes me believe that there hasn’t been anyone on the rooftops or in the surrounding buildings for a very, very long time. They don’t have guns and they don’t have bows or crossbows. In fact, they only have bludgeoning weapons or blades. It doesn’t make sense to me. Where are the marching armies like the one that laid waste to Detroit? If those killers showed up outside of Detroit, then these psychopaths would be completely and utterly overrun. They would be dead and I wouldn’t have to deal with them. God, I wished that something like that would happen. Can’t a roaming pack of marauders just annihilate these freaks?
“That’s probably putting too much on God,” I imagine her saying to me.
She’s right. Whatever Almighty is sitting up among the heavens has given me enough of a pass this far. He’s not some cosmic vending machine for me to run up to and punch when I’m in need. Clearly, he doesn’t work that way. If it worked that way, then Lindsay would still be here. Then again, if he worked that way, she would still be in Columbus and I would still be teaching at the University of Michigan. But then again, if he did work that way, then Tiffany would still be alive and I would be with her, writing on some beach happily ever after.
I pull the binoculars from my eyes and blink, looking down at the patrol rounding the corner of the park. I step back from the window and let the curtain fall where it is, making sure that it doesn’t swish too much. I don’t want to give myself away before I figure something out.
“I don’t have anything to do this with,” I growl. Looking at my equipment sprawled across the surface of the bed, there’s a bottle of lighter fluid, a few knives, and some medical equipment. Nothing that might actually save me. Most of my water bottles are empty and I haven’t got a single tin of food left to eat. I don’t even have a sizeable amount of rope. All I have working for me are blades and my bladed stump. “This is hopeless.” I shake my head and lean against the wall.
“If you let them live, others will die, Charlie.” Her memory speaks to me, telling me truths that I already know.
How many others are going to stumble into this city, looking for food or sanctuary, only to cross some horrendous law that the fanatics have enacted? How many grievous sins must be punished before they are stopped? I don’t like the idea of going down there on a suicide mission to try and stop them, not because I might end up dead in the process—almost certainly end up dead—but because I might not actually succeed in stopping all of them. I need more of a plan. I need more of a strategy.
The patrol beneath me has moved on and I slowly press the crack in the curtains and lift the binoculars to my eyes. There has to be a weakness. There has to be something in this city that can help me take out this army of psychopaths. As the day presses on, I see that there are others in the rows and rows of tents. What bothers me most are the children. There are so many young faces amidst the tents. They gather around men wearing white, with long beards and crosses painted on their faces. They have this fiery, animated way of talking to the children. There are no smiling faces, no laughter, and no playing of any kind. They gather around their teachers and they look at them with the most stony, stern faces that I’ve ever seen children have. I know exactly what is happening down there. I don’t need to hear what the passionate preachers are saying. They’re indoctrinating them. I look at the standing children in their ordered lines with their hands behind their backs. They are the new generation. They are the poor souls to inherit the devastated earth. These will be the last faces to look across the empty earth. Years from now, when the restoration projects begin and the cannibals are gone, these will be the zealous warriors who impede the process. Those poor kids probably think that this doomsday cult is right. They’ve probably accepted their nihilistic prognosis. The earth is dying as a payment for our sins and to resist the end is to resist God.
There are women down there too, gathered around fires with enormous cauldrons. They solemnly and silently work as they deal with their various tasks. The enormous stews are what’s feeding the soldiers. A single patrol returns and gathers around one of the pots as the women ladle out the meals to the famished warriors. When the men are done getting their food, they ignore the women, walking away to benches where they talk and laugh, all of which happens after they’ve bowed their heads and prayed together, their lips all moving as one synchronized prayer. I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all. Before they eat, they make the sign of the cross over their chests and begin their meal. The women stand by with their eyes lowered, so as not to disturb the men.
One thing I notice very quickly about the women is that they have no hair. They’ve completely buzzed their heads and none of them have breasts either. My mind goes to a dark, heinous place before I realize that they’re wrapping long lengths of cloth around their chests to press down on their breasts, to keep the men from being tempted. They all look like a bunch of gangly, awkward teenage boys. There’s nothing beautiful, unique, or freeing about them. They’ve taken the very essence of what it means to be a woman and stripped it away from them. They all look like supplicant beings, entirely in the service of these warriors. There’s an inner feminist inside of me that is furious at this sight, but it’s not important at the moment. They’re there for a reason. Lindsay didn’t submit. Lindsay didn’t surrender.
The overall encampment is defended, protected, and resilient-looking. But that doesn’t mean that it’s impenetrable. In fact, most of the people living in this settlement appear to be completely oblivious to the fact that there is something happening beyond their little encampment. They seem unfazed by my fugitive nature and my fleeing the city. It’s almost as if there is an entirely different world beyond their little wall of cars. I am nothing more than a ghost of a problem in a distant land. To them, the world is continuing just as it always had. They walk without even a thought that I might be in one of the surrounding buildings, watching them from above. No, they only think about themselves, down there in the present. Their eyes look to one another, lethargic and uninterested in the buildings they look at day after day. No, I am a ghost in the ruins that they know isn’t there.
Surprise would be the only advantage I would have with me. I still have that cross painted on my face and I think about how easy it would be to get ahold of something white to wrap around myself and paint a cross on it. How hard could it be to get ahold of one of the fanatics and to strip them and dress myself as one of them? The only downside, beyond maybe getting caught and killed in the process, would be that I have no clue how customized and well known some of these freaks are to one another. What if I kill one of their leaders and start masquerading around in his armor and dress? They’ll notice me for sure and then kill me. I lift the binoculars up again and search the encampment.
There certainly are vehicles in the encampment. There are a few long semi-trucks that look like they were full of supplies and food for grocery stores or maybe the government-run refugee camps that had popped up all around the east coast when the quarantine zones failed and the displacement camps were built. They must have hijacked some of the supply caravans in the chaos of this city’s collapse, or maybe they just converted the drivers. Honestly, there’s stability down there. I hate them, but they’ve got a protected, ordered society for those who decide to join them and aren’t unfortunate enough to sin against them. There are several military trucks, the kind that we used to see on the television in Iraq and Afghanistan delivering water to villages out in the middle of God-knows-where. I see that there are armed men standing at the back of every vehicle that appears to have supplies in it. It’s these large military trucks that draw my attention. Maybe I could get to one of those. Maybe I could get the keys and drive away.
Most importantly though, if they have trucks like that and vehicles that can drive and aren’t part of their enormous wall of metal and rubber, then they have to have gasoline to power them. They have to have a supply enough to pack up and leave if they need to. So if they have a reserve of it somewhere within their large walled village, then maybe I can get to it. Maybe I can get to it and toss a torch or flare at it and watch the whole damned thing go up in smoke and fire. I like that. I like the sound of that. Burn all those fire-happy psychopaths straight to hell or whatever demented heaven they believe in.
But that still leaves the problem of getting in there. How am I supposed to get past the patrols and then the legions of others inside the place? Damn it. The whole thing seems impossible. If Lindsay was here and had her bow, we might be able to rig some sort of fire arrow up and just blindly launch them into the camp at night. Eventually they would spot us and they would come clambering up the stairwell of whichever building we picked and then we would be caught like rats in a trap, but at least the encampment would be on fire.
“Stop wasting time,” I growl at myself.
There’s no point thinking about things like that. The hypothetical, if-onlys are getting me nowhere and just leave me thinking about Lindsay and how alone I am. There’s no one here to watch my back and there’s no one here to plan a tactical assault with. I’m alone against these nut jobs and I need to accept that. There has to be a way of getting to them, of completely overrunning them or destroying them. I need help, though. I need some other advantage, other than surprise, on my side. I look out the window and see that another patrol is returning. They have the numbers and the weapons to make me nothing more than a bloody piece of meat in the middle of their creepy, haunted city. I need something—something that will give me an edge.
I keep my eyes open, searching the encampment, but I see nothing. There is absolutely nothing that I can use against them. Maybe if I had Lindsay or at least one other person with me. Damn it, that’s no help to me. I’m alone, start thinking like a killer.
Maybe I could stay here. Maybe I could lurk in this building, kill some of them off one by one. I’ve left no survivors and no one has actually seen me, that was clear enough with the old man and his trio of idiots. That might work out. I could join their little order after a few days, claim that I’m a wanderer lost in their city, and want to join their commune to stay alive. Then on the inside, I could start picking them off, one by one. That was a long term goal. That would take days, weeks, months even. If the girls weren’t lost out there or if I was alone, that would be a plan I could live with but it’s too slow. I’m sure they would feed me—keep me alive like a parasite growing within them.
No, there needs to be another way.
Outside, there are more patrols returning, dozens of them. There are hundreds of men now returning to the little society behind the walls. I don’t know if these are all the people hunting me, but as I watch them, there’s a sinking, sickening feeling in my stomach. There’s no way I can kill all of them. They look like hundreds and hundreds of little ants, all swarming the complex as if it were a big hamburger at a picnic. I watch them, trying to fathom how many were out there, hunting me like a rat. There are so many. There’s no way I could escape this city without doing something radical. Looking down at the street, I see that the perimeter patrol has been overrun by those returning to the encampment. They’re chatting and talking, probably about how they all spotted me a dozen times and I kept escaping. I watch them as they file in through the entrances.
There are so many of them.
That’s when the plan clicks with me. I’ve been going about this all the wrong way. I look at the watchtowers where the watchmen are now completely distracted by the arriving legions. They weren’t very good at their jobs in the first place, so now they’re especially distracted. I watch them and realize that their weakness is so apparent. I have one more trick up my sleeve and it’s a very, very good one. It’s one that I never even thought about having. Stepping back from the window, I know that it’ll have to wait until darkness falls. Peeking one last time through the curtains, I see that it’s partly cloudy outside. I might just be able to pull this off if it gets cloudy again tonight. If it rains, it will be even better. I walk back to the bed where my pack is sitting and let out a long, slow sigh. It should be Lindsay here, not me. She would have been much, much better at this.
I have several more hours to pass until sunset and if I’m lucky, I can get some sleep before all of this needs to happen. I walk over to the door and lean against it, slowly sinking down and leaning my head against the corner. I could sleep on the bed, but I’m paranoid and used to the less comfortable things in the world now. I’m used to aching and groaning from the hard earth. I slowly close my eyes and listen to the bustle of noise beyond the window. They’re loud, fearless. There’s truly nothing in this city for them to fear anymore. All they have left to think about and worry about is keeping men like me at bay, but I doubt they’ve ever dealt with someone like me.
When I finally fall asleep, I dream of Lindsay. I dream of that blade sticking out through her stomach and the pool of blood. In my dreams, I never leave to kill her attacker. There, I’m always slow, late, or unable to save her, just like real life. As if reality wasn’t hell enough, I am damned to relive her dying again and again, watching that look of horror, surprise, and agony in her eyes as the blade punches through her. Every time, she falls into my arms and looks at me with angry, spiteful eyes. Through bloody lips, she tells me again and again that I’m the one who killed her. With teary eyes, she whimpers that she doesn’t want to die, that she wants to live. I fail her, again and again. Each time that blade punches through her, I scream and call her name, trying to warn her, but it’s all in vain, fruitless. Even if I pull her away from the door, she dies. Nothing I do can save her. I am helpless, doomed to be alone.