One Blink From Oblivion (24 page)

***

Max remains as invisible as possible. In areas where invisibility is not possible, he settles for being quick. He moves swiftly from the dimness of one storefront to the next. So far, invisibility and quickness have been enough and he has not had to resort to being loud. The rifle is loaded and ready to roar but so far, his sight or scent has not betrayed him. He occasionally hears and/or witnesses skirmishes in the distance but in every case, those involved were moving quickly in one direction or another. It appeared that no groups of soldiers large enough to make a stand remained. In a panic, the few surviving guardsmen had scattered in all directions searching desperately for an escape. As for civilians, Max had come across two holding rooms where all occupants were dead or at least deadish. Max did a quick recon in both cases and found both rooms full of males that had been either mutilated or left to turn from infection. Thankfully, thus far Vinny had not been among them.

Max makes a right turn into a wide shallow inlet to a Macy’s department store. The store is drenched in darkness and the massive gate before it is securely locked. The store is not what Max has been searching for but just to the left of its entrance he finds for what he’s been searching. An access door to the alleys that run behind the small shops stands ajar, offering only blackness beyond it. Once again, trading quickness for invisibility Max sprints on feathery feet to the door and for just a moment flashes the light on the end of the rifle down the hallway that it guards. ‘Coast is clear,’ Max steps in and shuts the door behind him. If he is being followed, perhaps the door will make a sound and betray whoever walks in his path. Though the hall is dark, Max doesn’t dare to keep the light burning. A single flash could be an electrical short or a flickering bulb. A solid beam of light that moves about in the black of night is almost always attached to a person.

Max makes a forty-five degree left turn down the next corridor and again allows himself one brief blink of light, ‘coast still clear’. He checks every doorknob and listens at every door before proceeding. He is now about one hundred yards in and still no sign of Brooke or Vinny. Ahead he approaches another bend –this time to the right- and he pauses for a moment to adjust his grip onto the pressure switch for the flashlight. One quick blink of light. One quick very confusing horrific blink of light raises the small, unbraided hairs on the nape of Max’s neck. Thirty feet before him crouches the freeway-man with his hands pressed to the lower half of a door. A hole in the door appears to be swallowing up his tongue in its entirety like a window to a fourth dimension.

The perplexing nature of what Max has just seen requires that a second dose of light be administered. ‘Have I finally gone completely ape shit? And if not, then what happens now?’ the time to pussyfoot with the light is over. Max squeezes the pressure plate hard and a bright crisp beam of light illuminates the freeway-man who is already in full gallop in his direction and danger close. ‘It’s too late for invisibility and there’s not enough quickness in the world to save my ass here.
Fuck it
, time to get loud!’ As the freeway-man bares down on Max like a runaway train, Max flips the thumb switch on the M16A1 to full auto and unleashes a torrent of fire so bright and deafening in the small space that he may as well be blind and deaf for all the good that those two senses can do him now. Total sensory overload is the only way to describe the blaring rapid-fire sonic booms, as the vapors escape the end of the barrel at supersonic speeds. Max’s ears mercifully shut down completely and the booms are replaced by the steady buzzing tone one gets after sitting too close to the Cerwin Vega speakers at a Metallica concert. The muzzle flash gives him flash-blindness so the silhouetted image of the freeway-man stretched out in a dive and launching himself over Max’s head is burned onto his retina. Even though he instinctively shuts his eyes the superman-like visage still pulses brightly against the backdrop of his closed eyelids in rhythm with his pounding heart. He swings around and blindly sprays the hall in the direction from whence he came in hopes of damaging the freeway-man even in the slightest. Possessing an even higher level of speed and agility than their previous encounter, Johnny Buckets leaves Max with little hope that he was able to strike home with a single shot.

***

A rapid succession of hollow thumps reverberates through the door and walls that comprise the back of the storage space. Instinctively women duck, dive and scatter to avoid being hit by another stray projectile. Brooke lies flat on her back and holds her breath until the last crack of gunfire gas echoes away down the hall.

“Hey, who’s there? We’re trapped in here!” Brooke asks of the steel door that remains as fixed as ever.

Her question dominos through the room as thirty or more desperate voices call out in a shared hope of rescue. Brooke pauses to listen for a response but the choir of voices inside the room is the only thing she can hear. She crawls to the door on hands and knees and dares another look through the small black hole, no eyeball to molest her, no tongue to explore her, only darkness, a rich deep darkness.

She calls through the hole this time, “Can you help us? The door is locked.”

Brooke is aware of the possibility that the one with gun is currently being snacked on by the one with tongue, but the need for rescue is too great to retreat and do nothing. Besides, the screams of the infected –both old and freshly minted- in the mall loom ever closer. Suddenly she remembers how deafening the sound of gunfire in the clinic had been, how her ears rang incessantly after they had fired their guns in such a confined space. The soldier on the other side of the door most likely had not heard a word she said and is probably moving away down the hall right now. In a desperate move she shoves the first two fingers of her hand through the hole in the door. Upon doing so she feels the cool sharp edge of the steel and the smooth wooden surface of the core against her fingers. Another, less pleasant substance lines the hole as well and her fingers are already covered in the cold sticky goop with their tips wiggling on the other side before she realizes what she’s done. She instinctively jerks her fingers back through the hole and examines them as well as the twilight of the room will allow.

“
Stupid!
” she exclaims and means it with every fiber of her being.

Beneath the blood-streaked saliva that now covers the index finger of her right hand she can clearly see the small but open wound she had suffered while searching for the light switch.

***

Max rubs his eyes and attempts to regain his hearing with several yawns. The ghost image of the freeway-man diving head first over him begins to deteriorate around its fringes but his ears prove more stubborn than his eyes. The high-pitched tone buzzes on in spite of his best efforts. The flashlight harnessed to the M16A1 was apparently of the cheap variety because the light had quit altogether halfway through his sloppy attempt on Johnny Buckets. Max depresses the pressure switch affixed to the left-forward grip of the rifle with no result. He raps the light with his hand several times and is rewarded with a quick flicker of illumination. In that brief moment he believes he saw something protruding from the holes in the door where the freeway-man’s tongue had been inserted moments ago.

Max smacks the flashlight against a galvanized pipe running vertically beside him once, twice, “Got it.”

He aims the light and consequently the gun at the door and the hole within it but finds nothing unusual. Whether it was real or imagined, he needs to know what had so enthralled the freeway-man. Max approaches the door and stoops to peer through the hole. He’s careful to keep his distance from the opening lest he get licked by a tricky Johnny Buckets that has circled around to the other side to taunt him further. No light escapes from the door so he aims the flashlight through the hole. What amounts to a pinprick of light from this distance is not enough to get a solid view of what’s on the other side but he does detect movement across the beam. Max steps to the door and places one hand upon it. He can feel drumming from the other side like a multitude of cross-legged anxious children knocking rapidly on a bathroom stall.

He shouts, “Step back I’m going to shoot the door!”

His words sound like a muffled whisper originating from somewhere deep within his own head. He can only hope that if there are uninfected people on the other side, their hearing wasn’t damaged as his was by his gunfire.

“I’m going to count to five and then I’ll shoot the hinges.”

Max knows that the deadbolt inserted through a metal catch will prove difficult to breach so opts for blowing out the hinges that are typically held by only a few flimsy screws in wood.

“
One, two, three, four, five,”
Max toggles the fire select switch back to single shot and puts two slugs in each of the three locations he assumes a hinge might be.

The bolt of the rifle locks open, indicating an empty magazine. In the event that what lies on the other side of the door is unfriendly, Max quickly changes to his only remaining magazine. He allows the old magazine to clatter to the ground. One thing about choosing to go loud is that there’s no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube once you’ve done so. He pulls the new magazine from his waistband and inserts it crisply into the lower receiver of the rifle. He follows this action with a slight smack to the bottom of the magazine to insure proper placement. With two fingers, he releases the bolt and chambers the first round.

Max waits a beat just to make sure nothing is coming through the door after him. Once he is satisfied that this is not the case he turns his back to the door and delivers a powerful mule kick to its lower section. The door gives and Max knows that his bullets had hit home. He kicks the door several more times and it finally drops onto one corner and pinwheels before falling with a dusty ‘thwump!’ to the floor. Max swings his flashlight into the gloomy room and illuminates the squinting faces and shielding hands of a large group of women huddled around the opening.

“Brooke?”

Max pans his light across the faces that stare back at him. Some of them with looks of concern are mouthing words that he can’t make out.

“Brooke, are you in here?” he repeats.

Two of the faces before him separate and Brooke steps out from between them. She appears haggard but somehow just as beautiful as always. Max allows the weapon to fall to his side on its sling and he steps to her. He swallows her up in his arms and squeezes her a little harder then he means too. He fights to keep his emotions in check and has to fight even harder when he feels the warmth of wet tears trickling down from where Brooke’s face is buried in his neck.

Behind them, the exodus begins as women pour across the fallen door and through the gateway it once shielded. The exiting from the room proceeds uneventfully and soon Max and Brooke are the only ones left standing inside.

Brooke pushes away from Max in order to gain enough space to see his eyes, “I need your help in here.”

Her voice sounds far away but by watching her mouth as she speaks Max is able to make out what she is saying.

“We need to get out of here now. That was the freeway-man knocking at your door and he’s far more dangerous than we knew. I know who he is now. He’s somewhere in the mall so we need to be somewhere else.” Max gives her arm a gentle tug in the direction of the door but she resists.

“There are women trapped and unconscious under the shelves over there,” pointing at the heap on the floor, “I’m not leaving until I help them.”

Max takes a look at the mound in question and sees only a twisted pile of metal and debris like a life-size game of ‘pick up sticks’.

“Anyone under that mess is dead already.”

“No! I heard someone moan before you came in. Help me move it.”

Max lifts his rifle and pans its light, first around the wreckage, then the rest of the small room, and then turns and proceeds toward the back door to the hallway and wordlessly disappears through it. Feeling dejected, Brooke’s shoulder’s slump and she drops her gaze to the floor. She understands Max’s urgency to reunite with Big Mama, but on some level, she selfishly hoped that she meant enough to him to make him stay just long enough to do this one thing. He was right of course, to stay could be suicide, but to turn a blind eye to the suffering here would be unthinkable. She turns to the tasks and lifts a large triangular piece of particleboard from the pile before her. As she spins to deposit it behind her, she is surprised to see Max reentering the room.

“Okay, the hall is clear, but if we’re going to do this then one of us has got to stand guard. I can get through this mess faster so that means you. Are you up to it?” Max is looking at the pile again as he speaks and doesn’t see Brooke’s eyes swollen with tears.

After a pregnant pause with no answer, he shines the light on her face and is instantly perplexed by her teary smile.

“What’s wrong? Don’t be afraid. We’re going to make it out of here, I promise.”

Brooke is too ashamed for doubting him to explain the real reason for her tears so she replies only with the quick agreeable tilted nod of a schoolgirl and wipes at her cheeks. As she does so, she feels a pang of discomfort from her right hand and is reminded of her wound and possible infection. She begins to speak but instead catches the words in her throat. Max already has more guilt and responsibility on his plate than any man of his age should ever have to bear. To add this on top could only serve as a distraction. If she is infected then she’s beyond help anyhow. She would let him know when they were free of this place and Max knows that his grandmother is safe.