The Dark Trilogy (88 page)

That was about the time when things went haywire and the blasted virus came into play. At first Michael reacted like everyone else: in a complete panic. His world came crashing down around him. His downtown Cincinnati condo was in jeopardy almost immediately, and he found himself barricaded inside it as the city tore itself apart thirty stories below. He tried to contact his parents and younger brother, but they were out of the country, somewhere in the Mediterranean on the family yacht. When he couldn’t get a hold of anyone else back home or even any of the other P & G executives to see if he could snag a ride out of town on one of the corporate jets, he realized he was on his own. He didn’t bother trying to contact Penelope. Despite claims of undying love for him, she wasn’t going to be much help from over six hundred miles away. In a way, it was a relief. She was an insufferable bore and a hypochondriac who complained incessantly. Michael could tolerate a lot to achieve his objectives in life, but the thought of having her at his side during the apocalypse terrified him.

As the world crumbled around him and he was certain his demise was eminent, Michael recalled something his father had said to him repeatedly when he was a young boy. “Life is what you make of it. When things go bad and you get knocked down, dust yourself off and get back up. You were born with my blood running through your veins, and I’ve never been a quitter. So don’t bother with the excuses, because I’m not interested in them.”

The words seemed trite and unimaginative to Michael as an adult. But to a child of ten, they sounded impressive, even scary. And it wasn’t just the words; it was how his father backed them up. He pushed Michael into every activity, every sport the private schools he’d attended had to offer. He was never allowed to quit or perform at a subpar or average level. He was expected to have stellar grades, leadership roles, and top-notch girlfriends from well-to-do families. Of course, nothing was ever good enough for dear old Dad, and Michael spent much of his early life sniffing at his father’s feet for any sort of praise he could get.

There was no sob story attached to his upbringing. Michael did not freak out, rebel, or ever climb onto a therapist’s couch. Sure, Dad had his mistresses, and because of that, Mom was a functional alcoholic and pill popper, but none of that ever played out in public or caused any uproar. It was simply par for the course for a wealthy family.

Instead, he grew up knowing he was better and stronger than everyone else, if for no other reason than the sweat he had to pour into all he did. His childhood had been hard, but he knew that anything worth having in life was hard. His father’s philosophy had carried him this far, and he knew it would carry him further still.

The sense of helplessness he felt while watching the city burn evaporated as he concocted a plan. Once the fear left him, things became clear. He grabbed the camouflage outfit he’d bought for some retreat on which he’d gone with other executives at P & G. For three days, Michael had played paintball, got drunk out in the woods, and howled at the moon. It had been an absolutely worthless experience, but at least he got some useful duds out of it. He also grabbed the rather large knife he’d bought out of a catalog after training with edged weapons in his martial arts classes. He’d studied tae kwon do more for keeping in shape than for self-defense, but now it appeared that he would have the chance to put that training and the knife to good use.

He scanned his place one last time, eyeing all the decorating touches for which he had spent top dollar. He glanced over at his wine collection and the few pieces of artwork he’d bought at auction. The accoutrements of wealth and success. Now it was all kindling for the bonfire into which humanity was being tossed, nothing more.

Being able to accept that was what made Michael stronger than his peers, and he knew it. So many of them would be desperate to save the trappings of their prior lives, believing it would somehow make a difference. They would all die clutching at scraps of that old world. He could relinquish it all—the wealth, the prestige, the influence—and recognize that in this new world, there would be other types of power that would allow only a few to stand out from the crowd. And that power would not come from possessions or connections, but from the strength of one’s determination and ability to adapt. Michael vowed to embrace this new world order and show his father and every other ghost living inside his head that he was up to the challenge.

The next couple of days were a blur of furious movement and hiding in any hole he could find. He managed to escape the tower in which he lived with a couple of other tenants, though neither of them made it too far. They were convinced the police or military would save them, or that they would find a safe haven within the city. Michael didn’t spare much regret when they were torn to pieces within blocks of their former home.

The running seemed endless, as did the uncomfortable and cramped spaces into which he squeezed to avoid detection. He slept in a broom closet in the bowels of an office building at one point, with the mop bucket and several large containers of cleaning solution pushed up against the door. He swiped bottles of water and smashed vending machines to get food. He avoided confrontations with both the living and the undead while moving steadily in the direction that appeared to be the safest: east.

The city was a war zone. The trick, Michael learned, was to be counterintuitive. Other refugees migrated toward the shelters, toward the National Guard. They headed to the hospitals and police and fire stations. They were idiots. Because not only were the living moving in that direction, so were the dead.

Michael listened to a portable radio he had taken with him from his condo, and every report about a shelter that had been set up in the city told him exactly where not to go. And when the reports stopped, he continued listening for gunfire, and steered clear of that as well. He slipped into areas that had already been overrun by the dead, because the stiffs had a pack mentality and followed their prey wherever they could sense them. That meant that only the stragglers and those too feeble to walk were usually left behind once all the living had fled or been devoured. Those few ghouls were far easier to manage than the large hordes attacking the National Guard troops and the frightened sheep the general population had become.

By the time Michael met Frank, the endless hiding and running had taken its toll on him. He was wearing down and feeling dispirited, questioning whether his brilliant plans for the future were all just a bunch of crap he’d made up to keep him motivated to stay alive when there wasn’t much sense in doing so.

Michael almost killed the other man by accident, thinking Frank was a rotter. He was beating in the brains of a woman with his bare hands out on the street, and it was hard to tell which of the two was alive.

Michael tried to avoid situations in which things might get out of control on him. He had no interest in playing the hero or drawing a crowd, but this was a quiet residential neighborhood; there was no one in sight but the two people a dozen yards in front of him. It was, in fact, one of the first streets he’d walked that didn’t have at least a half-dozen stiffs wandering aimlessly on it.

He’d come down this road because he’d spotted several cars and even a work van that appeared to be in working condition out in plain sight. The search for a vehicle he could drive out of the area had preoccupied Michael’s mind during much of his journey. Walking was getting old, and being out in the open and vulnerable was making him a nervous wreck.

As he came up on the two struggling figures, Michael wondered if the man, or maybe the woman he was beating, might have a set of keys to one of the vehicles nearby. Looking around, he spotted a heavy tree branch that had snapped and fallen to the ground. There was, in fact, plenty of debris all over the street from which to choose. Shattered doorframes, discarded housewares, and even a few broken road signs. The area, an old, rundown neighborhood filled with dilapidated row houses, looked like a tornado had hit it. The two people doing battle appeared to be the last remnants of whatever madness had passed through the area.

Michael crept up behind the man and raised his weapon, ready to strike. Frank chose that moment to turn his head, perhaps having spied Michael’s shadow from the corner of his eye. That probably saved his life. He turned white as a sheet and raised an arm to ward off the blow as he scrambled backwards. He stumbled over the woman he’d been pummeling and fell on his ass beside her.

The woman, no longer pinned to the ground, turned over in an effort to reach Frank, who scrabbled away from her. Her face was an open wound. A flap of skin that contained most of her facial features slapped at her skull with every jarring movement she made. She was a heavyset, matronly woman with thick arms and legs. She was trying to hiss out something through her detached lips, though nothing intelligible. A shower of spittle and blood came from the depths of her throat.

Frank was babbling as well as he pressed up against one of the cars parked at the curb. Reaching behind his back, he made an effort to hook his hand onto the bumper to help elevate his corpulent frame to a standing position.

Michael slammed his booted foot down on the small of the woman’s back and drove her chest toward the pavement. One of the hands she had used to elevate her body skidded out from underneath her, leaving most of the skin from her palm on the asphalt. Her other arm snapped, braking below the elbow, which caused her to collapse. Swinging the tree branch, Michael landed several blows as the ghoul struggled to get back up. A scattering of teeth sprayed from her mouth as the abuse rained down on the back of her skull. After a minute or so, the matronly woman’s movements stilled.

Michael studied the corpse for a moment before looking back at Frank. The expression on the filthy man’s face would have been amusing if it weren’t so pathetic. Frank looked about as terrified of Michael as of the monster with which he’d been brawling.

The fear turned into nervous appreciation as the two men traded introductions. After that, Frank’s story came out in a tumble, as if he were relieved to have the chance to speak to a live human being. He’d been stuck in his basement for several days and had been forced to “deal” with his wife, who’d been bitten early on. They had no children, so he had been all alone ever since. After a while, the itch to see what was going on outside as well as a chance to grab something beside the pork ‘n’ beans he’d been living on caused him to climb the stairs, pry open the door he’d nailed shut, and take a look around. Most of the stiffs out on the street had migrated elsewhere by then, since a lot of Frank’s neighbors fled in the first couple of days of the madness that had gripped the city. So he went on the hunt for food in his neighbors’ houses. That was when he happened upon Lila, the woman he’d been attacking when Michael wandered by. She lived a couple doors down from Frank. He entered her home and found her in the kitchen, snacking on Stanley, her husband. “I guess she wanted fresher meat, ‘cause ol’ Stan smelled a mite sour, so she went after me,” Frank said with a crooked grin.

He rushed to leave the house, but Lila followed, smashing through the front door he’d slammed shut behind him, forcing him to deal with her out on the street.

“I never liked that bitch much anyway,” Frank said with a nervous chuckle as his story came to an end.

Michael patiently listened to the sweaty, smelly man’s tale and tried to ignore the fact that Frank looked like the type of person to whom he wouldn’t have spoken on a bet just a week prior, unless it was to pay him to do plumbing work or some other menial task … not that someone in Frank’s condition (even if he had showered and had on clean clothes) would have ever made it past the doorman of Michael’s building. But things had changed, and the need to adapt to this new environment, and to the people who remained in it, was imperative. There would be a need for men like Frank, as there always had been. He was the type who took orders and was willing to get his hands dirty … very dirty if necessary.

Nodding politely, Michael did his best to seem interested in what Frank had to say as his eyes kept gravitating to the work truck sitting in the driveway nearby.

Frank invited Michael into his house, and they shared a sparse meal of the beans remaining in Frank’s stash and a few of the candy bars Michael was carrying. He did his best not to cringe at the smell of the decrepit house, noticing all the while that Frank didn’t seem to mind the foul odor emanating from his basement. Michael’s guess was that Frank’s wife was still down there and his new acquaintance had grown used to the smell of her rotten corpse.

It didn’t take more than an hour with Frank for Michael to make up his mind. Frank wasn’t too sharp, but he was malleable and appeared willing to do just about anything to get out of the stink trap in which he’d been living for the past week. The idle promise of some booze and the assurance that together they could forge a new existence for themselves and anyone else they found sounded pretty good to Frank. He was a pig, but Michael knew he would be a loyal pig, as long as he was given some mud to root around in on occasion.

Before the day was over, they were on the road in the truck, which happened to be Frank’s, maneuvering past the most of the wrecks and areas crawling with mobile corpses as they headed east, away from the city.

As they avoided the hordes of undead and the few clots of National Guardsmen still alive and still willing to fight, they passed their time by capturing a few of the individual ghouls they came across. Michael felt it was important to understand the enemy, to see if anything could be done to salvage these inhuman wrecks. He tried to see if they would respond to any stimulus besides warm flesh, and if, given enough time, they could be turned into some sort of slave labor or mindless work force.

They would lure a single stiff into the back of the van. A dead dog or cat carcass was usually enough to get them moving in the right direction. The truck had a wire-reinforced barrier between the driver’s area and the back, which made it easy to collect specimens without fear of getting bitten. A couple of hockey sticks, a fishing net, and some padded gloves acquired from an abandoned sporting goods store were the only equipment they needed to manage the task, along with some stout rope.