Authors: Keith Varney
“Yikes.” Sarah looks at the wreck through her binoculars from about a hundred yards away.
“Weird. They must have been going really fast when the virus hit. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I’m not sure that’s when it happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“Doesn’t it look fresher to you? No dust all over it. No blowing trash collected in the corners.”
“What are you saying?”
Sarah doesn’t want to say what she’s thinking right away. She wants to be sure. She walks a little closer before she continues. “I’m saying I think this happened recently. In the last couple of days. Maybe even more recently. They must have been survivors. Like us.”
“Holy shit!”
Chris starts to bike rapidly towards the wreck. Sarah calls after him.
“Slowly. Careful.”
When he gets within fifty feet, Chris stops pedaling altogether. He glides slowly. The only sound is the ‘tick tick tick’ of the bike’s wheels slowing down. When Sarah catches up, she lets out a sickened gasp.
“Fuck.”
“Jesus.”
Spreading out in several directions from the car are large smears of blood. Half chewed bones are discarded randomly around the vehicle. The occupants have been eaten alive. There are no bodies to speak of. There are only remnants. The crunchy bits. A skull—too hard to break up and swallow—sits next to the broken side mirror dangling from its wiring. A ribcage lies next to the guard rail. Its front is torn open and emptied of organs, but what remains of its spine is still partially contained by a torn black leather jacket. The small size of the jacket is the only remaining clue that its owner had probably been female.
They stare in silence for a moment.
Sarah speaks quietly. “The blood is still tacky.”
“Last 24 hours? Less maybe?”
“Mrrrrr…”
Chris and Sarah jump back from the sound coming from inside the car.
“Mrrrr…?”
Sarah recovers from being startled before he does. “Oh my God! Did somebody survive?” She starts to bend down to look into the car.
“Be careful!”
She gets on her hands and knees and shines a flashlight into the overturned SUV.
“Hello?”
She crawls in deeper and reaches in through a window.
“Meeeeerrrrroooo…”
“Oh!” Her voice softens into a coo. “Hi there little thing.”
Chris wishes desperately that Sarah would be more careful, but he stands his ground ready for anything.
“What is it? A child? Alive?!”
Sarah looks back over her shoulder with a wide smile. “Not quite. Take this.” She hands him the flashlight and reaches in as far as her arm can stretch. Finally her fingertip reaches its target and she pulls a small pet carrier out of the passenger side window. Inside the cage is a black and white long-haired kitten. It’s scared, confused and meowing mournfully but very much alive and seemingly unhurt.
Chris stares at her dumbfounded. “A cat?”
“Kitten.”
“If these people were alive, why in God’s name would they be wasting resources on a fucking pet?”
“We’re keeping it.”
“What?!”
Sarah’s decision surprises her too, but something inside her head clicks, accessing the part of her brain that had shut down when all hell broke loose. The nagging voice that demands that she do more than just subsist performing tasks and achieving practical successes returns. It’s the voice that redefined her very idea of success, the pesky desire that told her to quit her lucrative job as an architect to try and make a life as an artist.
She looks off into the distance. “You asked me what we were going to do. What the point was.”
“Right?”
“So far, everything we’ve done, we’ve done to survive. We’ve been running on instinct and adrenaline and a powerful will to stay alive.”
Chris nods and looks to the horizon, partially to avoid looking at the grim sight in front of him.
“What is the point of existing—in surviving—if we don’t
live
?” she continues.
All of the feelings she’s been holding back while existing in long-term ‘emergency mode’ come rushing out. She’s never felt as clear, as certain of what she wanted.
There are so many things they haven’t talked about. Even after two months, they haven’t really discussed the loss of all of their family and friends. They’d broached the topic offhand or obliquely. They made countless jokes, but they’d never really faced the reality head on—the distinct possibility that they had been forced to witness the end of everything they’ve ever cared about. They’d seen the demise of so many things that used to create the tapestry of their lives. There would be no more awkward Thanksgiving dinners with her parents. They will never get another Christmas card from an old high school acquaintance and wonder how they got their address. They’ll never go see a new movie. There will never be another Superbowl. Another election. In fact, even the
ideas
they used to feel so passionately about are gone. Equality, justice and freedom are now all purely academic concepts. So many of the things they thought were important no longer matter. Everything is gone except each other.
Sarah turns and looks Chris right in eyes. “We’re going to try and find a way to be
happy
. To make sure that there’s still love in this shitty wasteland…tenderness…care. I dunno. Maybe we can’t repopulate the planet or start a new society. Maybe we can’t bring anything else into this world. But we can love what is here, we can love each other… and we can love Charlie.”
“You named it.”
“Yes.”
“What if it’s a girl?”
“Its name is Charlie.”
Chris looks back at his wife. She’s wearing cargo pants and a torn sweatshirt. She hasn’t washed her hair in weeks and she smells a bit. But she’s never looked more beautiful to him in his life.
He nods and picks up the cat carrier. “Are you sure we can’t get a fish or something that doesn’t have claws and shit in a box?”
She grins at him as he puts the pet carrier in the basket. After Sarah mounts her bike, they continue on in silence.
*
At four thirty in the afternoon, the sun is already starting to sag in the sky. Chris and Sarah bike along the side of I-75, the freeway that cuts a path right through downtown like an artery.
Chris finally breaks the silence. “It’s good to know that there are other survivors. Or
were
other survivors.”
“Yeah. It’s great news actually. Although it’s a little discouraging that if we fuck up like they did, we’ll be reduced to smears on the pavement.”
“Yeah. That’s not ideal.”
“But Charlie will be fine apparently.”
“Apparently. He must have stayed quiet. Our Charlie is a survivor. ”
They bike across the John R Street overpass and look down into the Fisher Freeway’s six lanes of submerged highway. When this section freeway was built in 1959, they chose to run it under the street level, creating a giant trough through midtown.
It’s in that trough that Sarah finally spots pay dirt.
“Wait! There!”
Below them on the giant highway sits a large tanker truck with Exxon/Mobil stenciled on the side. The low sun glinting off its rounded silver tank is a welcome sight, a profound relief to both of them. What is not a relief is the fact that hundreds of zombies have wandered into the natural funnel created by the sunken expressway and gotten themselves trapped between its high walls. They fill the roadway, milling about in large clumps bumping into cars and each other.
“Well, we found a tanker. How are we going to get to it?”
Sarah doesn’t have an answer for that one. “There’s way too many of them. We can’t just walk in there.”
“We could do the car alarm trick again.”
“I don’t think so. They’re too many. Even if we divert these ones, they’ll be replaced by hundreds more. It would take hours and God knows how many we’d draw. Look at the freeway, they’re down there for miles.”
“Shit. You’re right.”
Chris surveys their options. The tanker is about twenty feet away from the overpass which hangs sixteen feet above the highway. A panel van is stopped behind the tanker and directly below where Chris and Sarah are standing.
Chris points to the roof of the van. “We don’t walk. We jump.”
“You’re not serious.”
“If we can get on top of the van, we can jump from that to the back of the tanker. Just like Super Mario.”
“I don’t know. That’s crazy.”
“Look. The sun is going down. We don’t have much time. We could come back later if we’re lucky enough to have another clear day before the snow, but the freeway is collecting those bastards like a fruit fly trap. There’s only going to be more of them, not less. We were out all day and didn’t see other tankers. Winter could hit us tomorrow. We’re desperate. This is our best option.”
Sarah hates this idea. But he’s right. “Yeah. I guess. Jesus, this is nuts.”
“Yup.”
Without hesitating, because he knows if he thinks about it too much, he will lose his nerve, Chris swings his leg over the railing. He reaches one foot onto the lip of the overpass’ outer edge, and holding the railing with his hands he swings his other leg over. He turns himself around so he is facing the van, his arms behind him clinging to the railing.
Sarah lets out an unconscious groan.
“Ok. Fuck it.”
“Chris, maybe we should-”
When Chris jumps, he does not look like Tom Cruise in some glossy action movie. His leap is awkward and sloppy. His arms flail and he tips forward at an unfortunate angle causing him to land on his torso, not his feet, hitting the roof of the van with the agility of a phonebook. The impact makes a terrifically loud booming noise as he dents the metal with his shoulder. The wind is knocked out of him so severely he feels like all of the oxygen in his lungs was suddenly deleted. The drowning sensation is accompanied by flashes of light in his peripheral vision. He wonders if the feeling of slipping is from being knocked silly before he realizes he is indeed sliding off the side of the van into the outstretched arms of the zombies already drawn by the noise.
“CHRIS!”
He flails his arms out wildly and catches hold of the van’s roof rack. With the strength that only comes from true terror, he is able to flip his legs back onto the roof and right himself. He lies on the top of the van staring straight up at the sky for a long moment while he catches his breath.
“Chris!”
Chris sits back up. Dazed, he does a quick inventory of his limbs, and finding them all still attached, gets to his feet.
“I’m fine. I’m fine. You’ve got to jump!”
“Oh man. What are we doing?”
Sarah reaches down and picks up the cat carrier and prepares to toss it to Chris.
“Oh right. The fucking cat.”
She throws the carrier containing the now severely pissed off Charlie to Chris. He catches it and sets it down at his feet.
“Come on! I’ll catch you.”
Sarah takes a deep breath and jumps, landing with slightly more agility that he did—on her feet at least. She lets out a short gasp on impact but is otherwise quiet. Chris grabs her and stabilizes her before she slips.
“You OK?”
“I’m fine.”
They look down to see that the van is now completely swarmed with Fred and Gingers. Hundreds of hands now claw the sides, trying to get at their feet, creating a distinct and nauseating rocking motion as the combined force of their hands start to tip the van this way and that. Sarah looks as though she has lost focus. With a blank expression on her face, she stares down at the sea of bloody hands and desiccated eyes.
Chris gives her a panicked shake. “We have to move! OK!? You go first.”
She is starting to look more than a little sick. But she takes another deep breath, drops onto the hood of the van and makes a giant leap towards the ladder on the back of the tanker. With a grunt, she grabs hold and scrambles up and onto the roof.
Sensing the motion and hearing Sarah’s feet, the zombies start to swarm the front of the van. One starts climbing onto the hood.
As soon as she gets on top of the tanker, Chris tosses her the cat carrier. She fumbles and it starts to slide off the rounded edge of the tank, but in a desperate reach, she just manages to catch it with her finger.
Charlie continues to express displeasure with his treatment. The tiny kitten snarls and hisses from inside the cage with the fury of a much larger creature.
Chris starts frantically attempting to kick the zombies off the hood so he can make the jump.
“Chris!”
He put his foot on the chest of the closest Fred and pushes it back. The zombie falls into the horde, knocking them backwards. Seizing his momentary opportunity, Chris drops down onto the hood of the van and without stopping his motion, he leaps towards the tanker. Dozens of arms flail at his feet while he is in the air. A large bloody hand grabs onto his ankle slowing his momentum. Chris hits the side of the ladder, bounces off, and falls to the pavement, into a sea of flesh.
Sarah shrieks. “Nooooooo!!!”
Chris slams into the ground with a thud. He wonders why it is so dark for a moment then realizes the sheer mass of limbs, faces and hands grabbing at him from all directions have blocked out the setting sun. He kicks violently trying to free up space, but it’s no use. In the background he can hear Sarah screaming, but the sound is muffled by the dense mass of bodies clawing at him. Several zombies drop to their knees and he is face to monstrous face with five former residents of Detroit. The smell is putrid. They are covered with blood, mucus, dirt and human feces. Their skin, when seen from up close, seems to have dried to the point of having the consistency of beef jerky. Human jerky. Several of their eyes have cracked from dehydration and popped, leaving remnants that look like broken soft eggshells dangling out of their skulls. The flies had laid countless eggs and maggots had begun to grow into the wounds that covered the Fred and Gingers. Chris is filled with revulsion when a pile of maggots drops out of an eye-socket and falls onto his face.
In his panic-fueled mind, he notices that they don’t seem to be breathing. He doesn’t hear any of the moans and guttural noises that he remembers from the zombie movies he watched as a kid. These bodies no longer seem to be running on oxygen. In fact he gets the distinct impression that they are just meat suits for whatever else is now in charge.