10. Plan

So life became boring. Not like a little boring. Like, I’m about to fucking crush my head with a concrete block boring. I realize that it’s ‘cause I’m alone and that man is a social beast. I’m not satisfied living alone.

But really I had a whole other reason which was way more complicated, but I can’t tell you about that. I’m working up to it. That reason is the one that makes me do it- because it involves more than necessary risk.  

Part of the plan was to find some people for myself. I already told you that the VBs sometimes come out of it. They look around, and it’s like, “What the fuck is going on?” Like when a sleepwalker wakes up, or a possessed person get’s unpossessed.

The thing is, and I’ve seen this multiple times, the other VBs know. Most times it’s kind of obvious when a pack of naked humans are hunting, and one stops and looks around with an expression like, “Why are you guys naked? Why is there blood on your teeth?”

What would you do? You’d cry, and scream, maybe run, maybe fight. You wouldn’t just keep marching along like everything is okay. So the VBs know pretty quick, and they go for this person so fast, so vicious. They always kill them and eat them all the way. It’s fucking terrible to see. One second you wake up in this broken eggshell city, and the next you’re being eaten alive. They never bite these people, with an infecting bite. No. Kill them.

Jim said he thought he was immune, because he already had it. He thought that was why they killed them. They knew they were immune.

There was one guy at the Baptist Army who told a story about it. He woke up and he was sleeping in a pile of raggedy humans. There was a smell. It was the human animal. Sweat, sex, dirt. He felt really weird but he was so disoriented he didn’t move. He watched. And the others started stirring. Scratching themselves, stretching. He copied them. He was waiting for someone to say something, “Good orgy. See you next time.” But they didn’t just looked around with sullen eyes, and then a big one grunted and they all started following him. This guy jumps in. They went about two blocks before they started chasing someone. He fell behind, freaked out but what was happening. He could taste blood in his mouth. But one dropped back, a female that was kind of fat. She turned to him, while the others were hunting and sniffed. Then she screeched. He’s still bewildered, but he’s also scared as fuck, and when she did this he started jogging away. Good thing to, because in a second the VBs were surrounding him, chasing him. He ran. He said all the physical work-out of being a VB helped him because even though he was gassed, he could keep running. He made it. Like I said, he was in the Baptist Army.

He was also a story teller. But that one, I believed.

The point is, people needed an opportunity to come out of it in safety. If you could get them isolated, as VBs from the pack, there was a chance. That’s the plan.

Now you’re saying, what are the odds. And I’m asking that. Because lots of people came out of it at the beginning, but I haven’t seen it happen recently. Of course, I’m not on the streets except for food and forage runs. And then, how many would I have to have, in isolation- before one came out? It might never happen.

And then I’d keep living as before.

I picture a building. Something big with lots of rooms, I can lock them in there. And watch. The day they say, “Help?” I’ll have a friend. Of course, right now, I’m snugged into a sewer listening to them screech and smash through my carefully constructed den. It’s going to take some work.

4. Hope(less) at the End of the World

                Sometimes I watched Angie. Her legs looked nice. She called me a creep but I was only doing what boys have always done. I told Angie, about a week after she told me she wouldn’t be with me even if I was the last man, “You shouldn’t have said that.”

                “What?”

                “That I had no chance.”

                “I was just trying to be real with you.”

                “Yeah, but now I’ve got nothing to live for.” It was a bitch-ass thing to say, but hopeless people say those things.

                “Yeah you do. Stop being a baby. You can live to kill these VBs so we can have the city back.”

                Jim, Kwanesha, and I first met in a group of people that followed this guy. He was a big man, some kind of Baptist preacher, with a beard that looked tough. His signature weapon was a truck jack, and he swung that thing like god’s own hammer.

                His people were pretty organized and they picked us all up at different points, and we all got the same speech at different times. “I’m Pastor John. I don’t know what you believe, but I believe in a God that cares about us. He wants to save us, and we are about salvation. Even if you don’t believe in God, you got to agree, this city is a mess, these crazies are tearing it to pieces. It wasn’t meant to be this way, and we’ve survived, I mean, God has saved us, so we can save this city. There are other people out there need saving. Now, you join up with us, we’re systematic, and we kill VBs.”

                He didn’t demand that you believed anything, just that you fought. It was a nice idea and none of us needed any more convincing. We’d been aimlessly surviving for a few weeks, hiding in corners.  Most of us hadn’t faced off with one VB yet, and here is this guy leading an army. We wanted to fight back.

                He had systems. We’d get into a warehouse, with an escape route set, usually with a vehicle out back or something. Then someone, usually a small fast person, would go outside, until one of the VBs saw them, then they’d run back, we’d be set up in a gauntlet, two rows of armed people, and the VBs would get killed. At first it was kind of amazing.

                Pastor John gave sermons about the city after we killed off the VBs. It would be green again. Whatever cancer-causing, tower of Babel technology we’d unleashed that’d brought on the plague, would no longer be used. We’d live a good life, a simple life.

                A couple things happened. I hit it off with Jim, because he knew comic books, and Kwanesha because she always said, “Fuck this god shit, but I’m down to kill some crazies.” She had a lot of pot, and we’d sneak up to the roof sometimes. One time we were waiting in the warehouse, and the runner popped through the door, and was like, “A lot are coming.”

                Jim was always in front with the pastor. He was big too. And then eight came through at a time. And the pastor hacked down two, and four got a hold of Jim, and they were falling on him. Jim talked about that moment, see them teeth only an inch from his face, holding a whole one in each hand. He said the thing that he hated about that moment is that he might have become one, not that he might stop living. Kwanesha screamed at us, and the rest of us yanked them off Jim, and did them in, but it changed Jim a little. He wasn’t that gung ho after that.

                But it was the next time we did it, so we’re talking maybe only two months into the All Fucked Era, it went crazy. The thing was, that was when they started with the screeching. At first, the screeching was like a battle cry, but then we realized that it was a call. One would scream, and others would come, and they’d scream too. So there was kind of like a ripple in a pond effect. I mean, us, inside that building, we didn’t know what was going on. We’d set up our gauntlet and were beating them to death. This was after guns too. If someone got tired they stepped back, and another came up. I’d taken to using an ax, which was the most common weapon. Try beating someone to death sometime. It takes a lot of effort. But if you can get an ax shot anywhere to the head or neck, it’s done.

                What happened that time, they’d scream and come in. But they kept coming. It was on my second break that I looked over and saw that there was more dead crazies than there were of us, and that they were coming to the door even harder, even faster. My arms were tired. I had a water blister on the pad of my thumb. The place smelled like blood. That’s when I thought about how it worked. Ordinary Wednesday in late May, and where is everybody? Kids are in school. Lots of people in work places. And it was only the loners, or at least the alone, who survived, or stayed sane. The ratios of them, the VBs, to us, had to be astronomical.  

                I rested until Jim’s next break. I said to him, “There is too many. We got to go.”

                He nodded and grabbed Kwanesha. Nobody noticed us walk out the back. They were too caught up in their mission. Us leaving, it meant something. It wasn’t cowardice. We weren’t afraid. Jim took his place in that line again even when they almost caught him. Us leaving was saying that there was no hope of killing them off. There were too many. That future green city of Amish farms, that wasn’t going to happen. We weren’t going to make it.

                When Angie said that my hope could be killing them all, I told her that story. She said, “You can hope you find Weapon X: Issue 4.” I still hoped she’d change her mind.

3. The Best I Can Do

                I slide under the branches of a Mulberry, and along into the backyard. I hear their shrieks of anger as I negotiate a hole in a wooden fence. Then I move in the back door of a house. It’s actually a back opening, the door is gone. Once inside, I sprint up the stairs. They hunt with smell as well as sight. When I’m escaping, I keep moving. If they discover my scent, I’ve still stretched the distance between us, and I’ve got a chance. It’s all about giving yourself a chance.  

                When I reach the third floor of the house, I duck through a pane-less window onto the back roof. Then I jump and pull myself up and roll onto the roof. I allow myself a peek back. I’m now three stories above them, and one hundred feet away and the Mulberry tree is between us. Eight of them, noses lifted into the air, peering about. They look as harmless as dogs or fat men in mental institutions, as if their gaze and sniffing are only curiosity. They haven’t caught my scent. They’d be moving already.  I know what will happen next. When they are alive, for some reason, they never rage against each other. Jim used to say they had the same goal of destruction, and they knew it. I heard a guy say it was pheromones. I don’t know. Their eyes turn down to the two I destroyed. VBs eat anything. I’ve seen them chew on sneaker leather, sidewalk weeds, anything. So it’s not surprising when they sink teeth into the dead. It’s just something I prefer not to watch. I lower my head, and get to the middle of the roof.

                I walk along the roof tops. One or two roofs are flimsy, but I know the solid beams and carefully walk them. Most of the roofs are still firm. When I get to a house with a roughly built trap door set in its roof, I swing down onto the lower roof and enter through the window. Then I climb down the stairs, which are littered with left overs from the family that once lived here, and the death battles that ended that. I enter the second floor front bedroom.

                I’ve got it very organized. Weapons hang along one wall. Another is a shelf with books, and a few PSP games. There are a few stacks of books on the floor, but they are neat and even. There is a mattress in one corner. Sheets, somewhat clean. In the bureau there are a lot of different items I think I might need if I set out for somewhere. Most of the floor is clear, and swept. I wipe it down once a week. Probably, if you’ve got the picture of me right, you are thinking, this former fat kid who eats Styrofoam Cheetos is organized? That doesn’t fit. You’re right. I was that kind of kid, not just clothes and games on the floor, but food wrappers too (no wonder he struggled with finding a girlfriend). But when you live in one room, and you’ve read all your comics, newspapers, and books four times, you clean your room. Then you figure out, hey, this is kind of nice. And it’s nice to feel like this space is in control. I don’t feel like that anywhere else. I know where everything is, I know where I would put Weapon X: Issue 4, if I had it.

                I hang Ackee by the door, and tip toe down the hall to the bathroom. This room reeks, as I only flush once a day. I piss into the top basin. I can use the collected piss later to flush the bigger stuff. You might say, why not just throw your shit outside? They watch for that, and they’ve got a great sense of smell. I figure, the sewer system is still intact. That way I can live in a house, and there is no sign.  

               Water is easy. It rains often, and I’ve got a real clean trashcan set up so the room drains into it. It’s a bit of a risk drinking rain water off a roof, but not drinking water is a bigger risk.

   I could talk a little about my defense system, but it’s basically more about escape. There are trap doors in the room, going up and down, the one is below a piece of plywood, going down. I pried up some floor boards, and kicked through the plaster. It doesn’t look like an escape way from below, just wear and tear. The one going up is the same thing, but there it’s on hinges, so I can swing it up quickly if I need to. I took the hinges off some kitchen shelves. I always use what’s handy. Foraging is necessary, especially for reading, but it’s also risking your life.  I can exit out the windows and drop about twelve feet to the street, or out the hallway to the third or first floor. I’ve been here for a few months. Eventually, I’ll have to leave. I could defend against a couple, but that isn’t usually how it would work.  

The last time I had to leave a place was terrible. I heard footsteps coming through the house, this was about four months back, and I figured it was them. Not many normals left. They were coming up the stairs. That time I lived on a third floor. I went to go onto the roof, and saw about seven of them along the roofs. I ducked back down. Sounded like about three. Thing was, they see me, they scream, now the team from the roofs is coming for me. So I remembered then that I was going to die, so I thought about what I would do.

I jumped off the half roof. It was about twenty two feet, maybe more. I landed light as I could, but I sprained my ankle. I didn’t even allow myself to whisper, “Fuck.” Sprained ankle meant, they see me, I’m dead. I limped across the hard, through a hole in the fence. Then I saw they were in other houses, and on the roofs on the back of the block. It felt like I was surrounded. I did something I don’t do much. It was there though. The back up plan. I went through the a vacant lot, onto the street, and hopped into a Ford 150 out there. As I moved, I heard their screech, answered by other screeches. Like wolves, you know. One leapt off a roof, and landed a lot better than me, and sprinted toward the car. Oh you fucking starter, sing for me now. Moment of terror, and the thing started. I was pulling away when one of them rammed into the window, cracking it. I swung out. Driving is hard. Lots of random vehicles in the way. I use a bigger vehicle for that reason, banging through them. I ride around the block once, slamming into the pack. After that I realized that they were hunting. They went through a block in large groups, with waiting sentries.

What they do is, get in groups of fifty or so, and they hunt a block. Some stay outside, and others run through the house. When they spot a normal person they scream, and then it’s over. I’ve got guns, you know. But guns are a double-edged sword. You kill that one, fast and from distance, but it’s just like a car. It makes a lot of noise. Each bang calls them to you. People used guns early on, but they all died, eventually. You can only have so many rounds.

Now you’re saying, why don’t you drive everywhere. As I was smashing through them with the steel bumper on that 150, I sure liked it. The problem is, there are so many, and once they hear a car, they all come running. So once you’re in a car, you got a problem. You got to stop sometime. And when you do . . . Well, that time I drove up to the far Northeast, before I ditched the car. Out there, there is a lot of space, so I could have a running start. I made it, but I don’t drive much.

Beside those packs it’s quiet. It’s been six months since I heard VBs chase anything but cats, which means no roommates. So. Take a seat by the window, where I can see the street through the blinds. I got a Franklin busybody so I can watch the block. I have a much better exit if they come again. I pull out an episode of Batman. I read the dialogue blocks, but I look at every little feature. The costumes, the positions. I try to see something I’ve never seen before. It’s good reading. I try to ignore his softness. It always feels like he takes the death of his parents a little hard. I mean, he’s still got Albert. What would he do if everyone died? I sip slowly from a bottle of Coke, enjoying the sweetness and the little bit of bite left. This is home for today. It’s the best I can do.

2. Angie

                I used to think that they were hungry, but that’s not it. They’re angry. I was hungry. I'd always been a fat guy. It was only two months into this, the All-Fucked Era, and I’d lost a lot of weight. I was running a lot, fighting a lot, and not eating hot food, which I already mentioned. I started to look a little better, though I was sad as a dead crocodile when the Cheetos everywhere turned stale. Can you imagine, walking into a store and bags and bags of Cheetos are spilling off the shelves, and you open one up, shove a Cheeto in your mouth: Styrofoam. I still ate them.

                The point is, I was thin, and a little scruffy, but not too much. I lived with a couple of people back then. There were more people. They were older and I was sort of their kid. One guy was this fifty year old mechanic named Jim. He used these big wrenches. The other was Kwanesha, she was only twenty five, but she and Jim were a couple. Back then we used to joke about me being the kid, and how they had to make some babies to replenish the earth. But even then, we couldn’t imagine bringing a kid into this place. Much less being pregnant. Anyway, we were at a different market, getting cans, when this girl scampered down an aisle. She was really little, like four foot ten, and dirty, but clearly not a VB, because she was looking over her shoulder, not forward. VBs always look forward, at where they’re going, at what they hate.

                “They’re coming,” she said.

                “How many,” said Jim.

                “I don’t know.”

                “Estimate.”

                “Twenty? A lot.”

                “Fuck.” This was the way we all felt.

                “Why’d you lead them to us,” I said.

                “I didn’t know you were here.” In her hand, which was little, was a Little League Bat. The sound of crashing, of shelves being knocked over, of food stuffs flying everywhere, echoed through the store.

                Kwanesha said, “Back entrance.”

                We followed her, with Jim taking the rear. The mini-girl got out in front. We made it into the stock room without making too much noise. I was checking out her butt as we walked along, but it was really her face that I was excited about. Maybe any female would have looked amazing to me right then. I don’t know. I thought she had the fullest, most perfectly shaped lips, bright eyes. She was small, not young. I mean, she was my age- I was sixteen then.

               So back to fat. Being fat sometimes is a symptom. It’s funny, it being All-Fucked Era, there is a lot of time to think about your life. I don’t have any social life to think about now, it’s me and them. But I think I was fat because I didn’t care. I didn’t care because I didn’t think I had a chance. I didn’t think I had a chance because I didn’t know anything about girls. So, fat, afraid, and with no social skills I wasn’t exactly going to be bagging like a ShopRite employee. Fact, girls didn’t see me.

                That was a ShopRite we escaped. And the girl, her name was Angie, came back with us. We lived in a row home. We stayed on the second floor, and it seemed pretty safe. For two months she thought I was really annoying, because I was. I said mean things to her all the time, like how she led the VBs to us, or like, what good would a ninety pound girl be in a fight with VBs. She mostly ignored these comments. Eventually I figured out that she didn’t care what I thought, and that my technique of pretending that I believed I was better than her wasn’t working.

                 We had a lot of time together. Jim and Kwanesha said that it was near the end and they had to get in what fun they could. They had triple boarded the back room windows, but I still worried about Kwanesha’s noise. Anyway, they spent a lot of time together. I had some comics and old magazines but I’d read them all so many times and new reading material was something you had to risk your life for. So Angie and I were together a lot. So I decided to ask her where she was when it happened.

                 Angie said, “I don’t want to talk about that.”

                 I said, “We’ve got to do something.” She was re-reading a magazine for girls and didn’t respond. I added, “It’s not like you’re ever going to be able to get that make-up.”

                She looked up at me. “True,” she said. 

                “You don’t need it,” I said.

                “You know that if I was Eve, and you were Adam, which is just about what it is, the human race would die?” This was no revelation to me. 

                “So we’re stuck here with nothing to do. You might as well tell me how you survived.”

                She had been home alone. She had three older brothers, and her mom. Her dad wasn’t home much. She was watching the news, which was talking about violent outbreaks, in prisons and hospitals. She had looked out the window, and saw the street. She saw there eight large people tear into an old couple who used to sit on their stoop. It had disturbed her and she called 911 but there was no answer. Suddenly she’d sensed that it was all coming apart at the seams, that this wasn’t incidents, but everything, and she had scampered out her back window, and up a drainpipe onto the roof. There she had huddled in a corner, and, in the warm August air, listening to screams, fell asleep. 

                In the morning, she could see that people wandered the streets in groups, that their eyes were vigilant, their ears attentive. They jogged and sometimes sprinted. They chased after noise, kicked in car windows. No-one was acting normal. They didn’t drive. Always on foot. Vehicles were smashed into others.  

                For most of us survivors, it was accidents like this. If you were in an institution, a school, at that moment, you didn’t make it. 

                She went back in the house. One of her brothers was there. It was her favorite brother, the oldest, I forget his name, but he was the one that taught her to catch and told her to watch out for assholes but wasn’t paranoid about her dating, except when she needed it. He would make meals for her when she was little. But it wasn’t him, if you know what I mean. He looked at her and came for her. She ran back the way she came, shoving her little body back out that window, and shimmying that drain so fast. When he came for her, she was ready.

                This is another thing about survivors. We didn’t think that long. We adapted. I’m just saying, if you spent a lot of time getting your bearings, you didn’t have any. 

                She broke a brick off a chimney. She stove her brother’s face in as he clambered up. The first hit, he stopped climbing. The second hit, he went down.

                Another thing about survivors. None of us spent too much time trying to meditate on the things that had passed away. No time for sentiment. Realism. Toughness. You would think North Philly would have done better. Maybe we did. Maybe I’m the last human. 

                But yeah, I liked Angie. And I wasn’t fat. That gave me hope.

1. Quik-Stop

Some people say that it started in a lab. Others say it moved from monkeys to man somehow. Like AIDS. Others say it’s God’s judgment. People said that about AIDS too. The thing is, when you’re running for your life, it doesn’t fucking matter. It just is.

I’m standing in a convenience store. I knew this place back before, and it was shitty then, a couple dudes from India who didn’t give a shit about the people in this ghetto neighborhood, never washed anything, the stainless steel rollers in the hotdog heater had turned brown. I mean it’s stainless steel. I still ate them. They were a dollar. I shouldn’t think about those hot dogs though. That shit makes me hungry real fast. Hot food doesn’t happen anymore. The gas doesn’t run. Smoke brings them. So I pick among the cans. 

There are still so many cans, and that makes me feel two ways. One, where are the people? I mean, if no cans are being taken, then there aren’t any people. That means my chance of survival is pretty low. No big fucking surprise there, but still. It’d be nice to think there was someone else out here. The other thing I think is, if no cans are being taken, there aren’t any people, so at least there are lots of cans. So it’s a complicated feeling.

I look for carbohydrates. I mean, I’ll eat canned spinach, but you can’t run real long on that. Some Chef Boy Ardee works good- a little mealy two years past it’s due date, but edible and it’ll keep my energy up. I fill up my bag on that stuff, and turn my attention to the street outside.

Quiet as Hiroshima that day in 1945? 44? I wasn’t that good in history. I specialized in escaping class, something that is a little more useful now. I mentioned that this used to the ghetto. The same thing that made it bad then, the many close buildings, the walls, the concrete, makes it prime living territory. So many places to hide, so many fortresses to create. 

The store has a two sets of doors, so I go through the first one, hiding behind a smashed bubble gum machine, and a poster for a frozen fruit drink. The street still looks quiet, and I pop through the last door and stride, keeping low, toward an overgrown backyard. It’s only a few yards of open space and I give myself an eighty percent chance of making it unseen.

I hear feet. Sprinting feet. They are coming down the main street, they haven’t seen me. I could go on, but if they see me they’ll know my little duckee. Blood on the trail. It’s not worth it. So I turn.

There are two of them. Now they see me. One lets out a screech. From the sound of it, she’s a female, but there isn’t much else to tell that. She’s ripped out most of her hair. The other one is taller, and I figure he is male.

They are dirty everywhere but around their mouths, where their tongues clean a circle. Only mess around their mouths is blood, which is mostly between their teeth but flecks about on their faces sometimes. Even at a sprint, a tongue comes out periodically, licking their upper lip. Their clothes are ripped rags, turned into a uniform gray from the dirt and the sun. Their bodies are gashed. Their zeal in pursuit produces these cuts, as they hurdle barbed wire fences, and crash through doors with no thought to their health. Still they are whole, moving at a full out sprint. They will be on me in a moment. I almost think that they are smiling at the thought of this, but I’ve never seen one smile I don’t run from them much anymore. I haven’t won many of those races, and then I was out of breath for what happened next.

I wish I had the sword she had in Kill Bill. Turns out most of the katana blades in North Philly bedrooms, usually full of video games (which don’t work, there is no electricity), and comic books, are worthless when it comes to actually chopping through flesh.

What I ended up deciding on, in the absence of a samurai sword that could fell seven with a single blow, is the top bar of a bike frame, with about a foot long wooden handle shoved up one end, and bolted in. The other end still has the twin bars that hold the rear wheel, but I bent them out, so that they face opposite directions. I left the bike seat bar on, and about six inches of the vertical bar of the frame. This I hammered into a spike. It’s basically a spikey club, something that the first cave man would have been pretty proud of, but which I, having grown up playing Halo and shooting plasma shrapnel through the universe,  knew to be corny.  That was why I named it Ackee.

She lunged first, her teeth gnashing twice the in air, ready for the meal already. He was a little too my right so I stepped to the left, and swung Ackee up. It’d have been a finished blowing if not for it burying a point into one of her flailing arms. She screamed again. BITCH. DO NOT SCREAM. She’s stuck to the Ackee now and he’s coming at me. I rotate so that she’s still between us, and Ackee is keeping me separated from her gnashing mouth. He roars in frustration. This is making too much noise.

I kick her in the chest, and she unplugs from the end of Ackee. He’s at me in a second. There was a time when I made mistakes in scenes like this. When I got nervous. I didn’t get better, really. A bit. The main thing that happened was, I’d been this close enough times, and I realized, “I’m going to die.” After that, I was a lot calmer. I don’t worry about surviving. I swing Ackee up and down into his head. Easy as you open a door. Two of the tines embed in his skull, but with a quick pull up, the point twist out as he sinks down, and I send it whistling into his girlfriend’s head. THUNK. The devotion dies in her eyes.

Ackee is quiet and effective. Of course, I can’t forget the screams. The pitter patter of more sprinters sounds in my ear. I decide to see if I can make the duckee. It sound like five or six this time, and I’ve never faced more than three at a time. Hopefully I make it unseen.