The Fast and the Dead - Day 8

He bit off a curse and ran to the least-blocked window he could see. “Well, that’s great. Looks like the whole ex-population of the city is out there. They’re spilling past the door, they’ll have this place surrounded in no time.”

The woman stood, breathing heavily, eyes closed. “No chance of a service tunnel out the basement huh?”

“What? Do they have stuff like that?” He was distracted by the pounding, ripping and clawing sounds of the zombies as they beat at the windows.

“Just something I saw in a movie once,” she said. “We’ll have to look upstairs, see if we can get to the roof.”

“More climbing. Better and better,” he groused, but followed her to the stairs. He was a lot slower than she was. “How’d you know there was a gun here?”

“Didn’t,” she said. “Saw it hanging above the bar when I ran in.” She led the way upstairs. The upper floor was set up for finer dining, but not for roof access that he could see.

“Check the back rooms,” she suggested, racing for the rear of the establishment. The staccato beating from downstairs was changing subtly as the door and windows weakened under the relentless pounding.

Kitchen, office, change room, washrooms, but no other stairs. They met up back at the dining room. “Nothing! We’re stuck.” Her focused resolve seemed on the verge of crumbling. He was eyeing the second floor windows anxiously. “What is it?” she asked.

“Maybe we can’t get up to the roof from in here,” he started.

“You can’t be seri—”

“What’s the worst that can happen? We climb out, fall down, and get torn to shreds and eaten. Our other choice is to stay here and get torn to shreds and eaten.”

She stared at him, mouth agape, face pale. For the first time since he’d seen her, it was obvious that she had just been thrown into this situation a short time before. “I … Okay.” And with that the windows were open and they were clawing for handholds above.

It took a few moments for the zombies below to recognize they were there, and when they did the racket was incredible. He didn’t dare turn his head to look as he climbed, but with that much noise they had to be pulling every zombie for miles around to this spot.

He couldn’t look, but he focused his mind on visualizing what that must look like. The effort took his mind off his hands and arms, which were fighting a desperate battle to keep him against the wall, and they weren’t equipped to win it easily. Finally he got himself high enough from the window to brace himself with his good leg against the window frame, and he risked a glance at his fellow survivor.

He’d only thought she was pale before. Now she was a sheet, and sweat-soaked to boot. Not good with heights, he thought, though it wasn’t the best time to ask.

She was slow-going but making it. He found her watching his every move, duplicating his handholds one window over.

The Fast and the Dead - Day 7

The moan seemed to well up behind him as she vanished into the building. He risked a quick glance back and immediately wished he hadn’t; he hadn’t pulled as far ahead as he’d thought. He whipped his head back around to face front and pumped his legs as fast as he could go, teeth clenched, ankle on a slow burn.

He was halfway to the building the woman had vanished into. His eyes were fixed on the doors, which she’d left open. Foolish, he thought. And deadly. He was no more than 30 seconds from making the doors when she reappeared suddenly, shotgun in hand. His eyes widened as she raised the barrel, but then she grimaced and lowered it, gesturing him in. “C’mon, get in!” He didn’t have to be told twice.

The roar of the gun as she fired past him was deafening, but he didn’t let that stop him. She slammed the doors and was still jamming the barrel of the shotgun through the handles when the pounding began.

He kept moving into the room; it was a tavern of some sort, or a bar, or pub. His eyes moved automatically to the windows; most were broken, but were covered with makeshift bars, nailed up table tops and other altogether too flimsy-looking barricades. “We can’t stay here, this place won’t last the hour.”

“Help me find something better to brace the door with.” Her voice was tight with strain but not out of breath, he noticed.

He opened his mouth to argue but shut it with a snap; an hour was better than a minute. His eyes scanned the room. Dining tables and chairs, none much better than what were already in use. Then several large pool tables caught his eye. “Think one of these will do it?”

Her footsteps announced her joining him. “Yeah, let’s move, get it into position. Your leg okay?”

“Let’s just get this thing in place, then I’ll worry about my leg.”

She cast an askance glance at him, what he imagined must usually be a skewering experience, but the glassy-eyed shock on her face robbed it of its power. That must be how I’ve looked all day.

They wrestled the table as quickly as possible across the floor, knocking aside chairs and bar stools that got in the way. They tipped it up on a narrow end, blocking the doors to their full height, and then for good measure secured it with a second pool table jammed behind it lengthwise.

“That’ll hold ‘em until they start bashing in the windows, anyway,” he said.

That was when the banging on the windows began, naturally.

The Fast and the Dead - Day 6

Down the side of the building he went at a pace that had his conscious brain screaming, but he couldn’t seem to stop or even slow his limbs. Every scuff, scrape and bruise he suffered as he descended using window frames and eaves as handholds warned him off. It’s painful down there, it’s scary down there, YOU DON’T WANT TO BE DOWN THERE, but he couldn’t shut off the part of himself that did.

He was halfway down when he fell, the impact jarring his bad leg again and momentarily knocking the wind out of him. By then the low murmur of the oncoming horde was driving into his mind. He had to get moving. Had to.

He regained his feet but couldn’t immediately spot the runner. The zombies were close enough that he could just barely distinguish individuals from the mass. There weren’t any disruptions in their line that would mark a mass feeding; they couldn’t have gotten whoever it was.

A part of him quailed at the coldness of the reasoning behind that thought; he’d seen scenes like this before on internet news bites. He’d never been this close to it, not in person. Even that morning he’d been too busy running for his life to look at the approaching hordes, to wonder about how to get away. He’d just run, and eventually distance had paid off.

That wasn’t going to work twice, he knew. Not when he was still tired, and injured to boot.

A flash of motion caught the corner of his eye. His head whipped around just in time to see the runner flying past. Male or female, he didn’t have time to see, but slim, certainly, and dark-haired. He could’ve sworn he or she was wearing long pajamas; a real possibility. When they came for you to throw you into the grinder, they didn’t offer you time to get changed. They came, they grabbed you, that’s it.

He grunted with effort as he swung his legs to follow; the additional knock to his leg had stiffened his ankle but good, and it was definitely slowing him down. “Hey!” he called out. “Wait!”

It was a ridiculous request; nobody in their right mind would turn and wait with a hungry pack of zombies behind, but when you have a hungry pack of zombies behind you, you tend not to be in your right mind.

The figure didn’t stop, but did turn her head. Her large eyes widened, the panicked look intensified, and she redoubled her sprint down the street.

Should’ve expected that one, a dry voice in his mind told him. He tried real hard not to think about how close the pack must be, focused on following after her instead, one painful step at a time.

She was making a bee-line down the center of the street, straying from the path only to dodge or jump over debris, and she was making good time; she was pulling far ahead of the pack, and ahead of him as well. The sound of their footsteps pounding the cracked old pavement gave him something to listen to other than the constant low, droning moan from the creatures behind.

They were a block past the coffee shop in the direction he’d originally come from when she broke from the center of the road. She dashed up to the doors of a large old building with windows all round. She flung herself at the door and wrestled with it fruitlessly.

The road seemed to be taking on a life of its own, trying to trip him up and leave him for the horde behind him. Debris shifted under his feet, cables snagged at his ankle, with a particular fondness for the stiff one, and over it all, the moaning never stopped. His only relief came from the distance at which it came from; he was gradually pulling ahead. As long as that stayed true, the road could do what it wanted with his feet.

Ahead, the woman was screaming, a furious sound, and wrenching at the door. Something must’ve given, as it flew open and without hesitation, she vanished inside as if the doorway had eaten her in one gulp.

The Fast and the Dead - Day 5

He turned his attention back to his task. He had to go painfully up another storey on the next building and then down two to the building beyond that, bringing him to the end of the block and facing his inevitable descent to street level.

He looked about for any way to cross without going down, but there was nothing; in years gone by, there could have been power cables he could try to cross, but if they’d existed in this location they were gone now. Worse, he was at the height he’d started at, three storeys up, and this building didn’t look like it featured roof access.

He was doing his careful rounds of street inspections when he realized that for the past few minutes he’d not been hearing the silence he normally heard. He shivered as the low moaning tide broke over him, and he looked up and down the streets, stretching out to see as far as possible.

Movement, out on the street crossing the one he was following. It was coming his way. Shading his eyes from the late afternoon sun let him make out a familiar sight; a single figure, too distant to note any details, running for madly his or her life. Behind the figure, still some distance back, a slow, unevenly moving tide of hunger.

As his eyes soaked in the details, he felt his body go rigid with terror; a few hours was not enough to forget that earlier that very day, that lost, terrified fleeing figure had been himself. Another one thrown into the grinder for sport, he thought. The idea was sharp, hot, painful and horrifying. That was the reason he was here, the reason he was fighting for his life, for escape.

Over a decade ago the first reports had come in; the dead weren’t staying dead. Not all of the dead, of course. Talk shows, blogs, Twitter, Google+, all the major media outlets had buzzed with speculation over the cause, but the original source was always kept murky, elusively out of reach. Mainstream news sources had reported merely widespread incidents of violence, but as it spread faster and faster, with more people dying and then refusing to stay dead, the truth became impossible to hide.

People reacted as they always did when something terrible and frightening is going on. They clustered together. Safety in numbers and all that. The cities became refuges, havens from the craziness outside.

That lasted all of a day. Maybe not even.

They’d underestimated the danger. They’d believed you had to be bitten to turn. People entering the security zones were screened for bites, any bites, human or otherwise since nobody knew whether animals were affected. But people who’d been scratched, they were let in. And they turned.

Less than 24 hours after the security zones were populated, they were all but consumed. People inside turned sometimes within a couple of hours of their injuries; others almost a day later. But those few who turned fast were enough. The plague had spread fast and hard through those concentrations of humanity, and it didn’t matter that security zones hadn’t been completely filled. People were panicky, crowding outside the zones to get in, and so when they realized their danger and tried to get away, they couldn’t do it fast enough.

He’d been one of the lucky ones. He’d been outside the cities, been on the road. He’d heard some of the early reports, had known something was going on, but not how bad it was. He was saved by his music collection, his digital library that meant he hadn’t had to put up with news or commercials. If he’d had the radio on, he might’ve crowded into a city himself, but he hadn’t.

The figure was closer now, enough to get a read on the growing exhaustion of the movement, but still not on any real detail. He found himself moving, good leg swinging over the lip of the roof, his hands taking hold of the edge securely. No no no no nonononono, his brain tried to tell him, but his deeper mind knew what it was like to be that person, couldn’t let that person go it alone, didn’t want to be going it alone himself any more.

The Fast and the Dead - Day 4

Old movies always showed abandoned buildings as virtual deathtraps, rotten and collapsing, debris strewn everywhere. This old coffee joint wasn’t living up to the image, he thought. It was nothing more than dusty. Linoleum stairs climbed their way upward, and if they creaked once or twice, it was possible they had in the years before catastrophe as well.

He’d seen other buildings that did more to live up to the image, to be sure. Open windows, holes in a roof, a missing door; if a place had any way at all for the elements to intrude, they intruded with fierce destructive purpose. There were many buildings in such states now, but there were plenty that had been left relatively good shape, and some of those had escaped further damage for now. The elements would still win, but it would take a lot longer.

Another flight of steps awaited him at the third floor, along with a sign proclaiming roof access. The door awaiting him led outside to the promised roof, from which he could see a good stretch of road in all directions.

The lone zombie had made it mostly through the intersection. A living person would’ve been some distance away by now; it was slowed even more than most zombies by what looked like a broken ankle. He moved from corner to corner of the building, checking up and down each street, moving quietly; there was nothing else in sight. He did see what looked like a rooftop path in roughly the direction he’d been moving in though, and it would carry him away from the zombie limping his way along the other route. It wouldn’t last for long, but he’d feel far less exposed than he would down on the street. He’d be forced to head back down soon enough, but there was no reason not to take advantage of the height and sight lines while he could.

There was no gap between the building he was on and the next, so he simply climbed over a low wall and was on his way. It was the same for several more buildings, then he found himself scaling a drain pipe as he came to a building that was one storey higher than the others.

This building had not fared as well as the coffee shop had. A large hole in the roof showed plenty of ruin within; he tread carefully, not just to avoid falling in but to avoid making noise. He was safe enough while he was up on the roofs, but if there were zombies within the buildings he passed over and they became aware of him, their frustrated moans could summon others. The streets could become unpassable awfully fast.

He saw no movement within, and had to climb up to the roof of the next building as well. He leaned out over the street and looked onward; taller buildings were becoming the norm. He’d covered most of the block though and could still see a lot further down.

The road ran generally downhill toward the lake. He had about another 3 blocks ahead of him before a T intersection cut off the visibility he’d gained, and over those 3 blocks he couldn’t see a single zombie. “It’s about time SOMETHING went right,” he muttered.

The Fast and the Dead - Day 3

Every instinct that told people to be frightened of dead bodies kicked in and screamed at him. As he edged towards the door, nothing happened. The body stayed where it was. There was no movement, no scrabbling of fingers against the floor. It was just a body laying still.

He stepped into the hallway and paused for breath. Quickly finding a stairway that lead up and down, he descended to the first floor. The coffee shop may not have been looted, but it wasn’t spared all damage. It looked like rats and other small animals had been at work. He ignored the counter and headed for the back of the store. Any restaurant needed to have a large cold-room, and that was where he was likely to find what he needed.

The door to the large refrigerated room swung open, though not easily. The hinges were corroding and the floor was a mess with scattered droppings and other bits he didn’t care to examine too closely. Stepping in, he noted the room was about the same temperature as the rest of the building; the power had been off for a long time.

The cold-room had been sealed better than the rest of the place and been spared the ravages of infestation by vermin. He ignored the boxes of napkins and cutlery and such, and searched until he found several boxes of bottled water. Sighing in relief, he drank several down without hesitation, the water feeling cool and refreshing even though he knew perfectly well it was room temperature.

His most pressing need taken care of, he quickly but methodically went through the rest of the stores. There was little he could use; mostly ingredients for making doughnuts and other baked goods. There were packages of sprinkles; he stuffed his pockets with those. They were pretty much pure sugar, but they’d given him energy and something for his stomach to work on if he couldn’t find better.

After about 10 minutes he started feeling antsy again. He’d been in one place far too long. There’d been no sign of movement outside, but he didn’t want to chance becoming trapped. Grabbing a large plastic bag from a box of them, he filled it with more water bottles and cautiously crept out of the cold-room, keeping his eyes on the large barred windows.

No movement on the street he was facing. Keeping low moving slow, he peeked around the counter to view the side with the fenced enclosure, where he’d climbed up to enter the building. He sucked in a breath; on the other side of the street, shambling aimlessly, hair in crazy disarray, clothes ill-fitting and terribly stained, flesh rotting; it looked much like the body upstairs, only this one was up and walking.

Some people shied away from calling them zombies. He’d heard all kinds of terms; ghouls, deadels, rotters, walkers, the living dead, the restless dead, even the living-impaired. He didn’t care what they were called, as long as it was from a distance. He bit his lip.

If he went outside now it would likely spot him. And then it’d start that incessant moaning. If there were others in the area, and he was sure there must be by now, they’d home in on it and he was screwed if he was still anywhere near. On the other hand, it was just the one. They weren’t exactly difficult to outrun once they were in a decayed state like this one.

Other options. The stairway that had brought him down from the second floor had also gone up. He could try the roofs. This wasn’t a great area for roof-hopping but he’d passed beyond the area of real skyscrapers. He might be able to get some additional distance, and a better look at the state of the roads. Decided, he hefted his prize and carefully retreated to the stairwell and began to climb.