Descent by Jay Bonansinga
Twenty-five seconds.
He twists the cap, stuffs in the gas-soaked rag, and shoves the pointed end in the Malibu’s tailpipe, letting a twelve-inch length of rag dangle. Twenty seconds. He digs out a Bic lighter, sparks it, and sets the rag alight. Fifteen seconds. He runs away.
Ten seconds.
He makes it across the street, brushing past a cluster of Biters, and into a dark alcove, diving behind a row of garbage cans, before he hears the WHOOMP of that first eruption—the bottle catching in the tailpipe—followed by a much bigger explosion.
Philip ducks and covers as a sonic boom shakes the street and sends up a fireball that turns the shadows into well-lighted places.
* * *
Right on time, April thinks as she crouches down in the shadows of the foyer, the concussion blast rattling the glass door. The light popping overhead is like an unseen photographer’s strobe. She peers out through the bottom half of the barred door and glimpses the sea change in the ocean of dead.
Like a moving tide of ragged, livid faces, shifting with the gravitational tug of the moon, they start following the noise and light, heading in a disorganized mass toward the south side of the building.
Tinsel shimmering in the sun couldn’t attract a flock of sparrows better than this explosion works on these Biters. Within a minute or so, the street in front of the building is practically deserted.
April girds herself. She takes a deep breath. She secures the straps of her duffel bags. She closes her eyes. She says a quick, silent prayer … and then she springs up, yanks the cross-brace, and shoves the door open.
She creeps outside. The wind tosses her hair, and the stench strangles her. She stays low as she darts across the street.
The sensory overload threatens to distract her—the smells, the proximity of the horde half a block away, the thunderous beating of her heart—as she frantically moves from dark storefront to dark storefront. Thankfully, she is familiar enough with the neighborhood to know where the convenience store is located.
* * *
If measured by the clock, it only takes April Chalmers eleven minutes and thirty-three seconds to slip through the jagged maw of broken glass and visit the ransacked interior of the convenience store. Only eleven and half minutes to fill one and a half canvas bags with enough food and water and miscellaneous stuff to keep them going for quite a while.
But to April Chalmers, those eleven and half minutes feel suspended in time.
She grabs nearly twenty pounds of groceries from the convenience store—including a small canned ham with enough preservatives to keep until Christmas, two gallons of filtered water, three cartons of Marlboro reds, lighters, beef jerky, vitamins, cold remedies, antibacterial ointment, and six extra large rolls of blessed, blessed toilet paper—throwing it all in her duffel bag with lightning speed.
The back of her neck prickles as she works with constant awareness of the ticking clock. The street will fill up again soon and the army of Biters will block her path if she doesn’t get back within minutes.
* * *
Philip goes through another half a clip of .22-caliber rounds, working his way back around the rear of the apartment building. The majority of the Biters are now clustered around the flaming debris of the Malibu, a riot of moving corpses like June bugs drawn to the light. Philip clears a path around the back of the courtyard by squeezing off two shots. One of them cracks open the cranium of a lumbering cadaver dressed in a running suit, the zombie dropping like a puppet whose strings have been cut. Another blast opens a trough in the top of a skull belonging to what looks like a former homeless woman, her geode eyes flickering out as she falls.
Before the other Biters have a chance to close in on him, he vaults over the rear fence of the courtyard and charges across the leprous brown grass.
He climbs up the back wall of the building, using an awning as a foothold. A second fire escape ladder is folded halfway up the stucco wall of the first story, and Philip gets a grip on it and starts to pull himself the rest of the way up.
But all at once, he pauses, and has second thoughts about the plan.
* * *
April reaches the critical point in her mission—twelve minutes have elapsed since she emerged—but she risks visiting one more merchant.
Half a block south, an Ace Hardware store sits empty, its display windows broken, its burglar gates loose enough for a smallish woman to negotiate. She slips through the gap and enters the dark store.
She fills the remainder of the second canvas bag with water filters (for making the standing water in toilets drinkable), a box of nails (to replenish their supply, which they used securing the barricades), markers and rolls of large-format paper (for making signs to alert any other survivors), light bulbs, batteries, a few cans of Sterno, and three small flashlights.
On her way back toward the front of the store, now lugging nearly forty pounds of merchandise in two bulging duffels, she passes a figure slumped at the end of a side aisle stacked with fiberglass insulation.
April pauses. The dead girl on the floor, slumped and leaning against the far wall, is missing one leg. From the snail-trail of gore leading across the floor, it’s clear that the thing dragged itself here. The dead girl is not much older than Penny. April gapes for a moment.
She knows she has to get out of there but she can’t tear her gaze from the pathetic, ragged corpse sitting in its own juices, which have obviously leaked out of the blackened stump where its right leg used to be.
“Oh God, I can’t,” April says under her breath, to herself, uncertain what it is she can’t do: Put the thing out of its misery, or leave it to suffer for eternity in this deserted hardware store.
April pulls the metal bat from her belt and sets down her packs. She approaches cautiously. The dead thing on the floor hardly moves, just slowly gazes up with the trembling stupor of a fish dying on the deck of a boat.
“I’m sorry,” April whispers, and buries the end of the bat in the girl’s skull. The blow makes the wet, snapping noise of green wood breaking.
The zombie folds silently to the floor. But April stands there, closing her eyes for a moment, trying to will the image from her mind, an image that will probably haunt her for the rest of her life.
Seeing the shank of the bat cleave open a skull is bad enough, but what April just saw in the horrible brief instant before she brought the bat down, as she was drawing it back, winding up, was this: Either through some meaningless flicker of deadened nerves, or through some deeper understanding, the dead girl turned her face away in that moment before the bat arced down.
A noise near the front of the store gets her attention and she hurries back to her duffel bags, throws the straps over her shoulders, and starts toward the exit. But she doesn’t get far. She slams on the brakes when she sees a second young girl blocking her path.
It stands fifteen feet away, just inside the mangled burglar screens, in the identical soiled dress as that of the girl April just dispatched.
At first, April thinks her eyes are playing tricks. Or maybe it’s the ghost of the girl she just put down. Or maybe April is losing her mind. But as the second dead girl starts shuffling down the aisle toward April with black drool falling off its cracked lips—this one has both its legs—April realizes that it’s a twin.
It’s the other girl’s identical twin.
“Here we go,” April says, drawing back the bat, dropping her load, preparing to fight her way out.
She takes one step toward the pint-sized monster, raising the bat, when a dry popping blast rings out behind the twin, and April blinks.
The bullet shatters a corner of the front window and takes off the top of the twin’s head. April flinches back at the kick of blood mist, as the girl collapses in a heap. April lets out a pained sigh of relief.
Philip Blake stands outside the store, out in the middle of the empty street, clicking a new magazine into his .22-caliber Ruger.
“You in there?” he calls.
<
“I know it ain’t polite to rush a lady but they’re comin’ back!”
April grabs her treasures, and then leaps over the bloody remains blocking the aisle and slips through the burglar gate and out into the street. Instantly, she sees the problem: The throng of zombies is returning, coming around the corner with the collective fervor of a demented chorus line moving in haphazard formation.
Philip grabs one of the bags and they both make a run for the apartment building.
They cross the street in seconds flat, with at least fifty Biters on either flank.
* * *
Brian and Nick are peering out the reinforced glass of the outer vestibule door when they see the situation in the street rapidly changing.
They see wolf packs of zombies coming down the street from both directions, returning from wherever the hell they had just gone. In the midst of all this, two human beings, one male and one female, like ball carriers in some obscure, surreal, twisted sport, come charging toward the apartment building with duffel bags slung and bouncing against their backs. Nick perks up.
“There they are!”
“Thank God,” Brian says, lowering the Marlin shotgun until the butt rests on the floor. He’s shaking. He shoves his left hand in his pocket, and he tries to get a grip on himself. He does not want his brother to see him shaking.
“Let’s get the door open,” Nick says, leaning his shotgun in the corner.
He gets the door open just as Philip and April are roaring up the walk, a multitude of Biters on their heels. April roars through the doorway first, shaking and hyperventilating with adrenaline.
Philip follows her in, his dark eyes aglow with testosterone-fueled mania. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!”
Nick slams the door just in time. Three Biters crash into the outer glass, rattling the steel-impregnated door, their drooling mouths leaving streaks. Several pairs of milky-white eyes gaze in through the greasy glass at the people in the foyer. Dead fingers claw at the door. Other Biters are staggering up the walk.
Brian has his shotgun raised at the figures outside the door. He backs away. “What the hell is going on, man! Where were you guys?”
Nick ushers them through the inner door and into the foyer. April drops her bulging duffel. “That was—that was—Jesus, that was close!”
Philip sets down his pack. “Girl, you got some cojones, I’ll give you that.”
Nick steps up. “What’s the idea, Philly! You guys just disappear without telling anybody?”
“Talk to her,” Philip says with a grin, shoving his Ruger inside his belt.
“We were totally freaking out!” Nick rants. “We were about one second away from going outside to look for you!”
“Calm down, Nicky.”
“Calm down? Calm down! We were turning the place upside down looking for you! Tara was about to have a shit fit!”
“It’s my fault,” April says, wiping the grime from her neck.
“Look at our take, man!” Philip indicates the loot stuffed into the bags.
Nick has his fists clenched. “Then we hear a fucking explosion? What are we supposed to think? Was that you guys? Did you have something to do with that?”
Philip and April exchange a glance, and Philip says, “That idea was kinda both of ours.”
April cannot stifle her victorious grin as Philip takes a step toward her, raising his hand. “How about a high five, darlin’?”
They high-five each other, with Nick and Brian staring in disbelief. Nick is about to say something else when a figure appears on the other side of the foyer, pushing through the inner door.
“Oh my God!” Tara storms into the room and goes to her sister. She pulls April into a bear hug. “Oh my God, I was so freaked! Thank God you’re okay! Thank God! Thank God!”
April pats her sister. “I’m sorry, Tara, it was something I had to do.”
Tara lets go, her face flashing with anger. “I ought to beat the shit outta you. Seriously! I’m telling that little girl you’re just upstairs, but she’s getting as freaked as I am! What am I supposed to do? That was a goddamn stupid, irresponsible thing to do! Which is so goddamn typical of you, April!”
“What the hell does that mean?” April gets into her sister’s face. “Why don’t you say what you mean for once?”
“You fucking bitch.” Tara winds up like she’s going to slap the younger woman when Philip suddenly steps in between them.
“Whoa there, Tonto!” Philip gives Tara a reassuring pat. “Hold on a second. Take a deep breath, sis.” Philip nods toward the duffel bags. “I want to show you something. Okay? Just cool your pits for a second.”
He kneels down and unzips the bags, displaying the contents.
The others stare silently at the supplies. Philip straightens back up and looks Tara in the eyes. “That ‘fucking bitch’ there saved our asses today—there’s food and water in there. That ‘fucking bitch’ risked her ass, not knowing if she’d be able to pull it off and not wanting anybody else to get hurt. You ought to be kissing that ‘fucking bitch’s’ feet.”
Tara looks away from the duffel bags and looks down at the floor. “We were worried, that’s all,” she says in a feeble, low voice.
Nick and Brian are now both kneeling by the duffel bags, looking through the treasures. “Philly,” Nick says, “I have to admit: You guys kicked ass.”
“You guys rock,” Brian mutters almost under his breath with awe as he rifles through the toilet paper and the beef jerky and the water filters. The emotional atmosphere in the room begins to shift with the slow certainty of clouds parting. Smiles appear on all their faces.
Soon, even Tara is throwing grudging glances over their shoulders at the contents of the duffel bags. “Any cigarettes in there?”
“Here’s three cartons of Reds,” April says, leaning down and digging out the cigarettes. “Enjoy them, you fucking bitch.”
With a good-natured smile, she hurls the cartons at her sister.
Everybody laughs.
Nobody sees the small figure standing across the room, in the inner doorway, until Brian glances up. “Penny? You okay, kiddo?”
The little girl pushes the door open and walks into the foyer. She is still dressed in her pajamas, and her little peaches-and-cream face is chiseled with seriousness. “That man in there? Mr. Chah-merz? He just fell down.”
* * *
They find David Chalmers on the floor of the master bedroom, amid a litter of tissues and medications. Granules of broken glass from a fallen aftershave bottle sparkle like a halo around his trembling head.
“Jesus!—Daddy!” Tara kneels by the fallen man, pulling his oxygen tube free. David’s grizzled face is the color of nicotine as he involuntarily gasps for air, a fish out of water trying to breathe the poisonous atmosphere.
“He’s choking!” April hurries around to the other side of the bed, checking the oxygen tank, which lies on the floor on its side near the window, tangled in its tubing. The old man must have pulled it off the bedside table when he fell.
“Daddy? Can you hear me?” Tara gives the man’s ashen face a series of quick, light slaps.
“Check his tongue!”
“Daddy? Daddy?”
“Check his tongue, Tara!” April rushes back around the bed, the oxygen tank and a coil of tubing in her hands. While she does this, the others—Philip, Nick, Brian, and Penny—watch from the doorway. Philip feels helpless. He doesn’t know whether to jump in or just watch. The girls seem to know what they’re doing.
Tara gently levers open the old man’s mouth, looking down his gullet. “It’s clear.”
“Dad?” April kneels on the other side of him, positioning the tiny breathing apparatus under his hooked nose. “Daddy, can you hear me?”
David Chalmers keeps silently gasping, the back of his throat clucking painfully like a record skipping. His eyelids—as ancient and translucent as a mayfly’s wings—begin flutterin
April feels his forehead. “He’s ice-cold.”
“Is the oxygen running?”
“Full blast.”
“Daddy?” April gently repositions the old man so he’s lying supine with the oxygen tube across his upper lip. Again they give him little slaps. “Daddy? Daddy? Daddy, can you hear us? Daddy?”
The old man coughs, eyes fluttering. He blinks. He tries to get a good lungful of air, but his shallow breaths keep hitching in his throat. His eyes are rolled back in his head, and he appears to be only semiconscious.
“Daddy, look at me,” April says, her hand gently turning his face toward hers. “Can you see me?”
“Let’s get him on the bed,” Tara suggests. “Fellas, you mind giving us a hand?”
Philip, Nick, and Brian step into the room. Philip and Nick take one side of the old man, and Tara and Brian the other, and on the count of three, they carefully lift the old man off the floor and lay him on the bed, making the springs squeak and tangling the tube on one side.
Moments later, they have the tube clear and the old man covered in blankets. Only his pale, sunken face is visible above the linens, his eyes shut, his mouth lolled open, and his breathing coming in fits and starts. He sounds like a combustion engine that refuses to turn over. Every few moments, his eyelids flutter and something flickers behind them—lips stretched into a grimace—but then his face goes slack. He is still breathing … barely.
Tara and April sit on either side of the bed, stroking the lanky form under the blankets. For a long while, nobody says anything. But chances are, they’re all thinking the same thing.
* * *
“You think it’s a stroke?” Brian asks softly, minutes later, sitting out by the sliding glass doors.