Descent by Jay Bonansinga
On the afternoon of his seventh day in Woodbury, still wheezing, every breath a stab of pain in his side, Brian finally gets up the nerve to visit the squat, gray-brick building on the south end of the safe zone.
* * *
“You’re lucky,” Stevens says, snapping an X-ray into its clip at the top of a light panel. He points at a milky image of Brian’s ribs. “No serious breaks … just three minor fractures to the second, fourth, and fifth pectorals.”
“Lucky, huh?” Brian mutters, sitting shirtless on the padded gurney. The room is a depressing tile crypt in the basement of the medical center—once the pathology lab—now serving as Stevens’s examination room. The air reeks of disinfectant and mold.
“Not a word I’ve used that often in recent days, I will admit,” Stevens says, turning toward a stainless steel cabinet next to the light panel. He’s a tall, trim, smartly groomed man in his late forties with designer steel-frame eyeglasses riding low on the bridge of his nose. He wears a lab coat over his wrinkled oxford shirt and has a sort of weary, professorial intelligence in his eyes.
“And the wheezing?” Brian asks.
The doctor fishes through a shelf of plastic vials. “Early stage pleurisy due to the damage to the ribs,” he mumbles as he searches the medication. “I would encourage you to cough as much as possible … it’s going to hurt, but it’ll prevent secretions from pooling in the lungs.”
“And my eye?” The stabbing pain in Brian’s left eye, radiating up from his bruised jaw, has worsened over the last few days. Every time he looks in the mirror, his eye seems more bloodshot.
“Looks fine to me,” the doctor says, pulling a pill bottle from the shelf. “Your mandible on that side has a nasty contusion, but that should heal up in time. I’m gonna give you some naproxen for the pain.”
Stevens hands the vial over and then stands there with arms crossed against his chest.
Brian almost involuntarily reaches for his wallet. “I’m not sure if I have—”
“There’s no payment for services rendered here,” the doctor says with a raised brow, somewhat bemused by Brian’s innate gesture. “There’s no staff, there’s no infrastructure, there’s no follow-up, and for that matter, there isn’t a decent cup of espresso or a half-assed daily newspaper to read.”
“Oh … right.” Brian puts the pills in his pocket. “What about the hip?”
“Bruised but intact,” he says, flipping off the light panel and closing the cabinet. “I wouldn’t worry. You can put your shirt back on now.”
“Good … thanks.”
“Not a big talker, are you?” The doctor washes his hands at a wall sink, dries them on a dirty towel.
“I guess not.”
“Probably better that way,” the doctor says, wadding the towel and tossing it into the sink. “You probably don’t even want to tell me your name.”
“Well…”
“It’s okay. Forget it. You’ll be known in the records as the Bohemian Fellow with the Cracked Ribs. You want to tell me how it happened?”
Brian shrugs as he buttons his shirt. “Took a fall.”
“Fighting off the specimens?”
Brian looks at him. “Specimens?”
“Sorry … clinical-speak. Biters, zombies, pus bags, whatever they’re calling them nowadays. That how you got injured?”
“Yeah … something like that.”
“You want a professional opinion? A prognosis?”
“Sure.”
“Get the hell outta here while you still can.”
“Why’s that?”
“Chaos theory.”
“Excuse me?”
“Entropy … empires fall, stars wink out … the ice cubes in your drink melt.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not following.”
The doctor pushes his glasses up his nose. “There’s a crematorium in the sublevel of this building … we destroyed two more men today, one of them the father of two children. They were attacked on the north side yesterday morning. They reanimated last night. More Biters are getting through … the barricade’s a sieve. Chaos theory is the impossibility of a closed system remaining stable. This town is doomed. There’s nobody at the controls … Gavin and his cronies are getting bolder … and you, my friend, are simply another piece of fodder.”
For the longest time, Brian doesn’t say anything, he just stares past the doctor.
At last, Brian pushes himself off the table and extends his hand. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
* * *
That night, woozy from the painkillers, Brian Blake hears a knock at his bedroom door. Before he even has a chance to get his bearings and turn on a light, the door clicks open and Nick sticks his head in. “Brian, you awake?”
“Always.” Brian grunts as he climbs out of the blankets and sits up on the side of the bed. Only a few of the apartment’s wall outlets are live with generated power. Brian’s room is a dead circuit. He switches on a battery-operated lantern and sees Nick pushing into the room, fully dressed, his expression tight with alarm.
“You gotta see something,” Nick says, going to the window, peering through the blinds. “I saw him last night, same deal, didn’t think much of it.”
Still groggy, Brian joins Nick at the window. “What are we looking at?”
Through the slat, out in the darkness of a vacant lot, Philip’s silhouette can be seen emerging from the far trees. He looks like a stick figure in the darkness. Since Penny’s death, he’s been losing weight, going without sleep, hardly eating a thing. He looks sick, broken, like his faded denims are the only things holding his long, lanky limbs together. He carries a bucket, and he walks with a strange, wooden kind of purpose, like a sleepwalker or an automaton.
“What’s with the bucket?” Brian asks under his breath, almost rhetorically.
“Exactly.” Nick nervously scratches himself. “He had it last night, too.”
“Just take it easy, Nick. Stay in here.” Brian turns the lantern out. “Let’s just see what happens.”
* * *
A few moments later, the sound of the front door clicking open reverberates through the dark apartment. Philip’s shuffling footsteps can be heard crossing the living room and making their way down the hall.
The click of the laundry room door is followed by the sound of Penny becoming agitated, the chain clanking, the garbled sounds of groaning—noises to which Brian and Nick have almost grown accustomed. Then something reaches their ears that they haven’t heard before: the wet slosh of something hitting the tiles … followed by the strange, animalistic, gooey noises of a zombie feeding.
“What the fuck is he doing?” In the half-light, Nick’s face is a pale gibbous moon of terror.
“Holy Christ,” Brian whispers. “He can’t be—”
Brian doesn’t even get a chance to finish the thought, because Nick is on his way to the door with a full head of steam, heading for the hallway.
Brian chases after him. “Nick, don’t—”
“This isn’t happening.” Nick barrels down the hallway, moving toward the laundry room. He knocks hard on the door. “Philip, what’s going on?”
“Go away!”
The sound of Philip’s muffled voice is clogged with emotion.
“Nick—” Brian tries to get in between Nick and the door but it’s too late.
Nick turns the knob. The door is unlocked. Nick enters the laundry room.
“Oh God.”
Nick’s mortified reaction reaches Brian’s ears a split second before Brian can get a good look at what’s going on in the laundry room.
Brian pushes his way into the narrow enclosure and sees the dead girl eating a human hand.
* * *
Brian’s initial reaction is not one of repulsion or disgust or outrage (which, as it happens, is exactly the combination of emotions currently twisting Nick’s features as he gapes at the feeding in progress). Instead, Brian is overcome by a wave of sadness. He says nothing at first, simpl
Ignoring the presence of the other men, Philip calmly pulls a severed human ear from the bucket, and waits patiently for the Penny-thing to finish consuming the hand. She gobbles the middle-aged male fingers with unbridled gusto, chewing the bloodless hairy knuckles as though they were delicacies, the stringers of pink, foamy saliva dangling from her lips.
She hardly pauses long enough to swallow before Philip places the human ear within range of her blackened teeth, offering the morsel to the child with the care and concern of a priest proffering a wafer to a communicant. The Penny-thing devours the cartilage and gristly rolls of human skin with mindless abandon.
“I’m outta here,” Nick Parsons finally manages to blurt, pivoting and storming out of the room.
Brian enters and crouches down next to his brother. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t accuse Philip of anything. Brian is drowning in sorrow right now and all he can think of saying is, “What’s going on, man?”
Philip hangs his head. “He was already dead … they were gonna burn him … found his body in a bag out behind the clinic … he died of something else … I just took a few pieces … nobody’ll notice…”
The Penny-thing finishes the ear, and starts groaning for more.
Philip feeds her a dripping, severed foot, the jagged bone exposed at the ankle like a slimy tusk of ivory.
“You think this is…?” Brian searches for words. “You think this is a good idea?”
Philip looks down at the floor as the sticky, wet noises of the feeding frenzy fill the laundry room. The girl-thing gnaws at the bone as Philip’s voice drops an octave, beginning to crack with emotion. “Think of him as an organ donor…”
“Philip—”
“I can’t let go of her, Brian … I can’t … she’s all I got.”
Brian takes a deep breath and fights his own tears. “The thing of it is … she’s not Penny anymore.”
“I know that.”
“Then why—”
“I see her and I try to remember … but I can’t … I can’t remember … I can’t remember anything but this shit storm we’re living in … and them road rats that shot her … and she’s all I got…” The pain and grief choking his voice start to thicken, hardening into something darker. “They took her from me … my whole universe … new rules now … new rules…”
Brian can’t breathe. He watches the Penny-thing gnawing on that pasty severed foot. He looks away. He can’t take it anymore. His stomach is clenched with nausea, his mouth watering. He can feel the heat rising in his gorge, and he struggles to his feet. “I have to … I can’t stay in here, Philip … I have to go.”
Whirling around, Brian stumbles out of the laundry room and gets halfway down the hall when he drops to his knees and roars vomit.
His stomach is relatively empty. What comes out of him is mostly bile. But it comes on spasms of agony. He retches and retches, the acids spattering a six-foot length of carpet between the hallway and the living room. He upchucks his guts, which instantly makes a cold sweat break out all over his body and sends him into a paroxysm of coughing. The fit goes on for endless minutes, each cough throbbing painfully in his ribs. He coughs and coughs until he finally collapses into a heap on the floor.
Fifteen feet away, in the light of a battery-powered lantern, Nick Parsons packs his knapsack. He shoves in a change of clothes, a couple of cans of beans, blankets, a flashlight, some bottled water. He searches the cluttered coffee table for something.
Brian manages to sit up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You can’t leave, man … not now.”
“Hell I can’t,” Nick says, finding his Bible under a pile of candy wrappers. He puts the Bible in the backpack. The muffled feeding noises drift down the hallway, fueling Nick’s anxiety.
“I’m begging you, Nick.”
Nick zips the knapsack shut. He doesn’t look at Brian as he says, “You don’t need me…”
“That’s not true.” Brian swallows the bitter taste of bile. “I need you now more than ever … I need your help … to keep things together.”
“Together?” Nick looks up. He slings the backpack over his shoulder, and then he walks over to where Brian is slumped on the floor. “Things haven’t been together around here for a long time.”
“Nick. Listen to me—”
“He’s too far gone, Brian.”
“Listen. I understand what you’re saying. Give him one more chance. Maybe this is like a one-time thing. Maybe … I don’t know … it’s grief. One more chance, Nick. We got a much better shot at survival if we stay together.”
For a long, agonizing moment, Nick considers all this. Then, on a weary, exasperated sigh, which seems to deflate his very spirit, he drops the knapsack.
* * *
The next day, Philip vanishes. Brian and Nick don’t even bother looking for him. They stay inside for most of the day, hardly speaking to each other, feeling like zombies themselves, moving silently from bathroom to kitchen to living room, where they sit staring out the barred window at the blustery sky, trying to come up with an answer, a way out of this downward spiral.
Around five o’clock that afternoon, they hear a strange buzzing noise coming from outside—like a cross between a chain saw and a boat motor. Worried that it might have something to do with Philip, Brian goes to the back door, listens, then pushes his way outside and takes a few steps across the cracked cement of the back porch.
The noise is louder now. In the distance, on the north side of town, a thundercloud of dust rises into the steel-gray sky. The howl of engines sputters and waxes and wanes on the breeze, and with a surge of relief, Brian realizes that it’s merely somebody maneuvering race cars around the dirt track arena. Every so often, the sound of cheers warbles and echoes on the wind.
For a moment, Brian panics. Don’t these idiots realize all this noise is going to draw every Biter within a fifty-mile radius? At the same time, though, Brian is transfixed by that buzz-saw sound drifting on the breeze. Like a wandering radio signal, it touches something sore inside him, an ache for preplague times, a series of painful memories of lazy Sunday afternoons, a good night’s sleep, walking into a goddamn grocery store and buying a fucking gallon of milk.
He goes back inside, puts his jacket on, and tells Nick he’s going for a walk.
* * *
The entrance to the racetrack borders the main drag, a high cyclone fence stretched between two brick piles. As Brian approaches, he sees drifts of trash and old tires scattered across the meager box office, which is boarded by graffiti-stained planks.
The noise rises to ear-piercing levels—the winding scream of motors and caterwauling crowds—tainted by the odors of gasoline and burning rubber. The sky is choked with a haze of dust and smoke.
Brian finds a gap in the fence, and he heads for it, when he hears a voice.
“Hey!”
He pauses, turns, and sees three men in ratty camo-fatigues coming toward him. Two of the men are in their twenties, with greasy long hair and assault rifles pinned up high against their shoulders patrol-style. The oldest of the three—a crew-cut hard-ass, his olive drab jacket buttoned up with a bullet bandolier across his chest—walks out front, obviously in command.
“Admission is forty bucks or the equivalent in trade,” says the commander.
“Admission?” Brian says, taken aback. He sees a name patch on the older man’s breast pocket: maj. gavin. Up to this point, Brian has only stolen glimpses of the vicious National Guardsman, but now, at this proximity, Brian can see a glint of crazy in the man’s frosty blue eyes. His breath smells of Jim Beam.
“Forty bucks for an adult, son—you an adult?” The other men chuckle. “Kids get in free, of course, but you look over eighteen to me. Just barely.”
“You’re taking money from people?” Brian is confused. “Times like these?”
“You’re free to trade, friend. You got a c
More snickers.
Brian’s gut goes cold with anger. “I don’t have forty bucks.”
The smile disappears from the Major’s face like a switch has been thrown. “Then have a nice day.”
“Who gets the money?”
This gets the attention of the other two Guardsmen. They move in closer. Gavin comes nose to nose with Brian, and says in a soft, threatening grunt, “It’s for the Commons.”
“The what?”
“The Commons … the collective … community improvements and what-not.”
Brian feels a surge of rage twisting inside him. “You sure it’s not for the collective of you three?”
“I’m sorry,” the Major says in a flat, icy tone, “I must have missed the memo that says you’re the new city clerk. You boys get the memo stating that this peckerwood is the new Woodbury city clerk?”
“No, sir,” says one of the greasy-haired minions. “Didn’t get that memo.”
Gavin pulls a .45 semiauto from his belt holster, thumbs off the safety, and presses the barrel against Brian’s temple. “You need to study up on group dynamics, son. You flunk civics class in high school?”
Brian says nothing. He stares into the Major’s eyes, and a red lens draws down over Brian’s vision. Everything goes red. Brian’s hands tingle, his head spins.
“Say ahh,” the Major says.
“What?”
“I SAID OPEN YOUR GODDAMN MOUTH!” Gavin bellows, and the other two Guardsmen swing their assault rifles into ready positions, the muzzles trained on Brian’s skull. Brian opens his mouth, and Gavin inserts the cold barrel of the .45 between Brian’s teeth like a dentist checking for cavities.
Something breaks inside Brian. The steel muzzle tastes like old coins and bitter oil. The entire world turns the deepest shade of scarlet.
“Go back to where you came from,” the Major says. “Before you get yourself hurt.”
Brian manages a nod.
The muzzle slips out of his mouth.
Moving as if in a dream, Brian slowly backs away from the Guardsmen, turns, and walks stiffly back the way he came, now traveling through an invisible mist of crimson.