Descent by Jay Bonansinga
Which is why Philip makes the executive decision at that point to leave the Buick where it sits, pack up every last thing they can possibly carry, and set out on foot. Nobody’s crazy about the idea, but they go along with it. The alternative of searching the frozen traffic jam in the pitch-darkness for spare tires or a suitable replacement vehicle doesn’t seem viable right now.
They quickly dig their necessities out of the Buick’s trunk, stuffing duffel bags and backpacks with supplies, blankets, food, weapons, and water. They are getting better at communicating with whispers, hand gestures, and nods—hyperaware now of the distant drone of dead people, the sounds waxing and waning in the darkness beyond the highway, percolating in the trees and behind buildings. Philip has the strongest back, so he takes the largest canvas duffel. Nick and Brian each strap on an overloaded backpack. Even Penny agrees to carry a knapsack filled with bedding.
Philip takes the Ruger pistol, the two bad-axes—one shoved down each side of his belt—and a long machetelike tool for cutting underbrush, which he shoves down the length of his spine between the duffel and his stained chambray shirt. Brian and Nick each cradle a Marlin 55 shotgun in their arms, as well as a pickaxe strapped to the sides of their respective backpacks.
They start walking west, and this time, not a single one of them looks back.
* * *
A quarter of a mile down the road, they encounter an overpass clogged with a battered Airstream mobile home. Its cab is wrapped around a telephone pole. All the streetlights have flickered out, and in the full dark, a muffled banging noise is heard inside the walls of the ruined trailer.
This makes everybody pause suddenly on the shoulder beneath the viaduct.
“Jesus, it could be somebody—” Brian stops himself when he sees his brother’s hand shoot up.
“Sssshhhhh!”
“But what if it’s—”
“Quiet!” Philip cocks his head and listens. His expression is that of a cold stone monument. “This way, come on!”
Philip leads the group down a rocky slope on the north edge of the interchange, each of them descending the hill gingerly, careful not to slip on the wet pea gravel. Brian brings up the rear, wondering again about the rules, wondering if they just deserted one of their fellow human beings.
His thoughts are quickly subsumed by the plunge into the darker territory of countryside.
* * *
They follow a narrow blacktop two-lane called Miller Road northward through the darkness. For about a mile, they encounter nothing more than a sparsely commercialized area of desolate industrial parks and foundries, their signs as dark as hieroglyphs on cave walls: Barloworld Handling, Atlas Tool and Die, Hughes Supply, Simcast Electronics, Peachtree Steel. The rhythmic shuffle of their footsteps on the cold asphalt mingles with the thrumming of their breaths. The silence starts working on their nerves. Penny is getting tired. They hear rustling noises in the woods off to their immediate right.
At last Philip raises his hand and points toward a sprawling, low-slung plant stretching back into the distance. “This place will do,” he says in a low flat whisper.
“Do for what?” Nick says, pausing next to Philip, breathing hard.
“For the night,” Philip says. There is no emotion in his voice.
He leads the group past a low, unlighted sign that says GEORGIA PACIFIC CORPORATION.
* * *
Philip gets in through the office window. He has everybody huddle in the shadows outside the entrance while he makes his way through empty, littered corridors toward the warehouse in the center of the building.
The place is as dark as a crypt. Philip’s heart beats in his ears as he strides along with the bad-axes at his side. He tries one of the light switches to no avail. He barely notices the pungent aroma of wood pulp permeating the air—a gluey, sappy odor—and when he reaches the safety doors, he slowly shoves them open with the toe of his boot.
The warehouse is the size of an airplane hanger, with giant gantries hanging overhead, the rows of huge scoop lights dark, the odor of paper must as thick as talc. Thin moonlight shines down through gargantuan sky windows. The floor is sectioned off into rows of enormous paper rolls—as big around as redwood trunks—so white they seem to glow in the darkness.
Something moves in the middle distance.
Philip shoves the bad-axes down either side of his belt, then grasps the hilt of the Ruger. He draws out the gun, snaps back the slide, and raises the muzzle at a dark figure staggering out from behind a stack of pallets. The factory rat comes through the shadows toward Philip slowly, hungrily, the front of his dungarees dark with dried blood and bile, his long, slack face full of teeth gleaming in the moonbeams coming through the skylight.
One shot puts the dead thing down—the blast bouncing back like a kettledrum in the cavernous warehouse.
Philip makes a sweep of the remaining length of the warehouse. He finds a couple more of them—an older fat man, a former night watchman from the looks of his soiled uniform, and a younger one—each dragging his dead ass out from behind shelving units.
Philip feels nothing as he pops each one in the skull at point-black range.
On his way back toward the front entrance he discovers a fourth one in the shadows, caught between two massive paper rolls. The bottom half of the former forklift operator is wedged between the blinding white cylinders, crushed beyond recognition, all his fluids pooled and dried on the cement floor beneath him. The top half of the creature convulses and flails, its milk-stone eyes stupidly awake.
“What’s up, bubba?” Philip says as he approaches with the gun at his hip. “Another day, another dollar … huh?”
The zombie chomps impotently at the air between its face and Philip.
“Lunch break overdue?”
Chomp.
“Eat this.”
The .22-caliber blast echoes as the slug smashes through the forklift operator’s orbital bone, turning the milky eye black, and sending a chunk of the parietal hemisphere flying. The spray—a mixture of blood, tissue, and cerebrospinal fluid—spatters the rows of pristine white paper, as the top half of the dead thing wilts like a noodle.
Philip admires his work of art—the scarlet tendrils on that field of heavenly white—for quite a long time before going to get the others.
SEVEN
They spend the night in a glass-encased foreman’s office, high above the main floor of the Georgia Pacific warehouse. They use their battery-powered lanterns and they move the desks and chairs aside, and they spread their bedrolls on the linoleum tiles.
The previous occupant must have practically lived in the little two-hundred-square-foot crow’s nest, because there are CDs, a stereo, a microwave, a small refrigerator (the food inside it mostly spoiled), drawers full of candy bars, work orders, half-full liquor bottles, office supplies, fresh shirts, cigarettes, check stubs, and porn.
Philip hardly says a word the whole night. He just sits near the window overlooking the warehouse floor, occasionally taking a swig of whiskey from the pint bottle he found in the desk, while Nick sits on the floor in the opposite corner, silently reading a small Concordance Bible by the light of a lantern. Nick claims he carries the little dog-eared leather-bound book wherever he goes; but the others have rarely seen him reading it … until now.
Brian forces down some tuna fish and saltine crackers, and he tries to get Penny to eat something but she won’t. She seems to be drawing further into herself, her eyes now displaying a permanent glaze that looks vaguely catatonic to Brian. Later, Brian sleeps next to her, while Philip dozes in the swivel chair by the greasy wire-mesh window, through which past foremen have kept their eyes peeled for loafers. This is the first time Brian has seen his brother too consumed by his own thoughts to sleep next to his daughter, and it does not bode well.
The next morning, they awaken to the sounds of dogs barking somewhere outside.
The dull, pale light floods in through the high windows, and they pack quickly. N
On their way out, each one of them—except Philip—studiously avoids looking at the bodies lying in pools of gore in the warehouse.
Philip seems galvanized by the sight of corpses illuminated by daylight.
* * *
Outside, they discover the source of the barking. About a hundred yards west of the warehouse a pack of strays—mostly mutts—are fighting over something pink and ragged on the ground. As Philip and the others approach, the dogs scatter, leaving the object of their attentions in the mud. Brian identifies the object as they pass, and softly gives Penny the code word: away.
The thing is a severed human arm, chewed so badly it looks like it belongs to a wet rag doll.
“Don’t look, punkin,” Philip mutters to his daughter, and Brian pulls Penny next to him, covering the girl’s eyes.
They trudge westward, moving silently, their footsteps furtive and careful like thieves creeping through the morning sun.
* * *
They follow a road called Snapfinger Drive, which runs parallel to the interstate. The blacktop ribbon winds through barren forest preserves, abandoned residential villages, and ransacked strip malls. As they move through increasingly populated areas, the side of the road holds horrors that no little girl should ever see.
A high school football field is strewn with headless torsos. A mortuary has been hastily boarded and nailed shut from the outside—the horrible muffled sounds of the recently risen scratching and clawing to get out. Philip fervidly searches for a suitable vehicle to highjack, but most of the cars along Snapfinger lie in ditches like burned husks or sit on the gravel shoulder with two or three tires blown. Traffic lights, most of them either blinking yellow or completely black, hang over clogged intersections.
The highway—visible up along a ridge a hundred yards to their left—crawls with the dead. Every so often the tattered remains of a person will cross through the distant pale rays of the rising sun, causing Philip to motion for everybody to get the hell down and stay quiet. But despite the arduous process of ducking behind trees or wreckage every time they sense another presence looming nearby, they cover quite a bit of ground that day.
They encounter no other survivors.
* * *
Late that afternoon, the weather turns clear and sunny—ironically, a fine early autumn afternoon in any other context—the temperature in the low sixties. By five o’clock, the men are sweating, and Penny has tied her sweatshirt around her waist. Philip calculates their progress, subtracting a thirty-minute rest for lunch, and he figures that they’ve averaged about a mile an hour—crossing nearly eight miles of suburban wilderness.
Still, none of them realizes how close they are to the city until they come upon a muddy hillock rising out of the pines just west of Glenwood, where a Baptist church sits on a ridge, smoldering from a recent conflagration, its steeple a smoking ruin.
Exhausted, drained, and hungry, they follow the winding road up the grade to the top of the hill; and when they reach the church parking lot, they all stand there for a moment, gazing out at the western horizon, frozen with a sort of unexpected awe.
The skyline, only three miles away, looks almost radiant in the fading light.
* * *
For boys growing up within a couple hundred miles of the great capital of the New South, Philip and Brian Blake have spent precious little time in Atlanta. For the two and half years that he drove trucks for Harlo Electric, Philip occasionally made deliveries there. And Brian has seen his share of concerts at the Civic Center, the Earl, the Georgia Dome, and the Fox Theater. But neither man knows the town well.
As they stand on the edge of that church parking lot, with the acrid smell of the apocalypse in their sinuses, the skyline in the hazy distance reflects back at them a sort of unattainable grandeur. In the dreamy light they can see the capitol spire with its golden-clad dome, the mirrored monoliths of the Concourse Complex, the massive Peachtree Plaza towers, and the pinnacle of the Atlantic building, but it all seems to give off an air of mirage—a sort of Lost-City-of-Atlantis feeling.
Brian is about to say something about the place being so close and yet so far—or perhaps make a comment about the unknowable condition of the streets down below—when he sees a blur out of the corner of his eye.
“Look!”
Penny has darted away, unexpectedly and quickly, her voice shrill with excitement.
“PENNY!”
Brian starts after the little girl, who is scurrying across the western edge of the church parking lot.
“GRAB HER!” Philip calls out, chasing after Brian, who is charging after the girl.
“Lookit! Lookit!” Penny’s little legs are churning frantically as she darts toward a side street, which winds along the far side of the hill. “It’s a policeman!” She points as she runs. “He’ll save us!”
“PENNY, STOP!”
The little girl scurries around an exit gate and down the side road. “He’ll save us!”
Brian clears the end of the fence at a dead run, and he sees a squad car about fifty yards away, parked on the side of the road under a massive live oak. Penny is approaching the royal blue Crown Victoria—the Atlanta Police decal on the door, the trademark red swoosh, and the light bar mounted on the roof—a silhouette hunched behind the wheel.
“Stop, honey!”
Brian sees Penny pausing suddenly outside the driver’s door, panting with exertion, staring in at the man behind the wheel.
By this point, Philip and Nick have caught up with Brian, and Philip zooms past his brother. He charges up to his little girl and scoops her off the ground as though pulling her out of a fire.
Brian reaches the squad car and looks in the half-open driver’s side window.
The patrolman was once a heavyset white man with long sideburns.
Nobody says anything.
From her father’s arms, Penny gapes through the car window at the dead man in uniform straining against his shoulder strap. From the looks of his badge and his garb, as well as the word TRAFFIC emblazoned on the front quarter panel of the vehicle, he was once a low-level officer, probably assigned to the outer regions of the city, feeding stray cars to the impound lots along Fayetteville Road.
Now the man twists in his seat, imprisoned by a seat belt he cannot fathom, openmouthed and drooling at the fresh meat outside his window. His facial features are deformed and bloated, the color of mildew, his eyes like tarnished coins. He snarls at the humans, snapping his blackened teeth with feral appetite.
“Now that’s just plain pathetic,” Philip says to no one in particular.
“I’ll take her,” Brian says, stepping closer and reaching for Penny.
The dead cop, catching the smell of food, snaps his jaws toward Brian, straining the belt, making the canvas harness creak.
Brian jerks back with a start.
“He can’t hurt ya,” Philip says in a low, alarmingly casual tone. “He can’t even figure out the goddamn seat belt.”
“You’re kidding me,” Nick says, looking over Philip’s shoulder.
“Poor dumb son of a bitch.”
The dead cop growls.
Penny climbs into Brian’s arms, and Brian steps back, holding the child tightly. “C’mon, Philip, let’s go.”
“Wait a minute, hold your horses.” Philip pulls the .22 from the back of his belt.
“C’mon, man,” Nick pipes in, “the noise is gonna draw more of ’em … let’s get outta here.”
Philip points the gun at the cop, who grows still at the sight of the muzzle. But Philip doesn’t pull the trigger. He simply smiles and makes a childlike shooting noise: psssh-psssh-pssssh.
“Philip, come
Brian stops and stares.
The dead cop is transfixed by the sight of that Ruger in his face. Brian wonders if his rudimentary central nervous system is somehow sending a signal to some far-off muscle memory buried deep in his dead brain cells. His expression changes. The monstrous abomination of a face falls like a rotten soufflé, and the thing almost looks sad. Or maybe even scared. It’s hard to tell behind that beastly snarling mouth and mask of necrotic tissue, but something in those Buffalo-nickel eyes flickers then: a trace of dread?
An unexpected tide of emotion rises in Brian Blake, and it takes him by surprise. It’s hard to put a name to it—it’s partly repulsion, partly pity, partly disgust, partly sorrow, and partly rage. He suddenly puts Penny down, and he gently turns her around so that she’s facing the church.
“This is an away moment, kiddo,” Brian says softly, and then turns to face his brother.
Philip is taunting the zombie. “Just relax and follow the bouncing ball,” he says to the drooling creature, waving the barrel slowly back and forth.
“I’ll do it,” Brian says.
Philip freezes. He turns and gives his brother a look. “Say what?”
“Give me the gun, I’ll finish it off.”
Philip looks at Nick, and Nick looks at Brian. “Hey, man, you don’t want to—”
“Give me the gun!”
The smile that twitches at the corners of Philip’s lips is complex, and humorless. “Be my guest, sport.”
Brian takes the gun and without hesitation steps forward, pokes it in the car, presses the muzzle against the dead cop’s head, and starts to squeeze off a single shot … but his finger will not respond. His trigger finger will not obey the command his brain is giving it.
In the awkward pause the zombie drools as though waiting for something.