All Our Tomorrows (22 page)

“There’s zombies in there, Haze. Lots of them.”

“But they said we should go here,” I say, pleading with him even though it will do no good. Nothing I say can change reality.

“Go back.”

“I can’t,” I say. “The duct. The junction. It’s too flimsy.”

“You have to go back,” Steve says.

I start edging my way backwards, unable to see where I’m going. A bolt pops out of the ceiling and the duct shudders, twisting to one side.

“It’s going to collapse,” I cry, reaching out and pushing him forward again.

“We’re trapped,” Steve says from ahead of me.

“Is it the warehouse?” I ask, doubting him, not sure what he can see. “Are you sure it’s the warehouse? They told us to go to the warehouse. Did we make a wrong turn?”

“No,” Steve replies over the cries of hundreds of zombies swarming below us. “We’re in the right place.”

“I don’t understand,” I yell, feeling frustrated. It’s irrational, but I feel as though if I could just get up there past him, I could do something. I couldn’t, but perhaps I’d see something he hasn’t. Damn, I should have gone first, I tell myself.

“There’s a forklift. A loading dock. Warehouse shelving. This is it,” he says.

“But why?” I cry. “Why would they send us here?”

And my heart sinks.

I know.

“There are hundreds of zombies,” Steve says. “Perhaps thousands. I can see an open roller door. I think this is how they got in. Why would Doyle send us here?”

“Because we’re bait,” I say. “It’s the only thing we’re good for. A diversion.”

Steve falls silent.

“They used us,” I say. “They knew we would draw Zee away from them.”

“Fuck!”

“What are we going to do?” I ask. I’m in denial. Doing “something” will solve this. No. It won’t, but I can barely grasp that thought through the panic clouding my mind. Zombies growl and snarl. It’s too noisy. I can’t think straight.

A grate falls to the concrete with a thud ahead of me.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I’m going to make a run for it. I’ll try to draw them away,” Steve says.

“No!” I scream. “Steve, don’t. Please, don’t go down there. You can’t leave me!”

“It’s the only way,” Steve says.

“You’ll die,” I cry. He knows this. He’s not dumb, but I have to point out that I know too.

“I—” he says, unable to complete his sentence as I cut him off.

“Steve. No!” I reach out and grab at one of his legs, pulling him back, yelling, “You can’t. Please! I won’t let you.”

Tears well up in my eyes, but I feel his body relax. Steve rolls around on his back, arching his head so he can see me in the dim light. He pounds the sheet metal beneath him in frustration and Zee roars at the sound.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

There’s silence for the best part of a minute as we both lie there stunned. Silence, though, only applies to us. Zee continues to howl.

“We have to do something,” he says, frustrated.

“But not this,” I say. “I can’t lose you again. I can’t. Not you.”

Steve lies on his back staring at the underside of the duct above us. He sighs, mumbling something. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but I can see his chest rise and fall in a huff. Over the snarling, I hear an unusual sound. It’s faint. It’s not natural. I’m still holding onto Steve’s leg. I’m not letting go. If Steve climbs out of this duct, he’s dragging me along with him.

“Can you hear that?” I ask.

We’re both silent. Again and again, there’s a sound like the wheezing of a door swinging on its hinges.

“What is that?” he asks.

“I’ve heard that before,” I say, trying to place the sound.

Steve twists around. I can see him peering out through the open duct into the warehouse.

“The door,” he says.

“What door?”

I can’t see anything, which is incredibly frustrating. My fingers grip his ankle as though I’m holding on for dear life.

“What’s happening?” I ask.

The thumping below me fades, dropping in its intensity. Bodies fall to the concrete. I can hear them collapsing in a heap.

“They’ve sealed the door,” he says. “I can see sparks, flashes. They’re welding it shut.”

“Who is?” I ask, confused. “What door?”

“The door below us. The one leading into the warehouse.”

The duct shakes, but this is different from the chaotic, violent shaking when the zombies attacked. I turn my head, peering behind me, and see Elizabeth’s head poking in through the broken junction. She’s wearing a white space suit, but she has her helmet off. The thick, stainless steel neck ring rests on her shoulders.

“Are you two okay?” she asks.

“Yes. Yes,” I reply, overcome with relief. “We’re fine.”

“Let’s get you out of there,” she says, and I realize she must be standing on a stepladder of some kind. I shimmy backwards, feeling the duct flex beneath me.

“Slowly,” she says. Her gloved hands reach out for my legs, guiding me backwards and onto the top rung of a ladder.

“Easy,” she says, and I slow my pace even more. I’m frantic to get clear of the duct. I need to calm down. “That’s it. Just a little further.”

Elizabeth helps me down the ladder as Steve wriggles backwards through the duct. The bolts along one side have been torn from their mounts and are hanging loose. It’s surprising the entire duct hasn’t collapsed.

I look around.

Bodies lie strewn everywhere. Blood soaks the concrete floor, running into an open narrow drain along the side of the hall. It’s all I can do not to vomit at the sight and stench around me. I don’t know that I’ll ever get use to the sheer brutal violence of life and death in the apocalypse. Such sights as a crushed skull or pools of blood make my stomach churn.

An astronaut welds the door to the warehouse shut. He has his visor down. The light from his welder reflects around him. Sparks fly, spraying through the air and bouncing off the walls.

Elizabeth’s helmet lies against the concrete cinderblock wall, lying upside down next to one of the fancy guns I first saw in use on the railroad bridge.

“We could have never cleared them out by ourselves,” she says. “There were just too many of them. When we saw you in the ducts, we knew you were our only hope. If you could lead the bulk of them back into the warehouse, we knew we could seal the breach.”

Steve climbs down the ladder.

“You did well,” Elizabeth says, smiling.

I’m not smiling. I don’t think she realizes we had no idea about their plan. It’s not their fault. They couldn’t have known the zombies would react the way they did and rip the speakers from the wall, but still, I feel as though we were sacrificial lambs. I’m sick of being someone’s pawn.

Steve holds me close, wrapping his arms around my shoulders and pulling me in tight. I’m still shaking from what happened.

Chapter 12: Moonwalk

“Why the hell does every goddamn zombie on this planet want you dead?” Doyle says as we walk into the underground control room.

“It’s good to see you too,” I say, ignoring him.

Steve slumps into a seat in front of the row of monitors mounted on the wall. Most of the screens are on. A few of them are black. Some of them have dead pixels showing their age—tiny black dots that never change color or position. One of the screens has several thick black lines running down the image, marring the view. It’s not intentional. Everything’s old and falling into disrepair.

Doyle flicks between images on the main, central screen, but his eyes dart from one screen to another, taking in all the views around the complex. The resolution on the various screens differs from one another. Some render in stunning high definition. A few of them are fuzzy and out of focus. One is in coarse black and white. I recognize the shot of our corridor. The doors of the various rooms are open and the lights are on. I can just make out the table we stood on to get into the vent.

Ajeet and Elizabeth follow us into the control room still wearing their space suits. They’ve both got their helmets off, each tucked under a bulky arm. They look like they’ve just stepped out of a reentry capsule. Their suits are huge, oversized, making their heads look small.

Ajeet twists the steel cuffs on his sleeve, loosening his gloves and taking them off.

“Damn, that was close,” he says, wiping sweat from his forehead. He leans back against a desk, resting the weight of his bulky backpack on the polished wood. Johnson helps Ajeet and Elizabeth unclip the hoses and cables connecting their suits to their packs.

“What happened?” Steve asks as I sit beside him in one of the swiveling office chairs.

Doyle glares at him as though it’s obvious. With animosity in his voice, he says, “We lost power to the back of the warehouse. We didn’t think anything of it at the time. Power shorts. Fuses blow. Shit happens. We followed standard procedure. Two by two. Anders and McCulloch went to check it out. They never came back. Next thing we know, there are goddamn zombies everywhere.”

“Best I understand it,” Ajeet says. “the zombies took out our power. They ate through the line.”

“But how would they—” I begin, only to be cut off by Doyle.

“There are tens of thousands of them out there,” he says. “And they’re all after you!”

Ajeet looks at me with compassion, asking, “Why?”

“I—I don’t know,” I say.

No one believes me. From the look on Steve’s face, even he’s not sure.

“How bad?” I ask.

“How many survived?” Steve asks, interpreting my question for me.

“This is it,” Doyle says with barely disguised anger. “Just us. Four of us. Plus you two. Everyone else is gone. Dead. Undead.”

I’m silent. My heart sinks.

Johnson crouches down in front of me. Adjusting his glasses, he speaks with kindness, saying, “We need your help. We need to understand what’s happening here. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“I don’t know,” I say as tears well up in my eyes.

Johnson pushes my chair gently, guiding me over by one of the large screens.

“Watch this,” he says. He uses a computer mouse to pull up video files, searching through them for a few seconds before hitting play.

A fuzzy black and white image appears.

“This is the view from one of the security cameras on the side of the mall.”

A car races through an intersection, plowing through half a dozen zombies, mowing them down like grass. As quickly as it came, the car disappears out of shot.

“Hey,” Steve says. “That was us. We were bowling for zombies!”

“Looks like fun,” Johnson says, jogging the video and fast forwarding through the motion of several other vehicles. In a blur, another Cadillac, a sports car, and a truck bounce through the intersection, scattering zombies like bowling pins.

Fun.

Bodies lie strewn in the street.

Arms clutch at the air, sticking out from beneath the crumpled bloody mess on the road.

These are people. Or they were. Even though I know they’re inhuman, it’s hard to see such carnage played out again. Zombie or not, they’re suffering. But zombies feel no pain, I tell myself, not really sure what zombies think or feel. They’re animals. No, they’re worse than animals. They’re monsters. They deserve this. They deserve to die, right? Deserve? They
need
to die. But to suffer cruel agony? No. Leaving them to writhe in pain says more about us than it does about them. We should have put them out of their misery. But we couldn’t, there was no time. There were too many of them.

For me, it’s strange to relive these moments and find thoughts from those frantic few minutes finally catching up with me. One of the unexpected side effects of the zombie apocalypse is it forces us to confront what it means to be human. Zee may not have morals, but we do. To be human is to refuse to sink to the level of monsters. Zee may not feel anything, but we are defined by our emotions. We must be, or Zee wins.

In the back of my mind, Johnson’s words replay softly. “Looks like fun.” He may have uttered those words, but the inflection in his voice tells me he doesn’t believe them. There was a lack of conviction, a lack of detachment. I’m not sure about Doyle, but I don’t think anyone else sees any of this as fun. Not even Steve, and like me, he was wrapped up in the euphoria of the moment when we pushed those cars down the hill. We did what we had to.

I have no illusions about what will happen to us and our loved ones if Zee has his way, and yet it never gets any easier to do what needs to be done. Whether it’s caving in a skull with a baseball bat or softly squeezing a trigger, death is never easy.

Johnson lets the video run at normal speed as one last Cadillac rolls into the intersection, crushing dozens of bodies under its tires before stopping in the middle of the street.

“What happened next?” he asks.

For me, it’s surreal watching four fuzzy figures climbing out of the Cadillac, knowing that was us just a few days ago. I feel as though several years have passed. We had no idea anyone other than Zee was watching.

“That’s David and Jane,” Steve says, pointing as they run to one side. “And that’s us going into the vet clinic.”

“And that’s where you found them?” Elizabeth asks. “The tablets?”

“Yes,” I say, hoping this is helpful. “There’s a small loading dock at the back of the building leading into a warehouse. We found the tablets in one of the aisles.”

“We need to get some of those tablets,” Ajeet says.

“You think that explains their behavior?” Doyle asks, and I note “their” refers to Zee, not us.

Johnson says, “Maybe. I’m not sure. It’s a start.”

Elizabeth talks through the logic of what happened next.

“So you went in there. You found the tablets. You took some. And you were immune to zombie bites?”

“Not quite in that order,” Steve says. “But yes.”

“We were bitten first,” I say, clarifying his point. Steve and I want to get to the bottom of everything that’s happened to us just as much as the scientists do.

Johnson wants more detail.

“There’s something else,” he says. “It’s one thing to be immune to a bite, but that doesn’t explain the behavior we’ve seen from thousands of zombies. Why did they abandon Steve in the heart of the mall? For that matter, why did they leave him alive at all? And you. Why did they let you approach him?”