The Mountain and The City: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale (37 page)

Five cars in front of us are smashed together with smoke coming out of them, blocking the way. This is why the cars aren't moving. “Impact,” mom says. She picks me up off my feet and slides me over the hood of one of the cars. I slip across and fall onto the concrete on the other side and then mom jumps and tumbles across and joins me.

On our feet again we run, into the place where no cars are, no people, only empty concrete, and a long way ahead of us we can see the other end of the bridge and the road leading away from it, and we may not have a car but at least we have a way out of here.

All the way at the end of the bridge, there's a loud sound. From behind the left corner something weird appears, something coming around like a pole or a pipe maybe, high up and getting longer, showing more, and it's followed by whatever is holding it up, and whatever is holding it up is big and gray and is a, is a...

A tank.

Army people round the corner with the tank, guns in their hands and more cars behind them, more all the time, marching toward us to say we can't get past them, won't get past them, their faces serious, their guns serious, too, and mom and I stop running because we're stuck in the middle, army people in front of us, monster people behind us, no cars to hide in or behind or under. The army people don't know we're not monster people. The monster people don't care.

“Stop where you are,” a big, loud, machine voice says. “Move any closer and we will be forced to open fire.”

“Don't shoot,” mom shouts, “we have a va-”

BAP-BAP-BAP! Gunshots cut her off. We drop to the ground as the army people fire at us, past us, hitting the monster people on top of the impact cars and spraying red all over the metal and glass. Mom crawls and pulls me along the concrete toward the side of the bridge to get away from the bullets and the explosions, but it's not so easy to escape because it's all above us and everywhere. The skin scrapes from my elbows and knees but I keep crawling, keep crawling, can't stop crawling.

Her back on the wall of the bridge, mom looks at me and sees my face. “I promise you we will not die here.” I can't even hear her words over the noise, only see her mouth make them. On one side the tank and the army people are rolling steady, never slowing down, and on the other side the monster people are being shot but they keep coming. Even if one falls another pops up where it was, so many of them that anyone behind them can't be alive.

Mom stands and looks over the side of the bridge. She looks again at the army people, at the monster people. “The water isn't far,” she shouts, “we can make it!” She stands me up with my belly against the wall, and then she lifts me up onto it so I can see the water.

As I look down to the dark water down there, all I can think is, don't people do suicide like this?

“Keep your legs straight and your arms tucked in. Hold your breath just before you reach the water.”

Under the sounds of the gun shots there's a weird clicking sound coming from the way of the army people. Mom and I both turn to look, and what we see is the pipe barrel thing on the front of the tank is lowering, lowering, lowering to aim at the monster people.

Mom helps me over the side of the wall, telling me to do a fireman's fall. “As soon as you hit water, start swimming up as hard as you can.”

She tells me to let go. I tell her I can't. Instead of arguing with me like I think she will, she just takes my hands in hers, pulls them off the ledge and pushes me off.

As I fall, keeping my eyes up at her so I don't have to see the water coming, something comes up over her shoulder. I feel the water rushing up under me, and just as I suck in a big mouthful of air, I see what it is: monster people teeth, biting into her shoulder.

I close my mouth. Hold my breath. Mom screams. I hit the water.

Silence. Water. Then BOOOOM, the tank fires and everything around me shakes and lights up like fire.

Everything screams.

**

Kick. Kick hard. Kick with everything you have.

Things are falling into the water around me, big things, small things, rocks and dirt and pieces of things that turn the water red. Keep kicking, I think. Keep kicking. Up through the water. Water. Water. Water. Kick. Water. Water. Water.

AIR.

The bridge above is burning, holes in it with cars hanging off, holes in it with people falling through. I hope they're not real people falling, because at least that would make it a little better, if it's monster people falling.

Something moves in the water next to me. A great splash shoots up as whatever it is comes up. A mouth tells me it's a person coming up for a breath, but the teeth tell me it isn't a friendly mouth.

The veiny eyes are wide, scared almost until they see me and change, and I already know that look, the look monster people wear when they see supplies. Right now that look is looking at me, and that means the death has found me, just like mom said.

I swim as hard as I can away from it. The monster doesn't really swim, it pulls through the water like if it's in a ball pit or maybe sand, like the sand from the place with the sun. It grabs my leg and pulls me back toward its mouth and its teeth, opening wide to bite me, and the monster screams and I think that's it, this is the death, but then it disappears under the water and I'm not sure what it's doing, maybe trying to attack me from under like a shark. I keep paddling away with pieces of fire floating down around me but I never stop looking for it, until I see the top of its head come up and then the face, but the face is facing up toward the bridge and the eyes are wide, and when I see its neck I know why: the throat is a big, open cut with everything inside showing, all the pink and red stuff. Before I know it, I'm throwing up in the water.

Something else comes up with it, next to it, and takes a great, big breath.

It's mom. I'm so happy to see her I forget all about the pink and red stuff and the throw-up in the water. She swims toward me with a sharp piece of metal in her right hand, a burnt piece of car with a bit of the monster's throat stuck to it, and she grabs me and checks me and I tell her I'm okay, I'm okay, and she asks, “Where's your mask?” and I feel around my neck but it's not there, and she says, “Never mind. Swim.”

Going around all the pieces in the water, we swim to the shore. Over us the army people are still shooting at the monster people but now they're further down the bridge. Some of them shout in a way which means the monster people are fighting back. We come up onto the land and then the street where more army people in masks are standing side-by-side like a wall. Mom waves at the closest one and says, “Hey! We need help!”

He looks at us, his eyes hidden behind the dark mask. He picks his gun up and aims it at us in a way which says he won't help us.

Mom yells for me to go back. We turn and run into the woods, gun shots behind us.

**

My clothes are heavy with water. Even with the sun out I'm cold and shivering. My toes sting as they step on sticks, my fingers are numb pushing branches out of the way. When I start to get tired and slow down mom swings me up into her arms and keeps running without missing a step. It lets me look at her shoulder, the place where the monster teeth bit her. Even through the ripped-up shirt she wrapped around it, it looks bad. Real bad. It's the opposite shoulder where dad got bitten by Elliot.

Knowing what I'm thinking, the way she always does, mom says, “I'm not infected, baby.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it's in the air. You can't get it from a bite.”

She says that with these things it's always one or the other, never both. I hold my breath for as long as I can, and when I can't hold it anymore I breathe in tiny, barely-there breaths, trying not to take the air in.

After running until we can't hear the gunshots anymore, mom slows down and puts me back on my feet so we can keep walking. After a while we start to see little, wood signs with numbers on them nailed to the trees, a few of them with arrows. Mom says people always point toward safety, toward places they want to be, never the opposite. I don't know if that's true, but she always seems to know what she's talking about.

We walk out of the trees and into an open place of dirt and grass. Up on a hill a line of smoke goes from the ground up to the sky, and we go slow and careful until we realize we're in a campsite, like the one we went on vacation to a couple times. We had such a good time, I remember, sitting in front of the fire, eating marshmallows and telling scary stories.

Like mom said, the arrows always point somewhere you want to be.

No one is sitting in front of this fire so it's almost gone out, only the white powder with bits of red are left in the brick square in the ground. There's also a picnic table with two fishing poles leaning on it and a red cooler underneath, and behind it a blue tent with the zipper closed. Mom waves for me to stay back as she pulls her mask back up over her head.

“Hello?” She gets closer to the tent and calls out again but no one answers. She unzips the flap and looks in. When I try to look she tells me not to, to stay back, to cover my mouth.

“Is it monsters,” I ask.

She shakes her head. “They didn't make it that far.”

She zips the tent back up. We take water from the red cooler under the picnic table and drink it faster than I've drank anything in my life. Then we follow the little, wood signs away from the campsite and onto a trail through little trees and great big, trees and birds singing morning songs and rocks covered in green. It would be a pretty walk, if monsters weren't real.

The trail gets wider and wider and opens up to another grass and dirt area, this one much bigger with big tents and little tents, barbeques and canoes and garbage pails with bugs buzzing around them, but still no people. We walk between the tents, and all I can think of is who might be lying down inside them, who might not have made it that far, who might have fallen down but never got back up.

One of the tents shakes.

We stop walking and watch it. We make no sounds so we can listen to it, listen for the breathing, for the croaking.

“I thought I heard a voice for a second there,” mom says.

“Was it the wind?”

“Yeah. I guess it could have been.”

The wind. The voice of the outside, where the bad stuff lives, the stuff that makes people fall down and makes some of them get back up. The air that took dad away.

The bad air.

The bastard air.

The tent shakes again, this time stronger and it keeps moving like something is trying to get out. We run past more tents and now they start shaking, too, things trying to get out, and in one of them a man starts screaming a horrible scream, and then something dark and wet hits the wall of the tent and he stops screaming.

Then the ripping. Like on the screen back home with Alicia on it, the sound of nails  tearing tent, monster people pushing their faces through and chomping their teeth, reaching through with gray tongues and pink arms and sharp nails. We run faster as they come out of the tents, eyes wide, my head spinning the world going so fast and mom pulls me up the hill to a big, square car with stairs and a door like a house and she opens the door and pushes me inside and locks it behind her just before the nails get in.

I crawl under the bed and try to breathe, try to stop my heart from hurting as mom pulls the house car apart looking for things to use.

“What the fuck is going on out there?” A man's voice from behind a thin door. It opens and steam comes out, then a man with big arms and a bald head holding a wet towel around his waist. Mom stops going through the kitchen drawers.

“Please,” she says, “it's not what it looks like.”

He gets closer to her, smiling a bad smile. “Y'know what it looks like to me.” He talks slow and low. “Looks like a pretty lady broke into my trailer cuz she couldn't
wait
to get into my bed.” He looks her suit up and down. “Strange choice in clothes.”

Mom's eyes go to me just for a second. She doesn't say anything, but she means for me to stay under the bed and stay quiet.

The monster people start to bang and smash against the wall.

“Who is it,” the man shouts, “Hey! I'm busy!” He heads for the door. Mom yells for him to stop.

“You don't understand, there are these...people.”

“What do you mean people?”

“Don't you know what's happening out there?”

“Course I do. Bunch of assholes starting the party early.”

“It's much more than that. They've changed, become something else. If you go out there, if you open that door, they'll kill you. And then they'll kill me.”

The man looks from mom to the door to mom. “I've heard some stories to get a man into bed, but you take the cake.”

He starts moving toward her again, his hand holding up his towel. Her hand shoots out and grabs a big, sharp, shiny knife from the kitchen drawer.

“Stop where you are,” she tells him.

“You'd better put that down before you get hurt, lady.”