This Rotten World (Book 2): We All Fall Down (21 page)

After they had torn down the
fence, they had circled away from the Coliseum. Ace stood in the turret, trying
to make sense of everything that was going on. At that point, he wished he
could fly up in the air, grab a bucket of popcorn, and watch the carnage. He
couldn't see everything, but the things that he could see were hilarious to
him. First, he knew that the rescue center was thoroughly fucked.

The Turtle bounced and rocked as
they drove wherever the hell they pleased. Slutty Rivets wheeled the vehicle
about, and Ace watched as the line of cars they had brought with them, slowed
to a crawl, damaged by the bodies they were smacking into, stalling on piles of
bodies, and generally driving to their own doom. There had been some thirty
cars, and as they circled around, Ace liked to imagine that he could see their
faces through the windows of their vehicles, cursing him for leading him to
their death. They were fools for following him.

He heard shattered glass,
gunfire and screaming, a symphony of death that was music to his ears. They sat
in a grassy strip away from the Coliseum, but close enough to see what was
going on. The giant floodlights showed him a roiling mass of arms, heads and
limbs advancing upon the soldiers in front of the Coliseum.

The soldiers fired their guns. The
line of cars achieved varying levels of success in escaping the Coliseum, and
they stacked up behind him, still intent upon following him to their own doom,
though he had already led half of the to their death. Ace cared nothing for
them; he was merely interested in seeing how long they would stick around. The
majority of them had believed that they were going to the refugee center for
safety, and that Ace was some sort of apocalyptic hero trying to save as many
people as he could.

Ace laughed atop the Turtle. Ace
didn't save people. It was up to people to save themselves. He was safe, he was
insane, and he was chaos. As he watched the confusion and the mess, a white
sedan broke free from the dead, zooming past the Turtle.
Where would they
go?
The answer came to him instantly.
Nowhere.

Ace maneuvered the turret on the
machine gun and blew the car apart. Its tires popped, and the rounds from the
fifty caliber machine gun mowed through the car as if it were made from cheap
foil. The car swerved into a concrete divider and tipped up on its side. He
watched, as a man inside struggled to get out of the vehicle. He heaved himself
out of the driver side window, and stood on top of the car, looking around to
see what had happened.

He spotted the Turtle's headlights,
and it was as if the man instantly knew who was responsible for his situation. Ace
waved at him, before he pulled the triggers of the machine gun again. The man
was blown to pieces and Ace laughed.

"You're a madman,
Ace," Slutty Rivets yelled from inside the Turtle.

"Don't you forget it!"
he yelled back.

From somewhere, a new noise
emerged. It wasn't the screaming of the dead, the occasional honking of a horn
from someone fighting for their life strapped into their car, or the muted
gunfire of the soldiers inside the Coliseum. "That's our signal!" Ace
yelled over the noise, as a helicopter appeared in the night sky.

Ace banged on the roof of the
Turtle, and it lurched into motion, causing him to bash into the back of the
machine gun turret. It was pain, but pain wasn't necessarily a bad thing, just
something to remind you that you were still alive, unlike the poor bastards in
the Coliseum.

Ace sat on the metal bench in
the back of the Turtle, a smile on his face and a cigarette in his hand. Pudge
handed him a beer, and asked, "How was it?"

Ace didn't have the word for it,
so he said, "It's like when you're with a woman, and you get to that
point, and POP!" Ace held up his fist and mimicked an exploding gesture.
"You know what I mean?"

"Orgasmic?"

"Sure," Ace said.
"I like that. Orgasmic."

****

Ace was drinking from a warm
beer when Slutty Rivets yelled, "We got some action up here. Looks like
some rats are trying to leave the sewer."

Ace drained the rest of the
contents in the red, white, and blue can, crushed it, and tossed it on the
ground where it clanged off the deck of the Turtle. He then moved to look out
the front window of the vehicle. In front was a group of people, their eyes
round with fear, their bodies covered in sweat. They were bathed in the headlights
of the Turtle. Behind the Turtle, the cars were stacking up. There were maybe
ten left according to Pudge, who actually seemed to care about these things.

"What do you think?"
Slutty Rivets asked.

"There's not enough beer to
go around," Ace said. "Run them over."

"You're a sick fuck,"
Spider said while laughing.

"The world's sick. We're
the cure," Ace said.

Slutty Rivets threw the vehicle
into drive, and stepped on the accelerator. Ace grabbed a handle that was
riveted to the steel frame of the vehicle, as the tires squealed on the ground.
He smiled again, and then the Stryker exploded.

Zeke stood ready to move.
Whoever was behind the wheel of the Stryker was not the type of person that could
be trusted. They stood there, waiting. And then Zeke heard it, the telltale
sound of rotors chopping air at 292 revolutions per minute. It was close, and
behind the buildings in the distance, he saw an Apache appear.

Then two things happened at once.
The apache flashed a bright orange as the Stryker's tires began to squeal.

"Get down!" Zeke
yelled, shoving his band of survivors to the side. Zeke watched as the tires
bit into the asphalt and the Stryker lurched forward, and then it exploded into
a hail of metal and shrapnel.

The concussion of the blast
knocked him backwards, through the air, but it wasn't fast enough to prevent an
inch-thick piece of the Stryker's armored plating from catching up to him and
puncturing his abdomen. He landed on the ground, the air knocked out of him,
and a piece of jagged metal sticking out of his stomach.

He tasted blood in his mouth,
and he couldn't see out of his left eye. He lay down on his back and watched as
the Apache banked around to his right and began firing on the line of cars
behind the Stryker. The sky lit up like the 4th of July as cars exploded in
geysers of flame and metal. He mused,
Would there ever be another 4th of
July?

Then the pain hit him. It wasn't
the type of pain that says, "Hey, you're hurt, but if you slow down,
you'll be alright." This was the type of pain that said, "You're hurt
real bad, but your body is shutting down now. It'll all be over in a bit."

He rested his head on the
pavement, still warm from the day's heat. He listened to the exploding of cars,
the chop of the apache, and the screams in the night. His legs seemed to not
exist.

Then hands were lifting him up.
Lou was there, his face a cloud of concern. Katie was there too, her eyes cold
and hard. Zeke was sad he wasn't going to be there to break that hardness down.

They stood him up and draped his
shoulders over Lou and the cowboy. Blake he'd said his name was. Zeke wondered
if the man's hearing would ever come back. They ran down the street, Zeke's
feet dangling uselessly, bumping and scraping across the pavement, dragging
through pieces of shrapnel and bits of burnt and charred flesh.

His head lolled from side to
side. On one side, he saw a row of flaming cars, burning in the night. On the
other side, he saw a horde of the dead advancing towards them, their slow,
plodding progress unfazed by the helicopter above as it dropped metal shell
casings onto the pavement with each pass. The smell was familiar. War smell,
drifting through the summer night.

Time stopped for Zeke, and he
saw it all. His life was spread before him, like a picnic blanket set with
memories. Over here, in an ice bucket was the first woman he'd slept with,
skinny, breasts that were barely there, a starter chick if ever there was one.
On the other side resting on a plate was a small picture of his father, beer
breath and shirtless in the July sun. Around the blanket, the dead crawled like
ants, small, unceasing, and ready to devour every single memory he had ever
had.

When he came to, he was lying on
the ground, people around him. There were no tears for him. They hadn't gotten
that far. They were sad, muted, but there would be no tears for his passing. If
only he had enough time, then maybe he could have built those relationships,
made up for the years of time he had frittered away polishing guns, drinking
beer, and making sure his lawn was green.

"What are you guys looking
at? You act like you've never seen anyone die before." He laughed,
coughing on his own blood. Then he was gone.

****

Lou watched Zeke pass. His last
words... man that was hard. He would miss the man. When Zeke was there, he
always felt like everything was going to be alright, like nothing could stop
the man. He was like the fucking Terminator, muscles, brains, hell, he even had
the looks. Now he was gone, and the truth dawned on everyone, as if at once...
If
he can die, then so can we.

Conversation was at a minimum.
They sat in silence, ten survivors in a world that was quickly running out of
them, and they were trapped at ground zero.
What was the next step? What
were they going to do?
Without Zeke, there was no leadership. There was no
nothing. He was the common denominator. They were fractured, spinning in a void
with no end in sight that didn't include winding up in the teeth of the dead.

Thoughts of suicide slid across
his mind. Lou looked at the girl he had carried, her emotionless face, the
sadness buried deep inside of her. How would she ever recover? Three days ago,
she was living in an apartment in Portland with a sister, a mother, and a
father. Hell, she probably even had grandparents, maybe some uncles, aunts and
cousins. Now she had nothing. She had Lou, an ex-hustler who never amounted to
anything. She had Katie, the cold bitch that had gunned down her father and
sister in the name of survival. She had Rudy, 300 pounds of meat with asthma,
just waiting for death to come calling. A homeless man, a cowboy, a doctor, and
an aspiring lawyer for a justice system that had all but become extinct.

He squeezed his eyes shut. His
head was beginning to hurt.

"Lou."

He didn't want to hear it.

"Lou."

Go away.

"Lou!"

He heard the rustling of the
fabric, the low moan, and he died a little inside. When he opened his eyes,
Zeke was there, his one good eye open, his arms rising off the ground as if
they were tied to puppet strings. Rudy handed him the sword he had liberated
from the pile of confiscated weapons in the Coliseum. Lou felt its weight in
his hands, a heavy weight, the weight of a friend. He swung the blade in a
sideways motion, like a baseball player. It caught on the thick bones in Zeke's
neck, and Lou struggled to pull it free, putting his foot on Zeke's chest and
tugging with all his might.

Zeke's head lolled to the side,
black blood oozing down the side of his neck. Lou swung again, and the head
hung a little further. He was able to pull the sword free with just his hands
this time, and the old adage proved true. The third time was the charm. Zeke's
head rolled onto the floor.

Lou looked around at the people
around him. Their faces were slack, sad, hopeless. They were all going to die
in here, a movie theater shrouded in darkness. Outside, the dead banged on the
doors. If only the electricity were on, they could put on a movie and take
their minds off the dead snarling in the hallway.

Lou spotted motion out of the
corner of his eye. "Goddamit!" he yelled, as he stabbed downward at
the still moving head. The sword went into Zeke's remaining good eye, and it
was finally still.

The banging outside intensified.

In the comms room, the report
came in. The Coliseum was lost. By the time the helicopters had gotten there,
their guns were of little use. The soldiers, outmanned and with their defenses
blown wide open, had held for a while, but eventually, the tide of the dead had
broken over them and they were forced inside the Coliseum.

The Coliseum was crawling with
Annies, and the Apaches were now on their way home, but not before they had
destroyed the convoy that was responsible for getting 2,000 of McCutcheon's men
killed. The pilots reported that the zone was too hot to attempt a rescue without
blowing the lid off of the Coliseum. Three thousand soldiers... eaten. The
thought shook him, worse than any tragedy he had ever experienced in his long
career with the army.

"Jesus Christ," he
said as he folded his hands on top of his head and looked at the ceiling. At
that moment, he was no longer a general. He was a man experiencing the worst
that the world had to offer. He left the comms room without a word and stepped
outside of Warehouse #206, waiting for the rest of his boys to get back.

From the roof of the warehouse,
he could hear the snipers' rifles popping with regularity in the night, no
doubt assisted by night vision scopes. It was somewhat comforting, except for
the fact that the pops were coming all too often. McCutcheon pulled a cigarette
from his pocket, put it to his lips and smoked it.

Over the noise of the pops from
the roof, McCutcheon could hear the rotors of the Apaches as they returned. He
shielded his eyes as they set down, and he ground out the end of his cigarette
with his fingers, tossing it on the ground. He was watching the men disembark,
when one of the communications officers caught his attention.

"Sir, there will be a communiqué
from POTUS in one hour."

"Yeah? Well record it for
me. I need to talk to my boys."

McCutcheon walked onto the
pavement, and left the communications officer behind. Whatever the message was
it could wait. He wanted to talk to the men that had run the mission. As the
apaches' rotors fell victim to gravity and friction, he walked up to the
nearest one and greeted the pilot as he began to undo the straps on his
harness. "How was it out there?"

The pilot looked at him, a blank
look on his face. "It was FUBAR, sir."

"Come again."

"There was nothing we could
do by the time we got there. The Annies had overrun the place. We couldn't
land, we couldn't even fire, for fear of killing our own, sir."

"Do you think they made
it?"

"Sir, I don't think so,
sir. There were too many of them. Even if we had opened fire, we would have run
out of ammunition trying to take them out, sir."

The news was worse than
McCutcheon had imagined. "Get yourself squared away. Tomorrow, we start
thinning out the herd."

"Yes, sir."

McCutcheon wasn't a chain-smoker
by any means, but the news left him wanting another one. He gave in to the
temptation, and walked back inside the warehouse. The whole situation bothered
him, but the thing that bothered him the most was how ineffective the whole
operation was. There weren't enough soldiers, and they were spread too thin.
But how do you fight something that kept popping up at every turn, like some
sort of deadly whack-a-mole game? Portland wasn't his biggest regret; it was
lost and he knew it. His biggest regret is that he had been away from his
family while trying to save the families of others, and he had lost everything
in the process... Portland, his wife, and his daughter. All he had was the
cigarette in his hand and some semblance of authority.

"Shit," he said as he
tossed the cigarette into the coffee cup where it hissed itself to silence. He
dozed at his desk until the communications officer shook him by the shoulder.
He looked at the solider with fire in his eyes, but to his credit, the officer
didn't slink away. "What?"

"You need to see this,
sir."

The communications officer had a
look on his face that would stick in McCutcheon's mind for the rest of his
days. It was the face a child might make when told that Santa didn't exist... because
he had been executed by his own elves for unsafe labor practices. It was the
face one makes when they realize that all hope is gone, and nothing was going
to get better.

McCutcheon rose from his chair,
cracked his back, and stood up. There were more people than usual in the comms
room, and McCutcheon shouldered his way past the radio jockeys, satellite
uplink personnel, and the eggheads who worked on encryption software so that no
one who was listening would be able to make heads or tails of what was coming
in and going out of the comms room... not that there were a whole heck of a lot
of people listening these days.

Their jaws were slack, and most
of them sported the same look as the officer who had woken him up. He saw what
they were looking at, took a second to lock onto the words that were being
spoken, and then he too produced the same face.

****

It was The Speech. In the days
that would come, as the world dwindled and humans fought to avoid the same fate
as the dinosaurs, the dodo bird, and dial-up internet, the few remaining people
would remember it as the day that The President gave a eulogy for the entire
world. Those cities that still had power, but little else, were allowed to view
the message on their TV's. Those cities that didn't have power would never hear
the words, but they would spread by mouth. It was the day of all days, the day
the world stopped pretending it could recover. Everyone in the military would
see it, those that weren't dead or walking around the world trying to eat others.

Over campfires, survivors would
stoop and whisper to each other in hushed tones that wouldn't attract any of
the dead, "Did you hear The Speech?"

This is how it went:

The President appeared, a
thin man from Jackson, Mississippi... gray around his temples that hadn't been
there in the first two years of service. He had a preacher's face. He was not
what one would call handsome, more... authoritarian, like those austere and severe
photos of the Founding Fathers disseminated in textbooks.

On this day, he was dressed
all in black. He stood in front of gray, nondescript walls built from cold,
unforgiving cinder blocks. He stood not in behind a fancy podium with the
Presidential Seal on it, but behind a plain lectern like one you might find in
a second-rate community college. Sweat stood on his brow, and he wore no
make-up so that the viewers could clearly see the bruisish bags under his eyes.
He did not smile. He was not trying to get re-elected. He spoke as himself,
honestly, perhaps since the first time he had run for public office in middle
school.

"We all fall down from
time to time. For years, the human mantra has been 'We will get back up.' It's
a good mantra, and it worked for a while. My advisors have apprised me of the situation
in the United States and throughout the entire world. Many of you watching this
can look out your window and see the situation with your own eyes. You don't
need me to tell you that it's not looking good.

Some of you have been waiting
for us, the government, perhaps even myself to right the ship. Well, I'm here
today to tell you that it's simply not going to happen. We all fall down, even
governments... even myself."

The President held his hand
up to show a wound. By now, everyone could recognize the familiar shape of a
human bite.

"My advisors have
recommended one last-ditch effort at saving the United States. They want me to
unleash our own nuclear arsenal on the United States. They want me to drop
bombs on the heaviest population centers, destroying a good portion of the country
and the reanimated that now infest it."

The President paused as if to
let the words sink in, and for everyone trapped in a large city, the words did
sink in.

"But knowing what I know
now, now that my own time has come, I simply can't follow through on their
recommendation. If there was a way for me to fight this, I would do so until my
very last breath. I will not rob Americans of that same opportunity. So I say
to you, the people that have made this life so worth living, we all fall down...
but now it's time to get up and fight."

Hope filled those that were
listening, a resolve that many hadn't felt since the Twin Towers fell. The
country had never been as united as it had since that fateful day... and yet
only five percent of the surviving population had the opportunity to even see
The Speech.

"Martial law is over. I
want to thank our armed forces for sacrificing and defending this country and
its citizens. Now it's time to take care of yourselves and your own families.
The government is dead, the military is disbanded, and it is up to each of us
to defend ourselves in the manner that we best see fit. Good luck to you all. I
only wish I would be there to see it all en, and to see the human race triumph
over the greatest challenge we've ever faced. Good night, and may God watch
over us all."

The camera cut, but the sound
did not. A hollow voice appeared as if from the depths of a tin can, "You
want us to do it now?"

The President's voice crisp
and clear responded, "I'll do it myself. Give me the damn gun."

There was silence, and then a
click. The President spoke one last time, "Tell my wife and daughter I
love them, and try and keep them safe." The boom of the gun blew out the
microphone that The President was using, but it didn't matter. No one else
would be speaking. Showtime was over, and around the country, soldiers and
citizens turned off their TV sets, hoping that they could be as brave as The
President was in his final moments.

###

About the Author

The Vocabulariast is a Native American author who has been
writing and teaching in Portland, Oregon for decades. After working on his own
website Moviecynics.com for a decade, The Vocabulariast decided to move on from
critiquing other's works of art and start creating his own. His first book is entitled
Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale. His second novel is entitled: This Rotten
World, and it is the first part of a planned trilogy. In addition to novels,
The Vocabulariast is known to write screenplays and make movies.

Also Available from The Vocabulariast

Fiction:

Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale

This Rotten World

This Rotten World: We All Fall Down (Late 2015)

Non-Fiction:

Let's Get Drunk and Watch Horror Movies: 50 Horror Movie
Reviews and Drinking Games

Music:

The All Hell Breaks Loose Soundtrack

Movies:

All Hell Breaks Loose

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