ZWD: King of an Empty City (28 page)

ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 28

ZWD: Dec. 23.

Scent bombs, baby monitors, and Motörhead blaring loudly. What could possibly go wrong? More than I cared for went wrong.

None of us had ever been in the building before so we walked into the lobby and set off a scent bomb. We stood in a semicircle at the front door. We’d already blocked off all the exits to the building on the outside and had people waiting to open them in case we needed to make a quick escape. Steve walked to the hallway and set down a boom box, then pressed play and strolled back to our group. I had to give it to that kid, he had balls; always cool as can be. The disk in the boom box took a moment, then Lemmy’s voice boomed from the speakers singing “Rock Out.”

It was kind of weird; the zombies in the lobby didn’t really stir till the M-80 went off. Then they moved like they’d just woken from a long nap. We could have probably killed them all without them even knowing we were there. But the S.O.L. were excited. They kept their excitement to a minimum but you could feel them quivering with anticipation. Earlier in the day before we came over here, I’d given Eddie, Donny, Steve, and Joseph a pistol each and told them not to use them unless it was absolutely necessary. Steve checked the safety of his pistol and tucked it into this belt, then took a machete and walked over to the closest zombie and buried it in the woman’s head. She was still getting off the couch where she sat. After that he stepped back into the semicircle and waited for the next one to come.

                  After him, Eddie stepped out and kicked this skinny zombie in the chest and then hacked off his head with a replica samurai sword. It took him seven or eight strikes to sever the head. Jr. actually stepped up beside him and killed a zombie that had gotten too close. He shot it in the head with his potato pistol. He put it to the zombie’s temple, and
whoomp
, the zombie was down. “That thing’s too dull. Go outside and get something sharper,” I ordered him, and Eddie ran out the door and returned with a crowbar.

                  We held this formation till no more zombies came to us, probably twenty minutes in all. As Motörhead started playing “Live to Win,” we teamed up in groups of three and cleared the floor. That didn’t take long at all. Fortunately, all the zombies that were around here were in the open and not hidden in any of the many small rooms on this floor. We called the elevators down and locked the doors open, then checked the stairwell fire exits to make certain nothing was in them. Steve placed the boom box in one of the stairwells and we waited. Outside the sun was starting to fade and the mist seemed to grow thicker around the building. I was kind of worried about that. This was an easy clearing of the first floor, but there were sixteen more to go and I didn’t want them to get too confident.

Steve pulled a cigar out of his jacket pocket and lit it while he watched through the window of the stairwell. He passed it to Joseph and in a few minutes they opened the door and Joseph slipped into the stairwell. We gathered as Jr. opened a can of soda he found in a mini-fridge in one of the offices. We passed it around and waited. Joseph was going up the stairs to the top, or as far as he could go without fighting any zombies. We heard a thud and when Steve opened the door there was a zombie twitching on the ground. From above Joseph shouted, “Sorry. Clear to nine.” He had six more stories to go before he was at the top. We started moving up the stairs. We decided to start at the top floor and work our way down. It was going to be a long night.                 

                  On the eighth floor, our Commander stopped to wait on the stairs with Shaun and his uncle Andy and the less experienced kids. They had the silk man-catchers and would act as relief for us as we moved down to them. In the lobby Ashley waited with a small medical team in case anyone needed medical attention. Once the first team worked its way back down to the eighth floor they’d act as relief and the Commander’s team would take over and do all the dirty work to the ground floor.

One of the best ideas we had didn’t work as well as it should have. The kids in their planning attached baby monitors to RC cars and drove them down the halls and into rooms to hear what was there. One or two monitors fell off the cars, but for the most part all you could really hear was the muffled sound of Lemmy singing “Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers” or “Whorehouse Blues.” By the time we dropped down to the fifteenth floor, we abandoned the RC cars and just started going room to room. Surprisingly, the halls were mostly empty. I think in all sixteen floors, we encountered four zombies in the halls. The rooms were another story, and none of us were prepared for some of the things we encountered there.

                  We’d found a master maintenance key in the lobby office and so when we went onto a floor we’d set off the M-80 scent bombs, then kill any zombies in the halls. Once those were clear, with Motörhead waking the dead at full volume, a team of two went down the hall and unlocked all the doors. Once they returned to us, we went from room to room and opened the doors, then stepped back and waited for the zombies inside to come to us. If none came, we went into the room and cleared it. Once cleared, each room was spray-painted with the S.O.L. symbol and we moved on. We found a lot of dead people who thought they’d just ride out the zombie apocalypse in their rooms. A lot of dead bodies.

                  The worst were groups. People huddled together but once one was bitten, they all eventually turned. We ran into that first group on the fourteenth floor. There was a group of five in this room and it looked like after the first one turned, they all quickly got bitten, but not before a fight. There was blood everywhere and you could see where the zombies starving for someone to eat started licking the blood from the floor. They staggered out into the hall one by one and we quickly killed them. We ran into that several times on the way down to the main floor, but that wasn’t the worst. The worst were the survivors.              

                  Yes, there were survivors, if you could call them that. The first one I ran across, Jr. and I went into a room and there on the bed was a body that looked like a skeleton with skin. You’ve seen those pictures of the Nazi Holocaust survivors. The body looked like that. Wide, staring eyes that didn’t really seem to see us as we walked into the room. Things in the room had been eaten; things like pillows, chair legs, paper, you name it; this person wasn’t prepared for the long haul. They barricaded themselves in the room and hoped for the best. But the best didn’t come soon enough, so they just starved up here in the safety of their room, too afraid to try to get out.

                  We had too few resources, as it was, to care for ourselves. We didn’t have the means to nurse someone this far gone back to health. I ordered Jr. outside and pulled my pistol. I was looking at this sad being lying there starved, mind probably gone, and I forced myself to breathe slowly.

             
As president some decisions are hard to make; some are impossible. I couldn’t look at anything else, so I never saw Jr. not leave the room. I took a step closer and this person turned its head to me. I have to say
it
because the person was so far gone that I had no idea what sex it was. It turned its head to me and the eyes focused for a moment. A smile played at the edges of its mouth as if it recognized that another person was in the room and not zombies come to eat it. Then it saw the gun and its expression changed. I stepped closer, almost within arm's reach, and aimed. Its arm feebly came up, palms open to me as if to say stop. From its lips I thought I heard the weakest whisper of the word “please” as I pulled the trigger. The arm fell and hung off the bed.

The music stopped outside and the whole world was silent for a moment. I dropped my head in shame and tried to pray for forgiveness, but nothing would come to mind. Jr. stepped up to the bed and looked closely at the fresh blood that was pooling under its head on the pillow. He looked at me, then back at the body. From outside the kids rushed into the room to find out why I fired my gun. We were only supposed to use them in a time of extreme need. Steve asked if everything was ok. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to hold back tears. Jr. said, “Fucking zombies,” and put a hand on my arm before stepping outside the room with Steve.

I quickly gathered myself and on their heels yelled, “Hey, language! Watch it.”

                  I honestly don’t know if that was still a person in the sense that you or I are people, or if all humanity was gone. I’m certain zombies can‘t talk and I’m certain I heard “please” come from its mouth before I fired. I’d just killed another human being. I couldn’t help but feel an empty place in my spirit. Today, it would grow bigger because this person wasn’t the only one I’d have to kill out of mercy.

                  The most disgusting sight we came upon was on the eleventh floor. The kids opened a door to a room and waited when nothing came out. They then looked in and their mixed cries of “Ooooo!” and “Holy crap!” drew everyone’s attention. They were all gathering at the doorway and stepping in then out with giggles and schoolboy shock. Whatever they were looking at was being treated like a circus sideshow freak. When I got to the room, I stepped past them all, and there in the middle of the room sat a woman named Maggie.

             
I’d met her once. It was one evening while we were walking with Andy and Jill through the neighborhood. Andy was always curious about people and loved to meet new ones. We’d walked around the corner of Eighteenth Street and were about to head back down Arch, passing Paris Towers, when we met her. Maggie was an obese woman, probably well over three hundred pounds and pushing four hundred who was confined to a motorized wheelchair. One leg was propped up on a leg rest and was a darker shade of red than her jovial face. We’d all talked for a while as Andy asked her questions about herself. I remember she was a very nice woman.

                  Now she was a zombie, stuck in a wheelchair and trapped in her room. A body lay at her feet, keeping her in one spot. The back of her chair pressed against the bed. It looked like it had died naturally, but just in case, I chastised the boys who had first opened the room and ordered them to take care of the body on the floor.

              Maggie wasn’t the happy-to-meet-you person we’d met on that late fall day last year. Now she was something else trapped in its own flesh. As the kids grabbed the body on the floor and dragged it out into the hall by its heels to dispatch it, Maggie tried to lift her arms and reach for them. The once doughy arms were now mounds of flesh dripping off bone. Maggie looked like a huge dollop of flesh someone had plopped into a wheelchair and added a face to. With the exception of the blood on her chin, she looked like a caricature of a human being. Loose flesh sagged off bony arms, draped over the arms and off the seat of the wheelchair. It pooled around her ankles. Her knees were bony protrusions that led down to mounds of flesh so heavy, she—No, not she, the zombie Maggie. This wasn’t Maggie anymore, I had to remember that. She was trapped in her own dead flesh. Had she known how, now she couldn’t even lift her hand to operate the joystick on her chair.

              “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie,” I said as I sat down on the bed next to her. “You said you were on a diet. You were losing weight. What happened to you?”

                  She just stared at me through dead eyes and tried to get at me by tilting her head in my direction. A guttural growl came from her. I looked around her room from my seat on the bed. Somewhere there used to be grandchildren. Pictures and school grade art plastered the walls. On a dresser were several framed pictures of her family. I took the time to look closely at the photos and one drew my full attention. There was Maggie’s family on a camping trip. Maggie was a lot thinner in the picture, probably only two hundred and fifty pounds. There were three grandkids and a woman next to her as she sat in the wheelchair, all kneeling down around her. Behind her stood a big, stocky man who looked just like Maggie, only younger. He had a flat-top haircut and a long, pointed red beard.

               I picked up the picture and turned to Maggie. “Is this your son, Maggie?” The zombie eyed the picture, then me, and said nothing as I’d expected. I started going through her things and found more pictures of him among her belongings. On the back of one of them, someone had written his name, Patrick. Patrick of the black truck. I felt like I’d found a goldmine. I stuffed the picture in my shirt pocket and picked up Harold. “Maggie, I’m so disappointed in your son. You’re a terrible mother.” I stepped next to her and brought Harold’s blade down on her head several times.

              On the tenth floor, we ran into another survivor. In the room there were several people, all dead, and one living person. If you could call the person alive, that is. Again, they’d been locked up in their own prison for too long. This person was in much better shape physically than the first one because they’d resorted to cannibalism. It looked like they’d tried to eat everything they could in the room before they decided to eat each other. There were eight bodies in different stages of decay, telling us they’d been at this for a long time. The last or freshest body wasn’t much more than a skeleton, not too different from the survivor. The survivor was a skeletal woman with hollow eyes who looked at our breaking into the room with wonder and fear. She’d been living in her own filth for who knows how long. The odor that assaulted us when we swung the door open was enough to make my stomach do flips. We followed our plan and stayed outside, waiting for whatever was inside to come out. She crawled out on her hands and one leg; the other was dragging behind her. She looked like a feral animal being released into the wild. From the ground, she looked at us as if we were going to attack her at any moment. In her hand was a kitchen knife held tightly, and she kept making grunting noises as if she’d forgotten how to speak.