Alive! Not Dead! (16 page)

“Like a kid would” I added.

“Exactly.”

We slid over to the steps.  One by one, we went down.  With each drop, the pain in my wrist screamed.  I was trying very hard to keep all of my concentration on the climb down and not on the pain in my arm.

Each step, Mindy held my arm, too.  She was trying to keep it straight, but it was ac
tually very uncomfortable.

We made it to the landing of the 10
th
floor.  I told Mindy that I needed to rest.  She told me to take my time.

I’m not sure how long the climb down took us, but I know it was a long time.

We made it to the 7
th
floor.  We bumped around the dead man, skidded over the dried blood on our butts.  It was sort of a sticky feeling, not a wet stickiness; more like sliding over a rough painted surface.  I expected the man to reach out and try to grab us as we passed, but he didn’t move.

Sometime later, we made it to the door we first came through.  Moonlight poured through the door as we opened it.  It was very bright even though it was nighttime.  It took a minute for our eyes to get re-adjusted.

We went back to the motorcycle.  I asked Mindy “Can you drive one of these?”

“I don’t know how.”

“Ok, the key is in my right pocket.  Can you get it?”

She stood behind me as she reached into my pocket.  “Got it,” she said.

We got onto the bike.  It was so hard for me to do it.  The pain was throbbing in my swollen wrist.  My back was covered in blood.

I drove back out of the downtown area screaming inside as we hit every bump in the road or as we swerved around anything
blocking our path.

The pain was intense, but I had to ignore it.  I didn’t have a choice.

Several times I told Mindy that I needed to stop because the pain was too intense.  She told me to stop whenever I wanted to.  It took us a long time to get away from the stench of the backed up sewers.  I was driving very slowly.

Heading back the way we came, Mindy told me to stop at the first gas station I saw.  Mindy jumped off the bike as I pulled up to the main gas pumps.  Without a care for her own safety, she ran into the store.  Inside she looked for any kind of medical supplies, but there were not a lot that she could find.  She did find some elastic bandage wraps and some samples of Bayer aspirin up front near the cash register. 
She brought those items out along with a warm bottle of Gatorade.  I swallowed three packs of the pain pills as she wrapped my wrist in the elastic bandages.  I told her to do it as tight as she could even though I cried out in pain several times as she did it.  She said she was sorry for hurting me.

We had passed many hotels on our way into the city.  I drove as far as the pain in my wrist would let me – about a mile.  We pulled into a
Sleep Inn
hotel at the next exit heading north away from downtown.  It was a three story building.  We went in, climbed a short set of stairs, and took the 4
th
door on the right. We locked the door behind us.

The room was messy, but I didn’t care.  I was exhausted.  The aspirin really wasn’t doing much f
or my pain, but still I slept.

I lived with severe pain for the next two weeks.  There wasn’t anything I could do to alleviate the massive pain.  I lived on pain killers.  All they did was take the edge off.

Mindy took care of me.  She went from room to room in the hotel in search of any kind of relief for my pain.  In one room she found a small piece of luggage with all sorts of medication in it.  We looked through the whole bag, but there wasn’t anything for pain.   It was all heart medication.

She also brought food from some vending machines on the floor below us.  I really hated to see her rummaging through the hotel alone.  I was afraid for her.  She insisted that I stay still in bed and keep my wrist stable.  She wanted me to heal.  That was her number one priority.

She kept the room clean.  She would change the sheets on the bed every other day with sheets from a housekeeper’s cart down the hall.  She also found more clothing for us to wear in another room on one of her runs.

There was no ice for the swelling in my wrist.  The swelling ran its own course.  My wrist was black and blue.  I didn’t know what kind of break it was, but it felt like both of the bones in my arm connected to my wrist had broken.  I felt the pain the most in the lower part of my wrist back up to the elbow.  I wondered if I tore a muscle in there, too.

My back was cut, but not in need of stitches.  Mindy washed it and poured some peroxide on it that she had found in one of the other rooms in the hotel.

When she wasn’t on looting runs, Mindy sat next to me on the bed.  We looked out the window at the dead world surrounding Denver while we talked.  Mindy told me all about herself, her family, her sister Cindy who she missed dearly.  She talked about her love for children and how one day she hoped to have several.  She talked about the schooling she had planned to go through to become an airline stewardess – if she would have gotten the interview.

We talked about the future of the world –
what was going to happen now? Was it the end of humanity? Would nature fix itself and rid the world of the MCON virus – if it was even real.  Were there still soldiers alive in Moses Lake? Did the nuke that we lived through make a second ring of death on the outer ring of the first and kill everyone in it – except us; well, and Mason and Vera. We talked about them, too.  Vera was so quiet – did she have a different agenda? Was she an insider for the Moses Lake soldiers? Was Mason undercover, too? We talked and speculated about everything as I laid there, my arm still, my wrist wrapped, the pain throbbing.

We talked about the zombies.  We wondered if they even felt anything or even knew that they were alive.  We wondered what drove them to keep moving forward even if they had broken legs to walk on.  We both agreed that we didn’t want to be eaten alive and we were going to do everything humanly possible to avoid such a thing.

We also made plans.  What was our next move? Were we going to go back to the
Trango Tower
? If not, should we leave a note for Mason like he asked us too? If we
did
go back, we’d need a trustworthy flashlight.  We’d need to get my gun.  We’d need to get the axe.

Mindy was such an interesting woman to know.  Just listening to her talk I loved to hear the way she thought out loud; and the way she shared her feelings with me.  She was so smart and so articulate and so beautiful.  I knew I loved her.  As we talked over those long days, I grew to love her even more.  She was a girl that I al
ways dreamed and hoped to meet.

She made me feel alive. Not dead.

Nights later as she lay next to me on my good side, her head on my chest, I whispered to her “Mindy will you marry me?”

She looked at me, her eyes darting back and forth.  She began to cry.  She nodded. 
“Yes Dan.  I would marry you every single day for the rest of our lives together.”

Smiling, I held her tight; then I cried with her, too.

MITS

There was a Wal-Mart a few blocks down from the
Sleep Inn
.  Inside we found some neon yellow spray paint and a 6 foot aluminum ladder as well as some other items.

“You sure you feel ok carrying this on the motorcycle?” I asked.

“It’s not that heavy and it’s not that far anyway,” Mindy said.  “We need to let Mason know what we’re doing in case they come back early.”

I drove the motorcycle back up onto the
highway to the exit leading downtown.  Mindy was a real champ holding the ladder off to the side of the bike.  I knew it probably got heavy for her, but she didn’t complain.

I stopped the bike on the side of t
he road next to the exit sign.

“What should we write?” Mindy asked.

“Well, we’re not going back up into the tower – we decided that already.  We really need to find somewhere safer than the hotel.  We need to find a higher place to look down on the highway to see whose coming.”

“Oh, like a lookout tower.”

“Yea.  Let’s just leave this stuff here and go look around.”

Looking away from the downtown area we saw other taller buildings in the vicinity.

Mindy asked “What if they come by here today? They’ll think we’re in the tower.  We need to let them know we’re not in there.”

“Write
‘wait’ on there.”

“Wait?”

“Yea, we’ll just come back here and write something different after we figure out what to do.”

“Ok.” Mindy set the ladder up, climbed it, shook a spray can and wrote in large letters:

WAIT HERE!

She stepped off the ladder, took two steps back and admired her work.  “Not too bad,” she said.

“You know, we could go to Denver airport.  I bet there’s a lot of food in there.”

“We could go check it out.”

We got back onto the bike.  Backtracking northward to highway 70, we made our way east toward the airport.  An hour later as the white pointy roofs of the airport came into view, we saw that along the road dead people had been tied to telephone poles.  They had been tied about half-way up with barbed wire.

“Holy shit,” I whispered bringing the bike to a stop.

It didn’t look like the people were zombies.  In the few seconds that I looked at the hanging people I noticed that they were all nicely dressed.  One man wearing glasses was tied around the waist with barbed wire.  His dead weight hanging on the barbed wire had cut deeply into him causing his blood to soak through the slacks of his three piece suit all the way down to his shined shoes.  He was grotesquely leaned forward at the waist.  His arms dangled.

“Go back, Dan.  Quick!”

Without a second delay, I pulled a fast u-urn in the median.  My wrist squealed in pain with the speedy turn – it wasn’t quite all the way healed.  I throttled up the motorcycle and we sped back down the highway.

“Don’t go back to the hotel,” Mindy
told me over the roaring bike.

I took the next exit into the suburbs.

Three blocks in, Mindy pointed at a road sign as we passed it.  It was a blue hospital sign.  She hollered in my ear “Hey let’s check out the hospital.”

Driving up to the hospital we had to maneuver through a lot of vehicles.  The streets
were jammed with cars.  It looked like there had been a mad rush for help when the pole shift came through.

I imagined how bad it must have been – the hurt people, clamoring for any kind of help, not knowing what had just happened. 
People screaming.  People fighting for a doctor’s attention.  The roads around the medical complex were simply overflowing with cars – some were even up on the sidewalk – some were parked in the grass, too, at odd angles.

There was no sound except for a slight north wind and the howl of the motorcycle as we swerved in and out of the cars.  The engine echoed off many single story look-alike brown brick office buildings in the area.  The noise seemed strange and loud to me.  It sounded almost doubled.

The hospital, like so many other buildings in the area, was brown.  It was a five story brick building.  The upper floors of the building had shifted to the side and collapsed onto a sky walkway between the two main buildings.  There was debris all over the street.  Cars were smashed and trees had toppled under the collapse.  Bricks were thrown everywhere. The road under the walkway had been blocked by the collapse.  The only way back out of the area was the way we had come in.  I didn’t like the feeling of being stuck in a dead end.

We followed signs to the main entrance.  This was the Rose Medical Center.  Right inside the front door there was a gift shop, a pharmacy, and hundreds of dead bod
ies.  As soon as we pulled the automatic doors open, the stench of death nearly overwhelmed us.

There were dead people everywhere.  Some people had sat down along the walls as they waited to be seen or waited on news of friends or family members.  There were children huddled next to their mothers, one boy dead with his thumb in his mouth.  A woman held a newborn baby in her arms - newborn but now dead.  Waiting room chairs were overfilled with people who had been waiting.  A nurse’s station was overcrowded with people who had fallen dead onto the desk.  There were gurneys lining the halls with dead people under sheets.  Inside the pharmacy, shelves were empty or knocked over, contents lying on the ground.  Behind the pharmacy order window, I could see more dead people lying on the ground or leaned against walls. 
There must have been at least 300 people just inside the main doors of the hospital.

Many of the dead were bloated.  The heat had caused the inside of the hospital to heat up like an oven.  Odd discolored bruises looked to have been dripped on their heads from above.

These were not zombies, though.

All were dead.

Mindy and I were speechless as we made our way into the pharmacy.  The thoughts of the dead people hanging on the telephone poles by the airport had totally slipped our minds.  Here, we had to physically step over people’s legs and arms to get past them.  Mindy was pinching her nose closed as she stepped.  The smell was so strong, it made our eyes water.

Shelves full of pain relievers had not been touched inside the pharmacy.  There was a wide assortment of all kinds of over-the-counter pain relievers.  Mindy whispered “Let’s try to find you some of the good stuff” as we went a little further back into the pharmacy.  It was darker back here.  I wished we had a flashlight.

It looked like people had only gone after drugs that would fight off infection or flu-like symptoms.  All of that type of medicine was gone.  Mindy found some bottles of Tylenol 3 as well as some Motrin 6.

“I found this too,” she smiled as she held up a wrist brace.  “This should fix you right up.”

We looked around some more for some other medicines that we might find useful.  We put them in a Rose Medical plastic shopping bag.  Mindy smiled as she put a pregnancy test into the bag as well.

“What do you need that for?” I asked with a smile.

She rolled her eyes.  “You never know.”

We laughed quietly.

As we started making our way back out of the pharmacy, we heard voices.

Quickly, I whispered to Mindy to sit down against a wall next to some of the dead people.  “Act like you’re dead,” I whispered to her.

We sat down next to each other and quietly waited.

After being brutally raped and beaten by a group of three men, Rachel Manning was dropped on the side of highway 90 just east of Missoula, Wyoming.  She was left there to die.

It was night when she was pushed out the back of an old rusted pick-up truck.  The men laughed as they drove off, the muffler banging and wheezing.  One of the men in the bed of the truck hollered “Have a good night out there, Red!” as he kicked her out the back of the tailgate-less truck.  The other two men brayed in laughter as they drove off into the night.

Seconds later, scraped, bleeding and ruined, she passed out.

When she came to early the next morning,
Rachel managed to get up bit by bit.  She limped slowly back to Missoula.  She wept most of the time as she walked; covering her naked body with her scraped and bruised arms.

When she started making her way down the exit ramp, she heard motorcycles approaching.  She
thought about hiding in some bushes, but at the time she really didn’t care; nor did she have the energy to fight anyone else off.

If these people wanted to harm her, too, then let them.  She felt more dead than alive now anyway.

The people were riding two motorcycles.  One was driven by an older man who wasn’t wearing a shirt.  He introduced himself as Mason Lauxmann.  The other was driven by a lady with long gray hair. Her name was Vera.  She was Mason’s wife.  She also smoked.  Rachel asked if she could please bum a smoke off of her.  Vera gave her one.

Mason got off his motorcycle, dug around behind the seat in a storage container, and pulled out a blanket.  He wrapped it around Rachel.

They helped Rachel get on the back of Mason’s bike.  They drove into town and up to an Inn on Broadway.

Vera offered Rachel another smoke and a plastic jug of water.  Rachel
laid on a couch in the lobby of the inn, her face bloodied and bruised.  Her lips were cut and her left eye was swollen shut.  Her back ached from being raped on a pool table in her ex-boyfriend’s pub.  Her legs, sides and ribs were also sore.

Her pride was also severely damaged.  Her dignity as a woman was crumbled.

Mason asked her what had happened as Vera wiped Rachel’s forehead with some hand wipes.  Vera also offered her some pain killers which Rachel swallowed painfully but thankfully.

Rachel began to cry.  “I was raped.  I was beaten.  The guys who did this to me left me to die on the side of the road.”

“You need help,” Vera said, comforting her.  “I know what it’s like to be raped, honey.  It kills you.”

“Yes, it
did
kill me,” Rachel said.

“You get some rest here.  We’ll stay with you today and see if we can round you up some clothes, some food,
ok?”

“That would be very kind of you.”

Vera took the pack of cigarettes out of her jacket pocket.  She put them and her lighter next to Rachel on the couch.  “You can take these, too.  I have more on my bike.”

Rachel gave her a painful smile.

“You rest now.”  She looked at Mason.  “Let’s get something for her to eat.”

Rachel said “There’s a bed and breakfast down the road.  Just take a right on Jackson.
At the end there’s a place called ‘Goldsmiths.’  There might be some food there.”

Vera nodded.  “We’ll check it out, hon.”

“Thank you.”

“Let’s go!”

When they left, Rachel burst into tears.

Outside, Mason got on his motorcycle.  Vera got on hers.  They picked up another bike in Wallace on their way back from Worley.  Vera had been complaining about no room with all of their stuff jammed behind her back
, so they found another bike.  Plus Mason got a large plastic container that he was able to secure on the back of his bike for storage.

Worley had burned to the ground.  Their home was nothing but burnt planks sticking ou
t of the ground.

As Vera cried, Mason tried to comfort her, but she was very distraught.  They slept on the outskirts of town that night in their tent.  The next morning Mason asked Vera if she
was ready to go back to Denver.

She nodded.  There was nothing for her here now.

They restocked provisions at the half-buried hotel in Coeur d’Alene.  The next night as call girl Rachel Manning was being raped on a pool table in Missoula, Mason and Vera were setting up camp.

‘Goldsmiths’ had disintegrated
.  In the back of the smoldering building he found a padlocked air-tight freezer half buried in splintered wood.  Making sure that Vera was clear, he shot the padlock off with his shotgun.  Inside the freezer, there were stacks of freezer packed food items, a large Butterball turkey, two twenty pound hams, and an assortment of frozen concentrated juices.  Everything was still frozen.  The turkey and ham were soft on the outside.  The middles were frozen solid.

Mason said “Oh we’re going to eat good to
night!”

He drove his motorcycle around to the back of the collapsed building.  They put as much of the food as they could into the storage bin on the back of the bike
and drove back to the hotel.

That night they had turkey and orange juice.

When they were done eating, even Mason enjoyed an after dinner smoke.

“We’re going to Denver to meet up with some friends,” Vera told Rachel as they ate.  “You’re welcome to come along with us.”

“That would be nice,” she said. “I have no reason to stay here any longer.  My boyfriend was killed during the – whatever it was that ended the world.”