The Lazarus Impact (9 page)

CHAPTER 17

Michael and Amy round the corner to see a mobbed street, filled with maskless people. They shamble and shuffle about aimlessly, in a daze.

“What’s wrong with them? Are they sick?” Amy asks quietly.

“I guess so.”

About halfway down the street a young man bursts out of a doorway and into the commotion. He runs full speed in Michael and Amy’s direction, with a young woman trailing behind. “Hurry!” he shouts at her. The sick start to chase them. They quickly swarm around the girl and tackle her to the ground. The young man turns and tries to pull her out, but she’s deep under a pile of the infected. Her hand reaches out for him. He yanks with all his might. But it’s no use. She’s buried. Her muffled cries gurgle to a stop. He gives one last tug and half of her arm rips loose. He falls backward and screams in shock as he looks upon the gnawed limb in his hand. Blood pours out from where her elbow used to be. Loose skin and flesh dangle as he shakes in fear. He tries to get up and run, but the crowd turns on him, burying him just like the young woman.

“Run. RUN!” Amy says.

“Where?” Michael asks, panicked.

Amy blurts out the closest location she knows. “Let’s go to Madison’s place.”

Michael nods his head yes, and they turn around and run in the other direction. He always hated Madison. She and Amy were roommates in college all four years, so Michael had to get used to faking it around her. She was fat, loud, unhealthy, and from the Bible belt. He always wondered why the hell Amy hung out with her. He assumed some “beauty is on the inside” bullshit, or that they went through some sort of “first friend away from home” bonding in that daunting freshman year at an Ivy League university, where it’s all backstabbing and one-upping for the best grades. He thought he was rid of the blob until she landed a job in the city some years back. A few chaotic minutes later they’re knocking on the front door of Madison’s apartment building.

“This is fucking nuts. I told you we wouldn’t be able to leave,” Michael says.

“Well we didn’t really have a choice, did we?” Amy huffs under her mask, trying to catch her breath. “We’re still going to try for the PATH tunnel, right?”

Michael struggles to breathe as well. He takes a moment to answer. “If we can make it there in one piece.”

The infected wander the street. They see Michael and Amy and start to run at them. Michael panics. He pounds on the door repeatedly. “Come on you fat fuck,” he mumbles under his breath. “Open up, Madison!”

The door swings open and Madison tries to make them out through the gas masks. “Amy and Michael? Are you guys alright?” Her hearty voice booms even through her own mask. The flab on her arms swings and dangles as she props the door all the way open and hits the brick wall behind. “Come on in,” she says.

“Hurry. Get in!” Michael says, pulling Amy inside.

“What’s wrong?” Madison asks. Her head is turned away from the street as she looks at Michael.

“Look out!” he yells.

But before Madison can shut the door one of the infected rips a chunk out of her arm, just below the armpit, where the flab hangs the lowest. Amy kicks the beast back out into the street and they close the door. Madison brays like a goat, reeling with pain and marinating in the red gravy that pours from her arm. They walk back to her apartment door. Amy is covered in blood. Her fingers slip as she tries to squeeze Madison’s wound shut. It squirts everywhere, hitting the missing cats and furniture-for-sale flyers on the cork board, coating the mailboxes and stairs, and slicking up the shitty linoleum vestibule floor. Michael opens the door to her small, crappy ground floor studio. It’s the best she could afford in this neighborhood. Michael was always convinced that she moved there just to torment him.
Close enough to fling a chicken wing at
, he used to say.

Amy immediately wraps Madison’s arm with towels and anything else absorbent that she can get her hands on. Madison finally stops her incessant groaning and instead breathes like a wildebeest, sucking in and out like she just ascended 15 flights of stairs. A look of pure disgust coats Michael’s face under his mask.
Someone so out of shape, and trying to breathe through a mask
.
That’ll do it
. 
She’s winded
.

“Her heart’s beating a mile a minute,” Amy says. “She’s burning up. Grab me something from the freezer, anything that’s still cold. I have to try and cool her down.”

Michael opens the freezer. It’s nearly empty. All that’s in there is a shrink-wrapped pack of hamburger meat, now half-frozen and squishy to the touch. He hands it to Amy, and she puts it on the back of Madison’s neck.

“The towels are soaking through,” Michael says, pointing.

“Grab me another?” Amy asks. She pulls back the blood soaked towels to reveal a blackened wound, festering with freshly formed pus.

Michael hands her a new towel, and pokes around Madison’s fridge for some water. But there is none. It too is almost empty. There’s just a can of high caffeine, high sugar energy drink and some condiments left on the door.

“The bleeding isn’t stopping,” Amy says.

Madison’s eyes grow heavy behind the mask. They close, and she starts to twitch and convulse. Her fat ripples and jiggles on her neck, just below her mask. The folds and rolls in her body flap around, slapping skin against skin under her oversized pajamas. Her mouth foams up underneath her mask, filling it with liquid. The shaking is so violent Michael can feel it across the room; her tremendous body rattles the floor beneath. Then suddenly she seems to calm down, and a moment later her elephantine heart stops.

“Is she?” Michael can’t believe it. “Just from a bite? She’s dead? It’s like she had a coronary or something.”

“Oh my God. What are we going to do?” Amy asks, frantic.

“I don’t think there’s anything we
can
do. The whole city is shut down, in chaos. The phones are dead, and I have no signal on what little remains on my cell battery.”

Then there’s a long drawn out breath. Amy feels her leg soak with a warm liquid through her jeans. Madison is pissing herself. Amy jumps back with a start.

“What is it?” Michael asks. “Was that her breathing?”

Then there’s a groan. Amy tries to rationalize it. “I don’t know. I heard things about what bodies sometimes do after people die. They can groan, and expel liquids. All sorts of morbid crap happens in morgues.”

Then Madison sits up. Her mask is foggy and foamed up inside. The eyes look like glowing lights. She stumbles to her feet, stomping and rattling the shitty parquet wood floor as she gets up.

“Well maybe she’s not dead,” Michael adds sarcastically. He raises his hands in the air as if presenting Madison to a crowd of game show viewers.

“Madison?” Amy says.

An instant later she blindly charges at Amy like a wild bull. Amy steps aside toward Michael, and Madison crashes through her flimsy bathroom door, splintering it into shards. Madison goes down hard, flopping chest first into the toilet and shattering the porcelain on her way through it. The stagnant, unflushed shit water pours out all over the floor, filling the room with stink. A stalagmite of toilet porcelain remains. Covered in shit and sheared off to a jagged point, it proudly stands tall where there once sat a majestic throne. Madison gets up again. She lunges at Amy and Michael. But her foot slips on a massive log of dump, and her body lurches backward into a fall. The back of her head lands right smack on the tip of the pointed porcelain monolith. The sheer force of her fall plunges it out the front of her gas mask, popping the glass eye piece. She lies motionless in a pool of her own excrement. The glass eye piece spins and wobbles to a slow stop on the tile floor. And all is silent.

#

“I can’t believe someone so fat has nothing to eat in their apartment,” Michael remarks as he rummages through Madison’s cabinets.

“How can you say that? She just died,” Amy says.

“I’m just saying. You think there’d be
something
. I guess she ate through it all in the last few days.”

“Well, I mean look at her kitchen. It’s nonexistent. A hot plate and a mini fridge? It’s like college. She probably eats out a lot,” Amy reasons.

“Yeah. Fish sandwiches and furburgers at Café Dyke,” Michael mumbles inaudibly. “This is a waste. She doesn’t have anything we can use to recreate our packs.”

“So then let’s just try to relax. We can leave first thing in the morning,” Amy suggests.

“Okay. Hopefully there’ll be less of those animals out there if we get an early start.”

CHAPTER 18

All is vacant, calm, and pitch black in the night. Sheryl drives down the winding road from the hospital back to town. An occasional buzzing sound comes through the police radio, but there are no voices. There’s no life on the other end.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Willy,” he says.

“I’m Sheryl.”

“I live over in the Hillside apartment complex in the west part of town. I ain’t got no kin or nothing, and the buses ain’t running. Do you think you could...”

“No. I’m not taking you there,” she cuts him off. She knows where it is. The woman her husband had an affair with some years ago lives there. A girl, more like it. A secretary in his office, no more than twenty years old, but trash. Sheryl immediately begins to judge Willy, despite him saving her life. She associates anyone from that place with her husband’s fling, with pain. She wouldn’t even let the boys go there to play with friends from school.

“I say somethin’ wrong?” Willy asks, confused.

Sheryl glares at him. “No.”

He’s older than she thought at first glance. Mid 60s. Weathered, white skin crinkles his brow. His bright emerald eyes burn into her mind. He’s fit, and actually quite handsome for a Hillsider, and for an older man.

Sheryl softens. “I have to get home and see if my husband is okay, but I’ll drop you off first,” she says.

But really she doesn’t care about her husband. She hasn’t cared about him since she learned of the affair. That’s why he was so “focused on work.” When she found out he said he would end it. She always wondered if he actually did.

“You know you should cover your mouth with something. Otherwise you might turn into one of them,” she says to Willy.

He eyeballs her up and down, noticing the bandaged arm first. He pulls out a small blade from his pants pocket. Sheryl grips the wheel tight in fear. “Thanks,” he says as he begins to unbutton and remove his custodial uniform shirt, revealing a white wife beater beneath. His eyes never come off her. Hers bounce between his, the road, and the blade. She’s a spitting image of what his daughter would look like today if she were still alive. Sure, she’s attractive, but all he sees is his daughter, especially around the eyes. Half obscured by her mask, they’re transformed in Willy’s mind to be exactly the eyes of his little girl.

“Keep your eyes on the road. I’m not gonna hurt you,” he says. He finally unlocks his gaze from her and fixes it instead on the back of his removed shirt, where he begins to cut a length of unsoiled fabric, untouched by blood and gore. Sheryl’s heart sinks back down from her throat to her chest, and she loosens her grip on the wheel. Willy ties the strip of shirt around his head, covering his nose and mouth in front. He returns the blade to his pants pocket.

Sheryl pulls off the road and into town. A few more turns and they’re at Hillside. “Which building is it?” Sheryl asks as they approach the darkened complex. She slows down along the fencing that lines the buildings, coming to a stop.

“Hold on. Keep driving,” Willy warns. They come from everywhere, out of the thick darkness, swarming the car. Before Willy can even finish speaking there’s one pounding on the hood of the car, crawling its way up and trying to claw at them through the windshield. Then another on the driver side window, and another. Sheryl flips on the high beams, fumbling at first to find them in the unfamiliar car. They’re surrounded. The beasts’ yellow eyes glow in the night like animals.

“Hang on!” Sheryl yells as she floors the gas pedal. There are clunks, thuds, snaps and bumps as she mows over the diseased cannibals, crushing them under the car. The one on the windshield hangs on with unearthly strength. She yanks the wheel to the right, finally shaking it off. She starts to turn around, flattening more of them with the rear end of the police cruiser as she circles in reverse. She puts the car in drive and heads back the way she came at top speed. She can see them running, chasing the car in the red glow of tail lights through the rearview mirror.

“I guess you can’t go home just yet,” Sheryl says. A sort of smile ekes out as she considers the fate of the home wrecker that lives there. “You can stay with me until then. It’s the least I can do.”

The roads on the other side of town, across Main Street, are eerily empty. Save for a few bodies slumped on curbs and lawns, it’s a ghost town. She meanders her way around abandoned cars and carnage until finally arriving at her house. Her husband’s car isn’t there. Still. He had no idea what happened to her, to the kids.
Is he even alive? Should I even care?
Sheryl begins to cry, hanging her head down and pressing it against the steering wheel. Her emotions have finally caught up to her. Everything from the accident until she parked the police car in her driveway had been one big surreal blur. The horrors, the sorrow... it was too much to hold it together.

“What is it?” Willy asks.

“My sons. I lost my two boys. One of them...” She can’t say it, but Willy knows.

“Turned?” he asks, completing her thought. She nods and sobs, confirming it. “Let’s get you inside and cleaned up.”

“You had no mask on for a while. You think it’s safe to breathe?” she asks.

“Better wait ‘til we get inside. Maybe I was lucky. I was only outside a little while. I holed up in my office mostly, 'til things got quiet. I tried gettin’ a bunch of ‘em at first, all around the hospital. But the whole place was overrun. We were lucky to get out,” he says.

“That dust isn’t blowing around anymore,” she says.

“Better just wait. Probably should try to head west too, past the impact. The winds are blowin’ right at us. If we get past there it might be safe to breathe,” Willy suggests.

“Good idea.”

They go inside and everything is as Sheryl left it. The turkey is still out, only now starting to stink with rot. The gifts are still half wrapped. The sight of them saddens her, knowing BJ and Stephen will never play with them. Dog hair still coats the couch. Just then Rocky, her German Shepherd, comes running out to greet them.

“Rocky!” She almost feels joy upon seeing him. She hugs him, and hears his stomach groan with hunger. “You must be starving boy,” she says, grabbing a bag of dry food from the pantry and filling his dish. “I’m surprised you didn’t have at the turkey!” She tries the sink for his water, but the pipes groan and shudder. Nothing comes out.

“Pumps,” says Willy. “Water needs pumps. Pumps need electricity. We ain’t got none, nowhere. Whole grid’s out, and I guess the generators are all down too. No wells or towers neither that I know of.”

Sheryl opens the fridge and empties a bottle of spring water into Rocky’s water dish. He laps it up and then devours the dry food beside it.

“Looks like it might be safe. The dog is fine,” Sheryl says as she removes her mask. Willy does the same. Sheryl passes him a bottle of water. She takes one and starts to clean herself over the sink. A rusty pink-orange liquid washes down the drain as the crusted blood lifts from her skin.

“Better conserve these after we clean up,” Willy says about the bottled water.

Sheryl nods in agreement.
He reminds me of dad before he died, only a bit younger
. She finds herself agreeing to his advice without question like a daughter. Perhaps she needed that comfort.
If only dad were really here with me
. For so long she needed no one but herself. She loved only her children. She grew stony without her dad, since her husband eventually stopped caring as well. But she missed the times when she called on her father for help, or knew he was there for her if anything went wrong. She wanted that comfort now, and, without knowing it, Willy was filling that void. “Want something to eat?” she asks him.

They split a can of meat ravioli with some sliced white bread that hasn’t gone moldy yet. Willy looks over her pantry and dry goods with approval. “We’ll pack it all in the car, as much as we can. Especially the water. You have any guns or weapons?”

“Yeah. My husband keeps a pistol somewhere in his closet,” she says.

“Good. If we can ever get into my place I have a rifle and a shotgun,” he says. Sheryl nods but she doesn’t want to go back there, back into danger. She doesn’t even fully know if she wants to bring Willy with her when she leaves.
I guess I owe him the favor, and the companionship can’t hurt now
.
Otherwise what point is there to go on living? The boys are gone, and my husband abandoned me
.
Why live in this nightmare?
She starts to think crazy thoughts; that perhaps Willy is her father’s spirit somehow, looking out for her now when she needs him most.

She wonders how they’ll all fit in a packed car if they find her husband, or if he returns home. She still tells herself that she must find him, but she doesn’t know why. In her gut she knows he was somewhere in that mob of monsters at Hillside, probably with his pants down or half naked, having turned into a zombie during a Christmas morning tryst.
That bastard
.

After they finish eating Willy puts his makeshift mask back on, pulls the car into the garage, and starts packing the trunk and back seat with supplies and food. Sheryl roots around her husband’s closet for his pistol with Rocky right beside her, wagging his tail with his ears perked up like it’s some kind of game. She knows her husband keeps the gun well hidden so the boys can’t find it. She pops open shoe boxes, and pokes behind his shelves. Nothing. But up on top, behind some unopened packaged shirts, she sees a small box. She takes it down. It has a combination lock, and she doesn’t know the numbers. She brings it to the kitchen.

“Locked,” she says.

Willy examines the box. It’s nothing complicated. He sees that it’s weak. The lock is useless. He takes the hammer and a screwdriver from his tool belt and begins to lightly chisel between the box and the lid, popping it off its hinges and opening it from the back. Sheryl marvels at him.
That’s something dad would’ve done
.

Inside is a gun wrapped in newspaper and a few boxes of bullets. But underneath there’s an envelope. Sheryl snatches it from Willy’s fingers. She knows what it is before she even opens it. But she has to. She has to see with her own eyes. Pictures of her husband and the girl from Hillside, doing everything, in every way, sexually. Recent too. The date from the digital camera they used to take them was printed on the bottom right corner of each. Some were as recent as last week.
He never stopped seeing her
. And there are two other girls in the pictures too.

“Fucking scumbag!” She yells. She tells herself that she isn’t going looking for him.
He can fend for himself and rot in this hell for all I care
. Willy doesn’t pry, but she involves him anyway. “Why did you save me?” she asks.

“You wouldn’t have done the same for someone in danger?” he asks in response.

“Maybe I’d be better off dead. Did you ever think of that? What do I have to live for?”

“Don’t throw your life away. Trust me when I tell you I’ve been down that road. It ain’t worth traveling. Life’s one of the few gifts we get.”

“Feels more like a curse now.”

“Maybe. But you have to press on. This may be the beginning of the end, but how you act now matters more than ever. It’s no feat to be a good person during good times. The challenge is to be a good person even in bad times.”

Dad used to say something similar
. Willy walks away and continues packing the car. After Sheryl cools down he shows her how to use the gun without actually firing it. She eventually thanks him for saving her, almost calling him “dad” in the process. She takes Willy’s advice. How she acts now matters more than ever. She convinces herself.
I need to find him even though he doesn’t deserve it
.
It’s the right thing to do
.