The Oasis of Filth (4 page)

7

We headed for the waterfront near the old, abandoned monuments. I had an idea that, while even dumber than racing after Rosa on the bike, might just work. We passed all of the boats docked on the Anacostia River, because while they would do the job, they were big, excessive solutions. But more than that, I had no idea how to start any of them. It was a long walk, but eventually we arrived near the Jefferson Memorial, neglected and forsaken by a country that had turned its back on its highest ideals.

I stared up at the rounded marble hulk, thinking about how far we had come from the days of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, founding father of a great country, now a sad, besieged city-state terrified of zombies and mold and its own citizens. If it weren’t all so terribly true, it would have been funny. I remembered walking under the dome, many years before the outbreak, and I recalled the words inscribed there: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” If true, Jefferson, a founder of our government, would now be that same government’s sworn enemy.

I made my way around the Tidal Basin to a tiny dock that once offered boats for tourists — small craft, easy to control, from what I remembered. The tourists were long gone, but a few of the boats still bobbed on the sick, oily water. I stared. Paddleboats. Really? Was this another cruel twist of fate? Couldn’t we just escape in a canoe, or
something a little more…
respectable
? No, we found only abandoned paddleboats. I was wondering if my so-called plan was turning out to be a joke after all. But we chose one, quite at random, and got aboard. Thankfully, despite 10 years of being ignored, its pitted fiberglass hull stayed afloat, and we started to pedal. But it was
dirty
. It terrified us to touch the thing. There were layers of filth, beyond anything we’d seen in years. I had visions of contracting the disease simply from touching the boat. But we went onward.

My God, the boat was loud! How would we escape the city without being detected? Water slapped with every movement of the pedals. Our hearts sank. We may as well have shouted, “We’re escaping!” every 30 seconds to add to the sonic overload.

As it turned out, no one cared. DC had become a walled city to keep zombies out, but it seemed to bother very little with keeping anyone in. I suppose when you could avoid having one or two extra mouths to feed, you were fine with people disappearing. What a model of efficiency. Our government had created a society so organized that it knew that losing a citizen could actually make caring for everyone else easier. How shrewd! But we had yet to realize all of this, so we tried to paddle quietly, slowly, over to Northern Virginia. It must have made a comical scene, the most ridiculous escape in history, although I suppose no one ever saw it. Or if they did, they didn’t care.

We reached Arlington in full dark. The only lights were behind us, in DC, since Arlington, Alexandria, and the other surrounding cities had largely been abandoned in the pullback. Stepping off the boat, onto land, with Arlington National Cemetery spreading up the hill to our right, overgrown but still recognizable, we felt like astronauts taking their first steps on another world. I’d been here before, many times. But 10 years of changes... well, it was a lot to take in.

We took one look back at DC.

“What now?” she asked.

“Good question.” I scratched my head. “Jesus, there could be zombies anywhere. We can’t just sit here all night.” So we moved.

I remembered — and, like I said before, it’s funny what you remember — that Interstate 395 was right there, just to our left. In the daylight, we could follow that to 95, our path south. But for now, shelter was the only concern. Too nervous and bewildered to go far, we walked straight ahead, to a marina in front of the Pentagon. It was dark and seemingly inactive, but filled us with an unbearable fear of the unknown. We found a boat that was still afloat and thankfully wasn’t overrun with untold grime, and we climbed aboard. In minutes we were both asleep, lying above deck, close together in the cool evening air of spring.

* * *

Hours later, with the moon gone and darkness all around, with DC’s light shimmering so near and impossibly far away, we awoke to a sound. It was a scraping, a scritch-scratching on the dock. It could have been a raccoon — it
should
have been a raccoon. But I felt it in my bones before I even saw anything. It was a zombie.

We propped ourselves up quietly. It hadn’t noticed us yet. I got the feeling that scanning the dock might be part of its nightly routine, but who knew. I’d never sat so close to one of these creatures and just...
studied it
.

If it hadn’t been for its rather feral motions, it would have been hard to declare it anything other than a human being. It — she — was female. Maybe mid-40s, Caucasian. But she could have been in her 20s. Age was hard to tell. She looked ragged. Her clothes were too filthy to clearly recognize, but looked like a button-up shirt, possibly flannel, and jeans, torn and covered with layers of dirt. The skin on her face at this distance appeared... bumpy. Her hair was a tangled mess, and her shoes seemed to be long gone. She breathed with the labored rasp of an upper respiratory infection, and cocked her head to one side. She was agitated but not enraged. Her eyes had a milky appearance and she didn’t seem to see very well; she spent a lot of time scavenging with her hands, which were clearly deformed. We watched, terrified and amazed, finally laying eyes on the monster we’d feared for so long.

And she stopped. With an almost casual manner, she turned toward us. Slowly, twitching, she shambled to the foot of the pier where our boat was tied. She took a step out onto the pier, wincing and licking her lips. She stopped, sniffed the air. I stiffened, willed myself not to breathe, felt Rosa next to me do the same. I stole a glance at her; she was frozen with fear. I thought
Please, Rosa, just stay still and be silent.
And my right hand, the one propping me up, slipped. I caught my slide with a dull
thump
, my elbow hitting the deck. The zombie flinched, looking right at us. For a split second, it seemed I got away with it. The zombie looked confused. Then that expression gave way to pure fury, her lips pulling back to expose rotted teeth. As Rosa and I scrambled to get out of the way, she lunged. 

Her gnarled foot stepped off the pier, toward the boat. And she missed. Rage filled her face, just inches from us, as she fell into the water with a loud splash, followed by a solid thud — possibly her head hitting the hull of the boat. She splashed with even greater hatred, with increasing wildness. It was like she wasn’t trying to get out of the water, but just trying to get all of it
off of her
. Again and again, she fell below the surface, then shot up with loud, liquid gasps and panicked splashing.

We scanned in every direction. Nothing we knew could have prepared us for this, sitting alone, outside the city walls, with a zombie making enough noise to wake the dead. Would the zombie’s terrible bleating bring more like her? We stood on the boat, too terrified to get off, too afraid to turn our back on the drowning zombie, and too fascinated by this intense experience to do anything but watch.

It seemed like eternity. The zombie finally gasped, splashed, and sank for the last time. For a long while afterward, we felt like we could see her face underwater, staring up at us with icy hatred. We kept scanning the marina. No other zombies appeared. Maybe there were none close enough to hear. Maybe they simply didn’t care, each locked in their own dementia. And yet part of me, the primal fear part, thought they were just waiting until we made a move.

We spent the rest of the night sitting back to back on the deck of the boat. We both dozed off momentarily here or there, but each time we awoke with a start, not only jolting ourselves but scaring the holy hell out the other. We never truly rested again that night. When I did sleep, I dreamed of deformed hands emerging from cold, black water.

8

The next morning, our eyes were glued to the water as we stepped back onto the pier. The Potomac isn’t terribly deep, but it’s muddy as hell, and the water was usually greenish and murky. I may have seen something down there in the muck. I didn’t want to dwell on it. After we passed over the gap, we kept walking to dry land and didn’t look back.

We walked down the George Washington Parkway to the ramp for 395 and turned toward the right, away from DC. There was no wall on the south side of the city, facing us, because the river provided enough of a natural defensive barrier. I might have given the city one last look, but I don’t recall, and actually would be surprised if I had. Funny, not knowing if I’d ever see it again, and not sparing it a memorable last look, not even up there on the highway, where you could take in the whole city. I guess survival and movement seemed more important at the time. We knew zombies weren’t just creatures of the night, so we proceeded quietly and kept looking around. Walking in the middle of a wide highway gave us some solace, because we felt that at least we would see if something approached. There were cars abandoned here and there that blocked our view and made for potential zombie hideouts, but most of them were on the other side of the highway, heading toward the city. Either those poor saps made it in or they didn’t, there was no way to know.

We made our way southwest. A short while later, as we walked in the middle of the three empty traffic lanes, we
crossed under a pedestrian bridge. Two zombies appeared on the bridge, probably 20 feet above us. The bridge was walled by a chain-link fence they couldn’t break through, or so I hoped. The one closest to the fence noticed us first. He looked to be a young black male. As we got closer, I could see he was missing one eye and bleeding from both hands and his face. Our presence enraged him, and he leaped at the fence to get to us, crashing into the woven metal again and again. It was pointless. A pedestrian bridge over a major highway is going to be designed to prevent suicide jumpers as its first priority. Flailing, the zombie bloodied himself even worse. We moved to avoid the splatter, which was disgusting and difficult.

From the other end of the bridge, the second zombie heard the commotion and ran in our direction. He also was male, but bigger, with dark, matted hair and a white t-shirt emblazoned with a day-glo logo I didn’t recognize. As the first zombie railed against the fence trying to get to us, the second one launched into him, and they both collapsed to the deck of the bridge. We passed under as they carried on a brutal fight, tearing at each other. In minutes, the larger one had killed the other, standing up with blood now coating his t-shirt, hands, and face. He continued to circle the body, swatting and kicking, making guttural noises, shaking his head. We continued farther down the road and out of sight as quickly as possible.

Along with our experience the night before, the bridge incident made me aware that we needed some sort of weapon for protection. I found a solid dead branch downed on the side of the highway, tested it for weight and comfort, snapped off some errant parts, and began using it as a walking stick. I figured at least I’d have something in my hand if anything rushed at us. Rosa found another stick, a little smaller, for herself.

Around midday, we reached the Capital Beltway. The one-time world-famous border between the U.S. political establishment and everyone else. We passed through the complex cloverleaf — there must’ve been 12 lanes of pavement — threading around and through several huge pileups of cars. There was a tractor-trailer on its side that looked to have been carved out for shelter, now abandoned. Inside the trailer, we could see a small table with a bowl on it, set for a meal. The view immediately made me recognize how hungry I was. What an oversight. I had no idea what to do. Look for supplies nearby? Try to forage or hunt? Every possibility seemed absurd or dangerous as hell. Not having the first clue what native plants to eat, or how to hunt, we made our way toward some of the large buildings that lined the highway. It took most of the rest of the day to find anything edible, but finally, a couple hours before sundown, we stumbled into a bit of treasure trove.

In a parking garage, a beat-up old Nissan two-door sedan had crashed into one of the support beams. The driver, long dead and unidentifiable, clearly had been torn up by a zombie. On the passenger seat, there was a cardboard case of canned beans, wrapped in plastic. Rosa had the bright idea to pop the trunk. There we found other canned goods, bottled water, and even a can opener. The poor dope’s emergency prep kit didn’t help him, but we both silently gave him thanks.

We opened two cans of refried beans, each of which had a strange taste but were edible. They were similar to a bean paste we’d get in rations from time to time back in the city. We ended up scarfing down a can and a half each. We found a slightly ripped backpack and several fabric shopping bags, loaded up as much as we could carry, and scouted around the parking garage for a place to sleep. It looked like it would rain, so we ended up sleeping on the landing at the top level of the staircase because it was indoors, was the cleanest place we could find, and had working doors that hopefully would provide at least some barrier. Thankfully, other than the rain, the night was uneventful.