The October Light of August (19 page)

I thought I should go and take the poor bastard out, but he wasn't in any worse shape than any of the other dead when it came down to it. I imagined all of them had died hard. Maybe he had it rougher in death, but that was over and he was just another miserable zombie.

Jesus, it's too nice of a morning to deal with shit like this
, I thought. This was the type of day that was made for sitting on my mom's porch drinking coffee, listening to the birds, watching the early morning walkers and joggers – maybe waving to a few of the regulars that were sociable. If I closed my eyes – dared to do it, actually – and concentrated, I could convince myself it was a time before the pandemic, and life was normal and easy. The birds still chirped happily, unconcerned with the dead. The only thing missing was the low whisper-rush of cars in the background. I could take for granted my job, the gym, my mom, and yeah, it was just one empty day after another but
God
it would be sweet.

I could hear a steady clacking, tapping, scrabbling noise to my right. Hollow little thumps and scratching like twigs on metal. I could see a green dumpster at the south-east corner of the lot, and both of its thick plastic lids were down, but one would twitch and lift slightly. I brought up the glasses and focused in on the metal container. The lid fluttered, and I thought I could see, for a fraction of a moment, bony fingers hooked on the rim of the dumpster.

Oh, you have got to be
kidding
me
, I thought. I swung the binoculars back to the guy on the kiddie-ride. His arms looked pretty picked over – I suspected my friends the crows had worked on him along with the elements. Sinew and gristle still held much of the bones together, but he couldn't lift his arms and the one leg for sure.
Didn't get the chance to be tossed away yet
, I thought darkly.

My view became obstructed, and I dropped the glasses from my eyes to see that two of the dead were now heading in my direction. Uh-oh. The sun must have glinted off the lenses and attracted their attention. Shit. I turned and ran across the empty lot, steering well clear of the dumpster, dodged the carcass of a burnt out car and hit a side street heading west, past pre-fab office buildings and then shot south down another street, past small shops and houses until I hit Mission Avenue. Directly across from me was a chain link fence blocking my way, so I headed west again, then south, past empty warehouses up a partial gravel road filled with weeds until I stopped to look up an embankment below a parking garage belonging to a black and chromed-mirror medical complex. I could see corpses hanging by their necks from concrete barriers, some twitching feebly, others just decaying into mere skeletons.

I began to get nervous again about taking Division to the river. The idea of a bold, straight shot into downtown started to feel more like bravado than common sense. To the west, Washington Street ran across the river, so I jogged up the hill towards it. An old-fashioned looking church loomed above, riddled with bullet holes. Plywood had been nailed over lower windows and doors, but the building had been breached, its front doors torn off. I ignored what hung from the steeple. How many places like this had been last stands – at first from the dead, and then from the living?

I stopped before I hit Washington, and bullish feelings began surface. I wavered on the sidewalk, taking a step forward, then back, and looked behind me. A few dead tottered towards me, but were laboring up the hill and it would be some time before they would be a problem. I sprinted the rest of the way up to the intersection, and to the north on Washington the random dead ambled almost peacefully. But there were a
lot
. I squinted, and I could see corpses tied to a chain-link fence that bordered a baseball field of a high school, but I had no desire to stand there and soak in the details. To the south, there seemed to be less of the dead, but I couldn't see very well past trees lining the street.
This is turning into a bad idea
, I thought, and turned to look back where I had come from. Still, only a few of the dead were laboring towards me.

“Fuckitfuckitfuckit,” I breathed as I ran back down the hill, not bothering to even acknowledge the dead as I shot past them. I ran east, determined I would hit Division and bull, bluff, and bluster my way down it if I had to. It was a matter of principle - of pride, by the gods. Until I chickened out and hung a right on Atlantic, one block before the main drag. I passed another medical complex with its matching parking garage to my right. I wondered who the architect was that had the mirrored glass fetish for medical buildings. Jesus.

As I crossed Boone I spotted an empty lot that stretched all the way across to Division, with the bonus feature that it sloped up and up until it rose higher than some of the rooftops next to it. I could see the sharp, rocky base cut into one side, and knew the side facing Division was a jumble of steep, weed-shrouded basalt, and the dead would have a hard time scaling it to get to me if they were on the other side. I could at least knock them back easily if I had to, and seeing how none wandered in the lot on this side, I cut over to it on it's south side and slowed as I picked my way through the tall weeds, busted pallets, and tires. The slope became more rocky, and I slowed, trying to make as little noise as possible. I didn't think any of the dead would likely be wandering around in here, and I wasn't too afraid of surprising any of the living in a camp site. I can't imagine anyone would want to be out in the open when shelter was pretty cheap these days. Still, I could see that this lot had been tramped through thoroughly once, and as a I reached the end of it I could see a fire had been built at one time near the apex of the rocky outcrop.  Spent shell casings shone in the dirt next to crushed stubs of cigarettes. Below me, down on Division, there must have been twenty to thirty dead piled amid old campaign signs. Some were rotted away to scattered bones, others were the dehydrated strips of jerky, baked hard into leather out in the sun. I looked north up the street, and could see maybe ten or so several blocks up. To the south, I couldn't see anything moving too near me.

Up near the bridge I could see a lot of the dead milling around, but could not get a good idea of the bridge's condition. Directly in front of me was a car wash that looked like it could have been used as a dump, for all the trash and abandoned vehicles that occupied it now. Behind the car wash rose the old grain elevators, as massive and seemingly indestructible as bedrock. More graffiti covered it than before the pandemic, and it looked like someone had tried to blow holes into the concrete cylinders – with what I had no clue. Craters pockmarked the surfaces of the silos, but to little effect it seemed. I speculated as to how good of a defensible space from the dead it could be, and decided a lot of people probably wondered the very same thing. I shifted nervously, trying to decide if it was occupied still, and the thought made me feel vulnerable and naked. The sun was much higher now, and against the morning sky's glare it was impossible to see if anyone might be gazing back at me through the broken windows up there. It wasn't even eight in the morning yet, and while I usually was thinking about hitting the sack by this time, maybe people were sleeping in later these days.

I stood still and tried to look...harmless. I'm sure
that
aspect came across easily enough. I had thought about doing this trip at night, but relying on the goggles too much bothered me, and I didn't want to be in the situation where I felt I needed them and then all battery power was gone. Plus, even while I was the great nocturnal scavenger, being out of the comfort zone of my neighborhood made me feel as scared of the dark as anyone else. I had also thought about waiting until winter, but I wasn't sure if more of the living would be mobile then too. I didn't want to be caught in any storms either. But probably more than anything I was just impatient to do it. I supposed I was bored and restless, and whether that would be my downfall or not I couldn't really predict. I was drawn down to the river, and that was fucking
that
.

The dead on Division were either back north or south nearer the river, and below me the corpses were truly dead. I decided if someone was drawing down on me from the grain elevators across the way, I may as well give them a moving target and began to pick my way down the slope to my right. I gingerly stepped over a few bodies – some of them looked like that poor bastard they found up in the Alps years ago. I had never seen any of the dead remain still for too long, and any that had been lying on the ground usually thrashed around to get back up. Still, I couldn't help feeling a bit uneasy, and was alert for the most minor of twitches. I gave a frantic little hop over the last body, and was back on Division Street. I had cheated a little with my detour, but I was back on track and let a nervous laugh escape.

Moving south again, I paused at a corner near a gas station. A giant metal diamond lay in the street, riddled with bullet holes and shining with a dim glow in the morning sun. Huh. Ahead, I could see a large group of the dead up near the bridge, and I could tell that the damned thing was blocked. A pile of burnt and twisted wreckage blocked any travel to the other side. Any
easy
travel. Maybe it could be climbed. And maybe I would be picked off it like a tin can on a fence post. And of course I would have to get past the dead, which would be the hardest part. I wanted a better view of it all, and shifted my eyes to stare at the hotel perched firmly on solid rock about fifty feet over the street. For once I didn't dither and wring my hands over a decision – I just started trotting down the street.

The dead spotted me almost immediately, and began to move in my direction.

“Crap,” I hissed through my teeth. “Crapitty-crap-crap-
crap!
” I thought I could just fight my way through them and cut over on the cross street below the hotel, but I could see more coming in from that direction. I darted a look down a driveway between a strip mall and the mammoth pile of rock the hotel sat on, saw it was relatively clear, and ran down it until I could scramble madly up the slope and into the long parking lot of the hotel. A dead man tried to intercept me as I began to jog up the driveway, but I knocked him down with the butt of my spear and continued on.

I slowed as it leveled out, and then stopped under the shade of a dying tree in the parking lot to observe the building. Like most large and prominent structures, it hadn't escaped any vandalism either. The ever present broken windows, bullet holes stitched across the slate-covered walls, graffiti. The little porch covering over the lobby entrance had been rammed by a truck, and it sagged tiredly (I flash-backed to Jackie's porch, and firmly pushed the memory away). I could see no movement, but knew that didn't mean a God damned thing. I was feeling restless and twitchy, and knew I would not spend the time I needed to in observing the building to judge that it was safe. Not that I had any intention of
entering
the damned thing. I looked back down the parking lot, saw the dead guy I had knocked down top the rise of the slope.

“Screw it,” I whispered, and moved out of cover and crossed the lot to the east corner of the hotel. I slipped through the narrow dead strip of grass between the hotel and a fence bordering the edge of the basalt outcrop. I gave a cursory scan of the open area behind the hotel, saw that it seemed clear of any dead – from where I could see, anyways. It was narrow behind the building too, at least where I was. What was past the center of the hotel where it pushed out into the grassy belt I couldn't tell, but I had no intention of exploring. My view was just fine from here. Dead vines and bushes intertwined with the metal fence, and before I leaned against the south-east corner, I hacked at them with my spear so they didn't pick and scratch at me as I looked down to stare at the Division Street bridge below.

It looked like two buses had been tipped on their sides across the bridge, and various other vehicles had once reinforced their mass behind them. They had been set on fire, and the twisted and blackened metal intermingled with twisted and blackened corpses. A large chunk of the bridge had a gaping hole in it south of the wreckage. Huh. I wondered if its defenders had tried to blow it up and failed. A mob of dead – a true mob now, by any definition – were gathered below on the street. I could see twisting forms in the piles of bodies at the base of the makeshift barricade on the bridge. It was hard to tell what was wreckage and what was a corpse, frankly, unless it shuddered and jerked. I pulled my binoculars out, looped them around my neck, and focused them beyond the buses and what had reinforced them. I could see movement back there, and before I could determine if it was alive or undead, I heard a small rustling to my right and turned, expecting to see a zombie coming towards me and was startled to see a guy with a gun in one hand, a machete raised in the other. He stopped about ten feet away from me and I reflexively brought my spear around, gripping it with both hands and jabbed it out at him. I could see the tip of it waver, and I tried to control the trembling in my arms that caused it.

His black hair, streaked with dirty gray, hung down as stringy and filthy as his beard. He wore a soiled t-shirt advertising some craft brewery, and wore the shortest shorts not seen since the 80s, and honest-to-God tube socks yanked up to his knees. His work boots looked fairly new, oddly enough, the laces looking crisp and neatly tied. He almost looked as if he was surrendering, with the machete arm high, the gun pointed in that sideways kill-shot angle that always looked tough in the movies, but kind of just looked goofy with him doing it – like he was trying to shoot fish in a really tall barrel. That didn't stop me from being scared of the gun anyways. A goofball could kill me just as easily as a gangsta.

“Whuh, whuh, whuh,” he sputtered, like a small engine trying to start. “
What
,” he finally spat out, “do you think you are doing? Huh? What?”

“I...was just trying to get a good vantage - ” I started.