The Wanderers (11 page)

“
I know what you’re saying. Sometimes we forget that they were once people, like you or me.”

“
Anyway,” he said, moving his hand in the air. “That was a long time ago.”

“
That’s the right thought, you know?” said Dozer.

“
What do you mean?”

“
I mean... that if you go around putting those ideas in the others’ heads, especially the ones in my group, well... it’s them or us, Aranda. If you have a rotted
thing
in front of you and you hesitate, even if it’s just for a second, you’ll end up on the other side of the fence with your eyes whitened and your ass full of worms. We can’t be fussy about it.”

“
I didn’t mean to-”

“
I know, believe me, I do,” interrupted Dozer. “But getting over just that was an essential part of training. It took a lot to walk and run among them shooting at them as if they were Pepsi cans on a fence.” He lowered his head, staring at his hands. “Sometimes you encounter things that are hard to forget once you go home and lay down to bed. They simply don’t go away, you can’t sleep and forget about them, and they don’t disappear when you wash your body to take off all of the blood after a row with the zombies. Not all of those things look like monsters. Sometimes you find a face looking straight at yours, and for a second you glimpse the humanity they lost. They’re almost pitiful. And you hesitate. But those are their fucking weapons. That’s why they destroyed everything. We simply can’t allow ourselves to even remember that all of those dead bodies were men and women, friends, spouses, regular people with mortgages and plans for the summer.”

Aranda had turned around to look at Dozer. He seemed disheartened and smaller than usual. His eyes held a trace of sadness, and for an instant, Aranda beheld unknown horizons of the big man’s personality, wells of darkness that he locked up inside, that he did not share with anyone else. However, in his head he drew an image so vivid that it seemed to shine with its rich variety of chromatic tones. Dozer appeared in it, after one of his missions outside, sitting in a corner of his room; his absent eyes fixed on his bloodstained boots, and shedding tears for all of those specters.

“
Do you understand?” Dozer said, with a serious countenance.

“
I do understand, Dozer. I’m sorry.”

“
Oh come on, it’s not your fault.” He turned his head towards the rows of specters that surrounded the sports center. “But while we keep on giving them nick-names like ‘corrupted ones’, zombies, ‘biters’ or ‘wanderers’, the longer it’ll take us to call them by their true name. They’re victims, Aranda. Dead people. That’s what they are.”

Aranda nodded, thoughtful.

A sudden gust of cold wind blew some dried leaves from underneath the old chair and dragged them several feet away. Behind the fence, as if it was responding to the change of temperature, one of the dead lifted its head and appeared to scan the sky.

Aranda looked at it, and the specter returned his gaze. Fascinated by that attitude, he continued looking at it directly into its watery and whitish eyes for a few moments. He shivered. Something in its eyes seemed to proclaim that the wind was one of change.

Chapter 13

Nightfall on an evening in the third week of February was an intense red. It almost seemed as if the sky was on fire in the west as the sun disappeared behind the buildings of the Plaza de la Merced. From her window, the girl observed the wanderers as on so many other days. One of them, impeccably dressed in a suit, carried a black executive briefcase. It was open and the lid was dragging on the ground. Inside you could still some documents, held by a security band. The girl asked herself why, in the name of Heaven, the thing clung to something so useless with such determination. It was as if a part of it insisted on hanging on to a past life that had been lost on that tragic day. She looked at his blue tie and white shirt, feeling pity for the poor unfortunate wretch.

“
The last bottle is finished. The last bottle...” someone said, entering the room.

“
Well we’ll have to live off of juice and soft drinks.”

“
The juice has also run out. The only thing left are those shitty isotonic drinks.”

“
They must be better than drinking Coca Cola...” theorized the girl.

“
Well I wouldn’t know what to tell you,” said the young man, settling his glasses on his nose. “Coca cola has several acids that have a decalcifying effect on the bones. But the isotonic drink could be even worse. It has vitamins, but they’re mixed with a very dangerous chemical agent. It was developed by the United States Defense Department in the sixties to stimulate the morale of the troops that fought in Vietnam. It worked like a hallucinogenic drug, and calmed the stress of war, you know? But the effects on the soldiers’ organs were so devastating that they withdrew it.”

“
What kind of side effects?”

He made a vague gesture with his hand. “Well, things like high rates of migraines, brain tumors and liver troubles in the soldiers that took it.”

The girl burst out laughing. “Where on earth do you get all of that from?”

The young man seemed a little offended, and crossed his arms several times, as if he was uncomfortable. “I read it... in a blog. Before, when... when there was the Internet.”

“
You’re incredible, Arturo,” she said with a smile.

It was actually a strange moment, one of those that had not happened in weeks. They had held out against the invasion of the living dead in one of the emblematic buildings of the Plaza de la Merced. There were six of them, although John, a fifty-two year old foreigner who had come to Malaga to study Picasso, was really sick. He’d been bitten on the leg, and had lost a lot of blood. Since then, the infection had continued spreading, and he’d been plagued with cold sweats, raging fevers, and periods of coma.

John, however, was still hanging on, thank God. The others were all young people, and except for some moments of hysteria, they were taking it quite well. Going out on the street was completely unfeasible due to the numbers of cadavers that constantly roamed the plaza, but they had lasted thanks to a hole they had made in the floor of one of the first floor apartments that had given them access to the small supermarket underneath. There was plenty of canned food, cereal with far off expiration dates, bottled water, and many other products they could store without compromising their nutrition: chocolate, nuts, energy bars and the like.

“
How is John today?” asked the girl.

“
He’s the same... we still need medicine. Antibiotics. Ideally a doctor should see him...” he looked down, feeling useless.

“
Perhaps we should make more of those notes...”

“
We threw five hundred of them,” he said.

They had prepared five hundred sheets of paper headed with a visible title:

WE’RE ALIVE

The sheets had included their exact localization, how many they were, and their major problems: the need to find a doctor for John, and the lack of water. They’d hoped that the sheets would spread all over, and that sometime, someone would find one.

“
I’ll prepare more. If it’s windy tomorrow, I’ll throw them from the roof again. I’m convinced that someone, somewhere, will find one of them.”

“
It’s all dead, Isa.”

“
If
we’re
holding out, there have to be more.”

Arturo thought for a few seconds. He did not share her hope, but he concluded that it would not hurt for her to be occupied.

The key to coexistence, as Isabel had predicted very well, was keeping busy. The three apartments they occupied were not too big, but enough for all of them to have their space. They tried to keep everything clean and organized, maybe in clear contrast to the foul chaos that reigned in the streets below them.

“
Anything new?” asked Arturo, pointing to the window.

“
Actually... no.

They both looked outside. Arturo did not like doing so: it was like looking at a black abyss of desperation, and as Nietzsche once said, if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss always gazes back at you.

“
I don’t know what I expected,” continued Isabel, “maybe a group of people on a tank, a big one that could make way, crush all of those things and reach here...” She let out a shy laugh, conscious that such a thing would never occur.

“
A tank would be good,” said Arturo, finally looking away from the window. “Sometimes I ask myself what happened to the soldiers... we never saw any. Did you?”

“
No...” answered Isabel, realizing that she had never thought of the matter.

“
I saw police officers, Civil Guards... but soldiers... did we even have soldiers in Malaga?” he asked slowly, a little uncomfortable about confessing his ignorance about the subject.

“
I don’t know.”

“
There used to be Camp Benitez, but they moved it... isn’t that where the Plaza Mayor mall is now?”

“
I think so.”

“
We would’ve done better with soldiers.”

“
What was closest then, the Rota base? San Fernando? The legionaries? Where were they, in Ceuta?”

“
Actually, I have no idea. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“
Do you think it’s the same in other countries? Maybe in some places they’ve managed to control it.”

“
It is possible. Maybe the English, they have a good professional army, very disciplined.”

“
And the Americans?”

Arturo laughed.
“Don’t you remember what happened in New Orleans? The hurricane and floods? All of those people were dying in their houses, without receiving help. It took them so long to react that the flood waters began to constitute a serious danger for their health, because of infection and all that. You know, the water, the sun, decomposing bodies. An equation that never fails. And where were all the grandiloquent American politicians then?” He laughed again. “Frankly, I have no idea. Incredible. All of these years we’ve had Hollywood selling us the idea that they would always be the ones that would save the world in case of alien invasions and the like, and when something happens in their own home, it doesn’t work.”

“
That’s true,” said Isabel, reconsidering the idea.

“
That said, I think that everything must be the same everywhere. Remember how fast everything went downhill.”

Isabel nodded, her head low.

There were a few seconds of silence that were somewhat uncomfortable for both of them. They did not usually talk of bad news except for when it was absolutely necessary, because they had learned the importance of keeping their morale high. However, the course of the conversation had managed to lower their spirits. Arturo shook his head.

“
Listen, I’ll be downstairs, I have stuff to do. Surely this will all work itself out, ok?”

Isabel looked at him and forced a smile, but she quickly lowered her head again, incapable of holding it up for long.

When Arturo left, she looked through the window again. The dead walked, bumped into each other, and changed direction without a visible reason. In silence, she hated them all. Each and every one.

The next day they had an emergency meeting after breakfast to discuss the water problem. They felt that their health could suffer if they only drank carbonated drinks.

“
To start with, we have five pallets of lemon Fanta, two of orange, and two more of Coca Cola,” explained Arturo. “I’ve also calculated about a thousand liters of Coca Cola in two liter bottles. This should last us a good while, but there are some problems. Apart from the sugar, there’s the problem of the caffeine: it can lead to tachycardia, insomnia, headache, trembling and anxiety attacks. We don’t need any of that, especially because we don’t have any medicine, not even a simple aspirin. If that isn’t enough, the combination of the phosphoric acid with the refined sugar and the fructose that these drinks have can make iron absorption more difficult, which can lead to anemia. That’s another thing we don’t want here, if we know what’s good for us.”

“
Well...” said David, a tall, lean boy.

“
So we have to think where we can obtain water. Not immediately, but it would be convenient to begin thinking about it.”

A general murmur indicated the group’s agreement.

“
This is not going to be easy at all,” said Isabel.

“
There’s the idea of the plank...” David began.

They’d found the plank on the roof, leaning against the wall. It was an enormous plank, at least four meters long, and it was reinforced with iron rods. It had remnants of paint all over, so they thought that it must have been used as scaffolding for painting jobs. If that was true, it surely had the necessary strength to bear the weight of a person.

There was also the window. The building across from theirs, from behind, seemed to be completely empty; they never saw or heard anything inside it. However, one of the windows was completely open. Someone had the idea of using the plank to cross over to the other building, because the distance between both buildings was not any longer than the length of the plank. In practice, no one had wanted to risk covering that distance crossing over on a plank that had been abandoned on a roof: the elements had turned it grey, and it was easy to imagine it cracking, breaking in the middle, and falling into the void.

“
We don’t know what advantages crossing to the other side can bring us!” exclaimed Isabel. She had always been a voice against the idea of crossing the street by that method.