The Wanderers (14 page)

They ran crouched down towards the building entrance. The cadaver of a woman in a tattered ivory colored dress looked at them with a strange expression on her destroyed face, as if she did not understand what she was seeing. Jose briefly aimed at her, but he soon dismissed her as a potential danger and moved forward. The rain dripped down their foreheads and fell into their eyes as they ran for the entrance.

“
Closed, great!” Dozer said, happy, after briefly pulling at the double door. A closed entrance meant fewer potential wanderers inside.

Uriguen smashed the glass with the butt of his rifle and reached in to try to open the door from the inside, but it was to no avail.

“
It’s electric,” he announced, moving away from the door. Jose and Susana were aiming at the zombies that were headed toward them. There were increasingly more of them turning around towards them, trying to assimilate the concept of new prey at an arm’s reach.

Dozer lowered the rifle and charged the door violently. The bolt gave in to the tremendous shaking and the door sprung open.

The sudden movement and loud sound shook the zombies out of their state of perplexity. The large cadaver in the blue jumpsuit suddenly turned around, as if electrically charged, and immediately began to run towards them. The air was filled with the moans and hoarse grunts of the wanderers.

Jose adjusted his angle with a micro-movement and fired a shot. The impact reached it, accurately. Head shot. The cadaver stopped short suddenly, violently, as if it had run into an invisible wall. The shot made pieces of its cranium fly in all directions, knocking it backwards, and it fell to the asphalt with a watery sound, like a splash.

“
Inside!” called Susana from the doorway.

Jose crossed the threshold and closed the door behind him. Uriguen already had the pocket soldering iron in his hand. He began to work on the doorjamb, blocking the hinges. It was an operation he had performed many times, and it only took him a minute to have everything ready. It was enough time, however, to allow a good number of hungry cadavers to get close. While the soldering was being done, Dozer held the door closed with his body weight and Susana and Jose aimed towards the interior of the entrance.

“
It’s secure!” he said, closing the soldering iron’s cover and putting it back in his tool belt.

“
Good,” said Susana, abandoning the cover fire position. She looked at her friends and, going cross-eyed, she paraphrased the clairvoyant of the famous movie and proclaimed: “This... house... is clean.”

They all laughed.

* * *

They did not find any cadavers on the first floors. All of the apartments were empty, with empty closets and drawers: the inhabitants had left. In one of the apartments, they found terrible damage: the furniture and electric appliances had been knocked down, and all of the possessions were strewn all over the place. Photographs, books, decorative objects... and also many cans of food. Some cartons of fermented milk had burst, leaving a dry, greenish trail. The parquet flooring had been ripped up in places. Someone had written a message on the wall in enormous script with a dark and grainy ink:

Caro data vermibus
.

“
Is that Latin?” Jose ventured, inclining his head a little to read the gigantic letters.

“
Yes, it’s Latin, but...” said Uriguen slowly, approaching the wall, “
Caro data vermibus...
I’ve read it before...
vermibus
... vermis... like in
De Vermis Mysteriis
, the mysteries of the worm, the Lovecraft story... caro is
carnis
... without a doubt... meat.” A shadow covered his eyes. “
Data
... the participle of ‘to give’, so it’s translated as ‘Meat given to the worms’. It’s cadaver... ca-da-ver. The same word in English... almost the same in French, German...” Suddenly, he became silent. They could picture the distressing dementia the owner of that apartment had surrendered to as the world went mad around him. They exited the apartment in silence.

They found a cadaver in the apartment to the right on the fourth floor, in an advanced state of decomposition; a heavy woman who had died playing the piano. She wore a pink nightgown and her dry and matted hair was tangled in what seemed to be hair curlers. There were also some on the floor. Her hands were still resting on top of the dust-covered keys. The skin was horrible, a taut and blackish leather that allowed her bones to show through it. The room was impregnated with a sickly sweet penetrating smell that none of them could bear for long.

“
Out with it,” said Jose, putting his facemask on his mouth. They were common facemasks, for anesthetic use, the kind that were used in health centers and hospitals.

“
Through there,” commented Dozer, pointing at the living room window. They opened it wide and, with considerable effort, threw the cadaver down. It fell with increasing speed and landed, crushing the zombies that had congregated next to the entrance. Afterwards they sprinkled a homemade mixture of
Bacplus
and
Bacter 900
, a couple of powdered antibacterial disinfectants, on the piano and bench.

On the fifth floor they found an uncommon sight: the doors of apartment
“D” were blocked by a large sofa, a desk piled on top and two large planks crossing the door horizontally. As they had feared, they found several zombies inside. They took them down without any difficulty, and their cadavers were thrown off the balcony, where they crashed to the ground on top of the pianist’s body.

“
Let’s rest a little,” entreated Jose after throwing the last body. As if he was activated by a spring, Uriguen immediately placed his rifle at his shoulder, letting it hang from the strap.

“
How sick,” Susana said. “Imagine those three locked up in these rooms for so long...” She pictured them continuously walking, bumping into the walls in the dark, dedicated to the task of waiting, infinitely waiting for the arrival of nothing in particular.

“
You can say that again.”

Jose was nosing around the house, followed by Dozer. Most of the fixtures and shelves had been knocked to the floor. They also discovered where at least one of them had died: the larger bed had dark stains on the sheets that had become a foul bundle.

They found something of interest in one of the other rooms. It was a rectangular box with several indicators and dials, and a microphone rested on the side that seemed to be from when the
Charleston
was the latest thing in Paris.

“
Damn,” said Dozer, surprised to see the box. “It’s... it’s a radio transmitter!” He got closer and began to turn the dials. “As far as I can see it’s a medium and long range transmitter. Military issue, that’s for sure. Look at the straps it has on the back of it... they must have been used to wear it as a backpack during battle. I’m not too sure, but this model could be from 1930, or 1934, I saw a similar one in the transmission school of Guadalajara. I’ll be damned...” he said, vividly interested in the appliance. “The resistance in Alcazar de Toledo could have used one of these during the Spanish civil war!”

“
A radio transmitter...” said Susana, who appeared in the door. She repeated the words again, slowly dragging them out. “A... radio... transmitter.”

“
Ah shit,” said Dozer, examining the back, “the battery’s missing. What would it have been, in those days? A twelve volt?”

“
But a radio transmitter...” said Susana. “How did we not think of it before?”

Dozer and Jose looked at her, not understanding.

“
What do you mean?”

“
A radio transmitter! We could transmit, maybe someone will hear us! Because we can, right?” she said suddenly, conscious that she knew nothing about radio transmitters, and most of all, realizing that the old piece of junk had probably emitted its last Morse code many, many years before.

“
I don’t know,” said Dozer, caressing the canvas that covered the transmitter’s metal with the extended palm of his hand. “This beauty could work at 0’6 Megahertz... probably. Let’s say that, in absence of interference, the range of a terrestrial wave of a medium range transmitter, expressed in miles, is equal to its wavelength in feet. If we’re lucky, and the transmitter works at one hundred miles, it could have up to sixty miles of coverage.”

“
Sixty miles!” repeated Jose, impressed.

“
We’d get to Estepona at least, and probably even to the east up until Motril.”

“
We have to try.” Dozer’s enthusiasm was increasing.

“
I think so.”

“
We’re taking it,” said Susana with a big smile.

Chapter 17

The squadron, as usual, exited though a window in the back, because the entrance was now swarmed with wanderers trying to gain entry. From there they reached the sewers, where they walked back to the sports center, returning to the encampment without incident. Uriguen wore the radio on his back, like a backpack. A few minutes later, in the common room of the center, Uriguen excitedly placed the radio transmitter on the table. Aranda examined it with great interest.

“
Can we transmit with this, and be heard with any type of conventional radio?” he asked.

“
In the whole province,” confirmed Dozer, “for sure. We’re not going to have any interferences at all... the whole spectrum is available to us.”

“
Does it work?” asked a man with a thick red beard.

“
That’s what we have to find out. For now, it’s missing the battery. I mean to say, completely. I could try some sort of fix to plug it into one of our generators,” he said, “but it could burn it out. I remember that there were some rechargeable 1’2 amp batteries that were specially made to connect electro-medical equipment, micro cameras, receivers and things like that.”

“
The pound and a half ones,” said Jose. “I know which ones they are.”

“
That’s it. If we could only get our hands on one of those...”

Susana banged her rifle on the table. “Girls, get your purses... we’re going shopping!”

* * *

The next day, the transmitter’s power switch gave a new life flow to the appliance thanks to the new battery. Dozer was delighted with the device. They had recorded a message indicating where they were, how many they were and much more information like the suggestion of accessing through the sewers. They transmitted it continually.

“
Do you think anyone will hear it?” asked Peter, a man with red hair and a face creased with wrinkles. They were in the small office where they had installed the transmitter. The twilight of dusk filtered in through the small window.

“
I’m sure of it,” said Dozer. He tried, unsuccessfully, to open one of those plastic bags full of chewing gum tablets. “Well, look... imagine you’ve survived and are hiding, in your house, an office, wherever. You’re surviving, but you don’t have any water left, the food is running out, and you can’t exactly just go outside to go shopping, so you wait for someone to rescue you. What would you do? There’s no electricity, Internet doesn’t work, there’s no television broadcasting. But radios are different. There are tons of batteries all over the place, and many of those transistors, especially the old ones, can work for weeks on a pair of fat ones.

“
Yes, it sounds like a good plan.”

Dozer looked out the window. The clouds were dispersing in pink and blue tones, dyed by the last rays of the sun.

“
I’m... I’m sure that here are more people. There have to be.”

“
It would be fantastic to find more people,” said Peter, uncomfortable with the trace of bitterness in Dozer’s voice.

“
When everything went to the dogs, we had just bought a barbecue grill. I had never had one before. I know that puts my manliness into question,” he said with a smile, “but it’s true. I bought a big one, one of those that need building work done to be installed. When I was putting it inside the van, a guy stopped and offered to help me, so I accepted, and when we finished, the guy congratulated me for the purchase. I liked that, you know what I mean? You know, how many times do you find someone like that? Well when I got home, another guy saw me taking the grill out and came over with a smile and says to me ‘When’s the barbecue?’. And he stood there, talking about the model it was and the one he has in his in-laws’ backyard. Well listen... I got home, I ask my neighbor if he can help me build the frame to set up the grill and he tells me of course he can, and he comes over with some cans of beer. It’s summer, the weather’s good and we spend some time talking about the grill’s specifics while we’re doing the job. When we finish, his wife comes looking for him, she sees my CDs while crossing through the living room and we discover she’s a fan of el Ultimo de la Fila, like me. Seriously... I felt as if, suddenly, I had joined some sort of a club that I did not even know existed.”

Peter guffawed loudly, snorting, and for a few moments, they all laughed heartily. The laughs dwindled, however, as they all plunged into fantasies and recollections of a past that seemed as remote as it was irretrievable.

“
It’s funny,” said Peter abruptly, “I spent most of my youth like I was in a waiting room, always waiting for something to happen in my life, as if it had not already started; do you know that feeling? Like when someone tells you about a place that is the shit, and on a random Sunday you organize a trip to go there. You travel a
long
road waiting to get to the end, and when you do... when you get there you discover that it really wasn’t that great, and that really, the trip itself was what was worth it. But when you discover that, it’s already too late, of course. Well
fuck
, that’s what I feel happened to my youth.”