The Wanderers (16 page)

“
Alright,” he finally said. “I’m going downstairs with Mary. We can take turns. “Do you think we can tell Isabel about this and have her help us?”

“
Not for now. She’s a romantic, you know her... David’s death has destroyed her.”

Roberto nodded, but did not say anything else. He disappeared down the stairs and left Arturo plunged into dark thoughts.

During the next few days, John slept almost the whole time. He still sweated, and his face had acquired a sallow color that gave him the appearance of a wax mask. Roberto and Mary had the chance to talk and get to know each other, and they discovered that they liked to spend time together. Roberto was Mexican, and when he’d been just fourteen he had taken his father’s little boat, the only inheritance he had left, and sailed to Japan. There he lived interesting experiences, and Mary liked to listen to them all, some of them several times. When Arturo appeared with some warm chicken soup to take over, he found Mary laughing, and the change cheered him up. They spent a few hours together, sitting on the floor and chatting about trivialities.

The next day, Isabel made a timid excursion out of her room. She appeared at breakfast, and they all celebrated her presence. She was pale and had large dark rings around her swollen eyes, but at least she managed to answer their jokes with a smile and eat her muffin. Not even then did they want to touch any important subject and most of the conversation revolved around establishing theories of how to prepare coffee without water or electricity.

At quarter after eleven that morning, Isabel stopped in the middle of the hallway when she was going to bring supplies from the supermarket. She thought she heard a far-away droning, from an undefined direction. It was like a song, as if someone was singing, a sad and melancholy tone. Where was it coming from? She turned to try to localize the source of the sound and then realized it came from the half-opened window. Her heart skipped a beat. A sound from the street! A song! She ran to the window and looked out in every direction. At first she only saw the same scene as every damn day; the same actors were all in their places, punctual, repeating their erratic dance. And suddenly, she saw him.

It was a tall and incredibly thin man, with long whitish hair. He was underneath a tree, not very far from the window. He wore a frock coat and a threadbare cassock, and he was looking right at her. His eyes were two brilliant dots that trapped her in their gaze. And he was singing, singing with a deep and elderly voice, an old song that Isabel thought she had heard somewhere before.

“
In the Wolf’s ravine,

There’s a fountain that flows,

With Spanish blood.

There are poor mothers, how they’ll cry!

When they see, their sons go off to war.

Malaga is not, a town anymore,

Malaga is a slaughterhouse,

Where men are being killed,

As if they were lambs.”

Isabel could not understand. That man was there, with his legs open and arms spread,
singing
, but the dead walked around him without noticing him. The scene had a surreal air that hypnotized her for a good while.

“
Malaga is a slaughterhouse

Where men are killed,

As if they were lambs.”

Finally, she shook her head and put a hand on her face. Her mouth was
so
dry. The man in the cassock smiled. His teeth, perfectly aligned, were large and were the color of old ivory. Slowly, he lifted his arm: he was holding a small sheet of paper. From that distance, Isabel could not read what it said, but she recognized the structure of the letters; it was one of her letters, one of the rescue notes they had thrown from the roof.

Then two things happened at once.

Mary, in one of the adjacent rooms, screamed. It was a long and high pitched scream, so hair-raising that Isabel could not help starting. Her heart pounded. Without moving away from the window, she looked down the hallway in the bedroom’s direction. In her mind several images were rapidly being drawn. They were like black and white photographs, yet they were represented with crushing clarity; she saw Mary, in the bedroom with John. He was standing on the bed. He was coughing up blood, but that did not seem to bother him; his gaze was fixed on Mary, and it was a cruel gaze.

Isabel ran, shouting for Arturo and Roberto. The Mexican overtook her; he was exiting the restroom just as she was passing by. They reached the bedroom door and he took advantage of the momentum he had from running to knock it down without giving himself time to turn the door handle. The door opened with a loud crash.

John was trapped in a corner. Mary had overturned the base of the bed and held it pressed against him. Her arms were extended and she was holding it with all her strength.

“
He-help me!” she pleaded, her voice wavering.

They ran to help her. John was shaking his arms, trying to grab someone. Mary, exhausted, moved away from the base of the bed and collapsed to a side. She was too afraid to cry, but hiccupped terribly.

“
I-I-I didn’t no-notice!” she said, unable to look away from her resuscitated friend. “All of a sudden he... he...”

John uttered a hoarse growl.

Arturo appeared in the room, eyes wide with fright.

“
John,” he said under his breath, incapable of assimilating the scene he had before him.

“
Get them out of here, man!” Robert said, putting pressure on the base of the bed. John was fighting with increasing intensity.

Arturo did not react immediately, but he finally relieved Isabel of the base and she was able to help Mary to her feet. Once they left the room, the Mexican turned to Arturo. He had a question that was fighting to get out, but it was difficult for him to formulate it.
“What do we do it with?”

Arturo returned his gaze, but it was clear from his expression that he did not have the slightest clue.

In the hallway, the girls were hugging. They did not know John well, but Isabel knew that her friend had passed countless hours caring for the Irishman.

“
Come, let’s go... let’s go to the kitchen,” said Isabel, trying to take Mary away from there. They walked down the hall, still holding hands, moving away from the grunts that emanated from the bedroom. When they passed by the window Isabel remembered; “
as if they were lambs
”, the man with the threadbare cassock and the large teeth. She took a look, disquieted, but he was no longer there. There were just the dead down there. Underneath the tree, a gentle breeze dragged a sheet of paper among the feet of the monsters.

Then they heard a loud sound echoed from the stairway and seemed to come from the ground floor. Nevertheless, there was just the hall, the elevator and a few small rooms that constituted the building superintendent’s apartment. They never went down there; the only thing down there was the improvised barricade they had raised to attempt to seal the large double door that led to the street. They remained embraced, listening. Almost at the same time there was a second blow. And a third. They had an ominous, almost oppressive cadence.

“
Isabel!” The Mexican called from afar. “What’s going on?”

But the girls did not answer; they were staring at the stairs that led down to the complete darkness of the ground floor. A fourth blow was followed by a terrible crack that brought Isabel the vivid memory of the plank that had killed David. At the same time, the darkness of the ground floor withdrew, banished by the unexpected source of light. Isabel screamed, incapable of containing herself; now she knew where the noises were from. She did not know how, but the downstairs door had been knocked down. It was the outside light that was spreading over the entrance.

“
ROBERTOOOO!” Isabel screamed.

Inside the room, the two young men were having difficulty controlling John. He becoming increasingly enraged; he shook his hands, grabbing for them, and opened his mouth, biting at the air in an attempt to reach Roberto and Arturo. His attacks were also stronger. They pressed the base of the bed against him, but needed all of their strength to restrain him.

“
I-I’m leaving you Arturo!” Roberto announced, raising his voice over the animal-like grunts. “OK? Do you have him?”

“
Hurry up!” Arturo said, putting his whole body on the base. He was using his arms to parry the dead man’s swipes.

Roberto let go of the bed base and ran out of the room, heading for the adjoining room. There was very heavy burnished metal ashtray stand there that would be enough to return John to the sweet lethargy from where he should not have awoken. But once in the hallway, he noticed the two girls. They were both standing stock-still, watching the stairwell.

And then he heard it
... some sort of a song. Someone was singing, a melancholy tone, his voice rose, rich and deep, from the entrance.

“
In the Wolf’s ravine,

There is a fountain that flows,

With Spanish blood”

“
Isabel!” he yelled.

Isabel turned. By the stunned expression on her face, Roberto saw that she had no idea what was happening.

“
Who is it?” he asked.

“
HURRY UP, FUCK, HURRY UP!” Arturo shouted from the room. The strain in his voice indicated that he was exerting tremendous physical effort. Roberto was struggling between going for the metal ashtray and finding out what was happening in the entrance. But then Mary screamed, and that horrible scream froze him in the doorway. Isabel was by her side, trembling like a leaf in strong wind.

That made up his mind. He ran the distance that separated him from the two girls and passed in front of them to look out onto the stairs. There, he encountered one of those
things
head on. It was dressed in a dirty gray shirt and jeans; a good amount of its thin curly hair was missing, and the skin on its scalp was puckered and red, as if it had suffered some kind of burn. Behind it, another zombie was blundering up the stairs. It looked at him with its one pupilless eye. Behind these two there was a third, a fourth, and even more... they were coming up the stairs.
It’s the dead,
he thought,
the dead have entered, they’ve entered
. But he saw something else. Leaning on the wall to one side, there was a man. Roberto immediately knew that he was not one of the living dead because of the unholy shine in his eyes, because of his perfect smile. He had a club in his hand and with the other he was urging and pushing the dead upwards, up the stairs. He was looking at Roberto and nodding.

Roberto stumbled, trying to get away from the frightening sight. His mind was a scratched CD that repeated the same thought over and over:
they’re-in-they’re-in-they’re-in
. The man with the club, with a powerful and mocking voice, drew him out of his state of shock braying from his position on the stairs:

“
When He opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living being that said: ‘Come!’ And I looked, and saw a horse. He who mounted it had the name of
Death
, and Hades followed him: and they were given authority over a fourth of earth, to kill with sword, with hunger, with mortality and the beasts of the earth!”

When the first of the zombies had nearly reached Roberto, Isabel grabbed him by the neck of his shirt and pulled him towards herself. Roberto bent to the side, walked a couple of steps and reacted quickly standing up. He looked at Isabel, perplexed.

“
GET UP HERE, COME ON GET UP HERE!” Isabel screamed. She was holding Mary by the arm. Mary seemed to have retreated inside herself. Her face was contracted and red; her eyes were windows in an empty room: no one was there to govern the ship.

“
But Arturo...” Roberto said almost whispering. They ran to the next flight of stairs, and he sent the girls on ahead of him. When they started up the stairs, he went down the corridor and looked into John’s room. First, he saw the mattress, which was now lying in the center of the room. It had a large dark stain that was almost as large as it was wide. Arturo was lying on the mattress, with his feet on the floor. One of his legs trembled with feverish agitation, as if suffering from involuntary spasms. He was holding his neck with both hands and looking at the ceiling with a painful grimace on his face. Blood was flowing from there, and it stained his hands and chest. He seemed to want to say something, but only red bubbles of blood and saliva came out of his mouth. John was on his feet, next to him, his mouth bathed in blood, and he was looking at him, his posture animal-like. Both arms were reaching menacingly, with his fingers turned into merciless claws, his legs bent and his body slightly leaning forward.

Roberto shouted,
“JOHN!”

The living dead man turned so quickly that the Mexican was surprised. He noticed how the terror that he had been experiencing a few seconds ago was turning into a torrent of fury. He clenched his fists. Adrenaline was tensing all of his muscles.

Outside, in the hallway, the man with the club shouted:
“Now I will make everything anew; I am the Alpha and the Omega!”

Roberto, who was about to throw himself onto John to take him down, restrained himself at the last moment. He had to think about Mary
... he had to think about Isabel. They needed him. He quickly glanced at Arturo. His hand was slowly falling to the side at that moment. His face was flaccid; a small flow of blood escaped the corner of his mouth and ran down to his neck.

Roberto ran, beating the floor with new and unexpected energy. He could almost feel John pursuing him. The living dead had already invaded half of the corridor. The demented man that directed them continued pushing them forward.
Jesus... he’s wearing a cassock,
Roberto thought, noticing the man’s clothes for the first time.