The Wanderers (18 page)

Cripple looked out into the hall again. If he was not in the house, he must be in one of the neighboring apartments. All of them were empty, most of them from before the catastrophe. In some of them, they had left planks, and three-inch long nails, in case the specters managed to burst into the building and they had to lock themselves up in some other place.

He slowly descended the narrow stairs. Once on the second floor, he detected the sickly-sweet and penetrating smell of putrefaction, the smell of rancid sewers
—the kind that slowly rises up the rotted and neglected pipes. Later on, they would have to do something about it.

He reached the lowest floor without any surprises. The entrance door was still closed off with a heavy iron piece of furniture that they had found in the kitchen of one of the houses. It was rusty and useless, but it must have weighed more than a hundred kilos and it constituted a good guarantee that the entrance was not going to be easily breached. But if he had not left, where was Moses?

Just then, he heard a metallic noise coming from behind him. He turned, disturbed, but there was nothing there, except for the open door that led down to the garage.

The garage! The feeling of anxiety overpowered him. He could still clearly remember the night in which some strange noises had woken them in the middle of the night. They had approached the door, with sticky sweat on their furrowed brows, and with utmost prudence, they’d looked through the peephole. There had been three, maybe four of those things, erratically stumbling in the dark. It had taken them an enormous effort to clean the apartments and rooms of specters again, armed as they were with only an iron curtain rod and a fireplace poker. In at least a couple of occasions they had close calls and were about to lose the upper hand and be trapped by the dead.

When they had finally reached the bottom floor, exhausted and tense from hitting, pushing and dragging for hours, they discovered with surprise that the barricade had not, in fact, been breached. The same heavy piece of furniture they’d dragged into place was still blocking access. “
Where did they get in?”
the two had asked each other, wrapped in the darkness of dawn. Then, out of nowhere, an emaciated and black hand had gripped Cripple by the shoulder. He shouted, but he freed himself with a strong tug. Moses had turned, unable to believe his eyes. They brought it down with unmeasured fury, viciously hitting it even once it had ceased to writhe on the floor.
Where had it come from?
They did not know.

They finally saw it in a corner of the entry, right in the space between the small porter’s lodge and the wall. Barely measuring a meter wide, there was a door that was carved with the same wooden filigrees as the wall, so they had never noticed it.

Downstairs, they had found the unexpected
—a spacious garage with large spaces for at least six vehicles. The metal sliding door had fallen off the ceiling and lay on the dust-covered floor. In a corner there was an old Volkswagen van buried in the dust of disuse of years and years.

They faced the zombies from the narrowness of the entrance door, a small stairway of only six steps that gave them enough height advantage to catch them with their iron bars. As it usually happened, when they ended the first couple of assailants, the rest became agitated and made their attacks with increasing violence. At one moment, Cripple’s hooked bar had become stuck in one of the specters’ cranium and he lost it
—it was ripped from his tired and sweaty hands when the cadaver fell. That had made things a little more complicated, but they finally managed to empty the garage of specters.

Repairing the door to a state adequate enough to ensure that no other specter was going to surprise them in the future took them a good while, and the sun was already high in the sky when they had finished. They agreed that none of that extra space served any purpose, and the entrance door was permanently closed.

A few weeks later, it had been forgotten.

“
Mo?” His tooth pulsated in painful waves with maddening persistence. His ear had begun to hurt, and a white cloud veiled him.

“
Down here!” Moses said, without raising his voice much.

“
What the hell are you doing?”

Moses was by the van. He had opened all of its doors, the back part and the hood, and he was examining the motor with interest. “Well, remember what we talked about yesterday?”

“
Well... vaguely man. I haven’t gotten up on the right foot today.”

“
All that about getting a car and trying to go somewhere else...”

Cripple looked at him, then looked at the van. It was an unidentifiable color, faded underneath layers ancient of rust and dust. He looked at the flat wheels and the rust holes on the underside, and laughed like a sick hyena.

“
This?”

Moses returned his gaze. He had that feverish light in his eyes that Cripple knew so well. “Well, I just wanted to know what we’re working with, and I think the motor’s not bad. The battery’s dead, and it would take a lot of work, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve taken a motor apart and put it back together again. Here we could at least work safely. If we find a few things, we could get it moving in a few weeks. We could put on some wheel covers, fortify the windows...”

“
Like the A-Team?” Cripple asked, still laughing. The pain was so exquisite that in the buffer of his mind, he imagined the tooth melting the gum and becoming encrusted in the bone.

“
It can work. It can
work
.”

“
Well, it’s going to have to wait... I have a problem.”

“
What’s the matter?”

“
A tooth. This one here,” he said touching his cheek. “It hurts so much that I’d rather spend a night of sex with a huge three-hundred pound black bastard. Moses blinked. His friend’s eyes were watery and red he noticed, now that he looked at him closely.

“
No fucking way...”

“
Yes. My fucking head’s going to explode.”

For a few seconds, Moses considered the options they had. In some ways, he had always thought that a situation like this would happen sooner or later. His mind evoked some
National Geographic
reports he had seen:
the mummy of Nefer-Titi found... recent studies seem to concur with the theory that the young Egyptian emperor died at the age of twenty-three due to a cavity.

“
That... that sucks, man.”

“
Tell me about it. It’s like someone’s stabbing my gums with a pair of nail scissors. “

“
I can’t picture myself pulling out that tooth... but we could go get some antibiotics for the pain, and pray it goes down.

“
Whatever. Seriously, I’ll make my way kicking ass if I have to, but it has to stop hurting.”

Moses stood up with determination, as one who is making an important decision that allows no discussion, and he closed the hood.

“
Ok. Let’s go to a pharmacy. We have to move quickly, before it becomes infected, or you have a fever, or both.”

Cripple nodded. The prospect of running a kilometer through streets packed with living dead seemed more preferable to him than the idea of
surviving
buried in that deep and persistent pain.

Chapter 20

Roberto was searching with his eyes, frantically, for anything around him that would give him the key solving his pressing problem. Isabel, in the meantime, pressed her weight against the metal door, anticipating that the zombies would reach them at any moment. Only Mary seemed absent from the situation, concentrated on rubbing her hands to the point of a nervous tic.

“
Ro-roberto!” Isabel screamed, hearing the voice of that strange man coming nearer, behind the door.

“
I know!”

“
ROBERTO!”

“
I KNOW, GOD DAMN IT, I KNOW!”

But there was nothing there that he could use to help them.

He then ran to the ledge and looked down. The façade extended, cold and solemn, at his feet. It was too high; they would never survive a fall like that. He ran to another one of the sides, again without luck.

The metal door shuddered with a forceful tremor. Isabel watched him, hoping he would figure something out to help them. Mary put her hands over her ears and closed her eyes, as if she wanted to transport herself to some private inside world.

Roberto ran to the other end, stopped in his tracks beside the edge of the cornice and looked down. Geraniums and lush ivy grew on a balcony located barely eight feet away. Threadbare curtains lazily blew in the light morning breeze. The balcony was narrow, but near enough, yes, to jump to it. Roberto felt a sudden spark of hopefulness.

He ran towards Isabel again, throwing himself against the metal door to help her keep it closed.
“Isabel, there’s a balcony down there, you have to jump with Mary!”

“
Wh-what?”

The blows on the door were becoming increasingly stronger.

“
COME ON!”

Isabel took Mary’s hand and they clumsily ran towards the cornice that the Mexican had pointed out. Roberto saw her look over, then say something to Mary that he could not hear. Mary looked at her, clearly not comprehending what Isabel was saying. Isabel urged her on, but it was in vain.

Through the door, she could hear the dull, frightening voice of that man who, inexplicably, walked among the dead.

“
The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down upon the earth... !”

“
ISABEL, JUMP!”

But they didn’t jump. She could not push Mary either, it was too dangerous; there was a good chance of her falling down to the street. Roberto understood that Isabel was not going to take that step, not after witnessing how David had lost his life in a similar circumstance.

“
... and third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass
was burned up
!”

Something in the frenetic tone of that Bible verse propelled Roberto into action. He discovered himself running towards the girls, abandoning the metal door, which opened wide almost instantly. A mob of specters burst onto the terrace; the first ones fell to the ground and were trampled by the ones behind them.

Roberto reached his friends, circled them each with an arm and stepped on the cornice.
“Listen, we’re going to jump to the downstairs balcony!”

Isabel tried to retreat; she looked at him with panic-stricken eyes. Mary looked backwards, her lip trembling again. Her crazed eyes were wandering among the ones that had just arrived.

“
Hold on! NOW!”

But before anyone could react, Roberto jumped. He tried to stay vertical while pressing the girls to his body. It turned out well: they landed on the terrace floor, passing through the geraniums and falling on their knees; knocking over the old flowerpots.

Roberto stood up and quickly glanced inside the apartment. He did not know where they had landed, or if they were really safe at the moment. Before him, there was a bedroom where an enormous king sized presided. On the walls were several portraits of some well-known folk musicians. The furniture was dark and ancient. He looked at the bedroom door: it was open, and through it he could see a long hallway. He did not recognize any of it; he had never been inside. Blessed be the Lord for small favors; they had landed on the building next door.

“
Come... we have to move quickly,” Roberto said, looking at the girls. Mary seemed to be going through an anxiety attack; her chest was rising and falling quickly, she was shaking, and her eyes danced incessantly.

They pulled her, holding her by the shoulders and the waist. The house appeared to be empty, and the lack of smells clearly indicated that they were not going to have any unpleasant surprises.

The quickly reached the entrance. Isabel stopped Roberto, grabbing him by the arm.
“Wait! What... what are we going to do?”

“
We have to go outside.”

“
What?” Isabel screeched, terrified.

“
Listen to me...” Roberto said sharply. His gaze had such strength and conviction that Isabel stopped short. “That guy’s in our building, ok? I don’t know how he did it, who he is or
what
he is... but for some reason the zombies aren’t going after him. It’s a matter of time before he rouses the zombies to come for us. He’ll find out where we escaped through, he’ll come down and will make them come inside this building as well. We can’t stay...”

“
NO!”

“
LISTEN TO ME! They’re slow, you know they are...
most
of them are. We can get away, go somewhere else. If we run fast enough we could get pretty far away, and find some other place. Remember when we said we could try going to Cervantes Theatre? It’s not far. Right across from it there’s a police station... there might even be someone there...”

“
You’re crazy...” said Isabel, her eyes brimming with tears. She was crying, most of all, because she knew Roberto was right. Staying there would be suicide, but going out on the street was like jumping off a second floor: there was a
chance
of being unharmed.

“
Just follow me... follow me, Isa... follow me.”

Roberto took Mary’s hand, and squeezed hard. She looked at him, blinking. He studied her for a moment, trying to weigh in a few seconds if she could handle a journey like the one they were about to commence. He hoped it would work; it
had
to work, because they could not do anything else. Looking at her dulled eyes, he told himself that, probably, Mary had withdrawn enough inside herself that she would not distinguish it from a walk in the mall.