The Wanderers (2 page)

Rodriguez opened the door to the refrigeration room where the corpses were currently stored. It was impossible to make one
’s way through it; there were so many bodies that they were everywhere, even on the floor, shrouded with the hospital sheets they had been wrapped in or still dressed with the clothes they’d died in. The cadavers were piled around the walls, two for each cell. In a second refrigeration room the cells were narrower, and for this reason Rodriguez only had two equally horrible alternatives—to pile the bodies on top of each other, which would result in crushing their faces, or leave the bodies outside in the lobby, where refrigeration was non-existent. Rodriguez was opposed to deforming the bodies, and that was the reason why a couple of cadavers had been left outside the refrigeration room on stretchers, behind a curtain. The smell of decay was not very strong, but it was sharp.

“
Is that all?” asked one of the assistants.

“
Yes, that was the last one,” he answered, visibly upset. He was looking over a list and writing some information on it. “Tomorrow the ones that are leaving will have to be embalmed; I think they’ll be traveling for more than seventy-two hours.” He took a moment to look at the cadavers that they had arranged. He knew it was a temporary solution until tomorrow, but he felt very bad for not being able to give the bodies better accommodation.

“
We should leak this to the press so they’ll finally enlarge the damn place,” he commented distractedly. His eyes were fixed on a heart-shaped birthmark on one of the bare feet. “Send them a fucking picture of this shit, you know?”

“
If you’re going to do it I’ll give you my digital camera,” answered the assistant, without taking his eyes off his list.

“
This is not acceptable man.”

“
No, it’s not.”

“
It’s...”

At that moment, Rodriguez’s calm and monotonous life changed forever. There were going to be no more beers after work at Oña cafeteria, nor would he ever celebrate the traditional “Friday Night DVD Sale” again. He was never going have stew at his mother’s house, or drink that Russian vodka with his friend Paola on Christmas Eve again. And that full stop arrived with the tremendous spasm of one of the cadavers. It shook with such force that one of the bodies next to it rolled and fell heavily to the ground with a muted thump.

Rodriguez started at the noise.
“Shit!”

For a few seconds, he and his assistant were silent, only the humming sounds made by the neon lights and the gigantic refrigeration chambers filled the air. But finally, similar spasms started going over several more bodies. And then they began to get up.

Rodriguez couldn
’t believe it. He looked around, resting his gaze on each body that sat up with difficulty, their eyes white and mouths open. The sheets fell to the sides, arms lifted and hands shaped into claws and closed fists. While sitting up, most of them were rasping horribly, or making terrible gurgling, muted guttural sounds, and a woman with frizzy hair vomited a blackish liquid paste.

“
What... What... ?”

“
My God, what... ? He-help... Help!”

The young assistant quickly approached the first man. Rodriguez couldn’t move. He found himself watching how his assistant held the man by his shoulders and asked him if he was alright.

“
Are you alright, sir?” he asked, “Are you alright?” And the man, with generous lips and hard features, looked at him as one awakening from a deep sleep. Little by little, his features changed from perplexity... to a brutal hate-filled stare.

Rooted
, thought Rodriguez.
He has hate rooted in his eyes
. He wanted to warn his assistant, but he was unable to utter a word.

Suddenly, although he could not really say how, his assistant was stupidly smiling at one of the boys, who had crawled to his leg and now held it with both hands. The other man moved his head between spasms, trying his best to open his mouth. This was apparently very difficult for him. The rest of the men slowly evolved, moving as a wave. Some squinted at the ceiling; others moved their hands in strange gestures, as if they were trying to reach an invisible goal in front of them.

“
What... what are you doing? Come on, let go... mister... mister let go!”

Rodriguez wanted to close his eyes. He sensed what was going to happen. He
knew
what was going to happen. He saw it in the watery, dead eyes of all of those people. But he still wasn’t able to react.

“
Let me goooooo!”

When the man who held his assistant’s leg sank his teeth into it, the latter screamed. And he was still screaming when the man he had attended sank his face into the curve of his neck and stayed there among continuous and horrible gushes.

Chapter 4

Nobody exactly knew how it had started. The world had destabilized much before any scientist could have given any explanation, theory or hypothesis. No television program lasted long enough to theorize about the problem. At first you could see it on the television. It was talked about... very little at first, but afterwards more and more; on trashy night shows with highest audience ratings, until nothing else was talked about, and the
biggest
news of the year
drowned everything else out. The first images where shown on the program
TNT
--or so Susana recalled—and the words “living dead” were spoken for the first time. But at the time the whole subject wasn’t very different from UFOS or the faces of Belmez, and you could still smile with self-sufficiency and feel far away from all of those hoaxes. Even when they showed enormous amounts of horrifying images of crazed people attacking other human beings on the Channel 2 News, and later on they stopped showing documentaries, yet continued talking about the incidents. Yes, that’s when they’d begun to worry. Strange incidents at a morgue in Madrid, at a hospital in Saragossa, in Huelva. Everywhere. In one hospital, in five more. A car pile up that ended in butchery when one of the victims violently attacked one of the emergency service boys and cleanly ripped out a piece of his throat with his teeth. A suicide that spectacularly fell from a twelfth floor terrace and started to shake inside his body bag sixteen minutes after a paramedic had declared him legally dead. But after a few days, they knew that things were really bad because they saw it on the streets. A crashed ambulance, abandoned on a busy street, a police officer who turned away people coming from Cartama, because apparently some vandals had caused problems in the San Miguel Cemetery. But they weren’t vandals. You could see it in their faces.

The psychological blow of the dead coming back to life was swiftly accepted once twenty-four hour emergency bulletins were broadcasted on every television. By then, the cities were already somewhat immersed in disorder due to the fact that each person that died came back to life from an hour and a half to up to two hours later. The cemeteries, hospitals, churches, and the dark and humid basement of some retirement home were controlled as soon quickly as possible, although by then, numerous problems had already been registered.

It turned out that Malaga was hiding corpses in the least expected places. Any given day in October, the Calypso gas station in Mijas Coast was the scene of a macabre spectacle of cannibalism and mass infection when no less than seven cadavers abandoned the refrigeration chamber of a restaurant cover-up business, run by a Dutchman who worked trafficking weapons for the mafia. The seven cadavers broke out in the sunlight on Monday, at 11:40 one morning and chewed a hole in the throat of a nineteen year-old North Korean girl named Yhin Un
’s, and attacked the gas station, ending the lives of four Swedes and two Spaniards who were inside shopping at that unfortunate moment.

At 1:20, a spasmodic horde of wanderers was blocking national highway number 340, causing accidents. At a quarter past three, twelve living dead, dressed in Gaspar
’s Movers work clothes, were in a nearby chalet, chewing slowly and delightedly on the lifeless body of an old woman suffering from osteoporosis.

When such scenes repeated themselves in different points of the same city, mobile phone communications began to suffer considerably. After a few hours, it was even impossible to communicate by landline. An automated recording informed callers that the landlines were overburdened.
“Please try again later.” Checking CNN on the Internet to see how the rest of the world was affected was becoming very hit or miss.

Susana lived in a brick building right across from the Carranque sports center, about six hundred yards away from the Carlos Haya Hospital. The day all hell broke loose, the area was immediately affected by the chaos. It started at about 10:30, when Susana was headed home from a quick shopping trip to the supermarket. An ambulance had stopped at the entrance of the emergency ward and two policemen were attempting to subdue a man who fought with unusual force to free himself. There was blood on his face and on his tensed fists, and a crowd began to form around him.

“
He came in the ambulance...” a lady commented to the group of people around her. Just then, a nurse came running out of the emergency ward towards the police, yelling something that Susana, who was on the other side of the street, could not hear. The policemen looked at each other, confused, and visibly fought to contain the convulsive detainee. Finally, with the help of a couple of passersby, they got the detainee into the police car and after locking him in, ran to follow the nurse into the interior of the health center.

But almost everyone continued watching the police car in silence. It was shaking with intimidating violence due to the passenger
’s persistent blows. From the distance, Susana could see a storm of arms and legs senselessly attacking the sides and windows, while the car rocked from left to right, front to back.

And then a loud gunshot retorted, echoing among the building
’s towers.

Putting a hand to her chest, a woman emitted a muffled scream that was followed by an intense silence, only interrupted by the sounds of the prisoner inside the police car. By the time all of the heads turned in the direction of the gunshot inside the hospital building, a muted murmur started coming
in crescendo
, a noisy clamor composed of voices and shouts blended with a new volley of shots.

Some of the onlookers stumbled, withdrawing without looking back, while a large group of people hurriedly exited the hospital, terror and anguish on their faces. Susana felt a wave of panic, an overwhelming feeling that started in an unspecific spot near her stomach that was rising like a boiling spring, up to the base of her brain, where it exploded like a hair-raising alarm.
It’s happening
, she thought,
It’s happening here and now. It’s really happening here right-at-this-very-moment
.

She had seen it on television, it was talked about at the cafeteria, and in the waiting room of her health center, but now it was right there. It was happening, it was right there, and it had surprised her with two blue and white plastic bags in her hands.

She felt the uncontrollable urge to run; run far away from there. If she could turn the corner, she wouldn
’t have to see any of it. If she could just turn the corner, the hospital would vanish from her sight, and she could get back home. She would spend the whole morning working on her computer, and it would all pass. After lunch, it would be over.

But when she turned the corner, mixing with the people who were running in both directions through the stalled traffic, she knew that something had forever changed. She smelled it in the air, saw it etched in people’s faces, felt it in her own skin. She nearly ran to her building’s entrance and locked herself in the safety of her home. There, she drank two big glasses of water, and took a third to the large window in the living room that overlooked a wide, four-lane avenue, with the sports center on the other side. From there, the perspective was a little better. The people either ran or stood still in groups, where they exchanged comments and pointed in several directions, gesturing exaggeratedly with their hands. The cars formed a great traffic jam, and many of the drivers had exited their vehicles to span the distance. Many of them pointed towards the hospital.

Approximately an hour and thirty minutes later, two patrol cars arrived. One of them was dented and had one side completely scratched. They advanced slowly due to all four lanes being block, and the road was filled with curious onlookers. The four police officers got out of the cars and were lost from sight once they turned the corner in the direction of the hospital. From a distance Susana heard sirens, shots, and a deafening din of cries and shouts.

The scene continued without varying much for five more hours. In that time, the traffic jam barely dispersed, yet hardly any cars passed. Many of the drivers had mounted the sidewalk and had left walking, but at the end of the street, Susana could still distinguish many cars in line, empty, with open doors. By then there were hardly any bystanders on the sidewalks.

During that whole night, far away, the occasional columns of black smoke, a fire
’s glow or the constant wailing of sirens denoted that Malaga was dying a slow death. When she looked out the window again, she saw that her neighbors were also looking from their own windows, and on each floor she saw that her neighbors talked among each other behind half-opened doors, ready to lock themselves in the safety of their houses. But nobody went outside if they could avoid it. Through those veiled conversations, full of rumors and gossip, Susana learned a few things. It was being said that the hospital area was sheer madness. There were policemen, wounded people, and big trucks where the violent ones were locked up, and they had also cut traffic and sealed the building.