The Wanderers (24 page)

After knocking down one specter that was in the way with a hard shove, the group finally reached the entrance. Cripple crouched down and pulled the hook, removing the cover with ease. One by one, they slid down the hole while Roberto and Moses kept an eye on the specters, which were coming closer and closer.

“
They’re almost here,” said Roberto, watching a living dead person that was coming closer staggering as if it would fall with each step.

“
They’re done,” said Moses, looking over his should at Isabel disappearing down the hole. “They’re done! Get in, let’s go!”

Roberto kneeled down and was finally lost into the darkness of the well. But unexpectedly, the specter shortened its last four steps, throwing itself forward with a rapid movement and grabbed Moses by the sleeve, making him bend over. The zombie ended up almost lying down on the ground.

Moses pulled several times with all of the strength he could muster, but it was not enough: the claw that held him was locked like a pair of pliers. The specter looked at him from the ground, irate, opening and closing its jaws in rhythmic and frenetic movements, snapping at the air.

“
MO!” Cripple screamed in an anguished voice from the hole. Moses looked around. There were five or six zombies that would not take long to reach him. They moved quickly, running like ones possessed, with their vacant gazes fixed on him. So quickly, in fact, that in a few seconds he would have them on top of him. Without ceasing his attempts to free himself from the specter’s claw, he numbered his possibilities and made a sudden decision: he held the arm against his body and threw himself down the sewer hole.

The specter was dragged a foot and a half while Moses hurtled down the hole; its arm made a monstrous noise as it broke in at least three different places. However, the pliers did not let go, and Moses swung out of control, hitting his head on the asphalt border. The arm was bent in a perfect ninety-degree angle, and the position of the wrist also seemed surreal compared to the rest of the body, like a poorly assembled doll. None of it seemed to affect the living dead man.

“
Pull him!” Cripple said from the sewer.

Moses felt how they tugged at his legs, so he held on to the dislocated arm with both hands and made an effort to climb, to offer more downwards pressure. Finally, among cracking noises, the zombie’s hand gave in and Moses heavily fell among the rest of the group.

“
Are you alright?” Cripple asked, shouting at him from just a few inches away from his face.

“
Y... Yes, yes,” said Moses, his arm still in pain. He looked up, and in the sewer hole, he saw the living dead looking in, with wide-opened eyes, frantically pushing and elbowing one another to be able to look through the opening.

“
Let’s go... let’s go now!” Roberto urged. “They’ll end up slipping inside the hole... let’s go!”

Despite all predictions, they felt much more relieved while they advanced through the tunnels, moving away from the disturbing and strident voices of the specters. It was not until a while later, when silence fell upon them, that Moses realized Mary was sobbing.

The water proved not to be a problem, as they had feared. They continuously splashed through some sort of dense and dark slime, but the level barely passed the calf. The beams of light swept the walls in every direction. Sometimes, the pale white lights surprised a cockroach that ran up the wall at a high speed, or a mountain of filth piled against a corner. But no one said anything.

A while later, the group stopped.

“
It’s here. We’ve arrived,” announced Cripple.

Moses approached the wall that separated them from the river and ran his hand over it; it felt cold and rough.

“
We have to think a better way of how we’re going to do it when we reach the next sewer,” he exclaimed. “Last time it did not go well too for us.”

“
It worked well when I was alone,” Cripple rushed to say, and something in his tone of voice carried an implicit apology.

“
Now we’re five. That’s the problem. It’s too much time. Those things have more than enough time to pounce on us.”

“
We could do it faster,” said Isabel, more to herself than to the others.

“
There’s no other solution than trusting we will,” said Moses, running a hand over his face as if he wanted to push away the memory of the scene he had lived not many minutes before.

“
Alright,” said Cripple slowly, illuminating the sewer cover that was barely at a sixty-foot distance with the flashlight. “Let’s get going.”

Then the tunnel exploded.

A bright and blinding white flash filled everything. They had the feeling of being transported, snatched from the place where they had been as if they had been shot out of a rocket. The intense heat scorched their skin, and they fell exhausted several feet away, covered in dust and debris. The tunnel filled up with smoke, which smelled of ashes and used gunpowder, but the ceiling had collapsed and it escaped towards the daylight.

Stunned and bruised, Moses opened his eyes. He discovered that it was hard for him to move and that he breathed with difficulty, panting, as if he had just run a hundred meter dash. He felt a strong pressure on his chest, and when he tried to stand up, he noticed that some pieces of rubble slid off his body; they were practically buried underneath the tunnel remains. It seemed to him that the air contained some sort of a bothersome and constant ringing, but as he moved the debris, which fell silently to a side, he discovered that it was his ears that were blocked by the explosion.

Moses called his friends by their names, one by one, and found that he was beginning to get his hearing back, even though he had the distressing sensation of speaking under water.

He tried to see through the cloud of dust. Close to him there were at least two bodies, half interred among the debris. He dragged himself as he could to the closest one, took the hand and shook it, but it was lifeless, completely limp. The arm had a long, vertical would, like it had been scraped with something.

No, please don’t
...

He shook the body, trying to receive an answer, and in doing so, he noticed the old gray sweater he knew so well. It was Isabel. Isabel buried in rubble.

“
Isabel!” he shouted, shaking her harder. “Isabel!” He noticed how the panic was born inside his chest and spread out all over his body, warm and paralyzing. He fought to drag himself a little more; he had to reach her face, to see how she was and if she could breathe or if she was buried.

A few meters away, someone else was moving. He heard coughing among the dust. The tears left trails of clean skin on his dirt-stained cheeks.

Finally, unexpectedly, Isabel shook with a violent spasm. She began to cough hard, making the rubble fall to both sides. Moses felt lifted by an enormous sensation of gratitude and he dragged himself until he had covered the stretch that separated him from her.

“
It’s over... sssh... it’s over...” he said, holding her hand tightly. Someone was calling Mary, not very far away.

“
Can... can you stand up?” he asked. Isabel put a trembling hand to her forehead, from which blood was flowing.

“
What happened?” she asked in a tiny voice.

“
I don’t know. An explosion. But I don’t know...”

Cripple’s heart-rending shout interrupted them. He was shouting Mary’s name, over and over again. Moses looked in their direction, and there, bathed in the daylight that entered from the ceiling, Cripple was holding Mary’s prostrate body in his arms. Her head was sunken in the curve of his neck; her face was turned back, with her eyes closed and blonde locks had become a tangled mass of hair and blood. Moses stifled a shout.

“
Roberto?” Isabel sobbed, with both hands covering her mouth.

But Roberto did not move, he remained where he had been thrown by the explosion. His arm was twisted behind his back, in an angle that would have been hard to accomplish without years of gymnastic training.

And then, gradually emerging, the moans of the dead reached their ears. First one, then another, the zombies began to look over the edge of the crack that had been left by the explosion. They seemed to be undecided and even afraid, to judge by their wide-opened eyes and the perfectly shaped circles their mouths made. But after they caught sight of Cripple weeping with Mary’s body against his chest, their eyes went back to reflecting the tremendous craving which characterized them.

“
Oh God,” murmured Moses. Gathering all of his strength and ignoring the lacerating pain in his abused muscles, he managed to stand up and get behind Isabel. He did it slowly, so he would not attract the attention of the specters, but his gaze continuously danced between them and Cripple.

“
Josue,” he called.
Am I yelling quietly?
he found himself thinking.

“
Come on,” he told Isabel, “we have to
go
.”

He put his hands underneath her armpits and pulled her up. It surprised him how little she weighed, but even so his arms protested at the unexpected effort.

“
She’s dead,” said Cripple, turning his face towards them. “Mary is dead.”

The living dead had crowded around the hole. There was a six-foot jump to the ground, and they hesitated near the edge. Moses knew that as soon as just one of them decided to jump, or fell by accident, all of the others would hurl themselves at them as a whole.

“
Josue... the zombies, for the love of God, we have to go back through the tunnel...”

Isabel had approached Roberto. His arm was slack, useless. She was running her hand over his face and calling his name, but Roberto did not answer. Then, as if he were responding to a basic instinct, Moses looked up and saw him. A few white hairs fell limply on both sides of his head. He wore a threadbare priest’s cassock.

The priest pointed at him with his finger.

“
And Jesus approached the impious and told them: rejoice, because it is the appointed Time, and it is Time to purge your sins with the blood you will spill in the name of Expiation.”

Isabel turned with the swiftness of a gazelle that, grazing in a meadow, perceives the smell of a predator just a few feet away. Moses saw the expression of terror that had overcome her. The whites of her eyes vividly contrasted with the blood on her face. And he understood. It was
that
guy, the priest who had pursued them at the Plaza de la Merced. The fucking bastard had blown the tunnel up.

Not giving it a second thought, Moses took a brick from the pile of debris and furiously threw it at the priest. His aim was true, the projectile made a sharp sound as it hit the priest right on the forehead. The priest stumbled, howling like a wounded hyena and moving his arms as if he was about to lose his balance. The zombies seemed about to explode with pure excitement, thrashing around like pack of hounds waiting for their master’s order to sink their teeth into their prey.

“
JOSUE!” Moses finally shouted. “WE HAVE TO GO!”

Cripple looked up, his eyes drowned in tears. His face was that of a Greek tragedy mask.

Moses approached Isabel and searched for a pulse in Roberto’s lifeless body, but did not find a beat in his heart, wrist, or neck. He looked at Isabel, and she seemed strange to him: her face had changed so due to the panic that was contaminating her.

“
Let’s go... let’s go...” he said, pulling at her. His own voice seemed different, surreal. “He’s dead, Isabel, he’s dead...”

“
YOU,” Father Isidro brayed from the height of the crater. His eyes were filled with hate.

Moses looked at him, defiant. The priest took the arm of the living dead man next to him, and with a quick movement, he threw it into the hole. The specter fell on its face; a strange sight, because it did not try to place its hand in front of it to break the fall, as any living being would do instinctively. It was barely twelve feet away from Cripple.

“
JOSUEEEEEE!” Moses shouted. His temples were beating with such intensity that his vision became clouded for a few seconds.

Cripple turned towards him, and something in his eyes produced a new wave of panic inside him, even more intense than the ones before, if such a thing were possible. Something in his eyes was telling him:
She’s dead, man. She’s dead and I give up. I give up, brother.

The zombie was clumsily standing up, its gaze fixed on them. A moment after, another one of the living dead was falling heavily into the tunnel, next to the one before it. It wore a short-sleeved blue t-shirt and a tie, and Moses, blocked and fascinated for a moment, thought of how much he looked like the asshole from the bank that had denied him a personal loan some years back. This time it was Isabel who pulled at him. She was moving her mouth but he did not understand what she was saying, as if someone had disconnected the sound. Finally, he shook his head and looked in the direction in which Isabel was pointing, and the tunnel was at their backs, the fateful and damp mouth through which they had come from, full of confidence.

A third zombie reached the foot of the crater, slipping down the cement wall and practically falling on its feet. Father Isidro continued pushing them, with an eye closed due to the blood that poured from his wound. He had cleaned it with his sleeve and had left several horizontal marks that seemed like war paint to Moses. And after that one a fourth quickly followed, and a fifth
... they began to arrive in geometric proportions; a cascade of bodies that landed and made watery sounds, like ripe fruit crashing against the ground.

At that moment, one of the specters pounced on Cripple and knocked him backwards, immediately followed by a second specter. Moses made an attempt to reach him, but three specters stood in his way, menacing. Moses looked beyond them: there were no longer any signs of fighting; Cripple had simply disappeared behind the figures of his attackers who shook violently as they hit, slashed and ripped the flesh that had once been Josue. Moses screamed, impotent, but Isabel restrained him with strength, making an effort to pull him in the opposite direction.