The Wanderers (31 page)

“
I don’t think we’ll catch him that way,” said Susana.

“
Me neither. But I can’t think of anything else, at least for the time being.”

“
What about the zombies we caught for the doctor?” Uriguen asked. He had been playing with a tennis ball someone had left on one of the tables.

“
It’s not going badly,” explained Aranda. “Rodriguez has made some advances. More than I had expected, really, taking into consideration the rudimentary material he is working with. I wish we had made that decision a long time ago, who knows what we would have discovered? But now, Dozer’s incapacitated, and the priest is a threat that hangs over us. If we can control the situation a little, I want us to help Rodriguez go back to the hospital. There’s some equipment there that could be used to discover more about the infection. Who knows?”

“
To the hospital?” Jose asked with an incredulous look on his face. “Come on, don’t screw with me.”

Aranda raised his hands, conciliatory. “We’ll talk about it,” he said with a smile, “it’ll be later, when Dozer is better. We’ll plan it well, and everything will turn out fine.”

“
Doesn’t everything always turn out fine?” Uriguen asked, throwing the ball up in the air to catch it again.

“
The nap you took while we were keeping watch was fucking fine, you bastard,” Jose said, with a mocking laugh.

“
Isn’t he jealous, this tough guy,” laughed Uriguen, feigning to throw the tennis ball at him.

A few minutes later, they were exiting the office, pushing each other and making jokes about whose member was bigger. Susana, before closing the door behind her, gave him one last look that seemed to say:
That’s why we come back each time, you know? That’s why they’re so good, because they’ve never looked the abyss in the eye.

And Aranda, who sipped his coffee again, now lukewarm and bitter, could not have agreed more.

In the meanwhile, at barely two-hundred yards away from the place where Uriguen and Jose were joking about the size of their genitals, a sweaty and messy haired Ivan abruptly woke up from a deep sleep. He had dreamed about the house where he had lived as a child with his parents on Cristo de la Epidemia Street. In the dream, he walked barefoot towards the kitchen and discovered, with infinite horror that the door that led outside was wide open, and because of it, all of the well-known, old and beloved corners suddenly became hostile and unknown. It was a recurring dream, that he had thought to already overcome, and which he had presented to his psychologist in several occasions, but had not repeated itself in years. His psychologist called it a
nepenthe
, like the plant that attracts flies with its smell and does not let them escape, because every time he had that dream he would oversleep, as if it was difficult for him to abandon it: neither his biological clock nor the noisiest alarm clocks could drag him out of that fantasy world.

Ivan looked at the time on his wristwatch, and was startled when he saw that it was almost nine in the morning. He was supposed to have relieved the night guard in the sewers at eight. He jumped out of bed like someone had pricked him on the behind, and because there was no time to take a dip in the pool, he dried his sweat with a t-shirt, dressed quickly, and hung his rifle on his shoulder.

It took him a few minutes to reach the stairs that led down to the basements. While he covered the distance, jogging at a quick pace, he passed through a corridor that had a structure made up of metallic bars; the walls were just one gigantic window through which a dark sky that threatened to storm could be seen. He was thankful for not running into anyone: he hoped that his little delay did not cost him much.

He went down to the basement thinking of how to explain to whomever was on guard duty why he was an hour late. He knew that the nights in the sewer were already hard enough to have to bear all that extra time as well. But when he reached the access room, he clumsily slipped and found himself falling backwards to the floor. After the initial confusion, he quickly realized that he was lying on his back in a puddle. He looked at his hand, disgustedly, and he discovered that it was a thick, blackish liquid, which slowly slid down the palm of his hand. He stood up as quickly as he could, suddenly retching due to the strong smell the puddle was giving off. The borders were not as dense, and there the color was clearly red. Suddenly he was overwhelmed by an outbreak of panic; he was beginning to consider that all of that liquid could be blood.

“
God... oh God...”

As well as the unequivocal trail left by his slip, there were traces of footsteps in the puddle. Small footprints, that danced all over the room in every direction, in a confused agglomeration, and later disappeared down the hallway. He cursed himself for not having seen the bloody marks on the cement floor before.

He called out loudly, towards the stairs and the ominous hole that descended to the sewers, but no one answered. His mind was jumping from one idea to another, but a luminous sign with large red fluorescent lights flickered in each one of them.

Finally, with his peripheral vision, he made out an undefined movement in the other room. His heart was beating like an old bomb about to explode. He kneeled down, bending his knees, to pick up the rifle, which had ended up in the middle of the puddle. His hand shook: the blood was cold, and sticky to his touch and it made the metal butt slip.

Then a silhouette appeared, half-hidden by the darkness left by the neon lights that illuminated the basement. It was a woman; her straight hair fell to both sides of her face, but he could not identify who it was.

“
Hello?” he said, slightly lifting the rifle. He discovered that he was only capable of emitting a thin weak voice, which scared him even more.

The figure did not respond.

“
Who... who are you? I...”

The figure took a step towards him, and then another. The impersonal neon light began to remove the darkness, and Ivan could see that her clothes were drenched in blood. He let out a shocked whimper.

“
My God, what... ?”

But he was not able to articulate and organize the plethora of sensations that were going through his head. He retreated two steps, trying to decide if the person in front of him needed help, or if it was one of the wanderers.

“
Who are you?” he exploded, tears appearing in his gray eyes.

A couple of steps more, and Ivan finally was able to lift a hand to his mouth, horrified by the terror he had in front of him. It was Sandra, sweet Sandra; Sandra with an empty expression in her eyes, the veins of her face bulging and a horrible wound crossing her neck bathed in blood.

“
Sandra... Sandra for God’s sake...” he murmured.

Sandra advanced towards him, very slowly and with an absent air. She looked like a girl who had awakened in the middle of the night, and who enters her parents’ room, half-asleep and wobbling, searching for consolation. Ivan finally approached her, holding her by the arms.

“
Sandra... what? Yo-you need help... my God... let’s go upstairs, Sandra, Sandra... let’s go upstairs.”

But Sandra, who up until that moment had not even looked at him directly, suddenly found his eyes. Ivan discovered that they were veiled by a white mist, something he had seen many times in the past: and while Sandra threw herself at him with her mouth open, he finally understood, with infinite horror, what was happening. He stopped screaming when Sandra, giving him an eager bite, tore his Adam’s Apple apart. His heart was still beating when, already on the floor, she continued making her way through the open wound.

Chapter 34

Slowly, gathered underneath the somber canopy of a sky pregnant with ominous storm clouds, the Community began to awaken. The sky burst into tears with a harrowing thunderclap at more or less the same time in which Ivan was saying goodbye to life, making the glass corridors resound as they filled with activity.

Almost everyone went up on the roof to help spread out a large number of washtubs and buckets to recollect the gift of rain, among them was Isabel, who had understood that her tasks in the vegetable garden were necessarily going to be postponed. Although they still had a good supply of bottled water and they could bring more from a large number of surrounding shops, water was a very valuable good and they had already drawn up plans to take advantage of the rainfall a long time ago.

Once they had distributed the plastic containers, Isabel looked over the cornice to have a view of the ample sports facilities underneath the rainfall. She loved the rain, the wet smell, its refreshing and icy caress on her skin, similar to a now prohibited relaxing shower. She closed her eyes and breathed in the moist air while her clothes stuck to her skin, and she remained that way for a few seconds, listening to the sound of the singular pattering background sound of water drops upon the plastic washtubs, intoxicated by the cold and the freshness brought by the air.

When she finally opened her eyes and looked down with a satisfied smile, she saw a dark form move through the dense curtain of water directed towards the complex
’s entrance. They kept the doors solidly closed with thick chains, because they’d never found the key to the locks and it had been a while since they had needed to break them to open the doors. They did not use them anyway, because on the other side there was a confused mob of living dead.

It rained so much that the whole scene had acquired a gray hue, like an old movie. She tried to concentrate on the form that walked at a good pace, almost running,
of course, to not get wet
, but from that distance, she could not recognize who it was.

“
Isabel!” a voice called from the building’s access door. Isabel turned, blinking to clear off the raindrops that had accumulated on her eyelashes. It was Pablo, a man with a thick white beard who was already fifty-something springs old, and who was in charge of the small vegetable garden that they were trying to grow daily. She had spent most of her time there since arriving at the encampment. She had begun to feel a great deal of affection for him, and she liked everything about his job; for example the beautiful contrast of his big and callous hands when he firmly held the small green plant leaves, or the soft and calm tone of his voice when he spoke to a cutting that he was transplanting,
“to take the stress away”,
he would say.

Pablo watched her with his brow furrowed, signaling to her with his hand for her to come inside, but Isabel lifted her thumb to indicate that she was alright. She was alright. Everything was alright again.

“
Come, come here!” Isabel called, lifting both arms to the sky. “It’s amazing!”

“
You’re going to catch a cold, you silly thing!” Pablo shouted, visibly worried.

“
Not at all!” Isabel laughed.

Then she made out a movement close to the door. The black figure,
a man, a woman?
, was moving the chains. And just then, when the chains fell to the ground with a muffled metallic sound, she understood what was happening.

She screamed as loudly as she could, until running out of air, and even then her face maintained the horrifying grimace of her scream for a good while. Pablo ran to her, shaking her by the shoulders, trying to get her to come round, until he followed her line of sight, and he too was petrified: the zombies were entering the fenced grounds as a mob; they were inside.

Michelle, a Sorbonne student that had been caught by the end of the world in Malaga, and a blond man named Julian who spoke her language because his parents had lived the postwar period in France, heard Isabel’s scream and froze on the stairs. They worriedly climbed up to the roof, where they found Pablo raising his hands to his face and retreating two steps back while compulsively shaking his head. Michelle asked Julian what was happening, but he shrugged his shoulders, visibly worried. They approached them and Pablo faced them: he was red as a chili pepper.

“
THEY’RE INSIDE! THE ZOMBIES ARE INSIDE!” he screamed at them, spitting small streams of saliva at them that were lost in the rain.

“
Q
u´est ce qu´il est en train de dire?
” Michelle asked, terrified.

Julian looked over the cornice and saw them, erratically yet quickly walking, stumbling through the sports areas like dark dye in a glass of water. They were barely fifty meters from the building
’s main entrance, which on the other hand, they always kept open.

“
The gates!” Julian shouted, terrified. A crash of thunder tore Malaga’s sky apart, giving the scene an even more sinister tone.

They left Isabel with Michelle and ran downstairs, panting and shouting things like
“Alarm!”
and
“The zombies are inside!”
, but their warnings reached very few ears; almost everyone had already gone to the dining hall, which was far away from that area, to enjoy their breakfast.

Although it barely took them half a minute to reach the main reception area, they discovered with almost visceral panic that the dead were already at hardly a few steps from the entrance; they saw them through the wide windows that dominated the whole outer wall. Julian, who was younger and more athletic, quickly ran towards the double doors and did not take long in making them turn on their hinges: the doors closed with a barely audible
click
when the closest zombies were already lifting their arms towards him.

“
For the love of God...” whispered Pablo, noticing the large windows that covered the whole wall, from the ceiling to the floor.