The Wanderers (32 page)

“
They’re thick windows!” Julian exclaimed. “They’ll hold out for a while, but we have to call the others!”

The zombies crowded behind the glassed gallery, making muffled sounds when their bodies thronged against the glass. They had seen them, and they beckoned to them with their palms and fists and their eyes fixed on the interior. Their hands left filthy marks on the glass.

Incapable of deciding what to do next, Pablo suddenly noticed a cadaverous-looking zombie with long white hair that was standing among the rest, and was lifting a hand towards him. He carried a gun, and stared at him with a ruthless smile.

“
What... ?”

The zombie fired, and the glass came falling down with a deafening crash. Pablo found himself thrown a couple of steps back, feeling how the cold street air touched his face. He wanted to say something, but his legs failed him and he fell to the floor; the shot had struck him right in the stomach. He spat out a good amount of blood that had gone up to his throat, and he fainted.

Julian shouted, heart beating in his throat. The specters invaded the reception lobby through the broken glass; triumphant and terrible. The one closest to him seemed to suffer from some form of Parkinson
’s disease, because it moved its head continuously, up and down, side to side, as if desperately searching for something.

Julian did the most sensible thing he could have done under the circumstances; he turned and began to run towards the hallway that connected with the rest of the facility. However, the zombie with the gun, who was actually wearing a cassock and was as alive as he was, entered the building and took his time to aim carefully. His shot resounded, strong and violent, echoing ominously throughout the reception lobby. Julian fell to the floor. The shot had pierced a lung, and when he tried to stand up again he discovered that he simply was unable to.

As Father Isidro very well knew it would, the shot went over the ranks of zombies like an activation order. Their movements became more animated, their mouths opened, revealing decomposed and terrible jaws, and the lobby was filled with savage grunts loaded with a pure and brutal hate. And, as he had done so many other times, he went outside again and began to push them inside the building.

From the main office, Aranda heard the first shot, but it was far-off and muffled. He furrowed his brow; that had definitely not sounded like a thunderclap, but it did not sound like the rifle shots he was so used to hearing, and that were normal in the almost daily practices on the sports tracks.

He stood up from his chair. He had been feeling a sense of foreboding, however, he was making an effort not to give in to panic. And even though a distressing feeling of pressure had settled in the pit of his stomach, he held himself back from running off to see if everything was calm.

At that moment, Moses entered the room.

“
Good morning,” he said, doubtful, his face worried. “Did you hear that?”

That was enough for Aranda. He ran to the window to look outside. From where he stood, he had a good view of the tracks. He often stood in that spot, looking out, quietly reflecting. But that morning, the scene playing out before him was such a hard blow that he stood in shock. He saw, with unequivocal certainty, that everything they had fought for was being destroyed; their fears had been confirmed, changed in just one gray scene, flooded with cold rain. The rain fell upon a plethora of living dead that was even now swarming through the place he had called his home.

“
My God... they’ve gotten in,” he said coldly, with barely any inflection in his voice.

Before Moses was able to respond, a second shot rang out in the distance—this time much louder, and with a thundering echo.

For a few seconds, a storm of ideas and sensations invaded his mind. He would have liked to activate some sort of alarm to alert the Community to the danger, but a wave of impotence gripped him when he discovered that they had not thought of installing one. Nor had they thought of providing some simple transmitters to warn the death squad. They had been too arrogant; he cursed the fact that they had though they were safe from the zombie infection.

“
Come,” he said, suddenly bathed in a cold sweat, “we have to sound the alarm.”

But Moses had already turned on his heel and was running down the hall.

In the meantime, the dead had taken over the lobby and had begun to spread through all of the exits, dividing the building in two. One of the cooks, a fairly stout man who had survived the first days of infection hiding inside a newsstand, ran out to the main corridor alerted by the shots. The zombies greeted him with merciless and irrational rage; he received a cruel bite to the middle of his neck and he staged a Dantesque scene, spreading blood in every direction as he tried to flee. His heart failed him before the blood loss took him down, and he fell, sprawled on the floor, seized by painful spasms.

Young Andrea was also in the area. That morning she had planned to clean the pool, and to get there she had to go outside through the double doors that Julian had not been able to close. She encountered death in the form of a lifeless fifty-something year old woman missing half of her face, dead skin hanging in tatters from her pale cheeks. Andrea screamed and retreated, but the woman trapped her by a fold in her peasant blouse. Andrea pulled roughly, so hard that the old shirt, which had been washed so many times, ripped at the armhole, allowing her to escape through the door she had entered, wailing hoarsely.

A short distance away, Moses was running down the stairs that separated him from the lobby, jumping over the broad steps two at a time while he cried out in alarm. In his mind, however, Isabel was looking at him with her face covered in dust and her eyes sad and disheartened. He had to get to her, find her and make sure she was safe, whatever it took. Only then could he decide how to face the threat that hung over them.

When he was running around the hallway corner, he began to hear the screams, so painful and desperate, that Moses had to clench his teeth to concentrate on ignoring them. He did not want them in his head at that moment; he wanted to have the necessary strength to face whatever lay before him.

When he reached the second bend, he had to stop so suddenly that he almost lost his balance and fell upon his back; the dead were right in front of him, dispersed throughout the whole lobby, and they were advancing through the hallway, moving with violent spasms. They had barely noticed him when they hurled themselves at him at a good speed, prey to a rabid excitement. Moses was not expecting such a sudden reaction, it had been some time since he had encountered zombies in such a state, and he was very nearly caught. He beat a hasty retreat, kicking desperately and landing blows without much control over himself. When he went back through the corridor, he realized that they were trapped; there was no way out.

He took to the stairs, and on the floor above he encountered Aranda and two other survivors who were talking, gesticulating wildly.

“
They’re coming !” Moses announced, conscious that he was out of breath.

“
There’s no way to get through?” Aranda asked.

“
No—they’re
runners
, Juan. And they’re on their way!”

“
Oh my God,” said one of the men with barely a whisper of a voice.

“
This way!” Juan said resolutely.

Juan led them through a metal door that was the same metallic blue color as the wall. It was hard to open, and they had to push it several times to make it move. From there, they reached a corridor that was barely illuminated by flickering emergency lights that made a muffled humming noise behind their frosted plastic protectors.

“
It’s the emergency distributor,” Aranda explained while they ran. “We can’t go outside; we blocked the exit a long time ago, but we can get to the other wing.”

After covering some thirty meters, they encountered another door similar to the one before and, again, they tried to open it. When, after making another effort, they had almost managed to open it, it slipped underneath their fingers and banged shut again.

“
Hey !” one of the men protested, realizing that it had been slammed shut from the other side.

“
Who’s out there?” shouted a voice from behind the door.

“
Hey, it’s us!” Juan explained, bringing his face close to the metal surface.

“
Oh shit!”

Finally, they reopened the metal door and encountered a group of four wide eyed men. One of them carried some sort of a thin lead pipe in both hands. He was sweating profusely, and his tongue, thin and white, appeared and disappeared between his lips like a small and restless viper.

“
Juan, it’s the
zombies
!” one of them said when he saw who it was.

“
I know.”

“
Sorry, we thought that they wanted to get in here too and... and...” another one said, speaking quickly.

“
We know,” Juan interrupted him, making way among the men. “Where are the guys from the squad?”

“
The squad? Oh! I... we don’t know, we...”

Juan and Moses exchanged a brief look and ran down the hallway that led to the rooms they used as bedrooms. Most of the survivors were already out of their little cubicles, nervously exchanging excited impressions and running from one place to another. When they saw Juan pass by, their eyes focused on him, as if they expected him to be their leader in some crazy last battle against the specters. But Juan went straight to the end of the corridor, where the rooms of those who had night rounds were. They were the ones that were farthest away, to ensure that those who used them could rest undisturbed while the daytime activities took place outside. He was sure that he would find the guys there.

“
Susana! Jorge!” he shouted, knocking on the doors with a closed fist. Moses joined him, beating them with both fists. “Uriguen!”

Susana was the first to respond, yanking her door open in alarm wearing only a long shirt that reached her knees. Her eyes were reddened, typical of someone who had fallen into a deep yet insufficient sleep.

Aranda faced her.
“It’s the zombies,” he said, “they’re inside.”

Chapter 35

While his very own team of the Lord’s executioners invaded the building, Father Isidro had gone outside again. At his side, one of the zombies jerked abruptly as if slapped by an invisible hand; small shreds of its worn jacket flew off at the shoulder along with an opaque drizzle of dark burgundy-colored flesh and dust. A second later it was followed by the sound of the shot that had caused it; it was a sniper, a sentinel positioned in one of the towers near the gates. He smiled disdainfully; the sniper’s aim was as bad as it could have been expected of a disgusting heathen. And would God not protect him, in any case, even from the projectiles forged by the hands of sin?

He walked resolutely, zigzagging through the large amount of specters that was already all over the place. A lightning bolt cracked across the sky, bringing out a malefic shine in his large, cruel eyes. He reentered though another small door that led to the indoor pool, dragging one of the zombies with him. From there, he accessed the maintenance basements, which were empty, likely due to the early hour.

Father Isidro knew perfectly well where the generators that ran the electricity of the whole complex were located, because he had already visited Carranque in the past, some years before. He had been invited by the Municipal Sports Foundation along with other members of the Church to orchestrate a plan that would encourage sports among catechist children, and they were very thorough in showing them every detail of their facility.

Down there, he found the various machines solemnly humming in the darkness of the basement. They had several different models, some of which were large, industrial sized ones that vibrated loudly, and other smaller ones, placed around them in several angles. A myriad of cables interconnected the different machines to an electric device on the wall.

Father Isidro slowly walked towards the panel while an aseptic grimace curved his lips upwards.

Inside the building, Aranda and the others were having problems. While the squad was being snatched out of the arms of Morpheus and were gearing up in their usual combat clothes, the rest of the survivors were dragging mattresses and bed bases towards the corridor, trying to stop the advancement of the living dead, who were climbing up the stairs. These were much more difficult to manage than the specters that they were used to: they were faster, more ferocious, and unpredictable. They had been waiting for too long behind the fences and had witnessed shots and deaths, not to mention the spectacular fire that had burned the whole night. Their monotonous clucking noises had already become histrionic screams that settled inside their heads, blocking out all other thoughts. They were frenetically, desperately searching for a way to get to the warm and living flesh of those before them.

“
It’s impossible to pass through there!” a man told Aranda, trying to make himself heard over the screams. The scene was a nightmare: the survivors were trying to keep the mattresses in a vertical position, forming a barrier against the zombies’ clawing and biting, but the latter pulled, grabbed and shoved with unmeasured violence. The survivors had to repel them with at least five men but even then, they were losing ground, inch by inch, slowly yet relentlessly.

In the foyer, Moses was frantically searching for Isabel. He asked everyone, looking directly into each person
’s eyes to force them focus, in spite of the situation they were in. But nobody seemed to have seen her.

“
How many are they?” Jose asked, appearing in the hallway with his rifle’s barrel pointed to the floor.