The Wanderers (6 page)

“
I...” he said, his tongue feeling like a sponge.

And on the digital bulletin board, the trains came together and became stuck, motionless. An icon with an enormous alert sign appeared on top.

The operative hung up. A tear was falling down his red, warm cheeks.

The collision was frontal, and so violent that three train cars were literally reduced to metal pieces no bigger than a piece of paper. The roar of the collision broke several windows of the nearest buildings. The broken glass fell to the street almost immediately, causing several fatal victims. Some pieces of the trains had flown at such speed that the passengers who were waiting at the platform received an unexpected shower of twisted iron. A man dressed in sportswear and carrying a backpack received so many metal shards that he fell to the ground, along a trail of spattered blood that was several feet long. Several feet away, a young girl, who had not reacted to the sudden explosion of shrapnel that was falling around her, found herself holding her boyfriend’s hand when she was able to recover. Just the hand. Others had much less prosaic deaths, and were immediately shot down, victims to the projectiles.

Of the two-hundred people that were in the train, only about forty survived. Most of them had been traveling in the end cars. Many were seriously wounded and others still lived, yet were imprisoned in a metal nightmare. A few could still move on their own and even though they were still confused, did what they could to help the others.

The authorities were very swift. In less than four minutes ambulances, firefighters and the police were on the spot. Many residents from the town arrived, alerted by the noise.

Nobody noticed when the first cadavers came back to life. There was blood and amputated limbs everywhere, and that, added to the deafening weeping and moaning that filled the area, obscured the maddening scenes in which victims turned against their saviors, and the bodies that had already been taken away in bags, disappeared. At least for a while, no one could distinguish the dragging walk of the living dead from that of the wounded who tried to stagger away.

Moreover, one of destiny’s dark plans desired that one of the trains was to transport several merchandise trains; and although most of them were textile, the ones in the back contained sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide. The container cars remarkably withstood the head-on collision and still resisted the next ten minutes, but they finally overflowed and the contents mixed, forming a large acid lake that emitted enormous toxic clouds. The invisible cloud propagated, swept by a soft autumn breeze. It caused a bothersome throat itch that became unbearable in a few seconds; afterwards it brought on a burning sensation in the chest, and in less than two minutes, it burned the lungs. Those who inhaled the poison ended up coughing blood, incapable of doing nothing other than falling, writhing, to the floor. Then respiratory collapse would overcome them, either due to lung failure or the lack of air due to throats closing and glands swelling.

In less than half an hour, eighty percent of the population of Ronda had succumbed. Approximately two hours later, most of them walked again, impervious to their dysfunctional lungs and wounds. They finished off the few survivors that were left.

In La Indiana, about three miles away from Ronda, where the Spanish Legion had its headquarters, the news came with the urgent and firm order to cooperate immediately and completely. They chartered trucks containing a total of eighty troops, all of them wearing masks and gas filters. The suits worked, but the legionnaires were not prepared to face a horde of zombies and the rescue operation became a massacre.

At the same moment in which one of the living dead ripped out the last of the intestines of a young legionary named Ramon Gonzalez, the wind suddenly changed. It began to blow energetically from the east, spreading the toxic cloud. Death arrived to the Legion’s headquarters, in the shape of a throat itch, some four minutes later. Many of the young men survived the chemical poison and managed to escape the clutches of their comrades once they had opened their eyes after death; they lived their own adventures traveling to the north, trying to survive the madness that had dominated the whole world, but such was the end of the Ronda barracks.

On a Thursday at 12:20 a.m., the government was declaring a State of Emergency in the entirety of the Spanish territory, and presenting the Chamber of Deputies a report stating a Siege of State. It was a formality without much repercussion: by then, the basic communication channels were already severely damaged. The nation was broken, and dying.

Chapter 9

It was the 24th of October, and Juan Aranda was facing the end of the world. He was twenty-five years old, although he looked much older. The marine breeze made his long, curly black hair flutter, and his gray eyes were looking at some undetermined point in the horizon. The beach stretched around him, made up of sand as cold and gray as the ocean. The waves crashed against the rocks and piles of reeds and the smell of salt flooded his lungs like an invigorating balsam.
Blessed aroma,
he thought,
so far from the putrid stench of the city.
He slowly inhaled a cleansing breath. Seagulls soared across the leaden sky. Juan asked himself if they could also be affected, as all of the people around him, but as far as he could see, all of them acted normally.

He liked the beach because the living dead were never there. Sitting on his little 2005 Honda Foreman with four-wheel drive, he asked himself why. On the beach they moved even slower; the sand made them trip, but it was still strange that he had never found one because they usually were everywhere: inside every building, in each street, in open fields. He recalled the wanderer
—that’s what he called them—he had found in the enormous drain pipe that led fluvial waters to the sea. He had found it on a bright morning four weeks ago, caught on a pile of tangled brambles and thorny bushes. It had a branch stuck in its spleen area, which kept it firmly in place. When Juan leaned out, the poor thing showed its teeth and stretched its arms trying to reach him; it articulated animal-like growls and tugged, striving to move. The corpse was incredibly thin, and a few locks of white hair hung from its scraped, skinless cranium. Its eyes were two tiny white marbles, but they were full of a primitive loathing. Juan observed it for a few seconds and left it there, opening and closing its tensed fingers in a futile attempt to capture him.

Motivated by morbid curiosity, Juan started the Foreman’s engine and turned around to take another look at the pipe. How would time have affected that bony cadaver? Once he had covered the three-hundred feet that separated him from the drain, he was startled to find that the unfortunate creature was still there, still firmly stuck on the branch, and with the sharp branches twisted around its torso and arms. It looked up with its eyes open; the mouth revealed a putrid well of necrotic and blackened tissue. It was a horrible sculpture, as hieratic as it was horrifying.

Impressed by the sight, Juan killed the Quad’s motor and hopped off. He cautiously moved closer, absorbed by the abominable details. The far-away roar of the sea reached his ears. He also heard his own breathing, surrounded by a barely audible buzzing sound that surrounded the whole scene. He squinted. Something inside him, a long forgotten primitive instinct, seemed to warn him about something, but he slowly continued.

Leave. This. Place.

He observed its legs, twisted at an impossible angle. The fabric of its threadbare pants was caught here and there on the brambles and thorns. One of its feet was a brown colored stump.

Leave. Soon. Now.

Suddenly, the cadaver violently shuddered. Juan started and fell backwards onto the cold sand. The cadaver turned its head; a hoarse rattle erupted from its throat. Juan screamed, incapable of looking away from the hands that were trying to capture him. His mind tried to calm him:
It’s trapped. Fuck, that son of a bitch scared me, fucking son of a bitch, but he’s trapped, trapped like last time.

The branches were now old, however, and completely dry; they were not as flexible as before. Juan watched with wide eyes as the cadaver now freed itself from its tethers. The brambles were breaking, the branches snapped, and the branch that had been stuck in its spleen came free with a wet sound. Its teeth were blackened chisels; the mouth a foul pit. It was already coming after him.

Juan screamed as loudly as the panic he was feeling let him. The cadaver was fighting so hard that it was literally jammed in place. Finally, it managed to free itself, using its arms and legs to back up. The white-haired cadaver used its arms to drag itself on the ground, gaining on him with amazing speed. It was obvious that its legs were not able to sustain it anymore. While attempting to flee, Juan ran into something and screamed intensely; it was the quad.

He was finally able to get up with a high jump: he climbed the quad’s seat and quickly tried to start it without losing sight of the cadaver.

“
SON OF A BITCH!” he screamed while turning the ignition key, still to no avail. The cadaver continued moving forward. Its mouth opened and closed like that of an impossible landlocked fish.

“
SCREW YOU, ASSHOLE, FUCK YOU!”

He finally managed to turn the key and correctly set the gear, and the wonderful sound of the motor filled him with joy. He hurriedly accelerated at the same time the horrible cadaver lifted a hand towards the vehicle and drove forward with reckless force. Juan laughed while the Foreman made way with a roar on the sandy beach.

“
NASTY FUCKING BASTARD! FUCK YOU BASTARD, MOTHERFUCKER!

He looked back, filled with relief and breathing hard. He took one last look at the cadaver that was using its arms to lift its torso up towards him, the small clenched teeth and white eyes, small and round, like little marbles.

Once he had put enough distance between himself and the cadaver, he let the quad idle.
Calm down, heart
, he thought, placing a hand to his chest. Juan had been through hell since it had all begun. He had buried his brothers, and left his parents transformed into wanderers in some place in Rincon de la Victoria, but he had never felt so afraid. “
How could that be possible
?” he asked himself, angry for not having thought about the subject before. What the devil sustained them? It had been at least three months since the dead began to walk the face of the Earth, and they still were hanging on. He had thought that perhaps the wanderers fed off each other because he had often found partially devoured cadavers with empty torsos or splattered heads on the sidewalk of some street. However, this cadaver had not been able to feed itself in that tunnel. Surely, the lack of food was what produced the sort of coma it was in until he got close, and yet, it had come to life again. How long could a person last without food before dying due to the lack of nutrients and water? Not much more than a week, he guessed. Why were those things different? Did their organisms not need amino acids and essential fatty acids like the living?

There were many things he did not understand about the wanderers. For starters, he did not know why the cadavers had come back to life. Judgment Day, but without trumpets or ceremony, like in all of those
zombie
movies. Since the incident that brought the dead back to life, he thought he had seen them all; Italian, American, and some insufferable French trash. He’d been searching for some clue that might allow him to understand the situation, but had found nothing. In some of the movies, they blamed it on a phenomenon related to sunspots, in others on a failed military experiment (invariably American), and in many occasions some muted germ due to the greenhouse effect, the loss of the ozone layer or Avian influenza.

Nor did he understand quite well why some were so slow and clumsy, while others seemed to have developed superhuman strength. Some seemed liked victims of their own cruel destiny, dragging their miserable existence with parsimony and visible exhaustion; and others were powerful machines with humanoid appearances, capable of the most amazing physical feats. At least the old myth about the head was true: if the head suffered considerable damage, the cadaver would never get up again.

In addition, there surely was a reason why there were no
zombie
children or elderly. Juan had seen the process a victim suffered from the time of attack up until he or she came back to life: a period of time in a coma without a pulse that lasted anywhere from minutes to up to several hours, and later they would suddenly reanimate. When the victim came back to life, he or she became no more than an absolute predator with one sole aim: to reach and devour its prey. However, the children and the elderly did not come back to life. They stayed dead. And while on that same train of thought, he asked himself why there was a time difference in the reanimation process; it was probably due to some particular factor that could be explained from a medical point of view. Frowning, he told himself that things like that could be significant information that could help him in his fight for survival. They could help him beat those things.

Sitting on the Foreman close to the shoreline where the waves broke, Juan was engrossed in his own fantasies in which he imagined himself spraying a gas over the city. A gas of his own invention, containing the result of his investigations and studies about the infected blood, a gas that would only affect wanderers, and that would put them back in their place: on board the galley with black sails that travels towards the sweet oblivion of death.

Chapter 10

Juan Aranda’s journey from the small coastal town of Rincon de la Victoria to the center of Malaga, a distance of some forty kilometers, was an ordeal that took several days. He had understood that there was absolutely no one left alive in the area, so on a serene night with a full moon, and a beautiful bluish sky for a witness, Juan took his Foreman quad and began to drive to the west, towards the city.