This Is the End (16 page)

“I know, but look at them,” she says. “There’s just too many of them for us to even attempt an escape.”

I look at the screen again the deluge of bodies coming to the building has turned into a slow trickle, but they keep coming nonetheless. If I had to take a guess I would say there are already close to five thousand out there, maybe more.

“I know, but my Focus is—” I start, but this time Kel stops me.

“Your Focus is as close to a tank as we could possibly get, I know, but still—it’s just a car. I’ve seen ten of those things overturn a car twice your Focus’s size.”

“Then we’ll have to distract them, won’t we?” I ask, and she gives me another look that says she thinks I’ve lost it. I’m starting to think she only has that look.

“And just how do you suggest we do that?” she asks.

So, up until now, I pretty much figured that I would just leave. As stupid as that sounds, it was my plan. I had actually forgotten that there was a mass of bodies waiting to tear us apart if we tried to leave. I stop packing more clothes into my second messenger bag and look up at her, and then over to Scott. He looks like he’s calmed down a little or, at the very least, he’s lost himself in the distraction of fighting Dracula.

“I don’t know yet,” I say back to her.

“So your plan was to just drive out there, where there are God knows how many of those things waiting, and what? Hope they didn’t figure out how to tip the car over?” she asks.

“Pretty much,” I say back as I finish packing the last of the two other suits that I want to take.

“I can’t tell if you’re the world’s biggest asshole, or just the dumbest motherfucker I have ever met,” she says smiling.

I stop packing, zip up the bag, look into her eyes and say, “Both.”

2.

We’re eating another meal of canned chicken, rice and mixed vegetables in silence. Kel keeps pushing the little white clumps of processed chicken around on her plate and making a dam that holds back her rice.

Scott eats like a ravenous animal and strips his plate clean twice. The guy’s got an appetite no matter what; I almost envy him for his ability to compartmentalize what’s going on. He’s completely content with just playing games, drinking, smoking and eating. It’s like the power isn’t ever going to go out, it’s like he’s in shutdown from reality.

I look down at my own plate, already cleared but not enjoyed in the slightest and wonder if leaving is the right thing to do. We can’t stay cooped up in here forever because, one, we have no idea as to how long the power is going to hold out, and two, as much as I want to deny it, I fucked us over by ramming the car into the garage door.

The horde of bodies hasn’t grown since the last time I looked at the screen, but it hasn’t thinned out any either. They slam their hands and fists into the building, the doors, the windows, anything in a pathetic attempt to try and figure out where the noise was coming from until all they have left are ragged stumps on the ends of their arms. If you are completely still and silent, you can hear their cries and moans coming from below; you can feel the small vibrations rattle up the insides of the building.

“I have to leave,” I say to both of them but neither one acknowledges me right away.

Kel looks up from her half-finished construction site on the plate, sighs and then says my name in a way that reminds me of my mother. “Jeff, I know you’re dealing with a lot right now,” she starts to say but I stop the conversation dead in its tracks.

“No offense, Kel, but you have no idea what I’m dealing with.”

I’m about to start tearing into her, but stop when I hear Scott.

“Let’s fucking do it,” he demands.

Kel and I turn and look at him; he’s sitting back in his chair smiling and smoking a cigarette.

“What?” asks Kel. He leans in and takes a drink of water.

“It’s just like
Castlevania
,” he says, and then adds, “We’re like Simon and McMillan’s like Dracula. It’s just something we have to do.”

Kel shakes her head, then gets up from the table and takes our plates into the kitchen.

“I’m in,” says Scott.

I don’t know what to say, so I nod my head. Kel comes back over to the table and puts a beer in front of Scott and then opens a second one. I get up and get the bottle of Bushmill’s.

“Okay,” she says with a sigh, “How the fuck are we going to do this?”

* * *

We go back and forth for what feels like half the night. I look over towards the windows and the night sky is illuminated by the moon and stars. There isn’t any light in the city except for the fires and my office, so the sky sparkles like a shattered jewelry store display case.

“Do we have any heavy ordinance left?” asks Scott.

“Nope,” says Kel, “just a couple of clips for the pistols.”

“What about you?” asks Scott and I pull away from space.

“The only thing I can think of is that they move in a crowd, so we could open the front doors to draw as many of them into the lobby as possible, then slam through the garage door and try to make it through the rest of them,” I say.

“That might work,” says Kel looking up from her beer. “How are we gonna open up the front door, though?”

“We could do it by remote from the Focus. It’s networked to my office,” I say back.

“Still gonna leave a fuck-load of ‘em out there for us to try and get through, though,” says Scott. We all nod our heads in agreement.

“You two don’t have to come if you don’t want to. We could secure the doors to the bottom floors and you could stay here if you wanted to.”

Kel asks, “What are we gonna do when the power runs out? Or the food or—”

I shake my head to stop her from going on. “I was just saying it’s not really your fight.”

“It is now,” says Scott, and I realize why he and Kel have made it this long.

“I think the door plan is as good as any,” he says, then adds, “When are we doing this?”

“We should get as much food in as many bags as we possibly can into the car, get whatever else might be useful together and leave. So…one more day?” I say.

The gravity of the situation passes around the table as if it were a living cloud of doubt and acceptance. Each of us goes through the same set of faces and emotions as we think about the fact that tomorrow night will most likely be our last night on the face of the earth.

“One last thing,” says Kel. I put my head down on the table. My hair has started to come back and it feels like a thousand separate pin pricks as I run my hand over my scalp.

“Yes?” I say from the tabletop.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Sorry for blaming you.”

From the corner of my eye I see Scott nod his head in agreement. “Yeah, sorry, dude.”

I pick my head up from the table and look at them to see if they’re joking or not, but they both smile at me in the way that apologies demand awkward silences and I say, “Thank you,” back to them in that weird way that acceptance brings relief.

We agree to go to bed and get as much rest as we can, try to sleep as long as we can, because we’re leaving first thing in the morning exactly one day from now.

I lie in bed for another hour or so and stare out the windows. From the loft I can see the sky and the frozen light of the moon. I fall asleep to the slow and steady vibrations of the masses outside beating on the building and thinking that, whatever happens in the next two days, to those stars out there in the cold vacuum of space, none of this really matters because we’re already dead.

3.

I wake up to the now familiar smell of coffee and cigarettes, biscuits and chicken. But as I come down the steps, the air in the office feels different. It feels as if someone opened a window, though I know that’s totally impossible. Kel is cooking and Scott is staring out the window, the smog and clouds and grey have lifted from the surrounding area and the sky is a vast and clear expanse of cerulean. The sun beats down on him, and he casts a long shadow over the floor.

“Morning,” he says as he hears me come down the metal stairs.

“Hey,” I say back to him as I make a straight line for the kitchen. Kel is finishing up breakfast and I pour myself a nice huge cup of coffee.

“Hey,” says Kel as I move to go back out towards my desk. I stop and look back and she smiles at me.

“Hey,” I say back to her as well, and then she moves towards me.

“Jeff, I meant it last night when I said I was sorry. I just want you to know that.”

“I know,” I say and try to look at her through one half-opened, bloodshot eye.

“It’s just that…” she starts and I take a long drink from my cup.

“I know, Kel, it’s fine,” I say back.

“Listen,” she says and then pauses for a few seconds. “I modded your app right after it came out, and it really was a brilliant piece of code. It wasn’t all McMillan and the rest; you built something one of a kind.”

“Thanks,” I say back to her and move to my desk, wave my hand in front of the screens and smile as they come to life.

I double tap the one that has the video from McMillan still paused and it minimizes down to the task bar. I scan the one that’s monitoring the wall of bodies still trying to get at the insides of the building. The sunlight doesn’t help the situation much; I can see their faces even more clearly than before.

Mouths hang slack and wide, blackened teeth and tongues loll about inside. Many of them raise their stumps up and continue to beat on the brick; ragged, rotten shreds of meat hang down and taper off in paper-thin shreds at the ends of their arms.

I don’t want to admit it, but it’s actually becoming easier to look at them, to scan the faces and empty eye sockets, the sickly sheen on their skin. It’s all becoming more and more tolerable.

I open up the main controls for the building and then put it into hibernation. Other than getting food and supplies ready, we’re pretty much done. Kel brings out three plates of food and we all sit down to eat. The meal tastes better than the others did, and I don’t know if it’s the sunlight or the finality of the plan to escape or what, but the morning seems to be nearly perfect.

I look around. Kel and Scott are laughing at something he’s said; they’re sitting close enough on the couch that, if you didn’t know it was the end of the world, they would be two people who didn’t know they loved each other.

I look over to window and the rays of light from the brilliant sun are defined by the clouds of cigarette smoke.

“Hey,” I say and they both look up. “Does it feel…different to you?”

Scott shrugs his shoulders and fires back, “Calm before the storm—enjoy it.”

Kel nods and then adds, “When it’s the night before you drop into a hot zone, same thing happens. Tonight you’ll have a ton of nerves if you don’t just forget about it. Then tomorrow…well, it’ll be pretty crazy.”

I sit back in the chair and try to enjoy the rest of the morning.

* * *

Halfway through the afternoon we begin to get ready for tomorrow. Scott and I take a couple of pillowcases and several smaller suitcases that I found in my closet up in the loft and make our way down to the cafeteria. I had Kel cut power from the rest of the servers and non-essential systems and route it to the elevator.

After we make our way down to the cafeteria, we make sure to load up with everything from the pantry. The only things we leave are a couple of cans of franks and beans that said they went bad three years ago; if it had been just a year, we would have considered taking them.

Once we were done there we turned our attention to the beer cooler. After we were totally done we decided to take one trip to minimize the chance of making a ton of noise that would alert the mass outside.

The pillowcases are heavy and Scott has to take the majority of the load. As we walk back through the empty silence of the cafeteria, a shiver runs up my spine. When the world wasn’t over—when it was just show up to work everyday and wait to find out what’s playing on the television—this place was the hub of activity. A highly polished, multi-function workspace, now it’s a tomb, a frozen memory of normalcy. Scott makes it to the elevator first and then realizes that I’ve stopped moving.

“Dude, what? Did you hear something?” he says putting down the two sacks full of canned food.

“No, no, I was just thinking about before,” I say back.

“It’s archeology,” he says as he hits the down button and turns back around.

I pull the suitcase behind me and roll into the elevator. As the doors begin to close I nod my head. We’re all archeology now.

* * *

The elevator opens directly across from the stairs so we’ll have to be extra quiet when we exit. In the elevator Scott and I talk about video games and beers that we liked. He tells me about being from Akron and then moving down to Tennessee when he had initially signed up for the Army. He tells me about his time in Afghanistan and how, if you could get past the shelling, suicide bombers, snipers and the limbless women and children, it was actually a very scenic place. We swapped stories about quitting shitty jobs and first cars.

The elevator stopped and a big digital
G
popped on the screen above the door. I broke into the panel and cut the wires for the speaker so that the computer lady didn’t blow our cover, but I knew somewhere there was a command being executed for the voice to say, “
Garage floor. Thank you.”

The elevator doors slide open and instantly the smell makes us both gag. The garage door had become dangerously unstable and through the gap under the door we could see what looked like a dense forest of calves and feet in the midday sun. The noise from outside was enough to mask any small amount of noise that we could have made. After getting the hatchback open and shoving everything in, I get into the driver’s seat and, careful not to actually start the car, turn on the systems. Scott stands outside in the parking garage and smokes a cigarette.

I make sure that we have a connection to my office servers and start tapping in commands to link the two. Kel pings in on the messaging system and does what she can on her end. In a matter of minutes we are up and running and ready to go; a little part of me really wants to leave now. The other part of me, the rational and sane part, wants to go upstairs, sit down and drink myself into a coma until the last sparks of power fizzle into nothingness. I push the pity into my guts and light up a cigarette. I message Kel that we’re done and then turn the car off and get out.