This Is the End (17 page)

“Jesus, man, listen to those fuckers out there,” says Scott.

I stop and listen to the sounds of tiny thunderclaps rolling across the door and little bombs being dropped on the bricks outside. The longer I stare at the door, the more convinced I become that it’s going to give way at any second. I close my eyes and breathe, the noise seems to intensify. I could stand here and be sucked into the off-timing and thrum. I can feel the small vibrations move through the concrete and travel up my legs, into my chest. Each beat says
Death, death, death
.

“Shit,” says Scott and I open my eyes, shake my head.

“What?” I ask.

“I forgot a pillowcase by the elevator,” he says and then moves back towards the nearly overflowing sack that’s sitting outside the doors.

“Do you really think we need it?” I ask.

“Might as well. We don’t know what else is out there or how long it’s going to take,” he says back.

I open the hatchback and try to make enough room. I pull out the road kit and open it up. There are a couple of flares, three collapsible reflective triangles, a set of cheap jumper cables and a poncho. I toss everything but the flares, which I shove into my back pocket.

We must have packed the case especially full because Scott has to drag it over to the back of the car. I grab one end and he moves around to the other and we lift in unison. We stop in unison when we hear the tear and watch in unison when the cans hit the concrete and cringe in unison as the noise of a sackful of cans makes its way above the din of banging. Both of us freeze in unison and watch a single, solitary can of green beans roll towards the gap in the garage door.

I hear my voice say, “Fuck,” which, up until that point, was a near impossibility. Scott looks at me and I look at him and then we watch as the can of green beans clears the gap under the door.

“Totally,” says Scott.

For a few seconds we don’t know what to do, and then it hits us. The banging has stopped. The silence is nauseating and I feel a wave of bile and adrenaline flood up my body and into the back of my throat. The mass of feet and ankles and shins are still; the rolling waves of the metal door have stopped. The moaning and breathing have ceased and in the absence of the crowd, the vacuum of noise, there is only the sound of the can of green beans rolling back towards us underneath the door.

 4.

The explosion of violence against the door rocks the two of us back on our heels. The door is shuddering in its track to the point that it nearly jumps off the frame.

“I think our plans just got bumped up a few hours,” I say to Scott. He’s already moving back towards the elevator doors.

“Yeah, I think you’re right,” he says while pushing the up button and pulling out his pistol.

I pull out my own gun from my waistband and then shake my head; it would be pointless to use them if the door bursts. We make it into the elevator and begin moving back up to my office. I click the intercom button and start to call for Kel.

“What the hell did you two do?” she asks from the other end. “They’re going apeshit out there,”

“Can of green beans fell out and rolled out the door, but now’s not really the time, Kel. Get your shit; we’ve got to move,” I say back.

There’s a long silence on the other end, but I don’t hear the click of the intercom. Scott looks at me and I shrug my shoulders. We hear movement on the other end of the speaker.

“You two are no longer allowed to do anything without me,” she says back and then I hear the intercom shut off.

“I really hate green beans,” says Scott.

“Me too,” I say back as we make our way up to the office.

* * *

Kel is waiting in the lobby and the stench of rotting flesh is just as intolerable in here as it was in the garage. The bodies on the ground have begun to sink into themselves and already decay has started to work its way through the softer parts and bits of scarred flesh on their hands and faces.

“Here,” she says while throwing Scott his backpack. It hits him in the chest and he lets out a gasp. After that she tosses in my two bags and she’s already got hers on her back. I try to step out of the elevator and go back into the office when she grabs me by the back of my collar and pulls me back towards the elevator.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“I have to—”

“I already packed up the smokes, coffee and two bottles of whiskey. What else do you need?”

I look back out towards the open doors and into my office. The stark white interior gleams in the late afternoon sun. Everything I have ever been, wanted to be and accomplished is staring back at me. Inanimate objects that were my friends and confidants, consoles and screens, oak flooring and unblinking glass eyelets look back at me coldly like a spurned lover. I open my mouth to protest, to say that I’ve forgotten something, but I haven’t. This wasn’t really me to begin with.

“Nothing,” I say as I get back into the elevator and watch as the doors close. I stare at the spot on the door where my office doors would be as we move down towards the garage again.

“Hey,” says Kel and then snaps her fingers in front of my face. I look over to here and then back to Scott, who’s checking his ammo situation.

“What?” I say.

“I found this the other day,” says Kel and then hands me my tablet.

My eyes go wide and I hold it like a newborn child. I thumb the power button and check the battery bar: fully charged. Good.

I tap the screen and it brings up a four-way display. One is the outside and I see the results of the can rolling under the door. Now that the things know something is in the building they have intensified their assault on the walls and doors. Another section is a display of the main unit upstairs, another is tied into the car and the last is everything that we received from Port Clinton and the documents about how everything happened.

“As you can see, I’ve patched everything into it. All we have to do is go,” she says.

“Yeah, I see. Where did you find this?” I ask.

“Right after Scott and I got trapped in your office, we looked through everything. I found that in a coat of yours. Looks like they didn’t think that you would ever come back from the dead,” she says.

I smile and look down at the screen and thumb through everything again. The elevator comes to a stop and I look out as the doors are opening up. The doors are near the breaking point. Each blow to the roll steel pushes it into and out of its frame, putting us closer and closer to the ravenous mob outside. I hand the tablet back over to Kel as we move towards the car.

“Here,” I say and then add, “My car—I’m driving. When we get in, open the doors to the building and get down in the seat.”

She nods as we throw our gear into the backseat. Kel hands Scott her pistol and they exchange glances that say
I love you
.

When we’re finally all in I start the car and say, “Okay, everyone ready?”

“Let’s do it,” says Scott and Kel smiles while crouching down into the floor well of the passenger seat.

“All right, open the doors.”

Kel motions with her finger over the display and brings up the main control screen. She hesitates, takes a deep breath and then taps the button for the magnetic locks on the doors. I grip the steering wheel tightly and hold my breath.

“I hope this works,” she says from the floor, “because if not, it’s gonna be a real short drive.”

5.

For the first few minutes after Kel tapped the screen, nothing happens. The doors all look the same. The waves of pounding fists on the outside of the garage doors continue. She brings up the external security camera feeds and watches as the things outside keep on as if nothing had happened. She pulls herself back up into the passenger seat and Skinny Scott sits upright in the back. We stare at the screen for a long while. The mood in the car rapidly goes from complete anxiety to utter despair. I sit back in my seat and look at the gap under the door. The thick mass of legs and ankles haven’t moved.

“Shit,” I hear Scott say from the back as he tries to slouch backwards into the rear seat.

Kel has brought the main controls back around with the flick of her fingers and started to double-check the command sequences for the doors.

“I triple-checked them,” I say to her, but she doesn’t register that I’ve said anything.

I roll my head back to look out at the door and fumble around in my suit jacket to find my cigarettes, but as I look down towards my pockets, I glance out the door and then stop.

“Hey, look.” I point towards the gap and Scott leans forward and squints.

“There are less of them,” I say and I can see Scott nod in agreement. Kel is still thumbing through commands, but pauses and looks up, then stops.

From underneath the door I start to see more concrete and more daylight, and then as we are watching, we see the first set of legs move towards the right hand side of the door.

“Hey, listen,” says Scott.

Kel stops moving her hands and then pushes the down button for the window, only allowing a fraction of a gap between the window and frame, but it’s enough to tell us that the pounding has subsided. It’s still there, but it’s subdued.

“Do you have the interior cameras tied into the feeds?” I ask Kel.

She flickers her fingers across the air in front of the tablet and pulls up the outside feeds.

“Holy shit,” she says. “It’s working.”

She stretches the front camera feed to fullscreen and we see the deluge of bodies trying to cram themselves into the front doors of the building. She rewinds it back a few frames and we watch as one of the crooked men pulls at the door and in the next frame it looks like twenty more rip the door off its frame. After that it’s like a meat grinder as the bodies try and move in unison towards the opening.

She brings up the feeds from inside the building and we watch the bodies move like a wave of destruction throughout the lobby and up the doors and through the hallways of the building’s first floor.

“Um, I think we should go,” says Scott from the backseat.

I look back at him, but only see the back of his head and the main door from the stairwell behind us bounce.

Once and I look back towards the garage door.

Twice and Kel looks back.

Three times and then door blasts open; the monsters smash out of the doorway like a wave of vomit.

“GO!” yells Kel.

I grab the steering wheel and floor the pedal. Kel and Scott slam back into their seats as we race towards the crooked door.

“SEAT BELTS, NOW,” I yell back but it’s too late; we’re already at the point of impact.

For exactly five seconds it feels as if everything in the world is slow motion movie-still. I know it was exactly five seconds because before we hit the door I looked at the huge clock on my dashboard and it reads out hours, minutes and seconds.

The glass spiderwebs a little. The metal from the hood meets the metal of the garage door and makes the worst nail-on-chalkboard times a million sound. The door crumples up and out towards the remnants of the crowd just outside. Smaller, saucer plate-sized pieces of metal dislodge themselves from the side wall and become death Frisbees; some even find homes inside of the unsuspecting bodies outside.

Kel and Scott fly up and out of their seats along with some of our canned food, which for those few seconds look weightless, hovering in the air. Scott has the benefit of being in the back seat and slams his face into the back of Kel’s seat. Kel is less fortunate and faceplants on the windshield; as she falls back towards her seat she leaves a small tracer line of spittle and blood from her lips.

The weight of the car against broken bodies outside is stomach-turning. After the fifth second passes the world seems to catch back up to us and everything jerks back into normal time. The sunlight outside blinds me for a few more seconds; I swerve into more bodies and then we’re out. Kel slips down into her seat as if she’s melting and Scott grabs her and pulls her back up.

I look over and start to ask, “Holy shit. Is she—” but Scott cuts me off with, “Just drive.”

I haven’t brought my foot up from off of the gas and we are rocketing forward towards the side of another converted warehouse building. We jump the sidewalk but I manage to crank the wheel all the way left and move us back out onto the actual street.

We smash into something with substance that crunches back. I look in the mirror and see we’ve just taken out a trash can. I watch it bounce back towards my building, but then the mass of bodies pouring out from all the openings of my building catches my eye. Some of them move faster, some of them move very slowly, others have a normal, almost living gate, but they are all after us.

I look forward and see a series of chained-together metal riot pens in front of us. I gun the car’s gas pedal again and break through the shoddy line. The barricades upend and disconnect, leaving them to look like the leftover ribcages of some forgotten metal beast.

Kel is still slouched unconscious in the passenger seat, still holding onto the tablet. Scott is trying to bring her back around and getting odd bursts of consciousness from her.

I drive around Public Square, making sharp turns around the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, past the broken and torched front of the Terminal Tower, the entrance to Tower City Shopping Center, moving towards Ninth Avenue. More riot cages and barricades crumble as we blast through them. I have to jerk the Focus around from left to right to avoid hitting the scattered, abandoned cars. I try to shut out the sound of thuds and crunches as we roll over body bags that are stacked two and three high.

The screen on the tablet is cracked, but the display is still feeding us info on what is happening around the building, the security protocols are off the chart for breaches, but the servers back inside my office are still online.

Kel snaps back into coherence and bolts upright, throwing Scott backwards towards his seat.

“What happened—did we make it?” she asks.

“Yeah, but you smashed your face. We’re out; where are the directions?” I ask while trying to avoid a stray, moving monster. I watch it turn around clumsily and reach out for us as we pass it in the rearview.