Wolf Running (7 page)

Jamie chewed on her lower lip for a moment, then continued drawing. “The floors are stacked in tiers, like one of those Mexican pyramid thingies. Going out the front is a no-go. Those damn Revs just
collect
there. But, the north side is a little better. I think. There’s just the staff parking lot, some small metal buildings for, I don’t know, electrical systems or whatever, and then there’s this narrow alleyway with a fence. That alley opens onto this street, Corsica, which, if you follow it far enough, turns into Highway 287 North, and then if you follow
that
long enough, leads into Wyoming.” She raised her head and looked off into the distance. “You know, I think north is the way to go. North, or maybe west. Less people so less Revs, and I wonder if the cold of the mountains wouldn’t just stop those damn things.”

Nowen had been studying the rough map as Jamie drew. Now she studied Jamie from the corner of her eye. The successful delivery of a large part of their stores to the second floor yesterday, via two open windows, knotted bed sheets, and a mop bucket, had caused a sea change in the young woman’s attitude and outlook. It seemed that just doing something, anything, was enough to draw her out of the despair that had threatened to consume her. There had been some discussion of trying to get the other survivors up to the fourth floor, but the pregnant woman couldn’t make the trip, the elderly couple wouldn’t even think about climbing up a rope made of bed-sheets, and the nurses wouldn’t leave their charges alone. Nowen had a feeling that the doctor would have loved to have climbed up the makeshift ladder but his self-image wouldn’t let him.

Nowen tapped the counter to get Jamie’s attention. “And where am I going?”

Jamie turned back to the map. She pointed at a spot just past where Corsica and the alley met. “Here. There’s a gas station, and they have a lot of food - I mean, it’s gonna be junk food, but it’s food. And water, sports drinks, etc.” She turned to Nowen, concern evident on her face. “I wish you weren’t going to do this.”

Nowen looked away from the turbulent emotions in Jamie’s eyes “We don’t have any choice.”

Jamie sighed loudly. “I know we don’t have any choice!” Her tone was acerbic. “I can still wish! I can still wish that all of this never happened, and I can still wish that the Navy would come marching in to save us.”

“We’re pretty far inland for the Navy.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was a joke.” At Nowen’s blank look the young nurse rolled her eyes. “Never mind. Come on, we’re wasting daylight.”

Half an hour later Nowen was looking out a window of the western-most hospital room. Below them the hospital dropped away, each floor wider and longer than the one before it. The drop to the next tier was about twelve feet, but a ledge ran horizontally along the wall right below the windows, effectively cutting the distance between drops in half. Fifty feet down the staff cars glinted in the sun. Behind the hospital a large grassy swath stretched out hundreds of yards. It was fenced in on all sides by limp chicken wire.

Jamie joined her. She gestured at the open ground. “I heard the hospital wanted to build on that space, but the old bastard who owns it wouldn’t sell.”

Nowen looked around, planning her route. This area looked to be free of Revs. There were a handful of bodies lying between the parked cars, but they weren’t moving. Likewise, the narrow alley and the grassland were empty. Looking to the right she could make out the figures of shambling Revs roaming through the street. Nothing else moved.

The wind shifted and suddenly the smell of the decaying bodies down below filled the room. Jamie gasped and drew back in, her hand clamped over her nose. “Oh my God.” she moaned and ran from the room. Nowen could hear the nurse vomiting from further down the hall. She closed her eyes and lifted her head to the wind. She inhaled deeply, filtering the smells as they came to her, reeking of bodies baking in the sun and rotting in the shade, of dead people behind locked doors and in locked cars dissolving into sacks of fluids and corruption. She could almost read the story of each death in the scents that spoke of gunpowder and disease and blood spilled, and she leaned forward into the wind, drinking it in.

Jamie’s footsteps snapped Nowen back into herself. Her hands ached. She looked down to see that she had made fists, clenching so tightly that her knuckles were white. She opened her hands and wondered at the half-moon marks from her fingernails. The capricious wind currents shifted again and the smells lightened and faded.

Jamie rejoined her at the window, face pale and sweaty. She offered Nowen a wan smile. “Sorry.”

Nowen shrugged her shoulders and looked back out the window. At the back of her mind a continuous note played over and over, three little words that she was able to ignore most of the time. They were trying to take over now, buoyed by her reaction to the scent of death.
Who am I? Who am I? Who amIWhoamIwhoamiwhoamiwhoamiwho-
She shoved the thoughts away, shutting a mental door on them and the faint feeling that she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer anymore.

Beside her Jamie was talking and pointing, and Nowen turned her attention to the other woman.

“-and there’s the store, the one with the blue roof, see, and you only have to get down the alley and across Corsica and there you are. Wow, sounds almost simple, huh?”

Nowen marked the location in her mind. It did sound simple, if you didn’t take into consideration the mass of cars in the street and the Revs, both of which presented obstacles.

“Getting down to the street should be the easiest part of the whole thing.” Jamie continued animatedly. “Out the window, onto the ledge, down to the next tier, and so forth. A couple of minutes and you’re in the parking lot.” She frowned and shook her head. “I feel like a general sending soldiers to their death. I’ll go.”

Nowen laid a hand on the nurse’s thin shoulder. “We’ve discussed this. I’m taller, I can run faster, and I can lift more weight than you.” Boredom brought on by interminable card games and browsing the baby name book had led to an impromptu track and field meet this morning. “And besides, you have medical training. You can help Dr. Useless if that pregnant woman goes into labor.”

“Don’t call him that.” The reply was quick and sharp.

“I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not.” Jamie turned away from the window, the set of her shoulders telling Nowen that she was miffed. “Come on, let’s do this.”

Twenty minutes later Nowen was standing in the parking lot. Other than a couple of scrapes on her palms the journey down from the fourth floor had been as easy as Jamie had said. Before starting down Nowen had changed back into the jeans and loose shirt from that first day. Now she dusted her hands on the jeans and looked up at Jamie.

A blue nylon backpack flew in an arc from the open window. Nowen caught it in one hand and looked back up in time to see another backpack, this one pink with glittery stars, come tumbling her way. She snatched it from the air and stuffed it into the first one, then pulled the blue one on, wriggling her shoulders to adjust the fit. A noise from above drew her attention upwards. Jamie was leaning far out the window.

“Please, be careful!” the young woman called down. “And don’t lose that pink pack - that one’s mine!” Her teeth flashed white in her face as she smiled.

Nowen lifted a hand and turned away from the hospital. From here her objective was hidden but she knew which way to head. She moved slowly through the small parking lot, all her senses straining for anything out of the ordinary. The buzzing of insects and the cries of a great many birds drifted through the silence. She slipped around a van that advertised a painting service and stumbled into a black mass of flies that covered something on the ground.

The flies lifted up in a dark veil and revealed two dead men in painters’ whites. One was hanging face down from the open back of the van. The other lay on his back on the ground. Maggots writhed in his empty eye sockets and spilled from his nose. The heat was drying him like leather, pulling his face tautly over his skull so that he grinned up at the indifferent sky. Blood from his savaged neck had pooled under his body, mixing with the blood that had poured from the other man in the back of the van.

In one withered hand was a length of pipe, clotted with blood and hair on one end. Nowen knelt among the flies and the smell of death and gently eased the pipe from the dead man’s grasp. She hefted its weight in her hand, then stood up and left the flies to their feast.

She reached the alley and the chicken wire fence and moved toward the street. Her view of the street ahead was narrowed by a small tan building on one side and a stand of trees on the other. The end of the alley was blocked by a dusty green station wagon that had crashed into the trees. Over the top of the car she could see other cars and storefront windows.

Reaching the small building she dropped to a crouch and moved close to the wall, the stone cladding rough against her side. She reached the cover of the station wagon and looked carefully around the rear bumper.

The street was a landscape of death. Bodies were scattered like broken toys on the street itself, on the sidewalks, on top of cars and protruding from shattered store fronts and piled in doorways where people had sought sanctuary in their last desperate moments. Flocks of crows and ravens and buzzards picked at the corpses and squabbled amongst themselves.

And everywhere were Revs, making their slow, aimless way up and down the street.

Nowen did a quick count. There were at least forty Revs between her alley and the next block south. To the north of her position there was just a handful visible. To reach the gas station she would have to cross open territory, with only a few abandoned cars for cover. There were no Revs between her and the station right now but their wandering could change that at any moment. She gripped the pipe tightly in her hand and went for it.

She slipped around the rear bumper of the station wagon and darted toward a white convertible that was slewed sideways in the street. Dried blood spilled down the driver’s side door. Crouching next to the car, she listened for any sign that the Revs had noticed her. The wind brought the rich smells of ruined bodies to her but no noticeable change in the shuffle of footsteps. She raised her head and took a quick look north and south. So far, so good.

A deep breath and she was running across an open span of pavement, hunched over as far as she could and still maintain her balance. A furniture truck offered the next cover, and Nowen crouched by the back wheels and wiped her brow. The heat was more intense out of the hospital’s shadow, and between that and the tension of this venture sweat was pouring down her face.

An empty police car parked at the curb was her next goal. Again a quick run, and again a quick look around. Someone returned her gaze. Her heart skipped a beat and she froze, watching the Rev that was watching her. It was a woman, dressed in a sleek navy blazer and skirt. The once-carefully coiffed hair was a rat’s nest over the vacant face, and dark stains covered her mouth and chest. The Rev was a strange bluish-grey color, like a moldy piece of bread. She was on the edge of the larger southern group of Revs, some sixty feet away, and as she stared and swayed Nowen held her breath and waited.

Finally the Rev turned her attention elsewhere and Nowen dropped to her knees gratefully. The muscles in the back of her legs twitched and jumped as they were released from the half-crouch. She crawled to the back of the car and scanned the gas station.

The building looked to be in good shape. None of the windows were broken, and there was only one Rev she could see from this angle. He was dressed in some type of coveralls and stood on the far side on the station by an ice machine. Debris from tipped over trash cans littered the ground. There were no abandoned cars here and she would have to make a long dash with no cover. Nowen drew her legs up beneath her and ran.

The breeze of her movement tugged at her clothes as she flew. Almost before she knew it she was through the front door of the station, letting it close softly behind her. She was assaulted by the stink of rotten food immediately and she wrinkled her nose in disgust. This wasn’t the scent of human bodies returning their substance to the earth, but instead a fetid soup of meat decomposing in plastic packages and milk souring in plastic bottles. The station had lost power some time ago, and in the darkened interior the heat collected in the air like an incipient rainstorm.

The station was large, with the checkout counter to her right. Four long aisles of merchandise, everything from cat food to cupcakes to motor oil, ran the length of the floor. Along the back and sides of the store were glass cases of drinks, juices, pre-packaged sandwiches, and a hot dog machine that still smelled redolently of roasting meat.

Quickly she slipped the backpacks off and pulled the pink one out. She headed for the liquids, filling the pack with bottles of water. When it was as full as she could get it she zipped it shut and slipped it on, the weight straining at her shoulders. Next up were bags of beef jerky, chips, crackers, and nuts, these going into the blue pack. On another aisle she found battery packs and threw a couple of them in. By this time the blue pack was full. She closed it, and then drew a short length of bed-sheet from her pocket. This she looped around the shoulder straps and drew it taut, then knotted the ends together to form a carrying handle.

Nowen stood up, balancing the weight. In her left hand was the blue backpack, in her right was the pipe. The unrelieved heat in the station and the chemical odor of the rotten meat was overpowering. Every breath she drew in felt tainted and corrupt, and nausea threatened to overwhelm her. She hurried to the front door and surveyed the street. Her luck seemed to be holding - there were no Revs nearby.

Her hand was on the door when something grabbed her from behind. Instinctively Nowen tossed her head back, connecting with a hard surface. The grip relaxed and a low moan told her it was a Rev. She whirled to face the thing, bringing her make-shift club around in a wide arc. The Rev, a man in shorts and a ball cap, had recovered quickly and he moved within the circle of her swing. Her blow missed. Again he moaned, louder this time, and raised ragged hands toward her.