The mayor was already in his office in the Palacio Municipal, meeting with his emergency cabinet and in direct communication with the chief of police, who was manning his battle station at police headquarters. Representatives of the community were constantly arriving there as well as the Palacio, and urgent deliberations resulted in the issuing of the first orders. Telephones were ringing throughout the larger metropolitan area. Fortunately, everybody knew each other in Pringles, and in turn all the people who knew each other knew everyone else, so the web of communications didn’t take long to start buzzing and producing concrete results.
The first initiative the authorities took was to establish a line of defense at a certain distance from the position of the invasion at that moment, sacrificing a few blocks (whose inhabitants would be evacuated) in order to have time to prepare. The Line was drawn on the map of the City of Pringles that was hanging on a walclass="underline" the central section would run along the diagonal, less than a hundred yards long, that went from the police headquarters to the Palacio, passing through the Plaza. It would continue northward along Mitre Street and to the east through the small plaza on the Boulevard, all the way to the Granadero. The idea was to form a line of cars and trucks in front of armed men equipped with all the weapons and ammunition that could be found. And there was plenty of it — a passion for hunting had prevailed in the town since the old days.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…
The roar of engines filled the Pringles night, awakening the few who were still asleep. Police and firemen oversaw the formation of the Line, while a police car equipped with loudspeakers drove up and down the streets of No Man’s Land instructing everyone to evacuate immediately. Those concerned did not need to be told twice: they were already running in their nightshirts and slippers to take refuge on the other side of the wall of parked vehicles, which had quickly formed. They didn’t keep going: they stayed there to watch the marksmen take up position, and they were joined by the curious bystanders who had come from downtown, drawn to what they hoped would be an unforgettable spectacle. Most were young people: the nightclubs had emptied out, and the fun-loving gangs of teenagers brought their boisterous happiness to the battlefield. With them, heavily armed hunters kept arriving and were placed at the weakest points along the Line. They were even hailing from the neighborhood beyond Boulevard Cuarenta, after having been informed of the situation by fellow members of the Rifle Club. The arsenal they deployed was impressive. The pretext for buying it had been the geese, the partridges, the hares, and the pretext had been perfected by the far-away and hypothetical deer and wild boar; even so, it would have been difficult to explain — except as the whim of a collector — the presence of Belgian automatic rifles, howitzers, molten aluminum explosive bullets, and even grenades. Many small farmers have more money than they need, and, with so few opportunities in small towns for social or cultural consumerism, they indulge in the purchase of weapons until there’s no place left in their houses to put them.
From the top of the Palacio’s tower, one-armed Artola, “El Manco,” watched the invasion advance. With his one hand he brought the walkie-talkie up to his mouth and reported on the latest developments; the receiver, with the volume turned all the way up and the channel open, was in the mayor’s office: with one ear they listened to El Manco and with the other to the reports and opinions of the crowd of polite volunteers who were coming, going, or staying put, in addition to those calling on the phone. The commotion was becoming extreme. To move from his desk to the wall map in order to record the data coming in from the tower, the mayor had to elbow his way through, and by the time he got there, somebody else had already moved forward the line of red-headed pins, which left him confused.
Up there alone, El Manco was no less confused. He had to admit that the view was splendid and defied the imagination; beyond that, everything was ambiguity. The full moon spread its white light impartially over the darkness of the town, making it seem to rise to the surface, like the checkerboard skin of an antediluvian sperm whale. The plain stretched out and beyond, as did the phosphorescent ribbon of highway distorted by the curvature of the horizon. The sector he was watching was much closer, though he was well aware that at night the illusory plains of contiguity could become stuck together, like the pages of a book. His attention separated the pages, and there the aberrations of nocturnal vision coincided with the monstrous fantasies of nightmare.
Nevertheless, they seemed so inoffensive, those grasshoppers in perpetual motion. He watched them flapping around like madmen, leaping from the street to the cornices, running across the rooftops, slipping through every crack — even where there weren’t any cracks. They crowded together, they dispersed, they stopped and spread out their arms like antennae. Suddenly they would all gather in angular shadows; an instant later they were legions swarming in the silvery glow through which their passage left a green, pink, and violet wake.
There was one thing they never did: retreat. The advance was uneven, as was the blotch of invaders across the checkerboard of houses and streets, but there was a method, and it was a very simple one: to continuously advance, to keep moving in the same direction. Everything was uneven: the movements, the leaps, the meetings and separations; that chaos, by contrast, highlighted the strict mechanics by which they were “covering” territory. It was the irreversibility that gave the scene its threatening oneiric tone. Like in a dream, everything seemed to be on the point of vanishing but at the same time ablaze with persistent reality. It was as if at every point in the unevenly illuminated darkness, valves opened, letting in impossible beings, then closed with a velvety plunger that stopped them from turning back.
El Manco had to keep reminding himself that this was not a game and that he wasn’t there to amuse himself but rather to monitor events and issue warnings, so he rushed to transmit the coordinates of the incoming tide; he also reported on which points were vulnerable along the barricade of automobiles and marksmen, though these were fewer and fewer. The impression he got, from his privileged perspective, was that the entire town had gathered at the Line of Defense, where there was an extraordinary amount of activity. People were arriving in their cars and leaving them parked two or three deep, often blocking the side streets completely. He sent a warning out over his walkie-talkie: it would be impossible to effect a quick retreat, in case that became necessary. He insisted, because he had the feeling that they weren’t listening to him. Then came a fairly hysterical exchange of opinions with somebody down below.
But when he turned back to look beyond the Line, at the neighborhoods that had already been invaded, he really had a fright. The advance had taken on a new dimension, had changed both quantitatively and qualitatively. All of a sudden the army of the living dead showed itself to be much more numerous. The huge mass of stragglers had reached the ones in front, overwhelming them like a solid, majestic ocean wave washing over drops of dew. And it continued advancing, destroying everything in its path, now without pausing, which was understandable because the last blocks before the Boulevard and the Plaza had already been evacuated, and perhaps also because they could smell the throngs waiting for them… He shouted into the radio: they were coming, they had arrived, hand-to-hand combat was imminent.
He wasn’t lying. He was still talking when the first shots rang out. The people lying in wait behind the vehicles, who’d already had their fingers on the triggers for some time, started shooting as soon as they had the first living dead in their sights, and since there were so many people aiming at the even more numerous capering ghouls pouring forth from the deserted streets, there were multiple salvos, and after the first few, they started firing continuously. The crowd that had gathered in a compact mass behind the marksmen let out a unanimous shout, like the audience at a rock concert when, after a long wait, they see their idols finally coming out on stage. And there was something about the dead that was similar to rock musicians, with their disheveled appearance, their stringy hair, their spastic stride, and the arrogant self-confidence of knowing they are stars and that their mere presence satisfies everybody’s pent-up expectations. That’s where the similarities ended and the differences — horrific — began. Somehow everybody, even those keeping a Winchester rifle with nine rounds warm in their hands, and even more so the bystanders crowding behind them, had sustained doubts about the truth of what was going on. Nobody liked their doubts to vanish; the truth threw them off. And by stepping into the white circles shed by the mercury lightbulbs of the streetlights along the Boulevard, the arriving swarm showed off a reality that was frankly disagreeable. Rotten rags, exposed bones, skulls, femurs, phalanges, strips of cartilage hanging off like the remnants of an old collage. as well as the determination, the hunger, the race to see who would get there first.