On the screen, a human zombie repeatedly slapped the door with a severed penis he clutched in his fist. A dead dog licked the steel, slowly and methodically, as if trying to wear down the door with its tongue. Another zombie’s eyeball popped in its socket as I watched. The gooey remnants slipped down the corpse’s cheek like a squashed grey slug. A cloud of flies swarmed toward the hole and began to crawl in and out. Disgusted by what I was watching, yet strangely compelled to watch it anyway, I shuffled toward the blast door, my peril momentarily forgotten. I was thankful that the closed circuit system had no sound. Seeing them was one thing. Hearing them was another, and smelling them was even worse. As I got close to the door, I imagined that I could hear them. Despite the background noise from the power plant and the unbelievable thickness of the door itself, I heard their distant moans. The dead sounded hungry.
I knew how they felt. My stomach grumbled, as if in sympathy, and I clutched at it through my shirt, feeling my ribs beneath the fabric. I tried to remember how long it had been since I’d eaten, and found that I couldn’t. In truth, I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d taken a shit. I hadn’t needed to for a while. There was nothing inside of me that had needed to come out, other than piss and despair and madness, and I’d been doing a pretty good job of keeping that last one bottled up.
Still holding my stomach, I returned to the cul-de-sac, climbed over the skids, and ducked down behind them. I laid one of my makeshift spears on the floor and clutched the other one in my fist. After laying it across my lap, I leaned back and tried to lose myself in the shadows. I settled in to wait for someone to show.
It turned out that I didn’t have to wait for long.
FIVE
“Careful now. He could be hiding underneath one of those forklifts.”
I snorted, coming fully awake, and sat up so quickly that I banged the back of my head against the wall. I winced, barely keeping from crying out. My eyes watered as I rubbed my head. Then I held still and listened. My pulse raced from zero to ninety. I was certain someone had heard me.
“Is that true, Pete?” The speaker was a man, but I couldn’t tell who. It was hard to judge how far away he was, due to the tunnel’s echoing effects. “You hiding out over there?”
Their footsteps drew closer. I could hear them even over the distant sounds from the power plant, which meant that they were close by. I cursed myself for falling asleep. How had I allowed that to happen, and perhaps more importantly, how long had I been out? Did they know I was here? Judging by their conversation, it didn’t seem that way, but what if they were just toying with me? Trying to psyche me out? I glanced down. One of my spears was still on my lap and the other lay out of reach. It must have rolled away while I slept. I grabbed the one in my lap, gripping the shaft so tightly that my knuckles turned white. I wanted to sit up the entire way and peer out over the skids, but I resisted the urge. My only hope at that moment was that the shadows would conceal me. If they actually entered the cul-de-sac and looked over the forklifts and generators, I’d be caught. I took a deep breath and held it. The footsteps stopped.
“See anything?” I recognized the speaker as George Laidlaw, a fellow employee of the Pocahontas and up until this point, a fairly decent guy.
“No.” I knew that soft-spoken voice, as well. It was Jim Mars. “Ain’t nothing here.”
“He could be behind those skids.” A third speaker. Male, and judging from the accent, a local, but I still didn’t recognize the voice.
“Pete,” Jim called, “come on out if you’re there. I don’t like it any more than you do, but there’s no helping it. Come on out. You’re only making this harder on yourself.”
My nose suddenly began to itch. I resisted the urge to move. When my stomach gurgled, I thought for sure they had heard it.
“Go on back there,” George said. “Let’s make sure.”
“He ain’t there,” the unidentified third man said. “I still say he’s probably hiding out in the power plant. That’s sure as hell where I’d go if it was me.”
“Well, it ain’t you.”
“I’m just saying, is all.”
“And I said we need to make sure, Clyde.”
I silently thanked George for filling me in on the third man’s identity. It was Clyde Osborne, a shifty little runt from Punkin Center who worked at the hotel as a greens keeper. ‘Worked’ was a relative term, since all Clyde had ever seemed to do was take smoke breaks. He’d weighed about a buck oh five before we ran out of food, and weeks of starvation hadn’t improved his condition. He’d be no problem, if it came to a fight.
“Come on,” Jim said. “The sooner we get this over with, the better. My stomach is in knots. This don’t sit well with me.”
The footsteps shuffled closer and there was a subtle change in the lighting. Without turning my head, I looked to the right and saw shadows on the wall. Whoever it was, they were close enough that I could hear them breathing. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. My entire body tensed.
“Got him,” Clyde shouted. “He’s hunkered down back here behind this—”
Without thinking, I jumped up from my hiding place and thrust the spear at him. The jagged point stabbed the fleshy part of his shoulder, right between his arm and his chest. There was a brief second of resistance and then the spear sank into his skin. Clyde wailed. I heard the other two men holler. Something slipped from Clyde’s hand and clattered onto the floor. I glanced down and saw that it was a length of pipe that he’d apparently intended to use as a club.
“Goddamn,” he screamed. “The fucker stabbed me.”
Jim and George stood just outside the cul-de-sac, gaping at us both. George was armed with a pocketknife. Jim had a piece of two-by-four. On the closed circuit television, the zombies seemed to be watching the action, as well. I wondered if they could sense the struggle going on beneath the mountain. Grunting, I yanked my spear free. Clyde stumbled backward, his free hand pressing against his wound. Blood welled from between his fingers. I thrust the spear at him and he scrambled away. He bumped against the nearest forklift and fell down. Despite everything, I laughed. At first, the noise confused me. I wasn’t aware that it was me making the sound. Then I saw the panic in Clyde’s wide eyes, and I laughed harder. I lifted my head and stared at Jim and George.
“Who’s next? How about you, George? You want some?”
“Fuck you,” George said quietly.
“No, fuck you, you cocksucker. It doesn’t have to be this way, George. None of this has to happen. I mean, have you guys stopped for just one second and thought about what you’re doing here?”
Jim sighed. “You killed Krantz, Pete.”
“Because you guys were going to kill me. It was self-defense, man.”
“So is this.”
I groaned with frustration. “Are you really so far gone that Chuck’s idea seems like a good one?”
“It’s better than starving to death,” George said.
Jim nodded in agreement. “I want to make it back home to my family, Pete.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.”
He shook his head. “Sooner or later, the zombies will go away. They’re rotting. Eventually, there won’t be anything left of them. We’re just waiting for the last zombie.”