Waiting to Die (Book 2): Wasting Away Read online

  Bodies, too badly eaten to rise, lay heaped along the road; hallow ribs and gleaming bone chewed until only the white remained. A few rats strayed from the bodies when I approached. Cockroaches oozed from the gaps in between. I held my breath to keep the stench at bay, but I could only hold it for so long until I gasped and brought the putrid decay back into my lungs.

  I searched like mad, trying to keep myself from losing what little remained in my stomach. I finally came upon a holster that laid in the gutter, shining rounds all about the belt, and I took it and thumbed out the ammo and left the belt there to rot with everything else. I put the ammo in my pack along with the other rounds I had gathered.

  Darkness was settling across the sky and I could smell the faintest hint of fire on the wind. The sky was blotched red above grey smoke.

  The dead moaned in the distance. The sounds they made hinted at pain, it played with my instincts, to reach out, to help those that cried in such misery. Somehow, it seemed as if there was something still human about them, that if I tried hard enough, I could bring them around. These thoughts were illusions, but it really did seem like they would snap out of whatever it was that made them that way.

  I was so utterly alone. I stopped in the middle of a vacant lot and thought, really took my situation into account. I was running, but wasn’t getting any closer to home. The people I loved were gone and I was another nameless husk amongst so many others. The only thing I knew was that I didn’t want to die. I decided at that moment that if I were to get back to my wife, I was going to have to put aside my disgust of the dead and do whatever it took to bridge the distance.

  I must have walked for hours because the sun began to drift up over the mountains, deep lines of purple and red lay triumphant along the clouds like a trophy to the sleepless.

  “So you ran from the beach and kept going until morning?” Mary asked.

  “As unbelievable as it sounds, yes.”

  “You had to be close to falling over.”

  “That, I was,” I said. “I’ve never been so tired. I had pushed myself farther than I ever had before. My entire body tingled with exertion.”

  There, across the dirt and asphalt, a city cast its gaze toward the skies. Even from miles away, I could tell this place was like all the others. I had only been through this city a handful of times, always on my way to somewhere else, never stopping for anything more than gas or a quick bite to eat.

  I went into the city. A mass of wrecks lined the streets. The smell of burnt chemicals had drifted away with time, but the husks still remained. Like a junkyard through time, a scrapbook filled with scenes that pointed out each massacre in turn.

  We have become the trash discarded by the unfurling of gnarled hands, I thought.

  I slept away the day in the second floor of a blown out building. With my pack cinched tightly against my back, I climbed the rubble. Broken chunks of concrete blocked the only door from what had been an office. I tucked myself beneath a desk and placed my pack under my head. I heard explosions from far off in the city. I heard the dead scream below. I listened to the building creak as I placed my arm over my eyes and began to drift away.

  It was dark when I arose. Moonlight played at the shadows of the wreckage below, creating deep crevices of darkness between the slabs of wall that had toppled from the building.

  I slowly made my way back down to the street, negotiating through jagged rebar and sheered of water pipes. A layer of dust covered me from my descent. I wiped away the dirt from my eyes and followed the light that seeped through the clouds.

  Through the rust and ash, I could see the bodies shuffling along littered streets. Hunched over, they seemed like haggard drunks with shallow, sunken faces. Each one was a testimony to defiance. The natural course of life and death had never come for them.

  I was alone, but my prison was no more. I had thrown off my fear of those things and emerged a new man. There was something transcendental about it like shedding skin. I felt free for the first time since this had begun.

  Over time, I discovered what they were, what made them tick, what made them want me dead. No breath escaped their lungs; no heart beat within their rotten chests. They were everything and nothing to me, they were the symbols of a new life, a new way of thought, and a new world just waiting to be had.

  I watched, waiting for them to move away. They never stayed in one place for too long. They were thirsty for blood; they were hungry for flesh; they were ghoulish things constructed of fear.

  As soon as they were out of eyeshot, I made my move and sprinted from behind the wreck I used for cover to a partially collapsed building at the other side of the street. Above the building, I caught a glimpse of a power line that ran to the park, glistening slightly from the moonlight and dew. I took cover in a pile of fallen bricks from the building to my side and held my breath for fear of them hearing me.

  The clothes I had scavenged from the sporting goods store were covered in filth, saturated in waste and sweat, torn by my ordeal. They were the image of how far I had gone, and everything I had been through. I wore them like a badge of courage.

  The dead made their way across the street, a block away and down an embankment to the park below. They moaned and wheezed as they shuffled along, haggard beggars in search of spare change and loose skin. A gentle wind brought their stench and I wanted to vomit from the smell. Their odor was like piss and shit and rotten fish left to bake in the midday sun. I held my breath for a moment before I made my move.

  Through the building I used as cover, I found an opening in the ruined outer wall and crawled through. Blast marks singed the sides of the hole. I passed a door on the first floor and made my way to a set of stairs. I leapt over a corpse at the bottom and continued upward. At every landing, I waited, concentrating on the groaning sounds of the building, hoping to filter through the sounds of the dead that might have been in there with me.

  At the top of the third floor, I peered through the broken out window that overlooked the street below. In the distance, they swarmed a particular area of the park and I strained my eyes to see what had gotten them in such a fuss.

  There was a shadowed form, huddled atop a platform of a water tower at the far side of the park. I could see the shape move slightly as the bodies screamed below. Their voices were like twisting metal; shrill and unnerving.

  From my pack, I pulled a small pair of binoculars and gazed at the shape on the catwalk. I could see tufts of hair poking out from underneath the hood of a sweater. The figure moved their head to the left and I could finally see a face. She was a young girl, probably in her teens. Dirt stained her face and streaks of clean skin appeared beneath her eyes and along her cheeks from where tears had washed away the dirt.

  The way she looked made me think of the time before. I had pulled off the freeway on my way home and saw a young man holding a sign that simply read HUNGRY. His hair was caked to his head and he wore a long face and scruffy beard, splotched about his cheeks and chin. I thought he couldn’t have been much older than twenty. But it was his clothes that caught my attention. Youth is a time to rebel and what better way to show your distaste for society than to wear black? His shirt and pants had faded to a dull brown, bleached by the sun. On the other side of the overpass, I saw a young girl. She kept an attentive eye on the guy holding the sign. And she looked just like the girl on the water tower. Everything she was or would be had been faded into a dull brown.

  It was hard to tell how many of the dead were there. They resembled a writhing mass of shadow, but I gauged at least a hundred bodies at the foot of the water tower and several dozen more approaching from around the outer banks of the park.

  I descended the stairs, hopped over the corpse at the bottom and checked the door I had found on the first floor. The knob turned easily in my hand and I slowly pushed it inward.

  The hairs at the back of my neck rose. I could feel something in the air, a tingling sensation that kept me on guard.

  An enormous wa
rehouse revealed itself beyond the threshold. Rows of shelves stacked with boxes, spread out for as far as the darkness allowed me to see. I began sorting through their contents, hoping to find something of use.

  This was a distribution warehouse, packed with merchandise for several different stores. I eventually found what I thought I would need to set up a distraction.

  I took a pulley, a bottle of paint thinner and two empty soda bottles from atop a desk near the main door. After stuffing the supplies into my pack, I went back up to the top floor and out the window.

  Along an external water pipe that went to the roof, I climbed; hand over hand, using my feet as leverage against the brick wall. My arms ached and the palms of my hands were being pinched as I gripped tightly to the pipe, trying to make my way to the roof.

  Every few feet, I tucked my forearm behind the pipe and rested, waiting for the pain in my hands to subside so I could ascend just a few more feet before repeating the process again.

  Sweat stung my eyes and I desperately tried to blink away the burn. From behind, I could hear the bodies grunting and screaming at the girl on the tower. It took every ounce of strength I had remaining to hoist myself up onto the roof.

  I collapsed once I cleared the decorative flashing. I rubbed at my hands to regain feeling. Above me, I saw the power line I had spotted from before and placed my pack on the flashing to recover the supplies.

  Once I had the pulley mounted on the power line, I used a bundle of paracord from my pack and tied a quick release knot around the bottle of paint thinner and looped the other end through an eyelet on the pulley. At the far end of the cord, I cinched a knot which would allow me to bring the pulley back in case I needed to repeat the process. I tore a strip off of my shirt and tucked it tightly into the bottle after I filled it with paint thinner.

  With a flashlight at the ready, I signaled the girl. She waved at me ecstatically when she spotted the signal. I pointed the light to a cropping of buildings, letting it fall to where we should meet up. The girl held her hands up, motioning that she didn’t understand. I pointed again. I used the technique I had seen earlier at the beach, upturning the bottle to allow its contents to saturate the cloth.

  I lit the wick.

  The mouth of the bottle leaned forward enough to where it wouldn’t catch the paracord on fire. As the contents of the bottle sloshed about, I let the cord go slack in my hand. The flames whooshed as the bottle descended quickly along the power line toward the dead.

  I held the cord once the bottle was stationed over the crowd and waited for them to notice. Within a few seconds, the dead caught their first glimpse of flickering flame and approached with curiosity. They were mesmerized by the fire as it licked upward towards the electrical line, dancing as black smoke drifted upward and mingled with the darkness through the light of the flame.

  Holding the cord with my foot, I made the second bottle ready while more of the Infected approached the dangling cocktail. I gritted my teeth and gave the cord a quick tug before it melted through.

  End over end, the cocktail plummeted toward the ground. From its initial height, the bottle broke easily as it slammed against a darkened silhouette. A wave of liquid flame surged through the air and ignited everything within a few feet.

  Enflamed bodies bumped into one another as they howled. The fire spread from one corpse to the next - an inferno of writhing bodies. Again, I signaled the girl with the pointer and flashlight. She nodded her head and made her way down the ladder as I pulled the cord, bringing the pulley back toward me.

  I watched as the crowd dispersed like firefly’s, each body running off as the flames surged upward and back from their movements. They wailed as bits of burning flesh peeled from their limbs, igniting the dead grass beneath their feet.

  To my right, I could see the girl run behind the buildings I had indicated as the dead began to fall. She zigzagged through burning bodies, inhuman torches, brightening the night. I was amazed to see that only one Molotov cocktail had done so much damage. I untied the paracord from the pulley and placed it in my pack, leaving the flashlight in my hand so I could signal the girl once I was within the safety of the cropping of buildings.

  Leaving the other cocktail on the ledge, I raced along the roof and found a fire escape at the rear of the building that ended in an alleyway. Bodies popped and hissed as the flames continued to burn. Their screams receded into the night as I climbed over the flashing and lowered myself to the first platform of the fire escape.

  The smell of burnt hair and cooking meat drifted in the air as I lowered myself to the last ladder that hung precariously above the ground. I readied myself and dropped from the last handhold, rolling once I hit the ground. I rolled to my left and leapt to my feet.

  I was off in a sprint, choking as the smoke drifted past. It stung my eyes and burned my throat as I gasped for air. From my peripheral, I saw a body shambling along the main street as it made its way from the sidewalk that led from the park. It stopped, swayed and finally collapsed at the curb line. A sickening wheeze escaped its mouth as I passed. The body was still sizzling as I darted past it and ran off into the cropping of buildings where the girl had disappeared. The smell of burnt hair, acrid and nauseating, wafted from the corpse.

  With the flashlight in hand, I began to click it on and off to signal the girl out of hiding. I took to the alleyway between two of the buildings at a jog, clicking the light as I went.

  “Stay there,” a voice said in a whisper.

  I stopped and guided the light to where I thought I heard the voice. A solitary face poked out from behind a trash bin; soot covered most of the girl’s features. Two gleaming white eyes stared out at me through the darkness.

  “We need to get out of here before more come,” I said.

  “Who are you and why did you save me?” she asked.

  “Most people would just have been happy for being alive,” I said.

  “Most people are dead,” she retorted.

  I laughed. “Listen, I don’t mean any harm. I just saw that you needed help.”

  “So did the last guy that claimed he was trying to save me.”

  I heard screams echo off of the buildings; shrill, hissing screams that made my spine tingle. “Look, we really need to get out of here.”

  The girl lowered her eyes as if she were out of options. “Fine, but keep your distance.”

  “I’ll walk ahead of you so you can keep an eye on me, but we need to go now,” I said as the wailing became louder through the alleyway.

  I clicked off the flashlight and gave the girl a wide breadth as I walked around her. From the corner of my eye, I could see her gaze following me until I was far enough along the alleyway for her to feel comfortable with the distance.

  At the next junction of the alley, I took a left and continued towards the street that lay beyond. The voices of the dead trailed off as we passed overturned dumpsters and rotten garbage. I kept checking behind us, afraid that the corpses would find us out.

  “We need to find a place to hide,” I whispered over my shoulder. “I think that’s an apartment building up ahead.” I pointed towards a dilapidated building in the distance and along the front toward the doors.

  “I still don’t trust you,” she said.

  I turned and pulled the pistol from my waistband. “Here,” I said, handing over the weapon. “Does this make you feel better?”

  “Actually, a little,” she said, taking the gun.

  Chapter 11

  “That was a pretty big move, trusting her like that,” Mary said. “She could have been crazy. Hell, she could have taken everything you had.”

  “I didn’t have much choice; it was a risk I was willing to take.” I moved in the chair and stretched my back. “It was either that or have her wondering about this strange, dirty man that came out of nowhere.”

  “I don’t know if I would have trusted you either,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like the thing a rational person would do - saving someone yo
u don’t even know, especially when there were that many of the dead around.”

  “Really, I’ve seen more than that on a morning stroll.” I smiled.

  “I bet you have,” she laughed.

  Like a captive, I walked ahead of the girl and crossed the street. I was surprised how the apartment building had fared comparatively to the rest of the neighborhood. The massive brick and stone structure retained its upper class status even through a war with the dead. Each floor of the building had a fire escape that wound along the side, eventually dropping off to stairs, leading to the next lower level.

  The front doors had ornamental metal bars over the glass facing and a decorative brass knob jutted out at the center. Cold in my hand, I twisted the knob. With a faint click, it opened easily. I hesitated at the threshold, sniffing the air.

  The building had a dank, dusty smell rather than the rotten, leprous odor of the dead that I had come to know. I breathed a sigh of relief and forged a few feet ahead, giving the girl room to follow.

  “I think it’s safe,” I said as I looked back at her.

  “How can you know for sure?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t smell of death,” I said, flatly

  I went in first and told her to bolt the door behind her. With a gentle click, she turned the deadbolt while continuing to hold the pistol on me. I walked ahead, sinking into the soft carpet beneath me and watched as dust glistened upward from my footfalls in the moonlit halls.

  My body ached as the adrenalin receded. Sore, tired muscles retaliated in fatigue as I made my way past the elevator and to a door marked with a sign that read ‘stairwell’. Beyond the door, there was nothing but darkness. I retrieved my flashlight, clicked it on, and guided the beam along the edge of the stairs. A vast expanse of nothing revealed itself - off white walls and red carpet contrasting in the glow of the light.

  “Don’t follow too closely,” I whispered, descending to the first stair.