This morning I removed the file cabinet I had placed in front of the office door. It scraped along the floor as I pushed it. I winced at the volume of the cabinet. Since leaving Marshall, I have uttered perhaps a paragraph of audible English to myself out loud. Although I have found silence to be crushing, noise, particularly banging and struggling, infuses my blood with fear of being discovered.
I drew my Glock and stood to the side of the door. With my off-hand, I turned the knob and pulled the door open. I rounded the opening, the Glock leading the way, expecting an onslaught of undead. But the room on the other side was empty. I could only hear the lingering hiss of the tinnitus I have self-inflicted with so much loud music in my life.
Methodically, panning every corner with my gun, I made my way through the old bank building, through corridors, down stairs, and finally out the back way into an alley. A light post stood century. A dumpster huddled to my right. I trained my weapon back and forth and found no undead. I took what seemed to be my first breath of the day, a taste of the ever-spoiling oxygen of a falling age.
I righted my mountain bike, mounted it, and kicked off down the alley, toward the dilapidated Walmart I had seen on the outskirts of town.
I reached Walmart in the late afternoon. As I made distance from the refinery, the frequency of undead dwindled to a trickle. Even on a bicycle, I had no trouble circumventing them as they staggered along the road, leaning against cars, limping toward me, turning at the sound of my shifting gears and clicking sprocket.
I dismounted as I pulled onto the sidewalk just outside Walmart’s entrance and walked my bike into the canting glass of a derailed door.
A clatter came from deeper in the store. Something was inside with me. It had sensed me. I didn’t know how many undead were shopping the big box store, but I didn’t want to risk being trapped.
I moved my bike to the toy section full of board games, squirt guns, action figures, and electronic toys—all so trivial and unimportant now. As I looked at a rack of shrink-wrapped video games, I recalled a time just months ago when we lived high on our over-stimulated world. It seemed we got lost in the onslaught of movies, cell phones, texting, tablets, video games, and social media. It seemed humanity had gone digital. All that had been halted in a few hours. Our digital counterparts dissolved into the air like vapor, leaving nothing but pure humanity.
Honestly, I didn’t miss digital humanity much, the Facebook avatars, the separatism brought on by social networking, texting, and email. I felt emancipated from the pressure of the barrage of ones and zeros. I remember surfing my Facebook feed and looking at photo after photo of rich, successful, beautiful people, posing next to expensive cars, posing on the beach, posing on luxury cruises, posing in Europe, living lives with no bounds. In the fantasy of the digital world, there were no domestic disputes, no sickness, no frailty, no death, only hopes dreams, and ambitions realized by everyone but the one taking the time to surf the feed. In the face of so much noise, I often became unsatisfied with my own lot. Such pressure even brought on depression from time to time; seeing only the best sides of everyone else can magnify your own faults.
No, I didn’t miss it. But facing the alternative, loneliness, wandering the streets and feeding from the last refused of food left by the frenzying looters, I guess I have to conclude that perfection is a myth. Life only hands out fancy-painted time bombs. They might look nice up on the mantle. But eventually they all go off. Could I dare to hope that this whole thing, the waste and wither of society, the breakdown of everything we knew and loved, would be temporary? Unlikely. And even if the undead somehow perish and leave us in a state of recovery, life would be there to meet us, ready to hand out more fancy-painted time bombs. Maybe at least we can found in all of the loss a reason to value humanity even in its frail and imperfect form.
I found what I wanted in the toy section. I picked up four Estes model rockets and a handful of fuel grain powered rocket engines. As I filled my arms with what I needed, I heard something crash at the end of the aisle. I looked up and spotted one of them, a woman, half of her shirt torn away, revealing the remains of a grungy bra, her skin white and littered with red lesions. She spotted me. Not a hint of intelligence registered on her face. She leaned toward me until her feet were forced to step. She came in a series of slow, articulated jerks. I backed away, my arms full, easily keeping enough space between us to stay safe. I thought about drawing my Glock and putting her down, but I decided to save my bullets.
I shifted my load to my other hand and pushed the mountain bike toward the front of the store. As I exited, I picked up a roll of masking tape, a pad of drawing paper, and a zippo lighter with a Harley Davidson logo etched into its face. I double-bagged everything and tied it to the handlebars.
More undead peeked out from the aisle as I pushed out of the store. It struck me how settled I felt in their proximity. In small numbers I had learned not to fear them. I had learned, rather, to pity them.
I rode the two hours it took to get back to the bank building. I leaned my mountain bike against the wall next to the alleyway entrance and spotted a dumpster tucked into an alcove. Should I sleep in there? Had the undead become wise to my camping spot on the third floor? I gave up on the dumpster and entered the bank building, taking my Walmart shopping bag with me.
I heard shuffling in the building and my heart sunk. They had gotten inside. I locked the entrance behind me, shifted my bag of goodies to my off hand, and drew my Glock. Room by room, I moved through the building, the eye of my weapon staring around corners and through doors just a beat ahead of me.
When I reached the teller area of the bank, a line of windows behind glass, computers fixed to each workstation, I found the source of the clatter. Three undead walked the reception area, all on the other side of the glass. I imagined them making a run on the bank, but not for trapped funds: for human flesh, my human flesh. Had they sensed me in the building and come to investigate? Or had they just randomly entered. I was too tired to care.
I moved to one of the teller stations and aimed through a circular hole in the thick glass. The three undead never suspected that I was there. With eight shots I killed them all. I only had a few bullets left. I mourned the loss of any extra firepower.
With the three of them lying dead in the reception area, I tried the main entrance doors: unlocked. They had come inside by pushing the oversized glass doors open. Even such a simple act of sentience scared me. I found the manual bolts on the bottoms of the doors and shot them down. The things would have to break the reinforced glass to enter the bank again and I didn’t see that happening.
I went upstairs to the office where I had made my bed and locked the door behind me. I laid everything out on a desk in the middle of the room, three rockets and twice as many engines, a sketch pad, a roll of masking tape, and a zippo lighter.
I picked up a pen and hovered over the sketchpad, pausing over what to write. I had surveyed the refinery at length from the roof. I knew the basics of its lay out. I drew a map. I put the refinery in the middle of the schematic and marked North with an arrow.
The main entrance to the refinery sat on its East end. That entrance was also the most slogged by undead. I had also spotted a break in the fence on the West end of the refinery, a gate that opened into a parking lot. I circled the smaller, west gate and wrote the words: Here, 7:00 A.M.
I looked at the map for a moment, double-checking its clarity. I wrote a brief note below the map drawing:
My Name is Lance King. I am a musician and a survivor. I came because of your smoke. If you mean your smoke as a welcoming beacon, I hope you can help me to enter your house. If you do not welcome me, I will die trying to get to you. If you permit me to join you, I will lend whatever skills I can to our collective survival. I will attempt to enter your west gate at precisely 7:00 A.M.
I drew in a deep breath and held it as I read the note one last time. I let it out in a long, resigned release. I rolled the note around the body of the largest rocket and secured it with masking tape. I put the rocket nose up on the desk, stood back, and stared at it for a moment. My entire future lay in the fate of a child’s toy. I shook my head and wrote two duplicates of the map and note and fixed them to the two other rockets.