Death, Be Not Proud Page 3

  One of the girls in our group let out a scream and the cops hurried her onto the bus. Then, while the rest of us watched in horror, one of the cops went over to the crowd and shot those wounded people one by one with deliberate headshots. I couldn’t believe it. The cop never even gave them a chance to run away. He just shot them. And weirder still, not a single one of that crowd bothered to so much as flinch, even with a rifle pointed at their faces. It was like they didn’t know what was happening.

  The next moment, we were on the bus. Our driver, a thin, terrified looking man in shabby clothes, turned the bus toward the street with a lurch and built up speed. The shooting we’d just witnessed had left us all stunned and silent. Cowed, I guess you’d say. We sat in our seats, staring out the windows at the destruction and the insane crowds banging on the sides of the bus, and I don’t think any of us even thought to ask where we were being taken.

  Just like I don’t think any of us thought to use the word zombie.

  At least at that point.

  From our hotel they drove us to the Beijing West Railway Station. Let me say this first and foremost on the behalf of the Chinese. They took care of us. They never once forgot that we were their guests. They could have left us in that hotel to die along with everyone else. I’m pretty sure, had what happened to us happened in the U.S., that’s probably what would have happened. But the Chinese had a sense of obligation that was so strong, so ingrained, that even in the face of a zombie apocalypse, they took real pains to get us out of harm’s way. They had no idea the hell they were condemning us to, and I cannot fault them for what came afterwards. They tried. They really did.

  The railway station was a mad, screaming hive of humanity. Hundreds of thousands of people were surging toward the platforms, trying to board the trains. We lost Virginia Wilder, our teacher from Florida, and Wade Mallum, our UAW representative, somewhere in that mad scramble to the trains. I don’t know how it happened, but I saw Jim and Sandra running away from where Virginia and Wade went down.

  “Those crazy yellow bastards are eating each other,” Sandra said.

  “What?” I said. I had only known Sandra for a few weeks at that point, but I was already well aware of her ability to say things that defied the logic used by sane people.

  “They got Virginia and Wade,” Jim said. “We couldn’t save them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They were dead weight slowing us down.” He was winded, but he managed to turn to Sandra and smile. “We’re okay.”

  I just stared at him, dumbfounded. Amid the deafening roar of hundreds of thousands of a panicking people, after watching two of our group get trampled and possibly eaten, he had the audacity to call them dead weight.

  But I didn’t get the chance to call him on his words, for at that moment our escorts managed to zipper open a path through the crowd and get us onto a train. It was a fairly new, fairly clean commuter car. No frills, no special compartments. Just three rows of seats on either side of a center aisle, like a small jet airliner.

  And we had the car to ourselves.

  I dropped down into a window seat and looked out across the crowded platform. I found it hard to believe we’d ended up the only ones in our car. As we pulled away from the platform, I saw people screaming for a chance to get on. Mothers held up their babies, begging us to take them. Hundreds jumped onto the outside of the train and held on as long as they could. It was a sorry, sad sight, and as Jim, Sandra, and Brad began to scream at each other about whose fault all this was, I slipped further down into my seat and pressed my hands over my ears and tried to block out the screams of all those poor people falling away behind us.

  We did not make it very far.

  As soon as we cleared the gates I saw people surging against the sides of the train. I heard their bodies thudding against metal and felt the train lurch as they collapsed onto tracks and were run over.

  I looked to one side and saw our entire group with their faces pressed against the windows, none of them speaking, but all of them wearing stunned, horrified expressions upon their faces.

  “My God,” I heard someone say. “Look at all of them. There’s so many.”

  And there were, too.

  Hundreds of thousands of them.

  I looked out the window and all I could see were faces closing in around us. They were pressing against the train, swarming over top of it.

  Suddenly the train lurched and came to a violent, shuddering halt. All of us were thrown from our seats. For a moment, I felt like I was getting pushed forward, like I was on the crest of a wave. And then, just as suddenly, I hit the deck and banged my head against the bottom of a seat.

  I blacked out for a second.

  When I came to, I was groggy, disoriented. I stood up and looked around. My hair felt wet. I touched it and came away with blood on my fingers. Sandra Palmer had her hand over her forehead, a runner of blood oozing out from between her fingers. Her mouth was twisted, like she was about to scream, or cry, but couldn’t decide which. Brad Owens had landed in a heap against the forward door. Jim Bowman was right next to him. His arm looked broken.

  “They’ve knocked us off the rails,” somebody said.

  “Impossible,” someone else said.

  “Take a look if you don’t believe me.”

  Several of us went to the window, and I could tell at a glance he was right. From where I stood I could see the half dozen cars ahead of us, and the lead car was jackknifed across the tracks.

  “How is that possible?” the girl next to me asked.

  I shook my head. But I knew. I think we all knew. We’d run over so many bodies the wheels had just skipped the tracks.

  And now, an army hundreds of thousands strong was surging against our train car, banging on the side panels. The combined roar of their moans and screams and their fists pounding on the sides of the train was deafening. The girl next to me, a Culinary Arts major from SMU, was in tears.

  For a moment I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her. But before I got the chance, Jake Arguello, our Texas cop, started hollering from the rear of the car.

  “Their breaking in the door back here!”

  Billy Gantz, our West Point cadet, rushed that way. “I’ll help you.”

  I watched the two of them punch and kick a Chinese woman who had managed to squeeze through the busted door. She fell back into the writhing mass of hands and faces and they slammed what was left of the door against the surging crowd.

  Jake put his back against the door to brace it.

  “I’ve got it!” he yelled. “Get something to help me hold it.”

  A metal handrail had snapped and fallen to the ground. Billy scooped it up and jammed it into well of the doorway on the opposite side. Once it was in place it looked like a curtain rod between the two doors. It was an elegantly simple solution. The harder the crowd pressed from one side, the more pressure it put against the doors on the opposite side, where the crowd was also pushing inward.

  Billy rushed into the door well and pulled Jake back into the car. We gathered around to look at him, then recoiled. His back had been shredded by the fingernails of the crowd. He was bleeding badly, and screaming from the pain.

  “Those fuckin’ yellow bastards,” Sandra said. “We gotta stop ‘em.”

  “No!” Brad said. “They’re cold. They’re hungry. They’re tired and poor. We should let them in.”

  “What?” Jim said. “Are you fucking insane?”

  Brad raised his chin. “No, I’m not. We will be judged on how we handle ourselves here. Those people are scared. I think we have a moral obligation to share our resources.”

  “I’m not sharing anything with them.”

  Brad was standing at the opposite end of the car, still nursing his bruised shoulder. He scanned the rest of us to see who had spoken and saw Tynice Jackson staring back at him. She’d been Brad’s biggest cheerleader throughout the first part of our trip, defending him every time Jim and Sandra railed ag
ainst his leadership, but now she stood defiant, arms akimbo.

  Brad steepled his fingers together in front of his belt. “Tynice,” he said patiently, “we’re going through a rough patch right now. We need to approach this logically.”

  “Logically?” said Jim. “Dude, they tried to kill our cop. How much more logical do you need to be than that?”

  “This isn’t a job for law enforcement,” Brad said.

  “Well, it’s pretty much become a job for law enforcement,” Tynice shot back, “because you won’t do anything about it. Get over here and help. As long as you’re standing way over there out of harm’s way you got no business to talk.”

  I was frantically writing it all down, thankful I had stayed awake during my shorthand class, when Jake started to convulse.

  “Something’s happening!” said Billy. “He’s foaming at the mouth.”

  And he was right, too. I watched Jake shaking on the floor. He was bleeding from the corners of his eyes and from his nose. He was trembling like we’d just pulled him from a frozen pond.

  “What’s happening to him?” Sandra said. “Those yellow bastards did something to him, didn’t they?”

  Nobody answered her.

  Wayne Scott, a second year med student at Johns Hopkins, rushed over to Jake’s side and looked into his eyes. The foam at Jake’s mouth was turning pink from blood.

  “He’s going into cardiac arrest,” Wayne said.

  “Help him,” somebody said.

  “I can’t. I’d need a...”

  Wayne trailed off mid-sentence. Jake’s convulsions had suddenly stopped, and now he looked like a tire rapidly going flat. A faint, rattling gasp rose up from Jake’s throat and then he went still, his bloodshot eyes staring off toward the ceiling, the only movement a runner of blood leaking down his cheek from one nostril.

  “Is he...?” Jim said.

  Wayne looked up at him and nodded. “It happened so fast,” he muttered. “I couldn’t do anything.”

  None of us spoke for a long moment. We all stood there, looking at our dead friend. I saw the same dawning terror on all their faces. What were we going to do? Who was going to bail us out?

  I honestly had no idea, and I’m pretty sure none of the others did either.

  Outside, the roar of the crowd continued. Their moaning was awful. I tried not to listen to it, to block it out somehow, but that was impossible to do. The sound was making my skin crawl, and all I wanted to do was go to the corner and throw up.

  “Something’s happening,” Wayne said.

  I stood on my tiptoes to get a look at what he was doing. He was still kneeling at Jake’s side, but his expression had changed to one of disgust, and he was rocking back on his haunches away from Jake.

  Jake’s dead gaze had been turned up towards the ceiling, looking at nothing, but now it was locked on Wayne.

  “I thought you said he was dead,” Jim said.

  But before Wayne could answer, Jake sat up. He looked at the circle of horrified faces staring down at him, and then lunged for Wayne. Wayne tried to push him away, but Jake was already on top of him, clawing at his face and biting at Wayne’s fingers as Wayne tried to turn Jake’s chin away.

  None of us moved. I think we were all too shocked. I watched one of Wayne’s fingers stray too close to Jake’s mouth and then Jake bit it off. Blood gushed from the wound. Wayne opened his mouth to scream, but at that instant Jake locked his teeth onto Wayne’s throat and silenced him.

  Only then did the rest of us react.

  Billy, our West Point cadet, rushed in and pulled Jake off of Wayne. He threw Jake to one side, and was about to check on Wayne, when Jake got back to his feet. He reached for Billy and started moaning.

  “Get the fuck back, man,” Billy said.

  Jake kept coming.

  “I’m serious, dude…take a step back.”

  Jake swiped at him with his bloody fingernails. Billy sidestepped the blow easily and swept Jake’s legs out from under him, dropping him to the ground.

  Before Jake could get up again, Billy grabbed another piece of handrail that had fallen from the ceiling. Gripping it like a police baton, he took up a position between Jake and the rest of us.

  “Come on, man…don’t come any closer.”

  Jake’s eyes were dead and vacant. If he heard a word Billy said, there was no recognition of it in his expression.

  His hands came up again, clutching at Billy.

  “Shit,” Billy said, and swung the piece of handrail at Jake, hitting him across the flat of his jaw.

  Metal hit bone with a sickening crunch and Jake collapsed onto the back of a chair. Anybody else would have stayed that way, or maybe even slid to the floor, unconscious. But Jake showed no sign of pain. He straightened himself back up immediately, his face a smashed and bleeding mess, and staggered toward Billy a second time.

  Billy took a step back, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “Do something,” Brad said. His cool, calm veneer was gone. The look on his face was positively frantic.

  I saw movement from the floor, behind Brad. It was Wayne. He had been convulsing, the same as Jake had done, but now he was rising to his feet. When he turned to face the rest of us, I saw a large flap of skin hanging from his throat like a bloody napkin.

  One of the others pulled Brad out of the way, and the next instant, Billy was standing between Wayne and Jake, the two of them closing in on him from either side.

  But Billy kept his cool. Holding the handrail like a spear, he jammed it into Jake’s chest, impaling him with it.

  A raspy gargle escaped his lips, but the enormous shaft of metal sticking through his chest didn’t slow him down at all.

  “What the hell?” Billy said.

  “They’re zombies,” said the girl from SMU. “Oh my God!”

  The word was like a peel of thunder in our midst. Jake’s imperviousness to pain; Wayne’s injuries; the moaning crowd outside; the burned people we’d seen the police shooting back at the hotel; it all made sense now. All through school, most of us had listened to those idiots who talked so gleefully about the coming zombie apocalypse and laughed at them. But none of us were laughing now.

  And Billy wasn’t wasting any time, either. He kicked at one of the wall speakers until it broke loose from its mounts. Then he scooped it up, lifted it two-handed over his head, and brought it down on top of Jake’s head.

  That dropped him. Jake collapsed in a heap and didn’t move anymore. By that point Wayne was almost on top of Billy, but Billy was able to step to one side at the last instant, kick the back of Wayne’s knees, and drop him to the floor so that he could finish him with another two-handed blow to the back of the head.

  When it was done, Billy stood over the bodies of our two friends, his chest heaving, and looked at Brad, Jim and Sandra.

  “Well,” he said, “what now?”

  Over the next three days, Billy emerged as our greatest resource. He worked tirelessly. I don’t think I saw him stop once.

  Our first problem was what to do with the bodies of Jake and Wayne. We couldn’t leave them inside, we all knew that, but it didn’t seem like there was any other way to get rid of them.

  It was Billy who proposed pushing them out the half-windows up near the overhead luggage racks. They were high enough up on the side of the train that the zombies outside couldn’t force their way in. The only trouble was, no one wanted to touch the bodies. Finally, Brad ordered Billy to do it, and the rest of us watched as he dragged the bodies of Jake and Wayne up to the window and shoved them out.

  The zombies grabbed the bodies before they’d even cleared the window and began to rip them to pieces.

  But none of us had the stomach to watch that.

  We all turned away and pretended it wasn’t happening.

  Later that afternoon, it became obvious we were going to have to do something about going to the bathroom. Pissing was no trouble for the guys. They could just go over to the door well and piss down
the short flight of stairs. But the girls, and the guys who had to take a dump, couldn’t do that. Putting your back to the door where all those zombies were trying to break in was like taunting them. They pressed even harder to get in.

  Plus, there was the issue of privacy.

  Brad put Billy to work removing the seats from the floor. He used a dime to unscrew them, and once he had them loose, he hoisted them over to the head of the car and arranged them like a horseshoe, like cubicle walls, so that people could do their business behind a sort of screen. The smell was bad, but it was best we could do under the circumstances.

  As night came on and we started to tire, Billy worked at prying loose the seat cushions on the few remaining chairs so that we could have pillows for our heads.

  I used mine as a writing desk, where I continued to scribble notes about what was said and done.

  Later still, it started to rain.

  Billy got excited, though at first none of us knew why. Then he pulled down the plastic covers from the overhead lights and slid one of them out of a luggage rack window, forming a sort of gutter to catch the rain. It trickled down inside the car, where Billy caught it in an empty water bottle.

  “We’re gonna need water,” he said to Brad. “You guys help me.”

  “Good idea,” Brad said, and though I could tell it plagued Jim and Sandra to admit it, they thought so too.

  Brad, Jim and Sandra ordered the rest of us to partner up and do as Billy was doing, and within a few minutes, we’d filled every container we could find.

  When we were done, Brad said, “Do you think that’s enough?”

  “For a few days, maybe,” said Billy. “Who knows? We’ll have to start conserving and rationing. And if anyone’s got any food, that’s gonna be an issue as well.”