It was all so quiet.
Rachel hits the ground hard, flat on her back, with snow and dirt flaring up around her. It catches the sunlight in shafts as it streams down between buildings and through trees that line the alley.
She struggles to refill her lungs. Rachel had toppled off the top of the ten-foot construction fence that divides the alley in half widthwise. It still shakes violently as gray, mangled hands push through the chain link and wooden planks that lined it, grabbing at her.
Winter air floods her chest and she presses it out into a scream, scrambling back from the fence. Blood pounds in her ears, her hands, and she shakes everywhere, still fighting to breathe. This is not her first close call with these monsters, these zombies, but she still can’t control how deeply her body quakes from the touch of their icy fingers.
No one else comes clamoring over the fence. There had been nine of them, but she can hear nothing except the slow, pained drags of air reflexively entering and escaping the dead lungs of the monsters that fill the other half of the alley. The wood blocks her view so that all she can see are hands clawing blindly for her. A new round of quakes wells up from her ankles and runs through her stomach. But no tears.
When she is sure there is no one else coming, and when she begins to realize those quiet gasps might be emanating from her former friends, Rachel turns away from the fence and jogs off, facing the city rising empty before her. Her own survival means postponement of her mourning.
An el train track casts a huge shadow over the street where it opens up at the edge of the buildings on either side of her. Buildings stand with windows broken and thick darkness stagnant behind them. A light wind rustles the intermittent plant life and kicks up snow that has never crowded these streets so completely. Cars cast long shadows over white; some broken, some abandoned after careening into telephone poles. One sedan is crumpled to half its normal size on the brown, metal strut holding up the spinal train track.
A convenience store with its huge front windows busted out yawns to her left, but no sunlight penetrates the cavity.
Rachel isn’t a Chicago native. She’s lived in the city only a few months. She really has no idea where she is. She’d lost the canvas bag with the three bricks in it she’d used as a weapon and she is without supplies, even water. If she’s going to get back to the clothing store the group uses as a safe house on Michigan Avenue, she is going to need more than she has.
With her heart rate slowing, she starts toward the convenience store. She can’t see much of anything inside the store: the bright sunlight bouncing off the snow-covered street makes the darkness impenetrable.
Carefully, Rachel lifts one leg, then the other, over the jagged rim of the store’s front window. She stands there a few long moments, letting her vision adjust, listening hard for anything in the darkness. As soon as she can begin to pick out cluttered aisles and tilted shelves, she starts into the store.
She passes a rack of canvas “green” reusable shopping bags and grabs two. She tracks down the food aisle, grabbing cans of peanuts and loaves of bread. She tears open plastic and cardboard packages of bottled water and yanks out half-frozen bottles, chilled by the winter intruding through the broken window. These all fall into the bag with the abrupt, unceremonious weight of necessity.
Immediate supplies dealt with, Rachel takes another moment to breathe. She fights back shaking as she thinks about the wretched hands pushing through the fence. Focus, she thinks. What’s next – a weapon.
Her eyes scan the aisles. Before her, the candy rack has tipped on its side and smashed against the shelf that held all the poorly made dollar toys and greeting cards. There’s stuff everywhere, and a dried, dark trail that could be blood. But nothing that looks solid enough to be used for defense.
She wanders toward the pharmacy, where she absently grabs a few bottles of pain killers. Nothing worthwhile here. The refrigerated compartments are next. There are a few cheap bottles of wine and beer, various sodas, gallons of milk. Still nothing she can use to fend off an attack.
She misses the figure because he is shorter than most, and crumpled strangely in a half-standing position in the aisle beside her. Her focus on keeping her emotions in check causes her to miss the creature as it lurches at her back and takes hold of her shoulders.
Rachel hears the gasp next, feels the putrid air flare from its chest and face, and she reacts as terror explodes through her. The strength of the thing is intense and frightening, its momentum and weight uncontrolled as they plow into her, and Rachel falls with it, turning, just barely avoiding the refrigerator case.
The motion sends the monster falling into the glass, shaking loose the whole case from its mooring on the floor. The creature’s clawing at the air finds purchase on the handle of the door, which tears open and shatters against the neighboring case as the creature topples backward.
Bottles of beer and wine bounce or shatter out of the case, spraying liquid everywhere. Rachel falls back against a shelf and lands on the ground. As she turns back toward the thing, its hand closes on her ankle, its bloodied, hellish teeth pulling toward her flesh.
Her hands, desperately searching the floor for anything to grab hold of, find the neck of a bottle. With a firm grip, she rips the bottle around and smashes it against the head of the monster. It flinches from the impact but barely reacts.
Rachel strikes again, this time bringing the bottle down as if it was a sword, smashing the base, where the glass is thickest, against the skull. She brings it down again. Again. Blood sprays and drips from the bottle as she crushes in the creature’s head. A second later, it goes still, its hand still clutching Rachel’s ankle tightly.
For the first time, Rachel gets a good look at what attacked her. Blue hooded sweatshirt. Dark brown hair. Thin, taught face. Deep, quiet eyes. Smooth skin.
The boy can’t be older than fifteen.
She pulls her ankle free of its grip, but not without a struggle. Slowly, Rachel rises to her feet. Her eyes don’t leave the body, but it’s clear she no longer has anything to fear. After a moment, she raises the bottle, still in her hand, and looks it.
A wave of horror strikes her and she drops the weapon. It feels sharp, almost electrified, and desperately cold – an instrument of murder.
That was what had happened, after all. She’d murdered a boy. The fact that he’d tried to kill her didn’t change the truth of it.
Rachel’s eyes drag over the boy. She recognizes his brand of jeans, the dirty, blurring logo of the rock band on his sweater. His eyes, a gray cloud over brown, give her the impression of a kindness now gone. He reminds her of Ian Downing from two blocks over, who she used to baby-sit a few years ago while she was in high school.
Something bulges in the boy’s back pocket. It’s brown and leather and sticks out almost three inches. Snow crowds the edges, but she can tell it isn’t a wallet.
With as much respect as she can manage, she reaches out and slides the object free of the pocket. She brings it back to her face. A journal with crisp, heavy pages inside and a string wrapped around to keep it closed tight.
Rachel pries it open, fighting the ice that binds the pages. It pulls apart on a page at random. The penmanship is messy and the ink blurred. She begins to read.
I’m glad Dad and Jim aren’t here for this. I’ve never felt so weak or worthless. I know what I’ll become and what I’ll do when I change. But I’m so goddamn scared to stop myself.
Keep turning over Dad’s watch in my hand. It’s been in his family for almost seventy years. I don’t think I deserve it anymore.
She looks up. The sun has moved, pushing the shadows deeper into the store. Looking down, she realizes she’s read through pages and pages of the journal.
”Rachel?”
She snaps up. A figure stands half in the broken window, silhouetted against the sunlight. Rachel recognizes him instantly despite the darkness.
“Bill!”
Rachel leaps to her feet and races the length of the store, half-tackling Bill in an embrace as he steps into the store.
“I thought you were dead,” she blurts. She pulls back to look him in the face.
Bill smiles. “Glad I found you,” he said. “We were afraid you’d disappear after you fell.
“But we need to go. They’re piling up against that fence, and it’s one of those cheap construction put-ups. It won’t last. We can’t stay here.”
Rachel nods, then waits, watching Bill’s eyes intently.
“Caitlin, Epstein and Mark were able to climb a fire escape. They’re still okay.”
A touch of a smile flutters over Rachel’s face.
“Mark made it?”
No smile. His voice is solemn but shaky: “No one else.”
She nods again, adding this to the emotions she would have to work through later.
“Are you all right?” Bill asks, reaching out to wipe Rachel’s face gently, the way her father used to. His finger came back stained a deep scarlet.
Suddenly Rachel is again aware of the leather and paper of the journal against her fingers. The boy’s eyes, obscured by that dead gray, appear in her mind.
Are you all right?
“Let’s get going,” Bill said, taking her by the hand.
The sunlight is harsh, glaring over the el track that looms like a ruin above them. Bill leads her back to the alley, where the fence that divides it is now shaking violently.
“Wait a sec,” he tells her, heading closer to the fence. Above it on one side of the alley, on the far side of the fence, she can see a fire escape. The other three survivors – Mr. Epstein, the sixty-something owner of a bar down the street from Rachel’s apartment; Caitlin, a woman they’d found a few days ago trying and failing to hotwire a car; and Mark, who’s only a few years older than Rachel – are standing on the platform, just a few feet above the fence, but on the far side of it, with tens of the monsters milling about beneath them. They can’t reach the fence to get to safety.
“I gotta help them down from the landing,” Bill tells her, turning back as he starts to jog.
“What can I do?” Rachel calls after him.
He shakes his head. “I’m not willing to put any more weight on this fence than we have to. Just sit tight and keep your eyes open.”
Bill reaches the fence and starts to climb. It shakes and sways with his weight and hands pressing through the holes. It seems like there are hundreds of hands, all in different states of decay, tearing at him.
Rachel watches Bill swing a leg over the top of the fence, giving himself two footholds as he stands up at the top of the fence. Hands everywhere, gray and searching, remind her of the clutching hands of the boy from the convenience store.
Bill stretches out for Caitlin as she swings over the fire escape’s railing and reaches out for him, but Rachel sees the boy’s hand tearing at her ankle. He hadn’t always been that thing. He had once been a young man with a life unfolding ahead of him.
As she watches the rescue, passages of the journal unspool in her memory.
Thought I heard my brother today when I came downstairs. Turned out to be the last news report before they packed up the emergency station. Dad was watching it and drinking. He didn’t make any noise, but I’m sure he was crying.
Bill takes hold of Caitlin’s waist and helps boost her over to the fence. Rachel thinks they look like dancers, working together slowly and elegantly. Beneath them churns a tempest of flesh, relentlessly hungering for them.
The police came by again. I talked to them because Dad couldn’t. They’re worried about us, that was clear, but I could tell the officers just wanted to get the hell out. They were both weird about talking to me, like they thought I couldn’t handle it. Officer Brady left me a card and said to call him every day for an update.
Then he asked me to convince my dad that we should run instead of stay behind. I already knew how that would go, though. Even if Jim never comes back, we’re still going to wait for him.
Caitlin is down on the close side of the fence and now Bill is helping Mr. Epstein as he steps gingerly out into space. Rachel can see already that he isn’t prepared to do the mid-air maneuvers that Caitlin had been able to handle.
Mark is holding one of Mr. Epstein’s hands while Bill tries to guide his foot toward the fence. The whole thing is shaking as if in a hurricane. Mr. Epstein won’t make it if he doesn’t jump for the fence, Rachel can see. She can also see the fear on his face.
“C’mon, Jacob, you can do it!” Bill cheers the old man on. “A little further and you’re home!”
They surrounded us. Dad used the pry bar to bust open a door and then he pushed me through. Couldn’t get the door back open. Think something was wedged against it.
They were still outside an hour later. I could hear them. But I never heard Dad. I don’t think he wanted me to.
Mr. Epstein almost reaches the fence, but he’s totally unstable. Mark holds on still but it’s not helping much. Rachel watches, feeling helpless, just the way she did as she poured over the journal.
“Now!” Bill called and Mark releases Mr. Epstein’s hand. Bill pulls hard, yanking Mr. Epstein to him at the fence.
He’s gone now.
Mr. Epstein catches the fence, but the force of it is too much for the weak construction chain link. The whole thing shakes and waves. Bill loses his grip and Mr. Epstein topples into the decaying crowd.
The fence buckles under Bill. Their arms are pushing through the wires and planks and the whole thing heaves. Bill flops backward, toward Caitlin, who nearly catches him.
Suddenly, a tidal wave of death is pouring down the alley.
They took him. They took him and he let them, but he sacrificed himself for the wrong son.
Rachel sees Mark still on the landing, his face stricken with panic. She sees ten or so of the monsters swarming on the far side of the fence, bent down and tearing. A few are still caught in the fence, trapped in the snow. More are lurching for Bill, who was still on the ground with Caitlin, scrambling away.
The first of them reaches for Bill and Caitlin seconds after he hits the ground. In her panic, Caitlin claws at Bill, using him to get away, the way a struggling swimmer drowns a would-be rescuer.
Bill tries to scramble back, but Caitlin’s interference holds him up. The first of them takes him by the ankle, another by his shoulder, slowing him more. One bites down, then another, and Bill screams.
He’s one of those monsters now. Because I was too afraid to tell him. I’m a monster too.
Rachel can do nothing but watch as Bill dies, as dozens of ruined hands clutch at his flesh. Then Caitlin bolts past her at full bore. She doesn’t see Mark anymore. The rest of the creatures are lumbering toward her.
She runs.
Caitlin is gone, though, and Rachel still doesn’t know where she is. All she feels is cold and terror. As she nears the el track above, she turns sharply. The gaping cavern of the convenience store stands there. Rachel steps through and drives down the aisles toward the back of the store.
She turns toward the area from which she thought the boy had come at her. Rachel needs some place to hide. He’d been inside a room, the journal said, so maybe the room is here in the store. She could close it off when those things start climbing into the store after her.
She only has a few seconds.
Past the shelves, Rachel finds it – a unisex bathroom. There is thick brown blood on the door at the bottom. She wrenches it open and nearly falls through.
Rachel hears them entering the store. They fall over the jagged edge of the window, slumping, bouncing over the snowy tile with the sickening slap of meat on frozen linoleum. It sounds like a lot of them.
She locks the door. Rachel leans back against the far wall with a pair of stalls lining the wall to her left, listening, trying not to make a sound. Her breathing is heavy and she can feel it echoing throughout the room. The dark leather of the journal is warm and alive in her hand. She doesn’t take her eyes off the door.
Doesn’t feel right that one of those things should have Dad’s watch, so I’m hiding it here before I become like them. It’s on the shelf just outside the bathroom.
I don’t want to disgrace it.
Something hits the door to the bathroom and Rachel jumps. The journal drops out of her hand onto the freezing tile beneath. Rachel stares, but the banging doesn’t persist. Whatever is out there must have moved on.
In the cold, she thinks again of the boy. He’d sat here too, trapped with a swarm of monsters outside the door, putting his last moments as a human being down in the journal. Leaving it and the last remnant of his father, of his former life, behind – for someone to find.
And Rachel smashed his skull in with a wine bottle.
She can’t help but feel blood on her hands. She looks down at them, still pulsing with life, and can still feel the chill of his death on them.
Like the boy, she feels disgrace.
Something slams and rattles behind her and Rachel bolts from the wall, spinning in fear. There is a thin window there, sealed and half-frozen, that she hadn’t noticed before. As she watches, something dark crashes through it from the other side.
The glass shatters inward, spraying into the bathroom. Rachel turns away as she hides behind the wall of one of the stalls. There is nowhere to go if they see her and drop in through the window.
“Rachel?”
She steps out. It’s Mark, crouched low, sticking his face in through the window. Snow drifts down through the hole around him and sunlight glares into the darkened room.
“Mark!” She bolts for the window.
“I saw you go in from the fire escape,” Mark tells her, lying down on his chest and inching closer to the window. “It was pretty lucky – you took them all with you. I was able to climb down and find the back of the store without running into any of them.”
Lying half in the window, he stretches an arm down toward her.
“Climb up.”
Rachel moves closer and reaches up to take his hand. But as she approaches, his flesh turns gray, the veins black; the nails brittle and chipping away. Thick, dark blood, dried and flaking, is smeared over the fingers. The hand reaches for her ankle, takes hold, and she feels death there.
So she murders the boy, in defense of herself.
“I can’t,” Rachel says, stepping back from Mark. She took a deep breath to push the vision of the boy away.
“What do you mean? I’ll pull you up,” he returns, confusion clouding his features.
“I can’t leave,” she tells him, turning back toward the door. Before he can say anything, Rachel takes four long steps back to the bathroom door, unlocks it, and pulls it open carefully.
They are milling around on the other side, or standing still, or slumping against shelves or just motionless. She makes sure not to make any sound as she slips out the door. The area around the door is clear to a range of about ten feet – enough to make it to the shelf and back again. But they’re all around her. She’ll have to be fast.
None of them have noticed her yet, thank God. She figures it’s because of the relative darkness inside the shop. They don’t have the sharpest senses.
Rachel creeps forward toward the shelf to her left, where the journal described the watch. She can’t see it yet.
Across the room behind her, one of them sees her. It’s a woman wearing a track jacket and fuzzy earmuffs. A jogger, Rachel thinks, who probably had gone for a run before heading to work in the morning. She might have stopped for coffee. She might have planned her day before taking her morning run, blowing off steam before the real work started.
Heading home for a shower, she might have found a man collapsed on the sidewalk, struggling with a heart attack. She might have pulled her cell phone and called 9-1-1, staying with the man to make sure he was okay, cradling his head to reassure him. He might have breathed his last right there, and she’d have noticed gruesome, bleeding, black-lined wounds on the man’s shoulder and neck.
It might have happened so fast she couldn’t react, that the man would suddenly be alive in her hands and snarling, pulling her into an embrace that would end in the flesh of her throat ripping away, the life spraying out of her in bursts.
Days later, perhaps more, the jogging woman would stumble through the drifting snow and early morning light into an alley, where the el train track threw the shadow of a lost civilization over one of its lost citizens. She would feel only one need, for sustenance, and she would follow it into a tiny convenience store.
More are moving toward Rachel now. She sees business people and students and parents and children. They all had lives.
Rachel ignores them. She turns toward the shelf and sees it, glinting in the little light that fights its way in from the front window. The watch, silver, sticks out from a box of bandages. She snatches it and turns around just as fast.
They are quickly surrounding her. There’s enough debris scattered about the room from overturned shelves that most of them are having trouble, but she can see their desire for her pulsing through their clouded, white eyes.
Fear shoots through Rachel like lightning. She clings to the watch, her grip turning her hand white. She sees the jogger woman reaching for her. Rachel lowers her shoulder and drives her whole body into the creature.
Rachel and the woman topple, with the woman’s head dropping back and slamming the tile with a sickening but slight thwack like a melon dropping off a table. Rachel rolls off the woman and her eyes snap up, locating the bathroom door just a few feet off.
She can feel the air moving, growing icier, as their hands reach for her. Fingers brush her clothes and over her skin and through hair as she scrambles, fighting to get her feet under her, unwilling to look back and see all those things, those people, reduced to nothing more than these murderous monsters.
Rachel’s legs churn and she claws at the floor. She feels hands catching her ankles and reaching for her face as she pulls across the tile. She reaches for no weapon this time. Thoughts of the boy’s skull crushing under the strength of her anger and fear fly through her mind. She grips the watch and focuses – she thinks of nothing but getting it out, getting it back into the hands of the living. In the grip of death, her hand clutches at life.
They pull and claw, and she can hear them falling over one another to get to her. She refuses to look, but she can feel them all around – a frothing maelstrom of anger.
Rachel kicks back. She rakes her hands over the linoleum and takes hold of the shelf beside her, pulling free of the stiff grip of the hands behind them.
She gets her feet under her and suddenly lurches free of all of them. They are stumbling over the jogging woman, who can do little but reach from the bottom of the trampling pile toward her. Rachel hits the door, bleeding but not bitten, rattled but not frozen, and tears it open.
“Rachel!” Mark shouts. He hasn’t moved, and she realizes that despite the danger, despite her insane need to find the watch, he hasn’t left her. Mark’s hand reaches for Rachel.
She runs toward him as the door flings open and the creatures pour into the bathroom.
His hand closes on her wrist as she makes the wall. He pulls mightily and she kicks at the cinderblock walls with adrenaline-fueled vitality.
More hands close on her as Mark rolls clear of the window, winching her up. Rachel kicks and flails, ripping her hands through snow and grass, scraping her back on the cold metal window frame as together they pull her free of that tomb.
Gasping, Mark and Rachel collapse into the snowy morning. Sunlight in shafts sprays down over their heads as fat, heavy snowflakes settle quietly onto their heaving chests and throbbing foreheads.
Through deep, tearing breaths, Mark asks, “Why did you go back?”
She lets oxygen stream back into her lungs, staring up into the silent, skeletal city that rises like gravestones all around her.
With one hand she pulls the silver watch tight on her wrist, snapping it shut.
Smiling into the quiet winter morning, Rachel whispers, “Because we don’t leave each other behind.”
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