the last explosions on the
In the backseat, a fat, happy orange cat was perched in a mesh cage, contentedly eyeing his owner and a small mustached man who drove as if the devil were carrying him to hell.
Prit and I smiled. Not only had we danced with the devil, we’d gotten out alive. Nestled between the two seats sat a black Samsonite suitcase sealed with red tape, identical to the one we’d left on the dock.
ENTRY 77
Everything was going too well. And that was the problem. We got too confident. We let our guard down. We acted like heroes out of a damn action movie, and we paid the price. The world today is dirty, mean, tough, and terribly dangerous. If you play with fire, you’re going to get burned. Burned. Fuck. That’s ironic. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.
When we drove away from the rubble of the port, we were euphoric. We were alive, healthy, with a car full of supplies and weapons. And we knew where a helicopter was, so we could get out of that hole. Everything was going smoothly.
Prit drove like a madman through the deserted streets of a Vigo suburb. Out the window I saw luxury villas, most of them locked up tight. Some had boarded-up doors and windows. Those safeguards suggested that it was one of the first neighborhoods evacuated in an orderly and systematic way.
After several months of neglect, the area was starting to look really bleak. The houses peeped out from behind overgrown bushes and weed-choked gardens. On one driveway, a fire-engine-red tricycle lay on its side, gradually being consumed by hedges. With all the humans gone, nature was reclaiming its place. Almost no cars were abandoned on the shoulder. Maybe their owners had fled in them, trying to escape the inevitable.
There were dozens of undead in that area. Their occupation of the city didn’t seem to follow any pattern. There were wide avenues where you only saw a couple. Then, around a corner, you stumbled upon dozens, even hundreds, of them, wandering around or staring off into space, waiting for prey. What motivates them or draws them to one place or another is a mystery to me.
That neighborhood was a hot zone. There were dozens of those things at every intersection, in every garden, some in good shape, others horribly maimed or disfigured. I’ve gotten used to them; their smell doesn’t even disgust me. I know what they are, and they know what I am. Period.
Prit zigzagged, dodging undead. He drove awfully fast, as usual. With each turn, the tires screeched, shaking us around like peas in a can. The undead appeared in greater and greater numbers. Prit performed heroic feats behind the wheel to keep from ramming them. We had to slow down, and the mob pursuing us was more abundant. It didn’t look good.
Out of the blue, a middle-aged guy appeared suddenly in the middle of the road. He was about fifty, heavyset, his shirt open to the waist, wearing lots of gold chains around his neck. Half his face was a bloody, tattered mess; he was deathly pale like the rest of them. We didn’t have time to dodge him.
Just seconds before, Prit had swerved to avoid a group of undead crowded together in the middle of the road. What happened next was inevitable. He didn’t see the guy until we were on top of him. With a loud thud, the monster’s body struck the front of the van and was thrown to the side, completely limp, leaving a clump of putrid blood on the windshield. Prit swerved like crazy, trying to regain control, but the heavy van skidded out of control, dragging several of those monsters in its path as ominous noises came from its engine.
Doing a spectacular 360, our car finally stopped in the middle of the road, enveloped in the acrid smell of burning rubber. For a moment there was silence. I exhaled; I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath. Once again I was glad to have the very talented Ukrainian at the wheel. He’d kept us from crashing and made sure the van didn’t stall. That would have been absolutely fatal.
But the motor sounded like it was falling apart. A thin trickle of steam wafted through a gasket mangled by the impact. The radiator had a leak—and not a small one. That motor’s days were numbered. It was a miracle it was still running.
Slowly putting the van in gear, Prit got us going again, this time more slowly. We weren’t laughing it up anymore. If the engine broke down in that infested area, with all the houses closed up tight, we’d be doomed to a certain death in seconds.
The next twenty minutes were endless. Both tires on the right side had blown out, so we inched along through the subdivision, wrapped in a cloud of smoke, with the temperature light on. We were forced to slow down to a lousy ten miles an hour as dozens of hands pounded on the sides of the van.
Suddenly my window exploded into a million pieces. It had been cracked by a previous blow, so a punch from one of those things shattered it. A young woman tried to climb through the smashed window, trying to grab me. She reached in and touched my face. Her touch was cold. Cold, wet, and dead.
I panicked, almost like when this whole nightmare started. Paralyzed with terror, I could feel her trying to slip inside the vehicle as Prit shouted hysterically in Russian and Lucullus hissed inside his carrier, baring his teeth.
When she put her hand on my thigh, I finally shook off my stupor. I grabbed the AK-47 and bashed her temple with the butt. She raised her head and hesitated for a second, staring at me with dead, bloodshot eyes. I hit her in the face again. The woman slipped back out the window, unable to hold on, her face completely mutilated.
Drenched in sweat, grimacing, I turned to Prit. One look around told me that either we got out of there immediately or we’d be dead men in minutes. The resilient Ukrainian nodded and wrung a little more out of the damaged, groaning engine.
Once again, our luck held out. Just five hundred yards away, half-hidden by the weeds, was a sign pointing to a ramp to the nearby highway. Just a little farther, and we might be saved.
With one last push, Prit turned on to the highway. There, the van picked up speed, though the damaged motor was still making some very scary sounds.
At last we were on the highway. We felt relieved. We didn’t know the worst was yet to come.
The highway looked like a ghostly lunar landscape. I’d made this trip a million times, every time I had business in Vigo. Back then this stretch of highway had been packed with traffic. Now, it was deserted.
With the van making a deafening noise, we drove as fast as that battered motor allowed. We passed a few cars abandoned in the strangest positions. Some of them were ringed with blood. Others looked like they’d rammed into something—or someone. Aside from a couple of corpses rotting in the sun, we saw no sign of humans.
I tried to imagine the scene. In the first days of the epidemic, dozens of undead turned up suddenly, staggering down the middle of the road. Startled drivers tried to dodge them. Some couldn’t avoid running over them, and they crashed. Some caring people, unaware of those monsters’ true nature, must’ve stopped to help what they thought were badly injured pedestrians. Either way, the drivers’ fate was fucking awful.
A mile or so down the road, we came upon the first serious accident. A Nissan SUV had slammed into the concrete median, knocking it down. The Nissan had bounced back into the middle of the road and collided with a couple of cars and a small delivery truck. All those vehicles were now a huge pile of bloody plastic and steel lying in the middle of the road, blocking all the lanes. We stopped, stunned by the scene. Rising off that mass of iron was the foul, sickening smell of corpses that had been rotting in the sun for several months. The smell of death.
Those people had been in a brutal accident and no one had come to their aid. They hadn’t even removed the bodies. My God!
A small space on the left allowed us to continue on our way. Prit drove deftly through the narrow gap, leaving some of our paint behind in the process. I wondered whether that lane was there by chance or whether another survivor had been there before us, moving the wreckage aside.
After two or three miles, we saw another major accident in the opposite lane. It was a huge pileup of about forty or fifty cars, buses, vans, and trucks. They had collided in a chain as they sped along, running from those things or just trying to dodge them. As a gauge of how hard the impact was, I saw a small Smart car folded like an
