across the street yelled something unintelligible back.
“I can’t hear him,” Ryan complained. “Shut the fuck up you pus bags!”
In frustration Ryan pointed to his ears and shrugged.
Chapter Fourteen
Avenue
The sweat dripped off Ali’s thick eyebrows as he pulled on the electrical cable. The soul ripping frustration had evaporated to the elation of finally hooking his quarry. Now all Ali could feel was the burn in his muscles and the pain in his fingers as he hoisted the zombie up. The undead were usually lighter than when they’d been alive. Ali assumed some level of desiccation or wastage set in.
When everything kicked off all those years ago, Ali had delivered a vanload of stray dogs to a research centre. He didn’t like to think of the poor animals’ fate. Intellectually he knew they were dead already; with no family to adopt them they were only days away from being put down. But he could guess their end wasn’t going to be peaceful in the gloved hands of the lab technicians.
He’d stood there in the bustling lab shocked and stunned by the frantic going-ons. Soldiers and doctors in blood-smeared HAZMAT suits. State of emergency broadcasts being repeated through the public address system.
It was here he had encountered his first zombie, a naked and emaciated looking waif of a woman, her skin brown and wrinkled, her eyes a frosted white. She was wheeled past him strapped to a gurney. Her chest was sawn open and there was just an empty cavity where her organs should have been. The scrawny creature still snapped and thrashed against her bindings.
Ali had been frozen by her gaze; that bleached-out stare that somehow expressed a malignant jealousy. Ali listed and watched in a stupor. Occasionally he was pushed out of the way by an anxious orderly or commanded to stand clear by a soldier, but no one questioned why he was there or told him to leave. Mingling among the chaos and raised voices were the moans of the captive zombies. Back then Ali had found the cry more pitiful than terrifying, an imprisoned soul pleading for help, begging for release. Like the sirens’ call it drew in Ali’s compassion.
He had found himself at the doorway to a lab. A caged zombie pressed against the Perspex of its prison. It moaned constantly, its expression one of confusion held behind the unfathomable invisible barrier. Ali stood and watched, aching to help, unaware of the creature’s deadly compulsion. It was the high pitch yelp of a dog that broke the trance and compelled him to leave.
The zombie dangling from his fishhook held the same look of confusion as it spun round on the line. Unable to arrest its rotation, it lashed out every time its orbit brought it back to face Ali. It too gave out the same pitiful whine, but in the convening years Ali had learned to loathe that noise.
Now as Ali heaved he heard an unexpected sound.
“Ali!” a faint voice carried over the moans of the dead.
Ali ignored the audio hallucination, more concerned by the burning of his muscles. Gritting his teeth he continued to pull on the cord.
“Ali! Ali!” the distant call came again.
“Oh my God!” Ali gasped, convinced now the call was real.
The cord in his hands slipped slightly before he regained his poise. Focusing on his catch, Ali brought it up to the level he wanted and tied off the cable. Rotating slowly, the tethered zombie lashed out, trying to snag him. Ali timed his aim and as its arms spun out of reach he leaned in and bludgeoned the back of its skull. He knew when to stop hammering when its stiff arms fell limp. Happy the zombie was dispatched, he stood up and scanned the street.
“Ali!” came the call again and this time he spotted where it had come from.
Across the road on the first floor up, Ryan was waving frantically from an office window.
Ali gave a long over enthusiastic wave back and called his friend’s name. His joyous shouts rebounded over the heads of the zombies that filled the space between them. The thousand-strong crowd of zombies joined with Ali’s cries in making their own exclaim as best as their decayed bodies could allow. Ali could see two other men behind Ryan. He squinted and peered at them, trying to recognise who they were. Neither man looked like any of Ali’s compatriots from the warehouse. They were too well built, with short cropped hair and sandy coloured military style uniforms.
“Soldiers,” Ali said with a firm voice. “They’re soldiers. That means a rescue,” he exuberantly told the body that was spinning on the wire. “Well, it’s too late to rescue you, my friend.”
Ryan shouted something over the zombie-filled chasm.
“What?!” Ali bellowed back. For emphasis he held a cupped hand to his ear.
An incomprehensible string of shouts came in reply.
Ali shook his head and shrugged. “I can’t hear you.”
Ryan started pointing out of the window. Ali followed the direction to the plumes of smoke belching from the neighbouring building. Ryan made a serious of baffling hand gestures, trying to communicate some message, but Ali couldn’t make sense of them.
Again Ali shrugged his shoulders.
With his index finger in the air Ryan made a circular motion like he was keeping an invisible hoola hoop aloft.
“Helicopter?!” he shouted, mimicking Ryan’s action.
Then Ryan made a thumb like a hitchhiker over his shoulder.
Instinctively Ali pointed in the direction Ryan had indicated.
“The helicopter is over there?!” Ali squinted his eyes as he tried to make out anything to confirm his interpretation.
One of the soldiers tapped Ryan on the shoulder and there was a short exchange between them. Ryan thrust his arm in the air and then made a thumbs up sign.
Still perplexed by the meaning of their conversation, Ali copied the signal.
He was still standing there dazed by the brief encounter long after Ryan and his two companions disappeared.
He looked down at the dead backpacker dangling in front of him.
“What you make of all that?” Ali asked. When the creature rotated away from him, Ali huffed, “Didn’t think you had anything to add.”
He bent down and took a long look at his catch. His make do hook had snagged under one of the pack’s shoulder straps. Ali pulled out his knife and was about to cut the strap free when he suddenly stopped.
“Idiot.”
Ali backed up and retrieved some cabling. He tied the wiring to one of the straps on the backpack and secured the other end to his wrist.
“I don’t want this hard-fought catch getting away from me now, do I?” he said to the cadaver as he sliced through the shoulder strap.
With a soft rip the last few strands of fibre snapped under the weight of the dead hiker. The centre of gravity on the hook bucked and the dead body slipped out of the undamaged strap. Like the dummy from a cheap action movie, the lifeless corpse tumbled to the mass of zombies below.
Ali sat in what had become his chair in Frank’s apartment. The backpacker had proven to be a gold mine: camping provisions, gas stove, sleeping bag and even a domed tent. He was spooning in the last of the beans from
