friend. They’d only known each other a couple of weeks but survivors made friends amazingly easily. Those who’d emerged from that Undead hell desperately needed to interact with other people to feel alive.
“Great!” Maite replied with a mischievous grin. “Fernando’s taking me out to dinner tonight. We may even have some wine! He’s got some special ration coupons.”
“Fernando…who the hell’s Fernando?” Lucia asked, but one glance at the guard and the starry-eyed look on Maite’s face explained everything. She shook her head. Her friend had a new boyfriend every week. They all promised the eternal love Maite was so desperate for. Of course there’d be a new guy the next week, but that didn’t matter.
“… Cecilia?”
“What’d you say, Maite?” Lucia abruptly turned from her thoughts.
“I asked you if there’d been any change in your friend’s status.”
Lucia thought for a moment, with a bitter look on her face. “No change. I’m going to go see her before my shift.” She wanted to say,
“Sure,” said Maite. “First let’s swing by the nurses’ station and get some of that crap they call coffee, okay?” Maite gave Lucia a loving hug and walked out of the room, not knowing that in less than half an hour, she’d be dead.
27
Madrid was dead.
There was no one left in a city where almost six million people once lived, breathed and dreamed. Nobody, except
The metropolis extended for miles; not a sound broke the silence. The SuperPuma flew really low over streets and plazas as it crossed the city at top speed. Prit said we’d be less visible that way since the engine noise would ricochet, making it harder for those monsters to locate its source.
Passing so close to those rooftops made me extremely nervous, especially in such an unreliable helicopter. Everywhere the scene was the same: wide, empty streets; here and there a vehicle lying across the road. Trash, broken glass and worm-eaten skeletons were everywhere.
Retiro Park, located in the heart of Madrid, had once been a showcase. Now it had become a jungle. Weeds had devoured its walking paths. Its little lake gleamed in the sun, almost buried under tons of algae that gave it a greenish cast. On the lake’s banks, the Crystal Palace was just a skeleton of steel beams and broken glass.
La Castellana, the main thoroughfare through the heart of the city, looked ghostly. Massive clouds of dirt rolled down that ten-lane road, rattling the few streetlights still standing. It was completely free of cars, since it had been closed to traffic right before the final collapse. A lone Volvo SUV with bars on its windows looked out of place on that deserted avenue. Why had its driver stopped in the middle of nowhere?
Here and there we spotted mounds of mummies and decaying skeletons where defense forces had taken a stand against the Undead. In every case, those mounds were surrounded by empty, shiny copper shell casings. Unfortunately, all those dead Undead were just a drop in the vast ocean of Undead that infested the streets.
It was a chilling sight. Sidewalks and roads were crawling with thousands of those creatures who were stopped in their tracks as if in a trance. It was like looking at an aerial photo of a street, frozen in a moment of normal city life. But the crowd’s torn, blood-stained clothes destroyed that illusion—those who still had clothes, that is.
Only when the noise of the propeller blades and the shadow of our helicopter passed over them did the Undead awaken out of their trances.
“Look over there!” Broto shouted in disbelief, pointing to a spot on the ground.
We were passing by Santiago Bernabeu Soccer Stadium. Heavy vehicles and huge, steel, industrial containers blocked all the entrances. The number of worm-eaten bodies littering the sidewalks around the stadium was even greater here. Scaffolding ran halfway up the south facade, connecting two open holes in the side of the stadium, but none of us understood why.
Clearly large crowds had mounted a resistance there, but the stadium was deserted now. Tumbled-down shacks lined the bleachers, and torn plastic bags were caught on rusted iron poles and floated in the air like ghosts. The grass playing field was a vast quagmire; dozens of small irregular lumps covered more than half of it. In a corner, where goal posts should’ve been, someone had spelled out
“What the hell’re those mounds?” I asked pointing to the lumps in the grass.
“Graves,” Marcelo muttered grimly. “It’s a graveyard.”
We were all speechless, in shock. I imagined the anguish of the people holed up there. As the months went by, their supplies ran out and no one answered their silent cries for help. They must have felt despair every time one of them died from hunger, disease, the Undead, or God knows what. For a moment I felt that suffocating panic. As time passed, they realized they were doomed. No one was coming to their aid.
“Look,” Pauli said. “The graves on the end are almost level with the ground.”
“Maybe at the end they didn’t have the strength to dig an actual grave,” someone muttered.
“Think there’s still someone there?” I asked.
“I doubt it,” said Marcelo. “Anyway, we can’t stop to find out.” He stared into my eyes. “You know as well as I do—this isn’t a rescue mission.”
I didn’t say another word. Marcelo was right, but I refused to accept it so coldly. I knew if I hadn’t left my house in Pontevedra, I’d have gone insane, wallowing in my misery, a prisoner in my own home. I imagined how I’d have felt seeing a helicopter overhead and not be rescued. I put that thought out of my head.
“Ready back there?” Tank’s voice boomed over the intercom. “We’re here.”
I craned my neck to see where we were and instantly regretted it. The massive buildings of the La Paz Hospital rose sharply on the horizon, like monoliths. Amid the shattered remains of what once had been Safe Haven Three, a roaring mass of Undead turned toward the noise that had awakened them out of their lethargy.
We waited. I couldn’t imagine how we would get through that crowd.
“How the hell can we land there?” Broto’s voice quavered. “They’ll make mincemeat out of us before we even get out of the helicopter!”
“Take it easy,
I wanted to be as calm as he was, but in my heart I was convinced the computer guy was right. As Prit flew lap after lap over the hospital parking lot, the situation grew worse. A crowd of five or six thousand Undead milled around below us. More monsters converged upon the parking lot by the minute.
The main door looked like the exit of a stadium at the end of a match. Dozens of those beings were crammed together, staggering and stumbling, trying to get out.
I watched in horror as some of them fell out the shattered windows and plunged to the ground. When the swarming mass on the upper floors saw our helicopter hovering overhead, their desire to reach us was stronger than their sense of survival. Thirsting for our blood, they threw themselves out the windows in an attempt to grab us. They somersaulted in the air, like bags of dirty laundry and crashed to the ground with a thud, some twenty feet below.
“I don’t fucking believe that!” Pauli muttered, nudging Marcelo. “That bastard’s still moving after falling from
