Deadlocked (2 page)

It took the nearby people far too long to notice what happened. A man in a yellow and orange construction vest was the first to do anything. He grabbed the assailant and tried to pull him away, but this dragged the woman forward and she lost her balance. She tumbled to the pavement. Her cheek ripped off in the bum’s clenched teeth as she fell.

Blood rolled down the man’s chin as he chewed on her flesh. The woman scrambled to move away and clutched her cheek. She wailed loud enough for us to hear behind the thick glass of our office building. Some people nearby rushed to help while others moved to confront her attacker.

“Someone call the police." Barry turned away from the window.

“Line’s busy,” said Jerry, who was already trying to call.

The bum wouldn’t stop. He moved forward and swiped at the people that tried to keep him away. The construction worker took a swing and hit the transient on the jaw. The man’s head whirled to the side, but his body didn’t follow. His head hung limp to the right while his hands gripped the construction worker’s vest. The vagrant's head rolled back to bite his new victim.

The construction worker fell backward with the man holding on to him. The bum bit his neck and blood sprayed forth like someone stuck a knife in a shaken can of soda. The construction worker cried out and tried to push the bum away. Finally, the crowd ripped the maniac off his second victim and threw him to the ground.

They stomped on him. The crowd circled and kicked at his side. The man tried to grab their legs and bite their ankles, but they wouldn't stop. Over and over, their feet collided with his face and chest. He was covered in blood and the wounds on his head gaped wide. I saw his teeth in the pool of blood beneath him, but he wasn't fazed. He pulled at the legs of the businessmen around him. He tried to grab their expensive slacks, their hundred dollar shoes, their gold wristwatches, but his movements weakened. They had beaten him to a pulp, but he still twitched. I could see his eyes blink through his new, red mask. He was still alive, but they kept trying to kill him.

They stomped him.

Kicked him.

Crushed him.

“Come on, man.” Barry pulled at my sleeve. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

The sight of the crowd trying to murder that man shook me to my core. The thought of dying at the hands, and feet, of an angry mob made my stomach turn. Could there be a worse way to die?

CHAPTER TWO – DEADLOCKED

The parking garage was packed. Horns blared and people screamed out their windows as everyone sat in their cars and waited for the line to move. It took us ten minutes to get out of Barry’s parking spot and into line. After another ten minutes I decided to get out. “I’m going to check how bad it looks.”

I walked over to the short concrete barrier that kept people from driving over the edge and leaned out to stare at the traffic below. It was gridlocked. I looked back at Barry and shook my head.

He rolled down his window and asked, “What? What’s wrong?”

“There’s no way we’re getting out of here, man,” I said.

“Fuck. Hold on a second.” He put the car in reverse and backed into a nearby spot. “I guess we’re hoofing it then.”

“That’s a hell of a walk.”

“We could take the train,” he said.

“Fuck that. They said this all started in crowded places.” We walked into the closed off, concrete tower and down the stairs that led to the street below.

“Do you think there’s a connection between this and the terrorist stuff?” asked Barry.

“Yeah, of course? Don’t you?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t really think about it. I can’t even grasp what the fuck is happening. You know? Jesus Christ. So this is like bioterrorism then. They hit us with some virus that makes us go bat shit crazy and start attacking people?”

He opened the door to 13th Avenue and revealed a scene of hysteria that took my breath away. Throngs of panicked office workers had taken to the street in a race out of the city. Everyone fought to stay on their feet as the people behind pushed them forward. In our short trip down the stairs from the third level, the city had descended into madness

A chubby woman fell to the ground about five feet in front of me. The people that ran behind her never stopped to help. At first they moved to the side to avoid her, but the ones that followed didn't see her until they were walking over her writhing form. I’m not sure if they didn’t see her or purposefully walked over her, but she was crushed to death beneath their feet.

I wanted to help. I swear to God I wanted to do something, but the force of the crowd was too much to contend with. I screamed out for them to stop, but they couldn't. If they stopped, they would've ended up on the ground, crushed to death as well.

Barry grabbed my hand as he got caught in ththe exodus. If he hadn't thought to grab me, we would've been separated. The crowd pushed at our backs and determined the direction we moved. It got worse every second and there were moments I lifted my feet off the ground and still continued moving forward. It was a claustrophobic’s nightmare, but the real terror came as my feet twisted to accommodate the fleshy shapes beneath me. I was walking on people.

I found an opportunity to get out of the crowd to a section of raised concrete that housed one of the few trees along 13th Avenue. I pulled on Barry’s hand and steered him in the direction of the concrete square. Either we would be able to climb onto the island or be crushed against it.

I hauled myself onto the concrete and pulled Barry up behind me. It gave us a vantage of the madness that swirled in every direction.

People crowded 13th Avenue for blocks. I could see the tops of halted cars in the sea of people. Several of the cars had people on top of them that stared at the scene like we did. Victims cried out that they were being trampled. I saw one guy punch a person in the back of the head for not moving fast enough. I ignored all of this because what I could see in the distance was far, far worse.

A fire had erupted outside our office. There were people in the flames that continued walking as they were immolated. They staggered through the fire and attacked those closest to them.

“Do you see that?” I asked Barry.

“Over there." Barry pointed in the opposite direction, to where the flow of people headed.

“What?”

“Look, down the road. A guy's killing someone with an axe.”

“Where?” I saw it before he had to show me. Not more than fifty feet ahead, I saw an axe rise in the air and then fall back down again. The crowd tried to avoid the murder but they were packed too tight for me to get a good view. All I could see was the blood red axe going up, then down. Up, then down. It flayed streams of blood in an arc behind it.

The commotion caused the swell of people below us to slow down. I knew they were going to come to a stop, and then they would go in whatever direction was open to them.

“Come on, Barry. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“How?”

The crowd had almost stopped and several people around us had the same idea we did. They climbed onto our raised section. There was only one way out.

“Up the tree.”

“I haven’t climbed a tree in twenty years, man,” said Barry.

I was already making my way up. I had climbed hundreds of trees as a kid, but none of that experience helped and I struggled to pull my way onto the lowest branch.

I grabbed Barry’s hand to helto p him as I searched for an escape. The tree looked close enough to the buildings and I'd expected to be able to jump from it to some other platform, but now that I was here it didn’t seem quite so easy.

“What the fuck do we do now?” asked Barry.

“There,” I pointed to a fire escape about ten feet away. “We can get onto that and get to the roof.”

Barry looked at the proposed route and said, “No we can’t.”

“We can climb over that branch and jump.”

“What the fuck? Are you serious? There’s no way that’s going to happen.”

Screams came from below us. I don’t know what happened, but people started screeching in terror. I glanced down and thought I saw a severed head rolling on the pavement, but the crowd closed in too quick for me to be sure. I think Barry saw what it was though, because he suddenly gained the courage to make the leap.

“Go, go, go,” he said and pushed at my back.

I inched forward. For the first few steps I could hang onto a thin branch above me for support, but the last several feet were handled like a tightrope. My bridge bent precariously, but I moved forward until it couldn't hold my weight any longer.

I jumped.

To my complete shock, I made it. It wasn’t graceful and I cut myself on the unforgiving, grated metal, but I made it. I stood up and reached out to help Barry. He looked at me with wide eyes stricken with fear from watching me barely make the leap. I wasn’t in great shape, but I was a pro-athlete compared to Barry.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Come on, I’ll catch you.” I leaned over the edge of the fire escape and reached out to him with both arms.

“I can’t. There’s no way. Let me go down there and you can lower the ladder for me.”

“What ladder?”

“Down there." He pointed along the building to a ladder that could be dropped down to 13th Avenue.

“That’s thirty, forty feet away,” I said. “You’ll never get there.”

People climbed the tree beneath Barry. He saw them coming and must have known it was only a matter of time before they pushed past him to make the leap I'd made. Barry inched forward and gripped the branch above. He wobbled back and forth. I was certain he was going to tumble off. He made it far enough that he had to let go of the branch above and raise his arms out to either side for balance.

One of the men, who had climbed the tree after us, moved out onto the branch behind Barry. He moved fast and the branch buckled under their combined weight.

“Wait your turn!” I shouted.

Barry glanced up at me. I reached out as far as I could. Our fingertips touched and he tried to reach out further. Our fingertips locked.

The crowd shrieked again beneath us. I looked down and saw people attacking each other. I clenched my eyes to ignore the tumult and then looked back at Barry. I tried to keep him focused on what he was doing. “Don’t look down,” I said. “Look at me. Look at me. Look at me. We can do this.”

Barry kept his eyes locked on mine until our hands clasped.

The man behind him moved forward and begged Barry to hurry.

Then the branch broke.

The snap is a sound that has haunted me just as much as the children screaming on that bus. It cracked from somewhere near the trunk and the entire branch crashed into the people below. Barry fell forward and I gripped onto his hand as tight as possible.

No matter how many movies you watch where someone barely grabs another person by the hand and then pulls them to safety, it’s just not possible. Barry fell, and my grip on his hand snapped free the second his entire weight became my responsibility.

He didn’t fall far, six feet at the most, but he fell into a pit of horror. The people around him were killing each other. They didn't just beat each other like the men in the business suits had stomped the vagrant outside our office, these people bit each other to death. They chewed pieces of flesh off the ones that tried to escape.

Barry fell to the pavement as I stood above. I watched the crowd of cannibals flood over him. They fell to their knees and ripped at his flesh. They pulled his arms up and bit into them. He cried out to me for help as they ate him, but there was nothing I could do. His cries became a gurgle as he choked on his own blood.

I watched my best friend get eaten alive.

My heart raced and every breath came into my lungs with a weight that crippled me. Barry was dead. It was my fault and nothing would ever change that. I let him fall to his death. My body shook as I cried out in rage at the loss of my best friend.

There wasn’t time to mourn. The city was in turmoil and I had to escape if I wanted to see my family again. I climbed the metal stairs to the top of the five-story building. Looking back on it, I suppose I should've gone over to the ladder to lower it and save whomever I could, but I didn’t. I didn’t understand what was going on at the time, and my survival instinct took over. How was I supposed to know the people attacking each other were zombies? How was I supposed to know they couldn’t climb a ladder? At the time, it seemed like this disease or virus or whatever it was just turned people into homicidal maniacs.

No matter what anyone thinks of how I acted that day, I did what I had to. I had to get home to my family. That was the only thing that was going through my mind as I stood on that roof. I couldn't quit until I knew they were safe.

CHAPTER THREE – THE ANGELS OF EVERLAND RIVER

I ran across the rooftops. Most of the buildings were close enough that I could step between them, but there were a couple I had to leap across like a comic book super hero.
 
A few groups of people had made it to the rooftops as well and watched me run past, but everyone was in such a state of shock that no one said anything. Most of them stared over the edge at the mayhem below.