The Mountain and The City: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale (36 page)

Dad points the crowbar. “Stop right where you are. I mean it.” Elliot keeps coming at him. Dad tells Elliot that he's serious, that he'll use it, but Elliot keeps coming. Dad swipes the crowbar at Elliot's face to warn him and the big guy steps back, but instead of taking the warning he only looks madder.

Then he does something I've never seen a person do before. His face gets tight and wrinkles in, like a cat's when they hiss, except instead of hissing he makes that sound, the ones the other made.

The croak.

Dad swings the crowbar and it hits Elliot across the face. Mom stays between them and me as Elliot lets out a croak-scream and dad hits him again, like back in the stairway except this time the person is awake and keeps coming at him.

Elliot crouches and jumps. He knocks dad to the ground and I hear myself cry out as the crowbar flies out of dad's hand and slides past us in a long, metal scrape. Dad holds Elliot back by his shoulders. The big guy chomps broken teeth at him, SNAP SNAP SNAP, so close to dad's mask, the red dripping from Elliot's face and onto dad's glass face.

Through Elliot's red and the fog from his breath, dad looks back at me. His face is a way I've never seen it before, too.

Scared.

Elliot begins smashing his face into dad's mask over and over like it doesn't even hurt him. Smash. Smash. Smash. CRACK. The mask breaks.

The sound of metal scraping again and then the crowbar comes sliding past me and back toward dad. Dad takes one hand off Elliot to grab it. He pulls his knees toward his chest, plants his feet on Elliot's chest and pushes hard. Elliot falls back and dad jumps on him.

Just before mom turns my head away, dad pushes the crowbar through Elliot's head. There's a horrible crack and a squish, and then something soft hits the ground. After a few seconds of heavy breathing inside his broken mask, dad takes it off.

“Thanks for the help,” he says.

“Look at his nails. Just like the others, like he hasn't cut them in weeks.”

Then I hear it: the croaking again, but this time it's louder and coming from every direction.

From all around us.

**

Footsteps in the dark, and they don't sound normal.

People start to come out of the dark of the cars. They walk like the monsters on the TV screens, crouched over, using their hands, their mouths open, letting out those sounds. Mom and dad move close together until I'm between them, sandwiched between their legs and watching the shadows move.

“We can still make it to the booth,” mom whispers.

The monster people sniff at the air but they don't look at us, never look at us. Their eyes stay up at the ceiling and their heads move around. That's when I pull on mom's arm, because I realize something.

“Eyes,” I tell her.

“Cover them if you need to, sweetie.”

I shake my head. “They can't see us.” I point and one of them looks toward me, but not at me. “Their eyes don't work good.”

Mom and dad look around. Dad says, “Some of the lab guys were complaining of blurry vision yesterday.”

Another one looks toward us. It's the words, the sounds. They can't see us but they can hear us. They're closing in on every side now. There's no way out.

Dad hands mom the needle with the blue stuff inside it. “Keep it safe, no matter what happens.”

“Why are you giving it to me?”

“Any doctor worth their weight could synthesize it, improve it. It's not complete but it might be enough to control the worst of the symptoms.” Then he says, “Give me your phone.” She hands it to him, watching the monsters sniff their way closer. “Listen to me, Cait, I want you and Silvia to crouch down, just make yourselves as small as you possibly can and don't make a single sound.” He gives her something else to hold, something I can't see.

Mom pulls me down to the ground. “What are you doing?”

He kisses the top of my head. “Proving how important you are.” He starts to back away from us, back toward the door to the stairs and away from the booth.

“Isaac...”

He turns the phone on. It lights up his face and he looks at me, at mom, a bright smile in the middle of all the dark. His mask is off and his eyes are wet.

The monster people scream.

Dad turns and runs into the dark between two of the monster people as all of them at once see his face and croak and run at him. Mom pulls my head down to the dirty concrete and we ball up tight, as small as we can like dad said, and we don't dare make a sound as the garage fills up with running sounds, some of them right past our heads but we don't speak, don't breathe, and echoing in the big, black garage is dad yelling, “Here I am!” getting further away shouting, “Right here!”

When they're far away, mom picks her head up and pulls me to my feet. We run through the dark that gets less dark as we get closer to the booth and the exit, and we reach the booth and get inside it and she looks through the box of keys on the wall until she finds ours. Then she looks up and sees a big, big car nearby and she puts down our keys and finds the ones with the logo on them just like on the big, big car. We run to it. She unlocks it and we get in.

I ask, “Isn't this stealing?”

Mom takes her mask off, turns the car on and drives toward the way out. “Aren't we going back for dad,” I ask, but again she doesn't answer me.

I look at her hand. In it is my father's watch.

**

The world isn't real.

We come out of the ground into a totally different city than the one we drove through to see dad. Instead of tired people walking down the street, these people are in a rush again. But it's not the normal kind of rush, like when they're late to their jobs, or they're mad at the car in front of them for taking too long to turn, so they honk at them to let them know. It's the kind we felt in the stairway, and in the garage, and I have a feeling the kind we'll be feeling for a long time.

The scared kind.

Mom says, “Silvia. Sweetie. Lock your door.”

The streets are so full it's as if every car in the city is trying to drive at once. Honking. Shouting. Bumpers bumping. Crunching. Turning. Stopping. All around the cars, people run with boxes and things in their hands- supplies- holding onto each other so they don't get lost in the crowd. But around those people, the scared people, the real people, there's another kind of people, less of them and they're not scared, and they're not worried, and they don't carry supplies in their hands.

The real people are their supplies.

Wherever they are they run and jump and knock real people down. They bite into the screams until the screams stop.

A red car gets tired of waiting and tries to cut across the sidewalk. It hits two people, takes them off their feet and keeps going until CRUNCH it crashes into the side of a white van going the other way. One of the people the car hit gets up but the other doesn't. The one that gets up runs to the red car and pulls the dizzy driver out and bites his face.

SLAM something hits the window an inch from my head. It's a woman's pink face, with veiny eyes looking right at me. As her gray tongue begins licking the glass, I look at mom for what to do.

“Put on your seat-belt.” As I click the metal side into the plastic side, she says, “I hope one day you can forgive me for what I'm about to do.” As the monster lady beats on my door with red-covered fists, mom says, “When times are different, people have to be different, too.”

She puts the needle in a pocket inside her suit. Then she turns the big car right onto the sidewalk, and she presses the gas pedal.

People begin to shout as the car comes at them, doing everything they can to get out of its way. The car is so big it barely fits on the sidewalk, the buildings on our left, the light poles on our right. The steering wheel jumps and spins in mom's hands as the tires run things over- boxes, suitcases, clothes, garbage cans. People.

“They're not real,” mom tells me with her voice shaking, “none of it's real, you hear me?” I nod and she says, “Let me hear you say it, Sil, let me hear you say it.”

“They're not real.” As an arm bounces off my window. “They're not real.” As the car scrapes along a hot dog cart. “They're not real.”

A policeman in the street watches our car with his hand on his gun. Usually policemen look so strong, like whatever happens they know they're in charge, and they can do whatever they need to stay that way. This one doesn't look like that at all. His eyes are so wide it's like a train is coming at him. But it isn't a train coming at him, it's a person, and by the time he sees them they're already knocking him down.

“They're not real.”

A supermarket window shatters. People come running out with supplies in their arms.

“They're not real.”

Something pops under our tires.

“They're not real.”

An electric box explodes. A building catches on fire. A girl watches everything.

“They're not real.”

**

It takes a long time, a long time and a lot of turns and a lot of screams, but we reach the bridge out of the city. We can't leave because everyone is trying to leave at the same time and the bridge only fits so many cars. We're stuck waiting for the people in front of us to move, but they're waiting for the people in front of them to move, and it's like that all the way up farther than I can see. Some of people are so mad about it they're out of their cars and fighting each other.

The sun is starting to come up behind us. Mom hasn't said anything for a while, so I turn on the radio.

“-State of emergency. If you're at home, please, stay at home. The hospitals are over-burdened as it is, and you're only risking further infection by-”

I press the button for the next station.

“-Do you have to say about the so-called 'quarantine camps' which some say are being erected in major cities across-”

Next station.

“-Absolutely no truth to the rumors that the president has been afflicted by the virus. She has been taken to a secure location in an undisclosed area, where she can assess-”

Next station.

“-Escape his judgment? Did you really think you could go on living the way you have been, allowing sin into your everyday lives without accepting-”

Mom turns the radio off. She takes a big, deep breath as she looks at the cars in front of us.

“I know this has to be confusing for you. I'm confused myself. It seems like we were just at the food store, trying to decide which mustard to buy. Now that feels like a hundred years ago.” She looks at me. “I was wrong to call your father a bastard. It's a very bad word, for very bad things. He had his problems, so does everyone, but he loved you, and he did everything he knew to keep you safe. He was a good man.”

“Why do you keep saying 'was'?”

She looks like she's about to cry, but then she sees something in the rear-view mirror that makes her grab it and move it to see better. She turns in her seat to look out the back and all the color falls out of her face.

“Oh, no. Oh, God, no.”

I turn to see what she's looking at. At first the morning sun is too bright for me to look into. Then my eyes get used to it and I can see the bridge behind us, the cars stuck together, the people standing in the street, arguing, wondering how to get out of here. Behind them it looks like recess at school when the bell rings and all the kids come running at once, laughing and pushing and moving their arms around.

“What is that,” I ask.

Except there was no bell, and those aren't kids.

They're monster people.

They run onto the bridge, five, ten, fifty, so many I can't count, and the people from the cars see them coming and try to run, to get back in their cars, but the monster people are fast. The people get knocked to the ground, bitten, pulled apart, the ones in the cars watching and rolling up their windows, their windows smashed on by the monster people until they crack. So many awful things so fast, back at the start of the bridge, and here we are in the middle, and if we wait they'll be in the middle, too.

I ask mom if we should hide.

“I know you're scared, but we have to make a run for it. That back there is death. If we stay in this car it'll catch up, and it'll find us.”

I pull the soft mask over my mouth.

**

Car after car, between the lanes, between the people, we run. The people stop arguing when they see us because of the masks. It must be a weird thing to see, even in different times.

“Run,” mom tells them, “don't look, just run!”

I don't look back but I know they're not listening to her, because they keep screaming when they see the monster people. They try to get into their cars but by then they've already wasted so much time I know they won't make it. Every face we pass, they're people who won't live. Men. Women. Young people. Old people. All of them turning to face the footsteps behind us.