The Reaper Virus (26 page)

Darkness is obscenely insidious in nature. A
stray moan from another driftwood reaper worked through the
babbling waves. It was impossible to tell just how high I was above
the river. All I could think of was how much I did not want to get
any closer. Above me I could see Phil’s outline against the dreary
sky. The shadow gave the appearance of him being like a tumor
attached to the wall’s silhouette. Even closer sat the ringed shape
that must be the lowest rung of the ladder.

I pulled and pulled until my left hand found
the rope’s next knot. Both boots hit the wall and found a tiptoe
tread. Before the world went and ended I always had interest in
rappelling. The obligations of family and work never gave me enough
of an opportunity to explore this interest. Now, here I was
“rappelling” like my life literally depended on it. With the
improved stance I was able to unravel my right hand and gain a
better hold on the ghetto rigging.

Outside I fought and strained harder than
ever, but inside I was pretty sure I had lost it. Every thought
laughed at me for being so out of shape. The lovely combination of
vomit, fasting and forced exercise I’d been subjected to over the
last few days had already taken my belt in a notch. I saw voluntary
exercise and healthy eating in my future if I lived past the next
few minutes.

“
Fuck
!” I cursed
aloud as my lower foot slipped. My left knee smacked against an
unusually rough patch of mortar. I winced, knowing that my skin had
just been pierced with lapidarian precision. The dirty Dickies
brand pants, worn thin already, became snagged for a gut wrenching
second. It didn’t occur to me at the time that yanking away from
the pain would tear the pant leg, but I couldn’t care less. Any
feeling of the fabric rip was lost to the cold and pain.

Phil had heard my distress. “Are you
alright?” He hollered down. Even though I hadn’t been able to say a
word back to him since I swung over in kamikaze-fashion he still
knew I was there. “
Nathan, man, come
on!
”

“I’m…” the words choked their way out at
last. “I’m here! I just hate rope climbs!”

“Jesus Christ, man! You had me scared!” Phil
shouted down. Not long ago we were implementing such caution in
conversation. It’s funny how adrenaline and peril negate volume
concerns. As precarious as our current place may have been, we were
safer from the infected there than we’d been anywhere else. “Just
keep climbing. The ladder is like four or five feet up.”

My heart sank. Four or five feet of vertical
rope are the fat man’s equivalent to a mile. “Got it…” I doubt he
could even hear my winded words over the roar of the water. Hell,
the pounding of my heart was so loud,
I
could barely hear them. “I think one of my ribs is broken… I can
barely breathe.”

In the darkness above I heard Phil say,
“You’ll be okay. I’ll see if I can get lower to help pull you up
when you get higher.”

“Don’t do anything that will knock you off.”
Neither pain nor exertion could conceal the seriousness of these
words. I gulped at the cold air and finished, “If you hear me fall
just keep going.”

“
Nathan, just shut the fuck
up and climb already
!” His tone was ripe with implications
of eye rolling.

“Fine! Damn it!” I shouted back over what I
swear was a chuckle from Phil. Then I pulled and strained. My feet
kicked against the slippery brick and inched higher each time.
Another knot found my grip. Then another knot in the rope filled my
soul with relief. My old gym teachers would be so proud…

I could see the ladder getting closer. Phil’s
outline grew larger. The darkness still skewed perspective enough
to prevent me from knowing if I’d live. After clearing another knot
I was convinced it couldn’t be much farther. I released my right
hand and started to feel up along the wall. Desperately I patted
around seeking the security of a rebar handle. Before I could
return my grip to the rope a hand shot down and grabbed a hold of
my wrist. The shadow above me was Phil reaching down from the
ladder. Little did I know he had been patting his hand around for
mine just as I had been searching for the bottom step.

Night vision adapted enough for me to see his
contorted reach downward. Soon we both matched a firm hold of the
other. The last foot was quickly cleared with a burst of adrenaline
and Phil’s help. He didn’t let go until I had both hands cemented
to the ladder. “I’m good! Climb up!” I shouted.

He let go and scaled up the wall. Every cell
in my body seethed with anguish and lactic acid. I rose to each
metal step anxiously. All I really wanted was to be on a horizontal
surface. If there were somehow undead waiting on top of that
bridge, I’d still end up falling asleep right away. The edge grew
closer by the second. Time skewed from anticipation of reaching the
approaching summit.

An eternal few seconds later Phil disappeared
over the edge. I hopped up the next three steps and collapsed over
the top. In my haste, I had neglected to think about what I might
land on above. A few feet separated the edge and first row of rail
ties. My body dead weighted over just far enough for the steel rail
to knock against my already battered ribs.

The last thing I remembered was the sight of
Phil grabbing hold of my shoulders and pulling me past the beam. We
both fell into the safely neighboring boxes of the train tracks. I
felt absurdly comfortable lying atop a railroad bridge. Who would
have ever imagined that an inch on the map of infinite parallel
metal lines could feel like heaven?

I slipped out of my backpack. Blindly, I
rifled through it and found an opened bottle of Gatorade. My vision
was blurred and the pain blended with exhaustion. The gloomy sky
swirled above. Any background noise was drowned out by the furious
pounding of my heart.

“Are you alright?” a voice panted somewhere
next to me.

My lips moved, but no words came out. The
tracks felt soft and welcoming. None of this felt real.

Phil repeated loud enough to penetrate my
fog. “
Are you alright
?” I think I mumbled
something. “
NATHAN!
” His volume was just
short of shouting now.

I closed my eyes and saw Sarah. She took me
in her arms and gave me a tender kiss. The welcoming softness of
her wavy brown hair tickled my cheek as joy returned to my heart. I
felt the kids tapping my side trying to get me to pay attention to
them instead of to Mommy. “Do you hear me?” Maddox was saying.
“Look at me!” Calise laughed.

Reaching his arm over the railroad tie that
separated us Phil wildly tapped my leg. “Come on, Nathan! Do you
hear me? Look at me!” he pleaded.

Both my eyes were closed. Beneath my eyelids
a soothing brightness showed me the smiling faces of those I love…
then that light subsided and it was all black.

Day Ten.

November 19th – 0020 hours:

The haze kept me from being sure about whether my
eyes were opened or closed. My brain started to compile shapes out
of the darkened nonsense that filled my view. I debated the reality
of my situation… that was, until awareness of the pain
returned.

“Am I dead?” I groaned. The only thing I
could be sure of was how uncomfortable our resting place was and
how every bit of me throbbed with pain.

“For a little while there… I think you
were
.” Phil said, his tone jubilant. I
found this to be alarming, only because it acted as a testament to
my level of injury. Not to mention it felts like I hadn’t heard
someone sound “happy” in ages.

“Where are we? What time is it?” Even saying
the words made my chest ache. I felt the bottle of Gatorade still
at my side. I downed the remainder so fast you’d think I was
drinking directly from the Fountain of Youth. My throat and chest
enjoyed immediate relief from the re-hydrating effects of the
sugary sports drink, but it became apparent that any relief
experienced in my current condition just paved the way for other
areas of discomfort. At that moment I was keenly aware of how cold
the air felt.

Glints of yellow light were flashing at
irregular intervals from somewhere upriver, and the illumination
aided my returning vision. Memories of our situation began to pop
back into my subconscious as Phil replied, “We’re safe at the
moment on the train bridge and if your watch is correct, the last I
checked it was just past midnight.” I noticed a hint of
embarrassment clouding his concern during one of the light bursts.
“Sorry… I had been checking on you pretty often. Nothing would wake
you up! I seriously thought you were going to die. After a little
while I couldn’t take it and passed out too. I woke up about
forty-five minutes ago and checked on you. While I was looking for
a pulse I saw your watch and didn’t think you would mind.”

His embarrassment disappeared when I let out
a small, agonizing chuckle. “Don’t worry,” my voice became less
raspy with each word. “I would have done the same thing. What the
hell is that flashing light?”

An unmoving metal track rubbed up against my
filthy hair. The toe of my boot hit the other rail bending my knees
to put me in an odd fetal position. This coarse box made by wooden
ties and steel rails had become like a cot to my battered person. I
only moved my neck enough to see Phil. Above there was no moon, no
stars. The only thing that looked down upon this world now was a
bleak blanket of clouds deserving of hell.

Phil’s face shifted again towards sorrow.
“It’s from the highway bridge over there.” He pointed quickly away
from where I faced. “But you don’t want to look over there,” his
hand and eyes dropped to our gravel bedding. “I don’t think you’ll
like what you see…”

It was the equivalent of someone teasing me
with the claim of a secret, but not following the tease with
anything further. The more pressing matter of my physical anguish
overcame curiosity. “It doesn’t matter as long as it can’t get to
us here.” I tried to sit up and failed. “Can you pass me my
bag?”

Instead of my bag he passed me a power bar. I
didn’t question this action and eagerly grabbed the offering. The
wrapper had thoughtfully been opened already and thus saved my
aching hands. In another yellow flash I saw that Phil was eating
one too. “Hope you don’t mind that I went into your stuff… I
figured you’d want one if you woke up. I also thought you’d need
these.” He set the travel-size bottle of gloriously pain killing
liquid-gels on the wooden beam to my left. “You’d probably jack up
your insides some more if you downed those with no food.” The words
were muffled through chewing.

I popped the cap and poured some into my hand
without worrying about the count. Still chewing the power bar, I
added the smooth capsules to the mix. They crunched and broke
amongst my rapid bites. A bitter taste overcame the thickly fake
peanut butter flavor of the meal bar. The awful combination didn’t
deter my consumption. In seconds the mix descended my esophagus to
whatever battered innards I had left. We sat in silence for a
while. Thoughts of what the last day brought and anxiousness for
what the new day would bring stopped any desire I felt to speak.
Although I didn’t have a clue what was going through my friend’s
mind, it couldn’t be far from my own thought process. After a
couple of minutes Phil passed me a bottle of water, one of the last
clean bottles in my pack, and encouraged me to sip. I felt some
semblance of relief within minutes. The pain killers were doing
their job. A moderate sense of humanity felt possible again thanks
to the concentrated nutrients I had wolfed down.

My other senses gradually started to regain
functional acuity. I again recognized the never ending drone of the
James River beneath us. Then I noticed another droning sound making
its way through the water. At first I thought this banging sound
was just my imagination.

Before passing out all I could hear was the
pounding of my heart through my temples. It reminded me of the
noise complaints we routinely got about the step team practicing
inside parking decks. I remembered all the irritated people
claiming to be bothered by the erratic percussion of banging fists
and rhythmic stomping. I tried to push myself up to a sitting
position. Phil noticed my struggle and extended his arm to help.
Evidently curiosity was visible in my expression.

He looked at me dead on and said, “I’m
serious, Nathan, you don’t need to worry about what’s over
there…”

His cautionary words were ignored. Now that I
was no longer completely horizontal I saw little reason not to
further investigate our predicament. Every muscle was stiff. Each
movement caused them to yell out in painful attention-seeking woes.
I didn’t bother responding to Phil’s concern. In a few long seconds
I was turned enough to look behind us.

“What the fu…”

Phil looked the other way. “I told you so,”
he said, each word more depressed than the last.

The Powhite Parkway Bridge was a sea of cars.
Twinkling hazard lights were sprinkled around the wide girth of its
concrete expanse. Such a large array of blinking lights explained
the yellow strobe I’d seen. My guess was that any cars that left
headlights on had lost their batteries by now, but all those just
with flashers would last another day or two. A traffic jam didn’t
horrify me, since I fully expected it. Rather, it was the condensed
area near the bridge’s center that churned my stomach.

It took a moment to make out what was really
going on. The railroad bridge was higher up than the highway,
giving me a vantage point I’d rather have done without. I could see
the Greyhound bus right away. It sat stationary in the middle lane
flanked by smaller cars. Something wasn’t right though… something
was moving. Then I saw the shapes lit in the yellowed glare. An
infected group had amassed all around the bus. I could see a
cilia-like wave of arms flapping against its side. They filtered
past still bumpers and debris to surround it completely.