The Turning: A Tale of the Living Dead (26 page)

7

There was a heavily-fortified,
door at the end of the hall.  The locks were on the inside, so he only had to
flick them and the door, made of heavy oak and as thick as his torso, slowly
creaked open.

The sight that greeted his eyes
was at once a scene from hell as well as a moment of heaven. 

In front of him was a marketplace,
full of vendors and kiosks, with dozens of people swarming around them, hunting
and pecking through thousands of items for sale.  The humans all pretty much
looked the same, with ragged clothing and dirty faces.  They fought with each
other over the food and items on display, some just haggling and others
actually punching and kicking each other.  After being alone for so long, with
only the woods and zombies and baby Jenny as company, the sheer number of
people was overwhelming.  It was all he could do to keep from reeling to the
side and vomiting. 

He shut the door behind him and
turned away from the cacophony, dizzy and sick.    The building he’d come from,
the one the pipe had led to, had a scorched sign in the front, broken and
cracked, hanging about fifty yards to his left.  It read, “The Brody Theater.” 
He fixed the location in his mind so he could remember where to go when he
needed to escape.

When he got his bearings, Jeff
turned back around to face the crowds.

The smells hit him next, smacking
his face like a wet fish.  There was cooking food—meat and vegetables—and
baking bread, human stench—from body odor to urine and feces—and animal refuse,
and the cloying scent of burning oil and gasoline.  His nose stung at the
sudden assault.

Grime was pervasive, from the
sweaty brows and dirty bodies to the mud on the ground and the soot coating the
walls.  The people ranged in age from kids to seniors, but mostly it was people
in their twenties and thirties, all skinny and malnourished, although to a man,
the vendors looked pretty robust.  Some of the fights were broken up by guards
dressed like the ones on the wall, men who carried their guns like their
authority, out front and angry.  Other fights were left to continue, much to
everyone's amusement. 

Jeff saw one man, a skinny guy
with a shaved head, no shirt and short pants, get yanked by his left ear and
hauled in close to one of the guards.

“You want the wall, buddy?” the
guard said.

“No!” Shaved Head said. 

The guard shoved him to the ground
and kicked his jutting ribs, a loud crack echoing off the throng.  Shaved Head
rolled into a ball and whimpered as the guard moved on.  Nobody in the crowd
paid it any attention.

Jeff looked around.  Most of the
street signs were still standing, for some strange reason, as were the
blackened traffic lights.  The vandalism, apparently, didn’t reach much higher
than an average person’s head.

He wondered up NW Sixth Ave. and
headed north and east, walking along Couch St, passing by the gutted remains of
Portland State University on his left and Chinatown on his right.  All along,
he witnessed human misery, people clumped together and living in former shops
and restaurants.  By the time he reached 2
^nd
, Ave., he knew this was
no place he’d want to be.  It was humanity at its worst, herded into small
areas and either prodded by the guards into menial tasks or left alone to fend
for themselves. 

On Couch and 2
^nd
, he
stumbled onto a building that looked pretty clean and new, compared to the
others he’d passed along the way.  The corner was thick with guards and people
and the sign on one of the walls read, “Spyce Gentlemen’s Club,” but
spray-painted right next to it, in big, bright red letters, was the word
“Whorehouse.” 

He walked on, keeping east, until
he reached NW Naito Parkway and the riverfront.  Once there, he followed the
parkway north, heading up towards the Broadway Bridge, passing through
neighborhoods and absorbing the layout around him.

Jeff had no idea where to begin to
look for Jenny and he was afraid that if he approached a guard and dropped
Parker or Dave's names, he would get beaten and carted off.  So he wandered,
looking for some kind of clue. 

The entire city wasn’t walled off,
for that would be a task too large for even the biggest government to do.  It
was a small section, running from the Broadway Bridge down to the Burnside
Bridge and across to the river, the water of Willamette River forming a natural
border on one side to keep the zombies out and the wall they’d constructed ran
along Broadway and Burnside on the other.  As Jeff surveyed the area, he saw
that they’d blown the Steel and Burnside Bridges up so that no zombies or human
traffic could enter the city.  It was a good grid, strong on one side and
impenetrable on the other.  Parker and his men had been smart and relentless. 
He could see how a group of armed men, followed by a corps of workers, could
secure sector after sector of this area, block by block, killing zombies and
constructing the wall at the same time.  It would have been a massive
undertaking and why they didn’t just choose a smaller town and do the same,
Jeff didn’t know.  Nothing humans did made any sense to him anymore.    

It seemed a very loose society had
grown up here, all subjugated to the guards, dozens of them in every
direction.  They moved about with impunity, taking food from kiosks with no
argument from the vendors.  If they saw something they didn’t like, they busted
heads.  Jeff couldn’t walk five feet without something going down somewhere
around him.  He watched a fat woman get cracked over the head with a club by
one of the guards and they all laughed as she pissed herself, staining the
front of her blue jeans.  She stumbled off, her eyes crossed and blood dripping
down her face.  The guards laughed and made snide sexual remarks as she
disappeared into the crowd.

The people were a motley bunch,
all dressed in rags or whatever was left of the clothing they’d come here
with.  Most seemed contented, congregating in groups according to race or age. 
A cluster of Asian boys huddled on one street corner while a gaggle of Whites
stood on the opposite corner, shouting out racial slurs.  The Asians ignored
them, though, because a group of African Americans were cruising by, peppering
the Asians with vulgar gestures and obscene words.  They cruised on by and
stopped briefly to face-off with the Whites.  A fight was about to break out
when a dozen guards stormed over, clubs swinging, and several concussions
later, the fight broke up and the gangs went their own way.

Jeff trudged towards the bridge,
his heart heavy.  He often hoped humanity would win its battle with the dead
and restore society, but this was too much to bear.  He passed through another
marketplace and a suburb.  The houses and apartments that had once been part of
a thriving, artistic community were now burnt-out husks or ransacked ruins,
most of the structures still standing but radically altered to accommodate
dozens of people.  Fires burned in oil cans, the flickering flames the only
source of light.  These neighborhoods were a lot calmer than the markets, but
the people there still seemed just as despondent and lost.  Nobody would look
him in the eye, and although there weren’t as many guards out there, their
presence was still felt.  They were a hodge-podge of folks, from old people
sitting on porches to kids playing in the mud to a mother teaching her child a
game of hopscotch.  This was a decidedly friendlier part of the city, but it
was filled with gloom and loss, an oppressive doom and darkness blanketed
everything.  It was an intangible feeling, but it hung in the air thicker than
the smoke from the burning fires, sticking to the skin, coating the lungs, and
blinding the eyes.

It was like they were all waiting
to die.

The streets coursed with urine and
feces, the sewer systems either backed-up or useless, but nobody seemed to
mind.  They went on about their business as if this was just an every day
occurrence, like the sun rising and setting. 

He continued onward, passing by
warehouse districts and small areas where populations had sprung up, creating
tent cities that were foul to the smell and angry on the eyes.    He reached
Cherry Blossoms Waterfront Park and found the largest collection of guards he’d
seen so far.  The park itself was protected by a ten-foot tall fence with a
guard posted every ten yards.  On the other side of the fence, Jeff could see a
few remnants of the Cherry trees that once grew in great numbers, most torn out
and tossed into the river now.  They were replaced by what looked to be a large
crop of food.  He was no agricultural master, but it didn’t take much to
realize this was where they grew their own food, and it was no surprise it was
so well-guarded.

Jeff took a left by Naito, not
even trying to get closer to the park.  There was no sense in it, seeing as the
guards looked primed to shoot-to-kill before asking any questions. 

As he walked, the population
thinned out until he reached Union Station and the railroad yards.  The main
building itself was in two halves, one functional, the other a burnt-out husk,
the terrain around it pock-marked with broken concrete and littered with chunks
of steel and glass.  The train yard was virtually empty of cars, with only a
few, rotting and rusting hunks hunched over like diseased, dying old men. 
There was a huge forklift parked in the middle of the yard along with a couple
of other pieces of heavy machinery and, as he watched, the occasional patrol of
guards passed through, mostly keeping an eye towards the waterfront, where
other guards patrolled regularly, watching the waters for any stray zombies
that might wash ashore.  A guard sat on the steps of the station, smoking a
cigarette and sipping a coffee.  He looked up at Jeff, decided he wasn’t a
threat, and went back to staring at the ground and smoking.

Jeff finally finally reached the
Broadway Bridge, the northern border of this small hellhole of a city.  The
bridge had been blown in half partway across and a set of pedestrian stairs
leading up to the bridge had been similarly destroyed. 

Jeff turned away and followed the
wall to his right back into the city as it traveled roughly along NW Broadway. 
The walls were constructed of a thick, metal material that must have come from
the train cars and when he looked closely, he could see how the bottom of the
walls were actually the train cars themselves, stacked two high, and strung
end-to-end and welded together.  The rest of the wall was built on top of the
train cars,  and it was here that guards roamed, armed with guns, patrolling
the area, checking for any breeches and occasionally firing into the mad crowd
of zombies on the other side.  Rail cars were placed two-deep at the bottoms of
those welded together, providing more leverage and strength.  Gangplanks ran up
the sides of these cars, allowing the guards to get on and off with relative
ease.

A sudden rumble shook the ground
and four tractor-trailer trucks shuddered past him, pulling long beds behind
them.  Dozens of fresh guards were on the transports and he realized he was
witnessing a shift change.  The new guards got off, eager and talking
excitedly, as the old ones piled on, tired and weary. 

He watched as the first group
arrived and one of the guards, a man with a red bandanna tied around his left
bicep, greeted another guard with the same decoration.  They traded guns and a
set of keys and went their separate ways.  Jeff stared as the new one with the
bandanna headed over to the heavy equipment by the highway.  He got into each
machine and turned them on, letting the motors run for a moment each, and then
turned them off, using the keys he was handed.

Jeff stood for a moment longer and
headed back into the city, following the train-car wall.

After a ten minute walk, he came
upon a new sight.  Along the wall there they had built a larger scaffolding and
at its top were not only guards, but also a half-dozen men, dressed in brown
outfits that were similar to the guards but they carried no weapons.  They had
a cauldron each full of hot coals and inside the cauldron sat long, metal
instruments.  

Screams filled the air, louder
than the zombie roar outside the walls, and Jeff saw some of the brown shirts
pull on ropes thrown over the sides and moments later, the tied and screaming
bodies of the men tossed over were hauled back.  The brown shirts by the
cauldrons sprung into action, putting on oven mitts and pulling long, hot
blades from the pots.  They fell to their knees and hacked-off the victim’s
legs at the knees as other brown shirts held the prisoners down.  Once the
limbs were severed, the brown shirts cauterized the wounds with red-hot metal
skillets left in the cauldrons.  The prisoners squirmed and screamed and those
that passed out were revived with smelling salts seconds later and then thrown
back over the sides of the wall. 

Jeff turned away, disgusted.

He walked back to the markets,
still active and teeming, and found a park bench.  He rubbed his eyes and his
face.  He’d never seen anything like this.  Portland was a filthy pit of human
despair and degradation.  The people here were safe from the zombies, but they
weren’t safe from their own, base natures.  It was a horrible place.  If this
was what was left of humanity, then God help them all.

Jeff looked around, taking stock
of the situation.  He had to find Jenny but he didn’t have the first clue as to
how.  He decide he had no real choice.  He would have to brave approaching one
of the guards.   

He walked over to one of the guards
and tapped his shoulder. 

“What do you want?” the guard
scowled.  Jeff got a good look at his face and realized the man was really a
kid, barely sixteen, his face covered in zits and blackheads.

“I need to see somebody,” Jeff
said.  “Somebody named Richard Parker.”
The guard smiled, revealing two missing teeth.