Gunslingers #3, April 24 2011

The Gunslingers #3: Alex and the Arrow

            From the third story apartment, all of the streets look empty. None of those things about, walking around, looking for victims. I hate it when the streets are empty. Makes me think that they’re all waiting outside my door, ready to bite into my flesh like a walking hamburger.

            “Maybe you should stare out that window some more and then one of those things will pop up and you could shoot it with your cool bow.” Annie says nonchalantly from behind me. I guess I should have said our door.

            “I’m sorry that I’m actually trying to keep us alive, Annie.” Her slender, pale skinned form is lying on a couch that isn’t hers, in an apartment that she doesn’t own. We don’t know who owned it before, but it’s ours now, at least until something takes it from us.

            “Big whoop!” She raises her arms as if that makes her point more meaningful. Leave it to a white girl to make a big deal about something. “Thank you Alex, roommate slash Amazonian queen of the bow. Thank you for saving my life from those corpses.”

            “You should be a little more grateful, I save your ass back at our place,” I knew when these monsters started attacking that my roommate would only slow me down, but Annie wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if it weren’t for me.

            “You saved me from what? Getting bitten and infected? Thank you, now I get to live in fear everyday while traversing this broken world! I’d be better off rotting in the bowels of hell!” She’s standing now, another power move that doesn’t faze me. Bowels of hell, leave it to an English major to dramatize everything.

            “Whatever,” I say, giving up. “I’m gonna’ try and get some sleep before we go searching for water tomorrow. You should too.”

            “Of course, mom.” Man, what I wouldn’t give to shut her up.

            We make it through the night without anything going wrong, but of course Annie complains when I wake her up, she says something about not having to wake up for classes anymore, says I should let her sleep. Damn right I should, I’d leave her ass if I didn’t have a conscience tellin’ me not too. Finally, she gets up off the couch, which looks a hell of a lot more comfortable than the floor that I slept on, and gets ready to go. She grabs the small handgun that she used to carry in her purse and I sling my bow across my back, and we head out.

            The apartment building that we’ve been holding up in is completely empty as we make our way down to the entrance, not even a walker at the front desk to wish us a good morning. We make our way to the street and still it’s deserted. First it was full of people, then the freaks, and now nothing. They’ve all disappeared.

            “Where are we going today?” Annie says, sounding board. I notice that it had been almost ten minutes without her saying anything, must be a record.

            “I donno, we went down West Street yesterday, may if we head down Bank we can find some un-tapped shops.” She just nods, which also comes to me as a surprise. Maybe the grand spectrum of what’s going on around here is actually setting into her head now. I decide that this can only be a good thing, and we head out.

            My years on the archery team at U of T seem to come in handy now, as I pull an arrow out of a third walker. This one was the fast kind, the kind that I dream about every night. I still remember the one that grabbed my sister and pulled her away into the darkness. I’ll never forget the look on its face, like it was grinning or something.

            “Well this sucks.” Annie says, looking down at what we’ve gathered. Half a bottle of water and an Mega-Bran bar. I pick up the bottle and hold it up in the sunlight.

            “At least it looks clean, that’s a plus.”

            “Yeah, but…” the unmistakable sound of a shotgun blast echoes close by. We look at each other and know instantly what we need to do. Together we take off at a running pace towards the gunshot.

           

            The scene doesn’t look promising. Outside a small butcher shop the only humans we’ve seen in days are being surrounded by a mob of hungry looking infected. A fairly well-built guy is lying on the ground, eyes shut, barely conscious. The other guy, the one with the crazy-hobo beard and glasses appears ready to take down upwards of ten infected with a single two-shot sawed-off. I pull one of the seven arrows out of the make shift quiver on my back and notch it into my bow. In my peripherals I can see Annie lift her gun with shaky hands and aim it towards the group of freaks.

            “Let me take this.” I say, lowering her gun for her. She nods and watches as I let a volley of arrows take out five of the eleven monsters. The other six turn towards us and I silently curse at the fact that I have so few arrows. The things shamble towards us, slowly, but fast enough for the fear to start up in the pit of my stomach.

            Two shotgun blasts echo towards us and I watch two more of them fall, four left, seems like better odds. The bearded guy puts his shotgun into a small holster attached to his belt and lunges at the group of monsters with a large machete.  I assume that he’s out of shells, and decide that he can take the things down on his own. As the last infected falls to the ground, I wonder why I had never thought of a melee weapon.

            “That’s taking the phrase ‘Get Medieval’ to the next level” The guy says to us as I retrieve my arrows. He shakes some of the blood and gore off of his machete and then offers me his hand. “Saul Ghoulachov, don’t worry, I’m not as Russian as the name sounds.” I take his hand and wonder why Annie is practically hiding behind me.

            “Alexandria Sanders, but you can call me Alex.”

            “Well met, Alex. That was some astounding aim, shame you’ve got so few shots.” He motions to my quiver and I nod.

            “This is all I could scrounge up from the campus archery range.” I point to the U of T seal on the bow. “Is your friend okay?”

            “Shit!” Saul shouts as he runs over to the fallen guy. “Jace, goddamn it, get up!” He violently shakes the guy, but he seems to be unresponsive.

            “Here,” Annie tosses a small inhaler to Saul who promptly administers the drug into Jace’s mouth. “I found that in a pharmacy, thought I’d throw it into my purse.”

            Jace’s body shudders a little and his eyelids open slightly. He makes a small sound and seems to go back to the unconscious state that he’d only briefly woken up from.

            “We should get him back to the apartment.” I look at Annie when I say this, but she seems distant.

            “You have an apartment?”

            “Yeah,” I point to the sky. “It’s getting dark, we should get moving.”

            “Good plan.”

           

Gunslingers #2, April 21 2011

The Gunslingers #2: Jace and The Briefcase.

            The shotgun sits idly in front of my face, but I can’t stop looking at the metal briefcase handcuffed to this guy’s wrist. Who is this suited lumber-jack?

            “Focus, kid. Back-pack. Now.” He pokes me with the gun and nods his head backwards.  I slide off one of the shoulder straps slowly. “Yah, that’s good. Nice and slow.” Before he can say anything else I knock the shotgun away and shove him to the ground. He tries to protest, but only finds my combat knife resting against his windpipe.

            “Fuck. Off.” The words drift out of my mouth slowly, like breath in winter. “I could slit your throat right now.”

            “Hey, hey, hey! Don’t be hasty!” His brow is covered in a thick layer of sweat. “You can use my help, friend.” He jangles his wrist and the briefcase shakes.

            “What is it?” I remove the knife and take my knee out of his gut. He reaches for the shotgun before noticing that it’s already been knocked behind me. He sighs and punches a fourteen digit code into a terminal on the briefcase and it slides open. He sits up and starts going through an array of vials inside the case. Out of roughly twenty vials, ten are empty and ten contain a green liquid that looks like some kind of alien blood. Beside a smaller lock box is an empty hypodermic needle and a small bottle of blue liquid.

            “I’m a doctor.” He says, looking proud of himself.  “I’ve created a solution that can tell if a person’s blood is infected.”

            “That’s amazing!”

            “It’s something alright. When the outbreak started, I gave up on my old research and came up with this formula.”  He holds out the hypo and an empty vial. “Care for a test?”

            “How do I know you’re not gonna’ stick me with something?” I lean back hesitantly.

            “Because I’m taking blood, not injecting you with anything.”

            I pause for a second, and then nod. He finds a good vein in my arm and sticks the needle in. It hurts more than I expect, but I try not to show it. He takes a full needle of blood and then deposits it into the empty vial.

            “And now to add the solution.” He drops a single drop of the blue solution into my blood and shakes the vial. There’s silence. We wait. “If it turns green, you’re infected, if it turns blue, you’re fine.” There’s more silence, and we wait some more. A bluish tint starts to form in the bottom of the vial and I let out a sigh of relief, not that I had any doubts.

            “That’s odd…” He says, and I look back at the vial and see the blue tint spreading through the blood is turning black. And then, in no more than a second, the entire sample turns black.

            “Does that not always happen?” I ask nervously.

            “I’ve never seen this before.” He adjusts his glasses and looks closer at the vial.

            “How many times have you done these tests?”

            “I did them at least a hundred times between now and when I first started developing the solution. I’ve never seen this result before though.” He quickly puts the vial back into the slot that he took it from and closes the briefcase. There is the sound of a mechanism closing, and then it’s locked.

            “That’s it? No closure?”

            “Sorry, that’s all I can do. Now why don’t you give me my gun back and we can be off on our merry ways?” He flashes a pearly-white smile that I don’t trust at all.

            “Where are you headed? A group of two is better than trekking it alone.”

            “Well I was headed into that butcher shop to look for scraps, after that, I’m heading for one of my old labs, it’s a long walk but I guess I could use the help.” He shrugs and I nod. I pick up the discarded shotgun and pass it to him. He takes it but doesn’t notice how tightly I have the combat knife clutched in my hand. He slides the weapon into a holster sewn into his pants.

            “That’s a clever place to keep it. Is that all you have? The gun and the briefcase?” I look around and don’t see a back-pack, money belt, or even a fanny pack.

            “Yessir,” He says, slurring the two words together. “Just me and Annabelle. I usually just eat what I find. Haven’t found myself to be that hungry lately. Water on the other hand, seems to have completely escaped me.” I slide my bag around to my side and dig out the water canteen. He catches it and twists off the top as soon as I toss it to him. He hands it back almost empty and wipes the water from his beard. “Thanks, man.”

            “That reminds me,” I say, putting the canteen back into my bag. “We haven’t even exchanged names.” I offer my hand and he takes it.

            “Saul Ghoulachov, Bio-Engineer.” We shake.

            “Jace Abernathy, Ex-military.”

            “Oh, military. Explains that rifle on your back.” Saul says with a chuckle.

            “This thing?” I say, grabbing my rifle. “Any farmer with a daughter or two could use this piece of crap. I found it in an abandoned apartment a few days ago, haven’t used it much though. I’m more of a Desert Eagle or M4 kinda guy.” I small smile creeps across my face as I see the shock on Saul’s.

            He puts his hand on the butt of his shotgun and chuckles. “I guess we’re just a couple of gunslingers, eh?” We both share a laugh.

            “Out here, man, you can’t be anything else.”

            “Should we check out this Butchery?” Saul nods back towards the building behind me and I nod. “I’m prayin’ for some steaks.”

            We walk up the stairs and Saul waits while I kick down the locked front door. On the outside, it looks like a regular butcher shop, on the inside, it looks like a crime scene. All of the floors and walls are almost completely covered in blood, and hanging from the ceiling on massive meat hooks are several infected. Still moving.

            “What the fuck?” Saul says, pulling out his shotgun and aiming it at the infected.

            “If the infected ones are hanging from the ceiling, then where are the Ragers?”

            “You mean the Hyper-Tension/ Hyper-Aggravated Re-Animated Humanoids?”

            “…Yah I just call them Ragers.”

            “Works for me.” Saul shrugs. Something clatters in the room in front of us and we both turn quickly to see the door opening.

            “What is dis?” A thick Russian accent shouts as a large burly man in a mostly red apron slams the door open. He’s around six foot three and could be no less than two hundred and fifty pounds.

            “Hey, we’re just here looking for food. We mean to harm, padre.” Saul says, failing to calm the giant. I assume the worst when out of nowhere the monster of a man lets out a massive, throaty chuckle.

            “Dis is good, yeah? De spoiled meat does not cook as vell as de fresh meat.” Something in the way he says ‘fresh’ sends chills down my spine.

            “Who are you calling fresh meat?!” Saul raises his shotgun but The Butcher is way ahead of him, he brings down the massive cleaver in his hand and smacks the shotgun to the ground. Saul staggers back, but I see the opening. As if he’s moving in slow motion, I charge forward, knife in hand, and tackle the massive man. I don’t know how, but I knew that his footing was wrong, and that if I hit him exactly where I did, he would fall. Before he has the chance to react, I punch his wrist and the cleaver clatters to the cold cement. I put all my weight on his chest and start pounding my fists into his meaty face. He blacks out but I throw a few more for good measure.

            “I think he’s done, Jace.” Saul says, picking up Annabelle. “That was insane.”

            “What was?” I say, wiping my hands off on the butchers bloody apron.

            “You moved so fast, like, weirdly fast. That didn’t look like military training to me.”

            “I just saw an opening.” I look away from him and stand up, wishing I could explain what just happened a little better. “let’s look around.”

            After what feels like an hour, we decide there’s nothing here for us to eat. Saul takes a long machete that the butcher had locked up in a case and a few shotgun shells from a shotgun that looks older than me. We’re about to leave when I see a door that I hadn’t noticed before.

            “Should we check in there?” I ask, and Saul nods. I pull open the door and feel my limbs going stiff.

            “We need to go. Like, now.” Saul says, pulling me away from the cage filled with what looked like twenty Ragers. Each one flings itself one at a time into the cage door, trying desperately to murder us.

            The stiffness goes away and is replaced with adrenaline. We book it out of the Butcher’s shop. I feel my heart pounding in my chest. Pounding, pounding, pounding. It hurts so bad, my vision is blurring. All I can see is Saul standing over my collapsed form and the group of infected gathering around us. I reach for my inhaler and remember it’s not there.

            “Saul…” I manage to say, “Behind you!”

Gunslingers #1, April 19 2011

Gunslingers #1: Jace and the Hotel

            A small, nearly unnoticeable breeze rolls in through the broken window of the hotel room. I didn’t break the window; it was probably its former resident, the one who harvested it of anything salvageable. But that’s not why I’m here. Shelter is the only thing that can be borrowed from these broken buildings now. That seems to be all I’ve been able to find. Shelter and a hell of a lot of bodies.

            Laid out beside me is the large brown hiking backpack that I’ve carried with me since the beginning and the contents that I’ve gathered since. When laid out, it doesn’t look like much…

            1 hunting knife

            2 boxes of rifle ammo

            1 box of assorted bandages (seven remaining)

            3 sticks of beef jerky

            1 half-litre canteen of water (full)

            1 map of Toronto

            …no it doesn’t seem like much, but it’s enough to get me by. I put everything away, each item its own specific place, and use the back-pack as a pillow.  I take off my green military-style jacket and lay it over top of me. The wind is still blowing through the broken window. It’s going to be a cold night.

            A scraping at the door to the hotel room wakes me and instantly I know that I’ve overstayed my welcome. The lock has held out, but if more than one infected start piling onto that door, it can only hold for so long. That’s assuming that they don’t attract a-

            Bang. Something smashes into the door and breaks a massive hole into it. A red, blood-soaked arm lunges through the hole and reaches for anything beyond it. Fucking Ragers, always getting in the god damn way.

            I fling my bag, my safety pack, my life force, over my shoulder and grab the rifle I left lying on the floor. I know for a fact that it has five shots loaded into it. I always keep it full. The door way is blocked, that’s obvious. I could open the door and lunge with my combat knife, take out the Rager and avoid the infected, but there could be more Ragers out there. It’s too risky. I take a deep breath, button up my jacket, and jump out the window.

            The cold steel of the fire escape meets my face as I land on the metal contraption. Luckily for me, It goes all the way down to the second floor. Stair after stair after stair I run as fast as I can down the fire escape, praying that the Ragers don’t follow me. I run past a room full of infected but they don’t notice the man almost literally flying down the fire escape. I know I’m going to fast, I can feel my hard pounding in my chest; bump, bump, bumping in my chest. So heavy, like a brick in my chest. My vision’s blurring. I reach into the bag and find the one thing I forgot to list. My inhaler.

            As I pull it from an easy-access pocket, my foot gets caught, and I sail ass-over-tea-kettle into the last floor of the fire-escape. I watch as the inhaler dislodges from my hand and falls into the alleyway bellow. I don’t see if it breaks or not, my vision is already blurring, I feel tired…so tired. The world is all sinking into darkness, I can hear the deep breathing of the infected everywhere. A dark symphony lulling me to sleep. Goodnight Toronto.

            No! I don’t let the darkness take me. I take deep, slow breaths, bringing myself back up. I’m fine. I know I’m fine, I can do this.

            I pick myself up and take several deep breaths. My vision returns to me and I can see that, yes, my inhaler has shattered on the hard blacktop below. That’s fine. It was almost empty anyways. I walk over to the ladder and drop it down into the alleyway below. The sound is uncomfortably loud, but I try to ignore it. When I get to the bottom of the ladder I check for any infected, but the coast seems clear. I grab my knife from out of my bag and hold it close. My rifle is still attached to my bag, but it’s too loud. A gunshot in the middle of the street would attract Ragers all around.

            The street at the end of the alleyway appears to be empty of the infected also, but every abandoned car could be housing one of those gross bastards.

            Something across the street catches my eye and then I see it…Bob’s Butchery. The thought of real, juicy meat fills my head and I make the decision to make camp there for the rest of the night. I step into the street and an infected stumbles out from behind a Buick, his hands reached towards my neck. I flip my knife forward and plant it securely in the freak’s head. It drops to its knees and falls to the ground.

            The butcher’s shop is bleach white with the words Bob’s Butchery written in red letters across the top. The letters are in a fancy, cursive font, but they still look like blood. I take one step onto the landing in front of the store and feel a small tap on my shoulder. I tighten my grip on my knife and start to turn quickly.

            “Whoa, friend. Slow it down.” There’s another tap on my shoulder and I slowly creep around. “That’s better.” The man says, his burly beard shaking with every word. He stand’s slightly shorter than me, maybe five eleven or six feet. He’s wearing a wrinkled suit that looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in weeks and he has a pair of thick black glasses. The only part of him that seems tended is his slicked back brown hair that looks as if it’s cut regularly. Then I see what he was tapping me with; a two foot long sawed off shotgun with the word “Annabelle” written across the barrel in white paint. He points the maw of the gun at my forehead and smiles.

            “Nice to see another mouth-breather, eh? How about handing over that backpack now.” His smile seems so fake all of a sudden.