TJ pulled the flashlight from his pocket and said to me, “I’m gonna let you pick. One of us will take point. The other stays behind and goes in last. The point man is the first to get to freedom, but he’s also gonna be the first to meet any bad news that might be waitin’ up there. Last guy has the easiest escape should things go wrong, but also has to spend the most time back here waitin’ for the stragglers to work through their bullshit. Guess it’s a matter of how optimistic you are.”
“No, it’s not. You’re in better shape than me, we don’t need the whole train to be waiting for me to catch my breath. You go first.”
“And you seen enough horror movies to know the black dude don’t ever make it to the end.”
“We all appreciate your sacrifice, TJ.”
“Fuck you.”
He laughed. So did I.
TJ tied a bandana around his head, Tupac-style, and wedged the flashlight in it above his ear, so it’d work like a coal miner’s headlamp. He clicked it, shook my hand, and climbed into the tunnel.
I said, “See you on the other side, TJ.”
Hope followed him in. Then Corey. It was on.
* * *
What followed was thirty excruciating minutes as one by one, the escapees slowly, clumsily and noisily clambered into the ragged hole in the brick wall. I went around the boiler room, telling people to quiet down, explaining the knee shoe process, and waiting for a red jumpsuit to throw open the boiler room door and ask us what the hell we were doing.
One by one, they went through. The crowd in the boiler room got more and more sparse. As we drew closer and closer to the “holy shit this is actually going to work” mark, the knot in my stomach pulled itself tighter and tighter.
So, so close.
Then there were only five people left. That worked its way down to two, an older woman who in my opinion had no business attempting the crawl (what would I do if we got halfway through and she told me she needed to go back?) and a suave-looking dude who looked like Marc Anthony, the Latin pop singer. Racist Ed was standing guard in the hall and I was supposed to knock twice on the door once I saw the last person go through. He’d wait a few minutes, then come in and cover up the tunnel.
The last pair of shoes disappeared into the bricks and the boiler room had finally disgorged its contents into the tunnel. Was TJ out the other end by now? Surely the fact that we hadn’t heard anything was a good sign.
Surely.
Hurrying, I knocked lightly on the hallway door and quickly jogged back across the room to the tunnel. I put my hands on the edge of the hole—
Whoa.
Dark in here. I couldn’t see the last guy who went in, and there was no sign of TJ’s bobbing flashlight up ahead. All I could see was maybe the first ten feet of muddy red brick before it was swallowed by the darkness. In the sputtering candlelight of the boiler room, it looked like a throat. I could faintly hear the hard breathing and scraping of the crawling refugees ahead, the sound fading in the distance.
I had a flashback to the dark hallway in the dungeon when I was heading for the elevator. The wet dragging sound.
Walt.
Stop that. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. Thirty people had climbed right into that tunnel ahead of me, men and women from age eighteen to early sixties. I’d be damned if I couldn’t do it.
My legs would not move.
Brick and mud. Cockroaches skittering along every surface. Spiderwebs spanned the gaps between rusty pipes. It stank of mold and mildew and rot. It stank of the grave. Water dripped from the cracks in the bricks overhead.
The shuffling of knee shoes was completely gone now, not even the echoes reached me. I had stayed behind too long. It was just me and the utter silence and the utter darkness. I remembered a video I had once watched of a wasp outside of a beehive, patiently beheading each bee that emerged from the hole. It accumulated a pile of hundreds of heads before it was done. I imagined a huge wasplike creature on the other end of this tunnel, silently and efficiently ripping the heads off of each muddy, exhausted person who emerged from the other side, tossing them into a pile.
Stop it.
I put my hands on either side of the tunnel. I said, out loud, “Here we go.”
But my legs did not move.
I started to whisper words of encouragement to myself, when a massive hand landed on my shoulder and spun me around.
Owen said, “And where do you think you’re going, bro?”
* * *
Owen pinned me against the wall. Racist Ed strolled past me and started dutifully stacking boxes in front of the tunnel entrance, which made me think maybe he didn’t fully understand the plan from the beginning.
Owen said, “Dude, you are a piece of work, you know that? What is that, a tunnel?”
“Let go of me.”
“Where does it go?”
“We don’t know. Out. Out there somewhere. We got no idea what’s at the end of it but we decided whatever it was, was better than being stuck in here with you.”
“How many people went in?”
“Fuck you.”
He slammed me against the wall. “How many?”
“About … thirty.”
“Thirty. And you had no idea what’s at the other end. Nobody scouted it first? Nobody crawled through to make sure it was even open at the other end?”
“We—we didn’t have time. I—”
“Right, you didn’t have time because you were afraid of being discovered. Because you had to keep this your little secret.”
Racist Ed said casually, “Well, I know where it goes. It runs right out to the old asylum.”
We both turned toward him.
I said, “You mean the—”
I was interrupted by echoes of gunshots, cracking through the tunnel.
Gunshots, and screams. Faintly, from the other end, I heard an unfamiliar voice scream, “THEY’RE COMING OUT OF THE WALLS! THEY’RE COMING OUT OF THE FUCKING WALLS!”
The Massacre at Ffirth Asylum
Amy was bouncing in her seat, muttering, “Come on, come on, come on.”
The gun cam was in the old cafeteria, trained on the door to the hallway. The other two guys—Flashlight Guy and Donnie—ran past. The camera swung around to find Donnie helping Flashlight climb up through the basement window.
To Fredo, Amy said, “They’re almost out! Get ready!”
It was taking forever. Flashlight guy was stuck in the window for some reason, his legs kicking but not making any forward progress. Josh kept swinging his gun/camera back to the door to see if they were being pursued.
Shrieking.
Not screaming—this was the kind of noise babies make, when they don’t know how to put their pain into words. It was Flashlight Guy. His legs were thrashing in the window. Something had him from the other end. Josh and Donnie grabbed his legs, trying to pull him back into the classroom. They pulled and pulled, and whatever had Flashlight from the other end finally let go. Of his legs, anyway.
Josh and Donnie found themselves on the floor of the classroom, with the lower half of Flashlight Guy twitching in their lap. Everything from the waist up was still laying in the basement window. If Josh and Donnie hadn’t had earmuffs on, they could have heard Amy scream from the RV.
Josh scrambled to his feet. He trained the gun cam on the window, and the twitching and now-silent pile of meat that was Flashlight’s torso. It appeared that something was ripping away at his guts from below, something coming out of the grass, like it had emerged from the earth itself and torn him in half. Josh shot at it, the Roman candle shells blowing Flashlight’s guts apart and sending fire streaking into the night beyond the window.
Amy flinched—she and Fredo saw the glowing projectiles streak across the windshield from the side of the building.
The view on the monitor was chaos. Donnie and Josh were arguing. Then Josh yelled, “THE DOOR! WATCH THE DOOR!” and more shots were fired, sharp reports that echoed through the night air.
Donn
ie screamed, until his screaming parts were ripped out of his throat.
The gun cam raced toward the basement window—which was still blocked by the ravaged remains of Flashlight Guy. The view flew through the window—Josh tossing the gun through ahead of him—and it spun around in the grass until Amy found her video feed was showing the very RV where she was sitting in the distance, weeds partially obstructing the view.
Through the camera’s mic, Amy heard a sound like a sponge being wrung out in a sink full of water. Josh screamed and then made a series of harsh grunts. The gun cam was still sitting motionless in the grass. Amy looked over the laptop at the building, then back down at the camera feed, back and forth, looking for something. Anything.
On the laptop, the camera view suddenly moved, being dragged backward through the weeds. The view swung around. Josh’s face came into view, laying on the ground, blood pouring from his mouth. He was grabbing the gun by the barrel, pulling it toward him. He was doing something with his other hand, reaching around. His mouth was wide open, making choking noises. Something came up in his throat. His eyes got wide, and Amy had a split second to see a fist-sized wad of Josh’s own intestines push out between his teeth before he pulled the trigger and blew his own head off.
Amy jumped to her feet, the laptop clattering to the floor of the RV. She had her hand over her mouth.
Fredo had heard the shot.
“What? What’s happening?”
“We have to go, Fredo, we have to go and we have to go now. We have to go. We have to…”
“What? What happened?”
“GO! Fredo! They’re dead! They’re all dead! Go! Please!”
“YOU DON’T KNOW THAT! We don’t leave men behind!”
Fredo threw the RV into gear and floored it. Instead of backing out onto the street, he plowed forward, across the lawn and toward the building. Amy stumbled back up to the passenger seat.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
“Look! They’re still alive! They’re moving!”
The RV skidded to a stop outside the basement window. On the ground, in the shadows, something was in fact moving.
“NO! Fredo, just go! We have to get out of here!”
Fredo yelled, “Josh! Donnie! Answer if you’re alive!”
Someone was out there, between the RV and the wall, a lumpy almost-human figure. Fredo peered out at it. Amy hissed, “Don’t, Fredo, don’t. Back up. Please. Back up the RV—”
Fredo reached inside his jacket and pulled out a serious-looking black handgun. He said, “Donnie?”
No answer. Fredo aimed the handgun at the figure, the glass of the driver’s-side door between him and his target. Amy could see Fredo’s face reflected in the glass. His eyes went wide. He had time to say, “Holy shi—” before a series of things happened so quickly that Amy’s mind couldn’t register them all.
While Fredo had been focused on the figure out of the driver’s-side door, something smashed through the windshield to his right. Something—a long, pink blur—whipped in through the glass, grabbed Fredo’s right bicep, and neatly severed it. The arm, with the hand at the end still clutching the pistol, was yanked through the windshield and out into the night. Before Fredo could scream or even turn to see what had happened, the arm poked back through the broken windshield, now with the gun end aimed at Fredo. Fredo’s own hand, now being operated by whatever was outside the RV, squeezed the trigger. Fredo’s skull exploded.
All of this occurred over the course of 2.5 seconds. To Amy, all she registered was the shattering of glass, a wet, meaty rip and a gunshot. Then she was covered in bits of glass and droplets of warm blood.
Fredo slumped over, dead.
A Trial by the Fire
Owen was pointing a gun at my head. An impromptu late-night tribunal had formed around the quarantine bonfire. I shivered. The fire had that campfire effect of making your front too hot and your back too cold.
Owen had waited in the boiler room for somebody to come crawling back through, fleeing whatever violence had erupted on the other end. He waited patiently through hellish echoes of shotgun blasts and screams, waited as the report of machine gun and shotguns ended the screams one by one. He waited while I screamed into the tunnel, for TJ, or Hope, or Corey, or anyone. He watched me throw up in the corner and waited while I put my head in my hands and heard those screams echo through my head over and over and over and over again.
Then I had a gun at my forehead and he was pulling me to my feet.
Five minutes later I was standing in a crowd of red jumpsuits. Everybody was out of bed. The echoing rattle of gunshots from a few blocks down the street—right on the back of the mysterious flares that came from the same direction—had everyone awake and at DEFCON 1.
From behind the nine millimeter, Owen said, “Now that you got everybody’s attention, why don’t you tell them what that shooting was about.”
I was so tired. It was the unique type of exhaustion that comes from failure on top of failure. Futility and fuckups take a lot out of a man—I should know, since that was pretty much my whole life up to this point. I didn’t have the energy to defend myself.
Those goddamned screams.
“Do what you want, Owen. But don’t make a show out of it.”
“A show. That’s what you think this is, bro?” He shook his head. “All right. Allow me to summarize for the fuckin’ jury. You and TJ found an escape tunnel. Instead of tellin’ the camp about it, you tiptoed around, gathered up your green clique, and tried to crawl out while everybody else was asleep. You left behind sick people, you left behind pregnant women, you left behind moms who ain’t seen their kids since the outbreak.”
“They still got drones buzzing around up there. If suddenly the population of this place goes from three hundred to zero, and a goddamned crowd spontaneously forms outside the fence, they’re gonna figure out what happened. And then they’re gonna rain holy hell down on that crowd. It was either a few of us go, or nobody.”
“And of course you get to make that decision, all on your own, don’t you? See, because none of us are as smart as you. We couldn’t have organized a way to do it without dooming the entire quarantine. No, only you.”
I shrugged. “You’d have stopped us, Owen. And you know it. You’d have started sticking that gun in everybody’s face. Same as you’re doing now.”
“And why would I ever do such a thing? Because I’m an asshole, right? Here, why don’t you tell everybody what happened to all your friends who crawled into that tunnel.”
“We don’t … necessarily know. We heard gunshots and—”
“What happened to them is exactly what I have been saying would happen to anybody who tried to make a break for it. It’s what I would have explained to you—again—if you’d asked. Because from the first day that gate closed on this quarantine, I said that anybody who crossed that line was gonna die. Because as far as anybody outside of that fence knows, every single one of us is tainted. And that fence is the only thing keepin’ back a tide that will turn the fuckin’ rivers into blood. That means all of us in here got to band together. But you, TJ and the rest of you greens, you never got that.”
I shook my head. “No. The difference is that we had a chance at freedom and were willing to take it. Unlike you.”
“Uh huh. And just to be clear, you were gonna be among the escapees, right? If I’d showed up five seconds later than I did?”
“Hell, yes.”
“You don’t even know what I’m saying, do you, you arrogant little prick? You’re the only one who can sort infected from uninfected. If you’d gone through there, what choice would you have left us the next time a truck full of people rolled through that fence? What choice would we have—would I have—but to burn each and every one of them? You crawling into that hole would have doomed every man and woman who got shoved through that gate, bro. And you’d have condemned me to have to do the killing, in the name of protecting the other three hundred swinging dicks who are trying to s
tay alive in this quarantine. I get to live with the final expression of every face I put that gun in, for the rest of my life, to smell their fuckin’ skin and hair burning, every night, for the rest of my life. And I bet you never even paused three seconds to consider that.”
“I don’t know. I … Amy…”
“And if you’d made it through and the feds started raining death on this end of the tunnel, all you’d have felt is relief. You’d never have given us a second thought. It’s all about saving your own ass. And that tells me that you’re gonna sabotage this operation again the first chance you get, for whatever selfish reason pops into your fat, arrogant head. And that means we can’t trust your judgment to be our ‘Spider-Man’ any longer. And that means that as long as you’re alive and walkin’ around in here, the three hundred—I’m sorry, the two hundred and seventy—men and women in this quarantine are in danger. Is there anybody standing here, including you, Wong, who can make a convincing argument otherwise?”
No one spoke. Not even me. The wind howled. The bonfire whooshed and crackled. I looked into the fire and the burning eyes of two dozen charred skulls stared back at me.
I said, “Nope.”
Mop-Up
Amy spun out of her seat and crawled to the rear of the RV, knees and hand crunching over cubes of safety glass. She knocked aside the spilled laptop, her knee crushed a box of Pop-Tarts. She crawled and crawled and eventually ran out of RV.
She turned over and pressed her back against the rear wall. She pulled up her knees and made herself as small as possible. Frigid air blew in from the busted windshield and it felt like the tears and sweat were freezing solid on her face.
She huddled, in the cold and the darkness, staring at the dismembered and lifeless corpse of Fredo the RV driver. His right foot was twitching. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.
The driver’s-side door yanked open. Amy screamed.
Fredo’s corpse was yanked out into the night. She screamed again. She pulled her knees tighter, and twisted her hair in her fingers, and squeezed her eyes shut and tried to make it all go away.