From Oblivion's Ashes Page 2

  For a few seconds, he trembled over the precipice of fear and self-preservation. The winner of the apocalyptic lottery for homes, all Marshal had to do was close the curtain and the moment would pass. If he kept his head down and took no risks, there was no reason he couldn’t survive in luxury for several more months. He had everything he could need, and… and who knew? Maybe he was wrong, and maybe there was an army out there that had discovered a way to fight the creatures.

  All he had to do was close the curtain.

  He bowed his head and glared at his shoes.

  And then, like a tornado destroying a paper village, a thought occurred to him, and the fear of it coming true broke past all hesitation and tore apart the last few strands of his uncertainty.

  He realized then that, whatever the cost, he didn’t want to be the last human alive. He’d endured enough of the silence, the shame, and the scorn of the end of time.

  That this girl existed had changed everything.

  He was not alone. And he wouldn’t need to be if he acted fast.

  He had to save her.

  She was his last chance at redemption, to not be the last man on Earth. Together, they would be two, two against the ghosts at the end of the world.

  Moreover, he couldn’t watch, as a little girl got ripped apart and devoured, bite-by-bite.

  Not again.

  His hands shaking, Marshal bolted from the window to the entrance of his apartment, with his whole world in the balance, the ghosts of history jeering at him as he ran.

  Chapter Two: Day 15: Rescue

  Marshal rushed into his front hall.

  The second floor had undergone many incarnations over the years. Its first had been as a living space for the extensive Sabbatini family, decades ago, when the ground floor had been the site for the first Sabbatini's restaurant. Later, when the restaurant expanded into other franchises, the family moved out and converted it to a work area and warehouse, with reinforced floors and plenty of space to service their growing empire. This included the industrial-sized kitchen and walk-in freezer, where they would store the hand-made pastas, the pre-made appetizers, and other unique, specialty food items that were to be shipped to the other locations.

  The scuffed hardwood planks in the front hall showed the wear and tear from years of loaded skids rolling over top of them. They had been re-varnished many times since, but they had never been replaced.

  Today, Marshal's front hall was a twenty-by-thirty foot space built up around the apartment’s main entrance. Except for the floor, the room was renovated with all new fixtures, polished surfaces, and earth tones. Oak-paneled walls with dark marble fixtures under the high ceiling and mini-chandelier gleamed under the soft ambience generated by multiple banks of track lighting. There was a small, walk-in closet for coats and shoes, right next to a prominently displayed wall panel and 40” flat screen monitor. The screen was lit up with the a split-image, video-feed showing the hallway one floor below and the alleyway out behind the building.

  The back wall, opposite to the hallway leading to the rest of the apartment, was a model of careful construction. Here, there was a beautifully crafted, cherry wood armoire, umbrella stand, and shoe rack, all which appeared to have been fixed directly onto the wall. Above the armoire, there was a gaudy but stylistically excellent oil painting of a fat Italian man, dressed up as Elvis under bright lights, performing to an unseen crowd.

  The front hall’s two most peculiar features, however, were the monumental, wood-panel columns, oddly positioned near the center of the room. They stood twelve feet apart, and other than a small keyboard and screen mounted on one of the pillars, they showed no obvious structural purpose in being there.

  Marshal's heart was pounding, and yet even as his panic grew, he felt his mood grow cool and detached. With meticulous attention to detail, he reviewed his strategy, playing out in his mind the actions he would have to take if he was to rescue the girl. Despite his terror, his thoughts remained clear, like foam floating above the turbulent ocean of his emotion.

  It had always been this way. A strange quirk of Marshal's personality was that he had never lost his head during a crisis. He could not explain it, and despite the advantage it often gave him, he did not enjoy the feel of it. Instead of uncertainty or confusion, something in Marshal had always crystallized runaway emotion into hyperaware, icy calculation. Like a dissociative state, his outrage or terror would drain away, leaving him cold, ruthless, and precise. Even morality and pain were reduced to a distant afterthought, present but not involved, allowing him to think, plan, and act with lightning speed and clarity.

  It was a dark impression, a shadow on his psyche. Whenever a crisis ended, the cold would thaw, color would be restored, and a very human Marshal would emerge, feeling guilty and self-conscious. At such times, faced with the repercussions of his own actions, he would wonder if he was part psychopath, and because of it, he had always preferred his own company. What friends he had were not the sort to be bothered by his unusual temperament.

  Even now, as his current terror grew, Marshal found himself wondering in a detached, clinical way whether it was possible that it was this side of him that was responsible for causing his recent hallucinations, that maybe, the inescapability of being the last human alive had pushed his unique form of madness into some kind of tipping point. Was sanity the price he paid for stability?

  He set it aside, reminding himself that there were more important things to consider. Was this really the right thing to do? There were so many things that could go wrong out there, so many easy ways to die. And the death, if it came, would be more horrible than he could even dream.

  But would it be worse than being alone at the end of the world?

  He would need a distraction. It was the only way that any of this would work.

  Opening a drawer in the armoire, Marshal removed a stuffed, toy bear. It was soft and cuddly and adorable. Big, shiny plastic eyes regarded him without judgment as it clutched its fabric guitar in both paws. A powder blue T-shirt that was its only apparel proclaimed in bright pink letters ‘I Love Toronto’.

  Was this sanity?

  He clutched bear to his chest and retrieved a small, dark plastic remote from an armoire shelf. Then, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, he pushed a button in its top right hand corner.

  With a near-soundless hum from the two pillars, a section of the floor began to sink. Stairs unfolded as it descended, and with one last prayer, Marshal stepped on board.

  The ancient skid-lift had been installed decades ago at great expense, and it had served with distinction during the many years that the second floor had been used as a storage warehouse. Eventually, the restaurant had moved to a better location, leaving the mechanism behind as a kind of white elephant. In the years that followed, the ground floor would experience many new lives, as a smoke shop, a video store, a beauty salon, a travel agency, and each time the need for second floor storage would diminish accordingly. The skid lift, which would have cost more money to remove than to ignore, was left intact.

  The presence of the skid-lift, however, had allowed the first floor to increase its square footage by tearing out the original stairwell. Since the mechanism didn’t see nearly as much use as it used to, and hardly ever broke down, alternate routes to the second floor had proved unnecessary. By the time Marshal had moved in, calling the skid-lift down like a garage door had become the only way of reaching his apartment at all.

  There were other reasons that the Sabbatini family had kept the skid lift intact. These reasons were never discussed, and Marshal had made a career out of not caring. What mattered here was that the lack of a front door was the main reason the undead had been unable to find his apartment.

  Marshal’s apartment had no doors to the outside world, and other than the camouflaged one that overlooked the street, it possessed no windows. There were other apartments above him, but they all had their own entrances and windows, and more importantly, they all belonged to
the apartment tower next door, whose foundation extended over top of Marshal’s building. An agreement had been worked out with the city to allow this marvel of engineering, in exchange for certain considerations, making Marshal’s whole floor little more than an architectural afterthought. Few people, including the police, were aware it even existed.

  Again, there were reasons for this, but only a few people knew what they were.

  As the platform descended, Marshal searched for any sign of the undead, but found nothing. The insufficient camera angles had given him some level of advance warning, but the possibility of an off-camera zombie spotting his descent would have made for a short trip.

  The last time he’d dared to venture downstairs, it had been so much easier.

  The last time and only time that he’d left the apartment since the outbreak, there had been a heavy thunderstorm. On that occasion, he’d had the pounding rain and the occasional clash of thunder to cover up any noise he might make. Even more helpful had been the rain itself, and the strange effect that it had on the undead. He'd used the occasion to loot the Dollar Den downstairs, taking almost everything he could get his hands on. Canned goods, toilet paper, tools, razors, cleaners, chemicals, perishables, wiring, batteries, light bulbs, and beverages by the case... he'd spent a full four hours running directly from store to apartment. He'd even grabbed things (like the stuffed bear) that he initially wasn't sure he had a use for, ferrying them upstairs until he collapsed from sheer exhaustion.

  The rain. The rain had made it all possible.

  For some unknown reason, whenever it rained, the monsters would gather outside and sway, trancelike, beneath the falling water. Marshal couldn’t begin to guess at why, but whether it was a light drizzle or a cataclysmic deluge streaked with lightning, they would not stop until it was over. They weren’t completely entranced, as Marshal had discovered when he'd dropped a bottle. The domino effect of falling products he set off had forced him to huddle behind a toppled-over shelf as two zombies investigated the noise, shuffling around the site of a shattered jar of hand cream for several minutes. He’d been lucky, and they soon returned outside to the street and the enticements of the weeping gray sky.

  Marshal scowled to himself. This time, he would not have the muffling curtain of rain to hide his activities. This time, the silence of the tomb-like hallway below was like a mousetrap in a mausoleum, waiting to spring.

  The platform touched down on the grimy, littered floor below with a light thump. Windswept papers, leaves, and bits of plastic covered the broad, dark hallway, which doubled as Marshal’s entry port and the ground floor loading zone. Huge, double doors, long since ripped away, opened wide into the building’s back alley, where the skids had once rolled off the trucks.

  This was not safe ground.

  For a second, he hesitated, daunted by the prospect that a zombie could come staggering around the corner at any second. Could one have heard the stairwell bumping against the floor? Was there a creature in the alley outside, just now wandering by and drawn by the noise? He didn’t know.

  He listened, but could hear nothing. And time was running out.

  With a cold snap of will, he stepped off the stairwell and pushed the button on the remote to send it upwards. When it was closed, it looked just like any other part of the ceiling.

  The way to Dollar Den’s shopping area was a gaping hole, the doors having been wrenched from their hinges, and Marshal peered through the opening with care. To his relief, he saw no signs of the undead waiting for him. He slipped through the doorway and into the back end of the Dollar Den.

  Many of the shelves had been knocked around, battered, even crushed by undead, who’d spent the first few days chasing humans through them. Windswept papers and product had piled up in corners from the breezes that blew through the open doors and windows, and the smell of mildew permeated the room. A massive hole now existed in the north-facing wall, product of a zombie who’d wasted no time looking for a door.

  Such destruction had not been uncommon during the outbreak, though it seldom happened anymore. Brick walls were like tissue paper to the undead. Usually, the creatures left them alone, using existing doorways and windows to enter or leave the buildings they patrolled. But when in pursuit of prey, they let nothing get in their way.

  The undead had three distinctive modes of behavior. The first, which Marshal had come to think of as ‘Search Mode’, was their default state. When you spotted a zombie staggering around in Search Mode, it was conserving its energy, walking an endless patrol of the world, looking for food. ‘Hunting Mode’ was another step upwards, and occurred when a zombie had reason to suspect the presence of humans. In Hunting Mode, they became sharper, quicker, much more focused and alert, but stopping short of random acts of destruction.

  It was in ‘Attack Mode’, that terrible moment when they’d spotted whatever they were hunting, that they shifted into high gear. In Attack Mode, the undead would do anything to reach their prey. They exploded through walls, shredded metal obstacles, and moved with lightning speed and ferocity. Nothing could stop them. If a zombie entered Attack Mode, it was all over but the screaming.

  Marshal had witnessed it all through the Terrible Window. All down his street, crumbled brick, twisted steel, and other examples stood as mute testimony to the sheer destructive power of zombies in Attack Mode. In some places, the walls had gotten so perforated that entire buildings had collapsed. He’d even watched one zombie have a building fall on it. That zombie had shaken the rubble off like it was cake, then pounced on its screaming prey like a falcon on a mouse.

  Marshal lifted his head to peer over one of the shelves that remained standing and spotted the little girl across the street, still motionless and near invisible in her shadowy nook. She hadn’t so much as twitched in all the time since he’d first seen her. It was an impressive display of self-control, all the more so now. The sound of the approaching zombie was growing louder.

  He risked a quick glance at the approaching creature. Bigger than most, it was coated in the faint purplish sheen from the same ichor that covered them all. It batted the husk of a wrecked Honda Civic out of its path, examining the ground beneath it with acute interest.

  And that was the reason the little girl was about to die. This particular zombie showed a pathological thoroughness in its hunting, more so than any zombie Marshal had ever seen. Unless his intervention worked, the girl would be caught and eaten alive.

  He would have to move fast. It had almost reached her.

  Clutching the teddy bear in his right hand, he ducked down and slipped across the littered floor. His heart raced each time his weight caused something to gently crunch, every light bump on a piece of garbage, or every scuff of paper on the ground. This close to one of them, separated by little more than thirty feet and open windows, even the slightest noise could inspire the zombie to come inside for a closer look. It wasn't a guarantee, of course. In a world still teeming with non-human life, obscure sounds alone were not enough to put a zombie into Hunting Mode, but it could certainly draw their interest, and this zombie was the worst of all.

  He managed to make it across the floor to the gaping hole in the far wall without drawing attention, and climbed through to the lobby of 'Greenville Mews', the residential apartment building next door. Hundreds had died here, to the point the floors should have been littered with bodies and forever stained with blood.

  Marshal’s fear heightened. He was entering places that he had not seen since before the outbreak, crossing spaces where random zombies could still be lurking. Luck was fickle, and he was becoming more and more dependent on it. Like a man riding a hot streak at a blackjack table, he felt the dread of knowing how, at any minute, everything could go disastrously wrong.

  And yet his luck held. He crossed the lobby and found yet another zombie-made hole on the other side, leading into “Rocco’s Pawn Shop”. Marshal had never been inside, but he knew that the original ‘Rocco’ had possessed some sort of speci
al relationship with the Sabbatini family. The store had been handed over to a man of Asian descent in recent years. Nobody seemed to know what happened to Rocco.

  He looked around. The pawnshop, it appeared, had been utilized as a last line of defense on so many occasions, that there was very little structure left to it. Walls were riddled with holes, with most of its products gone, destroyed, or buried in rubble. The protective iron grates, bulletproof windows, and store fixtures had all been smashed, crushed, and ripped apart. Man-sized portals – no less than three of them, including the one Marshal entered – led from the store. To Marshal’s relief, one led to the coffee shop on the corner of his street.

  Scanning the terrain ahead of him, knowing that every second counted, Marshal plucked up his courage and stepped through into the coffee shop.

  Here was where College Street met Spadina, which ran north and south in Toronto’s inner city. Two of the shop's glass walls had been shattered, leaving the store completely open to the late afternoon sunshine. From his vantage point, Marshal could see for several blocks up and down Spadina’s six-lane byway, easily picking out no less than seven zombies in the distance. The closest of these was still far away, but that didn’t lessen Marshal’s concern.

  Here it was. The point where his plan came into fruition.

  He held the stuffed bear up in front of him with both hands, then turned it over. There were switches on the back. Taking a deep breath, he pressed ‘PLAY’. Then, picking out the most likely target, he tossed the little stuffed bear out into the street, where it hit a wrecked SUV, bounced down between the twisted metal and disappeared.

  He had maybe twenty seconds to make some space. As quick as he dared, he darted back through the hole into the pawnshop, and then headed for ‘Greenville Mews’. He had only just finished stepping through, when the music started up.

  “You were the reason that I knew the way.

  You were my everything, but I couldn’t stay.