Eat Your Heart Out, page 19
Sort of.
It’s more like I kind of lunge in the monster’s direction. The table has an immediate downward trajectory, but it’s enough to send the thing away from Rachel and to the very edge of the roof.
I know what I have to do.
I run forward. Fast. As fast as I can. I pick the table up again, and I lift it as high as I can. Even though I feel like my back might give out at any minute or my arms might fall off. I lift it up. High. Over my head.
With every ounce of strength I have, I throw the heavy hunk of iron at the zombie.
And it’s enough.
The thing howls as it’s shoved back.
It struggles to find its footing on the ice.
I take one more breath.
Putting my arms out in front of me like a Halloween Frankenstein’s monster, I move with as much speed as I can. My fingers land on the monster’s cold, smooth, muscular chest, and I push. Its cold, slimy skin slides across my fingertips. I’m holding my breath.
The thing is off-balance enough that I’m able to force it over the side.
I release the air from my lungs in a whoosh as Rachel collapses in my arms.
But I have to see. I take her flashlight and lean over the side of the brick railing, shining the light onto the ground. The thing has fallen onto the snow. It’s on its side. Still. Not moving. The other monsters circle it.
One of them is doing something.
They’re eating it. Eating the dead zombie.
I grab Rachel’s hair and barely have time to pull us both down as a chair cruises overhead, coming to rest next to the sofa.
We have to get off this roof.
Miller runs up. “Nice work,” he says in between pants of breath. “I . . . used the . . . table legs to wedge . . . the door closed . . . but it won’t hold forever.”
It seems almost mean to keep mentioning how screwed we are.
But he points across the roof. “There’s a window on the side of the building. I think it leads to the area we couldn’t get into before. The part of the building that you said was secure.”
It takes me a minute to realize that I am the you Miller is referring to.
Since when does anybody pay attention to the shit that comes out of my mouth?
“Yeah. That’s . . . that’s what . . . I said,” I stammer.
He nods. “I think I have the hose pretty well secure. We can use it like a rope.”
Great.
Well.
I have to hope I wasn’t wrong.
Our lives depend on it.
Rachel moans.
We each take one of her arms and run along the roof, to where Miller has managed to tie the hose in a timber hitch knot that does look pretty secure.
He hands me the end of the hose. “Okay. You go first.”
Shit.
He expects me to swing down through the window like I’m Tarzan or something. Like he assumes everyone is up at five pumping iron just because he is.
When I don’t take the hose, he shakes it at me. “Whoever goes second has to bring Rachel.”
I see his point, and I doubt I have the upper arm strength to support her and keep myself from plummeting to my death.
So.
I am going first.
Grabbing the hose, I pause at the edge of the roof. Miller’s made a loop with the end of the hose to make it a bit easier to hang on to. He shines the flashlight along the red bricks, showing me the location of the window. I clutch the hose and do my best to align myself with it. He gives me an iron rod that must be part of a piece of furniture that he’s dismantled.
“Use this to break the glass,” Miller says. “Once you’re inside, try to clear the window as best you can so we can get Rachel through.”
“Okay,” I say. When what I really want to say is Please do this without me.
Those things pound the door again, and I almost drop the metal bar.
“We don’t have much time,” Miller says.
I loop the hose around my arm several times and climb over the safety bar, taking a minute to stabilize myself on the wet steel. I glance down. We’re a long way up.
There’s nothing but a dark void below.
Again, I’m filled with all kinds of regret. I could have gone with my dad on that rock climbing trip to Tettegouche. If Dad were here, at least he’d be going over the side of the building with a little bit of training. I didn’t go because Brittani suggested it. And now I struggle to remember why that was such a big deal.
“Good luck, Sheldon,” Rachel says.
“Thanks.”
Okay. Okay.
Here I go.
I make sure I’ve got enough slack hose and push my feet off the bar.
Too late, I realize that I left Vivian’s bag on the roof.
I descend.
Down.
Down into the darkness.
RACHEL BENEDICT
I am Eve.
And this is my curse.
Every Mother’s Day, my dad gives a sermon on Genesis 3:16.
I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children.
And yet this . . . this feeling . . . like I’m being torn apart from the inside. It seems like a steep price to pay for fifteen minutes in a library bathroom. I doubt that Dad would take such a view. He would say that we’re all tested. We’re tested and I failed. Maybe he’s right. Look at where I am. Look at what’s happening.
My abdomen cramps up again.
I’m on fire.
I put out my hand to brace myself using the icy safety railing that surrounds the roof.
Steve puts his hand on my back.
He really is a good guy.
Too bad he’s going to die. Too bad we’re all going to die.
Because of me.
Because I sinned. Because I tried to run away from my problems. Because my presence is slowing everyone down and preventing people from saving themselves.
As if sensing these thoughts, Steve says, “We’re going to make it, Rachel.”
No, Steve. I’m going to get us all killed.
“It’s gotta be after midnight,” he comments.
I’m sure my parents are locking up the church right about now. They’ve finished the service, handed out all the candy canes, packed up all the trays of cookies and cakes donated by members of the congregation. The whole front of the church is decorated for Christmas. I wonder if Dad has left the Nativity set outside or if he’s brought it in. I wonder if Mary and Joseph are out in the snow like us.
I wonder if my parents have tried to call me or want to know what I’m doing.
Out here, it’s so dark. Clouds block the moon and stars. As far as I can see, the landscape is dark and missing everything I look forward to each winter. No houses alight with twinkling lights. No bright shopping malls. No glowing church steeples.
Steve shines the flashlight down the wall, but the beam does a poor job of showing us what’s going on. Up where we are, the hose moves around, but we can’t see Sheldon. There are some grunts and groans. Breaking glass.
A couple more thuds.
“Smentkowski?” Steve calls.
No answer.
“Smentkowski?”
Oh Lord. He’s already dead. He’s fallen. Or those things are on the inside of the building. Or he’s cut all his limbs off on broken glass. Or he’s—
“Hang on, Miller! I’m clearing out the glass.”
Sheldon is alive, and he sounds . . .
Okay.
Me and Steve, on the other hand?
The monsters pound again. I flinch as they hit the door with enough force to knock over one of the chairs Steve stacked up to keep them from coming through. It won’t be long before they’ll be on the roof with us.
In fact, it will be right now.
I scream again. I’m not exactly sure why I’m screaming. I guess it’s 50 percent the crippling pain in my abdomen and 50 percent a response to the creaking of bending metal.
Steve whips the flashlight over toward the sound.
The zombies have bent down the top part of the door.
One is busy squeezing through the opening while the pounding continues.
“Smentkowski?” Steve screams.
Sheldon yells something that’s drowned out by the sound of my own bloodcurdling scream.
That thing is coming.
The way it moves. Faster than human. More than human.
Steve grabs my hand as he scrambles over the bars of the safety railing. He’s not being particularly gentle, but I can’t blame him. The zombies are seconds away from ripping us to shreds. He picks me up, hoisting me over his shoulder the way I suspect he deals with bags of animal feed back at the farm, and he lifts me up over the railing.
I barely have time to snatch up the flashlight that Steve has left on the ledge.
Another spasm of pain hits me.
“It’s coming!”
I shout this, and it’s true. The zombie is making smooth and easy progress across the ice and through the falling snow. It swipes at my ponytail as Steve pushes us off the roof. Its thick fingers brush the ends of my hair as we swing down.
It screeches and howls and snarls as it snatches at the empty air.
We fall straight down for a couple of seconds, and the only thing that stops me from screaming my head off is that honestly, right at this moment, another contraction hits, and plummeting to my death seems like it might be an improvement over my current situation.
Steve does his best to brace us, but the impact with the wall is inevitable. He bears the brunt of it, hitting the brick with an “Oof.” The sides of my legs scrape the bricks, but the pain is nothing compared to what’s going on inside me.
We’re hanging there, and Steve is breathing hard, the strain of everything finally getting to him. Sheldon shouts something, and Steve uses his feet to push against the wall. I realize we’re not perfectly aligned with the window and he’s trying to maneuver us in the right direction.
Up above, I hear the monsters hoot. I twist around and point the flashlight up, terrified of what I might find.
I hold my breath.
The zombie is up there, pacing around in frustration. But it doesn’t appear to have realized that it can untie the hose to kill us or climb down it to get to our level.
I draw in a deep breath.
That’s something.
The monsters don’t have human-level intelligence.
Which is a break for us.
But the way the thing is staring at me. I get the idea that it might eventually figure it out.
We slam into the wall again.
I do the only thing I can think of.
I pray for a miracle.
Dear Heavenly Father. Please let Sheldon and Steve and Vivian and Paul survive. They’re my friends, and they deserve to make it. Please let me survive. Not for myself but for my baby, who deserves a chance at life regardless of what I’ve done. Please let us survive for all the innocent people who might suffer if we can’t get out of here and warn the world about what’s happening in this factory. I know I don’t deserve one, but I’m asking for a miracle. Please deliver us. Please give us a miracle.
I whisper Amen just as a pair of arms reach out an open window and grab on to the hose.
It’s Sheldon.
Steve lands in the window frame, bracing us with his legs. We begin this agonizing process of trying to get me through the opening, which, despite Sheldon’s best efforts, is lined with shards of jagged broken glass.
It feels like it takes forever, and it’s humiliating when Sheldon needs a break midway because he’s having trouble supporting enough of my weight. I’m like a grand piano being delivered to a tiny second-floor apartment.
There’s the sound of footsteps in the snow below us. Those things must be down there.
Hoping we fall.
The second I’m inside, Sheldon deposits me into another bland office chair and collapses onto a table.
Steve swings in with ease.
But he, too, nearly falls over once he’s in the room. He hoists himself up onto a long worktable and lies down, breathing hard.
We’re in a large, wide room. On the table where Steve is resting also sits Sheldon’s flashlight. With its beam pointed toward the ceiling, it casts a dull glow across the area.
“Sheldon. Your face.” He has a horrible gash on one cheek.
“I . . . didn’t . . . clear . . . all . . . the . . . glass at first,” he says in between gasps of breath.
“We need to find a first aid kit,” I say.
He waits a second and then is able to go on more normally. “It’s nothing compared to what you’re going through.”
My pain has let up quite a bit.
Based on the very limited amount of googling I was able to do about what happens when you go into labor, my guess is that these contractions will come and go until they are almost nonstop and I’ll finally have this baby.
“Actually, I’m feeling a little better,” I tell him.
Steve sits up. “We need to keep track of the time between contractions. That will generally tell us how much time we have. When my sister went into labor, she was mostly okay until the pain started happening every couple of minutes.”
I nod but am not sure what he expects me to do. None of us have a watch or a phone, and it’s not like I can sit around counting out the seconds. I scoot myself forward, the wheels of the chair crunching on broken glass, and wave my flashlight all over.
Based on what I can see, Sheldon got it right. This part of the building is very secure. The walls that we saw from the other side are thick steel on this side too. I spot a couple of heavy steel doors that probably open via some kind of hydraulic mechanism. They’re all closed and locked up tight. And it’s a huge relief to be in here, out of the cold and the snow. It’s dry and reasonably warm. Up until the monsters took out the transformers a couple of hours ago, this building must have had heat.
It seems safe.
Yet I fight off a shiver.
Steve has recovered somewhat, but he sounds fatigued. “We should look around for supplies.”
Sheldon stands up.
“We need to find something to put in front of that window,” I say.
“Why?” Sheldon asks.
I stop moving my chair and hesitate, but I feel I have to answer. “I think those things might be getting smarter. That they might be developing problem-solving skills.”
The two of them freeze for a second.
“Problem-solving skills?” Steve repeats in a defeated tone.
“Yeah,” I say.
But there’s no arguing. Which surprises me. I’m not used to having people respect my ideas like this. Unless my ideas concern art projects for the kids in the church nursery. Sheldon and Steve find a heavy filing cabinet against one wall and push it in front of the window. It drags and scrapes against the building’s cool tile floor.
When they’re done, Steve picks up the flashlight from his table and searches the room, opening supply cabinets and drawers. Sheldon takes over the pushing, wheeling me around with more speed.
Unlike the other side of the building, which was divided into a series of offices and fake laboratories, this space is one giant room. It’s a functional workspace. I have to say that I’m momentarily distracted and kind of excited. The tables are full of real, working equipment. I spot a few refrigerated centrifuges, what might be a thermal cycler, and a UVP machine. Stuff I recognize from when Dad let me take a tour of the bioengineering department at U of A.
“What is this place?” Steve asks.
“It’s a lab. For bioengineering.”
This validates my theory that the Metabolize-A bars work by altering certain genes, but I have the sense that something else is going on. The long wall, the one against the outside of the building, is lined with what look like deep freezers.
They are storing lots of samples.
And manipulating them.
It scares the crap out of me.
I want to say something to Steve and Sheldon, but I’m not sure what the advantage is of terrifying everyone. Instead, I say, “I hope Paul and Vivian get back soon.”
“Me too,” Steve says.
When my flashlight lands on a few rows of stainless steel computer towers in the corner, Sheldon says, “Now this is more like it.”
His enthusiasm quickly wanes though when he remembers that there’s no power.
Steve approaches a group of basic blue cubicles with walls that are about five feet high. We can hear him pulling open drawers. “I found some food,” he calls. He tosses a couple of granola bars over the wall of the cube. I find myself checking the package with my flashlight, making sure they’re regular food and not some zombie-creating monstrosity.
The package has pictures of cute elves on it and reads Buddy’s Gourmet Cookie Company. Flagstaff, AZ. I tear it open, revealing a normal-colored bar with chocolate chips and nuts. It smells okay.
As I bite into the granola, Steve emerges from the cube with a bottle of water, a couple of Band-Aids, and a bottle of Tylenol. I do the best I can with Sheldon’s face. Truthfully, he needs a doctor. But then again, so do I.
Steve opens the bottle of water and passes it to me. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was, and I take several long gulps before giving it back to him. The feeling starts to return to my fingers and toes. It’s not a nice feeling. The numbness gives way to a cold burn.
Sheldon leaves me at a table to finish my granola bar. The baby shifts in my belly. I don’t know if eating and drinking is a good idea.
I don’t know much about this baby at all.
“Hey,” Sheldon says. “I found some dry clothes.”
He’s come to a line of employee lockers kind of like the ones back at camp. One of them is full of clean, dry sweats in various sizes.
