Brian Keene: Entombed

I glanced around, looking for a weapon or a place to hide. The incinerator room was a large, gray-cinderblock area. Despite its size, there wasn’t much room inside because the incinerator itself dominated the space. It was a big, metal beast with a large, hinged iron door. A ventilation shaft ran from the top of the unit up into the ceiling. A second shaft ran from the ceiling down into the incinerator. This second shaft was a burn chute that went to the bunker’s decontamination center, one floor above. In the event of a nuclear war, survivors could have shed their irradiated clothing, which could then be sent down the chute and burned. The other ventilation shaft acted as a chimney. It exited somewhere atop the mountain, far away from the hotel. I knew there was no way I could escape through it, though. We’d tried that early on in the siege, only to learn that the ductwork narrowed steadily the further it went. A human being wouldn’t have been able to fit through it. I glanced down at my skinny frame, wondering if maybe I could chance it now. Then I shuddered at the thought of getting stuck. Facing down the mob in the bunker was better than slowly starving to death while trapped in a tube.

Of course, I was starving to death down here, too.

Still, either option was preferable to facing down the dead, and even if I did make it out of the tube, I’d still have the zombies to contend with. I knew they were still sequestered around the blast doors, even without opening the doors to check. We’d been able to hear them milling around out there. The dead aren’t quiet. They’re anything but. They moan and growl and bump into things. They’d remained at the blast doors. Could they be gathered around the chimney pipe, as well? I didn’t know—and decided the possibility of getting stuck in the tube wasn’t worth the risk of finding out.

You might be asking yourself why the dead hung around for so long? If they couldn’t get inside the bunker to eat us, why didn’t they just move on in search of easier prey? Well, it’s because they’re stupid. Their bodies may be reanimated, but their brains certainly aren’t—at least, the part of their brain that solves problems and figures things out via logic and thought. Sure, they have their basic motor skills. They can walk and grasp and bite like a motherfucker, but they have no deductive reasoning. They saw us go inside the bunker, so they milled around the blast doors, waiting for us to come out. More zombies arrived and joined the others. Sooner or later, the first group of zombies probably forgot that we were in here, but by then, there are so many of them crowded around the doors, they mimic each other. If one zombie sees another banging on the door, it does the same. And they stay there until they rot away, or something else distracts them.

In the first few days of the siege, we tried to do that very thing—distract the zombies that were waiting on the other side of the blast door inside the hotel. We sent two volunteers, Rachel and Milo, to the bunker’s other exit. Rachel ran for her high school’s cross country team and Milo was a personal trainer who worked in the hotel’s gym. Both of them could run, and were in good shape. The plan seemed so simple. They’d sneak out of the bunker via the other blast door, make their way down the mountainside and through the woods, and then let the zombies inside the hotel see them. When those zombies began to follow them away from the blast doors, Rachel and Milo would run back to the other exit and get inside before the zombies could catch them. Then the zombies would lose interest and leave. Except things didn’t quite turn out that way. There were more zombies in the woods than we had originally planned on. Rachel and Milo hadn’t made it twenty-five yards past the exit when a corpse shambled out from behind a tree and made a grab for Milo. The personal trainer—this athletic, Adonis-like man—dodged the zombie, tripped over a root, and fell down, banging up his knee and twisting his ankle in the process. The creature had its rotten teeth in Milo’s throat before Rachel could even react. She panicked, and instead of helping Milo (although at that point, the only way to have aided him would have been to bash his brains out) she started running back toward the blast door. We hollered, cheering her on and urging her not to look back. For a brief moment, we thought for sure she’d make it back inside without being noticed, as Milo’s killer was busy gorging itself on his flesh. But two more zombies emerged from the woods and saw her. Rachel made it back inside, but by then it was too late. They knew we were in here. Then we had zombies at both exits.

They’ve been there ever since.

Rachel killed herself a few days later. She swallowed an entire bottle of Advil that she’d had in her purse. It wasn’t a quick death, nor was it painless. When we put her in the incinerator, her abdomen was swollen and hard. I can’t imagine what that many painkillers did to her liver. She popped when she burned.

My thoughts turned back to the business at hand. Musing over Milo and Rachel would only insure that I ended up dead like them, and I was determined not to let that happen. I needed something—anything—to defend myself with. There weren’t a lot of items or tools inside the incinerator room, and as a result, my choice of weapons was less than inspiring. A red fire extinguisher, covered in a thick layer of ash and dust, hung on the wall. It would be heavy and unwieldy. A long iron bar with a blunt hook on one end was leaning against the wall next to it. We used the bar to shove things into the incinerator and stir the ashes around, but it wouldn’t be of much use in defending myself with. It was heavy, and its length and the limited amount of space in the room meant I would have trouble swinging it around or thrusting. I decided instead to use the rod to bar the door. I slid it through the door handle. Both ends of the iron bar lined up flat against the wall. Satisfied that this would prevent anyone from pulling the door open, I slumped down to the floor with my back against the cold incinerator, and took an opportunity to catch my breath.

I hadn’t realized until that moment that I was trembling. My skin was covered with goose bumps and the hair on my arms stood up as if I’d been shocked with static electricity. I suddenly felt very cold. At first, I thought it must be the chilly metal surface of the incinerator, but when I slid forward and moved away from it, the feeling didn’t subside. Instead, it grew worse. My teeth started to chatter and the shaking intensified. I belched, wincing at the smell. My mouth tasted sour. I burped again, shivering all over now. My stomach cramped and then I felt pressure building in my throat. I leaned over, involuntarily brought my hand up to my mouth, and then vomited through my fingers. Even my puke felt cold. It ran down my wrist and arm and splattered all over my lap, soaking my clothes. The stench was terrible. There were no solids in it, seeing as how I hadn’t eaten anything in… well, since we’d run out of food. It was all liquid, and I cringed when I noticed a brownish-red tint to it. That couldn’t be good.

My stomach cramped again, forcing me to bend over far enough that the tip of my nose touched the cold concrete floor. The dry heaves came next, followed by more burps. I guess my body wasn’t satisfied with that, because then the gas started coming out the other end. At that point, I was beyond caring. I lay there shaking and moaning in my own filth and stink, and waited for the tempest to subside. I thought about what I’d just done—killing Krantz. The magnitude of my actions was unshakeable. I thought about the sound his head had made when I squashed it with Eisenhower’s bronze bust. I wondered if I’d ever be able to forget that sound.