Manel Loureiro - Apocalypse Z - The Beginning of the End

Dozens, then hundreds, maybe thousands, I don’t know. On the surface that multitude could have been a demonstration or a crowd at a concert, except it was plunged into a stony silence, broken only by shuffling feet and occasional moans. The fucking mob was headed for the Safe Haven. Tireless. Immutable. Unstoppable.

It’s clear why they were headed there. I don’t know how many people were crammed downtown, but any human crowd makes a lot of noise. In the silence, I could hear the crowd’s noise more than a mile away. Loudspeakers, electric generators providing light and heat, vehicles. A magnet drawing this violent mob, eager for human bodies with a heartbeat. They would fall on the humans, and there was nothing their victims could do about it.

A few hours later, the shooting started, near downtown. First some isolated shots. Then the gunfire increased; for a while it was a loud roar. I swear for a moment I even heard mortar rounds. Although the BRILAT troops had withdrawn from several parts of Spain recently, there should still have been a sizable enough contingent to drive them away, no problem. The police band was jammed for hours with frantic messages from one unit to another. Distress calls, urgent requests for ammunition, surrounded platoons requesting backup, reports of casualties… Fall back. They’ve broken through. They’re overrunning us. Then, little by little, silence. The sound of firearms gradually ceased. At dawn I didn’t hear anything anymore. Radio frequencies were silent. Dead. A few of columns of smoke rose above downtown, marking where my city’s Safe Haven once was.

We’re screwed. A couple dozen of those monsters are walking up and down my street like automatons. One of them is beating monotonously on the door of the house next door, the doctor’s house. I don’t know why he’s doing that. The house is empty. He keeps it up for hours, setting my nerves on edge.

It’ll soon be nighttime again. I hope I see the light of day.

January 26, 5:57 p.m.

This has been a really long day. I’m writing this in the upstairs bedroom. I don’t come out except to go to the bathroom or get something to eat. I have half a bottle of gin sitting next to my chair. It was full this morning. That doesn’t make me an alcoholic. A couple of drinks helped me cope. Shit, my nerves are shot.

Today, when the sun came up, I was dozing in front of the TV. To save the batteries, I only turn it on once in a while. They’re still displaying the royal coat of arms, but it’s been hours since there was a news report. I woke up suddenly. Shooting. I heard gunfire close by. It went on for a while, then suddenly stopped. I don’t know much about guns, but it sounded like a couple of pistols and some kind of high-caliber gun, maybe a shotgun. This tells me something important: there are other living people around! Or at least there were…

Miguel, my neighbor, is getting all worked up. He thinks staying here is suicide. The best thing to do is drive to the marina and get on his boat. I spent half the morning trying to talk him out of it. We don’t know if his boat is still docked there. Most likely it’s gone. Besides, the road will probably be closed in a dozen places, so we’d have to get out of the car and walk with thousands of those things everywhere. We wouldn’t last a minute. I think I talked him out of it, but who knows for how long.

In a way, he’s right. Either we improve our situation here or move on. Soon.

Those monsters are a constant presence on my street. When they heard the shots, hundreds of them headed down the main street toward the source of noise, including some that had been wandering around here for hours. The rest hung around here. Throughout the day, new ones showed up. From my window I see eleven of them wandering up and down. Four women, two children, and five men. One of them I named Thumper. He’s been banging his palm against a metal gate for hours. They all have the same dazed, distracted look on their faces. Their clothes are torn and stiff with blood. Some are horrifically mutilated. One woman’s rib cage is crushed, as if she’d been run over by a car. Her broken hip makes it really hard for her to walk.

However, the one that interests me the most is a soldier in the BRILAT special forces. He has a horrible wound on his neck, and he’s missing a chunk of his cheek. I can see his teeth every time he goes slumping along under my window. The clotted blood has formed strange lumps on his jacket.

But the important thing is the backpack he’s still carrying. And his belt, which has about a dozen pockets. And a gun. A gun! In a daze brought on by all the alcohol, stress, and sleep deprivation, I’ve feverishly plotted a dozen ways to get that gun and backpack. I need them. But all I’ve got is a scuba-diving spear.

Assuming I can bring him down, I’d still have to get everything off him. In the time that would take, the rest of the monsters would pounce on me. After a while I devised a plan. It’s really horrible, but it’s the best I’ve got.

I don’t want to ask my neighbor for help. He’s wound so tight, I can’t rely on him. Plus, if something happened to him, my guilt would kill me. No. It’s my plan, my risk, and my reward. I don’t have the slightest idea how to use a gun, but it would make me feel a lot safer to have one. With it, I’d try to get out of here. And I won’t hesitate to use it on myself to keep from turning into one of those things. That’s for sure.

Now that I know what to do, I have to figure out when to do it. I’ll wait a few hours. I want to be sure there aren’t any more of those things out of my line of vision. I loaded the speargun and had some target practice in the garden. Pulling the trigger releases the tension in the band, and the spear shoots off like a rocket deep into the tree trunk. I sweated a lot getting it out. I couldn’t get a grip on it. I won’t have time to retrieve my spears. Since I only have six of them, I’ll have to be a very, very good shot.

January 27, 11:25 a.m.

My hands are shaking. I needed a long, long break and another swig of gin to be able sit down and write. Dear God, my nerves are going to explode!

I started at the crack of dawn, when the light was good. Those things are deceptively slow; they can move really fast when they want to. I don’t know if they see well at night, but one thing’s for sure—I can’t see for shit in the dark. And there’re so many of them. I don’t intend to find out how many, at least for the moment.

Thinking it through, I realize my plan is pure madness. But it’s the best I’ve come up with over the last feverish hours. I need to do something to relieve the agonizing tension that’s built up since those things arrived. Plus, the gun and backpack have become a symbol. I’ll get them at any price.

All this excitement has infected poor Lucullus. He’s been running around the backyard all morning like a wild animal.

After hours of watching those eleven monsters, I realized they only move when something gets their attention. At about seven this morning, a rat or a hedgehog or something was darting around at the end of the street. Several of those things headed after it but apparently didn’t catch it. Six of them—two children, three men, and a woman—remained at my end of the street, about forty yards away, with their backs to my front door. When I saw that, I realized that my plan might have a fighting chance.

My entire plan hinges on the fact that there’s only one way on to my street, where it intersects with the main street. On the other end my street dead-ends at the embankment where the civil guardsmen and soldiers headed several nights ago. It’s steep, so I doubt any of those things can climb it. But I’m not 100 percent sure of that—one more unknown in my wonderful plan. I can see small groups of them wandering aimlessly on the main street. They don’t seem to find my street especially exciting. In the last two hours, a couple of monsters walked a few yards down my street but went back the other direction after a while.