full image - Repost: The Dead City (from Reddit.com, The Dead City)
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We scale the walls, we burglars of Eden. Once down, we keep to the grass beside the motorway, avoiding the gaze of the dead. We’re pretty good at this kind of thing. After all, we’ve been doing it for years.A long line of cars queue to leave the city. They never will. The spectral occupant’s cries of desperation are as airless and silent as the long-emptied horns of their cars. They went unheard by the aloof military long before they stopped making sound. We move on so as not to catch their gaze. I tell the rookie not to disturb the dead, making a joke about road rage. He doesn’t quite hear me as he dwells on the sight.A city that didn’t know it was dead. Mile-high gravestones of glass and concrete pierce the clouds of black and grey, the city’s epitaph written across their faces in the braille of broken windows. Dead dreams and the dust of decades.Pale faces in the windows. Phone calls on networks as dead as they are. Hushed conversations around stagnant water coolers. ‘They don’t see us. They only see what they saw back then.’ I say it to Walsh and the rookie, but mostly for myself. I always have to say it. When clinging to your rifle brings no comfort, cling to rituals.I watch the ghosts flood the streets at nightfall from the relative safety of a rooftop. The river Styx through the static of night vision. The last stampede of the dead-but-didn’t-know-its from those final panicked hours. Distance obscures their details and I’m glad I cannot recognise anyone. Small mercies. I look down at them a moment more, then I turn away as surely as god did.They called it “The Chills”. The kind of cold that seeps into more than just a man’s bones. Cold from a place we were never meant to know, distant gates ripped open by the cold engines that gave us power and fuel when the planet gave no more to be burned. So long as they still thrummed beneath the earth, we would never see what awaited us beyond death. Frozen in the mundane limbo of our final moments on repeat. A sickness, a penance for divine trespass? Better to dwell on what we did know. We see a man on a nearby rooftop, throwing himself to his death to escape it. A futile effort, as he appears moments later to begin his attempt anew. ‘Don’t feel sorry for him.’ says Walsh. ‘He’s been doing it for years.’We sleep on the rooftops, always. Safer that way, less foot traffic. But we always have one of us on watch, always looking out for a shadow stepping from a doorway here, a face in the dark there. They make no sound, and so it's our eyes that must remain vigilant. It's my turn tonight, so I drink a can of energy drink; one of the last of it's kind, just like the still-living. We burn detritus we gathered at the foot of the building, as much to see the fire exit door as for warmth. The fruity effervescence of the drink perks me up, and I begin to weep gently. I used to look forward to new flavours, but there will be no more. Perhaps it's the caffeine and sleep deprivation talking. I wipe my eyes. They must see clearly.We leave by the stairs. We bump into a ghost in a hurry. We have room to move on the stairwell, but she was quiet and far too quick. They always were. She wears the look of one jolted from a daydream as we bump elbows, and I know that we have to be quick. We exchange a bullet for time before she either changes or shows up again. ‘We should have taken the elevator.’ the rookie says, half-joking. Elevators are never a good idea. Within one, a cold shoulder from a ghost is a mercy. A bumped elbow, far less so. I pray he never sees why. I also pray that I have reason enough to stop calling him ‘Rookie’ soon, and throw in a quick prayer for better knees to tackle the rest of the stairs with.We shelter in a supermarket to avoid one of the Disturbed. We hold our breath as it moves through the street. A mockery of the human form. Their final routines interrupted; fragile peace in the familiarity of life’s habits forever shattered. The dead don’t take kindly to interrupted rest. It changes them, turns them into something wrong. The roiling chaos of it’s shifting offal briefly aligns into something vaguely resembling the structure of a human face. It almost looks like the woman from the stairwell. I hope that I merely imagined it. I look away before my eyes begin to ache.We see an old woman examining her empty hands. Tins of food long looted. We add a few of our own to a shopping cart, careful not to disturb her. A brief glimmer of lost banality. She reminds me of my grandmother. I stuff the food tins and memories away in the cart.From the rooftop I see metal behemoths over the walls. The macro-carriers that fed the ever-ravenous expansion of the city when it still lived. Colossal cattle grazing concrete pastures, dozens of lanes wide, the grand highways that penned our hubris across vast swathes of the earth. To the west, I see a maw of concrete, big enough to devour the metal behemoths. A Military tunnel, cavernous and imposing. Would our treasures be there?The sentry guarding the compound pays us no heed as we trespass. ‘Talk about being shite at his job.’ the rookie jokes. We laugh. It might be our last chance to.We stand in the mouth of the tunnel, sheltered from rain, and speak of a bounty of bullets awaiting us. An armoury of heaven’s army, ripe for the taking. The stygian depths threaten to swallow us. We’re in no position to refuse it’s call. ‘I’m not defending our cart of food by throwing fuckin’ stones.’ Walsh leaves no room for argument, for there is none. Our near-empty ammo pouches concur.In unknown depths, flickers of movement. A shadow, a boot. One soldier runs past, no doubt rushing to his futile quarantine on the outskirts. I want to laugh at how silly they look, how silly they acted even back then. Didn’t they know they were infected too?The darkness steadily gives way to grey light. A vast gate, rimed and humming with profane power. It crackles occasionally, and the light within it bleeds a fog that chills all around it. I feel a fantastic warmth as I step close. Beneath the thrum, I hear the singing of my mother. With every crackling arc, the bark of my first dog. Walsh pulls me back with a warning shake of his head. I walk away, shirking free from the hypothermic lullaby. Gateways to cold spaces beyond mortal ken. We were never meant to wander that far.We find a vault, sealed tight. We argue over whether to open it. Sealing something in or out? Coffer or coffin? The cold fog nearby carries lessons abound on where curiosity landed us, but ignorance and greed prevail.Inside, the corralled scientists who peered beyond the cold light in the gate. Driven irreversibly mad, and now, contained no more. They change faster than we can reseal the door. We smell that dreaded sanguine stench and hear their screeching inside our minds, that grating keen that only the Disturbed bellow. These ones are different; they shriek in languages without name.Panting, sprinting through the dark and cold. Flailing flashlights picking out others of their kind, drawn from the depths of the facility and blocking our way. We try to fight, but the bullets only do so much and we have so precious few. I see the rookie run through a gap in their ranks, leaving us behind. I finally use his name, roaring a curse upon it as it becomes clear that this complex will be our tomb.Walsh goes down, and my eyes sting too much to see what becomes of him. These blights upon physical space, visual aberrations, bastard glitches in the code of nature. They close around me as my body goes cold, rent apart by fractal bone blades and screeching maws and we scale the walls, we burglars of Eden. Once down, we keep to the grass beside the motorway, avoiding the gaze of the dead. We’re pretty good at this kind of thing. After all, we’ve been doing it for years.
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