near the gates. He made out corpses inside the car. Mutilated. A kid seat had been dragged out of the car and thrown on the snow-covered ground. Blood splatters all over the seat. No sign of the kid anywhere. He cupped his mouth with his hand. A scanty tear froze instantly on his manly cheek.
“What the fuck is going on here?” he said slowly.
***
Just when Ramses and Ksenia pulled out of the parking lot into the infested street, the piercing shriek of an air-raid siren choked off the monotonous wailing of the triggered car alarm systems and made a flock of sparrows take wing off trees and inactive trolleybus wires.
The traffic in the city was paralyzed. There were stranded cars sitting even on the sidewalks. Ramses maneuvered the Opel around the cars and the debris, looking frantically for gaps between the vehicles. They nearly hit a couple of survivors, a man and a woman, who whisked past them, riding a motorbike. The undead stretched out their hands toward the riders, but they were too slow to capture their prey. In only one day, the city streets were filled with fear and death. Hundreds of hungry eyes were pointed at the old blue Opel Corsa, which was making its way through the ravaged city.
“Where are we going now?” Ksenia asked. They had not had the time for discussing this issue before. Now it was the most vital one.
“I really don’t know,” Ramses said. He looked at Ksenia. She was huddled on the passenger seat and hid her hands under the sweater sleeves. It was still freezing in the car. “How about your place? To rescue your family?”
Ksenia lapsed into silence. She was sad and shivering with cold.
“Dad was … everything I had … in my life. He was my family.”
“I’m sorry,” Ramses said. In a minute he asked her, “You have any other relatives?”
“No.” She paused. “An aunt. In Moscow.”
Ramses said, “We’ll head to my hotel then. Let’s hole up there if the place is safe. My friend Steve must be still there.” He turned the steering wheel to avoid a bump against an attacking living dead. He was driving on the separating strip now. “I hope he is. We gotta stick together.”
They drove into an area where the power was obviously on. Some traffic lights kept on functioning, blinking only yellow lights for the indifferent immobile vehicles and the uncaring pedestrians from hell.
Ksenia gave Ramses the directions to the hotel.
“The Arkaim Hotel is half an hour ride from here.”
A pair of red fuzzy dice was dangling from the rearview mirror. There were distracting Ramses from driving and he took them off and tossed them on the back seat. He looked through the windshield at a burning car.
“I wish it were a dream,” he said. “And I wish I snapped out of this dreadful nightmare.”
“Can murderers be afraid?” Ksenia said with sudden anger.
Ramses breathed out a sigh. “It was an accident. I haven’t murdered anyone. I mean … This is all about self-defense. That kid pounced on me himself. Now, this,” he waved at the chaos outside, “is worse than what I’ve done.”
“Sorry,” Ksenia said. “I just don’t know where to go, who to trust.”
“I see. Sure thing, I’m afraid. I’m scared shitless. You don’t see dead people every day, you know. Especially the sort that walk around the streets and devour other people using no kitchen utensils.”
Ksenia opened the glove compartment covered with hot babe stickers and fished out an apple, two stale cheese sandwiches, a gas lighter, a pack of cigarettes and a penknife. She put everything into the backpack.
Ramses could feel the welcome warmth gradually returning to his body and numb extremities thanks to the heater.
“Brr! What a cold! Why did you choose to live here?” he said without taking his eyes off the road.
“I didn’t. I was born here.”
She dug into the apple greedily. She handed him one sandwich, and he wolfed it down in one go.
The danger was scattered around the city. Here and there, groups of creatures were moving around. A female monster wearing an expensive fur coat sat on the sidewalk, eating a piece of flesh. Blood and drool streamed down her chin. Ksenia closed her eyes and turned away from the window. Then she opened them and shoved the half-eaten apple into the backpack in disgust.
“Right there.” She pointed in the direction of a bridge. “Behind that bridge. The hotel is on the riverbank.”
An overturned bus had blocked a large portion of the road through the bridge.
“Uh-oh,” Ramses said and applied the brakes. “Not good. We can’t drive through this jam.” The car shuddered to a halt in the middle of the bridge.
“Let’s go back,” Ksenia said. “There might be crazies in that bus.”
Ramses strained his ears.
“Wait,” he said, letting out tendrils of vapor through his nose and raising his hand. “Think I can hear something.”
The ambient sounds were a cacophony. It was composed of the banshee-like scream of the air-raid siren, car alarms and incessant moaning of the horrid creatures. Now another disturbing sound added. It was a rumbling noise coming from behind the bus. Ramses could not see what it was because of it. The thunder was getting louder.
Ksenia said she could hear it, too, and looked at Ramses, hoping to find the answer to her questions on his worried face.
There was the screeching metal sound, and the body of the bus was burst open by the brutal force of an army tank, rushing along the bridge at full speed with the turret facing backward.
FIVE
Andrew Thomas woke up at 5:00 a.m. sharp. He switched off the alarm clock and got out of bed. His head was clear, as always. He felt refreshed after a good night’s sleep. He walked into the living room. The motion sensor lights kicked on. He took the remote control, turned on the CD player and selected Bruce Springsteen’s album, “The Rising”. He was into Bruce Springsteen this week. He pushed a button, and music filled the room. He opened the window to let the winter morning air in and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. It was still dark outside.
When the room was cool enough, he closed the window and started doing his morning exercises – push-ups and sit-ups. His body began functioning at full capacity, blood rushing in and filling each cell of his body with energy. While the music was still playing, he turned on the FM transmitter on the CD player and left the living room. In ten seconds, the lights went off automatically. He had always been a thrifty person like his father and saved every penny he could save. That was why he got the motion sensor lights installed in his apartment.
He went along a spacious hallway and stepped into the bathroom. The lights went on there. He touched the screen in the shower stall and activated the radio receiver tuned to the wave of the CD player, which was now transferring Bruce Springsteen’s music into the shower stall. Standing under the hot shower
