Nina gripped the handrail as the bus roared down the street.
“C’mon man,” Garço Broliguez yelled, “drive faster!”
“Dad, please,” Nina begged, “sit down!”
“We’re gonna see your brother, miha,” her father replied. “We’ll be together again.” His voice was dry and raspy.
Nina was glad that his coughing fits didn’t come that often. Unfortunately, when they did, they were bad.
Really bad.
Garço had been the first of the Broliguezes to fall sick. Nina’s older brother Quatémo was the next to get it, with Nina and her mother Miyali getting it after him, almost at the same time.
Within the span of two days, the whole family had fallen sick. But Nina’s father was not the kind of man who could be dissuaded to abandon hope—or anything else—and she desperately wanted to believe him.
“Will you shut up already?!” the driver—a soldier—yelled back, from this seat at the head of the bus. “Everything’s fucked up enough as it is!”
That was an understatement.
Though my first encounter with Nina Broliguez had been a brief one, it had, nevertheless, shaken both of our worlds. Nina had never been one to put much stock in Lassedicy’s wackadoodle eschatology, but then, when she came to WeElMed with her transformee brother, I helped her realize she possessed magic powers—likely of divine origin, and, ever since, the world felt like it had been turned upside down. Nina had spent the past few days locked in her room like the monks of Old Bazkatla. But where the monks would have smoked entheogens to send them onto meditative vision-quests in search of slumbering gods, Nina had sought the power within herself, honing her newfound abilities as best as she could without her parents finding out.
Entheogens: a psychotropic drug used to facilitate experiences of the divine, the spirit world, and the like. For the ancient Bazkatlans, their entheogen of choice was the cu’laté plant. The short, stumpy caucus looked like a tomato (the fruit) in spiked plate armor, and smelled of peppermint and vinegar.
Or worse, the neighbors.
It was like her head was filled with poltergeists. With just one thought, she could move objects at a distance, and much, much more. With the bathroom sink alone, she’d discovered how to direct the water from the spigot, concentrating it into a stream powerful enough to slam the medicine cabinet shut or blast the paint off the walls, and how to freeze the water into blades of ice sharp enough to draw blood, yet sturdy enough to break glass when she launched them at the windows at high speed.
She was pretty sure she could start fires at will, but she hadn’t dared try. The city was already burning. She didn’t want to make it worse.
“Don’t yell at her,” the old man snapped, in between haggard coughs. “She’s just a girl.”
The driver coughed and then yelled back. “Don’t tell me what to do!”
Nina looked the old man in the eyes. His eyes were as austere as his gray, buzz-cut hair.
“You don’t need to defend me, Mr. Elbock,” Nina said.
“I’m not defining you,” Storn replied, gruffly, “I’m defining decency.”
Nina and her family were among the motley group of civilians clustered into the bus. Two soldiers rode with them, one to drive, the other kept his rifle at the ready, in case of a zombie attack. An hour ago, there had been three more soldiers and a couple fewer civilians, but then the bus came across a group of people hiding out in their cars inside one of those crazy car vending machines, and the lead soldier had been kind enough to rescue them, though at great cost.
For want of space, and because people thought it looked cool, every once in a while, you’d come across a tall, tubular structure on the side of the street, connected to a catwalk overhead that crossed to the other side of the street where it let down in a staircase. It was a vending machine for storing cars, and for a small fee, you could park yours inside. You’d step out up top, onto the catwalk, and come back that way when you wanted to get your car back.
If the others they’d picked up in the process were half as decent as Mr. Elbock, Nina thought, then the soldiers’ sacrifice was surely a worthy one.
As the soldiers had explained, the bus was just one of many public transportation vehicles the military had requisitioned to use to evacuate people from the sections of the city where the infected were turning into zombies.
Unfortunately, taking the time to do the right thing and rescue Mr. Elbock and the others had made the bus lag behind the rest of the convoy, much to the displeasure of their air support.
The bus was from Elpeck Metro’s fleet: sleek, and aerodynamic. Two beady headlights shone from the vehicle’s bold red exterior. The grill on the front of the hood pointed outward like a snout. The thin, broad windows and windshield rose up over the bus’ chrome bumpers. It made Nina feel like she was on a train, or maybe an elephant.
“O Holy Sun, O Holy Sun / please let me know thy grace to come / for through thy face, I yearn to go / when Night’s erased and sin atoned.”
The Lassedile prayer came from an older Munine woman with her dark hair done up in a bun over her wrinkle-edged face—one of the neighbors, from the apartment building across the street. The woman clasped an icon of the Angel at her chest while making the Bond-sign with her other hand as she prayed. She was far from the only one on the bus to be praying, but she was the one closest to the Broliguezes, and was certainly persistent. The older Costranak man sitting next to the woman talked incessantly—to whom, Nina didn’t know. It sounded like he was losing his mind.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She really, really hoped he wasn’t turning into a zombie.
Nina had seen her first zombie about a day ago. It happened late at night; she’d seen it through the tiny window in her tiny bedroom in her family’s tiny apartment in the building on Broxton and Lemuel. The zombie had been moaning, begging, “Help me, I can’t stop, I can’t stop” as his body lumbered down the middle of the street, against his will. He’d moved like a wind-up toy, only to fall dead as a soldier on a passing military transport shot him in the head, shattering his skull.
That was the first zombie Nina had seen, but it was far from the last.
Nina looked up as the bus’ roof rumbled. For a moment, she froze, terrified it was another one of the monsters, but then she saw the lights and sighed in relief. It was just their aerostat escort, soaring ahead of them. Without the aerostat’s guns protecting them, the bus would have crashed into a crowd of zombies several blocks back. As the soldiers had explained, the fluids of the infected were corrosive. The stuff caused irreparable damage to machinery, to say nothing of what the green and black ooze did to human flesh.
The soldiers that had died rescuing Mr. Elbock and the others had been too close to a group of zombies when the aerostat had pumped the zombies full of lead. The spray of ooze and zombie guts had let off smoke as it had burned through their armor.
Nina’s mother spoke up. “You said this doctor was going to help Lopé?” she said.
Nina kept her grip on the support beam as she looked to the right, to where her mother sat, in the row of seats up ahead, against the wall.
“Yes, Mama,” Nina said, “that’s what he promised.”
By “he”, of course, she meant me.
Nina’s mother was a sweet cookie: big, soft, and full of heart. Both of Nina’s parents had yelled at her for leaving Lopé at the hospital all on his own. Nina defended her decision by telling them she only did so because I’d told her to do so, which I had.
Of course, as usual, that wasn’t enough to dissuade her father.
Nothing was.
Unfortunately, they now had bigger concerns.
There were monsters in the streets, and not just zombies. Things crawled among city parks’ deformed trees, and underneath abandoned cars, or over the corpses and shattered glass on the pavement, in front of broken storefronts. The things were lumps of twisted flesh, thrown together as if by a kid playing with clay.
And then, there were the serpents—haunting and eldritch.
“Okay,” the driver said, “finally!” For once, he didn’t sound angry. “We’re almost there. We’ve just gotta turn onto Merchant Boulevard at the next intersection, and then it’s straight through the Crusader Hill tunnel and we’re home free.”
Nina wished she could believe that, but the words seemed empty to her—maybe even pointless. She couldn’t even keep her stupid kid brother safe. How was she supposed to be a holy magic warrior and fight against the armies of Hell?
My words to her had dug into her thoughts and stayed there ever since, marring her nights with fever-dreams. She kept having visions of battling armies and unearthly monsters; of demon Norms and the Holy Angel’s shining glory, and then the Hallowed Beast would rise up from the depths of the earth like a volcano’s fire and devour the ruinated world and bring everything to its end.
She wished Lopé hadn’t stuffed her head full of so much Lassedile gibberish.
As the driver had said, the bus made a turn as it reached the next intersection, but then everyone screamed as a small horde of zombies spilled out from one of Merchant Boulevard’s alleys and the nearby cross-street. An abandoned fire truck jutted off the street and onto the sidewalk, blocking the way and the view.
The driver didn’t see the zombies approaching until it was too late.
“Shit!” Quatémo cursed.
Fear stiffened in Nina’s spine, overwhelming the aches in her head and the raw, grainy soreness eating away at her chest and throat.
She wondered if any of the zombies were as scared as she was.
The Munine woman’s prayers got louder.
The soldiers screamed into the comms: “Bogies! Bogies! Bogies!”
Bones thumped as bodies burst. Then the aerostat roared and swooped down, blasting out white-hot metal rain. Stray bullets shattered the bus’ high-mounted windshield as the aerostat mowed the zombies down. The soldier in the driver’s seat gurgled, and then slumped onto the wheel and dashboard, dead from a bullet to the brain. Lumpy zombie purée splattered onto the windshield, and onto the front of the bus and its flanks. Fluid and smell swept through the broken windshield. Rotten avocados. Moldy vinaigrette. Sweetness that burned Nina’s every breath. Nina’s back and sides bashed against her seat as the bus swerved.
“Bobby!” the remaining soldier cried. “No!”
The wheels screeched to a halt. Everything shook as the bus settled into place. The bus’ faint, fluorescent lights seemed to gleam brighter against the darkness of the ooze that dripped down its windows.
People started to undo their seat-belts, primed to run.
The remaining soldier—Sergeant Hess was his name—stomped his foot on the bus’ corrugated metal floor. “No, don’t!” he yelled.
He didn’t stop to wait for someone to ask why.
“The windows and windshield on this bus are too high up,” he explained. “The zombies won’t be able to get in. Our best bet is to wait for reinforcements. Military command is setting up a base at West Elpeck Medical as we speak. We can last for a couple of minutes. They’ll be here.”
“The zombie fluids are corrosive, man,” Quatémo said. “You saw what that stuff did to your buddies. Now it’s all over the freaking bus!”
Nina’s brother turned to face the shattered windshield. A soft fizzing noise could be heard over the rumble of the bus’ idling engine. The sound was like a whisper in Nina’s ears.
The soldier did a double take. “Shit!” he yelled. “Shit!”
Outside, somewhere beyond, an alien chorus sang.
“The Last Days have come!” someone said.
At first Nina thought it was the Munine woman, but she was still praying, her eyes squeezed shut.
“This is the end…” someone muttered.
Darting over to the other side of the bus, Nina’s father pointed at a window half-drenched in black ooze. “Look!” he said. “There’s a fire truck—and it’s close!” He turned to Sergeant Hess. “If there’s a fire hydrant nearby, we can wash the bus clean.”
“Dad,” Nina shouted, “that’s crazy!”
“You bet it is,” Sergeant Hess said, “but crazy is better than nothing!” He looked over his shoulder at the goo-stained dashboard. “I can hear the fucking stuff bubbling!”
The goo was bubbling. It was drying up quickly, turning into sticky-looking green powder.
Fucking spores, Nina thought.
The soldier looked over everyone, eye to eyes. “I’ll go,” he said. “It’s my duty to do it.”
Nina’s father stuck his arm out. “No, I’ll do it.”
Nina’s mother gasped. “Garço?!” She shook her head and wept. “No!” she yelled, “I’m not losing anyone else. You—you—”
“—Stop it, Meyali,” Garço barked, “it’s what needs to be done.” He nodded with conviction. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
He said that way too often, and Nina hated it.
“Goddammit,” Sergeant Hess said, “sir, what you gotta do is sit down and take care of your own.”
“Sergeant,” Garço said, bowing his head, “I’m a handyman. I’ve worked with fire hydrants before. I might be able to throw a mean punch, but you’re the one with the fucking rifle. The man with the weapon protects the women and children. That’s how life works. So, unless you want to hand over your rifle, it’s your job to stay here and protect us. Let me go. I’ll get the hydrant working.”
“Man, I just lost my last squad-mate,” Sergeant Hess said. “Who do you think you are, telling soldiers what to do!?”
Garço pounded a thumbs-up fist on his chest twice in quick succession. “I’m Garço fucking Broliguez, that’s who! I’m gonna bring my family back together, and together—on my honor—we’re gonna beat this thing.”
“Garço, please, this isn’t the time for ‘honor’!” Meyali said.
Nina’s father walked to the door.
“Sir!” Sergeant snapped, raising his rifle. “Get back in your seat, now.”
Garço looked back over his shoulder. “You’ll have to kill me first.”