Tamara stood alone in the breach, the fire painted everything the color of old blood. Heat rolled over her in slow, deliberate waves, baking the sweat on her neck, raising blisters on the tips of her ears. She tasted diesel and copper and the ghost of the health potion that had bought her these final minutes.
She rolled her shoulders once, felt the bad arm hang useless, and waited until the next one came alone.
A runner, wildly fast, wearing the reflection vest of some kind of public servant. It sprinted straight at her across the open asphalt, arms windmilling, mouth already in a manic howl and tamara stepped forward to meet it.
She caught the outstretched wrist with her good hand, pivoted hard, and used its own momentum to drive it face-first into the ground. The impact jarred her shoulder, sent white fire down her spine. She ignored the pain and dropped her weight, drove her knee between its shoulder blades, and hammered the base of its skull with her fist until something cracked wetly and it stopped moving. She rose slowly, chest heaving, and stepped over the body.
Two more came together.
She took the left one low, sweeping its legs with her boot, then met the right one with an elbow to the temple as it lunged. Bone gave. The first scrambled up behind her. She spun, caught it by the hair, and slammed its face into the Stryker's fender until the metal was slick and it stopped moving.
She stepped back. Blood dripped from her knuckles. Her breathing stayed steady. Slow is smooth. She repeated her training over and over.
Ten meters away the corpse-ramp they had accidentally built earlier finally collapsed under its own weight and the dam broke.
They came in a rush now, twenty or thirty at a time. A black, stinking tide that poured over the burning truck and kept coming.
Tamara backed up until her shoulders brushed the warm steel of the Stryker. She planted her boots wide, lowered her center of gravity, and waited before the first wave hit her like surf against a breakwater.
Hands clawed at her vest, her arms, her face. Fingers tangled in her hair and yanked her head back. Teeth scraped across the ceramic plate on her chest and found nothing soft. She twisted, drove her knee into a groin that no longer felt pain, felt the body fold anyway. She used the space to punch straight through an eye socket with her good fist. Something wet burst against her knuckles.
Elbows to temples. Knees to faces. Fingers gouging eyes that may not have even been providing sight. Every time a body fell in front of her, she used it as a stumbling block for the ones behind. Every time teeth found skin, she answered with the crack of her first or the butt of an empty firearm.
It felt like minutes passed, hours, days, she couldn't tell.
Her uniform hung in ribbons. Blood soaked her to the waist. Her left ear was half torn away. Something sharp had opened her scalp; warm rivers ran down her neck and into her collar. She was left still standing and yet she was still moving.
A child-sized one slipped under the press and latched onto her thigh. Teeth punched through fatigues and muscle. She looked down, met its milk-white eyes, and felt nothing but exhaustion.
She pried its jaw open with both hands, despite the pain in her off-arm, and snapped its neck with a sound like a celery stalk. Still another took its place, and another, and another.
She felt her strength fail all at once. The pile of bodies around her was waist-high now, forced against her chest, pushing her back. She couldn't fight back anymore. This was her last chance, this was her final stand. Just as she had given up, a hand closed around her ankle and pulled.
She went down hard, knees cracking on skulls and ribcages. The impact drove the air from her lungs in a soundless gasp, and they were on her in seconds.
Teeth found the soft spot under her jaw. Another set closed on the meat of her shoulder where the plate had shifted. Fingers dug into the bite on her thigh and tore.
Pain flared, bright and clean and final, but she smiled through the blood in her mouth.
She thought of Tuesdays. Of all days ending in Y. She thought of her father's voice. She thought of Rodriguez's stupid jokes. She thought of a little girl who would live because someone had held the line.
The last thing she felt was the wet, tearing pop of her own throat when the weight finally bore her under. The last thing she thought was simple.
Fucking worth it.
And then there was just darkness, everything went quiet, and she finally felt peace. No more gun fire, no more violence, nothing to create chaos in her lives, merely the calm peace of death.
Tamara woke up and her world came to focus, opening up a world of new experiences, a world of senses that she felt were once lost.
She felt the weight first, the force of bodies on top of her, the slow ooze of fluids, the way the asphalt had gone cold beneath her back. She felt the holes in her throat, the torn muscle of her shoulder, the deep gouge in her thigh where something ravaged her like a dog with a bone. None of it hurt anymore. That was the strange part. It should have hurt. It didn't.
She tried to breathe and discovered she couldn't, or rather, she didn't need to. She tried to scream and discovered she had no control over her lunges, she had no control over her tongue, she had… no… tongue…
Time passed, though she had no idea how long. The fire on the gate had burned itself out. The wind came and scattered ash across the pile. The bodies on top of her cooled, stiffened, then softened again as rot set in. Flies found her, and so did their maggots. She felt every wriggle, every tiny mouth, and still this was not her end.
Eventually the weight lessened. Something dragged corpses away, though she was unsure what did it. Maybe wild dogs, maybe the dead, it didn't matter to her. With every passing day she found a chance to escape. Enough shifted that she could move one arm. Then the other. Then her head. So she pushed.
It took hours, or days, or weeks, again she had no concept of time. She felt no hunger, no thirst, no desire, other than that to crawl out from under the pile. Her fingernails were gone, torn off somewhere in the struggle. Her uniform hung in wet ribbons. When she finally stood, the city was quiet except for the wind and the soft, wet sounds of things eating in the distance.
She looked down at herself, felt the bite on her throat that gaped like a ravenous maw. Her left ear dangled by a thread of skin. One eye was filmed over, milky, useless. The other stared out with clear focus, making up for the lack of sight in her other. She took one step. Then another. Just as she remembered. One step at a time.
The first weeks were nothing but hunger, a hollow, grinding ache in her chest that never calmed. She learned the city again by smell. There was fresh meat in the subway tunnels, old meat on the rooftops, the sour stink of survivors who barricaded themselves in high-rises and thought height would save them. She learned to wait in shadows, to move only when the wind covered the sound of her movement. She learned that if she stayed still long enough, the hunger dulled to something she could almost ignore, but it was never the same as satisfying that feeling.
She never found Rodriguez. She looked. God, she looked, but he was gone. For that, she was thankful. She had helped him escape, she had helped the civilians evacuate. Months turned into seasons, but it was all the same.
She watched the quarantine zone fall from the outside. Watched the inner ring burn when the generators finally died. Watched the last helicopter lift off from a rooftop and disappear south. Watched the dead inherit the city completely. Most of all, she wandered.
Downtown became a forest of broken glass and bone. The bridges sagged and rusted. Vines began to crawl up the sides of buildings, the earth slowly reclaiming lost ground. She watched the sky turn the color of ash. She knew time continued even though she found herself understanding it less and less. She knew that the sun meant that a day had passed, and seven suns meant a week had passed. She could count, and did count, until she didn't. As far as she knew, years had passed, decades, centuries..
She learned to stand on rooftops at dusk and count the stars, to paint pictures of the constellations she knew by heart but no longer recognized. She learned the difference between the ones who still screamed inside their skulls and the ones who had gone quiet. She learned that if she pressed her forehead to the cracked window of an empty apartment and stared long enough, she could almost remember what it felt like to be warm.
Sometimes, in the deepest part of winter, she would sit on the edge of the main bridge that lead out of the city, to sit and watch the river freeze solid with things trapped inside it. She would sit there until the hunger woke her up again and sent her shambling back into the ruins.
She kept her tags, even when she remembered she still had them. They were fused to what was left of her collarbone. Sometimes she touched them with her rotting digits and tried to remember the sound of her own name.
Tamara.
It felt like someone else's name, and in a way, it was. The name of a woman who stood in defense of the defenseless. The name of a woman who once had a purpose, a higher calling. That was then, but now, she was another mindless monster. Her hair fell out in clumps and never grew back. Her remaining eye sank deeper into the socket. Her jaw unhinged a little more each year.
One morning, or so she thought, she was having trouble differentiating sunrise from sunset, she stood on the observation deck of what used to be an imposing skyscraper, wind screaming through the broken crown, and watched something new appear on the horizon.
A ripple in the dust. A single figure, naked, stumbling, clutching a length of rebar, his lifeboat in a sea of death.
She tilted her head and the hunger stirred within her. Beckoning her to reach this man, to attack him, to consume him. Once she ate of his flesh, she would be happy, and in a life such as this, what was life other than a brief moment of chasing happiness. It was in rare supply, and when she was given the chance, she had to take it. But that was wrong, wasn't it? She didn't want a cheap thrill, she wanted more. What did she want? Why was she here?
The figure looked up, as if he could feel her watching, but she knew he could not see her. She took one slow step forward, then another, straining to see, to hear him. The wind carried his voice across four city blocks and thousands of days of ruin.
"What in the fresh hell…?"
Tamara opened her mouth. Nothing came out but a dry hiss, so she walked closer to the edge.
The gentle breeze bared its fangs at her and her hair whipped wildly about. She looked down the impossible distance, back to the man, and stepped forward.