Dog Blood

followed by a scream that could be either rage or pain. I throw my bag into the van, then climb in and slam the door.
    “Any sign?” Paul asks.
    “Nothing.”
    Yet another helicopter hovers nearby, this one using a searchlight to illuminate the ground below.
    “We’re not going anywhere else for a while,” Keith announces as he starts the engine and pulls away. “This place is too damn busy for my liking tonight. Anywhere close where we can hole up until it quietens down?”
    All eyes are on me, and the pressure is unwelcome. The only thing I’m sure about is that I’m not going back into the apartment. I try to think of other places nearby that might still be standing. Through a gap between two houses at the very bottom of Calder Grove I see the tall, dark outline of a high-rise that looks reasonably intact. That’ll do.
    “Turn left at the bottom of the road,” I tell him. “I know somewhere.”

12
    KEITH STOPS THE VAN behind a row of overflowing garbage cans, almost directly beneath the high-rise apartments. We each grab our individual bags of weapons and supplies and head for the shelter of the building. The front doors are missing, and the entrance foyer is as trashed as everywhere else. Like an idiot I instinctively press the button to call the elevator. Old habits die hard.
    “Don’t think that’s going to do anything, my friend,” Paul whispers sarcastically. I push past him and follow Carol, who’s already heading up the stairs, the glowing orange tip of another cigarette illuminating her route through the darkness. There’s a woman’s badly decomposed body at the very bottom of the first flight of steps, her neck snapped and her decayed face wedged against the wall. She was like us, and that immediately puts me on edge. I step over the corpse and start to climb, wondering pointlessly if she fell or if she was pushed.
    For a few minutes we do nothing but climb, our footsteps echoing up and down along the entire length of this dark and otherwise silent stairwell. We move quickly, most of us climbing two steps at a time. It’s hard work, but the pain is easy to ignore. It’s a perverse reality of my situation: I eat scraps, survive out in the open, and live from day to day, but I’m in better shape than I’ve ever been. The others are the same. Carol races ahead like a woman half her age. I feel strong and powerful, my body lean, toned, and efficient. Makes me wonder how, when everything was available to me on a plate and all I had to worry about was my family and my piss-easy job, did I manage to fuck everything up so badly? The memory of who and what I used to be is embarrassing. I wish this had happened to me years ago.
    “How far?” Carol shouts down from several flights up.
    “Just keep going,” I answer. We’re more than halfway up now. The higher we go, I think, the safer we’ll be.
    “Wait,” Keith yells. I stop climbing and turn back. He’s still a floor below me. “Look at this.”
    “Look at what?” Paul grunts breathlessly as he pushes past and starts heading back down again. I follow him back to floor eight (of eleven or twelve, I think). This floor is different from the others. I passed it too quickly to notice, but the doors leading from the staircase to the rest of the building here have been boarded up. There’s plenty of broken glass and other debris around here, but it doesn’t look like the barrier has been breached.
    “This has been done from the inside,” Keith says, stating the blindingly obvious.
    “So there might still be someone in there,” Carol adds, equally pointlessly.
    “Must be Unchanged,” Paul says under his breath as he runs his hands over the large sheets of plywood that have been nailed to the inside of the door frame, pushing and prodding in different places, trying to find a weak spot. He finds one near the bottom right-hand corner where the door frame is rotten. He brushes away shards of broken glass with his feet, then sits down on his backside and pushes the board with his boot. When it moves slightly he beckons for me to help him. I position myself directly between him and the handrail of the staircase so he can’t move backward, then brace myself as he starts to kick at the wood. The noise is massively amplified by the confines of our surroundings, but in the moments of silence between kicks, everything else remains reassuringly quiet. He’s barely forced open a wide enough gap when he turns around, drops his backpack,