The Wanderers by Permuted Press Page B

‘biters’ or ‘wanderers’, the longer it’ll take us to call them by their true name. They’re victims, Aranda. Dead people. That’s what they are.”
    Aranda nodded, thoughtful.
    A sudden gust of cold wind blew some dried leaves from underneath the old chair and dragged them several feet away. Behind the fence, as if it was responding to the change of temperature, one of the dead lifted its head and appeared to scan the sky.
    Aranda looked at it, and the specter returned his gaze. Fascinated by that attitude, he continued looking at it directly into its watery and whitish eyes for a few moments. He shivered. Something in its eyes seemed to proclaim that the wind was one of change.
     

Chapter 13
    Nightfall on an evening in the third week of February was an intense red. It almost seemed as if the sky was on fire in the west as the sun disappeared behind the buildings of the Plaza de la Merced. From her window, the girl observed the wanderers as on so many other days. One of them, impeccably dressed in a suit, carried a black executive briefcase. It was open and the lid was dragging on the ground. Inside you could still some documents, held by a security band. The girl asked herself why, in the name of Heaven, the thing clung to something so useless with such determination. It was as if a part of it insisted on hanging on to a past life that had been lost on that tragic day. She looked at his blue tie and white shirt, feeling pity for the poor unfortunate wretch.
    “ The last bottle is finished. The last bottle...” someone said, entering the room.
    “ Well we’ll have to live off of juice and soft drinks.”
    “ The juice has also run out. The only thing left are those shitty isotonic drinks.”
    “ They must be better than drinking Coca Cola...” theorized the girl.
    “ Well I wouldn’t know what to tell you,” said the young man, settling his glasses on his nose. “Coca cola has several acids that have a decalcifying effect on the bones. But the isotonic drink could be even worse. It has vitamins, but they’re mixed with a very dangerous chemical agent. It was developed by the United States Defense Department in the sixties to stimulate the morale of the troops that fought in Vietnam. It worked like a hallucinogenic drug, and calmed the stress of war, you know? But the effects on the soldiers’ organs were so devastating that they withdrew it.”
    “ What kind of side effects?”
    He made a vague gesture with his hand. “Well, things like high rates of migraines, brain tumors and liver troubles in the soldiers that took it.”
    The girl burst out laughing. “Where on earth do you get all of that from?”
    The young man seemed a little offended, and crossed his arms several times, as if he was uncomfortable. “I read it... in a blog. Before, when... when there was the Internet.”
    “ You’re incredible, Arturo,” she said with a smile.
    It was actually a strange moment, one of those that had not happened in weeks. They had held out against the invasion of the living dead in one of the emblematic buildings of the Plaza de la Merced. There were six of them, although John, a fifty-two year old foreigner who had come to Malaga to study Picasso, was really sick. He’d been bitten on the leg, and had lost a lot of blood. Since then, the infection had continued spreading, and he’d been plagued with cold sweats, raging fevers, and periods of coma.
    John, however, was still hanging on, thank God. The others were all young people, and except for some moments of hysteria, they were taking it quite well. Going out on the street was completely unfeasible due to the numbers of cadavers that constantly roamed the plaza, but they had lasted thanks to a hole they had made in the floor of one of the first floor apartments that had given them access to the small supermarket underneath. There was plenty of canned food, cereal with far off expiration dates, bottled water, and many other products they could store