At the bottom of the ladder, I stepped off and looked around, panting. I was in a long, wide sewage tunnel. It was almost entirely pitch black.
The man with the shotgun arrived at the bottom of the ladder. He leaned against it for a moment while he fumbled something out of his pocket. A click and a beam of light came on. A flashlight.
"Here," he told me, "hold this on me for a minute."
I did as he said. He pulled some fresh shells out of his filthy jacket and began reloading his shotgun. I got my first good look at him. He was probably in his mid twenties with dark, sunken eyes and a thin face covered with stubble. He finished loading the shotgun then held out his hand for the flashlight. I handed it back to him.
"What's your name?" he asked me.
I told him, then asked his.
"Aaron," he replied.
"What the fuck's going on?" I demanded. "What the fuck were those things? Where is everyone? Why is everything so fucked up outside?"
Aaron looked at me for a moment in silence, cocking his head slightly. "What's the last thing you remember before everything went crazy?" he asked me.
"What the fuck does that--" I began.
"Just tell me."
I told him about the convenience store. The guy with the pistol. The gunshot. How I had passed out, then awaken to find the world had turned into hell while I had been out.
When I finished, Aaron nodded to himself as if that was what he'd been expecting me to say.
"Now would you mind tell me--" I started.
"No," he cut me off, "we don't have time for that now. We have to get back to the others."
"Others?" I said, surprised. "You mean there's more normal people?"
"Yeah. A few. You better come with me if you wanna stay alive."
"Where?"
"The police station," he replied, pointing with his shotgun down the tunnel. "It's a couple blocks down that way. It's the only safe place in town."
He took off down the tunnel without another word, moving quickly. I hurried after him.
"Are there any of those things down here?" I asked him, looking uneasily around in the dark.
"No," he said without slowing down, "but there might be soon. They saw us go down here. They might try to find a way down and follow us."
"Shit," I whispered, alarmed.
"That's why we have to get back to the station," Aaron answered.
We went down the sewer tunnel for about twenty minutes, then Aaron stopped at another ladder. "This is it," he said, then started up. At the top of the ladder was another manhole cover. He pounded on it and said in a loud voice: "Open up! It's me!"
I heard the sound of something heavy being scooted away, then someone on the other side began to hoist up the manhole cover. A bright beam of light was shone down the manhole, causing me to squint.
"I found someone else alive," Aaron told whoever was holding the light, and pointed down at me. The he climbed out. He peered down at me. "You coming?"
I hesitated briefly, looking around the dark sewer tunnel nervously. Very faintly, I thought I heard a moan off in the distance. I quickly climbed up after him.
At the top of the ladder, I crawled out onto a hard cement floor. I looked around, my eyes adjusting to the light.
I was in what seemed to be some kind of parking garage. Aaron was standing nearby with another man who looked to be in his mid-thirties. He was balding and slightly overweight. He was also armed with a shotgun.
"Did you find anything?" the other man asked Aaron.
"Just him," Aaron replied, pointing at me. The other man looked at me.
"What's your name, kid?" he asked.
I told him, then looked to Aaron and said: "You think you can tell me what the fuck's going on now?"
"I guess you're new here," the other man muttered before Aaron could answer me.
"What do you mean?" I asked, confused. Meanwhile, Aaron had come back over and was sliding the manhole cover back in place. Nearby stood a wheel-barrel loaded with cinder blocks.
"Well, for one thing you're still alive. Most fresh meat don't last long around here. Secondly, you don't have the first fucking clue what this is all about."
"Well, that's what I've been trying to find out!" I retorted. "Who are you, anyway?"
"Oh, sorry, where are my manners. I'm Clark."
"What did you mean about 'fresh meat not lasting long around here'?"
"Most new people who show up in Dead Land are lucky if they last ten minutes before the Residents make their acquaintance. The Residents hate living folks."
Now I was totally lost. "Whoa. Slow the fuck down. I don't know what you're talking about. Dead Land? Residents?"
"We'll talk upstairs," Aaron told me. "I'll explain everything." He finished moving the manhole cover back in place, then pushed the wheel-barrel full of cinder blocks on top of it. He looked at Clark. "How's Lauren doing?"
Clark shook his head, his face turning grim. "Not good. She's gotten worse just in the last hour."
"Shit," Aaron muttered. He turned back to me. "Come with us. We'll take you up top and introduce you to the rest of the Tourists."
He and Clark started walking away. I got up and followed after them, looking around at my surroundings as we went. On the other side of the parking garage was an elevator. I started towards it instinctively, but Aaron stopped me. "No electricity," he explained, then indicated a metal door next to it labeled 'STAIRS.'
He opened it and the three of us entered a darkened stairwell. I followed Aaron and Clark up several flights until they stopped at a landing with a door labeled 'LOBBY." Aaron pushed it open and we stepped inside.
I looked around. It was the lobby of our local police station (I recognized it from a field trip my sixth-grade class has taken several years before) but like everything else in town, it was now aged, decrepit, and deserted.
Hearing a sudden pounding sound, I jumped, startled, and spun around toward the main entrance. I felt my skin crawl in horror. "Oh Jesus Christ," I said in a low voice.
The entrance doors had been secured with chains and padlocks. In the small windows at the top of the double doors I could see at least a dozen of those walking corpses clustered outside, pounding and moaning...trying to get inside.
"Don't worry about them," Aaron said. "They can't get in here."
"What about the windows?" I inquired.
"Reinforced bullet-proof glass."
"Come on," Clark said, "let's introduce you to the rest of us."
They guided me down a corridor and stopped at a door at the end. Printed on the frosted glass window at the top was 'RICHARD DODSON, CHIEF OF POLICE.' Aaron pounded on it. "It's us! Open up!" he called out. I heard the door being unlocked, then it opened.
I stood in the doorway, taking a look around.
It was a spacious, well-decorated office. There were stuffed animal heads mounted on the walls.
The room was lit by candles and several kerosene lanterns.
There were four other people sitting around on small cots. Like Aaron and Clark, they were all disheveled, their clothes dirty and ragged. They looked at me seemingly without much interest, their faces grim and sullen.
Aaron gestured with his arm around the room to each of them.
"This is Jeff," he said, indicating a skinny, awkward-looking guy only a few years older than me (eighteen or nineteen probably).
"Hey," I said in greeting and Jeff gave me a brief nod in reply.
Aaron nodded to a black guy in his early twenties. "That's Dante," he said. Dante just started at me with hard, blank eyes.
Aaron pointed to a woman who appeared to be in her late twenties with long, stringy dark hair. She was seated beside a cot on which lay a young girl who was probably no older than twelve. The girl seemed to be unconscious and looked sick. She was moaning and turning restlessly in her sleep. "This is Nadine," he said, pointing to the older woman, "and that's Lauren." He pointed to the sick girl on the cot.
"What's wrong with her?" I asked, concerned.
"What the fuck does it look like?" Nadine asked me harshly. "She's dying, that's what's wrong with her." She picked up a wet washcloth and gently applied it to Lauren's forehead. "She's been getting worse every day," Nadine went on in a softer tone, "and when she dies she's going to..." She didn't finish.
"Can someone please tell me what's happening?" I said, looking around the room. "One minute I'm going into a convenience store to buy some drinks, the next, some psycho aims a gun at me and the next after that I'm being chased by a mob of freaks who look like extras in a Romero movie!"
Aaron sat down on a cot and sighed heavily. "Okay. I guess you're entitled to an explanation. Go ahead and sit down. I'll tell you what's going on...but I don't think you're going to like what I have to say."
He looked at me for a moment.
"So the last thing you remember is some nut firing a gun at you?" he asked me.
"Yeah. I guess I got lucky and he missed. I passed out and woke up here...wherever the fuck here is," I replied.
At this, Nadine snorted contemptuously. "You seriously don't get it yet? You seriously haven't figured it out?"
I glanced at her, confused. "What do you mean?"
She gave me a look that was half disgust, half pity. "The guy with the gun didn't miss you at all."
"Bullshit!" I pointed to myself. "You see any bullet holes?"
"Nadine's right," Jeff said, speaking for the first time. "If he'd missed you, you wouldn't be here now."
"Where?" I demanded. "What the fuck is this place?"
Dante answered in a very soft, quiet voice. His words sent a chill down my spine. "The Land of the Dead. That's where you are, dude. That's where we all are."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" I asked, trying to sound tough, but I think my voice faltered slightly. I was getting scared.
"We've got some bad news for you," Clark told me solemnly. "All the religions had it wrong. There is no Heaven or Hell. No Nirvana, no reincarnation, none of that bullshit. This..."--he waved his arm around, a motion that seemed to indicate not just the room we were in but the entire world--"...this is all there is waiting for us on the other side. We call it Dead Land."
I stared at him, feeling a growing ball of cold dread in my stomach. Things were starting to become clear now. I was starting to see what they were getting at. "Are you saying I'm dead? That we're all dead?"
"No," Aaron said. "Not quite, anyway. Technically we're all still alive. We're stuck somewhere in the middle. Kind of like being in limbo."
"I don't understand any of this!" I said, my voice shaking with fear.
"What year is it?" Dante asked me suddenly, taking me by surprise. I looked at him, puzzled.
"What the fuck do you mean?"
"I mean, what's the date you went into the convenience store," he said.
"It was today. July 25, 2015."
His eyes widened. He looked stunned for a moment. "Five years. Shit," he said quietly, to himself. "It's been five years since..."
"Since what?"
"Since the car accident," he told me. "October 31, 2010. Me and some friends were coming home from a Halloween party. We were kind of drunk I guess, and crashed into a semi. That's how long I've been in a coma."
"What?" I said loudly, shocked.
"It's true," Jeff said. "We're all in comas right now. I was out swimming with some friends in a lake. I guess I hit my head on some rocks or something and almost drowned. I'm probably in a vegetable ward in a hospital right now on a respirator."
"What about you?" I said to Nadine.
She looked down at the floor and smiled bitterly. "I had a little drug habit. Meth. My boyfriend got me turned onto it. I guess I got a bad batch. Either that or I overdosed."
I looked to Clark. He shrugged.
"Brain tumor."
I looked to Aaron. "And you?"
"Tried to kill myself. I'm not going to tell you why. It doesn't matter now, anyway. I didn't have a gun so I figured the next best thing was hanging myself. Guess I messed it up somehow."
I was quiet for a long time, struggling to absorb all of this. Was I just dreaming all of this? This couldn't really be happening. Finally I looked up to Aaron. "You said we're all technically still alive."
"Yeah. If we were dead we'd be those things outside."
"Well if we're still alive, what the hell are we doing in the Land of the Dead?"
"Hey don't expect us to have all the answers!" Nadine snapped at me defensively. "You think we haven't been over this before? They don't exactly hand you a fuckin guidebook when you show up here."
"Maybe we're here because there's nowhere else for us to go," Jeff said grimly.
"No, I don't believe that!" I protested. "Maybe we're here as some kind of punishment. Maybe this is Purgatory, or Hell, or--"
Aaron interrupted me. "When I first arrived here, one of those things I ran into was my grandmother. I recognized her by the dress she was wearing. It was the one she was buried in. She was the sweetest old lady you'd ever hope to meet...when she was alive, anyway. She tried to kill me like all the others." He gave me a dark look. "This isn't a punishment. Jeff's right. We're here because this is all there is to look forward to after death."
TO BE CONTINUED