Part of my brain 'knew', without looking, what they saw (or could narrow it to a few possibilities), but the rest of my foolish self demanded clarification. My eyes enjoyed a blissful ignorance that my other senses, including my 'common' sense, didn't have the luxury of. The acres of trees acted as a calming influence that just about pipped the ominous sounds, the ones that sent the 'knowing' part of my brain into an apoplectic black-hole. My ears and brain joined forces to say that zombies were probably banging on the window, because what else would that noise be? My nose picked up the stench of pure fear that clouded us.
"You don't want to know. We're lower anyway now," Susan said with a sigh.
"Was it zombies?"
"Maybe," Stuart said. "We'll hit ground level soon; we're passing the fifth floor."
Then there was a sickening crack.
A bowel-loosening, eye-gouging crack.
Slow at first, like stepping on a frozen puddle, but growing more urgent as the newborn crack explored its world. Something was applying pressure to the glass.
Crack.
Crackcrack.
CrrrrrraaaaaaacccccckkkkkkSMASH.
Shards of glass poured from above, tinkling against the metal trolley. Quick-thinking Susan snatched the bucket she'd spared earlier and dropped it on her head as a plastic helmet; the handle resembled a loose chin strap. Suffering a lack of sight, she dropped to her knees and cowered on the floor between Stuart and me. The glass hit us all but with not quite enough force to cut; it sounded like a drum-roll on Susan's makeshift hat.
The shards, it turned out, were the least of our worries. We would have enjoyed a lovely, peaceful ride down the building if the only thing to fall on us was splintered glass. But no, it wasn't destined to play out like that.
One lone zombie at first, harmlessly clearing the trolley and landing face first on the gravelly floor below, its face and chest all torn up from crawling through the shattered hole in the window. It planted into the floor and crushed the majority of its upper body, leaving its legs poking up like a sundial. A host of others clamoured out, using the new opening as an improvised escape route, smashing more glass until a large window on the sixth floor had gone.
We reached the third floor.
Another creature fell, missing the trolley again though not by as much. We hung a foot or so from the side of the building, hugging the wall close enough that the apex of the zombies took them sailing past us. More followed the trajectory of the first two pioneers.
"How many were there?" I asked.
"Loads," Susan shouted, sounding hollow and distant under her bucket.
"Loads and loads," Stuart confirmed. He crouched, staring upwards, ready to dive away if one hurtled down at him.
A solid chorus of throat-bending groans and other gruff expulsions reached my ears. Arms and heads with sunken, rotted faces poked out of the gap, attempting to escape, to claw their way out.
Then I heard a new sound from on high, higher then the zombies and the sixth floor, from somewhere near the clouds. Like a screeching cat being repeatedly trodden on by a fat man in golf shoes. Or, more accurately, like the winch fucking us over good and proper. One side of the trolley began to lower while the other stalled.
We were toppling, tilting, doing a Titanic but without the water or wealthy socialites.
"The wire's snagged!" Stuart yelled, as another clueless deadite took an economy class flight to the ground floor. "There's a knot or a catch! We need to get it past that!"
We jumped together in sync. Susan didn't participate; she stayed cowered under her bucket, clinging to the trolley's edge for stability. She peeked out to investigate the commotion at the most inopportune time.
The snag gave way, popping past whatever trouble it had thanks to an unexpected helper from above, landing in the centre of our ride – precisely where I stood a few seconds before. It landed on its back next to Susan, snapping both of its legs off at the knees by slamming them against the rail. The limbs detached like they were made of meringue, making the pants empty and redundant. The de-bodied legs carried on going until they hit the floor below where they burst like bags of flesh. The rest of it turned to slurry and the bloated torso deflated as it dripped and slopped through the grate-like floor.
The tardy side of the trolley juddered upon impact and dropped two foot down, levelling the trolley out.
Susan screamed and let the bucket drop back over her eyes, then lashed out at the visitor's head with the heel of a shoe. If it wasn't done with from the fall, it was now, chalking up yet another kill for the most violent pair of heels in the building.
Footwear history was being bloodily forged; the classic military jackboot would soon feel the stiletto's hot, murderous breath on its laces, competing for the 'Highest kill count by a shoe' accolade.
More animated corpses toppled out like kamikaze pilots, but already dead and suffering terrible aim. The mess they made below was wretched; a pile of rotted, delicate husks with the sturdiness of a plastic bag, full of organs and sinew run through a blender. The brittle bones that punctured the weathered skin were a side order compared to the splattering, decayed insides. Bones didn't bother me as much as the guts; bones didn't leave stains.
It felt routine, almost normal now, witnessing such sickening gore on repeat until it hardly registered. Only knowing that we would have to hop the side of our metal beast and drop into the gloop gave me any concern. So much death caked my clothes that any extra would barely make a difference, but I still didn't want to take a swim in a lake of it.
By my count, another seven passed us by on their way to a sticky end. Another unfortunate geek struck our vessel, slamming its spine on the side before spinning and continuing on its downward journey. It rocked us hard, spooking Susan (still under her bucket-head) into thinking we'd started to free fall. She shrieked and dug her nails into my thigh, clinging tight like a son who doesn't want his father to go to work. With perfect comic timing, her makeshift helmet caught me square in the groin; in fortuitous timing, the severed head of a zombie landed where Susan had originally cowered. It exploded on impact and covered Stuart in horrid mush. If Susan hadn't charged head first at my lower half, it would have struck her bucket. A decapitated body fell to the side a second or two later, disappearing into the death-soup below like it'd been sucked into a portal to another world.
They continued to fall. A steady stream of the dead. Some nicked our trolley and shook it, causing it to swing and bump into the side of the building, but we avoided further direct hits.
The crate slowed to a halt almost level with the first floor, just a touch below it. The end of the line. It didn't go down far enough to allow a simple disembarkation. Of course it didn't. Why would it? Whoever designed it clearly hated the ground, opting to live their life on roofs or suspended on platforms, doing terrible jobs like window cleaning in the middle of bloody nowhere. They probably lived in a fucking airship powered by their own flaming idiocy.
The fun buggy thing was nice, but excluding the ability to actually get off the bastard at any point other than the roof felt like a gigantic misstep, a design flaw on par with lining a male sex toy with sandpaper and razorblades.
"This is as far as it goes, we'll have to jump," Stuart shouted, looking up to time his bid for freedom. Susan, under the bucket, jumped in the air once before she cottoned on.
"Oh, right. Oh..." she said.
"Can we smash this window, go back into the building? Might be eas..." I said. I stared into the featureless dark of the room until a female zombie tottered into view, knocking her forehead into the glass. She gave me a confused look then hissed, spitting up flecks of red, scraping her fingernails on the glass which left faint lines of blood. A draft of other decomposing faces joined her.
"Never mind," I said.
-
The safety of the ground lay three yards below, not the worst drop I'd ever risked my ankles on, but the amassing filth would make for a tricky landing. As each poor soul hit and
burst, they created a new splat, piling up on each other like a massive, abstract installation piece by a demented artist. I noticed that humans, at least these ex-versions, didn't exactly make a circle-shape of intestines and flesh that I expected. When they landed from a great height it left a triangular pattern, thin at the top near the head, spreading out as the body and legs crushed into one wide pile. The occasional unfortunate fell like a torpedo, leaving a landing strip of mess. Only one soared through the air with its limbs all splayed outwards, which made a starfish shape that would have been cute in another situation.
The vague shapes of red formed on top of one another, all different shades and textures but equally grotesque. Islands formed of clothes and shoes, but no body parts were identifiable. The very last zombie landed some way away, a yard past the furthest edge, as if it had been forcibly punted or had taken a good running jump.
They'd come as a solid stream, toothpaste pushed from the bottom of the tube, but dried up. There could only have been so many with access to that window, I reckoned. Even including all the people from the hallway earlier, they had to dry up quickly.
-
Stuart was first over the side of the trolley. He hung by his hands and dropped with confidence. Susan followed him in the most awkward way imaginable, delaying the whole escape process. Stuart stabilised her as I convinced her that getting off the damned thing was infinitely better than staying on.
"I'm not excellent at climbing," she whimpered, her knuckles white from gripping the edge. She had one leg on each side and her shoulders hunched up as buffers to protect her head. "Or dropping from any height, for that matter."
The bucket dangled from her shoulder as she straddled the railing, before gingerly shifting her weight over the side and hanging there for ten seconds whilst Stuart pulled at her legs. He lied about the length of the drop, of course, but grabbed her as she landed and adjusted her back up. She replaced the bucket on her head and held Stuart's hand as they navigated through the muck to a dry piece of floor, some way from the landing zone.
I was hesitant to start my climb, as Susan had been, because I knew I would end up on my face and completely covered in entrails again.
The predictability would bore me to sleep in any other scenario.
The lacklustre thuds and prods of the zombies encased behind the first-floor glass spurred me on. Their faces were bored, blank canvasses, emitting only occasional non-threatening snarls, but it was enough to make me want to run far away from them.
I slung my first leg over and took a deep breath.