Zombie Outbreak Ep. 6: What Was Left Behind (Day 121) — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00One hundred and twenty-one days since the dead took the city.
2. 0:03Everyone you lived with is gone.
3. 0:06The men who did it are behind this door.
4. 0:08And you just knocked.
5. 0:16One and a half liters. Nine portions. A wrench in your bag.
6. 0:21At dawn, you left two covered faces in a stockroom. Red glasses. White cap.
7. 0:27You came to make the Collectors pay.
8. 0:30At the stadium's staff door, behind the shutter, a blue cap.
9. 0:34An hour ago, you walked up the boulevard alone.
10. 0:38Every window could have been watching. Nothing moved in them.
11. 0:42The stadium sits at the end of it. Smashed glass. Dead floodlights.
12. 0:47High on the stand roof, something flashes once in the sun. Glass. Somebody is watching you come.
13. 0:54The radio said come alone. You have nobody left to bring.
14. 0:58The service gate is open the length of its chain. You squeeze through.
15. 1:03At the end of the service road, a truck with a tall mast stands against a wall.
16. 1:08In the yard, two caps make their round, one with a steel bar. One of the dead lies by the wall where they finished it.
17. 1:15Up in the stands, behind chained glass doors, shapes stand very still. Every one of them faces the glass.
18. 1:22You put each foot down slowly.
19. 1:25Now the cap at the shutter holds up his fingers. How many of you?
20. 1:29You hold up one.
21. 1:30He writes it down.
22. 1:31You could wait out here and take one of them with the wrench. They only come out in pairs, with the bar.
23. 1:37Not just any cap. You want the man from the bank.
24. 1:40You push three portions through the slot. One cup comes back. That is their price.
25. 1:46You smell it before you drink. A faint swimming pool.
26. 1:49Treated water should smell faintly of chlorine. If it doesn't, it needs another dose and fifteen more minutes.
27. 1:56It is the first water in four months you did not have to count.
28. 1:59One person needs about a gallon a day, to drink and to wash. One and a half liters is less than half of that.
29. 2:06You watch the eyes in the slot. Through the archive door, you saw a dark blue cap. You heard his voice twice.
30. 2:13None of them speak. Any one of them could be him.
31. 2:16You ask what else they buy. Work, you tell them. Your hands, for water.
32. 2:22The eyes move to your hands. The pencil moves. The shutter slides shut.
33. 2:27The man from the bank is somewhere behind this door. Work is how you get past it.
34. 2:32You once watched an injured neighbor through a peephole and left him outside.
35. 2:37Now you are the one outside.
36. 2:40The bolt draws back. A different cap holds the door. A tan bag on his shoulder, a radio at his collar.
37. 2:47He doesn't speak. He waves you in.
38. 2:50The corridor has been scrubbed. Not well enough. Dark smears run along both walls, at the height of a shoulder.
39. 2:57The cap with the notebook stays by the door. The other one checks you.
40. 3:01Sleeves up. Your arms. Your neck. Then the bag.
41. 3:06His hand stops on the wrench.
42. 3:08He looks at it. He pushes it back under the blanket and closes the bag.
43. 3:14He says nothing.
44. 3:15Boots off.
45. 3:16Your boots have not dried since the storm. Your feet are white and wrinkled, and they have swollen.
46. 3:22On day one hundred and eight, a voice through the archive door asked how your feet were doing.
47. 3:27You never found out how he knew.
48. 3:29Feet that stay wet can get trench foot, even at sixty degrees. Dry socks are how you stop it.
49. 3:34From his own bag, the cap takes a pair of dry socks and puts them in your hands.
50. 3:39You trust nothing a cap gives you.
51. 3:41You put them on anyway.
52. 3:43Behind you, the notebook cap writes something down.
53. 3:45All day, on swollen feet, you carry empty drums through their stadium.
54. 3:51A drum of water stands at every door. A cap drinks. Another cap writes it down.
55. 3:57You listen for the voice at every door.
56. 4:00Under the stand, one steel door has a light behind it. Nobody goes in. Nobody comes out.
57. 4:06The roof door stands open. Its chain hangs from one handle.
58. 4:11The cap with the tan bag carries the other end of every drum. He keeps looking at you.
59. 4:16He never says a word while another cap is near.
60. 4:22At dusk, he takes you up to the stand roof for the last ones. Nobody follows.
61. 4:27The wrench is in your bag. Up here, nobody would hear.
62. 4:31You have been awake since the chair scraped in the stockroom. After seventeen hours awake, you react as slowly as someone who has been drinking. After a whole day, as slowly as someone drunk.
63. 4:42After day thirty, the rain stopped for two weeks. Every tank they could reach, they drained.
64. 4:49One inch of rain on a house-sized roof is about seventeen hundred gallons. So now every roof they hold is a funnel.
65. 4:56That is why the radio called to your roof on day sixty. You had a full tank.
66. 5:01From up here, you can see your tower. The bank is somewhere at its feet.
67. 5:06Below you, the dead stand among the seats.
68. 5:09The cap says they get thinner. They dry out in the sun. They do not get slower.
69. 5:14Behind the last drums, he turns to you before you can move.
70. 5:19He says a name. Ines.
71. 5:21He asks if she is alive.
72. 5:23A Collector who knows her name. They had her on the bank roof on day sixty-four. They hunted her for fifty-seven days.
73. 5:32The wrench comes out of the bag. You have him against the railing.
74. 5:36You ask him where the man from the bank is. The one who copied your knock.
75. 5:40He doesn't fight you.
76. 5:41On day sixty-four, he says, he was on the bank's stairs. The others searched upstairs. He took the floor below, alone.
77. 5:50In a cleaning cupboard, in the dark behind the mops, he saw a green apron. One shoe.
78. 5:55He closed the door. He called clear.
79. 5:58She never saw his face.
80. 6:01Only Ines knew about that cupboard. She told you herself, the day you found her in the service passage.
81. 6:07The wrench comes down an inch.
82. 6:09He keeps his eyes on the stands while he talks.
83. 6:12She cleaned here. On day zero, she left in the afternoon to collect her daughter.
84. 6:17On day twelve, the day the stadium fell, he saw her at the gate. Her cap was splashed with paint.
85. 6:23On day ninety-seven, the caps searched the bank's supply store. He was sent to the lower cupboard. He left it shut.
86. 6:30Before all this, his crew fixed buildings all over the city. The bank was one of them. He mended its sump pump twice.
87. 6:37His job sheets went to the man who runs the caps. That is how the voice at your door knew which room floods, and why it asked about your feet.
88. 6:44He says it like a man who has said it to himself every night.
89. 6:47On day zero, that man shut him out of this stadium, with a hurt coworker called Sam. Over a radio. No further admissions, it said. That includes staff.
90. 6:58On day twelve, his own name was on their list. Sam's was not. He stayed outside with Sam, and lost him in the crowd.
91. 7:05When the rain stopped, he came back here for a cup. He tells himself it was to make them pay. He drank first anyway.
92. 7:13So did you.
93. 7:14The man who runs the caps never touches anyone. He leaves people outside, and lets the dead do it.
94. 7:20The day the stadium fell, he barred himself in under the stand, and left thousands outside with the dead.
95. 7:26At the bank, he never came through your door. He waited outside it while the water came up.
96. 7:31He never touched Ines or your friend. He only made you leave.
97. 7:35Then he asks again where she is.
98. 7:39You don't answer.
99. 7:41He doesn't ask a third time.
100. 7:42Two men on a roof. One wrench between them. Across the pitch, the dead that never left the stands.
101. 7:50On the stair you came up, someone pulls the door shut. A chain drags through its handles.
102. 7:56A padlock clicks shut. Every other way down passes the dead.
103. 8:01The wrench he hid. The socks he gave you. The notebook cap saw all of it.
104. 8:07The radio at his collar hisses.
105. 8:10No further admissions. That includes staff.
106. 8:14You know that voice.
107. 8:15It came through the archive door.
108. 8:17It is the man from the bank.
109. 8:19He sent this cap to bring you in. And had him watched.
110. 8:23He has never needed a gun.
111. 8:26Only a door.