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his entrails, at the base of his neck. It was a sixth sense that he had forged throughout his life, and it was a sixth sense he trusted. And God, how it screamed on that placid Sunday. It screamed that something was so wrong that he had better get some clean underwear and jump straight off the damn planet. He held tightly onto the seat’s arms and considered running away. He did not want to hear it. He did not want to hear it from Cripple’s mouth. He did not want anything to change.
    Cripple stared at him with his eyes wide open. Moses could not recall having ever had seen that expression on his face. Jesus , he thought, he looks like an unshaved version of Munch’s The Scream. He cowered in his chair, like one expecting a bomb to fall on him. Here it comes. He’s going to say it...
    “ There are dead people coming back to life.”
    Boom.
     

Chapter 7
    Submerged in the complete silence of the small third floor office, Antonio Rodriguez listened. His temples pulsated, he felt the rapid beats. His heart, and breath were still accelerated. He was crouched behind an office desk, feeling the rough old carpet with his hand. He held the remnants of an old iron desk lamp. He had been using it to hit people. Hospital patients.
    Everything had gone silent a couple of hours ago. The screams and noises could not be heard anymore. Nevertheless, his fist was still closed so tightly on the desk lamp that his knuckles were white. His mind was divided between the tasks of listening for more noises and reviewing the past hours. The images repeated themselves in his head like resounding blows. He tried to push them away, but it was useless.
    He shook his head, shudder intensely, and looked at his naked wrist. What time could it be? He felt like an eternity had passed since it all had started, however, that same morning had begun with his normal routine of breakfast —coffee and a prosciutto roll. Barely two hours later he had beaten to death a group of immigrants who were... were... already dead. They were dead, but they had ripped a piece of flesh from his assistant’s neck, and after that, had hurled themselves at him as well. Antonio had taken a desk lamp from the table and given his first attacker a resounding blow. A dense black blood clot flew from the heavy impact, but his assailant did not react in any way, just continued advancing with a horrible grimace on his face. Antonio hit again and again, with unmeasured violence. He remembered himself screaming while doing so, although through the white fog of the panic that clouded the scene in his head, he thought about the terrible cranial lesions his blows could be causing. His aggressor, however, had not given up, and advanced with both arms raised. Finally, Antonio had heard a sonorous crack. The assailant’s head fell to one side, his cheek brushing against his own shoulder, and the watery eyes fixed on it. Antonio ceased the rain of blows. That was not possible. He had dislocated his head. He should have fallen straight on the floor. Instant death. But was he not dead before, as well? He looked around. They were all dead. He saw it in the furious and dulled look in their absent eyes, and in spite of this, they were still moving forward.
    After that, Antonio did not remember well how it had all happened. He remembered pieces, unconnected scenes. He saw himself searching for the doorknob and exiting to the hallway, panicking. Now he knew he was right: yes, he had been screaming continuously. In his flight, he bumped into Marisa, an assistant nurse on that floor, whom he had frightened terribly. She looked in the direction from which Antonio was fleeing and saw the dead exiting the Refrigerator. She froze: she did not say or do anything more. As he crossed the section’s double doors, Antonio looked back and saw Marisa with three of them on top of her.
    He remembered the custodians trying to detain the immigrants; he remembered fallen bodies; he remembered screams. Most of all,