Dead Wrangler (10 page)

Janet snuggled into her couch, dying for a nap. Tabitha was towering over her in a second. "I'm terribly sorry, darling, but no sleeping outside of the basement. I'm afraid I just can't allow it."

Janet nodded, and tottered down to the basement. There were some large bunks, made in a hurry and with whatever parts could be scavenged from around the property. They were more like cages with a lot of pillows and blankets thrown in than beds.

Gary and Meghan were playing Uno with Vinny. There was just enough light filtering in to the basement to see the cards. They were so absorbed they ignored her. She wasn't inclined to disrupt anybody's fun these days. She slipped in and closed the hatch behind her and tried to get comfortable. It wasn't Tabitha's Lay-Z-Boy, but she had had worse.

No, she decided, she hadn't. But it was comfortable enough, and the exhaustion was so deep that she could have slept well on a bed of nails. She was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

She woke up much, much later. It was pitch dark. She could hear snoring, and her hands fumbled towards the door. Locked.

My God I have to pee.

She felt something odd at her head. Her hands felt it for a second, taking it for some kind of exotic bowl at first.

Then she realized. Chamber pot.

She wondered how many times they had done this. They seemed to have it down. Trying to ignore what she was pretty sure was the sound of Gerald snoring over on the other side of the basement, she did her business. Relieved, she was back to sleep just as soon as she assured herself she could hear four people breathing.

She woke a little bit later to the sounds of Gary banging against the walls of his cage. Fear leapt up in her throat; the miracle was gone. God did not favor her.

Gerald woke up and turned on the lights. He paused with his back turned to Gary's cage for a long time. He had known Gary since he was born. He had played tag with him, given him stuffed animals when he was a toddler, swam with him on float trips. He didn't want to know either. Janet begged him not to look, to keep time frozen at this moment before she would have to see for sure. She saw tears in his eyes as he turned, and looked.

He looked for what seemed like eternity, then turned to Janet. She knew. She howled with it.

"My baby!" she sobbed.

Diane joined in, and Gary did too, with his undead growl. It was a funeral mass in a dark place. Soon Tabitha, Meghan, and Vincent came down on their own, each looking grim.

Tabitha peeked into Gary's cage and then covered her face. Meghan kept her eyes away. Vinny covered his ears and looked away. He had known Gary his whole life.

Tabitha came over and removed the bar to Janet and Diane's cages. They climbed out and Janet took Diane in her arms. They cried together and for a long time that was their world.

The world seemed like a dark and cruel place with no light or hope. The others felt it too, how could they not? The world was over, and hope was awful hard to find in that awful basement. Tabitha herded Janet and Diane upstairs onto a couch. She sat with them for a long time. Then she took Diane to another room and came back.

"Janet, you understand what needs to happen now?"

Janet knew but couldn't let herself say. She stared, silent, at Tabitha.

"The kindest thing is to end it. He's already back with God, what is left is just an animated shell."

She wanted to shout No!, demand that he be kept... like that. Forever. But she had seen enough to know that it wasn't right, or kind, or safe. She just hid her face and waved Tabitha away.

"I'd ask if you want to see him, but your last memory shouldn't be of that," Janet nodded into the pillow.

Tabitha descended the stairs. Vinny and the others were still there, casting furtive looks at each other.

Tabitha pulled out her .22 pistol and held it for a moment, issuing a prayer for Gary and a prayer for forgiveness for herself. Meghan put her hand over the gun.

"Tabitha, let me do it. It shouldn't have to be a family member who does this when I can."

Tabitha gratefully handed the gun to Meghan without hesitation. Meghan wasn't exactly eager herself, but she forced the gun up. Gary's pale face hissed at her between slats in the cage. She aimed for an eye and squeezed. A quiet pop and Gary slumped down, left eye gone. The growling stopped.

They stood in silence until the smell of gunpowder dissipated, then trudged upstairs.

Meghan tried to tell herself that Janet was lucky, and she was in the strictest sense. The most likely result of the night’s vigil was all three of them dying. To lose only one child–there were many, many women in the world who would trade places with Janet in a heartbeat. While that was true, it was also false. The odds had nothing to do with this. Probability was a poor salve for the pure, gut-ripping grief Meghan had witnessed tonight.

Meghan herself hadn't had any children, and her family was distant. While she knew that most of them, if not all, were dead by now, it was one thing to suspect it, or fear it. It was another to witness it.

She left that basement with a heavy heart and a grudge against God. What possible plan or scheme justified doing this to people? She thought the rainbow had been a promise.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Red Zone

Two weeks ago Waxahachie had been crowded with refugees. Now it was crowded with corpses. People just refused to listen, and Dave didn't blame them. Sure, logic said you should split your family up. Logic said that most of your family was going to die. Logic said that you were going to die. But when logic said you were fucked and there was nothing you could do about it, the logical thing to do was embrace irrationality. So people had kept sleeping with their families. When two or three of them switched in the night, they usually did some damage. Casualties had been a lot worse than they could have been.

But even irrationality had its limits. As far as Dave was concerned the limit was when your irrationality started forcing Dave to do stupid shit like this. Dave had been drafted as a 'militia technical officer' once he had come in talking about aliens getting juiced in the asshole by God. In normal times that sort of talk did not get a man promoted. But in normal times guys talking like that didn't have a scorched alien corpse in the back of the truck. They'd told him to shut the fuck up about aliens and fix cell phone towers. The corpse went to Area 51 or wherever the government was stashing that sort of thing these days.

The experience had opened his eyes about a lot of things. He hadn't been a big conspiracy guy before, or a big God guy. Zombies had primed the eschatological pump, and then aliens on top of that had spun his worldview around. He didn't know what to believe anymore, except that it wasn't what these assholes believed. They had shot the pastor of First Christian Community Church on Tuesday. The pastor had not found their theology convincing. Then they had holed themselves up in the First Christian Community Church for three days. There were about twenty guys in there, armed to the teeth, and they had who knows how many women and children in there. They'd left fliers all over town inviting anyone who wanted to come down. The flier had been in the style beloved by the mentally unhinged. When nobody took them up on it, they'd gone on a kidnapping spree, grabbing everyone they could and taking them down to the church.

The flier had implied that the only way to appease God and delay the Apocalypse was human sacrifice. God wanted everyone dead, it seemed to say, so the best way to get on God's good side again would be to submit to his will.

Those murderous lunatics were why Dave was sitting outside a Church with an assault rifle. He listened to crying babies and the screams of women, waiting for the command to attack. The sun was getting deep, and they had an hour before sunset.

Dave didn't want to be here, but he couldn't think of anything better to do. He'd had plenty of places in mind until he heard those kids crying. Now he was scared as hell, but he didn't have any doubts about why he was here.

Lieutenant Alred approached the dark church with a white flag. Dave didn't hold out a lot of hope for this approach. In fact he was pretty sure Alred was going to get killed and waste the little time they had left.

"I'm Lieutenant Alred," he shouted. No response. "You have a lot of women and children in there that don't want to be there. All we want from you is for you to let the people leave if they want to. You can do whatever your religion requires once your captives have been released."

"The World has Ended," came over the church PA system. "We must fight the demons."

"They are women and children," Alred said. "They can't fight the zombies."

"Oh, but they can," came the reply. "They can fight them better than you can. Their dead flesh barely feels your bullets, and your tanks don't stop the spread of the disease. I will transform these innocents into Angels. They will fight these Demons on the spiritual plane, the only place they can hope to be defeated."

Alred's face was collapsing in despair. A firefight would kill a lot of innocents, no way around it. And that sounded like it was exactly what this nutjob wanted.

"If you don't release them, we will be forced to take action to save them," Alred shouted. A shot cracked, and Alred fell down, shot in the neck.

"Stop spraying your lies, Agent of Satan!" the voice said. Light began dancing behind the boarded windows. Hot light. "We will be raptured into God's Army, and Satan cannot stop us." The screams of the captives, which had sounded bad before, went off the charts.

The fire spread. They must have doused the whole place in gasoline. The screaming ended as the building burnt to the ground in under three minutes. There was nothing to do but help Alred, who they dragged off to the medics. Nobody, not even the kidnappers, got out. They hadn't had time to try to escape.

Dave slogged back to base, rifle on his back, too shocked to be upset, though he knew that would come, and come hard. The thing that drove him crazy was the certainty in that voice. He'd never been as certain about anything in his life, and he craved that certainty more than he hated it. The knowledge that he could have ended up being the minion of that murderous lunatic shook him. It made him feel even more lost and helpless. How could you fight the zombies and your own kind and have any hope of winning? How could you even brush your teeth in the morning when certainty led to what he had just seen?

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Double Cross

October 28

Now, I knew a guy. He was another member of the gentleman homosexual club. But he was from Columbia so that didn't have the same connotations as it did in my town. He was into gay pride. So much so that he spent a hundred thousand dollars on a rainbow flag hot air balloon, which he kept at the local airport with his Cessna. Hot air balloon piloting is pretty simple. You control the up and down, the wind takes you where it wants to take you. I wasn't an expert but I'd seen enough the one time I'd taken a balloon ride with him.

They liked my plan. They liked it a lot. And in fact it went so damn well that it's almost not a story. We got the balloon from the airport and figured out how to assemble the burner. My acquaintance had been so kind as to leave plenty of fuel for us. The airport was quiet, so we did some practice runs there. We took it up-wind from the Walmart and as close as we dared to get. The wind was in our favor, and we drifted right over the roof. Twenty excited people grabbed on to the ropes and helped us land.

Simple as that. I'm proud of that story, I really am. Most guys like stories about how they overcame impossible odds through sheer badassery. I like stories about how I solved the problem so well that it didn't even seem like a problem by the time I was done with it.

My little balloon trick reopened the rescue center. They had been stuck thinking two dimensionally. They had the ‘copters, but they only came when the army could spare the fuel. For a rescue center with three hundred people in the middle of Missouri, the fuel could not be spared often. The balloon let them set up rope bridges between buildings. Little triangular rope bridges, like an assisted tight rope walk. Impossible for a zombie to get across. They would drop a rope ladder down the building, which the zombies couldn't climb. My little trick let them set up a secure set of bridges. The zombies would flock to them when they got used, but after a while they would forget and drift back to the Wal-Mart. The radio man started talking about conditions at the bridgeheads like it was the weather. People started coming again. A working rescue station gets a lot more attention from the army than one under siege. The helicopters came more and more often. We got more resources to fight off the zombies.

Like I said, pretty proud of that one.

Now, a word on the overall situation. The government, at least in the sense we were used to thinking about it, had ceased to operate on pretty much every level. But the less populated the state, the more the plague was a slow burn and the easier it was secure. There were large swathes of the country where things were still at least somewhat under control. The part of the government that had survived had gathered what it could and built a new city, which they creatively called New City. This city was the cutting edge in zombie defensive arts. It was right in the middle of some of the most fertile farming ground in the United States. Primo territory for the rebirth of the human race. It was somewhere north. They would never give a solid location, and I'm not supposed to give any specifics even today.

The zombie has two main advantages. One, it never gets tired. Two, it never stops attacking. It’s a relentless mass of aggression. It is a flesh tsunami pounding at a dam. Once it makes a leak it pours through and everyone drowns. The sheer weight of the horde smashes windows, breaks down doors, even knocks homes off their foundations. The zombie horde is relentlessness personified.

The zombie has two main disadvantages. One, it never stops attacking. Two, any given zombie isn't formidable on its own. Anyone with a firearm can dispose of a few zombies without breaking a sweat.

The key to zombie defense is to isolate the zombies into manageable groups. Then, wear down their power through relentless and cheap attrition. Don't use bullets unless you have to. A man with a spear in a safe place can kill a lot of zombies, and he won't be using irreplaceable ammunition to do it.

You herd them. Then you slaughter them in a sustainable way. That way they don't achieve the numbers necessary to overwhelm your defenses. They will never recognize that what you are doing is a trap. They will always, always attack. You turn that to your advantage. That is zombie defense. Instead of straight roads, you have curved ones. Instead of big welcoming glass doors, you put the door behind a concrete screen. Then the mass of the horde can't put their weight on it. You build chutes. You open a door, you lure them in, you drop the door, you kill them. In New City they have air powered spikes. You aim at the head, a spike shoots through the brain. The spike retracts and is ready to fire. All you need is an air compressor. You dispose of the bodies. Rinse and repeat.

Herdsmanship is the mark of the true survivor. If you can control them so that they cannot achieve the tsunami wave of flesh that overwhelms every defense, you can win. It's all about outsmarting them. For those who haven't seen it, it is impossible to describe the power of the tsunami. A crowd of normal people has nothing on a horde. A zombie isn't afraid of getting pushed through glass. It is not worried about being crushed. It is happy to die so that the next zombie can step on its corpse to get six inches closer to the food. If not dispersed, there is no question that a tsunami could overwhelm any possible defense. Even the most hardened and well supplied military bunker will run out of food or power in the end. The zombies won't die of old age.

When we landed the first person we met was Ted White. He was a local hero in his own right. He was the one who had taken a bunch of frightened shoppers and secured the shopping complex. It wasn't just a Wal-Mart. It was a hardware store, a grocery store, a Bass Pro, and a Sam's Club. It was a perfect base of operations. It had food, hardware, guns, ammo, survival equipment. The place was a survivalist mecca. He was the one who kept things under control as the survivors died in their sleep and joined the undead.

Ted was not what you would expect. He was a short guy. You might even call him scrawny, and he didn't look like a leader of men. But he had a charisma and aura of intelligence that made him a natural leader. In fact, he was so good at it that it took me a while to realize that the rescue station had been on its last legs in a lot of ways.

Disease was a problem even after the unimmune had all succumbed. It was pretty hard to maintain hygiene. The generators were low on fuel and the water supplies were low. They were down to non-perishable food, and even that was not looking good. There were three hundred people trapped in that Wal-Mart. Even with two grocery stores, that still amounted to quite a drain on the food supply. It was especially bad if you insisted that people get nutritionally balanced meals. The store was stuffed with junk food. They had what seemed like a lot of ammunition, but they would have had to make nearly every shot perfect to dispatch the horde outside. Then they would have been defenseless. Ted had been hoping for a miracle or for somebody in New City to feel guilty and order an evacuation until we came along. I know all I did was pilot a hot air balloon, so please don't think I'm making myself out to be this savior. It was Ted who realized the full potential of the balloon. He was why the station had survived as long as it did. I know that.

The first thing he did was set up the rope bridges. Some of them must have been a half mile long. The balloonists would land on the roof, secure the roof, then drill into the building. Once the bridge was established, people would go over with lumber and inspect the building with mirrors. Any broken windows or doors would be covered with lumber. Lots of bricks and quick dry cement were ported over. Trying to carry a seventy-five pound bag of cement over a rope bridge will destroy your back. We figured out it was a lot better to put the stuff in a caddy and just use the bottom rope and a pulley to pull the supplies over.

We'd mix the cement on the roof and when we were ready it was action time. We'd break down the roof door and go in. The first building we did this with was a Verizon cell phone store. It was empty. But a lot of them had zombies inside. Some had a lot. If they could they would flood in the instant we hit the roof. So it was some pretty intense combat.

A sawed off automatic shotgun is a pretty fearsome weapon. If there were five of us, the first thirty seconds in the building was one loud slaughter. Just aim at eye level and pull the trigger. If they were packed in tight one shot could kill three or four zombies. We wore handkerchiefs over our mouth so we wouldn't inhale vaporized blood.

So they didn't last long, and we got to work fast. Any possible entry point was sealed up fast. The masonry didn't need to look good. The whole time the guys upstairs are blazing away, keeping the horde in check. Guys are dropping cinderblocks in front of weak points to keep the horde from pushing the weak spots. The end result, if all went well, was a secure building. We went from building to building that way.

One time it didn't go so well. We had just landed on this Whole Foods shop. It was the last stop on the south bridgehead. I was on the roof crew, firing down while they worked. The horde on this one wasn't even that bad. The further out we got, the thinner the crowds, and the weaker the zombies. The stronger the zombie, the closer he was able to force his way to the main Wal-Mart, you see. So it was elderly and kid zombies this far out. There was no roof access to the building, so they had to cut a hole in the roof for the masonry crew to climb down.

The masonry crew went down and started work. After about ten minutes, this weird sound came from below. It was a high pitched, almost supersonic yelp. We held our ears until we saw what was coming. You ever see sixty thousand zombies going full out at you? The sound is something that is impossible to describe. A roaring, screaming white noise. Even a half mile away it was painful.

The guys downstairs started screaming. It sounded real, real bad. These were hardened zombie killers and they were scared as hell. Then the screams were more than scared; whatever was down there had someone. Shots exploded; every gun in the place firing at the same time. The shuffling howling roar of the horde grew loud enough to compete with the fire from below. I looked down the hole. All I saw was flashes from the guns.

Someone was screaming into the hole that they needed to get up here right now. Somehow or another I ended up on the rope bridge, jammed between the rest of the crew. We'd made it about thirty feet on that tight rope bridge when the horde hit the building. And I mean hit it. The zombies ran at top speed into the wall. The zombies behind them did the same. So did the thousands behind them. There was an explosion of flesh. Gore spattered up in the air like a tomato thrown against a wall and they were through the barricades like it was nothing. Zombies were crawling over the crushed and mangled corpses of their friends. The impact was so hard that the building shook, and the rope with it. I watched two guys lose their balance. One fell into the mass below, while the other caught himself on the bottom rope. I don't think the one who fell could have suffered for long. I was just glad I couldn't hear it. We made our way back over the din of the horde, which followed beneath us, screaming and clawing for our blood. When we made it back, Ted was there. Someone explained what had happened. The four guys who had gone down in that building and survived the trip back were taken off for debriefing.

I never saw any of them again. As far as I know nobody saw them again. Rumor had it that a helicopter landed the next day, and all four of the guys who had gone down in that building got a ride–at gunpoint. Nobody knew if that was true, though everyone did hear the helicopter.

Nobody had ever seen anything like that. We'd all thought that zombies were always at peak aggression... we'd never seen anything like that, not ever. If they ever went at the station the way they went after that building it would be a rough day. Every impression was dissected, for weeks. Ted would get a tight look on his face and say that it was some kind of fluke.

Ben Rogers was there. He got a better look down the hole than I did, or anyone else on the roof that day. All he would say was that whatever he saw–whatever he saw had claws.

If you ever meet Jason McGee, Thomas Drew, Steve Ishmael, or Rich Franke... ask them about what happened in that Whole Foods. I'd like to know. As for Janet, she ended up disappearing a few weeks later. I hope she is with Rich and their daughter in New City. Though I sometimes wonder. It's easy enough to take a dive off the roof of the Wal-Mart without being found.

I don't understand the secrecy myself. It seems like a relic of government paranoia. Maybe keeping New City secret... maybe. If news spread I could see a wave of refugees that would be impossible to care for. So I can see keeping that one quiet.

But this? Whatever was down there... whatever made that noise... I just don't see the point in keeping it secret. The less we know, the less prepared we are. And what? Are we afraid the Russians will find out? I hope we tell the Russians, or whoever. Every living human is the enemy of these things. It can only benefit all of us for as many of us as possible to be well informed about our enemy.

While I was still enthusiastic about the rescue station and the work we were doing, the way the incident was handled made me a lot less naive. I saw that maybe things hadn't changed as much as I had hoped. I kept my thoughts to myself a lot more, especially about what Ben had said. It was clear that whatever had happened, it was a big damn secret, and things would happen to anyone who did much more than gossip about it.

So life went on. I did my job. Though it took a lot of persuasion, we ended up going back to that Whole Foods a few weeks later. The place had been wrecked. There was more hole than wall. There was debris. There was a quite a bit of blood stains, but that was it. The guy who had gotten killed down there had gotten up and walked off, I guess. And whatever had done it must have too.