RIZEN: Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse (2 page)

The next morning we were woken at dawn by the
chopping sounds of helicopter blades, far in the distance.  This was a sound
that my children’s ears had never heard before.

It’s easy enough to blend in with the undead. If only a few more people had
learned that five years ago, when the dead first began to walk the earth, then
maybe ninety-five percent of the globe’s human population wouldn’t have been
wiped out.  Maybe if everyone hadn’t gone out with shotguns and baseball bats
like they were in the middle of an action movie, there would still be a few
more able-bodied fighters available.  Maybe if the military hadn’t been overwhelmed
from within and splintered to pieces by the reanimation plague, maybe cities
would not have fallen like dominos.  Maybe it wouldn’t have taken the world so
long to even begin thinking about rebuilding.

Five years after the outbreak and, despite the fact
that many of the infected are now gone, the world is no safer place.  With the
absence of a central government, the people are free to do as they please in
the rural areas, but they must still remain alert.  Attack, from the living and
the dead, is a constant possibility. 

Those who would rather have not repeated the
mistakes of their forefathers were forced to band together, first by forming
roaming caravans.  They searched and searched for survivors and a home
relatively safe from the infected.  These groups became settlements, colonies,
towns, and even reclaimed some parts of the shanty ghosts of the major cities. 
Many settlers chose to build their encampments in the desert, far enough out
where they could see any infected coming from miles away, but close enough to
the remnants of civilization so that they could raid the bones of long dead
cities and towns for food, tools, medicine and supplies.

Given the nature of human beings, it was only a
matter of time before the new city-states began making war on each other for
their different ideologies or over resource disputes.  There was no shortage of
men willing to fight, especially since contact with the undead was becoming
more and more limited.  Naturally, different cities with similar ideologies
began to spring up within close proximity.  Sad little empires. 

Down in the south of Texas, north of the
predominantly Spanish-speaking colonies and just below the isolationist pods of
the survivalists, was the White Fist -- a group of white supremacists who
intended to eliminate the non-white, non-Christian portion of the remnants of
humanity in their small corner of the world.  And they did a very close job of
it. The Hispanic populations to the south stood clear.  The isolationists, to
the north, of course kept to themselves.  And the White Fist grew.

The Hispanics and blacks and Jews they did not kill,
they enslaved in the slums of their cities, erecting forges and processing
plants to aid in manufacturing weapons of new and simplistic design.  They made
bullets that fit the old weapons as well as the new ones, and ammunition had
become their currency of choice.  Those who would not barter with it could
certainly be shot down with it.  The White Fist was not discriminating in how
they used their bullets, at least.  Those who refused to work were shot, those
who fought back were shot, and those who they bartered with were forced to
adhere to the White Fist code.           

In the summer of the fifth year after the world
moved on, when White Fist caravans started being picked off by raiders, the
response was swift and brutal. 

Traveling in between the towns of Arya, Paradise Sun
and Caucasia, the caravans were going missing with increasing frequency. 
Search parties would be sent out and the reports that came back were of vicious
ambushes.  Ten armed guards, one heavy machine gun in the bed of a truck, all
taken out.  The men had been beheaded.  The vehicles had been blown up, leaving
dark clouds flying in the desert sky.  Their ammunition had gone missing.  Over
a dozen patrols went down like this, sparking a campaign of retribution by the
White Fist against the Hispanics to the south. 

The raids were a perfect excuse.  The racists had
their bullets and their clouded judgment.  The war was started without
negotiation, without appropriate intelligence in advance of the attacks, and
without mercy. 

Jacqueline hadn’t sleep a wink in weeks.  She stood
on her dirt bike under the darkening sky, staring out at the smoke stacks in
the desert through tinted goggles.  She felt sick knowing that there were
massive patrols of White Fist soldiers hitting Hispanic towns as she waited to
go into battle. 

She knew that the former Mexican nationals would hit
back hard, but the racists were wicked fighters, and would take no prisoners. 

Jacqueline knew all of today’s bloodshed was,
largely, her fault.  She and the two dozen others who had conducted the actual
raids that sparked this war.  Antonio had been the one who had drawn up the
plan, but at any time she could have pulled the plug. 

Originally her group had been hiding up in Houston,
just surviving, and when they had heard about the new cities to the south they
decided to venture out and explore. 

Jacqueline herself had escaped Caucasia, though
she’d been originally admitted as “a fine specimen for the continuation of the
Aryan race.” 

The way they treated everyone else who weren’t of
the same skin color, the same blood… it had made her stomach churn and her
vision flash red with rage.  On her way out of town in the dead of night, she
had stabbed two guards before fleeing across the desert in a stolen jeep.  She
would have rather faced the zombies in the city then the monsters in this new
colony. 

Jacqueline returned to the temporary camp that her
party had built in the dessert.  The survivors had been hiding out in tents and
sleeping bags, waiting for word on these new towns. 

She called them to a meeting and they listened to
the vivid accounts of starving men and women stumbling through arid streets,
being marched to factories and fed only bread and water, if that.  The slaves’
teeth fell out from malnutrition.  Their eyes seemed to sink into the back of
their heads.  The children died quickly.  So long as slave numbers were up,
White Fist militia officers were allowed to shoot anyone they pleased inside
the ghettos, leaving their mothers and husbands to wail over their bodies, leaving
them to be cannibalized by the other slaves who were desperate for any kind of
food. 

The White Fist used these poor shells of human
beings as labor until their bodies gave out.

Many of the survivors from her group had walked away
during these stories, overwhelmed by the disgusting details.  Jacqueline had
implored action, and Antonio had been quick to support her.  None of those who
still retained their humanity were strangers to violence.  Everyone had done
what they needed to survive over the last five years.  That had meant
re-killing “turned” family members, friends, and whole neighborhoods in some
cases.  Antonio had barricaded (and kept clean of infected) an entire city
block for a week before a significant amount of survivors had come flocking in
to help.  It was at Antonio’s fortified block where they all first met, and by
swaying him, Jacqueline swayed all of the others that something had to be done
to get rid of these Neo-Nazi pricks.  They couldn’t simply ignore this
genocide.

The small group of bandits decided to call itself
the Black Hammer, because black was the opposite of white and a hammer could
surely crush a fist.  The reality was that they were out-gunned by a
hundred-to-one on a good day.

The dozen or so organized raids that the Black
Hammer had conducted, and the resulting movement of the bulk of White Fist’s
forces to the south, was Antonio’s plan unfolding perfectly.  He’d been a
Captain in the United States Marine Corps what seemed like a lifetime prior,
and his tactical prowess was sharp and unmatched.  Everything was now slipping
into place for a final assault.  The main event, so to speak.

It was just after nightfall that they were to launch
their attack.  The Black Hammer’s small band of fighters was mounted on their
off-road bikes that could cover the desert in relative silence and speed,
taking full advantage of their electric motors and a lack of headlights.  Those
bikes would circle around to the north entrance of Caucasia and lie in wait
behind the dunes. 

However, the gated entrance to the south is where
the party would seem to start.  And just as the sun crawled into the
mountainous region to the west, there was a resounding and deep boom in the
distance.  Jacqueline looked towards Caucasia, and sure enough smoke started to
furl away in the desert winds on the other side of the city.  That would be the
truck they’d loaded with ammo and gasoline, and set to function on a remote
control.  Shortly thereafter, gunfire was heard in the distance, barrage after
barrage of
‘pop-pop-pop’
that was indistinguishable from firecrackers. 
Antonio and three of the others had opened fire from covered positions, and the
guards had spotted them. 

Antonio’s plan was to make the guards think it was
closer to twenty men attacking.  He and the others had positioned automatic
rifle after automatic rifle behind the dunes and would dash in between
positions firing handguns along the way, lobbing grenades.  One man even fired
a mortar.  The perceived size of the fictional attack caused the guards from
the north entrance to run over to help defend the wall. 

“They’re going,” Sara whispered breathlessly.  She
had stumbled, almost fallen down from a tall sand dune and back to where
Jacqueline and the others were congregated.  In her excitement she almost fell
head over heels down into the sand, her skinny legs flying and her red hair
bouncing in spite of it being tied back. 

“They’re gone from the fences and the gate… we have
to go.  We have to go now!”  Her eyes burned with urgency.  Jacqueline nodded,
resolving in her heart to finish what she had put in motion.  It still broke a
little bit as Sara dashed away for her ATV, shouldering a scoped rifle.  The
girl was only fifteen years old and thirsty for battle. 

Jacqueline circled one finger in the air high above
her head.  A little over twenty separate electric motors started up, humming
and whining.  Jacqueline wondered how old the youngest of the barbarians who
had burned Rome to the ground had been.  How old the youngest French Resistance
fighter in 1942 had been.  She wondered if the entire world didn’t have
bloodlust in their hearts at birth.  She pulled her bandana up around her
mouth, and jerked her arm forward to make what was essentially a spearhead. 

She took off, her small army of fighters behind
her. 

They rounded the main mound of sand they’d covered
behind, and spread out, doing their best to keep enough spacing so that they
could aid each other, but far enough away so that they wouldn’t blast sand in
their friends’ faces. Either that, or become easy targets for explosives. 

Those who had scoped rifles, like Sara, stopped in
front of the gates about ten yards back.  The rest of the group dismounted
closer. 

Jacqueline rushed forward towards the great
patchwork metal gate.  Four went west along the fencing and four went east.
Once they had spaced out far enough apart they would go to work with the wire
cutters.  She fumbled with the satchel at her waist, digging furiously at the
sand below the gate.  She put the plastic explosives right where the two halves
of the gate met and then rushed over to the fencing with the rest of her
assault squad. 

She thought about how it would have been preferable
to place the brick of explosives at one of the supports for the gate, but the
thing was a flimsy patchwork of scrap metal.  What had kept people at bay and
inside were mostly the White Fist militia and their guns.  Peeking through the
fence at the brickwork guard station and homes, she could see no soldiers at
all.  The place looked like a ghost town section of nineteenth century living
picked up and dropped into the desert two hundred years later.  Retreating back
to cover she fished out the radio from her bag, nodded at the raider now
standing closest to the gate, and clicked the knob on top. 

The gate blew in with a boom that shook Jacqueline’s
vision.  Just as the smoke began to clear, shots flew in from the sharpshooters
outside. There were screams.  There was sporadic gunfire close by, and then the
action was all distant again, save for shouting.  The men and women who’d cut
the fence were already in with compact weapons and sidearms, moving quickly and
hitting with keen accuracy. 

The sharpshooters had isolated themselves after the
zombie plague hit.  They had kept themselves alive with calm accuracy and
distant marksmanship.  They’d had to be dragged from their nests to join the
rest in many cases.  In a way, it probably made the violence less real for some
of them.  Look through the scope, point, aim, pull the trigger.  It was like a
video game, though not that many of those were played anymore. 

The ones striking through the fence, cutting
throats, shooting up close with homemade silencers on their weapons, they had
been the ones who ran when the dead first rose up.  They seemed to never stop
running, never resting in one place.  They moved and they stayed ahead of the
undead and the bandits and the consequences of what they’d done.  They were the
ones with baseball bats, fire axes and crowbars strapped to their backs no
matter what.  These were the ones who struck like lightning. 

Then there were the soldiers.  The ones who had
played conventional survivor.  They made shelters and fortified daily.  They
made raids for sake of supplies and ammunition.  They sought out the last dregs
of humanity and did their best to help each other.  They killed just to get
along.  They were not the kind who usually went after the bad guys where they
lived.  Jacqueline was one of these, and as she shouldered her shotgun and
turned through the smoldering wreckage of the gate, she did her best to silence
the part of her brain that screamed
“Murderer!”
and tried to amplify the
part that was roaring
“Soldier!”