World of Ashes (17 page)

“Why am I not surprised to see speaking in colorful metaphors is a family trait?” Keith interrupted, but Lee continued after a brief smile.

“
…So many so closely packed. The sheer pressure of bodies pushing on the doors was like a rotten meat grinder, the sounds of that… I’ll never forget. It was all more than the building they were in could take and a tsunami of rot and undead freaks just poured in over the second story bay window and through whatever cracks they’d squished into in the building’s loading bay.”

“How did you escape? If there were enough zombies to push in a door, the place had to be
swarming…” Keith was enthralled by the story. He suspected his own battle at Antire Hill had not been an isolated incident, or even the bloodiest.

“
We didn’t open fire. We stayed hidden for about a week. After we’d eaten everything in the dorm, our own rations included, we found we couldn’t even get birds to land on the rooftop so we could trap or shoot them. The smell and noise of the undead was so great no one slept. Our radios were still online, we talked to some poor kid from Custer’s company holding out in a utility closet, but he shot himself before he could starve to death. We got the attention of a passing CH-53, but he was laden with Marine wounded already. Promised he’d call in our position, but made it clear there were maybe thirty other distress calls just like ours since he’d left Cherry Point.”

“How long before someone came for you?”

“They didn’t.” Lee took a deep breath and cracked open another beer. It was lukewarm, but hit the spot. “We got lucky. A house near campus must have run out of supplies about the same time we did, because they took off on motorcycles. Loud and noisy fuckers they were, drew the hordes away long enough for us to make a run for it. I’d ordered Sergeant D’ to keep one MRE for each soldier should we catch a break. We ate as quickly as we could, filled our canteens and dropped that useless fucking body armor. If it wasn’t food, water, or ammunition, we didn’t carry it.

“We opened the doors and just fucking ran for it. Everyone stayed together long enough to get out of Chattanooga, even though we lost six guys. We were finally safe, and it was just in time for me to face a mutiny, of course.” Lee laughed at the word. “See, the men were aware there was no United States left, let alone a U.S. Army. They wanted to go home, so instead of me getting a bullet in the head, I told them I was heading for Missouri. If anyone wanted to come, I’d be happy to have the company. Then I started walking. Didn’t say a single word after that.”

“How many followed?”

“None. I haven’t seen any of them since. I know the boys who were from Texas took off for home together, but the rest just kinda went where they wanted, scattered to the wind. I think two of them shot each other, to be honest. I heard gunfire after I saw McCord and Green walk over a hill. They’d been harboring grudges against each other for months, ever since Green’s buddy got eaten alive while McCord ran for it.”

“Wow. How did you survive out there?” Keith wanted to know more, ignoring the undead as they milled about
, as if in a drunken stupor themselves.

“When did you call
, Lee? And how?” Ethan asked.

“I was recovering from a septic wound to my arm. I got cut by a
rusty shard on a car I slept in. He pulled his sleeve up to reveal mostly healed stitches. “A retired waitress, Rosalie Burk, took me in after she found me trying to boil water in a pot that had a bullet hole in it half-way up one side. I was camped in a burned out Target store, the only building in the area with doors I could barricade. She had a heart attack about a week later… Ran out of medication for her condition. There were too many dead in town for me to get to the pharmacy, God how I tried though. Set fire to half the town to distract them, but I never got through.”

Before Ethan could say anything else Lee did offer a ray of hope, albeit a gruesome one. “The infection doesn’t spread quite the way we thought it does.
See, a guy I met along the way got bit on the left hand. Before I could turn my gun on him his friend drew a machete he’d been sharpening for the better part of a decade and lopped his friend’s hand off without so much as a word. Blood sprayed everywhere, but after we got a bandage on it we started a fire and cauterized the wound. For the next three days no one slept, we just watched him suffer. And suffered he did, don’t get me wrong, but without the original infection site to continue spreading the disease he pulled through. He might even be alive today.”

Keith’s attention turn
ed to a sound on the wind, something like a motor or wheels crunching gravel and screeching around turns. In seconds he could hear a truck coming over the hill, and a few minutes later a Union Electric flatbed with a crane extension came into view. The truck pulled into the yard and Allen climbed from the cab onto the cherry picker’s boom and started operating the bucket and crane while his little brother drove closer. In a minute or so, after Allen had knocked over the old television antennae no one had ever remove, and nearly decapitated Keith with a wide swing, they were able to get off the roof one at a time. Each man that got down to the truck started shooting or hacking zombies to cover for the next, taking only a minute or two to do so until there was no one left to rescue.

Once on the road Allen started laughing, “No one’s gonna fuckin’ believe we just did that!”

Jimmy thrust his fist out the open window and started to hum the theme song to the Lone Ranger on the way back to town. They truck passed the one Keith had destroyed the night before, and the body of the uniformed zombie he’d hit was still where Lee had chopped its head off. There wasn’t much left of the zombie or the truck, and Ethan poked Keith in the ribs and teased him about driving like an Asian woman. The town, like Keith’s truck, was also a mess. The people sat in small groups, smoking and relaxing, weary and dirty from battle. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the undead hordes they’d encountered before were just small packs in comparison to the infected tsunami that had washed over the town. They had been wandering out of St. Louis for a month now, some massively wounded by military attacks, but still quite mobile. They couldn’t help but wonder if similar million zombie marches were heading down I-70 and I-55, the two other major highways in the state. If anyone was left alive in Columbia, Missouri, they were in serious trouble now.

“I wonder why the Stanton outpost didn’t say anything.” R
eynolds said, not knowing the group of men and boys had walked up behind him. The town had cleared most of its own streets, a triage area was heavily guarded behind the hospital and people injured during the battle but not bitten were being treated. There were more injuries now that people had a clearer idea how to handle a zombie, and much fewer fresh infected. Fighting back no longer seemed to guarantee infection, as the Government had suggested before. It make everyone furious to know that stopping the spread of the Envier Virus would only have been a matter of shooting or clubbing enough zombies, something the Last Administration had expressly forbidden.

“We have an outpost in Stanton?” Ethan narrowed his eyes at the officer. “I thought we’d consolidated everyone for protection.”

“We had to know if anyone was coming from the North.” Reynolds defended himself.

“That worked out really
fucking well.” Lee commented. “If those men are dead it’s on you, Sir.”

“I remember you.” Newton
pointed at Lee. He hadn’t shaved yet, so how anyone could recognize Lee right now was surprising. “I pulled you over in that hot-rod 88’ Mustang next to the Chinese place a couple years back. You had more beer in your trunk than a Budweiser delivery truck.”

Lee smiled, remembering
the night fondly, or at least the parts he could remember. “Yeah, she’s in a parking lot in the middle of the graveyard that used to be Ft. Drum. She was a good car though. I’m Lieutenant Lee Cally, Ethan’s brother.” He stuck his hand out to shake, Newton and Reynolds both accepted.

“Were you evacuated?” Newton asked.

“No. I walked here from Chattanooga.” No one questioned him. “So… Anyone got anything for me to do? Because if not, there’s about a hundred dead people on my brother’s front lawn suffering from a severe high-velocity-lead deficiency. I think it’d be only right if we gave it to them.”

             
“We’re deputizing six more men today.” Reynolds said. “We could have a quick chat with Mayor Kenly, put you on the list if Ethan vouches for you and make it seven.”

             
“If you don’t mind I’d like to look around for a while.” Lee didn’t want to be drafted so quickly, feeling oddly like his brother. Suspicion of authority had been a skill Lee was slow to acquire, and only then through tragedy. “Think I could pal around with my little brother for a while before I take the plunge?”

             
“Sure.” Newton and Reynolds went back to their conversation. They were discussing body removal, just another task on a to-do list that never ended. Over a hundred people had died that night. Mass graves had become the order of the day, because basically, there was no other choice. Most funeral homes had stopped accepting anyone bitten, no matter if they had been euthanized. The Easton Funeral Home was silent, the people who’d taken over for the original owners had a strict Natural Causes & Gunshots Only policy. All the dead from that night had been bitten, and so none were accepted into the immaculate building. An incensed relative of someone lost sprayed graffiti over the funeral home’s windows with red paint.
WHAT IF IT WAS YOUR CHILD?
No one had a good answer for that.              

D
aylight crept through holes in the ashen clouds. The dead who’d come into town were sluggish, not as prone to chasing people with excitement as before. Keith was on a warpath for Paula’s house after they’d checked in. No one, dead or alive was going to stop him from getting to her. Lee and Ethan were following him, providing cover and talking.

             
“I don’t want you to sign up here.” Ethan said to Lee as Keith roundhouse kicked a zombie into the side of a hopper train car of silica sand. A small quantity of sand poured down its chute and onto the zombie’s head, burying it ‘alive.’ It didn’t move again. “We need to gather some supplies and head for Oklahoma.”

             
“Why?”

             
“Because our parents are there! My fiancé is there!”

             
“Nicole was there?”

             
“Yes. I forgot to ask-” Ethan did interject, “Heard anything from Sarah?”

             
“She’s dead.” Lee said matter of fact. “She was an EMT in Norfolk when the city was overrun… She might have been a heinous bitch from hell, but she didn’t deserve...” Lee trailed off. He was known for dating superficial women, most of whom Ethan didn’t bother to get to know because they were so easily replaced. He felt almost proud that he remembered the latest girlfriend of Lee’s.

             
There was no point arguing that she might be alive. The highest mortality rates for people in the fight against the plague, while statistics were still coming out, were EMT’s & Paramedics. This was followed closely by Police and Doctors and other medical personnel, then Soldiers and the morbidly obese or people with health problems. The least likely to die, Ethan noticed, were Veterans and Hillbillies, often one in the same. Anyone with even the slightest bit of outdoors experience had an infinitely better chance of surviving than your average city or subdivision dweller. The most important skill, it seemed, was an ability to hide and stay quiet for hours or days. Try it. You can’t. Because you’re not motivated to be that quiet. Put a ravenous cannibal in the room with you, perhaps you’ll acquire said skills.

             
“Look, it doesn’t matter, Ethan. We can’t go to Oklahoma. That government facility was overrun weeks ago. It was one of the last reports that made it into an officer’s briefing before Chattanooga fell.” Lee was being completely honest, but he worried it was such a convenient excuse Ethan wouldn’t believe it.

             
“I just got an email form Nicole. They’re alive! I’m going.” Ethan shouted.

             
“Yo, Keith, we’ll catch up.” Lee said over his brother’s shoulder. Keith didn’t even turn around. He knew what Lee was about to do, and then new Cally brother didn’t disappoint when he punched Ethan straight in the face. “No. You’re not. None of us are, and that’s final.”

             
Ethan got up and head butted Lee, not a very tactical thing to do, but it hurt Lee every bit as much as it hurt Ethan. The brothers were rolling in the gravel swinging at each other until Keith turned around. He only did so because they were attracting zombies. Pulling out a can of mace he aimed it at them. “Knock it off!”

             
Seeing the can of OC spray come out of its holster, Ethan broke off and jumped away, “Whoa whoa whoa! I’m done. We’re cool.”

             
“Pussy.” Lee sneered.

             
“Have you ever been OC sprayed?” Ethan used a train car to pull himself back up to his feet. “Fuck you. I’d rather get shot.”

             
Keith, again, wordlessly made for Paula’s house. In the residential part of town just past Main Street most people had cleared their own property of zombies. Casualties had been expected, but to everyone’s relief there were fewer than expected. A family in a recently restored town house was performing last rights for a little girl, their daughter, that couldn’t have been more than six. Her mouth was gagged and her body bound while she squirmed and snapped angrily at the people gathered around her. The parents whaled in grief as a relative prepared to put their daughter down for good. They turned the corner and heard the gunshot, the mother screamed louder.