World of Ashes (5 page)

The windows were all intact
and the garage door was closed. Ethan grabbed the door knob. To his horror the door was unlocked, and the house completely empty. He cleared it twice, the living room, furnished basement, and loft bedroom too. No one.

             
"Hey, there's a note on the table." Keith pointed, unwilling to disturb the scene.

             
Ethan rushed over and snatched all four pages of it. His whole family had left their own goodbye letter just in case he made it home. The world stopped while he read them, tears already rolling down his face as he read of dead friends and family, and finally of what the Army had done to get people to leave. Nicole’s warnings were vague, as if she were afraid of someone other than Ethan reading it. She wasn’t the code leaving type, but there seemed to be a mortal, compelling reason for them to obey the Army when they were told to leave.

             
"FUCK!" Ethan threw a rather justified tantrum. "God fucking damnit!” A bowl of rotted fruit went sailing through the air. “Twelve hours! That’s all I needed was twelve fucking hours! If those fucking hillbillies hadn’t shot our fucking truck!..."

“It would have made no difference.”

“Fuck you!” The shouting continued until Ethan was exhausted and collapsed into an armchair a complete wreck. The air conditioner kicked on outside. Aside from the whirring of the vents the house was silent. "It's six thirty. We should go." Ethan finally admitted defeat.

The
Ford Crown Vic in the garage was still there, but barely started. One of Ethan’s
Evanescence
CDs started playing. The music was too painful for him right now and he ripped the faceplate off the radio and threw it in the garage. Who knew what would happen at the Police Station when they arrived. Someone might be trying to take power, someone might even attack them. The station parking lot was almost completely empty. Only a couple of cruisers and a pristine Cadillac town car were parked neatly by the door, but not in the handicap spaces. Were there really any handicap people left? Wouldn’t their medical needs have made them easy prey for the infected? A sad truth few were willing to admit. Ethan parked in the handicapped space and went inside and found the portly cop he’d met earlier, another male officer with a crappy bowl cut he must have done himself, making him look like the skinny guy from
Delta Farce,
and a female cop who tucked her lower belly fat into her pants like it was somehow more natural looking that way. 

             
"So now what?" Ethan said once everyone had turned to him.

             
"We were hoping you knew. You two are in the Army, right?"

             
"That’s an ambiguous question." Ethan took a chair and sat in the semicircle with them. "We were left behind at abandoned outposts when they pulled out."

             
"They left their own behind?" A man Ethan hadn't noticed was walking towards them. He had on jeans that might have fit fifty pounds ago, his gun hanging over a glittery rodeo belt. The pants had holes in the pockets with a bleach mark where a tobacco tin had been, and a red and black plaid shirt that had once had an embroidered
Winston
logo on the pocket. He carried an 1890 model Remington revolver in a leather holster strapped to his shoulder. He carried a frosty cold Coors in his left hand, a cigar of the finest quality in the other. The Stetson on his head had a big fat Eagle Globe and Anchor pinned to the center. "Typical Army pukes." He smiled, making it clear he didn’t mean the two men in the room.

             
"There were Marines there too." Keith retorted.

             
The old Marine harrumphed. "Look, Chief." He said to the officer who's kids they had met at Wal*Mart. "We got problems. If it ain't the lootin’ it's the dead. They're still popping up all over town. The guys at the VFW and the Boy Scouts are holding looters back from the truck stop, so at least that fuel ain't been stolen… yet." It seemed to the two newcomers this four person government was trying to hold onto at least some commodities for the looming winter, already assuming they’d be on their own. If any order was going to be maintained, they’d need to act quickly.

             
"He's right." Ethan said. "We need to protect resources for the town. Union already has a road block, we drove through it, so there's at least one line of defense between here and St. Louis. We can afford to take a little bit of time to make sure there's something left for hospital use at the very least."

             
"So are we deputizing these guys?" The female officer gestured to Ethan and Keith, but didn’t look at them. "Can we trust them?"

             
"Can
we
trust
you
?" Ethan countered. "I'm from here, lady. You pulled me over two years ago for doing forty in a twenty five on Church Street. I'm here, and so are you. Makes sense we have a common goal in mind.”

             
“And what goal is that?”

             
“I want to find my family, and helping you guys is the best way I can figure to do that right now.” Ethan was honest.

             
The cops and the old man shared glances. There wasn’t any political deceit or malice in trying to find your family. The fat cop spoke up. "I say tonight, while we still have electricity, we print out notices about a town hall meeting and then have it at the outside stage in the fairgrounds so no one feels threatened or trapped. The Army was only using it as a secondary landing pad for choppers. We can sweep the area around it first and all that, and post anyone who volunteers to guard the area. I promise, someone
will
volunteer.” He cleared his throat, probably used to smoking. “We get all the stragglers from the country into town and start a door to door sweep for infected. It grossly violates the Constitution, but we have no choice. Thomas Jefferson never envisioned Zombies.”

             
"We have another problem." The woman, Officer Liza Rowe, interjected. "Lots of people have infected family in their homes. Are we talking Police entering private residences without a search warrant? Good luck. You’ll be more likely to get shot than have them help you shoot someone. I don’t even think most people here will even consider us a legitimate police force anymore. Not after the Army abandoned us. Not after the things they did…”

             
Ethan agreed with a slow nod. "That’s exactly what we’re talking about. Big Bubba over there is right, and so are you Miss… Rowe? It’s going to be a nightmare to convince people to let us put a slug in their zombie kid’s head… They have to be made to understand they can’t save them. We need Keith here to tell them what the Zombies really are, and that there is still no cure but a bullet. He was at the Battle of Antire Hill, they got more information from FEMA that we ever did.”

             
“Thanks for throwin’ me under the buss, there buddy.” Keith flipped Ethan off. “But he’s right. I can brief a doctor if you want, but I was… there. It wasn’t a battle though… Not anymore than DC was a battle, and I’m sure we all saw the footage of that…” Keith’s speech slowed and his gaze came in and out from the thousand yard stare. “It was a full-on clusterfuck of the highest magnitude. I’m sure you saw some of that here too. People are going to have to zombie proof their homes too. More than it would take to keep a man out. I mean strong, heavy boards and flat roofing aluminum so they can’t get a grip on your windows in the first place. People are going to have to get used to guns, or find a sturdy baseball bat. If there are any stockpiles of guns we can spare, we should issue them to anyone who needs one. Families that don’t already have any guns, I mean.”

             
"That obviously didn't work for the cities. Why should we expect any sort of cooperation out here?” Officer Rowe folded her arms.

             
Ethan smiled, "Because we know this area. This is our home, what else could be more important? The infected aren't that smart after they're done raging. We'll just retake the Army's checkpoints around the town and start picking them off as they follow the highway. Maybe, if we're lucky, Union stopped them. Manning the checkpoints and making sure the public knows everything we know as soon as we know it will give those of us left behind a chance for cohesion. They’ll respect those who take charge and respect some semblance of the rules of fair play. Playing Follow the Leader hasn’t completely left our collective psyche yet.”

             
The man in the Stetson puffed a giant smoke ring. It was competition level perfect. “You keep being useful, Mr. Cally, and I might have to appoint you to something if I get elected mayor.”

             
“Elected? The dead have risen, and you are… voting?” Keith was astonished.

             
“We’re still Americans, aren’t we?” The old man said.

             
By noon the next day fifty armed citizens had been deputized under the authority of the Sullivan Police Department, a sad looking trio who rarely left the police station as swamped as they were with people seeking help. Most new deputies were assigned to guard the remnants of the town's gas stations. Others did what they could, anything from scouting the area for incoming packs of zombies, or straggling people. Some women served food at a free line in an attempt to calm the people, but it did little to ease the fears of abandonment. Everyone wanted to top off their tanks before the electricity failed too. Rolling brownouts were beginning to become a problem with all of America’s nuclear power plants taken offline. One gas station didn't carry diesel, so Ethan and the female cop, Rowe, bribed the former attendant a full tank of gas, an abandoned Thunderbird, and all the food and liquor she could put in the trunk to man the station with a scared-shitless Civil Air Patrol cadet with daddy's Glock 40 for security. The line for gas stretched over the bridge and down a service road behind a bend, but at least they could attend to more pressing issues with so many people distracted from causing more problems. Step one was fortifying and securing the truck stop.

             
"Assuming we can hold the roadblocks we'll have to start worrying about winter. It's August now, and ‘cause of the ash it feels like October already. Crops are gonna fail." Rowe said, making small talk mostly. She didn’t seem to be the type to suffer a needless silence, even if she couldn’t contribute to it.

             
"Did the Army leave any stores here? This was a big TCP."

             
"Yeah, they filled those storage units on the other side of the highway and left a few dozen more connexes in a cleared field. I didn't see any signs of looting, but that won’t last." Rowe finished.

             
"Know what's in them?" Ethan asked.

             
"Hopefully guns and medical supplies. We'll open the Wal*Mart parking lot as a trading area, we can’t stop people from getting supplies. It's a reasonably safe place, hills on two sides block the view of it from the highway.”

“What about illegal drugs? Pills and meth and pot and such?” Officer Newton, the nerdy looking one, chimed in. “How can the three of us enforce that? Even with deputies, that shit’s gonna be all over the market.”

Ethan laughed and shook and head. “Wow. Prohibitionist to the end. Gotta hand it to ya for trying, but you’ll never keep up with the drug trade. The ‘War on Drugs’ was nothing more than really, really bad joke. Best thing to do is take a Libertarian stance on it, confiscate it when we find it if it’s the really bad stuff, but otherwise we really don’t have the resources to fight it. We can’t even incarcerate someone long term.”

“It’s a sad truth of our situation.” Officer Reynolds, the chubbiest one, said.
“We can worry about that later, Newton. Get your head out of your ass for five minutes, man.” They adjourned the meeting shortly after when a CB radio on the far side of the dispatch office relayed a call for assistance at the truck stop on the far side of town. The would-be leaders at the meeting arrived at the truck stop and nearly jumped from the police cruisers before Reynolds and Newton could pull to a stop. Had he thought about it in time, Newton mused, he could have messed with Ethan Cally by locking the back doors of the cruiser, thus trapping him, but the opportunity was missed. A couple of hunters in gili-suits were taking up position on the overpass, looking rather comfortable in their efforts. A few people who'd been arrested the night before for attempted burglary and wanton destruction of property, were filling sandbags for gun positions as punishment. Most were teenagers.

             
"We've found a few people down at the bottom of the hills and through the forests. None of them were infected yet." One of the hunters felt the need to report.

             
“We should take a minute to go get our stash of guns from the ATV store. Arm these people if we don’t find anything in those containers.” Keith suggested, cracking open a frosty cold energy drink. He had purple bags under his eyes from lack of sleep. They all did.             

"No
t a bad idea, hop in." Ethan decided to borrow the police cruiser, since Reynolds had left the keys on the front seat. Keith jumped in and fell asleep before the car was in drive. Ethan drove up to the store, which was still within sight of the men on the overpass, and gathered their guns himself, letting his friend sleep. When they returned Rowe and Newton were trying to bust open an Army supply Connex with a hammer. The sand colored units weren’t hard to get into if you knew how, and they didn’t. The units were all padlocked and had a customs bolt through a special hole to prove they were still sealed. Ethan took a pair of bolt cutters and broke the locks away, making the officers feel slightly stupid. With a tug he hauled the doors up to reveal the best thing any of them had ever seen. Ammunition, and lots of it, a spectacle none had seen in a post-Socialist era where ammunition was more expensive than the firearm itself. A packing list accompanied each connex and made the work go much faster. Ethan mused that this was the man-child version of Christmas morning. Here, Santa brought you an M240Bravo and 6,000 rounds! Yay!