ZWD: King of an Empty City (13 page)

These two were shooting potato cannons! Another cry from the three and we all turned to look at him. He was pointing at the U.S. Drug Store building across Seventeenth from the Safeway. Two more zombies were coming to our parking lot. The boy who fired pulled one of those thick antennas from the pack on his back and reloaded. I could see they were using broom handles cut in half and sharpened for projectiles. He started pumping a lever on the potato cannon as they moved to meet the zombies coming from the U.S. Drug Store.
WHOOMP
,
WHOOMP,
two more zombies fell. Then the “Hi-Oh” cry from the three and we saw another one coming from the Safeway door. I had no idea we had so many around us, or under us, for that matter. It was a little disconcerting to think about. The two boys with the potato cannons quickly met this one and
WHOOMP
, it was dead.

             
I couldn’t see her up on the roof anymore, she’d moved back out of sight. The two boys took their cans and kicked backwards with their feet to make them rattle more while they stood at the door. Every now and then they’d stop and listen. Then kick again. I found that I was straining my ears to hear any noise coming from inside. Not that I could from my spot in the far corner of the lot. Finally one of them waved and the three younger boys moved into the building with glow sticks in hand. They cracked them and were shaking vigorously as they disappeared into the darkness of the store. One of the boys with a potato cannon stood in the doorway and kept watch for any sign of danger from within while the other one scanned the parking lot. He stopped long enough to pull out a cigarette. For a second his eyes rested on the La Baron and he studied it for a long moment. I didn’t move.

After a few minutes, the three came scrambling out of the building and they all gathered in the center of the lot three rows over from me. The cans were untied from the belts and stuffed into the backpacks with the stakes and they all started to move off across Main and the post office parking lot. When they’d crossed the street, it finally occurred to me that I should say something to them. I opened the door of the La Baron and stood up. The smoker wheeled and leveled the cannon at me. If it had enough force to drive a stake through a human skull up close, from a distance it could still probably hurt me. I raised my hands in peace. They had all stopped and were looking in my direction. Nobody moved for a long moment. Then the smoker raised a fist and gave me the heavy metal devil horns sign as he spun and they all took off at a run across the post office parking lot and disappeared west down Seventeenth Street.

             
I waited a few minutes, then grabbed my cigars from the seat and went back to the roof of the Safeway. She was standing at the corner next to Seventeenth Street with a pair of binoculars looking in the direction the kids went.

             
“I think they turned on Center,” she said. We talked about the encounter and I explained the potato cannons to her. We’d built one in high school but we used compressed air cans to power it. These kids were pumping air into them somehow. However it was, they were pressurizing the guns and it was pretty ingenious. With nothing more to do, we went to bed.

                   The next morning I was up before dawn. I stoked a little fire in the hibachi grill and found frozen burritos. I wanted waffles. Big round Belgian waffles with fruit and a gallon of syrup on them. My mind was going in circles for about an hour and I realized I was saying goodbye to the past again as a sense of melancholy fell on me like the snow on the ground. I thought about cartoons I’d never see again and sitting in bars with friends drinking beer or standing in line for the next big movie at midnight or yelling at the television when the NBA playoffs were on.

             
I grabbed the papers on hot-wiring a car and settled into a lawn chair, warming myself over the hibachi, and reviewed the process again. As I was reading, it occurred to me that most of the skills we were using to survive were skills that would have gotten us locked up in the old world. Breaking and entering, hot-wiring, lock-picking, hunting on public lands, murder; although with a zombie I don’t think you can call it murder. That list just kept getting longer and today it was a normal way of life. I read through the hot-wiring a few times to make sure I had it down pat.

             
She stirred in the tent; I knew it was going to be a few minutes till she came out. I took the binoculars and went to the corner of the building looking down Seventeenth Street to see if I could see any sign of the kids from the night before. With the fog, there was little luck. The smell of burning garbage made its way through the damp air. I remembered that smell from my grandmother’s house in Colorado. I always kind of liked that sweet, acrid odor and today it made me feel safer, comforted that there were still people living in a house doing normal things instead of on a roof in a tent trying to figure out how to survive through winter. I wondered what the Mongols did in their yurts.

             
I looked back at the tent and imagined it covered in carpets. Through our damp winters, they would probably mold and cause the tent to mold if they were covering the outside. But we could make it more comfortable on the inside by putting a few down on the floor like the Arabs of the desert. I made a mental note of that and to get the living room rug from Tommy and John’s house. It was big enough to cover most of the tent floor. One last breath of the garbage-filled air and I went to the hibachi and took off the burritos. The tortillas had busted open and the contents had spilled out a little, but for the most part they were good, not frozen.

              “You want a burrito?” I asked her, sticking my head into the tent.

              “We have burritos?”

“Mm, pretty good if you don’t mind burnt tortilla,” I said with a mouthful.

“Sure, I’ll take two. Try not to burn the tortilla, please.”

             
“Can’t. You have to burn the tortilla to unthaw the insides.” In response she just frowned at me.

Something had made a noise below us at the doors of the Safeway and I grabbed the bow and notched an arrow. Creeping to the edge of the building, I looked down to see two dogs with one of the softball-sized tennis balls they sold in the store. They were biting and pushing it around, running into the garbage that had spilled out over time as looters had visited the store. I watched the dogs bounce and jump around in the snow then stop and sniff something on the ground. I had lain down on the ledge of the building watching them. Suddenly they stopped and turned to the south, looking down Main Street. The hairs on one of their backs rose up and they both started growling.

             
She came up to the ledge of the building and said, “We have to go back to the Parker house.”

“Get down.”

She dropped to my side and asked what was going on. I told her something scared the dogs as I pointed to them. One of the dogs was looking up at us. Apparently we didn’t pose a threat because his attention went right back to whatever it was to the south that upset them. The other dog, hair erect, moved forward a few yards, crouching low and growling. We, from our vantage on the roof, couldn’t see anything out there. I still had the binoculars around my neck so I started looking more closely for something, but saw nothing among the buildings and bushes. One of the dogs let out a sharp bark, and then they both turned and ran towards Seventeenth Street and around the building. She backed away from the ledge of the roof; I stayed trying to find out what it was that had scared the dogs so badly.

             
It didn’t take long to recognize the sounds of the black truck with red flames rumbling in the distance. It pulled out from a street two blocks south of us and sped down Main Street. Behind it was a body tied at the hands. I don’t know if the body was alive, it was flailing about like it could have been, but then that could have been caused by it hitting lumps or something hidden under the ice as they dragged it down the road. That’s what I told myself. I couldn’t see the face for the snow that the truck was kicking up behind it as they drove past. Without slowing, they turned at the corner of Seventeenth Street and sped off to the east. From the cab of the truck music came thumping in dull drones as they disappeared in the distance. Alive or dead, they didn’t care about the condition of the body they dragged.

             
Stepping away from the ledge of the roof, I turned to her. She was standing far enough away where she could watch but still not be seen from the street. Her arms were crossed and she was tugging on her bottom lip with her fingers.

             
“It was moving funny,” I offered. “It could have been dead.”

She stared distantly in the direction they had gone. “Right” was all she offered in reply.

An hour later found us hot-wiring cars. The first three were easy. After that, we had to move closer to the downtown area on Main. At least it wasn’t Broadway, where all the fast-food joints were. Those were zombie traps. Just to close off the ramps and bridge on Main Street where it crosses I-630 was going to take a lot of cars, and the more cars we used the deeper into downtown we had to go to get them.

             
The cars; let me tell you about the cars. Hot-wiring cars is no easy task. Especially in a city where most of them have been sitting for at least two months or have run out of gas. We found a garden hose in back of Besser’s Hardware store and cut it up to make a siphon hose. From a trailer with a bunch of lawnmower equipment cabled up in the back, we took a couple of gas cans and I got really good at siphoning gas. After about the sixth one, I was also kind of high. We had to steal gas for about ten of them and we had to prime carburetors for five of them. Doing all this in the snow and cold isn’t fun, and as I worked she kept watch and helped when she could. I was pissed at Besser’s Hardware Store for being so secure because I knew that in their rental equipment building they had a backhoe, and we could have just torn up the ramps within minutes and made it difficult for anyone to make their way up those ramps, but no, they had to be as secure as goddamned Fort Knox.

We’d picked out a car that was parked behind Fuller and Son’s Hardware to be the next car to join the blockade. I’d just started checking the gas tanks automatically rather than fuss with it, then have to go siphon more gas. There was barely the scent of fumes, so I took the can and started filling it up when something in the car moved. Under a blanket in the front seat covered up from the cold sat a zombie couple. He didn’t have blood on his chin, so I knew he was the dangerous one. I hoped the cold and snow would slow him down as I tried to get him out of the car. Looking into the window I could see he had dried black blood all over his thigh. He’d been bitten in the leg. The woman sat up slowly and probably on old reflex raised a hand to primp her hair. The driver turned slowly to look out the window and up at me. You could almost see the recognition in driver-boy’s expression as he realized food was standing just on the other side of the glass. He started licking the glass as I thought about how to get him out. I’d first thought about just torching the car, but it was a long car and I needed it on the ramp, so he and the missus had to come out.

             
Finally I just took the folding shovel (I’m not calling it Harold anymore, I think that was the concussion talking), and smashed the window in. Quick as a bunny, I reached in and grabbed him by the collar and pulled him through the window. With a quick step away I brought Harold down and lopped off his head. The missus watched with a strange curiosity. It was almost unsettling that she didn’t try to crawl over driver-boy and get to me, but just watched as I moved to the other side of the car, opened her door, and stepped back.

             
She stepped out of the car pretty as you please, never taking her eyes off me. Her hands smoothed her clothing as she stood up. I backed up a few steps. Missus came from behind the door and moved towards me. “Been hooking in this neighborhood long?” I asked. From the back of the car, my lady rose up, machete in hand, and with a running start caught the missus in the back of the head, dropping her as ears met shoulders on both sides.

             
We moved the car quickly into place; it was the fourth to go on the Eleventh Street ramp to Louisiana Street. Two more to go, then we’d move the beer truck over there if we could get it started.

We had to go further up Main to find more cars. There was a parking lot between Louisiana and Center Streets, but we’d need those tomorrow when we closed off the ramps on Center Street. There were enough in that parking lot that we could do it easily if we could get them all to start. At one point today, we had to pull a battery from one car we’d already moved and put it into another just to get it started. We still had six ramps to go to close off all that we needed to close.

For the last two cars, we were forced to go all the way up Main Street to the parking deck on Eighth Street. Plenty of cars in there and who knew what else, so we picked the first car we came across to hot-wire. A Camry, not the biggest car in the world to block an off-ramp, but amazingly, it started up on the first attempt. It drove well in the snow. I was impressed. The satellite radio was on when we got in it, and she hit the scanner button and the dial started searching for a signal. It stopped once and we heard a German woman’s voice say, “Attention, attention, one, nine, one, seven, nine, nine, eight, one.” Then there was a little bit of music and it went on like that for a few minutes, then the signal was gone and the radio started scanning again. I’d heard about this on an NPR radio station. They called it Shortwave Number Mystery Stations. But those were broadcast on shortwave. This was satellite radio, so what was it doing here? At least there was proof that someone was still out there in the world. But god only knows where. It was a hopeful sign, but. . . what good were they doing us?