ZWD: King of an Empty City (16 page)

              “Where are you kids staying?” she asked.

              Eddie replied, “Nowhere, everywhere. We move around a lot.”

              “Kind of like you two,” said the kid with the potato cannon rifle.

              “What’s your name?” I asked him.

              “Donny.”

              “And you?” She pointed at the other rifleman. He was a good-looking black kid with lean features and dreads wrapped up in a bandana. Joseph, he said, and they called out one by one their names. The youngest one was only five. We told them our names and I decided to talk to them like they were adults. After all, they’d been surviving on their own for a while; they deserved that much respect from me.

“Eddie, what do you know about the black truck?”

“They took Joseph and Stanley’s parents.” Stanley was seven or eight years old. A pasty-faced kid who looked like he had at one time been a little chunky, but he wasn’t now. His clothes were tight in places and in others they hung off him like he was wearing hand-me-downs. Stanley wouldn’t talk about what happened, but through Joseph, Eddie, and Donny, who were willing to talk the most, we learned that the black truck had been taking all the people they could get and driving off. These kids didn’t know where. And like we already knew, sometimes they just killed folks for no reason. They did use live bait to attract zombies and lure them off south of Roosevelt someplace. But south of Roosevelt was, from what they said, very dangerous, with people shooting you whether you were alive or dead.  They’d tried several times to scavenge food over there, but one of their group had been killed. He was five years old.

               West of Chester Street, which was one of the streets we’d chosen to mark the edge of our kingdom, the S.O.L. said was mostly deserted, filled with empty houses till you got to Summit Street, then there were a few people living there on west but they’d never gone further west than that. Joseph still had family that lived over there somewhere. They named off some blocks I didn’t know, which they said were as dangerous or worse than south of Roosevelt.

             
One of the kids asked us what it was like living on the roof of the Safeway and if we had beds up there. At that point it was little use denying that we did—it was obvious from what they’d told us that they knew more about what was going on in this city than we did. She told him it was cold. We asked where they lived again. They’d been a few blocks down from us living in the Trinity Episcopal Church, a massive complex of buildings all interconnected that took up an entire city block and was open on only one side. With some strategic planning, the place could be blocked off on its many entrances and turned into a kind of fort, or as they were using it, a place to stay and escape through one of the many connecting building and exits. When we asked if there were more kids there, they wouldn’t answer, so we knew there were, but how many we could only guess.

             
I told them about the boundaries we’d chosen and my plan to secure it from zombies and asked if they knew of other people living within the kingdom. They were proud to tell of over two dozen houses that had people in them. They bragged about how they scavenged food and brought it to some of them. The S.O.L. prided themselves on being the providers for the adults who were too afraid to get out of their houses.

              “Do you have a symbol?”

              “What do you mean?” asked Donny. “A symbol?”

              “An S.O.L. symbol. Like graffiti, you know, like taggers leave.”

              “Yeah, we got something, why?”

              “We need a way that doesn’t look too obvious to tell what houses have people in them and what houses don’t. If you tag those houses with people in them, then we’d know who’s ‘friendly’ and who’s not. But to any outsider it would look like graffiti,” I explained. The idea made sense to them and Eddie ordered one of the kids to start spreading the word that that was what they were going to do.

I described the house where we had the shotgun pointed at us and asked if they knew who those people were. The S.O.L. knew them but didn’t interact with them. I asked the S.O.L. if I could get their help with doing some stuff, mainly clearing the empty houses. I was kind of surprised when they agreed. But it did make sense to clear a house and know that you didn’t have to come back into it worrying about getting bitten.

“Why did you put the skulls in Mount Holly?” one of the kids asked her.

              “The dead need respect.”

              “But you don’t put all of them in there. Like you didn’t put Mr. Tony’s in there.”

              “I don’t know who he is.”

              “He’s the handyman on the bicycle.”

We looked to Eddie and Donny for answers. Joseph spoke up. “He was bitten in the early days of all this. They may not have known him.”

              “I knew who he was by sight, but I haven’t seen him as a zombie.”

              “So if you know them, you stack them in the cemetery?” the kid asked her.

              “It helps. I’d like to put their name with them so they can be remembered, I think that’s only right.”

              “But if you don’t know their name?” He was trying to get somewhere with all this, I could tell that.

              “At some point those that we don’t know will be placed there, I’m sure, but right now they’re just zombies unless I know them.”

              “So if I knew them they could go there, like Mr. Tony?”

              “Yes, sure.”

The kid looked pleased with himself as he looked around at the others. “What was so special about Mr. Tony?” she asked him.

              “Nothing, I just knew him,” he said. Then looking up at Joseph he said, “See, we can put them in there.” The kid had empathy for the dead, at least.

I asked the S.O.L. if in two days they could meet me at the Chester Street Bridge crossing I-630 by the bus stop. I wanted them to give us security while I hot-wired cars and moved them into place on the ramps. I told them with their help we could get that one, Broadway, State, and Chester closed off very quickly. Then we wouldn’t need to worry about zombies drifting up from there to mess with us.

              “What about the rest of this territory you outlined?” asked Eddie.              

              “One problem at a time,” I said. “I have a lot to do if we’re going to live in any kind of peace. Any help I can get from you guys is greatly appreciated.” I purposefully left them out of the plans. I needed them to come to me of their own choosing. If I started saying things like “we” and “us” and ordering them around like I was the boss, they’d run from me. And I desperately needed them more than they needed me, but I don’t think they knew that. So as long as I could show them some respect and ask for their help, I thought they’d go along with me.

It wasn’t long till we decided to break up and meet at the bus stop off the Chester Street Bridge in two days. I next drove to the house where grandpa tried to shoot us. I parked the truck at the other end of the block and out of habit I locked it. Then, unarmed with the exception of
Harold
and her bow, we walked up to the front door and knocked. Then we stepped back to the sidewalk leading up to the door and waited.

It wasn’t long till the curtains parted and a face looked out. I could hear Dylan’s voice in my head singing, “Fox say I don’t runnnn…” The door cracked open and a gruff, menacing voice said, “You better get the hell on if you want to live. We got nothing for you here.”

              “Actually you do. I, we, need your help.”

              “We ain’t got no food.”

              “We’re not asking for food. We just need help. You can see we aren’t really a threat to you; can you come out so we can talk without shouting? I don’t want to attract zombies or anyone else.”

              “The black truck.”

              “The black truck, exactly.” It took a moment and some discussion inside the house, but a young guy, maybe in his thirties, came out with a pistol in his hand. He was nervous and his eyes kept darting around. We stepped up to meet him, and I dropped
Harold
to the ground.

              “Try anything and I’ll blow your ass to hell.”

              “And you're just going to leave the pistol hand down by your side? You should probably be pointing that at one of us if you think we’re a threat.” He nodded his head, then stuffed it into his pocket.

              “What’ch you want?” he demanded in a country thug accent.

“We need help moving cars.” I explained how the zombies that were trapped in the I-630 canal could wander up from there and how there were a lot of them, and if a herd of them came up those ramps it was going to be trouble for everyone. I told him about how we’d closed off two of the bridges by moving cars to block the ramps. “And we can’t do it alone. I know there’s more than one person in this house, probably five or six. We only need two people to drive the cars I hot-wire into place on the ramps to block them off. Two hours tops, then we don’t have to worry about zombies on the north side coming into the neighborhood.” He’d listened carefully as I told him all this and occasionally he’d nod. He was looking at the ground when I finished.

              “What about the black truck?” he asked.

              “I’m trying to come up with a truce for them. A way for them to leave us alone.”

              “Like paying them. Shit,” he murmured.

              “I’m still working on it. One problem at a time. Help me close off the north side of the neighborhood.”

He looked around the neighborhood for a moment, then at me. “You really think you can stop them?”

              “I have a last-resort plan, but I don’t want to use it unless I have to. We just want to get back to a civilized world or something close to it, and for that I need your help. I need everyone’s help.”

              “My pistol isn’t even loaded,” he chuckled after a long pause, his country thug accent gone. “We didn’t want to risk you taking the gun and being able to use it. Granddad’s idea. I like your plan; it makes a lot of sense. Granddad might not go for it.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the house.

“How do you plan to protect us as we move the cars?”

I told him about the kids.

“We’ve seen them moving around,” he said. I told him in two days I wanted to meet at the bridge on Chester next to Philander Smith College and start there, working our way back this way. He suggested that we use some of the cars from PSC to block the bridge. I asked him about zombies on campus.

“I was a student there when the outbreak started. A lot of people are in their dorm rooms, but the majority of the student body went into the cafeteria and locked themselves in. I don’t think we have that much to worry about. I’ve been on campus since then and I didn’t see that many. If those kids, the S.O.L., are that good, then we shouldn’t have anything to worry about.”

             
We agreed to meet in two days at the bus stop just off Chester and would decide what to do from there. I was feeling good as we headed back to the truck. We drove to the corner of Gaines and Daisy Gatson Bates Drive, a corner of the Mount Holly Cemetery, and parked, then crawled across the fence. At the stack of skulls a few more had been added with photographs taped to them of who they were. Some photos had several people in them and a face was circled. Some skulls had been cleaned like she’d cleaned them; some had been placed there still decomposing, rubber gloves on the ground showing where the placer had discarded them, afraid that if you touched the dead you’d turn. There were probably twenty skulls stacked up or lining the mausoleum door, the stone angel still looking on. We placed the skulls of the three hunters among the rest and she made sure their IDs were displayed securely in their open mouths so anyone could see them and they didn’t fall out.

             
After that we drove back to the Safeway and unloaded the guns onto the roof. I spent an hour or so matching guns and ammunition just to make certain that we had ammo for each gun, and to put into my mind just how much we had. She took a great interest in examining the sniper rifles. She really liked the
Barrett M107 .50 caliber sniper rifle, and who wouldn’t, it was magnificent.
Its scope was stronger than the binoculars we were using. She loaded the clip and snapped it into the rifle, then stuffed it back into its bag and looked at another rifle carefully and returned it to the bag. Finally with the pistols she selected one she liked and stuffed it into her own backpack along with a box of ammo. I’d picked out a Desert Eagle 9mm pistol and stuffed it into my pack, hoping I’d never need to pull it out. Gunfire attracts zombies. Happy with our work for the day I forgot what we’d set out to do, so we had to lounge around the roof till dark.         

I knew it was still early in the evening, but with the fog so thick still in the air it looked like it was about midnight. As the freezing rain started again I stoked the fires on the hibachi, trying to keep as much heat as possible before it went out. A few bricks of coal helped it go a lot longer. We munched on beef jerky and canned apricots.

After dinner I started lightly drumming on the ice chest I was sitting on.