ZWD: King of an Empty City (2 page)

I guess it was some kind of vague memory in his brain, but he lifted up his arms to catch it. As he did so I kicked him in the chest, knocking him to the floor. I grabbed a chair and set it down over his chest, pinning his head to the floor under one of the chair rungs. “Find something to kill him with,” I said and she handed me a cast iron skillet off the stove. With my weight all on one knee placed in the seat of the chair, I swung the skillet like a croquet mallet down on his head. He never made a sound. His skill just split and this dark ooze came out of it. I hit him several more times just for good measure.

When I stopped I looked around she had a couple of butcher knives in her hands. One was long and pointed, and the other looked like an old meat cleaver that weighed about thirty pounds. My little warrior. We dragged the old man out into the yard. She found a mop and some bleach, then started cleaning up the floor. I looked around; I didn’t want any more surprises. Fortunately the house was empty, and it also looked like scavengers hadn’t hit it, till now.

The house looked like it had belonged to a nice old couple who were enjoying their retirement. He was, I’m guessing, a gardener. There were a lot of books on landscaping and roses and things like that. Upstairs I found some clothes. He was about my size or a little bigger, so I grabbed some of his stuff and went to the bathroom to wash up. They still had hot water so I took a shower instead. It was the best shower ever. The first one I’d had in a month. The steam in the room was wonderful. I dressed in his slacks, a tee shirt, a button-down checkered dress shirt, and a sweatshirt. Looking at myself in the mirror of their bedroom all I could think was “Will I ever be able to look this dorky in my old age?” That little voice inside my head answered, “What makes you think you’re going to get to old age?”

While I was in the shower she came and got my clothing. When I got out, she started a load of laundry. I know for her it was more a matter of feeling somewhat normal again, but I was grateful she was doing it. It really felt weird wearing someone else’s underwear. While our clothes dried, she showered and I rummaged around the cabinets. Things in the fridge were spoiled. The bread was molded, so that left canned goods. We found some creamed corn and a package of tuna fish still unopened. There was an unopened jar of pickle relish and some powdered eggs, so we made the worst tuna fish sandwich I’d ever had in my life, but it was food. That was the main thing.

As soon as the dryer went off, I got into my old clothes again and felt like a brand new man. That was a good feeling. It did her some good too. She didn’t look so lost. I think we’d both looked kind of lost for a while. But I guess that happens when you wake up one morning and the world is insane.
 

We spent most of the afternoon sealing up the house, putting tables and couches in front of doors. The house was high on a foundation so the windows were kind of high. Standing outside, I would have to stand on my toes just to peer into the lowest of them. After that we relaxed and looked around to see what we could use. She found an old rucksack backpack and emptied it on the floor. It was filled with camera equipment. The newest camera was a digital one and still had good batteries. She looked at the photos they’d taken. There were only three, one of him, one of her, and one of both of them sitting at the table in the kitchen. Later on she found in a closet a bag full of wedding things, frames for pictures, guest books, congratulations cards. They looked like future gifts; at least, none of them were used. She took the guest book and signed our names to it, then took our pictures with the camera timer sitting at the same table in the kitchen. On a card she wrote, “Please sign in and take your picture.”

We spent the rest of the day upstairs resting. Getting ready to move out in the morning. We knew as peaceful as it was here, this would not last. We’d seen it too many times. Before long, zombies would show up and we’d be on the move again. With black plastic bags over the windows to block the light, we played checkers and “Sorry” and the “Game of Life” by candlelight.

The house had only one bedroom and the window to it had a busted-out pane. A big V-shape of glass was missing, so even with the plastic bag over it the room was still cold. We got into their big four-poster bed under every blanket and quilt we could find. It was the most comfortable bed I’d ever been in and we slept deep and hard that night. During the night the wind picked up and blew so hard through the broken window that it pushed the plastic covering off. The sun was out and it was probably about seven o’clock when I got out of bed to pee. I pulled the plastic off the window and got back in bed. We were still fully dressed and ready to move, to run at a moment’s notice. But it felt so good to be that warm. We hadn’t been that warm for months. We really didn’t want to leave the comfort of this cozy house, but we knew we had to eventually.

We gathered what things we thought we’d need, especially food. I found a pair of canvas-insulated coveralls that fit well and were very warm, so I took those. As she was making her last bathroom stop before leaving I pulled open a drawer and found two books, journals. One had been written in and I read a passage or two. Nothing really interesting, at least to me, and the other one was blank. I tossed it on the desk and we started out the door. In the yard I turned back and grabbed the empty book. We decided to stay one more day.
 

Now I’m writing in that journal. I don’t know why. I guess we’ll find out. Maybe I just want to let someone know we were here and . . . we are here.

ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 02

ZWD: Dec. 02.

Killed a zombie by the garden. We’re down to raiding gardens now. Gathering a lot of root veggies. Lots of onions. Afraid of meat.

Earlier in the day I’d been looking out one of the upstairs windows into the neighbor’s backyard. He had a wooden shed in the back and in front of it was a garden. It looked overrun, but it still looked like it had plants thriving in it.
I
t’d been a warm winter so far this year, thank God, so maybe there were vegetables still growing in it.

              She stayed in the house as I went outside and scaled the fence. Dropping to the ground I had a hammer in my hand, a little ball-peen hammer. I had no idea how much good it would do, but I wasn’t planning on staying there long. In the distance you could still hear the PT Cruiser’s alarm going off from the day before and I was afraid zombies would be everywhere. I made my way to the big plastic tarps that were stretched over wire arches that covered some plants and squatted down. The yard was empty and I could see her looking down at me from the window next door. She pointed to an area outside the tarps. I nodded and moved around. Under the tarps were a bunch of flowers. But where she pointed there were vegetable plants. Right off the bat I noticed tomatoes. Not the big kind like you get with a burger, but little round ones like you find on a veggie tray. There were over a dozen and I picked them all. I glanced up to her again and she pointed further down the garden. I moved to that location and saw this plant that looked like a miniature tree. She nodded so I pulled it out of the ground. Most everything else was dead or dying. I took off my hat and dropped them all in there, then as I started to leave I looked at the shed door.

Something about it attracted me. I wanted to go inside. She tapped on the window and pointed to the street. I dropped to the ground and listened. There was something moving at the front of the house. Then I heard an engine roaring and gunfire. My thought was someone was driving around killing zombies. I looked up at her and the look of terror on her face told me otherwise.

When the engine sound had faded away, I got up and dropped my hat over the fence and climbed back over. Back in the house she told me that it wasn’t a zombie the people in the truck killed. “They just drove up and as the person turned and started waving them down, the truck people rolled down the window and shot him, then kept going.” She couldn’t say how many people were in the truck. She just remembered that it was black with red flames on the sides and hood and it had black-tinted windows. My first thought was this sounded so typical. That was exactly what bloodthirsty killers would be driving. We were in a nightmare and that crazy bastard from Mad Max was the ruler of the world. There were no more cops to call, nobody we could report them to, and who knew when they’d come across us as we were out doing something. We’d just have to deal with them when we had to.

I showed her what I pulled from the garden and asked what the little green tree was. Broccoli, who knew. Rummaging around in the house some more, she found a can of condensed milk and I found a sealed package of cheese that hadn’t started molding yet, so we made a broccoli and tomato soup with cheese. Not the best in the world, but it was warm and it was food. We talked about the growing food problem and what we needed to do about it. It would be great if we could just stay here or move next door and grow a garden, but we had zombies to worry about and now those crazies in the truck. We decided to put it off for now and see what tomorrow brought us, hopefully something good.

We spent the rest of the day much like we had the day before, quietly playing games and looking into the lives of the people whose house we were using. Throughout the day I kept finding myself looking out the window that gave me a view of the shed next door. I had to go in there. I just had to.  
 

Later that evening she came to me and sat down on the couch, snuggled up close, and asked, “How do you feel about hauling dirt to a roof?”

“What are you talking about?”

“What if we had a rooftop garden? It would be easy to grow. We wouldn’t have to worry about zombies getting into it and we could keep it away from the edges so that people couldn’t see it.”

“Where are we going to do that?”

“I don’t know, it was just a thought.”

I admitted it was a good thought, but I didn’t have a clue about a lot of this stuff. First off, these roofs were slanted; second, I was no gardener, I’m a hunter. I killed a cactus, for God’s sake. She was the gardener; she had grown tomato plants before. So many questions, no answers. It was a restless night with little sleep. Normally with such questions in my head I’d just go online and start searching, but the web hadn’t been up and running for about two weeks. I’d think of something, or we’d die of starvation.

ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 03

ZWD: Dec. 03.

Looks like we’re heading to the library; I have no idea what a carrot plant looks like. Two miles and a city of zombies to go through.

This morning I woke with an idea. I might not have the web to search, but before the web there were libraries. We were going to the library to grab books on everything we thought we might need to answer our questions.

The only problem was the library was two miles away downtown and there was a city of zombies to go through before we got there. It sucked to be us. We knew we’d need weapons. We’d lost everything we had in the PT Cruiser and I wasn’t going back to get that crap. There was nothing there that could really help us anyway. We decided to move into the house next door and see what they had for food first. It made sense to move next door since their back door was still on its hinges and none of the windows were busted open. Once we moved in we’d make a list of the kinds of books we’d need.

The house with the garden in the back was a lot like the house we’d just left. The only difference was these people seemed to be lifelong vegetarians. There were books on canning; there were even canned goods and preserves all apparently from the garden in the back. There was a filing box with packages of seeds and index cards behind them with notes that said things like “bed #2 nitrogen level 40%” and other cryptic things we didn’t understand. The first thing we did after securing the house? We sat on the floor with spoons and ate jar after jar of canned peaches. The syrup was the greatest stuff I’d ever drunk.

From the looks of this house, we were the first to come in here. That’s kind of rare. I kept expecting them to show back up and ask us what we were doing in their house. After the peaches it was canned apples and crackers that were still sealed in the wrapper. She found butter that was still good and we spread it on the crackers and apples, then we just licked it off the spoon.

We ate till we were full and she went looking for a paper and pen. As we listed off the kinds of books we’d need, I checked the kitchen library and threw into a pile any that looked like they might match what we were looking for. We started trying to think ahead. We didn’t know what different vegetables looked like in the wild; we’d always gotten them from the grocery store. I had no idea what a carrot plant looks like in the garden. Unless it looks like those in the Bugs Bunny cartoons, I haven’t got a clue. There were three that looked like they might help us at least plan a garden. She started cross-referencing the indexes of the books with the filing cards with the seeds and confirmed that these books would be of help come spring.

We added to our list books about shelter, camping, fire starting, water purification, hunting with traps, disease, and first aid. I was hoping that there was one big book on all this stuff because I didn’t want to carry around forty pounds of books just to stay alive.

I had said before I was a hunter. I probably need to clarify that a little. I’m a modern-day hunter. When I went hunting we had packs filled with ammo, light, food packets, and water, sure, but we also had a camper that had television, GPS, satellite, a gas stove, and a shower. It was a hotel room in the woods we assembled. I’d never hunted like primitive man, eating that night what you killed that day. Someone else always butchered it for me. I never foraged for berries or plants. Friends made pine tree tea once and it tasted terrible; we stuck to our cans of Lipton tea after that. So I can hunt, track a little, but I’m not like my ancestors who were hunters. I wish to god now I were.  
 

As I walked around the house that next morning, I kept thinking back to the shed in the backyard. I hadn’t been able to explore it yesterday and I wanted a look inside. I was about to go outside and see if I could get into the shed when she came up beside me and said, “I like it here. It feels cozy. When we get done at the library can we come back here?”

“You want to go now?”

“I thought we were.”

“Ok.”

“What did you have in mind doing?”

“Nothing, I was going to look in that shed is all.”

“Do that tomorrow, I want to get there and back. I don’t like going downtown.”

I knew why; the last time we were downtown we thought it would be a smart trip because of all the restaurants. It was a killing field. A lot of people had had that same thought; they just walked right into the thick of a zombie horde. Hundreds of them drifting around down there, and every time fresh meat thought the restaurants might have some food, they tried to sneak past the horde.

They almost got us when we went down there with that same thought. When the zombies started after us, we just happened to run into a couple who were hiding. When we opened the door to the building they were hiding in, we bolted for the back of the building and any exit we could find. They jumped out to attack us, but we were already past them. We were clearing their barricade from the fire door (why you would barricade a door that only opens out, I don’t know), but we were throwing that crap behind us when they came up with brooms and knives in hand. All I heard was, “You have to hide.” As I shoved the door open, I saw a dozen zombies in the hall behind us. Between the door and them was all that crap we had moved. The woman tried to climb over it all with the knife in her hand. He tried to save them with the broom, pushing the zombies back. It was like pushing back an avalanche with an ice cream scoop. We didn’t wait to see if they made it. We were out the door and running down the alley, moving away from downtown as fast as we could run. I did listen for the door to open behind us, but as I turned the corner of the alley I never heard it open. I’m sure they were nice people. I didn’t want to go back downtown.

I looked at the sky out the window and saw it was getting dark. We’d wasted most of the day looking at these books and planning a garden we might not get to plant. “Let’s go tomorrow. We need to plan more for this trip. We need weapons. We need something.” I glanced at the shed door again. I was drawn to it more than ever. She pressed her face to the window and sighed. “I don’t want to go there in the dark either. Let’s see what else they have to eat.”

We spent that late afternoon packing food into plastic storage containers that we planned to hide in various places for emergencies. We packed food away for our trip downtown. We packed food away for our evening meal. We had bread and butter pickles, olives, more crackers, and raspberry jam.

I was getting our alarms ready when she let out a squeal and came bouncing into the living room with her hands clamped over something. She bent down and kissed me on the forehead. Then she presented me with the Holy Grail of food, her favorite, a pound of crunchy peanut butter. She danced around the room and shoved the plastic jar into the backpack along with a spoon. She was happy and that made the world a little easier tonight.

Now she’s breathing lightly with her head across my lap, and I’m writing this little bit in the journal while holding a pen light in my mouth. This journal thing is really therapeutic. I should have done this a long time ago.

I didn’t really pay much attention to what was going on in the world before. I didn’t pay much attention to anything, really. My only real interest was in college football. I mean, I watched it. I never really cared about the news or entertainment. I don’t even know a lot about football. I just watched it because my friends care about it. Cared about it. I used to watch TV for hours. Sports, history stuff, it was just a way for me to forget my job. What a job. I used to build websites. That’s important now, huh? Hours learning PHP, lot of good it does me now. I can’t start a fire, but I know how to simulate a bouncing ball for a website sing-along. I can’t tell you what a carrot looks like in the wild, but by god if you were to go to one of my websites, I could mine your email and spam the hell out of you if I wanted to. I was hot shit then. Now, now I don’t know.

Last month just after Halloween was when we first started getting zombie attacks. I think they’d been going on for three days before it really spread like wildfire. After three days it was really bad. People were in a panic. Some barricaded themselves in their homes. That’s what we did. A lot of people tried to get out of Little Rock. That was a bad idea. All the major roads out were jammed up because people had lost their minds. About day five, the TV stations stopped doing live shots because it was too dangerous. One of their reporters was bitten there on live TV and then the shot went dead. They’d been covering the bottleneck on I-630 to I-30. That’s when I started to pay attention to the news. Hell of a time to start, wasn’t it? I wasn’t alone, though; a lot of my neighbors were the same way. We thought this would pass and then things would get back to normal.

We met our first set of refugees on day six, I think. They were coming back from Bryant. Their plan was to go over the Broadway Bridge then cut through Sherwood and get to the Air Force base in Jacksonville. I don’t think they made it unless they started traveling on foot. Broadway Bridge was filled with empty cars the first time we saw it on our trip downtown. Their car was sitting there in the middle of the intersection on Third Street. They’d said that Bryant’s roads were clogged up as far as you could see. At some point both the northbound and southbound roads were blocked. They’d managed to get turned around and make it back into Little Rock. Now they were stuck in that intersection with nowhere to move. Trapped on all sides by cars that had been abandoned in the night. They were about to go on foot over the bridge; we were going back to our neighborhood.
Our neighborhood, home. What a safe place that turned out to be.

Rumors started coming in as the neighborhood tried to band together to protect ourselves, rumors of people getting trapped in the swamp southeast of town, rumors of the Air Force abandoning the area. Rumors that they were going to fly over and nuke the city for safety. We got on edge.
We set up barricades. People from other neighborhoods were the bigger problem. People were hoarding food and trying to get as much as they could. I remember a gunfight broke out down the street at the church. After that, it wasn’t long before the zombies showed up en masse and stopped the fighting. They were attracted by the sounds of the gunfight. Then we didn’t know how to kill them, just each other. As people were lying there in the street dying the zombies would feed on them and make more.

That’s when we ran. We grabbed our stuff, what little it was, and we jumped into the car. We drove through the barricade and we drove down to the Big Dam Bridge. We didn’t intend to go there, we just ended up there. That was almost as bad as being in the neighborhood. As we drove past the apartments at the edge of the park and drove along the golf course that led into the park, it looked so peaceful, as if nothing had touched it. Shortly after the entrance of the park there was a roadblock. Guys with guns stood at this barricade they’d made with two cars over this little bridge that covered a drainage ditch. At first they weren’t going to let us in. Finally a woman came walking up and looked at us, then said we were welcome.

They’d set up a camp down at one of the campgrounds near the Big Dam Bridge. Along the way as we walked down to it, we had to leave the car at the roadblock; we saw where they had patrols walking around. Armed men with rifles, it kind of made you feel safe. At the picnic site just before the bridge there was a tent city that had popped up and the two pavilions at the back had been turned into cooking tents. They were fairly well organized. Most of the people either lived at one time in the apartments we drove past or were from the houses up on the hill that overlooked the park and the Arkansas River.

They’d tried to claim the entire park as their area. Although we were made welcome, they didn’t want many more people coming in to the park. Someone had decided that they could live off scavenged canned goods till spring, when they would plant gardens in the park. Like we did later, they’d already come to the conclusion that it was safer to be in the open as much as possible. Some folks were already marking out and preparing the land for gardens.

We didn’t have a tent so we slept near one of the fires under blankets that people were kind enough to give us. Later someone gave us sleeping bags they’d found on one of the scavenging trips. We used a poncho to cover us when it rained, or we just sat under the pavilions all night. People welcomed us into the camp, but they wouldn’t welcome us into their tents. We both took up jobs getting the land ready for the spring gardens and gathering wood for the fires. I never really felt welcome there.

Once I was told I had to stand guard duty at one of the roadblocks, but they wouldn’t give me a gun. That’s when I noticed that the guys with guns weren’t doing any of the work, they were just standing around drinking the last of the coffee and the rest of us unarmed people were working our butts off trying to make this place a home again. But it didn’t matter; we felt safe. You could lose track of the days easily, and in fact I did. Monday or Sunday, it didn’t matter. Occasionally a zombie would wander into the park and the patrols would shoot it, but it was safe and you could almost forget that the world had gone insane.

One night it was raining, not hard, just a light, steady rain. It was cold and windy; you felt it in your bones as the wind came off the hillside and just cut through you. From the back of the park, under the Big Dam Bridge there’s a walking trail that runs along the river for about a mile then joins another part of the park and crosses another bridge. Along that trail probably a quarter mile down is another bridge that crosses over a slew. There were supposed to be guards there. I don’t know if they were surprised or if they were asleep, but they never gave us the warning that a horde of zombies had wandered down that trail and into the back of the park. I don’t know how many zombies there were, I just know we were all surprised. There were a lot of gunshots, and I know some of those shots hit people.