ZWD: King of an Empty City (20 page)

             
Once my girl went over everything with Donny on where she wanted security, he dispatched the remaining eight kids. Four took up positions around the Chester Street Bridge and started eliminating threats while we went onto the Philander Smith campus to hot-wire cars. After using Harold to break out the window of an Elektra, I popped the steering column and stripped the wires. Once it was going, Andrew drove it to where we agreed the first set of cars should go on the far side of Chester.

             
Chester has a unique set of ramps. Those on the north side come up and go down to I-630 off a one-way on Eighth Street. There’s also a service road that feeds traffic to the bridge. Andrew blocked off the service road, then came back for the next car. By then, I’d started another one and Shaun was driving it to the far side down ramp that lead to I-630. That was going to be the hardest one to close because it was a long, gradual ramp with no hard curves or steep spots to clog. We’d already picked what was probably the best high spot and he drove the nose of his car to it, then got out and made his way back for his next car. Andrew parked his next car nose to bumper behind it and they kept this up till there was a wall of cars stretching from the hedges of the MEMS shrub line to the retaining wall of the on-ramp for the Chester Street exit on the north side. The next few cars we placed across the north side of the bridge, parked side by side, forming a thick, low wall across the bridge till there was only a small gap on the side where a car couldn’t be parked. They closed off that gap with a car parked on this side of the opening, and then we started on closing off the south side of the bridge.

              Chester, the State Street Bridge, bridge after bridge, ramp after ramp, we worked all day, one car after another. I taught Eddie how to hot-wire cars and we worked faster. As fast as Shaun and Andrew could get back, we had another one ready for them. The steep ramps took more cars and better planning on the placement, but Shaun and Andrew were working that out pretty well from what we could tell. I kept getting laughing reports that the cars were just sliding into place over the icy sheet that was forming on the roads and bridges. There were a few times while this was going on that from the Philander Smith College parking lot, we heard the
whoomp
of potato cannon guns being fired. The S.O.L. snipers taking their shots started attracting the attention of the zombies in the I-630 canal, so the snipers had to stop shooting and start teaming up to kill those that came too close. When dozens more zombies started pressing against the barricades we’d built, and I’ll give the kids credit for this, they marched across the bridge to the north side and paraded around, occasionally shooting from the bridge into the mob below and drawing their attention to the north side before they disappeared and snuck back over the bridge to our side. They kept the zombies distracted.  

The two kids from the SEAL Team 6 Zombie Squad came back to report that we might be able to cut our time in half if we grabbed some of the eighteen-wheeler tractor trailers from the moving company and used them to close off the rest of the bridges.

“There are fourteen tractor-trailers parked over there and we just cleared the area of any obstacles,” said Steve, with military confidence. So we hot-wired a truck and they all loaded up in the back while I drove us over to the moving company. We drove the truck into the gate, crashing it to the ground. And they were right; there were a lot of trucks there for moving.

             
Shaun had never driven an eighteen-wheeler before and Andrew had only driven the smaller U-Haul trucks. Luckily, there were nine of them. Andrew gave Shaun some quick lessons on how to drive the smaller trucks while I showed Eddie how to hot-wire these bigger trucks, and soon we had them all going.

              Now we had to work in reverse, we had to block off the south side of the bridges and then finish the north. Two trucks placed crossways on Broadway’s off-ramp took care of that. When it got to the big trucks that we were going to use to block off the bridge itself, we used a combination of eighteen-wheelers and cars to cover the space under them so no zombies could get the idea of crawling under the trailers to get across. I had to drive the eighteen-wheelers because nobody else would, or if they wanted to, their feet couldn’t touch the pedals. I never got out of first gear, and I think I burnt out the parking brake in one of them. I know something stank and smoked as I drove it. But we got the four trailers and another six cars blocking the Broadway Street Bridge with little trouble.

              It was getting late in the day and we still had the Center Street Bridge to block off, it and its long, straight off-ramp. I wished we had more tractor-trailers to use, but we’d parked the last one on Broadway. We also had to find more cars to use. The Philander Smith campus was too far away so we were going to have to look locally for something. The SEAL Team 6 Zombie Squad started out scouting again while we took a break from working. I was saying just how fortunate it was that we hadn’t seen any zombies other than those on the Chester Street Bridge when one of the kids piped up and said he’d killed one at the State Street Bridge on the north side. Another kid said he’d killed two at the Metropolitan Branch Bank on the north side of Broadway. Each of the eight kids who were guarding us as we moved cars and trucks had killed one or more zombies in the course of protecting us. Seriously, these kids should have been playing soccer, not killing zombies. The SEAL Team 6 Zombie Squad came back and said that there were two school buses and a bunch of cars in the parking lot behind the Taco Bell and McDonalds on Broadway. “If we drove them south on Spring Street, we could get them to the bridge, then cut back on the service road and get them to the Center Street Bridge. Piece of cake,” he offered.

“Easy peasy,” assured his companion.

               We drove the truck over there and I didn’t like the openness of this situation. What we were looking at was a large parking lot that serviced several businesses surrounding it on four sides. I imagined that moving the cars would be easy for Shaun and Andrew, at least they’d driven the other cars into place with little trouble. What worried me were the buses. Growing up in Colorado, I rode to school on buses in snows that were feet thick and I knew that the best drivers with the right equipment had hell getting those buses to where they were supposed to go on the best of days. Here in Arkansas with a little sleet that would have made our bus drivers in Colorado laugh, the whole state would shut down in a panic. Experienced bus drivers would sweat as they took these behemoths out on the streets. How were Shaun and Andrew going to handle two buses in a freezing rain on icy streets, if the damned things would even start?

             
Eddie and I would start the cars and Shaun with Andrew would drive them into place as planned. But with our supply of cars so far away from the destination, I was worried about safety. How were we going to cover the bridge and this lot with the few kids we had? Where was that other group of kids who went to the alarm house? How were Shaun and Andrew going to get back here safely to pick up the next batch of cars? Turns out that the plan was the same as it was at the last location, the only differences being that the kids were going to circle around us to cover more ground. I still had a bad feeling about this and actually wished we’d brought some of the guns. I knew Andrew had that shotgun with him, but one shot and we were going to be swarmed. I didn’t like this at all.

             
I’d just started the first car and was letting the motor warm up when two kids came marching down Ninth Street. They had a bundle draped over their shoulders like two baggage carriers in some old Tarzan movie. They put the bundles down and uncovered their heads. “You guys aren’t where you said you’d be,” said the kid in front to Eddie. He blushed as she talked to him. She was a kid about Eddie’s age and a few inches taller than him. Her blond hair poked out from under her knit hat and the freckles that covered her face were even more pronounced against her white skin in this cold.

“You’re late,” he replied. “We’ve been busy. Did you get the thing working?” he asked.

             
“Some assembly required, but it works beautifully,” she said with a lot of pride.

“See if you can’t get it up high someplace, like on one of the buildings, and cover this lot,” he told her, and you could tell he was trying to look like the big man in charge. It was cute, really it was. While they tried not to make googly eyes at each other, Donny, in a disgusted huff, ordered the SEAL Team 6 Zombie Squad guys to find a way up on a roof. Before they even moved, one of them said that the garage across the street from the lot had a ladder in the back and they could help get it set up there.

             
Finally I had to ask, “What is this thing that has you guys so excited?”

             
The other kid, I’m guessing that he was Jr. since nobody introduced him to us, patted the big bundle that was tied in bed sheets to the two long PVC pipes with his gloved hands and said, “We have a cannon.” And it was; later I got to see the thing up close. Its barrel was made up of the two long PVC pipe poles they used to carry the thing with and a series of other tubes and pipes twisted into some semblance of a box and connected to the metal cylinder of two propane bottles housed in the pipe box. Those bottles had tubes coming off them to bicycle pump cylinders that were pumped to pressurize the propane tanks. It looked like it would never work, but it did. It could shoot anything that fit into its barrel over three hundred yards with deadly force. The killing field Bobby was covering was at best seventy-five yards long. And talk about deadly. They had a supply of two-foot long cuts of rebar that they were using for ammunition.

             
I’d gotten another truck running, a diesel truck with an extended cab. We sat there in the cab till the cannon was set up on top of the garage, which took twenty minutes. Probably all that rebar that they were hauling, I’m sure that took time to get up on the roof. I’d turned the truck around so I could see them give the all-clear sign and get the broken window away from the incoming freezing rain. When Bobby waved at us from the roof, we poured out of the truck and started working on cars again. We left the truck running and it was decided that each of us would take a turn in the warmish cab as the day got darker and the temperature dropped.

             
My girl was to follow Shaun and Andrew to the Center Street Bridge and drive them back. She had one of the SEAL Team 6 Zombie Squad kids with her as a lookout. With him and his potato cannon rifle, her with her skills at killing zombies, and Andrew’s Mossberg shotgun, and all the other kids who were watching the bridge, I wasn’t too worried about them getting into trouble. Compared to a zombie army, they were superior. It was my ass I was worried about. Eddie and I worked fast through the cars and had eight of them running when her truck came back carrying everyone.

             
Shortly after that, everything went to crap. Here’s what happened: my girl, Shaun, and Andrew headed off to park the next set of cars when we heard from the McDonalds the distinctive
whoomp
sound of a potato cannon rifle. A little after that there were three more shots fired and the other kids who were our perimeter watch went running across the parking lot in that direction. Eddie walked over there to see what was going on, since we had enough cars started. Standing there in the freezing rain I listened to the sounds of a battle going on as kids started yelling instructions to each other, then Eddie yelled, “Fall back, fall back!” I didn’t hear the sound of their feet crunching the snow and icy streets. I couldn’t hear it over the sounds of the engines running, primarily the diesel engine of the truck we’d been keeping warm in.

             
In a dead city where sound attracts zombies, we broke the first rule of survival. We made noise. We made a lot of noise. Those car engines caught the attention of every zombie that had gathered down there by the fire truck to watch the hoses flail around. I’m sure they all heard the diesel and came to see what the noise was. The last I looked, there were a lot of zombies gathered around that fire truck. The stupid ones stepped up to the edge of the circle and were killed by the nozzles of the hoses as they waved about, but there were plenty to take their places. In an attempt to cut down the noise, I started turning off cars and the truck to make it as quiet as possible.

             
There wasn’t enough room for us to fit into a car or the diesel truck without someone getting in the back, and that wasn’t safe, so I ran over to one of the buses and started hot-wiring it. I had a brilliant idea once the bus got started. Why not give the zombies another cat toy to play with? I left the bus running and went to the second one and started hot-wiring it. As luck would have it, this bus decided to be stubborn and not start when I wanted it to. Eddie hit the door of the bus and said, “We got to go. There are hundreds of them and they’re coming this way.”

             
“See what you can do here,” I said and started to the back of the bus. I was looking for the fire extinguisher. Don’t ask me what I was going to do with it, I have no idea, but it seemed like something we were going to need at the time.

              “Why don’t we just take the other bus? You have it running already.”

“We need to leave them something to play with when we leave so they stay!”

              “Well, what are you going to do?”

              “I’m not sure. Just get it started,” I said as I came back to the front of the bus, not finding the extinguisher. I ran over to the other bus and looked there for one. They didn’t have one either. The kids were constantly firing till they ran out of things to fire. They were fighting hand-to-hand now in twos, but there were just too many zombies for them, and they were hungry. I yelled for them to forget the fight and just run. Eddie got the bus running. I turned to Bobby on the roof of the garage and held out my hands, asking why
s
he wasn’t shooting. I could see Bobby and Jr. up there working frantically on the cannon. If nothing else, I’d make a stand and give the kids a chance to escape. I took one of the lighters from my pocket and lit the seat of one of the cars we’d hot-wired on fire, then stepped over away from it so if it exploded I wouldn’t get caught in the direct explosion.