ZWD: King of an Empty City (21 page)

             
With Harold in hand I waited as the kids ran past me and got onto the bus Eddie had started. As the last kid ran past I realized that none of them could drive. My head pounded in frustration. As I was turning to tell them to just get the hell out of there on foot, I heard the rumble of my girl’s truck returning. She drove onto the lot and it didn’t take her long to assess the situation and know it was desperate. With Andrew hanging out the window, she sped past me and towards the crowd of zombies. Andrew’s shotgun fired twice quickly. The SEAL Team 6 kid fired his gun into the crowd and Shaun was shooting his pistol from the bed of the truck. With the truck she wiped out the first line of zombies that were coming and gave us probably twenty more feet of space. She drove back to the buses and everyone got out of the truck. I came running back to the bus with the kids.

             
“Shaun, Andrew,“ she shouted orders. “Get on the empty bus and park it across that bridge. We can get more cars later. After you park it, disappear, we’ll catch up to you at your house to make certain you’re ok.” With a nod they were on the bus. Donny had taken the ammo, cuts of one-inch wooden dowel rods, from the SEAL Team 6 kid and passed them out to the kids still with potato rifles, and they formed a line. They had two shots each and shot them like a British square. Two lines of three shooters the first line fired, then the second line. It was very impressive and it brought down six zombies out of a hundred. It also kept kids off the bus. I couldn’t leave with them not on it.

              “Get on the damned bus!” I shouted out the window.

              “What’s wrong?” she asked Andrew, because their bus hadn’t moved yet.              

              “We don’t know how to drive no bus!” bellowed Andrew back to her. “He was going to show us, before all this mess.”

              “Do you know how to drive a stick?”

              “Yes.”

              “Find first and go!” She went over to her truck and drove it in a circle till she had it pointing at the approaching zombies, then slid out of the seat and put it into drive. The truck slowly headed for the mob. When it got to them it plowed over some of them and a few turned to follow it as it kept going till it stopped after crashing into the dumpsters behind McDonalds.

             
The gears of Shaun’s bus ground loudly in protest as he found a gear and started moving. He tried to turn the bus, but the icy parking lot had other ideas. He slid sideways before he caught any traction from the tires. The engine sounded like he was driving in second or third gear; he wasn’t going to get any traction that way. I finally got the kids on the other bus, and not a moment too soon. Zombies started swarming around us as soon as she closed the doors. We had nothing to shoot, so the kids were closing all the windows they could.

                  From the roof of the garage we heard a loud
whoomp
and a two-foot rebar spike tore into the zombies along the right side of our bus. The spike went through about six of them. Only eighty to go.

Shaun was having hell trying to drive the bus in the wrong gear and on ice, but he did manage to get it turned around and he was heading out past us when it slid and slammed into the side of our bus, crushing a dozen zombies between the two buses. I had to back up to get us unstuck. He wasn’t going to do anything to take it out of gear for fear he wouldn’t get it back in gear again. So while I backed up, he just held in his clutch so it idled.

Another loud
whoomp
and a two-foot-long rebar spike drove through the zombies that were standing in front of Shaun’s bus and straight into the engine block, killing it dead.

             
I’d just pulled clear of them and now I had to go back. I drove the bus in a circle, dragging zombies after us, and stopped with our doors facing each other, with perhaps a foot-wide gap between the two. My girl, Donny, and one of the SEAL Team 6 kids were at the door with machetes, pipes, and long daggers, ready to stab any zombie that tried to get in or grab any of us. Shaun was afraid to open his bus doors, so from the window next to the door Andrew fired his shotgun at the zombies that were bunched up in front of my bus, piling up dead bodies. After the fourth one, Andrew said, “You better go on and move. I’m about out of shells and baby got to get me across there.” Finally, Shaun opened the door and bridged the gap as Andrew fired the last rounds from the pistol and my three stabbed and poked at everything outside. Andrew crossed over in short order and we got the doors to our bus closed. The problem was we were now swarmed on all sides and I couldn’t move. Fortunately, the car whose seat I’d set on fire chose to explode at that moment, and the zombies that were pressed en masse against the front of the bus spread out to look at the explosion. It was just enough room that I could now move the bus. So I did and plowed over every single one of them in the way. Pissed off, I went like a bull in a china shop and drove over as many of them as I could before I drove off the lot and headed for the bridge.

             
At Eddie’s request we drove over to Foster’s Garage to check on Bobby and Jr. They were alright and had pulled the ladder up behind them. This stop proved to be a mistake because it brought Bobby and Jr. to the attention of some of the zombies. Before they could surround the bus again, I was driving headlong to hell to get out of there. Later, we’d find out that Bobby and Jr. used the ladder to cross from the roof of Foster’s Garage over to the roof of the next building, which was a long building that faced Broadway for most of a block. Traveling along the rooftops, they made their way to the back of the last building and lowered their ladder over the side of that building, escaping through the streets and alleys unnoticed.

             
Once we hit Ninth Street, I sped as fast as I dared on the icy roads, almost turning us over as I made the turn onto Center Street. I wasn’t going that fast, either. But we made it. I parked the bus crossways across the north side of the Center Street Bridge and we all poured out of the bus. A quick check of everyone showed that nobody was bitten or hurt, thank God. We sprinted across the bridge and halfway across, we heard “Hi-Oh,” the cry the S.O.L. used to call to one another. Over on the Louisiana Street Bridge were the ten other S.O.L. kids who’d split off from us that morning. They were just now coming to help us. We all met up on the south side service road that lines I-630 after crawling over the cars we’d parked on the bridges. As a group that scattered out over several blocks, we followed the road and gathered in the Mount Holly Cemetery, where we cut across on our way to escorting Shaun and Andrew back to their home.

             
We found the splinter group from this morning already out in the graveyard, where we thought it was safe to talk in a larger group. They’d gone to the alarm house and to their surprise the number of zombies had grown even without the alarm going off. One of the kids reported that there were about thirty zombies there, all of them staring at the house. They decided to use caution and started killing them off one at a time, starting from the back of the cluster and working their way in. The delay for them came when lookouts kept spotting more zombies coming to the house. They had to stop and wait for the new zombies to come to a stop and stare at the house. Then starting from the back, they began killing all over again.

             
An odd thing seemed to be part of the zombies’ group behavior: the longer the zombies stared at the house, the more oblivious they were to things going on around them. So ten minutes after they stopped in front of the house, the kids were able to walk right up to a zombie undetected and kill it. But that brought the other zombies out of their trance and they’d all have to go back to hiding. Once they ran away the zombies all turned back to the house and started staring at it again.

             
We decided that we were going to have to figure this one out in the morning. We got Shaun and Andrew back to their house and to my surprise, with all the things that went wrong today, they offered to help us again with the next big thing we were going to do. Eddie, trying to be a true leader, asked them if they’d join us for dinner tonight. But Andrew said, “No, thank you, I think we’ve had enough adventuring for the day.” They went into the house and we moved on to Trinity Episcopal Church.

It was a meager dinner of canned cheese spread on stale crackers and Spam that we ate that night. While we ate, we talked about all the things that went wrong and how to do them better next time. I didn’t really say much; it was mostly my girl and Donny who were going over things with the “troops.” Eddie and I stepped into another smaller room and started talking.

             
The room looked like a small office. There was a square table against one wall with two plastic-backed chairs on either side and some booklets still scattered around the top. The walls were decorated sparsely with cardboard printed caricatures of baby ostriches, bunnies, and orangutans in diapers. The back wall had a set of cabinets that reminded me of a doctor’s office.

“The reason I wanted to talk to you,” Eddie began, “is because, well, I was thinking.” He broke off. I sat down in one of the plastic-backed chairs wondering where this was going.

              “You know I’m their leader,” he finally continued after a long time trying to gather his thoughts.

              “I think you’re a very good leader.”

              “Thanks.” He beamed. “I don’t always do so well. We need something else. We need help.”

              “It looks like you got a lot of things pretty well under control here. Everyone’s protected, cared for at least as best as you can under the circumstances. You have an army. The place is clean, so you have discipline, and you’re friends with Ashley, who I don’t think will let any of you get sick if she can help it.”

              “I don’t always know what I’m doing.”

              “What are you asking me?”

              “Would you guys like to move in? Take over? We can give you your own room. We can. . .”

              I cut him off by raising my hand. Now I couldn’t tell him I’d been thinking about how I could take over from the moment I first met them. How I could see they were starving for adult supervision. How even now Donny and the rest were listening to my girl about how to improve their fighting tactics. I couldn’t tell Eddie that by default of being an adult they were all looking up to, I was already in charge. Honestly, I had to think of the future here; not the immediate future, but the long-range future. Sure, I could use these kids to do all the things I needed to get done to reclaim some semblance of the world we knew. But where would that leave them in the long run? I had to think bigger than that, especially now that he was making this offer to me. I had to think about how I’d leave this place for them to survive in for years to come. Dylan’s words from my dream last night rang through my head: “
Even George Washington had a continental army he didn’t know how to use.”
I knew my long silence was killing Eddie and the words he expected me to say were killing him because I wasn’t saying them. I wasn’t saying anything. All this was springing around in my brain for what seemed like an eternity to me, so it must have seemed longer to him. Finally I said, “No.” Crestfallen, stunned, crushed; none of those words come close to the expression of lost hope that covered his face. His lips quivered and I wasn’t sure if he was on the verge of tears or trying to decide if he was going to say “but” or “why.”

“Look, you’re their leader. They chose you.” I pointed at him for emphasis. “You might invite me in to take over, but do you think they’ll accept me as a leader because I’m an adult? No. They’re all very proud of what you guys have built here without adults. You might need adults, you might want adults, but you just can’t point to me and say to them ‘he’s the leader.’ They won’t accept it. They won’t accept me or her or anyone.”

              “But—”

              “If this were true, then why isn’t Ashley your leader? Did you offer the job to her?’

              “No.”

              “But you offered it to me. Eddie, I want the job, but I can’t take it. I can use you guys to do all the things that need to be done to secure this area and rebuild this community. With all your people, I could do it in half the time, if not sooner.”

              “Then why not lead us?”

              “You were there right beside me today. What went wrong?”

              “A herd of zombies came from down the street and caught us.”

              “No, man, I screwed up. What’s the first rule about survival in a zombie world like ours?” He stared at me blankly. “Come on, man, you know this, it’s silence. You have to keep quiet or they come. How much noise was I making letting that diesel truck and all the other cars sit running? Without those engines, how quiet is this city? I made a big mistake today and it almost got us all killed.”

              “But it was a smart idea closing those bridges and ramps. We’d have never thought of that.”

“I’m not saying I expect you to be Peter Pan’s Lost Boys here, Eddie. I’ve never been through a zombie apocalypse either. I’m making this all up as I go along. Sometimes I feel like I’ve almost gotten myself killed every day. You want me to put all of you in that kind of danger every day? I’ll make a deal with you. You stay here in charge of these guys. We’ll help you with everything we can. If you need advice on anything, you know where we live. And we can work together, a coalition government, on big problems.”