ZWD: King of an Empty City (25 page)

At a full run, I covered my face with my arms and crashed through the bay window of the house. I rolled onto the floor and cut my hand on the broken glass as I came to my feet and ran blindly through the house. I flung the back door open and grabbed a dishtowel from the kitchen sink on my way out. I heard the chain link fence that lead to the backyard crashing open and I turned on my heels, running through the house again. I leapt through the broken window and lost my feet as I landed on the slick porch outside. I fell into the holly bushes lining the front of the porch. I knew it wouldn’t take him long to realize what I’d done and I didn’t think I could make it to the empty house where my feeble plan of escape still waited to be formed.

              But, there in front of me was the entrance to the crawlspace under the house hidden by the bushes, so I went to it and popped it open, then shimmied inside and replaced the cover. Something told me not to stay near that thing so I looked around until I saw another light and started crawling to it. I was almost there when the entrance cover behind me opened. I stopped and hoped that all the obstacles I’d crawled over this far would be enough to shield me from his sight. It must have been, because he fired three rounds under the house and listened. I pretended I was dead just in case he could see me in the darkness. An eternity later, the little door shut again and I thought it was funny that this stone-cold killer would take the time to replace the cover to the crawlspace.

A few moments later the little light that had come in through the vent opening went dark and there was a scraping sound behind it. He was trapping me under the house. I slowly made my way to the other light I saw from the far side of the house. I must have been ten feet away when it went dark too. He was sealing me in for good. “Hope you die in there, motherfucker,” I heard his muffled voice say.

              I laid my head down on the cold earth and relaxed. I thought I’d stay here for half an hour, then try to get out. I knew I had some tools and I might be able to get out easily, but I needed to give him time to go away. I tried to stifle a cough and curled into a ball while I tried to stop the bleeding of my hands and my side where the screwdriver went through me. I fell asleep as the adrenaline wore off.

ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 25

ZWD: Dec. 20.

I get a lesson in meth lab economics as I burn up with fever right before I burn to death.

I woke up coughing, burning up and shivering in pitch-blackness. It took me several minutes to remember where I was. When I tried to sit up I hit my head on the joist of the crawlspace. I couldn’t see any sign of light anywhere. I panicked. I crawled towards what I thought was the direction of the opening I’d seen earlier, but I ran into a wall. My hands were hurting from the cuts and I vomited once and crawled through the puddle because I got turned around when I tried to puke away from the wall. Then I turned back, I thought to the wall, but it wasn’t there. I reached out in all directions and felt nothing. Sweat flowed into my eyes, not that they were doing me any good in this pitch-blackness, but the salt stung my eyes. I started to panic again and had to stop and calm myself. The rich dirt scent under the house wasn’t helping me at all, but it did feel good and cool against my face.

              I don’t know if it was five minutes or five hours that I lay there in the dark. The coughing was making my chest hurt and the smell of dirt was making me nauseous. I couldn’t believe I was lost under a house. You know when they say “Go to your happy place,” that was lost too. I finally had enough presence of mind to pull my shirt collar over my nose and that helped some. Smelling my own funk was decidedly better than the dirt, but not by much. I needed a bath badly. The vomit that was drying in my shirt where I’d crawled through it was surprisingly better to smell than the dirt.

                  I knew there were two ways in here and all I had to do was pick a direction and crawl, knowing that eventually, in this finite space, I’d run into one. After an eternity I made it to a wall and started tracing my way around the outskirts of the house, knowing I’d come to one of the openings.

                  Above me I heard thumping as if someone was moving around in the house. Something crashed to the floor and shattered, then the thumping continued. I debated whether or not I should call for help; after all, I didn’t know who was up there. If it was a zombie trapped in the house, I didn’t really have much to worry about. If it was a human, then it was a matter of friend or foe. Should I call out or not? The thumping stopped some distance away from me; a gun was fired, followed by what I recognized as the sound of a door being kicked in. I’d kicked in enough doors that I knew that sound, even muffled through the flooring. There was another gunshot and then there was silence.

I heard heavy, deliberate steps walking through the house. They paused, I was guessing at each room seeing if it was occupied, then they continued through the house. They faded once, probably to check the upstairs, and then came back. At one point, they were directly overhead. I tried to stifle a cough, but wasn’t too good at it, and I heard laughter from above. There were three distinct thumps from a boot and then more laughter. I now knew how fish felt when I thumped the glass.

                  Something dripped on the back of my neck. I wiped it off and sniffed. My heart raced as I realized it was gasoline. That fucker was drenching the house. He was going to burn it down with me under it! I started crawling faster along the wall of the foundation, feeling my way for the vent. Pipes from the house plumbing blocked my path, too high and too low to crawl through, so I was forced to follow them around and back to the foundation wall.

                  He walked leisurely around the inside of the house. I could imagine him grinning to himself. The smell of gas got stronger. I finally reached the elbow joint for the large PVC pipe of the plumbing and the smaller copper pipes of the water line. I wasted no time getting around them, ripping my pants on a nail as I went; I was bleeding from that too.

                  I knew he was there, he knew I was here; I made no attempt to hide my coughing now. It was getting harder to breathe with the gas fumes. I had to stop several times for a coughing fit. I was crawling in sprints as fast as I could. I couldn’t keep my shirt over my mouth and nose while I was crawling and the smell of the dirt, although it made me nauseous, was better than the gas. Goddamn, how much gas was he using up there?

                  Finally, my hand hit the foundation wall, quickly followed by my head. I was moving that fast, what can I say? The small hole where the pipes for the water ran into the house had a small space around them where the PVC pipe went under the ground. I stuffed my nose as close to the small opening as I could get it, also shoving it into a spider web. But I didn’t care, I was breathing in clean, sweet air. I thought because of the pipes, I was somewhere at the back of the house or at the side near the back. The crawlspace opening had to be near here somewhere.

                  With the foundation wall on my left, I started crawling as fast as I could. I had to stop almost immediately for another coughing fit. My eyes started watering and my nose was now running. After each cough I was breathing in the dirt from the crawlspace floor, which made me cough more. The smell of gas wasn’t as strong here at the wall, a small mercy because it eased my panic a bit. I rolled over on my side, my back leaning against the wall, and rested my head on the dirt and closed my eyes.

                  In that moment of “calm,” my mind said to check my pockets and see what I had that would get me out of here. The first thing I felt and pulled out was two or three of the lighters I normally carried in my jeans pocket. I almost lit one of them so I could look around. I swear, my thumb was on the flint wheel ready to strike it when I remembered the gas. I shoved that back in my pocket and found the keys to all the houses we were in and out of regularly. I had a few knives clipped to my belt, one Phillips, and a glow stick, along with a few other things.

                  I knew I had the glow stick, but after being chased by madmen, burning up with fever, and vomiting while being forced to hide under a house, I really wasn’t thinking straight. I snapped the stick and shook it vigorously. The yellow-green glow came to life and revealed several things around me. The first, I was leaning into a giant spider’s nest and was surrounded by dozens more hanging from the floor joist. As much as I’d been crawling around under here, I was sure I’d pissed more than one of them off and probably had dozens of spider bites by now. I was just too sick to really care. The second thing the glow stick revealed was that I wasn’t that far away from the crawlspace entrance. Five feet ahead of me was the first pool of vomit next to the wall, and three feet beyond that was the little metal door. As I looked at it and cursed myself, I started to crawl towards it, and a light flashed across the slatted air vent. Outside, someone was moving something out of the way.

                  “Hey, cowboy, you in there? Haha, I know you are. Where are you going to go? You know James? James says you’re a warrior. He says you’re dangerous. I disagree with him. I think you’re just a pain in my ass. A cowboy who thinks he can somehow make the world right, like it was.” There was a knock on the little metal door. I thought I should do something to try to make this to my advantage, so I put my mouth in the crook of my arm and answered him back.

“I can’t hear you,” I said. “You sound muffled.”

              “What was that, cowboy?”

              “I said it’s hard to hear you. What did you say?”

                  To my great relief, he opened the door and the rush of cool air did a lot to clear my head. I didn’t realize just how much the gas fumes had gotten to me. I stuffed the glow stick under my belly so he couldn’t see where I was.

              “Is that better? Can you hear me now?”

              “Oh yes, much better,” I said, and just to keep him talking and to help him believe I couldn’t hear him before, I asked, “What was that you were saying about jams?”

              “No, James, one of my people. He thinks you’re a warrior, a threat. I think you’re nothing more than a pain in my ass.”

              “I would be offended if that didn’t seem to be the general consensus about me.”

              “Ha, ha, ha, a pain in the ass
and
funny. Cowboy, I’m going to kill you tonight.”

              “I kill me too.”

              “No, I’m going to kill you. I’ve doused the house with gasoline and in a moment I’m going to close this door again and block it so you can’t get out, and I’m going to walk through the house setting things on fire and let it burn down on top of you.”

              “So why tell me all this?”

              “Call it respect. You’ve managed to galvanize these people into having hope. I can respect that. It won’t do them any good, and with your death, I get everyone back under control.”

              “How did you have them under control again?”

              “They feared us.”

              “Yeah, about that. Since I’m about to die this horrible death under a burning house, do you mind doing the super-villain thing and answering a few questions before you kill me?” There was a long silence, and then I heard the sound of a gun being readied to fire. Little did he know I had no plans of charging that opening and fighting my way out. I just wanted the fresh air and time to think.

              “Sure, why not. What do you want to know?”

              “What the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m making an empire.”

              “But why the zombies? What are you doing with them?”

              “Oh man, that’s the greatest workforce ever.”

              “What do you mean?”

              “I use them to power my building.”

              “Power your building? How? You suck at this super-villain sharing thing, just so you know.”

              “Oh, you want me to spell it all out for you. That it?”

              “Duh, yes! What do you do with the people? That kid said he was in a net. Why are they in nets? What are the zombies powering? What the fuck are you doing?”

              “Cowboy, have you ever wanted to be somebody? I’m assuming you’re a nobody. Before all this I was a nobody, still am, but I see an opportunity here to build an empire, and I goddamn well am going to build it. I was a nobody drug dealer making meth out of bathtubs and car trunks. Shake and bake bottles, all that shit. My shit was good too. Did I make money? No, not like some assholes did. I’d bust my ass and get shit from it.

                  “Then the zombies came and took out all my competition. It’s a simple plan, really. I keep cooking my shit and I pass it out for whatever you bring me. I think the government will come along soon enough. But if I work fast, I can cook enough to hook most of this city and they’ll bring me all the shit I want, so when things come back to normal, I’ll be the king on the top of the mountain. Really, I have a house picked out in West Little Rock that sits up on the bluff overlooking the river.”

              “So what do you use the zombies for?”

              “We have a conveyor belt we put them all on and as they trudge along trying to catch their food, they power the equipment we need to cook large batches of meth.”

              “And the people you take, the ones in the nets?”

              “Carrots on a stick. We hang them in nets in front of the zombies and those gruesome fucks will walk forever trying to catch them.”

              “Don’t you just need gas or propane to make that stuff?”

              “You need electricity to see what you’re doing. We had this idea before the zombies came along, but we were going to use dogs or horses to power the turbines to make our electricity. Work off the grid. My partner got caught once and did two years because the meter man said they were using too much power for the house. The zombies were just convenient. And they don’t eat much. One person in a net can keep them going for weeks. Naturally, we lose some of them. Some of the zombies get lucky and get a bite in, but then we let the victims turn and add them to the belts and hang another person up there, and things go on. Genius, huh?”

              “I have to admit, it really is, except that part about hooking everyone on meth. That’s lame.”

              “Ha, what easier way to control a population? If I want a new car, they’ll bring me one. If I want women, someone will sell their daughter to get a rock. Motherfucker, I got it made.”

                  About that time I heard a muffled voice talking to him. “No trace of her at all?” he asked. The muffled voice said something else in long detail.

              “Cowboy, it looks like your woman got away for now. But she won’t for long.” He turned to the muffled voice and said, “Get everyone together. I want her found.”

                  There was some movement outside and he closed the covering of the crawlspace. Before he sealed it off he left me with these words. “It was nice talking to you. I’m going to find your bitch and make her my first ho, so while you’re burning under there, I want you to think about her sucking my dick
morning, noon, and night.” Then the covering was swung back into place and something was wedged against it. I heard him go back inside and stop every so often. A moment later, I could hear the crackle of the fires he was setting and the heat started to seep through the floor, along with smoke. Then, I heard the truck start up and drive off.