ZWD: King of an Empty City (5 page)

I woke to the smell of coffee. When I stepped out of the reading room the clock said noon. She was sitting on the floor sipping a cup with a stack of books scattered around her. She’d been very busy while I slept. I went over to the windows at the front of the library and looked out; my eyes traced the off-ramp up to the I-30 bridge, where the runner had come from. It was too far to make out details, but I could see a large group of zombies meandering around up there. That told me all I needed to know about the runner. He and some friends were either trying to leave the city by the bridge or they were trying to scavenge from the empty cars up there and someone made a noise, then the zombies were on them like white on rice. What’s that old saying, “you don’t have to run faster than the lion, you just have to run faster than the other guy”? The guy this morning was faster than the other guys.

The library had a coffee shop on this floor, a way to bring in revenue and compete with Starbucks, get people to sit in here and sip coffee while they read. There were a few different healthy snacks like power bars and dried fruit, so I picked out breakfast and joined her at her spot among the pile of books. I told her about the zombie last night and the runner this morning.

She’d been busy herself. She decided to close off most of the other exits by moving things in front of them or locking the doors. She didn’t want to mess with the next floor, she just wanted to find out what we needed and get out of here. She locked the elevators to open up here and went downstairs to check the library computers for different subjects. The Internet was still down, she said, but the in-house system still worked. The phones were still out and she found nothing on the television in the break room. There was an NOAA radio but it was broadcasting nothing. Everything was the same as it had been for weeks. We kept checking, though.

Her subjects ranged from cooking to farming, solar power, electricity, canning, tools, locks, knots, ship rigging, home repair, renovation, carpentry, camping, and wilderness survival. She was sitting there with a notepad on the floor next to her and she’d flip through the books looking for things, then either toss the book behind her or sit it in a stack she deemed important. I picked up the book on ship rigging and thumbed through it. “See if you can figure out how to make one of those things where I have it bookmarked.”

It was bookmarked on a picture of a three-pole pulley system with a couple of block and tackle pulleys to make lifting heavy objects easy. “I can do this if I have the poles and stuff to do this with, why?”

She held up a finger for me to wait, then after reading whatever it was she was reading she made some quick notes and said, “I’m coming up with a plan and we’ll need that.”

              “Ok, what do you have in mind?”

              “I can’t tell you now. Let me finish. Here.” She searched around and found me a book on wilderness survival. “Read everything you can on water purification and how to build a big purifier.”

We spent the day and most of the night looking at all this stuff and a lot more. That night we found a DVD player and watched a movie in one of the cubicles while eating power bars and dried fruit and some of the stuff we brought. Later that night I took a sponge bath in the sink. The next day as she kept reading and making notes I explored the rest of the library. Turns out there were five floors to this building. I could never get the door to the roof to open. Probably just as well.

ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 06

ZWD: Dec. 07.

Two days in the library cleaning it of zombies just to find a book on plants. We have water, shelter, and little sign of the dead. Staying.

“How many do you think are out there?” I asked her.

“Zombies or people?”

“People.”

“Well, us and your runner from the other day is three. I hope some survived the attack at the Big Dam Bridge, especially some of the girls, I liked them. We know there are people hiding up in Cammack Village and in our neighborhood, so I’m guessing fifteen hundred around town.”

“That’s not a lot,” I offered. I rubbed my tired eyes with the palms of my hands, then laid my head down on the stack of books in front of me. We were on the third floor in the common area where we had basically moved in. Books were scattered in little piles all around us. We’d been reading for hours and I was tired.

“I’m just going by what we know.”

“You’d think there’d be more.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I did some reading on pandemics, which is kind of what this reminds me of, and since this spreads pretty fast, few people really had a chance.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s say this started in New York or L.A. There are a lot of people in those places and we know that if you’re bitten you change within the hour, sometimes half an hour. We’ve seen that happen time and again. So this probably spread like a wave in one of those places and knocked out the population quickly. Spreading exponentially, one turns, then two turn, four turns to eight. Sixteen turn. We probably were swept in the wave of infection at one hundred thousand turns to two hundred thousand.”

“But what about natural barriers like the Rockies or the Appalachian Mountains?”

“Well, you got to think that someone was bitten and they were fleeing to a hospital or some place they thought of as safe. Maybe their kid was bitten and turning in the back seat. They’re driving over the mountains and the kid finishes turning, then jumps up and bites them. This causes a wreck, now you have two in the car or more and someone stops to help them, and they get bitten, now you have another wave of infection on the other side of the mountains.”

“There are a lot of flatlands and fields between here and the coast,” I offered.

“There would still be a wave of infection, I think. We may have been on wave three or something like that.”

“How did we not hear about it at all?”

“I never really watched TV and you never took it off ESPN or the History Channel.”

“I don’t remember, how fast did this hit town?”

“The first I heard of it was on a Thursday. People started evacuating on Friday and by Sunday it was as it is now.”

“Damn, that’s fast.”

We talked like that for a few hours as we read book after book. She’d hand me a book with something marked in it and say, “Find out everything you can about this.” Often it would be something like lock picking and safes or magic dealing with picking locks something completely off the wall and vaguely related. Or it would be on water storage and irrigation. Pulleys and hoists, trap doors, traps, fire making, water purification.

Who knew that you could take sand, charcoal, grass, and two two-liter soda bottles and in a few hours have clean drinking water? She wanted me to think of a way to do this on a larger scale. She said that we had no idea when the water treatment plant would stop working and we’d have to know how to do this stuff on our own. I could see her point. For three days we read and napped and read more. And watched movies from the library selections. We had water and shelter and little sign of the dead around us. I was thinking of staying.

That afternoon she came to me and had all her notebooks under her arm. I was on the second floor looking through the last newspaper the library had gotten. I didn’t like the news it had printed. According to the paper that was dated two days before this zombie thing hit Little Rock, the first case started in Miami. Nobody knew how it started, but they just knew it did, or at least that was what the papers said. One or two more days and they might have said what caused all this. Within hours most of the city was infected. It didn’t have to cross the mountains like we speculated, but spread north and out. She was right, we were in the one-hundred-thousandth wave of the infection. The CDC in Atlanta was basically clueless. Now it’s gone.

              She laid the notebooks down on the table and plopped into the chair next to me. “I need a day away from this,” she said.

“Nobody is making you do any of this.”

“I know, but this has to be done, and soon.”

“What is it you're working on anyway?”

               “A way for us to survive. What was it Ben always said?”

“Ben? From the office?”

“Yes. What is it you said he always says when he’s giving his analysis about something? ‘In a worst-case scenario.’ That’s what I’m working on, how do we survive in a worst-case scenario.”

“Ok. Haven’t we been doing that so far?”

“No, the food is running out. We don’t know how to find more in nature, what’s safe to eat or what’s not. What about when the electricity finally goes out? And you know it will. We don’t know where the power plant is. And what about when the sewers stop or the tap water stops? We need to know how to dispose of our waste and get fresh water, grow food. I don’t even want to think about medicines.” I could see she was getting worked up and she had a right to be. I’d been thinking about those same things for a while, but hadn’t said anything. We definitely needed a plan and skills, both of which we didn’t have. By profession I was a web designer and she was an interior decorator, neither useful in a survival situation. I may be a hunter, we both are, but the last time she went hunting she bragged about how they sat in the inflatable hot tub and drank wine at night while they watched a movie on the tablet, hardly a survival situation. Up till now it had all been dumb luck, but now it was a matter of learn fast or die.

“The survival books all say the same thing,” I said, “Shelter, food, and water are the three top priorities. We got plenty of shelter, nobody’s home; we can pick and choose our homes and live wherever we want. Water, we have a river. So food is the growing problem.”

“No. Shelter is the biggest problem. We need someplace high, with a lot of space and easily defensible, like a mesa.”

“Not a lot of those around Little Rock,” I offered.

“I was thinking of the Safeway on Main Street.”

“You want to live in the Safeway? Won’t that invite folks to come in?”

“Not in it, on it. Up on the roof.”

“The roof? Ok, I’m listening.”

“People can go in and out of that Safeway all they want, it won’t matter if we’re on the roof, and if you remember, Tommy and John used to live in that house on the corner of Nineteenth and Scott. Scott runs behind the Safeway. We used to drive back there all the time. There’s only one way to the roof and it’s in a little cove with air conditioning units, so it’s easily protected. We can build a hoist and haul up all the stuff we need to live on the roof. There’s a funeral home behind it so we can burn our trash as long as we have gas. I haven’t figured out the water yet, but we can put a tent up there and live. We can build raised garden beds and haul dirt up there to grow our own food.”

“You’re really planning on the long haul.”

“I don’t know what else to do, and this is keeping me sane.”

I knew what she meant, and her plan was simple. Move to the roof of the Safeway and use its flat roof space as an isolated hanging garden where we could safely grow food. We went over her notes for her idea and she’d thought out almost every detail of how we’d do this. Now I understood why she was so intent on me reading about hoists and water purification and all that other stuff. For us to have carried all those books back with us would mean having to travel through zombie country carrying hundreds of pounds of books. Better to just carry the knowledge with us, and a few notes. I started making notes myself; now that I knew what she had in mind, I could start planning. I was making lists of materials, tools, and anything else I could think of that we might need to build the things we’d need to make this work. I started reading books on castles and forts and their fortifications. I tried to think of ways to apply it all to a grocery store.

              Did you know it only takes about an acre and a half of land to feed a family of four? That is, if they don’t grow their own meat and wheat. I don’t know how big an acre is, but I was guessing that the roof of the Safeway had at least half that much space up there. That’s a lot of dirt to haul up to a roof. We were going to be busy.

I drew out the plan for long raised flowerbeds. I thought we’d build them as we needed them and fill them as we went along. We still had the problem of food being sparse and having to go out each day to scavenge for it, as well as trying to build these beds, so the day would have to be split up between jobs. And I had a feeling that as we went along there would be more and more projects that we’d be adding on to this. On top of this, winter was just starting.

After we called it quits on our research and planning, I sat there at the window of the garden looking out at the corner of Second Street. Outside there was still a foggy haze in the air. Snow was mixed in with the rain that was coming down. I hadn’t been outside in five days and I could only imagine that it was that damp cold that got into your bones. The sun was going down because it was late. I was again in shadows. I liked sitting there in the shadows. For some reason it gave me comfort.

As I looked out at the misty rain and snow coming down, I saw a figure emerge from the fog. He walked with that confused movement of a zombie—aimless and lost. I knew what he was doing; he was looking for food. Behind him came another figure, followed by a third. A woman and a child who was perhaps nine when she died. They stopped as a group in the intersection and kind of looked around. The woman then wandered over to the library garden and looked around in it. She didn’t come into the garden but stood there at the fence. Her eyes moved up to the window I was in front of and it seemed as if she were looking at me through the reflective glass. I don’t know; maybe she was looking at her own reflection. I didn’t move, but I was ready to. I wanted to go out there and bring the shovel down on her head. I would if she started to make a fuss. I studied her face. She had a waxen color to her skin, bloated, tight. I looked over at the man and child. They were the same way, freshly dead. I think the freshly dead are the most dangerous because they still have a little bit of human in them. They can still think a little or remember a little. Till they go through rigor mortis they’re the most dangerous. After rigor they’re stupid, hungry, and slower, easier to kill.

She raised her arm and pointed to a statue of a cherub that stood in the garden under a dead bush. Her movements were too fluid. They hadn’t gone through rigor yet. I tried to see where she’d been bitten without moving. From where I was I couldn’t tell. The man turned and started walking north towards Markham. I could see his shoulder and the blood around his neck. He was still remembering that restaurants were on Markham, so he was going there to look for food.

              The child fell into step behind him. She had blood around her mouth. She’d bitten one of her parents. The woman had blood around her mouth too. She’d probably bitten him. He didn’t have any blood on his mouth, so he was probably starving. He’d be the dangerous one. As the woman fell into step behind them, I was rather proud of myself for making these observations and conclusions. I wondered if frontiersmen like Daniel Boone made these kinds of observations with animals. I went back upstairs after they’d gone and told her about my conclusions. She said that made sense. She suggested I start making notes about things like that so that it might help others. I found another empty pad of paper and started writing down this stuff. I called it the “Zombie War Diaries Fighter’s Manual.” I almost felt like I was thirteen again and playing Dungeons and Dragons. I’m kind of proud of it, although it’s really just a list of bullet points with some long explanations where needed. I guess I stopped writing after about seven and pulled a chair up to the window in the corner on the third floor looking east. I could look up the Second Street ramp to I-30. With the night and the fog I couldn’t see much farther than the parking lot in front of the library. My hand was cramping from all the writing and I still planned to keep this diary, so I lost myself in thought.

At first I tried to remember television shows and movies, then song lyrics. Spending hours on a computer as a web designer, I listened to a lot of music on my iPhone. Now I could hardly remember any songs. I think I remembered most of the words to “American Pie,” but I wasn’t sure. Some memories were sharper. I could clearly remember a night that seemed like it was a lifetime ago. Our neighbors Andy and Jill, dinner, laughter, and a future that looked very bright.

“Anybody want more wine? We have another bottle of Merlot chilling in the fridge.” Andy pointed the empty bottle at me in a questioning gesture.

“No, I’m good, in fact, it’s getting late and we have to be getting back,” I told him.

“You’re kidding, it’s only . . . nine-thirty.” He had to search the room for a clock. He and Jill didn’t usually use this room in the house, their formal dining room. Normally they ate either in the den or the breakfast nook of their kitchen. But today was an anniversary for them and they wanted to celebrate. Andy and Jill had now been in Arkansas for five years. They didn’t think they’d be here for one. His job with the government was a contract job that was paid for by a grant that was only to last for one year. But when all the fracking quakes started, his position was funded and extended. Now he was supposed to travel around the state and check on the fracking oil wells to make certain they were following guidelines. He had two more years on his contract before the money ran out again, and they’d both fallen in love with the state. She was an interior designer who worked in the same store as my girl. That was how we all met. Andy and I hit it off from the moment we met. I think that first night over at their house he and I played video games for hours while the girls talked. They became our closest friends. Our weekends were planned with one another. The girls were always on the phone with each other or texting. You’d think since they worked together that wouldn’t be so, but it was.