Zach Carter, Zombie Killer Page 2

  “Yo, Sugar Ray.”

  “Yo, Rock-o.”

  “You looking at the GPS? Grid street pattern, some cul de sacs to get lost in and only a couple alternate ways out of the nabe if we run into blockage.”

  “Copy that.”

  “Explain?” Pete said.

  “Lot of cars got abandoned or overrun in the side streets that emergency services never even bothered getting to, so we’ve been boxed in before and it’s not fun.”

  “Copy that,” Pete said. “I know the combination to her room, so it’s in and out.”

  “Guys, how do you feel if I hang back and ditch driving into the side streets,” I said.

  “Double-plus affirmative,” Roy said, “sky’s closing in.”

  “What?” Pete said.

  “Remember the monster movie where someone says, ‘I got a bad feeling about this?’” I said.

  “Understood,” Pete said, as I watched him and the other Expo peel off to go look for his sister.

  I kept the truck running up and down a long service road, keeping an eye on the fuel and the daylight, both of which were losing their early fullness. The way Jimmy tells it they weren’t even able to get out of the vehicle before they got hit by a swarm of zombies coming out from the other houses. Armed as they were with sidearms, they had to let them get close enough to kill, but that meant the Zekes were right on top of them and they had to keep popping them until their guns got hot and finally had to go “Zulu-style” with one guy shooting while the other guy was reloading, just to keep their hands and teeth off of their necks. When you’re in a firefight time stretches, but they were down to their last clip and a half when the kid finally came out with the pillowcase and hopped into his Expo, meaning they had burned through over a 120 rounds each. Taking into account aiming and reloading, the kid was probably inside for close to ten minutes, so his story could be true.

  What was inside the pillowcase was his sister’s severed head, complete with a bullet hole in the forehead. He said his Dad insisted, not only for proof, but to make absolutely sure she couldn’t continue to live as an undead ghoul, feasting on human and/or animal flesh. That kind of thinking is pretty standard, continuing to look at the Zeke as if it were still the person you used to know, and that it had somehow been converted into a perverted version of itself. Therefore, many people like Mr. Ralph Peters insisted on a medieval style of purging and cleansing, which I usually left alone. In my book, the Zeke is no longer a person, it’s not even a former person — it is nothing more than a walking disease without a soul or an intention. It is a malignant fire that needs to be extinguished.

  And I hold onto that belief, because that’s how I’ve learned to deal with this new world — as light against darkness — despite what Pete told us, and despite, or maybe because of, what I’ve learned since.

  Chapter 3

  “Pete, how you doing, son?” I was waiting for him to come back, and his silence didn’t sit well.

  “I’m glad to be headed home.”

  “You want to run that by me again?”

  “You mean about my sister?”

  I let that go. “Yeah, what happened in her house.”

  “I’m telling you, she was in her safe room, playing with one of her stuffed animals, sitting at a table with one of her kiddie tea sets.”

  “And you don’t think that stuff was in there before the outbreak.”

  “I know for a fact I helped her box that stuff up out of her old room at my dad’s place and I put that box myself in her attic at her new place. The box was in the safe room, with most of the contents pulled out.”

  “You think she might have pulled it down before the outbreak.”

  “Anything’s possible, but I’m telling you she was talking like she used to when she was little and she recognized me.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “You ever hear a Zeke call anybody Peepee? That was her baby name for me — and man, I’m telling you she offered me a little teacup, like she used to when she was little.”

  “Did it — did she make a move to put the bite on you?”

  “Yeah. It was like switching a tv channel. One minute she was talking like a little kid, playing house, the next she was nothing but a hungry animal.”

  “Did she —”

  “She never got near me. Once I saw the channel changed, I plugged her in the skull. But no one is going to tell me that my little sister wasn’t still in there, somewhere. Besides, how the hell did she get back into her safe room — it had a hydraulic door with a keypad lock — and she was locked in.”

  “It’s possible she let herself in after she got bit but before she was all gone.”

  “I know. But there was something left of her in that filthy shell I killed.”

  “Fair enough. But I don’t think we should let that kind of information out — we don’t need people having moral qualms if they see dear old Uncle Fester coming at them on the front line. Maybe he’s still in there, maybe he’s not, but you know he’s hungry.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m thinking about not even telling my old man.”

  “Your decision, but maybe you’re right. A father’s love is different than a brother’s.”

  “Clear on that.”

  “You’re a good man Pete.”

  Chapter 4

  The effect of the raw materials we brought back home was like a combination of Christmas and hitting the lottery for the tribe. They had reasonable hope, a means to face the threat that was always out there but ever more maddening because they never knew when it was going to hit again. I guess that’s pretty much a textbook definition of free floating anxiety as any, but flesh eating zombies were never cataloged among the threats facing people in what used to be modern society. The thing that always amazed me was that I hadn’t run into much in the way of crazy ass superstition or its more refined cousin, religion, in terms of the way people handled day to day living in the post Zeke reality. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad one — isn’t myth supposedly the way primitive man made his way out of the caves and into the light of day? As a means to keep him moving forward despite the fears that attacked him throughout the dark and often, during the middle of the day?

  Anyway, what the people of the junkyard had was work to keep them busy, work that was in direct correlation to keeping them alive, and that proved to be as good a balm as any.

  And Ralph was smart about it, he broke people up into groups, from those cutting the tubing, to those making arrowheads and tailfins and those putting them all together, with a separate workshop in charge of manufacturing the crossbows themselves. Everyone had a job and everyone understood they were an important part of moving their defenses beyond the brute hand to hand combat they had about to been reduced to. Maybe this was the birthing ground of the myths that would be told later, after the sheer mortal threat to the race had been beaten back to the point people would have the luxury of bullshitting themselves about magic and divine intervention.

  It was less than two months before Peters and his crew had a working arsenal of crossbows, with an unlimited supply of bolts. They were accurate enough, from atop the piles of crushed vehicles, that they repelled every random Zeke threat, plus a couple of mass onslaughts, once with about three hundred zombies that had been traveling in a pack and somehow got wind of the encampment.

  It was hairy though, and a couple of good people got dragged down from their crow’s nests and torn to shreds by hungry Zekes. That’s what scared everyone the most — Zeke was now so hungry it wasn’t enough to take a bite out of you and move on to the next mobile meal, they were tearing people to strings, eating them while they were screaming for one of us to kill them.

  The three of us had done more than our fair share, from the first and subsequent raids, to standing up and facing Zeke whenever they showed up. We were part of Peter’s inside crew now, and even though his little world was pretty egalitarian, we were first among equals as they used to say, in what
context I don’t remember and goddamn don’t I wish the internet was still around so I could look up stupid trivia like that. Anyway, after we cleaned up the last of the Zekes — and harvested the bolts from their heads, which was part of the deal, even with a stockpile of thousands of bolts and a steady stream of new ones coming — we started talking about what had been obvious to all of us for some time.

  “We got lucky today,” Peters said, eating kitty kabob right off the bbq stick.

  “We have no way to defend ourselves against a true massed attack — anyone ever seen thousands of Zekes moving over ground?” I said.

  “Like being swallowed up by the night sky,” Jimmy said.

  “Sounds like Mr. Peters has a plan,” Roy said.

  “I made a fortune in the salvage business while the world was still turning and that skillset is serving us pretty well — now that we’re in the business of salvaging what’s left of the human race.”

  “At least our corner of it,” I said.

  “Right. Well, like you said, we would be pretty much helpless if a large scale swarm got us in their sights, so I’m thinking we need to improve our defenses.”

  “You’re still not thinking about going underground,” Jimmy said.

  “No. I still don’t like the idea of taking over that military base and hiding out in those bunkers. I know I don’t come across the philosophizing type, but if we’re going to survive as something more than animals, we cannot cede the surface of our planet just cause some goddamned plague knocked us down. We came up from the dark slime and I’ll be goddamned if that’s where I’m gonna lead my people. We have to stand where we are and fight for the right to exist.”

  “You’re right,” Jimmy said. “You don’t come across as the philosophizing type.”

  “But noble, I’ll give you,” Roy said.

  “Ralph, we’re in agreement, I think, but it remains to be seen whether our noble sentiment is going to lead to us rallying back from the brink or getting pushed over it,” I said.

  “Right, well,” he started, then stopped. “Let me tell you what this is about. They took my daughter and she was my heart. Before she came along I was just a greedy scumbag, squeezing dimes out of nickels, but when she was born you know I just wanted to be a better person because I wanted her to live in a better world. And now that she’s gone all I can think about is not letting her down. I know she wouldn’t have wanted me to cave in and close out the rest of the folks still living. If she was here she wouldn’t let me, but since she’s not, well this is how I can honor her life. Cause that’s going to keep me human.”

  “Damn,” Jimmy said.

  “Tell us what you’re thinking,” Roy said.

  “In the way back of my mind I remember learning about walled cities, you know, the first real human settlements that were set up to organize people and to defend against those that weren’t, you know, interested in playing well with others. And that’s basically what we got here, Rube Goldberg style, but you know what I mean. Anyway, so far like we said we been lucky because the threat is larger than we’ve been prepared to answer, so we got to increase our perimeter, I think that’s what happened with some of those older cities, they just kept expanding outwards.”

  “I thought that was mostly because they had more people,” I said.

  “Right, well, that’s part of the plan. We are going to need more folks, and we’ve been seeing onesies and twosies drift along and we took ‘em in.”

  “I noticed you were relaxing your immigration rules.”

  “Well I been thinking about this a while,” Peters said.

  “Since Pete brought Zoe back,” Roy said.

  “That’s right. Once it was known, and since we are relatively safe here, we actually have time to think about things, and since at ground I am a heartless sonofabitch I know ain’t nothing we can do about bringing back what we lost.”

  “Forward,” Jimmy said.

  “Yes indeed. So the people, well, we’ll come to that. But for now, we have to get busy expanding our perimeter, in two stages, with a larger outer barrier made up of rows of what I’m calling Z-wire — same concept as barbed wire, but made out of rows of steel struts with spikes all along, and stacked, so Zeke will have to climb and rip himself to shit just to get inside. Then, inside that perimeter, another defense, this one old fashioned, just a deep ass moat that we dig out, and again, line the bottom and the close in wall with more spikes.”

  “You going to fill the moat with piranhas,” Jimmy said.

  “Nah, I’m figuring waste oil at the bottom, make it slippery for them to climb up out of,” Peters said.

  “You’re talking really about two layers of slowing Zeke down, when he comes.”

  “Yeah, when Zeke and a million of his closest friends show up,” Peters said.

  “Beyond the construction, you’re going to need a lot of people to patrol the perimeters,” Roy said.

  “Like I said, I figure we’ll pick them up along the way,” Peters said.

  “Because this is going to entail multiple trips into the city for material, equipment and supplies,” I said.

  “Right. In order to build our new world we’re going to have to pick the bones of the old ones clean,” Peters said.

  “Have you thought about what the zoning board’s going to say?” Jimmy said.

  Chapter Five

  Even though our job was to scour Albuquerque for supplies, killing Zeke was always at the top of the list. First, if you saw Zeke that meant he saw you and there was never any such thing as a Christmas armistice. Zeke was always on the attack, he was never tired and he was always hungry. Plus, any zombie we killed meant one less Zeke knocking on our door back at the ranch. Other than that, our job became a job like any other. We got up in the morning, shat showered and shaved, got into our gear and went to work. I would say we were like the fighting Seabees, at least my understanding of them, in that we were in charge of building and maintaining infrastructure in combat situations.

  Trips into town were executed in a medium size convoy. A couple strikers in front — SUVs like our trigged-up Expos that could move and fight, followed by a killing wagon, which was a heavy duty tractor pulling a flatbed that had a cage built on top that could hold about 20 fighters — men and women whose job it was to kill Zeke once we spotted a cluster of them. We would radio back and forth, figuring out how to deploy the killing wagon, and often, it was as simple as luring a bunch of shambling Zekes into a parking lot, where they would moan and groan at the tasty meal inside the reinforced box, while the killers would shoot bolts, or use pikes or chainsaws to cut Zeke down.

  The fighters pulled double duty, of course. When we got to an identified destination where we were going to pick up canned food, or steel, or tools or whatever, they would jump down and get the job done as fast as possible. It was taken as a given that there was going to be the occasional loss during our supply runs, and there were — a solitary Zeke could pop out of a bathroom in a service station, or come out of an office or what have you, and as I’ve already said, at this point, Zeke was hungry, so if you got attacked the only positive is that you usually got dead within seconds.

  So there were losses on the caravans, but it was more the stress of going out there, knowing you were going to have to kill them on the run like a goddamned zombie safari, then climb down from your nice safe vehicle and maybe have to deal with a Zeke in the box, jumping out at you, all that got to everyone, but in a way that made us all focused on working at breakneck speed to get the materials we needed for the walled city that many had already nicknamed New Petersburg.

  But there were the occasional triumphs, even if they were punctuated by heart-stopping bits of terror, that kept us going — mostly, I think because we were sharing them with other people, shoulder to shoulder.

  One time, we were on a basic food run, scavenging what was left out of every supermarket, bodega and 7-11 we came across. Back in the old world, people completely lost touch with how much raw
food people needed to survive, even on restricted calorie diets and believe me, obesity was pretty much cured once you entered the Zeke marathon and spent everyday of your existence jogging from the hungry jaws of death, you still needed at least one pound to a pound and a half of food per day per person and with closing on three hundred people at the compound that was a rough figure of at least a ton of food each week. And that number was only going to keep growing, so Ralph had people working on cultivation, preparation and cooking, recycling, even animal husbandry. Dogs were easy to catch, even the feral ones because most of them weren’t too far gone wild and could be coaxed close to us, even if we took them out with crossbows. Cats on the other hand, seemed to know better, and except for the breeding stock we had come by, they seemed to know life was no longer going to be about acting cute and curling up for tasty treats on the divan.