I turned around but all I could see were the trees. Until one of them moved.
Do you remember your seventh grade science teacher? He was probably a little bald guy with glasses who had trouble picking up textbooks with his pipe-cleaner arms. My teacher was the polar opposite of yours. Mr. Sheldon. Mr. Sheldon was six foot eight and four hundred pounds of solid muscle. This was the kind of man that would make professional wrestlers piss themselves at the thought of a bout with him. He had tree trunks for arms, and legs the size of…well…tree trunks.
So when I tell you that the man I was looking at was bigger than Mr. Sheldon, I want you to store that in your memory bank. Guy was a house. I have no doubt that he could have played football against the New York Giants and won. By himself.
He was holding a camouflage compound bow, which was dwarfed by his giant frame and massive hands, and he was looking at me. He cocked his head to the left to look past me and pointed behind me.
My former friends, the ones who had left me to die because I had been bitten, were coming through the snow a few hundred feet behind. I swallowed hard and turned to face the giant. With a simple nod of his head, he beckoned me to follow, and he moved into the woods with a grace that belied his size.
So I followed, the cries of the dead not far behind.
Here There Be Giants
A tree house. The guy lived in an A-frame tree house with antennas and satellite dishes and solar panels on the side. I mean, who lives in a tree house? Squirrels and giant dudes I guess. We climbed a ladder with a hinge in the center, and he folded it up when we got through his trap door. The place was hardly Spartan, with real windows, running water and power but hand-made furniture. There was a forty-two-inch flat screen on a birch table and an assortment of DVDs. A laptop sat on a bench in a corner.
He indicated I should sit down in a rough-hewn stick chair. I did. I had to move two books that were on the chair; Principles of Quantum Physics and String Theory, a First Look. He took off his gear and sat down, letting out a sigh. He opened a small fridge and passed me a Bud Light. It was cold. He took one for himself, popped the top and took a swig. His swig was twelve ounces, and he tossed the empty into a trash can. Swish. He moved to a book case, searched for a moment and pulled out a notebook. Scribbling something quickly, he passed it to me. My name is Ship, I don’t speak. What is your name? He took off his balaclava, and I picked the string theory book back up. His picture was on the back. Dr. Ship Parish. Good looking guy. Solid features, dark hair with little flecks of gray just starting to creep in over the ears.
I was stunned. Who the hell names their kid Ship? That’s just downright cruel. Can you imagine what the other kids said to him in the third grade? On the flip side, what person in their right mind would pick on this guy? He was a cross between Stephen Hawking and the Hulk. Not that stupid, crappy gray Hulk either, the green one that kicked ass. Yes, I’ve read a comic or three, and believe it or not, convicts root for the good guy too, it’s human nature.
I asked him if he was a genius, and he told me via notebook that was a relative term and smiled. The notebook also revealed that he was born with no vocal cords. I guess when they were cooking him, they missed one ingredient and made up for it with extra muscle and brains. The notebook continued to tell me things about him and we traded information for a few hours.
Ship was from California. Grew up near San Francisco, attended the California Institute of Technology, then traded one tech school for another and graduated from MIT with a double doctorate in physics and quantum physics. He also passed the Massachusetts engineering exam and was a board member of the National Science Foundation.
Holy shit.
He had given up his lifestyle to move into solitude because he couldn’t stand society anymore. Made his living writing books and giving online written lectures.
This guy must have terrified all the uber-nerds in the United States. Can you imagine disagreeing with him on the fundamentals of particle acceleration? I mean one sideways glance and the geeks would crumble and assent to whatever Ship said. I mean wrote down in his notebook. I chuckled at the thought of Ship being king of the nerds and he looked at me quizzically.
I let him know what I was thinking and he smiled too. I began to talk and he began to listen. I was in the process of telling him about being bitten, when he became rigid and looked nowhere special. He stood stock still and put a finger to his lips. His massive frame moved past me and he extinguished the lantern we had been using. He parted the dark curtains, and looked outside, then motioned me to do the same.
In the pre-evening gloom, I could make out shapes moving in the woods not too far away from the tree house. Directly below us was something I would never forget. Standing in the snow, not the least bit bothered by the cold, was a man in a bloody cop uniform with an arrow protruding from his chest. He stared up at me staring down at him. His mouth was impossibly wide open and he let out that mournful moan that was like a dinner bell for his buddies. They came as quickly as their dead legs would carry them.
Ship and I both kind of backed away from the window. We looked at each other and he shrugged and beckoned me to follow him. We sat near his laptop and he powered it up. It was plugged into the wall. I asked him how he had power and he told me that the solar panels were functional, and he had two windmills for additional power an eighth of a mile into the woods in a clearing. Fifty-six yacht batteries stored the power for use and the whole house and two small sheds were rigged for off-grid power. Genius.
He jotted something down on his notebook and passed it to me. Plenty of food and drink. If they go away we’re good, if not we will go take them out in the morning. Power is out across the country, but some nuke plants and solar/wind arrays are still functioning. Ship pointed to the screen, which held a map of the U.S. with different colored dots all over it. Red or blank means no power. Yellow means fluctuations, green is powered up.
Most of the country was blank. Just a black screen. Scattered lights of the three colors dotted the map. Surprisingly, one in southeastern Massachusetts was a bright green. I pointed to it, “Pilgrim?”
He nodded his enormous nut, (nut also means cranium, get your head out of the gutter); it was the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth, Mass. Still supplying juice to some I guessed. I knew that quite a bit of those facilities were automated, but somebody must be alive down there to pull switches and push buttons.
My brow furrowed and I asked him how it was possible that he could get on the internet.
As long as the servers and nodes have power, the clients will work fine, certain sites will start to drop off soon as their batteries deplete. Other critical sites have indefinite power and will remain online, but as the nodes fail we won’t be able to access them.
“Nodes?”
He rolled his eyes and shook his head at the same time. He grabbed the notebook and passed it back almost immediately. One word glared at me from the lined paper:
Noob.
That was mean.
Ship checked several other sites, including a Pentagon site that was still functional and being monitored. They were none too happy about the intrusion and they let him know it. I was actually watching somebody hack a government website. I was in the presence of another criminal. Suddenly his computer just shut off. He tried to turn it back on but it wouldn’t. SOBs bombed me. Was all he wrote.
We conversed for a while until the sun went down. Ship didn’t want to turn on any lights, so he showed me to the most uncomfortable couch in the world and gave me a sleeping bag and a pillow. He pointed to his crotch and then to a door that was apparently a bathroom. I nodded in understanding and we went to bed.
What’s the most unpleasant sound in the world? Fingernails on a chalk board? Your mom yelling at you? Baby crying? Nope. How about the sound of your cell door closing for the first time? Now that’s bad. Terrifying. Even the cell door can’t compare to the sounds of the undead though. The noise they make is…wrong. It’s just wrong. Yo
u can sit there as you read this and moan, and try to make it as spooky and weird as you want, but it won’t be the same. There’s no way you can be alive right now and not have heard them, so you get it. Their cries can’t be imitated. They’re just off somehow.
It’s maddening. I could hear Ship’s light snores in the other room, but those damn wails were about fifteen feet below me and they seemed to come from everywhere at once. I didn’t want to plug my ears in case one of them somehow got up here with us, but in the end I got so tired I jammed a .38 round in each ear. It worked. I fell asleep.
I woke up to the unmistakable sound of a pump shotgun being charged. Another terrifying sound. My eyes flew open and I stared cross-eyed down the unbelievably huge barrel of said shotgun. I had to pee and my morning missile shriveled away instantly.
Not taking his hand off the gun, an infuriated Ship pointed to my leg, which was hanging off the birch wood couch. The bite mark was glaring. It was still red and purple, but it looked much better than it had even yesterday before I took the bandage off for good.
“I’m immune.”
Ship shook his massive cranium in the negative and I told him I had been bitten over a week ago. I had been with him for more than twelve hours and I wasn’t sick. “Nobody bitten could last that long without being sick,” I pleaded as I raised my hands, “so you know I’m not going to turn.”
He seemed to ponder this for a moment as his gaze focused elsewhere, then he lowered the shotgun and sat next to me. He scribbled something in his book and passed it to me.
Explain.
I told him everything as quietly as I could because I could hear shuffling in the snow below us, although the moans had ceased. I showed him the wound on my leg and the other one just below my collar bone. That one did show signs of infection, but not by the plague. Ship took notice and he cleaned it out for me. To my everlasting shame, I screeched like a baby when he put that stingy shit on me, and then the moans started again. Baby, he mouthed.
That was mean too.
He put away the antiseptic and threw another log on the fire. I bandaged my shoulder boo boo and he began writing in his book. Actually, he wrote so long I thought he might be writing another book. When he finished, he passed the pages to me and I began to read. Lots of question marks at the right side of the pages.
Weapons fire from outside interrupted my reading.
The Crimson Collars
There were a lot of Woo-hoo’s and Yee-ha’s accompanying the gunshots. Some of the fire was automatic too. It was over in about a minute, and then Ship and I heard voices.
“Now this here’s a fine idea. We’d be off the ground and…”
“Jed! Clem’s been bit!”
Wonderful. Yee ha? Jed? Clem? I looked at Ship and he was already looking at me. My large friend’s laconic nature was emphasized by one mouthed word: Rednecks.
I was equally as terse this time: Shit.
“How many times I gotta tell you boy, don’t interrupt me when I’m talkin’!”
“But Clem’s been bit!”
A single shot echoed through the trees, followed by sporadic laughter, “And now he won’t bite nobody else. Didn’t like him none anyway, smelled like possum.”
Possum? Smelled like possum? No doubt in my mind anymore. I had held out brief hope, what with the fall of humanity and all, that these good old boys would be friendly. That hope evaporated with the mention of possum, and the quick decision to end someone because they smelled like said critter. These assholes were going to shoot us.
I peeked down and saw their weapons. Military stuff. M-somethings, all black and wicked looking.
Jed called up to us and asked us if we was in here. I looked at Ship and he nodded no, while he fished for something. He brought out a little green thing rolled up in a black wire, which he began unspooling. He was almost done before the first bullet tore through the bottom of his house. We ducked and I hit the table, jarring it and knocking my beerymid to the floor. (A beerymid is when you take some beer cans and stack them in pyramid fashion.) The scowl from Ship was worse than when my dad caught me smoking at age thirteen. I just shrugged.
“You boys comin’ out?”
Ship had already passed his notebook to me. It read: Them or us, and Ship held up the little green clicker thing. The wire snaked into the wall near the floor by the computer. He flicked a little silver toggle and a single tear dropped from his left eye.
Ten or fifteen bullets ripped through the floor and walls of the A frame, fired from an automatic. I could smell the cordite and I was inside. I looked at Ship, thinking that we were in it deep, but he was on his back. There was blood on his head and he wasn’t moving. They had gotten my new buddy. I told him I was sorry and grabbed the green thing with the wire.
Oh yeah, and the place was on fire. The bullets must have hit something flammable, because flames were licking up the far wall and had spilled across the floor.
Then I yelled down to the bad guys: “Hey Jed! Why don’t you eat a big bag of dicks you sheep-shagging redneck!” I clicked the handle together expecting something monumental. Nothing happened.
I heard Jed outside, “Did that sumbitch just call me a homo-sex-shal?”
I clicked the thing again and nothing happened a second time, so I double clicked it in a panic, and something outside went boom. It shook the A frame, and it was loud. I was inside and my ears were ringing. Screams of pain and terror were carried to me on the air, each one a nail in my soul, and I dared a peek outside. I probably shouldn’t have. Those that were still alive wouldn’t be for long, and pieces of them were scattered about on the reddening snow. One was trying to keep his insides inside with his one arm, and another was making a feeble attempt to crawl away with half a leg, leaving bits of himself behind in a red trail as he moved through the white world. He didn’t get far and the screaming turned to whimpering in about a minute.
I had now killed living men, dead women, and a Runner, however you classify him. Infected? I was thinking that I had been in prison for a year, but I had never killed anything other than bugs and a particularly unlucky chipmunk in my life until the past week, when I heard movement behind me.
Ship was sitting up. He was more than half my height sitting down he was so huge. Dealing with a gigantic zombie in a small room which, incidentally, was aflame, was going to be tricky. Not to mention his hundred pound leg was directly across the trapdoor. The big guy was starting to stand, so I darted for the shotgun leaning against the table. I was fast and I grabbed it, jacking a round into the chamber. What I actually did was jack the only shell that was in the weapon out onto the floor, where it rolled away and under the torture device Ship had called a couch. Shockingly, the weapon wouldn’t fire. Ninja like, I flipped the shotty around, brandishing it by the barrel, and with a war cry that would have put Conan to shame, I swung my bludgeon at his noodle in an arc designed to take it off at the neck.
The creature’s left hand shot out like a striking mamba and halted my wayward attempt at decapitation mid swing. It then grabbed me by the neck with its free hand and lifted me off the floor. My vision started to blur, and I have no doubts my face went from peach to cherry to plum with little pause between. Dead bastard was going to eat me standing up.
Then he put me down gently and shook his head in disbelief. He passed me back the shotgun and put a hand to his head, drawing it back in a moment. He looked at his hand and swooned, sitting on the couch with a creak. Apparently, my Ship had not sunk.
I stood there in shock until he opened the bullet-ridden fridge and grabbed a beer. It also had been murdered, so he tossed it, grabbed a survivor and put it to his head. I was still in shock when he whipped around and saw the fire behind him. He stood quickly blinking hard, obviously woozy. Grabbing a fire extinguisher, he pulled the pin, pointed it at the fire, and pulled the trigger. Momentary confusion set in for both of us as nothing happened, then he held up the extinguisher, and noticed that it too had been killed in the redneck att
ack.
The whole A frame shook when he hit the floor. The slaughter of his house, his fridge, his fire extinguisher, and most importantly his beers must have been too much for him, and he had passed right the hell out. I opened the trap door and tried to move him to it. Nope. I’m a strong guy, six four, two forty, little bit of flab, but I worked out in the joint. I couldn’t budge him. I slapped him twice. His eyes fluttered, but only for a moment.
I ran through his burning home to the kitchen and grabbed a pitcher, filling it with water. I dumped it on his head and that woke him up. We climbed down the ladder, almost falling because I forgot to release the bottom half, and he sat in the snow about fifty feet away against a pine tree. I was struck by an epiphany and raced back up the ladder. The place was really burning now and I reached for the shotgun, but it was too hot to pick up. My revolver was nowhere in sight, the last time I remember having it was when I was on the couch, which was now merrily ablaze. I was able to find the two items I originally went back for though, and as an afterthought, I dumped the fridge over and grabbed the last four beers with no holes in them.
I scurried back down the ladder and made my way to my buddy, whom I had known less than twenty four hours. He was on his back, and his head was bleeding profusely, a small red puddle in the snow next to him. I popped the tab on one of Ship’s beers and drank the whole thing down. Sloshing behind me made me turn around quickly.
The rednecks were coming, although considerably less alive. There had been eight of them, two of them down for good, two beginning to stir, and four headed our way. All I had was my lighter and three beers for defense, and Ship was down for the count. I did the only thing I could think of, I ran right at them. I pushed down the only one standing and searched the snow. A hand wrapped around my ankle and I screamed an extremely unmanly scream. I found what I was looking for and picked up the cold metal. It looked like one of the guns from the movie Platoon, so I guessed it was an M16. First to go was ankle biter, who was dragging both me to his mouth and his mouth to me at the same time. I aimed and fired at his head, turning it to goo, but also having the gun buck and shake as I spit out about fifteen rounds. The shots went everywhere when I spun the weapon out of control.
Chaos Theory Page 3
