As she stomped back into the kitchen, Abe upended his coffee cup and swallowed the rest, dregs and all. “I believe I shall go upstairs and visit my sweet Agnes.” As he passed, he patted Levi on the shoulder. “Sometimes women can make you regret opening your mouth to even breathe.”
Levi Hobbs simply nodded, afraid to agree, lest he find himself at the end of his wife’s lashing tongue once again.
Chapter 6
That night, lying in bed, the distance between them narrowed.
Neither apologized or said they were sorry. Her hand snaked into his and he clasped it firmly. It was as warm and small as it had been when they had dated, but with differences. Calluses thickened her fingers and palm, and the skin was looser and the veins larger across the back, between knuckles and wrist.
“What are we going to do?” she asked in the darkness.
“About what?” He knew good and well what she was referring to.
“Staying here, on the Ridge. We won’t remain untouched forever. They’ll make their way into the mountains sooner or later… looking for food, or just someone to take a bite out of.”
“We can hold them off,” he said. Levi listened to his own words and found them weak and lank upon his tongue, lacking steel or conviction.
Although he could not see her face, he felt her eyes directed toward him. “The buzzards have been plentiful lately. Moving across the sky thick and black like storm clouds. They don’t move unless the dead move beneath them. They’ll come, with the scent of us in their nostrils.”
He swallowed dryly. “I know.”
“What are we to do then? Stand our ground or turn tail and run?”
“You know my choice.”
“Yes… and we’d die because of it. A house and a piece of land ain’t worth dying for… or changing into one of them.”
Levi knew that she was right. “Tomorrow, I’ll hook the gas tanks to the back of the truck and haul them to either side of the house. Have Avery wire them up in case the house gets overrun. If need be, we can head down that little road out back to the other side of the Smokies and escape.”
Nell sighed in relief. “Maybe you ain’t half as stupid or bull-headed as I’ve thought all these years.”
“Maybe,” he replied with a soft chuckle.
His wife shifted her weight, rolling to face him. “Another thing… no more axe and chainsaw for the boys. I want them armed like the rest of us… a handgun and longarm for each. This toe-to-toe fighting is downright foolishness.”
“I’ll do that tomorrow,” he promised her. “Let them pick what they want from the arsenal Katie brought with her.”
“Well now, you’re being mighty agreeable.”
Levi grinned in the darkness. “If I’m not, I won’t be getting me some, now will I?”
“Oh, is that what you’re aiming to do?” Her hand turned from work hard to velvet soft in an instant.
“Yes, ma’am.” He felt the jounce of the mattress springs as she straddled him. Levi ran his hands under her flannel gown, searching for panties, but finding only her bare hips. “Seems to me you had the same idea.”
Nell emitted that throaty giggle that never failed to turn flesh into iron. Then she leaned down and attacked him with her mouth… but in a good way.
Three days passed without incident.
Levi was true to his word. He and the boys pulled the fuel tanks—one half full of gasoline and the other three-quarters full of diesel—to the northern and southern walls of the old house. Nell left her chores and came outside long enough to watch Avery work his magic—fastening a stick of dynamite to the side of each tank with duct tape and then running the wires along the back lot to a plunger box that sat on a rock beyond a split rail fence.
When he was finished, Nell leaned up on tippy-toes and kissed her son on the jaw.
“What’s that for, Ma?” he asked.
“For giving me peace of mind,” she replied, before going in.
Avery had never connected such an emotion with explosives before, but he accepted her affection just the same.
On the second day, they weeded out a third of the supplies they had taken from Gatlinburg, using the information Abe had brought with him from Oak Ridge. They buried the contaminated food in a large hole that Levi and the boys dug with shovels and muscle. While they were tossing the tainted provisions into the trench, a gray squirrel leapt down from the limb of a sycamore tree. It shuddered violently for a moment and then ran toward them, squeaking and chattering loudly.
It was nearly twenty feet from them when Levi pulled the Blackhawk from its holster and plugged it with a .44 slug. The animal exploded into a tangle of torn tissue and hair. As it lay in the autumn leaves, they walked up and studied it.
“Rabid?” asked Jem.
“Worse,” said their father. The squirrel stank of decomposition and was teaming with swarming black mites.
Carefully, Avery gathered it up on the spade of his shovel and chucked it in the hole. Then they quickly placed the earth back into place and tamped it down firm.
On the third day, Abe Mendlebaum and the Hobbses took up weapons and began to practice.
Jem and Avery chose their guns from the multitude that their sister had looted from her ex-husband’s gun safes. Jem chose a .45 Colt semi-auto pistol, a Buck knife, and a Remington 1100 shotgun, while Avery chose a brace of .357 Smith & Wesson revolvers and a machete with a blade nearly as long as his forearm. He remained attached to the AR-15, which Abe had graciously given him as a gift.
Katie held on to the twin Glock pistols and added an Uzi 9mm with a folding stock to her arsenal. Nell brandished the Colt Python from the glove box of the logging truck, as well as a .30-30 Winchester lever-action rifle. Abe found an Olympic MFR 5.56mm assault rifle to be his best choice, along with a Bersa Thunder Combat .380 pistol. Levi kept his trusty Blackhawk and the 870 pump shotgun.
For several hours, they familiarized themselves with their weapons, learning to load and draw at satisfactory speed. They also fired at a number of targets—tin cans, soda pop bottles, and plastic milk cartons—that Avery had set up on the weathered lumber of the split rail fence at the far end of the property. At first, their accuracy was erratic, especially from the guns with considerable recoil. But, eventually, they began to find their marks and cans spun skyward, while bottles shattered into sprays of gleaming fragments.
Midway through their practice session, Agnes Mendlebaum appeared on the back porch. Agnes was short and heavyset with iron-gray hair and delicate cats-eye spectacles that hung from her neck on a silver chain. Her health had improved steadily during the past few days and she had begun to stir a bit, leaving the house and taking leisurely walks around the Hobbs property. She seemed nervous and agitated, which Abe assured them was due to her desire to leave and continue to North Carolina to locate her sister, Angela.
“Come join us, darling!” Abe called, waving.
Agnes slowly made her way to where they stood in a line beside the storage shed. Avery and Jem looked at one another. “Watch,” said the wilder of the two beneath his breath. “She’ll jump clean out of her skin when the first shot is fired.”
The elderly woman nodded politely to the Hobbs family then spotted something leaning against the wall of the shed. She walked over and lifted a camouflaged compound bow. She lifted it in both hands and plucked at the nylon cord strung between the pulleys of the bow’s fiberglass arms.
“That’s called a hunting bow, ma’am,” Avery said, as if speaking to a two-year-old child. “Not the kind of weapon you’d want to fool with.”
Agnes eyed him, a bit amused. “You think not, huh?”
“No, ma’am,” Jem replied. “That thing has alot of tension to it. It’s hard for even me and Avery to handle.”
The old woman fished her eyeglasses up by the chain and perched them on the bridge of her nose. “Hmmm… PSE Visions usually are,” she said, studying the thing in her tiny hands. She hooked a finger against the string and pulle
d. “About seventy pounds, I’d say. Could get up to 306 fps, if you put enough leverage behind it.”
The twins looked at one another, puzzled.
Agnes reached down and took a 31-inch Easton Nemesis arrow with a narrow, four-blade broadhead from a quiver nearby. She cradled the feathered end of the shaft against the cord and, seemingly without effort, pulled it back until the string creaked with strain.
Silently, the Hobbses watched as she found her target—a gallon milk jug that had fallen on its side, with the open mouth pointed toward the house.
“You might just have some luck hitting that, Mrs. Mendlebaum,” Avery told her. “It’s big enough a target.”
Agnes squinted through one eye, her cheek lying easily against the thumb that clutched the rear of the arrow. “I’m not aiming for the milk carton… just what’s inside it.”
Then, before anyone could utter another word, she released her hold on the arrow. The string of the compound bow propelled the feathered shaft at an arching angle that rose gently and then fell at a slow and calculated trajectory. Avery and Jem watched, amazed, as the arrow entered the inch-and-a-half opening of the mouth of the milk jug, passing through without touching the rim. The broadhead speared the bottom of the carton, punched through, and then carried the jug fifty additional feet, pinning it to the knothole of a hickory tree.
“Needs a little fine tuning,” she said with a frown. Then she leaned the bow against the wall of the shed and walked slowly back toward the house.
Abe grinned at the stunned look on the twins’ faces. “Nineteen fifty-two Olympics, Helsinki, Finland,” he explained. “Archery. She won a bronze medal.”
“Well, I’ll shit a brick,” Avery said, utterly flabbergasted. His face reddened a bit. “Sorry, Ma.”
“No need, son,” said Nell, watching Abe’s wife slowly make her way up the back steps to the kitchen. “I was about to say the same thing myself.”
Chapter 7
On the morning of the fourth day, Nell Hobbs lurched from her sleep and sat upright in bed.
Startled, Levi turned over. The light that filtered in through bedroom curtains was sparse and gray. With a sigh, he settled back into his pillow. “Looks like rain.”
“No,” whispered his wife. Her face was pale in the gloom, her eyes bright with fear.
“What’s going on?” After all their years together, he knew Nell’s ways, how she could sense something before it even happened.
“They’re coming.”
Quickly, they dressed and left the room. When they stepped out onto the front porch, the sky seemed more like twilight than early morning. They stared upward, their hearts beating wildly.
The sky was dark with buzzards. Not just one swirling cloud of the predatory birds, but three. One loomed from the west from the direction of Knoxville, another rolled in from Chattanooga in the south, and a third moved from the northern direction of Virginia.
“Oh God!” said Levi. “They’re going to box us in.” He turned and yelled into the house. “Avery! Bring the binoculars… and my guns!”
Soon, everyone in the house was up and gathered on the front porch of the old house. Levi lifted the field glasses to his eyes and peered, from left to right, at the forest stretching down the slope of Hobbs Ridge. There were hundreds of Biters milling around in the trees, stumbling, staggering, slowly making their way toward them.
He turned and found that everyone was half-dressed. The Mendlebaums were still in their pajamas, Kate wore a Minnie Mouse sleep shirt, and the twins were parading around in their tighty-whities. “Y’all get dressed! Hurry!”
“We’d better take care of this first wave, husband,” Nell said from the porch railing. “Before we go to doing anything else.”
Levi whirled and joined her. He didn’t need the binoculars this time. A dozen Biters had emerged from the woods and were heading up the embankment toward them.
The others lined the railing of the porch, guns in hand. Like a firing squad, they prepared their weapons. A metallic cacophony of working slides, cocked hammers, and jacked shells filled the air, followed by a hail of lead. The Biters spun and sank as hollow-point slugs and buckshot assaulted them, ripping through putrid muscle and brittle bone. Katie and Levi took the heads, centering well-placed shots between bloodshot eyes and in the pale domes of their exposed foreheads.
Agnes Mendlebaum stepped up and held a .22 Ruger MK III in a two-fisted hold. She aimed calmly, then squeezed off a single round. The little slug skewered a Biter’s eye, ricocheted around in his brain for a second, then exited out the opposite orb. It almost looked as though she had shot out both of the zombie’s eyes with a single shot.
“Don’t tell me…” said Jem.
Abe nodded. “Melbourne, Australia, nineteen fifty-six. Women’s target shooting. She got the silver for that one.”
After the first wave fell, a second appeared, twice as many as before. The Biters seemed agitated and angry, wailing hoarsely and snapping their fuzzy, black teeth with bone-cracking intensity.
“I’ve got this, Papa,” said Avery. He lit the fuse of a homemade grenade and lobbed it down the slope. It bounced twice and fell among the shuffling feet of the zombies. The fuse reached its end with a spitting and sputtering of sparks and the explosion went off, nearly deafening them all. Amid the fire and shrapnel, dismembered limbs and severed heads took flight, then fell with meaty thuds, rolling back down the hill or laying still in the scorched grass.
Avery looked around at the others, who stood there, addled. “Y’all go on and get the trucks loaded. I’ll hold them off as long as I can.”
Jem stepped forward and lifted the Remington scattergun to his shoulder. “I’ll back you up, brother.”
Nell looked to the left and right of the porch. Biters were advancing from those directions as well. “I’ll grab your clothes on the way out. But don’t stick around too long,” she told her sons. “Those things are slow, but a lot of them together can get the best of you before you know it. When you hear our horns honking, come running.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they said in unison, then went to work. Avery flung grenade after grenade down the face of the Ridge, while Jem pressed the 1100’s trigger time after time, hammering alternating loads of double-ought buck and rifled slugs into the Biters that made their way toward the front porch.
The others fled into the house. While Abe and Agnes hurriedly dressed, Levi, Nell, and Kate began to carry provisions to the vehicles parked out back. As he grabbed a couple of duffle bags of food and bottled water, Levi couldn’t help but remember the tension of the night before. Nell had been in an oddly nervous mood, insisting that they pack most of their food and ammunition, as well as topping off the tanks in the logging truck, Yukon, and Ram. Levi had been more than a little peeved at Nell’s wild hair, but now that irritation changed to admiration and relief. It was as though she had had a premonition of what was coming.
“We’ll have to ditch the VW,” Levi told the Mendlebaums. “It’ll never make it down the road that we’ll be taking.”
Abe and Agnes looked at the Bug regretfully, then climbed into the back seat of Katie’s Yukon. Nell took the Ram pickup, while Levi cranked up the logging truck. As he turned toward the open gate in the fence, he looked through the rear window of the cab. Six five-gallon jugs of gasoline and diesel sat lashed to the flatbed with bungee cords. Another one of Nell’s annoying ideas that had paid off.
They were through the gate and heading down a rutted dirt road that led along the peak of Hobbs ridge, when Nell leaned on the Dodge’s horn. For a minute nothing happened. Then the back door of the Hobbs house burst open and Avery and Jem piled out. Avery twisted the lock and kicked the door shut. Through the plate glass of the door’s window, half-a-dozen zombies could be seen. Their faces pressed against the glass, slobbering, gnawing, and coating the pane with a nasty mixture of black saliva and blood. Soon, more faces appeared at the windows along the back of the house. Most were strangers, but a few were fami
liar, folks they had known and grown up with in the mountains they had once called home.
“Jump in, boys!” Nell yelled to them.
Jem did as she instructed, tossing his guns into the bed of the Ram and then jumping the tailgate himself. Avery, however, had other plans. “The house is full of Biters,” he said, running to the plunger box on the rock. “There must be a hundred of the bastards inside, maybe more!”
Nell looked ahead. Levi had stopped the logging truck and was standing next to the open door of the cab, staring back toward the house. From where she was, she could see tears in the man’s eyes. It was the first time she had ever seen her husband cry.
Avery clutched the bar handle of the plunger, but hesitated. He looked over his shoulder. “Papa?”
“Do it,” Levi said hoarsely. “Just… do it.”
Avery nodded. “Everybody plug your ears. This is gonna make one hellacious boom.”
His family and the Mendlebaums took his advice. Avery grinned broadly, then slammed the plunger home.
The Hobbs house erupted into a massive cloud of fire and black smoke as the dynamite on the gas tanks detonated. Ancient boards, shingles, and nails rained through the morning air, along with the charred remains of the zombies who had invaded the structure.
Levi Hobbs stood numbly beside his truck, stunned. In a flash of gunpowder and ignited fuel, the center of his family history was gone. The house he had been born and raised in—and had hoped to grow old in—was falling in a hail of blackened boards and refuse around him.
“We’ve got to go,” his wife said gently from the window of the pickup truck. “Levi… please.” She looked through the back window of the Ram’s cab and saw Biters picking their way through the thicket on either side of the burning crater that had once been their home. “They’re still coming… and they’re hungry and pissed off.”
Levi shook his head in disgust. A charred hand landed in the grass three feet from where he stood. It thrashed on its back for a moment, then flipped over and scuttled erratically toward him like a blind spider. Cussing, he kicked it away. With a sigh, he pulled himself together and climbed back into his truck. “Okay, let’s get the hell out of here. There’s nothing left for us on the Ridge now.”
The Buzzard Zone Page 4
