“Hey, I’ve got live ones…”
I was carrying a pack with my gear in it on my arms instead of my back and at that moment, I swung it around, awkwardly hitting him across the body, enough to knock the radio out of his hand, and make him stumble for a moment. Both of us were stunned for a moment, before I remembered what we had to do. I pulled out my gun and pointed it at him.
“Hey, it’s ok man, I'm not here to hurt you.”
I told Heather to radio the other guys, and they came rushing out a minute later while the guy just sat there, maybe a bit confused, or maybe planning on murdering us all with his bare hands. We would never find out. As he stood up, Evan came around the corner as well, knocking him out with a bat to the head. Tague exclaimed that he just might have killed him, but a quick check of his pulse showed that he was still alive.
The five minutes in which all of this had happened had been more than enough to get the zombies that were locked up in the cars completely riled up, and I knew that if we didn’t leave here soon, or get into a building, that it was highly possible that we could get overrun. Aaron dashed down to get the truck, and drove it down to where we were, mentioning as we got in that he had seen some movement down one of the streets that we had taken into this area. Ideally, we would be rather safe inside the truck, but we could easily get trapped in there. We tied the guy up as best we could (not sure if any one of us was any kind of expert on tying people up), grabbed his gear, a bag and a backpack, and got in. Looking out of the back, I could see a dozen or more walking figures beginning to head down that avenue.
We had to wind down the small downtown like streets in order to backtrack our way out of that place, but when we got to the interstate crossing, we realized our way back was going to require a detour. I do believe Evan made a joke about a parting of the red sea. The interstate was clogged with walking zombies out for an early morning stroll. They were even starting to fall off the side of the interstate overpass, when they first heard and then saw our truck pulling up. That just further gave proof to my theory that the more of them there were together, the more of a horde/frenzy state they were in.
Our detour got longer. We decided on heading south, instead of north, hoping we could avoid having to head into Asheville. That plan didn’t work as well as it probably should have, or at least how we would have liked it to. The further south we went, the worse it got. There must have been a rather large horde moving north, because even the access streets, the streets and roads that came off the interstate, were full at times. We tried at the airport, but not only was that a mess of the dead, the overpasses were completely stuffed with overturned vehicles, making our passing impossible anyways. We weren’t about to step out to see if we could move anything.
We kept heading south, not exactly panicking, but starting to wonder if we were going to be stuck on this side of the interstate. We checked two more interstate exits, but again, they were full. We finally reached Hendersonville, the same town I had found these guys in, and sighed in relief as we found out that at least here, it was clear enough to get across without having to run over too many of them. It was clear that this really had been a very large horde. The amount of zombies wandering these streets was much more than the usual random assortment we usually saw. We could only imagine that they had been pushed off of the interstate, as we had seen happen in overpasses before.
Once on the western side of the interstate, we began heading back north to get back to the house. We were so relieved with having been able to cross over, that we had forgotten about our prisoner. I had been sitting in the back, along with Heather and Evan, the other three in the front of the truck. We had stuffed the guy at our feet and I could feel him stirring, and my first thought was that we might have a little bit of trouble on our hands. It was far more than that. Evan had killed him.
The blow to the head must have crushed his skull, and while he was alive when we first checked, he must have died at some point during our little escape problems. We had all simply forgotten to check on him. I looked down, took one look into those eyes, and I knew at that moment that the guy had come back, and I screamed in what was probably a very embarrassing fashion, something I might have laughed at during some point, had this zombie not suddenly lurched up, attempting to eat me.
His hands and legs were still tied up, so he couldn’t stand up in there. Instead, he twisted himself around, and was kicking and lunging, attempting to bite at my legs. I was shouting about the biter, and for a moment everyone else was a bit confused as to why I was jumping around. At that point I was up in my seat, which even in a full sized truck, is a very difficult thing to pull off. I think everyone finally understood that when I was yelling zombie, it meant inside the truck. Heather recoiled back into Evan, who was just trying to get Heather off him to see what was going on. I had one foot on the creatures back, trying to keep him down, while it kept twisting around in that limited space, trying to bite at the same foot. I kept screaming to stop the truck, and when Tague finally did, I had to scramble to open the door and jump out, while still keeping him down. Heather and Evan did the same on the other side, while Aaron, Lucy and Tague got out of the front.
We had stopped while still inside of Hendersonville, and already the commotion was attracting some dead towards us, maybe five hundred feet away. The moment I got out, I stood there shaking for a moment, staring at the zombie still stuck twisting around on the floor of the cab, moaning and drooling. Then, I threw up. Evan pulled the zombie out by its feet on the other side of the truck, and Aaron would tell me later that both he and Evan bashed its skull in, completely this time.
I was still shaking as we got back into the truck. We couldn’t wait around for too long, as the other zombies had begun to close in. Within a moment, we were driving again and after we left that spot a few miles behind, Evan suddenly burst out laughing. I was certainly in no laughing mood, and am pretty sure I dropped a few choice words in the supposed French language, or other sordid words of insult. Tague, ever the pragmatic, mentioned about how we really should have been more careful, and I’m pretty sure I followed that up with a “no shit” comment.
That moment was the closest I had ever come to being attacked by a zombie. In the past, I had always been very careful, on my own, cautious to a high degree, always keeping an eye on the dead, keeping them far, staying mobile. All this driving around had made me soft, had taken the edge off. With all the adrenaline wearing off, I would have thrown up more if I had anything in my stomach. While there had been no harm done, and he was tied up, I didn’t like having been in that position.
On the downside, there was the fact that now we had lost our prisoner, our interrogation subject. We did have all of his gear, but there was no way of knowing if that would be of any use to us. As we talked about this, we decided to stay down off the mountains, at least for the remainder of the day, find a place to be safe and hidden at, and look through his things to see if we found anything else to go on. That way if we had to do anything down here near the city, we would already be here.
We kept driving west, out of Hendersonville, until we crossed a small bridge over the French Broad, where it’s still rather small, and found a fenced in public works type building just on the other side of it. The area was devoid of the dead, so we busted in the gate and maneuvered the truck right in front of the gate, just to be sure. From there, we would have a good view of any movement across the bridge and if needed, we could always escape along the river and cross it if needed. This was more of my type of thing.
I think I asked Evan to break a guy’s leg next time, instead of his skull.
We got into the little building and laid some of our gear out. Aaron broke out some food, tossing some of it around, offering drinks as well. Evan had gone outside to check on the fence all the way around the building, while Tague and Lucy began rummaging through the guy’s stuff. I found myself a chair, thankful there was one in here, and sat down, letting the sudden exhaustion set in. Heather looked c
oncerned, and I was touched, but there was something else in her eyes. She would tell me later that evening that she had been so terrified that she hadn’t done anything to help me while in the truck. Finding her nobility charming, I could only laugh and point out that I, the man, had screamed like a girl, and had been the first one to jump out of the truck. If anything, I was the coward. Yes, I won her over that night by proclaiming my cowardice.
So, this whole ordeal didn’t reveal too much to us. The guy had some food and traveling gear, but no smoking gun as to who he was, or what he knew. We checked his camera, but all it had was random pictures of different large buildings. The guy was looking for our house within the city, and seemingly had no idea that it was completely under a mountain, quite well hidden. Now, there were three DVDs with his gear, one of them had a slip of paper in it with this writing on it…
“Making inroads off the coast.”
Not much to go on, and at this point, we had no way of actually seeing what kind of media or data was on these DVDs, and wouldn’t be able to do so until we got back to the house.
That night we talked about heading back to the house the next day, as well as there being a lot of fun being made of me and my screaming at the zombie ordeal. I can readily admit that if death wasn’t such a stark reality, that there was a macabre humor to the whole ordeal. I'm sure this wouldn’t be the last time I’d hear about this, especially from Evan. Tague, of course, talked about how we would deal with something like this in the future, which of course, everyone agreed to. I had a feeling nothing like this would happen again.
So, here we are, just a few days since we left. I began writing a bit in a journal that night, but found my entry too disjointed. Well, added to that was Heather and her hands all over me that night, and that kept distracting me from my writing. Not to mention that zombie’s eyes looking up from me at the bottom of the truck’s floor. I had made him into a zombie.
That morning, I had expected us to just pack up and head back up the mountain, but apparently, Tague and Aaron had been talking some that past evening, and had come up with what was, at the time, an incredibly stupid idea. They had somehow convinced themselves that it might be possible to find where these men were basing themselves at, and get our information from that location. They mentioned that they had heard the men talking about a possible base location at a “Black Mountain”. When asked if I knew where it was, I said no, but then realized they were just talking about Black Mountain, and not the base. I didn’t sleep too well that night.
Black Mountain is officially a small town just east of Asheville, heading up into the mountains along I-40. It’s a nice little place, with a few hotels for highway traffic, but mostly just the people that live there. It was about an hour’s normal drive from here, which meant anywhere from an hour to a day of driving, depending on the traffic. Traffic of the dead, that is.
It was a rather small place, but as we talked about how to find this base of theirs, notwithstanding the fact that I think this is where their plan ended, it dawned on me that, in the days before the dead, there was a place perfectly suitable for a base of sorts. If it wasn’t overrun right now, the Ridgecrest Conference center. This place was a religious conference center, Baptist, I believe, of the sorts where these groups would hold their revivals or get togethers, or whatever it is that they did. I remember because I went there once with a girlfriend whose parents were avid churchgoers. We went there for some kind of youth rally. I mostly remember the amount of kids having sex after curfew.
Despite my memories of the hypocrisy, I do remember this place being that kind of ideal base location. It was set up higher than the rest of the town, tons of rooms, cafeteria, and storage. Its only real downside was the fact that it was essentially right beside I-40. Now, I had only ever seen the massive interstate zombie hordes on I-26, but I could only assume that this phenomenon worked along other major paved arteries. But, the interstate itself was separated from that side access road by a wall of sorts, maybe creating a natural zombie-funnel (yet another zombie-word combo of mine). I would assume that anyone up there wouldn’t post a huge neon light on the front, and play Iron Maiden tunes at full blast, either.
Well, it made sense of sorts. I knew of a way up and around the mountains here that would get us there easily, without going on the interstate or even near Asheville. It would also enable us to get out of the valley and up higher, less chance of running into the dead, at least in the numbers we seemed to be running into.
As we headed back through Hendersonville, the zombie population here had died out or moved on since the previous day, but not enough for everyone to chime in with their favorite jokes about girly screams, mostly by Evan. We took Highway 64 east out of Hendersonville, and joined up with Highway 9. This would take us up past Chimney Rock, and back through the mountains behind Asheville, and drop us right into Black Mountain. But instead of just driving right into the place, we decided to take a small back road that led up to what was once a kid’s camp of some kind. With a small hike, we could get up to a summit, and hopefully have a good look at the conference center.
The drive was uneventful as I had hoped once we cleared Hendersonville. We did have to stop twice to move cars out of the way of the road, but mostly the roads were clear. The mountains had never suffered like the cities, where the panic to leave left millions completely stuck in their vehicles, before being flooded by the dead that surged out. Up here instead, people had remained in their homes, only to leave when things had really come to an end. Where most people went after that, I cannot know. Maybe some, like me, just stayed up here and are still there. We certainly ran into no one, dead or alive.
We stopped for lunch on the highway, overlooking a valley the road dropped into. Below us was a tiny portion of Black Mountain, the interstate a small speck between two mountains. There was a Taco Bell down there, which we could barely see, but from that point on, the conversation quickly turned to all the different kinds of food we missed. Among the different kinds; steak, fresh seafood, BBQ, burgers and even sushi, I don’t think anyone ever mentioned Taco Bell. Maybe it was the fact that we thought we had to miss the really good stuff, made us seem like better people, but I think that if we could have, at that very moment, have driven down there and ordered some burritos and a Pepsi; we would have gone in an instant.
It really was mostly about those dumb things that we missed. Some stupid TV show about something completely impossible to believe in. Maybe we missed pictures of cats doing stupid things on the internet, or plugging in a heater in on a cold morning. Neither of those things was something we completely needed, but the sheer simplicity of it made us miss it even more. There was an odd nostalgic quiet (if that’s possible), as we all thought of what we missed most during that lunch. Might I add that we had tuna sandwiches? Just how many other people out there right now were having that?
We descended into the valley, and took a sharp right turn that led up to that kids camp. The normal two lane road quickly turned into one of those tiny, barely a lane, mountain roads. There were plenty of small stone houses along the way, wonderfully isolated up here, in case we had to hide out somewhere. The road went past the camp a ways, and ended up in a dirt pathway that just stopped. We parked there, and had to hunt around to find the old trailhead that led to the top of this section. It probably hadn’t been hiked much back when there were plenty of people around, but with no one here now, it had easily grown in. After not finding anything, we just picked the path of least resistance and headed up.
Thankfully, the top wasn’t even a half a mile from where we parked, heavily wooded, which made going a little bit harder, but probably worked in our favor to keep us hidden. At this point we were still around three thousand feet, so it was still possible to run into a zombie. When we reached the top, we had a somewhat obstructed view of the interstate down below, so we had to scamper through some even thicker brush to reach a spot where we could see better. Down below was a small lake, probably the city rese
rvoir. Immediately below though, behind us, was a house. We must have missed the dirt path to it, as well. Certainly something we would have to check out.
Once we had a clear view, we used our binoculars to look down upon the conference center. During the time of the living, the center had this huge Christian cross up behind the main buildings, on the mountainside behind it. But at that moment, the right side of it had split off, leaving a huge pillar with a left protrusion sticking out. Hard to explain if you don’t know what a cross is. I guess it looked like a crooked Y.
I realized I had to try to explain a cross, and I wondered just how religion, or at least the religions that we had with us before the dead arrived, would survive. I remember Dawn’s journal entry and her anger towards her religion, or her God, whichever it actually was. Would I have to be explaining what a cross is to my grandchildren someday? Of course, that means I’d have to have children of my own. Is it too much hopeful thinking to think this way? Would it seem foolish for me to even mention Heather in this same paragraph?
Back to what was going on.
We had a good view of the conference center from there, but there just wasn’t much we could see. Evan went back to the truck to get one of his rifle scopes, which he said had a far greater magnification than our binoculars, but that took him a good thirty minutes to do, which left the rest of us trying in vain to get a glimpse of something, of anything. It really dawned on us that we simply had no idea of what to look for, or what we hoped to find. We had come out this whole way to somehow get some good information about the group of living people, the first I had met in a while with any good sense of organization, a group of people who we thought wanted our house and were willing to kill for it, and here we were, mostly without a clue.
Deadfall: Survivors Page 20
