World of Ashes

by J. K. Robinson

  "He's right." Ethan said. "We need to protect resources for the town. Union already has a road block, we drove through it, so there's at least one line of defense between here and St. Louis. We can afford to take a little bit of time to make sure there's something left for hospital use at the very least."

  "So are we deputizing these guys?" The female officer gestured to Ethan and Keith, but didn’t look at them. "Can we trust them?"

  "Can we trust you?" Ethan countered. "I'm from here, lady. You pulled me over two years ago for doing forty in a twenty five on Church Street. I'm here, and so are you. Makes sense we have a common goal in mind.”

  “And what goal is that?”

  “I want to find my family, and helping you guys is the best way I can figure to do that right now.” Ethan was honest.

  The cops and the old man shared glances. There wasn’t any political deceit or malice in trying to find your family. The fat cop spoke up. "I say tonight, while we still have electricity, we print out notices about a town hall meeting and then have it at the outside stage in the fairgrounds so no one feels threatened or trapped. The Army was only using it as a secondary landing pad for choppers. We can sweep the area around it first and all that, and post anyone who volunteers to guard the area. I promise, someone will volunteer.” He cleared his throat, probably used to smoking. “We get all the stragglers from the country into town and start a door to door sweep for infected. It grossly violates the Constitution, but we have no choice. Thomas Jefferson never envisioned Zombies.”

  "We have another problem." The woman, Officer Liza Rowe, interjected. "Lots of people have infected family in their homes. Are we talking Police entering private residences without a search warrant? Good luck. You’ll be more likely to get shot than have them help you shoot someone. I don’t even think most people here will even consider us a legitimate police force anymore. Not after the Army abandoned us. Not after the things they did…”

  Ethan agreed with a slow nod. "That’s exactly what we’re talking about. Big Bubba over there is right, and so are you Miss… Rowe? It’s going to be a nightmare to convince people to let us put a slug in their zombie kid’s head… They have to be made to understand they can’t save them. We need Keith here to tell them what the Zombies really are, and that there is still no cure but a bullet. He was at the Battle of Antire Hill, they got more information from FEMA that we ever did.”

  “Thanks for throwin’ me under the buss, there buddy.” Keith flipped Ethan off. “But he’s right. I can brief a doctor if you want, but I was… there. It wasn’t a battle though… Not anymore than DC was a battle, and I’m sure we all saw the footage of that…” Keith’s speech slowed and his gaze came in and out from the thousand yard stare. “It was a full-on clusterfuck of the highest magnitude. I’m sure you saw some of that here too. People are going to have to zombie proof their homes too. More than it would take to keep a man out. I mean strong, heavy boards and flat roofing aluminum so they can’t get a grip on your windows in the first place. People are going to have to get used to guns, or find a sturdy baseball bat. If there are any stockpiles of guns we can spare, we should issue them to anyone who needs one. Families that don’t already have any guns, I mean.”

  "That obviously didn't work for the cities. Why should we expect any sort of cooperation out here?” Officer Rowe folded her arms.

  Ethan smiled, "Because we know this area. This is our home, what else could be more important? The infected aren't that smart after they're done raging. We'll just retake the Army's checkpoints around the town and start picking them off as they follow the highway. Maybe, if we're lucky, Union stopped them. Manning the checkpoints and making sure the public knows everything we know as soon as we know it will give those of us left behind a chance for cohesion. They’ll respect those who take charge and respect some semblance of the rules of fair play. Playing Follow the Leader hasn’t completely left our collective psyche yet.”

  The man in the Stetson puffed a giant smoke ring. It was competition level perfect. “You keep being useful, Mr. Cally, and I might have to appoint you to something if I get elected mayor.”

  “Elected? The dead have risen, and you are… voting?” Keith was astonished.

  “We’re still Americans, aren’t we?” The old man said.

  By noon the next day fifty armed citizens had been deputized under the authority of the Sullivan Police Department, a sad looking trio who rarely left the police station as swamped as they were with people seeking help. Most new deputies were assigned to guard the remnants of the town's gas stations. Others did what they could, anything from scouting the area for incoming packs of zombies, or straggling people. Some women served food at a free line in an attempt to calm the people, but it did little to ease the fears of abandonment. Everyone wanted to top off their tanks before the electricity failed too. Rolling brownouts were beginning to become a problem with all of America’s nuclear power plants taken offline. One gas station didn't carry diesel, so Ethan and the female cop, Rowe, bribed the former attendant a full tank of gas, an abandoned Thunderbird, and all the food and liquor she could put in the trunk to man the station with a scared-shitless Civil Air Patrol cadet with daddy's Glock 40 for security. The line for gas stretched over the bridge and down a service road behind a bend, but at least they could attend to more pressing issues with so many people distracted from causing more problems. Step one was fortifying and securing the truck stop.

  "Assuming we can hold the roadblocks we'll have to start worrying about winter. It's August now, and ‘cause of the ash it feels like October already. Crops are gonna fail." Rowe said, making small talk mostly. She didn’t seem to be the type to suffer a needless silence, even if she couldn’t contribute to it.

  "Did the Army leave any stores here? This was a big TCP."

  "Yeah, they filled those storage units on the other side of the highway and left a few dozen more connexes in a cleared field. I didn't see any signs of looting, but that won’t last." Rowe finished.

  "Know what's in them?" Ethan asked.

  "Hopefully guns and medical supplies. We'll open the Wal*Mart parking lot as a trading area, we can’t stop people from getting supplies. It's a reasonably safe place, hills on two sides block the view of it from the highway.”

  “What about illegal drugs? Pills and meth and pot and such?” Officer Newton, the nerdy looking one, chimed in. “How can the three of us enforce that? Even with deputies, that shit’s gonna be all over the market.”

  Ethan laughed and shook and head. “Wow. Prohibitionist to the end. Gotta hand it to ya for trying, but you’ll never keep up with the drug trade. The ‘War on Drugs’ was nothing more than really, really bad joke. Best thing to do is take a Libertarian stance on it, confiscate it when we find it if it’s the really bad stuff, but otherwise we really don’t have the resources to fight it. We can’t even incarcerate someone long term.”

  “It’s a sad truth of our situation.” Officer Reynolds, the chubbiest one, said. “We can worry about that later, Newton. Get your head out of your ass for five minutes, man.” They adjourned the meeting shortly after when a CB radio on the far side of the dispatch office relayed a call for assistance at the truck stop on the far side of town. The would-be leaders at the meeting arrived at the truck stop and nearly jumped from the police cruisers before Reynolds and Newton could pull to a stop. Had he thought about it in time, Newton mused, he could have messed with Ethan Cally by locking the back doors of the cruiser, thus trapping him, but the opportunity was missed. A couple of hunters in gili-suits were taking up position on the overpass, looking rather comfortable in their efforts. A few people who'd been arrested the night before for attempted burglary and wanton destruction of property, were filling sandbags for gun positions as punishment. Most were teenagers.

  "We've found a few people down at the bottom of the hills and through the forests. None of them were infected yet." One of the hunters felt the need to report.

  “We should take a min
ute to go get our stash of guns from the ATV store. Arm these people if we don’t find anything in those containers.” Keith suggested, cracking open a frosty cold energy drink. He had purple bags under his eyes from lack of sleep. They all did.

  "Not a bad idea, hop in." Ethan decided to borrow the police cruiser, since Reynolds had left the keys on the front seat. Keith jumped in and fell asleep before the car was in drive. Ethan drove up to the store, which was still within sight of the men on the overpass, and gathered their guns himself, letting his friend sleep. When they returned Rowe and Newton were trying to bust open an Army supply Connex with a hammer. The sand colored units weren’t hard to get into if you knew how, and they didn’t. The units were all padlocked and had a customs bolt through a special hole to prove they were still sealed. Ethan took a pair of bolt cutters and broke the locks away, making the officers feel slightly stupid. With a tug he hauled the doors up to reveal the best thing any of them had ever seen. Ammunition, and lots of it, a spectacle none had seen in a post-Socialist era where ammunition was more expensive than the firearm itself. A packing list accompanied each connex and made the work go much faster. Ethan mused that this was the man-child version of Christmas morning. Here, Santa brought you an M240Bravo and 6,000 rounds! Yay!

  "We need to hide these. Rural places we can fall back to if either army comes through here again.” Ethan suggested, opening his own drink Full Throttle energy drink.

  "What other army?" Rowe was confused.

  "The Army of the Undead, Officer Rowe." Keith pointed to the pre-dawn sky. They could already see smoke on the horizon from the direction of Union, the town was under siege. Next would be St. Clair, and then Sullivan. That night the lights stayed on again. Someone suggested putting up construction lights and pointing them down the hill to where Ethan and Keith had wrecked their truck. They still didn’t know who’d shot at them, but they had a hunch it was some of the local hillbilly types celebrating an end to Martial Rule by the most Unpopular President in History. Some were rather vocal about trying to stop newcomers, fearing the plague or for whatever other reasons they had, some being slightly more than bigotry. No one really knew where it had come from, or the caused it, and much ignorance still raged about how it spread. At the far end of a curve in the bridge a lookout claimed to see a person walking. Keith flicked on a set of thermal sights he'd found. He didn't see anything but a glow on the horizon, and you didn't need anything but your eye to see that. The world was burning slowly toward them, the consuming fires of the end of days.

  "I definitely have movement." A guy in urban cammo said. He reached to the forward grip of his “illegal” M4 and turned on an IR laser. Through the night vision goggles and thermal lenses the man painted his target. Those with sights saw the laser land with great precision on a figure’s center mass. "I have one unknown at the far end of small arms range… Waiting for kill order."

  "We're not killing anyone yet." Ethan warned, though he knew it was an inevitable order. "If the government does come back, let’s not be the ones who record ‘killing’ zombies as a pastime activity, shall we?”

  "This guy’s missing most of his left arm. I can see the bones split around a ripped up shirt." Keith took his eyes off the lens, a red ring circling where the rubber had met his skin. "He's infected, Ethan. Let's just put him down. That was our mistake at Antire Hill, we let them get too close because we have this overwhelming desire to know what we’re shooting at. It’s ingrained in us just like shooting center mass.” Keith gestured at the bottom of the hill. “In ones and twos they’re almost harmless, but let them get five and six deep, let one person get bitten and they become the fucking Juggernaut." Keith's argument was set in stone when three other lookouts detected movement.

  There were now hundreds of undead shambling down the interstate, probably having already overrun Union and St. Clair hours earlier. It was a long way from St. Louis to Sullivan, but if you never paused to rest, never slowed your pace, walked all day and all night in search of the next soul to devour, distance meant little. There was a story Ethan had read in high school, the 1953 short story The Ruum by Arthur Porges. An alien device pursues a prospector at a slow, yet relentless pace. A creature could easily outrun it, but the creature had to eat, had to drink, sleep, do all the things a living being must do. The Ruum, or in this case the Zombies, had none of those needs, no concerns about its self. Its only goal was you.

  Reynolds blanched. He looked at the rest of the decision makers. "Should we shoot them all?"

  "Yes." Keith didn't back down on his belief. "I'll give the order myself." He walked to the middle of the bridge and looked at the dozen or so people gathered there. "We’ll walk to the edge of the hill there, and pick them off in the valley below. Don't let them get past the road graters at the bottom. Take your time and fire selectively. If you need time to catch your breath or take a piss, just do it. We’re gonna be here a while. Some people, whoever thinks they’re unprepared right now, stay back until people start needing a break. Then we’ll rotate until the job’s done.” Keith said loud enough to be heard by everyone.

  At first, several people in hunters camouflage refused to fire, knowing there had been legal and political backlash to euthanizing the infected with what the administration had deemed Illegal Weapons, (a dangerous term as all firearms in the hands of the public were considered illegal under Marshal Rule.) The gathered men had no such reservations after Keith fired and hit the closest zombie in the leg. It fell to its knees, but continued to moan and drag itself toward the thin red line. Its head then exploded in the opening salvo as the others let loose their bullets. They kept the pace, firing from the bridge the entire night in an orchestrated chaos that eventually drew the entire town to watch as if this were the first Battle of Bull Run. With any luck, this time the spectators wouldn’t be running away at the end of the battle, right behind the retreating soldiers.

  Before sunrise the militiamen managed to pile more than two thousand bodies at the bottom of the hill. The teaming river of corpses didn’t stop until it was full light, and only one sniper remained to fire through the exhaustion, picking off the stragglers. No one spoke, the entire experience so weird, so foreign to any them that they couldn't speak, even if they’d had something to say. Those who’d fought in Vietnam, Desert Storm: Part One & Two, and in Afghanistan had trouble with what they’d been forced to do, the foul taste of shooting what had once been Americans burned into their mouths with so much cordite. One man, who wore a Vietnam service ribbon on his hat couldn't even bring himself to take a pinch from his open tin of Copenhagen. He just sat there, holding the can and lid, looking at the half pinched leaf inside as his hands shook with frayed nerves. What was already in his mouth hadn't been removed for hours, his face gaunt with shock.

  "There were women and children down there." Keith whispered almost too softly for Ethan to hear, leaning on the overpass’ railing. Whether or not Keith intended for Ethan to hear him wasn’t certain.

  "There's always going to be women and children, Keith. They're just as dead as the men and they'll kill you just as fast. C’mon, let’s eat, we have to clear the rest of the town before long."

  "Why so soon?" Keith asked. “Most of ‘em are locked in basements or closets and shit.”

  “And how long before all this gunfire makes them try to escape? Or before one of them causes a new outbreak in the middle of the night? This isn’t lawful, its survival. I have to survive long enough to track down my family. They’ll send an email or call soon enough. I can’t just run towards Oklahoma and hope I run into them.” Ethan handed Keith another energy drink. They were both too worn out to take an accurate shot anyhow, why not add some caffeine jitters to their mix of anxiety and fear?

  Putting the side-by-side in gear Ethan headed towards the local VA hall that was doubling as the North Armory, the police station holding that function in the South. "Get a couple hours, okay? This is all going to get a lot worse before it gets better. You ever see the show 'Jeric
ho'?"

  "No. Never heard of it.”

  "Well, I have it on a bootleg Hajji-Copy at the house, bought it for fifteen bucks in Iraq. I strongly suggest you watch it."

  "This isn't TV, Ethan."

  "Isn't it?" Ethan stopped the vehicle. "Look around you, man. The world has crumbled at your feet. England is gone. France is gone. Russia is gone. China is gone. Iraq is blessedly gone. Japan is gone. Australia is gone..." Keith's eyes were twitching with pent up emotion he didn't know how to vent. Ethan went on. "The United fucking States of America is gone, Keith. The land masses are all still there, but civilization as we know it has met its extinction event. I just wish the bastards hadn't taken my family with them when they left. Let me die with them at least." Ethan was about to put the small vehicle back in gear when they heard people shouting and a dozen more gunshots rang out from the roadblock. Without much thought they swung around and drove back as fast as they could, the little blue light on top of the canopy flashing. A bullet actually smacked the concrete frame of the bridge next to them as they pulled to a stop and took cover, unslinging their own rifles.

  "Who the hell is shooting at us?"

  "A bunch uh' fuckin niggers!" A kid, no older than fifteen shouted, working the bolt of his rifle, the brass casing clinking on the ground next to him.

  "Well aren’t you charming." Ethan rolled his eyes. He was no racist, that might falsely imply he liked anyone in the first place. "Well, who are they? Does anyone fucking know, or did you just start shooting?”

  "I'd say Bloods.” Another rifleman said. “They’re lit up like Redcoats, man. Looks like their Caddie got stuck when they started running over the bodies we stacked."