World of Ashes

by J. K. Robinson

  “We have reports that some zombies seem… Super Human, almost. Can you dispel any of that, Josh?”

  “Absolutely, Joe. Zombies don’t have super powers. They’re dead. When they’re raging, it’s more like someone on a bad Meth high. They go berserk and begin attacking people or things. There is no apparent response to pain stimuli, such as gunshot wounds to anything but the head. Until they burn themselves out, or enough damage is caused to their brain or spinal column, they are extremely lethal. They can break down doors, bust open car windows, rip hatches apart and wooden doors to splinters… But once they’re dead they become almost benign on their own. Sure, they will attack you, but they can’t move more than two or three miles per hour. They have only what strength can be pulled from their muscles, but don’t appear to become fatigued at any point in time. Their grip on prey will maintain so long as they can feel the prey. Whether or not they feel movement or heat is speculative at best. In one control group, a zombie with no eyes, ears or olfactory senses was placed in a fenced area next to five other zombies with only either eyes or ears to hunt with.”

  “And how did that turn out? I know I was there, Josh, so no sarcasm, this is for the audience.”

  The hyena laugh again. “I know, Joe. The zombie with no senses but that of touch was unable to track prey that did not touch it first, though once disturbed, air was drawn in and expelled through the lungs. The vocal cords were not removed and the corpse began moaning. However, it did not start moaning until poked by a hand. Sticks and even a gunshot before the other zombies were introduced yielded no results. Score one for the heat sensing conspiracy theorists, Joe. The zombie moaned for approximately twenty minutes on three different occasions, but only after physical contact with flesh, until ceasing vocalizations. After that the others were introduced in adjoining cattle stalls, some with walls, others with fences depending on what behaviors we were trying to illicit. We provoked the zombie with no eyes, ears or tongue until it vocalized. Those that could hear responded with a matching moan and attempted to reach the first zombie even six hours from the time of the last moan. We can only assume this single minded pursuit of prey is the parasitic part of the virus attempting to spread itself to a new host. It makes sense really, Joe. The virus can’t think, it’s just pure instinct. The zombies that should be responding to visual stimuli did not move until sighting a living person. Two with sight attempted to attack livestock, but gave up pursuit after losing sight. They don’t give up chasing people, though. We have recorded zombies lurking outside doors where they suspect prey for as long as a month, maybe even longer. Those that could not see but only hear attacked only sounds made by the living. We can’t tell for sure if they can smell us yet, but I strongly suspect they can. Back to you, Joe.”

  The radio went on for some time after that, but they were all asleep despite the haunting wails of the undead, pleading to devour their flesh. By morning, as the first light cracked over Ethan’s eyes Keith and Lee were already on the roof with .22’s popping zombies in the head. They had taken a supply of beer with them and were more or less making a sport of it. The only travesty was this was Ethan’s last case of Bud Select. After this finding a box with a “Born On” date that was after New Years would be impossible.

  “Can we see any fires from town?” Ethan asked, picking up the binoculars and pressing them to his sunglasses. The light was unusually strong today.

  “Only a couple, but if I reckon direction right, they’re at checkpoints where bodies might build up in front of machine guns.” Keith pointed lazily towards the Northeast. “We’ve been hearing machinegun fire from The Hill too, so I think most people fell back to there.”

  “Fuck.” Ethan flopped down on the slightly angled roof and popped open a beer too. “How many are around the house?”

  “Oh, a hundred or so. We’ve certainly got enough ammunition to take care of them, but fuck dude, that’s a lot of bodies to clean up. We’ve just been shooting the ones that are too close to the house. Maybe we can lead the others away. Let ‘em fall over a cliff or some shit.”

  There was a long silence before Lee spoke. “It took a while, but I think I get it now, Ethan. Why you left...”

  “So you were drafted back in?” Keith looked up at Ethan, he had to put up his hand to block the rising sun. He’d left every last one of his vast collection of hats on the first floor. “Can I assume you didn’t come back voluntarily when drafted?”

  “Yeah… I had already spent enough time in the company of death.”

  “Still quoting movies, I see?” Lee smiled. “Whatever. I’m not here to fight with you. I had a few draftees in my unit. Let’s just say they had no business being back, and it got them killed.”

  “Since you haven’t asked, I’m sure you’re just waiting for me to say it,” Ethan swallowed hard. “Our whole family is somewhere in Oklahoma, even Nicole. They got taken along for the ride during the retreat.”

  Lee’s heart sank and he tipped his tattered, filthy patrol cap forward over his eyes. For a moment he tried to control himself, but he broke down into tears anyway. Ethan moved to comfort his brother, but Lee would have none of it.

  “No. Leave me alone! I failed them, I was supposed to get here but I didn’t. Our barriers fell… My platoon never had a chance.” They waited for Lee to calm down as he went into a violent shouting fit, shooting wildly at the zombies with his .22 rifle. Once he had to reload he seemed to revert to a calmer state. “There’s maybe one safe zone per every couple of states… There’s rumors of holdouts in the Rockies and the higher Appalachians, but nothing the Army knew about for sure. Texas and Alaska seceded and took whatever troops they had with them, then they went just as dark as North Korea.”

  “When did you leave?” Ethan pressed for more.

  “Ethan, c’mon. Your brother’s been through a lot.”

  “After the Tactical Operations Center was overrun. My company was on the outskirts of Chattanooga, trying to clear a college campus so we could use it as arracks when we heard the XO on the radio. They had a couple of well armed gangs to their North, and the whole of infected Chattanooga to their East. The undead killed all of them… the gangs and the brigade commanders and the airlift squadrons too. There were no armored units close enough to protect them. We were given the order to disperse and seek refuge by whoever was left at Division HQ. A politically correct term for surrender. The fight’s over, we lost.

  “After that we were cut off from any kind of support. We didn’t have any radios with enough power to call for air evac, not that it would have come in any event. This gung-ho captain we’d been babysitting gave the order to finish clearing the campus we were on, get an antennae on top of a dorm, and start squawking for help. Why we needed to clear the entire campus I don’t know, but back then rank still meant something.”

  “Who would have come if you could call out?”

  “I have no idea.” Lee shrugged. “That’s why I ordered the platoon I was walking with to shut and barricade the doors to the closest building with us inside. It cut us off from the rest of the company, but then that’s what saved us, you see. Captain Clair was a high-speed motherfucker. Reckless even when we were fighting the Taliban, even worse when it came to clearing IED’s in Iraq. Kind of a George Armstrong Custer type, ya know? Captain Clair ordered snipers and sharpshooters on the rooftop of the building he was in to start shooting anything that came within three hundred meters. Naturally all the gunfire just acted like a dinner belle. They swarmed the place like it was a Woodstock concert giving out free LSD.”

  “Why am I not surprised to see speaking in colorful metaphors is a family trait?” Keith interrupted, but Lee continued after a brief smile.

  “…So many so closely packed. The sheer pressure of bodies pushing on the doors was like a rotten meat grinder, the sounds of that… I’ll never forget. It was all more than the building they were in could take and a tsunami of rot and undead freaks just poured in over the second story bay window and throu
gh whatever cracks they’d squished into in the building’s loading bay.”

  “How did you escape? If there were enough zombies to push in a door, the place had to be swarming…” Keith was enthralled by the story. He suspected his own battle at Antire Hill had not been an isolated incident, or even the bloodiest.

  “We didn’t open fire. We stayed hidden for about a week. After we’d eaten everything in the dorm, our own rations included, we found we couldn’t even get birds to land on the rooftop so we could trap or shoot them. The smell and noise of the undead was so great no one slept. Our radios were still online, we talked to some poor kid from Custer’s company holding out in a utility closet, but he shot himself before he could starve to death. We got the attention of a passing CH-53, but he was laden with Marine wounded already. Promised he’d call in our position, but made it clear there were maybe thirty other distress calls just like ours since he’d left Cherry Point.”

  “How long before someone came for you?”

  “They didn’t.” Lee took a deep breath and cracked open another beer. It was lukewarm, but hit the spot. “We got lucky. A house near campus must have run out of supplies about the same time we did, because they took off on motorcycles. Loud and noisy fuckers they were, drew the hordes away long enough for us to make a run for it. I’d ordered Sergeant D’ to keep one MRE for each soldier should we catch a break. We ate as quickly as we could, filled our canteens and dropped that useless fucking body armor. If it wasn’t food, water, or ammunition, we didn’t carry it.

  “We opened the doors and just fucking ran for it. Everyone stayed together long enough to get out of Chattanooga, even though we lost six guys. We were finally safe, and it was just in time for me to face a mutiny, of course.” Lee laughed at the word. “See, the men were aware there was no United States left, let alone a U.S. Army. They wanted to go home, so instead of me getting a bullet in the head, I told them I was heading for Missouri. If anyone wanted to come, I’d be happy to have the company. Then I started walking. Didn’t say a single word after that.”

  “How many followed?”

  “None. I haven’t seen any of them since. I know the boys who were from Texas took off for home together, but the rest just kinda went where they wanted, scattered to the wind. I think two of them shot each other, to be honest. I heard gunfire after I saw McCord and Green walk over a hill. They’d been harboring grudges against each other for months, ever since Green’s buddy got eaten alive while McCord ran for it.”

  “Wow. How did you survive out there?” Keith wanted to know more, ignoring the undead as they milled about, as if in a drunken stupor themselves.

  “When did you call, Lee? And how?” Ethan asked.

  “I was recovering from a septic wound to my arm. I got cut by a rusty shard on a car I slept in. He pulled his sleeve up to reveal mostly healed stitches. “A retired waitress, Rosalie Burk, took me in after she found me trying to boil water in a pot that had a bullet hole in it half-way up one side. I was camped in a burned out Target store, the only building in the area with doors I could barricade. She had a heart attack about a week later… Ran out of medication for her condition. There were too many dead in town for me to get to the pharmacy, God how I tried though. Set fire to half the town to distract them, but I never got through.”

  Before Ethan could say anything else Lee did offer a ray of hope, albeit a gruesome one. “The infection doesn’t spread quite the way we thought it does. See, a guy I met along the way got bit on the left hand. Before I could turn my gun on him his friend drew a machete he’d been sharpening for the better part of a decade and lopped his friend’s hand off without so much as a word. Blood sprayed everywhere, but after we got a bandage on it we started a fire and cauterized the wound. For the next three days no one slept, we just watched him suffer. And suffered he did, don’t get me wrong, but without the original infection site to continue spreading the disease he pulled through. He might even be alive today.”

  Keith’s attention turned to a sound on the wind, something like a motor or wheels crunching gravel and screeching around turns. In seconds he could hear a truck coming over the hill, and a few minutes later a Union Electric flatbed with a crane extension came into view. The truck pulled into the yard and Allen climbed from the cab onto the cherry picker’s boom and started operating the bucket and crane while his little brother drove closer. In a minute or so, after Allen had knocked over the old television antennae no one had ever remove, and nearly decapitated Keith with a wide swing, they were able to get off the roof one at a time. Each man that got down to the truck started shooting or hacking zombies to cover for the next, taking only a minute or two to do so until there was no one left to rescue.

  Once on the road Allen started laughing, “No one’s gonna fuckin’ believe we just did that!”

  Jimmy thrust his fist out the open window and started to hum the theme song to the Lone Ranger on the way back to town. They truck passed the one Keith had destroyed the night before, and the body of the uniformed zombie he’d hit was still where Lee had chopped its head off. There wasn’t much left of the zombie or the truck, and Ethan poked Keith in the ribs and teased him about driving like an Asian woman. The town, like Keith’s truck, was also a mess. The people sat in small groups, smoking and relaxing, weary and dirty from battle. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the undead hordes they’d encountered before were just small packs in comparison to the infected tsunami that had washed over the town. They had been wandering out of St. Louis for a month now, some massively wounded by military attacks, but still quite mobile. They couldn’t help but wonder if similar million zombie marches were heading down I-70 and I-55, the two other major highways in the state. If anyone was left alive in Columbia, Missouri, they were in serious trouble now.

  “I wonder why the Stanton outpost didn’t say anything.” Reynolds said, not knowing the group of men and boys had walked up behind him. The town had cleared most of its own streets, a triage area was heavily guarded behind the hospital and people injured during the battle but not bitten were being treated. There were more injuries now that people had a clearer idea how to handle a zombie, and much fewer fresh infected. Fighting back no longer seemed to guarantee infection, as the Government had suggested before. It make everyone furious to know that stopping the spread of the Envier Virus would only have been a matter of shooting or clubbing enough zombies, something the Last Administration had expressly forbidden.

  “We have an outpost in Stanton?” Ethan narrowed his eyes at the officer. “I thought we’d consolidated everyone for protection.”

  “We had to know if anyone was coming from the North.” Reynolds defended himself.

  “That worked out really fucking well.” Lee commented. “If those men are dead it’s on you, Sir.”

  “I remember you.” Newton pointed at Lee. He hadn’t shaved yet, so how anyone could recognize Lee right now was surprising. “I pulled you over in that hot-rod 88’ Mustang next to the Chinese place a couple years back. You had more beer in your trunk than a Budweiser delivery truck.”

  Lee smiled, remembering the night fondly, or at least the parts he could remember. “Yeah, she’s in a parking lot in the middle of the graveyard that used to be Ft. Drum. She was a good car though. I’m Lieutenant Lee Cally, Ethan’s brother.” He stuck his hand out to shake, Newton and Reynolds both accepted.

  “Were you evacuated?” Newton asked.

  “No. I walked here from Chattanooga.” No one questioned him. “So… Anyone got anything for me to do? Because if not, there’s about a hundred dead people on my brother’s front lawn suffering from a severe high-velocity-lead deficiency. I think it’d be only right if we gave it to them.”

  “We’re deputizing six more men today.” Reynolds said. “We could have a quick chat with Mayor Kenly, put you on the list if Ethan vouches for you and make it seven.”

  “If you don’t mind I’d like to look around for a while.” Lee didn’t want to be drafted so quickly, f
eeling oddly like his brother. Suspicion of authority had been a skill Lee was slow to acquire, and only then through tragedy. “Think I could pal around with my little brother for a while before I take the plunge?”

  “Sure.” Newton and Reynolds went back to their conversation. They were discussing body removal, just another task on a to-do list that never ended. Over a hundred people had died that night. Mass graves had become the order of the day, because basically, there was no other choice. Most funeral homes had stopped accepting anyone bitten, no matter if they had been euthanized. The Easton Funeral Home was silent, the people who’d taken over for the original owners had a strict Natural Causes & Gunshots Only policy. All the dead from that night had been bitten, and so none were accepted into the immaculate building. An incensed relative of someone lost sprayed graffiti over the funeral home’s windows with red paint. WHAT IF IT WAS YOUR CHILD? No one had a good answer for that.

  Daylight crept through holes in the ashen clouds. The dead who’d come into town were sluggish, not as prone to chasing people with excitement as before. Keith was on a warpath for Paula’s house after they’d checked in. No one, dead or alive was going to stop him from getting to her. Lee and Ethan were following him, providing cover and talking.

  “I don’t want you to sign up here.” Ethan said to Lee as Keith roundhouse kicked a zombie into the side of a hopper train car of silica sand. A small quantity of sand poured down its chute and onto the zombie’s head, burying it ‘alive.’ It didn’t move again. “We need to gather some supplies and head for Oklahoma.”