by Smith, S. L.
Isherwood felt a sudden tingling in his feet. The gray, linoleum-covered floor was vibrating. Seconds later, he could hear as well as feel the generators roaring back to life. A row of fluorescent lights sputtered on overhead. Streaks of display lights started buzzing back to life across the operations panel. The door clanged open, and Jarrah glided through the doorway as if on cue. With a distracted hand, he swiveled around and rolled a beat-up officer chair over to the panel. He sat down on torn seat of the swivel chair. Bits of yellow foam upholstery were leaking from the place where the cheap upholstery had been poorly glued to the black plastic underbelly of the chair.
“How far out now?” Jarrah asked again, while pouring over the console. Hoskins voice was crackling now and then through the walkie-talkie at his side. “That’s right, ‘Skins. Belts, gates, doors, grinders. All up and running, or will be after initialization.”
Isherwood was watching Jarrah with his mouth slightly agape. “You, uh – you worked in a gravel factory before or somethin’?”
“Nah,” he turned around smiling. “But I’ve been bounding around for quite a bit. It’s not – wasn’t easy finding consistent work when you look like a terrorist.” His smile slackened, and he repeated. “How far?” It was his turn to be frustrated.
Isherwood shook his head to regain his concentration. He grabbed the marine binoculars and again stepped onto the metal landing, wedging the door open behind him. As he scanned the horizon with the massive binoculars – normal binoculars would probably do just as well now – he was reminded of Luke Skywalker scanning the Dune Sea looking for the lost droid. One of the ladies back home – he thought it was probably Aunt Lizzy – had instituted movie night. They had borrowed a projector from the youth room. There was a pull down screen in the Parish Hall. It was every Thursday night, and it had become quite a big deal, especially among the kids. There had been a rainy day just last week, and they had made it into a movie marathon day. Star Wars. They had shown all six episodes from start to finish, right down to the dancing bear party. At the end of it, he had been bitterly reminded of the consequences of the end of the world or at least most of it. The first film of the new trilogy had been ready to hit theatres and never did. They would never know what happened in Episode 7: The Force Awakens. Of all the possible tragedies to consider, this little one, this almost miniscule tragedy, had really shaken him.
“Well?” Jarrah asked again. “You’re holding me in terrible suspense.”
“Quarter of a mile,” Isherwood said, swallowing down the memory. “Justin and Chet are nearly here.”
*****
“Here comes the Calvery, ur, I mean, cavalry,” Isherwood announced. He wondered to himself whether his mistake might prove to be prescient.
He no longer needed the large sea binoculars. Both groups were rapidly approaching. Justin’s modified Escalade had just come into sight along the roadway. The vehicle was slowly appearing from behind the narrow stand of trees that lined the shoulder of the road. The swarm oozed from the roadway, filling the shoulder and abruptly ending at the factory’s fence. Even now, they could hear the grisly orchestra of hundreds of rotting hands clanging against the chain-link fence.
Chet was still perched inside the turret hollering obscenities at the dead masses as the Escalade rolled slowly towards the open factory gate. There was still another fifty yards or so to go before the vehicle rolled onto the crushed gravel road that led into the factory. The plan was for Isherwood to guide them in from there, if necessary.
“Okay, boss.” Jarrah said, giving a distracted salute. “I think this old girl is ready.”
“Good, ‘cause we’ve got incoming.” As Isherwood watched, Justin sped up a little bit to put some distance between himself and the horde before making the turn into the factory. “Doing good, Justin,” Isherwood said into the walkie-talkie. “We’ve got, just like we discussed, a parking spot on the right side of the chute that should also help block them in, over.”
“I’m headed over to the grinder deck,” Isherwood announced to both Jarrah and the walkie-talkie. “Y’all should see me as you drive down through the gravel canyon. There’s a ladder not far from the parking spot. Take as much ammo as you can from your truck, just in case, over.”
Jarrah could hear Isherwood’s footsteps as he clanged down the metal staircase. These abruptly ended as he ran off past and around the long gravel mountains to the artificial box canyon they had chosen to lead the zombies into. But soon, another pair of boots started clanging up the staircase. These were going much slowly and were far less lively.
Jarrah tried not turning around to face whatever was climbing up those steps. He knew it was just Hoskins. Man, the old guy sounds like one of them, he couldn’t help but think. This was a critical moment, though. He couldn’t just step away from the control panel. Just in case his throat was about to be torn open by zombie, he pressed the round, black plastic button that started turning the great wheels of Grinder #3. The conveyor belt, which led to its yawning black mouth, could only be operated from the grinder platform itself, as a safety precaution. There was a manual override switch, but it appeared to require a key they hadn’t been able to locate just yet.
*****
Isherwood stood catching his breath atop the grinder platform. He was in much better shape now than before the apocalypse, but his heart was racing nevertheless. His belly, too, filled with the excitement and panic of several thousand zombies bearing down on them. He had every reason to trust in Padre’s plan, but he still felt the dark exhilaration pressing down on his chest.
The platform was vibrating disconcertedly as massive spiked steel cylinders spun beneath him. He put his hand around the metal control box that had been labeled for the conveyor. He pushed another black plastic button and the heavyweight conveyor belt lurched into motion. Isherwood felt uneasy as he looked down into the black mouth of the machine below. He imagined the geyser of blood that would soon be erupting from its depths as it chewed up an entire army of the dead. He wished to himself that had brought a poncho. I’m about to see just how curdled their blood really is, he thought to himself as his stomach lurched.
Beyond the long gravel mountain to his left, the groans of a thousand decaying throats were echoing across the manmade hills. Isherwood could almost imagine a football stadium lay beyond the mountain, filled to capacity with unhappy fans. He was terrified and excited all at once. He stood at the head of an artificial canyon made by two long piles of processed gravel. Each pile was at least two hundred and fifty yards long. There were several of these gravel mountains stacked parallel, one after another like rising and falling waves with maybe fifty yards between crests.
At the end of each canyon were more grinders. If the first zombie swarm didn’t fit in the first canyon, they planned on leapfrogging to the next one. Isherwood couldn’t imagine that even both swarms together would fill the first canyon. He was more worried about the grinders. He wasn’t sure if they could sustain the constant barrage. Hoskins had assured him that these machines could take it, but Isherwood had his suspicions. “Rocks aren’t wet,” he had told Hoskins. “There’s about to be an ocean of liquefied humans running out from this thing and pooling.”
Isherwood braced himself along the platform railing as Justin’s Escalade rounded the first gravel mountain. Justin had made a wide turn into the canyon so that he was facing straight in. The Escalade paused at the mouth of the canyon. Justin laid on the horn, while Chet kept on hollering from the turret. The first couple of zombies staggered around the curve of the mountain. They fell as the gravel shifted underfoot and were soon trampled underfoot. The leading edge of the horde was clinging tightly to the curve of the mountain. The zombies were grinding up themselves. Even from hundreds of yards away, Isherwood could see how the mountain was being splashed by the dark paint of their blood.
Justin accelerated suddenly as the first twenty or so hands began groping at his back bumper. He was in the home stretch after leading the horde s
lowly forward for the last five miles. Isherwood suddenly began to worry about Justin’s tires over the final stretch. The narrow road between the mountains was typically traveled by heavy duty equipment. It was littered with sharp rocks that could easily pop one of the Escalade’s tires. He just had to get a pretty boy Caddy, Isherwood thought bitterly.
Amazingly, Justin and Chet pulled into the small space beside the conveyor without a hitch. From above, it looked like the vehicle had plugged the hole out of the canyon perfectly. The conveyor belt was now the only way forward. Isherwood hollered down to the guys in greeting and took over the job of baiting the swarm forward, screaming at them. Justin and Chet meanwhile were grabbing as much ammo as they could from the vehicle.
The way the zombies trampled over one another at the opening of the canyon began to worry him. What’s gonna happen when they get to the choke point? He was thinking. The conveyor belt was lined with sturdy-looking steel walls, but they ended at the belt. If the walls continued forward, curving gently away from the belt, Isherwood thought, it would have been a proper chute for animals. If I survive this, I’ll know how to make a proper human grinder.
“You idiot,” Justin said, greeting his old friend. His feet banged across the vibrating metal platform. Isherwood could hear the bullets rattling ferociously in Justin’s ammo box as soon as he dropped it onto the steel floor.
“Had a nice, leisurely cruise through the country, eh?” Isherwood smiled. He kept hollering and waving his hands to keep the zombies interested, as the other two laid down their firearms along the platform.
“Y’all got this thing running, huh?” Chet asked, joining the other two on the platform. “Wow.”
“It was all Hoskins and Jarrah, believe me.” Isherwood said as they all started hollering again at the oncoming horde.
“I hate all those white eyes staring at me,” Chet said, but the other couldn’t hear him over all the racket.
“Hey,” Justin called out over the din. “So they just walk onto the ramp, get sucked in, and turn into blood sausage?”
“What?” Isherwood called out, but soon pieced the words together. “Oh, yeah. That’s the plan.”
“What if they’re not all gone when Gill and the others drive in?” Chet asked. “Won’t they be stuck in the middle?”
“Keep it up, guys,” Isherwood started hollering even louder. “Come on, this way,” he said, firing a couple rounds into the crowd from his 9mm.
“Who’s Gill?” Isherwood asked. “Oh, right. The redhead. Hopefully the zeds will all be ‘blood sausage’ by then, but we’ve got Hoskins on a second grinder next door and Jarrah’s working on a rock slide, too, to trap them in here with us.”
“Here we go,” Justin said, giddily. He seemed to be the only one unfazed by the idea of being trapped in this space with thousands of undead. “Looks like it’ll be door number one for our lucky winner!”
The first zombie fell forward onto the conveyor belt after the sudden change in momentum. The belt stood at a pretty gentle slope, but was nevertheless notched every couple feet to help keep the rocks from backsliding. The notches, they saw, may or may not be helpful for the conveyor’s new purpose.
The zombie was back on his feet with surprising speed. It had been an older man, mostly bald and with a white goatee. Miraculously, despite all the miles he had likely staggered, he was still wearing his glasses. The glasses were twin circles of black wire. They fit tightly against the zombie’s eye sockets.
“Dude, that one looks just like Elmore Leonard.” Isherwood called out, joining Justin at the rail.
“Elmore who?” Justin asked, unable to look away as the zombie was drawn closer and closer to the mouth of the grinder.
“Maybe you should take a step back for the first one,” Chet warned. “Don’t know what might pop out of these skin bags when smooshed. Might get infected if it hits your eyeball, you know. Like in, uh, 28 Days Later. Remember the Scottish dude from Braveheart? One drop in the eye and he started twitching.”
The other two weren’t listening to Chet’s ramblings. Their eyes were glued to the Elmore zombie. He was now only a couple feet from the top of the conveyor belt and the sudden fall into the emptiness and then the grinders’ teeth.
“Ohhh, man. Here he goes,” Justin nearly shrieked in delight.
The zombie seemed to hover at the end of the conveyor belt for an impossibly long time, and then he teetered at the edge. There was no fear registering on his face. He was reaching for the men on the platform the entire time. His distended belly hit the nearer grinder wheel with a splat as his feet fell almost perfectly between the two grinding cylinders. One of the grinder’s teeth protruded through his rib cage. Its body pulsed slowly as it was chewed from the bottom up. With each of the pulses, the pressure must have been building in the things body cavity. When the thing’s torso was half-devoured, it suddenly exploded. A bulb of shifting tissue emerged from the thing’s neck like a massive goiter. It popped and a vertical jet of the zombie’s innards shot straight upward.
Isherwood and Justin reeled backward just in time, as a tower of chunky black blood and rot ascended above the platform with a line of intestines serving as the kite’s tail. It seemed to hover in the air a second, just as the zombie had a few seconds ago, before falling into the grinder’s maw. As it all slowly turned to its descent, Isherwood caught a glimpse of the Elmore Leonard-style glasses glinting in the midday son.
“Did you see that?” Justin whirled around in mirth. “Thing popped like a zit! You were right, Chet, old buddy. We were almost splattered with that zit-thing’s puss. Dude.”
Isherwood watched now a step back from the railing as groups of two and three zombies at a time were loading themselves onto the conveyor belt. The horde of zombies was still rounding the edge of the gravel mountain, but appeared to be slackening in size.
“This plan might just work,” Chet said, still wide-eyed.
“Yeah, so long as the back of the horde doesn’t lose interest and …”
“The grinder doesn’t clog up,” Justin said. “We’re gonna need some poles or something in case they start coming too fast or we need to prod something out of the grinder.”
“I’ve got that,” Isherwood said, pointing to the conveyor belt controls. “We can always turn off the belt if they start mounding up on top of the grinders.”
“You’d think we’d be fine,” Chet said tentatively leaning over the railing to see how the grinder was handling the increasing rate of falling zombies. “This thing grinds up boulders.”
“Yeah,” Isherwood said, looking down into the machine’s mouth. There was a rising mist of body fluids hovering over the grinder. “Thing’s doing great, looks like when I put leaves into my wood chipper.” As Isherwood watched, the grinder was devouring three or four zombies at a time. Every once in a while, a skull would pop up, rattle around the works like a roulette ball, and then fall into place and get pulverized like it was nothing more than papier-mâché.
Isherwood was dimly aware of Justin climbing off the platform in his search for prodding poles. He took the moment of relative peace to contact the others on the radio. “Swarm one is all in the canyon. Repeat, Swarm One is all in. Padre, you hearing this? Over.”
He waited a couple seconds staring at the radio, as if he could make Padre answer by force of will. The radio remained silent. “Hoskins? Jarrah? Are you hearing a response from Padre? Over.”
The radio crackled to life. “Nope, nothing.” It was Hoskins. “But Grinder Two is ready and rumbling. Over. click-shhh.”
Isherwood looked up to the long gravel mountain, wondering if it was blocking his signal. As his eyes trailed back down to the ground, he noticed that not all the zombies were focused on their platform and the conveyor below. A few had become distracted around the Escalade. The parked vehicle wasn’t a perfect wall, but it was intended to slow down any zombies that might come from that direction.
“Here,” a voice called out. “Grab these.” It w
as Justin, climbing the ladder back up to the platform. All Isherwood could see was the tip of a pole hopping around near the top of the ladder.
Isherwood ran over to the top of the ladder to grab the poles from Justin. “Crap, man. You see what you’re doing? Ain’t gonna work if I gotta babysit you boys.”
“What?” Justin said. He looked down suddenly as hands grabbed around his boot. Teeth clenched around his Achilles’ heel. If it weren’t for the thick shoe leather, he would have been a goner. He cursed and knocked the thing off with the heel of his other boot. He dropped down to the ground to face the three zombies that had already wriggled through the space between the gravel mounds and his Escalade.
“Chet,” Isherwood called out. “Fire a few rounds to keep their eyes on the prize as we clean-up. Okay?”
Chet nodded. The panic was evident on his ghost-white face.
“Push them back to plug up the …” Isherwood started as he jumped down from the ladder, but realized his friend was already a step ahead of him. Justin was just removing his hunting knife from the temple of a stringy haired zombie, after having wedged her body in the narrow space between the vehicle and the base of the platform.
Isherwood’s katana sang as it sliced through the air and through the neck of a one-eyed zombie. This one fell where it stood. He pushed the tip of his sword into the exposed rib cage of the second zombie, pushing it around the far side of the Escalade. Isherwood was acutely aware, as he did this, that the underside of the SUV was still unplugged. He just knew a set of jaws was about to close around the meat of his calf.
He grabbed hold of the zombie’s reaching hand and steered it backward with his sword. He wedged it backward with a killing blow from the sword. He discovered with a sudden lurch of his stomach that the backward force had sheared off the skin of one of the zombie’s fingers that he had been holding onto. In the palm of his hand, he saw the limp tube that had been the skin of the creature’s ring finger. The zombie’s gold wedding band was also there. He cast them both away with a disgusted twitch.
