by Ben Reeder
Rule of three: 3 minutes without air, 3 hours without shelter, 3 days without water, 3 weeks without food.
Plan ahead.
Always have a back up for everything. Have a Plan B, because Plan A almost never works.
Keep the basics for survival with you at all times.
Know your terrain.
Always carry a sharp knife.
Always know where the exits are and know how to get to them in a hurry and in the dark.
Always make sure you know where your clothes and your gear are, and be able to get to them in the dark.
Have at least two sources of light at all times.
Assume that people suck after shit hits the fan, and that they’re after your stuff.
Don’t be one of the people who suck after shit hits the fan.
Guns are not magic wands. If you point one at someone, don’t assume they’re going to automatically do what you tell them to. Be ready to pull the trigger if they don’t.
Assume every gun is loaded if you’re not in a fight. Don’t point a gun at anything you want to keep.
Don’t count on any gun you might pick up during a fight. There might be a very good reason it’s on the ground.
Never put your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to pull it. Be sure of your target and what’s behind it if you do.
Know how shit works.
Never assume you know enough. Assume you always need to learn more.
If shit hasn’t hit the fan, it isn’t too late to prepare.
Always try your plan and gear out before you rely on it to keep you alive.
Watch out for your friends and family. No part of your survival prep is more important.
From the Journal of Maya Weiss
October 26, 2013
Between the traffic jams and avoiding the zombies, it’s been really slow going. Cars were backed up on the highway between Kansas City and Denver, and the side roads weren’t much better. We made it into Nebraska today, which means we probably averaged less than ten miles per hour after we left Fort Riley. I’m not in a big hurry to get to Wyoming as long as Dave and Amy are behind me.
Porsche’s been spending a lot of time with Mike, the Marine corporal who was flirting with her back in Nevada. She tried to sneak back into the truck last night, but I was still up. She tried to apologize, and when I asked her why, she stuttered and then clammed up, just like a teenage girl trying to be tactful about walking in on you and your boyfriend making out. But when I asked her to tell me about Mike, she started talking again. I guess after things get settled again, he’s going to be a truck driver. He has it in his head that traveling between groups of survivors is going to be something that will be at a premium for a long time. I guess he has a point.
After she crawled into her bunk, I stayed up and listened to the shortwave for a while. It’s a mixed bag out there.
Radio Concho, out of San Angelo: A mix of music in both Spanish and English, and a daily kill report. Evidently, there is a competition between three hunter teams for most zombies killed. One team is a historical reenactment group called the Buffalo Soldiers, the second is the Rams, from the athletics department from the local college and the third is the One Three Knights, a local gang that became part of the Fort Concho group. So far the Buffalo Soldiers are in the lead but the One Three Knights are catching up.
Radio Free America, out of St Louis: “The People’s Choice for News and Music” “President” Shaw is a regular here. Lots of slick, patriotic music; deep baritone voice-over; nothing positive reported. They do a lot of blaming everyone else for “the problems this country is facing” and claim President Shaw is the man to get things done. Tonight, they talked about the “freedom strike” in Kansas City again, and the heroic efforts of Daniel, a Christian leader who has saved countless lives and evidently killed a million zombies with his bare hands or something. According to them, Dave is a socialist trying to live on Daniel’s hard work but refusing to contribute to it himself. I’ll have to ask Dave about the whole socialist thing when I see him again. To hear them tell it, Dave abducted all the women in the new Eden complex, then ran off and joined some sort of socialist commune that stole the bread right out of the mouths of the hundred tiny babies Daniel was himself nursing back to health…when he wasn’t killing zombies, raising the dead and single-handedly saving the world. What bullshit. What’s troubling is that they suspect Dave was killed by the strike, but they’re saying that it isn’t confirmed. Which means they might still be looking for him.
Radio Z: This one is hard to pin down. Some nights he’s on, some nights he’s not. I think he’s mobile, because a lot of times, he just says “Transmitting to you from the heart of the wasteland” before he starts talking. He calls himself Johnny Apocalypse. Tonight, he said he was on top of a water tower, and that he could see for miles. Then, he stopped in the middle and said “Do you hear that?” In the silence that followed, I could hear a train blowing its horn in the distance. “That, ladies and gentlemen, is the sound of hope calling out to us from the dark of the night after the end of the world, calling us to follow it toward the dawn.” He has a poet’s soul. He played “City of New Orleans”, then some Bob Dylan and ended with Three Doors Down’s ‘Citizen Soldier’. Before he signed off, he said he was heading north. “There’s a town I heard about that’s having some troubles so I’m gonna go walk the ground around it and listen to the wind. Who knows…maybe there’s a hero or two left out there.”
The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind…
Chapter 1
Road Trip
~ “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware” ~
Martin Buber
Highway 40 out of Kansas City was packed with dead cars and dead people, some more dead than others. If a divided four lane was this bad, I wasn’t even going to try to imagine what Interstate 70 was like. With the rain still coming down in thick drops, the more active corpses couldn’t seem to make sense of things unless we got within a few yards of them. The first time one stumbled across out path, I smeared him across the front bumper of the truck. At least, I think it was a him. The second time, we were navigating around the wreck of a semi that had turned on its side when we found ourselves a few feet away from a group of deadheads munching on the bloated remains of the cattle that had been the truck’s cargo. Amy yelled out a warning, and I hit the gas. On rain slick roads in a five mile long traffic jam, that wasn’t the smartest thing I’d done all day. We ended up turned sideways, and the truck stalled. Immediately, I tried to restart it. After a few seconds, I stopped though. I wasn’t getting anywhere, and I figured the infected would be close to the truck by then. But when I looked out the window, I saw them wandering around only a few feet closer to us.
“What are they doing?” Amy asked. She was a pretty sharp kid, so I looked closer. After a few seconds of watching, I noticed it too. Most of the time, the zombie walk was a slow shuffle with the hands at the side. If there was food nearby, the arms came up and the fingers curled like claws to grab anything with a pulse and drag it toward the mouth. This group had their arms up, but they didn’t have the forward reach going on. Instead, they were moving their arms back and forth in front of them. As I stared, the sky lit up for the umpteenth time that morning, and thunder hit like a fist, rattling the truck’s windows. The zombies started and then began moving in a different direction.
“They’re blind,” I said softly. “The rain, the thunder and the lightning…the higher functions that help us sort that kind of thing out must not work in the infected. At least not in the dead ones.”
“No bets on it working on the ghouls, huh?” Amy asked.
“I wouldn’t bet my life on it,” I said. The truck started on the second try, and I pulled back onto the shoulder of the road. The shoulder wasn’t much better since every few yards we found where someone else had the same idea but with more fatal results.
“We’ve got to get off the highway,”
Amy said when we passed a turnoff.
“I’m looking for a roadblock,” I told her as I pulled around a gutted minivan. “I still need a new gun.” The wheels slipped in the grass on the side of the road and I let off on the gas to let the truck coast a little ways before I pulled back onto the loose asphalt.
“I thought you loved the Ruger.” She pointed to the little 10/22 Takedown that was stowed behind me.
“I do, and if I had to take just one gun, that’s the one I’d choose. But I like having something a little bigger around, too.” I pulled around the wreck of a little red compact car and drove along the shoulder for another half mile before we came to an overpass. On the far side, a stretch of clear road beckoned beyond the on ramp. I inched my way between two parked cars and crossed the grass median that separated the ramp from the access road, and we were on rough asphalt.
The access road followed the highway for a few hundred yards, far enough for us to get past the concrete barricades that had been set across the road two deep. Disappointed, I crossed the grass to get back on the highway, and a couple of miles later, we drove out from under the rain right before the road turned south. After a week and a half under the smoke that blanketed Kansas City, sunlight was a welcome sight, but I almost missed the rain and the added cover it lent. Still, sunshine was sunshine, even during October. We rolled the windows down and let the sun warm us up. Even in dry clothes, I still felt a little damp after swimming across the Kansas River, and I caught sight of Amy’s hands shaking a few times. She’d snagged a pair of gray camo pants and a hoody at one of the stores in Wyandotte Plaza, but the hoodie and the t-shirt weren’t enough to dispel the chill. I couldn’t blame the icy sensation that still ran down my back entirely on the weather, though. Swimming across the Kansas River had been more like swimming the River Styx to escape Hell. We’d left a lot of demons behind in KC, and very few of them were the strictly metaphorical kind. A little sunshine was welcome in more ways than one.
I saw what I was looking for as we passed a line of trees and found ourselves looking out across an open field. Parked on an overpass south of us were a Humvee and what looked like a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The road going east from there was clear. I couldn’t see the other side, but I was pretty sure it was crammed with cars all the way back into Lawrence. Ahead, I could see the sign for Kansas Highway 9 as it crossed 40, and I took the left turn. Almost immediately, I could see the overpass and the Bradley’s turret pointed west. We passed a couple of quiet little farms, and I did my best to keep my eyes on the road. I didn’t want to see what might be looking out of the windows of those houses. The bigger question in my head was which I was more frightened of seeing, the living or the dead. The first I’d want to stop and try to help, and the second would just haunt me as my writer’s imagination conjured up what might have happened behind the doors of those houses.
Nothing or no one rushed out toward us as we got closer to the overpass, and I slowed down and pulled to the left side of the road. Amy looked at me with one eyebrow raised as I put the truck in park looked toward Lawrence. Vehicles were backed up as far as I could see, but nothing moved. Two weeks of surviving the zombie apocalypse had taught me a lot about the undead, and one was that the mostly dead ones, stage two infected if you wanted a clinical name for them, tended to stay close to where they died until they had a good reason to move on. In some cities they followed the survivors who got out. Springfield’s city limits had been pretty porous, but Kansas City had been bordered by a river on the west side, so a lot of them had backed up against the few bridges that military hadn’t bombed to rubble. Lines of cars meant oceans of dead people who hadn’t got the message. Lawrence struck me as being pretty damn open. It was in freaking Kansas, after all. No road? No problem. Just drive over the flattest fields in the U.S. This whole area should have been crawling with infected. But we hadn’t seen a walker for a few miles.
“Let me guess,” Amy snarked from beside me. “You’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“The Farce is strong in you, padawan,” I said as I undid my seatbelt. “Do you?” She closed her eyes for a few seconds, then opened them and shook her head. It was a reminder of one of the things I hadn’t quite gotten used to, an ability to sense the undead that we shared. Amy was a lot better at it than I was, but she was more comfortable with it, too.
“I don’t feel anything,” she said after a moment. “Not for a while. Is that what’s got you spooked?” I nodded and opened the truck door. She got out as I did and held up her Ruger. “I’ve got your six,” she said, trying to sound casual.
“Aim for the neural strip, the T in the face if you have a forward facing zombie. Eyes, nose, mouth,” I gestured at my own face as an example. “If they’re looking to one side…well, you already know the best targets there.”
“I do?” she asked. Her eyebrows went up a little, giving the grin on her face a sort of surprised look.
“Same place you shot the Necromancer,” I said as I pulled receiver and barrel for the Ruger Takedown from its pack. “Temple and ears. Keep your eyes off your scope until you have a target. And don’t try to shout at me or get my attention. Shoot first, let the shot warn me. I’ll get the message.” The slide went back under my thumb and I pressed the locking tab to hold it in place. Inserting the barrel into the receiver was only a few seconds’ worth of work, and it clicked into place with a twist. Unlike my standard model 10/22, I’d grabbed four Ruger BX-25 magazines for the Takedown. Without a scope on it, I wasn’t expecting to be doing a whole lot of precision shooting. Not that I was a bad shot with iron sights, but I was a whole lot better with a scope. Hence the need for less time reloading between missed shots. With the Takedown assembled, I put the pack back on and loaded a magazine, then released the slide and flipped the rear sights up.
Under Amy’s sights, I headed to my left and made for the eastern side of the overpass. Once I got to the road, I could see that the Bradley was blocking the right lane on the bridge, with a Humvee taking up the left lane. Between the two, they effectively owned the entire road. The back ramp of the Bradley was down, which made me stop for a second. At a roadblock, I would have figured standing orders were to be buttoned up tight. The Humvee’s doors looked like they were all closed, but as I got within a few feet, the rear door on the driver’s side opened a few inches as a breeze picked up and ruffled my hair. The Ruger came up by reflex, and I waited to see if anything else happened. After a few seconds, I lowered the rifle and crept a little closer. More details started to stand out to me with every step. There was no gun in the pintle mount on the Humvee, and the Bradley’s top hatches were standing open, letting light stream down into the vehicle. The underside of the Humvee was visible as I came further up the incline, showing nothing but daylight between the road and the chassis. I wished hard for a scope on the Ruger, but nothing came of it, just like always.
Brass littered the ground between the two vehicles, and I could see bullet holes and burn damage on the cars closest to the roadblock. As I drew close the Bradley, I could see why it wasn’t buttoned up. The interior was blackened from fire damage, and I could see the melted shapes of electronics in the turret. That usually meant the vehicle’s position had been overrun, and they’d popped thermite to keep it from being captured intact. Fighting every instinct I had, I scurried up between the two vehicles and poked my head up to look in the Humvee. The inside was blackened as well, evidence of another thermite charge. My shoulder blades tried to pull together as I climbed the side of the Bradley and crouched behind the turret. To the west, I could see the line of cars stretching back toward Lawrence. A lake took up most of the left side of the road, stretching an easy six or seven hundred yards to the west. I stayed on the side opposite the lake. If I was going to hang out anywhere right now, a place with a supply of water nearby seemed like the perfect place. Then it hit me, what had been bothering me about this whole place.
No bodies. Since zompoc Monday, I’d seen hard core Special Forces
soldiers leave comrades where they’d fallen if they were bitten. I’d watched Marines burn their dead on the roof of a hospital to make sure they didn’t get up and follow us. No one took chances with bodies any more. If any of the troops in the Bradly or the Humvee had fallen, either to zombies or to angry villagers with torches and hunting rifles, I should have seen bodies. Thermite burned hot, but I knew it didn’t burn long enough to completely reduce a body to ash. It was one of the less savory things running around in my head and I was pretty sure the NSA had tagged it in my search history. For that matter, I didn’t see any bodies on the road. No suitcases or storage containers on top of cars. No zombies. Thousands of bullet holes peppered every car in my line of sight, and lots of blood covered the ground in dark patches, but the kill zone in front of me was devoid of bodies.
A shudder ran through me at the thought of what might have happened to the dead, followed closely by a colder dose of fear as I asked myself another question. Who has the soldiers’ weapons? The thought had barely registered before my feet hit asphalt again, and I was running toward the guard rail. My left hand propelled me over the metal rail and my feet hit the uneven ground hard enough to sink into the soft turf and keep me from tumbling down the hill. Amy kept her eyes on the road behind me until I opened the door and jumped behind the wheel. As soon as the engine turned over, she was in the passenger seat and hitting the safety on her rifle. She had barely buckled herself in when I put the truck in reverse and hit the gas. I didn’t try to turn around on the little one lane road. Instead I just kept going for the three hundred yards between our butts and the nearest driveway. My rear bumper took out part of the split rail fence as I cut sharp into the gravel drive and hit the brakes, then shifted into gear. Rocks sprayed the lawn behind me as I hit the gas again, and I took out the mailbox before I hit the road again.
“Dave, what is it?” Amy asked as she looked back behind us. “What did you find?”
