by Smith, S. L.
“Well, if we’re gonna do all that,” Justin said pausing. “We might as well try to get all the rest of the cattle, too. There’s gotta be a truck and cattle trailer on this property right here, don’t’ya think?”
Isherwood was laughing and shaking his head. “What?” Justin said, mildly insulted.
“You mean like that one?” Isherwood was pointing farther up the driveway towards the house at the back of the property. “Looks like Ol’ Patty has thought right past us.”
Justin turned to see Patrick driving towards them in a silver truck pulling a cattle trailer. It was a dually Dodge Ram 3500 and clearly a diesel. The power windows were rolling down as Patrick pulled up. He yelled through the cab, “It’s got a hemi!”
“Well, I guess so.” Isherwood smiled. “I didn’t know you knew how to hotwire!”
Patrick shrugged, “I don’t. The keys were right under the visor. A shiny new apple just waiting to be picked.”
In another hour or so, they had loaded up another eight cows. Patrick seemed to be having much better luck maneuvering this trailer than the one before. There were still another dozen or so, which they had to leave behind. These would likely be devoured by the zombies that all their noise would inevitable have drawn in. They were soon back on their way to Morganza, only another three miles or so down the road.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: PADRE
The Three Amigos caravan once again included three vehicles. Isherwood had taken over driving Old Blue, as Patrick had taken a liking to the new Dodge. Despite the change in driver, Old Blue was again at the head of the column. It had now become tradition, even superstition.
Isherwood took mental note as they passed the Laurent Brothers service shop. This had always marked the beginning of Morganza in Isherwood’s mind. It was also where he would cross the railroad tracks to go to Sara’s grandmother’s house, her father’s mother. The woman was sort of the matriarch of the town, having given birth to a large share of its population, who in turn spawned an even larger share of the population. Sara’s father, Glenn, had been one of thirteen children. Sadly, Sara’s Mawmaw had died the year before. It now appeared like a special grace for her to have died before the world became so inhospitable.
They passed the old high school. It was a three-story brick building surround by a somewhat sturdy fence, Isherwood took note. After another half mile, they passed the old fueling station and the remains of Melancon’s Café where the movie Easy Rider had been filmed years before. Next, Old Blue led the caravan across the railroad tracks down a short street which led directly to the front doors of St. Anne’s church. A large field stood empty and green before the church. Isherwood had never really noticed the fence encircling the church before. Its cast iron bars looked nearly as sturdy and tall as St. Mary’s.
But the very first thing they all noticed were the electric lights blinking on to welcome them. They parked the caravan in the middle of the road that crossed perpendicular in front of the church.
“Son of a gun got electricity!” Justin called out as they the driver’s side doors all clanked open along the church-side of the road.
“The son of a gun’s got a bicycle generator,” a voice called out. “And a gun, too, while we’re on the topic.”
“Dang, it’s good to hear that voice. Come on out, Padre! It’s me, Isherwood, and some friends. We come as emissaries of the new Abbot Monsignor or Monsignor Abbot or whatever of St. Mary’s. Civilization has returned to Morganza, more or less.”
A tall, thickly-built man in a black cassock threw open the doors to the church and walked out with his arms lifted wide. He had black-rimmed glasses and a coarse black thicket growing across his face which poorly concealed a broad white smile. He looked like a mountain man stuffed into black priest’s robes. Two small cats slinked out of the church after the big priest.
He strode to the front gate without saying anymore, but the wide smile remained etched across his face. As he drew near, they could see he was a younger man. Though Isherwood was actually the eldest, the four men were all about the same age.
“Come on in,” Father Simeon beckoned. “I was wondering when you’d get here.”
“Wait–” Patrick turned to the priest suspiciously. “You knew we were coming?”
“Mmm-huh,” Simeon nodded.
“But how?”
“Little birdie told me.” Simeon answered, smiling with an unreadable gaze. A moment later, Simeon returned to the group after latching the gate back. They just stood for a moment trying not to look at each other. Simeon seemed far more at ease in the uncomfortable quiet than the others.
Justin finally broke the silence, “So, what’s the plan, eh? Does that fence run all the way around to the back of the cemetery?”
“It does,” Simeon nodded. “I see you’ve brought a herd along with you.”
“And some bales of hay,” Isherwood added. “You saying we could use your church grounds to give them a home? This would be perfect, Padre. Perfect.”
Padre just nodded in answer, rocking back and forth a bit with his hands pushed down into the deep pockets of his cassock.
Isherwood was smiling slyly. “Bicycle generator, you say? You know, Padre. The only thing that could make this more perfect is if that generator of yours meant we could all share a round of cold beers.”
Padre slowly raised his still-smiling bearded face. “Indeed.” He said leading them over to the Rectory. “I think I still owe you a few, Isherwood, don’t I?”
“Maybe, but one cold, post-apocalypse beer would be worth an infinity of pre-apocalypse beers.” Isherwood answered.
*****
“I guess I ought to have asked this sooner,” Isherwood said, after he had taken his time consuming possibly one of the last cold beers left on earth. They were all sitting around the oak kitchen table of the rectory. The cats took turns preening themselves around the men’s boots. “Excuse me,” he said belching. “Is it just you here? Any others?”
“Oh yeah,” Padre answered. “There’s a few around. There used to be more, but –” He stopped there, not feeling the need to say anymore.
Patrick wrinkled his nose. “Uh, where are they?”
“They’re not here, of course. They come and go.”
“Man,” Justin said. “They the loner type or something?” Father just shrugged in answer.
“Do they live nearby or out in the woods?”
“There’s two that live in town. One lives somewhere out in the middle of the spillway. Call him Carrot.”
“Carrot?” Isherwood laughed. “Is he red-headed or something?”
“Nah,” Padre said. “He just sort of pops up here and there. Should really be called gopher, but so it goes.”
“You think they’d be willing to join up with us? Or, are they the unsavory sort?”
Padre leaned back in his chair to consider the question for a time. “Maybe, but they don’t seem to have much cause to just now.”
“Y’all haven’t had any zombies coming up out of the river?” Isherwood asked incredulously.
Padre leaned forward and put down his beer. “Come again?”
“Padre,” Patrick said. “We had basically emptied the town of zombies, and then we went scouting along the levees. We put down, after nearly a whole afternoon, about a thousand.”
Padre looked to the other faces for confirmation. Isherwood was nodding, “The river must’ve carried them from wherever. It just sort of belches them up, we think. Padre,” he said emphatically. “They don’t drown.”
“They just get soggy,” Justin added.
Padre nodded. “You know, I think we ought to round those guys up.” Even as he said it, there came a sound of iron bars rattling. They left their beers and hurried out of the rectory back to the gates. There were two men and a woman at the gate. They weren’t looking through the gate to the church, but backward. It was then that they noticed the moans coming up from the spillway. The sound drifted their way on the wind. It was a low soun
d composed of many thousand voices.
“Looks like the zombies already rounded them up for us.” Justin said as Padre was busy opening the gate. “That’s the good news.”
“The—they—they’re,” the woman was saying breathlessly. “They’re coming up the spillway.”
“Guys, this is Agnes, her husband Jim, and Marshall.” Padre introduced the two groups. They were each carrying either a pistol or a rifle. They each also had knives and some other kind of bludgeoning weapon.
“Alright,” Patrick said. “Where should we draw the line?”
“What’s that?” Padre asked calmly. The priest seemed to be growing calmer the crazier things became. Isherwood explained how they marked out a range and allowed the zombies to walk into the kill zone and slowly build up a barricade with their corpses. Isherwood suggested that they mark out their range in the open field at the front of the church.
“Yeah, nice clear line of sight, but we’ll need to guide them in somehow.” Justin suggested.
“He’s right,” Marshall was nodding. “We’ll have to lead them up along the highway, and then make them take a sharp turn.”
“Looks like they’re already doing half our job for us,” Padre nodded back toward the Morganza Highway the men had driven in on. Everybody turned. The leading edge of the hoard was trickling in along the road. They hadn’t yet noticed their group in the churchyard.
“Come on, guys,” Isherwood said in a hush. “Let’s get our trucks inside the gate. We can start firing from there, if the sound of the trucks doesn’t bring them in our guns will.”
Patrick was on the radio as he ran to his new Dodge truck. He was updating St. Mary’s of their situation. “We’ve found survivors at St. Anne’s, Padre among them, but a hoard of RDs arrived just after us. We’re fine here. This church has strong fences, too.”
Old Blue led the three vehicles into the elliptical driveway in front of the church. They followed the driveway around and then turned sharply onto the grass so that the trucks were parallel to the fence. They parked as close to the fences as possible to provide counter pressure to the fences in case the zombies overwhelmed the barricades.
“We’ve got one extra .22 and about two thousand rounds between us.” Isherwood was explaining. “Jim, what kind of rifle you got? Is that a .22?”
“Nah, it’s a .270.” He explained.
“That’s fine,” Isherwood was nodding. “I think we’ve got about a hundred rounds for a .270 and an extra one in Old Blue when yours overheats. Maybe you and your wife could lay down on top of that cattle trailer right there – the one without the bull in it. We’ve got a turret in the Escalade and the bed of Old Blue, too. Hey, where’s Padre?”
“I’m right here,” he called out. They looked around, but didn’t see the priest. “Up here,” he called out. They looked up, following the priest’s voice all the way up to the church’s west bell tower. Two towers rose from either side of the church’s front façade. Padre was laid out in the one closest to them, looking through the scope of a high-powered rifle. “I’ve got three more rifles up here, and – BLAM, ckshhh!” He paused blowing the head off the first zombie to cross their imaginary line of demarcation about seventy-five yards in front of the church fence. “—and about three hundred rounds. The rest of the Morganza police department’s armory is in the front bedroom of the rectory. Help yourselves.”
“Hey, Padre!” Isherwood called up to the bell tower. “Will you help us watch out for zeds coming from over there?” He was pointing down along the road that ran east-west in front of the church. There was another side street connecting the Morganza Highway to the church road. The zombies could easily start coming from that side, which would make for a bad shooting angle. They would also need to divert some of their people to cover the new direction. So far, there were only one or two trickling in down the church road.
Padre nodded. “Once they get past the Rectory, though, my line of sight gets blocked.”
“Hey, Padre,” Justin called up. “How about a quick blessing? This hoard’s looking pretty ugly.” They looked back to see Padre raising his arm and marking a cross in the air.
The new survivors took pretty quickly to the new strategy. They were forming a neat line at about 75 yards. The zombies were still trying to stumble and crawl over the mound. They would continue to do this, Isherwood had observed, until the mound reached about chest level and began to obscure the zombie’s peripheral vision. Either the zombies were just focused in on their prey and had tunnel vision, or else their visual field had contracted somewhat. Zombies don’t blink, Isherwood knew. The lenses of their eyes were gradually obscured and grayed by a thousand little scratches.
Once the mound grew high enough, they would begin staggering around the outer wings of it. The shooters used this movement to lengthen the mounds until they expanded enough to run into some manmade obstacle, usually the side of a house or building. The expanding mounds would gradually curve inward since the shooting line was relatively short, only ever ten or twenty feet long. Eventually, if there were no obstacles, the mound would encircle the shooters. There would come a time, Isherwood mused, that they may have to fight on open ground and not behind a fence. If that happened, they could use this strategy to build a wall around their position. If there were just a few shooters, they would need to shoot back-to-back. They would literally be circling the wagons. Once the mounds grew high enough, they would just need to shoot the heads of the zombies as they came crawling over the top. When it was time to get out of the zombie atoll, though, they would have to be very careful climbing over the mounds. There would likely be a number of zombies that were still squirming inside the mounds, who had become trapped inside during a z-landslide or avalanche.
After an hour of constant shooting and re-loading, the z-mound at seventy-five yards was about twenty yards wide and four feet high. It was already starting to grow longer. Padre had made another mound about three-feet high across the road running east-west in front of the church. Between the two slowly expanding walls was a house surrounded by a short chain-link fence.
Isherwood was resting a moment, but still watching the kill zone in front of the church. It was about three in the afternoon. He was reloaded his spare .22, and making sure the others were also good for ammo. “Hey, Padre,” he called up to the bell tower. “What’s it looking like upstream?”
“What’s that?” Father Simeon said lifting his head from his rifle and waiting a moment for the ringing in his ears to subside.
“Upstream? You know, up-hoard? Any signs of slowing down? Any leaks opening up around the kill zone?”
“I can’t see down the highway,” Padre was shaking his head. “Pretty steady up and over the railroad tracks. As the wind changed a little while ago, it sounded like the moans were still coming from out pretty far.”
Isherwood nodded, sighing. “It they’re still coming by the time it gets dark. We’ll put our headlights on ‘em. We could always start mounding again at thirty or so yards for those that make it over the top.”
“How’s the ammo situation?” Padre asked.
“We’ve probably got through three or four hundred rounds so far. We’re about a quarter to a third out. And that’s not counting whatever you’ve got stashed in the Rectory.”
Padre nodded in agreement and fell quiet. He soon put his head back to the scope of his rifle. Isherwood walked off awkwardly and went about passing out bottles of water to the new guys. The two men and the woman were on the right side of the firing line. He encouraged them to watch out for the zombies that would soon start coming in greater numbers around their side of the mound. He subbed in for them as they gulped down some water hastily. It was a cool, Spring day, but the heat from the rifles accumulated quickly.
After another hour, the zombies were crashing through the yard between the larger mound and Padre’s side mound. The zombies started spilling through the windows of the small house between the mounds. Isherwood called out for Padre and Ju
stin, who were all working the left half of the kill zone now, to help him plug the windows with the corpses. Next, they dropped the zombies as they came up against the short chain link fence. The space between the house and the fence quickly clogged up with zombies and the mounds collided with each other.
By 5:00pm, the St. Mary’s ammo supplies began running dangerously low. By this time, however, the mounds were rising past twelve feet or up to the roofline of the Rectory. The long semi-circular mound had terminated in a line of houses on the right side of the kill zone, or back towards St. Maryville. This was fortunate because it left one side of the road in front of the church open to the trucks as an escape route. The left side was petering out about thirty degrees past the ditch that ran along the road in front of the church. The zombies were now mostly coming straight on, trying to climb up the slippery outer slope of the mound. Their heads kept popping over the crest of the mound.
Patrick was getting really good at picking off the heads as they popped up. He called them “gophers” – “You know,” he explained, “like on the old Nintendo duck hunt? That little gopher would pop up in the foreground after the end of a round of shooting the ducks. You don’t remember that little guy? He’d be holding all the dead ducks?”
“You’re losing it, man,” Justin smirked. “That was a dog. You know, a bird dog?”
“Oh, right. You’re right.” Patrick nodded, remembering. A couple seconds later, he was back to calling them gophers. Justin cursed, but started his little screeching laugh when he noticed Isherwood shaking his head at both of them.
Around 6:00pm, they finally started taking ammo from Padre’s cache in the Rectory. “Go ahead,” Padre encouraged them. “Take some. Just help me gather up all the spent casings when we’re done here – and I think we are about to be done here.”
