by Smith, S. L.
Fewer and fewer zombies seemed to be coming to the church fence, as well. Isherwood knew this could change at any time, but it made him feel less anxious about leaving. Vanessa also seemed to be adapting well to her and her son’s new life at St. Mary’s. She had taken Isherwood aside to tell him how thankful she was, not just for saving her, but for bringing her son back to her. She had been more than happy to take on additional duties besides monitoring the radio, especially when it came to protecting the children from kidnapping. “Not my son nor anyone else’s are getting hurt under my watch.” She had promised Isherwood. Seeing the flame in her eyes, he didn’t question her commitment. She had even started, along with Sara, training the other women how to use the firearms. Even Aunt Lizzy was getting pretty deadly with a rifle – she’d even volunteered for bell tower duty. Isherwood mused that, if he did come back, he might be returning to an Amazonian kingdom of fierce female warriors.
All in all, Isherwood felt that the community would support itself despite the temporary loss of all the men. Though he may later regret it, he left them with a full stock of weapons and ammo. They would just need to find more ammunition along the way.
*****
Monsignor said Mass for the men before he would allow them to leave. When they eventually did leave, Old Blue was again at the head of their caravan. The caravan now numbered five vehicles. Isherwood had only begrudgingly added the National Guard vehicles to their caravan, when Uncle Jerry had promised he would modify the two CRVs as he had Old Blue. Father Simeon and Marshall were both able to drive either of the National Guard vehicles, the giant troop transport and the Humvee. Padre agreed to drive the Humvee and make up the caboose of the caravan.
The night before, not long after Vanessa broke the news of making contact with Whiskey Bay, they had started brainstorming about their ammunition shortage. They made first a list and then a map of the stops they would make before leaving town. The police and sheriff’s stations would be first on the list. There were three or four stops to make just for these. Next, they brainstormed the houses where they would be likely to find ammo and possibly even more survivors.
Sara was especially helpful identifying who might have a stockpile of weapons and ammo in their homes, as these were precisely the same families that had joined her family out at Whiskey Bay in years past. Many were even family members, though nearly everybody in town was at least a cousin. The first name on the list was Brooks Moore.
*****
Whiskey Bay was an hour’s drive from St. Maryville under pre-zombie conditions. The majority of Sara’s family property lay directly south of Interstate 10, extending right up under the interstate which consisted mostly of bridges between Baton Rouge and Lafayette.
The raids they had undertaken along the way had been oddly fruitful. The police station, though otherwise destroyed in what appeared to be the officers’ last stand, was a honey pot of 9mm ammunition. All of the police station’s firearms, whether pistol or rifle, had been made for 9mm, as well. They thanked God for the chief’s foresight, or whoever had made the decision to stick with the 9mm. Isherwood was especially grateful, as the score perfectly matched his own stockpile of ammo. The sheriff’s office, however, had already been picked clean. The raids on the various residences had been fruitful, as well, if interrupted by burials – Brooks Moore’s house was its own story.
After a full day and a half of preparations, side trips, and back roads, they caught sight of smoke still rising from the interstate. The caravan parked in the middle of gravel roadway beside a cell phone tower. The vehicles formed a diamond pattern around the large Army transport truck they had liberated from the National Guard armory nearly a week ago. Old Blue parked out front, as always, while Isherwood’s Jeep and Justin’s Escalade parked on either side of the transport truck. Padre parked behind the transport in the Humvee.
Marshall got out of the transport and switched positions with Isherwood, getting into the Jeep. Isherwood closed the driver’s side door and left the Jeep. He walked up to the gate of the chain-link fence that surrounded the base of the cell phone and radio tower. They were still about a mile north of I-10 and only slightly northeast of the camp where Glenn and the rest of Sara’s family were trapped.
They were in the middle of the Sherburne Wildlife Management Area. Just the right spot, Isherwood thought to himself, for a massive cell phone tower. The tower was massive. Standing at the gate, Isherwood looked up at it, shielding his eyes from the bright sky. He had read on the various maps he’d managed to put together that the tower rose over 150 feet.
Isherwood left the gate and walked back over to the Jeep. He opened the back tailgate to retrieve the set of bolt cutters. “Padlock?” Justin asked from the turret of the Escalade.
“Yeah,” Isherwood answered. “Thank God, too. I didn’t want to be climbing over that razor wire.”
“Yeah, buddy. It’s up to you to repopulate the earth.”
“You okay climbing that thing?” Padre asked.
Isherwood tried putting on a nonchalant ain’t-no-thing face, but gave up. “Yup. Got to. We talked about it, and I’m the only one that has the slightest chance of recognizing the landmarks from up there. None of y’all have ever even been to the camp, except you, Justin, and that was only once. I’m not gonna lie – y’all better grab your umbrellas, because that’s not gonna be rain that comes sprinkling down. It’s gonna be my pee. My knees are already all wibbly-wobbily.”
After about another half an hour, Isherwood clipped his harness to the ladder at over one hundred feet. He had climbed as high as his knees would let him. Even though he was tied off, he kept one gloved hand gripped tight to the ladder. He turned ever so slightly and caught a stiff wind. He flung his free hand back to the rung of the ladder. After a moment and a couple more “Hail Marys,” he again let his left hand drop down again. He slowly turned to face Interstate 10 at his back.
The interstate stretched for miles and miles, from horizon to horizon. He couldn’t believe how high one hundred and fifty feet had taken him into the air. He felt like he could see clear to Texas on a clear day. Isherwood figured he must be five times as high as the St. Mary’s bell tower. He was almost as high as the tops of the towers supporting the Audubon Bridge, which they had led the long snake of zombies across just over a week ago. Had it been only a week?
His stomach lurched as he thought about how high he was. He pushed the contents of his stomach back down and forced his swirling vision to clear. He dared not look directly down beyond his feet. What he saw stretching out behind him was enough.
Isherwood had thought he’d seen just about as many zombies as a person could see. He had been so wrong. From the crew he’d led across the bridge to Pickett’s charge at the levee to, just a day or so ago, the swarm coming out of the spillway, he must have dealt with at least five thousand by now. But there were still so many more below him.
As he looked down now, he couldn’t believe the wreckage contained in just one thin strip of roadway. Thin strands of smoke were rising diagonally into the sky from charred wrecks. After all this time, the smoke was still rising. Isherwood could even see flames still spilling out of cars along the roadway. He thought maybe one burned into the next, like a long fuse running all the way to Lafayette or Baton Rouge. The cities sat on either horizon. Thick smoke hung like black shrouds over both of them.
He was still quite a distance from the interstate. He squinted, but still couldn’t see any sign of the undead. There was something odd about the roadway, though, like the hazy mirage that hangs around a gasoline fire. There was a strange sort of movement along the roadway. He put his binoculars up to his eyes, but he still couldn’t make anything out except for the small lumps of cars – but wait. As his eyes adjusted, he began to understand what he was seeing.
It was like the videos he’d seen of the ocean floor, where endless fields of kelp or seagrass or whatever just drifted back and forth moved by unseen currents.
He could see the t
ops of the cars like flat squares, but not the sides.
The realization of what he was seeing struck him like a thunder bolt. The funny movement was them, moving listlessly side to side. They were just standing and waiting, some of them. Others seemed to be slowly groping their way toward one horizon or the other. Some seemed to be just drifting back and forth, as though first pulled toward the flames of Lafayette then slowly being distracted backward by Baton Rouge burning. Maybe it was the vibrations of explosions carried along the roadway that drew them first in one direction and then the other, alternating endlessly. They were completely filling the interstate like a slow-moving river pressing past and submerging the endless lines of cars and trucks like small islands in the stream.
He was not downwind of them, thankfully, nor even upwind, if that even mattered, but he could still hear the moans. They were not the excited moans that would rise from their rotting throats when living flesh was in sight. The moans were vast, however. It sounded like a giant, bored pipe organ made up of a thousand, thousand throats. It was horrifying, too.
Isherwood tried pulling his eyes away from the terrible scene. He eventually forced his eyes to scan the roadway up and down for exit ramps, especially directly behind him to the Whiskey Bay ramp. When he finally spotted it, he could see only the leading edge of it. But he could see enough. There was general, though still aimless, movement towards and leading down into the ramp. The river of zombies was narrowed there to thin rivulets where the cars were crammed too tight for zombies to pass abreast. No, it wasn’t that the cars were crammed so much as – Isherwood blinked at the sight and felt his stomach lurch. Rotting flesh, scratched and torn from a thousand passing bodies was gradually damming up the exit ramp.
It didn’t matter, though. Isherwood could see the zed heads spilling over the sides of the roadway. He couldn’t see where they fell. The tree tops blocked that. He was pretty sure, though, that they just got right back up again.
Isherwood estimated that there were maybe two to three thousand per mile. God, where had they all come from? If they started shooting at any point along the roadway, they would merely break the dam at that point. The dead would eventually start raining down on them. It might only be a trickle at first as the dead slowly surged against maybe one hundred feet of roadway. They would eventually mound up, Isherwood imagined, against the sides of the roadway, maybe across the whole width of the road. The dead would start using the still-squirming mounds below them as a ramp. The river of dead would flow, then, up and over the sides of the roadway. The whole river would start spilling down over the sides of the road, right down on them.
He realized that Sara’s family was lucky to be surrounded by only a few thousand. Any intrusion by their own rescue party would likely only add to these numbers. And by quite a lot.
“My God,” he finally said to himself, lowering the binoculars. “What the hell are we gonna do?”
The Cajun Zombie Chronicles continue in Book Two …
The Island Dead
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