by Won, Mark
I told Gavin and Sam, “That’s how they do things here. They only have the zombies to worry about and most of them have already been wiped out by Billy Ray and his buddies. Basically, they just don’t want to think about it, so nobody keeps watch.”
Tisha said, “Are you sure these guys are going to be here when we come back? With an attitude like that I don’t even know how they’ve survived this long. They’re begging for a bandit attack.”
“Well,” I began, “they’ve stayed alive this long so I’m hoping they’re on to something, even if it is just lucky placement. I take your point though. There was no way I could get through to Mayor Callow. He’d never listen, especially to me, someone with high levels of melanin in his epidermis. But Doctor Cooper seems a more sensible sort. Remind me to give him a few parting survival tips.”
Gavin asked me, “Why won’t that mayor dude listen to you?”
Sam answered for me, “Because he’s a racist.”
Gavin had another question, “Why are we dealing with these guys?” He motioned to the lack of security around us, “They’re stupid, they’re racist, they’re murderers,” at that he motioned to our prisoners, “and they’re cannibals. Can’t we do better?” He was pretty exasperated.
I said, “The folks in Flag Town are, hopefully, a better sort. Fact is, it’s really only these three that are responsible for the murder and cannibalism. I hope to cure some of the stupidity when we talk to the doctor and I’m not about to let a little racism get in the way of something we need.”
Finally we arrived at the southern extent of Flag Town and I ran up to the nearest house. After cutting across a field and knocking on the door I was greeted by a portly farmer (I assumed him to be a farmer because he was wearing work overalls and his house was surrounded by a farm). I introduced myself and he did likewise. His name was Mason Jacobson and he’d been more or less waiting for me.
He said, “Just give me a minute and I’ll go fetch the Parkers and Doc. Make yourselves at home. Luann, she’s my wife, is just in the kitchen cleaning up. I’ll be right back.” And off he went.
By the time Luann came out to greet me the rest of my group had caught up, and we all had a nice chat on her porch. She seemed real curious about why Buford, Harris, and Billy Ray had been tied up. I explained the whole murder/cannibalism thing to her. I even showed her a few examples of dried, yet identifiable, human flesh that I’d made a point to hang on to. She was appropriately horrified and sickened. Outraged even.
Doctor Cooper, Mason, and the Parkers drove up then, and I had to repeat the whole sordid story all over again. Mason Started yelling out into the fields for his children to show up. Three boys and three girls came running over in a couple of minutes. The doctor seemed disturbed by the whole affair. Angry and disturbed.
When Mason’s kids showed up one of the boys asked him, “What’s up Pa?”
Mason said, “Get a rope, Hayden. Billy Ray and his friends murdered Josiah and Nolan. Then the sick bastards ate them.”
What followed wasn’t exactly due process but it was fair enough in my book. The only complaint Doctor Cooper had was the lack of proper formalities. You know, a trial and such. But he was too much of a practical person to try and reestablish such orderly proceedings on such short notice. I did take the gags off our prisoners long enough for them to make a defense. Buford tried to blame everything on my guys and me, but no one believed his line of horseshit.
I asked if we could make them swing at a distance from the farmer’s property. Everyone thought that was because of the indecorous and repulsive nature of an execution (though not in those words), but the truth was I wanted to test the limits of the towns immunity to the zombification effect.
I also figured that would be my last opportunity to test my newfound ability to sense the cannibals’ presence (if that’s what it was, and not just me going insane). To that end, I let the group pull ahead of me a bit until the aroma died down somewhat, then I reapproached. What I discovered was that the cannibal stink would return with proximity, but it would take an extra minute or two.
Buford was hanged first, just south of Mason’s farm. He stayed dead. Billy Ray’s corpse was left dangling a quarter mile farther south. It didn’t change into a zombie either. We took Harris right up to the roadblock before we hanged him. I picked the spot based on the consistency of his pig shit body odor. As soon as his horrible stench was no longer suppressed, even in the slightest, I figured that I’d found the right place, the limit of the area unaffected by the Change.
I had sent Miss Parker and her mom and dad on ahead so none of them would have to witness the hangings. Along with them, I’d sent Gavin and Tisha. That left me with four gunmen, Mason and his whole family, and the doctor (who made a point of pronouncing death and taking notes for the death certificates he intended to draw up). In addition, the family of Nolan and Josiah had showed up full of questions and eager to pull on the rope. Who was I to say no? About eight or ten others arrived with them. People who undoubtedly knew the victims of the cannibals and were eager for justice (and a show).
As soon as Harris stopped kicking his body went ridged and I thought, This is it, he’s changing. And he did change, but not in any of the ways I expected. For no reason that I could see the rope around his neck broke, and Harris’s corpse fell to the earth. All my men and I had our weapons pointing in Harris’s general direction, with the intention of shooting him in the head if he did change. When he fell, three of us fired, but no one hit the creature’s head. Harris’s transmogrification was instantaneous, overcoming the corpse before the body even hit the ground.
What landed was something like a ghoul, in that it had a long tongue and sharp bony fingertips. It had lost all of its hair and its nose seemed to have puckered in somewhat. You know the look. But that’s where the resemblance ended. It’s arms had grown about eighteen inches and its feet had elongated by about the same amount. The creature stood on its overlong toes making the thing look like it had an extra bend in its legs. Every joint of its body had sprouted some kind of claw, talon or horn and the thing’s mouth had grown to twice the size of a human’s. And it’s teeth changed as well. It had a triple row of serrated shark teeth as well as some kind of saber tooth fangs sticking both up and down. Add to that a couple of horns on its skull, a whole line of four inch bone daggers sticking out of its spine from top to bottom, and its otherwise generally skeletal appearance and you have a good idea of its overall look.
Everyone present immediately drew back with a sudden look of disgust and nausea, and a couple of the civilians even gagged. But I have to give my guys credit, they’d never seen any such thing before, but they kept it together. No screams, no wild fire, everybody aiming either for the head or the legs with no wasted body shots. I myself tried for its head. I mean, at that range, how could I miss? But I did.
The thing didn’t seem inclined to attack (which was a first). Amid all the gunfire it seemed to conclude that discretion was the better part of valor and performed a superhuman leap backward, into the trees. My shot took the beast in the neck while a couple of other hits had messed up one of its legs. I tried to hit it again, but it was in so much cover that I doubt that I succeeded.
I shouted, “Hold you’re fire and reload!” The civilians around us had shown none of the discipline of my men. They were nothing but screams and wild fire (a couple of them had brought firearms along). All they were doing was wasting ammunition and time.
With no idea where the creature was I was in tricky situation. Getting back to the buses would be problematic. Moving around the steep banks of the roadblock would leave us too exposed, and the trip back to Flag Town would be a long hike while being stalked by a superhuman antagonist. I decided to try and circle the wagons.
“Everybody get over here and form a circle! Get the folks without guns in the middle.”
I guess all the unarmed civilians milling about and moving in such a sheep-like fashion was more than the monster could take.
It came bounding out of the tree line doing little half jumps and side jigs the whole way. It moved as fast as a scorched cat, bringing its wretched stench with it. Getting a solid shot was impossible.
Not that that kept us from trying. We scored a couple of hits, I’m sure, just not the kind to make a difference when dealing with such a threat. Meanwhile the horror had leapt among us and was tearing into men, women, and children with equal ferocity. At such close quarters my troops held their fire and immediately went to hand to hand combat. The only thing which saved us from a barrage of friendly fire was the fact that the civilians had already expended all of their ammunition.
We mobbed the beast. Donald and Sam managed to body slam the thing to the ground, landing on it. They had opted for anti-ghoul attacks. If the thing had possessed the strength of an ogre I’m sure that wouldn’t have worked. The others had moved in for head strikes using a machete and a kid’s baseball bat with a giant nail in it. Logan and Grayson failed to kill it, but between them they had managed to half sever one of its arms. I took that opportunity to finish it off with my shotgun.
I surveyed the damage. Donald was sliced up from the monster’s spines and Sam had some spurting blood from a slice on his arm. Five of the civilians were down, two obviously dead. I moved over to Sam and immediately used a length of cord from my pack as a tourniquet. Then I moved over to help the doctor with his wounded.
There was a lot of blood. By the time we’d improvised bandages and applied pressure to the various wounds the rest of my men (and women) had either climbed over or around the roadblock and had begun to help. Tisha, Chloe, and Bruce had all thought to bring first aid kits with them. Those three all had extensive medical experience. Meanwhile, Wolfgang was bringing up the rear hauling all of our dried plasma reserves.
I asked Doctor Cooper, “Don’t you have a doctor’s bag somewhere? I’ll go get it.”
He replied, “I already sent someone. He’ll be back soon.”
Between Doctor Callow and all my medical personal no one else died from their wounds. The names of the two who did die were Natalie and Conner. She was a lookie-loo for the hanging and he was a cousin of Nolan and Josiah.
I determined to get my crew on our transport and get out of there ASAP. It was tempting to hang around and heal up but I really didn’t want to spend the winter in Flag Town. Sam was worst off and he could heal up just as well riding on a bus as sitting around in small town America. None of my crew had any complaints, and so we were ready to go by the next morning. I made sure to get a few pictures of the dead monster so the folks back home could better envision the kinds of things we were running into.
No one from Flag Town had any hard feeling against either me or mine. If anything they were shocked into activity. I gave Doctor Cooper some advice, so that by the time we were pulling out everyone in Flag Town was nailing bars over windows and reinforcing doors. Fences were going up and some folks were even weaving wire to form primitive body armor. I, myself, had no intention of leading any more expeditions unless Mark started sharing out the protective gear. I know we had some somewhere because I’d seen a number of the units tasked with clearing the islands wearing it.
On our way back to Haven what everyone remarked on most was the creature’s horrible odor.
Chapter 4: What’s in a Name? How to Captain a Starship, and Knocking Down the Man
“If you don’t mind I think we’ll name it a ‘ghast’,” Mark said while looking over a picture of the Changed cannibal, Harris.
I said, “Whatever you say. One name’s as good as another.” Mark really liked to name things. He thought he was good at it.
I’d given Mark a full account of my journey as soon as we’d returned from our previous mission. The winter had passed without difficulty. Felicia had no complications delivering my son. We named him Martin, after Felicia’s granddad. He was a tubby little guy and I was seriously thinking about giving up my wandering ways so I could settle into the joys of being a father.
Now it was spring and we were due to head out again. This time with trade goods and a whole lot of personal armor. After hearing our story, Mark had made sure we would be taken care of. His initial thinking was that the scouting crews would try to avoid engaging the enemy, while the island clearing crews would be actively attempting to enter into combat. From that point of view it made perfect sense to reserve the armor for the militia clearing the islands. After seeing our wounded he changed his mind. If he hadn’t then I would’ve handed in my resignation on the spot.
Not that our body armor was fantastic or anything, but it was better than nothing. Mostly cobbled together sporting gear and scrap metal laminated with duct tape. I remember one guy handing out the armor told me that the human bite force couldn’t penetrate a scuba suit. I asked him if he was willing to put that to the test, personally. He said no. Hence, the sporting gear.
Mark said, “If this deal with the people of Flag Town works out we’ll be halfway there when it comes to bullet production. But there’s something I need to make clear. I don’t want you to take any bigoted crap from a bunch of cross burning racist hicks. That’s not who we are. Obviously, I don’t want you to go around picking fights, but I really don’t want the people we meet to get the misimpression that I’m...I mean we…are okay with that crap, understood?”
I said, “I don’t think it’ll be a problem with Flag Town. Maybe with Shallow Ford, but I only think I’ll need to deal with Mayor Callow once.”
Mark wished us well and off we went. The drive back to Shallow Ford was blissfully uneventful. I had been worried about large migrating (or at least moving) hordes of the undead. They do tend to get around.
We had even had reports from some refugees originating up north, that a mob of monsters was what had chased them south. The refugees had no idea where the zombies had originally come from. Old Man Althaus (a friend from west of the bay) actually went out and picked through the pockets of a few of the dead. Their licenses said that they’d come from Minneapolis and Duluth. Why so many zombies from two different places would converge in northern Wisconsin was beyond me. We even had some moving northeast along the peninsula. It was almost like they had some idea where we were but couldn’t quite figure it out.
Anyhow, I wanted to get my dealings with Mayor Callow over and done with first, so I could focus on the more pleasurable society of Dr. Cooper and the industrious residents of Flag Town. With any luck they would have produced enough sulfur to be worth the trip.
I was sharing a bus with Henry. We had more than enough trade goods to make the mayor happy in just that one bus, so I didn’t see any reason to bring all three buses, and the semi accompanying us, over to the town’s western roadblock. I got out of the bus with Tisha and Sam, and together we hauled two hundred pounds of butter around the roadblock and over to the Barrow residence. The place had a newly dangerous look about it.
The front door was hanging open and the window just to its left had been broken in. There were no happy children playing on the tire swing and no elderly lady sitting on the porch swing offering me apple cider. Clearly, something unpleasant had transpired since my last visit.
I dropped the buckets of butter and hauled my shotgun around to a shooters stance. Tisha and Sam were not far behind. They looked to me for orders.
I said, “Screw this. We’re out of here.” Then we began backing away.
Sam asked, “What do you think happened?”
“There aren’t that many options, Sam,” I replied. “In any case, I’d made arrangements to meet the mayor at this spot. If he doesn’t have anyone here to greet us then the deal’s off. I’m guessing some zombies came through this way, in spite of the roadblocks, and killed a whole lot of people.”
Tisha said, “Shouldn’t we go inside and check it out? What if somebody is still alive? Don’t we need to find out what’s going on?” Sam looked at her like she was nuts.
I told her, “No. If everything’s fine than everything’s fine, and I can apo
logize later. If things aren’t fine than maybe we can get some answers from Flag Town. There’s no way I’m going in that house with just the three of us.”
Once we had fifty yards behind us I called Jake, “Be on your guard, Jake. Something’s not right. There may be either hostile zombies or hostile humans in the area. Maybe both. We’re on our way back.”
He said, “Roger,” and I knew he was getting everybody ready for a fight.
I got all the buses back together and held a brief council, explaining the situation and my concerns. Then we drove around to the south roadblock that lead to Flag Town. I climbed to the top of the obstruction and tried to take a look around using my binoculars.
The three houses which I could see from that vantage point all seemed intact. There was some action in Mason’s fields. It looked like his kids were doing some work using heavy machinery. There was a big X-fence stretching all the way around the property as far as I could see. It looked good. I climbed back down and addressed everyone.
“It looks safe. Teams two, four, and six will accompany me over the roadblock.” That meant I was leaving Jake, Henry, and Albert with the buses with half the troops. “Don’t take any trade goods. After we know more the locals can return with us to exchange goods, assuming that it’s safe. Let’s go.”
We moved along the road until we came to the fence. Looking along its length I spotted a set of rungs, a sort of stile, about forty yards off. We crossed there and went to the closest house, the one belonging to Mason. Right off I could see some of the improvements which had been made. All the windows had bars of one kind or another added to them. Some looked like they were made from tree limbs, others from scrap, and still other windows were boarded up altogether, with just little eye slits left along the top. The front door had what looked like a pounded flat shopping cart nailed to it, covering the glass. I went up the porch and knocked loudly. It took about ten seconds for Mason’s wife, Luann, to answer the door. She seemed a bit surprised, but lowered her rifle as soon as she saw it was me.
