by M. D. Massey
The sound of creaking floorboards on my front porch woke me up at about zero-three-thirty, according to my watch. I still had my Glock on me and my M4 was leaning up against the side table close at hand. I slipped on my boots, listening for any additional noise from outside. While it could have easily been an animal, no raccoon was going to be loud enough to make those boards creak. Only thing that heavy would be a black bear, which I’d only seen once in all my years on the ranch. That, or a human. I was betting on the latter, although how someone would have found our place at random was a mystery to me. This cabin was well back up in the woods from the main road, and it’d take an aerial search team and a FLIR camera to find it in the dark.
No matter. I assumed it was someone who’d headed out in the woods to bug out and stumbled across the place. Or possibly an illegal—I found them on the ranch all the time. If it was a looter I’d try to scare them off, and if it was an illegal, I’d just give them some food and send them on their way.
As I was reaching for my rifle, in my grogginess I accidentally caused my soup bowl to collide with the table lamp. Although the sound wasn’t really that loud, it may as well have been a gunshot in the silence of the Hill Country night. Immediately after that, I could hear a pair of heavy feet shuffling to the door, followed by scraping and banging on the frame and door itself.
Must be a drunk, I thought to myself. But that in and of itself was a pretty damned deep mystery. How in the hell would a drunk make it up a mile of dirt roads and jeep trails in the middle of the night? Let me tell you, it gets pitch dark up here after sundown, and on an overcast night like this one you’re lucky to see two feet in front of your face without a flashlight or some other artificial light source. If whoever it was had come in a vehicle, then I’d have heard them coming up the road. As far as I could tell there weren’t any flashlights swinging around outside, either.
I figured it was time to take a look, so I crept over to the window and peeked out. All I could see was a large, dark figure swaying back and forth, more or less bumping into and banging on the door and wall outside. Deciding that this was just a little too weird, even for my tastes, I crept over to my gun safe and popped it open. I used just a sliver of light from my mini taclight to see the dial so I could crack it open, and grabbed my NVGs from inside. Strapping them onto my head, I turned them on with my eyes closed and cranked down the brightness, then opened my eyes and waited for them to adjust. After about 30 seconds or so, I headed to the second bedroom.
When I was about 14, I’d made an emergency egress point, otherwise known as a trap door, in my bedroom floor here at the cabin. Originally, I’d made it so I could sneak out and go frogging and coon hunting in the middle of the night, although when my dad found out he threw a fit. My grandpa calmed him down, saying he’d always wanted to do the same thing when he was a kid. Since Grandpa overruled Dad on all things having to do with the cabin and land, I got to keep my trap door. These days I kept the hinges well-oiled and the latch maintained, just in case I ever needed a way to get out of the cabin without making a lot of noise. This would be one of those times.
Secretly praying that no rattlesnakes had taken up residence under the house recently, I carefully lowered my rifle down the hole and on the ground below, and crawled out head first. It was a tight fit, and I recalled how much easier this had been as a kid. After getting my bearings, I tucked my rifle over my arm to keep it from scraping the ground, and began to low crawl out from under the house. I could still hear my guest banging and scratching at the front door the whole time, which pretty much covered any noise I made. Once I was out from under the cabin, I press-checked my rifle to make sure I had a round chambered, and headed around the house.
Coming around the corner, I could get a much better look at the guy through my NVGs. At first glance, he looked like he was either extremely muddy, or that he’d been in an accident and was covered in blood. A head injury could account for his strange behavior, so I assumed the latter. It looked like he had suffered a nasty cut over his eye; there was blood all over his face. As I crouched and watched him from around the corner of the cabin, something niggled at the back of my mind. His movements and behavior were strangely familiar, but I just couldn’t place them.
Then it clicked. The way this guy was moving reminded me a lot of the illegal who’d attacked me at the Stop N’ Steal. That guy had moved with the same rhythmic swaying motion, and with the same repetitive pattern as well. Weird. I decided to sit tight and observe him for a moment, since he didn’t appear to be an immediate threat. I leaned against the cabin and made myself more comfortable so I could keep an eye on him for a few minutes.
Strangely, the guy’s pattern of movement never changed. He just kept sort of banging on and walking into the door, over and over again. To be honest, after a while watching him started to put me to sleep, so I’d look away every now and again and scan the area for other threats. With nothing changing after about ten minutes or so, I was about to call it a night and go back inside.
Then there was a loud rustling from the treeline behind me. Likely it was a rabbit or a squirrel evading a night predator, but it sounded like thunder in the still silence of the night. I turned to look, just in case it was another human instead of an animal, but couldn’t see anything. When I turned back to see if my guest had noticed, I got the shock of my life.
My visitor had turned fully toward me to see what had made all the racket, and now that he did I could see that this gentleman wasn’t well. For starters, he was missing half the right side of his face, which looked like it had either been torn or gnawed off. He was similarly missing his right arm at the elbow, which ended in a nasty, jagged wound that should have been dripping blood all over. It was instead dry and crusty, like a newly scabbed cut.
Finally, the guy’s throat had been ripped out.
His throat had been ripped the hell out. And he was still moving around. Shit.
The impact of what I was seeing though my NVGs freaked me out so bad that I stumbled. And as I reached out to the wall to steady myself, I missed it completely and fell to one knee, making a shitload of noise as I bumped into the cabin wall. That sure got his attention. Before I could get back to my feet, he was moaning up a storm and making a beeline for me, despite it being blacker than charcoal on a cast iron kettle out here.
I got my bearings and started backing up, mumbling to myself, “This isn’t happening, this is not happening, holy shit, this is really happening!” Well, maybe I screamed that last part like a little girl, because Stumpy the one-armed freak was gaining on me as I was backing up. I yelled at him, as loud as I could, “Stop, or I will be forced to shoot!” That only seemed to make him even more agitated, and the sum’ bitch picked up his pace.
I knew that I couldn’t keep backing up or I was going to go ass over teakettle on a branch or rock and have this asshole right on top of me. Once I came to that conclusion, it was abundantly clear what I had to do.
“Screw this,” I declared, and fired two rounds center mass on the guy.
No effect.
“Ah, shit!” I switched the selector from select fire to full auto and lit the guy up. I emptied a mag in him, which made him jerk about like a puppet and seemed to halt his progress as he staggered about. Unfortunately, once I ran out of ammo, he kept coming.
“Balls!” I shouted out as I reached for another magazine and realized I’d come outside without a spare. I dropped the M4 on my one-point harness and drew my Glock.
The guy was within a few paces of me when I drew a bead on his big ugly forehead. Up close I could see he was some type of office worker. He wore a short-sleeved oxford and a tie, both covered in gore that went all the way down to his cheap Walmart khakis. His knees were also covered in blood, which I assumed meant he’d been kneeling in it. He was missing one brown dress shoe, and I could see that he’d worn through a sock and most of the flesh on that foot. His other shoe, strangely, was polished to a high gloss, and besides some scuff marks o
n the toe, was more or less free of blood.
Weird, the things you notice when you think you’re about to die. I took all this in within a millisecond, and pulled the trigger twice. The first round made a nice neat hole in his forehead and snapped his head back, and the second one caught him in what would have been his windpipe. The freak fell at my feet immediately, dead as—well, a corpse. I shuffled back a bit anyway and kept my muzzle trained on him for a few seconds, listening to the sound of my heart beating out of my chest and the rapid rhythm of my impending hyperventilation.
I made a conscious effort to slow down my breathing so I didn’t pass out. Once the lightheadedness cleared, I shuffled forward in a shooting stance and nudged Stumpy with my toe. No response. I did it a few more times, then I set to kicking the shit out of him with my steel-toed combat boots while spewing a string of obscenities that would make a drunken sailor blush.
Once I’d gotten that out of my system, I bent over and vomited. I must have stayed there, hands on my knees and catching my breath, for—oh, maybe five minutes or so. Once or twice, I heaved again, noticing just how much this guy stank. He reeked of dead flesh. It was a smell I was intimately familiar with, and one I’d hoped to never experience again.
When I’d got back from the ’Stan, I’d applied for a job with the Travis County Coroner’s office. After my interview, they took me on a tour of their autopsy room. It was the dead of summer, and they’d run out of space in their meat locker. Yeah, you think you could deal with that smell, but you’d be wrong. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.
All quaint memories aside, I needed to regroup and rethink my plan. Thing was, if the reports I’d been hearing over the shortwave were correct and there really was some sort of zombie outbreak going down, I really couldn’t afford to waste time getting to Mom and Dad. Hell, this is bad. Really bad, I thought.
On that note, I crawled back under the house, locked that hatch up tight, double-checked that all the doors and windows were locked, and started slamming that six-pack of tall boys I’d snagged earlier from the gas station. After the fifth one, my nerves had settled and I was finally able to get back to sleep and catch a few more winks to prep for what was to come.
5
Engagement
I woke up a few hours later, still a bit drunk and already feeling a minor hangover coming on. I sat up quickly, remembering the events of the night before. Despite the pounding in my skull, I got up and hopped over to the window. Yep, he was still there, clearly missing a limb, and clearly dead twice over.
“Piss,” I hissed quietly. I skulked over to the kitchen, slugged a glass of water and put a kettle on for coffee. Then, I went to the bathroom and carried out my morning routine, finding a clean change of clothes and taking the time to groom myself just like any other day. The routine was to help keep me sane, to keep my spirits up. I had a feeling I was going to need both before the week was over.
About the time that my kettle was whistling at me, the phone rang. I ran into the kitchen to pick it up, pulling the kettle off the stove at the same time. “Hello?”
“Aidan, Aidan is that you?” It was my mom, thank God. I could hear her chattering in the background to my dad, telling him it was me on the line. I heard his deep voice rumbling back, instructing my mother to tell me they were fine.
“Mom, tell Dad I heard him, and that I said to stay put until I get there.”
“Oh, mijo, everything is okay. Your dad has everything under control, and we’re safe as can be here outside of the city. He says to tell you—”
Click. The line went dead. “Mom? Mom, hello?” I hit the receiver and tried to call back. All I got was the same busy signal I’d been getting for the last day or so.
“Damn it to hell!” I shouted, and nearly threw the phone across the kitchen. Instead, I took a few deep breaths and set it down in the cradle. Probably wouldn’t have hurt it, as that old bakelite phone had been through hell and back over the years, but I didn’t want to risk breaking my comms.
I leaned back against the counter and looked at my options. Option A: Wait to hear from my parents again and make sure they stayed put. Problem with that was there was no way of knowing when or if we’d be able to get through again. So, onto Option B, which was to sit tight and wait for my dad to load up whatever wheels he could find and get here. He would find a means of transport, that was for sure. So no dice. Him and my mom alone on the road, all the way from Austin to here? Uh-uh, no way, no how.
That left Option C. Pack my shit and get my ass in gear. Action over reaction. Now, there was an option I could live with. I made my coffee and fried some eggs, heating some toast up on the burners and making some bacon as well. Once I’d fueled up and tossed back some aspirin for good measure, I loaded everything I needed into the Toyota and did a once-over around the place to make sure everything was locked down. First order of business was switching the solar system over to start charging the battery bank. No telling how long I’d be gone, and by the time I got back the power might be out for good, so I figured I may as well prepare for that contingency.
It also meant putting the bear shutters on the cabin. My dad had decided to get them a few years back after black bear sightings started increasing in the Hill Country. Glad he did, because they’d do double-duty for fending off these—what, zombies? Living dead? I thought back to that guy I’d put down the night before, and how after I’d punched his ticket he was deader than dead.
“Deaders,” I said to myself. That was as good a term as any, and it didn’t freak me out quite so bad to think it or say it. Well, at least that was settled.
As for all my valuables, the gun safe would take a forklift to move and a blowtorch to cut through. No way anyone was getting what I had locked up in there. As far as the rest of my weapons and ammo—my real stock of SHTF stuff—that was all buried in caches all around the property and at my camps out in the sticks. Hell if I was going to be caught flat-footed during TEOTWAWKI. Screw that.
I looked around the cabin and supposed I was ready as ever. Then I remembered Stumpy. He was sure to draw animals and Lord knew what else to the cabin. I definitely needed to dispose of him before I left. I wrapped him in an old plastic sheet, taped him up with duct tape, and laid him across the lowered tailgate of my truck, after securing my gear with cargo netting. I’d drop him in a ravine right off the road on my way out of town.
I drove down the old cabin road and hit 336, stopping to lock the gate on the way out. I was about to drive off when I thought better of leaving it exposed. I cut some brush to hide the gate and that shiny brass and steel lock. It wasn’t perfect, but it’d do for a short time. Then I got in the truck and boogied off down the road, heading south for Highway 83.
About a mile down the road I started running into trouble. Never mind the cars that had slowed me down on my first little excursion this way; I’d forgotten about that mob of “looters” that I’d seen coming up the road the day previous. Yeah, those looters turned out to be what looked like the entire population of Leakey, all milling up and down the road looking for somebody’s face to chomp on.
They were all deaders. All of them.
I figured out what they ate by observing several packs of them huddled around corpses like a school of piranha, tearing off bits of flesh and skin and fat with their teeth and hands. Those groups barely paid me any mind as I drove as fast as I could past them. However, if I slowed down too much I drew the swift attention of all those who did not have their own human snack pack to feed on. This resulted in my truck getting beaten on in a few instances, not to mention all the gore they left on the windows. Nasty.
Before I even got to Leakey I could see that this wasn’t going to work. There were simply too many cars blocking the road, and too many deaders milling about to get through. I briefly considered just running them down, then I came to my senses and remembered what had happened to my dad’s full-size Ford truck when he hit a deer doing forty. I doubted that my little truck could take that m
uch abuse, no matter how tough it was.
Moreover, I hated to think about what might happen if I got stuck on a pile of bodies. This truck had a lift kit and four-wheel drive, but I recalled a story a cop had once told me about a woman he arrested for murder. She had tried to run over another girl she had caught with her boyfriend in flagrante. The girl had gotten stuck under the car as she ran her over, and she’d dragged that girl three blocks before getting stuck on a curb. I could easily imagine getting two or three of these things stuck in my wheel well, and pictured what that might do to my axles and suspension. No thanks.
As soon as I got the space I hooked around and headed back north for Highway 41. I figured that away from town there’d be almost no cars blocking the roads, and a helluva lot less deaders. Nothing but ranches and hills out that way, so the chances that I’d run into a herd like this one were minimal at best.
Sure enough, I made good time all the way up to 41, and then it was more or less smooth sailing for the next eight or ten miles, up until 41 intersected with 83. Unfortunately, at 83 there was a four car pile-up with a small herd of deaders milling around and beating on an overturned minivan. I suspected that there were some survivors inside the vehicle, so I parked back up the road a few hundred meters and climbed on top of the camper with my rifle and a pair of binos.
I couldn’t see much inside the car, but I got busy straight away and started dropping corpses like Ash Williams on speed. Once I’d dropped all the deaders that were milling about the van, I hopped back inside the truck and pulled up close to the crash, leaving me some space to get out quick in case I needed to boogie. None of the corpses were moving, so I decided to jump out and see if there was anyone left alive inside.
