by Gareth Wood
“Jess!” I screamed as I ran to help, and got to her first. She had shot one of her two attackers in the chest with a shotgun, severing the spine, and it flopped about uselessly on the ground. Unfortunately the other one, a tall male dressed as a cowboy, was now grappling with her, so the shotgun was useless. She had her hand under its jaw, keeping the teeth up and away from her, but it was bigger than she was and very strong. I stepped up and grabbed the back of the thing’s collar and pulled, while pushing my foot in behind the knee. It fell back, and I stamped on its face. Another sickening crunch and I stepped back and shot it twice in the face. Jess took out the one with the severed spine, the shot pellets making a fine spray of the thing’s head and smearing blood, brains, and bone across the road, and we moved on after reassuring each other that we were okay. We found Chris and Darren on top of one of the Explorers, back to back, shooting calmly at the three zombies trying to get at them. Sanji and Eric between them had killed the last two walking dead by the time I got there. As suddenly as it had begun, it was over, and silence reigned again as we took stock.
“Where the hell did they come from?” Darren asked as he climbed down from the SUV’s roof. He offered a hand to Chris.
“Out of the hay,” said Sanji, “They just stepped out all at once.” He shook his head and looked at his now blood-stained clothing.
“Is anyone hurt?” I asked, “Is anyone bitten?”
This was a serious question, and we checked each other very carefully. No one was bitten though I had some splinters in my hands, Jess had a bruise on her hip, and Sanji had a small cut from some glass on his thumb. Dinner was still bubbling away of its own accord on the stove, though we were really not hungry any longer.
Eric and I checked to make sure the undead were all really destroyed, and to see what we could learn from the bodies. They were a mix of ages, genders and races. Most were Caucasian, but there were three First Nations and one Asian corpse. All were dressed in jeans and warm coats, now filthy with rot and blood and dirt. We dragged them all off the road into a ditch, threw in our work gloves, tossed some gasoline on the bodies, and set them on fire. Fourteen zombies made a big pile of burning flesh. We never ate supper that night.
The bloody mouth of the one who attacked me was troubling. It had fed on a live human, and I mentioned this to the others.
“That one has fed recently,” I said, pointing to the burning corpse in the pile of bodies.
“We should look around then, and see if there are any survivors nearby,” said Sanji, loading his Browning with a new clip as he spoke. He had wiped most of the blood off, and changed into a fresh t-shirt.
”They came through this field,” Chris said, pointing to the south. We all looked at the field, and could see the roof of a house and barn about a kilometre away. We couldn’t make out any details from here so we decided to take a closer look. We got into the Explorers and drove south along Highway 33 for about a kilometre and a half, slowing at the gravel driveway that angled towards a white two-story house in a nice yard. This yard was cleared of high grass out to the white wooden fence that ran around the property.
“Look,” said Darren from the back seat, pointing towards the barn behind the house. There was a horse there, alive and healthy looking, saddled and with reins dragging on the ground. There were two bodies on the ground near the horse, one an adult, the other child-sized.
We stopped the SUV’s and got out, looking around carefully. Jess and Darren each climbed atop one of the trucks with rifles, and the rest of us spread out, our shotguns and C7A1’s at the ready. I looked over the house with Sanji while Eric and Chris went towards the horse and bodies at the back of the house.
The house was in good shape, but had been broken into recently. There were bloody handprints on the frame of the front door, and the door was pushed in and off one hinge. The nearest windows had been broken, but there was plywood sheeting nailed up over the inside of the frames, and these sheets looked intact. There was a wooden porch running around the front and sides of the house, and it was also in good repair. As I stepped up onto the porch I looked to the sides, and saw a body lying to my left. Bloody havoc had been dealt to the brain of this corpse, and there was a spray of brain matter and goo on the outside wall of the house. This zombie had been shot from outside the house!
“Chris, let’s take a look inside,” I said, and we put up our rifles and drew Brownings. I approached the main door, and Chris was off at my right side a few feet away. We stepped to either side of the door and I called out, “Anybody home?”
Silence. I stuck my head into the darkness very cautiously. There was a lived-in funky sort of smell inside, not unlike unwashed socks, but no reek of decay. I stepped into the hallway and looked around while my eyes adjusted. Chris came in a moment later, and we stood there in the quiet. The inside was neat and clean, and had obviously been used as a shelter. There was a living room to the right, dark and cluttered, and I saw an unlit lantern on a table nearby. There was a book lying open on a table, a glass with an inch of some clear liquid in the bottom, and comfortable furniture lining the room. A fireplace with ashes from a half burnt log was against one wall, and we could smell the smoke lingering in the room.
The living room was otherwise empty, so we moved on down the hall. There was a kitchen at the back, stairs leading upwards, and a bathroom to my left. The kitchen and bathroom were both empty, and the back door was bolted shut and locked. The windows were all boarded up with 5/8” plywood, two layers thick. It was a good job, with no wasted material or boards just slapped up. We carefully checked the rest of the lower floor, and found a pantry. I opened the door and nearly fell over with shock. It was nearly fully stocked with canned goods, flour, dried fruits and powdered milk, UHT milk cartons, and cans of beer and fruit juice. There was a clipboard with what appeared to be a checklist hung there as well, with a pencil that had been tied to a string hung with it. Chris took the clipboard down and read it over while I looked through the pantry. Everything was neatly organised, and at the back I found a weapon. There was a shotgun in a case, with the stock pointed at us, and the case strapped to a wooden frame. The stock was at about my chest height.
“Look at this,” I said to Chris, and he looked up from the clipboard.
“What the fuck?”
“I think it’s an emergency gun. If the house gets entered, you run in here and grab the shotgun. It would be great for clearing rooms.”
Chris looked dubious, but I thought it made sense.
“Come on,” I said, “let’s check the upstairs.”
I led the way, the Browning ahead of me in one hand, the other holding my flashlight. Upstairs we found three bedrooms, another bathroom, and more supplies. There were beds in each room, a shelf of books in the master bedroom, and a rifle rack in that room as well. It was empty, but there was some ammunition on a dresser, a box of .30-.30 shells that was half empty.
About then I heard the others calling, so we went back downstairs and outside. It was a relief to feel the fresh air again. There had been an unpleasant closeness in the house that I hadn’t noticed until we left. We walked around back and found Eric and the others standing over the bodies. The horse was tied and unsaddled nearby. A man about fifty, dead of bite wounds, and a boy of about twelve, also dead of bites, lay on the ground. The undead hadn’t left much intact, and I looked away. That was an image I did not need to see again in my dreams. There were a whole host of images I didn’t want to recall. Both the bodies had been dismembered, and the skulls were broken open. There was no danger then of them rising.
“What did you find in the house?” Eric asked.
“Supplies, a shotgun, and a library. What about out here?”
“There’s a vegetable garden back there,” he said, pointing. “The barn has a tractor, maybe two hundred litres of gas, and some hay and water for the horse. There’s also a generator, but it isn’t hooked up.”
Jess spoke up, “There’s also a graveyard over there b
y the trees. Looked like about eight graves. I saw them through the scope when I was up on the roof of ‘Stop’ earlier.
“Did these two have weapons?” I asked, gesturing at the bodies.
“Yup, a hunting rifle and a pistol,” Darren said, and showed me the handgun. It was a .357 revolver, and when I checked it all six rounds had been fired. It hadn’t done them a lot of good, obviously.
I looked away for a moment, and noticed that the light was failing. Decision time.
“So,” I said, “do we stay here or do we go on?”
* * *
We buried them in the small graveyard, in holes we dug with the tools we found in the barn. We wrapped the bodies in plastic sheets and put them in the ground, then piled dirt and rocks over them, leaving smaller mounds than you might expect.
Three days later, we were still at the house. We hadn’t exactly settled in, but we had taken the time to bury the zombies’ victims and we had learned about them a little bit. We had no names for them, but the man had lived here. We knew that because we found pictures of him and an attractive middle aged woman on the walls and in photo albums. There were also pictures of children of various ages, but we honestly could not tell from the state of the remains whether the child’s body we had found was one of the ones from the pictures or not. In a more thorough search we had found more weapons and food stored in the cellar, a large woodpile for the stove, a small vegetable garden, and a neat pile of boxed electronics in the barn. All the things that normally would have been in the house, like DVD players, a computer, television, and even toasters and hairdryers, were found outside, wrapped in plastic and sealed into boxes, stacked in a neat pile under a blue plastic tarp at the back of the barn.
We debated where to go next. We were all sitting in the kitchen on chairs around the old oak table when Jess spoke up.
“I think we should leave this place in better shape than we found it,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
“I think we should repair the doors and reinforce them a bit, and leave the key where it can be found, so any survivors who might happen along can get in.”
“Good idea,” Eric agreed, “this place is well stocked. Anybody who comes this way might need a good place to rest.”
“We could leave the key outside, on the door, wrapped up in plastic, with a big sign that says ‘KEY’ pointed right at it,” she continued.
We debated this plan for a few minutes, and I offered a suggestion of my own.
“I think,” I said, “that we should use this place as a base of operations to explore the area from. It’s secure and well stocked, as you said, and it’s in a better place to operate from than a fucking zombie infested town.”
We decided then to use this place as our headquarters. We could send out scouting missions from here and always have a safe place to return. We might have to leave a radio here from one of the vehicles, and leave one or two of us here while the others were out exploring, but that was reasonable. Once we had explored the area we could move on and see what was farther north.
The next day at sunrise we got to work. We repaired the fence, placed sheets of plywood over the insides of the doors, and did maintenance on the vehicles. We refuelled from the barn tanks, and stocked the supplies up a little more from the house. Eric came to me with an idea to make the wraparound porch more secure. He wanted to put some plastic sheets on top of plywood and nail the whole thing over the stairs up to the porch. The undead would have a hard time balancing on the plastic sheets, but we could just grab onto the railing and pull ourselves over the top.
We fixed the place up over three days, and then it was time to get to the real work. We had called Cold Lake a few times to report, and now we called them again to tell them we were heading out in search of the fuel and food so desperately needed back there. There were always supply teams out looking around. Feeding the thousands that had managed to survive in Cold Lake was a full time and dangerous job.
* * *
I awoke in the night with a sense that something had gone wrong. I was sweating, and it was cold in the upstairs bedroom Jess and I were sharing. Dim light fell through the window from a moon shrouded in thin clouds, and I sat up in the silence, reaching for my guns. Once I had the Browning in hand I held my breath for a half minute, and listened. Nothing. I looked at my watch. 3:41 in the morning. It was Chris’s watch. I was wearing long underwear and a shirt, and grabbed my socks from the bed and pulled them on before I put my feet down. The sense of wrongness was still strong, and I stood quietly and listened again. I still couldn’t hear anything amiss, so I crossed to the window and looked outside. Shadows fell like gravestones all across the yard, but nothing moved. I stayed there, looking, for two or three minutes, but it was quiet out there. I started to turn from the window when one of the shadows in the yard moved. More shadows behind that one moved as well, and then several figures lurched into the thin light. I turned to the bed and said, “Jess!”
She was sitting up instantly, fumbling for her gun. She spotted me standing by the window and said, “Whazzat?”
“There are about five or six walking dead outside,” I whispered, and I stepped to the bed and pulled on my pants while Jess got out of bed. She gathered up her weapons while I stepped into the hallway and called into the other rooms. I only had to say the word ‘undead’ and I heard Darren and Sanji and Eric all getting out of bed, gathering gear, and quietly checking the view outside. Jess stood at the top of the stairs, aiming her Browning down towards the floor below us. She had dressed quickly, and her shirt was on inside out. The others joined us in the hallway, and Eric signed to me, five undead outside south, and Darren held up three fingers and pointed towards the back of the house. So that made fourteen or fifteen, if we’d seen them all. We all quietly stepped down stairs into the darkness, wondering what had happened to Chris. If he’d seen them coming he should have raised the alarm, and if he hadn’t seen them he should have at least had time to fire his weapon once or twice. He was supposed to be outside on the porch or inside the house and looking out the windows on a regular basis. At night we usually stayed inside, since it was warmer and more secure. There was an outhouse though. Maybe he’d had to take a piss, and gotten jumped on the way to or back from the toilet?
We fanned out in search of Chris inside the house. I went to the front with Jess and found the door secure and bolted. The windows were all blocked off fine, so I took out my matches and lit a lantern. We had checked the amount of light leakage from outside the first night here, and it was zero. We made our way back towards the kitchen, and Darren met us.
“The door is unlocked, and the key is gone. Chris must have gone outside.” He looked back towards the door and was starting towards it, when I grabbed his arm.
“Take it easy, Darren. Let’s do this carefully.”
Chris was not in the house, so he was outside with the hungry dead. We heard no gunshots, so either he was hidden or already dead. I suspected he was hidden, since the shambling horrors outside were not congregated in one place feasting.
“Might be he’s in the outhouse,” Eric said.
“Or the barn. There are plenty of places there to hide,” Sanji offered. He was loading a shotgun as he spoke.
“Okay, here’s the plan,” I said, checking my Browning once more. “Jess and Darren go upstairs and make a racket at the front of the house. Open the windows and shout and get their attention. Once they all wander to the front, Eric and Sanji and I go out here, circle around to the outhouse, and check that, then check the barn if he’s not there. Sound good?”
There were nods all around. Darren and Jessica headed upstairs, and soon we heard them hollering and shouting for the walking dead. A few minutes later Darren called down that he counted fourteen undead outside, and that we should go now. I looked at Sanji and Eric, and they nodded. I took the safety off my Browning, and opened the back door.
As I stepped outside, I flicked my flashlight on, pointing
it along my barrel with my left hand, while I aimed with the right hand and used my left wrist as a platform. The others flicked on flashlights as well, and we all stepped outside into the chill air. I could see my breath misting in the air as I stepped to the edge of the porch and looked around quickly. There were no walking dead in sight, but we could hear them from the other side of the house. Before long one or more of them was bound to notice our lights, and come to investigate, so we moved fast. Across the back lawn behind the vegetable garden was the outhouse, which was actually a construction site portable toilet that had been mounted over a deep pit on wooden beams. I approached it directly, with Eric on my right and Sanji on the left. We stopped at the door, and I called quietly, “Chris? Are you in there, man?”
There was no answer, so I tapped the door with my boot and called again. Again there was no response. I looked back towards the house, and could see three shapes shuffling around the side of the porch. Damn, they had noticed us. Eric and Sanji stepped a few more feet apart and aimed at the approaching undead while I turned back to the outhouse. I reached forward and opened the door, aiming inside with the Browning.
The toilet was empty except for a stale smell of urine and shit. Chris wasn’t there. I scanned around, in case he was lying nearby, but nothing. Sanji called to me, “Here they come, Brian.”
I turned back to the undead just as Eric fired his C7A1 at the nearest. Three rounds stitched a pattern up the face and head, making a very loud crack crack crack sound, and the woman—or the thing that had once been a woman—fell over backwards from the force of the multiple impacts. Sanji waited until the nearest to him was ten feet away before firing, and a foul crimson and grey spray erupted from the thing’s head and the pellets ripped through facial tissues long rotted, bone, and finally brains. Eric was already tracking the third one, so I aimed at the next at one of several more that had come around the house towards us. From the front I could hear gunfire as Darren and Jess fired from the upstairs at the zombies below them.
