by Rich Baker
Nicky contemplates the insult, and rather than try to come back from it, he changes the subject. “Should we tell him about the people we kill?”
“Why the fuck would we do that, Nicky?”
“Well, if he knew that it was harder than he thinks to get this stuff, he might be a little nicer to us.”
“I don’t think it will make any difference. And Nicky, you never tell anyone about stuff like that. Today, it’s not like the cops are going to arrest us for murder, but you never know when you might come across someone who knows them and wants revenge. Better to leave that kind of information buried deep inside your head.”
“I have bad dreams about it, Lucky. If I don’t tell someone, I think it might drive me crazy. I don’t think my head is that deep.”
“Look at it this way, Nicky. Anyone who won’t give us their stuff is going to get us killed faster, right?”
“I guess so.”
“So just think of it as self-defense. You’re killing them to save your life and mine. The alternative is we die, and they live, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, do you want to die?”
“No.”
“So, there you go. They’re forcing us to do it.”
Little Nicky looks at Lucky for a couple of seconds, then says “Okay, Lucky, I’ll go with that. And I assume we aren’t going to tell him about the things we’re gathering for Max?”
“Fuck, no! And now that you mention it, we need to call Max and let him know what’s going on around here. Let’s finish this stew and head up to our rooms. I’ll try and raise him, and you stand watch for the Gimp and his daughter.”
They eat the rest of the stew, rinse the dishes in the sink and go to their quarters.
Two
Nelson Farms, Friday, May 31, 2013: Z-Day Plus 14
Dale Nelson Jr, or DJ as his friends know him, sits in the hallway outside the principal’s office. Behind the closed door, Mr. Grauber and his mother discuss what he’s done. Behind his back, all the kids call Mr. Grauber ‘Frankenstein’s Monster,’ or FM for short. He’s every bit of six foot seven inches, weighs four hundred pounds, and one leg is shorter than the other, so he wears one shoe with a normal sole while the other one is more than two inches thick. He uses a cane, and when he walks down the hall the kids hear ‘click, thump, click, thump.’ It was DJ who first shouted, “It’s Frankenstein’s Monster!” on his approach. At least, DJ was the first in his class to say it, though certainly not the first in Mr. Grauber’s history to come up with the obvious taunt. In fact, Grauber has heard it from the first day he walked into a classroom after recovering from the injuries received in Vietnam that left him with the shortened leg. Every year there’s a smart-ass kid like DJ who thinks he’s original in making the comparison.
DJ squirms in his seat. He knows what waits for him after this. He’ll get suspended, that’s a given. Then his mother will lecture him the entire ride home about how he never fails to disappoint her, blah, blah, blah. When they get home, his dad will go ballistic. He’ll be up before dawn every day he’s suspended, listening to his dad lecture him about actions having consequences. He’ll be doing hard labor on the farm all day, every day until he’s asleep on his feet, and each morning he’ll be up again before dawn. Lather, rinse, repeat. He can’t wait until he graduates and goes to CSU to play football. He’ll put the farmer’s life of toil in his rear view and never look back.
The door opens, and Virginia Nelson walks out ahead of the principal.
“Thank you, Kevin. I appreciate everything you’ve done for us,” she says.
“You’re welcome, Virginia. I wish there were more I could do, but given the circumstances, I had no other options.” Kevin Grauber throws a sideways glance at Dale Jr as he says this.
“DJ, let’s go,” Virginia says.
“Don’t I get to tell my side…” DJ starts to say.
“NOW!” Virginia commands.
DJ gets up and slinks away, a step and a half behind his mother.
Virginia walks at a fast pace, and while DJ is six inches taller than her, even with his long legs, he has a hard time keeping up with her.
“Mom!” he calls out.
She keeps walking, not answering him. He starts to get worried. She’s really upset this time. She gets to the 1975 Chevy Suburban and climbs in the driver’s side. She looks over at the passenger window, and DJ’s face appears. She leans over, unlocks the door, and the boy climbs into the passenger seat and fastens the seatbelt. She starts the motor, puts the blue beast in gear and drives away from the Skyview High School parking lot.
“Mom, please, you have to listen to me…” DJ starts, but Virginia cuts him off before he can finish.
“DJ, you have fucked up this time,” she says. DJ recoils because he can count on one hand the number of times she’s used the F word.
“Mom, I swear it wasn’t my fault. Look, I’ll volunteer at the school, I’ll make it up to Franken – to Mr. G,” he says.
“No, you won’t DJ. You won’t ever see Mr. G again. You’ve been expelled. The other kid’s family has agreed not to press charges against you or sue the school on the condition that you’re removed and never allowed back. Do you have any idea what that means for your future? The rest of your football season is shot, DJ. Whatever chance you had at a scholarship is gone.”
DJ sits in shock. This can’t be. He didn’t start the fight, but he sure as hell finished it. How can he be in trouble and Chad Callahan isn’t? There must be something they can do to repair the situation.
“Mom, I didn’t start it…” he starts to plead, but she cuts him off again.
“DJ, it doesn’t matter. You never start it. But you can never back down even when it’s in your best interest. In life, you have to pick your battles, DJ, and your problem is that you pick them all,” she holds out a finger to silence him as DJ starts to protest. “You’re walking around with a few bruises, and that kid is in the hospital. The only reason I picked you up at the school and not the city jail is that Mr. G went to bat for you. Your friends backed up your story, and even though the other kid’s history is worse than yours, his parents were sizing up a major payday. Mr. G worked out a deal with them, but the one thing they wouldn’t budge on was making you pay. It was expulsion or jail, Deej. You fucked up your future just to prove you were the toughest kid in school. You had to send a message. Well, it was received all right. Loud and clear.”
They pass the rest of the ride in silence. DJ hasn’t ever seen his mom this upset, and it hurts him worse than anything his father will say to him.
DJs father was livid. Dale Senior had reached the end of his rope with DJ and his troublemaking. He launched into a familiar refrain.
“Actions have consequences, DJ. How many times have I told you that, and you never listen! It’s like I’m talking to a fucking rock.” Dale Sr. says.
“Dad, listen…”
Dale turns to his son. DJ is shocked to see blood running from three places on his chest.
“Dad, you’re bleeding,” DJ says.
“Actions have consequences, DJ. Actions have consequences,” Dale says.
“Dad, what’s wrong, what’s happening?” DJ is getting frantic. His dad’s shirt is soaked in blood now, and his face is pale white like he’s dead.
“Actions have consequences, DJ.”
DJ sits up in bed, breathing hard, soaked with sweat. The images from the dream have left him shaken, but they’re already starting to fade. He gets out of bed, empties his bladder in the bathroom, puts on jeans and a t-shirt, and heads down to the kitchen.
No one else in the house is awake yet. He decides to go to the workshop and finish his zombie killing weapon.
He opens the door and shines the flashlight at the barn. There’s nothing outside, but the twelve-foot-tall walls made of hay bales his brother Tim stacked up between the house and the barn. Tim used the front loader with the fork attachment to grab the massive four by four by eight-foo
t bales, which they would normally take to the dairy farm and piled them three high on either side of the doors for the sixty feet in between the structures. The result was a secure corridor they can use to go back and forth between the buildings without being seen by the zombies. DJ had to admit it was a really good idea.
To add some stability to the walls, Tim put three layers like steps on either side – the inner layer three high, the second two layers high, and the third just one layer - so a normal human person could scale them to get away from zombies. Based on what they’ve seen so far, the zombies themselves are unable to figure out how to scale the four-foot-tall bales. Still, DJ isn’t going to rush headlong out the door. He clicks off the flashlight and puts on his headlamp, slings his AR15, grabs his zombie spear, and heads to the barn.
After his initial encounter with the zombies a week ago, he used his rifle to provide cover for Tim while he played Legos with the hay bales. The rifle is very effective at killing them, but the noise only draws more of them. He’s decided that he needs an effective, silent weapon with which to kill these creatures. He calls his creation the Zombie Killer or ZAK for short.
Inside the barn, he closes the door and switches the lights on. He walks down the side of the building to the area where he has his workbench and cabinets filled with his assorted tools. He sets the ZAK on the workbench and admires it. He made it from the pitchfork that he used to kill those first zombies in the barn what seems like forever ago.
The pitchfork was a five-tine model, but he cut the outer two tines off each side with an angle grinder, leaving the center tine in line with the long wooden handle. He ground the point so that it’s needle sharp. He’s used it a couple of times and found some limitations to its effectiveness.
First, the slight bend in the tine made it harder than it should be to pull the thing out of a zombie’s head, the length made it a bit unwieldy, and the damage it did wasn’t always enough to kill a zombie on the first try. So, it was back to the shop where he pounded the remaining middle tine on an anvil to get the bend out of it, and he took a foot and a half off the handle.
He took a trailer hitch from one of the farm’s APVs, or all-purpose vehicles, cut the ball off, and welded a lag bolt to it. He screwed it into the end of the handle and secured three ring clamps on the first three inches of the handle to keep it from splitting. Then he mixed some epoxy and coated the clamps in a thick layer of the goop, attempting to make it as round as possible. Once it hardened, he took several feet of paracord and wrapped it around the handle to give him something with which to grip the ZAK. His next field test gave him the results he hoped for – he could get the ZAK in and out of a zombie’s head with greater ease, and the steel ball on the end gave it better balance. Plus, he could use it to bash a zombie in the face on the backswing, knocking out teeth and sending it staggering away, giving him time to bring the business end to bear piercing the thing’s brain. Unfortunately, these modifications didn’t do anything to increase the lethality of the single tine. He still had to wrestle with the zombies that he didn’t kill on the first thrust. If he can’t kill them on the first thrust, the whole project will have been a waste. He’s remedying that problem now.
He’s cut three triangles from a piece of steel scrap. They’re roughly the same dimensions as the paper ‘footballs’ he used to make in school, which inevitably would get him in trouble. He starts up the generator by his workbench. The lights get brighter as the Honda engine boosts the charge of the batteries they’ve jury-rigged to the electrical system. He fires up his welder and fastens the triangles onto the tine of the Zak, about three inches back from the tip. He grabs his Dremel and uses a stone wheel to sharpen the front and back edges until they’re as sharp as razors. The idea, as he has it in his head, is that it will penetrate the skull and the eighth-inch thick steel blades will do enough damage to the brain tissue to kill the creatures in one thrust. He’ll find out soon enough.
DJ puts his tools away, cleans off the workbench, and powers down the generator. He shuts off the lights over his workbench and heads for the exit. He takes a last look around, checking that nothing is moving, satisfied, he shuts off the lights and pulls the door closed behind him.
As he walks to the house, he can hear the undead on the other side of the hay-bale walls, probably drawn by the noise from the generator in the barn. He stops and listens to their noises. The shuffling of feet in the dirt. Rasping, wheezy breath, moans trickling from them as they move.
DJ doesn’t understand biology well enough to even hazard a guess at why these things breathe. They don’t need to. He’s shot and stabbed them in the lungs, and they keep coming. He’s shot them in the heart, and they keep coming. He’s taken the head off of one, and the damn thing kept trying to bite him. But whether they need to or not, they can draw breath, and they can moan, and they can scream. Sometimes they moan when they walk, almost like an accordion making noise when someone moves it, the bellows drawing air over the reeds unintentionally.
He shakes the noises off and heads into the house. Inside his mother is making breakfast. He looks over the fare – eggs, bacon and toast. The staples.
“Mmmm! Looks good mom!” he says.
“Well, we’d all better enjoy it because these are the last eggs. Bacon and bread aren’t going to last much longer either,” she says. She looks her son over for a minute. “Are you all right? I heard you moaning in your sleep this morning. Bad dreams?”
“I don’t remember,” he lies, then changes the subject. “I finished the ZAK! If it works like I think it will, I’ll make one for everybody.”
Virginia scowls at the improvised weapon.
“Go check on your brother,” she says. “See if he needs anything.”
“Jesus, can’t you even show some appreciation? I’m trying to find ways for us to draw less attention to ourselves while keeping us safe from those – things out there.”
“DJ, we’re low on food, your brother’s leg is all shot up – thanks to you, I might add. Three members of the family and our foreman are dead, again, thanks to you. We’ve been unable to reach your sister at the dairy farm for more than a day. I’m barely holding on to my sanity, boy. So, I’m sorry if I don’t get all excited about the latest thing you’ve got your hands into for killing something. Now, please, go check on your brother and see if he needs anything.”
Virginia turns her back on DJ and returns to the stove top of bacon.
DJ clenches his teeth, the muscles in his jaw aching.
“She’ll appreciate it when you’re keeping her and the rest of these assholes from getting eaten.” The voice in DJs' head, his companion for as long as he can remember, consoles him. He doesn’t answer it but doesn’t reply to his mother either. He leaves the kitchen and heads into the living room, turning and taking the stairs two at a time en route to Bill’s room.
He sticks his head in his little brother’s room and finds it empty. He heads down the hall to the office, or Nelson Farms Headquarters, as his dad calls it. Or, called it. Past tense. DJ takes a second and pushes the thought away as he typically does with anything that makes him feel real feelings. He shakes his head, clearing the cobwebs of thought, and walks into the room.
Bill Nelson sits at one of three desks in the office, the one his dad refers – referred – to as ‘Communication Central.’ Two thirty-two inch monitors allow the family to view any of the security cameras they’ve set up on their property. They access the video feeds from any internet connected device, but this configuration allows for viewing multiple cameras at once, something which is impossible to do on a mobile phone. The main CB transmitter also resides on this desk. It’s this that Bill is working with as DJ walks in.
“NFHQ to Anderson Dairy. Do you copy?” he asks into the handheld mic. “NFHQ to Anderson Dairy. Comeback.”
“Hey Snowman, how’s the Bandit?” DJ jokes, startling Bill.
“Jesus, man, I didn't hear you sneak in here. You fucking scared me,” he says.
> “I wasn’t sneaking, bro, just walking normal. How goes it?” DJ asks.
“Steve and Bonnie haven’t been responding,” Bill says.
DJ frowns. His sister Bonnie and her husband Steve Anderson own and run the Anderson Dairy Farm, which DJ’s dad recently added to their LLC. When the undead started showing up, they left the Nelson’s house and went back to their home at the dairy.
“How long has it been?” DJ asks.
“Since yesterday,” Bill says. I’m getting a little worried.”
“They’re fine, I’m sure. Bonnie’s a better shot than you. And Steve’s no slouch either. They probably just lost power,” DJ says. “And the CB reception has been iffy at best lately. How’s your leg?”
Bill looks at the bandage on his leg, which covers a gunshot wound he sustained in the gunfight that killed their father, their brother Roger, Steve Anderson’s brother William and their foreman, Hector Martinez. A spot of blood and pus soaks through the middle of the bandage.
“It fucking hurts is how it is. I think it’s getting infected too,” he says, a hard edge to his voice.
“We can get mom to look at it again. It probably just needs another cleaning. I’m pretty sure we got everything out of it,” DJ says.
“Yeah, sure. You’re the expert,” Bill says, clearly wanting to get into another argument over the short battle that everyone now considers unnecessary, but at the time they all went along with DJs plan.
Don’t take the bait. He’ll just go crying to mom, and she’ll be even more pissed at you for getting her baby boy hurt.
DJ listens to the Voice and doesn’t say anything in response. He sighs but keeps his mouth shut.
The CB crackles, and then a voice comes through. It’s tough to hear through the static, but they can make it out.
“Nelson Farms are you still there?”
Bill looks at DJ. The voice is not that of their brother-in-law Steve.
“Answer it,” DJ says.
Bill takes the hand-held mic and presses the button.
