by Eddie Austin
I can remember carrying bucket after bucket of water to the house; a seemingly endless tide of cooking and bath water. Bill told me little snippets of news as I would take breaks. The states were closing their borders, all of them, not just the ones that border with Mexico. International flights were being turned back knowing full well they would crash long before making it back to safety. There were puzzled doctors and puzzled families and, of course, politicians who had all the answers.
At some point the government enacted some doomsday plan, once it was clear that many of the people walking around were of the non-breathing variety. Some said that the government was euthanizing entire hospitals, setting up huge burn sites for corpses, and disbanding the National Guard, sending troops home to try to help those they could. I hadn’t seen one of these “zombies” at that point, but I will never forget the first time that I did.
It was early, like most of my mornings, and I remember jumping from bed when I smelled the smoke. It flowed in a column on the tree line and I knew that it led back to Bill’s. I ran, cursing the lack of a phone or radio or any way of getting help, but once I got there, I knew it was too late.
The fire had pretty much burned out. Some beams still fell out of the jumble of burning hell, but it must have been going all night. I ran around the house three times calling Bill’s name. I saw his truck and knew he wasn’t going to be anywhere if not there. I sat down about fifty feet from the heat of the dying pile and took stock. I was numb, not crying or hysterical but on the verge of despair. I knew they were dead, but it wasn’t the first time someone I knew had died and far from the closest. I guess I felt a little lonely. This is when I looked up and saw it.
Turning the corner down the long driveway, he was short, maybe five feet, six inches tall. He looked like a migrant farm worker. I thought he had seen the smoke and had come over from a neighbor’s farm to see if we needed help. I started to rise and go greet him when I noticed his beard. It was not a beard, but rather a great fan of dried blood and bits of scrabbly meat strings. Closer now, I could see that his eyes were mad and they were not looking at the house. They were looking at me.
“Holy shit!” I had said.
I didn’t pause long. I ran into the barn and closed the door. Last I’d looked; he was only twenty or so feet behind me and moving at a brisk if painful looking walk. I cast about me for some form of defense –seeing only an old fishing rod, a basket, chairs. My eyes settled on a kitchen knife. I flew back to the door and opened it just as he negotiated the first step.
I yelled, thrusting toward his belly, blade sinking to the handle as the knife passed through his shirt. Out of this exaggerated wound burst an awful stream of blood, fluids, fat, fingers, intestines, organs, lips… God! It was awful, like a pressurized cannon of chewed people-parts.
I fell backwards and the thing kept coming toward me. I pushed at the door with my left foot and got it closed enough to slide over and put my weight against it, trapping his arm. Shove, SHOVE, crack! I felt and heard the bone snap and the appendage flop to the side as I pushed harder at the door.
To my right were an old umbrella and some odds and ends in an old butter churn, nothing to defend myself with. I kept pushing on the door, and at some point my efforts unseated a horseshoe that hung there. It scored my scalp and made me pause long enough for the thing to force its way in.
I screamed and ran back all the way through to the back window. I dropped down to the grass, a jarring drop, and as I ran I almost fell over another of the things. This one was crawling in the grass, a blue bandana tied over its face and a samurai sword strapped to its back. I didn’t even think I just stomped it over and over again. The back of its head caved in and my boots were covered in this black shit. I bent quickly and drew the sword; half a sword. As I looked closer, it appeared to have been run over. Thanks.
Gutso had managed to spill himself out of the window behind me and I flailed at his approach with the broken half-katana. The top of his head fell sideways leaving his jaw and neck behind. I ran another fifteen feet, paused, threw up, and looked around. Nothing. I saw nothing but fruit trees, corpses and this big lovely barn rising above me. Standing there covered in God awful shit, I knew I needed soap. Badly.
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I pour the soap into some Tupperware trays that had been lying around. Three trays, maybe 13x9 inches, an inch and a half thick with soap. After it sets for a few hours, I will score the surfaces of the big blocks into the smaller bar-sized chucks. Good soap takes six weeks to cure. The lye needs to mellow out and finish the saponification of all that fat.
I leave the trays in my workspace, laid out on a big butcher block table that serves as a general hub of tinkering and food experimentation. I step back in the cellar and grab a bottle of pear hooch.
One of the most useful things I’ve found in the barn has been an old hand operated press for making cider and oils. I’m not a genius, but figuring out how to make hard cider isn’t too taxing. Just let it sit. As best I can, I keep a ready supply of this handy, for scavenged booze is often scarce.
I walk back out front and regard my surroundings. Behind me looms the barn and relative safety. Before me lays a small pasture. It is about an acre in size and borders the beginning of the orchard. Past the pump, an old wire electric fence runs next to the dirt road that begins as a continuation of the driveway and leads to the orchard. Random out buildings, the animal enclosures, and the pit that was Bill’s house lays beyond this. I have a fire pit set up at a safe distance off to the right and spend as much daylight as I can relaxing there.
I take the hooch and sit in the old rusty garden chair next to the dying fire. I take a long sour pull on the stuff and resign myself to boredom. Life isn’t too hard here. There is water, too much fruit for one man to eat, and some dried meat to add variety. Preserving as much fruit as I can, both as cider and dried fruit, takes most of my effort.
I grew some pot the first couple years I was alone, and by now, it pretty much takes care of reseeding itself. I harvest some and keep it in mason jars for the off season. Booze and the occasional joint serve to ease my boredom and loneliness, but I try not to get too careless, lest the dead sneak up on me. I walk around the property twice a day checking fences and booby traps. Most of these consist of monofilament wire attached to bells or anything that will make noise. I haven’t seen too many people alive or dead in the past year thank God. So I’m not really worried; just being cautious.
I learned the sense of caution slowly during the first year or so after the end of normal human existence, and after the fire. That first day was hard. Cleaning myself up and retiring back to my shack. (I hadn’t moved to the barn yet.) I remember being kind of freaked out. I’d left my clothes in a pile next to the pump while doing the best I could to clean off the awful oily mess that covered me. I remember the icy cold of the water, as I shook dumbly, and scraped water off of my body with the edge of my hand. Orange tinted rivers ran down my calves and through my toes to mingle with the short and very coarse grass.
I walked back to the shack naked except for my boots and boxers which I had deemed salvageable. I entered the one big room of the shack. The structure was rectangular with a door on the skinny end that faced the orchard. There wasn’t much to the place, which is why I had originally enjoyed it so much. One corner held a sink and half-fridge and a small electric range. That served as my kitchen. Opposite from it was my bathroom; a closet-sized room with a stand-up shower and toilet; no sink. The rest of the space held my single bed, a coffee table and a few short bookshelves. There was no ceiling, just the angle of the roof, supported by wooden frame, from which I had occasionally hung various plants and herbs to dry.
That first morning, I burst through the door and grabbed fresh underwear and socks, a long sleeved t-shirt. Heavy canvass overalls rounded out my ensemble.
I’d left my guns behind with a lot of the stuff from my former life when I moved out to work for Bill. I did remember my old knobkerrie
and I grabbed it before admitting to myself that I had no plan, no idea what was out there, no line of communication, no family or friends nearby. “Shit.” I sat there breathing slowly through my nose and out my mouth. “Shit.”
I had sat very still that morning listening to the wind outside and listening to my breathing inside. I leaped up and began pacing. I needed a plan. I had seen plenty of zombie movies and read up on the genre, but this was real. Still, how hard could this be? I fancied myself a modern day Omega Man, just without the cool apartment.
I knew I needed someplace defensible; preferably off the ground. The barn was my first thought. OK, clean the barn, gather useful stuff there and find some weapons. I’d keep the shack habitable and use it for a fall back in case the barn was compromised. The shack was out of the way with no road leading to it. I could cut down the power lines that ran to it. It didn’t look like I’d need them any time soon, and they might lead someone right to me. The shack was also on the edge of the orchard. Behind it lay the low hills that separated this small manmade oasis from the salty and lonesome desert on the other side. Should everything else fail, I’d stop here, grab supplies, and bug out to the hills for a bit while things cool off and come back when I could.
I imagined two real threats. First, these awful rotting corpses that wanted to chew on me. And second, the living people. Starving, armed, and looking for a place to stay. Well, this was my home now. I didn’t feel too charitable toward those who could or would inevitably ruin my nice form of government—myself; Autonomous I.
This moment of reverie and insight had been broken by the sudden rasping, as of someone sliding their body along the rough timbers of the shack’s outside walls. I set my teeth, put on leather work gloves, hefted my knobkerrie and pushed open the door.
In life, no measure of peace is bought without blood, or gore. This was no exception. Before me, spread out, perhaps fifteen feet from the closest other form stood a shambling crowd of thirty or so of the recently departed. Perhaps they had come from the town that was about ten miles away. Some looked local, farmers, church ladies, regular people. Some looked out of place. A soldier wandered with the milling group; his riffle still hanging from his outstretched arm. Another looked like a L.A. lawyer who’d slept in his suit for weeks. Possibly most disturbing was the prostitute with the enormous belly. I remember having hoped it was swollen with people flesh and not some unborn horror.
She was the one dragging around my shack and I started with her. Whap! The knobkerrie connected with the side of her skull and she fell like a sack of grain. This was too easy. Spaced out as they were, I walked or jogged as needed, spinning, keeping an eye to every angle if possible. LA lawyer. Whap! Church lady. Whap! Teenage punk, resplendent in a black shirt that said “kill me” across it. Whap! Whap! Carla from the bank: Whap! On and on this went. I sweated, took deeper breaths and soldiered on. Whap! Whap! Whap!
⃰ ⃰ ⃰
I start. The empty bottle of pear hooch clanks off of the chair and rolls behind me. I’ve burned most of the morning sipping the stuff, staring into the embers of the fire and reliving past glories, for what they were. I’m not wasted, but damn near close, and hungry, too.
I wander over to the shed which I have converted into a smoke house. Deer meet hangs high in thin strips beside a leg that I am experimenting with turning into a ham. Too much goes to waste when I take a deer, but I had never been a hunter in my former life. I eat as much as I can after taking a deer and make the best cuts into thin strips of jerky. So, I now grab a strip and walk away after securing the plastic sheets as best I can around the door. I head toward the orchard.
Bill was an interesting man. Before running the farm, He had owned a distributorship, retired, taught college, and retired again; this time to the orchard. I knew him from a class of his I took during one of my attempts at college. It was on sustainability and green farming. We chatted a few times after class, and I sent him an odd paper or two over the years for his thoughts. He was a nice man and he had an interesting vision for this land.
Most farming in this area had been possible only through extensive irrigation which left our poorer neighbors to the south with a serious water deficit. Bill had traveled to Africa, India, and Central America looking for crops that didn’t require such rich soil or large amounts of water. He envisioned leaving the farm to his alma mater as an endowment. It would have been an extension school, a teaching farm that produced responsible, sustainable food.
As I walk the orchard on this late morning, I have plenty of choices. Most of the trees are in season, and true to Bill’s dream, this particular section is an Eden of sorts, no two trees alike. I take an orange and peel it slowly eating the wedges whole and savoring the juice. After this I eat a sour pear with gritty, rough skin. I am nearing the newest end of the orchard. Rather than turning back, I press a little further toward the large trench in front of me.
Bill excavated these trenches himself; each row about five feet wide and five feet deep. The soil is sandy here and adding compost to the pits slowly over time before planting trees in them would give them a better chance of survival. Bill never finished this section, though.
I pause at the edge and regard the tangle of limbs and bones and cloth that lay in the pit now. Downwind, downstream, and pre-dug, this seems a logical place to dispose of bodies. I have thought of torching it, but what fuel I possess is precious and the smoke might draw attention. My eye catches a flicker of movement and I curse myself for not having the foresight to bring a weapon. After a moment, I relax. A small metallic blue lizard runs roller-coaster tracks through the ribs of a small person, perhaps a girl. It pauses and sees me before darting deeper into places I don’t want to imagine.
I turn then and decide to be productive with the rest of my daylight before turning in. I do a quick circuit past the deer fences and see no new gaps –this section only has been fenced off to protect young and tasty trees from the rapacious deer. I walk out beyond this, to the old orchards and contemplate my situation as I mindlessly survey the land.
Most of my forage I now have stored here has been brought to me. Not many people wander out this way. Those who do, I imagine as being horribly lost, or perhaps they wisely seek the less populous and therefore, safer, areas. I imagine the ultimate survivalist nut job. Needing a decent paying job to provide for expensive weapons and gear. Owning an extensive video library of elaborate Hollywood fantasies. Then one morning, they wake up in their fifth story apartment to the sound of something that actually demands surviving. First order of business; go find a nice hideout, preferably in the hills, far from this reeking, smoky God-awful mess. After the third time being shot at while trying to talk to one of these fellas, I stopped asking questions first. This is my land.
Pleased with my tour of the grounds and noting the slant of the sun, I decide to trek back to the barn and call it a day. I need to light a lamp.
Kerosene is one thing that I have in abundance. Bill had a large above ground tank of the stuff next to his garage. I hang the lamp on a hook that I have placed roughly in the center of my storeroom that leads off from the large first floor room of the barn. It is almost sunset, and this small room has no windows. Shelves rise on each wall all the way to the ceiling. Tupperware bins with clothes, boots and tents, faraday flash lights, radios, a whole shelf full of knives, coffee cans full of bullets, sorted as I unloaded them from clips and weapons. And what weapons! Row upon row of handguns lay out on two bottom shelves. Next row up are shotguns, breech, pump, semis. Riffles and assault weapons at head height: 30-30’s, AK47’s, .308, AR-15’s, even an old Russian M-44 carbine. Mankind has been killing each other for a long time.
The swords I keep in a fifty gallon trash barrel. The top shelves contain bulky stuff: packs ready to go with food, tents, and small arms; a stringer of canteens and plastic water bottles air drying. Opposite the weapons in salvaged bins, lay MRE’s, some still good. I try to eat them before they reach their five-year shelf life, but what y
ear was it?
Each week I choose a shelf and clean up, dusting, oiling, and repacking. I pause next to an AK-47 and pull it down. Pulling back the receiver, I peek in the chamber out of habit and let the bolt slide forward. I push the plate at the base of the stock and the cleaning kit pops out. I discovered this feature by accident. One day, out of curiosity, I stuck my finger in there, and nearly dropped the thing when the cylinder popped out. Would be nice to have a manual or something.
Pausing to grab the lantern and a bin of cleaning odds and ends, I bring the gun back out into the big room and lay it down across from the soap on my workbench.
You don’t drag a barn all the way across the country to put hay in it. Bill spent time making this space clean, insulated, and habitable. The big room has an open ceiling and the loft looks down over it.
I sit on the long green couch and busy myself in cleaning the weapon. The row of small windows above the large barn door to my right says that the day is slipping. I can see the buttery light soaking into the tan rough-hewn boards on the opposite wall before sliding over to an old nautical chart of the coast of Maine. I wonder how many people still live in Maine. I bet the waters teem with huge fat lobsters, clicking away on the smooth rocks of the Atlantic, pumping their cold blood and looking up with their cold black eyes.
I put the rifle back together and check the action. Rather than putting it back on the shelf, I grab a thirty round banana clip and chamber a round. Being a domestic gun, it is semi-automatic only, so the clip lasts more than eight seconds in the hands of a discerning marksman: Me.
I pop outside while the light is still good and jog over to the privy, set up behind the barn and ten feet from any other cover. It has a daylight only operation. Buckets fill up quickly at night though, so I waste no opportunity. The coast is clear, the seat warm and dusty. I flip through a National Geographic from 1979. There is an African fellow with a huge white turban and aviators on the cover. I’ve read every word of it forty seven times. I clean up with a rag and dump some ash down the hole. Is that a noise?
