by Won, Mark
I introduced myself and we got to know each other somewhat. It seemed that his crew was most recently from the boondocks north and west. The kid (his name was Luke) was a bit vague. I got the impression that he wasn’t the navigator. They were on their way to Haven.
Once back at the homestead we all got out and Luke started counting heads. He seemed to be in a mild state of shock, mumbling something about a miracle. Turned out they hadn’t lost anybody in the zombie attack. Not even a cat. With all that running around and desperate gunfire they’d gotten about as lucky as anyone could hope for. It was a real cause for celebration.
I got a few of them inside and situated and explained my situation. That muscle bound kid with the maul introduced everyone, saying that his name actually was John. Then he asked if he could help out with the animals and recommended planting soon, if I intended to do so at all. I hadn’t really given it any thought, but once he mentioned it I had to admit it was a good idea. I am, after all, a farmer, myself.
Luke asked if he could fix my antenna for me. He said he knew right off what was probably wrong with the telescoping unit. He’d had to fix the same problem back at the ‘silo’ he’d worked in.
But before anyone got to work, the pastors they’d brought with them, Reverend Ert and Pastor Jerry, performed a big outdoor service of thanksgiving. I thought that was real nice. I even got included in the prayers.
Then we split up and started to get some work done. With that crowd we fixed my whole place up in an afternoon. They were a lot of skilled labor. From a farmer’s point of view we only planted a little vegetable garden, maybe an acre. The rest of the yard I intended to leave as woodland for fuel or grass for my sheep.
Among their number, there were plenty to help out with the animals. All it took was just one look, and I knew my flocks were in good hands. Most of them were the kind of people who’ve been looking after animals all their lives. They were all awed by Zilla. I can’t say I blame them, he’s a lot of porkchop.
Luke seemed especially interested in my flame thrower.
“So, where can I get one of those flamethrowers from?” he asked me.
“Why would you want one?” I countered.
“You’re kidding, right? That thing was awesome! Zombies hate getting all burned up. I never knew that. Did you know that?”
I told him, “I did not know that. But, I figured it would get the job done eventually. I didn’t think it would work so quickly, though. That surprised me. I thought it would take a lot longer for the fire to reach their brains, with them flailing about the whole time. I guess we got lucky.”
He said, “Luck, my ass. It was a miracle! So, do you know where I can get one?”
He seemed determined so I gave him the one from the truck. I still had the one I kept in the van as well as a couple of backups laying around the place. They’re safe enough if kept empty. I made sure he fully understood it’s operational parameters and dangerous limitations before taking him out for a practice session.
There weren’t enough bedrooms to go around, not even close. They numbered one hundred twenty-four souls. Originally they’d been in two groups, Luke’s had forty-six and John’s had seventy-eight. Everyone was going to be packed in and sleeping on the floor, cheek to jowl. John volunteered to sleep in the barn loft with anyone else who’d fit, but we were still way over capacity.
I guess that was a good problem to have when almost the whole earth was dead.
Chapter 6: Interlopers, Have Zombie will Travel, and a Comparison to Sausage
That night I was awakened by my perimeter alarm. I called up the menu screen on my security monitor and selected an appropriate camera view for the gate.
A bunch of trash, covered in tattoos and full of ear piercings, were trying to figure out how to bypass my gate. There were about fifty of them. So far they’d managed to saw into the lock (thus triggering the alarm). I was pretty upset. That lock would be hard to replace if they ruined it.
First off, I used the intercom to alert everyone in the house of the problem. I’d used my phone/remote to access the intercom, so I could hustle down to my super bunker without wasting any time. I made a point of telling someone to use a CB to call everyone in my barn. That was where most of the men and half of the guns were.
Once in the super bunker I remotely opened the gate before those morons did any more damage to it. It was kind of funny, watching the gate swing open, with all of them jumping back and looking around in wide eyed fear. Eventually, they screwed their courage up and began a ‘stealthy’ advance on the house. I made sure to call the barn, myself, just to ensure that they were all as ready as they could be, for whatever might come.
When I’d let the interlopers get about half way to their destination, I got my turret going and let them have it. Half of them opened fire on my house! The fools thought the fire they were under was coming from the wrong direction. It was almost too easy. The gun moved smoothly on it’s rail, swinging this way and that, spitting death all along a forty yard section of my driveway. A number of them tried to run for the woods to the south, but they never made it. A greater number made for the open gate. I closed it.
You should have seen the looks on their faces when that door swung shut with them on the wrong side! Some of their buddies were trying to force it open, using brute strength from the other side. When I got the group that had run to the gate in my sights, I let their buddies have it too. The way they were all bunched up it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Except much more satisfying.
I know my puny little gun turret was such a small caliber, but it was also conveniently mouse driven and very user friendly. Just point and click, really. A joy to use.
After that, the night was peaceful for a time but nobody was going back to sleep anytime soon. I used the time to teach my new house guest, Luke, all about my super bunker’s options. Everything but the indoor listening system, that is. I felt he would know his way around the technology better than most.
John proved adept at setting up watch stations hidden along the fence line. Before I knew it we had a twenty-four hour guard with a watchman at each corner. I made sure to teach a couple of the others how to reload the turret gun. We seemed secure for the moment.
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We eventually managed to get the main antenna fixed. It only took eight days! In case you didn’t catch it, that was sarcasm. An antenna is the simplest thing in the world but we had a ton of issues. High winds for a couple days, a lightning storm, then a bunch of bolts, which had been damaged by the grenades, all broke off. Eventually we had to string up the whole cable all over again.
Mark had been getting worried when he couldn’t get ahold of me. I told him all about our situation. He was concerned and offered to send some of his militia types around to help.
I told him that sounded very neighborly of him and I’d take all the help I could get. What I really needed was for him to offload all my guests. We were packed in way to tight for comfort. He promised to help with that as soon as possible. Everyone also took the opportunity to tell Mark all about their missing kinfolk. Names and addresses, everything that he’d need to send one of those buses out their way as soon as he got the chance.
All of my guests and I were wondering whether or not there were any more living hostiles in the area. Until we knew for sure, we just had to assume the worst and keep vigilant.
Good thing, too. Just after sundown someone fired off a whole case of flares. One after another they lit up the sky over my house. In the distance I heard some really loud ‘music’ of the sort favored by stupid people. I could tell that it was coming closer slowly.
Obviously, it was some form of attack. My first thought was that the noise and light show were an intimidation tactic. Something along the lines of war drums. That seemed dangerously self destructive, though. The zombies would be attracted to all that noise and…
Then I got it. Everyone was in an alert posture already, as you’d expect, when I called to tell them to e
xpect an incoming zombie horde.
Eventually, we saw a big van moving up along my street. It had the doors open and the windows rolled down. How they got so much noise to come out of one sound system was beyond me. The driver let it come to a stop about fifty yards south of my property. He seemed happy to wait there.
I could see him well enough, using one of the cameras jutting from my wall on the east side (that’s the gated side). With all the woods along that side of the road, though, he must have felt pretty safe.
By that time I’d warned everyone to keep to their battle station. This was an obvious distraction. One of the farmers took careful aim and put a shotgun slug through the driver side of the windshield. That man was a fine shot. He’d had to fire through the tree line to pull it off.
That caused the van to limp forward until it finally came to a stop along the curb. I radioed the shooter, one Denis Ottenbocker, and asked him to shut all that noise down if he could. He was all too happy to comply. It took him four more shots but he eventually did enough of the right kind of damage.
We were all glad to have that noise finally done with. That’s when I saw a bunch of ghouls come running up the street from the same direction that the van had come from. There must have been a dozen of them. As soon as they looked inside the van and found the driver zombified, they started to cast about in a predatory fashion.
With their noses up in the air, sniffing like animals, I knew they would hunt us out soon enough. My plan was to ask everyone to keep real still. Hopefully they’d turn on whoever had led them to us. I figured the rest of the bandits had to be around somewhere, awaiting an opportunity.
Sadly, those farmers were a bit trigger happy. All three guys stationed at the southeast corner opened fire. Let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to hit a stationary target the size a man than it is to hit a moving target the size of a man’s head. Everybody missed. The only thing taking damage was the woods.
Those ghouls charged through the treeline and jumped right up to the razor wire. One particularly athletic ghoul managed to clear it altogether. It landed right in front of one of those farmers, and he shot it point blank in the chest. Which had no effect, of course. The ghoul grabbed his shotgun and cast it aside, then moved in for the kill.
Meanwhile, Denis and his other buddy were firing at all the ghouls stuck on the fence. The shooters were trying to kill them all off before they could get free of the wire. I decided to help out and hit the juice to electrify it. Zap! Denis hopped back and took stock.
By that time, the ghoul which had got over the fence had his victim flat on his back and was trying to bite the poor guys face off. Denis took the opportunity that presented to bash the back of the ghoul’s head in. Messy, but it got the job done. I cut the power again, before it drained my batteries.
My directional microphones were picking up more gun fire from the north, so I changed my camera view. John, and two more farmers, were trading shots with some bandits who clearly thought they were taking everyone by surprise. John and his buddies had a wall for cover, while our would be invaders only had the trees. The trouble was there had to be at least thirty assailants.
As I watched, the crew from the northeast corner moved in to support John and his companions. I called both groups and told them to fall back and take cover behind the trees on our side of the wall. I didn’t want to advertise my plan over the radio so I had to keep things vague.
John got everybody back a ways, and I watched as the great unwashed horde of ear pierced illiterates set a bunch of ladders up to my wall. They started to climb over. Once up to the level of the wire they got their wire cutters out and got to work trying to push my heaping masses of concertina wire out of their way. I hit the juice again and that was the end of them.
I turned the power off and asked John to hold fire on the corpses. I wanted to see if they would get back up. They stayed dead. That wasn’t my first time killing zombies with a shock, but it was nice to have confirmation. Electricity definitely seemed to get the job done, if one used enough of it. Good to know.
After that, I got everyone back into their original positions, just in case the enemy tried any more surprises. We kept a close watch all through the night.
Come the next morning a sea of zombies showed up. They must have been following in the wake of the ghouls. The bandits had apparently led the horde of zombies straight to us. Whether intentionally or not, I couldn’t say. I couldn’t see how drawing in an army of the undead would do the bandits any good, either.
Compared to an (relatively) intelligent, living human threat, zombies were nothing. I was a bit worried about how much damage a bunch of ogres might do to the brick facing on my berm wall, however. As it turned out they weren’t much of a threat. Once we knew what to look out for they were easy prey for a shotgun. Also, what I kind of liked about being surrounded by a horde of soulless horrors from beyond Hell’s gate, was how effectively they kept the riffraff away.
Later that day, when I had a chance, I gave Mark a call and asked what he thought about it. Mark seemed to be of the opinion that all my zombies came from the city just to the southeast of my town. Because that city was right on the bay, Mark and his people had been looting it pretty heavily. He explained that every time he’d lure the zombies away they’d slowly find their way back to the nearest activity. Suddenly his zombie problem had up and left for good. At the time it had been a happy mystery for him.
I hoped the zombies found every single one of those bandits and ripped them limb from limb. It would serve those bastards right for leading such an army to my doorstep.
That still left all my new house guests and myself with the problem of over crowding. They were all for cutting down some of my trees and building log cabins. I’d be damned if they couldn’t do it, too. Those guys were like hillbillies on steroids.
Instead, I convinced them to work on clearing the zombie problem. Although the zombies were good for keeping unwanted visitors away, I could never feel truly comfortable being surrounded by an enemy. I had quite a few polearms besides my halberd and we got to work with those. In order to reach over all the razor wire we built a few wooden overhangs to use as kill platforms. The dead really piled up, so it got to be pretty stinky work after a while.
With all hands on deck, including the women, we managed to thin the crowd by quite a bit in ten days. The zombies were still out in force but none were pressed right up against my wall. We could still call in a pack or two if we wanted, but if we didn’t make the effort then they’d mostly leave us in peace.
That’s when I called for a bus convoy from Haven to show up and relieve me of all my extra charges. They brought Tony and Greg with them, along with Deborah. Mostly, Tony and Greg wanted to apologize for leaving me in the lurch, with a bunch of gutter scum locking me out of my own house. Of course, I couldn’t blame them. I’d made the mistake of trusting the Tattoo Crew, too.
I was glad to see my little honeybee again. We had a great time before everybody had to head out. The rescue buses, led by a man by the name of Paul, had been busy picking up everybody we’d told them about, so most folks had at least some family waiting for them in the Haven islands. Much of my own extended family had been gathered in shortly after my first communication with Mark.
They all seemed surprised that I was staying on my land. I honestly don’t know why. Where else would I be happy? Haven sounded like it had a lot of potential to live up to yet. It was still overcrowded and suffered from a monotonous diet of fish, fish, and more fish. I could do better right where I was.
What surprised me was that both Luke and John, with their two wives, wanted to stay as well. When I asked them why, they had the same reasons as me. They all figured that once they had kids of their own, things might change. But, until then, they might as well stay someplace wide open, with a garden already planted. I couldn’t fault their logic, it being the same as my own. I bade them welcome.
By that time the Haven militia had begun a project of e
xtermination in my neighborhood. They took amateurishly reinforced snow plows through town, and shot dead or plowed under any zombie not smart enough to be somewhere else. That was real helpful of them.
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“You can’t touch that shot, Mr. Althaus,” said John. We were target practicing on what zombies we could see from the top of my old silo. His was a pretty good shot, I must admit. My eyes not being what they once were, I doubted I could match it. At five hundred yards I counted myself lucky to even see the target.
“Wait a sec. Mr Althaus, it’s my turn.” That was from Luke. He had much more practice with semiautomatic fire than John, but wasn’t nearly as accurate. I liked to encourage the boy. He clearly came from a disadvantaged background, and he looked up to me.
“Take your time, and take your shot. Remember, ‘one shot, one kill’. That’s the true way.”
Luke took a little longer than I would have liked. When he finally did fire I thought he’d missed completely. Then I heard John exclaim, “Two with one bullet!” and saw him pointing more into the foreground, only about a hundred yards away. Sure enough, two new corpses adorning my former neighbor’s lawn. That’s a lot harder to do when the shot has to hit both heads to be effective.
Luke was preening “Better make that, ‘one shot, two kills’ huh, Mr. Althaus?” That got a laugh all around.
It was impossible to not like the boys. Both skilled, both hard workers, both level headed when it came to the wet work. By which I mean killing things.
Anna, John’s wife, was an excellent cook. She also possessed all the skills any young lady ought. Sewing, first aid, crocheting, shooting, music, dressing a kill, etc.
Luke’s wife, Sue, had a lot of real solid book learning but not much overly practical. It seemed her parents hadn’t been too keen on having a daughter with any of the more ladylike capabilities. Still, she was a fair shot with a pistol and a quick study. Under Anna’s tutelage she was really coming along in the kitchen, too. Frankly, I was getting spoiled in that regard.
