by Chris Lowry
They shopped at the store, especially for Sunday dinners to grab potatoes and other veggies they didn’t grow on their own. But we always had green beans and pinto beans and homemade jellies my grandmother canned by hand.
Tomatoes for stews, soups and spaghetti so good I haven’t tasted the like since. Muscadine for jams and wine, blackberries. Pecans from eight trees around the yard.
I remembered many Saturday nights sitting on the sofa next to my grandmother as we watched television and shelled pecans, crushing the shell with sliver nutcrackers and picking out the meat with tiny silver picks that looked like dental tools.
She was fastidious, her eyes glued to the set while her hands worked with practiced ease. My child like fingers were different, less sure.
It hit me as I was driving that she always gave me a separate bowl, and it was because of the shell fragments I would get in the pecans.
She would go back after I was done and clean up the mess I made.
That made me smile.
Maybe there would be more survivors here, people like my grandparents who were better prepared to ride out any sort of plague. Zombies would be problematic, but not something any good old boy couldn’t handle with a couple of rounds from a hunting rifle.
We passed through tiny bergs and small townships, collections of houses and more trailers than tornado alley deserved.
But no people.
No zombies either.
“Where did they all go?” I asked aloud.
“The people?”
“The people. The zombies. We’re almost to Stuttgart and we have only seen one Z.”
“Z? That what you call them?”
“What did you call them?”
“Zombies. Haitian Voo Doo Zombies.”
“Are you Haitian?”
“I’m as American as you are,” she said. “But that’s where zombies come from. Everybody knows that.”
“I didn’t know that,” I told her. “I thought zombies came from someone’s imagination, and made a movie. Then some government superbug got loose and started all of this.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But you said you were from Florida, right? I went there once. That’s the only place I’ve ever seen a superbug. A cockroach in the hotel room. You walk in and that sucker starts flying.”
“Palmetto’s,” the thought made me grin.
The first time you encounter one is terrifying. She was right, you walk up to squash it with your shoe and it takes to the air.
Every time it happened, my kids would run around the house screaming, full of the willies and laughing at how spooked it made them. I’ll confess that I may have ducked and run from several in my time too. I draw the line at shrieking though. Manly yells for help, maybe, but shrieking? Not me.
“Cockroaches,” said Jean. “That’s what I called them growing up and no scientific name is going to make them any different. It’s like these damn zombies you want to call a Z. Like giving it a pet name. That’s not for me.”
Pet names. Z. Palmetto’s. Plague.
I’d called it a lot of things in my head, and in some conversations with Brian and Anna. Apocalypse. Armageddon. End of the world. But Jean had me wondering about labels.
And wondering who made it, who caused it all to happen.
Who unleased the second of the four horsemen?
Or was it the third?
CHAPTER TEN
It's easy enough to think Arkansas is all backroads and back woods and sometimes it does feel like that. Just as quick as you can think there's nothing there but farmland or pine forests, the woods open and a small town straddles the road.
I had been through a hundred of these on the journey here, maybe more. The towns were little more than a collection of houses, sometimes a post office, sometimes a store.
I road in the cab of the truck, pistol in my lap, rifle across the seat and passed through, Jean snoozing with her head against the window.
Some of the stores were intact, shuttered and locked. I thought about stopping and cleaning them out, filling the back of the truck bed with supplies.
Just as quickly I discarded that thought.
A moving truck was a juicy target for anyone who wanted a prize, but they might let it pass. A truck full of supplies was too much temptation.
Better to keep it empty, mark the township in my head and plan to find more when I approached the city.
I was worried about bridges.
In Florida, the bridges were jammed as people tried to escape. I hadn't seen that in smaller streams and rivers, at least until I reached Memphis and the bridges across the Mississippi. But here they were empty.
I chalked it up to population. Arkansas was just not that crowded, the people congregating in the Central and Northwest part of the state. From the Delta, up through Little Rock there just weren't that many people.
On the one hand, it was good.
The Z were scattered and spread. I didn't have to worry as much about the Zombie infestation as we did before.
The bad part was it made finding supplies and survivors even harder.
I had a small debate when I ran across Highway 79. I knew that ran through Pine Bluff, the small town where I grew up.
Burned, Boles had told me.
But where did he get his information? I really needed to stop being so bull-headed and just ask the people I met what they knew about other parts of the world.
I didn't turn though. I kept going North until the road ended and turned left to head West.
Eventually I'd hit Interstate 40, and would parallel it through Lonoke, then work my way north and west again to approach the suburb of Sherwood from the North. The kids had their home in the suburbs. Maybe I'd luck out and they would be hiding in their house.
Two months.
That's how long it had been.
And I'd been busy. Hiding. Running. Saving other people.
What if something happened to them while I did that?
What if I couldn't find them. What if they were just gone?
I tried to swallow the lump in my throat, but it stuck there. I couldn't breathe and had to stop when my vision swam in tears.
I gripped the wheel so hard I thought it would break in my hands, or my knuckles would snap.
“Give me a Z right now,” I bit back a sob and let my head fall against my forearms.
I gave in for just a moment, let it wash over me, the grief, the anger and frustration. The ball of rage I kept in my stomach threatened to overwhelm me, not with anger but with hatred.
I hated myself.
Hated the divorce, the million lost moments. The not being there.
It was a cascading list of failures that dropped like dominos, a bunch of what if's and should have's. I let them come, let them drown me, until the noise of it all dropped me down and spun me around. The feelings receded and left me empty, hollow.
But alive.
And in Arkansas. An hour from the kids, maybe two.
An hour from answers.
If I just stopped feeling sorry for myself in the middle of a country road in a pickup truck I stole from a dead man.
The laugh didn't even sound real coming from my throat. More like a chuckle. A weak chuckle.
I killed the owner of the truck when he tried to kill me.
I had killed a couple of dozen men, maybe more, when they tried to kill me. When they tried to stop me. Hundreds of Zombies.
I glanced into the mirror at my red rimmed eyes, scars on my cheek and head, face drawn like a skull.
I couldn't second guess everything that led me to this point.
The Z plague wasn't my fault.
All I could do was lift my foot off the brake and get moving.
So, I did.
I'd find answers somehow.
And if I had to rip apart the entire state to find them, it wouldn't be that big of a loss.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Driving through the delta region is an exercise in time travelling. There are some t
owns that seem untouched by progress. The roads roll through the farmland, dotted with occasional expanses of pine forest and a small twenty-four-inch green sign announces the town or city limits as you roll through.
One stop light, one store that may or may not have a grill attached, a couple of trailers perched on the banks of the blacktop, or wooden clapboard houses that survived fifty years of tornados only to be destroyed by families moving on for better opportunities in the big city.
At one point before the zombie Armageddon changed the world, I was going to work on an executive redevelopment committee to bring work, life and vitality back to the region.
I had applied for the position in hopes of being closer to my children here, and it allowed the freedom and flexibility to travel back to Florida to see my younger daughter. There would have been things I’d miss about the beach life in the sunshine state, namely the beaches and sunshine. The natural state of Arkansas could be considered an outsider’s paradise with hiking trails, bike paths and plenty of space to run, float, camp and play outdoors.
It didn’t have beaches though, unless sandbars on the river counted.
The search committee decided to go with another application, and I didn’t get the chance to rebuild or rehabilitate the state.
Which is sad.
I think a visionary could really take control of the Banana republic of politics that is the government and do something, like set an agenda and mission to move from number fifty in everything all the way up to forty-five.
It wasn’t the way things worked out though. I was thinking those thoughts when the tire blew out.
We heard a loud hiss and then the truck began thumping and pulling hard to the left, trying to carry us across the road and into the woods.
I didn’t bother to pull over because who was going to come along the highway. I just stopped and we got out.
“Got a flat,” Jean told me.
“I noticed.”
She squatted on her haunches and stared at the spare bolted to the undercarriage of the truck.
“Spare’s flat too.”
I glanced around check our surroundings. Did someone shoot out the tire? Were we in a trap that hadn’t closed yet?
Jean ran her fingers along the flat tire to show me the tread.
“It was thin to begin with,” her strong fingers plucked a nail from the rubber and held the sharp point up for my inspection.
“Then you ran over this.”
Like I did it on purpose.
There were two things I always hated about Arkansas roads. Nails and rocks. That same corrupt government was in the pocket of the trucking industry through their generous lobbyist groups, so dump trucks and construction crews littered the road with rocks, debris, nails and screws.
It created a sub industry in the state of windshield repairs, which created their own lobby group to work with the trucking industry so they could stay in business.
It meant most windshields had chips and cracks, and everybody had a flat at least once a year. Sometimes more.
I always wondered if they could have used the money to buy tarps and cleanup crews instead of paying legislators, but politicians were the same in Florida and California where I had lived pre-Z.
Look in the dictionary under corruption and the word politician is printed next to it. If it’s not, it should be.
“Guess we’re walking,” I told her. “We’re not too far from Stuttgart.”
The last mileage update was from a hotel billboard sign that told us it was only five miles ahead, so I knew it would take about an hour if we didn’t find another vehicle along the way.
Jean grabbed our food pack, we holstered up and began marching along the side of the road.
I wondered for a moment why it wasn’t the middle, but didn’t say anything. She seemed lost in her own thoughts as well, perhaps thinking about what she might find in Little Rock.
I wondered the same myself.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The road made a slow shallow S curve as we meandered at a steady pace toward Stuttgart. In the winter, the fields were flooded to create wetlands and ducks migrated to the region every year, making it one of the duck hunting capitals in the United States.
Stuttgart built the city’s reputation on that label, and kept the wetlands growing each year. They held a festival in honor of the ducks, built up large sporting goods stores to support the hunters, and created a nice little strip downtown to hang out after limits had been reached.
When visitors came in on the main highway, it led straight to the downtown area. We weren’t approaching from that direction.
We heard them before we saw them.
The low moan of Z carried on the wind through the trees. It sounded like a distant freight train at first, and I wondered if trains were still running. If so, who was driving them.
I slowed my walk, and noticed Jean slow beside me. Eyes up, head on a swivel we moved up the road and rounded the last curve.
The asphalt stretched out in front of us through the rice paddy fields that surrounded Stuttgart and made it a duck hunter's paradise. Every fall farmers would open the irrigation gates and flood the fields to create shallow ponds perfect for migrating ducks.
This year, I guess they got the gates open just in time for the Z to show up.
The two-lane road that cut through the middle of what looked like a mile of rice paddy was raised from the land around it. That was a good thing because we found the source of the moaning.
A hundred Z were trapped on either side of the road, up to their knees in mud and muck. Their arms waved, and reached, but they were stuck, unable to move from the shin and in some cases the knee down.
They filled the edge of the field just off either side of the road like a gauntlet.
Jean moved to the center and I didn't let her stay there alone for long.
"I guess this is where all the Z went."
She shivered. I didn't blame her. I wanted to shiver too. I wanted to shimmy and shake the willies off and run down the center line screaming.
Instead I just kept walking forward.
"We're going through that?"
I didn't turn around.
"I'm going through it," I told her. "Stuttgart is ahead, and we can find a car there."
"We can go around," she said.
I kept walking.
"Or we could just keep walking," I heard her jog up behind me.
"Going around would take too much time," I explained.
I almost couldn't talk though. We were moving at a fast clip. Just because I had to go through a tunnel of the undead didn't mean I wanted it to last a long time. At least they weren't walking.
The sounds of their moans grew louder as we passed and they swayed and pressed toward us. They almost looked like reeds.
One Z near the road leaned forward so far, his legs snapped and he plopped face first into the mud and grass on the edge of the field. Then he began crawling after us.
I was pretty sure I could outrun him.
But it set a bad example, because a couple of other Z were shoved forward by the herd, and the noise of snapping legs followed us like branches cracking in a thunderstorm.
And once they fell, the Z dragged their bodies after us on elbows and hands, clawing up the side and onto the road.
"I can't even," Jean gasped. "Crawling Z."
"Night of the crawling Z," I huffed out next to her.
"It's daytime."
Got to love the pragmatics in life, even if it's a post zombie one.
It was easy to outpace the crawlers but we paid too much attention to them and not enough to where we were going.
That's my only excuse.
We were focused on the crawlers as we ran past a sign that told us we were in the city limits, ducked up a side street and right into a street fight.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I’ve been ambushed. I’ve been bushwhacked. I’ve been hijacked. That’s all since the Z showed up, and none
of the times it happened involved the walking dead. It’s always been people, what’s left of people that are causing problems.
I remember reading once that judge a person by how they act in a crisis if you want to know their true nature.
Since the apocalypse, I haven’t really liked people’s true nature.
I especially haven’t wanted to look in the mirror or spend too much time thinking about mine.
The things I had done would make the old me shudder.
It might even make the old me stand on a soapbox and talk about justice and incarceration and death penalties.
Once I found my three children, maybe went back to Fort Jasper or maybe to some island in the Keys, I would sit down with a six pack and think about it.
Of course, by then I might have more to think about.
A lot more.
Like the scene we stumbled into.
Four people surrounded by eight guys. Never good odds. A silver haired older man, a woman and two teen girls. All dressed head to toe in layers. Unarmed. Scared.
The eight men were rednecks. The worst kind. Dirty. Scruffy. Cackling with mad laughter as they surrounded the small group.
They had guns, rifles and shotguns that they jabbed the man and woman with, and leered at the young girls.
I grabbed Jean by the elbow and pushed her back toward the corner we had just rounded, but it was too late.
One of the rednecks saw the movement out of the corner of his eye and spun around. He sent a shot in our direction, and it zinged off the brick of the building, showered us in debris and dust.
I dropped to one knee and aimed.
Three shots got three of them. The others bolted without shooting back. I got two more as they ran away, and the silver haired man grabbed a fallen rifle to join in. He shot two more.
The last one was smarter than the rest and disappeared down a road.
“Damn,” Jean whispered beside me.
I turned the rifle on the silver haired man. We had just rescued him, but adrenaline was pumping and tempers were high. He might determine we were a threat and decide he didn’t want to take any chances.
