The Hollow Men (Book 1): Crave

by Jonathan Teague

  “Dad, I know every second counts. When I asked to help, Mom said it was simple: just think what we’d need most after we get out of here, and then get it. I realized that everything we might need to know won’t magically appear in our brains. Getting to places, searching for food, making medicine, building shelters, finding ways to protect ourselves…” She took a breath.

  The pause gave Scott a chance to absorb what she had said.

  “The phones are already down. What will we do when everything stops working? No electricity. No internet. How much time do we have before that happens?”

  She shook a solar powered charger for electronics. “This may be our only power supply, and this is our only chance to download what we might need to help us survive. And it can be more than survival. We can have books, music, art, and even games. We can get all of it right now, before it’s gone forever! Mom and Maddy already gathered more than we’ll be able to fit in the van. This is my contribution. This is what I’m doing.”

  Her tears flowed down her cheeks. She turned away, picked up the next Kindle in her rotation and started another download.

  Emily was right. They couldn’t be reckless with the clock. Each new piece of information, every bit of preparation they could gather would make a huge difference in how—and if—they lived. It was vital not to squander the time. While he wanted to leave right away, he knew the one-hour time limit he’d set was arbitrary. Leaving too soon could mean leaving behind something that could save their lives later.

  Scott knelt beside her and put his hand on her back, massaging it. “I’m sorry, Emily. Thinking of losing you made me upset and afraid. I can’t believe I took it out on you. “

  She nodded her forgiveness then smiled. “I blame Mom. She’s the one who married you. Now we are the ones who have to deal with it.”

  Her smile disappeared, and she pointed to the TV. “From what I’m seeing, we really are running out of time.”

  Civilization had fallen. The cities were teeming with the undead. High definition brought crystal sharpness to numberless corpses, inanimate and not. Vivid color accentuated the horrific detail. Flesh and fatty tissue hung in tatters from the raw wounds not just from biting, but tearing at the fibrous muscle beneath the skin. Blood clothed both the walking and the permanently deceased.

  In comparison to the devastation playing out in the cities, the massacre in their neighborhood was a picnic.

  Discarded corpses of the truly dead were completely eviscerated. Space yawned in hollow chest cavities where organs should have been. Pale, stringy skin dangled in glistening strips from exposed rib bones that were, oddly, picked fastidiously clean otherwise. Most of the bodies were women and children.

  Crowds of spastically moving cadavers crawled, lurched, and shuffled through the streets, breaking into the hiding places of the living, pulling them out of their makeshift shelters whether in businesses or residences.

  The ranks of zombies flowed through cities in an endlessly swelling tide. There was no apparent ark for the rolling flood washing humanity from the Earth.

  Chase and Katie joined the Hales in the family room as the authoritative voice of a female news anchor spoke over the nightmarish footage.

  “Martial law was declared hours ago. However, the threat has been too widespread to keep order. Small companies of military and police were quickly overwhelmed. They’ve now consolidated their forces to more effectively gather and protect the living.”

  “Government authorities have established community centers where all resources will be channeled. These safety zones have been chosen for their invulnerability and their capacity to accommodate large numbers of people. Most are repurposed government facilities, military bases, and even prisons. They are well-fortified and fully supplied.”

  Video footage switched to different iterations of the hastily created sanctuaries. Grim-faced guards and police officers perched atop the walls and guard towers of a formidable prison complex. An embassy compound was staffed by private contractors with enough weaponry to wage war against a small country. Layers of sturdy fencing and a host of hard-looking marines bristling with an intimidating amount of military hardware surrounded a military base.

  Into the safe zones poured crowds of refugees of all ages, ethnicities, sizes, and shapes. They were cordoned off by two parallel rows of cars and trucks bumper to bumper, creating reasonably defensible walls along feeder streets that led to the secure compounds. Armed men and women stood behind and on top of roofs and hoods. Boxes of ammunition sat ready at their feet. Their collective gunfire sounded like firecrackers at Chinese New Year. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the police and military, ordinary people fired into hordes of the dead that were pressing forward.

  “Officials declared they will do anything and everything that is necessary to keep the safe zones secure. One of our remote news crews captured one example of how the defense forces are carrying out that mandate.”

  The next camera shot was shaky and slightly blurry. Four people carried a struggling man out of an airplane hangar located within one of the safe zones. A woman fought with one of them, obviously trying to get them to let the man go. They threw the man down and shoved the woman on top of him. One of the four men took out a gun and pointed it at the prone couple on the ground. Crack. Crack.

  The anchorwoman paused while looking directly into the camera to drive the message home. “We urge you to consider the potential consequences of failing to indicate that a person may be carrying the infection.”

  Then she continued. “At the bottom of your screens, our local affiliates are rolling the names and locations of the established safe havens in your area.”

  A box listing sites appeared below the video, beginning with the larger townships. The same template was normally used to announce school closings during major weather events. The designated center for Smithfield was a centralized public school campus ten miles from Scott’s house.

  The school facilities served the densely populated neighborhoods nearest to it. Classroom buildings were large enough to take in a substantial proportion of the community. However, the eight structures were designed with as many square feet of windows as of bricked wall. The buildings were separated from each other by expansive lawns, playgrounds, and soccer fields. No barrier, not even rows of thick shrubbery, enclosed the campus.

  It was impossible for Scott to believe the schools had been bolstered somehow to become impregnable fortresses against mobs of maniacally hungry creatures. He imagined a convoy of tanks and armored Humvees shuttling people along reinforced corridors leading to the school compound, enclosed by fifteen-foot, steel-reinforced concrete walls and guarded by a military force armed with an inexhaustible supply of automatic weapons and explosive ordinance. He doubted even that would be enough to protect them.

  Scott didn’t question if every available resource would be gathered, and every precaution taken. There just wasn’t the time, manpower, or gunpowder to defend the people who would shelter within the school walls; it would surely fall. Then the human buffet would open and the feast would commence.

  There could be few, if any, strongholds on the entire planet that could repel an assault of hundreds of thousands of the living dead, let alone possess the capability to identify and reject the not-yet-turned who would be hidden among the masses of people inside.

  Cameras cut again to the anchorwoman. She was remarkably composed despite broadcasting from New York City. It was reasonable to assume that her friends or other loved ones were caught in the midst of the horrors just shown.

  Raspiness in her voice revealed her fatigue as she pressed on. “Phone service is down. You will not be able to call for help. However, help is coming. If you are trapped, barricade yourself in your home or place of business. Secure and reinforce your doors and windows. Stay there. Do not try to make it to the safe zones by yourselves.”

  “Rescue squads, made up of military forces and medical crews, are retaking our cities block by block. You
will recognize a member of these teams by these royal blue shirts worn by FEMA personnel or these armbands worn by the Red Cross.” She held up one of each.

  As the report continued, Laura and Scott looked at each other, silently weighing the merits of reinforcing their stronghold and waiting it out. They were decently supplied and could hang on for a couple of weeks.

  Emily picked up the remote and used the DVR, rewinding to find footage of clustered undead. Disseminated among the throngs of zombies were flashes of blue shirts and white armbands with bright red crosses emblazoned on them. Perhaps they were overwhelmed as they fought through neighborhoods, or more probably they were surprised by those they were hoping to save. The rescue workers might have fought valiantly to get to the front door, burst inside, and fallen to the hungry mouths within.

  Home-delivered food for zombies.

  Scott took an opinion poll from the brooding faces in the room. They expressed their unanimous refusal to hide in their house, passively waiting for help. They doubted that anything coming to the door meant their salvation, blue shirts or not.

  They couldn’t tell if they were viewing live news—professionals standing at their posts to tell the story of global collapse in a heroic effort to provide warning and instruction for those within range

  More likely, empty studios delivered the pre-recorded, pre-packaged news in a perpetual loop. In the latter case, it meant they were watching past events, that things were even worse than Scott and his family were seeing, their situation even more precarious.

  While the video feed continued to play, Laura pulled Scott aside. “I’m not sure about the cabin. It’s broken down. It’s isolated. We won’t have food. And I’ll bet you don’t remember how to get there. I know I sure don’t.”

  The tendons stood out on Scott’s neck in an eye blink. “Really? You want to change plans now? Didn’t you see the same thing I did on TV? People are the problem. The dead ones come alive and make more dead, who then come alive. We need to get far away from any people!”

  “We never discussed it. You decided for us. That’s not how we do it. You tell me what other options you considered and I’ll try to reach the same conclusion you did. What did Tom have in mind?”

  When Scott described the scenario Tom had laid out, Laura nodded. “He made some great points. Food, shelter, defense. So we have additional people. So what? We build our community carefully. We screen each person who wants to get in. No one gets by Maddy. She’ll sniff out the troubled ones in an instant.”

  “First, I don’t think Tom took into account the legions of undead that will be out there. Gathering people there will turn it into a cornucopia for them. Mounting guns on every wall might—and I mean might—hold them off, but only for a limited time. Eventually those defenses will fail and everyone in that building will die. Even if we miraculously created the perfect stronghold, we’d be destroyed from the inside. It’s people, Laura. They will change when the food gets scarce, when the isolation becomes too much, when they have to fight off an enemy—the living or the dead. It will get very bad, very quickly. Let’s just get away for a few months first and allow those who’ll break under pressure to just break.”

  “So your plan is to wait and end up being the people standing outside the walls of Lomazzo, pleading for a place among the community smart enough to get there first? That’s if we don’t starve in the mountains!”

  “Laura. I can’t protect you there. In the mountains, I can feed you, shelter you, hide you and keep you all safe. You won’t starve. Just trust me and get with the program!”

  Laura’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “The program? I’m not one of your teen gangsters in one of your excursions. Remember that. Respect that. And start again. If you want isolation, what about my brother’s house in Vermont? Secluded. Unknown. Defensible.”

  The sound of gunshots echoed close by, putting the argument on hold and snapping everyone back into action. They triple-timed their already rushed preparations to leave.

  Laura, Chase, and Maddy finished sorting the piles of supplies, isolating those things most critical for them to escape and to survive. Katie, already better after a course of ibuprofen, joined Emily on the floor, helping her download furiously while monitoring the TV for any meaningful new developments. As Katie sat, Emily drew closer to her, comforting her. Autumn slept on the floor next to them.

  Their heaviest furniture crowded the eight windows and sliding glass doors on the main floor. Those windows were almost neck high off the ground, for an adult standing outside. While not impossible, it would be difficult to penetrate the house from there. The sturdy wooden fence protected the back of the house, but a concentrated push from a crush of zombies would ultimately breech it. From there, it was a short walk up shallow stairs to the deck and patio door with an opening wide enough to allow multiple bodies to break through at once and force their way through the barriers—an Achilles heel.

  Scott hoped his preparations on the house would create enough time for him, his family, and his friends’ two kids. He considered strengthening the back entry to the house beyond just stacking furniture against it. He took down the furniture that blocked the door and walked into the yard to gauge the feasibility of his ideas and weigh the advantages against the time lost and the noise that could draw the ravenous undead to his house.

  He had forgotten about the pork cooking in the smoker. The smell of it assaulted Scott’s nostrils. With it came the recollections of a hundred pleasant summer days past, over the course of his lifetime. Playing with his brothers and sisters in his childhood front yard. Emily and Maddy at one and three years old, giggling and splashing in the plastic kiddie pool on a cement patio. Summer barbecues with friends…

  Abruptly, the warmth of those memories dissolved into images of Ridley’s eviscerated body, of kids littered on the playground, of his neighbor Melissa being torn apart by her friends. Her screams burned in Scott’s mind.

  The spice-laden aroma of cooking meat made him sick. Scott worried the cooking meat might summon more than just awful memories. He lifted the lid off the smoker and used a heavy roasting fork to pick up the half-cooked pork. The coals he’d created earlier in the day had burned to ash. The meat was hot but not scorching. It had yet to reach the minimum safe internal temperature of 165 degrees, far from the ideal temperature of 190. The pork’s juices ran down his arm, scalding his skin. He barely kept himself from dropping the meat and instead slowly lowered the roasting fork, keeping the roast intact on the end of it. The smell from the meat reminded him of his dream the night before, how glorious the pork tasted in his mouth, how magnificent it felt sliding down his throat. His stomach ached with hunger. Saliva poured into his mouth.

  Then he was assaulted by the memory of hollow men kneeling at Ridley’s corpse, elbows deep into her as they scooped her gore into their hands and then into their mouths. They seemed insatiably hungry too.

  Scott felt sick. He spat out a gob of saliva thick with acid. He almost threw the roast away but reason took hold and returned to the house considering whether or not he could salvage the meat. He tossed the roast into the convection oven and set for the timer for thirty minutes at high heat. It would turn the pork into dried jerky but he couldn’t risk the diarrhea, abdominal pain, and vomiting that could come from eating raw pork. Besides, pork jerky would taste better than the fire-scorched rats they might have to resort to in the future.

  If they were ready to go before the roast finished cooking, he would leave it behind.

  Emily had taken the baby upstairs to sleep in her crib. Katie continued monitoring the news while downloading files to the mobile devices.

  Laura, Chase, and Maddy had taken the passenger seats out of the Honda Odyssey and stowed the bench seat, opening up the large cargo space. For the kids, they’d built a claustrophobia-inducing tunnel framed by two-by-fours on a foundation of fully packed fiberglass coolers, plastic containers, and a large wire dog crate.

  It would only delay the inevitable
if the van stalled, but if zombies broke through the glass on the way out of town, it would slow them climbing in and pulling the kids to their mouths.

  Scott and the other three began packing feverishly. Too many hands were involved, and they kept bumping into each other, so Chase went back inside to help Katie and Emily. Scott, Laura, and Maddy stacked supplies tightly above and around the tunnel, creating an artificial carapace to protect the kids who would hide inside.

  They’d finished most of the work and were getting in each other’s way again. Laura and Maddy continued the jigsaw puzzle, filling gaps and finding room for a few final pieces. Things were nearly ready to go.

  The Advil had worn off and shoulder pain slowed Scott down. He’d already placed a big bottle of the stuff in an appropriately prominent position—the cup holder on the driver’s side. He popped three into his mouth and swallowed. Though Scott never needed to wash down the rust-colored anti-inflammatories, he decided to indulge his craving for a cold beer. He wondered if it would be the last he would ever have.

  As he sipped his beer, he started thinking about what the family cabin must look like now. He hadn’t been there in years; even then it was in poor shape. Suffering through summer or winter, if it ever came, would be brutal.

  Even though he had his toolbox packed tightly in the van, there were other tools he had in the basement that could make bigger repairs easier: a hand operated winch, and a rope and pulley hoist.

  As Scott put down his bottled beer and left the kitchen for the basement, the sliding glass door flew open, startling him. Chase fell inside. “Help! Uncle Scott!” His words sounded as if they had been spoken through slushy snow.

  Streams of blood flowed from a wound on Chase’s cheek. The muscles in his body were tensed, the veins in his arms were engorged. His right hand held the mattock. Blood-drenched hair and bits of skin were splattered across the sharp black tip and bright yellow handle. “Katie is gone. Dad…” he trailed off and started to shake, then covered his face and cried.