by Howard, Bob
After almost a year of surviving on his wits and luck, Hampton was amazed to see how many people had survived in the city. He had the chance to talk with some of them, and they all had lost someone or hooked up with someone new. Some had managed to hole up in warehouses full of food. One guy had survived in a grocery store that had a gun store on one side and a liquor store on the other. He said he tunneled through the attic walls, and there were other people trapped in both of the other stores. He said it was pretty good for a while, but there was always someone trying to break into the stores.
There was one family that had a shelter in their backyard. They had gone inside and locked the doors on the first day, and they thought they had made the right decision. The father told Hampton their shelter would have protected them from anything except other people, as they soon discovered. He said it didn’t take long for scavengers to locate their air intakes. Once those were covered with dirt, it was only a matter of time before they had to come out.
There were some incredible stories of determination. Some people had just been smart enough to avoid the infected and outwit the scavengers, but they had seen friends and family die too often. When they spotted the army of living people walking defiantly along the middle of the highway, they couldn’t resist the call of civilization.
They were passing in and out of the openings between cars, but sometimes it was better to walk right over them. It was good to get a view from on top of the cars whenever possible. Hampton decided it was one of those times, and he stepped onto the high rear bumper of a pickup truck with oversized tires. He walked across the bed and climbed up on the cab of the truck.
From the top of the truck Hampton could see the front of the living army stretching out ahead of him. There were more guns up front where they could punch a hole through the infected dead that were walking along the highway in the opposite direction. They also had more time to reload while others stepped up to replace them. He had to admit, whoever had come up with the idea had at least gotten them out of the city.
There were infected dead coming out of the woods on one side and the buildings on the other. He saw the armed men and women on their perimeters taking aim at infected dead that wandered into the open.
What bothered Hampton was what he saw at the back of their group. He estimated the living army had as many as four to five hundred survivors with about two hundred men and women carrying guns. At the back of the army of living people, trailing by about one hundred yards, was a larger army of infected dead. The living had been out distancing the horde that was following them for the better part of the last two days, but as their living army grew in size, it began to move slower. If they didn’t increase their forward speed, they would have to start defending themselves from the rear.
Hampton remembered the horde that had marched down Highway 17 toward Georgetown. He and his fellow citizens had dropped the bridges and watched the infected try to walk on mud and then in the water. It had worked to stop thousands of the infected dead, but nothing could stop the infection that was already on their side of the bridge. He had been warned back then by the foursome he had met on the road. The people had seen things, and they told him there would be someone in his town hiding a loved one who had been bitten. Sooner or later, that person would die, and the infection would spread from within. The four people were trying to go north even though Georgetown was bracing itself against a horde coming from that direction. More than once he had wondered what happened to them, or even if they had made it to wherever it was they were going.
As he stood on the top of the pickup truck, he could see more and more of the infected coming out of the woods and the buildings. The sound of the gunshots and the groaning of the infected dead were both becoming more constant and louder at the same time.
“Hey, Hampton. What’s it look like back there?”
One of the other armed guards was looking up at him from the middle of the steady stream of people and pointing toward the rear of the column.
“Not good,” said Hampton. “There must be a thousand or more behind us by now. The problem is they don’t stop to rest. If we stop, they keep coming. I think we’re going to need some guns at the back really soon.”
Hampton looked up and saw the sky was clear, but there were some clouds on the horizon toward the southwest. They wouldn’t be getting rain today, but the heat was slowing everybody down.
“Can you get to the front?” he asked the other guard. “We need to let them know this parade needs to pick up speed or we need some guns back here picking off the leaders of the infected.”
Living people were starting to get nervous when they began to catch on that the infected were closer than before. The pushing started to increase, and from where Hampton stood he could see the rear of their column begin to spread toward the sides and become flat in shape. Some of the people were trying to go around the sides of the living army and were putting themselves between the guards with rifles and the woods. The guards were yelling for them to move because they couldn’t shoot at the infected that were coming out of hiding.
He wasn’t sure if someone was hit by a shot, but he was sure that someone attacked a guard. Hampton heard the gun go off and saw the guard go down under an angry crowd. Then all hell broke loose when the infected dead got too close to the living people who had been blocked from going forward by the pile up on the guard. First there was angry yelling, then there were screams as teeth found bare skin.
Hampton tried to take careful aim to shoot only the infected, but the crowd started to move around too much. Some of the people who were bitten were running toward the front. He changed targets and started aiming at the horde of infected dead that was behind them. He couldn’t miss in that target rich environment.
Several guards joined him in the truck as they began creating a blockade of bodies in the paths between the cars, and he started to yell at people to either run or to climb up onto cars.
He could see that they had slowed the progress of the advancing horde, but they were using a lot of ammunition. If help didn’t come from the front soon, they would be running in retreat along with the unarmed people in a few minutes, and they still had to deal with those people who had been bitten and were now hiding among the living.
“This is not going to go well,” he said to no one in particular.
“Are you just noticing that?” said a woman who was standing next to him on the cab of the truck. “We need to make a run for it while we still can. These crazy idiots are going to get us all killed.”
Hampton looked at her and it occurred to him he hadn’t given any thought to who was standing next to him until she spoke. All he knew was there was someone next to him who was a pretty good shot. For a split second he wondered why he had never noticed her before. Her strawberry blonde hair and Irish nose made her look better than anyone he had paid attention to in a long time.
She glanced at him and saw that he was looking at her with obvious appreciation.
“Are you kidding me?” she said. “This isn’t the time for speed dating, dude. We have a thousand zombies trying to hook up with half as many living, and you’re checking out my freckles and the color of my eyes?”
Hampton was embarrassed because he had been caught in the act.
“Sorry, Miss. I was just surprised,” he managed to stammer out like a teenage boy. He took aim with his rifle and fired a shot just to cover up the redness he felt in his face.
Despite it being the wrong time and place, she found herself to be amused and even a little complimented. He looked like a nice guy, and she wasn’t meeting many of them lately. He was also kind of cute with short, curly brown hair and broad shoulders.
“My name is Colleen,” she shouted over the increasing gunfire and screaming. “What’s your name?”
“Everyone calls me Hampton,” he yelled back.
She grabbed him just above the elbow of his left arm and pulled.
“Come on, Hampton. I can get your first na
me later, and I can tell you all about my hobbies. In the meantime we need to find another party. This one isn’t looking so good.”
Colleen pulled Hampton from the top of the truck, and he wasn’t sure why, but he knew instinctively the right thing to do was to follow her. They ran out the back over the tailgate and jumped to the ground. He was surprised to see the approaching horde had closed the gap to about fifty yards, and the man who had started for the front of the living army hadn’t made it fifty yards through the crowd of slowly moving people. By the time he would get to the front and alert them to what was happening at the back, there wouldn’t be anything they could do about it.
The western slope of the road ran down toward the woods. Hampton knew that somewhere beyond the woods was Lake Norman. It was a massive lake, and Hampton recalled a fishing buddy telling him it was fifty square miles of water, and the shoreline was so long that it would stretch from Charleston to Columbus, Ohio if it was a straight line. Five hundred miles of shoreline meant there would be plenty of places for survivors to have dug in, but there would also have been thousands of people who had found themselves cornered with their backs to the water. He imagined it was the luck of the draw which category someone wound up getting stuck with.
He saw a gap in the trees and pointed at it. Colleen understood, and they moved in that direction. He halfway expected someone to shoot them for leaving, but they all had their hands full. The horde was causing people to scatter even more, and the front of the living army had encountered a barrier of their own.
About a mile ahead of their army was a bridge that crossed a branch of Lake Norman, and the bridge had acted as a funnel for the infected dead. It caused them to come together into an army of their own as the living and the dead were forced to square off with each other. What the living army didn’t count on was the infected dead that came up from behind, and if that wasn’t bad enough, there were larger numbers coming from the sides than before.
As unarmed men and women began to break away from the protection of the armed guards, it became harder and harder for them to choose their targets. Hampton and Colleen were slipping away by going back past the trailing horde of infected dead, and they were going virtually unnoticed because of the frightened screams of the people who had no defense against the infected. The infected that saw them and tried to turn and follow were pushed from behind and trampled.
Shooting was no longer scattered, and the army of survivors were burning through their supply of ammunition at an alarming rate. They were killing the infected with vicious accuracy, but more and more people were bitten, and that would eventually mean more of the living would die, but not before they were well mixed into the throng of survivors. Even if by some miracle they were to win this battle, the war was already lost.
Hampton and Colleen were into the woods and then surprised by how quickly they were through them. They ran straight into the tall privacy fence that surrounded the backyard of a very large home. They didn’t know what was on the other side of the fence, but they knew what was on their side, and they didn’t hesitate. Hampton cupped his hands together and held them down for Colleen to use as a step to get over the fence. He practically tossed her over. When he landed on the other side with her, he saw they had made a good choice. The yard was clear of infected dead, and the fence hid them from view on all sides.
Hampton went back to the fence and risked a look back at the battle on the Bill Lee Freeway. He was on low ground, but he could see that the infected dead behind the living army had closed in on the victims in the back, and there weren’t likely to be any survivors by sunset. He went back to where Colleen had crouched behind a child’s playhouse and just shook his head at her.
“I really thought it would work,” she said in a low voice. “I really thought enough people could walk right up the middle of the road and be a match for those things.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he answered without a trace of humor in his voice. “What this tells me is there are far more dead than living. We need to hole up for the night and then figure out what we’re going to do to get out of this mess. We can’t go further up the interstate because there’s no way to get across that bridge. Lake Norman is west of here, so that leaves going back the way we came.”
“This backyard is pretty secure, so I’m all for checking out the house. If there aren’t too many occupants, it would be as good a place as any to spend the night.”
Maybe it was her earlier comments about speed dating that had Hampton thinking he already liked Colleen, but he couldn’t deny he also found her to be very attractive. Hearing her say the house would be a good place to spend the night made him think that speed dating had never been this fast, and he couldn’t stop the small smile before it escaped.
Colleen was quick to pick up on the smile and Hampton’s attempt to hide it.
“Does that mansion look like a one bedroom home to you, Hampton?”
Despite the fact that he had been caught, he went ahead and let himself smile like he hadn’t smiled in over a year. She could think what she wanted, and he could tell by her reaction to his smile that she had appreciated feeling attractive for the first time in just as long.
There was an instant bond, and they both knew it, but staying alive to live out that bond was going to be a trick. The battle up on the freeway sounded exactly like the war that it was. Screams, groans, gunshots, and people yelling for more ammunition. Sometimes it seemed like they could make out individual shouts about the ammunition or for help, but it was mostly just noise. There was enough noise to draw every infected dead out of the woods and neighborhoods for miles around.
Hampton and Colleen were in the only place they could be if they wanted to stay alive. They were in a place where the infected dead would be passing by for hours, and they had to keep from being seen.
Colleen asked, “How can we get up on that back porch to see if there’s anything inside? The deck at the back door is at least three feet above the ground. That means infected dead passing the fence would be able to see us if we go into the house standing up.”
“I see what you mean,” said Hampton. “If there’s anything inside to clear out, it won’t be easy going at them from our knees.”
Both of them inhaled and let out a heavy sigh. It seemed like that was the way life had become. If you had a choice, you were still faced with a down side. They could stay in the yard until it was dark, but then they would have to go into the house with no light. They could go into the house, but they risked being seen in the daylight. Still, the two choices had one really positive up side. The house was big, and the potential for supplies looked good because it was so big.
“I’m for going in now,” said Hampton.
Colleen just nodded. There wasn’t much to say.
It was easy to cross the yard because nothing could see over the fence, so they ran in a crouch to the side of the house where the steps to the deck were the closest to the wall. Hampton had a bad moment when he stepped on something metal that was buried in the overgrown grass. His heavy boots kept the pointed prongs of a rake from stabbing him in the foot, but the handle stood up and neatly smacked him in his right ear. Colleen froze where she was and gave him a look that said, “Really?”
“There’s no time for that right now, Hampton.”
Even as she said it, he had to admit it would have been funny under the right circumstances. He stepped away from the rake and watched the ground closely as he covered the rest of the distance to the house.
They had their backs against the wall as they eased themselves onto the deck. There were four steps that led to a broad landing that still had neatly arranged outdoor furniture evenly spaced around a stone fire pit. The family that lived here had most likely enjoyed many evenings with neighbors over for a visit.
The door into the house was actually a beautiful set of French doors that opened outward. Hampton held up a hand to Colleen then motioned for her to move closer so he could whisper.
“How are we going to pull open that door without the infected outside the fence seeing it move, and what if there are more inside?”
She started to say something, but he got an idea.
“Wait here,” he said as he ran back into the tall grass and retrieved the rake.
After he crouched back down beside her he said, “I’m going to play the odds and bet there is something inside. Those things don’t really pay attention to each other if there’s something bigger attracting them, and the noise up on the road is going to last a while. We have to move fast before everything is done back there.”
He didn’t wait for her to answer. He went up the steps on all fours and tried the door handle. It was locked. He heard Colleen making a noise to get his attention, and when he looked at her she pointed at the big potted plant next to the door. Hampton leaned it slightly away from him and saw the brass key underneath.
When he picked it up, it crossed his mind that the infection worked its way inside the same way someone got in with a key. It was simple the way it gave the infected dead access to the inside of a house or to the inside of a community.
He nodded at her to acknowledge she had been right but also to see her give him a look that said, “Good luck.”
He slid the key into the lock as quietly as he could and turned. When he was sure the door was unlocked, he went back down to where Colleen was crouching and picked up the rake. He held it out at arms length and caught the metal prongs on the handle. The weight of the rake did most of the work pushing down the handle, and as soon as it was down far enough, he started to pull.
