Snareville
David Youngquist
ISBN: 978-0-9831603-1-1
Published April 2011 by
Dark Continents Publishing
www.darkcontinents.com
Copyright ©2011 David Youngquist
Front Cover Illustration by Jethro Lentle
Cover and Book Design by John Prescott
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval system, without the written permission of the author and the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This book contains a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s creation or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Published in the United States of America.
All rights reserved.
To my amazing wife Fay. Thank you, Love, for everything.
Chapter One
We ignored the stories at first. It didn’t have much to do with us, clear out here in the sticks. Small towns are like that. Unless it affected someone we knew or our own families, it wasn’t really news.
The hemorrhagic fever was bad. We wondered how it got here. How it got loose.
Then the military nuked Macomb. Ten days later, Champaign turned into a glowing hole. That got everyone’s attention. Some of us lost family there. Government said it didn’t have a choice. It was a terrorist attack.
We couldn’t believe there were actually zombies out roaming around until one showed up in town.
Since Jake Prichard was into agribusiness, he did a lot of work up in the Quad Cities. He went on an overnighter up by Milan and came home sick. His wife Tami said he was throwing up blood, when he wasn’t shitting it out. She tried to get him to the hospital, but he wouldn’t go. She called an ambulance, but he was dead before it got there. Crew showed up, saw all the blood, and geared out in their hazmat equipment. First time they ever had to use it.
But as the EMTs loaded Jake up on a rolling gurney, he snapped awake. At least, they thought he was awake. He just came to all of a sudden, growling, snapping, and snarling. Katy, one of the crewmembers, tried to calm him down and take his vitals. Jake bit a hunk of meat right out of her face. She jumped back with a scream while he chewed on a piece of her and reached for more.
That’s when Denny strapped him down. He threw a belt over Jake’s chest and yanked it tight. Now they had a hungry zombie on the stretcher, a wounded EMT among them, and a crowd standing around trying to figure out what was going on. Denny started pumping Katy full of whatever he thought would clean out her system and keep her from getting sick. It might have worked if Jake hadn’t wiggled free and chewed out Denny’s throat.
Denny went down, flopped like a stranded carp, and died. The house emptied. Katy and Tami bailed first, with Jake close behind. After he died, Denny staggered to his feet and joined the chase. Outside, the crowd scattered. Old Bill Terrance wasn’t fast enough, though. He was damn near seventy and gimpy from working on the railroad. Jake and Denny jumped the old man, ate their fill, and went looking for more.
We don’t have a full-time cop here in Snareville. Not big enough, so we share an officer with the town of Buda, and it wasn’t our day to have him on duty. We do have more guns than people, though.
Kenny Rodgers was the first to take things in hand. He did two tours in Vietnam, and he never was quite right when he came home. Not spooky crazy, but just a little off. And he was one hell of a shot. He told us later he’d been watching the news, and he wasn’t a bit surprised at what was going on. He blamed it all on the government, not the terrorists—but none of that means shit anymore, anyway.
Anyway, Kenny came out of his house with one of his old military guns. He saw Jake, covered in blood and running down the street, and put a bullet through his brain. That shot dropped Jake on the run.
Then Denny turned and came at him, so Ken popped him, too. Meanwhile, Katy stood in the street throwing up blood, and another bullet put her down. Three shots, three fucking kills. It amazes me to this day.
People were pissed that Kenny shot Katy. Kenny asked if they’d rather have her running around chewing on people. That kind of shut them up.
Before long, a couple more vets came up, guns under their arms. Those of us who’d gathered around got sent off to get our own guns and come back to the post office on the square. I went home and got my AR-15. I shoot competition in the summer. Or I did. Before…
Well, we gathered back together, and we had a dozen vets among us now, different soldiers from various wars. Some had seen Vietnam. Some had been in Korea. Some fought in the Gulf. I grew up between the Gulf conflicts, but my dad was a vet. He served after Vietnam. First, we quarantined the bodies. We decided on a place out by the sewage plant. Someone got the village truck to haul out the dead. We dug a hole with the backhoe the city kept there, and we covered the bodies with lye.
It took a couple of hours. By then, townspeople started to get home from work. The busses came in from school. I worked third shift, and that was the only reason I was around that day. It wasn’t time for me to go to work yet, and I didn’t figure I should go in after what happened. The town began to fill up, and we started to block roads. Snareville is a small place. Only eight hundred people live here, but we have bigger towns a few miles away. We’ve got a creek and a canal to the north that separates us from Princeton. Roads cross in two places. We parked pickups crossways at the mouth of the bridges, and town folk manned them with guns.
We did the same on the other roads. Al Capone used to run booze through Snareville because the law could never catch him here. There are seven ways out of town; the cops never could cover them all. They’d still have a tough time doing it today.
Digging in like we did, we scared a lot of folks here in town, but it hit home this was serious. We didn’t know how long it would take for things to get out of hand. We didn’t know if the government was going to step in. We didn’t know anything.
Kenny called the county sheriff’s office. They couldn’t tell us much. They did threaten to take our guns away, though. Kenny told them they could try, but we already had about a hundred people on patrol. They decided they had bigger problems to worry about. We found out later that Princeton already had Zeds wandering through town at the time. Two cops had been infected. Armed zombies are not a good thing.
Kenny and the other vets organized us into round-the-clock patrols. They gave me command of a five-person squad. We were to patrol the north edge of town, on our side of the creek. Anything that looked infected or dead, we were to put it down.
It’s a two-mile hike from one road to the next. Timber grows thick along the creek. We didn’t find anything on our side the first day, or on the second. We’re a little off the beaten path out here. You have to mean to go to Snareville to get there. We don’t have any through roads, so I think that slowed down the Zeds. They couldn’t find us.
Not that we didn’t have a few infected pop up in town. Tami was the first. She must have caught the virus while she took care of Jake. Kenny quarantined her at the school. She started to get sick, same as her husband. Kenny asked for volunteers to execute her before she turned. No one volunteered, so he walked her out behind the building himself. I could hear her crying, so I peeked around the corner of the school. I watched her calm some and start to pray. Just as she finished, she vomited what looked like half the blood in her body. Kenny put a bullet in her head. We put her in the pit with her husband and the others.
Two more staggered down Main Street the third morning—a couple of teenagers who were dating each other in high school. One
must have been sick and passed it to the other. They spotted Ted Gibson and took off after him. Their lips were gone. Who chewed off whose, we never knew.
The kids chased Ted down Main Street, snarling and snapping, blood and some kind of black ooze running from their mouths. They ran past the convenience store parking lot. All the retired farmers stood outside, each with coffee in one hand and a bird gun in the other. One of them dropped his mug when Ted ran by, then grabbed his gun and dumped the boy in a heap. It was a lucky shot. Just a few pellets of shot scrambled the kid’s brain. The girl turned on them. Five or six blasts of birdshot didn’t slow her much. One of the farmers adjusted his aim and blew her skull off.
Killing isn’t easy. Like I said, we’re a small town. Even if we didn’t know somebody by name, we knew the face. We managed the best we could. We dealt with death in different ways. Some drank. Some withdrew. Some threw themselves into the job of building up our town’s defenses.
There was a heavy equipment operator just outside Snareville. We pulled his tractors into town and used them to block the bridges. We also had a tree surgeon in town, and we used his bucket trucks as spotting platforms. A trucking company called Snareville home, too, but we held the semis in reserve—just in case. The first week, everyone in town who got infected ended up in the pit out by the sewage plant. We figured the lye killed whatever virus lived in the blood. We inscribed the names on the bulletin board in the town center, where we used to post public notices about meetings and such.
On the tenth day, we lost power. We were on a co-op out here, so our power didn’t come from some big company somewhere else. A few cities along the river went in together to put up a hydroelectric plant, and it always seemed reliable before. When we lost the juice, we figured there just wasn’t anyone left to man the plant. At that point, only one TV station out of Peoria was still broadcasting, and the news seemed the same all over. The only good it did was to tell folks where to find the safe zones. We were too far from the nearest zone, so we decided to hunker down where we were. We didn’t have city water without our power, but we had enough people at the outskirts of town who still had wells, so we were okay.
Fifteen days into it, I was on patrol along the canal with Bill Henderson and the rest of my crew. We were walking along one of the locks when we saw her. She was a young gal in her twenties with long, black hair. She wore a pair of those multi-colored bicycle shorts with a gray sports bra, and she was drenched in sweat, mud, and blood. I put up my rifle, but she screamed for help right away, and I knew she wasn’t infected. Zombies aren’t the most talkative bunch. The problem was the pack of Zeds about fifty yards back, running after the girl.
I hollered at her to get across the little footbridge that spanned the lock. The Zeds started to gain on her, so I started popping rounds. Bill joined in with his Min-14. My whole crew uses rifles that fire the same round as mine, so we can keep each other supplied with ammo.
I saw black blood blossoming out of the bodies as the Zeds got closer. There must have been a couple hundred of them in that pack, some on our side of the canal.
The girl tumbled into my arms, I lost my shot, and the Zeds got closer.
“We have to go!” Bill shouted.
“No shit,” I snapped back, then to the girl, I said, “Can you make it a little farther?”
She nodded, gasping for air, and we took off for the barricade on the road a quarter mile up. We waved our guns as soon as we could see the guys on guard, and I saw one of them take off running toward town. I figured he was going for backup, and I didn’t dare look behind us. We dove behind the trucks about a hundred yards ahead of the Zeds, and seven of us opened up on the moldy bastards. Rotten flesh and blood flew every which way, splattering the zombies coming up behind. Shit sprayed the trees and the white-gravel bike path. Sure as hell, they don’t go down with body shots. The bastards barely missed a step.
We found out later that the older the corpse, the slower it moves, but this bunch was pretty fresh. We sent the girl back to the next barricade. It was only fifty yards behind us. We couldn’t slow the swarm much, so two guys buttoned up in the big five-ton truck, and the rest of us fell back to the second bridge.
We put down some fire then. Ten of us with some pretty heavy caliber guns. We calmed down enough to take head shots. Even then, we had twenty laid ten yards off our guns. Some of them fell into the creek and got swept away. Three got into our lines and tackled some of our guys. One was about to take a chunk out of Bill’s throat when I stuck the muzzle of my rifle in the deader’s ear and splattered him. He went over the side and down to the Illinois River.
Then it was over. We looked down the road. From one bridge to the next, the way was paved with corpses.
More folks came up. They went around and put bullets in the skulls of the Zeds that still moved. The ones we dropped along the canal went into the water for a drift downstream. I passed Jack in a bucket tractor as I walked the girl back to town. The group at the barricades loaded the corpses, took them out into a little pasture beside the creek, and threw them in a pile. They covered the dead with a bunch of driftwood, topped them off with five gallons of diesel fuel from the trucking company, and lit them up. Greasy, black smoke rose in a thick column.
“What’s your name?” I asked the girl as we walked into town.
“Jennifer,” she answered. “I live up in the house a couple miles back along the canal. What’s yours?”
“Name’s Dan.” I held out my hand. She took it in hers—small, soft. Not the hands of a girl who worked in a factory. “No offense, Jennifer, but are you nuts?”
“I didn’t figure any of those things would find me. I wasn’t worried about it. I figured the government would take care of it.”
“Didn’t you figure something was wrong when you lost power?”
“We’ve got a backup generator. Rick made us get one after that ice storm when we were out for a week.”
“Ah. And is there anything on the TV?”
She sniffed and looked away. “To tell the truth, we never watched much TV. Rick was gone on business a lot, and I have a garden. And I have my horses. I wasn’t in the house much.”
Great. A rich girl who doesn’t like to hang around us paupers.
“Where’s your husband?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in about ten days. He called me from Chicago and said he was having trouble getting out of town. All the roads were blocked, and the trains weren’t running. That was the last I heard from him.”
I looked at her. She was near tears. All scratched up, but I didn’t see any major wounds on her. At least she didn’t look like she’d been bit or anything.
“So you just decided to go jogging this morning?”
“Look. I’m human, okay? I was going stir-crazy in that house by myself. I didn’t figure I’d run into any of those… those things.”
“Where’d they come from? How’d they get on our side of the canal?”
“They were east of me when I saw them. From down near the highway, I guess. I don’t know how they got on this side. Probably same way I did.”
Damn. We hadn’t thought of that. We had some bridges to blow.
In the meantime, I took Jennifer into town. Kenny talked to her some, then sent her to quarantine with some of the women. We’d changed the quarantine area to the old high school. At the time, we had only two rooms in use. Some people made it home from out of town. So far, no one had developed any symptoms. The girls gave Jennifer a bath, cleaned her cuts, and gave her a room of her own with clean clothes. I went back to the bridges to help out there.
We’d done a hell of a job out there between the bridges. One hundred and seventy-eight deaders sent to the burn pile. Jack dug a deep hole in that cornfield and shoved in everything that was left. When he covered the mess, I wondered if that ground would ever grow a crop again.
We didn’t realize until we talked to Kenny in his after-action report that we were going to see some issues real
fast. Even with decent shooters on the line, we’d burned up nearly five hundred rounds of ammo. We didn’t have much in the way of uniformity among us when it came to our arsenal. Everyone in my squad had a rifle that fired the 5.56 NATO round, but we were the exception. Everyone else had a mish-mash of guns, everything from Garands to AK-47s to SKSs to shotguns. The Soviet rifles interchanged ammo no problem. Biggest challenge was how to keep the guns fed. Some of the guys had battle packs. I had a couple, plus reloaded ammo to use on coyotes. But we weren’t an armory. We couldn’t survive a sustained Zed attack if they swarmed us bigger than they did that day.
“I might have a solution,” I told Kenny.
“I’m open. Let’s hear it.”
“There’re three gun manufacturers within sixty miles of us. Two are in the same town.”
“You think they’re just going to supply us?”
“I think the buildings are probably sitting empty. I figure they’re in the same boat as everyone else, and I don’t reckon anyone’s showed up to work in a few days.”
“You don’t think the looters have hit the places yet?”
“I don’t know about the one. It’s pretty public. The other… I had a buddy that worked there. He’s the one who built my rifle and tweaked it out. His shop just looks like a bunch of brown buildings. You have to know Geneseo and know what you’re looking for.”
“Okay. Figure something out.”
For the next three days, we made plans: how to get to Geneseo and back with the supplies. We had to go after ammo for sure, along with guns if there were any in the warehouse. We also disassembled all the footbridges over the canal from us to the river. It was a hairy job. We took quad runners and hand tools. Three people stood guard while two people tore the bridge apart. We just needed to pull the wood floor, so it only took a few turns with a wrench to take care of it.
The closer we got to the state road, though, the more Zeds we started to see.
Snareville Page 1
