“I’m Catholic, Dan. Not a real good one, but I still know suicide is a ticket to hell. I’m already close enough to that here, and I don’t want it in the afterlife, too. I can already feel that junk in my system, so come on.”
She walked away, headed for the front of the building. Against my will, I followed. Around the corner, under a big maple tree, she knelt in the soft, spring grass. She looked out over the cornfields, then she bowed her head and started to pray. Tears streamed from her eyes, and I felt a few run down my face, too. My hands shook, trembling on the grip of the rifle. After a few moments, Chrissi crossed herself and opened her eyes.
“Sure is a pretty day,” she told me. “You’re a good man, Dan. I’m ready.”
I brought up my gun. The muzzle shook in the air a foot from her temple. Just one shot, and her death would be instant. My hands wouldn’t hold still. The damned sight danced around. I couldn’t breathe.
Chrissi started to hum. A little tune I’d heard in church as a kid. First song I ever learned: Jesus loves me, this I know…
I started to hum along. The rifle barked and shattered the morning.
I turned and walked back to the trucks.
The others stood around, staring hard at the gravel. Jennifer dragged the toe of her boot through the limestone dust. No one looked at me.
“Next time we go out, these trucks have armor over the windows. I don’t want to have to do this again.” I looked at my crew. “We came here for supplies. Let’s get it done.”
Bill and Jeff stayed with the trucks as the rest of us headed inside. The windows were barred here, and the doors were made of steel, closed up tight with deadbolts and door-handle locks. We walked around to the employee entrance. It was locked, too, but the door there was made of barred glass. I busted it out with the butt of my gun, reached inside, and turned the lock. No electricity; no alarms. Inside, we passed through a second door the same way. Then we were in.
At the end of the manufacturing line, I saw racks full of rifles. The racks themselves were labeled with model and caliber. I knew how the system worked here. Those guns at the end of the line hadn’t been test fired yet. Off to the south lay the loading dock. We walked out there and found pallets of boxed rifles. There, the pallets were marked. We wanted one type of rifle in two calibers.
I rolled open a dock door and signaled for Jeff to back up. He did. Bill locked in the trailer and chocked the wheels so it wouldn’t go anywhere. Meanwhile, Jennifer marked the pallets we wanted. Back in one corner, we found a pallet of pistols; we marked them, too.
I jumped up on a forklift. That’s what I used to do for work. I loaded trailers.
In fifteen minutes, I had five pallets of rifles on the truck, along with the pistols. Bill found a pallet of the big fifty-calibers and passed three of them out to John to put in the pickup. The trailer was still mostly empty, so we unlocked it from the dock. We hopped out, and I pulled down the door. Jeff followed me around back. In a large, gray building, we came upon two more dock doors. I told the others to back in the trucks.
It took a little more doing, but we found a way in through a side window. There, stacked floor-to-ceiling, lay pallets upon pallets of ammunition.
We took everything we could load on the two trucks. Pistol and fifty-cal ammo went on the pickup. Feed for the rifles went in the trailer. Two pallets of magazines for the guns went into the trailer as well. We didn’t take everything in the warehouse, but we took everything we could use. Then we pulled away from the docks, buttoned up the trailer, and headed out.
The Zeds found us in no time. We were out there barely an hour, and here came those bastards, stumbling down the road at us.
“I’m not goin’ back through town, Boss,” Jeff said.
We sat in the drive and watched them come. Bill popped off a round at a time. I watched the deaders go down, one by one. I was glad Chrissi wouldn’t be among them.
“Turn left out of the drive,” I told Jeff. “We’ll make the twenty miles extra.”
That we did as fast as the rig would go, loaded down as it was. We stopped at the intersection outside Buda and grabbed the extra pickup. By the time we got home, we were exhausted. The adrenaline had run us through, and we all felt wrung out. Seemed like all Jeff could do just to get the rig backed up into its little warehouse. We stood back and watched while the rest of the group unloaded the trucks and buttoned up tight. We'd made it home.
I walked to my pickup, dug the keys out of my pocket, and climbed in. Jennifer climbed into the cab opposite me. She didn’t say a word; she just rode with me to my place. We washed up in a bucket of room-temp water I had in the bathroom, then we collapsed into bed together.
“If I ever get bit, do the same for me as you did for Chrissi.”
“Okay.”
It was the last thing I remember before we fell asleep.
Chapter Two
“I love the way that sounds,” Jennifer said. Thunder rolled again though our valley. Lightning cast her face in silver as she snuggled down against my chest, nearly asleep. “It sounds so normal.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. We'd discovered a few weeks ago that thunderstorms turned us both on. She lay half across me as I played with her long, brown hair. We stuck to one another from our lovemaking, and the sheets stuck to us. Thunder boomed again.
“One of these days, you’ll have to pull out, or you’ll get me knocked up.”
“Didn’t hear you complain.” I was nearly asleep, too.
She giggled.
“No, I like it. Warms me up.” She turned her face to me and gave me a small kiss. “But I don’t know if I want to have a baby right now, Danny.”
I kissed her back. “I don’t, either, but it’s not like we can run to Wal-Mart and get you some pills or me some rubbers.”
“I know.” She rolled over and lit a candle beside the bed. “I’m going to wash up. There’s water in the bucket for you, too.”
I sat up. “Yeah, I know.”
I watched her stand. Her hair brushed the middle of her back. The small braids I put there waved across her shoulders. Her bush now grew almost to her navel. The rest of her had gone back to nature, too.
“You’re such a hippie chick.”
She giggled. “Don’t hear any complaints from you. Besides… not much sense in trying to shave with dull razors and cold water.”
“True.” I followed her into the bathroom. Six weeks after our first big raid, two months after the viral outbreak in our little town, and few of the women of Snareville still shaved, from what I could see. Same with the men, but the extra hair was one of the ways we identified ourselves and one another. Zombies don’t grow hair.
But at least I trim my beard.
Jennifer lathered up a washcloth in the five-gallon bucket of sterilized creek water. She turned, grabbed me, and washed my cock. I started to get hard again.
“You’re a horny goat tonight, aren’t you?”
I kissed her. “You have that effect on me.”
She rinsed the cloth, finished washing me, and threw me a towel. I dried, and she handed me the washcloth with a wicked little smile. “Your turn.”
I chuckled as I returned the favor. She dried, pulled on a pair of panties, and led the way back to the room. We remade the bed and crawled in. Jennifer blew out the candle. Thunder raced down the valley, shaking the house. I spooned her with a hand under one breast. She felt so good and normal on nights like this.
“It’s our turn to check the fences and ditch, right?”
Cold revulsion twisted my guts. Thunderstorms drive the deaders nuts. They blunder around, looking for shelter and trying to get into town.
“Yeah. Our turn.” I was in charge of one of the four platoons of fighters in town. We manned the southeast quadrant. Two other couples slept in the upstairs bedrooms with us. Like ours, their guns rested in racks on either side of their beds. That way, everyone could turn out armed and ready if a swarm or something got through the fence.
&n
bsp; In the morning, we’d patrol the fence and ditch system we were in the process of building. If we found any Zeds hung up, we'd pop them, rope them, drag them out with a quad runner, and burn them. It was never a pleasant job, but it had to be done.
I heard Jennifer's breath deepen as she drifted off. I wasn’t far behind her.
Morning came along and woke us with sunlight. The air smelled freshly washed.
I checked the yard to the west and the north. I saw nothing out of place. Jenny unbuttoned one of my work shirts and slid it on over her T-shirt. It hung nearly to her knees. I pulled on my clothes and laced up my boots.
“No bra today?” I grinned.
“They’re all in the wash. They’ll be on the line for you to perv over this afternoon.”
I rousted the rest of the house. Bill and Sandy Henderson had the room to the east. John and Cathy Cattani had the room to the south. Everyone started to roll out. Jenny brushed her teeth over the sink while I checked the window at the end of the hall to the north. Still nothing. All the occupied houses stood two stories with their first floors fortified. We'd boarded up all the windows from the outside, securing them with heavy screws and lag bolts. The extra doors were bolted shut and boarded over as well. Each house maintained one way in and out via an emergency ladder on the roof of the porch. We could get out if we had to, or we could go up a roof level to wait for help if we had to.
I checked on the two-way with Kenny, and all reports were clear in town.
"After breakfast, we’ll start the perimeter search," I told him.
I went downstairs into the gloom. Most of the windows on the lower level were boarded nearly to the top. Some of the bigger ones on these old houses had a gap of a foot or so to let in some light. We didn’t figure the deaders could get that high off the ground. The window over the sink in the kitchen was completely covered because it was accessible from the porch. Same with the window in the door, which was reinforced with lumber. We'd worked up a system to bar the door with two sets of hooks and four-by-four timbers, like old castle gates. We'd scavenged the extra wood from a few of the empty houses around town.
I opened the door. None of the dogs growled; that was a good sign. We had a pretty clear fire zone from our place. We'd dozed the three empty, useless houses around us. That opened things up a lot. It was the same all around town. A lot of houses came down after reality set in a couple months ago.
The dogs ran out into the long grass and sniffed around to check things over. Jenny came up behind me and slid her arm around my waist.
“Looks like we need to mow,” she said, smiling.
“I’ll get on it after breakfast.” I smiled back.
We leaned our rifles against the porch rail, stepped out, and got the camp stoves set up for breakfast. As my platoon came along to check in, everyone pitched in. Soon enough, the yard was full of people, kids, and dogs. Rifles lined the outside wall for quick access. As we cooked and ate, I handed out assignments for the morning. In addition to my responsibilities as a platoon leader with twenty-five people under me, I was second in command—the executive officer, if you will—of our little town.
After breakfast, I kissed Jenny goodbye. She’d work on our garden with some of the others. Meanwhile, I went to check for Zeds. One of my guys followed with a quad runner and trailer as Bill, John, and I walked the fence.
We only found three that morning. A shot through each head, a rope looped around each rotting corpse, and a drag of each out to the burn pile. It took us a couple of hours. Some of my people were out on water detail. Others were on tear-down at a couple houses while still others built fence or reinforced the lived-in places.
Jenny went with me when I reported to Kenny. We hiked over to the library five blocks from the house. The library served as our headquarters, as it was located in the center of town and made of solid brick. We still used the grade school for the kids. We wanted to keep things as normal as possible, so we kept classes in session. We had a hundred kids from kindergarten through high school left in town. The older ones taught the younger ones. Most school days were only half days, and some subject matter didn’t get covered all that well, but it was better than no routine at all for the kids.
As we walked in, I saw Terry Hines, another platoon leader, coming down the walk from the opposite direction. Most days, we all met up together. Dale Thompson was already in talking to Kenny. On days after a storm, we met later than normal because of the cleanup. Jenny and I went in and sat in the area that used to be the children’s room—Kenny's office now—to hear what Dale had to say.
“Hakim came back last night,” he told us. The corners of his mouth twitched up. His platoon covered the north quadrant of town, which was the most exposed. We’d thrown Hakim out of town three weeks ago when he wouldn’t let us have any of his gas unless we paid for it. Fucker thought despite the Zeds wandering the countryside, we still had to pay him two-fifty a gallon. We shoved him out the gates by force, and his wife walked back into town with us. From her black eyes and broken nose, I figured she wouldn’t miss him much.
“Dead or alive?” I asked Dale as Terry wandered in.
“Dead. Missing an arm and half his face. Recognized the bastard, though, from that bald head of his. Guess he didn’t make it back to Chicago. Should we tell Talula?”
“No," I said. "I think she got over him a couple weeks ago.”
Talula had taken up with Dale about a week after we got rid of Hakim.
“How ‘bout you, Danny? Anything?” Kenny asked.
“Three deaders. One in the fence, two stuck in the ditches. We got the burn pile goin’ with the rest.”
“That makes eight from last night. Only one we knew was Hakim. That's the most we’ve had in a while. Hope it doesn’t mean they’re building up out there for another swarm.”
“Don’t know," Terry said. "Hard to figure deaders. Food’s probably getting tough for them to find by now. Probably pretty desperate. Hope none of 'em remember the way to Snareville.”
We all stared hard at the desk. We were a small town, and we were getting smaller. The sign at the edge of Snareville said we boasted eight hundred souls. The first week of the outbreak, a few over five hundred made it home. Since then, after all the attacks, suicides, and people just up and leaving, we were down to less than four hundred. Those of us left kept ourselves busy building up our defenses and getting on with our lives the best we could.
Kenny broke the silence. “We need to make a run to Princeton.”
We all looked up. We all knew this was coming. We’d been preparing for another raid on town. Until now, we'd hit up the farm store on the edge of town for our wiring and building supplies. But we were low on food and other things. Our little grocery mart and the convenience store in town were already tapped. The frozen stuff was long gone, and the canned goods would be soon to follow.
“We need more than food, Ken,” Jenny said. “We need soap of all sorts, plus women’s supplies.”
“Your platoon’s up, Danny,” Ken said. “You’ve got the best raiders in your group. The trucks fueled?”
“Gassed and waiting for the next run.”
“Hit Wal-Mart. It’s on the edge of town.”
“We’ll go the long way around, so we don’t have to run through residential or down Main Street.”
“Good idea. Dale, get your people on the tractors and keep working on the ditch. Terry, your crews keep working on the houses. Get them up to snuff. Let's get goin’, folks.”
Our little pow-wow broke up. Jenny walked with me out the door. We chitchatted with the others for a few minutes, wondering aloud about what might be going on in the outside world. None of us envied one another’s jobs. My group took the most risks, but we were the best at raiding. Dale was a heavy equipment operator once upon a time, along with two of his crew members, and the three of them had been teaching the rest how to do it here and there. Terry used to work in construction, and he took the other builders in town for his group. W
e could all fight, and we’d proven that a couple times in the last few weeks. But mine was the group made up of the gun collectors, competitive shooters, and hunters. When we weren’t on raids, my crew hunted everything from deer to feral hogs.
On the way home, we stopped to pull the trucks out of the shed.
“You drivin’ or ridin’ this time?” I asked Jenny.
“I’ll shoot.”
We called the rest of the group in. We had four pickup trucks we used as main raiders. They’d been slightly modified. After we lost Chrissi on the first run, I wasn’t about to repeat that mercy kill. We'd improvised old-fashioned cow-catchers on the front of the trucks with tube steel and sheet metal. Over the windows, we welded sheet metal with firing ports to see and shoot from. Two of the trucks came with sunroofs. One of those I used as my command truck. The rest served as good shooting platforms. All our trucks had four-wheel-drive and four doors. Easy in, easy out. No getting stuck.
Upon hearing the plan, everyone geared up. Four people per truck. I had three Gulf War vets on my team, plus a couple of Reservists who got left behind in the chaos. Their unit had called them in, but they couldn’t make it to LaSalle back when the outbreak first hit. Together, we pulled on our heavy-duty coveralls, work boots, and leather gloves. Human teeth and fingernails aren’t that strong. If a deader got hold of one of us, it’d have some work to do in order to get a chomp in. Some of us wore motorcycle helmets; the Reservists had their own K-pots. A couple of us wore football helmets. We made a motley crew, but we got the job done.
Our weapons were uniform, though. From our first raid, we'd snagged enough guns to arm the whole town. The men carried AR-15 rifles like the military's, except ours packed a bigger punch. They were all 7.62 NATO. A good, heavy round. The girls carried AR-15s like ours, but theirs were standard military 5.56 NATO caliber. Easier to handle without the recoil. In addition to the rifles, we all carried pistols strapped to our belts. Most of the team members also kept sawed-off shotguns slung across their chests. We carried spare magazines and ammo in ditty bags. No such thing as being over-gunned when driving into a horde of Zeds.
Snareville Page 3
