Snareville

by David Youngquist

  “God had a hand in it," Pepper said. "I took a dive through a second-floor window to get out.”

  “Then you are blessed," O'Shea said, sighing, "as we have been. Not long after the outbreak, two of the test subjects used to develop the virus walked right through our front door. We were also fortunate enough to have snatched Patient Two off the University of Illinois campus before our former government nuked it.”

  “Test subjects?” Connie asked.

  “Yes. Two former med-school students were abducted from the U of I campus when it was discovered they each have a unique blood chemistry that makes them immune to the Ebola virus. They escaped and came here. One was pregnant. Her son is immune to both viruses.”

  “So you’ve used them all as lab rats?” Catfish asked.

  O'Shea frowned. “No. They're free to come and go as they please. They live here on campus. Both volunteered to help. We used stem cells from the infant's umbilical cord to develop the anti-virus, and now Patient Two is non-symptomatic. She’s a carrier, like the other two, but she was infected too long to be entirely cured.”

  We were all duly impressed. Before long, O’Shea gave us enough vaccine to cover all of Snareville, plus some. He explained to Pepper how to use it—the doses and such. Pepper slipped the precious parcel into the pack she wore on her back. The anti-virus came to us in a smaller batch. O’Shea warned us it was only good within the first twelve hours of infection. After that, breakdown set in, thanks to the Ebola. I still thought it was a better early-response measure than blowing someone’s head off.

  “Now, I understand some of you Snareville ladies are pregnant,” O'Shea said at last.

  Catfish chuckled. She was well into her second trimester. “Is it that obvious, Doc?”

  O’Shea smiled. “Would you like pre-natal exams while you're here? Just to see how things are going?”

  Catfish looked at Pepper. They both nodded.

  “Good. We’ve got time and rooms available. Follow me.”

  Boss Connie shot Bill Yoder a glance and blushed bright red. Bill stared hard at the floor.

  “Do you have time to do three, Doctor?” he mumbled into his beard.

  The rest of us stared at the two of them.

  “Bill, you old dog!" I cried with a laugh. "At your age?”

  “You English must put something in the water,” Bill tried, grinning in spite of himself.

  Together, the three ladies went off for their exams. All the babies were healthy. They jumped and rolled when the wand passed over them. I didn’t want to know the sex of our baby, but Tony’s child was pretty obviously a boy when he rolled over. Connie and Bill’s baby was just a dot yet, but it was in there. We all received our vaccinations during our visit.

  Later, as O'Shea walked us out, I asked where we could do some trading. He called a young med student over and volunteered him to take us to the local market. Finally, we said our goodbyes and stepped back out into the cold.

  “What’s with all the black smoke?” Catfish asked.

  I’d noticed it on the way in, but I had other things on my mind then.

  “Burning Zeds,” the student replied. “They have teams out searching for frozen zombies. We throw the corpses into the power plants with the coal. Twofer deal.”

  “We’ve just been burning them in piles,” Tony said.

  “We do that, too, when we have to. We’ve got two thirds of the population of the state up here, and we have to gain an edge somehow. Best way to do it as far as I can see.”

  We nodded as we loaded up in the trucks. Bernie, as the med student on loan was named, climbed into the plow truck with us. After a few minutes' travel, we reached a street converted into an open market. We parked. This time, we took our rifles, which Bernie informed us were illegal.

  "You wanna take 'em from us?" I inquired.

  No answer.

  The market was a madhouse. People crammed in shoulder to shoulder. They parted for us, though. People sold anything and everything they had on them. I saw radios, TVs, and all sorts of electronic gear on the market. Some tables held up a few wilted vegetables, and some boasted cans of fruit with hundred-dollar price tags. Five-gallon cans of gas were priced at three hundred. One woman offered up herself and her twelve-year-old daughter in exchange for canned goods. Catfish produced a case of MREs and handed it to the woman. The woman cried. I think we all felt the same.

  Bernie led us to a grocery store. The glass doors had been shattered and replaced with heavy plywood. Two armed guards stood to either side of the entrance. They held up their hands when they spotted us.

  “Uh-uh. No way. You people ain’t gettin' in. You get rid of those guns before we call the cops, then you can come in.”

  “I don’t think so, bub,” I said. “You let us in before we shoot you, and we won’t have an issue.”

  “Who da fuck you think you are, you li'l shit?” the second one—the bigger and, apparently, dumber one—demanded.

  “We’re Raiders,” Tony answered.

  For a moment, nothing at all happened. Then the guards backed away from the door. Word about us must have reached Chicago.

  Inside, Bernie led us to a little guy with long, black hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  “Hey, you can’t have those guns in here. Where’s Tommy and Frank?”

  “We need supplies,” Boss Connie said, skipping the niceties. “Flour, rice, beans. Milk would be nice.”

  “It’ll cost ya. I ain’t no charity.”

  “Ed, these people are Raiders, from downstate," Bernie said. "They’ve been out to the hospital and need some supplies.”

  “Yeah? They look like hillbillies. I don’t take paper money. Gold, silver, or bullets. Something with value.”

  Already, I didn’t like the guy. “You got a loading dock?”

  “Around back. Why?”

  “Because what we’ve got to trade, I don’t want to drag through that mob out there.”

  “Yeah, okay. Bernie, show ‘em where it’s at. I’ll meet you out there.”

  Tony went to fetch the truck. The rest of us followed Ed, and he raised a door for the truck to back in. Tony came around, slid the key into the lock on the cover, and flipped it open.

  Ed stared, speechless.

  “We even gutted ‘em for you," I said. "What're they worth?”

  “Get what ya want,” Ed whispered, then shouted toward the front, “Tommy, Frank, get back here! We got work to do!”

  The women passed the guards as they headed opposite directions. Tony, Bill, and I lifted the carcasses from the truck and hauled them to Ed's cooler. It still worked. We hung the meat on the hooks. Tommy, the bigger and dumber of Ed's guys, started skinning the deer immediately.

  "They used to be meat cutters for the store, before the outbreak," Ed mentioned, eyes shining.

  The girls came back with three shopping carts full of supplies. They picked up bulk bags and several gallons of milk. We had the pickup loaded in no time and paused on the dock to talk business with Ed. That was when I heard something rattle, like a chain being tugged. Then I head a Zed moan from somewhere in the back of Ed's shop.

  We went into reflexive combat mode. Our rifles came out. I pulled my pistol. Pepper and I flattened to one side of the wall, and the others took the opposite side.

  “Wait, wait!” Ed urged, waving his hands in the air. “It’s just gettin' close to feeding time… that's all. The girls're gettin' hungry. Tommy, cut me off a couple pieces of that meat.”

  Tommy complied. Ed waved us down the hall. None of us put our guns away.

  “I provide more'n groceries, see?" Ed explained as he led us back. "Some of my suppliers're the biggest freaks in the city. I just provide for their needs.”

  We turned a corner into a storage area. To the right opened a small room with the door gone. Inside, I saw a few girls chained to the walls. My eyes darted past them. Farther back, chained to the concrete-block wall, I saw the two Zed women. Hands cuffed behind their backs, ball
gags in their mouths, the two wore tattered stockings, grungy bras, and scuffed stiletto heels. They moaned and snarled behind their gags. Black slime dribbled out around the rubber balls. Dead-white eyes stared through us. I spotted a big box of rubbers on a shelf.

  “Like I say… some people're freaks,” Ed said. He didn't sound too bothered about it.

  I gazed at one of the deaders—a blonde with her tangled hair cut in a bob. She'd been slender in life. Skinny, even.

  I looked in her face. I looked into her eyes. She looked back at me and stopped snarling for a moment. She stood still. Something flickered across her face.

  A lot of things raced through my head. Hate, rage, sorrow… I raised my pistol and put a round through the Zed's face. She slumped in her chains. I turned to the other deader. She'd been a young black girl, maybe high-school aged. With another bullet, she drooped still, too.

  Ed was screaming something at me. I didn’t hear his guys coming, but when I turned, I saw my troops had them both pinned to the wall with the muzzles of their rifles.

  “Do you know that blonde?” I asked Ed.

  “What?" he cried furiously. "What the hell're you talkin' about?”

  “Who was she? What was her name?”

  “She was a whore I was makin' money on, ya fucker!”

  Ed reached into his pocket for something. I stuck my pistol under his nose.

  “I asked you what her name was.”

  Ed stood frozen, hands in the air. “Carly somethin'.”

  “You're half right," I whispered. "Her name was Carly Jackson. She was my sister. She came up here three years ago to go to school and dance. Two years ago, she dropped out of school to become a junkie. A year ago, we lost contact with her.”

  Ed's eyes went wide.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he managed.

  “I’m Danny Death. These are my Raiders.”

  I watched the color drain from his face. Our reputation preceded us.

  “I… I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  I pushed the pistol against his forehead. He started babbling. Something about how he had to make a living somehow. I pulled most the slack off the trigger. No one stopped me. Another pound of pressure; that’s all it would take.

  Then I heard a sob from one of the live girls. That broke my rage.

  I blinked as I let my finger off the trigger. “Keys."

  “You can’t take my girls! I’ll lose suppliers!”

  “I can kill you and then take them, if you prefer."

  Ed dug out his keys and handed them over. Pepper, Catfish, and Boss Connie disappeared behind me. They returned with four girls in tow. One of them, no more than thirteen years old, looked sick. Pepper removed one of the vials from her backpack. She pulled a couple cc’s into a syringe and shot it into the girl’s arm.

  “Did you infect her?” I seethed. My gun pressed in under Ed's nose again.

  “This mornin', man, just this mornin'! Chloe was gettin' a li'l rotten, see?”

  He jerked his thumb toward the black girl, and I whipped my pistol across his face. He stumbled, crying out. Blood pumped from the gash in his cheek.

  “You sick fuck,” I said.

  He straightened and found the muzzle centered on his forehead again. Pepper laid her hand on my arm.

  “Let’s go,” she whispered.

  Ed stood frozen, eyes wide and locked on mine. I twitched the sight aside as I squeezed the trigger. The gun roared in the small room. It sounded like a cannon. A bloody half-circle appeared in Ed’s right ear, and the bullet spattered a crater in the concrete wall. Ed screamed.

  “Clean this fuckin’ mess up,” I said. “Next time I come up, I’ll check on you. If you're still runnin’ whores, we'll take our meat somewhere else.”

  I turned around to find a pile of hooker clothes discarded on the floor. The girls huddled together, wrapped up in freezer blankets against the cold. We loaded into the pickup. It was a tight squeeze.

  In front of Ed's store, I hopped out with Pepper. We took the young girl she’d inoculated. With a turn of the key, the dump truck fired. We dropped an open-mouthed Bernie back at the university, and we headed out of town.

  “You know we'll have to kill her if she starts to turn,” I told Pepper.

  She sat between me and the girl. The girl shivered against her, wrapped up in the blanket.

  “Yeah,” Pepper said. “But we couldn’t leave her there. At least now she has a chance.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I wasn’t convinced. The pistol rode in my lap.

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” Pepper managed. She tried to say more, but my eyes were already running by then. She wrapped a hand around my face and kissed my cheek.

  “Me, too,” I choked out.

  A week later, we put Ella to bed in the downstairs bedroom where Pepper used to sleep. She was only twelve. She hadn’t seen her folks since June. None of Ed's girls were older than eighteen. Two went to live with Boss Connie and the Mennonites. The other girl, Charlie, stayed with Tony and Cat. Four more additions to the family.

  Chapter Seven

  Rain dripped on the roof of the little porch outside our window. I snuggled into Pepper’s pillow as I drank in the scent of her hair. My right hand cupped her breast. Jenny’s arm encircled us both at the waist. The babies were asleep—a luxury we didn’t get too often these days.

  I smiled as I listened to the rainfall. It was good for the garden.

  Then the sound changed. The pitter-patter intensified, like someone had turned up the spigot. Weird rhythm. Choppy, like—

  “Guns,” Jenny whispered.

  I woke up a little more. Then I heard the dogs barking. Rifle fire punctuated the morning. Someone cut loose on the M-60. It has a slower cyclic rate. I could hear each of its shots: da, da, da. It shredded the morning air. Someone opened up with a Squad Automatic Weapon. Smaller bullet, but man, it’s a faster gun. They call it a SAW for more than one reason.

  From there, more guns joined in. Sounded like they were west of us.

  “Am I hearin’ a firefight?” Pepper mumbled into her pillow.

  “Sounds like it,” I said.

  Outside, our dogs added their voices to the racket. Jenny rolled out of bed on her side.

  “Those idiots are gonna wake the babies.”

  She pulled on some pajamas and headed into the hall. I heard her say something to Heather as they met on the way to the nursery.

  The radio crackled to life beside the bed as Pepper swung her legs over the side. “Cap’n Death? You there?”

  I picked up the mike. “I’m here.”

  Heavy gunfire rattled in the background. “We got Zeds everywhere, Sir.”

  More shots.

  “We got ‘em inside the fence. I don’t know how many. Still comin', sir.”

  “Where you reporting from?” From the sounds of the fight, I already had a pretty good idea.

  “Private Wilson on the southwest gate, sir. I think Peoria found us.”

  More gunfire.

  “Fuck,” I muttered.

  It wouldn’t be long before we had people rolling toward the fight. The noise had to be waking everybody else up, too. Pepper started to pull on her fighting gear.

  “Sir?” Wilson called again.

  “Yeah, Private?”

  “We got Savages here too, Cap’n Death. They came in with the Zeds. Hit us first, then rolled out of the way as the swarm boiled in. I don’t know where they went.”

  Fuck again. “Okay, Private. Shoot 'em on sight, too.”

  “Yessir.”

  Not ten seconds later, the fire siren went off in the center of town. Kenny was monitoring the broadcast. He'd turned on the generator and hit the whistle. I flipped the radio to link with the command net. Over the winter, my brother Tom brought a lot of presents to us down in Snareville from the Rock Island Arsenal. Along with gear and supplies, we now had about a hundred troops stationed in town. He was using Snareville as a staging ground to exterminate Zed
s and establish order. A year after the outbreak, we Raiders were now a militia attached to what was left of the U.S. Army.

  A curse from Pepper got my attention.

  “What?” I asked as she struggled into her body armor.

  Pepper yanked up her top and tried to close it. “These vests aren’t made to cover milk jugs. Your son hasn’t had his breakfast yet.”

  Couldn’t help myself—even in a Zed storm, Pepper could make me laugh.

  “I don’t think they took that into consideration when they made them for combat soldiers.” I walked over to my wife and helped her zip up. “I could milk ya, if you want.”

  “Very funny, farm boy,” she said.

  We both finished dressing. Tommy, now Major Tom Jackson, had brought us some 1980s era woodlands BDUs his guys had stored in mothballs for the last ten years. He also brought us boots and modern K-pot helmets. Our comm-link was wired into the helmets, so I could talk with anyone in town. Reports from the other commanders began to come in. I ordered everyone to link up at the fire house. Kenny, now Major Kenny One Shot, would meet us there.

  Downstairs, the dogs went berserk. We heard pounding at the doors. Moans drifted up. Glass shattered out of a window. The Zeds had found us. We were only two blocks from the gate, so I figured it wouldn’t take long.

  “I hope we locked up last night,” I shouted. From somewhere else in the house, someone affirmed we were tight. It was spring. Warm weather. We were jumpy anyway. Now the babies started to cry. I glanced at Pepper.

  “You can stay with Michael, if you want,” I said.

  “We already worked this out.” Pepper picked up her MP-5 and slung her bandolier of ammo over her shoulder. “We’ll be back. Jen’s staying.”

  I picked up my rifle and slung on my own band of magazines. I topped it off with four WP grenades I got from Tom. The pounding downstairs intensified. Bill passed through the hall into the nursery and slid open the window to the porch above the kitchen. I heard shots begin as he dropped deaders from the second floor.

  “You’re a good woman,” I said to Pepper. I kissed her before she lowered the face shield of her helmet. “I love you.”