by Cedric Nye
“Don’t know,” I reply. “I’m guessing yes.”
“Does it matter?” Jon says. “A threat is a threat.”
We get weapons ready, but keep walking. I can catch flickers of action to my right, back behind some of the houses that line Lakeshore Dr. Just brief flashes of limbs and clothing. I have no idea how many, what size, sex, or age. I just know they are there and they are keeping pace with us.
Stuart’s thumb flicks with just the barest of movements and I know he has taken the safety off his pistol. He’s ready for a fight. I grip my pistol and SS, very aware of the clammy sweat on my palms. I pray my weapons don’t slip from my grasp right when I need them.
Stuart spins quickly and fires one shot. A person cries out in pain and Stuart is off, running towards the sound, his pistol up, his eyes taking in everything, his machete at the ready.
“Fuck,” Jon curses, looking at me. “Do we follow?”
“If you were running towards uncertain danger, wouldn’t you want your travelling companions coming with you?” I reply.
We follow, basically mimicking Stuart’s attack: pistols up, melee weapons at the ready. But before we get more than a couple of feet, they come at us from all sides.
Kids.
“Shit,” I shout as four preteens rush at me from my right.
I spin and fire, hitting one in the leg and then I fire again at their feet, hoping it will make them stop and back off. It doesn’t. The three left are nearly on me, axes, handmade spears, and twisted clumps of rebar in their hands, ready to split my skull wide open
I fire again and again, emptying my magazine before I realize I took them all down. I stare at the dirty, bloody, malnourished bodies before me. Two are missing half their face, the other is trying to suck air from the hole I put in his chest. The first one I tagged is trying to get up, screaming at me about how he’ll rip me open and eat my guts without even cooking them.
Nothing ruins a day like feral, cannibal kids.
Well, not true. Not seeing a fifth kid come at me from my left, kind of ruins the day too.
I feel the pain before I know what’s happened. My left leg buckles and I barely get SS up in time to block what would have been the killing blow. I stare up at the teenage girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen, and our eyes fall on our weapons. A smile almost crosses my lips as I see she has a baseball bat with spikes driven through it. But my leg is on fire and I know she can give a shit about the coincidence.
She tries to yank her bat back, but our spikes are crisscrossed and all she does is drag me a foot closer to her. So I kick out as hard as I can, shattering her kneecap. She screams, a real bloodcurdling scream, and goes down hard on the wounded knee. Another scream, almost so loud it hurts my ears, escapes her throat as the shards of patella grind against each other.
I kick again, my foot hitting her in the chest. It knocks her back, but her momentum is enough that she does manage to take SS with her. That pisses me off. Fucking feral cannibal bitch has my baseball bat. I look for my pistol, but it was knocked from my hand and is several feet away. I don’t have that kind of time, as I see more kids streaming towards us.
Struggling to my feet, I nock an arrow and fire. It hits her baseball bat. She actually got her bat up in time, and in the right position, to block a mother-fucking arrow. A deadly grin splits her face and I can see the three teeth she has left sitting in brown, rotten gums. I nock another arrow and fire. This one hits the mark. Straight through her throat. She gurgles and coughs while blood pours from the wound. Huge bubbles of blood and snot foam from her mouth.
She’s done, so I nock another and spin about. Shit. Too close. Eight kids, various sizes, are almost on me. I let the one arrow go, hitting a kid in the eye, luckily, and then use the bow as a bat. I cringe when it connects with a kid’s head, not because I probably split his skull, but because I know it has fucked my bow up. I duck down and swing again, sweeping the legs out from under another kid. Lunging up, my leg screaming in pain, I use the top of my head and connect with the jaw of a boy that is about to stab me with quite the wicked looking hunting knife.
He screeches and I feel something wet fall down my neck and into my shirt. I don’t want to think about what it is. Not that I have the luxury of thinking time. I punch the kid in the nuts and shove him back, but his pals are on me and tackle me to the ground. I can see sharpened screwdrivers, steak knives duct taped together, even a fucking gardening trowel, coming at my face.
Then the sound of suppressed gunfire reaches me and I am suddenly pinned under a pile of dead and bloody kids. Trying to free myself from the tangle of limbs, I end up slicing my hand on the fucking gardening trowel (apparently it is very sharp) and shout, “Get these evil munchkins off me!”
“Shut up, dipshit,” Jon says as he helps roll the kids off my body. “We’ve made too much noise as it is.”
“They made too much noise,” I reply as he gives me a hand up. “All I’ve done is bleed.”
“Let’s take a look,” Jon says, helping me off the asphalt and onto a patch of moss under a large oak tree. “Any wounds besides the hand and leg?”
“Aren’t those enough?”
“Big baby,” he smiles as he takes his pack off and pulls out his first aid kit. “Hold still. This will hurt.”
It does. I grit my teeth as he cleans and bandages my hand. My leg needs cleaning, stitching, and a bandage, and then I’m good to go.
“Can you walk?” Stuart asks. “Because we need to-”
“Move?” Jon finishes.
“Up there,” Stuart says as he points up a winding street that overlooks Beaver Lake.
I glance down Lakeshore and realize I should be able to see the lake, but something is blocking the view.
“We need higher ground to see, don’t we?” I say.
And it hits me. Why Brenda asked Jon and me to go with Stuart and not Carl. Why Stuart has been agreeable, but vague. Why we aren’t heading towards the college campus and the laptop batteries we need that could be there.
“What are you going to show us?” I ask Stuart.
“Better just to see it,” he replies. I catch the hint of a smile. He knows I’ve figured it out.
Jon looks at me, and then to Stuart. “What am I missing?”
“Help me up and let’s get moving,” I say.
Jon helps me to my feet and I’m surprised my hand doesn’t hurt more than it does. I can’t say the same for my leg. It throbs and feels hot. I know Jon cleaned it, but who knows what was on those spikes. I start to walk, but stop immediately. Not from pain, but from revulsion.
“Jon,” I say, “pull out the back of my shirt.”
Jon looks at me and then at Stuart. Stuart just shrugs.
“Any particular reason, Hoss?” he asks. “I don’t think now is the time to get your kink on.”
“Please,” I say, trying not to shudder, “I think there’s something down my back.”
I know what it is. Ugh. I know what it is.
Jon pulls my shirt from out of my jeans and I hear the wet flop.
“Oh, damn,” Jon says, and then hushes up as he tries not to laugh. “That sucks.”
“It’s a tongue, isn’t it?” I ask. Jon nods. “I feel so dirty.”
“Don’t be a wimp,” Stuart says. “You’ve had worse splattered on you.”
“From Zs,” I say, shaking myself a little, trying to get rid of the heebie-jeebies.
“You going to be okay?” Jon asks.
“Yep,” I nod.
“Good,” Jon says, as we make our way around the dead kids. “What about these bodies? Zs will be on them soon. That’s gonna make the area less secure and our way home a little harder.”
“I have a feeling there aren’t any Zs close by,” Stuart says. “At least not free roaming.”
“Free roaming?” I ask. “What are they? Chickens?”
Stuart actually smiles at this. It’s a little more than off putting.
“You may be more right than you know,” Stuart say
s.
“Don’t do that,” Jon says. “Seriously.”
Stuart’s smile goes away quickly and his eyes narrow.
“Come on.”
We hike up the long, winding street until we reach a large colonial house. Three stories with wide decks on the back, Stuart leads us through the gate and up the back stairs to the top most deck. As soon as he looks out and below, he hisses and waves us down. My leg hurts like hell.
“You cool?” Jon asks.
“Right as rain,” I smile.
“Shit,” Stuart says. “Shit shit shit. Get down.”
We flatten ourselves on the deck boards and crawl to the edge for a better view. What I see takes my breath away. I can hear Jon’s gasp and I look over at Stuart.
“How long have you known about this?”
“Not long,” he says. “Melissa and the scavenging crew have avoided North Asheville for months because it’s pretty picked over. I came out here a week and a half ago just to be alone.”
“You know you can just not answer your door,” Jon says. “It’s safer to be alone in your own living room.”
“Unlike the rest of you,” Stuart says. “I have no illusions of safety in Whispering Pines. I come out here to train and stay sharp. I have bags packed and weapons ready at a moment’s notice.”
“Jeez,” Jon says, “that’s no way to live.”
Stuart grunts in response and then looks down at the lake below. We do also, and I begin to study what I am seeing.
Beaver Lake is a small lake, about the size of an oval football field. It’s man made and can be filled and drained in less than 24 hours. Right now, it is drained. Yet it’s filled too.
“Are all of those Zs?” Jon asks.
“Yes,” Stuart replies, “but they weren’t there when I first came here. The wall was, and the guards, but not the Zs.”
Surrounding the lake is a massive wall cobbled together from all sorts of materials. Steel, wood, aluminum, car hoods, reinforced chain link, stone, and brick. Guards are posted every twenty feet at least. And these guys look like business. Semi-automatic rifles, body armor, some have helmets and goggles. Even from up here, I can catch the occasional squelch from a walkie-talkie. Which means they have power available to them somewhere.
“You brought us here to analyze and assess what they were building, right?” I ask Stuart. He nods. “But it looks like we now know what they were building.”
“The real question is why,” Jon states.
“I think I know why,” Stuart says. “The real question is when.”
“How do you mean?” Jon asks.
While Jon and Stuart talk, I have been busy doing a quick calculation.
“7,000,” I say.
“What?” Jon asks.
“God,” Stuart responds, “that many then?”
“At least,” I say.
Jon looks at me then down at the dry lake. “Are you saying there’s 7,000 Zs down there? My Lord.” He looks at Stuart. “So you know the why, but want to know the when? I’d like to know the answers to both of those questions.”
“They’re making a herd,” I say. “They are weaponizing the Zs.”
“Weaponizing? What for? There’s no one to fight. Are they gonna use the Zs against other Zs? Zs don’t fight each other. This doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure it does,” I say, tired of looking down into the lake of undead. I roll over onto my back, which makes my leg feel better, and look up at the blue sky above us. “Resources are finite. That includes armaments. If you wanted to lay siege to a place, you’d need a lot of resources to do it. You have to have more resources than the place you are laying siege to. You have to be able to wait them out.”
I turn my head and see Jon watching me, waiting for me to go on. I do.
“But in this day, no one can afford to waste all of their resources at one time. The key to survival post-Z, is conservation of resources. So you look for a resource that is not only plentiful, but renewable. And the only resource like that anymore is?”
“Zs,” Jon replies. “You don’t mean?”
“Yep,” I answer.
“They are coming for us,” Stuart says. “I didn’t know it before, but I know it now. When I saw that lake empty and those guys building the wall around it, I figured at first it was for us.”
“That they’d come and take Whispering Pines and throw us in there,” I say.
“Yeah,” Stuart nods. “But the more I thought about it, the more it didn’t make sense. Why keep us alive? They’d have to feed us and give us water. It goes back to a waste of resources.”
“You knew we’d find this?” Jon asks. “And you still brought us here?”
“I had hoped we wouldn’t find this,” Stuart says, shaking his head. “And I didn’t want to bring you. But after talking with Brenda-”
“Who else knows?” I ask.
“No one in Whispering Pines,” Stuart replies. “Unless Brenda told someone. I told her I’d keep it secret until everyone absolutely needed to know.”
“So you talked to Brenda and she changed your mind about coming back alone,” I say.
“She said that you two would be the best to bring and help figure this out,” Stuart nods. “Padre here can look and see what the structural integrity of the wall is. Maybe find some weak spots. Maybe see if it has a dual purpose.”
“Dual purpose?” Jon asks. “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Stuart says. “That’s one of the reason you’re here.”
“And I’m here why?” I ask. “You have always known I’m full of shit and just winging it, Stuart. You’ve never come out and said so, but I’ve guessed that you don’t think very highly of my position in Whispering Pines.”
Stuart looks at me for a long time. Long enough for me to grow uncomfortable.
“I’ve stopped trying to figure you out, Jace,” he finally says. “You don’t fit any mold I know of. I’m a military man and I like everything to fit perfectly. Everything in its place and all that. But you are all over the place.”
“Thanks?” I smile.
“You can seem like the laziest asshole in Whispering Pines, but then you show these bursts of creativity and industry, and all of a sudden, we have a new innovation in the neighborhood. Wi-Fi communication. You spearheaded that. The gate structure. That was you. And the razor wire and fencing is quite possibly the simplest, most genius use of natural topography I have seen.”
“I didn’t come up with any of that,” I say. “Those ideas have already been invented. I just put them into use.”
“No, what you did was search through that wild, information hoarding brain of yours and found solutions, and then,” Stuart said. “And post-Z, solutions are as valuable as bullets.”
“More so,” Jon says. “You can run out of bullets. There’s always a solution.”
“Not always,” Stuart says. He points towards the lake of the undead. “But I’m really hoping there’s a solution to that. I’m counting on it.”
We watch the lake for a long while, each lost in our thoughts. Unfortunately, this internal focus screws us. I know Stuart’s senses are tuned to pick up anything coming for us. He has a sixth sense about danger. But no matter how well trained he is, he never sees this coming.
“There is a gate,” Jon says and we look over at him.
I don’t see the problem at first, but Stuart does. He grabs the binoculars away from Jon’s face and shoves back from the edge.
“Move! Move!” he hisses.
“What? What is your problem?” Jon asks.
“The reflection, you moron!” Stuart says, standing up and hurrying down the stairs. “They saw the damn reflection off your binoculars!”
“How do you know they saw it?” I ask as Jon and I follow him down to the street.
The sound of motorcycle engines revving up answers my question.
“Fuck,” I say as we follow Stuart across the street and up a muddy incline. “Fuck fuck fuck.”
