Dead Wrangler

by Coke, Justin

  Ben Rogers was there. He got a better look down the hole than I did, or anyone else on the roof that day. All he would say was that whatever he saw–whatever he saw had claws.

  If you ever meet Jason McGee, Thomas Drew, Steve Ishmael, or Rich Franke... ask them about what happened in that Whole Foods. I'd like to know. As for Janet, she ended up disappearing a few weeks later. I hope she is with Rich and their daughter in New City. Though I sometimes wonder. It's easy enough to take a dive off the roof of the Wal-Mart without being found.

  I don't understand the secrecy myself. It seems like a relic of government paranoia. Maybe keeping New City secret... maybe. If news spread I could see a wave of refugees that would be impossible to care for. So I can see keeping that one quiet.

  But this? Whatever was down there... whatever made that noise... I just don't see the point in keeping it secret. The less we know, the less prepared we are. And what? Are we afraid the Russians will find out? I hope we tell the Russians, or whoever. Every living human is the enemy of these things. It can only benefit all of us for as many of us as possible to be well informed about our enemy.

  While I was still enthusiastic about the rescue station and the work we were doing, the way the incident was handled made me a lot less naive. I saw that maybe things hadn't changed as much as I had hoped. I kept my thoughts to myself a lot more, especially about what Ben had said. It was clear that whatever had happened, it was a big damn secret, and things would happen to anyone who did much more than gossip about it.

  So life went on. I did my job. Though it took a lot of persuasion, we ended up going back to that Whole Foods a few weeks later. The place had been wrecked. There was more hole than wall. There was debris. There was a quite a bit of blood stains, but that was it. The guy who had gotten killed down there had gotten up and walked off, I guess. And whatever had done it must have too.

  After that people told themselves it was just a weird zombie. That maybe those guys got shipped out because Ted was worried they were going to spread tall tales about it. Make excuses for not checking the closet and getting a couple of guys killed. Somebody compared a zombie horde to a herd of buffalo jumping off a cliff. After hearing this theory ten times it started to make sense to me too. I lost interest and got into my routine.

  It's amazing how people are. Before the zombies, we worried about all kinds of stupid shit. Violent crime was down, people were living longer. We had so little to worry about that people were more afraid of the vaccine than they were of the disease! Monkey bars had to be padded! Give people too little to worry about and they will make up dumber and dumber things to be scared of. It's like there's a Minimum Anxiety Baseline.

  Give people too much to worry about and they will ignore as much as they need to ignore to get back to the MAB.

  It works I guess. I don't know what good I would have accomplished if I had gnawed at the loose ends for six months. Sometimes you just have to accept the fact that you have no idea what just happened and move on with your life.

  You can adjust to a lot when you have to. The whole thing became my normal life. Even though my days involved dispatching thirty to fifty ex-people, and my life was always at risk, it became my job. During the down time I would worry about whether I could maybe finagle an extra shower this week or an extra can of ravioli.

  Being able to lose yourself in the small things is a blessing, and it's a skill that I had to learn.

  Things went on that way until the zombies breached the station. It happened, well, we don't know when it had happened really, but we realized what was going on at 4 AM.

  And man was there a panic. The fire alarm went off and woke all of us up. The panic over the next few minutes... some of us held it together. Some did not.

  At the time all we knew was that there were zombies pouring into the south side of the building. The zombies held the grocery store, but the patrol had spotted them before they could get any farther. We had designed the station to be a bit like a submarine; if there was a leak you could close the hatch. Anyone inside was doomed, but the rest of the station would be safe. The problem was that most of our food supply was in there. If the zombies could breach the store, they would end up being able to breach the hatch. The longer we waited to deal with it, the worse it would become.

  Ted handled it well. A lot of us got to work strengthening the hatch defenses, while I and a few others got called up to the roof. Ted was there. He was pale as a ghost.

  "We need to figure out what happened, how they are getting in and seal it before we can clear them out. I've looked, and all I can tell is that they seem to be getting in from the loading dock. We need to see more. Anyone know how to rappel?"

  I didn't, but I figured it couldn't be that hard. Before long I was edging my way down the building. I could hear the horde of zombies, but I refused to look. The few flashlights people pointed for me made what I was doing worse, not better. A sea of undead faces, arms reaching, hoping for me to fall. Even now thinking about it makes me tighten up, like imagining being buried alive.

  I got low enough, but high enough that they couldn't get me. I turned on my flashlight and scanned. They were inside, oh they were inside. There were so many in there that the horde was having to shuffle in. The loading dock door was up. Now, I mean it was UP. It wasn't pushed in, it wasn't knocked off its rails. It was up, just the same as if a shipment of milk had just arrived.

  Now, that thing had been locked. And barricaded. They had taken several one ton pallets of bricks and put them behind that door. And then locked it again. There was just no way that door could have been open like that. The pallets of bricks had been moved to one side, neat as could be.

  It was betrayal. A betrayal so self-destructive, so selfish, so evil that it just took the breath out of me. I couldn't understand it, I wanted to find some other explanation. And I just didn't have the heart to tell them, no matter how much they shouted at me. I didn't want anyone to have to feel what I felt then. For the first time I felt hopeless. If, even after all this, people were willing to do something like this for their own bizarre ends... what hope did we have? What hope did we deserve to have?

  They pulled me up on their own. I must have looked bad, because they were ready for bad news. They must have thought I had seen a breach we had no chance of repairing.

  I took Ted aside and explained what I had seen. Ted looked at me for a long time. He was weighing me. He turned to the others.

  "Get a few pallets of bricks up here. We're going to need some kind of winch." He took me by the shoulder and took me downstairs to his office.

  "Fitz, I don't want you telling people about your betrayal theory. It's not true," he said.

  But right then I just knew it was. It was the only explanation that I could accept. I told him to go fuck himself, that people deserved to know that there was some lunatic traitor running around. He looked at me and covered his face.

  "If I tell you this, you have to promise not to tell anyone. If I get a whiff of this getting around, I'll throw you over the side, you got me?"

  "Tell me what?" I asked.

  "You have to promise to keep this to yourself."

  "I won't promise to keep the door a secret. I'll promise to keep what you tell me secret."

  "You remember the incident at the Whole Foods, right? I think you were there."

  "Yeah, I was there."

  "Well, I think what you found was a herder."

  "What the fuck is that?"

  "We're not sure. Or at least they aren't telling me. But New City is very worried about it. Seems like there's some evidence that these herders can control the zombies. They can get them to behave in ways that are a bit more strategic than they would on their own. New City seems to think these herders are real smart. New City has seen zombie hordes refuse to fall into traps that have worked a thousand times before. Zombie hordes backing away from a fight, or taking cover. That's what happened at the Whole Foods. You guys found one of them. Whatever it was... and th
e descriptions were all over the place–it is not a zombie. It's something beyond that. It called the horde to protect itself."

  I didn't even know where to begin with that. I'd rather believe that than believe that I had to worry about a normal person sabotaging us. But even if it were true, it didn't explain what happened. I said so.

  "Well there's another thing. You know how some of us are partially immune, others totally immune? It looks like it's a bit more complicated than that. Some of us are carriers. We have the plague, but it doesn't kill us. We just pass it along. It's how even in populations that have never seen a zombie, the plague can appear.

  For carriers, the plague just effects their mind. It makes them forgetful and impulsive. They forget to load their gun, or they leave a door unlocked. The plague gets them to do things that make it easier to get caught. There's some disease that does the same thing to mice. It makes them less scared of cats, which makes them more likely to get eaten. Now, this disease needs to get eaten by a cat to complete its life cycle. The mouse isn't suicidal... he's just not in his right mind. Carriers are the same way."

  There are plenty of people in the station who could be carriers. How much a herder could influence one of the carriers... I don't know. But all our defenses are built around certain ideas of what the zombies can and can't do. For instance, they can't unscrew the cover to the ventilation shaft. They can't figure out which key opens the door. They can't use a rope bridge and open a door to let other zombies in."

  "What are you saying?"

  "I don't know what happened yet, but I figure it went something like this: a herder sneaks in. The guards we had in place, maybe they aren't paying enough attention. Why would they expect something like that? The herder kills the people in the grocery store, and opens the gate and calls the horde in. The only reason we aren't all dead right now is that Jenna McCorkle was sneaking down to the store to try to steal some Oreos. She saw them and sounded the alarm before the horde got any farther. Most of us were asleep in the next store. If the horde had gotten in... we're very lucky. Very, very lucky.

  But my ultimate point is this–you can't tell anyone this. Morale is fragile. A lot of people are always about one bad jolt from sheer panic. If they knew about herders and carriers who knows what a lot of them would do. You need to keep this quiet, for the sake of the station."

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "I want you to tell people that they broke through the gate. Just leave it at that for now."

  I had to think about it for a long time. The things he was telling me were pretty crazy, but I had been there at the Whole Foods–that made sense now. And what he was telling me jibed with my own experiences. Keeping it a secret was not something I was a big fan of, but a lot of the people around were in a pretty fragile mental state. We didn't need them looking at everyone else as potential danger, even if they were. I nodded. I told him I would keep this secret for now. But some kind of story would have to be put forward so people would be aware that there were more dangers than just zombies. I had no idea what the story could be without undermining people's faith in each other, but something had to be said.

  Life was precarious enough; we deserved to know all the threats against us. I didn't want a witch hunt, where every incident of forgetfulness was proof that someone was a carrier. But then again, maybe it was proof. And Ted had seemed to imply that the carriers could be manipulated by the herders. If that was the case, a great deal of paranoia was necessary. If a herder could, say, encourage someone to take a nap at the wrong time, the next time they tried to attack us like this it could work. It almost did work and we weren't out of the woods yet. They had most of our food supply, and every second that passed more and more of them were crowding in there. Cleaning them out would cost us some lives. So it was with some serious reservations that I agreed. But sometimes it's better for people to be unaware. At least when there wasn't a whole lot they could do with the truth.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Endurance

  They spent another week at Tabitha's house. For Janet it was a fugue of grief. They had a hurried funeral service behind the barn. They had taken a terrible risk in spending the time outdoors to dig the hole. Every day more zombies were visible outside, though their camouflage seemed to work. Those zombies that took an interest in the place were dispatched with quick .22 shots from Gerald's rifle. He had a sound suppressor he used to plink on Sunday mornings. It quieted the shot down enough that even zombies a hundred yards away didn't seem to notice it. Still, each morning a few more were visible heading this way or that. The bodies piled up.

  Diane showed no symptom of the plague, though she too was lost in grief.

  The atmosphere grew a little more tense each day, until even Janet sensed it.

  Finally, Tabitha took her aside.

  "Janet, we probably need to leave soon. We've got just enough food for six people to last us about halfway through winter. If we tighten our belts. The solar system is barely generating enough power to supply all of us with water, much less heat the place. It's going to be a real bad winter, because there's no way for us to heat the house. Even if we had the firewood, we're afraid the smoke will attract them. I've been watching, and there's just too damn many for this to be all Canton zombies. I don't recognize most of them now. I think maybe some of the Peoria zombies have walked out here."

  Janet nodded.

  "We've waited this long because, well, we wanted to give you and Diane the time to recover a bit. But we really need to go. Everyone agrees."

  Janet nodded. She didn't care anymore. She didn't care about anything right now, which meant she was up for anything. She wondered why Tabitha would think she wanted to stay in this house where her son had died anyway. She hadn't been in the basement since, and she never would.

  "Gerald has a hunting plot out in Iowa. Got a cabin on it. Nobody around for miles. Lots of game, lots of wheat and such to attract game. If we can get out there we can get the supplies we need."

  "Whatever you think is best." Janet replied.

  They were so ready to go that Janet thought that asking her had been more of a formality than anything else. If she had said no she'd be tied up in the back of her Escape instead of driving. The cars were jammed with stuff; boxes of canned food, bottles magic marked with a G for gasoline and a W for water. Clothes. Ammo. Guns. Meghan rode shotgun. Diane was crammed in back next to a stack of propane stove paraphernalia that threatened to tip over on her head at the first right turn. In front of them Tabitha and the two men rode in a packed Silverado. She had the route explained to her but she was relying on following Tabitha.

  A dozen corpses came shambling their way out of the tree line, out of neighboring houses, out of nowhere while they were packing. They were moaning like they thought maybe there was some prey over that way but they weren't too sure. Not the full throated howls she had heard on the trip over.

  Out of habit she took her cell phone out of her purse. It was dead, of course. She had the charger in the glovebox, and she started to reach for it, but she paused. She glanced at Meghan. Meghan shrugged a bit, and Janet laughed. She lowered the window and tossed the iPhone on the ground. The thing wasn't even good for a coaster now.

  They finally started moving, and when they did Tabitha tore it up. Janet had seen Tabitha's truck a million times. If you'd asked her a month ago about that thing on the front of her truck, she would have said it was a redneck limo. But now that grill of heavy steel was practical. Tabitha didn't have to swerve to avoid the zombies. She just plowed into them. The zombies went down like bowling pins beneath those bars. Her lifted tires rolled over them like rotten grapes with clearance to spare.

  The Escape was not so lucky. One of the fatter corpses got stuck beneath the Escape. Not stuck so much as clawing at the bottom of the car, still trying to get at the people inside. Janet saw a large rock in the middle of the road, and steered the car right over it. There was a sound like a steak slapping concrete. The clinger appear
ed in her rearview mirror twitching and convulsing. She didn't look too hard because its head looked like collapsed meatloaf soufflé. After that she stayed a few lengths behind Tabitha, enough space to coast in her wake around the corpses. Soon they were working in sync. Tabitha would try to strike the zombie and move a few feet to the right or left. That way Janet could move around the corpse and still have the Silverado Shield in front of her. Soon they were knocking them down like they'd spent their whole lives driving through clouds of zombies.

  It was exhausting work. After three hours Janet was more tired than she had been after a twelve hour shift driving the kids to the Grand Canyon a few years ago. She doubted she'd ever concentrated so hard on driving before in her life. Or any other activity for that matter.

  Tabitha had tossed a CB radio in their car right before she had left. She hadn't explained how to use it –the zombies had been getting more certain by then, and much too close for comfort. But it was pretty much plug and play, and after a few minutes of fiddling it was up and running. It didn't take long to find the right channel, and Janet suggested that she wouldn't mind a quick fire drill once they found a safe spot. Tabitha agreed without hesitation. Janet suspected Tabitha had wanted to change drivers quite a ways ago but couldn't. Janet felt guilty for not knowing how to use the radio.

  Then she thought Tabitha could have stopped anytime she damn well pleased, and that family guilt shit had to go. Janet wasn't being ungrateful for some lame Christmas present anymore. If Tabitha wanted to stop she could damn well stop.

  Anyway, they pulled over in an ironically dead-free small cemetery. Seemed like everyone was dying to stretch their legs because what had started as a quick driver switch had devolved into a BBQ. Gerald broke out the propane stove and had a whole lot of hotdogs going while Vinny tried to cheer Diane up with some coin tricks. Tabitha and Janet just stared at each other, so mentally exhausted that they couldn't speak. Even though they had been driving for over three hours, they had at best gotten about halfway there. They'd averaged about forty miles per hour. The front of the Silverado was a nightmarish mess. The chrome was covered in chunks of flesh and skin, more than a few bone fragments, and was just coated in coagulated blood. Janet took the ice scraper out of her glove box and scraped quite a bit of it away, but the radiator was just crammed with cooked blood and flesh.