His pistol roared. Although he knew they’d all regret it later when deafness temporarily claimed their hearing, they begin to fire in unison, filling the enclosed space with the sound of gunfire, the spark of fire, the wonderful sharp tang of gunpowder.
Ron was not afraid. Jean was full of nothing but determination. Oliver was not alone and did not fear the dead things that he knew were going to fall and die for good and never bother them again.
They fired and paused, reloaded and fired again. They repeated the process until the doorway was clear and nothing else followed the initial rush of the deaders to gain entrance. More than a dozen of the stinking creatures lay forever down on the floor of the house and on the rooftop yard just outside the door.
“Is everyone okay?” Ron asked. He was gasping, short of breath. Sounds were muffled to him, but it was not as bad as he’d feared.
“We’re okay,” Jean said, as if from a distance. “Are…are you bitten?”
For the first time Ron had the presence of mind to look at his hands, at his arms, to see if he was bitten. It happened, he knew. People could be wounded and then not feel it until the adrenalin rush was over. The skin of his hands and arms were unblemished. Then his left hand went to his face, his throat, his fingers went along his ears and scalp, feeling for cuts made by questing, slimy teeth. “Any bites on my face or neck?” He asked, examining his fingers and finding no blood on them.
And then Jean was on him, her arms around him, holding him close. “You’re okay,” she said. She repeated it again and again until Ron could feel the pounding of her heart against his ribs.
“We have to check the door and stairs,” Ron said. “I think we got all of these, but there might be more coming up the stairs. And there might be more on the roof.” Thinking of that, they all were quiet, listening for the shuffle of dead feet, of the clatter of dragging soles across the gravel on the rooftop.
There were no other sounds, save for the slight dripping of water on various surfaces outside. So they got dressed quickly in their finest makeshift armor and, loaded purely for undead bear, they carefully emerged from the house and stalked out onto the rooftop.
“The door is shut,” Oliver said. And before Ron could stop him, the boy raced across the way to check it. His small fingers gripped the handle and he pulled, and then pulled again. “It’s locked up tight,” he yelled, genuinely surprised.
“How the hell did they get up here?” The question came out of Jean and died on her lips. Her eyes were on the rooftop where the gang of zombies had been standing just before the storm.
Ron’s eyes followed hers to the other side. “I’ll be damned,” he said. Oliver came over to join them and they all looked around, seeing where some of the zombies had been lifted up and smashed down on their rooftop like toys, lying broken, their brains dashed out against the roof and the side of the blockhouse.
“They blew over here.” Oliver said it first. “The wind picked them up and blew the bunch of them right over here.”
Ron stood in the center of the roof and counted. Besides the ten they’d shot to pieces, there were three more that had been destroyed on their flight from one building to the next. “Thirteen,” he said. “Thirteen came over here by way of the north wind. My God.”
“But look.” Oliver was pointing at the shed where Ron made his ammunition. It stood solid and intact where it had been constructed. “You didn’t need to worry! Your stuff is okay!”
“You hear that?” Jean asked. “You didn’t need to worry.”
Ron began laughing, then. He knew that he should just be relieved to be alive, but this was far more than that. He was happy. Somehow, no matter that he’d almost been killed in the most awful way, he was nothing but happy. For a moment, Jean and Oliver just looked at him as if he had gone mad, but then they joined him, the trio standing on the roof, laughing at the world and what it had dealt them.
And as they later went from corpse to corpse, tossing them overboard (as it was), they roared in laughter, watching the dead matter twisting as they fell the dozen floors to splatter on the pavement far, far below.
**
October
“It’s cold this morning!” Oliver came back into the rooftop house from the wide space on the top floor. “I can see my breath,” he shouted. To prove it, he huffed out and standing even in the open doorway, Ron and Jean could see that he was as good as his word. The boy’s cheeks were ruddy in the cool air.
“It’s September,” Jean said. “It’s supposed to start getting chilly this time of year.” She smiled back at the boy. Despite the chill, the sun was coming up over the city and she knew that soon enough, it would get warmer. Winter was still a long way off.
“My dad used to tell me that winters were colder when he was a kid,” Ron said. He was sitting at his worktable, and loading his sniper rifle. He was going out on the roof to see if any deaders were around on the streets. One piece of advice that he’d taken from the good (in devious and suspicious) Colonel Dale, was to shoot down the zombies as often as he could. Not only was it good to thin the herd a little at every opportunity, the man had been telling the truth when it came to putting the fear of gunpowder into them, as the British soldier had so eloquently put it.
Ron and Oliver had spent the better part of the previous week pouring lead into molds and making gunpowder that they packed into shells and married the new, bright, shining bullets of cast lead with the gleaming tumbled brass cartridges for his .220 Swift. Now it was time to put deaders down for the count and make sure they never got back up to menace them again. As he loaded a last cartridge, he stood and continued his train of thought. “Maybe now that people aren’t around in vast numbers to belch CO2 into the atmosphere, our seasons will go back to normal.” Standing, he marched toward the door and his waiting adopted son.
“You going to let me pop some of those bastards?” The boy asked, falling in alongside his foster father. Back in the house, Jean just watched them march off as she shook her head and tucked her long hair behind her neck, bundling the tresses up with a bit of string.
“Sure,” Ron said. “You can kill some of the sons o’ bitches.” That was, if there were any down there. As he’d been told, the zombies had learned to put some aspects of two plus two together. If they heard the gunshots and watched their fellow shamblers heads shatter apart, then they did figure that one preceded the other, and that it might be best to go somewhere else. In fact, the dead things were not as aggressive as they’d been in the past, and many were the days when they never saw a single one of the walking dead. Only the newly turned were as aggressive as the walkers had been in the beginning. And despite everything, there were still people who were killed or just died and rose up, reading to destroy and consume the living. That was something that always remained the same. Whatever it was that made the recently dead come back to be killers, it was still around and showed no signs of vanishing back into whatever black hole had spawned it.
The pair walked together to the parapet that surrounded their rooftop redoubt. Ron stood there and looked west, then north, and south. The morning had arrived and so had about thirty zombies up and down the streets. It was good that they were all within earshot of his rifle. Better that they should know why the heads of the other zombies would soon explode. It didn’t do any good if they couldn’t figure that part out.
“There’s a bunch of them today,” Oliver noted. “Let me get the ones on Tryon Street,” he suggested.
“Okay,” Ron said. “Let me just rack off a few rounds and find the range. And make sure the scope’s calibrated. Then you can have at them.”
Oliver leaned out over the edge a little and yelled down. “Get ready to be really dead you dumb fucks,” the boy let them know. “We’re gonna blow your dumbass brains out!”
Some of the zombies heard the keening, high-pitched call of his voice and turned toward their location, lurching toward them. A couple, Ron noticed, also heard and headed off in the opposite direction,
eager to be far away before the shooting started. “Don’t give them too much warning,” Ron said. “Some of them are learning how to keep out of our sight.”
“Well, it’s good for them to see what it’s like,” the boy stated plainly. “Let’s see how they like being scared all of the time.”
Ron rubbed the top of the boy’s scalp and then set himself up at the edge of the roof, staring down at a group of a half dozen of the dead, rotting figures making their way down the street, some of them leaving dark smears on the ground with every step they took. Noticing that, he peered intensely through the scope, getting a good look at the dead things.
“You know,” he said. “I think some of them are starting to rot. I mean…it’s really speeding up with a lot of the older ones.” It had always been a mystery to the scientists who’d been part of the parade of talking heads on the television, in the days before the collapse. No one had figured out precisely why the zombies wouldn’t quite rot. The process would begin just after death, but within a day or so, they would all but cease to decay, except very slowly. It was almost as if there was something in them that killed off the bacteria that normally turned flesh into its chemical components.
“Yeah,” Olive agreed. “I saw some this past week that looked like they were about to fall to pieces. I wish they’d all do that. Fall to bits, I mean.”
“That would be a very good thing,” Cutter said, drawing the butt of the rifle tight to his left shoulder. Sighting, he zeroed in on the head of what had been a very tall man who was now wearing an NC State Wolfpack jersey, and a pair of jockey shorts gone to a diseased brown. Goodbye to you, Ron whispered, and squeezed the trigger.
He smiled as the thing’s head went into a million dark bits. The body collapsed to the ground where it lay like a pile of thinly sheathed bones.
“Wow,” Oliver said. “Those soft lead loads we put in really mash up and make a big hole, don’t they?” Even from the distance, and with no spotting scope, the boy had seen that the zombie’s head had completely vanished.
“They do, indeed,” Ron agreed. He put the butt of the rifle to his shoulder again, scanned the street, and found the tottering figure of an old lady. She was trying to walk along using a broken aluminum walker that she wouldn’t release from her moist but iron grip. Her eyes were wide and staring, her nose something long since gone, and her lips nothing but dried tatters hanging around a set of yellowed teeth, holding steady in beet-red gum tissue. Somehow, that one struck him as one that wouldn’t run no matter how many of her fellow zombies he blew to bits right in front of her. “This one must have been an evil old bitch when she was alive,” he told Oliver as he pulled the trigger.
Her head was like a burst balloon, and she was suddenly a dark pile in the street, but her knotted hands still gripped that crumpled walker.
“Can I take a few shots now?” Oliver asked.
Ron looked at his son, smiled, and handed him the rifle. “Sure,” he said. “Remember, now. My gun kicks a lot harder than your .22. Even harder than your .410,” he reminded the boy. Ron stepped away to watch the youth. Two shots later, there were two more destroyed zombies lying inert in the shrub-crusted streets that had once been the main thoroughfares for downtown Charlotte. With the chamber empty, Ron reached into his jacket pocket and produced four more rounds.
“Here,” he said, handing them to the boy. “Load ‘er up and take ‘em out,” he suggested. “You’re a better shot every time we do this. I’m just going to stand here and watch you do ‘em in.”
“Thanks,” Oliver said, eagerly taking the cartridges from Cutter who squatted down to pick up the ejected brass shells lying on the rooftop. Putting his hand on the lip of the concrete abutment, he looked down the avenue, seeing movement off in the distance some six blocks away.
“Hold your fire, son,” Ron said. He pointed at what he could see moving down the street.
“Who is it?” Oliver asked.
“I don’t know,” Ron told him. But as they watched, there was a group of exactly ten people marching down the street, moving carefully along, around the barriers of abandoned cars and rusted hulks, stopping from time to time to fire on any zombie that appeared from the buildings around them or which tried to flee before their advance. There were eight leading the way, in the rear were two more people who were covering their flanks, shooting at any deader that they had missed and which seemed at all interested in pursuing them. The group was steadily and efficiently clearing the streets of all danger.
Well, all danger if you didn’t count them as such.
Then, suddenly, the group turned sharply eastward. They were making their way directly toward the Trust Building. That much was obvious. “Hand me the rifle,” Ron said. “Hurry.” Oliver placed the gun quickly into Cutter’s hands. He whipped the gun to firing position and sighted down the scope, looking for any familiar face.
“Colonel Dale,” Ron said to no one in particular.
“That’s him?” Oliver asked.
Ron nodded.
“What are they up to?” the boy asked.
“That’s a very good question,” Ron said. “Let’s go ask your mom what she thinks about it.” And they retreated to their home.
**
The constant training for the possibility of having to bug out at the blink of an eye came in handy. And while the situation might prove dangerous, Ron was not going to leave Jean and Oliver behind while he went out to quite possibly face down the Colonel and his gang.
They had loaded up the necessaries on their hips and backs and gone swiftly down the floors to street level. Only two deaders moved toward them when they emerged onto the street, the few others doing their pitiful best to flee at the sight of a trio of heavily armed humans suddenly appearing near them. The tide, Ron figured, was actually turning. With determination and not a little rage, he disengaged his hammer from his belt and marched up to the first of the two approaching zombies. They were both recently turned and had not learned to fear him, it seemed. The thing had been a big man once upon a time, but Ron did not recognize him at all. This was another thing that the Colonel had said that had proven true: the city was home to many thousands of the living, and they were slowly coming out into the light as the soldier and his group slowly civilized the place.
Ron set his face in a grimace to match the snarling features of the reaching zombie and brought the hammer down on its pale and mottled head. A single blow was all it took and it fell down, not so much as twitching. There was another one behind it—the figure of a smaller Asian man wearing red pants and a blue shirt that was smeared with the gore of its own initial death. The thing pulled up suddenly as it noted the fall of its shambling companion. It actually hesitated, but before it could turn to flee, Ron raced up to it and crushed in its seemingly puzzled face with a pair of side-swipes of the hammer. It fell backward, fish-belly eyes staring up at the brightening dome of the sky.
“Let’s go,” Ron said, pushing on and leading the way. They saw no more of the undead as they headed north along the street.
It only took them a few minutes to make their way to the base of the Trust Building. It towered high above them—taller than any other building in town. Sometimes Cutter and the others had to stop and stare up at it, wondering if men would ever again construct such things. Or wondering even if these existing skyscrapers could be saved from the dissolution that was destroying everything else.
“Look!” Jean grabbed Ron’s shoulder and was pointing off to the east. Familiar tendrils of smoke were rising high into the still chilly sky, the warmer air of fires taking the dark towers of soot high and straight into the Carolina blue vastness.
“The last of the old neighborhoods,” Ron said. “I think they called it ‘Dilworth’,” he told her.
Over the previous three weeks, the fires that had been slowly consuming the old communities around the city center had increased in number and frequency. Ron had lost almost all of his old safe houses in the conflagrations. But he was
at last convinced that it was the Colonel and his lot who were at the base of the fires, although he’d never once seen how they’d been started or who any of the arsonists had been. It just had the Colonel’s fingerprints all over it. Jean and Oliver agreed with him, and over the days, his suspicions of the foreigner and his people had grown among all three of them.
“We need to get some answers once and for all,” he said. Jean and Ron had discussed going to what appeared to be the Colonel’s headquarters in the makeshift hospital. But they had decided not to put themselves in harm’s way, amidst so many people who might not have their best interests at heart.
And so, now, this seemed to be the best solution---catching the Colonel and his men at large, even if they were outnumbered by more than three-to-one. It was still something that seemed less dangerous.
On the wind they could smell smoke. But the fires were always so well constructed that there had never been a threat that they would spread into the city. Backfires always flared up and burned out the fuel needed to reach the city proper. Even the outskirts of the flames never went beyond a great rough path that had come now to encircle the downtown area like a great collar of carbon. For now, they were not worried that the flames could threaten them. And for now, Ron was not afraid of the Colonel and his men. He’d never known them to kill the living, and the city was definitely a safer place since the man’s influence and practices had grown. He just wanted some freaking answers, and he was going to get them. Now.
At the base of the Trust Building, at that solid steel door that so resembled the one that led up to his own redoubt, he saw a pair of heavily armed men standing. They were obviously guarding that door, but were not standing at attention, and did not seem to be at all tense or anxious. The guys were about as relaxed as any people he had seen on the dead streets of Charlotte.
The Coalition: Part II The Lord Of The Living (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 2) Page 9
