HVZA (Book 2): Hudson Valley Zombie Apocalypse 2

by Zimmermann, Linda

  As she stuffed as many as she could fit into a long duffle bag and strapped it to the back of the ATV, a light snow began to fall. Becks couldn’t suppress a shudder as the raw, damp air started to seep into her bones. She would have loved to just go in the house and start a toasty fire in the woodstove, but this street was no longer safe, and she had her sights set on getting as far west as possible.

  Heading back down Sparrow, she turned right on the main road and went west—the direction she started to go before she had heard Angie’s cries for help. That seemed so long ago, and so much had happened since then—and none of it good. But it could all be forgotten with that first bite of bacon in the morning…

  The road went up a short hill, then down steep, winding curves along a wooded stretch and over a stream, before opening up onto a relatively straight section of block after block of typical, nondescript, suburban New Jersey houses. After about two miles, the snowflakes became larger and thicker, making it almost impossible to see more than about thirty feet ahead with the night vision goggles, so Becks had to slow way down. She began cursing Mother Nature and her bad luck, until she went into a blind curve and almost drove right into a solid wall of zombies.

  They looked almost as surprised as she did, but they hesitated only a few seconds before the huge mass of undead flesh moved as one—shuffling straight for her. Gunning the engine, Becks spun in a tight turn, speeding back up the curving road. The precipitation had obviously started as sleet or freezing rain here, and the ATV slipped and slid several times before gaining enough traction to stay ahead of the hungry horde of pursuers.

  Turning right at the first cross street, she didn’t get more than a few hundred feet before she almost went into a wall of another sort—a wall of furniture, overturned cars, fencing, and anything else the neighborhood residents could find to make a barricade. It had been a common practice after quarantine to barricade streets and neighborhoods to “remain safe from infection.” Of course, what nobody realized was that most of the people were already infected, and when they started switching to zombies, the penned-in victims were easy prey.

  The spray painted sign nailed to the front of a dresser in the middle of the pile still spoke volumes:

  “STAY OUT! We don’t trust anyone and will shoot you on sight.”

  Becks drove from end to end of the old barricade, and while some sections had collapsed, the wall was still way too high to drive over. Turning around and heading back slowly, as visibility had been even further diminished, she could just see a line of figures stretched across the intersection. Maybe she could have plowed through them, and maybe she would run right into the center of the herd; she just couldn’t see well enough to know what would happen.

  Ahead of her were zombies, behind her was the barricade. To her right, she could probably go through some yards to return to the road further down, but that would take her back the way she came, and Becks never liked giving up ground. Even as a little kid, her parents often remarked how stubborn she was; she would rather scrape her knees climbing over an obstacle than go around it. So habit and obstinate genes left her no choice than go left into a wooded area.

  Branches clawed at her as she bounced over fallen tree limbs and down a rough embankment. She was splashed, head to foot, with icy water and cold clumps of mud as she crossed a half-frozen stream. But the ATV forged ahead, and she wasn’t about to give up and turn around. She finally came out to a storm drain surrounded by a gravel slope. Opening up the engine to full throttle, she sped up the slope—perhaps just a little too quickly—as she went airborne off the high curb and hit the road with a bone-jarring thud.

  The heavy snow now made the night vision goggles useless, so she flipped them back and turned on the headlights of the ATV. Just across the street was a large building; one of those post-WWII post offices that lacked everything but functionality. It wouldn’t have been her first choice in accommodations, but any port in a storm, she thought, as she pulled into the parking lot and around to the back. A row of mail trucks sat in mute testament to the fact that the post office motto did not read, Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night, nor zombies, stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

  Actually, the position of mail carrier became an extremely high-risk job in the early days of infection. They not only came into contact with a lot of people on their routes, increasing their risk of infection, they were also obvious targets as they had to walk everywhere, up to every house and into every apartment building, and a zombie could crop up anywhere, and usually did.

  All Becks had on her mind at this point, however, was how fast she could get inside, and how quickly and safely she could clear the building. One of the upsides of an apocalypse is that people rarely bothered to lock doors as they were running for their lives from their homes and businesses. This was something looters quickly took advantage of, grabbing televisions and smartphones, until the power went out for good, and they realized the only things worth stealing were food, guns, and anything to help them survive.

  Becks kept her fingers crossed that even the intrepid postal workers didn’t give a rat’s ass about Uncle Sam’s letters and packages as they abandoned their posts and headed for wherever they thought they would be safe. Sure enough, the back door opened effortlessly, despite its security bars and brightly-colored stickers warning of alarms and surveillance video.

  Before stepping inside, she flipped her goggles back down over her eyes and took a deep breath. As many times as she had cleared a building, it never got any easier. However, she had learned a few tricks. For instance, let the zombies come to you. After carefully making her way through a storeroom filled with mountains of mail sacks and packages, she entered a huge sorting room. Pausing in the doorway, she whistled, yelled, and banged on a long, metal table.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” she yelled in a singsong voice, and then waited silently for any sounds or motion.

  As she waited, she read a large sign on the wall calling upon everyone’s patriotic spirit to pull together, work long hours, and get that mail delivered. In the waning days of government, the president had promised that the mail system would continue no matter what, as it was “the cohesive force that bound American to American—the Rockies to the Keys, the Heartland with Hollywood, and the seats of government with its citizens.” Two weeks later, everything collapsed, and special emergency distribution centers like this post office were abandoned with undelivered letters and packages stacked to their rafters.

  Minutes passed, but there was no indication that anyone, living or undead, was in the building. Slowly making her way through the sorting room, she came upon another long room jammed floor to ceiling with walls of packages, before emerging behind the front counter where the postal workers dealt with customers. Hopping over the counter into the lobby, she was momentarily surprised when she landed on something crunchy, and discovered the desiccated remains of a man. Upon closer inspection, it was a postal worker who looked as though he had gone “postal” on himself, and put a bullet through his brain.

  Becks didn’t waste time wondering what had transpired and driven this man to shoot himself. Instead, she picked up his revolver, checked that it still had five rounds left, stuck it in the waist of her pants, and moved on to the front doors. They were also unlocked, and a ring of keys was hanging from one of the locks. She decided to lock the front doors, as well as lower the security gate. No sense taking any chances of unwanted strangers, of any kind.

  Searching the rest of the main floor, she found a maintenance closet and a small break room with a refrigerator full of mold, but cabinets full of coffee, tea, and individually wrapped biscotti. Behind the break room was a tiny room, or more like a double closet, with a cot and some blankets. Someone apparently didn’t mind sleeping on the job.

  There were two sets of bathrooms, each with a shower, which only taunted her as, of course, there wasn’t any water. The post master’s office had a few bo
ttles of soda, and a drawer with not one, but two boxes of Girl Scouts’ thin mint cookies!

  “Come to mamma!” Becks purred as she tore into a sleeve of the cookies, eating half of them before she forced herself to stop, reminding herself to ration everything.

  With the first floor secure, she opened the door to the basement and was about to make noise to rile up any zombies, but decided that she was too tired and strung out to face any more surprises. Instead, she shut the door and found the key to lock it. Then she went outside to get her pack and bag of MREs, and covered the ATV with a tattered tarp she found. In the short time she had been inside, at least an inch of snow had fallen, and it looked as though the storm was only getting stronger.

  Shaking the snow off of herself, she then locked the back door, the doors to the storeroom and sorting room, and then locked herself into the break room. Peeling off her wet and dirty clothes, she layered on all the other clothes and socks she had with her, and curled up on the cot under all the blankets. It was a cold, musty room in the middle of a post office, but compared with the circumstances of where she had woken up earlier that day, it was about 25 square feet of paradise.

  Still, as she drifted off to sleep, her every thought was about Eddie. Was he dead or alive? Was he hurt? Was he being beaten and tortured? Or, had the last of the New Ridgelawn tyrants perished in the fire, giving Eddie the opportunity to create a new community and help the people? It was terrible not knowing, but she would have to deal with the fact that she would probably never know.

  Becks awoke from a fiery nightmare, yelling and kicking. She had dreamt that after she and Eddie had lit the embalming fluid cocktails, they tried to escape, but the window started shrinking and they couldn’t squeeze through. The flames were searing her flesh, and the acrid smoke was suffocating her.

  In reality, she awoke to find that she had somehow managed to wrap the fuzzy plaid blanket around her head, so it was actually polyester fleece, not burning embalming fluid smoke, that was blocking her air supply. It took a few moments for her to get her bearings and recall the details of how she had gotten there, but the fire, the snow, and the zombies all came back into focus.

  Keeping her fingers crossed, she got up, wrapped the fuzzy blanket around her shoulders, and shuffled into the break room, which had a tall, barred window. Using her breath and the corner of the blanket, she rubbed a clean spot to peer out, and couldn’t quite comprehend what she was seeing. She thought there had been a few cars in the side parking lot, but now there were only rounded bumps in the snow. Grabbing the ring of keys, she hurried to the front lobby.

  “No! No, no no…” she shouted, running from the doors to windows and back to the doors, horrified by the two feet of snow that had swallowed everything. Drifts had pushed that depth to over a yard at the front doors. Sinking to the cold marble floor, she put her head in her hands and said dejectedly, “No bacon and eggs for you today, Becks.”

  She was able to get out the back door and down the steps, because of a ten-by-ten awning, but that was as far as she could go. To add insult to the snow total injury, at least a quarter of an inch of ice had formed a crust on top. Trying to take a few steps, Becks first slid to her right, then to her left, and then fell on her butt, breaking through the ice and plunging into the deep, powdery snow. Even the ATV, which was a small rounded bump in the snow, couldn’t get through this. Without a snowmobile, or a tank, she was going to be stuck for a while.

  After a breakfast of a hot MRE, biscotti, and only one thin mint cookie, Becks’ morale had improved. She decided that if she was going to be here for days, or even weeks, she needed to know what—or more importantly who—was in the basement. Gearing up with a mask, her leather jacket and pants covered in silverware, and all her pistols, she switched on her night vision goggles and unlocked the door.

  Banging on the walls and shouting for several minutes, she waited another full ten minutes. Zombies nesting in basements, in a full twilight state, sometimes took quite a while to regain their version of consciousness and become mobile again. When all remained silent, she carefully began to descend the stairs. Spider webs looked particularly creepy in night vision, their bright filaments floating by like phantoms as she tried to bat them out of her way. Clearly, no one had been down these stairs in a very long time, which was a good sign.

  The basement was expansive, and windowless. It was filled with old stamp vending machines—worth their weight in gold on eBay, BZA—cases of outdated uniforms, hats, and coats, priority mail boxes, change of address forms, and even long banks of post office boxes, which by their various styles, had obviously been torn out and replaced at least three times over the decades. Of course, every tower of boxes could be hiding a potential threat, so Becks had to move slowly and methodically. Her heart leapt into her throat when her boot kicked a couple of 50-year-old Schlitz beer cans in a back corner, but fortunately, after almost an hour of searching, that was the only surprise.

  Other than the coats and old uniforms for spare clothing, and the cardboard boxes and papers she could burn for warmth once she made some sort of fireplace, there didn’t appear to be anything of much value in the basement. However, there was one locked metal door under the stairs she had yet to open. From its rusty hinges, Becks thought it looked as though it hadn’t been opened since the Eisenhower administration, which actually wasn’t a bad guess. After trying several keys, she found one that fit, and it had a piece of white tape on it with the faded letters “FOS.”

  The key reluctantly turned, after some coaxing, but the door was more stubborn. The hinges groaned in protest as Becks leaned back and put all her weight into it. Finally, she braced her right boot up on the door frame and groaned even louder than the hinges. Before she could regain her balance, the door swung open and she backpedalled several feet before falling over some cases of airmail envelopes.

  “Son of a bitch! This better be worth it!”

  Wiping off the dust and dirt, she slowly approached the open door, a pistol in each hand. To her surprise, there was a short staircase leading down to another metal door, and this one was much larger and stronger.

  “What the hell?” she asked out loud, going down the stairs and gripping the heavy arm-type latch, feeling as though she was on a submarine.

  The door slid sideways, like on a walk-in freezer, and a blast of ancient air, as though from a tomb, assailed her nostrils. The concrete-walled room was about twenty-by-twenty feet, and triple-high bunk beds lined the walls. In the left back corner was a shower curtain hanging next to a small sink and some kind of pump toilet. To the right, was a large stack of something covered by a tarp. Holstering her weapons, she used both hands to pull down the tarp and was stunned by what was underneath.

  After whistling in amazement, she spread her arms and announced, “Welcome to the Cold War!”

  There before her was barrel after barrel of Civil Defense food and supplies.

  “Of course, FOS—Fall…Out…Shelter!”

  It was common for government buildings in the 1950s and 60s to have fallout shelters in the event of a nuclear attack. Some were simple basement rooms large enough to hold entire neighborhoods, and some—like this one—were much more sophisticated and designed to just house local government employees and their immediate families.

  Officials would argue that it was important to keep the government intact, but in truth, they often abused their positions of power simply to safeguard their own asses. The same thing happened generations later when the real apocalypse began and our elected officials retreated to their tax payer-funded, private, luxury bunkers, while their constituents got chewed to pieces.

  Becks was somewhat familiar with these barrels and their contents, as her parents had bought and sold many Civil Defense items in their antique shop in Nyack. When she was about five or six, she got in trouble because she had opened one of the tins of survival crackers and was happily munching away on the decades-old food. But it wasn’t so much that her parents were upset that s
he had ruined the value of the item. They were more concerned that she would get sick from eating something several times older than she was.

  As it turned out, little Becks suffered no ill effects. And now, even more decades later, she would eat these crackers again if she became desperate. As she recalled, these barrels also contained tins of hard candies. Those she would start eating without being desperate.

  The medical supplies might come in handy, for everything that hadn’t expired during the Reagan administration, and there were probably some other things in these barrels she could utilize. Short of a snowmobile or a satellite phone, this was a great find, and it at least meant that starvation wouldn’t be an issue for quite a while.

  Becks had been so mystified, and then intrigued, by the room, she hadn’t yet stopped to think about the lighting, ventilation, and heat. There was another tarp she had missed in the right front corner, and sure enough, underneath was an old generator. There were several pipes to vent the generator exhaust, and she found other pipes that connected to another pump that circulated and filtered outside air. She was no ventilation expert, but the stenciled label reading, “Ventilation Pump,” was her first clue.

  Scanning the ceiling, she saw rows of light fixtures, and two electric heaters. They were a sight for sore eyes, and chilled bones. Even if she couldn’t get this antique generator running, she could remove one of these heaters and then scavenge the neighborhood to find a working generator—once the snow melted. There was most likely a good amount of gas in all the mail trucks, and some post offices even had storage tanks of gas on the premises for their fleet of vehicles.

  But she was getting ahead of herself. First, she would have to see if she could get this prehistoric beast up and running. If only Cam were here, he would have it disassembled, cleaned, lubricated, put back together, and running by lunch. Even though she had helped him work on his endless stream of “automotive reclamation projects,” as Cam called them—Becks called them junk cars—she would be thrilled if it only took her a few days to get it to work.