How Beer Saved the World

by Phyllis Irene Radford

  There were a few things the hundreds of bad movies about zombies didn’t tell us. Actually there were dozens of things, but so be it. The big one is that you don’t die and turn into a Zombie. You die and you stay dead. None of that waking up all groaning and bleary eyed with a taste for brains. If a zombie kills you, you’re just dead. You don’t get to come back as a zombie. Not that I wanted to. Much.

  I heard tell of a lot of folks met their maker ’cause they got bit and everybody freaked out. You know the drill. “Kill me, don’t let me turn into one of them.” And then the turned head, the pained expression, the raised pistol, and ‘BAM.’ Lot of really embarrassed people out there once they found out a bandage and bit of ointment worked better and wasn’t near as messy.

  The truth is if you aren’t already a zombie, you’re immune, about twenty percent of us are, or were anyway. You turned about a week after exposure to the airborne virus, plus or minus a day. You go to sleep with your sweetheart, you wake up feeling really good by all accounts, none of the flu like symptoms crap, and then you get a headache, and then you get hungry. Lots of couples went that way. ‘What’s wrong honey?’ probably became the most common last words in America.

  And then you were a Zombie. Not at all dead. Nope, Zombies are about alive as it gets; at least your body and a small chunk of brain about the size of a lemon. And I mean it lives like it is on steroids. We all figured it was a military virus gone bad. It made you healthy, vicious, stupid, and hard to kill. A perfect soldier, except for that lemon sized brain thing. And the sex drive? I’ve seen things now that six years in the navy couldn’t match. I’ll let the history books handle that little detail.

  And the hard to kill part? That's a no shitter. The head shot thing kind of works, but you damn near have to shoot them in the nose, that’s about where what’s left of the brain is. The rest has already turned to mush.

  Also, forget the gaping wounds and rotting flesh. Oh yeah, for about a week, then it just kind of coats over. You cut off a zombie's arm, it just heals over like a surgical amputation, except maybe a chunk of bone pokes out. Kind of gross, but it is what it is.

  I figure scientists will figure out how it spread, but it is hard to say. Most likely super airborne. Breathe in clean air, breathe out the Zombie bug. By the time the air lines, busses, and truckers stopped moving, the Zombie bug was everywhere.

  But back to our Zombie Apocalypse. We were very near set. Very near is the key point. We had one tanker of diesel and another of gasoline. We had big screen TVs, generators, guns, and beer. Did I mention beer? If you’re going to make a last stand, a brewery is a great place. We didn’t think of it as a last stand. We were planning on being survivors.

  Even then we knew there were enclaves and there were pockets. Enclaves are what you called the big, government camps. Once they got established, they worked pretty well, if you could get there and if you could stay fed. I’m told zombie tastes like pork, but I don’t want to find out. It was mostly army bases, airports, stadiums, and other places already set up for security. I heard of some places where the jails were cleared and the local constabulary brought in their families.

  The rest of us survived in what were called pockets. We were a pocket. A dozen people in a place the zombies couldn’t claw or hammer their way in. I heard the Space Needle was quite a pocket there for a while. At least until the gun nuts shot their way in and didn’t leave doors enough to close behind them. I saw the videos. Ouch.

  As for us? The whole damned thing is still in the air. We live in the middle of the desert side of Washington State. The virus hit slow, we had about a two week day delay from the onset on the east coast and about a week from the west coast. We got to watch. Had time to make a few phone calls and make some decisions. A lot of folks went out to the old nuclear plants. The last we talked on the radio it was fine, those are some big tough buildings. But what point is surviving the zombie apocalypse if all your hair falls out.

  Communications are good. Satellites are automated and the power comes mostly from wind and dams out here. Pretty hard for a zombie to scale a 150 foot windmill or bust into a concrete damn. Hear lots of folks are making a stand at the wind mills. Family gets inside and locks the door. Kind of a natural zombie proof thing it is.

  I’m here at the Brewery with Angus because I like Pink Floyd. Actually I love Pink Floyd and say to those who don’t, go screw yourselves. That, and I got a trunk load of anti-terror gear, gadgets, and government comm gear along with two crates full of guns, and more bullets than we could ever hope to shoot. I may have abused my shiny gold Marshall Service badge a bit, but it is the Zombie Apocalypse you know.

  I also have a band, or part of one anyway. A Pink Floyd cover band, as we were billed when we played the brewery. The stands and stage are still up out in the parking lot from the last gig. We’re pretty good. I’m 47 years old and that makes me younger than the actual Pink Floyd band, let alone the surviving members. Surviving members, now that’s a phrase that will gain new meaning. We do concerts at the brewery. I don’t say did, because we did a show last night. Kind of hard without the base player, but we got canned music when we needed it. Some of the zombies seemed to like the music. When the zombies are coming, there is a special appreciation for “Just Another Brick in the Wall.”

  We had a concert set for exactly two weeks after the first news report about a fellow in Georgia getting eaten by his family. The next day it was dozens. The next day, Georgia shut down. It spread from there. We still did the concert. Attendance was light, but that was when Angus, me, and the band made the decision that this would our ground for the impending apocalypse. Angus rented a couple of generators. Like he’s ever going to pay that bill. We had a couple a guys that drove fuel trucks for Mr. H. R. Jones. The son of a bitch has, or had, a local monopoly on fuel. Before the zombies got him, he had the biggest house in town down on the river. I think all that’s left of him is a little bit of zombie shit. We got two of Mr. Jones trucks, one full of diesel and one full of unleaded gasoline parked inside our little pocket. Wish we had the drivers, they brought in the trucks. Supposed to be back the next day with family. They never made it. The shit was starting to hit.

  So power is not a problem. Food is another matter. You can live on beer, but it loses its appeal. We made arrangements. Two truck loads of groceries headed for the local Safeway, with what was left of the families trailing, that was the deal. All the non-perishable food and shit paper we would need to last out the winter.

  And right now? It is sitting across the street with the trucks still running.

  We got the families in before the pack got wind and came after them. One of the drivers made it, the other? Thirty years of driving a truck and not much else means that you might not oughta try to outrun fifty or so zombies. Puts a bit more strain on a heart than climbing into the cab. We told his wife he was dead before he hit the ground, but he wasn’t. He was still thrashing when they dragged him off. They were more like wolves than people in this state.

  So the trucks are there, still idling. Right under the big blue sign advertising Ainsworth’s Pool supply store. That brings you up to date.

  “You gonna talk into that thing all day or we going after the grub.” Angus was a big man, he didn’t appreciate my Zombie Video Diary.

  “Stand right there,” I said and flashed a picture. It showed the big blue pool supply sign, the two trucks and a posse of half naked Zombies sniffing around the trucks. You could just barely see the Piper boys sitting on cupolas of the tanker trucks. The Piper boys were God’s gift to us. Two rednecks in from Texas. I’d hired them to tote speakers at the last concert. They worked hard, laughed when they should, and could shoot, we invited them in. They brought squirrel rifles. Little bolt action 22 caliber rifles. The kind the survivalist laugh at. They dropped more zombies than my AR15 assault rifle ever thought of. Of course they tend to shoot straighter than I do.

  We weren’t a very big group. Me and Sally, and her two friends. They show
ed up the same night the trucks had. We did a session with the amps turned up. Just for the fun of it. We’d finished and were turning off the lights and they drove right up to the gate horns honking like hell. They weren’t there for the music, just looking for a hole to crawl in. The zombies were already thick. The Piper boys manned up and together we tried to clear the way, but most of the newcomers never made it to the gate. And we were shooting like heck. Three of them made it in. Turns out Sally was the only one worth a shit. The next morning, while the other two was sitting around crying, she got to working in the kitchen. We put the other two digging latrines. They complained, them being girls and such and there being asphalt to dig through. But Angus and I talked and we’d be damned if we was gonna keep flush toilets going with drinkable water. After that we had the one driver, his mother and a sister-in-law, the other driver’s wife, God knows I thought about putting her out, but I owed her old man. Then we had two waitresses, a cook and dishwasher the three preschoolers that I foisted off on the driver’s wife, let her do something. That was all that was left of the staff. And that was us.

  That and of course the Piper brothers.

  And my chickens. I kept a flock of fifty little salmon favorelles. I figured it might be good for meat and eggs. They bitched like hell when I threw them in the gunny sacks for the trip over, but I like my eggs. If we survived they’d make good trading stock.

  Every now and then one would fly over the fence. We’d all watch. Ain’t nothing funnier than a zombie trying to catch a chicken. Zombies are fast, but it’s just flat hard to catch a chicken. After a couple of zombies got a handful of tail feathers, the chickens learned. If we wanted to watch zombies chase chickens we had to throw one over.

  We were set to get the trucks. They had now been idling for three days. The driver said they’d idle til the tank was empty. We didn’t want that.

  We had a plan. The three of us that could shoot would lay down the cover, that would be me and the Pipers. Angus had a shot gun, as did my drummer. They could be cover for the driver. He was the only guy I trusted to take a sixty foot semi and back it into a tight gate at 20 miles per hour. We had the cook and the dishwasher at the gate, one had a .410 shotgun that’d been my wife’s and one had an old straight bore pump 12 gauge. He could handle the shotgun but he was half blind and I’d be damned if I was giving him anything with muzzle velocity. They’d keep the zombies out of the compound. If they got in we were stacked thin enough we wouldn’t make it. We all knew it. The other trucker’s old lady was in the with the kids. Sally manned the stage. She had my thirty-thirty lever action rifle. I didn’t really know if she could shoot, but she was our only backup.

  The drill was simple, swing the gates out. The waitresses from the dining room did that. Me and the Piper boys would start taking head shots the second the Zombies took notice. Angus, the driver and my drummer, would hit the truck, driver in first with Angus covering the door, the drummer in the passenger seat. Angus following it back in. The cook and the dishwasher take anything that got too close to the gate. And the two waitresses bring the gate closed. It was a great plan.

  Angus unlocked the gate and lifted the anchor peg. Step one. Nothing but passing interest, no zombie charge. The gates open. Piper-the-older has the right flank, Piper-the- younger has the left. The pops of their twenty-two long rifles sound small. They aren’t. When a head shot is what you need, something that will get in and bounce around a bit is pretty damned good. A twenty two does a fine job of that. I had the AR-15, semi auto. I batted clean up, if my crew put a Zombie down but it didn’t want to stay down, I took it out.

  It was good, Angus, the driver, and my drummer were already across the street and in the parking lot. Only about a hundred feet to the cab. Fish in a barrel. Then yips came from the left. Young Piper’s station.

  “Oh shit,” I heard him say. But he was good. He had three twenty shot clips and a bolt action. He could get off thirty rounds a minute. Not a great condolence when a swarm of what must have been sixty of the things turned the corner. Maybe a hundred yards out. I could do a hundred yards in less than ten seconds. Most of these things could do it too if they put a mind to it. They seemed to.

  The waitresses screamed in unison. They started to pull the gates shut. The cook and the dishwasher were helping. Angus and the driver could see it. They didn’t give the truck a second thought as they turned back to the gate. I heard the heavy crack of Sally sending out lead from behind me. I was glad.

  “Come back, back in,” I screamed. My drummer was already pulling at the door to get in the cab. The zombie charge was coming from the other side. He didn’t know. I jumped off the stage next to Sally.

  I screamed again, everybody screamed. It didn’t matter. My drummer was half deaf. Being a drummer in a rock and roll band didn’t prepare you for the zombie apocalypse. He went into the cab, just like the plan. Ok, I figured, we could clear the cab in a bit of time. Stay put.

  The cook and the dishwasher weren’t shooting. They were tugging on the gate. Sally seemed to know what she was doing. When the firing stopped I glanced over. She was feeding ammo in like a pro. We shared a smile.

  The gates were going closed. I risked a jump from the stage and with only a slight stumble on the landing I made for the gate and smacked the cook across the back of his head with my free hand. “Let them in.” He wasn’t the sharpest pencil in the box but he got the idea. He held the gate open. The waitresses ran. Sally came up from behind. She’d left the half loaded rifle and had pocket pistol. She fired off three rounds. Two zombies stumbled. One was young, a redhead, a really hot red head. Intact. Something about the steroids in the mix made them look better. For a moment I wondered if they could be tamed. Sally answered the question with a head shot that sent red everywhere. I’d liked her from the minute I drug her through the gate, now I like her more. The zombies were less than a dozen yards away when Angus and the driver stumbled through. The steady popping of the twenty-twos didn’t stop and the bodies fell like drops in a rainstorm. Funny thing about drops. You don’t miss a dozen or so of them in the middle of a storm. And it was a storm.

  That rainstorm was clawing at the gate. The cook seemed to have come to his senses and he stuck the shot gun between the bars of the gate and let go three quick rounds. This gave Angus time to slip the anchor pin and the gate was secure.

  The feral yips and growls didn’t stop, they just found a new focus. My drummer was standing on the board of the truck looking confused. The door open behind him.

  He was on the wrong side of the fence. Way on the wrong side of the fence. He was a great drummer, he just wasn’t real smart. He came for the fence. There were easily fifty of them between him and the gate. The Pipers were good, just not that good. Angus and I both emptied everything. For a second I thought my drummer might make it. He had good hand eye coordination and he emptied his shotgun on the run with solid effect. If they had still been people, they would have scattered. Zombies don’t have survival instincts, they have pack instincts and the pack instinct said close in. He had both hands on the fence when they finally got a grip on him.

  I pulled out my Glock. I didn’t turn my head and he didn’t ask for it. He turned loose of the fence and tried to cover his head against the bullet. I saw the stigmata appear on his hand and then his head exploded. I empted the clip into the crowd until it stopped working and the survivors hauled off the dead. The Piper’s stopped their tune as well.

  We sat inside that night licking our wounds. Not talking.

  The news feed was still on. A cute young news girl from up the valley was reporting on the epidemic. She was interviewing a biker dude with heavy leathers, heavy gut and beard he must have figured would cover it all.

  He said he “wasn’t worried.”

  He said it was a “government plot to get his gun” and then patted the saddle bags. That was when a dozen or so of the critters came out of the ditch. They were yipping like a pack of wolves. He got his hand in the saddle bags and pulle
d out this foot long shiny cannon of a revolver that looked like something Clint Eastwood might jack off to. About that same time a couple of Mexicans came out of a Hop field hollering and motioning for them to run. He didn’t, but the girl and her camera guy did. A bunch of the kind of jerky camera work we’ve all gotten used and she was in the field. These Mexicans looked strange. They had their straw hats and their guns and machetes but every damned one of them had Hop vines strung around them like bandoleers.

  The camera guy filmed the whole damned thing. The biker dude lasted long enough to get off a round into the asphalt and then screamed like a wet panther while they drug him to the ditch. Then he screamed some more off camera while the camera guy did a thoughtful serious shot of the gun lying on the blacktop while its owner screamed for his mother.

  Then it got creepy. The zombies were bloody when they came back up on the road and started towards the reporter and the folks that were in the hop field. You could tell from the camera angle that the camera guy was backing into the field. The tall hop vines grew up the ropes, framing the zombies perfectly. The pack broke into that run they have. I’d have said adios to my Mexican friends and the cute babe. But the pack got to the edge of the field and stopped. These guys just sniffed the air like some freaking dog and paced. A machete wielding arm flashed out and a streak of red crossed some fat zombie guy’s belly. It howled and stepped back. Finally, they just left. The girl got back in the camera van. She tried to get the Mexicans to go. They kept saying no and kept trying to wrap her in Hop vines.

  “You take, you take.” Their English was bad. Her Spanish was worse. She tried to ask questions and just got hop vines shoved in her face. Finally both sides gave up and some very nervous farm workers escorted them to the van.