She waited.
“OK. I'm gonna go. You'll need to crank the handle a few times every day. It doesn't take much to keep it alive.
“OK. I love you, Kristine. Bye.”
She released the button, and the green "Receiving" light faded out.
* * *
Kurt lowered the walkie talkie from his ear.
“Everything OK?” said Brother Travis.
“Yeah. She’s... Sophie’s lonely.”
Travis nodded. “Maybe we should get a softball game going tomorrow.”
“I don’t think a softball game’s going to do it.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised.”
Kurt smiled and washed his hands of the blood and salt as Travis poured the water. He decided, right then, not to confront her about the killings. First, because he wasn’t sure it was true, and by the time he checked on it, they would have risen. Second, because he didn’t want to think his youngest daughter had changed.
When he got back home Sophie was drawing something, but quickly put it away. She’d changed into shorts and a t-shirt, and as she stood up from where she lay on the floor, he realized how strong her legs had gotten.
“What is it, Thursday?”
She nodded.
“Seiyunchin.”
She nodded again, and they walked to the back yard together, closing the patio gate so the dog wouldn’t bother them.
Seiyunchin was an Okinawan karate kata, a solo training form against an imaginary enemy, with lots of squats and slow, muscular hand movements, interrupted by bursts of footwork and hip rotation. They did the kata a few times together, and he watched her more carefully than usual in his peripheral vision. Stepping away, he gestured that he wanted to watch her perform it while facing him, as a teacher evaluating a student.
Something had changed in her eyes as she performed Seiyunchin. At the slow movements, and at the pauses, she wasn’t thinking of the next move, or where her feet were, or how to hold her hands. She wasn’t doing some odd dance routine. She was killing the imaginary enemy.
That’s when he knew that she had killed those boys, that she wasn’t just making up stories to sound tough.
When her kata performance was over, she bowed to him, and he bowed to her, and he held his bow a little longer than usual.
She turned to go back into the house, and when she realized he wasn’t following, asked if there were any more chores to do. Kurt shook his head, and decided to play with the dog for a while.
* * *
Women’s inability to have children added a new fear to the Dallas suburbs. A young child would be discovering flowers, oh look at those, oh look at these, wandering off into the park, and then the mother looked back to where she expected her to be and poof she was gone.
Usually it was a woman in the same neighborhood, because people kept to themselves. An outsider would have been too obvious.
Sophie was small for a nine year old, shy, and used to her older sister, her father, and other people telling her what to do. When 33 year-old Jessica Wallace took Sophie’s hand and walked off with her, she just went along.
A week later she escaped, and it was all she could do to keep her father from walking the two blocks to her house, knocking on the door, and blasting Jessica with a shotgun when she answered the door.
They went to Brother Travis, who reluctantly held the first church trial in their neighborhood clan.
Jessica cried and apologized. Losing her pregnancy during the Leonids had broken her. She asked Kurt for forgiveness.
Kurt had calmed down by then. He forgave her, but did not trust her.
Brother Travis and the 10 elders and deacons of the church debated in private, and concluded that she was to be banished. It was known that she had a sister in Flower Mound, a farm community 25 miles away that had grown into an operations center for a dozen major companies when DFW airport was built just south of it. Instead of binding her limbs, putting her on a horse, and scaring it off, which is what most folks in that church thought of when they heard the ancient word “banishment,” Brother Travis and two other members helped her pack, and walked her there personally.
Though that was three years ago, Kurt had been terrified that something would happen again to Sophie. Now, as easily as Jessica Wallace had walked off with tiny, nine year old Sophie, his fears started walking away. She was not a frail child anymore. She was capable of facing enemies, both imaginary and real.
As Kurt knew well, the ones in your head were the most persistent.
* * *
Sophie cranked the radio several times, then set it to shortwave. WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado, was still broadcasting at 20 MHz, and she found the clicks that marked the seconds soothing. At the hour and half-hour, a synthesized but pleasant voice said, “National Institute of Standards and Technology time. This is Radio Station WWV, Fort Collins, Colorado, broadcasting on internationally allocated standard carrier frequency twenty megahertz, providing time of day, standard time interval, and other related information. Inquiries regarding these transmissions may be directed to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Radio Station WWV, 2000 East County Road 58, Fort Collins, Colorado, 80524.”
There was no “other related information,” ever. No weather reports for the Atlantic or Pacific. No satellite confirmations for the Coast Guard. Just a tick, every second, and that announcement every 30 minutes. The clock of the world was on autopilot.
She liked to hear the mailing address. She’d lip sync it as she stared out the window, imagining what Road 58 looked like, imagining a mailman in a white Jeep with plastic boxes of junk mail, Christmas presents, and magazines, bouncing on an ill-kept country road, the stars bright overhead.
She spun the dial to the right, out of boredom. Static. She spun it to the left. Static. She spun to the right, as if finishing the spins of a combination lock... and heard garbled static. The dial was not near 20 MHz. She turned the dial until the signal became clear.
“This is the USS Fort Worth at Coast Guard Station Galveston. We have room for 41 survivors. We will update the count as we accept new passengers. Message repeats.”
She sat up to make sure she was awake. For a minute, nothing happened.
“This is the USS Fort Worth at Coast Guard Station Galveston. We have room for 41 survivors. We will update the count as we accept new passengers. Message repeats.”
It was a human voice. Female, Southern. Not Texas, maybe Tennessee. It was a recording, but of a live person.
“Dad!”
She heard him slide the screen door open.
“You need to hear this.”
Chapter 2: When Girls Wore Skirts
Kurt, too, needed to hear it twice before it soaked in. This was real. He went to the driveway, opened the passenger door, which coated his fingers with thick, yellow pollen, and got the old accordion map out of the glove box. He hadn’t started the car in a year. There was a gallon of gasoline left, though he’d never added stabilizer, so it was junk now. He knew it was silly to keep the car in the driveway, but he didn’t want to give it up, even if it had flat tires and would become a home for squirrels and dandelions. In Texas, a car was more than transportation; it defined status, as a horse did when the land was part of Mexico. A man without transportation was a peón, not to be respected.
Holding the flashlight in his mouth, he opened the map wide, moving the beam from Dallas to Houston to Galveston, then looked at the map legend. About 300 miles. Maybe we could do 20 miles a day on foot, maybe a little more. That’d be two weeks. Too long. Bikes! 15 miles an hour... no, she’s still a kid... call it 10 MPH, riding 10 hours a day, 100 miles a day, three days. That was doable. That could happen.
Kurt smiled and took the flashlight out of his mouth.
“Sophie!”
She yelled back, from her room. “Yeah, Dad?”
He smirked. Why don’t kids just come when they’re called?
“Come here.”
She came, and was happy to see that h
e was happy.
“Let’s go bike shopping.”
They packed their gear and headed out.
* * *
There were thousands of bikes in the Dallas suburb of Frisco. Some rusting in the weather, but most were in garages, or still in stores. Kurt decided he wanted to do it right. He’d not had a bike since he was a kid, but knew there was a branch of the famous Richardson Bike Mart down Preston road. Before leaving the yard, he and Sophie spent a few minutes filling a plastic bag with pecans from a young tree.
Society was both more brutal and kinder than it used to be. Unexpected visitors showed up with gifts – usually fruit or cornbread, sometimes jerky. Water was too heavy to carry as a give-away.
The gift showed you came in peace, that you probably weren’t there to rob them or kick them out. It was a little odd to visit at night, but not unheard of. The days were often too hot to socialize, so people gathered at sundown to chat, trade, or tell of good spots for berries or fish.
As Kurt and Sophie walked down Preston Road, he repeated an old story.
“Preston is the oldest road in Dallas.”
Sophie nodded. She knew telling him that she knew all this would irritate him. She kept walking. He spoke in bursts, in timing with their fast pace.
“Used to be a cattle trail. We’ve pretty much lived near Preston Road for the last three generations. Just kept moving north. From granddad’s place near SMU. To dad’s place in Plano. To our place in Frisco. Used to like going all the way down, where Preston turns into Oak Lawn. Gay part of town. Cool part of town. Great place to take a date. Don’t have to worry about guys hitting on her.”
He nudged Sophie.
And so it went, for the two mile walk.
The Frisco-Plano corridor, at least along the north-south Preston Road, was usually safe. Most of the people who had not been felled by bullets or botulism two years after the first dead rose were cautious folk.
In the 20th century, people gravitated to their own ethnic groups and worked vigorously to keep them distinct. In the mid-21st century, there were so many mixed marriages that people returned to an older tribal structure, defined by blood, marriage, and faith. No one assumed social status purely by skin tone. Strangers approached each other on equal and polite footing.
In this area, a mix of white, Mexican, Guatemalan, black, and Filipino formed into clans of 50 to 200, sometimes raiding each other, but usually trading livestock, jewelry, homemade booze, and musical instruments peacefully.
In the first few months after the Leonids, no part of town was safe. Terrified and well-armed men did most of the killing and dying. At the peak of the tech boom, many Dallas men had gun collections that would impress a Nigerian mercenary. One of Kurt’s best friends had over 300 guns, from 18th century black powder rifles to 19th century revolvers to 20th and 21st century semi-automatic pistols and assault rifles. The prize of the collection was a fully-automatic M16, purchased in the early 1980s before they were banned.
When Bill died of food poisoning, Kurt took two of the .40 caliber pistols and a Plano® Zombie Max Ammo Can with 1,000 rounds of ammo, and went home. He couldn’t behead him, and he didn’t want to see him rise; whether he came back happy or angry, it wouldn’t be him anymore.
Kristine and Sophie, who were 12 and 9 then, loved the ammo can – a rectangular black plastic box with a green handle – because it had a cool sticker on the side: “ZOMBIE MAX... Just In Case,” written in fat green letters with dripping blood. They wanted to put the puppy in it, but the look on Kurt’s face said no in a way that they never asked again.
When Kurt went back to Bill’s place two days later, his friend, the guns, and ammunition were gone.
Most of the gunfire happened in the first six months. The young male gangs killed themselves off quickly. You’d see them after rising, staggering around in their sagging pants and $300 NBA shirts with bullet holes in them, but no visible wounds. If their clothing was still in good shape, it was hard to tell the before-and-after difference until they wandered into traffic or fell into a ditch.
The young female gangs lasted longer, but broke up and joined neighborhood clans before completely killing themselves off.
It was during these early days that an important discovery was made. There was a way to truly kill someone.
A risen gang-banger, somewhere in Pennsylvania, had stumbled into a construction pit and been decapitated by falling onto a rough-cut four-foot diameter metal pipe, left standing vertically. With his head inside the pipe, and his body outside, he never rose again. His body simply rotted away.
The follow-up experiment was a YouTube sensation. The video, “Banga Be Headin 2,” opened with a still photo from the first dead gang banger, and some text that explained the event. Then mobile phone video showed another risen banger of the same height and weight being guided toward the pit by a snickering teenager. The risen banger walked off the ledge and was likewise decapitated, to the delighted groans of the cameraman.
Cut to the next scene. The video makers pushed the giant metal pipe over, picked up his head, and set it within an inch of his open neck. The body was still pumping blood, though it was down to a trickle. A pool of blood six feet in diameter had formed around the neck in the rough depression of limestone where the body lay.
Close up of the neck. The rest of the video was edited for time. At three minutes, a jelly formed. At five minutes, the gaps and bubbles disappeared. In an hour, the head was being pulled slowly towards the stump, like a flower closing at sunset. In 12 hours, the camera had changed to ten feet away, and he was standing – just as dumb and smiling as before. Except for the blood stain on his shirt, and a scar all the way around his neck, he was no different than before the fall.
“Banga Be Headin 2” was the most popular video on YouTube when the internet finally timed out. Whether you saw it yourself, or heard it from friends, you knew how to truly kill people. Everyone knew. No one could keep such knowledge to himself.
However, having knowledge and knowing was not the same thing. Those who had done it confessed that it was brutal. A human head doesn’t pop off like in a zombie movie. It’s attached with bones, joints, tendons, and thick muscle, even on fat kids. You needed serious metal and accuracy to sever a head gracefully, and no one was skilled with swords anymore. Even the iaido club at a local private school, which kept traditional Japanese swordsmanship alive, didn’t practice cutting through muscle and bone, because cutting up prisoners or goats like in the old days would have been inhumane. Mostly they cut air, but sometimes they cut straw rolls before bowing and sliding their $20,000 swords back into their scabbards.
When striking a real body, machetes got stuck. Axes got wedged. A spurting neck got blood on the blade which dripped to the handle. There was the spasming and screaming. Many victims, even the mindless Angels, crapped their pants. Beheading someone was an unpleasant experience for all the senses.
After “Banga Be Headin 2,” people took hatchets, butcher knives, and hacksaws to people they never wanted to see again, but they had to be ready to get warm blood on their hands. Even with the world collapsing, few people were willing to do that, so the population of risen grew. The Angels didn’t bother anyone, and most of the Devils were locked up. Their legal status was unclear – yes, they were dead, but most people had enough humanity in them that they did not like the idea of abusing them for sport.
Only the ones who were truly loved in Kurt and Sophie’s Frisco clan were beheaded, with the head kept separate so they could rot away. The rest, the world was stuck with.
Plano® Ammo Cans were great for head transportation, once you were out of bullets. It didn’t have to be the “Zombie Max” model. The more modest Plano® Ammo Can Field Box, grey with a black latch and a small yellow logo, was more appropriate. Though a little narrow, there was an advantage to that. For most people’s heads, the ears wedged in and held the head firmly in place so it didn’t roll or shift when carried. Since a head was round and weighed 10 po
unds, this was helpful.
“What are you thinking about?” Sophie asked.
“My friend, Bill.”
“You know what I liked about him? He never talked to me like I was an idiot, even when I was little.”
“Yeah, Bill was a good guy.”
“Were you with him when he died?”
“Yes.”
“Can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“What was it like?”
“He had food poisoning – this was before we were used to not having electricity to run refrigerators anymore – so he was pretty miserable. I’d found a bottle of Advil, but he couldn’t keep anything down. He just moaned and tried to sleep. Then, there was this moment, where he kinda held his breath, then let it all go, like his air went out all the way down to his toes. I’d never seen anything like it. Well, I’d never seen anyone die before.”
“How many people have you seen die now?”
“I don’t know. Maybe... twelve?”
“Do they all die like that?”
“No. Some, you can’t even tell. Some struggle. Some talk. Some, it’s like their cord got cut, and they just stop. I remember this one guy saying, ‘Man, I’d like a grilled cheese sandwich.’ And that was it. He was dead. His last thoughts were not of a loved one or Jesus or regrets. Grilled cheese. And you know what I thought? He was right. A grilled cheese sandwich sounded good.”
They smiled and walked a bit farther. Kurt said, “I think that guy was your first funeral at the park.”
“Ohhh yeah! That was neat. I mean, I don’t like people dying or anything, but that was special. I could tell. And I felt kinda grown up ‘cause I got to participate.”
Kurt paused at the intersection, holding Sophie’s shoulder, and they waved their right arms in an arc, one big wave. Clan areas were divided by streets, and they were entering a new one. These folks along Stonebrook Drive were not violent or to be particularly worried about; it was just a sign of good manners to pause and pay your respects before entering. Maybe someone saw it, maybe not, but it set the right tone, and seemed to bring luck to their journey.
300 Miles to Galveston Page 2
