Dead Fall

by Joseph Xand

  Thad, for his part, was always encouraged to form his own opinion of each subject debated and voted on, even if his opinion differed from that of his father. The average child would believe his attendance of the monthly meetings to be some form of punishment and the subject matter a bore. But Thad shared with his father a veiled enthusiasm in the days leading up to the meetings, both of them jovial and outwardly euphoric as they dressed for the occasion.

  But then one day Thad's father's demeanor changed with regards to an approaching city council hearing. He'd acquired the agenda as usual, but kept it to himself, staring at it and muttering to himself in his recliner. At dinner, not a word was spoken concerning the upcoming meeting, and the day of the hearing Dr. Palmer put on his suit agitatedly, dressing the room at the same time with an air of quiet hostility.

  At city hall, they didn't sit in their usual spots and as they walked through the doors of the hearing room, Thad thought he glimpsed his father's name on the agenda posted on the free-standing bulletin board. Sure enough, midway through the meeting, the fourth item on the agenda was introduced and opened for discussion and the board recognized the "distinguished" Dr. Palmer as having requested an audience at the meeting.

  Thad's father stepped up to a podium in front of the council members and proceeded to impart an eloquent and impassioned, although at times irate and condescending, plea that the council rejects a proposal to build a federal prison facility within the city's jurisdiction. His reasons against the construction were many and far-reaching, covering everything from the threat to the local ecology to the threat to public safety.

  But through it all, the looks on the faces of the council members suggested that his reasons against wanting the prison built went beyond the speech he'd prepared, and with good reason. They'd all dined with him personally in the months since the idea to build a prison first surfaced to them as a possibility by federal officials.

  They knew his reasons for not wanting the prison built were fewer in number and showed less concern for the community at large than he pretended.

  Simply put, the prison would ruin the view from Dr. Palmer's mountaintop villa.

  Sure, he did worry that an inmate breaking out of the prison would see his house on the top of the mountain as a possible place to hide, but everyone knew the prison was to be of the low-security variety, and no one expected too many inmates to risk lengthier sentences when most of them were nearing the end of their current terms of incarceration.

  Dr. Palmer spoke for a full fifty minutes, after which several other community members (people Thad recognized either from around town or as patients of his father) took to the podium one at a time to counter his arguments and show their approval of the prison's construction. The decision, they argued, should come down to economics. The prison would mean hundreds of jobs to the growing unemployed as well as a boost to the businesses around the area where the prison would be built.

  After everyone spoke who wanted to speak, one council member motioned for a vote, and another member seconded the motion. There was eight Ayes, no Nays, and one Abstention; and just like that, the prison project moved from a proposal and into the planning phase.

  The councilmembers moved to the fifth item on the agenda, which concerned a new parade route for the county's Petunia Festival, but Dr. Palmer didn't hang around to hear the result. He left the meeting in a huff, his son trailing behind, before it could be fully introduced.

  That was the last time the Palmers ever involved themselves in local politics.

  Over the next few years, Thad watched as the trees below his home were slowly cleared out and their driveway leading to their mountaintop estate relocated (at the city's expense, of course) to the northern edge of the prison property. The prison itself was situated on the extreme southern edge.

  As a child, Thad owned a telescope that he had once kept trained on the stars and moon on cloudless nights. But after the prison was built, he turned it downward, watching the inmate's movements and those of the guards.

  Mark Twain once said something about how if a person wanted to see the lowest form of life, that person need only go down to the prison and watch the changing of the guard. Thad watched it sometimes three times a day, much to his father's dislike.

  When Thad left for college, Dr. Palmer moved out of the house and rejoined society below. He threatened to sell the mountaintop home, but Thad convinced him to keep it for vacations, if for no other reason. And when he retired from private practice, long after Thad ventured into a promising career as a microbiologist, Dr. Palmer returned to his cliff top plateau, setting up his own private lab in the basement to conduct research of his own into the causes and possible treatments of various types of cancers; a lab Thad would come to utilize for his own ongoing research in the months after the plague began to spread.

  Over the next years, when Thad would visit his father on the mountain, Thad made a point, still to his father's dislike, to borrow a pair of binoculars (his childhood telescope long lost) to study the prison below, noting the changes it had undergone as time passed—more buildings as the boundaries of the fences expanded, which Thad knew probably was necessary to house an ever-growing inmate population. He sometimes wondered how many thousands of people lived inside those fences, each one of them wishing they were on the other side of it.

  He never thought he'd see the day when crowds of people, living and dead, would be fighting to get in.

  * * * * *

  The siege began at 7:30 a.m. precisely.

  Less than an hour before that, Thad walked to the edge of the cliff and scanned the tree line with his binoculars. As was becoming customary, he found the two men in the Hummer checking out the prison's perimeter. But this time Thad could see beyond them. Past the tree line, there was parked a convoy of vehicles. Thad made out three large RVs followed by two U-Hauls, a one and a half ton dooly pulling an empty trailer that might be made to haul motorcycles or other small vehicles, and two sedans.

  Apparently, the entire group was here.

  But something else was different. One of the men standing outside the Hummer was talking into a walkie-talkie. Thad panned the tree line closer to the prison and on all sides of it. Sure enough, he found more people huddled in the shadows.

  In three places Thad saw men sitting astride small, off-road vehicles, like four wheelers or riding mowers or something. It was hard to tell from this distance, the men doing a good job of concealing themselves amongst the tall grass.

  In one spot Thad saw two men huddled in a patch of low-lying trees about fifty yards from the prison's visitors' entrance leading into the primary parking area. The trees had been planted just a few feet from the driveway leading to the tall, double gate. Occasionally, one of the men would lift a radio of his own and speak into it.

  Walkie-talkies were one of the few supplies Thad had overlooked when he'd gathered everything he'd need to survive on the top of the mountain. How he wished he had one now. He could have found the channel the men below were using and listen in to their conversations.

  Thad noticed movement in his peripheral. He looked left to see the Hummer driving out into the middle of the field next to the prison. Since large pockets of the dead also noticed the vehicle—they began moving slowly away from the prison fence, some of them for the first time in months—Thad assumed the driver of the Hummer had to be honking his horn, purposely trying to draw them out.

  The Hummer stopped dead center in the field, and then the sunroof slid open and one of the men popped up from it, rifle in hand, and began shooting blindly into the air. More of the dead drifted in the direction of the noise. They likely couldn't see the man or the Hummer above the high grass.

  About a minute after the Hummer began its barrage of bullets, men on four-wheelers shot out of the surrounding forest. Two of them drove on either side of the prison fences, heading towards the Hummer, though far enough from the prison to be at little risk from the dead. A third four-wheeler drove quickly along the
fence line opposite the Hummer and parallel to it.

  All three drivers wore helmets and thick, heavy coats to protect them from the grass slapping at them as they drove. Each of the men also had a rifle strapped to his back and a bullhorn attached to the handlebars. Thad could faintly hear the horns blaring, even from this distance. The dead turned from the prison fences and gave pursuit.

  At almost the same time the four-wheelers blazed out of the woods, the convoy shook to life and drove slowly up the highway, trying not to be too perceptible to the dead following the four-wheelers.

  On all sides of the prison, the dead left their long-time posts against the fences and gave a slow, meandering chase towards the Hummer. Even along the fence furthest from the Hummer, a four-wheeler led them from the prison's front entrance. The driver paused when he reached the other side of the prison to give the dead time to catch up, then made a wide berth around the corner and drove along the same path as the first four-wheeler on that side.

  The corpses wandering inside the prison's perimeter reacted to the ruckus. They moved to the side of the prison nearest the Hummer and began pounding on the fence, trying to get out.

  When the first two four-wheelers reached the Hummer, one of the drivers spoke into his radio.

  Immediately the two men waiting near the top of the driveway broke cover and ran towards the entry gates. They were carrying something between them that Thad eventually identified as a small, gas generator. One of them also had a backpack strapped to him. Both men carried rifles.

  As they moved, the first two four-wheeler drivers, as well as the man standing out of the Hummer's sunroof and the Hummer's driver, turned their weapons to the crowd of approaching dead. The gunshots were barely audible from the cliff top. Occasionally one of the dead would drop, but most didn't even flinch against the hail of bullets. Thad imagined it was pretty hard to get a clear shot through all the grass. Probably only the man hanging out of the sunroof could tell that the corpses had already closed half the distance between the vehicles and the prison.

  At that time the two men on foot reached the prison gates. By then, none of the dead remained where the men needed to work. One of the men, the one without the backpack, shouldered his rifle and immediately started clambering up the first of the tall fences, much faster than Thad would have thought humanly possible. Then he realized the man wore spikes on his shoes, much like workers once used to scale telephone poles. The spikes allowed him an easy foothold.

  As his colleague climbed, the man on the ground opened the backpack and pulled out a long, rolled up extension cord (actually several spliced together) and began connecting one end to the generator.

  Upon reaching the top of the fence, the man pulled some sort of rope that attached to the belt around his waist and clipped himself to the fence so he'd have both hands free. From behind his back, he pulled out a pair of bolt cutters, which he used to snip away the double razor wire curling around both sides of the top of the fence.

  As he snipped he gingerly pulled the wire aside with hands draped in gloves that looked like chain-mail. Once he cleared away a four-foot section of the razor wire, he threw a leg over the top of the fence and made his way down the other side, jumping down the last few feet.

  While the man outside fed the extension cord through the fence, the inside man traversed the 15-foot span to the interior fence of the double fences. He picked a spot directly behind the guard house that operated the gate and, rather than scaling the fence, this time clipped a hole in the fence itself, enough for him to slip into the two-foot space between the guard house and the fence.

  Meanwhile, the third four-wheeler driver was still trying to work his way towards the Hummer. He had to abandon the path plowed by the first four wheeler because of the dead closing in on him, and so instead rode along a road closer to the mountainside to his left. He also didn't want to be accidentally shot by one of his friends. As he drove, he kept trying to stand up as best he could to see above the grass to better judge his distance from the zombies.

  At one point one of his front wheels hit a large rock and he and the four-wheeler flipped over. The vehicle fell on top of him, pinning him down.

  Only Thad above and the man outside of the Hummer's sunroof saw the accident happen. Sunroof Man seemed to be screaming and pointing to where the accident happened. He lifted his walkie and talked into it.

  When he did, the two men at the main gate reacted. By that time, the man inside the fence had pulled the extension cord through both fences, his partner outside feeding him the slack to avoid tangles. At the guard house, standing between it and the fence, the man used a screwdriver and hammer to pound a three-inch hole into the corner of the guard house's thick glass window. As the man at the Hummer spoke into the walkie, he stopped swinging his hammer and both men looked in the direction of where they knew the Hummer should be.

  Hordes of the dead moved in the direction of the wreck. Possibly the man beneath the four-wheeler was screaming (maybe he'd broken a leg or something when he flipped), and they were drawn to it. Thad couldn't know for sure. The other two four-wheeler drivers looked like they might head off to try and save their fallen friend, but the man in the sunroof stopped them with a fist raised in the air. He shook his head. He knew nothing could be done.

  Only Thad could see the man beneath the four-wheeler as he wrestled the rifle off his back. Only Thad saw him drop three of the dead when they flowed out of the grass towards him.

  Only Thad saw as thirty more fell on top of him.

  Sunroof Man spoke in his walkie, looking towards the prison's main gate.

  There, the man outside spoke briefly into his walkie, then motioned with a nod of his head for his colleague to continue. Turning back to his work, the inside man finished hammering a hole in the glass, then fed the extension cord through the hole. That done, he moved to the door of the guardhouse around the corner.

  He tried the doorknob to see if it might be unlocked. When it wasn't, he pulled out a small sledgehammer that had been concealed in his belt and gave the doorknob two quick solid smacks. The doorknob broke off, and he pulled the door open and stepped inside. At that point, Thad lost sight of him.

  Between banging on the glass with a hammer and screwdriver and banging on the door with the sledge, he'd attracted the attention of some of the dead inside the perimeter of the fence. Four corpses lumbered towards the guard house. The door, of course, was compromised and easily accessible, but luckily for the man inside, the zombies pounded on the glass on the side opposite from the door. Maybe he did something from the inside to draw them there and away from the door.

  Pulling more of the extension cord into the guardhouse, Thad caught a glimpse of him through one of the large windows before he disappeared under a cabinet. He was gone from sight for quite some time. Long enough that his colleague outside the gate pulled his rifle off his shoulder and stood guard next to the generator. Then he appeared to speak into his radio. Perhaps to check the progress of the man in the guardhouse. Perhaps to radio their progress to the man with the Hummer.

  In the field, the men, still honking their bullhorns, were beginning to feel the pressure of the throngs of approaching dead.

  Apparently, the man in the Hummer's sunroof ordered their retreat deeper into the field, nearer the tree line and Thad's driveway. All the vehicles rumbled farther from the prison.

  Finally, Thad saw the man in the guardhouse stand and give a thumbs-up to his companion outside the gate. Once it was received, he started the generator with a single, quick yank of a ripcord, then waited.

  The noise of the generator, though inaudible from atop the cliff, was loud enough down below to draw more of the dead inside the prison fences towards the guardhouse. At least two dozen staggered in that direction.

  Shortly after the generator roared to life, both gates of the double fence began to slide open, something Thad had never seen in all his boyhood years of voyeurism of the prison below. Usually, the gates would be opened on
e at a time, allowing a vehicle to be inspected thoroughly before entering the second gate. The man in the guardhouse must have found a way to link the two gates together.

  The man next to the generator pumped his fist, then lifted the radio to his mouth. Almost instantly, the convoy began pulling through the driveway and into the gates. Once the convoy was inside, the man with the generator ran in as well and the gates slid closed again. Immediately he began putting down the dead, popping them in the head at close range, starting with the four outside the guardhouse.

  Other men and a few women sprang from the vehicles to help him. They worked carefully and methodically, moving as a team in the tall grass.

  As they worked to clear the area in the inner prison, the Hummer and four-wheelers drove onto Thad's driveway, the first of the dead only twenty yards away, then drove quickly onto the highway and over to the prison entrance. As they approached the gates, they opened again.

  Once inside, the men on four-wheelers jumped off their rides and ran to retrieve the generator. When they unplugged the extension cord, someone on the inside yanked it through the fence. They carried the generator through the innermost gate, positioned it next to the guardhouse, and then plugged the extension cord back in. After another yank of the ripcord, the gates glided closed again.

  With the operation complete and most of the crew making short work of the dead within the prison fences, Thad watched a woman climb down from one of the RVs and over to one of the men who had been on one of the four-wheelers. She looked around expectedly and her arms went out from her sides as if asking a question. Their supposed leader, the man in the Hummer, approached her slowly and she shook her head. He put his arm around her, then went to the ground with her when she collapsed to her knees, her body rocking with grief.

  Thad looked down, almost straight down, to where a large mob of zombies piled on top of one another, the tires of the overturned vehicle barely peeking through. He knew that underneath that pile a man was being torn to pieces.