Generation Z (Book 1): Generation Z

by Peter Meredith

  She was so sure of it that she canted her rifle to point over the head of the crowd. “I know you don’t want to die today,” she told Willis. “You can still get better. What’s wrong with you guys, anyway?”

  “TB, I think,” he answered, his shoulders drooping. Just like that, the tension spilled from the crowd. “You guys got anything for TB?”

  “Sorry, I don’t know what cures TB,” she answered. In truth, she didn’t even know what TB stood for. “What about you guys? You have any pills? We’re looking for the yellow ones.”

  Stu was the last to lower his rifle. “We need antibiotics. We’re willing to trade for any you have. Unless they’re…” His words faltered as Willis started shaking his head. He wasn’t the only one either. Half the people shook theirs while the other half looked glum.

  “Everett Baron and eight of his boys took all the pills and medicine we had and ran away, the damned cowards!” Willis cried, his voice rising so that his words echoed. This brief explosion of sound took the last of his energy and he sagged against a brace holding up one of the shelves.

  “And do you know where they are now?” Stu asked. “We can pay you something. Jenn, can I have one of the jars of that vinegar?” She had brought six of them to trade, though she had secretly hoped it wouldn’t come down to it. Each jar had taken days of work on her part. Still, she didn’t hesitate.

  She stepped forward and handed the man the jar. “It’s my own recipe. It’s really good with venison.”

  “We don’t have any venison,” he answered, clearly hoping to be offered some.

  “Neither do we,” she shot back. “Now tell us where this Baron guy is.”

  He held up the jar to the feeble light and squinted at it. Next, he unscrewed the lid and stuck a finger in it and tasted it. A look of disgust passed over Jenn’s face. There was no taking the jar back after that. Fortunately, his brows shot upwards and he dipped the diseased finger a second time.

  “Well?” Stu demanded, pulling Jenn back.

  Willis lifted a shoulder as he screwed the lid back on. “I don’t know. They took everything a week back and straight-up disappeared. If I knew where they went, I would have gone after them myself.”

  Jenn started sputtering angrily. Mike spoke over her, asking, “A week ago? Interesting timing. Where do you meet the traders?”

  “Out front, but the traders are two days late.”

  “And where do they come from?” Mike asked. “Which direction? I-5 or 80?” The man nodded at the latter. “That’s where these guys are. Somewhere along I-80. When do the traders usually show up?”

  Willis’ glistening brows came down. “It’s always high noon. But, but if you find them, you can’t have our stuff. You can’t have it.” He took a dangerous step forward.

  Stu pulled Jenn back behind him, saying, “We don’t want all your stuff, just the antibiotics, but if we can get a fair price for the rest, I promise we’ll come back and work something out.”

  “What’s there to work out?” someone called out from the crowd. “They crossed the line. Kill them and we’ll give you half.”

  “He meant a quarter,” Willis added, quickly. “Don’t listen to him, he’s got the delirium going.”

  Stu shared a surprised look with William before saying, “We’re here to trade. We’re not mercenaries. But like I said, we’ll do what we can.” The crowd buzzed with whispers as the four hurried back out into the snowy evening where the wind drove the flakes sideways.

  “I feel disgusting,” Jenn said, pulling off her scarf and tossing it into the water. She contemplated throwing her gloves in as well, then decided to keep them on a little longer. Almost immediately a crow flew across the canal. She waited for a second—she hoped for a second. When it came to counting crows, one crow was bad luck, two was good luck, three meant health, four told of wealth, five meant sickness and six meant a death was coming. Six in a row was the ultimate; death came quickly.

  “We aren’t going to fight anyone, are we?” she asked, getting into the boat last.

  Mike and William had been looking off in the direction the crow had taken. Mike crossed himself, which had Stu rolling his eyes. “I hope not,” Stu said as he and William began to paddle. “Getting mixed up in another group’s affairs is a sure-fire way to start trouble. I say we let them work it out. We have our mission.”

  “But it would be the right thing to do,” Mike said. “You saw how many people were sick back there. Hundreds. We should help.”

  Stu pulled his oar out of the water and the Puffer drifted, gradually losing headway. “We’ll see,” was all he would commit to. He and William went back to heaving on the oars. They didn’t have to heave far before they came to a long, narrow lake on their left.

  They pulled the Puffer ashore at the north end of it and crept up the embankment, each of them clutching their crossbows. “Anyone have a map?” Stu asked, an embarrassed note to his voice. No one did. “Damn. I’ve never explored Sacramento and I don’t know where I-80 is.”

  “Me neither,” William said. “We always just stuck to the canal when we come up here. It’s poor form to scavenge in someone else’s backyard.”

  They were surrounded by industrial facilities which had only one redeeming quality: there were plenty of big rigs and it was a guarantee that most would have maps in their glove compartments. Stu climbed up into one and searched around for all of three seconds before he pulled out a folded map.

  “How’s this for a sign?” he asked, grinning. “I-80 is right on the other side of this building.” He gestured with the map at a low rectangle of a structure that was such a drab shade of grey that the driving snow improved its appearance. Once more he studied the map. “If I had to guess, I’d bet that Everett and his friends are shacking up someplace right up the road waiting on the traders.”

  Right up the road turned out to be a five-mile walk in the wet snow. Soaked and shivering, they stopped after a few miles as they came to a dreary farm house set a little ways off the highway. It would have been miraculous if the home hadn’t been ransacked and, as expected, it was a terrific mess. The four didn’t care as long as the place was zombie-free and relatively dry.

  With the others hiding behind an old Ford pickup, Stu went to front door and listened for a minute while snow built up on his shoulders. “Hey!” he called out softly through the crack of the door. When that didn’t elicit a response, he called louder, “Wake up! Anyone home?”

  Nothing budged inside, so the four trooped in. “Mike and I will get a fire going, William will get the windows covered. Jenn, if you will find us some warm clothes that would be great.”

  She went to the bedrooms and poked around in open drawers and in closets. Without any light, it was impossible to read sizes and so she used herself as a measuring stick—and stick she was. Everything she found seemed not just tall but shockingly wide. She found a dress that could have been stitched into a sleeping bag for two. On the nightstand was a belt that, when stretched to the floor, came up to the notch in her throat.

  She had seen such things before and as always, she couldn’t help but wonder at the wealth of food that had to have existed back in the past. How had they had so much? Where did it all come from? Supposedly, back in the past there had been uncountable numbers of people, like sand on the beach, and yet they had all been, not just fed, but fed to such an extent that everyone had to worry about overeating.

  Overeating was a concept that boggled her mind. And overeating as a bad thing made no sense at all. If there was still food around like she saw in her magazines, what they called “feasts” she would happily accept round cheeks and a little bulge of a belly.

  Sighing, she tossed aside the belt. The men didn’t have an ounce of body fat on them and the belt would have to loop twice around their thin hips to work. A length of rope would work better.

  Embarrassingly enough, the only things that came close to fitting her were found in a ten-year-old boy’s room. It was embarrassing but she
was too cold to care. Stripping down to nothing, she put on layers of clothing: two pairs of socks, thin pajama bottoms that she wore under jeans that were too wide around the waist and too short at the ankle, and finally, a t-shirt, a turtleneck and a hoodie. In the boy’s closet she found a winter coat that had a grey cast to it from layers of dust.

  Warmer now, she went on but didn’t find anything that would fit the three men. Their only choice was the triple-extra large clothes that had belonged to the man of the house. She piled pants and shirts, socks and underwear in her arms and came back to the living room where a fire was burning.

  “Hey little boy, what did you do with Jenn?” William joked at the sight of her, He elbowed Mike who kept a very neutral face.

  “Ha-ha,” Jenn said. “Let’s see how you like your clothes.” If anything, the three looked even more ridiculous. They used appliance cords to cinch the ballooning pants around their waists, while they wrapped duct tape around their ankles to keep the cloth from swishing as they walked. The over-large shirts made them look as though they were boys themselves, ones wearing “Daddy’s” clothes.

  Stu allowed them to rest and warm up for only an hour. They fed pieces of a broken kitchen chair into the fire and nibbled on smoked cod that they heated up on the ends of straightened coat hangers.

  Jenn found a stack of magazines. The ones on top she had seen before and in deference to the next person to come by she set them aside. Beneath were some from 2012 and earlier. She poked through them, staring at the beautiful people. Although there was an abundance of food, the people in the magazines were always tall and thin. “I think we’re shrinking,” she said, suddenly. “I mean as a group. You never see people who look like this.” She showed them the picture of a runway model.

  William, the tallest at just about six feet, nodded. “When I was a kid, they used to say the Chinese were short but they were getting bigger because their diet was getting better.” He was twenty-five and knew a lot about things from before.

  Jenn didn’t even know what he meant by Chinese, exactly. They were a people, like the Islanders were a people, but what characteristics they had, she didn’t know. She had seen Asian people, but assumed that they were separate from Chinese people.

  Now, she had to wonder if she was part Chinese. She didn’t ask, however. William was a nice enough guy, but he tended to make rude comments and then exclaim, “I’m kidding.”

  “Did you see those kids back there?” Mike asked. “What was the deal with their legs? They looked like they had been broken and not set properly.”

  “They’ve been like that since I first went on a trade mission,” William said. “It’s some sort of disease and it’s getting worse.”

  After seeing the horrors in the warehouse, Jenn didn’t want to go back, and she was sure her desire for traveling was good and dead. She tried to take her mind off the odd bowlegged children by going back to her magazines. For the most part it was all the same and somewhat depressing. She then turned to a picture of a true monster and a gasp escaped her.

  The picture was of a tyrannosaurus rex standing in between two cars and letting out a roar. She tried to read the caption however there were too many words that didn’t make sense, tyrannosaurus rex being two of them, Jurassic being another. “Are these real?” she asked.

  “They were,” Stu answered, standing and stretching. “It was a long, long time ago. Okay, everyone, I think it’s time we got moving.”

  Jenn quickly pulled the page from the magazine and stuck it away with the other pictures she had collected. In her mind a long, long time ago included the day her mother died. Thirty minutes later, she was still fretting about running into a tyrannosaurus rex when she caught the scent of a wood fire and cooking meat.

  She wasn’t the only one. All three men smelled the fire, as did ten or eleven zombies. They were milling around in the dark in confused circles. Strong smells got the dead excited and perhaps more hungry than usual, but with their limited brain capacity, they couldn’t orient on the smell. They tried, however. Even with the snow blinding them, they searched for the fire.

  “What do we do?” William asked, fumbling his M4 from his back, fear stamped on his face. He was an Islander. Severe weather kept them huddling indoors and it was rare they left their island at night. He was holding the rifle with fingers that looked like the long legs of an albino spider.

  “No guns,” Stu said. “They’ll only attract more of them. No, we keep quiet, we keep low and slow. We move from cover to cover. If we get spotted, I’ll attract them to me. Only run if you have to and if you do run, always run for cover and always make quick cuts. But don’t worry, it’ll be fine.”

  It didn’t sound fine and Jenn was very worried. The flying crow haunted her; every time she closed her eyes it was there, winging silently by. It was the only omen she had seen. Something bad was going to happen, she could feel it in her cold bones. She wanted to suggest going back to the house or maybe all the way back to the boat, but before she could open her mouth, Stu was slipping away into the snow.

  He headed across six lanes of highway where wrecks and stalled-out cars littered the landscape and in between them giant shadows roamed. At first the dead were easy to dodge, their moans giving them away, but as they closed in on the smell of the fire, the zombies grew more excited and would suddenly lurch along faster, going in random directions.

  Stu moved in quick dashes with everyone hurrying after. He went from car to car as if they were little islands of safety or base in a child’s game of tag. But there was little safety to be found anywhere that night. Twice they were nearly run over by charging zombies and they only escaped being mauled because the zombies were nearly blinded by the snow and couldn’t tell what was what even from five feet away.

  It seemed like forever that they were out in the open where death was a second away, but somehow Stu got them to the relative safety of a little community. It had a high fence that couldn’t be climbed. They slunk along it until they found a gully that had been dug by long-ago rains. They crawled through the gully on their bellies.

  “We’re close,” Stu whispered. The smell of the fire was heavier now. They started south, but after a block the smell seemed to fade. Sounding like bloodhounds trying to sneak up on their quarry, the four sniffed their way back the way they had come. After crossing though a few yards, climbing a smaller fence and hiding while three immense creatures lumbered by, they soon were huddled on the porch of a two-story home, eager to get inside, eager for the warmth of the fire they could hear snapping and crackling on the other side of the door. Jenn was particularly eager. She couldn’t feel her fingers and her feet were like bricks strapped to her ankles.

  Stu knocked softly on the door. He heard what sounded like a panicked scramble from inside as Everett and his friends grabbed their weapons. Then only silence. Stu cleared his throat. “We’re from the Bay Area and looking to trade,” he whispered. “We have bullets, grape seed oil, cocoa powder, fresh oregano, smoked salmon, and infused vinegar. We’re looking for medicine.”

  A spear of light shone out from one window. Stu faced the light, holding up his empty hands; his crossbow sat against the door.

  The light blinked out of existence. “I don’t know ‘em,” they heard from inside. “There’s three of them and a girl.”

  Jenn was too grounded in reality to be insulted, she knew her sex and her size made them more likely to view her and the group as less dangerous and if that got them inside then she wouldn’t say boo about it.

  The door opened and a scruffy, scarred face peeked out at them. The man wasn’t sick which was an immediate relief. He gave them each a quick once-over before saying, “Come in, Islanders. Come in. How did you find us? Was it Willis? If so, I wouldn’t believe the lies he spun if I were you. He’s a self-serving little git.”

  They were ushered into a little open area just inside the door. To their right was a sitting room that was covered in sleeping bags and backpacks. A small fire was
crackling in the fireplace. To their immediate left was a staircase which curled up the wall to the second floor. A little ahead was a formal dining room that was covered in splinters and spears of wood. Everett and his men were getting their wood from in there and there wasn’t much left.

  Jenn had expected to find nine of them in total, however there were only seven and two were sweating through their shirts. The other five, Everett included, had a hungry, feral look that she didn’t trust. Neither did the others; they kept their crossbows ready.

  “What went on between you and Willis isn’t our concern,” Stu said. “We’re here to trade and we heard you had medicine. We need antibiotics.”

  “Well damn,” Everett said, turning. Now, with the fire behind him, he was only a shadow of a man, his features hidden. He brought a hand to his face and scratched at the scruff growing there, saying, “That’s the only kinda medicine we don’t have. You can blame Willis for that. He tried to treat that TB crap with antibiotics and it didn’t work, but he kept going and going. It’s why we left. He was wasting everything we had.”

  “No antibiotics? None at all?” Stu asked. Everett shook his head.

  “We have other stuff. Do you need insulin? We got lots of that. And we got lots of other pills. Morphine and codeine and tramadol. We got stuff that’ll keep your heart going and, hey Rick, grab the big box. You’ll see we got all sorts of…”

  Stu grimaced, cutting him off. “No. We need antibiotics and nothing else. If you don’t have them we’ll go somewhere else, sorry. Thanks for your time.” Stu turned, as did the others. Jenn was closest to the door and she had it half open when Everett pulled out a big black pistol.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked, in a quiet, deadly voice. “You wanted to make a trade and we’re going to, one way or another. You got stuff we want and…” He lifted a single shoulder. “And you don’t want to die. Sounds like a fair trade to me.”

  Chapter 17