by Jake Bible
“Sound off,” Stanford pants, his empty M-4 dangling in his hand. “DTB?”
“Lang!”
“Horton!”
“Schuemaker!”
“Which one?”
“Both!”
“Leister!”
There’s silence.
“Shep?” Stanford asks, looking around. “Shep?”
“Yeah,” Shep says, walking up to the group. “Here.”
In his arms is a girl, maybe ten or eleven, her belly split open and blood streaming from her clothes. Shep sets her down by the other fallen crazies.
“They aren’t all the same,” he says. “These are just meat. They aren’t trained like the others.” He rolls the girl over and lifts the back of her shirt. No markings. “Just a cult following the real Code Monkeys. Meant to slow us down, but probably not expected to kill us.”
“Shit,” Val says, looking north. “Then the real threat is almost to the Stronghold.”
***
The cramps finally stop as he gets to the first checkpoint at the outer perimeter of the Stronghold. Still a ways from the massive wall that truly secures the settlement, Carlyle is happy to know his journey is almost at an end, at least.
Scotty Kurowski, pissed off he has perimeter duty five days in a row, watches the man stumble towards him, his skin red and cracked, lips split, eyes wild with fatigue. Foam coats the edges of the man’s mouth, and Scotty’s first thought is that he’s watching one strange looking Z come at him. Then he sees who it is and hurries forward, catching Carlyle as he collapses, keeping him from cracking his head open on the pavement.
“Fucking A, Carlyle,” Scotty says. “What the fuck happened to you?”
Near delirious with dehydration and his muscles, starved of oxygen, going into painful spasms that make the earlier cramps feel like tickles, Carlyle struggles to speak.
“Zs,” he croaks, barely audible above the wind that never stops whipping off the Plains and up the mountain. “Zs…herd…huge.”
Scotty looks at the trolley jocks a few yards down from him. He had wondered why the uphill line wasn’t moving while the downhill line continued to send reclaims and other passengers down the Turnpike.
“Hey!” Scotty yells. “Fogherty!”
One of the uphill line jocks turns and gives him a bored look.
“What, Kurowski?” Fogherty asks. “What the fuck, man? Who you hugging?”
“It’s Carlyle, dildo!” Scotty yells. “Hustle you ass up to the wall and let them know we’ve got a herd coming!”
“A what?”
“A fucking herd!” Scotty shouts.
“A herd?” Fogherty asks, moving from his station and walking towards Scotty. “We’d know if a herd was coming. Someone would have sent a trolley up, man. Do you see a trolley coming up the hill?”
“No,” Scotty says. “And you don’t find that weird? The salvage from the reclaims should have been sent back by now. But no salvage. And no Teams, either.”
“Teams are down for the week,” Fogherty says as he stands over Scotty and Carlyle. “I’m just glad for a break, man. Weather’s nice. No Zs bugging us. Life is good, bro.”
“Monkeys,” Carlyle whispers.
“Huh?” Scotty asks, unsure of what the man has said. “Did you say monkeys?”
“Blind,” Carlyle whispers. “Blind monkeys.”
Fogherty holds his hands up and walks back to his station. “Fucker lost his mind,” he says. “Runners are a crazy fucking bunch, man. Who volunteers to fucking sprint up and down the mountain? Or sprint run from pyre to pyre in the fucking wasteland? Old bastard didn’t drink enough water and fried his brain. He’s yours to deal with.”
“Asshole,” Scotty says, squatting and getting Carlyle situated in his arms before standing up. “I’m taking him inside. I’ll send someone else down to watch the checkpoint.”
“Dude,” Fogherty says. “It’s your ass. You leave your post, you’ll be on shitter detail for a month, and I heard that Collin Baptiste works the shitters now. Fuck that crazy asshole. Or, if you’re lucky, you’ll just get thrown in the jail with no one to keep you company other than Sheriff Marsh.”
“Just keep your eyes open, will ya?” Scotty says. “If there is a herd, you better be ready to sound the alarm.”
“Tell ya what,” Fogherty says. “I’ll hitch a ride down to the next switching station, how’s that? I see this mystical monkey herd the old guy is yammering about and I’ll come let everyone know.”
“Fuck you, Fogherty,” Scotty says as he walks away, Carlyle heavy in his arms.
Fogherty watches Scotty walk off and shrugs. The other uphill line jock looks over at him then at the downhill line.
“You going down there?” he asks.
“What? Are you nuts?” Fogherty replies, closing his eyes and lifting his face to the sun. “Why ruin a perfectly good day by riding down with a bunch of sweaty reclaims? I’m not wasting time on a hallucination some old Runner has because he forgot his water bottle and salt tablets. Fuck. That. Shit.”
***
Scotty quickly attracts attention. Any man would when walking up from the perimeter carrying a body. The majority of houses around him are empty, but a few aren’t and the occupants start coming out to see what’s going on.
“Who is that?”
“What’s up, Scotty?”
“Is he dead?”
“Is that Carlyle?”
“He’s dead, isn’t he? Poor guy.”
“If anyone wants to help instead of jabber at me, that would be great,” Scotty says. His arms are already beginning to ache and he’s only a third of the way to the wall and main gate.
“Here ya go, brother,” an older man says as he pushes a wheelbarrow from around the side of a house. “This’ll help.”
Scotty carefully places Carlyle into the wheelbarrow and grabs the handles.
“You want me to take him?” the man asks.
“No, I got it,” Scotty says. He looks over his shoulder at the checkpoint down the road. He’s certainly worried about getting put on shitter duty, but he can’t risk the old Runner being right. What if there is a herd coming? “Listen, you all should come with me. Get your neighbors, anyone still home, and have them get to the wall and inside the gate.”
There are gasps and scared whispers.
“What’s going on?” the man asks. “Zs? Crazies?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Scotty says. “But before he passed out Carlyle said there was a herd coming.”
“You don’t look so sure,” the man says, his hands on his hips. “What ya holding back?”
Those that live outside the wall and main gate are the citizens that would rather not be directly under the thumb of Team command and the Mayor’s office. Not that they think they have a better way of running things, just that they don’t like being watched and prefer to run themselves. That ingrained suspicion instantly grows strong as they all look at Scotty’s puzzled face.
“It’s nothing,” Scotty says. “Just better to be safe.”
“Ain’t telling no one nothing,” the man says. “Spill it, Scotty Kurowski. I knew your mother when she was still wearing diapers, so don’t act like you’re better than me.”
“I’m not,” Scotty says, thinking the day just keeps getting shittier and shittier. “It’s just…”
They all watch him. He debates, seriously debates saying anything. If he does, they’ll probably react like Fogherty. But since they already suspect something, and he can’t lie worth a shit, Scotty takes a deep breath and goes for it.
“Monkeys,” Scotty says quietly.
“What was that, brother?” the one man asks.
“Monkeys,” Scotty states louder. “He said there was a huge Z herd coming. Then he said something about monkeys.”
The crowd all looks at him, then slowly start to smile. Snickers and giggles bubble to the surface and soon the crowd is laughing full out.
“Monkeys?” the man asks,
his face suddenly very serious. “Did you say Monkeys?”
Scotty hears the difference in the man’s voice when he says the word. An emphasis there matches Carlyle’s urgency.
“Uh, yeah,” Scotty says. “He whispered monkeys.”
The man turns on the crowd, his face red with rage and sweat slicked with fear. “GO!” he roars. The force of his words makes a few stumble back. “Get your family! Tell everyone! This ain’t a laughing matter no more! GO!”
He whirls on Scotty and grabs onto the wheelbarrow.
“I’ll bring the old Runner,” the man says, nodding up the road. “You run your ass off, Scotty Kurowski! You run and warn everyone! But mostly you find Commander Lee! You hear? You tell her that death is coming! DEATH IS COMING!”
Never having felt fear like the fear he feels at this very minute, Scotty doesn’t know whether to start running or start pissing. But he pulls himself together, turns and sprints up the road, leaving the panicked crowd behind him.
***
“You hear that?” Fogherty’s co-jock asks. “What is that? Crows?”
“Nah,” Fogherty says. “Sounds like a bunch of girls playing.”
“Hey,” one of the downhill jocks says, watching the line stutter and stop. “Something’s wrong with the trolley. One of you guys want to hike down and check it out? You ain’t doing anything else productive.”
“Fuck you, Price,” Fogherty says, flipping the man the bird.
Price just smiles and points downhill.
“Fuck,” Fogherty says. “I’ll fucking go.” He looks at his fellow uphill line jock. “I’ll just keep walking and grab a trolley up. Be ready, okay?”
“Whatever,” the jock says as Fogherty turns and starts hiking.
He goes a quarter mile before the road curves around a hill. It took tricky engineering to get the lines to stay secure and keep from getting tangled on the curves, engineering that Fogherty doesn’t understand. Sure, he can repair lines just like any jock, but the science behind how they work is beyond him. He spends most of his hike cursing the engineers, thinking it’s their fault that the trolley has stopped and the line gone slack.
But as he keeps going, what his pal thought were crows and he thought were girls playing (which is probably the most stupid assumption in the history of the zombie apocalypse), turns out to be people trapped in a trolley surrounded by the first wave of the Z herd.
Fogherty, never having gone down the mountain ever in his life, is stunned by what he sees. He’s only lived life in or near the security of the Stronghold. The last herd that made it up the mountain was when he was three and he spent the whole time deep behind the Stronghold wall, huddled in a closet, wrapped in his grandmother’s arms.
So it takes his brain a second to process the nightmare just down from him.
“Oh, fuck,” he whispers then turns and starts running back up the hill. His thought of using a trolley is forgotten as the screams behind him get louder and several Zs catch sight of the meal that is running away. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.”
As his legs tire quickly on the uphill slope, he wishes he could take back every negative thing he said about the old Runner. Wishes he wasn’t such a lazy fuck and maybe exercised more instead of just sitting at a switching station running nothing but his mouth.
***
The sentries at the main gate of the Stronghold, while not Team Mates, take their jobs just as seriously. They don’t question the honesty of Scotty’s words, they don’t wonder what he means by “monkeys” and they certainly don’t laugh when he says he is supposed to tell Commander Lee that death is coming.
One turns and hurries through the gate while the other grabs a thick rope and starts to clang a massive bell set just inside the gate. Soon, up and down the Stronghold other bells answer the call, filling the air with alarms that send everyone into action or running for safety.
“Let’s get you to the Mayor,” the sentry says as half a dozen more come to the gate to take his place.
“No, no,” Scotty says. “I need to see Lee. I have to find Commander Lee.”
“Protocol is to alert the Mayor first,” the sentry says.
“Fuck protocol, man,” Scotty snaps. “Mr. Helliger says I need to find Lee first. That guy has been around, man.”
The sentry looks out the gate then nods, knowing the reputation of the old man that lives by himself outside the wall.
“Fine,” the sentry says. “I’ll get the Mayor while you go to Lee.”
People are streaming towards the gates with rifles, carbines, shotguns in hand. Ladders are thrown up against the wall and folks start climbing up to the platform close to the top that spans the entire length. Scotty notices that most of the people that have come running are older than his parents; veterans of the last time the Stronghold was attacked.
“Come on,” the sentry says to Scotty. “Move ass, Kurowski.”
“Jesus, that’s what I’ve been doing,” Scotty gasps as he fills his lungs with air and starts on another sprint, this time to find Commander Lee.
Chapter Nine- Gauntlet
“This isn’t going to work,” Cole says to Stanford, as he studies the two trolley lines. “One goes up and the other goes down.”
“Are you retarded?” Val asks. “They both go up and they both go down. That’s how empty trolleys get up the mountain and empty trolleys go down the mountain. The weight of one pulls the other and vice versa.”
“With the help of counterweights and the pulley system,” Stanford says. “We each get in a trolley, DTA there and DTB here, we free the cables and off we go.”
“And off we go,” Cole smirks. “Just like that.”
“Can I have a quick word with you, TL Wright?” Stanford asks, gesturing off away from the Teams.
“Whatever,” Cole says.
“That’s my line,” Benji grins, ignoring the look of death Cole shoots his way. “Oh, be nice and stop being such a grump.”
“I like you,” Diaz says, looking at the others. “I like him. What’s your name?”
“Benji. Why, you looking for date later if we don’t die horrible, awful deaths?”
“Hey, you never know,” Diaz grins. “You ever had a Cancun Threesome?”
“Never had the pleasure,” Benji replies. “What’s that?”
“Let’s just say there’s cactus involved,” Diaz nods.
“Really?” Alastair asks. “How does that work?”
“Guys,” Val says. “Shut the fuck up.”
Stanford has Cole by the elbow and refuses to let go.
“You need to man up, Cole,” Stanford says. “Stop pouting that DTA voted their own TL in. That’s their prerogative. That’s how DTA works. The other Teams play it by the numbers, but DTA is DTA. If they don’t want you, then all the bitching you do won’t change that.”
“But Val?” Cole snaps. “I could see Diaz or even Tiny D, but Val? She’s a rookie! Never held a TL post even in the other Teams!”
“Yeah, well neither have I,” Stanford says. “And my Team is running like a well oiled machine. And still alive.”
“Fuck you, Ford,” Cole says, getting right in Stanford’s face. “You have no idea what went down in Sector One. Don’t you fucking put that on me! Don’t you fucking dare!”
“Calm down, man. We’re all friends here,” Stanford says, “I’m sorry. That was a cheap shot. I apologize, okay? But you have to get it together. We need you to get it together. Cool?”
Cole’s eyes narrow and Stanford isn’t quite sure what’s going to happen next. He almost flinches when Cole grunts and nods his head.
“Cool,” Cole says. “I’ll let it go, but if we live, then Commander Lee decides who takes over DTA, not those guys.”
“My mother is going to have to decide a lot,” Stanford says. “Since most of the Mates are dead.”
“Right, yeah,” Cole says, nodding. “Sorry. Every person counts.”
“We always remember,” Stanford replies. Then
he claps his hands together and turns to the Teams. “Who’s ready to go for a ride?”
***
Val looks through the bars of the trolley cage over at Stanford and DTB in the other trolley. He gives her a wide grin and a thumbs up.
“This was your idea, remember?” Stanford yells.
“Yeah, I know,” she yells back. “Not sure it was the best idea!”
“No one has a better idea,” Stanford says. “You ready?”
“No!” Val replies.
“Tough shit!” He looks at his Team. “You all set, my dears?”
“No,” Shep says. “Not if you’re going to call us your dears.”
“Got it,” Stanford smiles and reaches through the back bars, down to the cable coupling at the rear of the trolley.
His eyes follow the cable to the set of switch pulleys a few feet away. Then he looks over at Val who is mirroring his actions with her hand out the back of that trolley and resting on the coupling there.
“One,” Stanford says.
“Two,” Val says.
“Three,” they say together and yank the large steel pins free from the coupling.
The cables from the back of the trolleys go flying downhill, hit the switch pulleys, scream through those, and come loose with a whine of metal on metal. They all watch the cables shoot past them back uphill out of sight.
“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Alastair says.
“Just wait for it,” Val says. “And keep hanging on.”
“TL,” Tommy Bombs says as Stanford grabs on to the bars. “I don’t think it’s going to do what you think it’s going to-”
The trolleys lurch then are yanked up the mountain, the force strong enough that if the Mates weren’t holding on they would all be mashed up against the back bars.
Scrub brush and pine trees whiz past the trolleys as the cages gain speed, going considerably faster than they were intended. The cables on the front of each trolley hum with tension and Stanford wonders if maybe physics might not be on their side. He knew the trick would work and the counter weights, plus the opposite trolleys which are screaming down the mountain towards them, would send their trolleys flying uphill.
