by Karpa, Boris
They were standing in front of a three-story building, its sides blazing in orange and blue. The first story was decorated with countless drawings – from crude initials to swear words and to elaborate paintings and portraits.
“Arrived where?” – Arthur asked.
“City Hall. They insist on calling it that. Didn't I tell you? I have an appointment with the Mayor.”
12:45
Mayor Theodore Jackson was an imposing man. It was not even his clothing – an olive-green suit that looked like a military uniform of some country too backwards to implement camouflage, nor his stern face and the short beard that seemed to merge with the dreadlocks of hair. He looked like a serious-minded version of Bob Marley – and was gifted with a deep bass voice. It was no doubt the voice that had given him this important air – and no doubt helped him ascend to his position, Arthur guessed.
His office was set up to resemble a stereotypical bureaucrat's office – a computer, some papers arranged in stacks on his desk. Behind him was a flag – a wide orange and wide blue stripe, the flag of the Florentine Republic – and several portraits of people Martin didn't know.
“Hello, Theodore.” – Martin spoke.
“Hello Martin. I've heard you've come here with an apprentice and a refugee.”
“This here is the apprentice. His name is Arthur Campbell and he's an excellent kid. Soon he'll be doing my job better than I do it.”
“Pleased to meet you, Arthur.” – the Mayor got up, smiling as he shook Arthur's hand.
“Pleased to meet you, Sir.”
“My name is Theodore , as you well know. I have a name, and, just like you, I prefer to be known by my name. “
"I see... Theodore. Sir." – Arthur stammered. There was something about the Mayor that made him instinctively address the man in the most respectful way possible – something none of the people at Serenity Bay had ever evoked in him, for all the authority that they wielded.
"Please, take a seat." – the Mayor waved his hands expansively. Martin took his place directly opposite the Mayor at his large desk, while Arthur sat down in the corner of the office. His friend, he knew, was about to talk business.
"Well, Theodore." – Martin said – "I have found the things you wanted me to find."
"Oh? That's pleasant news." – the Mayor smiled. – "Where would they be?"
"You've asked me to find you a secure place where there aren't many ghouls and you can get tractors. I found a farm, fifty miles out of town, where they had two tractors and enough diesel fuel to last them a year stored in long-term storage. You'd have to use it up quickly – but it's plenty of fuel."
"Good."
"I found the medicines you asked me for too. I've already handed them to the doctors. I am sure Amanda will tell you that I've got the right stuff."
"Oh, I am sure you did, Martin. I've known you long enough to know you're neither stupid nor dishonest enough to try to pull a fast one on me."
"That's right."
"Which brings us to the topic of this conversation – because I know you and I know you think you've saved the most important thing for the very end."
"I think? I have."
"What you think is important and what actually is Important sometimes quite different."
"Stop the word games, Theodore. I have found one of the old Army dry storage facilities. More, I know how to get there and get the stuff out."
"A... dry storage facility?" – the Mayor's eyes went wide. I think Martin did get it in one. This is important, Arthur thought to himself.
"What's a dry storage facility?" – Arthur blurted out, and blushed.
Both men glanced at him, and then the mayor explained. Unlike Martin, he clearly wasn't averse to doing some talking.
- "A dry storage facility is a sort of Army base where weapons and equipment are kept for emergencies. Tanks, guns, even planes – but more to the point, ammunition, uniforms, and supplies. There are supposed to be enough weapons for every able-bodied man and woman in the country to grab one if an invasion begins. Of course, they weren't able to get to most of this in time. To my knowledge, every dry storage facility in the country was overrun in the very first days. They tried to use them to protect refugees – and of course some of the refugees were already infected. Today they're just full of ghouls. Which makes them worthless."
- "Worthless?" – Arthur asked. If they are worthless, how come he's so excited to hear about them?
- "You'd lose more people going room to room fighting with the ghouls to justify anything you could get out of there – and you couldn't get out much while fighting a horde of ghouls. And your friend Martin knows that. Which is why I know what he's about to say next."
- "This one isn't overrun. Or rather, it's overrun, but they're not in the base."
- "I'm going to enjoy this tale, I expect." – Mayor replied. – "Please, Martin, tell us about this base that's overrun but not overrun. And don't talk like every word costs you money."
Martin sighed. – "Very well. The doors and gates of the base are locked. There are ghouls all around – perhaps there were refugees there that expected people to let them in, and then the usual happened."
In this context, the usual meant only one thing – panic, stampedes, and eventually, ghouls, biting and gnawing on anybody they could get to. The Army would start firing into the crowd. Men would crawl on the ground, trampled by others like themselves, panicking and stepping on their friends to get to safety.
- "What about the people inside the base?" – Theodore Jackson did not seem as enthusiastic as Martin – "What happened to them?"
"A good question. I visited the place several times scouting – took a look at it with binoculars a few hundred yards away, figured out some approach paths. I've never seen a person, living or undead, within the fence.”
“And how many of these shamblers do you think there are?” – the Mayor continued.
“I believe there are several thousand of them.” – Martin looked in Jackson's eyes as he said that, his voice calm like the voice of a man delivering a financial report.
“Several thousand?” – the Mayor's eye went wide – “I hope you have a very good plan.”
“I have an excellent plan.” – Martin replied. – “The shamblers may be scary, but they're stupid. We're going to distract them.”
For a moment, the Mayor just stared blankly across the desk. – “How are you going to distract thousands of shamblers?”
“I am not going to do any such thing.”
“But you just said...”
“I said we will distract them. Your men will of course do the distracting. You will deploy a team of men who will distract the shamblers – rifle fire, noisemakers, you know the drill. They will start pulling away – enough to give me and Arthur, and perhaps half a dozen people who are handy with trucks, time to get to the gates.”
“And what will you do once you reach the gates?”
“It's a dry storage facility. All the warehouses are tagged. We go to where the guns are and get some serious hardware. Or we climb the guard towers. There are machine guns there, of course. We catch the shamblers between the hammer and the anvil. Then we win.”
“Do you know how many dumb holes there are in your plan?” – the Mayor looked at Martin with wide eyes. – “Do you have some perspective about how many different things can go wrong?”
“Please go ahead.” – Martin replied in a mocking tone. – “Name a few.”
“Well let's start with the whole idea of distracting several thousand undead. You're never going to be able to distract them all. You'll need to be fighting them off while you open the gate.”
“Or drive my car through it. Or back up to it with a truck and cut the lock from the inside. There won't be that many, and your boys will be giving me fire support no doubt.”
�
�� “What if we mess it up royally and they run us off?” – the Mayor smirked.
“You won't.”
“You never know. These things happen even to the best of people. I can tell you some stories from my Army days you wouldn't believe. The best-trained, most professional men will mess up spectacularly on some occasions, and you know it quite well.”
“Even if you do. I'll get on a guard tower and have a machine gun. I'll be able to snipe ghouls until I get bored, and so will anybody who gets there with me. We'll just sit up there until you come up with a rescue plan.”
“What if I won't? What if I'm killed on the retreat? Martin, you could get killed doing this. And so can anybody who comes with you on this... mission.”
Martin turned towards his apprentice, still seated in the corner of the room. – “And you, Arthur? Would you come with me on this... mission?” – he paused before the word 'mission', mocking the Mayor's words.
Arthur nodded. – “Yes. I know you and I know you wouldn't just ride into the viper pit without a plan to come out.”
“You see, Theodore? I've already found me my first volunteer.”
“Martin, this does not mean anything. Just the fact one young man agreed with you on this mission doesn't enable you to tell me where to go – and more importantly, it doesn't enable you to force me to accept your proposal. It's honorable and good that your friend is willing to risk his life for you – the world would be a sad place if we did not agree to risk our lives for our friends – but that isn't yet a basis on which I can send a hundred, perhaps two hundred of young men to war -even if they are volunteers. Hell, I'm not even sure why you are going. I didn't take you for the type for meaningless heroics.”
“There's nothing meaningless in this. You're going to pay me. And with the supplies you capture – you will be able to clear out the city.”
“Excuse me? What?” – Theodore Jackson stared at Martin as if he had just drawn a pair of horn and a tail.
“I believe I've said it right the first time. You will have the guns and supplies to recapture the city. Shoot the shamblers. Retake the main power plant. Put the lights back on and have a decent place for your children to grow up in.”
“Wow.” – the Mayor breathed out – “You really are insane. And I don't mean some complimentary 'you're the good sort of crazy' crap, I mean, you are fully and seriously and certifiably insane.”
“Why? What makes me insane? Just because I...”
“Because I neither have the manpower to clear the city from the shamblers, nor do I see the need to.”
“What do you mean you don't see the need to? Do you like to see people living in tents like they do? Do you like not having enough medicine? Not having civilization?”
“That's not how it works and you know it.” – the Mayor replied.
“How does it work, then?”
“We are clawing the city back – house by house. It's hard, and we lose people. But we do it carefully and we measure our resources.”
“Theodore. Have you looked at a calendar lately?”
“What?”
“Theodore, this whole mess started in early March. Today is September 18th. How long do you think will it be before winter starts? How many houses can you “claw back” when scrounging ammunition by the case? How many of these people out there are going to still be in tents when winter really sets in? How many of them will freeze to death?”
“We both know you can winter in tents. But that's not even the point.”
“How is that not the point?” – Martin blurted out, leaping up from his chair – “Yes, you can potentially winter in a tent if you're a trained hardcore super-commando. We also both know that not everybody will make it to spring. You'll be scooping out dead people out of these tents every morning. You know that, and I know that. You're not dumb enough to believe that, Ted. If you were that dumb, you wouldn't have made it this far.”
“That doesn't matter, Martin. That simply doesn't matter. Sit down, and I will explain.”
“That better be good.” – Martin said as he returned to his seat.
“We have been friends long before this whole thing started, Martin. We've been friends for years, and this is why I am explaining to you this simple thing. We are not the only survivors, you know. We're not even the biggest. We keep hearing through the grapevine about actual serious groups of survivors – dozens of thousands. Entire Army brigades. In other countries there are even bigger groups. On the long-range radio, I heard that a Russian General named Tozky is in control of a slice of land in Eastern Europe.”
“And you believe that?”
“I don't know if it is true. But that doesn't matter. I'm not arguing that any one given rumor is true. Certainly I doubt the rumors of General Tozky – but the point is, there are survivor units. They're going to push back against the ghouls. They have better guns than we do, better organization. They'll clean the ghouls right out. I don't want to lose good men doing what these people should, and will, do anyway.” – the Mayor concluded.
“Theodore, how long do you expect to wait?”
“A month or two.”
“Right. And you know what?” – Martin stood up again, pacing the room – “Do you know why you will likely still be waiting here next spring? Those of you that make it, of course.”
“Why?” – the Mayor inquired. He seemed to be less certain now.
- "All over the world, there are tiny outposts, caves, villages, towns – Florentine Republics all of their own, each huddling in the darkness, waiting for someone to come to restore civilization. The Army. The Navy. The traffic police. And you know what? They will not come. They will never come, because we're sitting here waiting for them. And we – you and your men – will lose more and more men, because you just kept waiting for someone to come instead of fighting for what's yours. From cold, from starvation, from whatever comes – simply from the civilization they grew up depending on no longer being there for them."
- "That hardly makes any sense," – said the Mayor – "They won't come before we are waiting for them? What kind of argument is that?"
Martin paced the office, seething with rage. – "They will not come, because we are them. You know who joined the armies, and patrolled the roads, and drove the ambulances back in the day, Mayor Konechny? I'll tell you whom. People like you and me. You were a soldier back in the day, and I was a teacher. People make civilizations happen, every day, by their own hard work. You want civilization? Get out there and start making it happen."
- "And how do you propose we do that?" – the Mayor looked curiously at the advisor as he walked from one wall of the room to another in wide, confident steps. – "There are, in your own words, near a hundred thousand ghouls there."
- "Once we get in there, there could just as well be one ghoul. We get in there, and they are completely toast. All we'll need to do is stack them."
- "It's getting in there that's going to be the difficult part. It's not hard for me to imagine what I will do with the dry storage warehouses." – the Mayor smiled broadly – "In the same way as it's not hard for me to imagine what I would do with King Solomon's mines. It's just that I can't get to King Solomon's mines."
- "We need a hundred people, and we need time to prepare."
- "A hundred?" – the Mayor raised an eyebrow.
- "You can send more if you would like." – Martin looked entirely unperturbed. – "Choose volunteers first. Men and women without families. Priority for men, of course – a single man and ten women can repopulate whatever you need repopulated."
- "And you are suggesting I would give up this many working men?"
- "And more. You will give me men who can drive cars and tractors. I will need at least a dozen such people. The rest – I do not care who they are. They can be rejects for all I care. Troublemakers. We both know you have those."
Th
e Mayor looked at the man standing in front of him, examining him closely. – "You are less crazy than you first seemed. I bet you even know where to get tractors for that plan of yours."
- "A farm supply company on the outskirts of the town. Anybody who can drive a tractor can figure out a combine real quick if they need to."
- "I really like how your mind works, Martin Schmitt. You might win me over yet," – the Mayor answered.
- "Have you ever heard about the American mastodon mass graves, Mayor?" – the advisor replied.
- "I'm not even certain I know what a mastodon is. What on earth do they have to do with this plan of yours?"
- "Mastodons were the relatives of the wooly mammoth. Don't ask me exactly how they were related. The thing is, around the middle of the previous century, researchers started finding these giant piles of mastodon bones around the Northern United States and parts of Canada. At first they thought the animals just died a natural death. Soon, however, two things disrupted that theory. First of all, the bones were all found in such a way as to suggest the animals died about the same time. And the second – the bones had been chipped, carrying the marks of teeth – and knives."
- "I still don't get it."
- "The mastodon didn't just go extinct. They were hunted to extinction, on purpose – not even so much killed for food – a tribe of early humans couldn't eat so much meat at once, and they couldn't have preserved it. Our ancestors – sickly, illiterate primitives, standing a foot lower than you and me, armed with spears and rocks – hunted entire herds of prehistoric giant elephants over the frozen plains, and they did it because they thought it'd be fun. And not only that they didn't die doing it – they enjoyed it so much they did it over and over again, until the very last mastodon was dead. Several of the species of Paleolithic megafauna went out that way – our ancestors killed them because they thought it would be fun to herd them into tight, confined spaces and then kill every last one – and they did."
- "And you are suggesting we should do the same thing with these... zombies?" – the Mayor asked.
