First Time Dead 1

by Chantal Boudreau

  The reply came without hesitation: “It’s delicious.” Tim handed my steel back to me. “You’re on duty tonight. Baines and I’ll be watching. We want to make sure you can handle yourself. Remember, cans mean north and glass means south.” Tim pointed so there was no confusion. “Leave the bodies until light and re-rig the line as soon as you can.”

  * * *

  I sat in the middle of the camp, equal distance from either trip line. Baines and Tim were each at an end of camp watching an approach in case I totally dropped the ball. Perhaps they thought I would fall to my death as I went to meet the threat.

  It was a long night, partly because, although I was surrounded by people, they avoided me. I spotted the other two children running in and out of a shack, one boy and one girl. They would toss small sticks inside the shack, then go inside and throw them back outside. It sounded like they were keeping score, but I couldn’t decipher the rules. They both looked older than the boy with the bad ear who had disappeared.

  I tried to count the camp’s inhabitants, but found it rather difficult. People would move from one fire to another constantly, and from a distance I couldn’t make out much more than silhouettes. I would have sworn there were more than twenty-three of them.

  Breaking glass instantly hushed everyone. As I got up, I was very impressed by the group’s quick reaction. Glass meant south, and I could tell from the direction of the sound that the line for the side I wasn’t on had been tripped. I jumped up on the middle plank to cross to the other side of the overpass and felt it bow a little under my weight. I passed some of the supplies storage and the smaller grouping of hovels; one was actually a canvas tent in pretty decent shape. I saw Tim, mostly hidden, crouched between two of the makeshift structures, his axe laid across his arms, ready to pounce if something happened to me.

  “Hi, Tim,” I called as I ran past.

  The zombie squirmed on the ground and I realized it had tripped at almost the exact spot where I had taken a digger the night before. It had been a woman once. It stood by putting its palms on the pavement and shuffling its feet toward the hands. When it straightened its body, it lost its balance and stumbled, but managed to remain upright.

  I slowed to a trot. It was wearing a faded, torn, and stained argyle sweater and a cross hanging from a thin gold necklace around its neck. I wondered how that happened, like an unbent piece of straw driven through a tree by a tornado. It had shoulder-length hair that may have been blonde once with a few twigs stuck in it. Its face was mostly unmarred and quite clean. What did she do before all this? Librarian? Accountant?

  It finally noticed me and moaned. In stride, I swung my steel from below and hit it under the jaw with the flat side of the hammer/jaws end. The zombie left its feet and fell flat on its back like it slipped on ice. Bits of its tacky blood and flesh rained down on it a moment later. Its jaw was shattered, and it was disoriented; the feet still moving like it was walking. I stood to one side of its head and swung in a high, exaggerated arc, planting the longer jaw right in the middle of its forehead. It stopped moving. Finally dead.

  Her hazel eyes stayed open, looking at me, seeing nothing.

  Tim came up to me as I was working the steel free. Sometimes it gets caught. I put my foot on its face and choked my grip closer to the steel’s head. It popped loose and dripped.

  “How lavish,” he said dryly. “And you didn’t say thunder.”

  I felt a little giddy. “Do I get the job, mister?”

  “Rig the line back up and continue your watch. The night’s not over yet.”

  The night was over. There were no more disturbances. The people in the camp were a little less cold to me. I saw Tim and Baines walking around, no longer watching over my shoulder. I guess I proved myself. I caught the little boy with the bad ear peeking at me again, but he vanished once I took notice of him.

  The cook placed a bowl in my hands and walked away without a word. I tasted it. “It’s delicious,” I said. Someone laughed briefly.

  * * *

  The next day I worked with three others. We limbed dead or felled trees and dragged the trunks back to the overpass. We bucked the trunks, split the logs, and took turns hauling small batches up to the overpass in a heavy-duty canvas tarp using a double pulley system.

  The day after that, I went back and forth to the river filling and hauling a variety of containers on a wagon. The bridge over the river was in awful shape. It looked barely passable, like it survived a botched demolition attempt, probably an effort to keep zombies on one side of the river. Too bad they were already everywhere before the failed endeavor.

  The day after that, I took a dip in the river, set some lines for fish, and then picked mostly corn and soybeans from the farms.

  The day after that, I went back to the forest to check and set some traps. I flung my steel at a rabbit, but just missed it.

  That was the way it went; those were the main jobs the able-bodied rotated. Less fun were jobs like covering the shit piles beneath the toilets with dirt and grass; or body removal which was, thankfully, limited to no more than a few each day. I also took a lot of shifts on night watch and found out that they usually have two people on watch at all times. Most attacks happened at night, although the days were far from quiet. Occasionally, Baines or someone else in camp would share a watch with me, but typically, Tim and I would team up. We would sit on opposite sides of the overpass near enough where we could converse.

  “I miss potato chips,” he said one evening. “A couple years back I was living in a commune in Michigan, even smaller than this one.”

  “Is that where you’re from?”

  “No. No, I’m from New York. Haven’t been back there since before the city was abandoned. But at this commune, there were a dozen of us—give or take. There was this one old lady who liked to make potato chips—what she called potato chips. I don’t know what it was, maybe her potatoes weren’t cut thin enough, or maybe her oil never got hot enough, but her chips were soggy and gross. I mean, all you need to make a fucking potato chip is potatoes, vegetable oil, and salt.”

  “Maybe you remember potato chips differently than they actually were.”

  “I remember them distinctly. I’d pull that bag open and look inside for a whole chip I could pop in my mouth in one bite. Potatoes don’t have much in the way of flavor, but the texture of a fresh, crisp chip and the saltiness and the slight greasiness from the oil…man, that was like perfection. What do you miss?”

  “Nothing,” I told him.

  “Nothing?”

  “Can I tell you the secret to happiness?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “The secret to being happy is not caring about anything. Do what you have to do. Gather food, build a fire, kill a zombie, but beyond that who gives a shit?”

  “You don’t seem happy.”

  “Happier than you are.”

  “Don’t you have a plan? You can’t be pointlessly travelling around.”

  I was facing west. “I’m going that way. I imagine someday I’ll reach PNW if I don’t get killed, but I’m in no hurry.”

  “What’s PNW?”

  “The Pacific Northwest, you know, Washington, Oregon, British Columbia? I figure the climate is good enough. Most of that area is forest, which means fewer people, fewer zombies, and survival will be that much easier. It doesn’t tend to get too cold for too long unless you’re up in the mountains. And the mountains are a perfect refuge from zombies. It’s very rainy, so fresh water won’t be a problem. It’s as close to paradise as I can get.”

  “I never thought I’d hear anyone call Portland a paradise.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “I was in the Army when all this started. We were deployed to Portland to provide disaster relief and humanitarian assistance. It seemed like we had to redraw our defense lines daily. Always fucking back. We weren’t there for more than a month before pulling out for some other soon-to-be overrun urban area. The story was the same everywhere.”


  After a moment, Tim added, “Oh, and it doesn’t rain so much as it mists.”

  Baines walked up to me. I never saw him carrying a weapon. “Quiet night so far.” Overpass small talk. “Listen, you’ve been with us a few weeks now, things are working out pretty good, yes?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “Well, now that you’re really with us, it’s time to let you in on our contingency plan. If we ever lose this overpass, we have a fallback position. There’s another overpass six miles to the west, past the river. There’s nothing there yet; we’d start from scratch.”

  “Good to know.”

  “Yeah. Tomorrow we go to town. Are you in?”

  “Sure.”

  “What about you, Tim?”

  “North or south?”

  “South.”

  “I hate that shitburg.” Tim chewed his lip. “Yeah …fuck it.”

  Cans clinked and clattered on the ground, trouble from the north. “My turn,” I said, already on my feet.

  “Bullshit, it’s my turn,” Tim yelled. We both ran north on the overpass. Once we got clear of the camp, I could see my side was safe. I leapt onto the concrete side guard and jumped down to the other side’s roadway in stride. Tim and I were now neck and neck; I considered tripping him, but assumed he’d fall on his axe and decided to just push him. I shoved at his shoulder and ruined his rhythm, sending him veering off to the left.

  The zombie must not have fallen, because it was already a fair distance past the trip line. Clouds obscured the stars and moon; all I could see was a dark shape, but I clearly heard a gurgling moan.

  “Thunder!” Tim yelled from only a couple steps behind me. I became worried about Tim’s position so close to me and decided to give him this one. I changed direction slightly and slammed my steel’s broadside into the midsection of the zombie, doubling it over as I ran past to safety. I turned just in time to see Tim’s overhead chop split the back of the zombie’s cranium open. It dropped to the road with a squishy thump, limbs bent awkwardly beneath it.

  Tim’s axe was stuck. He muttered numerous permutations of “fuck” as he pried it loose. He looked up at me and smiled, “You fucker.”

  I had to laugh. Thick blood slowly pooled near our feet.

  * * *

  I took up residence in one of the shacks on the shitter side of the overpass. Apparently that was where the outcast—or at least the newer members of the group—were put. I heard the fellow that had my shack before me left one day and didn’t come back until he was a zombie, at which point he was no longer welcome. It wasn’t much, but it was sturdy, roomy enough for an honest-to-goodness twin mattress plus my gear, and the roof didn’t leak...which was good because it was raining.

  “Are we still going into town?” I asked Baines who was looking south through binoculars.

  “No reason not to.” He didn’t stop surveying the distance. “Having second thoughts?”

  “No, I just wanted to know if I should wear my church clothes.” I walked away before he could engage me in that conversation. I found Tim just exiting his shack. He was wearing full rain gear, hood already up.

  “Hey, new guy!”

  “Hey. Where’d you get the sauna suit?”

  “Ha ha. Gander Mountain, back in Illinois. There were dozens on the shelf; I couldn’t believe it. You’re going to need one of these when you get to Oregon.”

  “I doubt it.” I examined him a little closer. “I don’t think that hood’s a good idea. Your peripheries are limited, and with the rain you’re not going to be able to hear so well.”

  “Well, I don’t want crotch rot, so I’ll take the chance. This suit keeps you dry and it breathes. By the way, I heard that’s how this whole zombie thing started: crotch rot.”

  Six of us were going: Baines, Tim, the cook, the woman and the silent man I met upon my arrival—Jess and Charles—and me. Each of us pulled a small wagon.

  Baines explained during the trek how they were searching the town. “After you’re done taking what you’re taking from a building, mark on the front door if anything useful is left inside: X for nothing, T for tools, F for food, C for clothes, M for medicine, V for anything else that doesn’t fit in the other categories. Here’s our wish list.” He handed out black markers and small pieces of paper with the scrawling script of a doctor: bullets, Playboys (I assumed this was a generic term for any skin mag), food, nails/screws, rope, fuel, alcohol, pills…

  As soon as the town was in view we had to put down a couple zombies that came out of an overgrown field. Through the rain and haze I could see a few zombies stumbling around the town’s main street. “Second thoughts?” I muttered to Baines.

  “It’ll be okay,” Baines reassured us all. “Just make sure when we leave, none follow us. Split up. Take an unsearched house. Fill your wagon. Try to stay out of sight as much as possible. Put ‘em down quiet.” Baines didn’t wait for responses; he began walking east to enter town from a side. “Meet back here,” he called over his shoulder.

  Tim and I circled west together. The river, or a branch of it, curved eastward south of the overpass. The western edge of the town was built close to it and the ground was considerably sloppier.

  “Shit! I knew I should have worn my galoshes,” Tim whined. We quietly agreed to split up when we reached a peaceful side road.

  I passed a couple houses with marked front doors before arriving at a small stone cottage-style house with no door markings. The cottage was set back a ways from the street, and there were green, leafy vines growing up one side of the house that had begun to encroach on the front. The windows were intact and the door was closed.

  I peered through the large picture window in the front and saw a mess of upturned furniture, scattered and broken décor, and no bodies—prone or otherwise. The door was unlocked. I shut it behind me and, from my position in the living room, took note of the heavy, moldy smell and the sound of rain dripping somewhere deeper inside. I began a quick search to ensure I was alone. At the back of the living room was a short hallway leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom on the left and the kitchen on the right. A third bedroom was set directly off the kitchen, and opposite that, a small entryway led to the basement and the back yard. The main floor was clear. I wedged a chair under the doorknob to the back entryway and began the search for supplies.

  The house appeared to have already been hastily picked over. I scavenged a couple mold-free blankets, but that was about it. The source of the leak was in the biggest bedroom. Most of the ceiling had fallen in, and water was readily dripping from a small hole in the roof to the bedroom’s badly warped floor. I stood on the bed and jumped a couple times to get a look into the tall attic. I saw a number of boxes that didn’t look like they’d been disturbed. The attic access was in the hallway; I used another kitchen chair to stand on, pushed aside the access panel with my steel, and pulled myself up.

  I plopped down with my feet dangling out the attic hatch. The body laying four feet from me scared a small, girl-like shriek from me even though I almost immediately recognized the body as dead-dead. The bullet wound that removed a large chunk of the back of his skull was undeniable proof. He stank, but not as badly as I would have guessed. He must have been at peace for quite some time.

  Miscellaneous supplies, cans and boxes of food, and numerous candles told me this guy had been staying in the attic for weeks, maybe months. A knotted rope lying beside him betrayed his secretive method of attic comings and goings. His pistol was still clutched in his left hand. I smiled when I identified it as an M9A1, the same model as mine, Marine Corps issue 9mm. The bite taken from his forearm explained the suicide.

  I began to sweat bullets from the attic’s high humidity as my eyes seized on five boxes of 9mm ammu-nition and three extra magazines. I licked sweat off my upper lip and collected several cans of food, two dozen MREs, half a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon, one partial and five full boxes of ammo (277 bullets), the three fully loaded mags, and one M9A1 in despera
te need of cleaning.

  I loaded those goods into a duffel and quietly placed them in the wagon outside while smacking myself in the head for not bringing my own pistol. I wouldn’t chance the weapon from the attic before it was cleaned, but I trusted the ammunition.

  The glass-blocked windows let in little light that only cast murky shadows into the basement. The open staircase groaned as I descended it. I expected dead hands to shoot out from between the stair treads and grab my ankles. Low hanging pipes and the large, sooty furnace in the middle of the floor obstructed my view. The air was refreshing: cooler and drier. I walked softly and listened hard but couldn’t hear anything beyond the dripping on the floor above my head and my own heart beating so forcefully it made my chest ache.

  The basement was a bust for zombies and useful supplies. I hauled ass upstairs—two at a time—the sixth stair split under my weight. My left leg went through; I grabbed onto the railing with my right hand and tried to find purchase with my right foot. With my perch stable, I pulled my left leg free and climbed up to the landing carefully. I had deep, bloody scratches embedded with splinters on both sides of my calf. I gritted my teeth and pulled out the largest pieces. I smacked myself in the head for being a moron.

  My leg ached, but I was able to put weight on it and walk with a slight limp. I drew a big X on the front door and pulled my wagon behind me down the street. The rainfall had intensified and I was feeling miserable. Visibility was down to less than a block. I longed for rain gear instead of the thoroughly soaked long sleeve t-shirt and freshly torn cargo pants I wore.

  I spotted Tim coming out of a ranch house a short way up the street. He wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings. I approached him as he was marking the door; his axe was just out of reach, leaning against the house’s siding. “What’s the ‘F’ stand for?”

  “Fu-uck!”

  “Not food?”