“What was?”
“Righteous Rick. It’s what they called me back in ‘Nam.”
I looked over at him in surprise. I had known Rick for quite a while now and thought I knew him pretty good. “I never knew that.”
“I never told anyone. You should have seen me back then. Young, fit, handsome, full of piss and vinegar.” He took a large swallow and handed it to me. I shrugged and took a very small swallow. It was strong and burned the throat going down. Just what both of us needed.
“Why not?” I asked.
“I didn’t want anyone calling me that again on account of I got some poor kid killed.” He shook his head in frustration. “I’ve tried for years, but I just can’t seem to remember his name. You see, I couldn’t get to him in time and he stepped on a booby trap. It took him a few minutes to bleed out. He died in agony, screaming for his mother and wanting to go home, and there was nothing I could do.” He looked over. “That’s how I got hit in my leg. When the booby trap exploded, I caught some shrapnel. It might have been okay, but infection set in and caused a lot of nerve damage. I got a purple heart and sent home because of it.” He took a long swallow. “You see, according to the therapist over at the VA I have a lot of what you call survivor’s guilt in addition to PTSD. So, when I got back home I didn’t tell anyone my nickname. If everyone went around calling me Righteous Rick, all I’d ever be doing was thinking about ‘Nam and the kid whose name I can’t remember dying in my arms. I’m fucked up enough as it is.”
“Well I don’t think you’re fucked up. You knew this zombie shit was going to happen and you planned for it. You got us to where we are today. We’re going to survive this because of your foresight.”
“Yeah, but without any pussy.” It was a crass statement but I started laughing anyway. Soon both of us were in stitches. It was a good stress reliever. The dogs looked at us like we were crazy.
Instead of going to my bed, I climbed up on the couch and pulled a quilt over me. I wanted to be near Rick and talk with him. Curly jumped up beside me and made himself comfortable. “Don’t forget to soak your dentures.”
“Right.” Rick unsteadily stood up. “I’ll do it right now.” He came back a minute later and turned the lantern out. The fire was now our only light source.
“Where do you think they’re going to go?” I asked.
Rick grunted. “Don’t know and don’t care.”
“If they’re smart, they’ll park under an overpass or find a secure building for the night. The snow is really coming down hard. The streets will be pretty slick.”
“You’re worried about them.” Rick said.
“Yeah, I guess so.” I said. Rick grunted again. “I know what you’re thinking and I agree. They were up to no good, and good riddance to them. I can’t help but think Janet was behind it all. What a psycho bitch!”
“You got that right brother.” Rick said. I heard him taking slow sips from his bottle. He was going to finish it off before he would be able to sleep without the nightmares. “Zach, I’m glad we’re friends.” He said quietly.
“Me too buddy. You may not realize it, but you saved my life. I don’t think I’ve thanked you properly. By the way, Merry Christmas.”
Rick chuckled. “Hell, I’d forgotten what day it was. Merry Christmas to you too kid. Oh wait, I’ve got your Christmas present.” Rick delivered a long, noxious fart. It sounded like a hippopotamus dying. Moe took offense and snorted.
In spite of the fetid odor, I laughed. We talked some more before I eventually drifted off to sleep. There was no way of knowing, no indication, no omen, of what was going to happen next. Sometime during the night, Righteous Rick died.
Chapter 15 - A Proper Burial
I shot Rick in the head before breakfast.
It was a no-brainer, no pun intended. When I finally accepted the fact he had died in his sleep, I carried him to the barn and laid him on a tarp. I sat on the cold ground looking at him for at least an hour. I thought of all of the good times I had had with the old man and how much he had taught me.
I did not wonder so much about how he died. Bad heart? Too much whiskey? Lack of pussy? I did not know, and it did not really matter at this point. He was the father figure I never had, a good man. I was going to miss him terribly. He was the last person on Earth who cared about me, and now he too was gone.
He did not turn. His body did not reanimate, nor was there any hint of him becoming a zombie. Nevertheless, I stood, took careful aim, and fired. Rick understood.
I buried him on a small hill overlooking the brook bordering the east side of the farm. Rick had once told me it was an old Indian mound. I had to use the backhoe to break the frozen ground. I buried him deep. The boys watched quietly. Only once did a forlorn whimper come from Moe. I was going to put up a tombstone when I had the chance. After covering him up, I did something I never did. I prayed. I prayed to God that Righteous Rick was finally at peace.
The rest of the day went by in a blur. I went through the motions of the never ending chores. At the end of the day I started the generator and took a long hot shower.
Yeah, I cried a little.
I could not tell you specifically what I did for the next month. I performed chores. I ran for miles at a time. I worked out with an old rusty set of weights. There was an old punching bag hanging in the barn. I would punch it until my fists pulsated in pain and my arms were so fatigued I could not hold them up. I knew I was burning calories, but Rick had stored enough food to keep me fed for years.
Every once in a while I would turn on the Ham radio. I’d capture bits and pieces of someone talking or Morse code, but nothing of consequence. There was one man I spoke to when the atmospheric conditions made for good skip, or radio waves bouncing off of the ionosphere. He lived somewhere on the Cumberland Plateau. He really did not have much to say, just the usual. Zombies everywhere, lots of dead, etc. I never answered anyone else. I did not have it in me to talk to anyone. I just went through the motions. At night I’d sit by the fire and brood. The dogs were my ever present companions. They would try to play with me, but after a while would give up when I did not respond.
Depression had returned with a passion. I really missed the old man. My Grandmother, Felix, Macey, I missed them all. Now, with Rick gone, I found myself asking daily why I should go on.
I had nobody.
One particularly cold evening, I had wrapped myself in a dirty blanket and sat in Rick’s chair. His bottle of whiskey, still half full sat beside it. I opened the top, wiped it off, and then drank until I passed out. I felt like I dreamt of many things, but the only part I remember was a nudge on my shoulder. I dreamt I opened my eyes and Rick was standing there, grinning at me. “Wake up kid.” He said. As I roused from my sleep and everything came into focus, Rick was gone, but the boys were sitting there staring at the spot where I dreamt Rick was standing. Strange.
Yes it was strange. I got up quickly and went through the house, searching every room and closet. Even the root cellar.
Nope, nobody here but yours truly and three stinky dogs. I hustled outside and retrieved some eggs. I checked the barn while I was at it. Empty, except for the calves and their mommas. They had steadily been putting on weight. I had turned them out to pasture a couple of weeks ago, but they’d keep seeking shelter in the barn. I shooed them out again and closed the double door.
The sun probably would not make an appearance today. It was cold and windy. I made a decision as I ate breakfast. It was time to start clearing houses and scrounging for supplies. Rick and I had talked about it, back when he was still alive, and we speculated a zombie’s motor skills would be severely hampered by cold weather. I even made it a rule, even though it was untested. Well today would be a good day to test the theory out. Rick had one of those large thermometers, the kind with a tin frame painted with an advertisement for a soda, nailed to one of the columns on the front porch. It read twenty degrees. Perfect. The decision was made. I’d clear a few houses, scrounge f
or supplies, maybe I would even find some fellow survivors.
I rushed through the morning chores, loaded the truck with equipment, gassed it up, checked the fluid levels, and the tires. When I was satisfied I had thought of everything, I headed out. I took Moe with me. He was some kind of shepherd mix and was a decent watch dog. He only barked when a stranger came near. He would have to be my security monitor while I went through houses and buildings. I put Moe in the truck and got in behind him. “You’re going to have to watch my back Moe, okay?” Moe looked at me then licked me on the face. I interpreted it as a yes.
Rick and I had many discussions about clearing buildings and scavenging. It was going to be an essential element of long term survival. Here is the plan we devised.
First: One should always assume a structure is occupied. Second: If a house appeared to have an alarm system, leave it. Most alarm systems had a battery back, so in theory they could still be activated, even after several months. Noise was bad. Third, if it was obvious the house may be occupied, determine if the occupants were real or infected. If it had real people and they weren’t sociable, back off. Go to another house, or even better, move on to another neighborhood. Rick surprised me with a tidbit of logic. He said, any house occupied by zombies were going to be goldmines of needful things. It made sense I guess. Zombies weren’t going to eat up all of the food, nor would they use toothpaste and toilet paper. Well, I don’t believe infected people bothered with those things, but I couldn’t swear to it.
Since I was going to be doing this solo, I was going to restrict my work to smaller homes or small businesses. Imagine trying to clear out a large office building by yourself. You round a corner only to run into a dozen or so infected secretaries who were fresh out of donuts. Nope, not me. I’d stick to small stuff. Even then I almost screwed the pooch on the very first home I went to.
I started with a quaint community in the southern area of Nashville known as Lennox Village. I turned in and drove up to the front door of the closest one. I sat in my truck for a couple of minutes to see if there was any type of reaction, living or otherwise. There was nothing. Only the ticking sound that a hot car engine makes when you first shut it off, and a couple of noisy birds fighting over a worm or something. I got out and knocked on the first door while giving an innocent salutation.
I said, “Hello? I’m friendly, not looking for trouble, anybody home?” I was just about to make entry when the door suddenly burst open. An older woman, wearing nothing but an untied bathrobe and her hair in those big round curlers, ran out. She was screaming like a banshee. The suddenness of it startled me. Even more unsettling was the visual image of her open robe. I stumbled backward while pointing my handgun at her. She continued screaming while running to God knows where. I watched in rapt befuddlement as she rounded the corner of a townhouse and disappeared.
No. I did not go after her. She had obviously lost her mind, and all of the screaming was going to attract zombies. Or whatever you wanted to call them. I moved on to another subdivision a couple of miles away. As one may expect, I was extra cautious with the first house. There was another old woman in this one as well. She did not run out screaming though, she sat there at her kitchen table looking at me. She was obviously infected, but made no effort to stand or chase me. She merely snarled at me when I entered the kitchen. I dispatched her with a quick headshot and carefully cleared the rest of the house.
I cleared almost twenty houses before noon. I did not run into any other live people, but did encounter eight more zombies of various types. Quite a few homes had stinking, rotting corpses. One house had a family of four that were all infected. I gave the front door a little knock and was shortly rewarded with moaning and scratching on the door. Nice, I thought. I kicked open the door and put three of them down with head shots. I was feeling smug with my skills, until the family’s little girl crawled out from under a bed and tried to bite my ankle. It was a good thing I was wearing heavy boots. If I had my running shoes on, I would have been bitten. I stomped on her head until it made squishing noises and she stopped moving.
After the first hour, and constantly repeating my congenial greeting, I became bored. My salutation soon went from friendly verbiage to, “Any zombie cocksuckers in there?” I guess it was fortunate I did not have any human contact. They would have thought I was the one who was crazy.
Breaking into a residential house was actually quite easy. I had a set of skeleton keys which were used in most residential door locks and used a technique called lock bumping. Rick showed me a video tutorial on the Internet. It only took a couple of minutes and was relatively quiet. If it did not work, I had one of those long pry bars firemen used. It could usually snap the door right open. No wonder there were so many burglaries back in the day. On those occasions where I encountered security doors, I broke out a window. If the windows were barred, I hooked up the winch from the truck and pulled the bars down, or moved on to another home. If I activated an alarm, I moved on to another neighborhood.
After encountering several zombies, I came to realize they were quite predictable. They heard a noise, smelled something, saw movement, they responded to it. They did not sneak up on you or lay in wait to ambush you. They did not have the mental faculties for it. Along the same line of thought, they were incapable of planning or coordinating a mass attack. They merely responded to stimuli and the rest was instinctive. Consequently, they did not seem to need sleep, nor did they feel pain, anguish, or fear. They moaned, wandered aimlessly, bumped into stuff, or sat there and stunk to high heaven until something caused them to act. A zombie form of Weber’s law, if you will.
What did it mean in common terms? Zombies were easy to spot and easy to kill. But, one had to be vigilant, or else you would become zombie food. There was a zombie law in here somewhere. I would have to think on it. Nah, zombies weren’t a problem unless you happened upon a group of them and did not have an escape route or enough ammunition.
Humans, live humans, they were the potential problem. I had no illusions about all humans being good hearted people. Someone might see me and kill me for what I had. Someone might believe I was a threat and shoot me in a perceived act of self-defense. I was hoping my act of announcing my presence before entering someone’s house might negate any hostile act, but hell you just never knew. They might be just like the woman in Lennox Village, crazier than an outhouse rat. Those were the ones that will hide in a closet just waiting to blow your head off. I had to be careful or I’d end up dead.
I took a break and looked over my newly acquired property. The pickings were slim, but not altogether bereft of goodies. I took an inventory with my notepad:
Some gently used clothes that fit me. Fresh bed linens. A set of Ruffoni brand copper cooking pots. Very nice. They would replace the Goodwill rejects that I currently had.
Over a dozen Tupperware bowls. They were one of those items in which you could find a thousand and one uses for. Containers were essential for hunter-gatherer societies. They were like weapons and tools, you could never have enough. A couple of boxes of Kleenex, several half used rolls of toilet paper, and several used tubes of toothpaste.
A box of nine millimeter bullets. I had no nine millimeter guns. Rick hated that size, only women shot nines, he would say. I took them for trade purposes. Some assorted food items, including an unopened bag of coffee beans, four boxes of rice, a dozen boxes of Jell-O, two boxes of powdered milk, and an unopened box of Mexicana Cal which was good for nixtamalization. Several used boxes of laundry detergent. Almost every house had either powdered or liquid in various levels. I guess when people decided to bug out to wherever they were going to, a used container of detergent was useless in their minds. Along that line I also found a few half empty bottles of bleach. Two five gallon gas cans. These I suspect were also going to be a rare find. And finally, I scored a major coup in the last house I checked. Three cases of an expensive brand of dog food! The boys would be happy.
I found many other small items and d
utifully jotted them down on my inventory list. Yeah, I know, I’m the only one around, no need to write out a list that was already in my head, but old habits die hard. I finished the list and reviewed it twice. It was definitely turning out to be a successful day.
I also noted some houses which were closer to Old Hickory Boulevard had already been searched. Several had windows broken out, along with other assorted acts of vandalism. This particular subdivision stopped at a dead end street. Three of the houses at the end had burned. Upon closer inspection, I determined a car had crashed into the front door of one of the houses. I surmised the wreck caused the fire, and it spread to the other houses. I wondered what had happened. Was the driver trying to escape from somebody? Had they been attacked?
I pointed this out to my companion. “We got some survivors out here that aren’t so nice. We’ve got to be careful.” Moe wagged his tail appreciatively. He was a good listener. He never once interrupted me or flipped me the bird. Oh, he occasionally farted, but Rick farted a lot as well, so I was used to it.
I stood and stretched. It was good getting out and moving around. Only now did I realize being cooped up at the farm all by myself was causing me to sink into a deep depression. I needed to get out more often.
Zombie Rules Page 11
