All That I See - 02

by Shane Gregory

  Off to my right, the troop carrier was about to exit the grounds onto a narrow side street. The woman was right on me. I could hear her heavy breathing. I dropped both of the rifles to lighten my load and to hopefully trip her up. They clattered to the ground behind me. The big pistol I had taken from the tank driver earlier was biting into my stomach so I pulled it out of my pants as I ran.

  Her gloved fingers brushed my shirt. I arched my back and screamed. Even if I killed her, there were at least ten more behind her. It was like so many nightmares; I was running but not fast enough. These things didn’t get tired. These things always had plenty of energy. If I couldn’t outlast her, and if I wasn’t faster, then there was no hope.

  There was a boom!, then a sizzling sound, and then the ground heaved up about thirty feet in front of me. The men in the tank were playing with me. I didn’t stop or change direction. I ran through the raining mud and dirt and through the small blast crater. She growled like a cat and brushed my shirt again.

  “Oh, God, please please please….”

  Boom! Sizzle. Then there was a curtain of debris in front of me. I stepped in a hole and went down. I rolled, doing my best to see where she was, but my eyes were full of grit. Then I was on my back, and she was on me. Her foul breath caressed my face. Warm lips pressed against my cheek. Hot, wet tongue slithered along my face.

  “Please no…”

  There were points of pressure then pain as her teeth sank into my jaw. She moaned, and it sounded so much like pleasure. I pulled the trigger on the big pistol. I didn’t even know if it was pointed at her; I just kept shooting over and over. Then her hot, moist breath moved down to my throat.

  Boom! SSSZzzzz…. I opened my eyes. I caught the blurry sight of zombies and pieces of zombies vaulting over me in a cloud of mud and blood and turf. The blast shifted her too, and I was able to push free.

  They were near. I didn’t know how many. I tried to rub my eyes clean. I got to my feet and stumbled sideways. There was a moan to my right, so I turned to avoid it. Something growled in front of me. I spun around. Hands groped me from all sides. I cried and fired the pistol wild until it was empty. I threw the now useless gun toward the moans and pulled the 9mm from its holster. I rubbed my eyes with my free hand and spun around trying to get my bearings.

  All I could see were slack-jawed faces with vacant eyes. My bleary vision made them appear dreamlike. Then I caught sight of the fence; it was close. I lifted the weapon, firing only at the ones between me and my destination. Others grabbed my arms and shoulders from behind, so I was constantly twisting and jerking to stay free from them.

  Boom! SSsszzz…

  To my left, a group of the undead was translated into a spray of meat chunks and gore. I screamed and fired and ran. Then the .50 caliber opened up again. I looked over my shoulder. My view of the tank was blocked by the throng, but just above the thousands of bobbing, swaying heads was a dark red cloud, and it was moving in my direction. It was the bloody mist from hundreds of exploding heads.

  Chng-chng-chng-chng!….

  The cloud got closer….

  Chng-chng-chng-chng!…

  Closer…

  Time seemed to slow to a crawl. The mind does this. I could perceive every minute detail. I could hear my own breath, my own heartbeat.

  Chng!………..chng!…………chng!…

  The cloud was so close…

  I looked over my shoulder again. The skulls of zombies five back burst open…then four back…I felt the blood rain on my face…then….

  It was like somebody hit me with a sledgehammer just above the shoulder blade. I had no balance. I stumbled forward. Then darkness.

  I woke up to moonlight. I was on my side in the mud. There was a body on top of me, but it was completely lifeless. I rolled out from under it and sat up. All around me on the ground were hundreds of corpses. It looked like a battlefield. There were also approximately fifty undead ones too scattered around the cemetery grounds.

  I was wet and sticky with putrid zombie fluids. The meaty part above my left shoulder hurt really badly. I touched it, and it was bloody, but I didn’t know if the blood was mine. I looked around. The zombies that were still “alive” were just walking around and bumping into each other. None of them approached me.

  It was an eerie scene, like something from one of those old scary movies. Beyond them, near the entrance to the grounds, was the tank, its hatch open. It looked dead, like the monuments around me. Except for the occasional lowing from the creatures or barking of a dog, the night was quiet. It was too cool for crickets and frogs.

  I sat still for a long time watching the undead creatures walk around. I was so covered up in gore that I must have smelled like one of them. They had no interest in me. I stood. My 9mm was on the ground next to me. It was empty. Cautiously, I stumbled back to retrieve my rifles. They were farther back than I thought they would be. I looked around for the woman that had attacked me. I thought I might be able to get the pistol in her shoulder holster, but I couldn’t find her, and if she was still walking around, I didn’t want to find her.

  I picked up the rifles. The AR-15 had mud stuck in its barrel. I had no way to clean it, and I didn’t want it slowing me down, so I left it. The hunting rifle I had taken from the men earlier that day was fine and fully loaded.

  I needed to drink something. That bottle of wine was still in the pickup I had abandoned earlier in the day, so I headed in that direction. It was strange to be out on foot after dark. It was even more strange not to get harassed at all. I easily walked out of the cemetery and up the street to the truck.

  When I got there, I climbed in, shut the door, and just sat there and drank the rest of the bottle. I was in a daze. I found it difficult to hold a single thought for very long. When the bottle was dry, I lay over in the seat and slept.

  When I opened my eyes the next morning, the sun was warming my face. I sat up and examined myself in the mirror. The bite on my cheek was swollen and red. My left shoulder was stiff, and I found it difficult to move my left arm. The Kevlar vest had a hole in it near the edge at the top, so I must have been shot, or at least grazed by that .50 caliber. There would be no way to know until I undressed and bathed. I would be doing neither until I got back to the stables. If all of the stink on me was masking my own scent enough to keep the zombies disinterested, then it would stay on me until I got somewhere safe.

  I looked around and checked the mirrors. There were four creatures in the street two blocks behind me, but that was all I saw at the moment. I left the truck again and started walking east. This took me through a couple of lawns, across a street, and into a wheat field. It was winter wheat that had been planted before Canton B had ruined everything. In a few weeks, it would be harvest time. There were fields like it all over the county, and I intended to get as much as I could when the time came.

  Eventually, the field let me out onto the bypass. I got on it and walked south until I got to the intersection where Jen had been shot weeks before. I looked up East Broadway toward downtown Clayfield. There were a lot of bodies littering the street. I wasn’t close enough to actually see into the streets of downtown, but I could see the tops of buildings, and one of them was burning. The dead, undead, and living all seemed intent on destroying the world. There would be no satisfaction for them until I lost everything.

  Chapter 46

  It took me a little over two hours to walk to the stables. I stayed with the roads mostly, but a few times, I cut across pastures or empty fields. I arrived around noon. It was a warm, spring day, and the flies were all over me. I stripped naked in the driveway and left all my clothes there.

  The water tank in the RV was empty, so I heated some water on the range and took a bath in the house. I had to drain and add water to the tub three times before I got all the gunk off me; even then, I couldn’t get the stench out of my nostrils.

  My shoulder just above my left collarbone had been nicked by the .50 caliber. It had cut right through my Ke
vlar vest. I’m amazed I survived at all considering the amount of force of the thing that hit me. There wasn’t really a wound there as much as an ugly bruise. The bite on my cheek didn’t look good, so I started some of the antibiotics I had taken from the hospital. Once I had bathed and dressed in clean clothes, I made myself something to eat. Then I grabbed a bottle from my stores, sat in front of the fireplace, and got good and shitfaced.

  The first big storm of the season rolled through that night. I thought the wind would take the house apart. It made me feel small and lonely. I had never been much of a drinker before, and when I did drink I’d always been a happy drunk, but that night I was a crier. It wasn’t fear that made me cry; it was loss. I was mourning. I still mourn sometimes

  I slept most of the next day. The day after that, I drove the RV into Clayfield to have a look. I wasn’t able to get into the city limits because of the incredible number of infected. I skirted around to the north on the bypass. I couldn’t enter on the north side because the streets were crammed there too. I circled the town to the southwest. There is a water tower on that side of town. I didn’t know where it was exactly, but I could see it sticking up above everything else, so I just kept an eye on it, and eventually found my way.

  I used the RV to force my way through the chain link fence that surrounded the tower. I strapped my other AR-15 to my back, put my binoculars and lunch in my backpack, and started climbing. My shoulder was stiff, but I took it easy; I wasn’t in a rush. From the heavy mesh platform that encircled the huge, bulbous reservoir, I could see all of downtown Clayfield and some of the surrounding area.

  The town was overrun with zombies from Clayfield, Singletree, Riverton, and from southern Illinois. A couple of the buildings near the court square were blackened from fire. The dome on the First Christian Church had a big hole in it, probably from a tank shell. Seeing the church—Sara’s church--just irritated the wound that was Sara’s absence. I lowered the binoculars and let them hang around my neck by the strap. Then I took it all in. I was probably the last healthy person left in Clayfield. I had inherited an entire town. I remembered Sara’s discussion about Yertle the Turtle when she was on that roof.

  “I am the ruler of all that I see,” I whispered. There was nothing gratifying about the statement. It was hollow, pointless. I knew if I stayed in Clayfield by myself my sanity would be tested, but I had to stay for a little while. I needed to be in Clayfield in case Sara came back. I had to act as if she would return. If she did not, then I could assess the situation at a later time. I didn’t know how much later, just later.

  I drove into Clayfield almost every day for the next two weeks. Gradually, the undead dispersed. They were still around; they just weren’t all congregating in downtown Clayfield. Sometimes, I would be out driving and see two or three hundred of them out in an open field or bunched up on a street. I don’t know why they did it. Maybe they heard something and would zone in on that location. Maybe they went there to feed on an animal. Maybe there were healthy people around that I didn’t know about. Later, when I would pass by the same location, they would be gone.

  In the weeks that followed, I spent most of my time at the stables. The garden had to be planted, the cisterns had to be set up to collect rainwater, firewood had to be gathered, and I worked on fortifying the property. I tried to go into Clayfield every couple of days to look around, but my main focus was on making myself a home. It never felt like home, and I never called it that. In my head, it was always the Lassiters’ place. I’d never met them, but it always felt like I was a guest.

  I put up an additional fence across the front of the property. It wasn’t anything fancy—welded wire loosely stretched a few feet out from the board fence secured to T-posts. I could have used barbed wire, but I didn’t see a reason since zombies aren’t really slowed by pain. I put in a gate across the driveway too. Around the rest of the property, I added more welded wire, but I just attached it to the existing fencing.

  I built ladders on the side of the house from the second story windows so I could escape either to the ground or to the roof. I also kept my vehicle parked next to the back door so if I ever needed to get away quickly, I could. I supplied every room in the house and barn with a gun, and every building got a bug-out bag containing at least 24 hours of provisions.

  Having extra cars parked around at strategic locations would have been nice, but collecting vehicles was too much of a hassle for one person, so I didn’t do it. One day, I did drop off a few bicycles around town, but I was never brave enough or desperate enough to use them.

  I planted the garden in the front pasture to the right of the driveway. It was the flattest area, and it got the most sun. It was also a little lower than the house, and I thought I could rig up a gravity-fed irrigation system from one of the cisterns if I needed to.

  I broke up about an acre out there using a tractor with a disc attachment I had taken from one of the local farms. On the day I used the tractor, I set off a car alarm to lure the undead away from my location. A few of them still came in to investigate the noise of the tractor then followed me back over to the farm when I traded the tractor for my truck. I left the tractor running, and they stayed with it.

  The garden was almost too big for me to tend by myself. After that first day, I didn’t use any machinery except basic hand tools like shovel, rake, and hoe. I committed at least a couple of hours every morning to maintaining it but that wasn’t really enough. I tried to be in it longer when I could, but there were so many other things that needed to be done. I never let the weeds take over in there, but the plot was never really clean either.

  The weeds did take over everywhere else. By the middle of May, Clayfield and Grace County looked very differently. Grass in most lawns, including the courthouse lawn, was nearly waist high and some weeds had gotten even taller. The roads felt narrower because of the growth. I drove by the Sons of the Confederacy Cemetery around that time, and I could only see the tallest of the headstones and mausoleums. The grass there was thick and lush, fertilized by hundreds of decomposing corpses.

  The undead didn’t go away. Some of them had wasted away to the point where they could no longer walk, but they didn’t die and were still quite dangerous. One afternoon I came up on one that was on the ground like that in the weeds. It looked like a skeleton with skin stretched over it. I thought it was dead, but it grabbed me when I stepped over it and bit my boot. Most, however, were still up and walking. They were finding nourishment somewhere, probably from livestock. I had noticed a huge reduction in the number of cows.

  The flies were awful everywhere. The vultures, crows, dogs, and coyotes were abundant. I had to be extra careful when I was out on foot, because I never knew what predators would be lurking in the tall grass.

  I planted my sweet potatoes the last week of May. Those shriveled potatoes Jen, Sara, and I had collected from Wal-Mart back in late winter had produced thirty-three slips and would continue to produce them so long as I kept them watered. I broke off the short, leafy vines and stuck them in the ground. I had grown sweets before in my tiny garden on 17 Street. The slips would wilt for a day or so, but I knew they would recover. Soon they would spread, and their leaves would help shade the ground and smother the weeds, making my job a little easier.

  No matter how hard I worked and distracted myself, my thoughts were never far from Sara and the Somervilles. Some days, I would get an overwhelming urge to drive into Clayfield to see if they had returned; and almost every evening, I would go to the end of the driveway and look down the road hoping to see them coming.

  The water tower became a regular stop for me when I drove into town. I climbed up there at least once a week. I never saw any indication that other healthy people were still around. Every time I looked out from that tower, I hoped to see smoke from a cooking fire or a car driving on one of the streets, but I was all that was left. I was never comfortable with that thought, but I did grow comfortable with the idea that Clayfield was mine. I was the
king of all that I saw. I had earned it.

  End of Book Two

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46