Communication became a tale of a long-forgotten past. Only radios still functioned, but barely so. Not many survivors used them; many did not know how (it figures really, because everyone was so engrossed with catching on with new tech, no one cared to learn about defunct gadgets of the past), many preferred not to communicate with others in an attempt to keep their location secret and many were so far away from each other that the radios were no help. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, and no WhatsApp. All the data centres of the world were either shut down or inhabited by the last remaining humans. Hope, in the true sense of the word, was lost.
*
In the wake of this devastation, one man survived against all odds. In his old life, he had been a sore loser with a torturous past, a deplorable present and a grim future. Liam Otterman was his name. Before the Infliction, as the survivors called it, he was a mechanic at a local garage in the small town of Pennington, California. He was born there, and never in his life, up until the Infliction, did he set a foot out of that town. He had been handed a rough deal. His dad had ditched his mother before he was born; he never learnt his father’s name, and he didn’t care either. His father did not love him enough apparently to be there for his birth and he did not care to stick around, so what was the use of getting to know that man? His mother wasn’t exactly in line for any Mom of the Year awards from the local elementary school groups. She was drunk for most of his childhood, and when she was sober, she’d do coke, smoke pot, or if it was a special day, she’d inject heroin. That was the sort of mother Liam had been living with. He ended up taking care of her more than she took care of him. When she died shortly after his high school graduation, he did not cry. He went to the funeral parlour and booked the cheapest burial: Two hundred dollars for cremating the body and putting the ashes in an urn. If she were alive, she’d snort her own ashes, he had thought and laughed at this hideous idea all the way back home with the urn in his hand.
School hadn’t been his cup of tea. So, after his graduation he took a job as a mechanic’s apprentice in the town’s shady garage. He learnt many things from that shop, little of which pertained to actual mechanics. He learnt to bug up cars, necessitating frequent returns in the months following for these ‘new problems’ to be fixed, thereby creating long-term customers who had no idea that the car was being shitted with by the very mechanics who were posing to fix it.
But that was not the extent of it. When you’re a mechanic in a small town, there’s not much to go around for the thugs and the thieves. A symbiotic relationship developed between Liam’s garage and the thugs. He’d get a little money on the side if he disabled a car’s tracker to make it easier for the crooks to steal it. By definition, it made him a crook too. But when you’re raised by a mother like Liam’s, the line between right and wrong doesn’t exist for the most part. The only thing that he inherited from his mother was the contact information of a dozen drug dealers (seeing as how late in her life she was unable to get the hash and coke for herself, so she made him do her dirty work) and a pound of cocaine. He sold the cocaine. And then he sold some more. There was money in that business. He kept doing it as a way of generating side income. He didn’t even bother to maintain a low profile. It was a wonder he never got arrested.
When the outbreak happened, he was preparing a car for jacking by one of his crook clients. It was a Toyota Pickup. There was nothing special about it. Not yet, at least. A gust of red haze swept across town and kept blowing for the better part of an hour. Later, he would learn that it was an occurrence all around the globe; similar reports came from all the places he had managed to contact; there was a red sandstorm and all those who had been out and about in the open became infected without a moment’s warning) When it eventually died down, Liam went outside to see if everything was okay. It wasn’t. His boss was standing at the garage door, his eyes red, his nose bleeding and his mouth curved in a grimace.
“You alright there Nathaniel?” he’d asked.
Nathaniel looked up at Liam and growled. He then lunged at Liam with the ferocity of a leopard. Reacting purely out of instinct, Liam huddled backwards and sought refuge in the only available place to hide: The Pickup. That was the first time it saved his life. When his boss’s slashing and gnawing at the car’s window did not stop, Liam said ‘fuck it’ and started the car. He slammed it through the garage’s door and zoomed out of there, fearing for his life. The streets were plagued with hundreds of people who looked totally unlike their previous selves. They all attacked his car and tried to jump aboard, and that’s when Liam knew that they were beyond help, every single one of them.
He didn’t even bother going home for shelter or to pick up supplies. He drove the Pickup out of town and never looked back. A few hours after his first faceoff with ‘zombies’, he tuned in the radio and was aghast as the newscaster declared a state of emergency across the States, telling the survivors to lock themselves up in their homes, bolt the doors and cock any weapons they might have.
On that unforgettable day of 15th March, 2020, the zombie apocalypse had begun. Mankind was back on the fucking food chain. It was ironic in every sense that the predators were themselves, former humans.
“Mother of fuck!”
This was Liam’s way of showing that he was shit out of luck. His Toyota Pickup, after serving him valiantly for a year, that much time had passed since the onset of the Infliction, had decided to give out. The engine was not starting, and this wasn’t the first case of it stubbornly refusing to comply either. It had started shutting down more and more often as the mileage climbed. At any other time, Liam would not have minded as much as he did now, stranded in the middle of the road, in broad daylight, in a desolate Arizona town whose name was etched out of existence, with a pocket of three dozen zombies hot on his trail. It wouldn’t exactly be right to call them ‘hot’ on his trail, considering how stupidly slow they were. Think of your best friend on a Friday night after ten shots of Tequila too many. They were walking like that; like drunks who couldn’t walk fast enough to the toilet seat to throw up. They would have been funny had they not been the flesh eating undead fiends that they were, with malice and hunger dripping from their eyes. Mostly hunger.
Liam’s dog, Lady, was a mongrel he’d spotted at the California-Arizona border. Poor thing was surrounded by zombies, and she barked and bared her teeth at them as they approached her. Liam was passing through when he caught sight of the helpless creature. Think I might do some good for a change, he thought and drifted his Pickup, it was his Pickup now, finders-keepers and all that shit, in a semicircle, knocking half the zombies off their feet. He then opened the door of his car and whistled. The dog, taking it to be her cue, jumped in the car. It was one of those serendipitous moments you catch on TV, except this one was real and felt more heart-warming.
He named her Lady, after one of the dire-wolves in Game of Thrones. That show was the bomb, in Liam’s opinion. He’d binged all the seasons numerous times. It was one of the only two shows which he liked. Modern Family, being the other one.
The dog became his friend, his only one, and the two became thick as thieves. Lady had a very uncanny ear for zombies, or perhaps it was her nose that smelled them, because she could sense them from afar. This dexterity of hers had saved Liam’s life many times. Except this wasn’t strictly true. Before she had come into his life, Liam was a lone roamer. He’d taken to his truck like a nomad does to his caravan, and he moved around states looking for food, survivors and shelter. During the first few months, he had come across all three aplenty. And he had also come across zombies. His eyes had seen as hordes of zombies feasted and hunted on human beings as if they were cattle. But surprisingly, none ever came for Liam. This was a miracle for him. If there was a God up above, Liam thought, then He was keeping an eye out for him. Either that or he was unbelievably lucky.
Right now, as Liam tried to start his car, Lady started barking maniacally. The zombies were closing in. They were slow, granted, but they we
re getting close. Liam looked over and saw that singletons, lone zombies wandering about all by themselves, had joined the pocket, swelling their numbers to almost fifty.
“I know, I know, I can outrun those sons of bitches, but Lady, this car has all my stuff in it,” he said to the dog. This soothed her. Him talking to her always did. She calmed her barking to a subtler growling. Liam knew he had a good chance of making it out of town on foot with Lady accompanying him, but this Pickup had all his essentials. Over the better part of the past year, he’d kept busy scrounging cities in passing for weapons, munition, food, water and medicine. Before the Infliction, he didn’t have an opinion on guns. Ban them, regulate them, keep them, trade them, export them to terrorists in the Middle-east, use them as kinky dildos, he didn’t care about any of that. However, holding a nine-millimetre pistol in his hands for the first time felt so right, so true. And when he shot it at the singleton approaching him in the dark alleyway, everything about that bullet whizzing out of the gun, the flash, the recoil, the smoke, the sound, clicked with Liam so synchronously that he immediately felt in love with guns. And his Pickup truck was loaded with them right now: shotguns, submachine guns, pistols, sawed offs, rifles, and even a sniper, which he was sure was a WWII antique. He’d used it only once; for killing a stray gazebo in the California wilderness.
Guns weren’t the only weapons he had in his Pickup: he had a pair of machetes, a katana he took from a pawnshop, a baseball bat with barbed wire all around it, a crowbar, an axe like the ones the Vikings used to have, an axe like the ones the Red Indians used to have, and finally, an assortment of kitchen knives he had picked up at Walmart. You can never be too prepared, he’d said to the dead cashier as he walked out of the store.
It was completely out of the question that he should ditch the pickup. It was also completely out of the question to take on all the zombies. It was unnecessary.
“Alright Lady, you hold on tight in there for a moment, I’m going out,” he said and got out of the car. The zombies were only ten yards away now. He went to the bonnet of the car and checked the engine, in one last attempt to fix whatever the fuck was wrong with the car. The engine looked fine and everything else under the hood looked okay, too. It had to be. The car was practically new when it came to Liam last year.
Oh, fuck me, he swore again in his head as he saw the thing that he had been overlooking all this time. The zombies were now less than two yards away. He could smell their stench of death. It was vile. Like long forgotten vegetables and eggs in a basement after a year. Like dead meat. Like the smell inside a meth lab. Liam looked at the battery and saw that one of the two wires was off the terminal. He quickly put it back and thumped on it to fix it in place. There was no goddamn time to start screwing it with a screwdriver. He closed the bonnet and turned to the car. Lady was barking rabidly. The zombies were intimately close to him now. Their drawling voices and their dank breaths made him woozy. But before any of them could touch him, he opened the door of the car, got in and started the engine. Sound agitated them. When the car vroomed to life, they all maddeningly started attacking the car. One of them, in his frenzy, cracked the window.
“Eat shit motherfuckers!” he said and jabbed the accelerator with all his strength. The car jerked and zoomed off down the road, leaving the zombies behind, crushing the two who had tried to attack from the front.
“It’s okay, Lady, they’re gone now,” he said. The dog looked at him reproachfully, as if reprimanding him for not letting her loose on them. Or maybe it was reprimanding for him having a potty mouth. Dogs are sensitive to that kind of stuff. And Lady was one of the most sensitive critters Liam had ever seen. She’d spot the slightest change in Liam’s mood and behave accordingly. Her previous owner must have been one of those goody-two-shoes-tighty-whitey kind of guys who didn’t curse or swear. Because that was the only thing that Lady disliked: him swearing like a motherfucker.
“So you’re gonna give me a hard time now, Lady? Don’t worry, I don’t kiss my mother with that mouth. She’s long dead anyways,” he said with a dry, mirthless chuckle. Lady gave him a Hmph, smartass look and proceeded to poke her head out of the open window and slobber with her tongue out as the car accelerated down the highway out of town.
They were in completely barren territory now. Zombie apocalypse or not, it was a desert long and that’s what it had been ever since the creation of earth. The Arizona desert. And there was nary a shade in sight nor an oasis nearby. Sand, dusk and dunes were the only things visible other than the bare trail of the road that spread in front of them.
It looked like a carnage had happened here. Cars upon cars were scattered all over the road and the roadsides, like some kid had forgotten to pack his toys away after playing with them. It looked comical, it looked bizarre, but most of all it looked fitting. Like this was supposed to be what a post-apocalyptic world looked like. Cars scattered about the road; dead bodies strewn across the driver’s seats; half eaten faces of the women and children sitting in the back of minivans and pickup trucks like the one Liam was driving; blood splattered all over the roads; the stench of dead flesh heavy in the air and the crows fighting with the vultures in mid-air over rights to the remains. Animals had a way of doing that: despite the ton of dead people speckled everywhere, the birds fought over the carcasses already claimed by another and confirmed as edible. Perhaps they were afraid of the other dead bodies. Afraid that they might not be dead.
Liam skilfully drove his car past all the cars, making sure to avoid hurdles and dead-ends while keeping an eye out for zombies. In areas of dense cover such as this, the zombies hid like guerrilla fighters and leapt out of shadows at the unsuspecting victims, if there were any. Liam was not a deep thinker, but whenever he rode past those cars with dead bodies still sitting inside them, he wondered about who they were, where they’d come from and their thoughts as they departed, those people who’d met their deaths in such an anticlimactic place to die: their car seat.
He crossed the toll plaza and reached the open road where no cars cluttered the space. The pickup truck still had plenty of gas in the fuel tank, so Liam unworriedly zoomed his car on the open road, heading to the south of Arizona.
*
It made sense to go to the southern tip of Arizona. Liam had been quite adamant in keeping his distance from other humans at first, but later, he saw something that made him change his mind. It was an incident that jolted his conscience awake after thirty years of slumber. When shit hit the fan when it did, Liam had decided that he wouldn’t care for other humans. It would now be every man for himself. He had no mother, no father and no sibling to take care of. In his thirty years, he had just two girlfriends: one had ditched him on prom night, breaking his heart and making him hate all womankind with a fierceness that rivalled his hate of Star Wars. He was a Lord of the Rings fan. And it was common knowledge that one hated the other like Cain did Abel. His other girlfriend had been a decent woman save for the fact that she reminded him a lot of his mother. His mother had been a pretty woman back in her day, even with the boozing and the smoking working their destructive wonders on her skin. And when he met this girl, Christy Meyers; a waitress at the diner next to his garage, he couldn’t help but notice that she was everything her mother was not, except for the looks. She was kind, caring, loving and funny. She even made the extra effort to laugh at his desperate attempts at humour. Those were a good five years. Everything was good: the outings, the dating, the sex and even the fights. They somehow managed to kiss and makeup after every single one of them, and she was woman enough to admit when she was wrong, which was not a lot of the time. She managed to revive Liam’s lost faith in womankind with her love and her compassion. All was going well until the day she didn’t turn up for her morning shift at the diner. When Liam dialled her number, it went to voice mail. He was genuinely worried about her. One of the strong aspects of their relationship was their constant communication. Whenever the two of them talked, it was as if they were playing a
game of brain tennis, constantly jabbing good natured fun at each other, riffing off of each other and simply enjoying each other’s reply. A few hours later, after he’d crossed off every possibility from her being abducted by aliens to her being dead in an alley somewhere, he got a call from the hospital. It turned out, his one dreadful thought had come to be. The doctor who had declared her medically dead told a grieving Liam that she had died of blunt force trauma to her whole body. She’d been involved in a car crash.
After that incident, he was never the same. He stopped caring for everything, including himself. And he kept not giving a shit until one day, long after the Infliction had taken place, something dreadful happened right in front of him.
It happened two months ago, and yet the memory still remained as intact, as unforgivingly fresh, as if it had happened yesterday. What can you say, when the clocks stop ticking and the calendars become defunct, everything feels like yesterday; the time when you lost your virginity, the time when you first drove a car, or in Liam’s case, when he first saw a brutal murder occur right before his eyes. He could have helped, but he didn’t. And that’s the part that ate him the most. That’s the part which sent him on this salvaging journey marred with remorse.
He was in Bakersfield, California, lying low and hiding from the horde of zombies prowling the streets. When daylight came, the undead scattered into the shadows. It was another day just like that when he saw, unmistakably, on the outskirts of town, a silhouette of a young boy crouching in the corner of a barn. This was back when Liam was still rather selfish, and seeing the kid by the barn made him think that there his parents ought to be somewhere nearby. This would mean that they would have supplies. They had to have food, water and clothes, and back then, Liam was short on all three. Weapons he had aplenty, and he had straightened his hand on them on many a zombie that came his way. So, he turned the pickup off the road and drove towards the ranch. It was quiet there, too quiet, and there was a gas station next to the ranch. Liam, in his naivety, honked his horn to alert the kid of his arrival.
The Golden Horde and the Zombies (Zombie Conflict Series Book 1) Page 9
