DEAD_Snapshot_Book 5_Estacada, Oregon

by TW Brown

  The men looked around to each other and Ken waved a dismissive hand. “That was rhetorical.” He winced inwardly when a few of them looked even more confused by that word. “The thing is, we are going to have to do more than just hit the couple of stores in the area. We will need to do house searches and I think it would be a good idea to bring in the families that have the larger farms. I think everybody is going to need to plant. Luckily, I believe most of the home improvement stores had their spring displays up with all kinds of seeds and fertilizer.”

  “What about a few of us setting up on the river?” Colton offered. “We could fish without worrying about limits. Hell, we could net.”

  “Actually, that is a good idea, but I was thinking that it would be more productive if we sent a team to the Bonneville Dam. The steelhead are huge, and no worries about game wardens. I think we save our local river for a last resort,” Ken countered.

  He didn’t miss the look on Colton’s face. The man had obviously wanted to stay close to home. His instability was a problem, but Ken couldn’t worry about that at the moment. He needed to try and get ahead of the game. That meant hitting the areas where people had abandoned their homes and scavenging anything and everything.

  He was about to ask for team leaders to volunteer for the various scavenging teams when the door opened and Patrick Lake walked in. The man was flanked by two men Ken knew by sight but not by name.

  “Is this a private meeting or can anybody attend?” the man said with his usual arrogance.

  “If you’re here to cause trouble, then no…you can’t attend.”

  Ken had opened his mouth to respond, but Sean beat him to the punch. Ken flashed a glance at the mayor and had to work hard in order to keep the surprise from his expression. Disaster apparently made for strange bedfellows.

  At first, it looked as if Patrick was going to argue. The man’s neck reddened, and the color was creeping up like a thermometer, but he clamped his mouth shut, gave a curt nod, and took a seat in one of the nearby booths.

  “So, we should decide who will lead each team,” Ken continued. “We have the fishing run to the dam, house-to-house raids…I would suggest going over to Sandy and hitting some of those pre-fab neighborhoods. And then we need a team to head the runs to Home Depot and maybe even the Lowe’s as well as the Safeway and Fred Meyer stores.”

  “What about some of the restaurants?” Patrick Lake spoke up.

  Ken’s first internal reaction was to discount or blow the man off, but he quickly realized that was a good idea. “You want to head that up?”

  Patrick looked over at Ken with surprise clearly etched in his face. Ken couldn’t begrudge him that, he’d been prepared to discount anything the man said. However, this was an idea with merit. Perhaps some of the mayor was rubbing off on him, he thought.

  “Sure.” Patrick gave a nod and then looked around the room. “I would probably need four or five guys?”

  “If you have some in mind, then get them rounded up, otherwise we will pull men from the pool,” Ken replied.

  Colton and Sean had sent several people door-to-door to get volunteers for what, at the time, were being referred to as “vital community tasks” and managed to obtain over a hundred names. Ken had already handpicked the group he was bringing along with him.

  “I think I can get a few guys together,” Patrick said.

  Ken wasn’t sure, but it almost sounded like he was getting his nasty attitude back. He decided to see if he could push the man’s buttons. It wasn’t that he wanted to force the guy to be a total ass, but he also needed to confirm the man’s sincerity.

  “You know to bring everything back to the market. We will be storing all goods there, inventorying them, and then distributing them evenly with the people,” Ken said with as little inflection as he could muster.

  To his credit, Patrick simply gave a nod. “Makes sense.”

  That seemed to be the signal that the meeting was over. Several of the men gathered together with the list and began selecting their teams. Ken went out to his truck and made his rounds to the group of men he’d selected. Most of them were what could be referred to as “old timers”. Not one of them lacked at least a few gray hairs. Most were a few pounds too heavy, and all of them had been hunting since before most of the people in town had been alive.

  Once he had them all together, he eyed the nine men and gave a slight nod of approval. All of them had been told what their mission was to be and not one had so much as batted an eye.

  “We making any attempt to bring in survivors?” Dusty McCovey asked as he loaded rounds into his once illegally modified AR-15’s magazines.

  “It is not a priority,” Ken answered. “However, I’m not against it.”

  “So we are worried about food, but we’re bringing in more mouths to feed?” Harold Loutan snorted.

  “We have a responsibility to be good citizens,” Sean Drinkwine spoke up.

  “Maybe a few weeks ago you could sell me on that load of happy crappy,” Harold deadpanned. “But, from what I’ve been gathering, we’re trying to ensure this community’s survival. That don’t have nothin’ to do with bringing in strangers.”

  “Maybe not,” Sean said with a shrug, “but we are still not going to turn people away. That just isn’t how things are gonna work.”

  Ken sensed an argument and spoke up. “We ain’t lookin’, but we also ain’t gonna leave some poor soul to them things if it doesn’t put any of us in danger.”

  That seemed to be good enough for all concerned. Ten minutes later, his team were headed back to the Fred Meyer where Chad Lake and his pals had made their own ill-fated run.

  Pulling in to the parking lot, he was surprised to see it almost completely empty. They had decided this run called for the big trucks they’d liberated from the warehouse so he turned in and led the team around back to the loading bay area. Again it was empty. Nothing moved.

  Turning off the vehicle, he climbed out and was greeted by an odd silence that he realized was now probably going to be the norm. He’d never realized the amount of constant background noise that existed in the “normal” world. This was unsettling, but it was something he knew he would probably be able to get used to.

  One by one, four more big trucks did their own little ballet as they maneuvered around until everybody was backed in. Once that was done, all the cargo doors on the trailers were opened and then the men walked up to the one bay door that had been ajar during his last visit. Ken remembered that it was this open door that zombies had been pouring through just a couple of days ago. He still wasn’t sure what brought them in numbers like what they’d ended up encountering.

  As they walked inside, all the men flipped on their head-mounted flashlights. He’d insisted on those, and most of the guys had one for various reasons.

  They had not gone far when they came to the scene of the fight. Corpses littered the ground and hordes of flies buzzed around the rotting bodies.

  “Damn,” one of the men gasped. “You sure we gonna be okay taking food out of this place?”

  “We’ll be fine,” Ken assured.

  He quickly began pointing out cases, boxes, and pallets stacked with goods. It took them just a few minutes and then hand-trucks were being wheeled about and out the open cargo bay.

  One man had been stationed on the platform of the loading bay to keep a lookout, but time rolled by without a single zombie stumbling up to them. It was almost an hour into the job when the man who’d been on watch motioned Ken over.

  “Yeah?” Ken asked as he wiped the sweat from his face with a handkerchief from his back pocket.

  “There’s a zombie over on the other side of the car,” the man whispered, pointing to a vehicle parked at the far end of the back alley that ran along behind the store.

  Ken shaded his eyes from the sun and looked. At first, he didn’t see anything. Then a little bit of movement got his attention and he spotted what the man had been pointing at.

  It was a ch
ild. Ken guessed it to be no more than ten years old. It was also very obvious that the child was one of the undead. There was a dark stain all down its front from where most of its throat had been ripped out.

  It made him wince as he tried to put himself in the shoes of a child experiencing all of this madness. It was difficult to accept as an adult, but for a child, this had to be infinitely worse. How many children had been told that monsters were not real? The monster under the bed was just a shadow made by a tennis shoe that hadn’t been put away?

  And now, monsters walked the streets. Even worse, they wore the faces of close friends and loved ones. Sure, they looked different with the bluish color and the eyes. The faces wore slack, emotionless expressions that altered the appearance even more. Yet, to a child, that was mom…dad…brother…sister. Those were people that were supposed to mean safety and security.

  Had this child gotten his throat ripped out by a friend or family member? How had his mind processed those final minutes?

  Ken shook his head to clear it. Deep thinking was not something he did on a regular basis if it didn’t revolve around the brewery.

  “Okay, it doesn’t seem to be coming for us,” Ken finally said.

  “Yeah…but why not?” the man asked.

  Ken opened his mouth and then realized that he didn’t have an answer. Why wasn’t it coming for them?

  “I don’t know. Maybe he thinks you’re scary,” Ken laughed, but it was only half-hearted.

  Returning inside, Ken resumed stacking, loading and transferring pallets of food to the open cargo areas of the trucks. He’d been at it again for another hour maybe when his name was called from outside once again.

  “Look,” he began, not doing a good job of hiding his irritation, “this better be important. We need to get this done before…”

  His words died on his tongue as his gaze swept over toward where that child had been. It was still there. If that was all, then he would be handing out one of his famous ass chewings. However, there were now five children between the ages of perhaps five up to the one he’d guessed to be ten. They were just standing there…watching. None of them were making any attempt to come at them.

  Now it was more than just an odd instance. This was something else. The problem was that Ken was not in any way able to come up with even the most basic excuse for this behavior.

  He’d already made his mind up that these things were no longer human. They were the dead come back. Whatever had once been the person was gone. That made killing them simple for him. He didn’t have to think any more than he would if he were hunting…fishing…or even just doing some target practice. You couldn’t kill something that was already dead. Hell, he was convinced that putting these things down was a mercy!

  These children were acting like…well…children. They seemed tentative. Maybe even scared? But that couldn’t be. Could it?

  “How long have they been just standing there?” Ken asked.

  “Those others just showed up,” was the answer.

  “If any more just show up…come get me.”

  Ken spun on his heel and hurried back to help resume the loading. He hadn’t been back at it for more than a few minutes when a loud banging sounded and the alarm was called.

  Rushing out, he had to take a few seconds to make sense of what he was seeing. One of the children, a little girl that might be six or seven, had moved over to an abandoned car and was hitting the hood with a rock. None of the other children had moved but rounding the corner at the far end of the alley that ran along the back of the store were a few zombies. A least it started as just a few, but in just the span of only a couple of heartbeats, more were coming.

  “What the…” Sean and the others had come with all the noise being made.

  “Time to go,” Ken said as he turned to face the others.

  “How the hell did this happen?” one of the men snapped. “I thought Terry was supposed to be watching.”

  “I was. And I even called Ken when a few of them kids showed up. But they wasn’t moving. They were just standing there until a minute ago,” Terry practically whined. “Then that little girl just walked over to that car and started pounding. That brought all them other sumbitches.”

  Terry Kroger was rail thin with a nose shot full of blue blood vessels from years of drinking way too much. When sober, he was a decent enough guy. And he never shirked from hard work which was why Ken had brought him along in the first place.

  “We can worry about this later. We need to get moving,” Ken repeated.

  The men did not need to be told twice as they dropped or tossed everything they were carrying into the backs of the trucks. The cargo doors were yanked down and everybody hopped into the cab of the closest vehicle.

  Ken led the way out and was happy to see that there were no zombies blocking the exit. As he made the turn and then pulled out to the road, he glanced in his side-view mirror and felt his mouth go instantly dry. Coming up the far end of the parking lot from the direction of Highway 26 were hundreds of the undead.

  This new discovery sent his mind into overload again. Had the children seen or sensed this group and then sent a signal for them to come? Was this a calculated attempt at taking him and his group down? Were the children thinking? Planning? Plotting?

  This was all simply too much to digest at the moment. Unfortunately, his mind refused to shove all the crazy thoughts aside. He was so distracted that he did not see the lone zombie that had come up out of the deep ditch that ran beside the road until the last second. On instinct, he went to swerve. Unfortunately, the truck had been picking up a good head of steam as it began its way along the downhill ride that would eventually take them to the highway that took them to Estacada.

  Jerking the wheel, Ken slammed on the brakes in an attempt not to hit the figure in the road. His attempts failed and there was a solid, heavy thud as the body was hit and thrown several feet.

  The truck began to shudder when the brakes were applied too heavily and the trailer started to slide around perpendicular to the cab. Something caused the tires to grab and trailer began to hop. Looking out the windshield, Ken already knew they were in big trouble. The branches of a tree were coming right at them as they swerved enough to go off the road.

  The next few seconds were part of a nightmare that would haunt Ken the rest of his days. The cab launched into the deep runoff ditch that bordered the road and slammed hard into the other side. There was a crash, and an explosion of glass showered him. There was a sound just before the wet scream to his right that was unlike anything he’d ever heard before. In the blink of an eye, something slammed into his face…and the world went dark.

  ***

  “Ken!” a voice screamed from far away. “Ken, wake up dammit!”

  Ken opened his eyes, but everything was soupy and refused to come into focus. His hand went to his forehead where a hot bloom of pain felt like it was trying to burn a hole to his brain.

  He swatted at it as if he could simply brush it away. That caused him to wince as the pain ratcheted up a notch on contact. He looked down to see his gloved hand wet with blood.

  “Ken!” the voice yelled again.

  Ken turned to see Sean standing outside the door to the truck’s cab. His face was creased with lines of concern and he was pulling at the door so hard that his face was turning a purplish red. For some reason, Ken was drawn to the bright blue veins he could see clearly sticking out on the man’s face.

  Crap, I’m one of those things, he thought. He figured it would just be a matter of time before he began to get a peculiar hunger for the flesh of the living.

  A sound to his right drew his attention back inside the cab. When he turned his head, the rest of his senses came back on line. He could smell blood and shit. It took him a few seconds to realize that he was only contributing to the coppery aroma of blood.

  A branch a few inches in diameter had plunged through the windshield and impaled the man in the passenger’s seat through the
chest. Unfortunately, the man was not quite dead yet.

  “Ken…help,” Terry Kroger gurgled around a mouthful of blood.

  “Ken, you have to get out of the truck…now!” Sean pleaded.

  Looking back to the man still trying to desperately open his door, Ken could almost make his face out through the blood dripping in his eyes. He was too blurry for Ken to see his face, but there was no doubting the fear creeping into the man’s tone.

  He wiped at his own face again trying to gather his wits. He looked back over to Terry, his mind trying to figure out some way to help the man. Terry’s head had dropped—his chin resting on the branch that was jammed through his chest.

  When he turned his attention back to Sean, his eyes paused on the side view mirror that was hanging askew. He could now understand Sean Drinkwine’s urgency. Coming from one of the open fields that bordered this section of the road were dozens of the undead. Ken had to figure there were easily over a hundred figures stumbling and staggering towards them.

  Leaning down and putting his shoulder into it, Ken shoved at the jammed driver’s side door. There was a screeching protest of metal being wrenched, but between Ken and Sean putting everything they had into it, the door slowly opened to the point where he could force his body through the gap.

  He had intended to just step down and follow Sean, but his legs apparently did not agree as he crumbled to the ground. Hands came in under his arms and he found himself being hoisted up. He couldn’t see the man who had moved in on his left, but Sean was on his right.

  “We need to get you into my truck,” Sean grunted as he took on most of Ken’s weight.

  “Terry…” Ken managed to gasp.

  “It’s over for him,” the man Ken couldn’t see managed to huff as they kept hauling him for the open door of one of the trucks idling in the middle of the road.

  Through the blood that was once again running into his eyes, Ken could see many of the doors open with the men standing on the step-up perches. He could also tell that none of them were apparently looking at him. They were obviously more concerned about the undead closing in than anything else.