The Zed Files Trilogy (Book 1): The Hanging Tree

by David Andrew Wright

  But I didn’t have time to worry about that shit, the dead were coming and I had to protect my family. I cut back through Rommy’s yard, thinking I should say something or do something but there simply wasn’t any time. When I got around front, I heard screams in the distance. Then barking. A wild, frantic barking and yapping.

  Old Man Castleberry’s beagles.

  Had to be. Castleberry was retired and had found a hobby: beagles. He raised them in a kennel in the backyard. Hunting dogs. Sold them for pretty good money. Problem was, when one started barking, they all joined in. And that could be at two in the afternoon or two in the morning.

  But this was not your ordinary barking: this was the dogs going haywire, trying to alert any and all to a most unnatural threat.

  The dead weren’t just coming up the alley.

  They were in the streets.

  And they had found the mailman.

  He was knocked on his ass. Letters were flying and drifting earthward like goose feathers. A corpse in a black burial suit was biting into the poor guy’s arm. His blue uniform shirt was red with blood and he was screaming something terrible. I made to go to him and then two more zombies came through the shrubs, a teenage boy whose face was more skull than flesh and a little girl in filthy cerements. They both looked right at me with their graveyard eyes and then, passing me, they set on the mailman like hyenas on a fresh kill.

  I had tossed the shovel so I had nothing to fight with.

  The teenage boy was gnawing on the mailman’s legs, the little girl was going for his throat. Poor guy was writhing and twisting, trying to beat them off, trying protect his face, screaming for help. The little girl seized one of his hands in her jaws and began to shake it like a chew toy. I could hear his finger bones snapping.

  Shit!

  Was anybody else seeing this?

  I looked for a weapon, something, anything. The ice-chopper. It was on my porch. I still hadn’t put it away and for once my incurable procrastination was going to come in handy. It was just a broomstick with a sturdy iron blade on the end, but it was better than nothing. I ran up and grabbed it. In the distance, I could hear screams rising to a fever pitch and I knew the dead were attacking the living. And not just here on Holly Street but all over town.

  I made it far as the sidewalk with my ice-chopper.

  That’s when the little girl left the mailman to the others and turned on me. She wore a white dress gone gray with mildew. Her face was like wax melting off the bone below. She held her arms out to me like she wanted a hug. Her eyes were glowing hot and savage, teeth barred, tangles of saliva dangling from her mouth. I waited for her. When she got within three feet, I gave her a swift kick that sent her rolling in the grass.

  She made a hissing sound and came right back.

  She crawled through the grass, grinding her teeth.

  She looked like some human insect.

  When she came at me again, I swung the ice-chopper. The flat edge of the blade caught the top of her skull and there was a hollow, wet, cracking sound like a baseball bat striking a soft pumpkin. I hit her in the head again until her brains splashed down her face. She trembled in the grass and stopped moving.

  Up and down the streets the dead were shambling about.

  Some were up on porches pounding on doors and windows.

  How could it have amplified so fast?

  I ran for the mailman, the ice-chopper held up and ready to strike. A couple zombies shambled past me. They snapped their teeth at me. One of them—a woman wearing what looked like a hospital gown—reached out and I cracked her in the head with the chopper. It made no difference to her: she just shambled away. I might as well have hit a stump.

  I reached the mailman about the same time as Jimmy LaRue.

  Jimmy had brought a .22 semi-auto rifle with him. As I got into range, Jimmy shot the teenage boy through the head. He staggered comically back a few steps and then folded up, blood and brain matter leaking from a hole in his skull. Jimmy shot the man in the back, which did absolutely no good. He turned on us, his maw dyed red, feral as any wolf. He made a growling sound in his throat. As Jimmy took aim again, the dead man snatched one of the mailman’s arms he had chewed free and tried to walk off. Jimmy cracked off two more shots. By luck or design, one of them went through the back of the zombie’s knee. He hit the pavement, dragging himself forward in a slime trail of ooze and rot, refusing to drop the arm.

  Jimmy popped him in the head and that was that.

  “What the fuck’s going on here, Steve?” he wanted to know. His eyes were wide and shocked, his face white as the hair on his head. “These aren’t people…they’re fucking corpses. Goddamn zombies like on the late show.”

  I was looking down at the gored remains of the mailman. “That’s exactly what they are,” I said.

  The mailman’s throat was torn out and his belly had been hollowed, his mangled viscera spilled over the sidewalk. Everywhere he was red and ripped and partially-eaten.

  I turned away, my stomach rolling over.

  Jimmy said, “I…called the police…there was no answer…”

  I looked down Holly Street, dozens of other zombies were moving in our direction. They were making moaning sounds. An army of the dead had been set upon Lincoln Park.

  Jimmy started shooting again, dropping three more of them with perfect head-shots.

  It was insane.

  But it was happening.

  A bloated, naked woman whose flesh was mottled with green patches of mildew had Mrs. Hazen by the throat, was dragging her corpse off through all those carefully-tended azaleas, petunias, and morning glories. Her body flattened them as she was dragged into the backyard. I was going to go to Mrs. Hazen’s rescue, but I could see she was already dead. A big, one-armed zombie with a face like a nest of black moss climbed up onto a porch and dove through the screen door. A car came winging down the road, hit the zombie of a young woman with a resounding thud that sent her rolling to the curb. A guy got out and two zombies took him down, began savagely biting at his face and throat. People came out on their porches and the dead went after them.

  Everywhere now you could hear screaming and shouting and frantic pleas for help. Gunshots in the distance.

  It was madness.

  Shouting, sirens, gunfire.

  A naked woman came strolling out between two houses. She was tall and leggy, flaxen-haired, and was probably very attractive in life. But in death she was a sheer horror and Jimmy shot her dead. I turned and a fat man greasy with rot and drainage came at me, jowls drawn away from teeth that were stained red. I went at him with the ice-chopper like a man possessed. I didn’t even let Jimmy draw a bead on him. I charged in, swinging, like some bloodthirsty barbarian with drawn sword. I hit him six or seven times until he went down and I kept hitting him, landing that blade on his head, until he rolled over in the grass, from the neck up nothing but raw hamburger.

  There were more coming.

  Jimmy said, “Better get inside and get your guns out, Steve. I wouldn’t open your door for no one.”

  Numbly, I staggered off towards my porch, still gripping the ice-chopper.

  There were fifteen or twenty walking corpses in the street by then.

  DOWN TIME

  When I got in the house, Ricki was waiting there. Paul was with her. Her golden summer tan had gone pale and her blue eyes looked drained of color.

  “Steve…what is this?” she said to me. “It’s all over the TV. It’s happening everywhere. They’re declaring martial law.”

  She wanted to know what it was, but I didn’t dare tell her what I suspected. I had never told her about what I had seen in Iraq. It was too weird, too painful, too unbelievable. She would have thought I was nuts. But what had happened over there in a small, isolated pocket had gone global now. It was everywhere. It was no longer murky, white-knuckled memories that would wake me up sweating at four in the morning. It was here and it was now.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.
/>   “Well, they’re not terrorists,” Paul said. “That’s for sure. They’re goddamn zombies.”

  I felt it all start to boil out of me then. Normally, when your ten-year old son says something like that you tell him to watch his mouth. But I did not tell him that. Neither did Ricki. I had all I could do not to start laughing at the absurdity of it all. But I knew if I started laughing I would scare the hell out of them and they were plenty freaked out by then.

  “There are no such things as zombies,” Ricki said, just repeating by rote the things parents have to say. Even now, it was so ingrained in her she couldn’t help herself.

  “Oh yeah? Then what are they, mom?”

  Neither of us had any answer to that.

  “Spooks aren’t real,” she said, trying to believe it herself.

  And isn’t that what you tell your kids? Zombies and ghosts and all that crazy shit is just make-believe movie-stuff, comic book shit. There aren’t really witches flying on broomsticks or ghosts in closets or things scratching under beds. Pure fantasy. Things dreamed up by superstitious people who were scared of the dark and confused by their world. The only reason any of that stuff survived was that people found a way to squeeze a buck out of it. First they did it to scare people and then to cater to teenage girls who thought ghouls were cute. That’s how horrible bloodsucking monsters had become angst-ridden androgynous pretty boys who hung around smoothie bars and werewolves had become coiffed male models with waxed chests. Watered-down, romanticized, 100% non-threatening. But scary or effeminate, it was all bullshit and nobody with a modern, functioning brain took that crap seriously. And you made damn sure your kids didn’t or they were headed for a future that included bi-weekly visits to the therapy couch.

  But now this.

  In the streets, the walking dead.

  “Paul,” I said. “Go upstairs and grab my cell. It’s on the dresser.”

  “Okay,” he said, taking off.

  When he was gone, I took Ricki aside. I gripped her by the shoulders and said, “I don’t know what’s happening exactly, but this town is under siege and we better batten down the hatches and ride it out. Let the police clean it up.”

  Ricki still had that dazed look in her eyes. “They’re dead. I watched them out the window. Those aren’t people. They’re dead.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I’m okay with, Ricki. It’s happening so we deal with it.”

  I was trying to appeal to her practical streak. Inside, Ricki was tough. Maybe on the outside she was small and petite, but on the inside she was 110 pounds of attitude once she got going. And I needed her to get going right then.

  “The best thing to do is hole up in the basement,” she said, taking the bait, switching gears so fast it astounded me as always. “We’ve got a bathroom down there. A bedroom. A fold-out couch. The camping stuff and sleeping bags are down there. I’ll bring some food down. Some water. We’ll need some basic first-aid items.”

  She started sorting around in the kitchen.

  Paul returned with my cell. I called a few people in the neighborhood and got no answer. I called Ricki’s mom. Nothing. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all.

  “Did you get a hold of Carty?” Ricki called out to me.

  “She’s not answering. Neither is your mother.”

  She frowned. She dug her cell out of her purse. “I better call Diane.”

  When Ricki calls Diane, she means business. Diane’s head wasn’t much good from all the drugs she’d taken through the years. Let’s just say that Diane’s morals are loose, her ethics questionable, and her common sense negligible. Ricki called the apartment building where she lived—Diane did not have a cellphone, the FBI could track your movements with one—but there was no answer.

  She sighed. “Where the hell is everyone?”

  “You know Diane,” I said.

  We packed up stuff and brought it downstairs. There were still a few zombies in the streets but I was hearing gunfire, both near and far, and I knew people were fighting. That was good. As long as they kept fighting we could turn this around…however it had happened. I got out the only two guns I owned. One was a Remington 12-gauge pump. I loaded it with buckshot and gave it to Ricki.

  “Use it if you have to,” I said. “I don’t think you’ll need it, but let’s err on the side of caution.”

  The basement was the best idea. The door leading down there was solid oak and it would take a tank to breach it. Once it was dead-bolted and locked, no one would get through it.

  “Are you going out again, Dad?” Paul asked me.

  Ricki stopped what she was doing and looked at me. Just for a moment. I knew without a doubt that she wanted to warn me against playing hero, but on the other hand we couldn’t reach her mother or Carty, who was one of our best friends in the world. As much as I wanted to hide out with them—and as much as Ricki wanted that too—I couldn’t abandon the people we loved. I had to check on them. There was no other way around it.

  “Yes, son,” I told him. “I’m going out to check on gramma.”

  “You need me as a backup?”

  I didn’t smile because he was serious. “No, stay here. Protect your mother.”

  “She’s pretty tough. She doesn’t need me.”

  Ricki was carrying another box down to the basement. She was out of earshot. “She needs you more than you’ll ever know,” I told him. “When I leave, you lock that door down there. Don’t let anyone in.”

  “What about you?”

  “Well, yeah, me,” I said, noticing and maybe not for the first time the platinum highlights in his hair he had gotten from his mother.

  “Zombies can’t reason much, Dad. All they are is stupid eating machines,” Paul explained to me, an expert on the subject from all the zombie comics and paperbacks he devoured. “We’re going to need a password. They can’t think. If you get zombified, you’ll never remember it. That’s how we’ll know you’re okay.”

  Kids are amazing. Absolutely amazing. I knew damn well that just about every adult (save the crazy ones) were scared shitless at that moment and I was, too…but kids, man, they reorient themselves so quickly it can be frightening. I was willing to bet that while most adults were ready to piss themselves, their kids were rising up to the challenge of the undead. Maybe that sounds silly, but I believed it. Kids are tougher and much more resourceful than adults. They are not so anchored to the physical reality of their world, they can adapt and improvise at the drop of a hat. You can spin their world 360° and they’ll come up standing. We adults would be thrown on our asses.

  “What do you suggest?”

  He scratched his tawny head. “Hmm. Didn’t you guys use passwords in Iraq?”

  “Yeah, sometimes.” I thought it over. “Zulu Foxtrot.”

  “I like that!”

  I explained it was military phonetics for Z and F, in other words, Zombie Free.

  “Okay,” he said. “Watch it out there. Aim for the head.”

  I gave him a hug which he did not appreciate—there’s no tougher soldier than a ten-year old fighting man—and went over to Ricki. I gave her a kiss and, surprisingly, she slipped her tongue in my mouth. “Give you a good reason to hurry back,” she said.

  Paul had the TV going. “I’m setting up the comm center, Dad,” he said.

  “I’ll keep in touch with my cell. I should be back in half an hour,” I told them.

  “Then what, Steve?” Ricki wanted to know.

  “Then we hold out until this is sorted out.”

  I wanted badly to tell her about what I’d seen in Iraq. But there wasn’t time and I didn’t want Paul knowing about it for some reason. Though, again, being a kid he would have probably just shrugged and said, “Gotta start somewhere, I guess.”

  “Please be careful,” she said.

  Then the door was closed and locked.

  I wondered if I’d ever see them agai
n.

  I went up the steps and got my gun and went out into the world of the dead.

  IMMEDIATE THREAT

  In the thirty or so minutes I’d been in the house, the war—if that’s what you can call it—had not slowed down nor even taken a breath. In the distance I could hear gunfire, sirens, people shouting, and even a few thumping concussions like some real firepower was being used. The sound of it brought back memories of the war. I saw no zombies in the streets. Maybe they had pushed on. Not that it gave me much hope, because what I saw was devastation, minor maybe, but ugly for America. There were bodies everywhere. Bodies of zombies. A couple half-eaten dogs. Cars were stalled in the middle of the avenue, doors opened. Their drivers were nowhere to be seen.

  What else was nowhere to be seen was the body of the mailman.

  All I found was a single blood-spattered shoe which was being investigated by a couple flies.

  Could he have risen so fast?

  I scanned around looking for trouble.

  I had my old man’s gun, a Browning Hi-Power he had carried in Vietnam. I hadn’t used it in a couple of years and then only for target practice. But it would do the trick. As I moved up the sidewalk, I heard someone clear their throat.

  “Where you going, Steve?” Jimmy LaRue asked. He was hanging out of a second story window with his .22.

  I looked up at him. “I’m going to check on Carty.”

  “You need me?”

  “No, I can handle it,” I told him. “I got Ricki and Paul barricaded in the basement. Keep an eye on my house, will you?”

  “You got it. I’ll cover you.”

  Jesus, it was insane. In a matter of hours our peaceful neighborhood was like something out of Fallujah. Here I was patrolling the streets with a sniper above keeping an eye out for unfriendlies. Hour by hour the entire thing was becoming more and more surreal. And scary. My natural paranoia was whispering in the back of my head and it kept saying things like: What if this situation is not containable? What if this zombie plague keeps rolling until there are no people left? I had to force that stuff from my head. When I was in the war, we’d go out on these mounted patrols to see if we could draw fire from insurgents so we could hunt them down and kick their asses. The Army called it “Pacification” but the bullet-eaters and grunts on the ground called it “pussification”. Pussifying the enemy. Our officers called it “movement to contact” and what it consisted of, basically, was exposing your ass to fire. Creep around in Stryker vehicles and see if any RPKs or RPGs opened up on us. Baiting, that’s all it was. Like hanging your dick in a piranha tank and seeing if you got any nibbles.