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

by David Andrew Wright

  And that’s what it felt like I was doing right then: baiting the dead.

  Like I was a hooker or something, trolling my wares and seeing if any righteous zombies wanted to take a bite.

  It was insane, yes, but it was only the beginning of the madness. Just a delirium fever compared to where it was all going.

  I made it over to Carty’s house. She lived next to Rommy Jacob, whom I knew was dead. I did a quick reconnoiter of Carty’s yard, made sure no bad boys were hanging around out by the garage or under the shade of the sour apple tree picking maggots from their teeth. There was nothing. That was good. But what was bad is that Carty’s back door was wide open.

  Carty wouldn’t allow that.

  Carty hated flies.

  Swallowing, I entered the house silently.

  Like a mouse into a shoe, I moved with stealth and silence. My throat was dry. It felt like it had been powdered down with beach sand. My heart was hammering, my knuckles white on the grip of the Browning.

  Carty was laid up after knee surgery which was one of the reasons I thought I better check on her.

  Years back Carty owned a saloon, but had sold it off after her husband died. In her eighties, she was very spry, full of wit, off-color jokes and salty metaphors. She could cuss like a sailor and took her bourbon in a water glass. She had an ongoing battle with old Mrs. Hazen and her goddamn flowers—her and her goddamn flowers, Steve, you know how fucking sick I am of hearing about those pissing flowers of hers? Bitch called the cops for chrissake because my leaves blew into her flowerbeds last fall, you believe that shit? You don’t hear Rommy bitching about it. Green goddamned thumb…I’d like to stick it so far up her ass she’d get a tickle in her throat—yeah, that was Carty.

  I loved her like a mother.

  She, along with Bill DeForest and his wife, had sort of adopted us when we moved into the neighborhood. I could remember the day we moved in. Bill and his wife had come over. Not to be undone, Mrs. Hazen had followed suit and brought us an apple pie. Very nice, I thought. But as I’d gotten to know her I realized the only reason for the kindness was to get a look at us so she could make some rash judgments as to the sort of people we were. Carty had brought no pies. She’d invited me in for a few fingers of Jim Beam. Told me if she were forty years younger, Ricki would have been in trouble, big trouble, because she would have stolen me away.

  I felt tears well in my eyes.

  Because I knew what I was going to find.

  Soon as I got in the living room, I smelled it. That heady, metallic, almost savage stink of human blood. The living room was a mess—lamps knocked over, magazines scattered, end tables overturned.

  Carty had two Chihuahuas. Nice dogs. Liked to bark a lot, but they were harmless creatures. Pathetic, really. Shivering and shaking, prone to colds and infections of all sorts. Bred by man to be pretty much shit useless in the real world. Mimi and Momo. When I got into the living room, I called out to them. The very fact that they had not barked told me all I really needed to know about their fate.

  I found them first.

  I could never tell them apart and less so in death. One of them was mangled in a red-stained heap in the corner. There was a bloody splatter mark about three feet up as if somebody had picked the poor thing up and hurled it with serious velocity at the wall. I found the other one lying at the foot of Carty’s rocking chair. It was nearly bitten in half.

  “Carty?” I called out, just sick to my stomach.

  Nothing.

  I pressed my fingers against the kitchen door. Pushed it open.

  Carty was sprawled on the floor in jogging pants and a collegiate sweatshirt that read UBP, and beneath that, UNIVERSITY OF BIG PECKERS. Something had been at her and she’d been bitten repeatedly in the face, the throat, the wrists, the belly. She was almost unrecognizable such was the severity of the attacks. Her face was a bleeding, livid bruise.

  An ocean of blood had spread around her corpse.

  It was nearly dry. That made me think that Carty had been one of the first.

  I can’t say that she was eaten exactly. It was more like whoever had done it just kept biting her until she bled out. It seemed inconceivable, but if somebody had asked me what had happened to her I would have had to tell them she had been bitten to death.

  There was nothing more to see.

  I turned away and went back in the living room. I pulled out my cell and called Ricki. “Carty’s gone,” I said. “There’s nothing I can do.”

  And it was as I stuck the cell back in the pocket of my carpenter jeans that I heard something. A noise from behind me that made a cold chill run up my spine and play down my arms: a wet, sticky sort of sound. Like somebody peeling up a rag that had been stuck to the floor.

  That’s what I heard.

  As I turned, the Browning shaking in my fist, the kitchen door swung open and Carty was standing there. Her left eye was that same glossy white as I’d seen in the other walking corpses, her right eye glazed and staring off at the wall. Beneath the bruising and the bloodstains, her face was a cool porcelain white. The left side of her mouth was hitched-up in a cadaverous grin, all teeth and gums.

  “Carty,” I said.

  A couple flies buzzed about her face. She paid them no mind. Things like that no longer bothered her. She was driven now by forces that knew only appetite.

  She shuffled forward, her hands coming up like she wanted to caress me.

  “Please, Carty,” I said. “Just go away.”

  I tried backing towards the door but she followed me like my own shadow. I told myself this wasn’t Carty any more than that dead thing in Rommy Jacob’s backyard had been Bill DeForest. She came at me. Her mouth was open. Her lips had pulled back from the gums. Her teeth looked almost unnaturally long and white.

  But what made me bring up the Browning was that she was drooling.

  She was drooling for my flesh.

  Biting down on my lower lip, I sighted in on her forehead. “I’m sorry, Carty,” I said, and squeezed the trigger. The round was neat, efficient. It popped a nickel-sized hole dead-center of her forehead. Something sprayed out of the back of her skull. She dropped and hit the floor like a stunned steer, legs bicycling for a moment and then she stiffened up and was dead again. I felt a wave of remorse wash through me. But I had no business feeling anything: it wasn’t Carty. It was walking meat. It was an abomination. Yet, my eyes were wet when I walked out of her house. It felt like something was stuck in my throat.

  Outside, I had to sit on the porch a moment and catch my breath.

  The streets were silent.

  I heard plenty of commotion, but there on Holly Street, the hub of my little world, there was nothing.

  I didn’t waste any time. I went back home.

  INHUMAN WAVE ATTACK

  Twenty minutes later, I was driving.

  I was in my pick-up heading up to Dunwoodie to check on Ricki’s mom. I figured if I found her—or didn’t—that would be it for the day. I’d hole up in the basement, see if Jimmy LaRue wanted to join us. What I saw as I drove was pretty much what I was seeing in my own neighborhood: cars abandoned in the middle of streets, bodies in yards. I saw a burning house and two zombies on a street corner feeding on a corpse, pulling entrails from its belly and stuffing themselves with them. No one was trying to stop them. I saw two teenagers running. I saw a naked woman with autopsy stitching running up her torso in a Y just walking up the sidewalk. She paid me no mind. She just kept walking.

  I saw three or four others.

  It was unbelievable. Yonkers was being overrun by the living dead. I wondered what it was like in New York City which was just a few miles south of us. I thought of all the cemeteries there. The funeral homes. The morgues. The mortuaries. I thought of all the people there who had been bitten and were now waking up. It would be like some kind of insane geometric progression. If it wasn’t brought under control and fast…

  I called Ricki and pulled to a stop before her mother’s house.<
br />
  I stepped out with the Browning Hi-Power in my hand. Just up the block, hidden behind a delivery van there was a police car. Carefully, I went over there. I saw no one about, but I could feel eyes watching me and I didn’t think it was my imagination. Like a lot of the other cars I’d seen, the driver’s side door was open. There was blood on the seats. On the dashboard. Sprayed up onto the windshield. The police radio was still working and there was a steady chatter between dispatchers and mobile units. Some of the voices were hysterical and shouting.

  I could hear gunfire in the distance. A lot of it. I didn’t like that at all. There was a steady stream of traffic out on Central Ave and, realistically, it didn’t look much different than any other day. But it was different. It was different now in just about every way.

  I went over to Ricki’s mom’s house.

  It was a trim little brick ranch with a flowering wall of white and pink tea roses. They were beautiful. Even I had to admit that. Ricki and I had stood before them and had our engagement picture snapped by her mom. The photo was up on the mantle at home. Thinking that, I felt something twist in my belly. I put it out of my head and went up to the door. I knocked three times, then I just went in.

  A TV was playing away.

  “Della?” I called out. “It’s me, Steve. We’ve been trying to get a hold of you.”

  No response.

  Nothing but the blare of the TV. I tracked the sound and went into the bedroom. Della wasn’t in there, but I knew her well enough to know that she would not turn the TV on and just leave. She was frugal as all hell. Della was manic about turning off lights if you weren’t in the room and turning down the heat in the wintertime to the point where you’d be shivering. She did not waste electricity.

  So where was she?

  The feel of the house told me it was empty. It had that cavernous, deserted feeling that empty houses have. I detected no unpleasant smells that would have told me something awful had happened. There was nothing. It smelled like Della’s house always did: flowery, fresh, a distant trace odor of something like baked bread and pots of soup. A good smell. The kind that made you feel at home. Made you want to kick off your shoes and curl up in a LA-Z-Boy.

  I turned towards the TV to shut it off.

  CNN was on and they were following stories about military containment operations in the continental U.S. I flipped to the BBC to see scenes of the British Army patrolling streets in armored vehicles. They looked like Panthers. I kept clicking and found FOX. One look at the screen told me all I wanted to know: DEATH VIRUS? I shook my head and turned the TV off. Death virus. Maybe that was a good name for it, but it sounded like tabloid shit. Typical FOX. When they weren’t stroking the Right Wing they were ladling out the bullshit in great steaming heaps.

  But none of that found Della.

  And I was worried. Della, for all intents and purposes, could take care of herself. She grew up hard in the South Bronx and, despite just celebrating her sixty-fifth year, you didn’t want to piss her off. But all that aside, she was kind. She treated me like a son and she was the one who’d given us the down payment on our house. Despite having deep pockets from when her husband (Ricki’s father) died on the railroad, you wouldn’t have known it. She still did most of her shopping at flea markets and rummage sales.

  “Della…where are you?” I said under my breath.

  With the TV off, I could hear the almost claustrophobic silence of the house. I heard more shooting in the distance. I looked everywhere and saw nothing. Everything was in its place. I had no reason to suspect anything weird had happened…that was, until I peered out into the backyard and saw all the sheets flapping on the line.

  I went outside.

  I found a house slipper in the grass. Nothing else. No blood, no nothing.

  I called Ricki. “I don’t know where she is,” I told her, leaving the slipper and TV out of it. “Everything looks fine. Maybe she’s out.”

  Ricki was not convinced and I didn’t blame her. But I’d done my bit and now it was time to leave. As much as I cared for Della, I didn’t like the idea of leaving Ricki and Paul alone any longer than necessary. As I was getting ready to leave, I heard that gunfire again. And it was closer. Real close now. I went outside to my pick-up and stopped right on the sidewalk.

  The dead were coming.

  And not just the dead but the men fighting them.

  It was an awful cacophony of rifle fire and screams, vehicles squealing their brakes and men shouting on bullhorns. Overhead, a chopper buzzed the neighborhood.

  Driver ants, is what I thought.

  I’d seen a program on TV. South American driver ants cutting a killing swath through the jungle. Trees and bushes stripped, animals eaten down to bones. Nothing escaped them, not even men who were stupid enough to get in their way.

  The dead were coming on in much the same way.

  They were coming from the direction of Downtown.

  If I had to reduce it to military terms, I would have said the walking dead I had thus far seen were reconnaissance units and now here was the main force. There were literally hundreds of zombies pushing forward, a huge and voracious machine of destruction. They overflowed the street, they filled lawns and sidewalks and boulevards. People—normal people—were pushed before the wave of the dead, screaming and crying out as the hissing army bore down on them. I saw zombies eating people. I saw zombies eating each other. I saw two women who were running ahead of them fall and disappear amongst a flurry of clutching hands and swarming bodies. Blood was flowing and gathering in a heaving, stinking mist over the streets. And still the killing and atrocities continued.

  Out on the Avenue, people tried to run cars right through the crowds of zombies, to blast through their numbers. But that was a mess. They smashed into one another, into zombies, popping curbs and slamming into houses. The dead were caught in the traffic pile-up, their own crushed—but still animate—bodies becoming ramparts until that forced the traffic to stop. And then, of course, it got worse as cars and trucks backed-up, trying to escape the snafu and bashing into one another, tangling things up worse. The zombies were the sharks in the confusion and chaos, of course. Like some reaction force of the living dead, they thronged in, throwing themselves against windshields. Battering themselves bloody, thrashing and biting and forcing their way into cars, feeding on flesh and burying screaming people in their masses.

  A jacked-up four-wheel drive Chevy Blazer with balloon tires came screeching in, smashing zombies to pulp. In the cab and in the bed, men with shotguns and hunting rifles kept shooting into the legions of blood-maddened ghouls. There was so much confusion and screaming and dogs barking you could barely hear the reports of their guns. Zombies were dropping, but never enough. It was like some pipe had burst and Dunwoodie was being drowned in an ocean of the undead.

  Finally, even the four-wheeler was overrun as zombies got into the cab. The driver and his shotgunner were yanked out and offered to biting mouths and tearing fingers.

  The zombies got up into the bed, too, and the men dove for freedom and were instantly inundated, shrieking as they were dismembered and torn to shreds.

  One of the zombie hunters escaped the crushing swarm. He had produced a machete and was frantically chopping at the dead, but, he too, was overwhelmed. I saw a man stumble free. A zombie that was nearly split in half hung from his belly by its teeth.

  I wanted to help, but there was nothing I could do. There were too many and they were pouring forward in a tide. If selfishness is the key to survival, then I was selfish. I went to my pick-up, refusing to watch the slaughter any longer, my guts shriveling like fruit in a drought. This was it, I thought. This was really it. Civilization was falling. The dead were rising. They were gutting society, making more and more of themselves. And if it was this bad here, I didn’t want to think of the slaughterhouses that Manhattan and Los Angles and Chicago had become…or the Bronx, which was just minutes away.

  For one frantic insane moment, I couldn�
��t find my keys.

  They weren’t in my pockets.

  They weren’t in the truck.

  I had left them in the house.

  Jesus.

  It was a habit of mine built up by many years of repetition. I always set my keys on the table in the foyer of Della’s house. I ran inside and they were right where I’d left them. As I got outside, the dead were converging. They were no more than fifty feet away. I could smell their putrescent stink which was hot and seething. My heart banged against my ribs as I dashed for the pick-up and came around the side and two zombies were waiting for me.

  The first was a heavy woman in a flowered bathrobe.

  The other was a priest. He still had his Roman collar on, his eyes fixed and glaring, his mouth open like that of a rattlesnake ready to strike. They both came at me simultaneously, moving with slow and economical strides, but persistent, endlessly persistent.

  I didn’t have time to aim.

  I put two rounds into the woman to drive her back and I turned and fired twice right into the priest’s face. The bullets split him from chin to scalp and his face literally fell off. Somehow, the bullets had not punctured his brain. Maybe they were deflected by the skull itself and maybe my aim was poor (it was).

  His mold-speckled fingers brushed against my shirt and I jammed the muzzle of the Browning right up to his left eye and jerked the trigger. His skull blew apart with a grisly splashing sound…then the woman grabbed me. I spun from her grip seconds before she would have bitten into my shoulder. I cracked her in the face with the butt of the Browning which made her stumble back a few steps. Then I jumped up and drop-kicked her, slamming one foot into her sternum and driving her to the pavement. It was a wild and insane thing to do—something from a fucking Chuck Norris movie—but it was the first thing that entered my mind.