Last Fight of the Valkyries

by E. E. Isherwood

  Victoria hopped up to get a look at his phone's screen. She looked at the message and the phone number where it originated, but said nothing further.

  He looked up and saw Grandma with a patient face. As always.

  "OK, Grandma, this is what it says, but I don't get it." He cleared his throat as if it were an important radio announcement. "Liam. Need to go to Koch Hospital Quarry. See research." The number was prefixed by the 435 area code. It was from the day before.

  "Grandma, did you send this? Like you did the other one." Back at the Riverside medical lab, a strange message had appeared on Victoria's phone, supposedly sent by someone using Liam's phone. Grandma was holding it at the time, though the message could have been sent hours earlier based on how frequently the cell phone towers dropped service.

  "Oh, I'm afraid it wasn't me. I don't know how that other one was sent to Victoria either. I only barely managed to contact you, Liam."

  It was true enough. She had gotten one message through to him, giving him an X to mark the spot where she was being held captive. It was by far the most important text he'd ever gotten—and it came during a gunfight to boot. But now...

  Victoria finally spoke. "I should tell you this town has the internet. It even has cell service, though the people who run the place say most of the other towers are down in the surrounding states, so there aren't really many people to talk to."

  "Wait, internet is working? How?"

  Victoria sat on the arm of the sofa. "From what I've gathered, this place is a hub of sorts for all the surrounding country. When the zombies came, local governments and some military retreated here and brought as much tech as they could. There's a huge parking lot with nothing but tractor trailers and generators humming next to them. But," she heaved a large sigh, "like the cell towers, there's not much to do on the internet because lots of the cities are completely offline."

  Liam wasn't exactly sure how the internet worked, but he knew there were transmission lines between cities which carried data—they were always laying more fibre cable next to highways. But if the cities were dead, there'd be no one to manage the hubs, and with no one to manage those, it was only a matter of time before they either went offline because of power loss or even something as dumb as a zombie tripping over a network cable. Not many techs would be on duty either.

  "So we have cell phones but no one to call, and internet but no websites to visit."

  Victoria nodded solemnly.

  "Children, don't fret. Liam, I'm sure your parents are fine. We're safe. That's what they'd want for you. For you both." She winked at Victoria; her smile was reassuring.

  Liam studied the area outside the home's windows. Again he saw the small, squat houses nearby, and appreciated how forlorn they seemed. A few people milled about on the tiny street—there were small weed-strewn sidewalks, but people studiously avoided them. The yards were unkempt, and judging by the age and condition of several derelict cars and trucks parked under huge shade trees, were that way even before the Apocalypse. He peered out as far as he could and saw some multi-story stone buildings a couple blocks over. Mostly he saw grass though. Like houses had once lined the streets, but only one or two out of ten still managed to survive.

  Kind of like us.

  "Are all these people," he turned to those sitting in the room with him, and quieted his voice, "are we all refugees here?"

  Victoria answered, "When we got off the plane, they took you to a large tent. It looked like it was for the Army or something. Most of the Marines from those planes went there too. They all had something wrong with them it seemed," she chuckled, "though they weren't complaining as much as you."

  He put his hand to his head wound without realizing it. "Well, I wasn't right in the head."

  With a smile, she continued, "They wouldn't let me stay with you, and I needed to take care of Grandma. They walked us all a few blocks from the landing area and handed us off to some town officials for temporary housing. We got in a golf cart and they ferried us here and told us to get comfortable. They said the residents of this street had all gone and we were welcome to stay wherever we could find room. Grandma and I chose this house because...it had the least blood inside."

  Liam gulped. His stomach was legendary for betraying him in the sight of blood, though he was getting better about it.

  “They gave us some clean clothes, a bar of soap per house, and told us we could get water over at the courthouse. And...we haven't heard anything for two days.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “I ran back and made sure you found your way to me. To us.” She pointed to Grandma, though she smiled, too.

  Liam didn't want to ask the next question. It had been bothering him since he woke up and it would forever burn bright until he knew the truth.

  “So how did I get in these clothes?”

  Victoria's face turned red, but said, “What are you, five? Would you rather Grandma got you out of those filthy clothes and cleaned you up a little?”

  As he thought about it he came to the conclusion that no, he really wouldn't prefer Grandma handle that particular chore.

  As was common with the trio, they all had a good chuckle at Liam's expense.

  3

  Liam and Victoria left Grandma in the refugee-filled home and walked toward the center of town. Victoria knew the way. He wanted to see things for himself, and she seemed happy to get out with him.

  As they walked, Liam tried to reply to the mystery text, but nothing came back.

  “I have service. It should be going through.”

  “Yeah, well maybe they don't have service,” she looked over to see the phone number again, “in the 435 area code. Where is that anyway?”

  Liam shrugged, ready to write it off, until he remembered where they were.

  “Hey, I can look it up!” He giggled as he tapped the browser for the internet. With a few swipes and clicks he had his answer. The biggest search engine survived the zombies, so far.

  “This is what I've been missing all these weeks. The ability to answer simple questions.” He held the screen in front of Victoria's face as they strode down the middle of the car-less street.

  “Utah.” She said it in a deep voice, as if it revealed a mystery.

  Liam brought it back, then looked at it for several paces. “OK, that tells us nothing.” He couldn't help but be disappointed, but he didn't know why. He had his answer, after all.

  On his mental map, Utah was a veritable black hole. He knew Colorado as mountainous. Nevada had Las Vegas. But Utah?

  “I don't know about Utah, but I do know about Illinois.” She pointed ahead. “I don't think we're going to get in there.”

  Ahead of them, at the large stone building being used as the command center for the town, a large crowd of people hovered about. The diverse group appeared agitated.

  As they approached the outer fringes, Liam took Victoria's hand. She gave him a smile, then put on her serious face.

  “Excuse me,” she called to a smattering of people on the outer edge of the crowd, “what's happening here?”

  A middle-aged black woman dressed in black slacks and a long-sleeved black shirt with a sequined cat outline on the front answered her call. “You don't know?” She made a pointed effort to look Victoria up and down. “You folks come in here and take our houses and you don't know what's going on?” She ended with a very deliberate “humpf” sound.

  Victoria looked taken aback. Unsure. So Liam tried his hand.

  “Sorry ma'am. I hit my head and have been in the hospital. My girlfriend has been watching over me. We really don't know.”

  The woman's mood softened, but just a little. “You two little kids don't have to worry about it, but us older folks do. Food rations is being tied to work on the line. Can you believe that shee-it?”

  Liam and Victoria both looked at each other with blank faces.

  “Are you kidding me? How long you been out?” She began speaking very fast. “When the Army ca
me in here, the first thing they did was clear half the town and put us all together like sardines. Then they watched us like hawks. Next thing they began burning all the trees north of town. All of them! Finally, they began digging the line.” She said it with dramatic flair, but seemed disappointed it didn't elicit a reaction from them. “Oh fine. The line is a big ditch they been digging up north of here to cut across from one river to the next. Ohio to Mississippi. We'll be on an island. Get it? They gonna keep them zombies out of here completely once it's done.”

  “Wow, that's a really good idea,” Liam volunteered.

  “Yeah? Then you go up there and dig! I'm too old and tired to be digging holes.”

  “Ma'am, why don't you want to dig? Isn't it going to protect all of us?”

  Victoria added a soft hum in agreement, as if it were perfectly obvious.

  The woman turned hostile. “Oh sure. You come in, take my house. Take over my town. Interrupt with all your comin's and goin's with those awful planes. And then you bring those infected people to Cairo's doorstep. Dontcha' know we've been getting' along jus' fine until you'all show'd up.” Her dialect seemed to change the angrier she got.

  Victoria pulled his hand, moving him.

  “Oh yeah! You two gonna go back home and sleep while I gotta dig yo' damned hole!” Other agitated people turned their direction. Many, but not all, were black. Victoria whispered that the town, until the sirens, was a sleepy and predominantly black community.

  They moved around the crowd for several minutes, but there was no one in the middle giving work assignments or otherwise signifying someone in charge. As they walked, they saw the crowd was actually a queue, and the line went inside a large three-story building that looked like something out of the 1800's. It was made of large stones, ringed by a low black metal fence, and even had old-looking decorative cannons at the corners of the small patch of grass surrounding the structure. On the backside, people walked out with shovels, and headed north.

  Liam wondered if they were going to hand him a shovel.

  As if reading his mind, Victoria spoke quietly, “I think we better head back. I'm not sure what we can do here. This wasn't happening the last time I was here.” They'd gone around the building and came back along the other side of the angry residents. “Though I vote we take a different street to avoid that mean woman.”

  “Agreed. Though if someone came in and took over my street—” He hesitated as it dawned on him someone did come in and take over his street. They were dead when they arrived too. “Follow me.”

  When they reached the area where the lady had chided them, she was still there, yelling into the air at no one in particular. He didn't know why it bothered him so much, but he couldn't walk away without responding to her accusations.

  “Ma'am?” He got her attention quickly, as she'd been eying him as he approached, though she tried to feign surprise.

  “You two again?”

  “Look, I appreciate what you said. I lived south of St. Louis up until about two weeks ago.” Actually, he thought, even that wasn't true. He lived in the city of St. Louis two weeks ago. But the story was the same everywhere. “I lived in a nice little subdivision, a lot like this place,” he swept his hand behind him, “but if they're digging a ditch to keep out the z—the infected—you better be out there digging.”

  She looked taken aback, but he kept going.

  “On my street, when the infected arrived, they came by the thousands.” He began to speak louder. “First in ones and twos, but they never stopped. And my street was filled with refugees, just like your town. People who came from the north, hoping to outrun the sick.”

  He was aware a few more people were listening.

  “They came into my backyard. They broke through my window. We ran to the basement. They filled the entire house. To the brim. Anyone left outside...was dead.” He left out most of the grisly details of his rescue: blood dripping through the floorboards, pieces of the zombies strewn over his lawn, the loss of Victoria. “When we finally came out of our home, the sick had moved on. But my house was destroyed. My neighbor's house was burned to the ground. In fact, my whole neighborhood looked like a war zone. And almost no one else survived.”

  He knew he was exaggerating for effect, but the end result was perfectly true.

  “I can never go back home.” He paused, amazed that he had a considerable number of people listening. “It was wiped off the map by the zombies.”

  He felt he had them. Surely the message was clear, though he didn't intend anything more than convincing the lone woman. But she pulled the wrong message from his speech.

  “Zombies?” She said it loudly, as if to bring the listeners back to her side. “Look child, I appreciate your fantasies, and I'm sorry your house got burned down, but I'm not scared of no zombies. Nuh uh. Last year I had a robber break in and I shot 'em dead, yes sir. If these zombies make it to kare-roh, you can bet they gonna get what's coming to 'em.”

  Then, with a flourish she turned away from him and yelled, “And I ain't digging no damned ditch!”

  Liam let himself be pulled forcefully by Victoria.

  4

  They were halfway back to their temporary house when Liam finally stopped.

  “All right, that didn't go as planned.” He looked at her and couldn't help but smile in her presence.

  “What? What's so funny?” A crooked smile hung on her face.

  Liam's smile grew bigger. Most of his smile was because he just liked being around her, but a not inconsiderable part was because of what he saw in the yard behind her.

  “You know, you may regret joining up with me for the Apocalypse.” He nodded to the pile of bikes under the massive tree in the unkempt lawn behind her. “I'm going to take one of those bikes and go look at this ditch they're digging. I'm not going to spend my life lounging in a house like those kids back there and I'm not going to push a shovel either. Not when there are bigger problems facing us all...” His speech petered out.

  Her smile didn't diminish. “So, what I'm hearing is that you suffer from ants-in-the-pants syndrome, and it just won't let you settle down and watch the grass grow. Maybe enjoy a lemonade on a quiet patch of backyard? Stuff normal people do?”

  Liam wanted to be a writer. He had more or less took an oath at the dying figure of Agent Duchesne that he would document the destruction of the world, if for no other reason than ensure the proper people were blamed when the history books were finally printed again. He couldn't tell a story if he was thumbing a smartphone with other teens, or “shoveling shit in Louisiana” while a war was going on. He would have to give credit to General Patton for that bit, if he remembered.

  They walked through the yard and Liam reached out and touched Victoria's side. “You're it!” He took off running through the tall grass, laughing. He made his way to the bikes.

  She sauntered along to the pile as he was pulling one out. “Not in the mood for games?” He grinned.

  “You'll know when I'm in the mood for games, mister.” She was stern, but she was seldom able to pretend to be angry or mad, which was something Liam loved about her.

  Fortunately, the bikes they selected hadn't been there for very long. The tires were low, but not flat. Liam didn't even flinch at the need to ride a bright lime green women's cruiser. Victoria's was pink.

  The town of Cairo was smaller than he thought it would be. He could see most of it by looking in all directions along the gridded road system. The central building they'd just left was about midway between the north end of town where there was some kind of metal gate, and the south end of town where there were lots of trees. Beyond and above the trees he saw two metal-trussed bridges. It was a mystery where the bridges went, or what they crossed. He assumed it was the two rivers.

  Riding through the town, he saw many more refugees. If he didn't know they were there, he might have missed them. Most were faces inside the dark interiors. Hiding.

  Others were bolder, like them, and stood on the
stoops or walked in the nearby yards. Some waved. Most kept to themselves. By and large, they were white with a few rare other assorted races, leaving Liam to wonder whether the woman back at the building was telling the truth. Did all these people come in and kick the native residents to the curb? He didn't doubt it would be done by "the authorities," but the biggest question was why. Why go through the trouble of kicking people out? Why not just have refugees live with the natives?

  Once again he turned introspective, remembering how he felt when those refugees came up his own street. Or when they were on the highway. Everyone wanted the refugees to keep going. For several minutes, he churned the pedals as he followed Victoria.

  She pointed to her left. "Let's go that way. It looks like there's a way to get up on that levee."

  The levee wasn't obvious from inside the town, but as they neared the edge he was struck by how big it was. It was basically a miles-long huge pile of dirt, covered by grass. "It looks like a prison wall. The town is a prison."

  Victoria replied, "With walls like this, I wonder why they need to dig a ditch?"

  Liam had no idea.

  The grassy slope was too steep to ride. They hopped off and pushed their steeds up the incline. With a huff, Liam pushed his onto the flat gravel service road on the ribbon of levee above the town. Victoria was a moment behind.

  "Wow," he said.

  She repeated him as she saw the same thing.

  They were at the highest point of a narrow peninsula. From his position, the levee road receded into the distance to the south, toward the two large bridges. Looming large to the West was the Mississippi River. The ugly brown water moved fast. He could see that from several hundred yards away, across some newly planted farmland.

  "What in the heck is that?" She pointed to a side channel of the Mississippi river. It was about a mile long and completely filled with barges, barge towboats, and smaller watercraft. At the head of the inlet were two bright white towboats pushing drifting boats and other debris into the protected harbor.

  "It looks like they're junk collectors," he replied.