Nation Undead (Book 1): Neighbors

by Ford, Paul Z.

  Aisha walked out the front door and waved at her husband from across the yard. He waved back and started walking toward her. She continued to wave, frantically, now seeming to beckon him to move faster back to their home. His jeans swished as he half-walked, half-jogged back. He could see as he got closer that her eyes were furrowed, and she had a fresh coat of worry on her face.

  “Hey,” he greeted her. “What’s up?”

  “The power. The electricity just went out.” She opened the door and walked back into their house. Daniel was on the couch, on his tablet, watching a show that he’d seen dozens of times in the last couple of weeks. Aisha went over to the oven and pressed buttons to no avail. The clock was blank. Kahn reached over and flickered the light switch several times up and down. Nothing. No power.

  “Okay, don’t panic. I’ll check the panel.” He walked back out the door. Their electrical panel was on the side of the modest house, and he thought maybe a breaker tripped and caused the outage. He brushed through the tall grass on the side of the house and swung the panel up and open. None of the breakers were tripped so he turned the main breaker off, waited a few seconds, and then back on again. He went back to the front door and found the house was still powerless. He shrugged at his wife from the entryway to the room. She did not look amused.

  She threw her hands up. “What are we going to do now?” She barely contained her frustration, holding back because Daniel was within earshot. Neither parent wanted their young child to catch their panic and uncertainty. But Aisha’s mood had shifted with the power outage. She was now bordering on panic, and her husband’s reaction would either keep her calm or drive her further into alarm.

  “Well, I think we should take a look at your rationing plan. I think we have five or so days left of food?” He walked fully into the kitchen, intending to study her written notes and come up with a plan together. Instead, she picked up the paper and pen lying on the counter and threw them both angrily at her husband. He threw his hands up in a defensive gesture while the pen bounced off his chest and the crumpled paper fluttered harmlessly to the floor. Hot tears welled in his wife’s eyes, and he kept his hands up to defend against the sudden emotional intensity of the moment.

  “We don’t have a plan!” She shrieked through angry, clenched teeth. “Everything we have needs to be cooked in our oven. Our electric oven!” She punctuated her point by slapping her right hand down on the glass oven-top. “You’ve… we’ve been ignoring the writing on the wall. After a week we both knew nobody was coming. The food would run out and we wouldn’t have anywhere to go or any way to take care of ourselves. Nobody is coming to help us!”

  Kahn realized their dilemma now. Her plan relied on baked bread and dough to fill out their meals. Without the capability of making anything in the oven, they were comparatively rich in raw materials with no way to turn them into food. Actual food that they could eat. He bent over and retrieved the paper. It had an inventory on it, something she did every morning, and the plan for the next days. He smoothed the paper and read the inventory. Not enough. Not enough food for even three full meals tomorrow. He let the paper drop back to the floor. Aisha was actively sobbing now, and he went to her and held her in his arms. He patted her back while his mind raced.

  She was right; anytime she brought up the idea to plan for the next steps, he had changed the subject or given her a cursory answer to hold off the obligatory serious discussion. Aisha had blissfully enjoyed the last few weeks as well, and hadn’t pushed hard for a long-term strategy. The truth was, he didn’t know what to do. And each time his thoughts wandered toward the future, Kimble’s warning scared him back into isolation. The fact they lived just outside of the major city, on a fenced and relatively safe property, and they had the ability to remain away from others for this amount of time furthered their innocence and unwillingness to act.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered into her hair, pressing his face against her head and squeezing her gently and affectionately. “I’m sorry.” He pushed them apart gently. She came up and looked at him with red eyes.

  “We need to get out of here. We need to go somewhere safe.” Her voice cracked on the last word. Kahn shook his head.

  “We have no idea what’s going on out there.” He let her shoulders go and waggled his arm loosely in the air. “I think we are safe here. If we need food, we need to go find food.”

  “Okay, we need to go now.”

  Kahn once again shook his head. He trusted his wife and knew she was strong and capable, but he kept hearing Kimble saying, those things are dead. They bite people. The people die. The dead people get up and bite another. He couldn’t tell Aisha his fear that this insane statement was true. He didn’t even think it was true. But fear was enough to keep it to himself.

  “I’ll go alone. You stay here with Daniel. If any of those,” he hesitated, not sure how to proceed, “um… people are out there it’ll be easier for me to get away if I’m by myself. I’ll just go out, check it out, see if I can find food at the store or anything, and come back here.” He nodded once, firmly, to show the matter was closed in his mind.

  “You’re just going to go to the store?” She crossed her arms. Emotions of fear and doubt danced across her face. He understood her doubt. His face reflected his thoughts transparently as well.

  “I don’t know what it will be like out there. All I’ll do is… drive. I’ll head toward the Wal-Mart. If it’s closed and nobody is out there, I’ll come back and we’ll leave. All together, as a family. Otherwise, I’ll buy food and we’ll stay put for a while longer. I’ll try to find out when things will be back to normal.” He doubted his own words. They made no sense in the context of Kimble’s advice. According to him, and his radio conversations--

  Wait a second, that was it. Kimble had some sort of a radio set up in his place. Something that wasn’t fed from the same source the TV and car radio got their emergency statement. His eyes lit up with the idea.

  “What if you run into infected people?” Aisha was asking. Kahn snapped back into the conversation with her with a new sense of direction.

  “Wait here. The guy next door, Kimble, the guy who left, he mentioned some sort of radio set up in his house. I’m going to go see if I can get in and reach someone.” He touched his wife’s arm and made his way toward the door.

  “The power is out, honey,” she stated coldly.

  Dammit, thought Kahn. She’s right. What was I thinking? He paused for a second with his back turned. Kimble seemed like a guy who would be prepared for that kind of thing.

  “Hey, maybe he has a generator!” Kahn leapt to the optimistic conclusion. “Maybe he has food he left behind, too.” Kahn smiled, trying to infect Aisha with his hopefulness.

  “So, you’re just going to break into his house?”

  “No, I mean, I’ll go in. I don’t think he’s coming back. He told me…” Kahn stopped. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say. His protective filter was not in place when he started to speak. He quickly thought through what he could tell her that would be safe. “Um… he told me that he wasn’t coming back.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I don’t really know.” Kahn scratched his bearded chin and awkwardly shifted his feet. “He said he was going to get together with some other people and share resources. I don’t know, it didn’t really make sense to me then.” And it hadn’t really. Kahn had been confused. It was Christmas morning when they spoke, and he didn’t think anybody really knew what was going on. Starvation was far from his mind at that time, and isolation seemed safe. Listening to authorities seemed safe. Where did Kimble really go?

  Aisha thought for a moment. Daniel called out for his mom and both parents looked toward the sound of his voice. She shrugged lightly and pointed as if to tell her husband to do whatever he needed to do. Kahn took a step forward and kissed her on the cheek before turning and leaving the house. On his way out he grabbed the car key hanging from the loop near the door. He strode out the door and
looked toward Kimble’s abandoned house. He briefly considered walking over there, maybe jumping the fence, but decided against it. If he didn’t find anything, he would just drive to the store.

  He popped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. He reversed down his familiar gravel driveway and looked behind him as he accelerated away from his home. He spotted the forgotten boxes in the back of the car and looked at them closely for the first time. Several rifles, pistols, and ammunition for all of them, plus a couple vests in the packaging, a box with gloves, one with knives. Ash couldn’t have thrown some freeze dried food in here, he complained. He knew they had a small section in the store, for hunters and campers. Any food would do at this point.

  He reached the gate and exited the car to open it. He walked over to Kimble’s gate and opened it as well. Kahn returned to the small SUV and maneuvered it onto his neighbor’s property. He drove up and parked in the same spot where Kimble had loaded his red truck a few weeks ago. He killed the engine and stepped outside.

  As he approached the elevated porch, he looked back toward his own house. It looked small, even from this close distance. Clouds had covered the sun in the few minutes since he left, and he knew the daytime darkness would be worrying and wearing down Aisha’s resolve. The few trees on his land seemed to dwarf his home from this point-of-view, and their leafy shadows danced menacingly across the yard. He stepped up into the darkness of Kimble’s patio and felt the temperature drop. He was suddenly chilled in his short sleeves.

  He made a fist and pounded loudly on the front door. Immediately, he felt foolish for having done so. Of course nobody was home. He knocked almost without thinking. How neighborly of me, Kahn thought. A social nicety that didn’t make much sense. He reached forward and gripped the doorknob, not expecting anything, and not sure what to do beyond this move. To his surprise, the knob turned easily and the door popped open. He pushed it silently open and took a step into the dark house.

  He tried the light switch and, expectedly, got no result. He left the door wide open to let some light into the daytime shadow and walked farther into the strange place. The entryway led directly into the living room. Kimble had a leather recliner facing a flat-screen TV on a pedestal. The window behind the TV was covered with a thick black curtain, shielding the room from natural light. The house was almost bare. No decorations adorned the walls. Nothing to personalize the home. Kahn walked into the farthest of several attached doorways and found a pocket door leading into a small kitchen. He quickly opened cabinets and found glassware, utensils, cookware. The pantry was completely bare, so he walked back into the main room. He tried the next door and found a small half-bathroom, pitch dark. Backtracking toward the front door he entered a narrow hallway that was relatively well-lit in the dusky home.

  He felt nervous and walked cautiously down the hall. He didn’t really have an idea of what he was looking for. He felt like he was seeking Kimble’s guidance in the dim, empty house. Nothing indicated to him that there was anything in this house that could help him or his family. There were three doors down the hall, one of which was narrow and Kahn guessed it was a linen closet. The first door on the right showed him a bedroom with a large, unkempt bed and nightstand. This room, like every other room in the house, was bare. Kahn slowly reached the end of the hall and opened the last door in the house. This room was set up differently than the rest. There were several documents and photos on the walls in here. It was too dark to make out more than the outline of some furniture, so Kahn followed the wall around to the left. He bumped into something, a rolling chair, and pushed it out of the way. He felt forward with his hands and gripped thick cloth hanging from the outside wall of the house. As he stepped into it, he realized it was another heavy black curtain covering a window. He pulled, hard, and the heavy piece of material snapped taut and protested with a tearing sound. He pulled again and the single piece of cloth fell down to the floor in a heap.

  The shine of the cloud-covered sun immediately revealed the room to Kahn. The wall opposite him had a small desk with a laptop computer on top, lid closed, and several notepads, books, and papers cluttering up the surface. In the corner beyond where he was standing was another desk, much larger than the first he noticed, with an amazing array of equipment filling the space.

  This must be the radio, Kahn thought, as he stepped toward the unfamiliar gear. The desk was built in two layers. The bottom layer had several boxes that looked to have digital readouts and dials. There was a keyboard on the bottom row with a coiled, heavy-duty cable running into a large connector. There was also a microphone, just like Kahn imagined one of these units having. It stuck up from the base and ended at a 45-degree angle with a mesh covering at the rectangular top. There was a button at the base that read PTT in large blocky letters.

  The top shelf of the desk had several large black and silver boxes stacked six high in two stacks. Next to these stacks were several more pieces of olive-colored equipment. Even in the dim light Kahn recognized these as vehicle-mounted military radios. They each had handles on the front for sliding into a mounting bracket in a Humvee, truck, or other vehicle. Kimble had even built rough frames out of wood to keep them stacked neatly.

  How in the world did he get his hands on these without anybody noticing? As a former supply sergeant, Kahn knew these units were serial numbered and inventoried regularly. Kahn pushed one of them aside and peered around back. A snake of wires connected the radios to the black and silver boxes and the civilian equipment below. He fiddled for a second until he felt a flat button on one of the unfamiliar boxes and instinctively pressed it. The device lit orange and beeped a long note, startling Kahn. The light illuminated power plugs from the rest of the equipment running into this box.

  “A battery!” Kahn spoke to himself. Of course Kimble would have a battery backup on this setup. Kahn was no radio expert, but he knew a power surge could badly damage equipment like this. Kimble seemed to have set up these dozen battery backups to protect the sensitive apparatus. Kahn pressed the identical button on each of the units, but none lit up except for the first one he had touched.

  He then got to work turning the rheostat switches for power on the military radios. The backlit buttons and display began to glow with a dim green light. He sat in the chair he had pushed earlier to flip the red switch labeled “power” on the below radio kit. A snap of static pierced the air from one of the built-in speakers. An LED readout sprang to life on the bottom screen. It showed him the channel and gave him the ability to adjust several settings with which he was not acquainted.

  Kahn did the only thing he knew how and pressed the button on the microphone. “Hello?” he croaked softly. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  When he let the button go another chirp of static came and was cut off. Nothing. He waited a few moments for a response while he examined the equipment. There were selection buttons on the panel where he could rotate the channel number. He pressed it a few times upward, and then back down again to the original channel. This was over his head. He had no clue how to set this stuff or how to talk to people. He tried again.

  “Hello. This is Hal Kahn in San Antonio, Texas. Can anyone hear me?” Chirp of static and then earsplitting silence, again. After a few moments he knew he had to give up. There was no way he’d be able to do anything with this stuff. He stood, deflated, and pressed his hands to the desk in defeat.

  ...surp…not…yuh…ai…

  Kahn jumped with the sudden noise of broken speech. He depressed the talk button again and started repeating hello, hello over and over again. He let the button go and waited for a coherent response. There was someone out there!

  …earme press the… button on your cons… press the cat bu… ill use the computer to enhan…

  Kahn searched the console. He sat again and tried to peer into each box in the shadow of the desk overhang looking for something that might be a cat button. He frowned, not finding what he was looking for, until
he studied the small keyboard. It wasn’t a standard computer keyboard, it had the alpha characters in the same place as a typical keyboard but it had a row of large buttons across the top of the plastic chassis. They each had acronyms or numbers on them, none of which Kahn recognized. Then he spotted it, CAT, right in the middle. He pressed it.

  The LED console readout blinked with a multitude of numbers for about 3 seconds and then stopped. The only thing that didn’t change was the channel, so he thought he’d try again.

  “Hello?” Kahn hesitated with his finger off the button for a moment. “I… I couldn’t hear you before but I pressed the button you said to. I hope I didn’t lose you, hello? I’m here with my family but we’re running out of food. We need help. We need to know when help is coming.” The little chirp of static punctuated his desperate plea.

  “Where are you?” The voice had a southern accent, not unusual for Texas obviously, but it was forceful. Not friendly. Kahn suddenly felt a sense of unease having activated this device.

  “Um… we’re outside of San Antonio,” he hesitated again, not wanting to give more without knowing more about the man on the other side. “Where are you? We need to know what to do.” Another long pause. This time, the man coughed uncontrollably through the microphone before speaking. It was a wet, nasty cough, and he ended it with a sharp intake of breath.

  “I’m in my truck. I’m north of San Antonio.” He took another breath into the mic, wheezing this time, “I thought I could get into town. Get some food. I couldn’t get my truck south into town so I stopped as close as I could and walked. But those things… those things were on the road. They were in the cars… oh god… what happened?” The radio cut off suddenly. Goosebumps ran up Kahn’s back and arms at the fear in the man’s voice.