“They’re still in quarantine, right?”
“They get out today, supposedly, but we can house them another twenty-four hours,” the colonel added helpfully.
We quarantined ever since discovering that some infected turned slower than others. The range was wide, from several minutes up to almost a day, depending on the severity and location of the bite. I’d heard the rumor of some people who proved to be immune to whatever this was, but never seen it with my own eyes. Always a “friend of a friend heard this” sort of rumor, which didn’t make it false. Just rare as hell.
Even Dr. Singh admitted it was not only possible, but likely that given the millions, billions, who had been bitten, one or two might have the correct makeup or body chemistry to either throw off the infection entirely or at worst, become an asymptomatic carrier—if it was an infection, which remained to be seen. Damn it.
“All right. I’ll be back sometime tomorrow to interview them. And they better pass my interview or I’m leaving them with you. I already got Roxy, so I don’t need no more crazies in my house.”
“Does she know you say those terrible things about her in public?” Northcutt asked.
“Roxy? No way. And don’t mention it to her, either. She is nuts, you know. No reason to get her riled up when she is off her meds like she is and all.”
The colonel laughed again, indulgently. He knew Roxy. He knew who was really crazy at my house and it wasn’t the old lady who kept everything running. It was me, of course.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Pederson Lakeside Marina and Resort must have been lovely when first constructed in the late 1990s, and was still a nice vacation spot when the First Wave fell, and rose. I’d been drawn to the site from the first days after arriving in Livingston, and I initially wondered why the survivors there in the city didn’t flock to the location. Instead, Colonel Northcutt established what would eventually become the Livingston Safe Zone, a roughly twenty-city-block area, around what used to be the community of Blanchard west of Livingston proper.
Size probably had a lot to do with it, I’d finally realized. Blanchard was a peninsula that stuck out into the lake and could comfortably house thousands, while the tiny finger of land that developers chose to make into the Pederson was just a condominium community, a few restaurants and a really nice marina.
Of course, the Safe Zone required hundreds of stacked containers to form the initial wall, and I’d labored long hours alongside the rest of the survivors to erect the barrier, then spent weeks inside, systematically killing zombies. That was where I really started honing my skills and discovering that my ability to shoot for hours at a time was something that stood out from the rest of the population.
I’d never been in the military, and so I didn’t know. I knew I was pretty good at competition shooting in the civilian world, but I simply assumed the Army or Marines spent hours and hours honing their skills at the range. I was less than enthused to find out this was not the case. Well, maybe in some Special Forces units that was true, but most of the Guardsmen Colonel Northcutt commanded were primarily mechanics or Civil Affairs troops, and I never could get a straight answer on what the fuck that was, anyway.
They could shoot, and they had really good close-quarter combat training. Taking the room or the building back from the zombies was something these guys did easily, once they got over the center mass fetish and started capping zeds in the head. But the steady, grinding work of shooting headshots for hours at a time was simply not something the US military taught. No zombie sniper school, I was sad to discover.
So I quickly found myself assigned to a nest on top of the local Conoco station in the center of the walled-off area that would eventually become the Safe Zone. I proceeded to eradicate hundreds of zombies as the days began to run together. I started off with an AR-15, but soon realized the true worth of the 22 Long Rifle cartridge as 5.56mm ammunition began to run low.
So, as soon as the Safe Zone was officially declared zombie free and the groups of hard-pressed survivors began moving into the freshly liberated homes and apartments, I started my own plans in motion. Well, maybe “plans” was too grandiose for what I had in mind. I knew I didn’t want to live with the herd, and I wanted control over who I would have to endure as neighbors.
The Pederson was abandoned property, with no clear titleholders present for either the individual condominiums or the larger properties of the marina and the related businesses. I checked. So I decided to squat in the middle of my new domain and clear as I went.
Even with a stout, six-foot-tall brick fence surrounding the bulk of the property, I couldn’t do it alone. I figured I was going to have to hire some help, so imagine my surprise when Roxy, Ken, and Patty showed up on that first day to help. And they haven’t left since.
When I pulled up to the gate, I was greeted by a familiar sight. A welcome committee made up of half a dozen zombies stood waiting, pressed up against the heavy iron bars. They were a motley lot, damaged from the violence of their deaths and the ensuing months of staggering around. I did a quick check, and even though some of these deadheads were well advanced in their gradual decay, I didn’t see any with that darkened, leathery appearance we’d begun to associate with the First Wave of the dead. Oh, goodie. I was hoping I would get some of the order filled right off the bat, but I guess that was asking for too much.
We knew what attracted the zombies, of course. I could hear it even now, this late in the afternoon. The sounds of laughter, the merriment of children at play. That sound carried and attracted the zombies, like the calliope song of an ice cream truck on a hot summer day summoned children in the old world. These creatures were looking for a snack too, but they would receive nothing here today except for the eternal sleep of the truly dead. That remained the only treat I had to deliver.
I parked facing the small crowd, but as was our procedure, I exited the vehicle with one of the Rugers and circled quickly to the left. I don’t know who choreographed this little dance the first time, but we always cleared from the left and fired across the gate. That way we were firing away from the compound and avoided any chance of hitting the living. The bullets that over-penetrated continued winging it south, and I didn’t know of a single occupied structure further south than our little outpost. Well, the clinic in Goodrich, now, I thought. May need to rethink the standard operating procedures if that plan went forward. Worry for another day, I thought as I lined up my first shot.
Shooting offhand while standing is not as easy as it looks. The body sways and the rifle, despite the small size, is a noticeable weight after a while. For these few targets at this meager range, though, I didn’t bother with getting out a shooting stick or bracing against the side of the truck.
Bang. I started clearing nearest to most distant and none got within ten yards of me. Good enough. Six down with seven shots. One had a hitch in his giddyup that spoiled my first try. Hey, happens to the best of us, and I wasn’t on the clock at the moment.
“You better clean that mess up,” came the cry from behind the gate, and I gave Roxy a single-finger salute as I stopped to reload.
“Yeah, yeah. Let me get the truck in first and I’ll get to hauling. This all you got?” I replied, my voice raised to be heard over the cry of the nearby birds.
“Hell, no. Third batch today,” Roxy replied as she triggered the gate to rumble open.
I blanched at that declaration since my mind was still on the conversation with the colonel. If Roxy noticed, she didn’t say anything. I pulled the truck in, parked it up under the expansive garage, and swapped vehicles. The ATV we used already had the trailer attached, and I wasted no time transferring over a bag of loaded magazines for the little rifle as I headed back out. Roxy never relaxed until I was back outside and she could reclose the gate. She waited with her AR in hand, ready to add her firepower if necessary.
Using the heavy kitchen gloves we carried on the ATV, I hefted the filthy corpses up into the trailer and motored over to the
burn pit. Inside, I saw there were already fifteen or twenty dead stacked up in the six-foot-deep pit. Shit, this many wandering dead was unusual since we’d systematically eliminated the zombies from the surrounding neighborhood months ago. Most days, we would see two or three that were the more wide-ranging of the roaming dead.
As always, it seemed getting the deadweight out of the trailer was more than getting them in, and I was sweating pretty good by the time the ragged bundles of dead flesh rested atop their fallen brethren. Thinking about what the colonel said, I stopped with the last corpse and felt around with the thick gloves until I located what I thought was there.
“Robbing the dead now, are we?”
Roxy’s words caused me to jump like a scalded cat and my pistol was already halfway out, bulky gloves or not, when the old lady waved me down. I rounded on her anyway.
“What the hell, old woman? You scared the shit out of me,” I grumped, and held up the wallet I’d snaked. “And this isn’t stealing. Just performing some intelligence gathering.”
“Don’t you ‘old woman’ me, you big bastard. I can still hand out spankings, you know. And what do you know about intelligence?” she shot back, but I could tell something was on her mind. I knew because she waited too patiently as I flipped open the filthy leather wallet and peeked inside.
I looked at the little plastic rectangle and tried to keep the emotion off my face. The dead man had a name and a life before the plague took him, and I forced myself to ignore the pictures of a woman and child visible on the other section of the trifold and focused on the cloudy image inside the first slot.
“You’re a long way from home, Delbert,” I said to the corpse as I moved the billfold closer to Roxy’s old eyes. She got the implication immediately when she saw where my finger pointed. Delbert Collins hailed from Kingwood, Texas. Sixty miles away, in fact. I knew Kingwood, of course. That was where my wife and son were buried. In the backyard of our old home in Kingwood. Too far for a zombie to be roaming, I reckoned, unless somebody intentionally led them here. Or they were getting smarter.
“Let’s get this fire lit. Then I need to talk to Ken and Patty. The colonel had news.”
“I’m not going to like it, am I?” Roxy asked, seriously.
“Not even a little bit.”
“Want to give me a hint?” she asked, and from the way she spoke, I figured she already knew something was in the wind.
“Delbert ain’t the only zed wandering away from home.” That was all I said, but I could tell the words struck home.
Roxy nodded. “We’ve seen upswing in movement, while you were gone. Getting as many as ten or twenty in a day, and the last few men I checked came from Goodrich or further south.”
“Robbing the dead?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“Gathering intelligence,” she replied smoothly.
Why did that not surprise me?
CHAPTER SIX
Scavenging in the zombie apocalypse was a game for suckers, but playing rodeo with the dead was a purely stupid thing to be doing. I told myself this for what seemed the hundredth time as I approached yet another shambling, white-eyed monster.
Patty watched my back from her perch atop the big Peterbilt as Ken sat in the driver’s seat, ready to shift the big rig into gear if the numbers started going against us. I was left with Roy, my earnest but slightly skittish helper, as I dropped the circle of tough nylon rope around the neck of the latest customer to arrive.
I wasn’t actually tossing the rope, mind you. This was more African nature park than Wild West rodeo. The capture poles were an essential part of the zombie hunter’s kit, and I was an old hand at maneuvering the ten-foot-long aluminum pipe into place. Once the range was correct, I could snag the zombie and snatch the rope tight around the creature’s neck. This way, the zombie could be walked, or wrestled, around to the loading gate and forced inside. Once through the gate, I simply released the knot at the friendly end of the pipe and the rope could be pulled loose from the First Wave zombie and it was free to play with its new friends inside the cattle transporter. Easy, right?
I was only grabbing up the oldest of the monsters, and so far I had seven in the bag after hunting all morning. We’d set up south of Livingston, out on a stretch of highway near enough to a small housing development, where I hoped to snag some of the oldest of the walking corpses. So far, so good.
Of course, in the meantime, Patty was racking up an impressive pile of bodies in an arc around where Roy and I were working. Since I had all the “stick” time when we used these same devices a few months back to clear the fuel terminal in town, and later, at the Pederson Marina, I was doing the heavy lifting and Roy stood around to lend a hand. Or words of encouragement.
“Here comes another customer,” Roy shouted, and I nearly clubbed him with the long stick. The twenty-something Roy Swiger might not be weighed down in the brains department, but he had guts enough to stand out here on the asphalt ribbon. I decided to cut him some slack, seeing as how he was the excitable sort.
“Pass,” I said. “He’s old, but not first generation.” Slinging the pole over my shoulder, I drew my suppressed .22 pistol and notched the old monster’s noggin with one shot. With the barrel extension provided by the suppressor, I noticed my accuracy was picking up out over fifty feet.
“How do you know? And why does it matter?” Roy queried, and I just gave a shrug before answering.
“He didn’t have the leathery texture we see on the First Wave,” I said simply.
“Why did the colonel order these up, anyway? He going to turn them into work gloves or furniture covers?”
“Beats me,” I lied. In addition to being a bit shy in the smarts department, Roy was also a notorious blabbermouth. If he was so bad, why did I bring him? Because getting anybody with half a brain to act as close support for a Zombie Roundup was harder than it sounded. Yes, it sounded hard enough already, but since we weren’t looting—I mean scavenging—the nearby houses yet, the interest by men of a certain skillset was weak at best. For all his faults, Roy could use the shotgun he held at the ready, and he would take silver in trade. Done deal.
Silver, and gold to a lesser extent, were used as currency of a sort, but more as a kind of trade marker than for any real, intrinsic value. Of course, the same could have been said of the now useless dollars we used to chase. Another of the colonel’s ideas, and a good one. Silver-paid wages could be redeemed at one of the stores set up by the Guard and run by civilians. Simply called the Marts, these businesses served as a combination department store and grocery warehouse.
“You think we are going to finish today?” the young man asked as I saw a fresh trio of zeds ambling our way.
Two looked older, with the saggy skin and ragged clothes, but the third, a nearly naked male, was a prototypical First Wave victim. He looked like a Claymation figure sculpted from beef jerky, and I noticed his stride, while short, was almost without any distortion or hitch common in the dead.
I risked a quick look at the sky before answering Roy. “Probably not. Looks like we might get some rain, and I am not wrestling with zombies in the mud.”
“But we are on the road, man. All asphalt.”
I nodded, conceding the point. But we might end up off the road, and in the weeds the mud could be a hazard. Roy, though, as I’d come to learn, wasn’t much of a thinker. I knew that going in so didn’t give the thought any more traction in my brain.
Instead, I focused on the middle zombie as he drew within range. Ten feet and ready to lasso. Two suppressed cracks, Patty’s work, and the pair of zombies flanking the First Waver went down. Perfect.
“Good shooting, Patty,” I called over my shoulder as I dropped the pole. And missed.
I’m not the best cowboy at the zombie rodeo, but my aim is usually spot-on. Until the zombie decides to take evasive maneuvers, and giving me a head fake like an NBA point guard. So my pole wacked him in the shoulder instead of settling the noose around his neck. And
the thing was on me in a sudden surge of speed. I saw the snapping jaws draw close as the dead thing huffed and snarled.
I dropped, my butt hitting the hard asphalt even as I released the pole and came up with the suppressed pistol in hand. Two rounds, fired into the looming creature’s face up under his chin, and the deadweight hit me like a sack of rotted meat. Which was what it was at that point. Not a threat to my life but just another decaying corpse to be hauled to the burn pits and torched.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Roy step close. He’d been looking away, I realized. Distracted by something, he’d failed to give me proper cover. Now he had his shotgun shouldered, turning in my direction. Too late to save me, but arriving just in time to take me out with a late blast. I don’t know what he had planned, honestly, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
“Back the fuck up!” I barked, and managed to wrestle the stinking mass off my chest and halfway to the roadway. My legs might have been pinned for the moment, but I still managed to draw down on Roy as he swung the barrel to bear.
“He got you, man,” Roy whined, the barrel of his pump shotgun only inches from lining up with my head. If he squeezed the trigger, I realized the explosive gases from the muzzle might still blind me even if the slug missed.
“He didn’t bite me, you idiot!” I bellowed. “I shot him before he could get a chance. Now get that fucking gun out of my face.”
I was rattled. That was too fucking close. A split second longer and the thing would have been gnawing on my jacket. It was heavy leather, and hot as the blazes in this spring warm spell, but once again I swore to never set foot outside without wearing the thing. The jacket had proven to be bite resistant before, but that was still just too close.
Unlike the movies, zombie jaws prove to be no stronger than they were before death. But, since the creatures didn’t feel pain, they would happily exchange a few broken teeth or a shattered jaw for a bite of warm, living flesh.
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