by R. J. Spears
As soon as Mike and Logan were in position, just a block away from the horde, they sounded their car horn. It took a good twenty seconds for the zombies to react. Logan jumped out of the passenger door and made a war whoop that we could even hear over the car alarm and the honking.
The whoop definitely got the zombie’s attention as several of them broke from the mob and started toward the SUV and the man waving his arms frantically -- a fresh meal, ready and waiting. The only thing they had to do was catch it.
Logan jumped back inside and Mike slowly led the parade of zombies towards the downtown area. The horde staggered toward the SUV, blindly following it down the street. It was like a macabre parade, zombies stumbling along bouncing off parked cars with the sole intent of getting a bite of a delicious Logan sandwich. Mike played it safe always keeping a half-block distance between the back of the SUV and the throng of undead.
Unconsciously I began whistling “When the Saints Go Marching In” and got a few bars in before I caught Greg’s unappreciative stare. I cut off my whistling.
Mike moved towards the west side bridge that would lead them out of town. It was a slow process that required a lot of patience on Mike’s behalf; most people would just jack-rabbit out of there, but Mike was one of the coolest people I’d ever seen under pressure.
It took a half hour for the SUV with its trailing zombie horde to make it to the bridge. The SUV was a distant speck through the binoculars when it sped away from the throng and off to the west side where they would double back and back to the church and home.
After their potential source of food sped away, the zombies continued to follow for another mile, but then the horde broke up into aimless small packs heading off into different directions. We lived to fight another day.
CHAPTER 7
High Tension
Our leadership team was never really elected. They just rose to their roles like they did in real life, by taking charge. Most of them consisted of the pillars of the community, well intentioned and conscientious. They were the people who served on the PTA, led community charities, and delivered Meals-on-Wheels. Now though, they were just like everyone else -- trying to survive.
Over time, a few people couldn’t take the day-to-day survival or loss of their loved ones and took themselves out of the equation. These people usually just walked out into the night and never were found, but at least three of them were discovered in houses hanging or dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. There was not one of us that blamed them. Each and every one of us had considered their exit strategy at some point.
Some people opted out to be with relatives. It was bittersweet to lose someone that had fought alongside us in those first terror-filled days, but we all understood and empathized with their need to be with their own. We all had people out there, but many stayed because they felt the church was their best place to survive or relatives were too far away. In the end, our core little band of brothers and sisters held fast, if not always happily together.
The setup was simple. We shared food, weapons, and all our resources. It was much like the communal system set-up by the early Christians in that first century, who shared everything. Cooperation was their linchpin as it was ours. That is until Ananias and Sophora spoiled everything by being selfish. God took care of them by dropping both of them dead as a doornail. There was, however, one big difference between our group and that first Christian group: they were being persecuted by the living and we were being persecuted by the dead.
With the horde gone, the tension level in the church dropped fifty degrees, but there was still a low level of anxiety pulsing in the air. I didn’t pick up on the ugly underlying cause until it hit me in the face.
“Her people are the reason that we’re in this mess,” I heard a woman’s voice filter up the stairs that led to Doc Wilson’s E.R. I was on my way down to check on Naveen but stopped on the landing as footfalls made their way up to me.
“What do you mean?” another voice asked.
“Well, she’s a Muslim. Do you see what I mean?”
My blood started heating up, but I tamped it back down.
Two women hit the landing below me and looked up with surprise on their faces.
“She’s Hindu,” I said keeping my voice flat.
The “she’s a Muslim” woman was the same red faced woman who didn’t want us to save the child who was running for her life just a couple days ago. Mrs. Hatcher. While I wasn’t a regular attendee, I knew Mrs. Hatcher all too well. If there was an ugly mask to Christianity, she certainly wore it. Most of the hurtful gossip that filtered around the congregation before the Outbreak could be traced back to her. If there was a way to cut someone down, she knew how to use it and, in most cases, she’d smile in self-righteousness while she did it.
“They’re the same thing,” she said.
“No, they are not,” I said. The woman accompanying Mrs. Hatcher looked as if she wanted to melt into the wall. “Islam originated in Arabia. Hinduism came from India.”
“Well, whatever they are, they’re not...”she paused, knowing she needed to be careful with choosing the right words, “not one of us.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Not human. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Joel, you know what I mean.”
“The way I see it is that whether she’s on our team,” I said using air quotes around our team, “or not, she’s not the reason that the dead came back to life and started eating the living.”
“You don’t know that,” she said leaving the rest of her retort unspoken, but both of us knowing where she was going. It had filtered around the church in the weeks after the Outbreak -- the zombies were God’s way of telling us that we had screwed up His world enough and it was payback time. Pastor Stevens did his best to quell these ideas, but people being people, it was impossible to clamp them down entirely.
I hated adding to the tension, but I couldn’t help myself, “So, you’ve anointed yourself into a place of judgment.”
“Joel Hendricks, you have no place to talk,” she said, her friend still shrinking away. “You were barely attending once or twice a month and I’m sure that’s because your mother rousted you out of bed.”
This was disintegrating and I allowed myself to be sucked down deeper, “Don’t bring my mom into the conversation. ”
“Well, what do you think brought this judgment down on us? It was those that turned their back on God.”
“Then why are you suffering if it was the bad people that caused this?”
“Sin,” she said.
“I’d pick another word that starts with an ‘S,’ like science. Viruses are spawned from science, not from religion.”
In the heat of our discussion, we failed to hear the footsteps coming our way from above.
“Do either of you think you know the nature of God?” Pastor Steven’s asked.
We both pivoted quickly to look his way. He always seemed to be an endless fountain of patience, but there was something in his face that said the well was getting dry and I hated myself for pushing him to the brink. The heat of anger left my face and I felt a rush of shame replace it.
“God is big enough to allow science. There should be no arguments in that area. Science has been good to us and I sort of like electricity and antibiotics. As to where this judgment comes from -- neither of you can know that so playing God’s armchair quarterback is not productive. Can we agree on this?”
His stare went from Mrs. Hatcher to me. I nodded without a word and she said she could agree. Mrs. Hatcher and her friend skulked up the stairs leaving me there with Pastor Stevens.
“Really, Joel, you should know better,” he said, shaking his head, some of the disappointment leaving his face but it was replaced by a bone weary fatigue. “Were you on your way to see the little girl?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t let me stop you.”
CHAPTER 8
The Way We Live Now
Day-in/da
y-out survival was a real drain. Living in a world without the grid can be quite taxing. If you add zombies to the mix you get endless and prolonged drudgery intermixed with moments of mind numbing horror. Some said it was sort of like war except there were no reinforcements that had our backs.
We had solved some of the power issues by collecting all the generators we could get our hands on. We could only run those sparingly because keeping a constant supply of gasoline was quite challenging. The generators had to be placed on the roof because we learned quickly that they attracted the zombies when we had them going full blast. Some of the more industrious of our lot were working on ideas to baffle the sound.
Water wasn’t a big issue because the city had a gravity fed system. Still, no one was sure that it would last so we built a large water collection system on the roof.
Food became an issue. There were nearly seventy of us. Collecting food meant encountering zombies. We lost a few good people while foraging for food because we weren’t prepared. Initially we weren’t very systematic just going out willy-nilly on snatch and grab runs. The warriors stepped in and designed our foraging missions with a military precision and efficiency. They decided the best way to reduce the chance of losing people to zombies was to go with a double pronged approach of having disciplined foraging parties combined with clearing parties to cleanse the town of the zombies.
Part one was manageable, but part two was monumental. There were thousands of those things out there. Greg and the gang convinced us that it would be a long slog. If we took them out in small numbers, a bit at a time, it should have been an attainable objective. It was a logical argument, but one that took focus and courage. At least that’s how the warriors sold it.
For reasons beyond my comprehension, I was selected to serve as a member of these groups, even though my warrior skills were suspect. I guess being twenty-something with a quasi-athletic background gets you membership. It was that or sheer desperation because I was anything but military material.
I rotated between foraging and clearing two days a week. Foraging was a much better gig because the clearing parties sought out zombies while foragers tried to avoid the damned undead things. In reality, your chances of finding zombies while foraging was quite high.
Fridays put me on clearing party detail. Clearing parties usually got the cream of the crop from the warriors because of the danger quotient of these missions, but less experienced types like myself were usually mixed in for skill building. After twenty or so of these missions, my zombie slaying skills had improved, but I didn’t fool myself: the warriors were the pros and I was, at best, a semi-pro.
A spotter on the roof of the church with binoculars was charged with finding wandering zombies for us. If they got really lucky, they might even find a nest of them holed up in a house or old building – if you could call finding a nest of zombies lucky. The spotters located them, we found them, and wiped them out. It was a basic search and destroy mission.
The theory on clearing was, the less of these undead things around, the safer we would be in the long run. The problem was that there seemed to be an endless supply of the undead bastards and a limited supply of us.
“Joel, make sure your body armor is pulled tight on your forearms and legs,” Mike said.
“You know, for a brother, you’re pretty uptight,” I said, doing as I was told and tightening down the riot gear. Portsmouth isn’t that big of a town, but the drug problem here was quite pronounced before the Outbreak. The cops in town were prepared to take down a small army of drug dealers and their preparation was our reward. When we toured the police headquarters we netted a dozen sets of body armor, which came in handy for clearing parties. The stuff was hot as hell to wear in the summer, but in the zombie apocalypse, function won out over style. Not getting bit beat out being sweaty any day. Several of the guys wore tactical helmets, but I drew a line and refused. There had to be a line somewhere, right?
Mike led our group because he had served in the first Gulf War and Somalia after that. He knew his way around tense situations. He was in his late forties with a square frame and blocky broad shoulders. Taciturn, he rarely spoke unless it was absolutely necessary, as if speech was painful for him.
Today’s clearing group consisted of Mike and me along with two guys I didn’t know all that well, but trusted well enough, Brandon and Aaron. Brandon and Aaron were inseparable -- so much so that the two of them had picked up the nickname “A & B.” What made it so ironic is that they couldn’t be more different from each other. Brandon was a real gun nut. At twenty one, he knew more about guns than most of the warriors. He was a little guy, so maybe it was a compensation mechanism. Aaron, on the other hand, had been a pacifist prior to the Outbreak. Under Brandon’s tutelage, he now knew as much as Brandon when it came to weapons. In contrast to Brandon, Aaron was a big guy. Polite people would call him husky. Impolite people would say he was fat, but not to his face. Despite his weight, he was quite nimble. Their duo made quite a killing machine when the shit hit the fan, but today we hoped there wouldn’t be any need for wholesale killing -- just a surgical removal.
Their back story was that Brandon had pulled Aaron out of an apartment building just as a group of zombie were about to munch down on him. Those kind of situations can really bond people together and it did with them.
“Weapons check, guys,” Mike announced.
As a group, we ran through the drilled checklist of inspecting our weapons. There was a gleam in Brandon’s eyes as he went through his check. We all were outfitted with an M-16 (complements of our local military armory), Glocks, and a slicing or bludgeoning weapon of our choice. Early on we all learned that noise got the attention of the zombies. If they heard you, you were on their radar. If you shot a gun, it was like ringing the proverbial dinner bell. So, finding a quiet way to take out zombies was a must for our foraging and clearing parties.
“Hey Brandon, why don’t you have a silencer like the bad-ass hitmen in the movies?” I asked jabbing playfully at him.
“Silencers are for pussies,” he responded. “They cut down on your accuracy and velocity. If I’m facing them down with a gun, I don’t intend to be quiet about it.”
He patted his M-16 and gave me a broad smile.
“Joel, I see you’re bringing your bat,” Brandon said. “You going for a homer?”
There was a real division in our ranks on bludgeoning versus slicing weapons. There were some huge fans of swords. Some people envisioned themselves as kick-ass Samurais or Medieval shit kickers, slicing their way through zombies. Other people thought that were Paul effing Bunyun reincarnated when they came to the party with an axe. In my experience, not one person in our group was all that good with a sword or an axe.
“I see you have your King Arthur sword,” I said. “I hope it doesn’t get stuck in anything.” He carried an old fashioned broad sword, scabbard and all.
Over time, I’d seen more than a few people become shit-out-of-luck when they found their sword stuck into a zombie with no chance of pulling it free. While an axe had the satisfying feeling as it cut through bone and flesh, the weight tended to wear you down.
“Go get ‘em, Batman,” he said smacking a high-five with Aaron as both of them cackled.
“Eyes on the prize, guys,” Mike said.
My weapon of choice was a baseball bat, but not just any bat. I liked the Thunderstick. It wasn’t a standard bat, but was a training bat, thinner than a normal bat and little heavier. A lot of players used them to improve their swing. I had spent a lot of time with this type bat on the high school baseball team. Not that it did me a lot of good. I was more a glove man, riding the bench and getting limited time in right field when the score was out of reach.
It turned out to be a pretty effective weapon against the undead. If you had to face a couple of them down, you needed a way to do it as quietly as possible. I’d found a baseball bat to be a good way to affect deadly efficiency and be relatively quiet about it. My bat never seeme
d to tire me and was great at scrambling the brains of the undead. It was like hitting a fastball, only these fastballs had teeth and wanted to eat you.
“There’s a group moving between houses on 6th Street, east of Offnere,” Greg said over the walkie-talkie.
“Got you,” I said, riding shotgun in our SUV. Mike had the wheel and Brandon and Aaron were in the backseat. “What’s our best approach?”
“Head down Union and come at them from the south. They seem to be moving north. You’ll be able to come at them from behind.”
“Roger that, good buddy,” I said. Mike shot me a sideways glance and I pretended not to notice. Mike was just wound too tight for me to make any jokes and in all honesty, we were going into a dangerous situation. We came armed and armored, but all of our prep was only so good if we got boxed by another horde.
Another voice came over the walkie-talkie, “We’re getting ready to enter a house on Robinson between Park and Offnere.” It was Logan. He was leading the foraging team.
The warriors decided that there should be two teams in the field at the same time just in case the horde decided to make an appearance or marauders intruded on our territory. The working theory was that each team was the other’s ready reinforcements.
“Roger on that, Logan. Be careful,” Greg said.
Mike banked us right and then headed east before heading north again towards 6th Street. He slowed to a crawl and everyone in the car watched intently for any movement.
“Aaron, you watch to the left, too,” Mike said. “We don’t want any to come in from behind us.”
“I got it,” Aaron said.
We passed 5th Street and I sensed the alertness level in the SUV increase. The term ‘Ghost Town’ applied to the city now except our ghosts didn’t gently haunt as spectral phantasms; they tried to eat us. Most of the houses showed signs of neglect and abandonment with broken windows and doors hanging off their hinges. The worst were painted with streaks of blood and red hand prints, ugly reminders of the worst days.
