Dying to Live

by Kim Paffenroth

  Oddly, the presence of a never-sleeping army of the undead just outside the gates really didn't change the dynamics of petty squabbles and insults and power plays, so the woman, whose pride was somehow hurt by the remark, shot back, "Yes, that one guy did!"

  Military guy smiled. "Okay, Jones did, because he was just barely nicked on the hand and you chopped his damn arm off at the shoulder about two minutes after he'd been bitten. It was so tiny he might've pulled through with his arm if you hadn't. Don't sugarcoat it for this guy."

  The woman flushed. "I did the best I could! I always do the best I can, you macho asshole! I was a damn dental hygienist before… before… Oh, why do you have to be so mean?" Her voice was starting to crack and she turned and stomped off.

  There was an awkward silence. I was glad that their military precision was better honed than their interpersonal skills, or I probably would've been incinerated, or eaten, or both. "I'll go talk to her later," he said, a little surprising and almost comical in his sheepish contrition. "We call her Doc, even though she's… well, you heard that she's not completely, all the way, exactly… a doctor. But we try to be nice to her and show her some respect, 'cause she's helped a lot of people. Damn it, I shouldn't have said anything." Another awkward silence. "You'll have to excuse us, but it's just hard with new people. It's so embarrassing, admitting how little we have here and how many things we can't do, and how scared we all are. But we have to be careful."

  "No, no, I understand. What you did was amazing, and I'm grateful you got me in time."

  He picked himself up a little, forgetting his faux pas and reasserting some authority. "But she's right—if you're bitten or hurt or sick, we'll do the best we can for you, even if we have to quarantine you." He took a step toward me. "But if you lie about it and we find out, it'll be different."

  I wasn't trying to be a bad-ass, but I sensed this guy was again jockeying for position, and I still understood enough about people to know that I had to have some credibility and respect in this new group, so I met his gaze and didn't back down. "I said I understood."

  We'd gotten our male posturing out of the way early, and to everyone's satisfaction, which seemed to suit him fine. He stuck out his hand. "Sorry. I'm Jack Lawson."

  We shook hands. "Jonah Caine," I said.

  We walked over to a table near the gate where a young man sat with a clipboard. On one side of him, one of those big Rubbermaid storage sheds shelved dozens of weapons, and on the other side there was a big plastic garbage can. The people who had attacked the zombies at the gates were handing in their weapons to the man at the table, and he was marking them down and putting them in the locker. They tossed their armor and shields and larger items into the garbage can.

  Jack put his own pistol, an old Colt .45, on the table. He turned to me. "Rules. You'll have to hand over your weapons. We'll keep them and give them back if you ever want to leave."

  This was a little more than just looking me over for bites, more than them protecting themselves; this was them asking for a lot of my trust so they could enforce some crazy rules they'd thought of for their group. And it was taking away the only things that had kept me alive for weeks. "I'm not handing over my weapons. What if they break in? I don't know how safe this place is."

  "It's plenty safe, trust me. We can't always go outside whenever we want, but they can't get in. And we're rigged up pretty good if they do. There are weapons lockers all over the compound, and they're all guarded, but you'll never be far from a gun or a club if you need to defend yourself. You saw how many of us could get armed and go get you, as soon as our lookouts spotted you. It's just part of our community that when we're in here, we don't want to have weapons to remind us of how we have to live, or to ever tempt us to use them on each other. We don't have much here, but we don't have to live like people used to." He paused, and we were once again back to posturing, unfortunately. "It's not a request."

  "I know." I put the Glock, the magnum, and four knives on the table.

  "Anything else in the bag?"

  "Just clothes and food and stuff, no weapons."

  "Okay." He made a gesture, and a boy of about thirteen came running up. "Is it all right if he takes the bag inside?" he asked me. He looked at the boy and made his tone stern. "He knows not to open it."

  "Sure," I agreed. The boy took my backpack and ran off toward the building.

  Jack eased up a little and visibly relaxed. "Well, welcome to our little place. Let's take a walk around."

  We headed toward the river. "Jonah… Jonah… Wasn't he in the Bible? Didn't he—no, Noah was the guy in the ark, with the animals. What did Jonah do?"

  "Jonah was swallowed by a whale."

  "I thought that was Pinocchio."

  "Him too."

  "Oh, yeah, right." He laughed a little. So did I, for the first time in weeks.

  * * * * *

  "What was this place?" I asked, looking around.

  Jack stopped and turned, pointing back at the big building. Near the top was a large sign that read, "MUSEUM OF SCIENCE AND HISTORY." Jack laughed again. "It was kind of a miscellaneous museum for the whole area, since they didn't have too much of either science or history that was unique to here." He gestured to the sculptures we were walking by. "I'm not sure how these qualify as either science or history, but they eventually added the sculpture garden, too. No big discoveries or battlefields or artists around here, but they had some nice displays. Kids liked it. We all used to come here when we were kids, and some of the older people in our group used to bring their kids here. And being by the river was always nice. They'd have concerts in the summer, and you'd come down to see the fireworks over the river on the Fourth of July. Now it's all we have. I guess it's not where any of us would've picked to be when the world ended, but it's held up pretty good."

  We had reached a low fence and hedge that bordered the river. I looked over and saw that we were at the top of a wall that dropped about six feet to the water, which was rushing under the wall. It was an unusually good setup for defense against attackers who didn't have weapons or vehicles or machines. It almost seemed like fate had a hand in the perfect setup of this place. Or God. But I couldn't quite make myself believe it, even though I partly wanted to.

  Over the hedge and fence, there was a string, with various bells and wind chimes every couple feet. Jack held one to show me. "Just in case. We keep a close eye on this point, since it's not perfectly secure. Sometimes, one of them will manage to climb around the edge of the wall. Usually they just fall in the water and the current takes them downstream, but a couple have gotten a foot up on the wall here and have grabbed on to the hedge before somebody whacked them and killed them."

  "How'd you all get set up here?" I asked. "We heard on the radio and TV to go to military outposts, forts, those kinds of things."

  Jack looked down at the water, then across the river at the city. "Yeah, for the first few days, that made sense. If there are corpses walking around and the only way to stop them is to shoot them in the head, then it made sense to go somewhere where there are lots of guys with guns."

  He sighed. "But as the tide turned, those became death traps. All those people in one place, shooting guns and making noise, and driving and flying vehicles in and out: the dead converged on them and overwhelmed them. Whoever could get out and make a stand somewhere else, did. No, an army camp in the states hasn't been set up for a siege since the days of cowboys and Indians.

  "Nowadays, they just have barbed wire fences and gates with some barricades you have to drive around. Hell, they were set up for stopping suicide truck bombers, not armies of walking corpses. What the hell does a zombie care about a waist high concrete barrier or spikes that shred your tires? He doesn't know what tires are anymore."

  He fell silent for a second, but then he laughed again and gestured at the walls, and I definitely got the feeling that he thought of them as his walls. "No, if you needed a place that was made for keeping people out, and you were lu
cky and it hadn't already been blown open or burned down, the place to look was where they used to charge admission! And preferably a place where not too many people would think to hole up. At least there you would have a shot. We got lucky."

  He looked at me quizzically for a moment. "Or God was looking out for us? You believe in God, Jonah?"

  I looked down at the rushing water. I didn't know the answer to his question. If I were being practical, I might have thought just to tell him what he wanted to hear, whether it was true or not, but I wasn't sure yet from his comments what he thought the right answer to his question was. "I don't know. I'm sorry."

  He took it in stride. I was beginning to get the impression that he took a lot in stride, and I liked that. "No need to be sorry. I'd think you were crazy or retarded if you could answer that with two thumbs up or two thumbs down at this point." He looked so thoughtful, gazing across the river at the city of the dead. "No, I think this has definitely taken all the certainty out of it, if you ever had any. You think of all the good people, the honest and kind people, who've died since this began, and you just can't help thinking the Big Guy is on vacation and he left the other guy in charge. What do they call that?"

  I knew the Bible a little, but I wasn't up on all the end of the world stuff. "The Apocalypse?"

  "No, no, I had an aunt who was into all that junk…. It was a special part of the apocalypse…. Oh, yeah, the ‘Tribulation' she called it, when the Beast would rule the world for seven years. Anyway, you see this and you think either there isn't a God, or if there is, then He must be taking a big, divine siesta, and we're catching hell—literally—until he wakes up.

  "But then you look at something like this," again, the gesture to his walls, his domain, and he clearly wasn't just proud of it, he was grateful for it, and would even pray for it, if he could, "and you know we'd all be dead if it weren't for a million little coincidences and lucky breaks, and you can't help thinking maybe, just maybe we'll make it, and we were supposed to make it, and it'll all work out."

  Jack was getting his own thousand yard stare, I could see. In his position, he probably had to give a lot of pep talks and bolster people's courage in tough times, so he hadn't had a chance to speak his real, more ambiguous and pained mind in days.

  "Well, Jonah, to go back to your question: everything here kind of came together haphazardly, little by little. For the first couple days, there were just a few museum employees holed up here. They grabbed all the food from the cafeteria that they could, and they barricaded themselves on the top floor. As they looked out the windows, though, they got a little braver. They saw that nobody—living or dead—was paying any attention to them, and so long as they stayed away from the windows and doors in the main lobby that face the outside street—don't worry, we walled those up later—they could move all over the museum and the grounds.

  "They got brave enough to open the gates—there's another gate to the employee's parking garage in the back—to let in survivors sometimes. Fortunately, they only did that after they'd heard on the radio and TV about the bites, so they knew to be careful. They were brave people. They even went up to the roof."

  He pointed to a little glass enclosure on top of the building. "See that? The local TV station had a camera up there. It'd show you a view of downtown all the time on their website, and they'd show the view from it at the end of the 11 o'clock news. Before the electricity went off, the people got brave enough—or lonely enough—to stand in front of it and try to get out a message that there were people here and it was fairly safe and they'd try to let you in. Fortunately, not too many people saw it, or tried to get here, or it probably would've been mobbed by the living, and then by the dead, and there'd be nothing here now.

  "A few days into it, we showed up—the military. We also didn't think anything of one more shut-up building, and we drove right by here without a thought. We rounded up some police and firemen who were still listening to their radios, and we built the barricade you probably saw on the bridge. We were sent to try and keep the dead in the city.

  "At first, it was easy. Shoot one every couple minutes, wait, shoot another. But little by little, you were shooting them constantly, and they were still coming. It was obvious we couldn't stay there. We were the only ones still trying to hold on to one of the bridges, so they could just get around us on another bridge and come at us from behind. I know, I know, they couldn't figure that out as a conscious strategy, but the point is, our position was exposed, and it wasn't even keeping the dead in the city, since they had other ways out.

  "We knew we had to get out of there, but at that point, we'd stopped hearing anything from our base. The crowds of dead were getting bigger, and we had no idea where to fall back to. It was then that somebody saw people on the shore here, pretty much right where we're standing now. You know, from a distance, you can't tell if it's a real person or one of them, but through binoculars you could, and we could see they were real people, alive and waving. We were lucky: we were able to pull back and only lost a few men. We even retrieved the .50 calibers from the Humvees and a lot of ammo. God knows, we've needed it since.

  "We waited with the people who were already here, listening to the radio and watching the TV. But in a few days, there was nothing. You didn't hear shots in the distance or explosions anymore, either. It was just still, just the sound of the river, with the reeking of the dead rolling across you when the wind shifted. And at that point, supplies became an issue.

  "We were a lot luckier than some people, because we had the river for water. But all we had to eat was what had been raided from the museum snack bar and whatever people had brought with them when they'd been let in. So we launched raids for supplies.

  "We got better organized as time went on. Like I said, we walled up the lobby completely, so we had no worries there. There was some construction going on at the museum when the outbreak began, so there were some construction supplies to do the work, as well as the cherry pickers you saw, and we could see how to use those to defend the gates when we needed to open them. We got especially good at distracting the stiffs—setting up a ruckus out by the employee parking lot till they all congregated there, then launching a raid out the main entrance, or vice versa. We can go through the sewers to a couple spots on this side of the river.

  "Oh, and to the other side of the river?" He got a mischievous grin. "See that?" He pointed overhead to a wire that ran from the roof of the museum to the city on the other side. "That was my idea: a zip line. I swam across during the night and waited till dawn, then climbed out and tied the thing down, so we'd always have a way to get to the other side quickly. It's another way we set up distractions for the stiffs. Cool?"

  "Very cool, Jack." I was truly impressed with everything, and also didn't want to let him down, as he was obviously getting wound up.

  "For a while, we kept picking up survivors. At first, there were quite a few. We'd spot smoke somewhere and go check it out and bring a few people back. That's how we got Popcorn and Tanya."

  "Popcorn?"

  "Long story. Somebody will explain it to you when you meet him. Sometimes, someone would get close, and we'd let them in, like we did you. That's how we got Milton. You'll meet him later. He's kind of important."

  "Important? Important how? Like a leader?"

  "No, not exactly. It's another long story. I'm sorry, it seems like everything here is a long story, but that's just how everything's come together in a little less than a year, and it's hard to explain in a few minutes. So anyway, we've been scrounging for supplies, but this year might be better. We've caught some fish from the river, and now we're going to try growing some vegetables here, so we might eventually not be so reliant on Spam and Twinkies."

  "I was getting tired of them, too."

  "I know, a hazard of the apocalypse."

  "Who put the sign up outside?"

  He laughed again. "Our little motto, or half of it? Milton thought of it, to let people know there's someone still in h
ere, and to say we're dying to really live, not just living to die."

  "I hope that's not his most profound idea."

  Jack laughed harder. "No, not at all. He's got some odd ones, I'll admit, but they all kind of work out and make sense. I don't know how to explain him, either, but you'll see. I'm kind of the joint chiefs of staff or the secretary of state, and he's more like the pope or the dalai lama."

  I thought about that for a second. "Who's the president in that scenario?"

  "That's one we haven't had so much use for in our new setup."

  This time we both laughed, and more heartily.

  Chapter Four

  We walked back toward the museum. The side of the building that faced the river and sculpture garden was all windows, with glass doors near the front wall. Jack led me through these into the lobby, a large circular room that extended the height of the building, with a huge Calder-inspired mobile hanging in the midst of it.

  I could see the construction Jack had spoken of—roughly-made brickwork had been erected on the inside, shutting off the large windows and doors that fronted on the street outside. At irregular intervals, some bricks had been left out at eye level, to function as peepholes, I assumed, and possibly gun-slits, if it came to that. Walling it in had made the room dark and cavernous, though the sun was now shining in from the western side of the building, over the dead city and across the river and sculpture garden. As Jack had promised, there was another weapons locker here, with a young man seated next to it.

  From the lobby, a large spiral staircase ascended to the second, third, and fourth floors, and a large archway led into a huge room on the first floor. A sign above the archway read, "MAIN EXHIBIT HALL." Jack and I went up the staircase, all the way to the fourth floor. After the third, the sign above the stairs read, "EMPLOYEE OFFICES."

  "We kept their original idea of barricading ourselves in on the top floor," Jack said. You could tell that he loved arranging and organizing things, and then describing the arrangements and all the thought that had gone into them. "If the stiffs ever got this far, I don't suppose it would make much difference, but I think it helps if people think there's a plan. Without electricity, the staircase is the only way up, except for the fire stairs at the end of the hall. Those are sealed up on the lower floors, so you can only get to them from up here, and they lead up to the roof, so we could fall back to there if we ever had to."