by Joe Kelly
The silence of the night was only fitting for a group that mourned the loss of two good and irreplaceable people. By morning it would be three. Sometime before sunrise Tyler Carson snuck outside and sat by the graves of his parents watching the snow build up, lost in the happy memories of his life before the world had died. When he heard people calling his name, searching for him, he lifted the pistol he had swiped and took his own life. He did it the right way too, always responsible he didn’t want to come back and kill anyone.
Chapter 9
The work on the farm had slowed to a crawl for three days after the deaths, Lloyds group wasn’t shocked, it was hard to be shocked in a world ruled by the dead, they just felt drained. There was only so much grief, sadness that people could handle and many of his people had reached that point and the hope and optimism they had begun to feel had only made the tragedy worse. Tyler had been a popular kid around the farm. Always willing to help, nice, well behaved. Cosmo had been teaching the boy how to blow glass, so he could do something for the farm when he got older. But that was over, wasted potential buried forever.
His parents, former telecommuters had dived into farming, never complaining about the hard work or how much better their life had been before. They had just been thankful to have survived and were able to eat. They had been good people and their deaths had been hard on the small community.
Lloyd sighed and wiped sweat from his eyes, splitting wood worked up a sweat despite the winter temperatures. Placing another log on a stump he hefted his axe, his thoughts already swinging back to the situation.
Jared and his people had taken up the slack giving Lloyds people time to grieve. They had leaped in and worked hard to get things done. In the three days, one group had stripped parts off abandoned cars then towed the vehicles into position, completing the maze and road blocks in a day and half. Another group had worked from before dawn to late into the evenings till the Wall and every DFP at the bridge and along the south edge of the river had been finished. After that they had concentrated on getting the defenses at the base of the ridge finished. The stake fences and something called lilies would be finished by tomorrow and Lloyds people were finally back to pulling their weight.
The Lilies had been another suggestion from Jill, and Kevin, essentially a Lillie was just large bowl shaped hole almost two feet deep with a wooden spike in the center. They were filling the area between the stake fence and the DFP with the things. It might or might not slow down undead, but any raider that came down off the ridge and tried to rush the DFP’s were going to be sorry.
And all that work had only been possible because of the equipment we recovered from the yard, if I had remembered the damn place back in the beginning there is no telling how much we could have gotten accomplished before now.
Through it all Jared had kept patrols running and had led several Patrols himself up the blue ridge parkway till the first tunnel had been sealed by stacking cars in front of it, It would slow down raiders and stop any undead from swarming down off the Parkway into the farm.
Unless we build a high wall completely around the Farm, there will always be some way to get to us, but the easiest and best ways are now off the table, Lloyd thought. well all accept that ridge line. We will keep adding to the defense’s there till the raiders attack. Assuming they do attack. He glanced towards the north field and saw the new watcher tower was finished, or it looked it since there were people standing up there. Another thing to mark off the list, he thought almost happily.
I think all of us will miss Jared and his people when they head out in the spring, and there it is again, looking to the future, I think I almost enjoy it these days. His thoughts turned more serious, I’ll miss them but I’m glad they will be leaving too. I know we could get a lot of planting and other work done with them here, but coming out of winter, food is going to be tight and we won’t have excess till after the first harvest and that many mouths to feed in the meantime would hurt us.
I know that without Jared and his folks showing up and sharing their supplies food would tight around here and we wouldn’t have the medicine they brought with them and of course without them the Raiders, any raiders could just walk in and take what they wanted. No Jared has given us a fighting chance to survive and that is the truth of it.
At least we have a few trained soldiers on our side, not many but a few, six in Jared’s group and four more veterans in Lloyds, it wasn’t a lot but they were trained and were already working to train the forty other adults who were willing to fight.
The rest of the adults at the farm, might or might not fight. Till the dead, none of them had ever had to deal with any kind of real violence and fighting a war was a scary and daunting idea. There had been some debate, angry loud debates, on what if anything should be done to those who didn’t want to fight. Jared had sided with Lloyd that the Farm needed people who could plow, plant and do whatever else needed doing just as badly as it needed fighters.
I wonder how anxious the kick them out crowd would have been to throw Doc Winston out, he refuses to take a life. Lloyd asked himself. At least they were past that argument, for the moment, at any rate.
With so much of the defenses ready, Jared had two of his men running volunteers through combat drills. Lloyd was already planning on using them to help train a defense force that would combine fighters from Cherokee and the farm to help fight off any future raiders and undead hordes. Assuming we don’t get slaughtered here shortly.
More importantly than any of that Jared and his people had brought hope, and every one of Lloyds people knew it. His people had been going through the motions of surviving before Jared’s arrival. All of them had expected the dead would show up sooner or later and kill them all, like they had done with the cities and towns across the world. They hadn’t believed they had any future, so it was life a day at a time. Oh no one had talked about of course, aside from a comment here and there.
But then those vehicles had come rolling down the gap, Fuel tankers, Rv’s, trucks loaded with men, women and even kids. People that smiled and joked and despite who or what they had been before the dead, every one of them carried themselves with confidence, confidence won through surviving and thriving against the odds and it had changed his people.
Lloyd smiled to himself, now his people were making plans, cautiously, but still they were planning for the future. Just yesterday, he had heard Willy Banks, Simon Teller and Amanda King discussing whether to have some kind of Christmas party. If that wasn’t a sign of things turning around nothing was. As insane as that sounded they needed to hang on to something normal, and for most Americans religious or not Christmas had held a special place in the hearts of many before the dead.
.
Hearing the rumble of snowmobiles, and who would have thought that they would be needed around here, Lloyd sat aside the axe he headed towards the center to greet John Graham and see what news the man had brought this time.
It was he found out, neither good news nor bad, instead John had come to ask that Lloyd and Jared come back to Cherokee with him. People there wanted to meet them all.
Jared seemed oddly excited to Lloyd. must be cabin fever getting to him, Lloyd decided, watching as Jared and Jill climbed onto a snow mobile. Steve looked down right cheerful as he bundled up and climbed on the last snowmobile. Ronny seemed less than thrilled on his snow mobile, especially when he saw the weapons and ammo being loaded into the van that Jason would drive following the rest of the group. Once the last man had boarded the van the small convoy started off.
Jared slewed the snow mobile around a car on the highway, ginning as he sent a spray of snow fanning out behind him and enjoying the way Jill was hanging tightly to him. Graham looked over and saw the idiot grin on Jared's face and smiled back.
Another speed and danger junky that one was Jared thought as he considered using a large bent over sign, as a ramp. He decided not to, it would mostly likely just collapse under the weight and send him flying. For so
me reason he felt good today, young like the teenager he had been so long ago. and the urge to be as reckless and stupid as he been at that age. Back then we could afford to feel invincible, we never believed we could die. But now, in the land of the dead there is even more reason to be cautious. Frankly there is no sense in breaking my own neck and coming back as a zombie he decided. Regretfully he ignored the almost overwhelming desire to do something spectacularly stupid.
The road and Ocanaluftee River curved around a mountain spur and the ground opened up into the Narrow river valley ringed by mountains and ridges here Cherokee lay. Chamber of commerce signs proudly proclaimed such destinations as Cherokee Botanical Garden and Nature Trail, Museum of the Cherokee Indian, Ocanaluftee Indian Village, Qualla Arts & Crafts Center, Black bear museum and the Harrah’s Casino and many more.
The town itself was a mish mash of modern to quaint buildings, with a touch of something that had to be Cherokee culture inspired. There were even signs in the Cherokee language. The few zombies they saw were dispatched quickly.
“That’s how we keep the numbers down here, see one kill it again.” Graham explained. “Unless it’s a large group. Then we wait till we can get a team together if possible.”
Tsali Boulevard was eerily empty, like any such main street these days. Lines of cars, trucks and SUVs abandoned by both residents and tourists had been pushed against the side of the road, and none to gently judging by the damage. Most of the business’s Jared could see were tourist related, selling everything from colored visors to Beach towels with the Cherokee or the Smoky mountain park logos on them.
Snow blew fitfully as the wind gusted between buildings; with each gust of wind the snow would rise up blowing across the road then settle back to the ground forming deep drifts against the buildings.
Occasionally the shifting snow would reveal a skull covered in decaying flesh or a part of a body. It was silent except for the sound of their motors rebounding off the walls of buildings and soft whispering of the wind.
“How many did you kill around here?” Jared asked Graham as they stopped for a moment on the bridge over the Ocanaluftee.
“Not really sure, we killed maybe a thousand at and around the casino, maybe four or five hundred more zombies here in Downtown. Then we got low on ammo. By then we had the Compound finished and moved everyone we could find into it.” Graham replied
Graham looked around the dead town his eyes haunted with memory “don’t really know what happened to most of the dead that were wandering around here.
All we know is that they seemed to just go away around August and that allowed us to get out and really strip every bit of food we could find and bring it back to the compound and the two storage areas we had set up. Then right at the end of August, maybe the first week of September, five people come thru, they were fleeing Asheville, and you wouldn’t believe the stories, the military had leveled half the town, undead shoulder to shoulder just standing in the streets till they see or hear a person. From what we were told once they see you or hear you they swarm, thousands of them just coming at you from all directions.” Jared shivered at that mental image. “they had started off with almost a hundred survivors, only five made it this far.”
“what happened to them? The ones that made it here” Jill asked before Jared could say anything.
“three of them stayed with us, the other two headed out, they were trying to get back to Indiana.” John replied.
“Looks like a few of the rotting dead have noticed us” Steve said pointing to ten zombies that were awkwardly moving down the road towards them. they moved incredibly slow, slower than normal, the two-foot-deep and growing snow was making things even worse for the normally uncoordinated undead.
“Let’s go, we have sat here too long.” Graham said, as he started moving again not wanting to risk zombies hitting them from every direction. They put down the zombies with hand weapons as they passed, like some kind of Neo Renaissance knights on snow mobiles, leaving the corpses sprawled in the black stained snow behind them.
The compound lay just outside the downtown area, on a heavily wooded finger of land that was part of a mountain spur. The tree-lined road that led up the compound was fairly steep, and snow covered. It leveled off briefly on a flat topped hill then rose again to the gate in the compound wall.
The compound walls were Semi Trailers that had been tipped over onto their sides with sand bag emplacements along the top of trailers. The rigs that had brought the trailers up here, had been driven off the road at the bottom and abandoned.
“ there isn’t more than two streets up there, twenty houses and three stores, we ringed it all with those trailers. The zombies have a hard time making it up steep slopes, so that helps us keep the place safe, note I said hard not impossible.” He said as they rode up to the gate, “the time it takes a few of them to reach to wall gives us plenty of time to pick them off with bows or send out people to deal with them, if there’s not a lot of them.” Graham told them as they reached the entrance to the compound. Entrance was a rather grand noun for what was nothing more than a gap between two over turned semitrailers blocked by a bus. As they got close the bus started then backed up, so they could enter the compound. On Top of the trailers to each side of the gate, men stood guard in sand bag positions, mostly armed with bows and improvised spears, a few carried rifles and pistols.
The Van pulled to a stop just inside the compound in what had been a parking lot for a mom and pop convenience store and gas station. The road, lined by close set, older homes smoke rising lazily from the chimneys, continued on for what looked like a block, where the street ended at a trailer on its side.
Most of the community were already gathered in the street watching as Jared and his people parked and dismounted. They were curious but not stupidly trusting, judging by the number of weapons on display. They were silently watching, waiting to decide if the visitors were a threat. Most of the people were natives, Jared noted, but there were some few Caucasian, African American and Hispanic faces in the crowd as well. They silently waited to see what was going to happen.
Jared looked over at John Graham who gave him a thumb up. “Get it open.” Jared called out.
Jason threw open the vans rear doors and passed a M16a2 with an M203 slung under the barrel to Graham who held it up for everyone to see then handed it to Two feathers who smiled at the gift.
They handed out all five of the M16s Jared had brought along with five combat vests and six extra magazines for each weapon, then passed the cased ammo including one case of 40mm HE rounds they had collected. The crowd wavered between shock at such a gift from total strangers and excitement at having improved their odds of survival.
The bag with medicines they had brought was taken into the house being used as an infirmary.
“Are you sure you can afford to part with these?” Graham asked.
“Even if I changed my mind, I think it’s a bit late for take backs.” Jared said sounding amused and motioning to one fierce looking man holding a New M16.
“I see your point” Graham said laughing.
“Truth is you need to get your people together and hit a few of the National Guard blockades. We found quite a bit at the one we hit near Knoxville.” Jared told Graham, who filed that bit of info away for future consideration. “I have a map we found at the one we cleaned out, that has Guard unit positions marked on it. Might want to take a shot at one of those road blocks once we get the snow plow going. Since those pus bags don’t seem to do to well in snow.” Jared said watching as an elderly woman walked through the crowd that parted before her. Moses and the red sea came to mind Jared thought.
She was bundled heavily against the cold her brown eyes peered out from under the fur trim of her coat hood studying the red headed stranger as she stopped beside the van.
Graham looked surprised for a second at seeing the woman, then recovered himself and said. “Jared Stone, I would like you to meet Gayle Costins.” Jared wasn’t su
re whether to offer his hand, or what so he simply inclined his head politely.
“Nice to meet you ma’am” he said respectfully.
.
“Maybe, maybe not, you’ll have to decide that later,” she said with a grimace that might have been a smile.
“Come with me, just you and your woman.” She said motioning with a hand whose joints looked swollen.
She didn’t wait for their answer she just turned and walked slowly, and a bit unsteadily down the snow-covered street. “Guess that’s decided” Jared muttered as he followed. Graham tagged along behind the small party but stayed far back, keeping on eye on Gayle while respecting her privacy.
“Your woman?” Jill muttered.
Woman get me a sandwich, the old punchline ran through Jared’s mind but wisely he kept it there.
Opening a gate to the yard of a well-made two story log cabin home, she trundled up the recently shoveled stone lined path. As she started up the steps to the wrap around porch that promised some shelter against the wind she stumbled slipping on a patch of new ice and Jared was at her side in an eye blink steadying the older woman, who glared at him for a moment. “I’m not that old yet.” she said tartly starting up the stairs again.
