Cities of the Dead: Winters of Discontent

by William Young

  Warren, Pennsylvania - Day 1801

  Will and Frank sat in front of the fire without saying a word, each sipping on a glass of bourbon and letting the heat sink into their bodies. They’d lost Olandis that afternoon in Warren on their way back from a successful deer hunt when they’d run across a group of eight super-runners. Will, Frank and Olandis were knee-deep in snow, each with a chunk of deer on his back when Olandis had suddenly said, “Fuck.”

  And there, at the intersection of Hemlock and Pennsylvania Avenue, were a group of super runners. Super Runners. Frank shifted in his seat as he thought about it. The snow falling for the entire day, the deer - a nine point buck - standing thirty feet away when he noticed it, the fact they hadn’t seen a zombie in more than a month leading all of them into a sense of complacency. Frank brought the deer down with an arrow and relished the thought of venison for dinner, again. It had been almost a month since they’d brought down a deer and had been living on canned food rooted out of houses in the town and smoked fish from the previous summer.

  Running wasn’t an option. The super zulus were all threadbare and skeletal while Frank, Will and Olandis were all dressed heavily in winter clothing and heavy snow-boots. Frank watched as Will shrugged off his pack and pulled his bastard sword out, a weapon he’d rescued a year earlier from a long-forgotten Renaissance faire and sharpened frequently.

  “Olandis, get out your blade and move over to the left and get ready to come in from the side,” Frank said as Will side-stepped in the opposite direction.

  Frank had four arrows left in his quiver, and he laced one into his bow and took aim at the lead zombie, putting an arrow into it’s shoulder. It didn’t notice and kept skip-hopping through the drifts of snow on the street. He readied another arrow, watched out of the corner of his eye as Will kept moving to the side, sword at hand, and Frank released it. The arrow sunk into the undead’s head and it fell into the snow. Frank quickly readied another arrow and let it loose, watching in disbelief as it sliced by the side of the zombie’s ear and fell into the snow inert. Then he dropped his bow and pulled out his own sword.

  “Everyone keep falling back on me,” Frank yelled.

  A runner was closing on him quickly, and Frank raised his sword for a strike, watching in detached satisfaction as Will took the head off of one and then sliced another down from skull to neck. At the last moment Frank thrust the blade forward and up through the soft spot behind the chin. As he pulled the blade out and looked around, he saw Will striding toward Olandis and he slashed at two zombies backing him up toward a store front. He chopped through the wrist of one of the undead monsters, but another step back and he tripped on something beneath the snow and tumbled to the ground.

  The undead fell upon him instantly. A moment later Olandis’ machete punched through one of the creatures, but the snow around the three was already turning red. Frank ran as best he could through the drifts and arrived just as Will cut the first zombie head off. Frank took the other head and they pushed the dead undead bodies off of Olandis. It had only been ten or fifteen seconds, but the two walkers had removed Olandis’ left ear and portion of his cheek, slashed through his clothing with their fingernails and cut deeply into his chest, broken his left arm at the elbow and taken a chunk of his right shoulder.

  Frank looked at Will and both thought the same thing, though neither said it. Olandis’ days as a member of the living had come to an end, and soon he’d rise as one of the undead. They looked down at the twenty-seven-year old black man they had known for a little more than five years: Olandis lay in the snow, dazed, his eyes slowly turning as if he were looking for something upon which to fix some meaning to his reality. Frank took Olandis’ right hand in his and patted him tenderly on the chest with the other.

  “You were a good man, O, and you’ll be remembered.”

  And then Will sliced Olandis’ head off.

  “You could’ve let him maybe say something back.”

  Will sniffed out a mirthless laugh. “They always say, ‘please, don’t.’”

  There were no tears when they got back to the cabin and told the others what happened. It had happened so often to each of them that they were long inured to the sudden death of a friend. Frank had known Will for almost twenty years, had been with him the night Will had met his wife, Cora, at the bar in a steakhouse on the South Side of Pittsburgh. She was a twenty-four-year old blonde with thick wavy hair that fell to the bottom of her shoulder blades, blue eyes the color of Caribbean beach water and a figure that defied gravity.

  “I gotta go meet that girl,” Will had said, taking his martini off the bar.

  “She’s on a date.”

  “He just went to the bathroom. I figure I’ve got two or three minutes.”

  Less than two years later, Frank had been Will’s best man at his wedding. As they stood in the church waiting for the music, Frank had leaned in to Will and whispered in his ear.

  “You know she’s still out of your league.”

  Will had smiled. “Why you think I’m locking this shit down now?”

  And two years after that, Will had put a bullet through her skull after she’d been turned at the beginning of the apocalypse.

  Frank had no idea what had happened to his wife. His wife had been a corporate human resources recruiter, and her job had required long hours, occasional travel, and dinners with potential recruits, but didn’t include sharing domestic chores. She’d been on a business trip to Dallas when the outbreak suddenly was everywhere and the government had shut down all air travel.

  Frank stared at the fire, took a sip of his bourbon and wondered why he was suddenly thinking about the past. The past was gone, along with its uncertainties. His best friend was still alive, just a few feet away from him, and Frank had a woman in the kitchen fixing the evening meal. For the first time in his life, he had a woman who cooked and cleaned and looked after him.

  There was a quick two-three-two knock on the door, and after a pause it opened and Mike and Pat stepped in from the snowy dusk outside. They had been living in the next cabin up the road when he, Will and Olandis had parked the gyrocopters for the winter in an overgrown field off Frantz Road. He looked over at the two men - fully bearded and hair down to their shoulders - and downed the last of his bourbon.

  “Get anything?” Frank asked.

  “Two turkeys. The girls are cleaning them now,” Mike said as he pulled off his gloves and hat.

  And then Frank told them about Olandis, and all were silent for a moment.

  “Damn, I liked that guy,” Pat said softly. All of them had. Olandis had grown up poor the The Hill District of Pittsburgh, managed to find a way out of the city into the wilds of Westmoreland County and been found by Will hiding in a bar in Leechburg, out of bullets, skinny as a rail and sporting an afro of epic proportions. But through it all, he had never lost his sense of humor, though it got darker and darker with each passing month.

  “Two turkeys and a deer ain’t bad hunting in this weather,” Frank said

  “We really came over to let you know there’s a couple hundred dead ones in Russell probably moving in this general directions, seeing as how they saw Pat and me ski by them with the birds,” Mike said. “They didn’t have a chance at us what with the snow, and if they could track us, it’d take ‘em at least a day to get here, so just keep on your toes.”

  “We saw lots of shufflers on the way back, groups of twenty or fifty on the other side of the river in the south part of town,” Frank said. “Might be wise to stay indoors for a few days and let ‘em get bored with the lack of food around here.”

  Mike nodded. “Let’s just keep the walkie’s charged as best we can and stay in contact. Since there were runners in the town, there’s probably a horde of them nearby, which’ll mean watchers on top of shufflers and a bad situation for us if we get caught out somewhere we can’t get out of easily.”

  “And don’t forget we’ve got those two Humvee’s Will and I parked across the river.
It’s frozen solid so we can get there pretty quickly, and Will and I have been going over every other day or so just to start them up and let them run. Just make sure everyone’s bug-out bag is ready-to-go.”

  After dinner, Frank and Will sat in the living room, again, the fire going low but neither of them worried about heating the cabin. They had taken to playing chess in the evening, after Will had found a set on a shelf with games. Will had had to teach Frank how to play the game - he had a general idea of how the game was played, but hadn’t played it since “learning” it in high school (that was always something Will and Greg did, when Greg was still alive). Frank had beaten will three times since moving into the cabin in the fall, and the unofficial “official” score of the games was Will 103 to Frank’s three. Will had won the game tonight and, as usual, had just put the pieces away after the game. As Frank thought on the night, the only words he’d heard Will say since walking home that afternoon were “check” and “mate.”

  “You alright, bud? You’ve been pretty quiet since we got home,” Frank asked.

  Will looked at him and Frank could see there were no emotions in Will’s eyes. They weren’t dead, they were sharp and focussed, but devoid of emotion. Frank knew that Will hadn’t given up on life, hadn’t become a nihilist and was generally optimistic and in good spirits. Will trimmed his hair with scissors and shaved frequently. He worked out nearly every day they were home, doing push-ups, sit-ups and a variety of other exercises. He was probably the last man on earth to do any of that, but Frank had given up making fun of Will’s determination to pretend that if life returned to normal- Will always said “when” - he wanted to be the same person he had been when everything had gone wrong.

  Frank didn’t think the world would ever return to normal, not in their lifetime. If the undead died tomorrow, there would be years of devastation to repair, and nobody with the skills to do the repairs. It would be like life in Italy after the fall of Rome: a hundred years later everyone would look at the marvelous infrastructure and incomprehensible architecture and wonder how it had been achieved. Centuries might go by before anything like the 21st Century rose again.

  “I’m fine,” Will said after a moment. “We need to get up to the gyro’s and run the engines a little sometime soon so the fluids don’t gum up. If we can find some gas, I wouldn’t mind taking one up for a flight.”

  Frank laughed. “It hasn’t been above twenty degrees in two months. You’d freeze your ass of up there in an open cockpit.”

  “True, but I freeze my ass off every time we tromp through the woods around here looking for something to eat. Maybe we should try flying south again?”

  Frank rolled his eyes. “We tried that. So did everybody else in the country. That’s why there’s so many fucking zombies down there. We’re better off freezing our asses off a few months of the year.”

  Will smiled: it was a discussion they’d had many times, and then Stacey walked into the room, a petite brunette Frank had saved from death in Knoxville the year earlier when the group had been trying to get to Central America.

  “I’m going up to bed. You coming up soon?” she asked.

  Frank turned his head to her and said, “I’m coming up now. We cheated death, today, so it’s time to celebrate life.”

  Will threw another log on the fire. “Have fun. I’m gonna work my way through some more of that bottle.”

  A week later, Frank and the other men were deep in the woods looking for game, the sky overhead crowded with clouds and littering the world with a steady stream of snow flurries. He had his Mossberg 500 shotgun and a 9mm Beretta on him, but it was the compound bow and fifteen arrows that he was relying on. Nobody liked to use firearms anymore because ammunition was tough to come by, and the bullets were best used on rival tribes of humans than on the undead. Frank hadn’t seen that coming: the breakdown of civilization into small units. Not everyone was hostile, but most were: nobody had anything and everybody was eager to get something. And the zombies had nothing. Anybody still counted as among the living had survived the Darwin cut and could usually kill the undead without having to shoot them. Which was why everyone trudging through the snowy forest today had a bow and a blade in addition to a firearm.

  The four men worked through the woods slowly, in a skirmish line with a hundred yards between them. Mike and Pat were to Frank’s left, Will to his right. Frank had met Mike and Pat in the fall when he and Will and parked the aircraft and scouted the cottages along the Allegheny River near the Kinzua Dam. They had wanted to find someplace to lodge for the winter that wasn’t too close to a town. Population centers attracted the undead, requiring keeping watches during the night which neither of them enjoyed. But, they also wanted to be close enough that they could go into it and forage. There was still plenty of canned goods in household pantries, and you never knew what other useful stuff you could turn up. Stores, on the other hand, had largely been denuded of everything edible by the end of the first year. He had learned that lesson hard when they had tried a raid into Pittsburgh and lost everyone except Olandis from their original group.

  Neither Frank nor Will had been hunters before the end times. They had had to teach themselves everything Mike and Pat had learned from their fathers. Over beers, Frank and Will had occasionally talked about learning how to hunt, but skirt-chasing had always taken precedence. After the last few years of doing it, Frank now knew he didn’t like hunting, didn’t like the long hours of searching, tracking, waiting. Fishing was even worse. He wanted the old world back, his old life back, his wife back. He wanted to sit on a bar stool with Will and merrily complain about married life and then switch gears to what it would like to be a dad.

  Frank stopped in the snow and stared at nothing, realizing his mind had wandered back to the past. What had happened, had happened, and nothing was going to change that. He lived in a cottage in the woods alongside the Kinzua River with a girlfriend and his best friend. They could both die today. He could die today. The past and everything in it was irrelevant. Yesterday wouldn’t save him if he stumbled upon a lurker zombie covered in the snow. Tomorrow didn’t exist. Today was life, and he was in the Allegheny National Forest hunting with a bow, not sitting in his office at the bank processing mortgages and investment accounts.

  An hour later he heard Will’s P90 fire once. Twice. Three times. Then repeatedly, the reports nearing him. Frank unslung his shotgun and took a knee, looking through the flurries for a sign of his friend. Will had taken to wearing a white cloak over his clothing so that he could blend into the snow more easily. Frank’s radio crackled to life.

  “What the hell is Will shooting at?” asked Mike over the walkie.

  Everybody knew the sounds of everybody else’s weapon. Mike had a Winchester .308 that boomed, Pat had an AR-15 that kapowed, Frank’s shotgun kabloomed, and Will’s P90 went pow.

  Frank clicked his walkie, “I don’t know, but he’s sure as shit going through his magazine in a hurry.”

  A half-dozen more shots rang out in the distance and then the snow fallen world fell silent, again. Frank ran his eyes back and forth through the woods, trying to find something that would make sense of the sudden eruption of gunfire from Will.

  “Hey, Will, you listening to this freq?” Frank said into the walkie. They were all on the same frequency, so if Will were still alive, he’d have heard what he had just said to Mike. “Click if you have to.”

  Nothing.

  “Will, are you out there? Can you read me?” Frank said.

  Nothing. Minutes went by. Frank raised his hand to his forehead and dragged it down over his eyes and groaned. He had known Will for fifteen years, had roomed with him in flight school in the Army and served in the same National Guard helicopter battalion in Washington, Pa. before they had gotten out. Frank had moved to Pittsburgh with Will on the strength of Will’s conviction that it was a perfectly sized city, with one of everything that a bigger city had. When Greg and Al had left the Army two years later, both of them had m
oved there, too, based on Will’s - and, later Frank’s - testimonials. Will had a pull on people few others Frank knew could match, and now, somewhere out in the woods, Will had gone silent.

  Frank pressed the button on his walkie, waited a beat, and said, “Come on Will, tell me you can hear me.”

  “Yeah, I hear you, I’m right behind you,” Will said.

  Frank spun around.

  “Don’t shoot, it’s me.”

  “What the fuck just happened out there?”

  And then Frank saw the blood on Will’s winter smock, “Are you bit?”

  Will looked down at himself. “No. Fucking undead blood. Listen, we’ve got like a minute to two to get the fuck outta here. There’s a thousand-plus horde of the dead moving up Route 6, and they’re all through the woods. There’s maybe a couple hundred super runners leading them, and they’ll be here in a couple of seconds, so we need to start running to the Humvees. We gotta drive over, get Stacey, and get to the gyros. Then we have to fly to anywhere half-an-hour away where we can land, since we don’t have much gas in them.”

  Frank looked through the woods and saw nothing. Moving through the deep snow took effort, and even the super-runners barely managed to walk fast through it. The shufflers could take ten times longer. And though he hated to admit it, ever since the Pittsburgh fiasco, Frank trusted Will’s judgement less. Will was prone to quick decisions under pressure rather than thinking things out.

  “What about Pat and Mike? We can’t fly them with us. Maybe we should all just shelter in place and wait it out. The zulus might not even come up to the cabins, they might just head into town like they usually do and leave after a couple of days.”

  Will looked around through the woods and nodded. “Sure, but let’s get to the cabins first and talk about it there. We don’t have much time to waste here.”

  Frank used his walkie to tell Mike and Pat to meet them at the rally point on Kinzua Road near Verbeck Island, a spot nearly a mile behind them and almost a half-hour worth of run-trudging through the deep snow, near where he and Will had parked the vehicles on Eagle Lane. But instead of a response, Frank listened to gunfire off to his left. He looked at Will incredulously. And then he saw a pair of runners furiously skip-hopping through the forest, their eyes fixed on him and Will.

  “Fuck,” Frank said plaintively, “it never stays good for long.”

  Will swung his rifle off his back, aimed through his ACOG sight and took the two down.

  Frank looked at Will. “You’re right, it’s time to run.”

  And then Frank and Will did what they had done hundreds of times: ran for their lives. By the time they got to the rally point, Frank was exhausted and over-heated, unzipping his coat and stripping off his hat and gloves while sucking in deep gasps of frigid air. He pulled his canteen off his belt and drank deeply, the cold water chilling him as it poured down his throat into his stomach.

  A few minutes later they were brushing the snow off one of the Humvees, the cottages on Eagle Lane empty, abandoned or forgotten years earlier by their owners. They were hunting lodges and summer vacation homes most people wouldn’t have retreated to at the beginning of the end times, and had been stripped bare of useful items long before Frank had set up shop on the other side of the Allegheny River when Autumn had set in, and those looters were long since gone. Or undead.

  Will hopped into the vehicle and cranked it to life. Frank keyed the talk button on his walkie.

  “Mike, Pat, are you two on the way?”

  Only the engine made noise. Frank looked up into the sky as Mother Nature let down snow flurries. Snowflakes. Frank tried the walkie again, waited, and shoved it into his pocket. He’d never see Mike and Pat alive, again. Like so many others. He looked around at the abandoned neighborhood, covered deep in snow, the world silent, sounds muffled. The Humvee’s engine was almost an abomination, rumbling arrhythmically, the only man-made sound in existence anywhere within who-knew-how-many square miles.

  “Shit.” Frank saw a dozen slow walkers forcing their way through the snow past a closed-up swimming pool on the other side of the street, hatred in their eyes. They were a skeletal lot, skin exposing bones, clothes tattered. But none of them had ever seen the inside of a grave, they were all infected, and whatever they had become, they had turned to prey on the living.

  “Get in!” Will shouted.

  Frank popped the door open and slid onto the seat. He looked out the front window and saw dozens more on where the street had once been, all of them shuffling relentlessly toward the sound of the truck’s engine. The undead knew the sounds of the living, and the combustion engine was one of them. They knew inside it was fresh meat.

  “Aww, fuck,” Frank said. “We can’t go that way.”

  “We were never going that way,” Will said, shifting the vehicle into gear and turning toward the river.

  Will drove the truck across the lawn slowly, the frozen river looming large before them.

  “Get ready, I’m going to gun it over,” Will said.

  “We’ll crash through the ice. What the fuck?”

  “The ice is ten inches thick and the river is three feet deep here, I think we’re going to make it either way. But we aren’t making it up that road through the horde, so hold on.”

  Will gunned the engine and the truck sprang forward and onto the river. Frank looked out the side window at the frozen river to his right, up toward where the dam was around the bend in the river. Here was another thing he’d never done before: drive on a frozen river. The zombie apocalypse sure produced a lot of unexpected firsts. It was only a few seconds before Will was driving up the opposite bank, slowing down in the deep snow. Will turned the truck to the side and Frank looked out his window across the river, at where the horde was. Dozens of the undead were stumbling through the snow down to the ice. Frank couldn’t believe they hadn’t frozen solid, given that most of them were wearing threadbare clothing and were shrunken like Nazi Holocaust victims. They couldn’t live - they didn’t live - and, yet, they lived.

  Will put the truck in park and popped out of it, walking around the truck to the edge of the river. Frank rolled down his window.

  “What the fuck are you doing? Let’s go.”

  Will turned his head over his shoulder. “Just wait.”

  Within moments, the dozens of undead had turned into hundreds, and they lurched through the snow onto the ice. The horde was half-way across the river when Will pulled out a small walkie-talkie from a pocket, held it before him and pressed a key. The river exploded, heaving chunks of ice high into the air and sending a spray of frigid water everywhere. The undead were knocked over or lifted into the air, but they all fell through the open ice into the frigid water. Moments later, the ice began to move with the current, sweeping the undead downriver and creating a logjam of bodies near a bend in the river where the ice was still solid.

  Will slid back into the truck alongside Frank and put it in gear. Frank shook his head.

  “When the hell did you rig that?”

  “A couple weeks ago,” Will said as he drove. “There’s another spot closer to the dam with the same set-up. Wanted to make sure we had more than one exit if things got tight on the other side.”

  “What was I doing when you were doing that”

  “Banging Stacey, I guess,” Will said, turning his head and smiling at Frank. “Mike and I put the charges in. He had some explosives he had never figured out a use for, so I suggested one.”

  As Will drove down the lane to their cottage, Frank stared absently out the window, watching the snow flurries ratchet up into a steady, heavy snowfall.

  “We’re not getting out of here today, bud,” Frank said as Will parked the vehicle. “We’re gonna get a couple more inches before the end of the day.”

  Not that Frank wanted to leave. They’d been in the cottage for nearly six months, the longest stay in one place since the collapse of civilization, and he had grown used to it and the life he was building with Stac
ey. If humanity were going to rebuild anything, the remaining survivors would have to stop being hunter-gatherers again and set down roots. Frank watched Will as he walked up to the cottage, stripping off the zombie-blood-infused cloak and dropping it on the ground. Will thought it would take hundreds of years for humans to rebuild any sort of civilization, longer if the undead persisted. And Will expected things to get worse as the left-over technologies slowly became irreparable and un-replaceable. Humans would end up forgetting everything they knew about living and start all over again. The world would never look the same again.

  But it was the only world Frank had.

  ***

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. He was a newspaper reporter for more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded trucks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in Pennsylvania in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River with his wife, three children and their dog.

  Other Books By William Young:

  Monster

  The Signal

  The Divine World

  Cities of the Dead: Stories from the Zombie Apocalypse

  Of Monsters and Men