by Gnarly, Bart
Something has to be done.
No one is saying that one man could wipe out the zombie threat, but if everyone helped… If everyone stepped in and stood together against the undead, we could recapture the world from them. If people across the country did their part to eliminate the zombies in their area, we could win this country for the living if everyone helped.
Something has to be done.
And so I made a goal: The eradication of zombies in Cheney. I would work to kill as many of the shufflers as I could find. I figured that there had to be others out there who felt like I did, and if enough of us took action, then we could take this world back. I didn’t have any dreams of single-handedly eradicating zombies across the globe, but I knew I had to do something, and my hometown was as good a place to start as any.
So my first step was to find a residence. If people were suspicious and dangerous before there were any zombies in Washington, they had become erratic and homicidal since the horde landed. Across the area, if you were too close to someone’s house and you moved, prepare to be shot at. Living or dead, the residents of Cheney lived in dread of the unknown.
What if that’s a zombie?
What if it bites me?
What if I become a zombie?
Is it coming this way?
Shoot it, Carl! Shoot it!
There was no noble effort to band together and hunt down the undead threat. People preferred to board themselves up and hide. Almost overnight, the majority of the human population gave up their seat as top of the food chain to a band of infected undead. Some got brave, but most just hid.
While I had no intentions of staying in hiding, I did understand the need for a safe place to sleep. So the search began for a headquarters. My first thought was an abandoned house, but that proved to be too dangerous a maneuver at this time. It was impossible to tell if anyone was using a house. Even homes with broken windows and smashed-in doors sometimes still housed breathers, and breathers love their guns. Just walking the street I took too long looking at a home that by all appearances was completely forsaken, and the residents fired a few shots my way. I threw my hands up and swore that I wasn’t a zombie. They either didn’t believe me or didn’t care. I was ordered to leave, or be killed where I stood.
So homes were a bad choice. I then went to the industrial district, looking for a building that was hard to access, sturdy, but could give me shelter.
More breathers. More warnings.
Down by the tracks I found an enclosed railcar that was open. I looked, and discovered that I could latch the storage area from the inside. My hopes soared, until I considered my escape route. If the horde should come back, what would I do? I wouldn’t be able to exit the front, and I couldn’t wait them out. Who knows how long these shufflers can last? I imagined myself, standing atop the railcar, looking out over a crowd of zombies extending in every direction. A castaway, stranded upon a steel island in a sea of the dead. No. Whatever I used would have to have an escape route.
That’s when I saw the mill just up the tracks. The building looked sturdy, with a limited number of doors and windows on the ground floor. It was tall, so I could have a great view of the surrounding area. Consequently it also meant that I would be able to spy a zombie from a long way off. The facility was huge, with lots of exit paths. The only way that I could be completely surrounded is if the horde numbered in the thousands, but I decided that was highly unlikely. The zombie population was actively hunting, and a horde of one thousand zombies was going to be searching for a large food source. They’re not going to lay siege to a building this size for one human happy meal to-go. So I stood there, hidden amongst the rail cars, looking at the place that was to be my home. It felt perfect.
The sound of crunching gravel made my heart suspend its efforts. The sound was irregular, like a person was dragging a load behind them. Crunch drag, crunch drag, crunch drag. My eyes flew across the scene. From my spot, I couldn’t see who was coming, but I was sure it had to be a zombie. Then it sounded like a pair of steps. Now it sounded like one shuffler. The echoes off the cars were playing tricks on me. I thought to climb the car I was standing next to, but I didn’t want to be trapped. I could hear it mumbling now, in low, unintelligible noises and grunts. I could feel my heart start again as I considered making a run for it across the yard. Long ways, but I bet I could do it faster than any dead-head. Whatever was coming was now very close, and by the sounds of it, the thing was going to move right by my hiding spot.
In a panic, I ducked and went under the railcar.
Stupid, stupid boy.
I used to fantasize that I was a ninja, capable of silent travel over any surface and deadly surprise attacks. Not so, apparently. Not so. While scrambling to get under the car I kicked up a bit of rock and fell loudly against some metal rods that made a rather resounding gong noise. The labored walking stopped. I searched between wheels and under frames until I spied the legs. They were just at the head of the car. I planned to watch them carefully, and when they began to move, I would crawl out in the opposite direction and make a dash for it.
If it came down to it, I knew I could kill a zombie. I had no weapon, but I would tear its head off if I needed to. I knew I could. I just knew it.
“Shit, Dave. You found yer’self a squirrel.” I spun to find the source of the voice and came eye-to-eye with a bearded man in a cowboy hat. He had knelt right behind me. I was so distracted by the legs that I had found, I never noticed the second pair.
In later years I would look back and remember that day as the one on which I was scheduled to die. Hiding under the railcar? What the hell was I thinking? That it would be better to be dragged out from beneath my hiding spot and torn to pieces in the gravel than to die on my feet? Idiot. By all accounts, I should have died.
The cowboy laughed and swiped at my foot. “Get’cher ass outta there boy, ‘fore one ah them things wanders over and tears you up.” He stood, and his friend made his way around to car to us.
Sheepishly, I slunk out from my hiding spot. Out of shame I wouldn’t look the cowboy in the eye, but that didn’t stop him from laughing and talking.
“Damn boy, I’ll say. I have no idea how you ain’t dead yet you thinkin’ that was the right thing to do.” The cowboy shook his head and grinned widely. “Whatcha gunna do down there? Huh? Think they can’t reach? Or crawl? Huh?”
“I…” Words were coming hard at the moment. I was being schooled by some redneck, and my pride was taking some serious blows. “I didn’t think that… I heard you guys coming and thought that you were zombies, and…” And then tears. Of all the moments in my life that I could have cried. I had never been madder at myself than I was at that moment. Standing before two grown men, being treated like a scared puppy, and then putting on the waterworks. If suicide was an option at that moment I most likely would have taken it.
Truth was, I was scared, alone, and I had just got my first lesson in zombie survival. Turns out I was no good on my own. And so I began to cry.
Whack!
The cowboy cracked me across the head with a gloved hand. I looked him in the eye and he was smiling again. “Cut that shit out, huh? Freaks Dave a little to see kids cry.” His tone was steady but his face was the very image of insanity. I looked at Dave, who continued to be silent. Even though, he looked at me like I was a bug that was due to be crushed and tossed out. His eyes were deep and hollow. I could remember thinking that he was half a zombie himself. Without any pretense, Dave started his shuffle toward the mill again. One of his legs moved free, while the other was clearly a prosthetic.
The cowboy laughed again and said, “Shoot kid, he ain’t a zombie. Dave here lost his leg long before all this.” He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. Oddly, my tears were drying up and the sensation of human contact felt good. “I bet you could use some chow, huh?”
My stomach bubbled in anticipation and I nodded eagerly.
“Ha! I thought so,” he replied animatedly. “C’mon k
id.”
As we walked side by side, the cowboy chatted happily but his eyes never stopped moving. “Now don’t you worry about Dave rattin’ on your whimperin’ and cowerin’. Boy hasn’t said a word since I met him. Don’t even know if Dave is his real name, but we have to call him somethin’, right? An’ Dave’s as good a name as any.”
“We?” The wheels were turning slowly in my mind, but at least they were moving. “How many of you are there?”
“Including you?” he asked. “Seven.”
The cowboy, Dave, and four others.
And me.
“And you guys all live…” I ventured.
“In the mill. Great place. Lots of room and storage. Lots of viewpoints. And we’ve barricaded all the entrances we don’t use.” He looked up to the looming structure and smiled like a proud parent. “She’s just about perfect.”
“You and the others,” I asked. “Are any of you family?”
“Shit, boy,” he chuckled at me. “It’s the end of the world. Zombies are eating the heads right off most of our loved ones and crazy-ass humans are shooting the rest. There’s little to no food, no police, no fuel, an’ no more bullets once they’re gone. We are going to live the rest of our lives and then die in this infested wasteland. Kid, every human that is not infected or insane is now your family.”
“Uncle Cowboy,” I say.
“Damn right!” he pipes back. “An’ don’t you be forgettin’ your uncle Dave there.”
Dave stopped just long enough to turn around and share with us an expression that told a very different tale than the one the cowboy just submitted. Beneath his outer countenance of tired irritation, there was clearly the presence of hurt. There was pain and despair, and from what I could see, he didn’t try very hard to hide it. Wordlessly, he then turned back to the building and kept on.
“I think he likes you,” says the cowboy with a grin.
We approached the building from the rail yard on the east side. There were sandbags and metal sheeting up in all of the ground floor windows. Doors had massive bolts running through them that connected to pipes stretched across the frames, effectively anchoring the doors.
I waited with heated anticipation at the uncovering of the secret entrance, the password, armed guards in BDUs, and a poorly lit passageway that led to a command center with maps and canteens, and a stock of weapons and food. Instead…
“Molly!” the cowboy hollered. “Open the gah damn door!” A steel door opened unceremoniously to reveal our hostess.
When I heard the cowboy call a woman’s name, I pictured someone young, army pants, tight tank top stretched over a large perk chest, ponytail, and a pistol drawn and ready. What I found was an average woman in her forties. She wasn’t thin, or fat. She was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. No gun was visible, and her hair had been cut extremely short. Honestly, I felt a little let down.
“We’ll come on, boys!” she bellowed. “I ain’t standing here all day.”
Yeah, she wasn’t at all what I hoped she’d be.
“Molly, you beautiful creature,” crooned the cowboy. “If you called to me a hundred times a day like that I still couldn’t get enough. When are you going to admit that you are madly in love with me?”
“Duck,” she said, “I’d sooner sleep with Dave here, than ever have feelings for you.” Her smile was big, bright, and venomous. At that moment, I kind of liked her.
“Wait,” I said, “Your name’s Duck?”
“Cute kid,” Molly says as an afterthought. “Where’d you find him?”
“Hidin’ under a railcar, waiting to be eaten. And what’s wrong with Duck?” he asks, sounding wounded.
“Cowboy sounded cooler,” I admitted.
Molly laughs heartily as she bolts the door behind us. “Duck? Cool? Ha!” She put an arm around my shoulder and led me into the building. We were in a large storage room, filled with wooden crates, pallets, and packing equipment. The biggest of the items in the room had been pushed up against the roll-up doors. Our guide led us to a stairwell. It was a metal set of stairs that wound up to the top level and was suspended from the ceiling. There were four levels before the last set of stairs took you to a pair of doors. On the first landing was a stack of packages. The second and third flights of stairs had been removed and replaced with a ladder that reached the third landing. Molly stopped and pointed at the ground floor.
“Roll-ups are the weak points,” she started, “so we padded those. If they get in and reach the stairs,” she says pointing at the boxes on the landing, “these are for slowing the horde while we get up the ladder. Once we reach the upper landing, ladder goes up and zombies are stuck down here.”
“Then you run,” I say.
“Hell no!” Duck replies. “Then we hunt!”
“There are a couple of escape routes from upstairs,” Molly interrupts, “but Duck’s right. We mean to kill as many zombies as we can before we go. In here, they’d be fish in a barrel.”
We climb the ladder and I get a better view of the floor. She’s right, I decide. No humanoid could cover the expanse from the first landing to the third without a ladder. It would be cherry picking from here.
“So it would be just, pow pow pow,” I say, imitating the shooting of a rifle.
“Kinda,” Duck responds.
“You just shoot them in the head, right?” I ask, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“Kid, you ever seen one of them die?” Duck asks.
To this point, I hadn’t. I shook my head and looked at Molly, confused.
“This ain’t the movies, kid,” is all she said.
As we made our way up the stairwell, Duck filled me in on his favorite pastime: Zombie killing.
“Think of their heads as just a melon with teeth. Their brains ain’t workin’ anymore, so shootin’ those don’t do no good. Shoot,” he says with a laugh, “I shot one in the head eight times and she jus’ kept a coming.”
“She?” I asked, a little shocked that he would commit such an act on a woman.
“You think them parasites only come with a dog between their legs?” He laughed hard and shoved me a little. “There’s plenty of kittens out there that want what’s in your head, and I don’t mean in the fun way,” he added in a mumble.
“Duck!” Molly scolded. “For heaven’s sake! Do you always have to be like this?”
“It’s who I am, dear,” he replied unapologetically. “She wines,” he whispers at me, “but she loves it.”
I can’t help but smile when she responds, “The hell I do you old perve.”
Molly pulls a key from her pocket and unlocks one of the doors at the top of the stairs. It opens to a windowless, sheetrock hallway. We take the first door on the right and enter what looks like a break room. The center of the room is filled with several tables pushed together and circled with chairs. A whiteboard hangs in the wall but it looks unused. There’s a bathroom to the immediate left, and two doors further down the wall. The right wall has a single door, and a glance reveals a locker room. There are two men sitting at the table, playing cards and chewing on toothpicks.
“It’s ‘bout friggin’ time, Duck,” one of them responds without looking up from his cards. The man is bald, with a short beard that starts just above his ears. His opponent has short hair and a very youthful look. Neither one notices me standing there.
“You know me, Peter,” Duck responds with a grin. “I do love to hunt.”
“Yeah,” says the younger one, “we know. What’d you catch?”
“Found a deady wanderin’ out the Spokane road, but old Dave here bashed him in before anything could be done about it.”
“Good work, Dave,” replies Peter. “Wood, I call.”
The younger one lays a weak hand that is easily defeated. Peter smiles and looks up at us. “Who the hell is that?” he asks, scowling at me.
“This is Kid,” Molly replies firmly. “He’s staying with us now, aren’t you?”
“Uh�
� yeah,” I say weakly.
Peter leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest. “Huh,” is all the man says at first. After a moment of studying me, he finally says, “I’m Peter, this is Wood.” He gestures at his poker opponent, who gives me an expressionless gaze. “You’ve met Dave, Duck, and our beloved Molly.” He cocks his head to the side and frowns at me a little. “So, Kid, where you from?”
“My name’s not Kid, okay?”
“Mine’s not Peter, and he’s not Duck,” he replies mysteriously. “When our old lives passed away, so did our old names. We gave each other new names, and yours is Kid.” He pointed around the room as he continued. “The weirdo in the cowboy hat loved to hunt Duck. So now he’s Duck. Wood here was a carpenter’s apprentice. I drove truck.”
“And I’m the friggin’ molly maid,” Molly announced sarcastically.
“But your name is Peter?” I ask, still a little baffled.
“As in Peterbilt,” he explained. “And Dave here,” he continued, “well he hasn’t said a damn thing since getting here. Found him in an awful state, though he does love smashin’ zombies.”
“I promised Kid some grub,” Duck interjects. My stomach again lurches at the thought.
“Sissy’s in the kitchen workin’ on some soup.” Peter smiles and nods at the corner door. “Why don’t you show our new roommate the way, Duck?”
“C’mon, Kid.” Duck leads me to the door and into another hallway.
“Tell him not to use the shitter,” Peter calls before the door closes behind us.
“Water’s kinda limited right now,” Duck explains. “So if you gotta piss, do it outside. You learn to crap only when you have to.”
“You go outside, unprotected?”
“Not really. See there’s this window in an office off the kitchen,” he says with an embarrassed grin. “You just stand there to whiz out of it,” he explains as we make our way down the hall, “but you’ve got to hang your ass out if you need to crap. And don’t get any on the walls, either,” he adds quickly. “Pisses Wood off somethin’ fierce if there’s scat anywhere near the sill.”
