by Bobby Adair
The thing about climbing—as I came to understand pretty quickly—is that it’s not as easy as it looks in the movies. Yeah, I know, like anybody has to be told that. Climbing a ladder works the arm and leg muscles in a way they’re not used to, at least not in a repetitive, weight-bearing fashion.
My muscles were getting stiff and I stopped, thinking a good excuse for a pause would be to look down to see how Murphy was progressing.
I swung one foot and one arm away from the ladder and leaned my back against the cage. In another day, in an old, civilized world, I might not have done it. Too much risk for nearly nothing gained. But compared to the shit I did on a daily basis, it seemed a lot like no big deal. I looked down. Murphy was a good ways below and climbing a lot more slowly than I expected.
At least a half-dozen screaming Whites were crowded around the base of the ladder, with more of them close enough to spit on. A steady flow was piling into Creepy Town from the woods. All were heeding the call of their naked kin.
“You good?” I called.
Murphy looked up, worry on his face. “Yeah.”
He wasn’t good. He was having trouble with the rungs and he was coming up slowly.
I waited and watched, feeling the ladder vibrate with the weight of the Whites mounting it at the bottom.
“Dude?” I asked, concerned.
Murphy grimaced and raised his hand, palm up. His fingers were swollen as fat as sausages. “Whatever got me back in the woods—” He looked down at the Whites, then back up at me. “It keeps swelling.”
“Pass me,” I shouted. “Hurry.”
Murphy shook his head.
“Goddammit,” I yelled. “Just get the fuck up here.” I brandished my machete. “I can cut fingers off rungs all night long.”
Wrapping the arm with the swollen hand around the ladder, Murphy climbed with only his good hand to hold onto the rungs.
A clinking sound startled me into looking up instead of down. Way up at the top of the ladder, hanging right over the ladder cage, one of those wide-mouthed, metal grain chutes was pointing down. That didn’t make any sense to me, not one bit.
Why would the silo owners want to dump grain down through the ladder cage?
The pipe vibrated with a throaty, tinny noise.
Oh, shit.
I pressed my back against the ladder cage to get as far away from the center of the tube as possible. I yelled, “Murphy, off the ladder. Against the cage! Right fucking now!”
The pipe spat something black and round.
Before I could curse, a perfect black sphere swished past me, pushing a puff of air into my face. I looked down as it passed, hoping to God Murphy had heeded my order with the urgency that I’d shouted it.
His body was moving to the side, even as the bowling ball—it was a fucking bowling ball—brushed the front of his MOLLE vest. It hit the toe of his boot and deflected just enough to bounce off the ladder cage before it thudded with a wet crunch into the first White on the ladder.
Screams followed as I watched the weirdest piece of performance art I’d ever seen. Arms and legs flailed inside the ladder cage as they fell, spraying blood through grunts and howls.
However many Whites had been on the ladder, they were now crumbled into a squirming pile at the foot of it.
“Holy mother of shit.” Sometimes the words just come.
“What the hell was that?” Murphy shouted.
“Bowling ball. You okay?”
“I think.”
“Climb and be ready for more.” I started up the ladder again, shouting upward as I went, to whomever. “Hey! Hey! Give me a warning before you drop the next one. Please!”
Rusty metal hinges squealed from up at the top of the ladder. A head popped out directly above me, but way, way up. It disappeared again.
“There are people up there,” I called down to Murphy. I saw Whites below as I did, and felt the ladder take their weight as they took up the chase again. I looked back up and shouted, “We’re coming. We’re cool. Just let us up.”
“Say please,” Murphy called, his smile clear through the sound of his voice.
I swore to myself if he didn’t spend at least a little more time in a shitty mood, I was going to kick him in the ‘nads.
Nothing happened above. No more bowling balls.
As I got closer, heads kept popping out from up there for a look. Voices discussed and some shouted. Things were tense upstairs, I guessed, as they were deciding what to do with an intruder and his friend in the process of dragging the attention of God knows how many naked Whites up to the top of their silo.
My biggest fear as I neared the top was that they’d see the color of my skin.
Chapter 37
“Bombs away.” The shout came from above.
I immediately pushed my back against the ladder cage and hollered down to Murphy, “Here comes another!”
Two seconds later, a bowling ball—not black, but glittery, with dark green swirls—whooshed past. It missed Murphy, thank God.
Another wet thud. A splatter of blood. Grunts. Screams. And falling bodies, adding to the pile of wiggling flesh and broken bones at the bottom.
“You gonna make it, Murphy?” He was still moving slowly, and the distance between us was growing, though I’d been climbing more slowly since becoming aware of his swollen hand.
A few hundred Whites were below, most crowding the foot of the ladder, trying to be next to climb. Some took advantage of the free meal of their dying comrades. It occurred to me that a significant minority in the naked horde had probably developed a preferential taste for the easy meat that cannibalism offered. Spending your days in a massive herd of edibles, eating the weak and injured, had to be so much easier than going balls-out into the bullets every time a normal was spotted. I wondered if the cannibalistic ones—that I now decided had to exist—were relatively smart compared to the mass. I wondered if they had the good sense to hang back during an attack and feed lazily on the leftovers in the aftermath.
Probably.
In a way, I thought none of that was my problem, but it was. Or at least, it was in terms of my understanding of the scope of the problem at the bottom of the ladder. How many of those Whites, Smart Ones included, would continue to climb, only to be slaughtered before they started trying to find a better way to get to the meat at the top of the silos? I wanted to believe that this ladder was the only way up, but I’d seen the brutal intelligence of the naked horde at work too many times. They had an uncanny ability to quickly solve the hardest problems, to see past the staunchest defense, to overwhelm, and kill.
I guess I hoped that we’d kill enough of the crazed ones that the majority of those left below were the cannibalistic ones who’d content themselves to eat their own dead and then wander off.
Ah, hope.
Why did I even bother with it?
Once I was close enough to the top, I saw that the ladder terminated at the foot of a vertical wall of rusty diamond-plate steel, welded along the top edge of the silo where one would normally climb off the ladder to get onto the roof. It stood ten feet tall and extended at that height a good fifteen feet out to both sides. It was hard to imagine that any White had the gymnastic ability to get himself from the ladder’s highest rung over that smooth wall of rusty steel. Only the metal tube that the bowling balls rolled through broke the smooth surface.
A door was cut through the steel at the top of the ladder, but I had zero doubt about how firmly it was braced from the other side. Anybody going to the trouble to weld that wall and secure it to the top edge of the silo surely had the smarts to make sure the door wasn’t the weak spot. Even if it were relatively weak, no more than two or three Whites would ever be able to squeeze themselves into the top of the ladder cage in a position to push on the door at one time.
The silo, at least where the ladder was concerned, had a formidable defense.
A small door above the main door swung open. It had been cut just big enough for a person
’s head to stick out for a look down. An old man looked at me.
“Hello,” I said, because it was the friendliest thing that popped into my head. I smiled widely. “May we come in?”
“Two of you?” the old man asked.
“Yes.” I nodded toward Murphy. “He’s going slow. He hurt his hand.”
The old man disappeared for a second and then popped back out again. “We got rules,” he said.
I laughed. “I don’t care if your rule is that I have to scrub your toilets for a week. We’re not in a negotiating position. We just need a favor.”
“We’ll help you,” he said.
“Thanks.” I hurried up the last few rungs. “Thank you very much.”
The main door swung open on rusted hinges that protested with loud squeals.
A very wrinkly, calloused black man’s hand reached out to take mine. I paused before taking it. I looked down. “Murphy, they’re letting us in.”
“Cool.” He was panting heavily from the exertion of climbing with a bum hand.
To the guy inside extending his hand to take mine, I said, “I’ll wait here a minute. Cool? I need to make sure he makes it.”
“Suit yerself,” he told me, in the same country accent as the other old man. “If them ‘nfected ones git up here, I’m closin’ this door.”
I brandished my machete. “I gotta protect my friend. You do what you gotta do.” I looked down, not wanting to hear the man’s response.
Murphy made it past another ten rungs. The ladder below was filling with Whites again, and the one in the lead was coming on fast.
“Tell yer friend to scoot back against the cage,” said the man inside.
“Bowling ball?” I asked.
“Yup.”
“Murphy,” I called. “Another bowling ball is coming!”
Murphy quickly got himself into position.
“Ready,” I told the man inside.
He gestured at someone I couldn’t see.
The pipe above made its throaty, metal sound again and a bowling ball rolled out and accelerated past. The welcome wet thud followed. Whites screamed as the ball and the accumulated weight of falling bodies scoured the ladder.
Murphy climbed the rest of the way up. As he passed me, he said, “Damn, that’s a lot farther than it looks.”
Once he was through, I clambered in behind, falling on my back on the silo’s flat concrete roof. The steel door slammed shut. Four separate braces were latched on behind it, and I looked up at our saviors, who were standing in a circle, evaluating us with grim faces.
Chapter 38
“Yer’ both white as that bunch of ‘fecteds down there,” said the old man, the one who’d opened the door for us. He placed a worn straw hat on his head and looked at our other three defenders: one black, and two younger people, a man and a woman, both with skin as pale as mine.
“Looks like white skin isn’t as rare as I thought,” I said, as I sat up.
Murphy elbowed me, as though I’d said something wrong.
The defenders didn’t seem to feel any urgency about the Whites trying to climb to the top of their silo. I looked past them to see if others were tending to the defense. No one was.
Odd.
“All together, we got four,” said the man in the hat. He reached out to help me up. “The rest of us ‘er normal.”
“I’m Zed.” I got my feet beneath me. “This is Murphy.”
“Pleased to meet ya.” He extended a hand to shake mine. “I’m Billy.” He nodded at an ancient black man, “That’s Isaac.” Billy pointed a thumb at two people with skin as white as mine. “Travis ‘n Holly.”
In a voice too deep for his wiry frame, Isaac said, “Howdy. Isaac Brooks.”
“Please to meet ya,” said Holly.
They all spoke in a drawl that seemed purposeful to the point of exaggeration, an affectation to prove membership in a group, The Rural People of East Texas Club.
It was just an observation, not a judgment, though my mind tried to make it such. And whose doesn’t? We were all human. Well some of us were—the rest were Whites—and that’s just the way human brains work: Like me equals good. Different equals bad.
I needed to stop letting my thoughts wander off on their own. They needed adult supervision, and I needed to take off my asshole cap and spend more time appreciating the nice folks who’d just saved my life.
Holly went over to get a peek through the window in the wall at the top of the ladder. Travis fetched a bowling ball from a bin that looked to contain a hundred or more. The bin and the balls struck me as strange.
“Had to raid the bowling alley in Caldwell to get most of those,” said Billy, noticing my curiosity.
Murphy laughed and shook his head. “Bowling balls.”
“They work,” said Isaac.
“No doubt.” How could I not agree? I’d seen their effectiveness up close.
I looked around the top of the silo. The roof was concrete and flat. The tower structure built behind the wall that protected the roof from the ladder looked to have been modified with plates of metal welded on to protect those within. All the way up here, I didn’t know what they were protection from, but I was full of guesses.
An elevated catwalk ran from the tower back down the centerline of the five silos. However, halfway across the silo on which we stood, the catwalk was blocked by a steel wall that bisected the silo roof. It was smooth, except for the diamond plate pattern on its surface. Whatever support structure was required to hold it up was on the other side. It stood easily fifteen feet tall and extended over the edges on each side, such that there was no way a human could reach from this side of the wall to grasp anything around the edge. Any attempt would lead to a fall to the ground below.
A door similar to, but larger than the one at the top of the ladders, was cut through the steel wall. No other holes or features existed.
Along the top edge, on the other side, several heads peered over. Obviously, the wall had been fashioned as a rampart, and the people who lived here figured if they were going to have to fight for it, they’d fight from up there. Having planned for the event, they left this half of the silo’s roof mostly empty. They had the bin of bowling balls and four fifty-five gallon drums. A couple looked pretty new. Two bore some rust. Sticking out of the cap on one was a hand pump.
Beside the drums were stacks of jars, all with screw top lids. Each lid was holed, with a piece of cloth sticking out. Molotov cocktails. The drums had to contain gasoline or diesel. Plan B, if the bowling balls didn’t do the trick.
“You guys put some work into fortifying this place,” observed Murphy.
“It keeps us safe,” said Billy.
“You mentioned some rules,” I said. I tightened my grip on my machete as my suspicious imagination came up with worst-case guesses. “What are they?”
Billy cut a glance at my machete and Murphy’s M4. “Ain’t much. The usual do-unto-others type of stuff. That, and if you want to stay, we’ll give ya a couple of weeks to let you know if we like ya. Then you gotta pull yer’ weight, same as everybody else. Or you can stay the night and clear out tomorrow.”
“Thanks for letting us up,” Murphy stuck out his swollen hand for a shake, then grimaced. “Sorry, something bit me.”
Billy waved at someone on the wall. “Patty, would you help Murphy out, please? See if we got something we can give him for his hand?”
“Will do, Billy,” Patty called back.
A moment later, the door in the wall opened and Murphy went through.
I said, “Thanks for letting us in. We really appreciate it.”
“You can run along, if you want,” Billy told me. “You look like you could use a rest.”
Shaking my head, I said, “I’ll stay.” I pointed at the wall that blocked the ladder. “At least until we take care of the Whites.”
“Suit yer’ self.”
Holly said something I didn’t catch.
Travis dropped another bowlin
g ball into the pipe.
It rolled through, making that throaty sound I’d become familiar with on the other end. A silent moment of free fall followed and I waited for the thud when it crushed a White’s skull.
Instead, something banged the hell out of a piece of metal.
Billy and Isaac looked at each other. Both wore worry in the wrinkles on their faces.
Holly cursed and pulled her little door closed. She looked back at us and said, “We got a problem.”
Billy hurried over to take a look through the viewing door. He spent a few moments looking down and then pulled his head back through. “I’ll be damned. Holly’s right.”
Isaac waited for Billy to step aside and quickly put his head out for a look. When he pulled it back in, he said, “Ain’t good. Seems they’re gittin’ smarter.”
Smarter? Haven’t you guys seen Smart Ones?
“I knew something was wrong the second that ball hit and busted,” said Holly. “It took me another second to figure out they was carryin’ some piece of metal for a shield. At least, the first one is. Thick metal, too. Maybe a piece of scrap we left down there.”
I took a deep breath and took a longer look at the silo’s defenses. A few minutes before, they had seemed impenetrable. Could the naked horde get through the metal wall at the top of the ladder?
Seeing the structure of the ladder-wall from behind, I couldn’t think of any way the Whites would be able to break through. But I’d never seen them fail when they corralled their half-pint brains and got them all herded in the same direction on a problem.
Pessimist Zed needed to figure out how we were going to get off the silo alive.
Chapter 39
Might as well enlighten my friends where they seemed to have a blind spot. I said, “I don’t know what kinds of Whites you guys have seen out here—”
“Whites?” asked Isaac.
