Animals

by David A. Simpson

  As they sat on the banks of the river, Cody leaning into the warm fur of Otis, he decided the time had come. That night he would tell the others they were going on a raid. Putnam was close enough that a fully charged cart would make the trip. If they were careful, if they were quiet, maybe they could find enough stuff to get them through. They needed food for them and the animals, warm clothes and some weapons to protect themselves. Going into town to see what was available would give them an idea of how hard the coming winter was going to be.

  Maybe they’d find a town barricaded by military personnel, thriving and safe but deep down he doubted it. Most likely, the town would be crawling with undead and before the day was out, he and his crew would join them. There was no other choice though. They had to go now while they were strong and had options. If it was really bad, they could quietly retreat and figure out something else. They couldn’t wait until they were weak with hunger and desperate.

  They were on their own and he’d made his mom a promise to look after the park and its survivors. He wouldn’t let her down. Wouldn’t break the promise. He didn’t know what he’d do if he walked out one day to see her at the fence, clawing and growling as she tried to get in.

  He ruffled his hands through Otis’s fur then climbed to his feet. Committed to his plan, they started back towards the house where he began gathering brush for the fire. It would feel good, burn hot and bright and chase the chill of the night away while he explained to the other kids his plan to either save them or get them all killed.

  16

  Kerry

  Kerry Lovell peeked through the blinds, looking for any sign of her husband. She was drinking the last of the coffee scavenged from their neighbor, the caffeine taking the edge off of her hunger. Chris had been gone too long. Worry set in. What would she do if he didn’t come back? There wasn’t anything left to eat, they’d even finished off the canned cat food from Mrs. Lowell. They’d been holed up and hiding since everyone went crazy. They had been one of the lucky ones, Chris had late classes that day at the University and was planning on grading papers all morning. They’d decided to keep Caleb home from school because there was a bug going around and he’d just gotten over a bad cold. She volunteered to watch her sister’s kids if she wanted to keep them out of classes and Sharon had agreed. She had enough stress in her life, she didn’t want her children coming down with whatever was going around.

  They thought the madness would pass quickly. The Army or the police or somebody, anybody, would restore order. The sick would be taken somewhere to get well and life would go on. They were wrong. It got worse. They lived fifteen miles south of LaCrosse where her husband worked.

  Had worked.

  They had moved away from the city and into the same subdivision as her sister a few years ago. It was far enough away from town to be called country and the Rolling Hills Estates were considered gentleman’s or hobby farms. The houses sat on five to ten acre lots and many of the families had a horse or other 4H animals.

  Things had gone from normal to insane in a matter of minutes. Her sisters’ kids had spent the night, had stayed up half of it giggling, and were still sleeping when everything went wrong. She and Chris were sitting on the front porch enjoying coffee and some quiet time before the children woke up when their neighbor across the street came tearing down the road in his car. He was driving like a maniac and screeched to a halt in front of his house. He ran inside, yelling for his wife to get his gun. He was bleeding from his shoulder and a screaming mob came running down the road after him.

  They sat and watched, too shocked to move as he came back out a moment later blasting away at the people. He shot them dozens of times but none of them fell to the ground. They only screamed louder. They smashed through the windows and they heard his wife’s shrieks become gurgling and liquid filled. They attacked in a frenzy, ignored the bullets ripping through them and started biting and tearing at him. Their fury died down as quickly as it started and they watched with wide staring eyes as their neighbor stood up and began shuffling around. Instinct told them to stay still, don’t get noticed. They barely breathed as they watched the bloody, ragged crowd walk aimlessly around the house and yard until they heard another scream. This one came from four or five houses down, a good quarter mile away. The mob turned towards it instantly and started running, keening and screeching until they disappeared over the rise.

  They went inside, locked the doors, shuttered the windows and tried to make phone calls. They kept quiet and watched the world burn on the television and computer until they lost power. After that, more of the same. Stay quiet, ration food, filter the pond water the best they could and steal eggs from the Walters two houses down. Their doors were swaying in the wind, bloody footprints covered the sidewalk. They wouldn’t be needing them.

  They were out of everything though. It had been weeks and Chris had raided all of the neighbor’s houses. He’d brought back a wheel barrow of food but it hadn’t lasted long with five mouths to feed. You’d think the so-called farmers would have pantries full of canned goods fresh from the garden but nobody did. Thousands of dollars’ worth of food went bad in their deep freeze, nobody did their own canning anymore. By the time the undead had cleared out of the neighborhood and it was safe to venture out, all of the penned-up animals that had been trapped in their stalls were dead and bloated.

  On one of his raids he had found a battery powered radio with shortwave and weather bands. He spent hours with it, rotating the dial slowly through each setting and never getting anything but static until he tried the AM band. Low on the dial and late at night he found a message being broadcast on a loop. It repeated the same few sentences over and over but it gave him hope. A group of truckers were headed to Lakota, Oklahoma and they were going to set up a safe area. All were welcome.

  They needed supplies if they were going to make the trip. He had cleaned out every house for miles and they hadn’t provided much anyway. Usually just a handful of canned goods the wildlife couldn’t get into. Mice and squirrels and insects were taking over and tearing into the boxes of cereal or bags of rice or cartons of noodles. The children were thin as rails and had been sleeping a lot, they were all slowly starving to death. They needed sustenance. They needed food. They needed to be strong. Anything could happen along the way and they needed to be able to run if they had to. The trip might take days, maybe even weeks. They had no idea what the roads would be like or how many of the undead they would encounter. They might have to backtrack a lot to avoid the hordes.

  Chris was going farther this time, they needed real food. He was going to take their truck and go into town to the store, make a big haul, get everything they needed. He wasn’t a mechanic and didn’t know much about cars. He took it to the dealer to get serviced and called triple A if he had a flat. He could figure things out, though. He knew he needed more between him and the undead than a thin pane of glass. He covered the windows with strips of metal and added a big push bar to the bumper to protect the radiator. The truck didn’t crank when he was ready to test it, the battery had drained. He had to take one out of a neighbors’ old Ford tractor.

  “All of the batteries will be dead.” he’d said. “I should have thought about it and disconnected them. The cars clocks and computers and who knows what else is a constant drain on them. I’ll stop at a parts store and get us a new one.”

  He should have been back an hour ago.

  She checked on the children. Caleb, Landon and Clara were playing with Legos in the basement. Caleb was her only child and the other two were her niece and nephew but they were hers now and had started calling her mommy. At the tender ages of six and seven, they were inseparable, Caleb and Landon born only days apart and Clara, less than a year younger.

  They’d been locked inside, mostly staying downstairs and being quiet for what seemed like months. The kids learned quickly that it wasn’t a game. They saw for themselves a few days after it all began and Landon and Clara were still crying for their
mother. A horde came screeching down the road chasing somebody in a car. A neighbor down the way making his escape. They saw the bloody crowd with ripped open bellies, torn off faces and missing arms. They heard the keens and cries of hunger and watched in revulsion as the broken things too damaged to walk dragged their way down the road leaving smears of gore behind them.

  They stopped asking about their mother and they became very, very good at keeping quiet.

  Chris been gone too long, she thought again for the thousandth time. It had been hours since he’d left that morning with his homemade armor. She had sewn pieces of carpet to the sleeves of his work jacket to stop those things from biting him. It was already after lunchtime and Putnam was only a half hour away. He should have been back, been with her and the children by now. She gripped the key fob to the BMW parked across the street. If he came running with the crazies on his tail, she’d hit the alarm, hopefully distracting them enough for Chris to make it to safety. If there was any juice left its battery.

  Where is he? She repeated to herself over and over, glancing at the clock on the mantle every few minutes.

  17

  Putnam

  Putnam, Iowa was a typical small midwestern town. The old courthouse with its weathered clock tower dominated the skyline while elms and maples lined the sidewalks. Their leaves exploded in the brilliant colors of fall and the hues of gold, orange and red invoked images of a Norman Rockwell painting. Now, the trees stood in silent witness to the devastation that the virus had wrought on the small slice of heaven. Trash and debris nestled against their trunks and white plastic shopping bags were tangled in the lower branches. Fallen leaves covered the streets. Store front benches, already starting to rust, sat empty and forlorn. The old men who whiled away the mornings with hot black coffee were long gone. The stores and businesses sat deserted and dark, a few had shattered windows with glass shards on the sidewalk. Smashed cars with open doors sat at intersections, traffic lights swayed on the wires above them.

  Flies still buzzed around the delis and ice cream shop, their perishable items long spoiled and reeking. Birds flew in and out of the open windows while mice skittered back and forth, chewing into the boxes and bags of food. Ants marched in single file lines carrying their spoils like a conquering army. A few stray cats and half-starved dogs wandered the alleys, their owners either part of the undead hordes or long gone and never coming back.

  Putnam was laid out in a square design like many other turn of the century towns across the country. Its buildings were brick and mortar, no fancy glass and steel, just classic architecture in the old square. Easy access to the Mississippi, with its barges moving products on the river, and the fertile soil made for an ideal agricultural site. Bypassed by the interstate in the early 1970’s, it sat off the beaten path and died a slow death as lifestyles changed. They youngsters went away for school and never came back and the downtown became boarded up storefronts and second-hand junk shops. For a generation it was forgotten, a relic of a bygone era withering away. The digital age changed all that, the antiques store no longer needed local customers to stay afloat, he could sell his wares globally on eBay. The inexpensive houses near the riverfront found a resurgence in popularity when people worked from home and gentrification brought in new businesses.

  Like so many other small towns the square offered an eclectic mix of the old and new. Situated beside the feed store was the Verizon hub. Across the square, Mixon’s barbershop sat next to Bowman’s software engineering office. The owner of Maroni’s Italian Restaurant had worried about the new Subway shop when it opened but by setting out a sign advertising his lunch specials, he more than made up for lost business. Not that it mattered anymore, Sal Maroni shuffled along the road a hundred miles away in an unending quest to find fresh blood. He didn’t know where he was going or where he’d been. He didn’t feel the rain or the cold or the bones of his feet as they scraped along the asphalt, his shoes and skin long worn away. He wandered with dozens of others, mindless and adrift, always hungry and always searching.

  Donny jogged ahead of the rest of them, scouting for danger. Harper drove the cart with Murray seated beside her, his wheelchair folded in the back. The others walked silently down the road, ready to turn and run for the safety of the park at the first sign of trouble. They had drawn straws to see who would stay. Somebody had to if the trip were a disaster and none of them came back. Somebody had to free the animals if that happened. Vanessa had walked with the strange parade to the rear gate and made sure it was latched then watched as they disappeared. If none of them came back, she knew what to do.

  Murray brought China, one of the capuchins. He insisted that her knack for getting in and out of places might come in handy. She perched on his shoulder, looking through his hair for anything that might provide a snack, grooming him affectionately as if he was one of her own pack. He swatted at her as she stuck her finger in his nose. Undeterred, she kept probing.

  Zero and Lucy padded softly beside Swan, ears up and alert, while Cody and the twins brought up the rear.

  Welcome to Putnam the sign read Iowa’s friendliest town. There was a compact car crumpled against the base of the brick structure, the doors still open where the driver had either fled or died. There were dark stains on the seats that looked a lot like dried blood and they looked away as they passed.

  By group consensus they had decided to skip looking in any houses unless they didn’t find any big supplies of food at the stores. They might get a few bags from homes but they were much more likely to find the dead inside. It would be better to try to score big, maybe find whole storerooms of canned goods, more than they could carry. Walking beneath the trees that lined the streets the stench of decay was heavy in the air. Occasionally they saw a curtain flutter in a house as a shambling shape brushed against it. They didn’t talk, not even to whisper. They used military hand signals learned from a book. Swan had to shush her wolves more than once when their deep rumbling growls started to get loud. Putrid bodies lay decomposing in the streets, empty eye sockets filled with mucky water. A lot of them had holes in their heads, dried brains and blood crusted around the wounds. There were empty bullet casings littering the ground, a lot of them, but they didn’t see any guns. Whoever had been doing all the shooting had won the fight. At least, this one. All the bodies showed signs of having been fed on, bones exposed and weathering as they returned to dust. They didn’t know if it was from the zombie attack or animals scavenging their remains but none of them cared to look closer to try to find out.

  Donny fell back to joint them as they continued their slow walk into the downtown area, the cart crunching over leaves and broken glass, all of them gripping their makeshift weapons and staring in all directions. The desire to turn and run back to the safety of the Park was strong. Inside the fences, they weren’t afraid. Inside the fences, they were safe. But inside the fences, there wasn’t any food. They heard thrashing up ahead and Swan urged Zero and Lucy forward as she slunk along in a crouch beside them. Unconsciously baring her teeth and growling deep in her throat with them. Cautiously, the group followed the growling trio. Tobias and Annalise readied their pitchforks and advanced slowly, eyes wide, breathing fast and ready to lunge. A zombie in a deputy sheriff uniform lay pinned underneath an overturned patrol car, his clawing fingers ground down to splintered stumps. It snapped at them, biting the air with his yellowed teeth and struggled harder to free himself.

  “Kill it before others hear him and come running.” Murray whispered. “Hurry.”

  China hid herself under his shirt and shivered.

  “We are warriors.” Tobias told his sister.

  Mouth grim, she nodded and they both thrust their pitchforks into the biting things face.

  It fell still instantly and the wolves stopped their quiet growls, sniffed at it and snorted. Tobias’s eyes were huge in his rune painted face and Annalise seemed even paler as they pulled the tines out and looked at the black blood dripping from them. It was their firs
t kill. She waited for a moment to see if she would feel guilt or shame. She had just taken a man’s life. But she hadn’t, really. The man was already dead and they had done him a mercy. She gripped her pitchfork with greater resolve and a small, tight smile spread across her lips. It matched the one Tobias wore.

  The closer they got to the square, the more evidence there was of a battle. The zombies had won, that was obvious, but a lot of them lay dead with blown open heads. Windows were shattered at the municipal building and the doors were broken down. Someone had tried to make a last stand but it hadn’t worked. There must have been thousands fighting to get in, the entire town. Cody wondered what happened to them because so far, they hadn’t seen any wandering around. The place was long abandoned.

  The nose of a pickup was wrapped around a utility pole and a lone black crow was focusing on the driver as it cawed and shifted anxiously from side to side on crumpled hood. The woman inside was pinned: trapped by the steering wheel and the crushed roof from the broken off pole. She was half way through the windshield, her body bent in an unnatural manner. Her face was a ruined mess, eyes and lips gone, cheeks shredded from the crow that dipped down and tore at the easy meal, feasting on the rotting flesh. She still struggled and chomped but her movements were feeble and the black-eyed crow easily avoided her broken teeth as he ate. Vultures circled overhead in slow lazy circles, awaiting their chance to feast undisturbed on the dead.