A Shrouded World - Whistlers (10 page)

Time is moving on and I need to be hasty. I drag the fallen zombies and place them ar
ound the motor home. It takes some work, but I also manage to hoist a few onto the upward-facing side. Searching through several autos, I find a roll of duct tape in the glove compartment of one and stow it away for later. Now to the messy part, and one I’m not all that looking forward to undertaking. The smell of the dead bodies is horrid already, but I want to create a wall of stench that the sensitive noses of the night runners can’t penetrate.

The odor is horrific as I lean over the first body. The smell has an almost physical presence to it which causes my eyes to water and initiates my gag reflex. Taking my knife from its sheath, I cut the shirt away
, exposing the rotting flesh of the torso. If anything, the smell becomes so strong that I can’t sink my knife into the corpse. I’m thinking the reek is good enough as it is.

There’s no way anything will be able to smell me through this shit.

However, I can’t assume anything. If there is something I can do to better my already crappy situation, then it needs to be done.

With that in mind, I place my knife just below the sternum and, turning my head, slice downward. The stench from the decaying insides roils upward. Cursing my enhanced sense of smell, I gag and then retch on the ground. There isn’t much left
, but there’s no way I can stop the reflex. I don’t look at the body but rise after a moment, more from needing to get away than to carry on. I move to the next body and go through the same motions. Yeah, I’m not going to be able to eat anything tonight. I’ll be lucky if I can keep a sip of water down.

Finishing the last of the ones around the motor home, and with the sky growing darker by the moment, I walk away to get a breath of fresh
er air. That isn’t entirely possible, but I am able to clear my head some. The small amount of drumming still going on in my head, coupled with the stink pervading the area, is not making me a very happy camper – pun not intended.

I crawl back on top of the motor home and look at the two bodies I hauled up. Enough is enough
, and I just can’t bring myself to cut into these two. I know what I said earlier about doing anything to make my situation better, but I just can’t. If there is something that can smell me through the reek of decaying bodies that have been nearly disemboweled, then I need a new deodorant.

Standing on the top with the last of the daylight covering my little island paradise, I cast outward with my mind to see if I can feel the presence of any night runners about. I immed
iately sense a couple of middle-sized packs in the nearby, dark forest. Yeah, the woods are out of the equation and I’m glad I didn’t venture into them. They are apparently dense and dark enough to allow night runners to lair there.

Roger that, remove the woods from the equation
.

Still feeling ill from the stink, I open the door, drop the ladder inside, and descend. I test the ladder to see that it will reach and am happy
to find that I’ll have a way out. Plus, it will help with sealing the windows that are now high above me. Heading to the back, which is no easy process with my having to climb and step on cabinetry and walls, I find the back bedroom in the same shambles as the rest of the motor home. A mattress and blankets are lying in a heap on the wall/floor. I prop a box spring against the window and tape it in place to prevent it from falling. Hauling the actual mattress across the maze to the front, I wedge it up against the windshield and tape it there.

It takes the rest of my time available, but I manage to tape blankets and towels against the windows on top. The interior darkens into shades of gray and I find that I have retained the night vision from my other world. I still feel this is some sort of dream but the pounding in my head and bruises are real. Regardless, here I am and I intend to survive. I’m sure I won’t be able to sleep tonight with the stench
, much less if there are night runners prowling, but I’m hoping to get some rest. When I wake, I want it to be in the nightmare of the world where my kids are.

Almost anything is better than this. I’m alone in the state of ‘Amissus’, trapped in
side an overturned motor home, surrounded by the overwhelming odor of decaying bodies, with night runners about to venture out on their nightly hunt.

How much better can it get?

I think through anything I might have missed regarding my security for the night. Nothing comes to mind, so I find a place to settle in. Just in case you want to know, there is no place of comfort to be found on the wall of a motor home. However, I pile seat cushions as best as I can and, placing my M-4 in my lap and two mags by my side, I settle in to see what the night brings.

I don’t know if it was THC induced or not, but when the moon arose, it looked both larger and greener than I had ever remembered.

Was this alternate realm even of the same planet?

That scared the bejesus out of me. I didn’t have an interstellar rocket ship license. Odds were good John did, and then I laughed. I stood up carefully and stepped over to the railing.

Nothing to it but to do it.
A silent mantra I’d often used for a myriad of my issues.

It usually worked except when I had to deal with my daughter or
, Tracy, my wife. I pushed gently against it, making sure it didn’t give way. When I cautiously peered my head over and looked down, I was not rewarded with a sight I would have hoped for. My initial band of runners had swelled into a full-fledged horde. There had to be some means of communication among them, how else could the slower bastards have tracked us down?

We were safe because I hadn’t met a climbing zombie yet, but would they leave? How long could we stay
up here without food and water? That was another funny thought; we were inches from a lake’s worth of water, and we couldn’t touch it. There’s some more damn irony, pretty soon I was going to be able to build a story with all of it.

“I’m so thirsty
, Ponch.”

And so was I.
I would have commiserated with him, but just then we heard the war-slash-hunting cry of the howlers. It seemed that they had picked up our scent. The question now was, could
they
climb?

“Look,” John said.

He had come up to the side of me and was peering off into the darkness, pointing. The greenish tint of the earth from the moon looked as if we were peering at everything through night vision goggles, which I would have given my left ball for. (Well not really. I like them just where they’re at, it’s a figure of speech.) A group of thirty howlers were heading our way, and I’d swear that, from time to time, they would stop and stare directly at us.

“Does ev
eryone in this place have super-smelling skills?” I asked no one in particular.

“I was go
ing to say something about that,” John stated.

“Don’t even go there
, man. It’s not like you smell like lilies of the field. I just can’t figure out how we became so popular.”

“Howler Monkeys
can climb trees, can’t they?” John asked. He was leaning pretty far over the railing, enough so that I had taken a grip on his belt. I could see him completely forgetting his locale and just letting go for the flight of his life. “This thing has support cables all over it,” he said as he stood back up. He staggered a moment and gripped the railing tight. “Head rush, man! Cheap high!”

Nothing was clicking, maybe it was the exhaustion, maybe it was the mild buzz I was enjoying
, or just fucking maybe I didn’t want it to. Simple as that. This could basically be the world’s largest jungle gym to what was heading our way. The zombies had ‘treed’ us and the howlers were coming to do the wet work.

“I really wish you had a rifle,
” I told John.

“P
robably wouldn’t be a good idea,” he answered seriously.

I looked over at him. “Probably right.” I smiled. “You’re going to have to be my spotter then
, alright?”

He nodded.

“Do not let go of the railing,” I admonished him.

I laid out my magazines and began to jam rounds into them. I kept it to
twenty-five rounds per thirty-round magazine. I’d learned over the years, both in the military and in the civilian world, that the springs in these high capacity mags fail all the time, and it’s those last few rounds that ninety-five percent of the problems will arise from. When you’re shooting at the range and a round fails, you put your rifle down on a table and clear the jam, taking your time to be safe. In the midst of a firefight, one jam can mean your life or your death, simple as that. Anything I could do to improve my survivability, I would do.

I was finishing up on my
last magazine when John spoke. “They stopped.”

“Like for coffee?” I don’t know why I asked
, it was the first thing that came to mind. John turned to look at me. “Sorry.” I told him.

“No
, not for coffee.” He turned back around. “They stopped at the fence edge. They keep looking up at us and over at the zombies.”

“Really? That’s pretty frigg
in’ interesting,” I said as I stood up, strategically placing magazines all about my body in various pockets.

I got next to John
, and that was indeed the case. The howlers for once were quiet and not moving. Well, that’s a lie; some of them were walking the perimeter. I would imagine to find a less conspicuous way to come in. It was fairly safe to say that the Z’s and H’s weren’t in cahoots. I don’t know if they actively hated each other or just weren’t in a sharing mood. I followed as three scouts walked counterclockwise around the perimeter. They stopped and looked around when they realized the zombies were the thinnest on this side. One of the monsters began to climb, I noticed two things: one, he was real quiet, and two, he was good at climbing. I didn’t think the water tower was going to be much of an obstacle to them when they got to it. My best defense just became my offense.

The first scout had just jumped down from the top of the fence and was getting his feet under him
, looking around for any signs of trouble.

“Should have looked up,
” I told him, sending a bullet down into the top of his skull.

His knees buckled and his ankles folded in on themselves as the bullet slammed into his skull and spine. His two howler buddies glared at me
. I swear their eyes glowed, just about stopped my heart to look at them.

I immediately sent one of them back to the hell it had originated from. My first sh
ot caught him high in the thigh. He practically shrugged it off, no more affected than if a tennis ball had hit him. Maybe it was only a flesh wound. The second shot was center mass, even from my height I could hear the satisfying impact of a round striking breast plate.

The third howled and was gone before I could acquire him as a target. Then the best news of the night happened as the zombies came over to see what all the fuss was about. They began to tear into my first kill.

“So, apparently howlers are on the menu. Good news,” I said, wanting to fist bump myself. “Where’d they go?” I asked, coming back to John.

“They split as soon as the one g
uy came back. And he looked pee-oh’d. Think they left for good?”

“Doubtful, it looks like viable food sources for these guys are becoming increasingly difficult to come across. No way they’re giving up so easily. On a good note, zombies like to eat howlers.”

“Seriously? They don’t look like they taste good.”

“Some might say the same thing about
two hundred and seven bags of Phrito’s.”

He shrugged his shoulder
s in response. “I think I see movement in the woods across the street.”

I was by his side in an instant. I could
not detect any movement, not matter how much I strained to see. “You sure?”

“I was, can’t see them anymore. Maybe they left.”

“Doubtful,” I said with chagrin. “They’re just trying to find a weakness in the zombies and in our defenses.”

I walked the entire perimeter of the parapet a dozen times before they made their
next move. The sneaky bastards sent two out to entice the zombies into following them. The two distractions shouted and hollered until the zombies took notice and began their pursuit. Our guardians were leaving in droves, chasing the new meat. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a large detachment of the howlers approaching from the side.

“Son of a bitch. Damn near text
book.”

“I loved school,
” John said, startling the hell out of me as he came up beside me.

“Huh…
wouldn’t have thought that. Looks like uninvited company is going to try and make an appearance. You need to start shouting and draw the zombies back in.”

“The funkies? We want them back?”
he asked, perplexed.

“Right now we do.” Thankfully he didn’t question me anymore as he started to hoot and holler.

“Hey, girls and boys, look at this!” he screamed pulling up his shirt. “USDA prime beef! Top shelf! Come get a morsel!”

I left him to his devices.
The howlers were coming en masse, maybe all of them, tough to get an accurate count as they streamed into the opening. I began to open fire; even if they had been standing still, this would have been a difficult shot. They were a football field away, and because of the severe angle, I didn’t have a much bigger target than their heads and shoulders. After a couple of them had climbed the fence and dropped to the ground, they began to randomly zigzag across the concrete. The only bonus I received was the slow zombies that had not yet made it off the pad smelled the blood and came to investigate. The howlers were smart, but not geniuses, they had not allowed their distraction enough time to truly take hold. Either they weren’t overly bright, or they were just starving and desperate. I was going to hold on to the low IQ theory for a little while longer. Made me feel better inside. Maybe not warm and fuzzy, but better.