Deadfall: Hunters (11 page)

Aaron and I had many conversations, but these events recently made me think of one in particular. I think it was around Fayetteville when we were driving through there. Somehow, the conversation had gone to the topic of babies, and I can guess who started that, but then we started talking about children and kids in general. We all came to the consensus that we had seen very few children. We defined a child as someone under the age of thirteen. Chris had made it a point to establish the fact that he wasn’t a child.

We all started thinking back to the time after Deadfall and no one could really ever recall any time, at least once everything really fell apart, that we came across a child. It was a rather somber conversation as we came up with many legitimate reasons why children wouldn’t survive the Deadfall scenario. I guess it came from the general attitude most had. I remember many of my former teacher coworkers, those in middle school especially, complaining about their students. It usually went something like ‘when I was their age’ and then some exaggeration about how much more they could do. ‘Kids these days are lazy, they have it too good, back in the day, uphill both ways, blah blah blah.’

Despite that belief, it still seemed odd to me that no one had run across any children, even if with an adult.

Of course, that topic changed from the living to the dead. I had definitely seen teenager zombies, but I couldn’t recall any children. Neither could Aaron or any of my travel mates. Tague had a theory that made the most sense to me. It was related to how the zombies viewed themselves, or used their bodies, or however you want to explain it. Just like zombies didn’t expend energy going up into the mountains, they didn’t turn children because they weren’t useful enough to their ‘agenda’.

No one else liked that idea, but it made sense to me.

So three days ago we pulled into this small coastal town on the eastern coast of Cuba. And by pulled in, I mean we sailed in. Because were in a boat. We had been doing good time but we needed water. The small cove was protected in case any storm came up, there was a small town there with possible supplies, and, most importantly, there was a visible stream coming down off the mountains at the edge of the town, so we wouldn’t have to travel far for fresh water.

Also, Janine said she had seen banana plants and I think everyone wanted off of the boat.

It also had a small airport right along the coast. We liked airports.

Let me back up a bit. We left the Florida Keys four days ago. Maxie says we probably could have sailed to Haiti in much less time, but he was taking it slowly. We also kept going out of the way to try to hit rain showers for water and we’d move in and out of bays and coves checking out coastal towns. All were a mess. Most of the larger towns had ships scuttled and littered in their bays and zombies everywhere we looked. It was a lot of work, but mostly for Maxie. We did some running around helping him, but it was mostly work for him. For the rest of us, it was all very boring. That is why we were anxious to get off the boat.

In this town there were two large container ships anchored, or grounded, in the cove. One was tipped to its side a bit, but the other was in very good condition. Tague suggested checking it out if we didn’t find anything useful in town.

We arrived around six that evening and did our little ‘sail by’ the main piers. We found a few that would be big enough to dock the ship to directly. I always hated getting in the little boat. We did the sail by to see just how many zombies we would attract and to our pleasant surprise, none came out to greet us. Tague became suspicious right away. He thought that maybe there was a reason the town was clear when all the others were not.

The rest of us didn’t care.

We anchored a little ways out in the middle of the cove and settled in for the night. This is when thing started getting creepy.

It was a very hot and humid night. Somewhere after midnight, I got up, drenched in sweat. I grabbed my pillow and headed up to see if I could sleep on the deck. Hopefully, a breeze would make things easier. The moon was nearly full and much to my dismay, there was no breeze at all. There was just a slight sway to the boat, brought on by the waves that slowly moved across the water. Otherwise, everything was calm.

I wasn’t the only one bothered by the heat. I found Janine sitting on the bow and I came and sat next to her. I began trying to talk to her but she shushed me right away. She pointed out towards the intact container ship. It took me a while to adjust my sight, but it didn’t take too long to notice movement on the ship. I strained me eyes to try to make out what it could be. I whispered ‘zombie’ but Janine shook her head. I saw why. Whatever it was, was moving too quickly for our slow dead friends. Janine shifted over to sit right next to me.

“I’ve been watching them. I saw one jump into the water.”

We watched together for about thirty more minutes until all activity stopped. Neither of us slept much that night and then retold our story to the rest of the ship that morning. Of course, we watched that large ship for a good part of the early morning, but there was no movement.

“Let’s scout and salvage and we can get out of here sooner than later,” Maxie said.

Maxie pulled up to one of the docks and dropped us off, along with the dinghy. He returned to the middle of the cove, there to wait, and to keep watch on the other ship. He did radio in about ten minutes later that he had sailed as close as he felt safe to the ship, and it was definitely moored in the cove’s bottom.

Now I’ve walked through many an empty town in the past. The smaller the town, the less chance of running into a zombie there is. For the most part, they seemed to herd up and leave. Why they did that was a debate for another day. The town ended up being even smaller than it first appeared. The airport was its biggest structure, at least as seen from the sea, but it ended up being a big disappointment. Its infrastructure was in shambles and whatever supplies we may have scrounged there were long gone. The rest of the town, a fishing village at best, was clean.

That was the only term we could come up with. The streets were clean of any debris, as if they were in constant use, which of course, they were not. The homes and buildings were clean, untouched by looting. There were a few busted windows, but the shards, you know, that mess left over when a window shatters, had been cleaned out. The plants were overgrown, which would happen too easily on a tropical island, but otherwise, neat, if that was possible. There were many other more details that didn’t feel right in the post Deadfall world. Tague pointed out a small plaza with a tiled fountain area. The fountain pool had cleanish water and there were no broken tiles. All the garbage cans we came across were empty. The sidewalks were clean of all the leaves that would have fallen off of the trees by now.

The town had all the appearances of being taken care of by living people, except there were none.

“Unless they are hiding,” Blevin said.

So, despite the shadows on the big ship the other night, and the strange creepiness of the clean town, we kept on with our little scavenging mission.

That made me think. How far had we come when a clean town, one that looked normal and that people lived in, made us feel awkward. We were used to the broken down, the dirty and destroyed. Everywhere we looked that is all we saw. The former glory of mankind strewn all over the yard. I brought that up as we walked from building to building and no one had a good explanation. We should feel comfortable in a place like this. It was our desire to be able to go back to that, but we all agreed it didn’t feel right.

How long until we were able to return to normality?

Better question actually was would we be able to return to normality?

So, the downside of the clean town was that it was clean. Completely. We spent that whole day, at least till the midafternoon, walking and being frustrated. We found nothing useful. Whomever had manicured the town had taken everything else. We headed back up to the stream that spilled out into a small lake before it emptied out into the cove. We filled out bladders (the plastic ones as well as our inside ones) with fresh water and made our way back to the docks where Maxie came to pick us up. We went over our day quickly, and made plans to stock up on the ship’s water the next morning and then continue on our way.

So the town had one river or stream that emptied out into the cove. It was a small thing, maybe ten or fifteen feet wide, nothing big. What we saw and what we wanted was a much smaller stream that emptied out from the side of some hills into the larger stream. This was our source of fresh water as the larger stream was likely too brackish for our use. We could see the smaller creek cascading down a few waterfalls easily within sight of the cove when we had first entered it and during our first day of scavenging, we figured out which road let out past the stream. It was picturesque, just like a postcard you picked out and sent home to your parents when you went on that cruise. The crystal clean water came pouring out over a small cliff, splashing over boulders and rocks of all kinds. All that was missing was some stupid sign over the top of the postcard.

That night we had filled up our bladders, but on that second day, we needed to refill our ships supply, so we had to work with something larger.

Our plan involved taking one of our water barrels out of the ship which proved to take even longer than we had wanted to. Then we found a really broken down wagon and Tague spent almost an hour fixing it up to the point where we could move the barrel on it. This was messing with out plans. We really wanted to be out of there. That previous night, nearly all of us had stayed up, with our eyes on the large container ship. We hadn’t seen any movement that night, but we were all quite disturbed by the thought of, well, whatever it might be. We really wanted to get out of there. These little delays made us even more nervous than usual.

The road veered off the pier area towards the inside of the island, not even a quarter of a mile where a dirt road intersected it. We followed that dirt path two, maybe three hundred feet to a small wooden bridge. The fresh water stream came cascading down just next to the bridge. It splashed down among the rocks into a small pool before it went under the bridge, and then down a small rocky slope into the bigger river. It was a very idyllic scene, straight from a movie set. Up the side of the mountain, large tropical plants with huge green leaves fought for the ample sunlight amidst huge trees. Vines and bamboos squeezed out wherever they could.

A wonderful sight in the bright tropical sun.

We spent the next couple of hours just filling up the barrel. We had two buckets which we thought would be more than enough. Well, they weren’t. One by one we took turns shuffling down the side off of the bridge, filling a bucket, and haul it back up, spilling half every trip. It was comical at first, but after the first hour, it was just frustrating. By the time we had filled the barrel up, the tropical paradise had turned into a hot muggy hell.

And that as only the start.

We hauled the water barrel back, slowly. That thing was heavy, and it felt like the makeshift wagon would break at every tug. So of course, it did. We had just come onto the paved road that led back into the town and the pier when the whole back end just fell apart. Tague and I had been pushing it from behind and we shouted and struggled just to hold the full barrel of water from tipping over. So now we had a half broke wagon, a heavy barrel of water, and were all just tired of being in the hot sun.

And that’s where we got stupid. With just one day in that quiet town, we had gotten lazy and careless how we acted. Here we were, especially Tague and I, shouting and yelling. There is no way we would have acted like that. Weeks on the boat with no danger and now this stupid little clean town and we just got stupid. Blevin and I stood there while Tague ran inside one of the buildings to try to see what he could scavenge to fix the wagon when we heard the crashing. It came from behind us.

It sounded like a boulder crashing down through trees, right with the sound of splintering wood. It was along the same hillside where we had filled up the barrel, but on the side next to the town. It started as one crash, and it continued building up to multiple things crashing through the trees. My heart sank as reality came groaning through the trees at the bottom of the hill, rotting flesh and all.

The first one stumbled through, horribly mangled. However it had crashed down the hillside had left it broken. There was just a stitch of rotten skin holding the left leg together as it was clearly broken. Somehow, it was able to pull its leg forward to continue walking. Its head hung to the side, still somehow attached. It was comical at first, that is, until we realized what would follow. At this point, it didn’t matter anymore.

I shouted out to Tague. I called Maxie in on the radio, just saying one word, tucked the radio back into my belt, and took out my two swords. I felt like a badass for a moment, and then realized I had zero skills using two of the gladius at the same time. As the first zombie shambled over to us, more, in similar states of dismemberment and mangling, came stumbling out of the trees, I handed the extra sword to Blevin, but he ignored me and started walking over to the first one.

This was the only second time I had seen him take on the zombies, but it surprised me none the less. He walked up to that first zombie and as the creature reached out with its arms to get the large man, he simply took those arms and ripped them clean off. I didn’t know it was that easy to rip arms off. He then took one of the arms and with two swings, took the zombie’s head off.