Deadfall: Survivors (31 page)

We
’ve  been waiting here for two days now, but have just received a message tonight that the horde seems to have moved back north, and we’ve  been given the green light to proceed into town to get to the tower. We are to meet someone before the towers, who will help  guide us into the area. Apparently, the residents of the tower have set up all sorts of barricades, to help them stem the flow of zombies up to the tower.

Tomorrow
, we head off into another city. Not feeling great about it. Then again, I’ve never liked city traffic.

Entry 46 – Maxie
[43]

We’re  spending the night at the water tower inside of Fayetteville. They’re  in the process of relocating nearly all of their families from this tower, to the one east of Fayetteville. According to them, this tower has become too much of a risk, especially for as many people as they have living here.

Our trip in was relatively easy. We met our contact a few miles south of the tower
, and he rode in with us. They had been watching a large horde of zombies, and it was now about ten miles north of the tower, so they had clear sailing. They had estimated the horde to number around twenty thousand, and that number staggered us. They had been extremely safe within their tower, which, as we saw, was indeed a very large one. They had about a hundred and fifty people living within it, but the risk of being stuck in there with that many people, and the amount of food required, was just too much. Scavenging around the city was becoming too risky, and they were losing too many people.

They were
, therefore, moving out, and were only going to make this an outpost. They would keep a few men here to keep track of the large horde. The vast majority would move out to the eastern tower, and be a little more comfortable. There were even plans on fencing in some of the large farming areas around there, to provide food for the ever growing number of people. That water tower out east was also right next to a rail line, and some of the men here had a grand idea about establishing a working rail system, and using that area to provide food for more towers.

We
’re  only spending one night here, in order to not  risk being caught up in here if the horde moves south again, which they say it does every couple of days.

The tower here had been set up by my father and three other men, two of which had long gone to set up more towers in other locations. The lone
, remaining founder was a man everyone called Maxie, and this turned out to be just the man we were looking for.

Max had been a
long time friend of my father. The two had collaborated on many movies, and according to him, they enjoyed sailing. He had been living in Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, and had been in Fayetteville visiting his daughter, who was married to a soldier stationed here, when the zombies had risen. Apparently, he had been able to get a message off to my dad, before all the cell towers went dead.

I don’t remember ever having met him, but I do somewhat remember my father talking about him. It was always business talk, so I kind of ignored it, and didn’t come to realize that this guy had been one of my dad’s legitimate friends. So
, it was then, when I asked him about where my father was, that I could instantly tell by his hesitation that I was about to get bad news.

“Brian, I'm sorry. Your father died, about two months ago.”

So there it was, the end of our little mission. I asked how.

According to Max, my father had left here
, and gone on to help setting up a few more towers in the southeastern regions of the state. They had scouted out several potential good towers, and had taken some of the people from here to go set them up. There had been an accident, and someone had gotten some kind of metal poison in his system, and died in the middle of the night, and we all know what happens. The poor sap had not chained himself in that night, and had killed two people, before my dad had intervened, and gotten himself injured badly. In the chaos of the night, he appeared to have wandered off into the night, where he was found the next morning.

I asked Max if he knew anything else. I was trying to coax
out any information we needed, without giving anything away. He talked about how my father just wanted to give people a safe place to live, and how he had dedicated himself to that for many months, but otherwise he knew nothing. He did mention that all of my father’s gear and belongings were still at that tower, which was now fully up and running. He showed us on a map exactly where the tower was.

We would head out there tomorrow
, after stopping by the eastern tower.

Entry 47 – A Grave
[44]

It’s  been a solemn and quiet day. I told everyone this morning  the news about my father. We were in silence, as we drove out of the tower and headed east.

Before bidding us good bye,
Maxie did say that if there was anything we needed, he always made sure someone was on the radio, and that messages traveled fast enough on their little radio network, and that he would receive it quickly.

We had a guide that
helped  us out of the maze of wrecked cars and overturned semis, out into the city again. They had heavily barricaded all but one of the bridges across the Cape Fear River. Whenever they needed to cross, they would just move the two small vehicles blocking the bridge, and block it up again after they passed.

The eastern tower turned out to be nearly as large as the one
in Cliffdale. It also had a completely covered in tower staircase, which they used as storage for all of their farming equipment. We followed a caravan of two vans. With our van, we transported about forty more people out of their tower. The other vans would return later that day to get a few more people out.

We didn’t remain
there for too long, as we wanted to get on the road, and make it to that tower before night. It was easily within a few hours’ drive, and since it would go through the countryside, odds of running into wandering hordes that would require detours were slim. We traded a bit more bread for some vegetables. They were happy to have fresh (days old by now, but still fresh by their standards) bread, and we were happy to have fresh vegetables. They were all looking forward to having cornbread in the fall, after they harvested their corn. They had already begun the process of building a man pulled mill within their fenced in area. They were clearly on the lookout for good farm animals to use instead.

Our trip south made a quick pit stop at a tower just south of Elizabethtown, right next to the county airport. It was a small community of
twenty three that had plans to fence in the airport, and attempt to bring it into some form of use. There were a couple of airplanes there, and they had contact with two individuals in Cliffdale who were pilots. They had also been in contact with the Military at Fort Fisher, with a possible use for the strip as an outpost. With only twenty three of them though, the work was going to take the entire year, if not more. It was critical to fence it in, and even out here, they would get interrupted from time to time by the wandering zombies. Their main business though, had been fuel. They were using the airport fuel tanks to store fuel they scavenged.

This tower had been established by one of the three men, Max included, that had established the tower in
Cliffdale, along with my father. He had a lot of good things to say about him, plus a small tidbit of information I found curious. Apparently, Max had a large sailboat docked in Wilmington, on the coast, and that my father had talked about using it. But he had never told the founder here why he wanted the boat.

After eating lunch with them, we arrived an hour later at a rather impressive water tower (
I’ve  come a long way to be able to give my own opinion on water towers). It was a county water tower, based in the countryside to provide water pressure for the rural areas, but now served as the easternmost tower city, in the little network my father had created.

It was located just twenty miles from the edge of Wilmington, and about
five hundred feet from a rail line, which they claimed, would connect them to the tower in eastern Fayetteville. When we arrived, we encountered a large group that was grading the land. They were planning to build a spur off the rail line, to go right up to the edge of the fenced area of the tower. The fenced in area wasn’t nearly as large as the one in eastern Fayetteville, but it was still large enough to house their own form of crops, solar panels.

We
were instantly impressed with the large solar array they had set up facing south, along the southern line of their fence. They had moved a part of the array from where it had been located, near Wilmington, out to the tower and set it back up. The electricity it produced became their currency. They provided electricity in the form of charged batteries in trade, generally, for food. They were also in the works to take apart another large section of the solar array, to move to the eastern Fayetteville tower. I had been keeping my notepad charged up by using the truck, but I obliged them by plugging it into one of their “charging stations”.

The tower was on
Highway 87, really close to what had been some kind of factory. So, the residents of the Cape Fear Tower, as they called themselves, due to their proximity to the river, I can only assume, had found a large store of materials that they could scavenge to rig up their tower. With the electricity they had, they even powered large fans inside, to move the cool air from deep within the pipes through. Again, the radio network allowed these little communities to share ideas, in this case, on how to deal with hot, muggy North Carolina summers, especially while locked into a metal case.

There had been three founders here, along with my father. One of them had been the one poisoned in the accident that had turned him
, and managed to kill my father. The other two, a couple, Silvio and Samantha, or Sammy, greeted us warmly. While the rest of my group took a moment to walk the grounds, Tague especially, taking in and asking a lot of questions about the solar array, the two founders led me away to an area on the north eastern corner of the fence. Here, they left me at a small, metal tombstone stuck in the ground. On it the words Richard Arche, Thank You for Saving Us, had been melted into the metal.

I
’ve  been at somewhat of a loss since then. Back when my father first left, so many months ago, I had essentially assumed that he had chosen to end his life, by risking it on the outside. I had thought I understood then, that he had wanted to see what he had dreamed about, and written about so many times, before dying. It turns out it had not been that way. Instead, he had hoped to help people out.

After I had found out the references to him in the Follower’s logs, I had really hoped to see him alive. In fact, I thought for sure that if anyone out there was an expert in surviving this kind of world ending event, my father would be the one. Instead,
I’ve  come upon his grave here. He was killed, just like any one of us could have, by the living dead. It was something that could happen to any one of us, regardless of how much guard we put up. It was just that death was even more deadly now, than before. Before, death just took you, but now it could take you, and everyone else around you.

I wanted to ask him so many things
, and I wouldn’t have that chance. It wasn’t just that I wanted to ask him what the Followers might be after, but I had created, in his absence, a true connection to him. Before, he was just my book writing, movie making, very distant, dad. Now, I was a character in one of his books, I was a part of his imagination. I was his creation come to life, in the truest sense of the word. Well, I was biologically, but the point is that I seemed to understand him so much more now, and I wanted to share that connection with him, and I wouldn’t be able to now.

The people here worshipped my old man. By now
, everyone knew who I was, and whenever I walked by anyone, they would always mention how special my dad was, and how he had saved them. It was unnervingly messianic, and although it was very flattering to hear such good things about my father, it was still a little odd. I knew most of the basic ideas about the towers had been his, but it certainly wasn’t all his own. He had built the towers, along with other people, and these men and women were equally worthy of the praise my father seemed to be getting.

I would find out later the real source of the worship.

Tonight, they held a mini feast, under a large shelter they had built for their tables. There were sixty seven people here, of whom six were missing, as they were out doing scavenging, or looking for more survivors. There were many toasts to my father, and everyone was listening to Silvio and Sammy telling stories of things they had done together with my father. As the feast wore on in the evening, and many of the men went out for “guard” duty, the rest of us broke down into telling our stories, as well.

I was having a conversation about my father with Sammy
, when I asked something I had wanted to know since I had left the grave.

“So
, who did the deed with my dad?”

Sammy looked at me, confused.

“Who shot him in the head? I know I wouldn’t have been able to.”

Sammy called Silvio over, telling him what I had just asked.

“You didn’t know?” She asked.

I could only
shake my head. I couldn’t know, and didn’t know, what  they were even talking about.

“We didn’t have to,” state
d Silvio.

I'm sure I raised an eyebrow.

They told me how they had found him that morning, a few hundred feet away from the tower, sitting up against a tree. He had several bad wounds on his arm and torso, and had apparently bled to death. He was clearly dead, and had been so for ten or more hours, and yet, he was still there, dead. There had been no wound to the head.

They thought that maybe he was just slow in turning, but out of respect for him, they decided to wait and see. They tied the body up to the tree
, and went about finding those people who had run off in the middle of the night in all the chaos. When they came back again that evening, he was still there, and still dead.

My father had not turned. He had been buried, unlike any other zombies they eliminated, which they burned if they could. Other than the stark realization that my dad was either more than he let on
, or knew more than we realized, it finally became clear the kind of worship they had for him here at this tower. The man that had saved them from the undead was himself, somehow, immune to the rest of the disease.

I didn’t tell anyone else that night, not even Heather.
I’m  not sure why I didn’t, but if someone finds this journal in the future, then perhaps you should come and find out, if you can, why he didn’t turn.