Fire Birds (2 page)

I cooked myself an egg, some coffee, and a bowl of oatmeal and looked over my to-do list while I ate. The list didn’t change much from day to day, but I still reviewed it every morning. Most days I would spend the first couple of hours weeding the garden. After that I would pick the vegetables that needed picking. At that time it was mostly greens, cucumbers, and squash. Then I would go out and pick whatever wild stuff I could find–berries, greens, etc.

I had built myself a simple, solar food dehydrator using construction plans from one of my magazines. I would set it up each day drying some of the greens, berries, and squash. I found that I could dry the leaves, and then crush them into a powder to be used in soup later on; it was the only way I could preserve them. The sliced squash would dry up sort of like pliable potato chips. They tasted bland, but I didn’t mind. I still had plenty of real, brand name, salty potato chips I could eat.

The drying didn’t always work. A couple of times, the squash hadn’t dried properly and it molded later on. The cucumbers dried too well; they just shriveled up to nothing, and they didn’t taste very good. Of course, drying wasn’t the preferred way to preserve cucumbers. I would need to make pickles. On this particular day, I had added a new task to my list: locate all necessary items for home canning. I would need jars, lids, pots–all of it. I had never canned my own food before, but I’d watched my mom do it. I had a general understanding of the supplies I’d need to find, but I would need to find a book to teach me how and give me the recipes. I decided that day, after setting up the dehydrator, to go out and find the necessary supplies. Then, if I had time, I would drive into Clayfield for a while to look around.

It had been an unseasonably warm and dry June at that point. My rain barrels were empty, and my cistern was getting low. I tried to collect as much bottled water as I could from scavenging so I could use the cistern to water the garden. It had gotten over ninety degrees three times in the past week, and it was still almost two weeks away from the first day of summer. I knew I could expect temperatures that high or higher as I went into July and August.

The year before, I wouldn’t have minded, but the year before I had air conditioning and a refrigerator. The nights were still comfortably cool, but soon they would be warm too. It was going to be difficult to sleep inside, and I wasn’t wild about the idea of sleeping outside, not with zombies walking around. The upper floor of the house didn’t have good airflow, so opening the windows wouldn’t help much, and I didn’t dare leave the windows open on the ground floor. I thought about building a platform on the roof for summer sleeping, but it just seemed like too much work. There had to be a simpler solution, and I would work it out eventually.

Things like that kept my mind occupied, but not enough.

Sara was always there in my head.

I set out around 10 a.m., and it was already getting hot. I kind of liked driving around, because, at least when I was in a vehicle, I could have air conditioning. The zombies seemed to love the heat. They were more active when it was warm. By active, I don’t mean to say that they moved faster, it was just that there seemed to be more of them out. The heat wasn’t kind to them, however. For those that were strong enough to find nourishment on living flesh, their bodies were bloated and soft, often swarming with flies. For those that had not been fortunate enough to feed regularly, their bodies were taut and mummy-like. Regardless of their condition, they just kept hanging on.

I passed a group of them that were in a dry, fenced-in pasture trying to corner a gray horse. The horse was malnourished, but it was still strong and fast enough to elude them, and it had enough space to stay out of their reach. I knew if I didn’t intervene, they would eventually run it to exhaustion. I would go back later to see what I could do when I was finished with my errands.

I had seen canning supplies at different houses, but I was having trouble remembering which. I had been into so many homes looking for supplies the past few months. Sara and I had collected some home canned goods from an old woman’s house on Gala Road. It was the same house where I had found the field guide for edible wild plants. The woman was probably still locked up in her freezer in the basement. I decided to check her house first.

I thought Founder’s Farm and Hardware might have some stuff too. I knew they sold that sort of thing, but when the virus hit Clayfield, it had been in February, and they might not have had that merchandise stocked that time of the year. It wouldn’t hurt to check. I had been over to Founder’s several times looking for other things. It was almost picked clean, but perhaps I just didn’t see something I hadn’t been looking for.

When I got to the old woman’s house, I noticed the front door was standing open. I tried to remember if Sara and I had left it open, but I couldn’t recall; that had been months before. I know we were in a hurry to get out of there, so we could have.

I climbed out, grabbed my 12 gauge, and stood by my pickup for a moment to listen. All I heard were the sounds of late spring–the sounds of late spring without people. I eased the truck door shut, pulled up my mask and went up to the house. Just inside, near the open basement door, was the nearly decomposed body of a woman. I couldn’t remember what the old woman had been wearing, but this woman was wearing a dress, and her hands were bound with an extension cord. The cord made me fairly certain that the body belonged to her. I don’t know who had let her out of the freezer, but whoever it was had removed her head. I didn’t see her head anywhere. I assumed it had rolled down the stairs into the basement, but I wasn’t going down there to look for it.

I did a quick check of the house (except the basement) and didn’t find anyone else there. I found some large stockpots, empty jars, rings, and lids in a walk-in storage closet. There was also a worn copy of Ball Blue Book of Canning and Preserving. I was pretty sure that was everything I would need to start, but if there was anything I lacked, I could just read the book to tell me what.

“That was easy enough,” I said.

I propped my shotgun up against the wall and started hauling the supplies out to the truck. On my second trip back into the house, I found the old woman’s head. It was down at the base of a shrub next to the front steps. I hadn’t noticed it coming in the first time, and I almost missed it that time because of the tall grass. It was on its left ear, looking out toward the truck. It was still very much alive...or, rather, not dead. It blinked at me. I kept walking and tried not to look at it.

On a whim, I went out to the old woman’s garden plot. Just like everything else, it was overgrown, but I went in anyway and looked around. It was not uncommon for plants to come back from the seeds of the previous year’s produce. I recognized five okra plants. They weren’t very tall, and they had not yet bloomed, but I would come back later in the year to harvest them. There was also a clump of tomato plants growing in one spot. They’d already set some fruit, which at that time were like green marbles. I didn’t see anything else. I suspected I could find something similar happening in other old gardens all over the county.

Early on, during the first few weeks while I was waiting for Sara and the Somervilles to return, I would go on extermination runs and spend a couple of hours driving around killing zombies, but by that day in June, I hadn’t killed one in more than a week. I was tired of killing, and, I feared, I soon might get tired of living. I had no intention of taking my own life…not yet. One argument I always gave myself when that thought came into my head was that I had worked too hard and fought too long to stay alive only to just give up. Still, I was lonely and fatigued. I yearned for rest and for the touch or voice of another human being. I would leave Clayfield and search for survivors elsewhere before I ever took my own life, and even then I doubted if I would have the courage to do it. I was fairly certain that there were survivors still in Riverton, but I hadn’t made the time to drive there.

From the old woman’s house, I drove into downtown Clayfield to have a look. There had been a time when the Somervilles, Sara, and others were around that securing Clayfield seemed like a possible goal. But driving through the town that day, I doubted it could ever have happened. We might have been able to retake a city block or two, but not the whole town, not and hold it, not with our limited numbers. Alone, I didn’t stand a chance. It wasn’t just the undead; nature had to be contended with too. Then there would have been the upkeep of the buildings.

One summer, a few years before, I had been fortunate enough to host a reception for an archeologist at the museum. He was a bit younger than I and not much more than a grad student, but it was kind of a big deal to have a real archeologist visit my small town museum. His focus had been on Pre-Columbian Mexico. He had brought along some artifacts, and he gave a little talk about a dig from which he had just returned. He told us how the Mayan civilization there had once been quite large, but that something had happened–he presented a few theories–and whatever it was that had happened had greatly diminished the population. He said that over time, the forest retook the cities. The people were forced ever inward, tending smaller and smaller areas, and taking parts from older buildings to maintain their shrinking communities. There just weren’t enough of them around for the upkeep.

That’s what I envisioned happening to Clayfield. Eventually, seeds would find their way into the cracks of the asphalt. Acorns would sprout into oaks. Eventually, roots and vines would force concrete and bricks apart. It wouldn’t happen this year, but it would happen, and there would be nothing I could do about it by myself. I would have to decide where my place would be, dig in there, and hold it. Everything else would disappear into forest. I wanted downtown Clayfield to be that place for sentimental reasons. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the luxury of being sentimental. I had to be practical, and at that time the Lassiter’s farm would have to be my place.

The undead were everywhere. They walked and crawled and bumped into things. They reminded me of fish in an aquarium–wide-eyed, mouths open, going one way then the next, only getting “lively” and zoning in when there was food.

I didn’t have any particular place I wanted to go that day; I was just having a look around. I toured a few residential streets, careful to stay away from congested areas. I wound up on the south side of town near Founder’s Farm and Hardware. I didn’t need to go there since I’d found most everything I needed at the old woman’s house, but I didn’t think it would hurt to see if they had any canning supplies I might have missed.

Just before I got there, I passed by a few houses, then came upon a small park that had been built for the town by the local Kiwanis Club. I stopped in the street and got out. The large sign by the entrance said: SPONSORED BY KIWANIS OF CLAYFIELD. The grounds were overgrown, but the playground equipment, pavilion, and basketball goals were still easily visible. The reason why I stopped was that there was a row of six metal fence posts–known as T-posts–in the ground in front of the sign. Each post had two to four human heads driven down on them like grotesque shish kabobs. It was new–something done within the past two or three weeks. There was another fence post there that was empty.

I got a chill and looked around to see if anyone might be watching me. I didn’t know if the heads had been the heads of zombies or healthy people. I presumed they had been zombies, because of their state of decay, but I hadn’t been out that way in a while, so they could have decomposed in that time. Then I thought I saw one of the heads move. It was the top head on the second post. I took a step closer to investigate. It felt like the thing was looking at me with its bluish, milky eyes. Then it opened then closed its mouth. I stepped back to my vehicle, and looked around me again.

I could understand exterminating them, but I couldn’t understand beheading them and staking the heads. Beheading them didn’t kill them; it just disconnected them from their bodies. While that incapacitated them and took away their mobility, they could still be dangerous. It was reckless, pointless, and barbaric.

I was troubled by what I saw, but I was trying to be optimistic. The beheadings meant there was, at worst, a very sadistic healthy person left in Clayfield, and at best, a bored or fed-up healthy person. I tried to focus on the “healthy” part. “Healthy” meant conversation and possible companionship. “Healthy” meant I might have help. I returned to my truck and drove on over to the hardware store.

Founder’s was gone–burned to the ground. I hadn’t been there in a while, but I was surprised I hadn’t noticed the smoke from the fire. The ground was scorched at least a hundred feet around the building. There were dozens of charred bodies and blackened skeletons scattered around.

I got out and walked up to the remains of the store. I could feel heat coming from it. There were probably still some glowing hot spots under all the ash and debris, but the fire had died days before. There were some warped metal racks and shelves still poking out, but the flames had done a thorough job on everything else. I couldn’t imagine what had caused it, but since it was in such close proximity to the Kiwanis Park and the staked heads, I presumed the fire had been intentionally set. Founder’s sold T-posts; I had taken some of their posts to shore up my perimeter fence at the stables. They didn’t keep them inside, but rather had them stacked outside. I hadn’t taken them all, but now there were none left.

Either someone torched the building, and the zombies had gathered in, attracted to the fire and burned, or someone had somehow lit the creatures, and the hardware store was an unintentional casualty. I wouldn’t know until I met this stranger.