The Zed Files Trilogy (Book 1): The Hanging Tree (18 page)

Chapter 24:  Compound Interest

“Hear that?” Ray asks.  His mouth is
open, ready to take a bite of pan fried brown stuff.  “That sounds like…”  We all get up from the table of the main house and move to the windows and doors.  No one rushes outside.  The noise from above is unmistakable.  The chopping air and the low rattling can only be a helicopter.

“Should we signal it?” Betty asks
, her arm wrapped tightly around Kevin’s.

“Or run away,” I mutter. 

“Nah, we don’t need to do nuthin,” Kevin says and continues chewing on a piece of squirrel.  “They see the smoke coming from the chimney.  I reckon they’ll stop whether we want’em to or not.”  He steps just outside the front door and looks to the sky.  “They’s two of’em.”

We all lean out of the house as far as we can to see them.  Both helicopters hover over the compound for a moment.  It is impossible to see what color they are
; only black silhouettes framed against the gray midday sky. 

“It’s blinking,” Ray says from his perch at the side window.  “Look at that, right under the thing there.  Now look at the roof of
the bath house.”  A bright green laser pulses on the roof of the bath house.  Another appears over the ground covering the bunker.  “What the fuck are they doing?”

One of the helicopters drops down closer and a package is shoved out of the side door.  A gunner is now visible, the barrel swinging back and forth.  The package jerks a few feet below the
chopper’s skids and a flurry of different colored paper begins to drift down on us.  The helicopters hover for a moment and then quickly move off out of sight beyond the tree line. 

“Well that’s a fine how do you do,” Kevin says and tosses the squirrel bone he’s been chewing on out into the mud.  “
Ain’t seen hide nor hair of nobody in forever and then they fly over and drop a bunch of garbage.”

Tyler steps out into the courtyard and
grabs one of the hundreds of leaflets falling from the sky.  He stands and reads it for a moment before bringing it back into the house.

“Well,” Betty demands.  “What’s it say?”

Tyler is smiling.  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”  He looks almost happy.  “I’m packing.  And getting out of here.  You guys can make up your own minds.”  He hands the flyer to Ray and is off to his room upstairs.

Ray holds the paper out at arm’s length and begins to read:

LEGAL NOTICE

Any and all persons in receipt of t
his LEGAL NOTICE, as issued by The Bank, are hereby advised of their legal obligations under the Summers Act of 2012, which are to wit:

a)
                   
All persons notified of the aforementioned act are to assemble for collection at the place of notification 24 hours after receipt of said notification for transport to processing facilities located in the Safe Zone.

b)
                   
Individuals will be assessed for exposure to infection and contamination and provided with free medical support.*

c)
                    
It is ILLEGAL to remain in the Infected Zone.  All persons found trespassing in the Infected Zone, now property of The Bank, will be deemed infected and subject to fine, imprisonment or removal by whatever means necessary.

d)
                    
All assets, properties and items of any value located within the Infected Zone are now the property of The Bank and any persons found in possession of said assets, properties or items will be prosecuted under the provisions of the Summers Act.

THERE WILL BE NO SECOND OPPORTUNITY.  ALL PERSONS ADVISED OF THIS NOTICE ARE TO ASSEMBLE AT THIS COLLECTION POINT WITHIN 24 HOURS OF RECEIPT.  ALL PERSONS REMAINING IN THE INFECTED ZONE AFTER RECEIPT OF SAID NOTICE WILL BE VIEWED AS HOSTILE AND/OR INFECTED. 

*Free Medical Support available up to $500.  All balances above $500 are to be paid by the patient.

THE
BANK AND YOU

WORKING TOGETHER FOR A BETTER TOMORROW

Ray stops reading, his mouth hanging open in disbelief.  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“
Lemme see that,” Kevin says and snatches the paper away from Ray.  “Property of The Bank.  What is ‘The Bank’ and how the hell do they figure they own everything now?”

Tyler comes down from the attic with a backpack slung on his shoulder.  He’s added a shotgun to his pack and carries the MP5 across his chest.  He’s still smiling but it isn’t a happy smile.  “Out of the frying pan,” he says with no small amount of sarcasm.

“Where you going?” Kevin asks. 

“Away from here.
  As fast as possible,” Tyler says and takes another step down.  “You don’t really think they’ll be back in 24 hours to pick everyone up, do you?”

“It’s what the notice says.”  Big Donna is holding the leaflet in her hand and going over and over it.  “It says they’ll take us out of here, give us medical care.  I don’t really care about the rest of it.  They can have all of this if they want it.”

“It doesn’t bother you that they’re calling this the infected zone?  You’ll be ‘assessed for contamination.’  We’ve all been exposed, haven’t we?  And what do you think happens to the contaminated people?  Think they’ll just keep everybody from the infected zone in a separate housing development?”

Kevin looks at me with a somber expression.  “Guess
you’re fucked.”

“We all are,” Tyler says waving his arms.  “We’re all fucked if we stay here or if we go with them.  Just because we don’t look like Billy doesn’t mean that they won’t ‘remove us’ anyway.  Even if we hadn’t been eating the stuff, they’d still determine that we’ve all been exposed and cart us off to the incinerators.”

“Hang on, hang on,” Ray interjects.  “Why warn us then?  Why not just roll through here and kill everything moving?  Why drop leaflets when they could have just bombed the bejesus out of all of us, right now, end it all, done.  Why not do that, smart guy?”

Tyler is smiling again.  “Catch more rats with cheese than you do with a sledgehammer.”  Ray winces and shakes his shoulder and mouths the word ‘what?’  Tyler spells it out for him in detail.  “The Infected Zone, as it were, is a fucking huge piece of real estate.  If they can spend a little time and money dropping leaflets, and if people fall for it, then they get everyone together in a group.  It’d take a helluva lot longer to go around individually targeting every single survivor.  Even ten or twenty at a time is
much faster than one at a time.

“And let’s say that people do show up.  Alright, so they collect a few ‘specimens’ for study and instead of getting shot or blown up, you get carted off to the lab to have tests
run on you.  Maybe they want to weaponize this shit.  Maybe they want to test out vaccines, see what the side effects are.  Maybe they’ve figured out how to eat this stuff as well and this is the new cash crop of the future.  You can bet the farm that when you see corporate funded helicopters out dropping leaflets instead of government or military, everything is fucked.  Way more fucked than it ever was by the rock from outer space or the fucking zombies.”

Nobody says anything for a while.  Karen looks like she’s going to explode. 
Her hands cover her belly.  She’s as infected as I am, as her unborn child is, as is anybody in this room. 

“What were the green lights?” Betty asks.  She’s hanging on Kevin again.  I wonder if he gets to shit by himself.

Tyler shrugs.  “An educated guess?  Taking coordinates for the attack.  Some places, with more people, they’ll round up the inhabitants and take them back to do whatever horrible things they have planned.  Little enclaves like us?  Probably just take the coordinates, send in some automated ordinance or drones and we’ll all wake up tomorrow blown to smithereens.  In fact,” he says looking at his watch, “they’ve probably programmed coordinates in already.  We’re just standing here like sitting ducks.”

“Standing like
sitting ducks?” Ray asks.  ”Hold on.  That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Whatever,” Tyler snipes back.  The smile is gone.  “I’m betting that within the hour, this place will be a crater.  You can stick around and see what happens, but I’m out of here.  I’d rather take my chances out there in the woods with a few of the zombies running loose than try and stay here and see what the fucking Bank has to offer.”

“I’m staying,” Big Donna says.  “You can’t be that cynical about it all.  I’m not infected or contaminated or any other damn thing.  I’m sick of living like an animal out here in the woods.”

“We’re all animals,” Tyler says as he moves towards the door.  “Only difference in animals is that some live in cages and some don’t.”  He disappears through the doorway and starts heading for the front gate.

Kevin follows after him to the doorway.  “Hang on a minute, man.  We’re coming too.”  He turns to Betty.  “Get your stuff.  We’re splitting.”

Ray hustles upstairs without saying much.  I motion for Karen and Eddie to follow me.  Karen explodes into tears again.  Goddamn it.  I stop and kneel beside her for a second.  “We have to go.  There is no other option.”

“That’s not true,” Big Donna says and sits down with a thud on one of the kitchen chairs.  “She can stay here with me and we’ll get her some proper care for that baby.”

I ignore Big Donna and squeeze Karen’s hand hard enough to hurt her a little.  “You need to snap out of it.  I can’t make you
go, but I can promise you, if you stay here, you die.  Even if they do come, they’ll pull that baby out of you and you’ll never see it again.  They’ll slice you up six ways to Sunday and that’ll be it.”  She doesn’t move but her crying slows down.  “I’m taking Eddie to the bunker and the bath house to get as much as we can carry.  Get up, go to the bath house, we’ll meet you there.  If Tyler’s right, we don’t have much time.”

Big Donna looks worried.  “You should reconsider,” I tell her.  But she simply folds her arms across her chest and looks away.  “Come on, Eddie.  Let’s get going.”

I walk out the door and leave them all behind.  I assume Eddie is behind me.  Down in the bunker, I grab my pack and begin stuffing anything and everything into it.  Matches, food, ammo.  I fill my canteen with water and grab as many of the wool blankets as I can and head up to the bath house. 

Eddie is walking Karen across the courtyard.  He’s holding her hand and talking to her quietly.  She puts her arm around him and gives him a squeeze.  I motion for them to hurry up.

Inside, we load up as much as we can carry.  Ray, Kevin and Betty show up just as we are grabbing the last of everything.  “We can always come back for more if Tyler’s wrong about them just bombing the shit out of everything,” Kevin says.  He’s got the big sniper rifle slung across his back and an AK in his right hand.  Betty isn’t carrying much but she does have a shotgun.  Ray looks like he’s about to shit his pants.

“Let’s take the tractor,” Ray says. 
“Or the Jeep.  They both still run.”

“Easy targets from the sky,” Tyler says and begins slicing a path through the brown stuff covering the gate. 

“We can park them outside,” I tell Tyler.  “Use the front end loader to open the road, follow with the Jeep.  There’s a house just down the road that I stayed in for a night.  We can ditch them there and move out into the woods.  At least we’ll have access to them if you’re right.  And if you’re wrong, nothing wasted.”

Tyler stops swing the axe as Kevin climbs onto the tractor.
  It belches smoke out the exhaust pipe as the engine turns over.  Ray is firing up the Jeep. It turns and turns and turns and finally kicks over just as the battery is threatening to die.  He pops the clutch and guns it towards the gate. 

Kevin lowers the scoop and starts to clear the
road, but then stops and turns in the tractor seat.  He motions to Big Donna who is standing in the doorway of the house with her arms folded across her chest.  She shakes her head no.  “Well, hell,” is all I can hear Kevin say before he throttles the tractor up and starts pushing his way down the road. 

Karen, Eddie, Tyler and me all pile into the back of the Jeep with everything we can carry.  We start the slow drive down the road.  It is like driving through a coral reef.  Porous chunks of brown stuff are already encircled with vine.  The brown stuff spreads in every direction covering everything where a human might have been able to stand.

At the house on the lane, we park the vehicles and head inside.  “Leave them on the road well away from the house.  If they’re tracking heat signatures, they’ll know we’re here.”

“Heat what?” Ray asks. 

“Just park here,” I yell at him.  “Let’s go.”

We all make it into the house and take all of our supplies up over the stairway I had broken out before.  The big tree that fell during the twister is still
embedded in the roof. 

“Shouldn’t we be in the cellar?” Kevin asks. 
“Probably a whole lot safer down there.”  I remember being down there during the twister, the howling moan and the piles of coon crap. 

“No.  We’re staying up here,” I tell them. 
“They blow up the house, we’re cooked in the cellar just as easily as upstairs where everything isn’t covered in shit.”  No one argues.  It is cold upstairs and the winter wind whistles through the cracks in the weathered siding.  No one asks about building a fire.  No one speaks.  We all just huddle together in blankets and sleeping bags and sit and listen.