The Zom Diary (3 page)

     I wander over to the shed which I have converted into a smoke house.  Deer meet hangs high in thin strips beside a leg that I am experimenting with turning into a ham.  Too much goes to waste when I take a deer, but I had never been a hunter in my former life.  I eat as much as I can after taking a deer and make the best cuts into thin strips of jerky.  So, I now grab a strip and walk away after securing the plastic sheets as best I can around the door.  I head toward the orchard.

     Bill was an interesting man.  Before running the farm, He had owned a distributorship, retired, taught college, and retired again; this time to the orchard.  I knew him from a class of his I took during one of my attempts at college.  It was on sustainability and green farming.  We chatted a few times after class, and I sent him an odd paper or two over the years for his thoughts.  He was a nice man and he had an interesting vision for this land.

     Most farming in this area had been possible only through extensive irrigation which left our poorer neighbors to the south with a serious water deficit.  Bill had traveled to Africa, India, and Central America looking for crops that didn’t require such rich soil or large amounts of water.  He envisioned leaving the farm to his alma mater as an endowment.  It would have been an extension school, a teaching farm that produced responsible, sustainable food.

     As I walk the orchard on this late morning, I have plenty of choices.  Most of the trees are in season, and true to Bill’s dream, this particular section is an Eden of sorts, no two trees alike.  I take an orange and peel it slowly eating the wedges whole and savoring the juice.  After this I eat a sour pear with gritty, rough skin.  I am nearing the newest end of the orchard.  Rather than turning back, I press a little further toward the large trench in front of me.

     Bill excavated these trenches himself; each row about five feet wide and five feet deep.  The soil is sandy here and adding compost to the pits slowly over time before planting trees in them would give them a better chance of survival.  Bill never finished this section, though.

     I pause at the edge and regard the tangle of limbs and bones and cloth that lay in the pit now.  Downwind, downstream, and pre-dug, this  seems a logical place to dispose of bodies.  I have thought of torching it, but what fuel I possess is precious and the smoke might draw attention.  My eye catches a flicker of movement and I curse myself for not having the foresight to bring a weapon.   After a moment, I relax.  A small metallic blue lizard runs roller-coaster tracks through the ribs of a small person, perhaps a girl.  It pauses and sees me before darting deeper into places I don’t want to imagine.

     I turn then and decide to be productive with the rest of my daylight before turning in.  I do a quick circuit past the deer fences and see no new gaps –this section only has been fenced off to protect young and tasty trees from the rapacious deer.  I walk out beyond this, to the old orchards and contemplate my situation as I mindlessly survey the land. 

      Most of my forage I now have stored here has been brought to me.  Not many people wander out this way.  Those who do, I imagine as being horribly lost, or perhaps they wisely seek the less populous and therefore, safer, areas.  I imagine the ultimate survivalist nut job.  Needing a decent paying job to provide for expensive weapons and gear.   Owning an extensive video library of elaborate Hollywood fantasies. Then one morning, they wake up in their fifth story apartment to the sound of something that actually demands surviving. First order of business; go find a nice hideout, preferably in the hills, far from this reeking, smoky God-awful mess.  After the third time being shot at while trying to talk to one of these fellas, I stopped asking questions first.  This is my land.

     Pleased with my tour of the grounds and noting the slant of the sun, I decide to trek back to the barn and call it a day.  I need to light a lamp.

     Kerosene is one thing that I have in abundance.  Bill had a large above ground tank of the stuff next to his garage.  I hang the lamp on a hook that I have placed roughly in the center of my storeroom that leads off from the large first floor room of the barn.  It is almost sunset, and this small room has no windows.  Shelves rise on each wall all the way to the ceiling.  Tupperware bins with clothes, boots and tents, faraday flash lights, radios, a whole shelf full of knives, coffee cans full of bullets, sorted as I unloaded them from clips and weapons.  And what weapons!  Row upon row of handguns lay out on two bottom shelves.  Next row up are shotguns, breech, pump, semis.   Riffles and assault weapons at head height:  30-30’s, AK47’s, .308, AR-15’s, even an old Russian M-44 carbine.  Mankind has been killing each other for a long time. 

     The swords I keep in a fifty gallon trash barrel.  The top shelves contain bulky stuff:  packs ready to go with food, tents, and small arms; a stringer of canteens and plastic water bottles air drying.  Opposite the weapons in salvaged bins, lay MRE’s, some still good.  I try to eat them before they reach their five-year shelf life, but what year was it?

     Each week I choose a shelf and clean up, dusting, oiling, and repacking.  I pause next to an AK-47 and pull it down.  Pulling back the receiver, I peek in the chamber out of habit and let the bolt slide forward.  I push the plate at the base of the stock and the cleaning kit pops out.  I discovered this feature by accident. One day, out of curiosity, I stuck my finger in there, and nearly dropped the thing when the cylinder popped out.  Would be nice to have a manual or something.

     Pausing to grab the lantern and a bin of cleaning odds and ends, I bring the gun back out into the big room and lay it down across from the soap on my workbench.

     You don’t drag a barn all the way across the country to put hay in it.  Bill spent time making this space clean, insulated, and habitable.  The big room has an open ceiling and the loft looks down over it.

     I sit on the long green couch and busy myself in cleaning the weapon.  The row of small windows above the large barn door to my right says that the day is slipping.  I can see the buttery light soaking into the tan rough-hewn boards on the opposite wall before sliding over to an old nautical chart of the coast of Maine.   I wonder how many people still live in Maine.  I bet the waters teem with huge fat lobsters, clicking away on the smooth rocks of the Atlantic, pumping their cold blood and looking up with their cold black eyes.

     I put the rifle back together and check the action.  Rather than putting it back on the shelf, I grab a thirty round banana clip and chamber a round.  Being a domestic gun, it is semi-automatic only, so the clip lasts more than eight seconds in the hands of a discerning marksman:  Me.

     I pop outside while the light is still good and jog over to the privy, set up behind the barn and ten feet from any other cover.  It has a daylight only operation.  Buckets fill up quickly at night though, so I waste no opportunity.  The coast is clear, the seat warm and dusty.  I flip through a National Geographic from 1979.  There is an African fellow with a huge white turban and aviators on the cover.  I’ve read every word of it forty seven times.  I clean up with a rag and dump some ash down the hole.  Is that a noise?

     Rounding the left hand wall of the privy, I spy him shambling out from between two trees; thrashing at the longish grass with his arms and torso, the whole while his gaze remains locked on me.  He looks like a Chinese soldier with olive drab uniform, hammer and sickle insignia over a red star.  Only his helmet is blue and has “UN” written in white across the side.

     I bring the AK to bear and take the long pull on the trigger before feeling the rattling clink of the round going off.  The thing’s head snaps back like a whip and I can see the rainbow mist as it catches  the light of the dying sun.  What the hell is this guy doing out here?  No time now, it’s getting dark.  I’ll drag him off in the morning.

     I don’t bother to wait for the sounds of others.  I jog back to the front of the barn, open the door and secure it behind me.  I drop the bar across the door and turn left, leaving the side entrance room and entering the big room.  I keep the AK ready.   Shouldering the strap, I climb up the ladder to the loft. 

    Once up, I test the ladder.  Pulling the white nylon rope, the ladder slides upward on its tracks and I tie it off on the railing that overlooks the big room.  The pulley squeaks like a bat.  Maybe time to oil that.

     From above, the loft looks like a blocky letter “c” with railing on the inside that circles the big room and looks down upon it.  Standing as I am, looking over this railing and regarding the big room and the tall barred doors, the left arm of the loft is the space over the entrance room.  I have set up a table and chairs there and it serves as a place to eat and work on things.  The right arm of the loft is over the storage room that holds the bulk of my supplies.  This area in the loft holds my bed and shelves of books.  Behind me is a large open space confined only by the angle of the roof.  Even with the floor, is a line of square windows identical to those over the front barn door.  This space is over the press and various other bits of machinery in the workshop.

     It is the line of windows I seek.  With the slope of the hill and the height of the back foundation, I am about twenty feet off the ground.  This commands a nice view west back toward the privy and the direction the dead soldier came from.  Lying on my belly and lifting my head some to shade my view from the last rays of the sun, I freeze and lie still.  I let my eyes unfocus and concentrate for signs of movement or colors.  I lie there for some time and nothing else comes.  The sun sinks over scraggly rows of overgrown trees, some now dead.

     What brings these straggler zoms out to find me?  Do they possess some unholy sense that allows them to lock in on the living and home in?  Is it a smell or sound?  Is it random?  I hope for the latter and loose sleep over the former.  Seeing nothing more, I fall asleep.

     Dawn comes and goes.  The sun is almost high when I seek my boots and lower the ladder.  My night soil is carried down in its five gallon detergent bucket and dumped in the privy.

     No scavengers have touched the remains of the undead.  As far as I can tell, there are no zombie coyotes or vultures.  The bullet entered through the space to the right of the soldier’s nose, leaving a 7.62mm entrance wound and a smashed lettuce head of an exit wound.  I tie a rope around the thing’s ankles and drag it to the long pit.  A search of his body brings some usable AK rounds and a folded letter in what I assumed is Mandarin.

     “So long fella,” I croak as the body does a roll and settles into a sitting position.

     I decide to cut the grass and work on a new warning system I’ve been thinking of.  I pause on the way back to the barn to grab some lemons and a couple of avocados.

     Sitting next to the cold fire pit out front, I peel an avocado and bite into the mushy flesh.  The lemons I juice and add to a pitcher of water from the pump.  I sip and eat and wonder over the visitor from last night, chewing this with my meal, working it over with the teeth of my logic, it doesn’t taste right.  After brunch, I begin the chore of cutting the grass. 

     Bill’s crappy push mower works pretty well as long as I keep it oiled and don’t have much to cut.  In keeping with my attempts to make the place look deserted, at least to a point, I only mow the front pasture of the barn—less than an acre.  This is to accommodate the fire pit and also it is nice to have an open space.

     I keep the mower in the garage next to the burnt out pit of Bill’s home.  As a rule, I never throw anything out unless it is rotting.  Although many useful things I don’t need at hand in the barn often end up here as well.  Among the rows of junk, are some thin green tomato stakes.  I grab a huge bundle of these on the way out.

    After the yard is mowed, I run some water over my head and arms and gather the tomato stakes.  I walk to the edge of the orchard and begin to drive them into the ground a foot apart, ringing the space around the barn.  By the time I am done, I’ve made two more trips to the garage to grab more stakes.  My idea is this:  If any non-living person passes through this area while I am away, they will knock down a stake.  If they keep going, they’ll knock down another giving me an idea of the direction they were headed. It is worth a shot.

     I am planning another trip out, and yesterday’s encounter has kind of set me on edge.  What is the deal with the Chinese UN soldier?  He wasn’t too fresh, but he wasn’t old enough to be from the start of this mess.  I have been on the farm for six years.  Three of these I worked for Bill, and roughly three, I have been on my own. 

     I mark the passing of time by the phases of the moon and the passing of seasons.  I figure roughly ten moons to one of my years.  Lord, that makes me almost 32 years old.

     I shake my head and focus on my surroundings.  This line of thought is depressing. I close the door to Bill’s garage as I leave, and cross the dirt road ducking under the electric fence and coming around the door to the barn.  It is time to plan and pack.

     I decide to back track the UN zombie, at least as far as the edge of town, and then come back the same way.  I will avoid the road if possible.  That place, more than any, often has eyes.

     I rummage in the supply room and choose a camo suit and a light green backpack.  I chance upon a couple MRE’s and wrap some fruit leather and venison in paper just in case.  The backpack has one of those fancy plastic pouches for water built in with a hose attached to the shoulder for drinking.  I also fill a canteen.