Zombie Dawn (27 page)

We laughed when I gave the order to “synchronize” our watches.  The attack was to begin at 6:00 a.m. exactly.  Mike and I started to pick our way down to our spot at 5:30, followed by Dave and Cameron.

The attack would begin with a mortar round.  George thought he could drop one right on them, but we’d see.  Mike and I set up behind a stone wall and scoped out some targets.  We had trouble seeing over 600 yards with the night vision scopes so we had to move in to about 550.  We picked out a series of fallback positions to use and agreed that we’d move after five shots each.

Just before 6:00, Stan’s team fired a mortar, followed immediately by George.  Both were a bit off, landing at the base of Jim’s berm.   I told him he was a bit long.  Mike and I had identified some of the leaders in our sector and began to drop them.  We each got two then George corrected his aim and landed one right in the middle of the raider group.  I told him to fire at will, and he poured it on.  Meanwhile, Dave had started with the M19 supported by Cam with his M240.  He fired the M19 in bursts of three so you’d hear three quick booms followed by a single boom, then it would happen again. We heard pretty much the same thing happening with Stan’s team as well.

Mike and I were nailing quite a few ourselves.  I had the M107 and used it to cripple their vehicles.  They were trapped.  Jim was ready, and his guys poured it on from the berm.  The raiders had no place to hide and we picked them off at will.  A few of them rallied, but the sun was coming up and George was able to adjust his mortar and nailed them again.  I checked my watch.  It was 6:10 and we were already on mop up duty.  I radioed up to Dave and Cam to switch to some phosphorus rounds to light up the woods.  Mike and I picked off a bunch of guys running from the flames.  Pretty soon, there was no one moving down there.

Per our plan, we rotated to the east to support Stan’s team.  Jim had actually sent out the cavalry over there—two armored Hummers—and they were all done as well.  Jim directed one team to mop up to the south while the second handled the east.  A few scattered shots while they finished some guys and it was over.

We knew some of them must have gotten away but we had already decided not to chase them down.  I wanted to grab Jim’s people and whatever he had packed and head north.  The Farm was my priority.  Jim’s setup was too exposed and too close to the highway; it was not worth defending even though it was well designed.

We drove inside, filled up the Hummers, checked and reloaded our weapons, and prepared to leave.  Jim’s crew had suffered terrible losses.  Jim had lost his wife and two of his kids.  Only Jim and Billy would be coming with us.  Jenny and Katie were fine but TJ had been killed by a stray round.  A few of Jim’s original crew were alive, together with some survivors who had struggled in.  His fifty should have grown to seventy but instead had been reduced to twenty-five.  The suffering caused by the humans who’d gone bad was almost worse than the zombies.

Jim had loaded up most of his supplies on three tractor trailers.  I told him that we had plenty of weapons, food and equipment but whatever he had would be a big help.  He loaded his people in four Hummers plus the three trucks and we rolled out of there and headed north.  We took some sniper fire on the way out.  One of Jim’s truck drivers got hit and the truck rolled over and exploded.  There were no survivors.  Mike got one of the snipers and Jim got another and the firing stopped.

Once again, we rolled straight through.   We were all exhausted and pounding Vivarin and Red Bulls to stay awake.  We made it back to the Farm in about sixteen hours without further incident.

Chapter Thirty Four:  Winter at the Farm

Things had been quiet on the Farm, although Tom had nailed a few Wolves a few hundred yards out.  They were able to cross on the ice, which had frozen pretty solid.  We asked Tom and Kate to take charge, then crashed for 18 hours.

We spent a couple of days getting squared away and finding places to put the new people.  There was another large house about a half mile away to the west and Jim and his people grabbed it and started setting it up. 

Cleve and one of Jim’s guys, Larry, cleared a line of trees between the two houses so that we could see each other and started to dig a trench around Jim’s house but the ground was too frozen to dig much.

Jim set up his own defenses in and around the house.  He looked to be all set, as the house was bristling with weapons.  Jim built sandbagged machine gun positions on the four corners of the house and adopted our idea of a Crow’s Nest on top.  Jim worked too much, at least 20 hours a day, to try to work through his loss.

Billy’s sadness exhibited as anger; he was a tough kid and got in a few fights with some of the other kids until I told him to lay off.  We’d always had a great relationship and luckily he listened to me.  He started to focus on weapons training and martial arts and became a huge help.

Jenny was also heartbroken and pitched in wholeheartedly to our medical crew.  Katie would not leave Bobbie’s side except to sleep in Jenny’s room.  It was sad to see but we were glad to have them with us.

Jim’s crew loved the fresh milk and meat that we had; they were sick to death of MREs.  We put together some great meals and life got back to normal, or what now passed for normal, after a few weeks.  Everyone started to get to know one another and relax a bit.

The hormones were flying and we had to develop an approach to sex education.  Mine was to speak openly to whichever kids would listen to me about sex, marriage, babies and responsibility. I found myself alone a lot and learned to start one of my “sex” talks whenever the kids wanted to make demands on me.  They would literally race out of the room.

Kate tried a moral/religious approach.  Her crowds ran away even faster than mine did!  Li and Jenny ultimately came up with winner.  First, they gathered all of the condoms on the entire island and made them available to whoever needed them, anonymously, no questions asked.  Second, they made everyone who was not already a parent spend real time taking care of babies.  Third, they made them all watch videos of women having babies.  After a while, it seemed to get through.  The condoms were diminishing a bit, but to my knowledge we didn’t have any babies coming--yet.

As a group, we came up with a policy on abortion, since we knew we’d face the issue.  No abortion except for serious health issues of the mother or the fetus, or for rape or incest.  I wondered if Nancy believed in the policy because she was strongly pro-choice before the Incident.  But the consensus now was that we should both rebuild the population and instill a profound sense of responsibility in all of us, and we thought the lack of a “free pass” might help.

We also came up with a policy on crime, which was: “We don’t have any jails so if you choose to commit a serious crime we’ll banish or kill you.”  That seemed to work pretty well.  We had enough of everything so there was no real theft issue.  We were able to take turns on anything in limited supply as well. There was plenty of drama, breakups, name calling and stuff because we were all still people but it was pretty much under control.

We also came up with a policy on social welfare.  It dovetailed pretty nicely with our crime policy, as far as I was concerned.  I called it the “work your ass off and you’ll be fine” approach, but Kate tried the old “To each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities.”  Stan refined it: “From each according to their full ability; to each according to their reasonable needs.”

We were starting with a strong gene pool in the sense that all of us had survived both the Incident and the flu.  Since we mostly came from Massachusetts and Vermont we were not terribly diverse overall but when we shared our stories and our lineage it became clear that we were a bunch of mutts, genetically speaking.  Nancy and Jenny thought we had a pretty good mix, if a bit skewed to the Caucasian flavor.

We didn’t have to develop a policy on discrimination because there was none.  We’d save that for some future time when it was needed.  In the meantime, we judged people not by the color of their skin but by how useful they were.  Same with religion.  Absolute freedom, but I would punch you in the face the third time that you tried to convert me.  No one knew about that policy except one hyper-Christian and one Wicca who tried to export their beliefs to me one time too many.

One thing that was developing was a bit of competition between Jim and me.  We were both natural leaders, and we both had substantial followings, although I had a numerical advantage in supporters.  Jim and I were fine with the situation since we’d been doing it since birth, so we let it be for the time being and used the natural competition to improve things.  I could foresee the day when we’d have to split, but I figured it would be a good thing when it happened; one of us and some followers would be ready to go and the other would help.

Dave and Danny were doing a great job up north.  We reinforced them with a few of Jim’s people and they’d located some survivors who’d walked across the ice from Isle La Motte, a neighboring island.   They had quite a crew up there now.

It was now late February, and we were anticipating the spring thaw.  We asked Dave and Danny to reach out to the north with an eradication and barrier program while we reached out to the south, particularly Burlington.  Dave and Danny enthusiastically agreed, and we loaned them the two Expeditions with .30 cals for the purpose.  One of Jim’s guys, Miguel, would go along and help with barrier construction.  We let him take the big loader to do so.  We were not too concerned about the north approach but better safe than sorry.  Also, I’d begun to think about putting another settlement up on North Hero Island to expand our reach northward.

We’d been receiving a lot of shortwave reports about increased zombie activity down south, moving north as the thaw occurred.  Apparently, zombies down in Florida stayed active all of the time but tended to rot in the wet, hot weather.  Some of them were even starting to fall apart.

There was a large survivor colony in Nova Scotia that was constantly expanding its territory.  Those old Scots were doing pretty well for themselves.  We heard about a few other survivor groups as well, including one in Newport, Rhode Island and another in Gloucester, Massachusetts.  The Provincetown area on the Cape was starting to come back.  Isolated and island areas were definitely the way to go.

There were also some dark broadcasts from neo-Nazis, end of the world types, religious freaks, and other psychos.  At first, they seemed bad for morale but we just got used to them.  Who gave a shit what they thought?  As long as they didn’t threaten us, they’d be fine.

As I planned my raids on Burlington, Jim was working on St. Albans.  He loved Barry and Elliott and made repeated trips to fortify the Bat Cave and raid the armory.  I hadn’t been out to the Bat Cave for a while, but it was a popular spot due to Edith’s cooking.    They’d located a few survivors and a couple of our people had moved there so it was a happening place.  Jim had fortified the living shit out of it so it seemed pretty safe but he’d carefully prepared a bunch of bug out routes as well.  He knew I was right about the highways. St. Albans was right on a main one and would ultimately face a horde.

Jim’s guys built a huge storage bunker inside the fort walls at the Farm and loaded it up with the contents of the armory.  Jim had an ex-Special Forces guy named Tito who knew how to operate the heavy duty stuff and trained some others how to use it.  Jim built a series of bunkers in and around the wall and armed them with all kinds of stuff-rockets, machine guns, even chain guns designed for choppers and planes.

Tito was also a licensed pilot and we started to lay out a runway and figure out how to get him set up with a plane to act as a spotter.

Chapter Thirty Five:  Back to Burlington

Stan and I planned a one-week trip to Burlington in early March to eradicate Zs and barricade the highway.  We brought Cleve and his truck and forklift, with Mike riding shotgun, and Tito and the loader with Christina riding shotgun, plus a Hummer with a crew of 4—me, Stan, Kate, and Courtney.

Burlington was a good-sized area to block off.  Kate’s crew had done a lot of work but much remained to be done.  We set up Cleve and Tito with their equipment.  Mike sniped from the roof of Tito’s tractor where he could see everyone while Christina covered Mike from Cleve’s tractor.  Mike was busy because there were quite a few Wolves around.  They wouldn’t attack the crews but they were watching.  They weren’t quite smart enough to keep their heads down so our snipers were able to nail a bunch.  They tried to sneak up on Mike and Christina picked them off as they’d approach.  Then they’d try to sneak up on Christina and Mike would get them.  This was by far the most Wolves we’d seen.

It was as if the Wolves actually wanted to prevent us from burning the zombies in the cars.  We found quite a few cars that looked like they’d been recently opened, too.  I wondered if they were freeing zombies and gearing up for the attack that we’d feared for so long.

Stan, Kate, Courtney and I kept going into Burlington.  We wanted to check for survivors and also firebomb the place and burn as much of it down as we could.  We also wanted to find a good spot for a listening post overlooking the highway and had brought a small generator, fuel, supplies, and a shortwave radio.

The city was a total mess.  We’d burned quite a bit of it during our earlier battles there but there had been some activity since then.  Almost everything had been looted and wrecked, apparently by human survivors, since it seemed to have been intentional and directed at stores rather than houses.   They had apparently moved on because we didn’t see anyone.