Zomblog: The Final Entry (21 page)

Min and his family are headed north. I told them all that I could remember. After some discussion, he and Alicia decided that they would try to winter in Winnemucca before pushing on in the spring. They said that their ultimate goal was Alaska. A bit too cold for my taste, but I imagine that its small population, miles of empty space, and months of heavy snow has its appeal to some. In fact, they seemed more than a little dubious in regards to
my
plan of trying to get to Vegas. I guess they’ve heard some wicked stories. Still, I’m one of those people that, once she gets an idea in her head, has to see it through.

Of course I made their day when I showed them the cache of MREs and bottled water that I’d found. To their credit, neither said a word about my bathtub. Of course Alicia and the girls enjoyed it themselves. Min was fine with a sponge bath. When they joined me outside, they all looked and smelled much better.

I have no explanation for it, but for the next couple of days, the five of us just hung out around the now-defunct military base. Sometimes we went around together, and sometimes I would wake up and think that they had left. Then I would go downstairs and see their backpacks lined up against the wall. At some point the family would stroll in with a couple of odds and ends or knick knacks in their hands. The girls found a pair of model jets one day and played with them just like a couple of boys their age might. It was actually somewhat pleasant.

Once, I watched the girls so that Min and Alicia could “go for a walk”. They came back looking like they had just run a marathon. Well…except for the ear-to-ear smiles on both their faces. Alicia probably thanked me fifty times.

Then, on a morning no different from any other, they said they needed to get moving. I actually felt a strange loss. Is this what it’s like every time
I
tell folks that I’m leaving? I went up on the roof and watched them go. When the little girls looked back and waved…I cried.
What in the hell was that about?

The next day I wandered around the base alone. When I came back to my little camp, I knew that it was time for me to get moving once again. I had ended up staying one day too long. I heard the sounds of breaking glass. That was what jarred me awake a couple of hours before sunrise. My first thought was kind of stupid: The family is back! Then my brain flipped a switch and more sounds of breaking glass had me up and grabbing my weapons. I don’t know why, but something made me grab the bag that had my books and the MREs along with both of my canteens.

There was a voice in my head that was screaming for me to run. I ignored it and listened to the muffled voice that told me to go see what was happening.

In the shadow of one of the giant hangars that housed a pair of jets, I saw movement. The laughter gave them away as living. I stayed put as they cranked open the big doors. The hangar was dark, but those five morons had torches and lanterns. They were like kids who’d been let into Disneyland early and had it to themselves. They climbed all over the jets making quite a scene. Of course they had no idea what to do, so the jets were really nothing more than a pair of giant play structures.

I stayed back and kept quiet as the sun came up. Eventually I staked out a spot in one of the admin buildings. There was no reason to do anything. These guys weren’t taking anything that I cared about. One of them had found a uniform and put it on. Another seemed content just to sit in the cockpit of one of the jets. The only real negative side of this situation was that I was stuck hiding and watching. I knew better than to show myself to a group of men.

As the sun began to set, they made camp in the hangar. I wasn’t really paying attention any more. As long as they stayed inside that hangar, I could simply wait it out until it was completely dark, and then slip away. I must have been napping, because I was jolted to full alert at the sound of a scream. I was certain that somebody had been set on by a zombie.

I tried to move into a position to get a better look. I could still see a low fire burning in the hangar between the two jets. What I couldn’t see were any of the men; or any signs of zombies. It went on for at least a minute. And let me tell you, when somebody is screaming in obvious pain, that is an eternity.

There was no way that I was going to snoop around in the dark for the source of those screams. Also, that meant I wasn’t leaving. Something was going on in the darkness, and I had a nice, safe, defensible spot. I’d just wait till morning.

As the sun rose, bringing what I am positive was the hottest day I had endured in my life, it actually took me a couple of minutes to make sense of what I was seeing. Four of the five men were in the hangar huddled together. When one of them got up to do something, I spotted something large on a spit over the fire. It took a minute for it to dawn on me that it was a human torso. Things clicked. At least somewhat.

I considered making a break for it, but being in the middle of nowhere, it would take me over an hour just to get out of sight. I would be exposed for way too long. The only choice I had was to stay put. The worse part was the fact that the smell of roasting meat was making my mouth water. Try as I might to remind myself what I was smelling, I could not overcome the growling in my stomach or the saliva building up and occasionally dripping down my chin when I wasn’t swallowing enough. I think, at first, I wouldn’t swallow because I was protesting my bodily reaction to the smells versus the knowledge of where those smells originated.

Finally, late in the afternoon, they started gathering up their stuff and moving along. I waited for what felt like forever, but really couldn’t have been more than an hour after they were gone before I came down. I couldn’t help it, I had to go see. Finding the killing spot was easy. It was a big, dark stain in the sand. There were bones tossed about, and on a stick was the head. The boy couldn’t have been any older than sixteen.

My guess goes something like this. They encountered this kid, maybe when they ran across another group. They probably enticed him away with stories of all the lawless fun to be had. I’m betting that this wasn’t the first time that these guys had done this. It seemed too cleanly executed.

I waited until it was light enough for me to see a few feet in front of myself the next morning, and got moving. Of course I topped off on everything and stuffed a few days worth of the MREs in my satchel.

I was cutting across an airstrip when I heard a commotion from a squat building that sat at the end of a narrow path. It was right against the fence. I couldn’t help myself; I had to go check it out. I was surprised to say the least at what I had discovered. The best I can figure is that maybe it’s like prison. Some men go in and need sex so badly that they make do with whatever is available. Men who don’t have a gay bone in their body, but just couldn’t do without sex.

It was the same four from the boy-barbecue. I watched through a dirty window as they fought each other. It was definitely every man for himself. When the dust settled, two men were unconscious and two men were unbuckling their pants. I tried to wrap my mind around the whole concept.

“Sorry you lost the fight today, Pete. You know the rules. I will be butt-raping you now.”

“It’s cool, bro. I’ll get you next time.”

What I did next wasn’t out of any sense of helping the two unconscious men. It had solely to do with the fact that these men were animals. They had succumbed to their most base level. They were barely a step above the slime that we supposedly evolved from.

Fortunately, these guys weren’t worried about much. The door was shut, but a window that gave me a clear shot was open. I fired my crossbow catching one of the still conscious ones right between the shoulder blades. Have you ever noticed how close the sounds of sex and pain are? That is why I got off my second shot catching the other in about the same place. Two down and two to go. I figured I could go in and retrieve my precious bolts, then finish off the other pair with my blade or spear. I got two steps inside the door when the body underneath the first one I killed shoved the corpse off of him, rolled over, and came up with a blade that would make Crocodile Dundee jealous.

It never once occurred to me that one of the unconscious men might be playing possum. And trust me, as alert as he was, that was the only explanation. That brings a whole new series of thoughts and questions to mind, but all I had time to do was to turn and run. I don’t know if you have ever tried to reload a crossbow on the run…I couldn’t.

What I did do was duck inside a three-story building. I got up the stairs and kicked open the door at the top. It was probably all the noise I was making, but I wasn’t prepared for the pair of zombies waiting on the other side of the door. I jumped back from the two sets of arms that came at me. That’s when I dropped my crossbow. I felt a little sick when parts and pieces of it flew off as it bounced down the stairs.

I grabbed the first hand I could and did a yank-and-sling move that send it careening and tumbling down the concrete steps. I brought my knife up and drove it through the underside of the jaw of the remaining zombie, and then hip-tossed it downs the stairs as well.

I heard my pursuer burst in down below and looked for a place to hide. The sounds of a scuffle let me know that he went heads-up with the zombie I had thrown down the stairs. It sounded like they clashed on the second floor landing. By the time I heard booted footsteps coming up, I’d wedged myself in an alcove between two tall filing cabinets. My plan was simple. If he came in and looked for me, I was down low with my knife ready. I would thrust out and up.

Sure enough, the door slammed open and I could hear his heavy breathing. He called out, hoping that I would be some frightened girl who couldn’t deal with the fear of being stalked. I heard him toss a few chairs out of the way, thinking that maybe I’d hidden under some desk. When he stopped in front of me…the idiot actually had his back to me. I must have hit a kidney, because when my knife plunged in, he barely made a sound. More like a hissing whimper. I scooped up the big-ass knife that he’d been carrying and drove it into his chest. The worst part was the fact that I did not feel one single thing while I looked into his eyes as the light dimmed, and then went out.

I wiped my knife off and headed for the stairs. My crossbow was in pieces.
That
was a bummer. I stepped outside and that’s when I saw the other guy. We just looked at each other for a moment. Then…he leered, waved, and started heading my direction.

He was a big man and I didn’t have any doubts as to who would win in a fight. Wait! Let me correct that. I didn’t have any doubts about who would win in a
fair
fight. The first thing I did was run back into the cluster of main buildings. At the very first corner I reached, I took it so that I was temporarily out of sight. There were eight buildings to choose from.

The rest of the day was a glorified hide-and-seek game. In the movies, chases are so dramatic and rarely last beyond a few minutes. By nightfall, I’d been in at least a dozen different places, and hidden in every one of the buildings in this little cluster at least once at some point. At first, I considered trying to rig a trap. Those take much longer than a person realizes. I was really missing my crossbow. By late afternoon, I came up with an idea. He had set fire to the first building. All day I’d had to listen to this man’s dialogue. He took great pleasure telling me about all the things he was going to do when he caught me.

When he ducked into a second building to light it on fire—by the way, I did kick myself for not realizing that he was preparing for this activity all day while we were playing our life or death version of hide-and-seek—I bolted for the structure that housed the bombs. I knew that, as far away as it was across open ground, he would see me. I had one canister of gas or kerosene; whatever it was that he had found as an igniting source for his fires, which were now burning in three buildings. There were a lot of wooden crates in addition to the metal ones in that storage facility. I didn’t have any idea what was in those wooden crates.

I had enough of a lead that I could douse a few crates close to the rows of bombs. It really was a wing and a prayer. It didn’t have the initial effect that I had hoped for. I tossed a rag that I lit after soaking it in the gas or whatever and then ran. There was a very small reaction as something cooked off and blew up…sorta. (Curse you Hollywood for filling our heads with so many ideas involving giant explosions.) It did do enough to have the man turn around and run the other direction…for a minute or two.

I managed to duck into another bunch of buildings and escape. For a couple of days, I hid in an air duct while my pursuer searched in vain. Then, the zombies started showing up. Some even wandered right into the building that I was hiding in.

Eventually, things settled down. I didn’t hear anything living or undead. When I climbed down, I was surprised that things didn’t look worse. The biggest bummer of a discovery was that the guy had torched the building with the water and MREs. I only had about a half of a canteen of water left.

I was walking northish, heading back to the highway. That was the only way I figured to get past the mountains to the east. That was when I stumbled, almost literally, on the cemetery. When I saw the pair of legs sticking out from behind a cracked and worn monument, I brought my spear up. His eyes opened just as I raised my arms to plunge the spiked-tipped spear into him. His head moved just enough to cause me to miss.

He swept my feet out from under me and I barely had enough of a chance to get my knife clear. His fist smashed into the side of my head, and just like that, the fight was over.

When I came to, I knew he had done a number of unpleasant things to me when I was unconscious. All of my stuff was thrown everywhere, including my satchel. My hands were bound and secured above my head to a headstone. My feet were likewise tied with the legs spread uncomfortably wide and attached to stakes driven into the ground. The other handicap was being on my stomach. I couldn’t see a thing. Worse, I couldn’t hear a thing but the occasional sound of the wind which carried the smell of the still-burning buildings a couple of miles away at the military base.