ZWD: King of an Empty City (3 page)

I learned a lot that night. Most of those men with guns didn’t know how to shoot. You can shoot a zombie in the chest all day and they keep coming. Also, zombies can’t find you in the rain so well. We actually snuck behind one as we tried to escape and it never turned around, even though we were making a lot of noise moving over the dead leaves that covered the ground. I think that was the most important thing we learned that night. We used it to our advantage often later. We also found out that zombies can’t climb hills very well. That’s how we escaped. We started climbing up the hill. Several tried to follow us once they saw us, but they kept falling down or sliding. We made it to the top with even less stuff than we came into the camp with. But we were alive. We got to the top and hid under a carport for the rest of the night.

That next morning we broke into a house and barricaded the door behind us. We slept on the living room floor. I guess about noon we woke up and found some food in one of the cabinets. It wasn’t much, a bag of stale chips. We talked about going back to the camp, but decided that was a bad idea. Instead we made our way back to our neighborhood. It took us a few days because we weren’t familiar with the streets between where we were at Greathouse Bend Drive and downtown where our house was. Once we found the road that connected to Cammack Village we weren’t long getting back to the house, if you can call four days not long. We stayed low and moved slowly from house to house, not wanting to be surprised by people or zombies. We didn’t see a soul in Cammack Village; it was like a ghost town. We knew people were there in that neighborhood. We could feel them watching us, but we never saw them. In the Heights it looked like people had lost their minds. Buildings were burned down. Cars were overturned or smashed into each other; it looked like chaos lived there. Once we got on Cantrell Road we felt we were almost home. We didn’t want to be on a main road, but we still didn’t see anybody.

              Once we got to Chester Street we broke into a law office. We spent the night there in the copy room. It was an inner room where we could turn on the lights and relax. After so many days in the park and on the open road it was strange to find someplace so quiet. The copy machine put out some heat and in the inner confined room, we made a nest using cushions from their office furniture. The snack machines offered a little food, but it was mainly the isolation and warmth of the little room that we needed. We slept a lot there.  

The next day we decided to look for food downtown. That was our first trip down there. I think we made it all the way down to Spring Street before we started to see signs of how bad it got downtown. Burned out cars, burned out buildings, the Old State House still in flames. Smoldering down to just barely a frame. Blood was all over the glass and walls of the Peabody, where it still had glass. That’s when she said, “We need to get off the main streets again.” So we moved up a block. We made it all the way to Sherman, one block from the I-30 ramp, and from there we could see trucks and cars on fire all along the interstate. Some bodies were draped over the rails; others were being eaten by zombies. That part of the interstate was up high and for them to get to us they would have to come down a long circular ramp. We would be long gone before that could happen, but they weren’t our concern right then; we still needed food. I suggested Juanita’s Bar and Grill, so we moved towards the river down to the bar.

The closer we got, the more we could hear screams and fighting. The place was a war zone. People were acting like animals, throwing rocks, pipes, gas bombs, anything they could use to fight. The zombies had them trapped for two blocks and it looked like they were surrounding the only other humans we’d seen in a few days. We couldn’t help them. We zigzagged our way along back streets to where we knew of a few less popular bars, but we were driven towards the river trying to avoid more zombies that were coming into the area. We followed the foot trail that moves along the river to the Clinton Presidential Museum. From there we headed south till we got to Sixth Street.

That was all part of our first trip downtown. That was when we saw those people in the store. That was only part of the horror we saw on that trip.

The corner of Sixth and Cumberland is nothing but parking lots, but there are some buildings nearby, apartments surrounded by trees, and we spent the night in a garage. I’d smashed the window out of a car and we pushed the car against the garage door, using a bungee cord to secure it to the bumper of the car. We didn’t want anyone to open it on us during the night. I know it wouldn’t have worked, but at the time it seemed like a good idea. Zombies couldn’t have gotten in, but a person could simply crawl under the door after they lifted it to its tied limits. We slept in the car, not eating at all that night.
 

The next morning we started walking to our home. I-630 is an asphalt ribbon that cuts Little Rock in half; it travels up and down over hills and through natural and manmade ravines. There are places where the banks are high, forming an asphalt canal along the freeway. These parts of the road have bridges going over them connecting the two sides of the city that I-630 splits. We crossed at Cumberland Bridge. We were feeling good about our trip that morning. We hadn’t met anyone or seen any zombies, at least till we got to the bridge. Even before we got there, we could hear the moans and some screams. As we crossed the bridge we tried to stay in the center, not looking over the sides to below where the sounds were coming from. Curiosity got the best of us and we looked anyway. Below were miles of cars all stopped; zombies were going from car to car. There were still some people alive trapped in those cars. Trapped in traffic and trapped by zombies trying to get to them. I remember I stood there for a long time watching in morbid fascination. Someone trapped in a car below saw me looking over the bridge's railing and pointed. The other passengers started pounding on the windows and dashboards, begging us for help. All it really did was bring more zombies to the noise. Within moments you almost couldn’t see the car, it was so badly swarmed. She stepped up next to me and grabbed my sleeve. “This profits us nothing,” she said and pulled me away from the bridge. “This profits us nothing,” what an odd thing to say.

After crossing the bridge we zigzagged southwest down the streets till we got to our house. Our neighbors were all gone. The barricade was destroyed and our house had been looted. We had even less than we did when we left. Great, just great.

ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 04

ZWD: Dec. 04.

Just found a Marine folding foxhole shovel in my neighbor’s shed. It works well as an axe. I know ‘cause I just used it on his dead ass.

The morning started out bright but quickly turned to a thin fog that lingered low to the ground, maybe thigh high. The first thing I wanted to do was get into that shed. Outside I tried the door and it was locked. I tried kicking it like they do in the movies; you know, when they bust a door down. That doesn’t really work. My foot still hurts. Next I tried to shove my shoulder into it. Again like you see in the movies. I just bounced off like a rag doll. My last thought was to get a running start and drop-kick the door like I’ve seen wrestlers do. I’d backed up ten or twelve feet and was ready to make my run to the door when she walked up to it with the ball-peen hammer in hand and smashed the doorknob off with one quick blow. The door didn’t open but the insides of the doorknob were exposed, so using an ink pen I was able to get the bolt to pull back.

I don’t know what I expected to see in there
, perhaps a stockpile of weapons, grenades, RPGs, machine guns, stuff like that, like you’d find in a videogame, but it was just a garden shed. Lawnmower, weed eater, garden hose, that sort of thing. Just to my left was an old Marine folding foxhole shovel. The kind they used in WWII on their backpacks. I remembered seeing pictures of them and a story my uncle had once told me about how in WWI guys used to use them as axes, sharpening the edges and swinging them like battle-axes. I’d taken it down off its hook and pulled it out of the case that protected the shovelhead when we heard a dog bark.

               Dogs barking are never a good sound these days. It was the dog from yesterday. The one tied to the tree. He was in the middle of the yard and barking at something in the driveway. Had we made too much noise? Yes, we had. This short guy with overalls and a flannel shirt came drifting into the yard, a zombie. He had one arm extended and his hand was shaking. He was pointing at us as if he were saying, “What are you doing in my shed?” As he came closer the dog kept backing up to us. Through gritted teeth she commanded, “Quiet!” The dog looked at her, confused, but obeyed. He made a wide circle around the guy and ran out of the yard. We never saw him again.

I don’t know what it was, but I’d had enough. We’d lost our house to looters. We’d been homeless, on the run, starved, chased, and hunted. Every time we’d gotten anything of value we ended up leaving it behind somewhere or losing it on the run. And it was all because of these things! I took a firmer grip on the shovel handle and started moving towards him. He stopped and looked at me with a kind of pleasant smile on his face. I swung the shovel like a baseball bat and his head rolled across the yard, hitting the house and bouncing off with a thud. His body stood there for a while, then fell over and disappeared into the ground fog.

That was it. That was the moment! That was when I stopped running, stopped being the victim. I don’t know what changed within me, but something did. I turned and looked at her. She wasn’t moving, just studying me with narrowed eyes. I walked to the shed and looked in again. This building wasn’t filled with lawn equipment anymore; I saw a room full of weapons, an arsenal. Screwdrivers were weapons and so were hammers, spades, tree limb loppers, pruners, big shovels, saws, wrenches, chisels, pry bars and crowbars. Machetes, there were two of them, hanging on hooks. We were now equipped like we never had been before. You know the funny thing? We’d been in several sheds and had seen all this stuff before, but I’d never seen any of it as useful till now. Like I said, no longer the victim. No longer was I going to lose our things, no longer was I going to be a scared rabbit running in the night. No longer, no longer.

                 We grabbed things like duct tape, screwdrivers, and hammers. We found a domed backpack tent. We took the ice scraper/chopper, which is a garden hoe handle with an ice chopper head on the end of it; I don’t know what they’re called. I’ll call it an Ice Pike, it’s easier than writing ice scraper/chopper each time. We took files for sharpening. As we gathered it all up we realized we had too much to carry easily and we needed to be light.

As we tried to think of what to do the fog outside got bigger, fuller. It no longer lingered at ground level; it was now just a foggy day out there, and colder. We decided the biggest thing we needed was a survival guide, woodland crap, things that would make our chances better, books on weapons. We needed knowledge; we needed to get to the library.

We fit what we could into our pockets. I carried my new toy, the shovel, and she carried the Ice Pike. We both had a machete and as an afterthought she grabbed a flashlight and a roll of duct tape. Our plan was to go to the library, which meant back downtown, and find the books we’d need, then make our way back here. This house would be our base.

As we moved down the street a light rain started to fall. With the fog you could see about two blocks in front of you. The top of the Little Rock skyline was shrouded in fog. From where we were in the city the library was about five miles away. We had perhaps a mile and a half to go before we reached I-630, then we had to make our way back downtown all the way to the river just to get to the library. It was a fifty-fifty affair. If we went on the back roads we might not see anyone, or we might see everyone. The same held true if we used the main roads. After talking about it we decided to zigzag through the streets and cross I-630 at Chester. Chester seemed to be at the edge of the biggest concentration of zombies. If we worked our way around them we could, we hoped, sneak into the downtown area. Half a block from Chester a gunfight broke out somewhere nearby. People were yelling at each other and someone was shooting what sounded like a machine gun.

We hunkered down in some wisteria bushes at the edge of an alley just before you make it to Chester. We sat there till the gunfire stopped and we heard someone yell, “There he go. Go get that motherfucker!” That’s when we got out of our hiding place and ran down the alley, crossing Charles Bussey Ave before we cut back east. I might not be a victim any longer, but there’s no victory in bringing an Ice Pike to a machine gun fight. From there we decided as we moved along to cross I-630 and go across MacArthur Park. The rain started to fall a little harder by the time we got to the bridge. The fog lay thicker in the I-630 canal and you could hear noises and see them stirring down there like some sort of hellish soup. She didn’t want to cross the bridge at Commerce Street. So instead we went to the footbridge at Rockefeller Elementary School and crossed there into the park.

All along the way between here and there it seemed like people were watching us as we moved through the streets. Sitting there safely locked in their houses watching the two fools who were brave or stupid enough to travel in this world. I got to tell you, I like to keep moving. Something about barricading yourself in never worked in the movies and your supplies were limited in the end.

Speaking of moving, as we moved along and I felt the occasional pair of eyes looking at us, I got a song stuck in my head. You know how that happens. I don’t know what the name of the song was, but the part I kept playing was some guy with a gravelly voice going, “I like to move it, move it.” For a few blocks I sang it out loud. Not shouting, just quietly, loud enough for her to hear it. She started laughing. I started doing these goofy dance steps to the rhythm in my head like I was leading a marching band. She joined in a little and we both laughed.

The footbridge was this big long concrete pedestrian crossing that crossed over the interstate from the school’s playground to the park. It’s long and scary and wide enough for two people to walk across side by side. I wasn’t happy about this decision. On the other side the bridge came out to an open field part of the park. There aren’t a lot of trees at the park anyway and there was only one way of retreating if we got caught at that other end. Seemed like too many things could go wrong. Aside from the waist-high protective wall the bridge was caged in either side by a ten-foot chain link fence that met at the top, little place to hide.

As we got to the apex of the bridge, the fog was thinner. Below it was just thick and moving like snakes in a barrel. My stomach was tight. We crouched down as we crossed, trying to stay hidden behind the waist-high railing. I didn’t look forward to descending back into the thick of that mess on the other side of the bridge. It empties at the south side of a manmade pond that’s about an acre big. To the left there’s a small bridge that crosses over a narrow part of the pond and the path cuts uphill to a circular path that takes you round to where the ducks like to gather. To the right on the other side of the pond is a pavilion where people liked to gather and fish. The game and fish commission used to stock the fish yearly and hold fishing contests for little kids. Not anymore. We decided to go the long way and turned right, going around the pond’s edge. Who knows, we might catch a duck. At its point where the pond ended, we stopped and sat down under a tree as the rain picked up, coming down harder. She sat there listening towards the pond and I kept an eye out for any movement in the fog around us. After a few minutes she said, “There’s no more fish in the pond.” There was sadness in her voice.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“They would have been feeding near the edge, you would have heard them splashing. No splashing.” She stood up and straightened her clothes. She took off her gloves and stuffed them into her pockets. The wet damp of this rain in the normal world wouldn’t have bothered me, it would have been just an inconvenience as I got out of the car and moved ten or twenty feet from the car to whatever building I was going to. But on foot it held a cold that was starting to seep into my body. I was becoming miserable.

As we moved north through the park across the open grass we heard something that made us stop. I stood there looking around for the source and saw that she was gone. I couldn’t see her anywhere. From the deep ground fog her head popped up, and with a quick motion of her hand she signaled me to get down. I dropped into the thick fog and couldn’t see a thing. There it came again, a clinking, jangling sound. I could barely make her out in the ground fog five feet away from me. The sound was getting closer. Suddenly she sprang to her feet and without more than a grunt and a hard sigh she was running across the field, her Ice Pike held in front of her. When I stood she had the blade pressed against the throat of a dead AT&T pole worker and was rushing him backwards into a tree. He had no control of his motion, she was rushing him so hard. When his back hit the tree the blade of the Ice Pike almost went through his neck, chopping his head off. She was moving so fast she ran into him and bounced off, dropping the pike. Before I could move to help her, she had the ball-peen hammer out and was bashing his head in. He fell to the ground and she grabbed the Ice Pike again. She brought it up and down with as much force as she could gather. When I got to her side she was breathing hard and what was left of the poor guy's head was resting between her feet, separated from the body. “Check his pockets, see what we can use,” she said and turned away, going to another nearby tree, and leaned against it. Wow! Talk about not being a victim anymore. I’d never seen her like that, ever! It frightened me a little to see her just spring into action like that. I could only stare at her in amazement for a while, I really didn’t know what else to do. I’d never seen this side of her before.

“We need to find a knife sharpener, one of those handheld kind,” she demanded. “This needs to be sharper. Ninja sharp.”

“Ninjas mainly used poison,” I offered, trying to lighten the mood a little.

“You know what I mean. Get me a hand sharpener,” she grunted.

We moved on north to East Ninth Street.

From there we had to decide if we were going to travel up Ferry or Sherman. Either one took us past the post office.

The woman wanted a knife sharpener and I wasn’t going to argue; after all, it was our lives that depended on the blade of that Ice Pike, so we started checking the houses along Ninth Street. The third house offered us a sharpener and wool socks for her. That doesn’t seem like much, I know, but when it’s wet and rainy, dry socks are a blessing. We kind of took the long way then by going up Commerce to the library.

I used to love riding my bike through these neighborhoods. Grand old gingerbread houses, Craftsman style, Victorian brownstone homes lining the streets in a small section of town. This was the part of town where the railroad and shipping companies’ rich had built their homes at the turn of the nineteenth century. There were spots in the road where you could still see cobblestones and trolley car tracks peeking through the asphalt. Most of the homes had iron fencing around them still, along with hitching posts made of cast iron for horses, and the more prestigious homes had granite blocks with the original owners’ names carved in them sitting at the edge of the road. The blocks were used for ladies to step out of a carriage. They’d step out onto the block, then down to the sidewalk. You had money if you had a carriage block in granite with your name on it.      

It was a strange contrast seeing these blocks with some of the oldest houses in town sitting under these massive trees looking all majestic and peaceful, then coming across a dead body lying in a driveway, and knowing you had to go up to it and kill it just to be on the safe side.

The body was just lying there when I walked up to it like it was taking a nap, face down, an arm under its head. I raised the machete and was about to bring it down when it moved and scared the shit out of me. It was just a slight shift of the body, like it was trying to get comfortable, but it made me jump back. I remember I yelled and brought the blade down like a madman several times. His head rolled away after a few blows and she pulled me back by the collar, then got in my face and bawled me out for making so much noise. “WE MUST BE QUIET,” she growled at me, inches from my face.