ZWD: King of an Empty City (7 page)

              Our plan was to leave by the garden exit. It was at the back of the building away from the horde at the front door. Hopefully, we could get down Cumberland and back across I-630 with little trouble. But, since we had this place locked up, we needed to get the key she’d taped into the lock on the front door. It was back downstairs and at the top of the ramp to the help desk.

She moved around the desk to the back and squatted down; the fewer yummy morsels for them to see the better. I walked down the ramp and up to the door. They all stopped what they were doing and stared at me like a puppy expecting a treat. Not an eye blinked. I reached up and took the tape off the key. One of them shifted and jostled his way from the back of the crowd. It was the father from earlier. At the glass he looked at me, evaluated me. Drooled at me! I slid the key out and into my pocket and backed away from the door. That’s when he went nuts. He started pounding on the door with force. He was still hungry and still hadn’t gone through rigor. How freshly dead was he when I first saw him? Rigor commences after about three to four hours, if you believe the TV shows; it had been longer than that. The doors rattled and the rest of them went into a frenzy. I ran up the ramp and darted around the help desk, slinking to the floor. I hoped they couldn’t break that glass.

              Keeping low, we moved to the back of the room towards the garden. We were geared up again with machetes in holsters, shovel in hand, Ice Pike over shoulder, and our belongings stuffed into book bags on our backs. This time we decided we were going to take the direct route and go from the garden gate straight down Cumberland across I-630 till we got to Daisy Gatson Bates Drive. Then, we would turn west and work our way back to the house with the tool shed and our new home base. We could still hear thunder rumbling in the distance as we paused there at the intersection of Cumberland and Second Street. The fog was still heavy in the air and I felt like I was saying goodbye to my parents’ home as we shouldered our packs and started that long jog.

              Our trek back home took us straight past the bus station. What seemed like a long time ago, you’d always see homeless people sitting on the bus benches pretending they were waiting on the bus just to get out of the elements or to sleep on the benches. I wasn’t surprised when we walked up on four zombies doing the same thing. They hadn’t noticed us yet, and I wanted to back up and go over a block to avoid them. She, on the other hand, had different ideas. “We’re going to have to start getting rid of them sooner or later. No time like now.” She started walking towards them and dropped her backpack on the ground. The Ice Pike was on top of the pack with the blade sticking up and she pulled out the machetes. I was more concerned with what we didn’t see in the mist coming out after us when this fight started. I dropped my pack next to hers and took a firm grip on my shovel. I listened to the surroundings as she walked ever closer. I was frozen with shock when I heard her singsong, “Here, zombie, zombie, zombie.” I couldn’t imagine what in the hell she was doing. The four zombies moved from their places on the bench and staggered towards her and she squatted down on one knee, machetes in hand, ready. She was a dozen feet from me. I stared at the fog around us and strained my ears, listening for any other threats.

The first zombie to reach her was looming over her when she popped up and kicked him in the gut. She then spun around and brought a machete down on his exposed neck, taking his head off. I tuned in to a sound from the fog. Like some kung fu master she had her machete in the skull of the next one before I could see what she’d done. She was having trouble getting the blade out of its head and I ran over, throwing a shoulder into the third one and knocking him to the ground. I fell down next to him and swiftly shifted around till I was sitting on my butt next to his head. I brought my shovel down, splitting him like a watermelon.

She had her foot on the second one’s head and was pulling the machetes out with both hands when the fourth one got to us. He was still fleshy, almost bloated like rigor had come and gone. Could have been why he was slow. I had to spin around on my butt and kick at him to keep him off me. I couldn’t find a way to use my shovel and swing at him. She left her machete in the last one’s head and ran back for the Ice Pike. Holding it by the end of the handle, she swung it with all her might at this guy’s knees and sent him tumbling backwards. I was on my feet fast and brought the shovel down across his neck. I had to jerk the shovel out because it buried itself a little in the pavement. I don’t know why I did it, but I kicked him in the head. That’s when I noticed I hadn’t taken his head completely off, there was a little bit of spine still keeping the head attached to the body. He reached up and grabbed my ankle. I almost shit myself. I wasn’t expecting that. I couldn’t run, I was so scared, so I stood there over him and stomped his head in repeatedly till it was a pulpy mass.

“Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?” she quoted my favorite movie,
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. I stomped his head again for good measure and took the shovel blade and struck his neck again, making sure I separated head from body, or what was left of his head at least.

              “Where did you get those kung fu moves from?”

              “I got moves like Jagger, baby.”

              “No, really, where did that come from?”

              “You forget I’m a former gymnast and dancer?” She did a twirl as we moved back down the street. She moved very elegantly in her twirl, although she was splattered with blood, was carrying an Ice Pike, and looked like a street urchin from some Dickens play. She did a few more dancer’s twirls and with the final one she winked at me. She’s something else, my girl.

              Shortly after that we started trotting down Cumberland and kept up that pace till we got to Daisy Bates. We took a short breather, and then started trotting again till Main Street. After that we walked. It felt good to be back in the neighborhood. It felt safer; it wasn’t, but it felt that way. I guess it was the familiarity of it. It felt like home. Like before.

ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 08

ZWD: Dec. 09.

Found a freezer that still works. I have one pound of bacon. Now to find a place to cook it. We have two cans of warm beer. Ah, a king’s feast.

Scavengers had gotten into our base house and taken a lot of food while we were gone, but there was still plenty left for us. Thank God for the home canners.

               I woke up the next day to the sound of thunder in the distance and birds chirping outside. I thought I heard voices below in the kitchen, and listened for a moment, but she lay still beside me and I dismissed the sounds till I heard a solid
thwack
from the kitchen. I shot out of the bed in socked feet and with a bare chest. I must have gotten hot in the night and pulled off my shirt. The cold morning air made me even more awake as I hit the stairs three or four at a time, shovel in hand. Still I didn’t make it down there in time to catch whoever it was. The back door stood wide open and the aluminum screen door had just whacked shut as I ran into the kitchen.

Outside I found an unopened jar of canned pears on the ground. There was nobody in sight. There was a milk crate under one of the kitchen windows and a butter knife. It looked like they had worked the window’s lock open with that.

             
I went back down the little hall when I heard her heavy boots on the landing upstairs. “Can you bring me my shirt and shoes?”

“Sure,” she said. “Did they get away?”

“Yep, they were fast.”

Then I heard a cabinet in the kitchen squeak. I spun on my socked feet and ran back into the kitchen. The back door slammed shut. As I opened it I could hear feet running rapidly away. Again when I got outside nobody was in sight.

             
I guess while we were away what they got just wasn’t enough, so they had to come back for more. I was frustrated and mad but I couldn’t blame them, whoever they were; like us they were just trying to survive and they were hungry. I was still pissed off. Out of spite we ate the canned pears for breakfast. It was just something they wouldn’t have the joy of eating. I was so mad there was no joy in it for me either. I wanted to shore up the defenses on the house. Make it secure so they wouldn’t get back in, or at least if they did make it back in they’d have a hell of a lot of trouble doing it. But we were moving to the roof of the Safeway today and there wasn’t much point.                

Our to-do list was a long one today. First we were going to check out the Safeway roof and see what we needed to do there. Then we were going to move as much food as we could carry up to the roof. Then we were going to go house to house and clear them one by one and seal them up so we would know there were no zombies or no worthwhile supplies for us to use. That would take most of the day. Hell, going house to house was going to take years, but what else did we have to do? And lastly we had to find a tent or something for the roof. We had no intention of just sleeping up there in this cold rainy weather without shelter, no matter how easily defendable it might be. Added to that, if somehow along the way we found the wood to make the raised flowerbeds, we were going to drag that back to the Safeway and somehow get it up on the roof. At least we were going to be busy.

               After hiking the few blocks over to the Safeway, we walked around the building just to see what we had to deal with. As we expected, people had broken into it by smashing out the front windows and taking everything they could get their hands on. The same was true with the Dollar General next door to it. You could still hear the recording repeating itself every few minutes over the intercom. “Thank you for shopping at the Dollar General. We would like you to know that all movement in the store is being monitored by our security systems at all times. Thank you again for shopping at the Dollar General.” The inside of the place looked like it had been torn apart by a bull in a china shop. Since we didn’t care too much about people coming and going in or out down here, we headed to the back of the building and checked out the way to the roof.

               Nobody had been up here. The door to the upstairs offices was still locked. Next to that was the metal ladder to the roof. We climbed to the roof. It looked as if nobody had been up here since they put the white tar down to reflect the heat and cut down on the cooling bill for the summer. This was going to be pleasant in a few months. Despite my misgivings about living on a roof, I had to admit it was kind of comforting to be up here. To know that there was only one way up. After reading all those books on castles and fortifications, I started looking at this place as easily defensible and started making my defenses in my mind. My to-do list was getting a lot longer. But first on the list was plywood, and a lot of it.

The U-shaped section cut in the back of the building where all the heating and cooling systems were sitting offered several options for defense. I thought I’d start with the ladder to the roof and work my way down.

The ladder started on a metal grate landing outside of a second-floor office door. The ladder itself was probably twelve feet long and had handrails that allowed the climber to hold on to something as he rested his foot on the top rung. Hacksaw, that rail had to go. My plan was to place some plywood across the U, covering the ladder, making it hard for anyone to come up that way. If anyone tried to come up from the back, I wanted a way to shock them and knock them off as they climbed. I still hadn’t come up with a way for us to easily get up and down as we needed. This was a true work in progress. Plywood across the opening of the U on the ground level would offer another line of defense. Leaving the roof in an emergency was easy. Rope ladders thrown over the side in any direction would let us escape as needed. I’d never had to defend against zombie attacks, marauders, and scavengers before, and there wasn’t exactly a “How To” book available.

             
We went back to the house and picked up the rest of our gear. The sleeping stuff mostly. We grabbed a bunch of those canvas recyclable shopping bags and anything else we could find to carry food in and loaded up everything we could and headed back to the Safeway. The irony of carrying food to a grocery store wasn’t lost on me. It took four trips up the ladder. After a brief rest, we decided we needed to get started on going door to door and see if we could find plywood. We drank water from the spigot on the outside of the building and filled water bottles.

             
Somewhere to our west there was a single gunshot and someone yelled out, then all was quiet. You hear things like that in the distance. Not long after the gunshot we heard the roar of a truck speeding away in the distance. My heart sank. I had the feeling that sooner or later we were going to deal with them, but for now they were moving away from us.

According to the map of my new kingdom, the houses on the corner of Scott Street and Nineteenth should be first to clear. Why not get to know your neighbors first? We chose Tommy and John’s house to clear first. It was locked up tight and we hoped that perhaps they were still alive hiding inside. We went around the back where they kept the dogs, but there were no dogs. We knocked on the back door and shouted their names. The cars were still there, but no one answered. I took the two-pound sledge out and brought it down on the lock. A moment with the screwdriver and we were inside.

              The first thing to hit us was the sound of flies. Something had died in here, and there were thousands of flies. Some still buzzing, but a lot of them were dead. Dead on the floor in front of the door. Across the table in the kitchen, on the windowsills, flies everywhere. Normally I’d see that many flies and get grossed out, but I knew something was dead and I took the flies as a sign that it was a natural death and we probably wouldn’t find zombies in the house. Not knowing for certain, we erred on the side of caution and moved slowly through the house.

             
Tommy and John kept an immaculate house, fashionable and trendy modern designs mixed with tribal art from around the world all showcased in an old small Victorian house. Difficult to pull off, but they made it work. On our first visit to their home, they’d told us how they opened up the house by taking out all the walls that weren’t load-bearing and tried to make one huge downstairs room. They’d widened the doorway from the kitchen to the living room and had to put in an extra metal beam for support so the second floor didn’t come crashing down on them. They hid the modifications behind a huge archway covered in rich wood that looked like it had always been a part of the house. I was thankful for this because it meant that instead of seven rooms to clear there were only three downstairs, and a closet. We moved cautiously but quickly. We opened the closet and checked the insides, then closed it and ran a piece of tape over the door seam. The same with the bathroom. However, she did take a bar of their decorative scented soaps. “It’s lavender, it will repel bugs,” she said as she stuffed it into her pocket.

               Tommy and John had taken out the old stairwell that lead upstairs and replaced it with a floating one. You know the kind where only one side sticks out of the wall and each step seems to be floating in midair, not attached to anything else. There was no rail to grab on to, either. We used to joke that it was probably really fun to go up and down those steps when you were drunk. You could hear the droning of the flies from upstairs. The sound came in waves as if they were landing on something and quieting down, then being stirred away and flying around buzzing angrily till landing again.

             
She went up the stairs first, Ice Pike in hand pointed in front of her. I followed with the shovel ready.

                  You know what the most dangerous part of a stairwell is? I found this out in those castle and defense books. It’s the overhang. That part where the stairs open up to the room above you. They used to call that a “murder spot.” Archers would wait there and as you came up they would shoot you from behind. The idea was to clog up the passageway with dead bodies supplied by the guys coming up the stairs, making it easier to defend. Murder from above and behind. We had to go past a murder spot. I didn’t think we had to worry about a zombie in this spot, or the living. The flies said there was no one living here, but still it made a knot in my gut crossing that spot on the stairs. She knew it too and squatted down low, almost creeping up the stairs on all fours. After a certain point I turned and faced the murder spot to guard us.

                  There facing me was Bobo, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, his body emaciated, dead. Bobo was their pit bull-mutt mix. He was as sweet as he could be for a pit. If he liked you he was pressed against you, anticipating your every move. He used to stay pressed against me. Now he was a quiet sentinel forever guarding the murder spot. Even dogs knew where the best defense was. My heart broke as I looked at his face. He looked like he had died of hunger.

               At the top of the stairs, she stood there holding the Ice Pike, hand over her mouth with tears in her eyes. We’d both loved Bobo and had often joked with John that we were going to take him home with us. John always replied, “Go ahead, Bobo poops bigger than any dog we’ve ever seen. You can clean that up. Isn’t that right, you little poop machine?” Just his dry sense of humor, he wouldn’t have parted with that dog for anything.

                The guys had turned the upstairs into two rooms during their remodeling project. One room was turned into a cedar-lined walk-in closet filled from floor to ceiling with racks and shelves for all their clothes. It was like a miniature department store in there, complete with mannequins for alterations and a couch to dress on. The bathroom was like a day spa with a jet tub, towel warmers, chairs, a massage table, and any manner of thing you’d want to pamper yourself. But for them their favorite room, the bedroom, was what you came into when you came off the stairs. One massive room that had been opened from two that looked like a loft apartment. It was complete with a large flat-screen TV mounted on the wall and an old stereo console piece of furniture as big as a Buick that they’d restored and upgraded to play their mp3 through the surround sound system with its hidden speakers. There was even a mini bar in the corner and chaise recliners for watching television. It reminded me of an airport lounge from the seventies, in many respects, with the exception of the bed in the middle of the room.

              The bed was a contrast to everything else in the room. There was no headboard, no fancy sheets, no decorative pillows or nightstand beside it. There was just a simple bed with white cotton linens and a simple round yellow smiley face pillow they’d gotten from some trip they’d taken when they’d first met years ago.

              John was clutching the smiley face pillow when we got to the top of the stairs. It was cradled in his left arm and their little dog Maxi Brown was cradled in his right. Maxi was some sort of terrier mix that hardly left John’s side. John was lying against Tommy. Tommy had one arm around John, cradling him. The other lay out to his side as if it had fallen away in sleep. Maybe it had been resting on the back of one of their other dogs. They had four other dogs whose names I didn’t know. All of their faces were sunken and tight. The guys’ normally clean-shaven faces had wiry beard growth. The kind the dead get. They say after we’re dead the hair and fingernails keep growing for a few days, and it looked like it. They were dressed in clean white shirts and dress pants like they were getting ready to go out. But they were lying there on the bed embracing each other. Some sort of greenish-white crud had dried on their mouths. Flies filled this room. I had to pull out a bandana to cover my mouth and nose to keep them off. Here and there the skin had cracked from bloat and you could still see maggots feasting. They and all their dogs dead together.