Levi reached out and took her hand as she positioned herself behind the steering wheel. “We can’t, Mama. It’s not our way.”
Nell nodded grimly. “I know.” She handed him the twelve-gauge. “Here.”
Levi took the shotgun and jacked a shell into the breech. “There’s a .357 Magnum in the glove box, if you have need of it. Just hold it in both hands like I showed you. And, remember, it kicks like a mule with chiggers on its balls.”
The woman reached over, opened the compartment, and laid the big, nickel-plated revolver on the seat beside her. “Let’s get to it.”
Levi turned and regarded his sons and daughter. “There’s a man and woman down there with about thirty-five or forty of those sick bastards bearing down on them, looking for a free lunch. Spread out and be careful. And, no matter what, don’t let ’em get hold of you and take a bite.”
His children nodded. They waited until he took the first step and then followed.
They started down the street, six feet apart, their attention centered on the commotion at the traffic light of the fifth intersection coming into Gatlinburg from the west. As Levi approached the feeding birds, he waved a lanky arm. “Y’all git!” he hissed, loud enough for them to hear, but not enough that his voice would carry. “Head to the heavens with the rest of your scavenging bunch!”
The two buzzards—slick and black, except for their featherless, pink heads—eyed him balefully and then reluctantly took flight. Levi watched them ascend as he walked past the corpse… and nearly paid for his inattentiveness.
Before he knew what was happening, the dead man reached out and grabbed his ankle. Levi expected the attempt to be feeble, but it was anything but. There was some real strength in that decomposing muscle and sinew, fueled by the instinctive hunger that possessed their kind. The Biter—a middle-aged man with graying hair and a lower face ravaged with decay—sat up and craned his neck toward him, mouth open. His teeth were black and fuzzy and teaming with tiny motion, as if they were covered with gnats without wings.
Levi tried to pull away, but the thing’s fingers—stiff and bony—refused to let go. With a grunt, Levi lowered the muzzle of the 870 toward the Biter’s forehead.
Jem walked over to his father and lifted the shotgun’s barrel with one hand. “You do that and that whole bunch will be off that car and on us quicker than a horny jackrabbit. I’ll take care of it.”
Levi nodded, lifted the Remington to his shoulder, and leaned back a bit. Jem’s axe swung downward, cleaving the Biter’s arm in half at the joint of his elbow. The blade struck pavement and threw sparks as it hit. Levi stumbled away. Disgusted, he reached down and wrestled with the forearm and hand that held him, careful not to touch the exposed flesh that the buzzards had been picking at. Finally, he pried it free and tossed it away. It rolled across the pavement, the fingers flexing and clawing, before finally growing still.
That seemed to anger the Biter to no end. He lurched, rocking back and forth, trying to get his legs and his good arm beneath him. Before he could get leverage and rise, Jem swung the axe again. The blade split the zombie’s head open from scalp to neck bone. The two halves divided, revealing a half-devoured brain, purple-black and as moist and stringy as pumpkin guts. Amid it all swarmed a multitude of the tiny black things, spilling out onto the street, spreading like motor oil that should have been changed a long time ago.
“Avery,” Levi called to his other son.
Avery laid his chainsaw down and grinned. He walked over and took a can of lighter fluid from side pocket of his overalls. Dousing the ruined head of the Biter liberally, he then took a box of sulfur matches and struck one. The boy stared at the guttering flame for a long second and then tossed it. The upper half of the dead man burst into flames, causing the spreading blackness to grow even blacker as it burnt to a crisp and then rose in the smoke in tiny pinpoints of cinder.
“Y’all steer clear and don’t breathe it in,” Levi instructed. “We don’t know if that stuff is as dangerous dead as it is alive.” He turned and regarded Avery, who bent to pick up his chainsaw, his eyes still glued to the flames. Avery was peculiar in that way; he loved fire and explosives. Levi used to frown on that flaw in his son’s nature, but lately it had become downright handy.
Again, the four started down the street. They could hear the throaty rumble of the logging truck as Nell remained a steady twenty feet behind them. They were nearly upon the crowd of frantic Biters before they were noticed. A woman with matted blonde hair and a McDonald’s uniform turned, spotted them, and then unleashed a shrill cry and shambled toward them. Two or three left the disabled Volkswagen and followed her.
Levi nodded to Avery. His son lowered the chainsaw again, took a bundle of three M-80 firecrackers from his pocket, and lit the short fuse. He tossed it, underhanded, and it rolled past the Biters’ feet and under the front bumper of the car.
It went off almost immediately. The concussion knocked a dozen zombies to their knees and lifted the Bug clean off its front tires in the process. The little car slammed back down, shaking the other Biters off balance and startling the old man behind the steering wheel.
Levi and his children stepped in and went to work. Levi fired the shotgun as fast as he could pump it, decapitating the standing Biters with blasts of double-ought buckshot. Kate stood, lean arms outstretched, firing the twin Glocks in rapid succession. Within a span of fifteen seconds, eighteen had fallen.
Jem and Avery went to work on those who had been driven to their knees by the explosion. Jem welded the broad axe deftly, severing heads between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. Avery cranked the string pull of the chainsaw, sending it into roaring, sputtering life. A cloud of blue gasoline fumes billowed from its engine as he stepped from one Biter to another, cleaving off heads and limbs, sawing torsos in half, crossways. Avery’s siblings regarded him uneasily. Of the three, he had always been the wild card.
After all of the zombies were down, heads rolled on the pavement, snapping and snarling with angry red eyes and black-coated teeth, Kate calmly strolled among them, putting a 9mm slug above the bridges of their noses or directly through the crowns of their skulls. She was shucking a spent magazine from the butt of one pistol and replacing it with a fresh one, when she spotted movement behind the Bug. A tense smile crossed her freckled face, but her eyes grew as cold as stones.
Puzzled by the expression on his sister’s face, Jem turned and watched as a large Biter rounded the back bumper of the VW and staggered toward them. “Well, look at who’s come a-visiting.”
“Bill,” Kate said. Her eyes narrowed as he approached in a lurch.
It was Bill Franklin, Kate’s husband, but a horribly altered version of the man. Part his face had been chewed away, revealing stark bone and a half-grin of exposed teeth, and one of his eyes lay flat and useless in its socket, the fluid having leaked out after hungry teeth had punctured it. Much of his shirt had been torn away, revealing pale muscle that was still toned, even after death had claimed him three months ago. A tattoo of a naked Bettie Page straddling a Harley Davidson shown on the tricep of his left arm, resembling a child’s crayon doodle on stark, white paper.
As the man drew nearer, Kate turned to her brother and held out one of the Glocks. “Trade?”
Jem eyed her warily. “Sure, Kate.” He took the pistol and handed her the axe.
“You boys stand back,” Levi told them. He stared at his daughter as she stuck the second Glock in her jacket pocket and tightened her grip on the hickory handle. “Give your sister room to work.”
Kate planted her feet and stood ready. “Come here, Bill. Come here, you sorry son of a bitch.”
Although no recognition shown in his eyes, Bill shambled toward her, arms outstretched, grinning that skeletal half-grin of his.
When he was nearly upon her, she swung the axe, chopping his right arm off at the shoulder. Ink black blood spurted weakly from the severed artery, then slowed to a sluggish trickle. “Treat me like shit
, will you? Put me down, humiliate me, call me a bitch?”
Her father and brothers watched as she swung the axe again and again, whittling Bill Franklin gradually down to size. Levi turned and looked toward the truck. Nell sat in the driver’s seat with tears in her eyes.
“Beat me… burn me with your damn cigarettes… tear off my panties and rape me when I told you I wasn’t in the mood?” Again the blade hit cold flesh, sinking, pulling loose with a loud suck. “Punch me in the stomach until I miscarried… until I sat on the commode, bleeding, with my baby hanging between my legs!” She swung low, taking his legs off at the knees, sending him crashing to the pavement.
Bill squirmed in the road, teeth gnashing, his single eye rolling like that of a mad dog.
“Kill our baby?” The axe came crashing down on his skull, crushing, mangling, time after time after time. “My baby… my poor… sweet… little… baby girl!”
By the time Levi reached her, she was crying, her narrow chest hitching with deep sobs. Gently, he took the blood-splattered axe from her hands. “My baby…” she muttered mournfully. “Oh God…”
Levi held her for a long moment and kissed her forehead, feeling his heart ache. Granddaughter? She had never told them… never breathed a word. When he released her, she turned and climbed into the truck. She snuggled closely to her mother and cried into her shoulder.
“Papa?” said Avery. “The folks.”
Levi turned and walked to the Volkswagen. He stood at the side door, looking at the little bald and bearded man who stared back at him, his blue eyes magnified behind the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. “Sir? Are you alright?”
The man nodded and feebly reached for the door’s handle. As it swung wide, he slipped off the seat and fell out. Levi was there to catch him before he could hit the pavement. He gently lowered him until he was lying flat on his back.
“I’m sorry,” the man murmured in a thick foreign accent. “I haven’t eaten in two days. I’m a little weak.”
“That’s okay,” Levi told him. “We’ll get some food and water in you soon enough.” He looked over and saw that Jem and Avery were carefully lifting the woman from the passenger seat. “Your wife?”
“Yes,” said the elderly man. “Agnes. She’s diabetic. Her insulin was in the trunk, but we couldn’t get to it.” He craned his head and looked at the slaughtered forms around him. “They wouldn’t let us.”
“How did you end up here?”
“My name is Abraham Mendlebaum. I was a biological researcher in Oak Ridge… a scientist, if they still call us that these days. We left the facility there, intending to cross the mountains. Agnes has family in North Carolina… in a town called Hendersonville, near Asheville. We reached Gatlinburg and ran out of gas. I got frustrated and cranked the engine a few times. They heard us. We were trapped… couldn’t get out.”
Levi turned and called to Nell. “Bring some water.”
A moment later, his wife appeared with a bottle of purified water in her hand. She unscrewed the cap and brought it to his lips.
Mendlebaum turned his head aside. “What is the lot number of that bottle?” he asked cautiously.
“Lot number?”
“Yes, it signifies the date and facility that it was processed at,” he explained. “If it was bottled before June of this year, it is safe. If not, it is probably contaminated.”
“We’ve been drinking from the same case,” Levi told him. “So, I’d say that it’s okay.”
The old man nodded. Nell tipped the bottle and he drank. Mendlebaum took a couple of swallows and strangled. He coughed violently for a moment, then took some more.
When he finished, his eyes sharpened. “Where is Agnes?”
“On the far side of the car with my boys.”
“Does anyone know how to give an injection?” he asked.
No one did.
“Bring her to me and I will do it,” he said urgently. “There is a black duffel in the trunk. It has her medicine.”
Soon, Agnes Mendlebaum and the black bag were within Abe’s reach. He sat up weakly and began to work, drawing pale liquid from a vial and injecting it into one of the dark, protruding veins in his wife’s left hand. “I only pray that it’s not too late. I don’t believe that she has lapsed into a diabetic coma, but she is close.”
“You’ve got a helluva lot of food packed in that trunk, Mister,” said Avery.
“We’ll gladly share, if you’ll shelter us until Agnes is back on her feet,” the biologist told him, a ring of hopefulness in his voice.
Nell patted him on the shoulder. “Our home is yours, for as long as you have need.”
Abe took her hand. “Thank you, dear lady.”
While Levi and Jem looted a pancake house, a Mexican restaurant, a Starbucks, and a Burger King, Avery siphoned gas out of a Nissan Altima and filled the VW’s tank to the quarter mark. “We’ve got more gas up at the house,” he assured the old man. “Papa buys it by the tankload, for his logging business. You know, chainsaws, log splitters, generators and such.” He took a plastic Ziploc bag full of dried meat from his side pocket and handed it to Abe Mendlebaum. “Deer jerky? Might perk you up some.”
The elderly scientist eyed the offering skeptically.
“Weren’t nothing wrong with the animal it came from,” the boy assured him. “I’d say it was healthier than I was.” As he replaced the Volkswagen’s gas cap, he glanced into the rear of the car. “I see you’ve got an AR-15 in the back seat. Where’d you get it?”
“At the installation back in Oak Ridge,” Abe replied. “I took it off the body of an MP… right before he turned.”
“Got right ugly back there, did it?”
“Oh, yes.” A shadow born of uneasy memory fell across the old man’s angular face. “Extremely ugly.”
“When these Biters surrounded you, why didn’t you just cut them down?” Avery asked curiously. “You certainly had the firepower.”
Abe eyed the boy. “Have you ever tried to maneuver in the front seat of a Volkswagen Beetle with an assault weapon half as long as yourself? Opening the door would have been like ringing the dinner bell. Sometimes to survive, you simply do nothing at all.”
“Yeah, I get your point. I reckon you did the right thing.”
Soon, everything that could be found was packed into boxes and lashed to the bed of the logging truck. They carried Agnes Mendlebaum to the Yukon and laid her across the back seat. She was beginning to come to, moaning and squirming, but she was only semi-conscious.
“Think you’re up to driving?” Levi asked the old man.
“I believe so,” he said. “The jerky that Avery provided seems to have fortified me.”
“You’re bound to know more about what’s safe and what’s not than we do,” Levi said. “Maybe you can share that information with us when we get to the house.”
“I certainly will.” He patted the duffel that was slung over his stooped shoulder. “I have a full catalog of contaminant-free lot numbers for most manufactured food and water in the United States.”
Levi walked to the logging truck and looked in at Kate. “Darling, are you up to driving?”
The young woman smiled and nodded. “I’m okay, Papa.” Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. “I’m sorry about what happened… you know, back there with Bill.”
Levi’s work-hardened hand lifted her chin until her eyes were level with his. “The bastard deserved everything you dished out.” He thought about the last horrible accusation she had made against her abusive husband. “And I’m sorry about the…” The word stuck in his throat. He couldn’t bring himself to say it.
Kate leaned over and kissed him on his bearded cheek. “I know, Papa. Sorry I couldn’t tell you.”
Soon, everyone was in their vehicles and ready to go. Levi lingered outside the logging truck and studied the sky. The buzzards seemed twice as thick as before. They circled furiously and erratically, as though impatient to the point of madness. Just looking at the
m made Levi’s head swim. They had a hard-on for the carnage Levi and his family had left in the middle of the street, that was for sure.
“Should I torch ’em, Papa?” Avery asked.
“Naw. Leave ’em be.” He climbed into the cab of the logging truck. “Let’s head out,” he hollered loud enough for everyone to hear. “Those black devils will be down here and ready to chow as soon as we start rolling. And I don’t want to be in their way when they get here.”
Chapter 4
They were a mile up the winding logging road to Hobbs Ridge when Levi stopped the truck, climbed out, and trained the binoculars on the main street of Gatlinburg.
The sky had lightened considerably, but the little town appeared dark from where he stood, as though covered with a thick layer of soot. Buzzards had descended to clean up the mess they had left behind. Dozens of scavengers lit upon the bodies of the disabled Biters—picking, ripping, rending, and pulling at muscle, tendon, and vein with pale yellow beaks and hooked talons. They were a sociable bunch, Levi gave them that. After each had eaten their fill, they retired to the eaves of the buildings or the taut black lengths of telephone and power lines, allowing the others to partake while they digested the cold meat and tissue that lay in their bellies.
“Those birds stink as badly as the Biters,” Nell said. “The stench must be horrific down there.”
“You better believe it. The wind’s carrying a generous helping all the way up here. It’s like Hell without the flames.”
“Maybe this is Hell.”
He turned and looked at his wife, but said nothing. Nell had once been a strong, God-fearing woman, but what had happened in the world had tested her faith to the breaking point. At home, her Bible gathered dust on the nightstand and she never protested when they failed to say grace at the supper table.
Levi climbed back into the cab of the truck and they continued up the face of the mountain. They were nearly a half-mile from home, when Nell ducked her head and looked through the top of the windshield. “We’ve got more buzzards.”
The Buzzard Zone Page 2