Deadfall: Survivors

by Richard Flunker

  Evan returned with his scope to find us sitting there, feeling useless. He went to work on his scope though, and immediately found out that there were certainly people there. A few “guards” as he called them, spotted at the top of the main building. Below that, the main grounds were empty, probably the safest thing to do. The interstate itself was also empty, but, we did notice that it was completely clear of vehicles of any sort. One thing about I-26 was that it was definitely littered with cars of all sorts.

  As that day began to turn to dusk, we decided that we had better find the house, and see if we could make it our own for the evening. We could then rest safely, and plan our next move.

  The house itself had an odd stale smell to it, but was otherwise completely abandoned, if not completely preserved. Someone had left here and left things the way they were, and had not returned. There was no food to be found, so it had all been taken with the owners. There were a couple of bedrooms, with beds, mattresses and blankets. They could all probably use some washing, and I know everyone was shaking the sheets off to make sure no critters had taken permanent residence. The house was a strong stone house, with a nice big thick door, so after barricading it to be extra sure, we felt reasonably safe. We ate supper that night, and this time it was Tague’s turn to make fun…

  “Everyone ok? No bleeding? No broken skulls? I want to sleep tonight, and I don’t want Brian to scream too much.”

  We kept the lights out just to be sure, so as the sun went down, we all retired to our respective rooms. Heather and I slept in a room on the first floor. She even attempted to make her own jokes at my zombie attack, but they came out rather flat. I knew she was trying to smile and let things go, but who is ever really able to let all those things go? Instead of jokes, we talked about life before the dead, and she was better at ease with that conversation than with anything afterwards. Not that I wish I was a shrink, but I wish I could do more. And not only because I’ve completely fallen for her, but simply because I wish I could help.

  It’s not that I can cope so well with everything that has happened; I'm sure I don’t. One only has to look at how I scream when attacked by a zombie, to know I'm just as lost as anyone. It’s just that I seem to have adapted easily with the death and chaos, the loss of human life on a scale that rivals the Old Testament. I guess that happens when you're just not that attached to the human world to begin with. Maybe things will get worse.

  Or better.

  I continue because things began to move, starting that very next morning.

  We were all woken up very early that morning, with what appeared to be banging on the outside, along the door and windows. We all came crawling out of the bedrooms, groggy but alert. Tague was ahead, already at the door, quietly trying to see out of the windows. We all noticed something flash across a different window, to our left, but it was gone in an instant. Evan went back upstairs, while I moved slowly and quietly towards the very same windows we had seen something, dragging Heather along, as she refused to let go of my shirt. Aaron and Lucy got two rifles out of one of their bags and I heard clicks, safeties maybe.

  Tague continued to try to peek through the windows, when Evan returned back downstairs. He motioned with his hands for us to come back upstairs, which we did, although we made more noise than I wanted to. Upstairs, he whispered to us that there were about six zombies on the outside, five of which were just randomly dancing, as he called it, and another, which was the one that we thought was bumping up against the door and windows. These were of course, the only ones he could see, so there could be more. We quickly came up with the idea to slowly and quietly move the barricade away from the door. We would quickly open the door and assess what we had in front of us, and either deal with it immediately or close the door again and plan another way out.

  We each got our weapons ready. I remember Heather’s hands shaking, and I told her not to shoot if she didn’t need to. I knew I wouldn’t.

  We moved the couch aside and opened the door. Evan took the first look, and in about two seconds was out of the door, shooting twice. Tague and Aaron quickly followed behind. We had assumed that if Evan went out, then it was worth dealing with. I followed them out, very cautiously. The last thing I needed to do was to scream again. But by the time I stepped out, a few more shots had been fired, and Evan was walking up to the last one and was simply standing next to it. Aaron walked up to it and was about to pull his trigger, when Evan asked him to stop.

  “Look, it’s not doing anything. None of them were. Even the one that was against the door was walking so slowly, and it barely turned around to face me.”

  They stood there for a second, rifles pointed at the zombie, waiting to see if it did anything, but it didn’t. It simply stood there, just staring at Evan, not even making any sounds. It was clearly alive, well, alive, for a zombie, because its head kept swaying a bit. At one point it turned its head, very slowly, at Aaron. Then it took a very slow step towards him, and that’s when Aaron quickly shot it in the head.

  There had been only six; Evan had been pretty good at making sure that’s what he had seen. They looked no different than any other zombie we had seen before. That is, they were different people, but in anything that would make them seem like they would act any different, as sluggish as we had encountered them, there was nothing.

  Since that time, I have come up with a simple theory, although I might be wrong. The zombies are still living creatures, a term used lightly. They do eat to somehow nourish these bodies, I mean, they do require energy to keep moving around, although from what I have seen to this point, it probably doesn’t need much. Now, as I had mentioned before, I very rarely saw these things past thirty five hundred feet, essentially never. Maybe, it’s not some altitude thing, but maybe it’s just that they realize that going uphill expends more energy, and they simply don’t do it. So then, maybe the ones we encountered that morning had indeed followed us up, but had used up too much energy, and had become like that.

  Now, it’s entirely possible that I’m completely wrong, but if I’m not, could I not come to the conclusion that eventually all of these things will just run out of things to eat, and run out of energy? Would we go back to the normal world then? Well, other than whenever any one of us died, we would have a new zombie. Yeah, this world is a mess.

  You know though, it was after this little event that Heather actually came up with an idea that the rest of us wondered why we hadn’t thought of it earlier.

  Spears.

  She wondered why we couldn’t just use spears. My history teacher nerd rage kicked in, and I immediately jumped in to suggest that in a group, with spears, which could keep a reasonably large size of zombies at bay, while spearing their heads to take them out. It was something we would have to look into. It certainly would create a lot less noise than a bunch of gunshots, which is why we quickly packed up and left, this time following the driveway down to where the truck was parked. How we had missed the driveway the first time, I have no idea.

  With that spot being only a mile away from the conference center, someone there must have certainly heard the gunshots, so we wanted to be gone from there before anything else, or anyone else, showed up.

  So here we are, driving away back down that windy mountain road, with nothing to say for what we have attempted to do. Instead, it appeared like we had wasted away a couple of days, chasing after something we weren’t quite sure of. There really wasn’t any non suicidal way we were going to get into Ridgecrest and get any kind of information. The only thing we had gotten out of this entire trip were the DVDs (which could be nothing), and the fact that we put a face, although now a dead face, to this group we were tracking.

  We got back down the hill and turned back onto Highway 9 to head back the same way we had come. We stopped at an ABC store, a liquor store, because Aaron had asked to see if he could scavenge anything from the inside. Since we had no sightings, we stopped for a bit. Aaron and Evan went inside, while the rest of us stayed outside, kee
ping an eye on things out there, but mostly just talking about what had happened that morning. It was then that it all began.

  To our east, we began to hear the unmistakable sound of something in the air, like the sound of a helicopter. At the moment, it seemed funny to me that this sound seemed so foreign to me. Our first thought was that the men at Ridgecrest had their own helicopter, and were searching for the source of the gunshots we had made this morning. I grabbed Heather and jumped into the truck, while Tague and Lucy dashed into the liquor store. Heather and I ducked low in the truck, hoping the vehicle would look like just another random car along the road.

  While looking out the back window, three helicopters came slowly into view, moving from east to west, just north of us. I couldn’t tell you what kind they were, but they looked like your typical army helicopter, the kind you see in movies, especially the ones about the Vietnam War. No clue what those are called, but that’s what they looked like. They were moving together, well above the mountain, but kind of flowing with the contour of the land. They weren’t coming in our direction, and were actually not going towards the house which we had stayed at the previous night.

  And then I began to hear gunfire. Heather and I peered cautiously out of the rear window; I'm fairly certain there was zero chance that they could see us, as they were at least four to six miles away, probably more. We could hear the gunfire, and we could see the three helicopters began to weave and break formation, if they were in any kind of formation. The idea being something was making them scramble. We couldn’t see anything, though. One of the helicopters began to dip, dive down towards the ground, but in what appeared to be a controlled descent. Of the two that stayed up, one started to smoke and it began to spin, ever so slowly, while the third dipped down its head and sped forward.

  I lost sight of the one that dove down to the ground, as it disappeared behind a mountain. There were flashes coming off the one helicopter that was smoking, and Heather and I talked about this later, you could almost see traces of what I can only assume were bullets, streaming up from the ground somewhere behind the mountain. My guess, the group from the conference center. Why they had attacked the helicopters, I cannot fathom.

  The third was dipping down into the valley that we were in, probably to get out of the range of whatever gunfire was hailing on its two flying companions. It came down, hugging the north side of the mountain, flew into the main valley and began turning north, into the gap where I-40 was. It seemed to be circling around the mountain to get at the conference center from the west. What it hoped to do, I can’t know because at that moment, from somewhere down in the Black Mountain town, a rocket streaked out and hit the back of the helicopter.

  I don’t know what it was. Later, Tague would tell me that he thought (they were all just as hypnotized by what was occurring as they gazed out of the liquor store, as Heather and I were) that it was an RPG, a rocket propelled grenade. I didn’t know you could hit flying vehicles with it, but the more I thought about it, the more I could see Tague was right. As the helicopter had come around the bend of the mountain, it was only a few hundred feet off the ground. While I would have thought someone would need some kind of guided rocket thing to hit a helicopter (shows what I know) at that range, it was just like shooting a normal gun.

  The blast blew the back end part of the helicopter right over, that back propeller flying off straight up above the helicopter itself, while the rest of the vehicle itself spun about and came flying (if you can call it that), right towards us.

  I glanced to the east and couldn’t see either of the other two helicopters, although I could see a plume of smoke rising up from behind the mountain we had been at the night before, the rift that the gunfire had come from. That was just a quick glance, because our entire focus was on that helicopter spinning around and falling out of the sky towards us. It really only took a few seconds, maybe even more in the range of ten or fifteen seconds. Whoever was in there, was trying really hard to keep it somewhat afloat in the air, but I think that’s rather impossible without the helicopters tail.

  It crashed down about two miles north of us, down below us, among a bunch of houses. A huge plume of smoke rose up, but we saw no explosion or fire. I was debating on whether to get out of the truck, when Aaron and Tague ran past the truck and decided for me. I got out and joined them, while Heather stayed at the edge of the truck. From our point there above the town, we could now see the wreck of the helicopter. Although it was a mess, the helicopter seemed to be in one piece.

  Aaron went running back towards the truck.

  “We need to get to them right away.”

  Tague had mentioned that the shot that had taken them down had come from somewhere on the other side of the interstate, a good eight miles away, or at least he thought. Aaron made it clear that he wanted to get to them, to see if anyone had survived, before the other group got to them. I really didn’t have any time to give my opinion, as we were all just piling back into the truck.

  With Aaron driving, we nearly flew down the mountainside, and quickly turned into the neighborhood where the helicopter had crashed.

  As we pulled up, we quickly saw two guys trying to drag a third out of the helicopter. Upon seeing us, they laid him down and pulled out their guns. Aaron brought the truck to a screeching halt, and jumped out of the truck, shouting. I didn’t quite catch what he said, but I can only assume it was something towards the nature of “we come in peace.” The two guys were in shock, obviously, and the third was a bloody mess, but according to them, still alive. Aaron was telling them how we had seen everything, and quickly found out that they were part of the US Army, or whatever remained of it. He told them where the rocket had been fired from, and told them that we could help them.

  Decisions were being made quickly, and I was getting a little flustered by this quick change of events, but things were getting quickly out of my control, not that I had much to begin with. Aaron and Tague were helping the two soldiers get the third one into the back of the truck, while Evan was running back into the helicopter, and came out a few moments later with a rather large gun and some containers. I would be informed later that this was a 50 caliber machine gun and some ammunition, and that he was CERTAIN that it would come in handy. I don’t think anyone was about to argue with Evan and his love of guns.

  In the back seat, Heather had a death grip on my hand. It didn’t dawn on me until later that here she was face to face with soldiers again. Given that her last experience with soldiers had been horrific, the way she was reacting was normal. She remained quiet though. As Aaron and one of the soldiers helped strap the wounded soldier down in the back, the second soldier (I really needed their names) and Evan returned to the helicopter one last time, this time they came back out with a few more guns, and another large box which the soldier carried on his back like a backpack.

  With everyone set, the soldiers and Evan in the bed of the truck, Aaron pulled out and drove back out of the neighborhood, nearly running into a small pod of zombies who had been drawn to the chaos of noise caused by the helicopter crash. He jumped the curb into a yard running over one zombie, plowing it under. The heavy thud I heard made me cringe. The last thing we needed was to wreck the truck and be stuck here.

  As we pulled out onto Highway 9 and began to head back up the mountain, out of the valley, Evan slid the back window open, and shouted back into the cab that there were two trucks coming down the highway towards us at a high speed. We could only assume at that point that this was that groups welcoming committee. As we flew up the highway, winding around a few turns, it became clear that they had seen us, because they ignored the turn into the neighborhood, and came right towards us, following the highway up into the mountain.

  We sped by the liquor store and the road leveled out a bit into a straight away. Aaron was speeding into the road ahead of us, while Evan kept shouting updates through the back window. I turned around and saw the two trucks rounding up the hill, and beginning to speed up onto
the highway. Evan was scrambling to try to set up his big machine gun, but was having trouble setting it up on anything. When he tried to open up one of the containers with the ammunition, a long belt with bullets spilled out all over the floor of the truck bed. I heard him cursing, dropping the machine gun, and picking up one of the rifles the soldier had brought in from the helicopter.

  As our truck sped faster and faster, I was thankful that we had found this rather powerful truck. We were staying ahead of them. They must have realized this as well, because we started hearing the sounds of bullets zipping past us. Everyone in the back ducked down, and one of the soldiers began to fire back at the truck, making them swerve on the road. I did manage to glimpse the other soldier using that large pack he had brought on. It was some kind of radio. He had hooked up a headset of some sort to it, and was shouting into it.

  Up ahead, a pile of cars alongside the right side of the road, was forcing Aaron to slow down a bit to be able to get around them, but in those few instances, our pursuers began to catch up quickly, the hail of bullets clanging off the back of the truck or whizzing past us, zipping in a high pitch ahead of us. The armed soldier replied with gunfire, and then flew back himself into the back of the truck. He had been hit by something.

  We pulled around the two abandoned cars and began to speed up again, putting a bit of distance between us and the two trucks, but they were certainly not giving up. Aaron probably had his foot all the way down on to the floor as we sped up on the highway, the powerful roar of the truck’s engine rumbling underneath us.

  As the two trucks reached the car obstacles, I heard Aaron shout from the front.

  “HOLY SHIT!”

  There was a loud sound, like a super large vacuum cleaner combined with a grinder, from somewhere up above us, and then the two trucks began to get vanished in a haze of flying metal. One of the trucks flew off the road, glass and metal flying off of it. It was as if a chainsaw had hit a tree, and pieces of wood and bark were just flying off of it. The second truck came to a quick stop, and began trying to turn around when the hailstorm turned to hit it. The truck disappeared in a haze. It was like a picture getting out of focus. Smoke poured out of the front and the cab, and its roof was pulverized.