Deadfall: Survivors

by Richard Flunker

  We were up here for a little over a month, before he decided to leave. Again, he never told me why, and didn’t even say he was coming back, but he seemed ok with everything. Didn’t seem like someone who was running from anything. So, I wonder just what exactly he knew, and if he knew something that a whole group of well armed men would want, why wouldn’t he tell me?

  The logs reference his appearance at a water tower in Pittsboro. That’s a good distance from here, especially on foot. He was like me, a hiker, a walker. I can easily see him hiking from here to Pittsboro. I just didn’t enjoy picturing him hiking from here to there, with all those zombies in his possible path.

  There were no other references in there about my father as far as sightings or rumors about him anywhere. The entry about Pittsboro said he had been there, and long gone when this individual found out about it. It also mentioned that they would ignore the people living at the water tower, because it was a waste of time.

  That little bit there got me thinking about something my father and I talked about, not too long before he left. We had come up with theories about the zombies, and while mine sucked, he, as always, had some good stuff. We also talked about different ways to survive in the world. We clearly had our fully stocked freezers, but if humanity were to survive, they would need to find some way to reside, to live, in security. We had some ideas, but most of them involved being overly occupied with watching for zombies. It was also unfeasible to dig large holes, and stock them with hot water and computers.

  So, we came up with water towers. He reminded me of a hiking trip we had enjoyed many years before, and we had snuck into an older water tower, and spent the night up there, talking and looking at the stars. Other than the fear of possibly rolling off (we tied up our hammocks, so no fear there), we knew that no bear, and mostly likely no other animal, would bother us up there.

  I wonder if my father went with that idea, or, if someone else out there had that same idea. I could easily see some potential pitfalls, as in, being surrounded by zombies and stuck up there, and dying of starvation. It was just an idea.

  I’ve been talking with Heather about my dad tonight, even more so than that night at Cold Mountain. I even offered to find some of his books for her to read, but she had a statement about something quite obvious,

  “You want me to read a book about zombies and the end of the world?”

  Good point.

  Entry 39 – A New Car and an Old Story[37]

  All is good in Vaultville today. Aaron, Evan and Chris made their return today, and, as they had hoped, they returned with another vehicle. They had found a fifteen passenger van, and had removed the back two rows of chairs. They had also managed to come up with two barrels of fuel, one gas, one diesel. The back of our old (not really old) truck was full of assorted metal parts, plus a large gas canister barrel like thing. I was informed by a beaming Evan, that it was the gas for metal welding. When I asked him if he knew how to weld, he answered no. For some reason, I just left it at that.

  They had also found the chicken wire and extra wood that Dawn had request for her rabbit cages.

  The trip had gone without much incident. They had run into two small groups of zombies, which they had simply avoided by driving around one, and just detouring around the other. According to them, they had initially set their eyes on what they called a “sweet ass” RV. It was one of those very expensive ones, well, in the day of money. It had a large storage area in the back of it, and the moment they saw it, they thought it the ideal vehicle for moving about the zombie countryside. I thought about it for a moment, and before asking the obvious, I gave my opinion that, no, such a large vehicle, other than guzzling fuel, which might be limited, was too big to manage around all the car litter on the roads and highways. They replied that they thought of that later, as well. As it turned out, they spent three hours trying to find the keys, and when those were not located, they tried for two more hours to hot wire it, but were not successful, so they ditched it. Aaron did say he marked where it was, just in case.

  Just in case.

  The van would suit our needs perfectly. In combination with the truck, we would be able to move long distances, and take even more supplies. That would also allow Evan, if he was able to, to mount that thing on the back of the truck. Although, I don’t think I had really given him my full blessing, when it came down to it, it really wasn’t a bad idea. There was something very Mad Max about driving the wasteland, with a fifty caliber machine gun mounted on the back of your truck.

  At least he didn’t come back with a rocket launcher, or God forbid, a cannon of some sort. I wonder if that’s possible. I better not mention that to Evan.

  They arrived shortly after one in the afternoon, and a few hours after that, Tague emerged from his computer hideout, with some interesting results on his search. He had been doing a search on both the terms Inanna and Ionatite. As he sat us all down, he began first by saying that the Ionatite search had been inconclusive (not sure how that works on a computer search), but that he would try some different search parameters. The Inanna search though, yielded something rather interesting and spooky at the same time.

  He began by relating to us how he first found references for Inanna in an ancient myth story called the Epic of Gilgamesh. As a History teacher myself, I was mostly familiar with it, just not the details. It was an ancient Sumerian legend about this demi-god named Gilgamesh, who essentially, like most ancient demi-god types, kicks ass and takes no prisoners, on a long quest to do whatever it is that these types do. The interesting part of the epic is a part that clearly tells of a worldwide flood, eerily similar to the better known story of Noah and the flood in the world wide best seller book, The Holy Bible. I don’t know the details, since it was many years ago the last time I taught ancient history.

  Apparently, the name used in that myth for our mystery word is Ishtar, a far more familiar name. It’s a name for an ancient goddess of fertility, sex, war, love, but oddly enough, not for marriage, which was funny considering what she was the goddess of already. The joke being that there is plenty of sex, war and love in marriage. Now, the tie in here was that Ishtar was the better known name for this goddess. She was called this by the Babylonians and the Assyrians, better known ancient civilizations. The ancient Jews of the Old Testament era, knew her as Astarte, and thusly hated her hot sexy ways. But before the Babylonians and Jews, there was another civilization, known as the Sumerians. These are the people that we historians have a decent, clear understand of having created civilization as we know it. It’s not to say that there wasn’t civilization before them, just that we have records on these guys. They founded cities, farmed, developed writing, math, laws, that kind of stuff.

  Are you taking notes yet? There will be a quiz on this tomorrow. Well, the name these guys had for their goddess of hot sexiness was Inanna. So, there we go, our connection was made. So, almost two weeks ago, we had gone out to find a group of men, were chased by these men, shot at by them, made friends with a bunch of soldiers who attacked them after being attacked by them, killed a whole bunch of them and took their gear. These men called themselves the Followers of the Sexy Goddess of Hotness and Sex. Yes, I’m exaggerating to make a slight point. It made no sense.

  Here we were, after Tague had shown us these things he has found, and were all just as amused and confused as I’ve just mentioned. But, as if Tague was just waiting for the dramatic moment, he tells us that he found one more thing, something rather bizarre, yet oddly pertinent. He said he was browsing through the Epic of Gilgamesh and some other myths about Inanna, just to see what this goddess was all about, and he came up with a small section on a myth about her descent into Hell, or the underworld. Apparently, there were a lot of descent into Hell type myths about many gods, and that’s not the main thing here. Instead, this section details something very specific. I’ve typed it up here.

  It appears that Inanna is at the gates of Hell, and is yelling at the gate-keeper to open the gates
. This is what she says,

  “If thou openest not the gate to let me enter,

  I will break the door, I will wrench the lock,

  I will smash the door-posts, I will force the doors.

  I will bring up the dead to eat the living.

  And the dead will outnumber the living.”

  Trust me, when Tague read this out loud with all of us sitting there, there was a collective gasp. We had just read that some ancient Sumerian goddess had threatened to bring up the dead to eat the living, and have them outnumber the living. That sounded exactly like the situation we had here.

  Of course, the pragmatists in the group, namely, at that moment, only Tague, clearly pointed out that the source of the dead clearly came from the heavens, and by heavens he meant the actual physical sky, and that obviously no goddess had control over the dead, and while my logical sense automatically agreed with him, I could tell by looking around that a small supernatural and fantastical part of each and every one of us was wondering, if it was, at all, possible.

  In either case, as Tague continued, it was more likely that someone in our cult like group had come across this very same line in the myth, and had used it as their symbol.

  Which made us wonder, were they trying to control the dead?

  Evan’s Notes: That entry, the lines about Inanna, still are enough to give me pause.

  Entry 40 – Plans[38]

  The day has been spent in a buzz of conjecture. It has gone from trying to put our own spin on the information we received yesterday, to our own attempts to explain the rising dead, how they work. Mostly it’s all just fun bullshit to help pass the time, to create a sense of excitement in what is really a dull, dreadful world.

  My mind was somewhere else today, though. I was thinking back to Pittsboro, and my father’s supposed visit to that location, that water tower there. Simply put, what I was really thinking about was if I should go try to find him, or if it wasn’t worth the risk. The little side adventure we took two weeks ago, while exciting in its own macabre way, and despite the fact that it actually did help us uncover quite a bit of information we would now not have if we had not gone out, was supremely risky and in my opinion, not the best of ideas. And that was mostly within fifty miles of where we were now. Pittsboro was easily two hundred and fifty miles from here. If we left, we would need to plan well, and would be completely out of our safety zone. There would be no quick hideout. If anything went wrong out there, we would be, quite truly, on our own.

  I think that was the part that made me think twice. As I began to bring this subject up to the other members of Vaultville, they seemed open to the possibility. I was the lone person who felt that it wasn’t a good idea. I suspect the truth was that they had already been on their own, out in the dead world, and while I had done my hiking around, I had always had my fallback position.

  And so I brought it up a bit more at this evening’s dinner, with the intent of creating a very serious discussion about it. I made the point that apparently we had come across something important, and that if my father knew about it, we should try to help him, or at least, attempt to discover what it was that he knew. Also, he was my father, and the very house we were in right now was his work and creation, so maybe, we owed him.

  As I had seen earlier in the day, everyone in the group was fully in favor of this idea. The sole dissident was Dawn, who, while not opposed to it, was simply indifferent. So, just like that, and despite the fact that I was still quite afraid deep inside, we decided that we would venture out to attempt to find my father, in whichever state he was in.

  The main idea would be to head out to Pittsboro, but be ready to travel on to wherever my father would have gone to next. Clearly, he had not left here to go to Pittsboro, so he must have had a destination in mind. I could only hope that we could find any hint of that destination at Pittsboro, although quite honestly, I had no idea how such hints would materialize.

  Aaron, Lucy and Heather would begin to plan just how much of our supplies we would need. I had guessed that it would probably take two to three days to reach Pittsboro, one day if we ran into no detours or obstacles, moving or otherwise. Seeing as how our previous trip had easily gone way past our planned time out in the world, we began to think a month’s supply worth of food and gear. If we began to run low, then we could always return to resupply, or give up.

  Evan still wanted to finish up with his gun mount. He had spent the whole day reading up on how to weld, thanks to information on the computers. I can truly see what my father had intended for this vault to be. Evan figured that he would practice tomorrow, and then hopefully, put together something the day after. That gave us two days.

  Tague said that he would take as much time as was given to him, to continue researching anything that he might find relevant. He said he still hoped to find something about this Ionatite. If the Followers wanted this, surely there would be some kind of reference to it in some file somewhere. By the time we were ready to leave, he had not found any information.

  Dawn and Chris would cook. Best way to take some of the food was to precook it here, and Dawn did say that at least that was something she could try to do. Bread would be baked, and I hoped I wouldn’t just eat it all now, as it came out of the ovens. Chris said he had no cooking skills, but that, in his own words, “what the hell.”

  I would plot out our trip, as well as plenty of alternates.

  I asked Heather again tonight, if she thought we were doing the right thing.

  “I know my dad is dead. If I didn’t, I would do almost anything to know for sure whether or not he was alive.”

  I must say, that girl has me.

  Entry 42 – Tired[39]

  Tired.

  Entry 43 – Out[40]

  We spent all of yesterday bring up the supplies from the storage rooms; many pounds, up many steps. As a guy who thoroughly enjoys hiking, I must say that I absolutely hate steps. I had fully intended to provide a little description of the supplies we were taking because, to give Aaron a lot of credit, he really planned it out nicely. But, I was tired. I opened up the notepad, stared at it a while, and then only typed in that one single word. Heather was next to me, already sleeping, so that was that.

  So instead of spending time on a very detailed list of our supplies, I’ve come up with this description,

  We’re set.

  We loaded the van and truck up with the food this morning, filled up one of the barrels with water, and we were getting ready to leave, when Dawn dropped us a little bombshell. She asked us if she could stay behind. It really wasn’t that big of a bombshell. She plainly told us that she had no desire to get out into the world, that she would do us no good, and mostly likely do more harm than good. There were no arguments against it. I essentially told her that if we weren’t back in a month, to attempt to radio the military in Wilmington. It dawned on me later, that she didn’t know how to use the radio, and we had no contact information for them.

  I would like to mention here, because it becomes important later on, that while we were bringing up the supplies yesterday, Evan made a discovery among the “weapon” supplies that brought a smile to Heather’s face. We found spears. Now, before you get an image of a stick with a rock attached to the end of it, these looked about as high tech as spears can get. The shafts were made out of a very light, yet hard metal, quite possibly titanium, while the tips were screwed on, and could be replaced easily, if damaged, with some spares that we also found. We grabbed a dozen of them as well, finding a place for them in the van. Apparently, my father had really thought of many things.

  When it came down to it, I think I felt much more comfortable warding off the dead hordes with a spear, than a gun. I don’t think I’d spear myself in the foot.

  Maybe.

  In either case, it made Heather’s day, mostly because she had brought up the idea of using spears not too long ago.

  Tague joined us from his last efforts in trying to search for any more information
on Ionatite, but when I asked him on his way through the door, he only shook his head sadly. This bit of information would have to wait, then. He did say though, that he left an extremely thorough search going on in the computers, which would take almost a week to complete. If, or when, we returned, maybe then we would have something.

  Alright, so we headed out on my planned route. We drove down the mountains into Hendersonville, yet again. I-26 was clear enough this time around, though, and after one simple detour on the eastern side of the interstate, we were back up into the hills, away from any dead. As I had hoped, the trip was without incident, at least of the dead kind, until we came down from the mountains, and into the Piedmont.

  North Carolina was quite clearly divided into three geographical parts; the coast, the Piedmont, and the mountains. It was the first two that I was worried about traveling through. Just as I had suspected, not long after we passed Lake Lure, we started seeing more of the dead. Mostly, we would catch glimpses of them wandering through the fields, individuals or in smaller groups. Whenever we went through a small town, we would see a few more. When we were passing through Lincolnton, it was very empty on the roads, but we passed a McDonalds restaurant that had a whole load of them on the inside. As we drove by, they all rushed, well, stumbled over, to the large glass windows. It was an eerie sight, and it made us wonder just how they had all gotten in there. Most likely, a group had attempted to barricade themselves in there, and something had clearly gone wrong.

  Evan joked that it was better than having to survive on McDonalds food for weeks. It was funny, and yet it wasn’t.