by Smith, S. L.
CHAPTER THREE: THE FENCE
Isherwood was just standing there holding his wife. He had tucked his wife’s head under his chin and was holding her as they both caught their breaths. He listened as the swarms of zombies hit the fence. The fence groaned as each group slammed against it.
Aunt Tad and the other women ran back to the fences with their weapons. Lizzy and Isherwood’s grandmother, Mrs. Lorio, still weren’t comfortable using knives. They had instead used their knives to sharpen the ends of broomsticks. Lizzy and Mrs. Lorio were also shorter than most all the zombies. Instead of stabbing through the fence at the zombies’ temples, like Tad, they plunged their broomsticks up and through the underside of the jaw bone. They had each already practiced this motion several times protecting their home during the last week. For petite women, they found they wielded quite a bit of force with this upward thrusting motion.
Mrs. Lorio winced as she stabbed her broomstick handle up through the bearded neck of an older man. He had been trying to squeeze his thick head through the iron bars of the fence. He had been pushing with such ferocity that he had sheared off his ears and cheeks in the process. There was a popping sound as the head became unstuck as it was launched backward. “Oh, dear,” she said as she yanked the shaft back out. “He used to be my air conditioner repair man.”
“Wow,” Aunt Lizzy smirked. “He’s nothing but a pile of goo now.”
“Come on, Ish.” Uncle Jerry tapped Isherwood on the shoulder. “Let’s check out the rest of the fence before we get too cozy.”
Isherwood groaned, finally pulling away from his wife. “You’re right. This could all come tumbling down on us if that fence isn’t solid.”
“Wait,” Sara growled. “What about your leg? Remember how you shot my husband, Uncle?”
“Just a little stinger.” Jerry smiled. “But where’d that rifle shot come from?”
“Don’t know, but must be one of the good guys, right? Hope we find out soon. An extra hand and a good shot, too, would be nice.” As he said it, he was feeling around his calf muscle and trying to look through the new hole in his jeans. “Yeah Sara, he’s right. No immediate need. I can walk on it fine. After you’ve dispatched these twenty or so, get everybody inside or at least inside the rectory’s fence for now. We don’t want to draw any extra attention just yet. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Monsignor will still be here and alive. We’ll sweep the perimeter for holes, come back, and start sweeping buildings.”
Isherwood nodded at Sara and the rest, and was about to turn and run off to walk the fence line.
Sara grabbed his shoulder, jolting him backward. “Ah,” Isherwood smiled. “A parting kiss for your husband, the hero?”
“Sort of,” Sara said, tapping the firearm Isherwood was still holding. “You need to reload.”
“Oh, yeah.” Isherwood nodded, as his cheeks registered crimson. Isherwood left the little group of ladies and Uncle Jerry to reload from the box of rounds he had left in the front seat of the CRV.
“Going to church, ma-daddy?” Emma called from the back seat. She was kicking the back of the driver’s seat still strapped into her child seat. Her little brother Charlie, Isherwood noticed with a smirk, seemed to be sound asleep, the earlier trumpeting of gunfire notwithstanding.
“Sort of, Lu-lu. We’re gonna be living at church from now on. We hope.” As he spoke to her, he was pushing the brass rounds into the magazine. He thought to himself how his hands were able to do this much faster now than a week ago. Callouses were thickening up his thumbs, too, where he pushed the rounds into place. The pistol was desperately in need of a good oiling. Isherwood had a little burst of excitement as he thought about how the time was coming when he would need to raid a gun store or a hidden cache in one of the nearby homes to start stockpiling weapons and ammunition.
“Living at church?” She repeated. “Church” sounded like “search” in her little voice.
“Yep, it’s like God’s castle. To protect us from the cut-men.”
“Cut-men.” Emma nodded, approvingly. “Daddy bang-bang in their face.”
“Uh, right.” Isherwood said with hesitation. He was always underestimating what she was able to see and absorb. He tried not to think about what all the gore and guts were doing to her little psyche. He was glad that Charlie was able to sleep through it all. Maybe.
Isherwood slid the first magazine back into place. The second one he slid down his back pocket, the same pocket that he used to keep his wallet in. Not much use for wallets anymore.
As he was about the close the driver’s side door, Sara came behind him with his Aunt Lizzy along the far side of the car to grab the kids from their child seats. The ladies had apparently finished dispatching the initial wave of zombies from inside the fence. Charlie grumbled as he was dislodged from his seat and then settled back down to sleep in his aunt’s arms.
“All right, Emma Claire. Stay looking at mommy. We’re gonna go hang out for a minute in Monsignor’s back yard, okay?”
“Okay, ma-mommy,” the little girl answered and then promptly plugged up her mouth with her thumb.
*****
“Ya-know, I think this place’ll do just fine.” Uncle Jerry was nodding as they walked the perimeter of the church grounds. Isherwood had been rattling the iron bars to begin scattering the mass of zombies that had formed at the church’s northeast gate. They were walking counter-clockwise around the church grounds toward the west and back south again, towards the river. The northwestern section of the church grounds was mostly open land, interspersed with tall pine trees. There was another gate here for access to a long steel recyclables container.
“That container might prove useful,” Isherwood thought out loud. “Not quite as tall as a container ship container, but it could be used as sort of a panic room in a pinch if things got hairy.”
“Would be better if we could move it,” Uncle Jerry said. Jerry was pushing into his seventies, but was still incredibly strong. Though his hearing and sight were beginning to fail – Isherwood had been truly lucky only to be nicked by Jerry’s shotgun blast – his body was still strong. His skin was long-darkened, either by exposure to the sun and hard work or by the Cajun in his blood. He had worked for the last several decades, as sort of a semi-retirement, in the St. Maryville electric company. Tad – Sara’s aunt and Jerry’s wife – looked much the same as Jerry in skin tone, but was at least ten years younger. In contrast to Isherwood’s Aunt Lizzy and grandmother, Sara’s aunt and uncle were going to be much handier to have around, as both were used to living off the land. The apocalypse and the subsequent failure of the electric grid and other modern conveniences really hadn’t affected Tad and Jerry’s life much, except for the absence of visits from their children and grandchildren, none of whom lived very close by.
They were moving south now, along the west side of the church grounds. There were no gates on this side of the fence. The adjacent property was the Poydras Building and surrounding buildings, which were owned by the city. The Poydras Building used to be Central High School. It was several stories tall and strong, like a fortress, in its own right. It had no fence, though.
“Those warehouses behind Poydras are full of city vehicles, right, Uncle Jerry?”
“What’s that?” Jerry said, leaning his ear closer to Isherwood’s mouth.
“City vehicles?” Isherwood asked again, pointing to the buildings behind the Poydras building.
“Oh yeah, and a whole maintenance bay full of belts, engine oil, spare tires, and everything we could need to keep a fleet going. That’s gonna be a treasure there, boy.”
“Nice,” Isherwood smiled. They had walked along thousands of feet of fence line and had yet to find a single damaged section. There were several places with diagonal bracing, but Isherwood hardly thought it was necessary. The fence posts themselves were thick as tree trunks in most places, like the Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge.
“Good looking fence, eh?” Isherwood asked Jerry as they came to th
e southwest corner of the church property where the fence ended about ten feet from the edge of Main Street. They had passed under the shade of an ancient oak tree that stood on the church grounds between the Poydras Building and the church office and Adoration Chapel.
Jerry slapped his thick hand like a bear claw against the post that marked the southwest corner. Jerry’s hand made a thudding sound against the solid iron. “Better by a mile than the chain-link at the Kingdom Hall,” he answered. The square post was taller than either of the two men, over seven feet, and served also as a pedestal for a sculpture of a winged lion.
As they turned to the east, all of Main Street and downtown St. Maryville unfolded before them.
“Crap.” Isherwood said, and was echoed by Uncle Jerry’s more explicit phrasing. “Good thing we took the side streets.” Isherwood continued. The mobs weren’t thick directly in front of the church where a statue of Jesus – “Touchdown Jesus,” most called it – looked across the road to the entrance of St. Mary’s. Behind the statue of Jesus the land fell away steeply to a boat launch, the main entrance to False River. No doubt the steepness of the incline helped thin the crowd of staggering, sometimes off balance, zombies. Much further on, however, the crowds grew thick, so thick they blocked the rest of the view of Main Street.
“Guess we won’t be grocery shopping at Langlois’.” Isherwood remarked. Six blocks further east was the grocery store at the front of Delware Avenue, the other end of which they had just come from. “I’d only snuck in the grocery at night and from the back – I never realized this is what Main Street looked like.”
“It might be getting worse, too – those things seem to attract one another.” Jerry added. “We ought to keep a lower profile even behind this fence.”
“Let’s just check the two gates in from of the church office, and we can fade to black after that. They seem to be the only weak parts of the whole fence line.”
“There’s one more gate after these, ain’t there?” Jerry asked.
“Yeah, the east side has one gate. We might be able to get to it without getting noticed if we go around the back of the church. We’ll be skipping the southeast corner, but if we don’t see any of those things staggering across the lawn, it’ll be a good bet that part of the fence line is solid as the rest. Ah, crap – there’s one more set of gates we’d be skipping over. The front gates, right in front of the main doors of the church.”
“All right. We’ll be fine if we stick together. I haven’t heard a peep from the women-folk, so they’ve probably found their way inside the fence of the rectory. That line of trees and landscaping should get us close enough to the front gates without them things being none the wiser.”
*****
“Crap.” Isherwood said again, after they had crawled and crunched their way through the inside of some giant formosa azalea bushes. They had their backs against a three-sided low brick wall that served as a planting bed for flowers and a small crape myrtle tree. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
Isherwood pointed to a place midway up the right front gate, and was again echoed by Uncle Jerry’s more explicit phrasing. “Maybe Tattoo wigged out and made a break for it.” The gate was only slightly ajar. Oddly, it was open towards Main Street, so it was unlikely that many zombies, if any at all, had wandered inward. “The padlock’s just hanging there.”
“Is the padlock hanging open?” Jerry asked, unable to see for himself.
“Yes. Just dangling there.” Isherwood answered.
“That’s luck.”
“We’re less than fifteen feet away. I could sprint over there, shut the gate, and lock it, before any of those things noticed, much less got to me. Heck, it’s a decent angle. I might be able to get away without notice altogether.”
“Do it, kid.” Jerry agreed. “Do it before our luck runs out. I’ll cover you.” Isherwood winced at the idea of the shotgun being aimed near him again. “But, Ish – don’t sprint. Just mosey over there real easy like, and they might just think you’re a dead-head, too.”
At the count of three, Isherwood slowly rose up from behind cover. As he stood there and quietly began moving toward the gate, he noticed that none of them were noticing him. This had worked for him during his night time raids, but he had never really tried it in the daylight. Within moments, he was standing at the gate and pulling it towards him. It was heavy. Too heavy. The creaking might as well have been a blast from a fog horn – or a dinner bell. Half of Main Street swung their heads his way.
“Come on, kid!” Uncle Jerry said, cussing. Isherwood’s hands began shaking violently as he fumbled with the padlock. A hand fell atop his own, and he was looking eye to eye at a rotting teenage girl. Only her stringy hair could pass between the iron bars, but she was tugging on his hand. He couldn’t forcefully push her away, so Isherwood dragged her arm inside the posts and snapped in sideways, rendering it unusable. He then pushed it back out of the gate. It was horrible, Isherwood thought, as he watched the girl’s eyes through their little exchange, how the pain didn’t even register on their faces.
Isherwood swung the creaking gate so that its iron ring overlapped the matching ring of the post. He slipped the padlock through the union and closed it with a click. Though the padlock was joining to other sturdy pieces of metal, he thought to himself that the spot will likely need to be reinforced soon. With the few moments he had left before more of those things stumbled over, he pulled out a few long strips of black plastic from his pockets, which he had brought for just this purpose. Zip ties. They could seal up a chain link fence against zombies no problem, but they weren’t yet tested on iron posts. He zipped them tight at three places along the length of the post. That’ll hafta do for now, he thought to himself as Uncle Jerry’s thick arm began dragging him backward.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE RECTORY
“Your husband just made sure that fence is gonna get field tested in a hurry.” Uncle Jerry added, somewhat loudly, to the hushed discussion that was ongoing in the backyard of the rectory.
“So y’all haven’t seen any sign of anything moving inside the rectory?” Isherwood asked. “Have you even tried knocking?”
“No and no – you made me promise you I wouldn’t knock until you got back. Remember?” Sara scolded.
“Oh, yeah.” The wave of crimson again washed over Isherwood’s face. “Well, any reason I shouldn’t get on with it?” He looked from face to face. Sara’s was shaking her head, as Emma squirmed in her arms. Emma’s thigh had been reddened with spanks, after she had started screaming for Sara to let her down. Isherwood’s aunt and grandmother were wavering on their feet with unfocused eyes, probably in some minor state of shock. Aunt Lizzy was still holding Charlie and he was still sleeping.
Aunt Tad was standing with the shotgun slung over one arm and holding Uncle Jerry’s arm with the other. “Nah, honey. Let’s get on with it. Bet they’ve got nice beds in there, and I wouldn’t mind putting my head down. Might even get a good night’s sleep tonight behind that nice fence.”
“Agreed.” Isherwood nodded. He turned to the rectory’s back door that opened into the backyard from the kitchen. He knocked on it a few times, but there was no answer or sound from the house. He leaned over a metal railing to peak inside the kitchen window. “I’m not seeing anything. There are more doors – one on every side of the house. Let’s not split up, though.”
“Well,” Sara whispered. “The good news is – if we haven’t heard anything yet, it’s probably not a zombie inside. It’s either empty or Monsignor is sleeping or Monsignor is more deaf than we realized.”
“Or,” Isherwood said. “He’s more deaf than we realize because he just fired a rifle to save my butt.” Uncle Jerry grumbled in agreement. “Yeah, let’s see if we can pry this door open. Sara, why don’t you throw some pebbles at the upstairs window while I do this. Hate to ruin a perfectly good door and lock these days.”
The pebbles having done no good, Isherwood was able to pry open the door a few minutes la
ter. In a moment, they were all in the kitchen of the rectory. Isherwood put the door back together as best he could and latched it. “Everybody just stay here in the kitchen a second, okay?” Isherwood went into the large dining room adjacent to the kitchen and grabbed a chair. He left Monsignor’s chair untouched at the head of the table.
“Looks like somebody’s been using this kitchen,” Gran said. “A living person, I mean.”
“I think this is the first time I’ve been in the rectory.” Aunt Lizzy said.
“I know it’s my first time.” Aunt Tad said with a note of derision. She and Uncle Jerry had both grown up Catholic, but had since bounced through various non-denominational and Pentecostal congregations.
“There. That just hold for now.” Isherwood said as he wedged the dining room chair under the doorknob of the kitchen door. “The rest of the doors – except for maybe the screen door on the side porch – are old and heavy and should withstand anything.”
“Good, because Charlie’s starting to stir.” Aunt Lizzy said.
“Yeah, and Emma’s about to go mad. She wants to get down and run around.”
“Almost.” Isherwood said. “Let me sweep the house first.”
“And, Isherwood. I don’t understand,” Gran said. “Why are you so worried about the doors? I thought you said the fence would hold.”
“It’s a fine fence.” Uncle Jerry agreed.
“It will hold, Gran.” Isherwood nodded. “But, we’re gonna need several layers of fortification, you know what I mean? The fence is the first layer, though I have plans for pushing beyond the fence. The buildings are the second layer, and the church building, itself, is the last layer, the castle keep, sorta.”
“Pushing beyond the fence?” Sara asked.