by Smith, S. L.
“Alrighty, then.” Just nodded to himself, as he closed the door of the Escalade behind him. “Maybe I won’t be letting you play with my kids, after all.” He mumbled to himself.
“Looks like the doors to the place are wide open,” Patrick said looking through the scope of the rifle.
Isherwood sighed. “That’s probably a bad sign. I think this place probably ended up serving as an emergency shelter, once General Hospital devolved into a bloodbath. They probably started triaging the bitten, and we know what happens after that.”
“The place is slowly emptying in this direction,” Patrick told them after squeezing off another couple of rounds. “You could probably loop around the back and enter without being seen.”
“You sure we even want to go in there?” Justin asked. “It’s probably a house of horrors. I think I can hear the flies buzzing from here.”
Isherwood shook his head in indecision. “Let’s help Patrick ring the dinner bell a bit first. The zed crowd looks like it’s starting to thicken. But we have to get to that armory before someone else can. There will probably be some automatic rifles scattered among the dead that we’ll need to gather up, too.”
“You got it, dude.” Justin relented. He hopped into the bed of the truck and pulled another .22 from the gun rack.
After another couple of rounds, Patrick was reloading. “All this time, you haven’t reloaded yet?” Isherwood said from the tailgate, where he was cleaning up the dead straggling up the road behind them.
Over the next half hour or so, each of them was forced to reload at least once. “That place just never seems to empty. It’s not like the doors were locked or even closed. Why would they not have scattered over time?”
“Something’s rotten in Denmark. Clearly.” Patrick replied. Then, realizing what he had done, “I’m sorry, guys – there’s like a Shakespeare quote for everything.”
There was soon an extended pause in the flow of zombies coming from in and around the armory. They left the trucks behind, as well as the little boy. Justin looked back to see his eyes peeking out just above the dashboard. They immediately disappeared again.
They found the first uniformed guardsmen near the front door. “At least they didn’t turn,” Patrick said at the grisly sight.
“They never had a chance.” Isherwood frowned, looking down at the odd collection of still-uniformed body parts. “They were probably swarmed, poor guys. True to their posts until the end. At some point, we’re gonna have to honor the dead with proper burials.”
“I was wondering when you’d get to that part,” Justin said with feigned exhaustion in his voice. “Gross, you could at least leave what’s left of them alone.”
“I told you I was going to collect up the firearms. It doesn’t bother you when people in the movies leave guns behind all the time?”
“Gahh! I hate that.” Patrick said, bending down to help out.
“Well, sure. I just think we have plenty enough already.”
Isherwood stood back up, checking out the condition of the pistol and automatic rifle he had retrieved. “Maybe for now, but we’ve gotta think long term.”
“Figures,” Patrick said, fingering a pistol he had found. “Magazine’s empty. They must’ve fought to the bitter end.”
“Shhh! Wait.” Justin said from just inside the door. There was a short hallway before another set of glass doors opening into a wide assembly hall. Justin had turned on his flashlight and was shining it into the darkness of the hall. They followed him in, finding another pair of firearms as they went.
“I think I can hear what was drawing them in or keeping them in. There’s something rattling around in there.”
“By all means let’s go into the dark following a funny noise.” Patrick said with actual enthusiasm.
They stood still together in a line as their eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light. Justin’s flashlight was slowly scanning the large, gymnasium-like hall. There were lines of narrow windows along either side of the walls, but only a little light was coming through. It was overcast. Justin had been right about the flies, as well. As their eyes adjusted, they began to comprehend the carnage around them. There were lines of flipped cots and a maelstrom of supplies and rations, but the single most common thing littering the floor was rotting meat. Even now, the floor was sticky with blood.
Isherwood choked. “It’s like a scene from a Kubrick movie.”
“Yeah,” Patrick agreed. “Like that elevator of blood in The Shining. Tidal wave splashing up the walls. The smell, though – the movie couldn’t tell us about that. Shows us just how accustomed we’ve become to all this crap.”
Justin shook his head. “A few years of fatherhood were enough to stall my gag reflex. I’d almost rather this than a nursery full of kids exploding with a stomach bug.” The rest of them nodded in agreement. Their eyes fluttered with memories. “Y’all ready? I think the noise – whatever it is – is coming from inside one of those metal cages. It might just be an alarm clock.”
“I can’t believe how easy it is to herd those things up.” Isherwood raised his hand in disgust. “A stupid alarm clock? Are you serious? If the human race had known about this weakness, we could’ve survived.”
“Hey,” Patrick said. “I resent that. We did survive. I’m still here, aren’t I.”
“The son of man,” Isherwood smiled distractedly, as he began searching through the junk left behind for guns and ammo. He had turned his flashlight on. “You know,” he said. “I might just pass on all this mess. Go straight for the armory.” He headed back to the entrance and began arranging the useful supplies he had found on one of the few clear spots on the ground. Coming back in the gymnasium hall, he found Patrick and Justin staring into one of the metal cages against the wall. The cages, like individual prison cells, probably once served as materiel storage lockers but were now mostly empty.
“Looks like he survived in here for a week or more,” Justin was saying. “Dude, fought off starvation for a week or more probably on MREs before finally putting a bullet in his head. Can you imagine being shut up in that little cage, surrounded by these things all this time?” They had followed the tiny sound of the alarm to a storage locker, where a black uniformed man lay curled up on the ground around a radio backpack. The radio was emitting a constant hum of static – it was the noise they had been hearing.
“Bullet?” Patrick asked. “I don’t see any wounds.”
“Dude,” Isherwood said sternly, pushing his way between them. “He’s still breathing.”
“He’s what?” Justin said looking back down in surprise. “Are you kidding me? Let’s get him out of there. Probably needs water. If he’s lasted this long, God knows what he’s been drinking.”
“That’s weird,” Patrick said, tugging at the lock that had been holding the door latch in place. “It’s padlocked from the outside.”
“Either he’s a criminal, then, or somebody stuffed him in there to protect him.” Isherwood thought aloud.
Patrick ran off saying he was going to grab the triangular file and the mini-sledge. A couple seconds later, Justin and Isherwood heard shots being fired and ran off after him. Patrick appeared to be in no serious danger, though, having dispatched five or so zombies that had wandered down the road in their absence. Soon, however, Justin was holding the lock in place as Patrick knocked the file deeper into the shackle.
“Whoa,” Isherwood said, nudging the man with a booted foot. “This isn’t a dude. It’s a lady.” The woman suddenly awoke with terror in her eyes, but fell helplessly into a coughing fit. They helped her to her feet and carried her outside to the trucks. Isherwood was excited to finally have an opportunity to use the survivor’s kit he had put together for Old Blue. It had food and water, as well as some basic medical supplies.
They heard a door slam suddenly. Isherwood spun on his heels, dropping the kit and grabbing his gun. Justin and Patrick, too, nearly dropped the woman in favor of their sidearms. It was the boy they had f
ound. After hiding timidly inside the Escalade the whole time, he was now running across the road to them without a fear in the world. He plowed right into the woman’s legs. Patrick and Justin lowered her to the ground as she started to stir awake. There was dawning recognition on her face, though extremely weak. The boy immediately curled up in her lap, and she slowly reached up an arm to wrap around the boy. Isherwood pushed a bottle of water into her mouth, and she drank greedily from it.
“Not too much, not too much – it’ll shock your system, ma’am.”
“Momma, momma,” they heard the boy whisper as he curled up against the woman’s uniformed bosom. The three men looked at each incredulously. “Momma,” the boy repeated.
“There’s no way.” Justin said. “That’s just – just –”
“Yeah,” Isherwood agreed. “Just that.”
They helped the woman and the boy into the Escalade, and Justin agreed to sit with them while the other two finished searching the building for the weapons cache. It wasn’t long before they found it. Luckily, the weapons area wasn’t sealed like a bank vault. It was just another padlocked cage door that sealed off a windowless room. The padlock, however, hung open from the closed latch. Whoever had last emerged from the weapons locker had not been too concerned about sealing it back up.
“Wow,” was all either of them could say for a minute, as their eyes darted around. There was some of everything in there and all of it in abundance. The pistol rack was knocked backwards and a pile of ammo lay scattered across the floor, but that was the only sign of the final struggle to take back the armory.
“It’s like walking into an F.A.O. Schwartz.” Patrick gurgled. There were racks and racks of 12 gauge tactical shotguns and M16 A4 automatic rifles, all with bayonets, tomahawks, frag and other kinds of grenades. There were M9 and M11 pistols in neat racks with stacks of ammunition lockers piled high around them.
“Or Wonka’s Chocolate Room.” Isherwood agreed. “There’re actually grenade launchers in here, man. What the flip am I gonna do with one of those? Blow my head off, probably. But can you imagine? I could hold off thousands of those things from crossing the bridge. Or, the land bridges on either side of False River.”
“How’re we gonna get it all back to the church?” Patrick asked.
Isherwood laughed. “With glee.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: CARDINALS FANS
“I know you’ve been thinking about your family a lot.” Isherwood said, interrupting himself as he droned on and on about his plans for St. Mary’s. He and Sara were taking their morning stroll through the Prayer Garden, following morning coffee with Gran and the others. Sara had been giving him only short non-verbal replies for the last couple of minutes. Isherwood knew her attention lay elsewhere.
“My thoughts were that loud, huh?” Sara smiled sadly. “I’ve been trying really hard to keep that from you, because I knew there was enough on your shoulders already.”
“I wish we could just get a message to them. I’ve been leaving cryptograms behind wherever we stop.”
“Crypto-whats?”
“Just symbols spray-painted on the ground mostly that will tell only friendly people and family, I hope, where we are and not the thugs.”
Sara was looking at Isherwood suspiciously, and not without a certain note of fear. “What symbol could do that?”
“It’s a Chi-Rho pointing towards St. Mary’s. I remembered that Christians in Rome used the Chi-Rho during the persecutions. It just blended in with the graffiti. Though,” Isherwood added, looking a little worried. “Mine won’t be blending in with any graffiti.”
“No,” Sara said tugging on her husband’s arm. “It’s a brilliant idea, I’m sure. The bad guys will definitely not recognize that. But,” she said, trailing off.
Isherwood had pulled her down to sit beside him on one of the garden benches. “Now what else I did? Just yesterday, actually. We found a nicer radio. There was a UHF backpack radio in the armory. Vanessa was all wrapped around it. I think the solar-powered battery charger will charge its batteries. I think there’s a working antenna, too. You can point it towards Whiskey Bay. I’ll talk to Vanessa whenever she comes around.”
Sara let out a sign of relief. Isherwood could feel her shoulders heaving as she cried quietly in his arms. He was relieved for now that she was relieved. He knew, however, that whether or not the attempt to establish radio contact was successful, he would still need to figure out a way to get down to Whiskey Bay. He had already planned the route in his mind. He hadn’t told Sara, but he guessed that she already knew.
*****
They had arrived back at St. Mary’s an hour or so before sunset the night before. They were loaded down with the stockpile of weapons and their new guests. The men unloaded the weapons into a large closet in the St. Joseph Center, clearing out boxes of art and youth group supplies. Returning to the rectory for dinner, they found that the women had succeeded in nursing the black woman they had found back to consciousness. They had discovered that her name was Vanessa and that, despite the impossible odds, the boy they had also found that day was actually her son.
Wanting to give them space to recover, they had fixed up one of the offices in the church office as their bedroom. Isherwood was also glad they were not staying in the Rectory. He didn’t know if either of them could yet be trusted following their traumatic experiences. It was still possible, he thought, that either one of them could react violently to their new surroundings. He didn’t particularly like his grandmother delivering their food alone. He had tried getting his Gran to change her mind once or twice before, which had been once or twice too many.
Gran had already delivered a couple trays of breakfast to their door that morning. She seemed to think they were still sleeping. Gran had flatly refused Isherwood, when he asked if he could maybe begin asking Vanessa questions. Gran again delivered trays of lunch to their door. She thought that the boy had probably awoken and then returned to sleep. His tray was licked clean, though his mother’s remained untouched, except for the drink.
*****
That afternoon, they returned to armory. They had apparently done away with most of the zombie population the day before. There were only a couple zombies for Old Blue to mow down. Isherwood and Justin were both riding in the backseat of the truck, following a protracted dispute about the rules of calling shotgun. Patrick was driving.
He drove them up close to the fenced-in parking lot behind the armory. Justin could almost break open the padlocked gate from the truck window. The top of the fence was lined with a coil of razor wire, and the parking lot was filled of an odd collection of vehicles, several of which were military. There was a small convoy of large, likely diesel trucks and troop transports, as well as two Humvees.
Once everybody and Old Blue were safely inside the fence, Isherwood said, “I say we take one of the big trucks and a Humvee, fill them up with diesel, and park them under cover in the pines by the Prayer Garden. They’ll be our bug-out vehicles. Our ‘exit strategy.’ What d’you guys think?”
“Sounds good,” Patrick said. “But where would we be bugging out to?”
Isherwood shrugged. “These things are like mobile shelters themselves. We could bug out into them until we find something that works.”
“You sorta dodged the question there, buddy.” Justin said turning to face Isherwood. “I know you’ve got not just one but a hundred ideas for locations in your head. What aren’t you telling us?”
“It’s the location I can’t get out of my mind, because of Sara. It’s probably a bad bug-out location to boot. It’s Whiskey Bay.” He took the next couple minutes explaining the situation to the other two. They each had family, too, that they would like to go searching for. They knew and expected Isherwood to realize as well that leaving to search for them would be to self-serving right now.
Patrick was reasoning with Isherwood, who was nodding in complete agreement. “You just can’t direct our resources to a private mission. None of us can,
just now. It would probably tear apart this little, fledgling community. And it’s community keeping us alive.”
“I agree. Completely.” Then, changing subjects, Isherwood began again. “I was actually thinking that right here – the armory – would make a great bug-out location. There are some old plantation homes I’ve been thinking about, too, for locations that are more out of the way.”
The engine of the first truck wouldn’t turn over, but the next one did. There were soon leaving the parking lot with a convoy of their own and headed back to LA Express to fill the tanks and the spare tanks of the vehicles with diesel fuel. Isherwood had read or saw on YouTube that diesel was less volatile than gasoline and so could be stored for a much longer time – probably why the Army used diesel in the first place, he thought. The diesel could just slosh around in the tanks until the vehicles were needed.
The LA Express down the eastern half of Main Street still seemed like the best place for hand-pumping, if only because it was near the Armory. The zombies Patrick had helped clear out the day before hadn’t seemed to diminish the groups still staggering towards them.
Patrick had again parked Old Blue in the road in front of the station. “Does it seem to you,” Isherwood was saying from the inside of the turret of the Humvee. Justin was taking the first turn at the hand pump today as penance for the Snickers debacle. Everybody would likely need to take a turn at the hand pump today, as there were probably over a hundred gallons of capacity in the two National Guard vehicles, given the spare tank on the truck. “Does it seem that more zombies are coming up from the direction of Waterloo?”
“Wouldn’t know,” Justin said breathlessly. “Just a pumping away down ‘ere, sir.”
“Yo, Patrick.” Isherwood called, pointing east to Waterloo. “You seeing more coming from up that way?”
“You better believe it.” Patrick called back emphatically. Isherwood felt like a rock had dropped into his stomach. Seeing Isherwood’s skin pale, Patrick called out, “You think it’s the bridge, don’t you?”