Liam had no doubt in his mind his father was on the up and up about loving him and wanting him to be safe, but there was something in his tone of voice that told him something more was on his mind.
“Here it is!” Liam's mother had found the stake in the ground, signifying the location of the cache of weapons and material they had stashed in the woods. It was near a small but dense tree which still had a lot of branches on fire.
“Behold, the burning bush.”
Victoria's exclamation startled him. He looked around and noticed this small tree was the only such tree burning in the entire area. Other trees were smoldering, but this one still had flames on it. He stood staring at it.
“Liam, the burning bush from the Bible is where Moses was given the task of leading the Israelites out of Egypt.”
“OK, so who is Moses here? And where is the promised land?”
They had all stopped what they were doing and looked around at each other. It suddenly seemed like a legitimate question. Was it Liam? He seemed most likely after leading Grandma and the others to this place. Was it Jerry? Liam's father was capable and had also made a trip into and out of the fallen city. Or was it Grandma? She seemed to be a solid candidate given her age and her devotion to religion. Liam would be happy if it were anyone but him. He didn't judge himself a capable leader.
Unlike the Bible, nothing was clear cut in the real Apocalypse.
Phil finally spoke up. He was pointing straight down.
“Right now these weapons are our Moses. They're going to lead us out of this wretched place, maybe not to the promised land, but to somewhere safer than this.”
Almost in unison, they all replied with a hearty “Amen!”
4
The day ended with everyone huddled in the woods for protection. A small pile of supplies had been exhumed, including guns, ammo, and even Liam's backpack.
The bombing did its job and cleansed a wide area around the street of everything—including zombies—but more had stumbled in after the fact. Of course they took their sweet time and didn't come until after the Marines left.
Liam shared what he'd learned in the Boy Scout Camp, especially how they whittled stout sticks into nasty spears used to puncture the skulls of the zombies. “The key is to kill them with the minimal amount of noise so we don't keep bringing in more. A spear isn't as sexy as a gun, but it's free, it's plentiful, and it works. It also keeps the zombies at a distance while you do your thing.”
As they all tried their hands at making adequate spears, and dispatch the odd wandering zombie, they were pleased to see a few neighbors did survive the assault. One of them was a man who lived several houses up the street from Liam. He was old and gray, and had a serious demeanor almost all the time. Liam remembered him from his youth as the guy you never wanted to tangle with.
His name was Paul.
“Me and the Wright's from across the way were standing on my lawn when those birds first came through here with their cannons. I'm as big a fan of our military as anyone, but it was a sound of pure evil. Of course everything got all shot up, but luckily they were shooting right up the middle of the street instead of in the lawns and houses. Well I guess unlucky if you were standing in the street. I saw one man—I didn't recognize him—just stand in the street and then evaporate. Just evaporate. Poof!”
The stern man almost showed emotion at that, but continued. “Well you can bet your ass we started running. Everyone scattered into the woods. My old legs wouldn't carry me faster n' a wounded dog but I never looked back. Them bombs hit the bottom of the street and worked their way up, so I had a little extra time. Lucky me. Others were in the woods too, running much faster. Most haven't come back. Maybe they ran into the dead walking toward the sounds of destruction...”
Paul also explained he came back because he had nowhere else to go. No family. No friends. Nothing. Not even a pet.
No wonder he's a sour man.
It made Liam feel slightly better to know there were some survivors out there. Even crusty ones. He felt bad enough for being responsible for Drew's death. He'd given up hoping his friend survived once he saw the area he'd last been standing. There wasn't even a body to bury.
They didn't light a campfire for fear of being seen. They salvaged some stout patio chairs which had survived everything, and used those as a base camp of sorts. It at least gave them some place to sit besides the ground. For the first time in a long while Liam could relax in the company of his family. The whole group was in hushed conversation with those around them.
Victoria was sitting in the chair next to his. Perhaps it was coincidence, but the young couple was given extra room by the others. He was looking at his her. When she noticed him, she leaned forward to quietly talk. “We have to do something to get Grandma back. I feel horrible all this happened because of me.”
“Because of you? This all happened because I brought her back here. If I would have kept her away she might still be with me.” He knew that wasn't exactly true. Hayes had been looking for them the whole time. It was bound to happen sooner or later. He had a lot of resources apparently. But he wasn't going to let her take the blame for the end result. Bad luck, as his dad had said.
She was about to argue, but Liam moved on. “We can't worry about what's happened. We have to worry about what's next. Where do we even start looking for her? How can we rescue her? Is it even possible?”
Victoria sat back in her chair, thinking. The soft light from the moon made her bruises and abrasions disappear. Even her swollen lip was difficult to see. He was happy to be in her presence again, despite all the destruction it had brought. He was happy Victoria was focused on finding Grandma too. It would be so easy to ignore Grandma and instead tackle the not inconsequential matter of survival day-to-day. It spoke well that Victoria wasn't just a pretty face, but had a sense of duty matching his own.
“You are always talking about the end-of-the-world books you loved to read. Did any of them give any clues on how we can get through this next task?”
Now he was put on the spot. He was always drawing parallels to the stories he'd read. Stories about zombies were all over the place in subject matter, and of varying instructiveness to the real life zombie apocalypse. In general, stories about captured group members depended on clues provided by the author to help the heroes discover the location of their missing friend. Sometimes that was done in a ham-handed fashion, while others were more realistic. Always there were clues though. Now, when it mattered, Liam saw no such clues.
He felt in his pocket, thinking he was overlooking something. His pocketknife was in one, and the family picture given to him by Colonel McMurhpy was in the other. He pulled it out, seeing the man he watched shoot himself in the head back at the government medical camp—just after he was bit by a zombie test subject. It also displayed his wife and teenage boy. He had asked Liam to find them and tell them he loved them. It was his final request. Liam felt a lump in his throat as he relived the last moments of the man. He turned the photograph over to see the address on the back. It was some town in Colorado.
Some clue!
He didn't think it likely they'd be going to Colorado anytime soon. Although...
“Didn't you say you are from Colorado?”
“Uh huh. Denver. Why?”
“I met a Colonel back at the Elk Meadow Camp. He gave me this picture of his family and said if I should ever be in their neighborhood, I should stop in and give them his last words. But the address is in Colorado. Some place called Grand Junction.”
“I see the city name all the time on the interstate signs driving around Denver, but I've never actually been there.”
“It doesn't matter. We aren't going out-of-state anytime soon. We'd never make it.” Liam recognized he was in delicate territory now. He didn't want to discount ever going to Colorado. Her parents were there. But clue or no clue, there was no way to safely cross 1000 miles of the unknown. Certainly not for a flimsy clue. Not even for her parents.
/>
Uh oh. Bad Liam!
He realized the irony pouring off his declaration. He'd travel any distance to find his own parents, but hers, not so much. At least, he was afraid that was how he sounded to her.
Victoria made a sound Liam couldn't interpret.
“I didn't mean anything by it. Someday we'll try to get there after this is over. I'd like to meet your parents.” He tried to be cheery, and she even reached over and touched him on the arm, but he knew it was perilous to hope anyone could survive whatever this was. The end of the world. The zombie apocalypse. End times. Take your pick. “Let's focus on one rescue at a time. Grandma first because we owe her. Then let's talk about getting you home to your parents. Deal?”
She was silent for a long time. He tried to play it cool. Did he say the wrong thing? The right thing? He chanced a look in her direction. She was silently crying.
He stood up, then pulled her out of her chair. Together they held each other in the soft ambiance of moonlight.
Later they slept the sleep of the dead.
5
The night wore on. Hunkered down as they were, they were able to ride out the darkness with only a couple encounters with interloper zombies. Liam's spears were put to good, silent use. As the sun started coming up, the group came together to discuss the day.
Liam could tell they'd all been thinking about what to do next.
Phil made the case they should try to get further out into the countryside. Find an abandoned farm or piece of land where they could regroup and ride out the worst of the crisis. Melissa wanted to scout out from Liam's ruined neighborhood to find like-minded souls who wanted to join their group. She argued the bigger the group, the better chance they had to survive. Liam's parents had agreed they wanted to find Marty, but they had no suggestions on where to even begin. It left Liam and Victoria to answer that question. They too had been talking and thinking.
“Victoria and I feel responsible for Grandma getting captured and taken away. I know what you'll say—that it wasn't our fault—but nothing can change our minds short of having her back with us. We've been trying to put our heads together to think of where she might have been taken but we've been very short on clues. What I do know is this; I gave Grandma my phone just before she left on that helicopter. My hope is that somehow we can get a text through to her and—God willing—she'll figure out how to use my phone to send a message back telling us where she is.”
Everyone seemed to perk up at Liam's revelation.
“There are a lot of assumptions, but if we can find out where she is we still have to figure out what we can do to get her out. We aren't exactly a crack commando squad.” He looked around, thinking of the calamity they had just survived, and knew he could have been tossed in with worse survivors. In fact he'd spent some time with a group of twenty or so eighty-somethings. They were probably all dead by now.
“So Victoria came up with a short-term plan, a type of triage she called it, whereby we'll go back to the Boy Scout camp I left the other day, and use that as our base camp for future efforts. At least we know we'll have friends there, and we'll have a secure base from which to operate. Once there, maybe we'll be inspired to pick up clues to find Grandma.”
He looked at Melissa. “They're going to need help with security, that much I can promise you. Also, I told them if I ever returned I would bring back weapons to help them fight off zombies and other threats. That might be the price of our admission.”
He turned to Phil. “The other thing they're lacking over there is food. There are thousands of people and lots of water, but no food. If we can provide them some opportunities to get food—say from abandoned farms—it might further reinforce our value to them.”
One thread was consistent through almost all the books he'd read on zombies. If you couldn't contribute to whatever survival group you happened to end up with, you were no good to anyone. Doctors would be near the top in terms of value. Soldiers would be important. Insurance salesmen or data entry clerks with no other skills would soon find themselves hungry. The wild card was pretty women. Many books placed high value on pretty women no matter what other skills they had. Liam's mind had trouble processing what was so valuable about them, but writers in the zombie genre seemed confident on this point. He was content to put an asterisk on the thought for now.
He intended to present his group as being a valuable addition to the Boy Scout Camp leaders. He knew Mr. Lee would have no problems accepting him. It was selfish to say, but he needed a good solid base so he could dedicate his time to solving the mystery of where Grandma had been taken. He couldn't do that if he was running around hiding from zombies, trading bullets with criminals, or zigging and zagging to avoid falling Air Force bombs.
There really wasn't much argument from the core family and friends. Old man Paul was adamant he wasn't leaving his home, even if it was lying flat. He insisted he still owned the land and was going to protect it until his dying breath. To Liam it seemed foolhardy, but his older companions seemed to admire his dedication. A few other neighbors came and went, none of them eager to move on to parts unknown based on the word of a kid.
Liam was used to it. He often thought he could be Jesus himself, citing scripture and working miracles, and someone in the crowd would criticize his age. But his reasoning was sound in this instance. There was nowhere else to anyone's knowledge that had been picking up the pieces and providing some hope—well not unless you count Mark, who was a man they'd met days earlier giving water to refugees on the highway. Most people were content to salvage from the dying world, or take from those left alive. Neither of those activities had any long-term prospects. Maybe it was too early to talk about rebuilding, but certainly now was the time to organize the people who would eventually do the heavy lifting of repairing the world.
Liam's dad put it all in perspective. “So all we have to do is get our guns and ammo, walk through the back roads of the county, and knock on the door of the Boy Scout camp and see if they let us in? That sound about right?”
Liam nodded.
His dad finished with words he'd almost forgotten. It was something he said often when he was letting Liam practice driving this past spring. “Liam, you're driving!”
Let the exodus begin.
Acknowledgments
The research for this second book was done on location here in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. Most of the places Liam visits I've known and frequented all my life. I chose to set the story here because I could go walkabout to these locations and be back in an hour.
Arnold, MO is near my boyhood home; its distinctive green water tower was the final landmark on northbound Interstate 55 which, as a child, let me know I was getting close to home after many a long journey. Today, that tower is a different color, but still pulling duty for children on long rides north. It would have been easy to write that tower into this story, but Liam and his friends were in a different part of the town—they couldn't have seen it. I should also mention my books portray the government of Arnold as, how shall I put it gently? Shady? Xenophobic? I don't show them in their best light. But fear not. Arnold, MO is a nice town and not at all likely to block people escaping from St. Louis. Right? Seriously, it's a nice town.
Liam's street and neighborhood are mostly fictional. The area where he lives in the story does have houses, and it does have parking lots large enough to land a helicopter, but Riverside Drive isn't found on any map of the city. The interchange where he meets Mark and talks to agent Duschene is real. It is exit 186 on Interstate 55 if you ever come round. I warn you, it isn't very exciting.
Elk Meadow, or more specifically Lone Elk Park, is real. The county park is in the suburbs of St. Louis off Interstate 44 just south of the town of Valley Park. Much like Liam and his family, my parents took me there once when I was a kid, but we never went back. That reminds me, I should go check it out with my own family...
Beaumont Boy Scout Reservation is real. I'm very familiar with the cozy valley in t
he woods, including the surrounding terrain. Boy Scout culture is also portrayed realistically—at least as best I can describe it from going on numerous campouts and jamborees with my own Scout and when I was a young Scout many years ago. I did generalize the terrain a bit for the sake of storytelling, including the addition of a north-south dirt track cutting through the woodlands beyond the watchtower. As far as I know there is no such route for vehicles. But there could be.
The final book will be out in February 2016 and will also feature St. Louis locales. Look for it at all the finer ebook retailers.
Thank you once more to my family. It takes a lot of work to produce a book, and my family has been tolerant of my late nights and sleepy-eyed mornings for several months while I finished my trilogy. With this book out the door, it's time to look ahead.
E.E. Isherwood
About the Author
E. E. Isherwood has penned three books about the infected zombies, along with several short stories describing the wreckage they left behind. He has designs for many more tales. His long-time fascination with the end of the world blossomed decades ago after reading the 1949 classic Earth Abides. Zombies are just a handy vehicle which allows him to observe how society breaks down in the face of such withering calamity.
Isherwood lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his wife and family. He stays deep in a bunker with steepled fingers, always awaiting the arrival of the first wave of zombies.
Find him online at www.zombiebooks.net.
Books by E.E. Isherwood
E.E. Isherwood currently has three books in the Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse universe. Visit his website at www.zombiebooks.net to be informed when future titles are launched.
The Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse series
“Start the Sirens” (Introductory short story)
Since the Sirens
Siren Songs
Stop the Sirens
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“Start the Sirens”
Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse (Book 2): Siren Songs Page 29