by Jack Hamlyn
Now, I’d had combat training. I’d been an infantryman, more specifically a Truck Commander, TC, a .50-cal gunner on a Stryker vehicle. But I was nowhere in the league with a guy like Tuck. He was the real thing. He’d even been interviewed for books on Vietnam special ops. He knew his shit. If we were going to survive the zombie plague (if it can be called that), then we were going to need someone to whom survival was second nature.
And that person was Tuck.
We became good friends working sites together. Ricki, of course, didn’t exactly approve of him. But he was all right. I liked him. Being war vets, we always had a lot to talk about. Tuck had built himself a stone tower just off the Taconic Parkway on a farm he’d inherited from some uncle of his. Tuck was a survivalist. He’d loaded his tower with weapons and provisions so he, as he liked to say, “could fiddle about at the end while the rest were slitting each other’s throats for crusts of bread.”
Tuck believed in being ready.
And he was.
Of course, his neighbors were all rich Westchester County horse breeders and they hated him and his tower and had tried numerous times to buy him out and force him out. But never to his face, of course. They wanted the crazy bricklayer and his tower gone. It was hurting property values and insulting the aesthetics of the countryside. So far it hadn’t happened. But they kept trying, as he told me, and he kept resisting simply because it was pissing them off and that gave him great satisfaction. Rich or not, they were learning what the North Vietnamese had learned in the war: Tuck doesn’t leave until he’s good and goddamned ready.
THE TOWER
You could see it half a mile away.
It looked like the battlement of some Medieval castle. Tuck had twenty acres of farmland, a silo, an old barn, a ratty-looking farmhouse…and the tower. It was built atop a hill in the center of his property. The hill had long ago been hollowed out and turned into a potato crib by his uncle who’d been something of a tater baron following World War II. Tuck re-bricked it, reinforced it, then built a stone tower block by block atop it…then installed a state-of-the-art security system. He was a guy who took no chances and that was exactly what I was counting on. The tower rose forty feet above the hill and had a fenced widow’s walk circling around the top of it which gave you a clear view straight to Manhattan. Half-way down like a wreath of garland there was a barbwire encirclement so nobody could climb their way up to the walkway.
It was something all right.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Jimmy said when he got his first look at Tuck’s compound, because calling it a farm was like calling a Surface-to-Air Missile a firecracker. “He expecting World War Three or what?”
“You might say that,” I said.
I’d already told them about Tuck. As much as I could, I guess. The rest they’d find out themselves. All they needed to know and all I really cared about was that Tuck was your best friend in the world or your worst enemy, depending on which side of the fence you stood on. His survivalism, I knew, was an outgrowth from his war years when security and carefully-orchestrated defense were the difference between life and death. Had he carried it to an extreme in civilian life? Absolutely. Was he paranoid? Yes and no. He’d once told me that his philosophy of life could be summed-up in the following: “They’ll never take me alive because I’ll be waiting for ‘em every time.”
“Is that a lighthouse?” Paul asked when I cut off the road and pulled up at the gates that sealed off the drive going in.
“More like a watch tower,” Diane told him. “Pretty effing sweet. Very…very phallic, isn’t?”
“Looks like something from Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” Ricki said with her usual deadpan humor.
“What’s phallic?” Paul said.
Jimmy and I grinned at each other like a couple schoolboys who’d just peeked into the girl’s shower room.
Tuck’s property was enclosed by a high chain-link fence topped by double coils of military-grade razor wire. About twenty feet inside from the fence there was a perimeter ditch dug all the way around. It looked to be about fifteen feet wide and at least that in depth. If you got over the fence you’d have to deal with the ditch and I could just about guess there were surprises in that ditch you didn’t want to know about.
There was a big padlock on the gates. We weren’t getting in unless Tuck wanted us to. There was a sign that read DANGER! ELECTRIFIED FENCE so I wasn’t about to get too close to it. I had a pretty good feeling he’d already spotted us. I tried my cell but I wasn’t getting anything.
“This don’t look like a real friendly sort of place,” Jimmy said.
Seeing no deadheads about, I jumped out and walked over near the gates. In the distance I could see someone up on the widow’s walk. I caught a shine of chrome and then the first shot rang out. It landed just inside the gate, medium-caliber, maybe a .30-30. I knew that the shooter in question could drop me anytime he wanted. I dialed-up Tuck’s number again and it was answered right away.
“You can stop shooting anytime,” I told him.
“Booky? That you out there?” he asked. “Hang tight, I’ll be down to get you. Shit! I was hoping somebody decent would come calling!”
Tuck called me Booky because I was always reading on my lunch break at the sites we worked. He got a kick out of that. Seeing a blue collar schlub like me reading Hemingway and Proust. It sent him into gales of laughter. But it was no stranger than a crusty old jarhead scraping a fiddle.
“Are you okay?” Ricki said when I got in the Suburban.
“Fine,” I told her.
“Hell of a way to greet a man,” Jimmy said.
“Well, you can’t say that Tuck’s place isn’t secure,” I told him.
Paul was getting excited and I could see that. The tower. The crazy guy I’d told him about. He was expecting something out of a comic book and I was pretty sure he would not be disappointed. About two minutes later I heard a dirt bike roar to life and here came Tuck roaring in our direction. He jumped off it and opened the lock, swinging the gates in for us.
“Hell, you people out on picnic?” he asked. “Well, you’re all welcome to the last redoubt. This is where mankind makes its final stand. Shit, yes!”
He was dressed in camouflage fatigue pants, scuffed combat boots, and a black sleeveless Tee that had a pot leaf on it. It read: LEGALIZE THE SEED AND I’LL MAKE THE WEED. Maybe I left that part out: Tuck was also a firm believer in the power of the sweet leaf and was something of a dope farmer. His security measures had something to do with that, too, I imagine. He stood there, appraising us, a 9mm Sig-Sauer hanging on the web belt at his waist, a knife in his boot.
Nobody was too sure what to make of him as I gave a quick round of introductions. Ricki was intimated by him. Jimmy was unsure. Paul was in love. Diane just smiled, looking at his shirt. “I think I’m going to like this guy,” she said.
I pulled the Suburban down the road to the tower and, after locking us in and reactivating the voltage in the fence via his Blackberry, Tuck joined us. Since I’d been out there last, something like six or seven months, he’d made a lot of changes. The silo and farmhouse were gone, two sheet metal pole buildings were in their place over near the barn and a variety of security technology had been installed, hemming the tower in.
“C’mon, let’s get inside,” Tuck said.
You got into the tower by entering a metal security door set into the hillside. It had an electronic entry keypad and Tuck punched us in. Inside, the old vault-like potato crib had been turned into something like a storeroom in a fallout shelter. Tuck showed us locked cages that were stocked with olive drab Army packing cases of MREs, medical gear, sealed bottles of pure drinking water, Army/Navy surplus fatigues and boots and jackets. You name it, he had it. There were also three Suzuki dirt bikes and drums of gasoline and oil.
“I got like three-hundred gallons of hi-test out in the barn,” he said.
He keyed us through another metal door and we climbed a circular staircase
(very lighthouse-like) up to the first level which was more storage. The second level held bedrooms, small but functional, military cots lined up in rows along with blankets and pillows. The third level was Tuck’s living room and kitchen. It’s where the bathroom was located. There were three windows looking out set with steel bars that were just above the garland of barbwire, I noticed. We climbed to the upper story and it was some kind of panic room or control center, call it what you will.
“Goddamn!” Paul said when he saw it.
“Watch your mouth,” Ricki warned him.
“Awesome,” was Diane’s comment.
Both Paul and Diane were right, though: it really was something.
Tuck had a tech board set up with video screens and infrared monitors, motion detectors…the works. It was all tied into his laptop. He could access all of it remotely with his Blackberry. He took us over to a sliding steel door in the wall. He keyed it open and it led to the walkway. We stepped out there and you literally could see for miles and miles, just like in that old song by The Who.
“You’ve made some improvements since I was here last,” I said.
“Lots of ‘em.”
“This must’ve put you back some,” Jimmy said.
“I dropped every cent that Crazy Joe left me into it,” he told us.
“Crazy Joe?” Ricki said.
“That’s my uncle,” Tuck explained. “They used to call him Crazy Joe the Potato Ho. He left me this farm and a pile of cash. I put it to good use, don’t you think?”
She just nodded.
Dick was out there with us, still staring. I figured he was seeing something other than what the rest of us were seeing. He looked positively haunted and with good reason, I suppose.
“This is wicked!” Paul said. “I mean this is so sick I can’t believe it!”
Tuck laughed and ruffled his hair. Then he put his arm around Ricki and held her close. “See now, baby, this is the place for you and your son. Defensible. Impregnable. The dead want to get up and walk? Let ‘em, I say. They ain’t gonna breach my defenses. Let the world go to shit and you and me and your boy, why, we’ll just be cozy as two peas in a pod. Hell, cozier than turds in a blanket. You know what I’m saying?”
Ricki just stared at me wide-eyed.
Funny thing was that Tuck…out of all of us he could have taken a shine to…he had a real gleam in his eye for Ricki, the last person who probably would warm to him. But maybe that was why. I wasn’t sure if I should have felt threatened or laughed at the absurdity of it.
Towing her around with him like a prize kewpie doll he’d won at a carnival pitching booth, he said, “Let me lay it out for you, sugar. Now like I said, this tower is impregnable. I got food and water stocked that could last us over a year. I got medical. I got transport—got three hardass SUVs reinforced with steel plating—plenty of fuel, weapons and ammo, everything.” He gave her a squeeze. “What if somebody tried to attack? you say. Well, I got high-res CCTV with pan/tilt/zoom and night vision that monitors the fence, the grounds, the outbuildings. We can see right where they are, day or night. That fence is fifteen feet high. It’s unclimbable and electrified. I’ve got Passive Infrared sensors just inside the fence and around the tower. They pick up body heat. Problem with that, of course, is that the dead don’t throw off much in the way of a heat signature. But I’m guessing that in the days to come the living might prove just as much of a problem. In conjunction with the PIR we got microwave motion detectors as a failsafe. If they both detect intruders, my board lights up and motion lights flood the compound.”
“What if it’s just a woodchuck nosing around out there?” Jimmy asked.
“Not a problem,” Tuck said. “I have a software recognition package. It can differentiate between animal and human signatures.” He gave Ricki another squeeze. “But say the bad boys break through my fence. Say the voltage don’t deter them. Then what? See that ditch all along the inside perimeter?” He pointed down towards it. “I got 50,000 gallons of fuel oil hooked to a gravity feed system. I touch the button, it floods the trenches. I fire an incendiary into it and you’ve got a curtain of fire that will burn for hours and hours. But you ask, well, Tuck, what if that is breached? Well, that’s what I’m working on now. See, I got me a friend with connections. He got me a bulk of surplus AP mines—that’s anti-personnel. Me and your husband are going to be mining this place. We’re going to be ringing in our tower with M18 Claymores. When we’re done, hell, 1st Marines couldn’t breach this place.”
Good old Tuck. Landmines, of all things. I didn’t want to know how much illegal stuff he had. I was just glad that he had it. Just buying some of that stuff could have put him in a federal prison for decades especially since the Patriot Act.
Jimmy said, “But if they were to get through even all that…hell, up here, sitting pretty with a rifle and scope it would be turkey shoot.”
“You got that, man.”
For the first time in the past twenty-four hours, I felt somewhat relaxed. I think we all did…though it was hard to tell if Diane had ever really been concerned because she lived on her own private planet. Dick still wasn’t saying anything and Tuck was watching him very intently.
“He lost his wife,” I told him, filling him in on the situation.
Tuck stared at me. “He didn’t get bit, did he?”
“No.”
“You’re sure? I wouldn’t care for it if you brought the infection in here.”
“No. I wouldn’t do that.”
“All right, Booky. That’s cool then.”
We went down into his living quarters and all fell into comfortable chairs and let out one long collective sigh. Tuck clicked on his widescreen and it was doom city on every channel. Things we (the world population, I mean) had feared for a long time were coming to fruition. We were standing at the very edge of World War III, and at a time when we all desperately needed to quit pointing fingers and work together to defeat Necrophage and the damage it was creating. But instead of unilateral cooperation, it was bipartisan dirty politics as usual between the Liberals and Conservatives in the U.S. Worldwide, it was even worse: death on a spit, particularly in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Things had gotten so bad they were calling airstrikes on their own cities. India and Pakistan were inching closer to a nuclear confrontation. China was pissing that the West had loosed Necrophage to destroy the economic might of the Chinese people. Meanwhile, the worse-case scenario became a reality on the Korean Peninsula. The KPA, Korean People’s Army, had surged towards the South Korean border en masse and tactical nukes had been used against them. It was being said that the KPA had lost 80% of its armed forces in fifteen minutes. Pyongyang and the crazy midget, Kim Jong-Il, responded by hitting the outskirts of Seoul with a ballistic missile carrying a nuclear warhead. Deaths were climbing well into the millions. U.S. and South Korean forces were currently responding by decimating the North Korean infrastructure with a surgical bombing campaign. Two-thirds of the country, apparently, were now without water or electricity and people were dying by the droves.
And, as you might guess, the more people that died, the more Necrophage amplified itself in a lethal chain of transmission. Aerial reconnaissance by unmanned drones showed the countryside and burning cities literally swarming with the walking dead (which was a term now being used by the media even if our own government and most of those of the world were still referring to them as “irrational and violent” mobs.) It was pretty much the same over much of Asia. A microbiologist on CNN said that if the virus was not eradicated or at least halted in its transmission, that it was reasonable to assume that Asia, Africa, and the Middle East would soon be a graveyard in the literal sense.
Southern and Eastern Europe were the hardest hit by the pandemic, but it was making itself known in Scandinavia and Russia, too. The Third World in general was absolutely devastated and dozens of countries were on the verge of immediate collapse. They were begging NATO and the U.S. for assistance but there wasn’t
any to be had.
Over here it wasn’t exactly peaches-and-cream either. According to CNN the Army was fighting zombies and militias in Dallas, Atlanta, and Cleveland. Helicopter gunships had attacked armed bands in Manhattan and the Bronx as well as veritable armies of zombies in the other boroughs. There were rumors that napalm had been used in Chicago, and Detroit had been targeted with cluster bombs. Half of Los Angeles was burning. Riots in Baltimore, Houston, and Miami had resulted in an absolute bloodbath as thousands were gunned down in the streets by Army and Marine units…and that wouldn’t last much longer because not only were individual soldiers deserting but entire companies.
It was chaos.
And this within like thirty-six hours.
What would a week or a month bring?
And how had that damn virus spread everywhere practically overnight? What possible common vector could explain it?
After a time, content that the world was going to shit as he’d long expected, Tuck turned off the TV and put on some bluegrass music.
That was what our first day at the tower was like.
Everything was going to hell, but we were alive and we were safe and we really couldn’t hope for much more.
PANIC LIST
Thank God for Tuck, a.k.a. J.J. Tucker (don’t know what the Js are for)
We seem safe here
The world is going to shit
Social order is collapsing around us
Necrophage is everywhere—how long before one of us gets it???