by Jack Hamlyn
Think positively!
The above, not so easy
Here’s my anxieties: the zombies scare me, Necrophage terrifies me, and the idea of nukes with resultant fallout sweeping over our position here fills me with horror. I was never this freaked out in the war, but back then I didn’t have to worry about Paul and Ricki.
On the above: the fallout. If nukes were used on New York City, the fallout would reach us. We’re too close. Even a tactical will fry us if the wind is right. I’ve been through most of Tuck’s supplies by this point and I see no NBC protection, no biohazard suits, radiation gear, or anything.
I’ve been something of a confirmed atheist for years (though I never mention the fact), but lately I’ve been praying. I feel like a hypocrite.
I just want us to survive this if that’s at all possible
Pessimistic thought for the day: Tuck is like a father-figure to us. He will not let anything happen to us…but he watches everyone very closely. He’s at war. If one of us picks up the virus, I’m afraid what he might do.
LIFE ON THE FARM
Over the next week or so as the world continued to split the collective seam of its pants, we settled in at the tower which was, for all intents and purposes, our home away from home. Ricki, Paul, Diane, and I shared the biggest room on the second level. Dick and Jimmy were in the one next door. I’d never seen Paul quite as happy. Each day he got closer with Tuck, much to the chagrin of Ricki who still did not entirely approve of our benefactor. At least, that’s what she liked to say. But I think she was taken with him, too, she just wouldn’t admit it. Jimmy and Tuck got along fine as I knew they would. They liked to spend their evening in a couple lawn chairs out on the walkway, talking about ‘Nam, about the ‘60’s, reliving their younger days.
Diane was really something.
I had to finally admit it.
All these years I thought she was just a free-living, slutty stoner and now I had to wonder how much of that was true and how much was general middle class judgment and how much was just the impression she liked to create for her own amusement. During that week I learned things I already knew (she worshipped good pot and pot culture in general) and things I never suspected (she had a green thumb and was an absolute natural working Tuck’s crops). She never complained or griped and she generally went out of her way to avoid Ricki’s wrath…though her natural sarcasm often slipped through. One thing about Diane, she’s always content wherever she is. And on Tuck’s farm, she was very, very content. She would rise early and always be the first one outside to start working.
Tuck, of course, wasn’t crazy about that.
Despite his security system he did not like anyone going out on their own. The way he had it set-up was that when we went outside to work, one of us was always posted as a sentry. He wanted somebody on the ground keeping an eye out for trouble and another up on the walkway scanning with binoculars. He could get a little confrontational when someone disobeyed his orders as Diane always did.
“I ain’t trying to turn this into a fucking prison or anything,” he told her. “But we gotta have rules. We gotta live by ‘em. If we follow ‘em and respect ‘em, they’ll keep us alive.”
“I’m cool with that,” Diane told him.
Of course, the next morning she’d break them and go outside anyway and Tuck would get miffed but he’d get over it. I started to wonder if, as good as Diane was, maybe she lived the life she did simply because she couldn’t follow rules. Maybe it was something genetic. A short in her hardwiring.
Ricki turned into a very good lookout up on the walkway or “catwalk” as she liked to call it. Being down on ground level made her nervous. We were all traumatized by what we had seen, but with Ricki it was almost a physical thing: leaving the tower for any reason made her nearly physically ill. She didn’t like me going out but she knew I had to. Paul tagging along with Tuck and I or Jimmy scared her.
Dick was proving day by day to be trouble.
He was unhinged by what had happened in his attic with Elena. I think we all sympathized with that, yet him wandering around with that blank-eyed (I hate to say it) zombie-stare was enough to give you the creeps. You had to practically force him to eat and then he just nibbled. He would stand there staring into space, his mouth moving but no words coming out. Twice Tuck had caught him wandering about in the dead of night. I myself had caught him trying to get into the gun locker. Tuck wouldn’t have liked that much; he was real particular about his collection of weapons. He made all of us wear 9mm Sig-Sauer’s like his own when we were out in the compound or out in the fields (the sentry carried a .30-06 with a scope) except for Paul, of course, but he did not want Dick anywhere near a gun because he was convinced he was going to snap any day. In the gun locker, Tuck had quite an armory, lots of semi-auto weapons and riot guns, but also fully automatic CAR-15s that were illegal as hell and were identical to the M4 carbine I carried in the war. He also had a vintage Walther MPK submachine gun, an M-14 sniper rifle, and a MAC-10 that no one, absolutely no one, was allowed to touch.
We just didn’t know what to do about Dick.
He would rarely speak and when he did it made absolutely no sense. I had the best luck with him and then he’d usually say something along the order of what he’d said that day we picked him up on Holly Street: “She was alive, Steve, then she was dead…I didn’t want her to be dead…but she was dead and then she was alive…she was crawling at me…she wanted to bite me…she wanted to kill me so I was like her…I had to hit her with the hammer, didn’t I? I had to do that, didn’t I?”
Even Ricki, who was one of the most sympathetic and mothering sort of people I’d ever known, was reaching her limit. One night as we lay in bed and Diane had crashed-out (soon as her head hit the pillow usually) and Paul had finally wound down from talking about all the things Tuck was teaching him (good and bad), I pulled Ricki into my arms and said, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Worried. Stressed. Concerned. Other than that I’m fine.”
“I think we’ll be okay.”
“How about six months from now? A year?”
She liked to think ahead and our new life made that really hard for her. “We just take it day by day. Sooner or later, people are going to get the upper hand out there. It’s got to happen.”
I didn’t think she believed me anymore than I believed myself, but she sighed and said, “I suppose you’re right. What about Dick, though?”
“What about him?”
“I’m starting to wonder if Tuck isn’t right,” she said. “That he might just flip out one day. I worry about it. He needs some kind of help, Steve. Only we don’t have that sort available.”
She was right, but what could we do about it but watch him and take care of him and hope for the best?
Tuck had quite a “garden” out there if such a term really applies to what was more or less a working farm. He had rows of sweet corn, squash, carrots, three kinds of tomatoes, onions, parsnips, rutabagas, and potatoes. Lots of potatoes. He also had a dozen apple trees, another dozen cherry and peach trees. It had been raining off and on and the days had been hot and sunny, so the crops were bursting with leaf and fruit. I realized how dependent we were going to become on those crops like people back in the old days—one good season of blight and we’d be starving.
Diane and Paul and Jimmy spent a lot of time tending fruits and veggies while Tuck and I continued securing the place. Outside the perimeter ditch we laid down seventy or eighty AP mines. They wouldn’t blow anyone to fragments or anything. Their purpose in a war was to create disabling injuries, blow off toes and mangle feet, take an enemy combatant out of action. And when he was unable to walk, a couple others would have to help him, thereby tying up more of the enemy. More of a nuisance sort of thing. We decided against wiring the Claymores in a perimeter around the tower until we actually needed them. Nobody liked the idea of being out there with the business end of a Claymore staring down at them.
&n
bsp; “We can wire ‘em in about ten, fifteen minutes if the need arises,” Tuck said. “We used to do it in ‘Nam for our NDF, Night Defensive Position. We’ll set ‘em out, wire ‘em to a single clacker or in pods of twos and threes. Nothing will get through ‘em. Nothing. “
I’d seen them used a few times in Iraq. One time, a group of Johnny Jihads at our FOB in Samarra tried to run the perimeter and the grunts drew them in real close and then fired their Claymores. There’d been maybe forty Johnnies out there, but after the Claymores there was nothing but a lot of gore and body parts for about 200 feet. The Claymore fires some 700 steel pellets that literally vaporize the enemy.
They work. Trust me, they work.
The third night we were there, cell service went down and Tuck was pissed because he couldn’t run his security from his Blackberry anymore. One provider after the other bit the dust that night. The fourth day we lost satellite TV and all we had was the radio and internet, though I feared the latter wouldn’t last too much longer.
In the world at large, things were approaching critical mass.
THE WATCHERS
The next night, after a long day working out in the compound—we were digging a secondary trench system with Tuck’s backhoe, me being the shovel guy, of course—we were just beat. Jimmy, Tuck, and me sat out on the walkway after the others crashed for the night. We sampled some of Tuck’s bourbon, chatting and having a few laughs. I remember thinking it was almost like all the badness out there was going on in some other world that we were isolated from. Then Jimmy stood up and went to the railing, “Lookit that, will ya?” he said.
Tuck and I were at the railing and we saw: the lights of Yonkers were going out. Section by section the city was plunged into blackness.
“Grid’s failing,” Tuck said. “I was hoping it would last another week or so.”
Not an hour later, we watched as the lights of the Bronx and Manhattan which lit up the horizon followed suit. There was blackness creeping in on us from all quarters and it was very sobering. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like in those places. Like being in a Medieval city under siege. We listened to the radio, grabbing a station from Jersey, and the gloomy-sounding DJ said that the power was failing all across the northeast and that most of New England was blacked-out. It was all very sobering.
And frightening.
“Now it’s going to get ugly out there,” Tuck said.
The announcer said that Europe was pretty much blacked-out, too, and there had been no word coming out of Eastern Europe in over twenty-four hours now. China, for all intents and purposes, had fallen and the rest of Asia had already followed suit. Satellite imagery showed that Africa really was the dark continent and news out of there was very sporadic. There had been nothing out of Mexico in forty-eight hours. Same for most of the Midwest where Necrophage had, for some reason, spread like wildfire. Before we lost satellite, there had been video on CNN of literally thousands of the undead flooding the streets of Chicago. It looked like the noon rush in Midtown Manhattan.
On the BBC we’d seen similar images from London and Manchester, Liverpool and Cardiff. All of which was minor in comparison to what was going on in India. According to estimations the dead outnumbered the living 800 to 1 in Calcutta and in China and Southeast Asia it was something like five times that. I wasn’t about to say the war was lost before it began, but it wasn’t exactly promising. The CDC, State Department, Department of Homeland Security, and the White House continued to broadcast emergency bulletins over the airwaves as well as state and local agencies, but the latter were getting a bit spotty.
I didn’t want to imagine a world that was an open grave from sea to shining sea, where the cities were ruined sepulchers and the rivers ran black with mortuary run-off, the sky blown gray from crematoria ash…but I thought that’s where it was all going. If we did not get the upper hand and soon, the human race would be nothing but one immense smoldering bone-pile.
As we watched the darkness out there which was thick and unbroken save for an occasional flash of light from the direction of Yonkers and the Bronx, probably an explosion, I looked over at Tuck and said, “What’s your long-range plans? We’re safe for now, but—”
“But we can’t hide like rats in our hole forever?”
“I guess.”
He thought about it, sipping his bourbon. “We lay low for a few weeks, maybe a month or so. We let the dust settle. Then we go out there on recon missions, scope it out, find out where the dead are.”
“And then?”
“Then we start taking it back house by house, block by block, city by city. It’ll be ugly. But this world wasn’t tamed the first time around without blood, sacrifice, and hardship. We’ll do it again.” He had our attention and he kept going: “If this Necrophage thing follows the course of most pandemics, man, then in six months it’ll have peaked. What I mean is, most of those who are going to get infected and die by the virus will have died and risen back up. The people still around by then will have developed immunities. And when that happens, when the human population has flat-lined and stabilized, then it’s all-out war. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not about to raise the white flag here. I’ll be damned if I’ll let a bunch of worm-brained shit-eaters take my world and make me hide under a bed.”
“Hear, hear,” Jimmy said.
Tuck refreshed our drinks and we toasted his words which were not only optimistic, I thought, but rock-bottom practical. I think when our glasses touched that night a bond was formed, a blood oath: we would fight and we would keep fighting until Necrophage was a bad memory like the Spanish Flu epidemic of the First World War and every last zombie was burnt, blasted, broken, or buried back in the holes they crawled out of.
We would exterminate them.
And we would exterminate them because there simply was no alternative.
That night I fell into an uneasy sleep, fraught with nightmares where I saw the living dead marching in armies and the human race fighting a desperate guerrilla war tree to tree, tomb to tomb, and house to house. Then, around four in the morning, I woke in a panic as I was shaken awake.
It was Jimmy. “Dick,” he said. “He’s gone.”
“Gone?” I said, still trying to make sense of it.
“I woke up and he’d not in his bed. We gotta find him.”
“What is it?” Ricki said.
“Dick wandered off again,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
We searched the tower from top to bottom, save Tuck’s digs, and couldn’t find him. That’s when the alarms went off and I realized that Dick had gotten down into the crib at the base of the tower and had somehow keyed open the outside security door. He must have tripped the motion sensors outside the tower which were armed dusk to dawn.
Jimmy and I grabbed our guns and made for the stairs.
That’s when Tuck showed. He had a short pistol-gripped pump shotgun in his hand that he must’ve kept under his pillow.
“It’s Dick,” I said. “He must’ve got outside.”
“That motherfucker,” he sighed. “Okay, go find him before he walks into the minefield. I’ll kill the alarms and join you.”
Jimmy and I hustled down the stairs, keying our way through the security doors that sealed off each level. When we got down into the crib, we grabbed flashlights and stormed outside. Lights were blazing everywhere. Jimmy was no kid so I told him to circle around the tower to see if he could catch a glimpse of Dick and I ran off down the road. Like I said, there were lots of lights but Tuck’s farm was a damned big place so there were pockets of darkness everywhere. The lights threw my shadow before me.
“DICK!” I called out. “DICK!”
There was no answer, of course, and I knew there wouldn’t be one but I had to try. About halfway down the winding dirt road I cut into the field, shining my light around. We had marked the perimeter of the minefields with red flags and we all knew to steer clear of them, but Dick, I was sure, was so out of it that he would hav
e blundered right in there. In the back of mind, though I hate to admit it, some voice was saying, go ahead, let him get his ass blown away. It’ll be one less worry. But I wasn’t about to let that happen. I scanned the flags with my light. The minefields were like a belt that surrounded the tower and I began following the flags. Maybe he hadn’t made it that far. Maybe he’d fallen into the new ditch we’d dug or curled up in the grass somewhere. There were an awful lot of maybes. I frightened a rabbit and it scampered off and nearly gave me a coronary.
Then I heard shouting.
I looked back towards the tower. The walkway was lit and I could see Ricki up there waving at me.
“HE’S IN THE ROAD!” she called out. “HE’S IN THE ROAD BY THE GATE!”
Dammit. He was quicker than I thought.
I got back to the road after tripping on a log and going face-down in the grass, grabbing my flashlight and realizing there was a big blacksnake about a foot from my face. He did not look pleased with me interrupting his nightly mouse hunt. He went one way and I went the other. If all we had to worry about were harmless farm snakes. On the road I ran at full speed and as I came around a bend in the road I saw Dick standing about a foot from the main gate.
I got up to about six feet from him when I realized he was talking.
On the other side of the gate there were seven or eight of the living dead—three adults and a group of kids, like some kind of extended undead family. They were not coming any closer, just standing back at the edge of the shadows about fifteen feet from the fence watching Dick. I couldn’t see much beyond their shadowy forms and their glistening eyes, but I could smell the hot stink coming off them.
“Elena?” Dick said. “Is that you? Come closer so I can see you.”
The zombies did not speak, of course. They just stood and watched and waited. Much like the blacksnake, they were creatures of opportunity driven by reptilian brains that understood only feeding.