Necrophobia - 01

by Jack Hamlyn

  “That’s pretty heavy shit,” I said. On one hand, being the rational guy, I dismissed it, of course. But if I’d learned anything since the dark box of Necrophage was kicked open, it was that rationality didn’t seem quite so rational anymore. I wasn’t as ready to dismiss what she said as I might have been before this all started.

  “I dreamed something else, too,” she said and she was even more serious. She was so serious that she got about three inches from my face and I thought she was going to kiss me or something. “I dreamed that you and I were doing it, you know, making love or fucking or whatever you want to call it. And that was the beginning of the end.”

  “Us having sex?”

  “In some way it was.”

  “That’s way too mystical for me,” I said.

  “Me, too,” she admitted.

  We never spoke of her dreams, not for a long time, but I was always wondering about them. And, more so, I was wondering about things that Ricki might not have told me.

  What I remember most about our new digs was one night when we settled in. Paul and I whispered about Ricki a little bit, trying, always trying to put it all in some sort of perspective. Right before I fell asleep, Paul said, “I’m going to kill them, Dad. The zombies. I’m going to kill every last one of them.”

  PANIC LIST

  Okay. We seem to be in okay shape.

  We’re alive. We have weapons. Supplies are in good shape.

  I feel vulnerable as hell here.

  I tell myself every morning to put on a bright face for Paul, but it isn’t always so easy. Ricki’s face is in my mind. I hear her voice. I sometimes think I can almost feel her touch.

  Enough. I have to get my shit together.

  How long before the dead find us again?

  SCAVENGERS

  I realized something over the next week or so as we hid out in the garage and secured our position as much as possible. I realized something about the human mind and how it works: just surviving is not enough. It was enough for animals and it had been enough for our ancestors, but with our modern mindset we needed more. We needed something to reach for, to aspire to, a light at the end of the tunnel. When we were at the tower, we had that, I thought. Our plan was to wait for a few months and then start waging war on the dead and taking back what was ours. It was the carrot at the end of the stick. It unified us and made us whole.

  Now we lacked that.

  We were just rats surviving.

  Although war is never a good thing, a popular war like World War II can unify everyone and give them a common enemy. It was kind of like that after 9/11. It didn’t last, of course, and before long it was back to the same infighting and bickering. But for a while there, we were unified. Our little group, on the other hand, had unity to stay alive, but we lacked something bigger than mere survival. Somehow, some way we had to find that.

  We had to find something.

  We needed the carrot.

  I told that to Jimmy. “You’re right,” he said. “We need that. We’re all getting shack happy, we’ve all got cabin fever. We all feel the need to do something but I don’t think we know what it is.”

  “I hope we find it.”

  “We will.”

  The only real pastime we had besides staying alive was scavenging. We made regular raids into Scarsdale, avoiding the dead whenever possible and searching out food, weapons, ammo, anything that might be of use to us. We all took turns. Even Paul got to go. Trust me, I didn’t want to put him in harm’s way but the first time Tuck and I went out on scavenging trip, Paul had a real fit and we had to take him along. Paul wasn’t a bratty kid, he did not throw temper tantrums. This was something else. This was separation anxiety. He’d lost his mother and he was afraid of losing me.

  We recognized that, even Tuck.

  So Paul got to come.

  I didn’t care for the idea and it made me nervous as hell…yet, I had to admit the kid was a born scavenger. He had an uncanny sense of where to find hidden stashes of things. Each of our scavenging trips was successful. We came back with canned goods and dry goods, lanterns and batteries, gasoline. We raided an Army/Navy surplus store and, although somebody had already emptied the knife case, we found lots of work boots, raingear, and a positive stockpile of British DPM clothing, which is Disruptive Pattern Material, the UK version of camouflage. We all took to wearing it. It was comfortable and practical. We looked like a squad of Royal Marines. All we lacked were the berets.

  Our trips into the city were not entirely scavenging missions, they were reconnaissance as well: we needed to know where the dead were and how many there were. We discovered that it was worse than we had imagined. There had been something like 18,000 people in Scarsdale before Necrophage and it was my rough guess that more than half of them were in the streets as the undead. You would find block after block of deserted neighborhoods, then you’d wing around a corner and there’d been fifty of them bearing down on you.

  The zombies were bad enough, of course, but we began to see something else that was equally disturbing: armed bands of men in pick-ups and SUVs. They were dressed in camo fatigues and carried a variety of weapons, mostly semi-automatics. One afternoon we were entering the city and a truck bore down on us. Our first thought was great, here’s some survivors, but then they closed in and started shooting at us. We led them a merry chase through the streets with me at the wheel and finally lost them. A few days later we were at a hardware store getting some chain and six trucks rolled on by. Luckily, we had the Jeep parked out back or they’d would have probably come after us.

  It was scary.

  Weren’t things bad enough without survivors fighting one another?

  Although I wouldn’t say they were organized to a military level, there was no doubt they were part of some militia. They’d probably been waiting for something like this so they could run wild without the risk of the police kicking their asses. Regardless, they were trouble and we all knew it.

  “The question is,” Tuck said that night. “Do we just run and hide from them or do we smoke their asses? That’s the question.”

  “Might be a good idea not to tangle with them if we don’t have to,” Diane pointed out. “Every stone thrown in every pool casts ripples.”

  Jimmy lifted an eyebrow. “Sure. Makes sense, but just because we leave them alone don’t mean they’ll do the same for us,” he said.

  I had to agree with that. “They didn’t look like the types to live and let live.”

  “Wannabes,” Tuck said. “That’s all they are. Any real force would cut ‘em in half. They’re weekenders, little boys playing soldier. They got the numbers so they think they’re badass. They’re used to pushing people around and not being pushed back. Bullies. All the militias are the same. You start shooting back and killing them, they’ll start pissing their pants and running.”

  I hoped he was right.

  RILEY

  Between the zombies and the militia, we only went into Scarsdale when we had to. Even at the airfield we took to hiding the Jeep in one of the hangars so it couldn’t be spotted from the road. The last thing we needed were a bunch of drunken cowboys coming in shooting. We had to be careful in every way. We knew we couldn’t make the garage our permanent HQ, but for the time being it would have to do.

  We thought we were pretty secure.

  We thought no one could sneak around in there without us knowing it.

  Then one afternoon I was out in the hangar with Jimmy and Diane. They were selecting useable boards from a stack of lumber and I was doing some work on the Jeep. I replaced the old stock Autolite four-barrel with a Holley Truck Avenger carb kit to crank up performance and horsepower. I wasn’t paying much attention to Jimmy and Diane. I had the Jeep running and I was adjusting the float level on the carb. Sounded smooth. I shut the Jeep off and stepped out and that’s when I realized someone was right behind me.

  “Turn around, real slow,” a woman’s voice said.

  I did as I was told. I
found myself looking at a forty-something African-American woman. She was dirty, face scratched and bruised. She had a gun in my face and it was mine. While I was working on the Jeep, I took off my Sig-Sauer 9mm and left it sitting on the bench in its holster. My bad. Now she had it in my face.

  “Listen,” I said. “We’re friendly, we’re not—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” she told me, looking around and slowly backing away from me, keeping a clear field of fire between us. Just by the way she held the gun I could see she knew what she was doing and she’d been trained. She was dressed in what looked like mechanic’s coveralls and they were dirty with greasy stains and what might have been old blood. The sleeves were ragged, holes torn in the seat and shoulders. The name sewn at the left breast said her name was ED.

  “Where are your friends at?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know. They were here.”

  “Don’t fuck with me!”

  “Take it easy,” I said. “Nobody’s fucking with you. They were hauling lumber. They must be outside.”

  “I want the keys to that Jeep.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I need a ride, asshole. There’s somewhere I got to go. Some people that need help and I plan to see that they get it,” she explained. “That’s something you militia pukes can’t understand: there’s people out there, real people. People just trying to get by. Trying to survive. Not like animals, but like people.”

  “Wait a minute. I’m not—”

  “Shut up before I blow your face off,” she instructed me. She turned towards the darkness at the back of the hangar. “Jilly? Jilly, get out here. It’s safe.” She turned to me. “Now give me those goddamn keys or I’ll kill you.”

  I believed her.

  I could see by looking in her eyes that she had been through the shit. Used and abused and roughly-handled. She was desperate. She would kill. There was no doubt of it. The problem was that we needed the Jeep. We would not survive without it.

  “I’m not with any militia,” I said.

  “Mmm-hmm, I bet you’re not. You just dress like that because you’re a law-abiding citizen,” she said. “Now I ask for the third time: gimme the keys.” She raised the Sig so that it was eye level with me. “Now.”

  A girl came running out of the shadows. She was maybe fourteen or fifteen, Asian, with huge dark eyes and long beautiful hair. She was a pretty thing, but like the other woman, dirty and bruised and scratched.

  I took the keys out of my pocket because I didn’t see where I had much of a choice.

  That’s when Diane stepped out of the shadows with her CAR-15. “Drop that gun, bitch, or I cap twenty rounds into you,” she said, calmly and resolutely.

  For the first time there was indecision in the woman’s eyes. She saw the CAR-15 staring down at her and she knew she was beaten. But something in her wanted to fight on and I could plainly see that.

  “Do it!” Diane told her. “Don’t make me fuck up my Karma by killing you!”

  The woman let out a sigh that was pure defeat. She let the gun drop from her hand and without being asked, as if she’d done this before, she kicked it over to me.

  I picked it up.

  The girl was crying and the woman held her.

  “All right,” I said. “We’re not the militia. You can both relax.”

  “You serious?” the woman said.

  “Very.”

  To make a long story short we got them inside, explained who and what we were and how we happened to be at the airfield. The woman said her name was Riley—not ED—and the girl’s name was Jilly. Then she told us a story that was sickening to the extreme. The militia we had seen around was called the American Resistance Movement (ARM). They’d been small-time before Necrophage, maybe thirty or forty extremists, but now their numbers had swollen into the hundreds. They had fought a few minor battles with the Army and National Guard, but mostly steered clear of open confrontation and concentrated on guerrilla warfare. Riley said they were nothing but hoodlums. Animals. They had numbers and they had weapons and they specialized in murder, rape, and robbery. They took what they wanted and anyone who challenged that was killed. One faction of them had set up in Kingsbridge Heights in the Bronx, just down from the old Medieval-looking armory in a former Catholic school complex there. It was ideal because it was surrounded by a high chain link fence and was defensible against the hordes of the living dead. Riley said she had been a cop with the 50th Precinct. When word reached them that women and girls were being snatched off the streets, something had to be done.

  “We were in bad shape at the Fiftieth,” she explained. “Between the dead and the pandemic, our force was down like sixty percent. But we had to do something. Word reached us that the abducted were being taken to an abandoned school. I went there with five other cops.”

  She was the only survivor.

  The others were gunned down by ARM as they tried to get out of their cars. Riley fought back until she ran out of ammo and then they took her. They locked her in the basement with twenty other women who had been brought there for one express purpose.

  “A rape camp,” Jimmy said.

  “Those motherfuckers,” Tuck said.

  She nodded. I was glad Diane had taken Maria and Paul out of earshot so they could get to know Jilly. “That’s exactly what it was. I was there for two weeks. I’m not going to tell you what was done to me and done to Jilly or the others. You can use your imagination. I’ll just say that we were first beaten into submission and then…well, you get the picture.”

  By my figuring it had been roughly two months now since The Awakening. Two months, maybe not even. Time had lost meaning for the most part. Regardless, in that short span of time the world had changed and not for the good. The zombies were one thing. Like disease germs invading a body, you couldn’t hate them really, you couldn’t personalize them anymore than you could a virus that makes you sick or a snake that bites you. But ARM was something else entirely. They had taken advantage of a bad situation and shown their true colors. Nothing but outlaws and predators.

  “Jilly and I escaped,” Riley said, “using an old steam tunnel that leads out into the alley beyond. Other women and girls had tried to escape and the militia killed them. Only Jilly would come with me when I decided to try and get out. See, at the Precinct, we had the old plans for the school and if we found out that the rumors were true, a SWAT team was going to use the steam tunnels to get in there and get the abductees out.”

  “When you went missing…did the Precinct send anyone after you?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “That’s what I hoped for. Then they brought in another woman and she said the Precinct was overrun by the dead. There was no more Fiftieth. So we were forgotten. That’s when I decided to make a run, using the tunnels.”

  “But the others wouldn’t go?”

  “They were terrified. Others were not in their right minds from the abuse,” Riley said, getting emotional for a minute and wiping her eyes. “There are women there that I think were going to try if we made it out alive. A lot of them are ready and willing to fight. Maybe some of them got out. I don’t know.”

  She said that Jilly and she ran and ran. The Northwest Bronx had been hit by numerous airstrikes and it looked worse than ever. Like London after the Blitz. It was hard to find your way, the landscape had been completely altered. But they got out. In Yonkers they stole a car and made it to Scarsdale. ARM was there, too, and they were attacked, their car destroyed. They barely made it out of the city. That’s when they found the airfield. They hid in the woods across the road, watching us coming and going. Today they made their move.

  “So you wanted the Jeep to go back in and free the women?”

  “If I could. Jilly and I were willing to die trying.”

  “Sounds like suicide,” Tuck said. “The militia would shoot you down.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t understand. When we escaped, the militia was gone. The entire neighborhood was ove
rrun by zombies. ARM did what they do best: turned tail and ran. There were hundreds of zombies. We barely made it. But there was one thing for sure: there was no way I could get back to the steam tunnels to lead the others out. The dead were swarming.”

  “At least we know why the tower was hit,” Jimmy said. “They must have thought we were a militia outpost.”

  “But now you want to make a run to the school with a Jeep?” I asked her.

  “I have to do something. It’s been four days. Those women are trapped in there. If the dead are as thick as they were, they’ll never get out.”

  “How many were still alive when you left?” Jimmy asked.

  “Fourteen or fifteen.”

  “I don’t think you’d make it in,” Tuck said.

  “Not alone,” she said and I knew we had suddenly become part of her rescue team. “If I can reach those tunnels, and if I have some back-up to keep the maggot-heads away from me, I think it can be done.”

  We discussed it then. There was never a moment of hesitation where one of us said, no way, that’s suicide, we’re not risking our necks. We started planning with her on how it could happen and how it couldn’t. In retrospect, it’s amazing how we went for it. A big part of it, of course, was that we were not a militia. We were compassionate human beings who still had morals and ethics and a well-balanced sense of right and wrong. Those ladies had been through hell. They needed help. We were going to help them.

  “The problem is the zombies,” Tuck said. “That damn many, we just don’t have the firepower to secure a corridor for you to get in and out. We need heavier artillery.”

  Riley nodded, undaunted. “You’re right. What if I told you I know where there are some armored cars with machine guns?”

  We all looked at her.

  “APCs?” Tuck said.

  “Yes, they belonged to a National Guard unit. They’re in a garage near the Precinct.”