Haven From Hell: Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse

by Won, Mark

  I immediately got on the radio and started calling people to my position of relative safety. There was a nice prerecording option which I took advantage of. That gave me time to get back to work securing the island.

  There was a moped that someone had left in the lobby, which made for a quick tour of the island. Besides the resort and the lighthouse there wasn’t much to see. Just a bunch of trees. Don’t get me wrong, it was beautiful. I could imagine spending a summer vacation there (if I had summer vacation time) just boating around the coast (if I had had a boat), swimming in the pool (because, I guess, the lake wasn’t good enough), and relaxing in the spa (doing whatever people in a spa do).

  I’d forgotten all about my idiot boss, so I went back to my new yacht to check on him. He was still there, taking up space. Once I’d gotten him off the yacht and planted in a cozy room, I headed back to the radio room to check for any developments. While I’d been gone a great many people had begun to respond to my call. A seemingly vast horde were very curious about my situation and what it might have to offer them. I was happy to elaborate. Shortly thereafter, the people started swarming in.

  There were so many names and faces that they’re all a blur now. I remember that the first people I talked to on the radio were Jean and Latisha Caruso. The first people to actually show up on my island were the Robinson family.

  That’s also when I reached Old Man Althaus. A crotchety, suspicious, elderly gentleman with apparent access to a lot of ammunition. Over the following weeks we had numerous conversations. I had it in my mind to, eventually, try and use his house as a base of operations. His house had a superior location, for my purposes, because it was nearer a city which I wished to loot. At the time of my initial contact with him, however, I had bigger fish to fry.

  Everything was chaos. But it was a good chaos. The first order of business was using my resort’s well to supply potable drinking water. I remember that was what I put the Robinsons on, right away. Next, I managed to find a commercial fisherman (he’d brought his own boat). I got a crew for him to take around to all the other islands and get more fishing boats. His name was Pete and his wife was Harriet. Real solid, smart people. Their assignment was to teach fishing, on-the-job.

  Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Being one of the few people with firearms I had to go along on our ship reclamation runs. We found our first potential new fishing boat to be adrift about two hundred yards off the coast. So we pulled along side and hailed the boat. Out came a couple of zombified fishermen. Since they couldn’t reach us it was like shooting… Well, you get the idea.

  The next boat we came across also had a couple of zombie crew on board for me to shoot. When we boarded we found three more zombies trapped in the cabin. Harriet opened the door and I shot them, trying to avoid making a big mess. That was it for our first day of ship salvaging. I was surprised by how many of the boats were crewed when the Change took place. Everybody knows that fishermen get up early, but I guess that I’d never really thought to apply that to our situation.

  By the time we got back that night the chaos had escalated, and it was clear that I’d have to remain behind, at my new home, or nothing would get done. Too many people with too little space and not enough direction.

  That night I sent a good guy, by the name of Joe, to get the semi that I’d left at the Fudds’ mansion. He took a ferry with him to transport everything back.

  I knew housing was going to be a real problem, so I organized a militia to go and clear Lincoln Island. After that they cleared the peninsula island of Thumb County. That operation was headed up by Captain Floyd, and everyone with police, military, or security experience joined in with a passion. I was pleased to note that the method of staying just off the coast and shooting the Changed, from a position of safety, was called the ‘Smart Maneuver’, after my middle name (it was also my grandma’s maiden name). That just goes to show that I can enjoy flattery as much as the next guy.

  You might wonder who asked me my middle name, since that’s not the sort of thing that comes up in casual conversation. Well, there was nothing casual about Captain Floyd.

  Good old Captain Floyd was very curious about my presumption of command. Naturally, being an intelligent military officer, he desired to understand my credentials. From his point of view, why should I be telling anyone what to do?

  My answer was a simple lie. I claimed to be a town council member of my Berg of origin. His questioning of my credentials were subtle while my answers were seemingly uncalculatedly ingenuous.

  You see, I realized going in that no one would ever listen to some jerk utility clerk. But an unpaid town council member? That was just barely good enough. I knew my town, including the names of the actual council members. I also knew that nobody else, even from my home town, ever cared enough to know who they were. All it took to fake the title was remembering a few local newspaper articles. That and a real nice suit, courtesy of the Fudds.

  After that, the good Captain was putty in my hands. For some reason I’ve never been able to figure out, the mindset of the average military officer of the United States seemed to dote on civilian authority. Most of the rest of the New World and the Old, had been fraught with a constant succession of military coups and armed rebellions. And why not? Historically, its the guys with the guns (or crossbows, swords, clubs, or whatever) who get to be boss. At least until somebody stronger showed up.

  If I’d been in Floyd’s shoes I’d have taken all the initiative for myself and put everything on a paying basis. Which was exactly what I’d been trying to do. In fact, Floyd probably would have been better at it. But he didn’t, and that implied he either wouldn’t or couldn’t, and I couldn’t and wouldn’t take the chance of a boss level screw up. Not with the human race up against the ropes.

  By the end of the first week we had thousands of people clogging my tiny island. Most had to sleep on their boats. The congestion was terrible, so I kept rotating the neediest people through my new home, the resort.

  One night I heard screaming and fell out of bed trying to grab a firearm. By the time I’d ran down stairs I had people surging against me, running in the opposite direction. The crowd broke and the source of the commotion presented itself.

  A zombie was stalking my halls. It had clearly been a fresh change, since it wasn’t showing any signs of strange pseudo-decomposition yet. I remembered who he used to be. Not his name, but his situation. He had been an elderly man that I’d insisted take up residence in the inn. His health had been poor and now he was a zombie. I shot him in the head, point blank, and tried to calm everybody down.

  Eventually, the story came out. He’d died in his sleep and Changed. He’d managed to kill two other people before everyone got out of the room. Those two people he’d killed both stayed dead.

  Everybody wanted answers, but I had no idea why he’d changed. So I made something up. I told everybody some people were predisposed by nature to change after death and some weren’t. That we had no way to tell which was which. Then I initiated new rules for sleeping. Everyone had a hand or belt or something tied to a bedpost or some other fixture. A human could untie it easily enough, but a zombie couldn’t figure it out. At least it would buy some time.

  After that nightmare, I found a couple of motor heads who proved invaluable. Once I got my hands on them I had them focus on welding scrap metal onto a bulldozer. When the drivers seat was safely caged in, we had a nice little pseudo-tank, just like on that old kid’s show they remade into a movie. I asked a ferry driver to take it over to the peninsula and I had the time of my life driving that thing all over the place.

  I would blow the horn and the zombies, ghouls, and ogres would come running as fast as they could. That split them into three clear categories. The first type were ghouls, and I ran them down. Any ghouls that grabbed my cage I just shot through the bars. The second group were ogres, and I fled from them at my best speed. I believed that my bulldozer could crush them, but anything that can rip down a jail wall
could tear my safety cage to pieces. When I got far enough away, I put my shotgun through the bars and opened fire. The third group were simple zombies. Not strong enough to be a threat to my welded metal defenses, and too slow and stumbling to get out of the way of the treads.

  My new toy accelerated the process of clearing the peninsula greatly and won the hearts and minds of all who heard about it. I was quickly becoming something of a rock star. Please understand, fame is only desirable, for its own sake, to the weak minded. The kind of people with a high probability of eventual failure. As a tool, however, fame can be quite a motivator. That was how I exploited it, anyway.

  Chapter 3: Housing Concerns, The Perils of Democracy, and Madness

  With the island peninsula cleared, we had enough space to crowd everyone in cheek to jowl. The food situation was consistent, if monotonous. Wells had been dug. Survival seemed somewhat more likely. The rescue crews were bringing people in daily. I’d even managed to contact survivors as far away as Kansas. Some group living in an old missile silo, of all things.

  That’s when my old friends from the clink showed up. They were kind enough to show up in a series of prison vans (because nobody would find that alarming). Through my binoculars, I managed to spot Pete Trace driving the lead vehicle across the bridge.

  Floyd asked me “Who do you think they are? And why are they all in prisoner transports?” He seemed a little confused.

  I decided to help Floyd out. “The reason they’re all in paddy wagons is because they were all in prison until recently. At least that’s my guess.”

  Floyd said, “Do you want me to get more troops over here?” His confusion had turned into nervousness. That actually happens a lot if you think about it.

  “No, I’m sure everything will be fine. Well, maybe a couple.”

  Pete and Dayton climbed out from the vans along with about fifty other souls. When I waved they seemed real happy to see me. It was time to press the flesh.

  I hurried down from the watchtower and ran over to them, before any of the militia standing about did anything stupid. Once I reached the two men, I bypassed the customary handshake and gave each a big hug. I figured that would keep them guessing long enough for me to think of something to say.

  I said, “I’m so glad you made it! How many did you save?” As if I couldn’t count.

  After that it was all just a matter of moving them into our already overcrowded situation. I made sure to handle all that personally just in case there would be a problem. Surprisingly, they seemed like a nice enough bunch. They all pledged to be quite helpful, and they seemed ready to pitch right in on whatever project needed more manpower at the moment.

  Don’t get me wrong. Some of them were stone cold killers. But that was all about drug deals gone bad and eliminating the competition, blood feuds, cheating wives, and escalating police confrontation. Not the sort of thing that would be a problem for us. I made that plain from the start by going over the Golden Rule with them and explaining the practical value of unity. I might have also noted that we had no prisons. We couldn’t afford the luxury. They got the point.

  Most of them fit right in with the militia and the rest were happy to help out with maintenance. One was even a farmer.

  Fortunately, we had cleared the farms before all the animals had died of neglect, though there had been some sad cases. Once the harvest finally came in our diet would improve. Until then, we would just have to get used to fish.

  I had Floyd boating down the coast and plundering the countryside of anything and everything that wasn’t nailed down and they couldn’t pry loose. They took ferries to carry our amateur version of armored cars. My plan was to use the vehicles to draw off the zombies. That worked fairly well, for the most part. Our workers had enough time to get some procurement done, but the zombies always kept coming back. Until, one day, they didn’t.

  As it happened, there were some bandits operating in the region immediately to the northwest of our sphere of operation. One night they came in and drew off the horde. I learned about this from Old Man Althaus. It seemed that the bandits were trying to use the ghouls as some sort of auxiliary force for taking Mr. Althaus’s home. All the rest of the zombies and ogres naturally followed along.

  I made a point of sending some help his way. A few snow plows to clear the road, so to speak. Previously, I’d sent transportation to evacuate his family. With the snow plows I’d also sent another transport to bring back about another hundred people. Old Man Althaus seemed to have a knack for picking up survivors. More survivors than he could accommodate.

  When one of Mr. Althaus’s guests got shot, Floyd sent our best doctor, Dr. Jed, to patch him up. And when Mr. Althaus had another group of survivors to offload I went over to Mr. Althaus’s farm to meet the man, personally, for the first time. That’s when I got the idea for this manuscript.

  It had occurred to me that posterity might want to know its roots, to understand the pressures and forces that have made the world the way it is. To know why our society places such an emphasis on the equatable distribution of things like food, clothing and shelter.

  And so my next area of focus was to get every able bodied person working on housing. I was acutely conscious of time slipping by. In just a few months our gasoline would go bad, and that would end transportation and travel. We had no power grid. Communications was generator driven or battery powered. Usually with a range of less than twenty-five miles, even on a good day. With all that on my plate, I had to start somewhere.

  Conceptually, it was simple enough. I rounded up an architect by the name of Quincy. I told him that I wanted to build tract housing. I wanted the buildings to be square, two story, made out of wood, with only one size of window. 1800 sq. ft. No basements. He had me the basic design in a day.

  From there we had to fashion trees into decent boards. For that purpose I took all the generators and fuel and used them to power every tool we could lay our hands on. The high school workshop was the pinnacle of our industrial powerhouse.

  I knew we would need more fuel to power all the tools. To get the fuel we would need to send out reclamation teams. The reclamation teams would need weapons and ammunition. We had stripped a couple of gun shops and police stations but that was just enough to get us started.

  There were no hydraulic power stations in the region, but there was a wind farm within two hundred miles of our new capitol. So I gathered what passed for my engineers together and had them look at some diagrams I’d managed to download. It really wasn’t much to go on, but if it worked we might save a lot of lives.

  Floyd wanted to make it a major military action. That seemed like a great idea to me. If we could pull this off we’d really be getting ahead of the game. We assembled the militia, made our plans, and set out the next morning.

  That idea with the bulldozer had been an inspiration. The mechanics armored a pair of snowplows to push aside any obstacles which we might encounter. All the vehicles (not just the snowplows) had bars welded over all the windows and an impromptu bull bar affixed across the grill. In the name of unbridled optimism, we made sure to bring a couple of semis to haul back any extra goods, in addition to our proposed treasure of windmill parts.

  With all of our tonnage we didn’t have any real trouble. Any zombies we encountered we managed to run down. We had spotters on top of the big trucks keeping an eye open for any ogres. We did stop a few times to shoot a suspected threat, but overall, we made good time.

  The windmill farm was open and desolate and complicated as hell. None of my guys really knew what they were doing, and I was positive that we didn’t have the right tools for the job. It was a bit more difficult than metric conversion.

  Floyd circled the wagons while everybody got to work. Basically, the rest of the day was wasted. Floyd came up to me and said he thought we should just pull out. To his way of thinking, there was no way we were ever going to get one of those giants back to where we wanted it. I tended to agree. I asked Floyd for one more day,
anyway.

  My ‘chief engineer’ had to admit defeat. There was just no way to get those things down to our level. I asked if we could reroute the electricity. He said he didn’t know how. He’d have to bypass a ton of infrastructure, and he didn’t know where to start, so that seemed like a lost cause.

  I poked around the grounds until I found a kind of maintenance shack. It had some paperwork that I’d never understand. It also had delivery information. I even found a tracking record someone had just thrown out. The manufacturing town was my home town. I had remembered hearing that some corporation had moved in and had been hiring; not me, but other people, to make the various parts for windmills. The trouble was that town now had over seventy thousand zombies in it. One dead end after another.

  Back outside I called over all the tech support and had a powwow. The new plan was to rip those things to pieces and screw the consequences. Just get the magnets, or whatever, out of them, so we could get back to Haven. If we’d had bombs, I would have recommended their use.

  Unconcerned with doing the job right, ironically, things started to happen much more efficiently. Parts started falling off the windmills right and left. Pieces of this and that and the other thing. Apparently, all it took was some practice, because by the third windmill whole assemblies were falling from the sky. By the tenth windmill they’d begun lowering pieces. By nightfall Floyd had reconsidered his stance and thought we were getting somewhere.

  For me, the funnest part was the expression on Floyd’s face. It was full of respect. One look and I could tell he thought I’d made success happen. My stellar leadership had saved the day, again. He had no clue that my ‘success’ was based on a desperate hissy fit. The real work was done by, get this, the workers. All they needed was a little hands on experience and some time with a learning curve.

  We took a few days to grab as many electrical generating components as we could, then headed back to Haven. Upon our arrival we were celebrated as returning heroes. Not for the first time, I had underestimated the negative impact my absence would have on general morale. Various factions had arose. The fishermen, the farmers, the carpenters, etc. As soon as I returned everyone breathed a sigh of relief and got back to work. I realized, then, that I needed a second in command, and if at all possible, a hierarchical system of leadership for the community to rely upon. After all, what if something happened to me?