by J. W. Vohs
“Hey, you’ll ruin dinner,” Jack protested.
She leaned over the table and held the half-eaten cookie to his lips, “Try it . . .”
Jack bit off a decent chunk and thoughtfully chewed for a moment before deciding, “You have potential.”
Andi grinned, “Yeah, I was thinking the same thing about you. The question is, potential for what? Right now I’d say you’re potentially the toughest zombie crusader I’ve ever had dinner with, even if you do seemed scared of a little tofu.”
“Give me a couple minutes and that fear will be totally conquered,” Jack managed to interject between mouthfuls of the first hot meal he’d seen in the past several days. They both laughed and focused on enjoying the home-cooked dinner.
After a few minutes, Andi spoke up, “So, will we ever have a chance for a normal life?”
Jack wiped his mouth and answered truthfully, “If by normal you mean me running a museum and you teaching high school while we run the kids to all types of practices and lessons the answer is no. If you are asking me if we’ll ever be able to feel safe and play with the kids in the yard after dinner the answer is yes, if I have anything to say about it. But I want to tell you something that might freak you out a little bit . . .”
He hesitated until she motioned for him to go on. “I’d rather live in this world with you than go back to the life I had. I don’t mean that I’m glad so many people are hurt and suffering, but I feel like I’m finally doing what I was meant to do.” He sat his fork down and looked into her eyes. “It’s more than that though—I’ve never felt more alive than I have these past few weeks. I hate what’s become of the world, but I will always remember the first time I saw your smile.”
She reached out and took his hand, “I’ve never been one of those hopeless romantics, but I feel the same way. I just pray that after we win this war we can actually do the mundane things that used to make up so much of life. You know, cook dinner together, work in the garden, spend romantic evenings at home with our phones turned off . . .”
Jack smiled and gently squeezed her hand, “Every time I go out there that’s what I’m fighting for.” He studied her features and wondered how he could have ever not noticed someone so remarkably beautiful—even if she’d just been ringing up his purchases at the Quickie-Mart. He wanted to reach over the table and pull her close to him.
She sensed the mood and looked away shyly before returning his gaze. “There’s so much I don’t know about you.”
“Ditto,” Jack replied, “but I’m willing to invest my heart, along with the rest of me, in the learning process. That’s more than I can say about any other woman I’ve ever known. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’ve lived the life of a monk, but I never let myself get serious about anyone. I know is sounds like a line, but I can’t imagine a future without you.”
Andi let go of his hand and returned to her food, but she kept her eyes glued to his. “Coming from you, that means more to me than anything any man has ever said to me before.”
Jack ceremoniously lifted his glass for a toast, and she reached out and tapped it with her own. She smiled and quietly offered, “Here’s to full investment in the learning process.”
Everyone at The Castle that night enjoyed a hot meal and the company of others. The few people who didn’t have a loved one there were pulled into the circle of others with whom they had bonded during the terrifying process of surviving the zombie siege. People talked about their lives before the pandemic, explained how they had ended up in one of the safe-houses, or simply shared war stories from the combat many of them had experienced while escaping the zombie horde. There were tears and there was laughter, but most of all there was the comfort of being with people united behind a common goal. They didn’t know it that night, but they were becoming a tribe; a group strongly tied together by the bonds of shared experiences as well as the dreams of what they might create if they stood as one against the darkness falling over the world. In a word, they were allowing themselves a luxury that many of them had given up in the preceding weeks: hope.
The work began the next morning, along with brainstorming and planning that led to ideas Jack and Carter hadn’t considered when they hatched their scheme to lure the county’s zombies to The Castle for slaughter. The most obvious fact that they hadn’t recognized was that the zombies could almost certainly be manipulated into attacking along just one section of wall, allowing the guards to greatly reduce the length of their defensive line. Secondly, Barry had suggested slipping back into Albion, hooking up the tornado-alert system to the generators that had been providing the courthouse with power, and letting the sirens draw zombies to the town before Jack and his troops began the process of luring the creatures to The Castle with the fire trucks. This would give The Castle some lead time to prepare for the attack as well as help concentrate the area’s zombies together in one place.
In spite of the brutal fight they had won the day before, Rickers and Ross insisted on leading their all-volunteer squads back into town to set off the alert system. Jack and Carter inspected the soldiers’ equipment, then helped load the squads into several pick-up trucks. Jack also sent an RRT under Bobby’s leadership as a reserve which was only to monitor the action unless an emergency arose. Barry insisted on going along and Jack agreed, placing the dependable ex-carpenter in charge of the entire operation.
The next order of business was stripping down and inspecting the fire trucks, ensuring that the engines and sirens were in good condition. Jack also sent out two RRTs to the farthest reaches of southern and central Noble County searching for survivors who had been holed up since the crisis began, and by the end of the day they had brought in fourteen new people and recorded the addresses of over a hundred more who refused to leave their homes. Doing the rough math, Jack figured that somewhere around five hundred people were still uninfected in an area with a pre-virus population of nearly twenty thousand. Perhaps a thousand zombies had been killed in the battles of the previous days, maybe fifteen hundred, but that still left well over ten thousand zombies within fifteen miles of The Castle.
The largest town in the county was Kendallville, but that was in the northeast corner and a bit too far off to worry about at this time. Ligoneer was the second largest town in the county, but it was in the northwest, and again, Jack had to leave that area until he could secure the south-central part of Noble. The Chain O’Lakes State Park adjoining his property was five square miles of heavily wooded lakes and swamps, and Jack believed that humans had a big advantage over zombies in the woods. The Castle and the state park were going to be the geographical center of the resistance movement Jack was planning to lead, but he didn’t want to make the mistake of taking on too much at once. Albion was in the center of the county, and he knew the tornado sirens would be heard several miles north of town, but they would not reach the larger cities to the north. If his plan worked the next step would be to secure their northern border, though he didn’t know if that would require clearing out the larger population areas of the county or not.
As he had explained to the others, adjacent Allen County was home to the city of Fort Wayne and probably had over four hundred thousand people who could overwhelm any of the surrounding areas if the zombies there began to expand their range. Additionally, Allen County had three state-of-the-art hospitals, a National Guard Base, huge stores and warehouses filled with enough supplies to keep thousands of people alive for years, and three rivers that met in the center of Fort Wayne. These rivers should allow a community of survivors to more easily defend themselves against both zombies and marauders.
But Jack knew that worrying about any future plans depended on winning the coming battle, so he pushed those thoughts from his mind and focused on preparing for the imminent zombie attack on The Castle. He and Carter armored up, the only exception being that they carried their helmets rather than wore them. They walked the outside perimeter of the earthen berm that served as the outer wall of The Castle. The
ditch below the berm was muddy, in some places holding small pools still standing from the spring rains. The berm itself was now weed and grass covered, with thousands of small to medium sized rocks dotting the slope which was not as steep as Jack would have liked. Carter had told him when they were excavating the land that trying to build an earthen berm any steeper would simply result in increased erosion and slumping, both of which would eventually threaten the integrity of the wall. In any event, it was what they had to work with, and now they considered how best to defend it.
They walked quietly for a while until Carter broke the silence by explaining, “An army of zombies is more dangerous to this wall than thinkin’ humans would be. They’ll just keep comin’, fillin’ the ditch and climbin’ over one another till they reach the top. We could string wire parallel to the slope, but in the end they’ll get over it the same way they did at the so-called safe-houses.”
Jack thought about Carter’s observations for a moment before replying, “You’re right, some of them will eventually reach the top, and in this case ‘some’ will mean hundreds. Once they have a route up there they’ll keep taking it too. “
“Hey,” Carter suggested, “let’s wire those trucks to explode once they’re covered with zombies. We can set other explosives out here too. Might be able to thin their ranks a bit.”
Jack didn’t reply immediately, then offered, “Might create more of a problem than we think. Any head not crushed will keep trying to get to us with whatever it’s still attached to. Talk to Bobby about it and see what kind of explosives we can rig up. If you guys think it’s worth it, bring it up at one of our meetings.”
Carter seemed pleased, then another thought came to him. “Hey, what about rocks?”
Jack didn’t have a clue what Carter was talking about. “What about them?”
Now Carter was excited as he explained, “We store up as many fist-sized rocks as we can on top of the wall. When the zombies attack we throw ‘em as hard and as fast as we can. Hittin’ skulls from that distance will crush ‘em. Arms and legs will get broken too. Them that ain’t killed will be less of a threat to us ‘cause they’ll be crippled!”
Jack grinned at Carter as he mocked, “Why don’t you just rig up some catapults while you’re at it.”
They both looked at each other, and a wide grin spread across Carter’s face as he exclaimed, “We’re gonna do it!”
CHAPTER 25
When Carter and Jack returned to the command center Andi was monitoring the radios, and she told them that the sirens were on in Albion and the soldiers were on their way home. There had been some fighting, but nobody had been seriously threatened despite the need to kill several dozen zombies that had gotten in their way as they worked. Jack gave Carter the go-ahead to put together collection teams for rocks and bricks emphasizing the need for heavy guards covering each team. Once that was accomplished, Jack sat down and asked Andi, “How is that girl doing, the one who was shot at Hunter’s Ridge?”
“Her name is Jade Andrews. I told you once before but you’ve been through a lot since then. Doc’s amazed with how quickly she’s recovering. Tyler spends most of the waking hours he’s not training in her room. According to him, they were friends in elementary school, then she became one of the cool kids in middle school, and by high school they acted like they had never known one another. Now he seems to be her lifeline; she knows a few of the people we rescued at Hunter’s Ridge as neighbors, but all of her family is missing. She’s a good girl, Jack, and she’ll be a good addition to The Castle.”
Jack smiled briefly, “Well, I’m glad she’s recovering and that Tyler has someone he can talk to. How is his training going?”
“John said that he’s a natural, whatever that means.”
“It means that he knows how to use those weapons well, almost as if he was born to use them.”
Andi looked pensive for a moment, “Are you going to let him fight soon?”
Jack slowly nodded, “He’ll be part of defending this place, if that’s what you mean. I’ll try to keep him off the front line but once the battle starts he’ll use the confusion to join the fight. Heck, I might as well keep him beside me so I can try to look out for him.”
Andi frowned, “Then I’ll have to worry about two of you.”
Jack smiled grimly, “If we lose the battle you won’t have to worry about anything ever again.”
A voice came over the radio, interrupting their conversation. “This is gate, Barry and his crew are back. They have three new people who’ll need quarantine, and he didn’t lose anyone out there.”
Andi replied back to the guard that she’d copied his message. Jack stood while she was at the mike, and when she finished speaking he quipped, “Glad I was able to stop by and cheer you up.”
“Yeah,” she smartly replied, “just another one of your special talents.”
By day’s end the battle plans for The Castle were agreed upon and in motion. The fire trucks were moving along roads deemed out of reach of the town’s sirens, doing their best to lead zombies in that direction. They had decided not to wire explosives to the vehicles, mainly because they lacked the fuses and igniters the Rangers were comfortable with on trucks that would be driving half a day and pulling up in a hurry. They also had virtually no plastic explosives, and would have had to rely on gas or fertilizer bombs to blow up the trucks. What they did decide to do was rig as many mines around the area where the trucks would park as they had time and materials for.
Carter had found a mechanical engineer and plenty of volunteers to work on his catapults, and rock-gathering had begun in earnest. They had no trouble finding volunteers to work on the project, though most were very disappointed to learn that what they were needed for was rock-gathering. Jack had eighty-five experienced soldiers with which to fight the coming zombies, all of them well-armored and quickly learning how to fight with medieval weapons. Several hundred more people would be directly supporting the front-line troops by transporting water, replacement weapons, and wounded soldiers to the clinic. John and Tina were organizing everyone into squads and platoons, including the support-workers.
At Jack’s insistence, everyone physically able to use a pike or mace was being taught the basics of how best to kill zombies in the event that The Castle was overrun. These people armored themselves as best as they could, and Jack estimated that they numbered around two hundred. The plan was for everyone to do their assigned tasks during the battle unless the zombies broke through somewhere, at which point everyone nearby would grab weapons and join the fight.
The next day brought more work and training, with the most obvious changes being the preparation for the placement of four catapults on the reverse slope of the berm. Workers had dug into the hillside in numerous places to create level ground for the machines and the piles of rocks they would be tossing. Steps were also carved into the slope so stones could be more easily resupplied during the fighting. The catapults themselves were still being assembled in the barn, but Jack had inspected the blueprints and had the concept explained to him, and he believed that they were going to be a welcome addition to their defenses. Bobby and several other Rangers were working on explosives for the mines, and they were certain that they could create large enough blasts to incapacitate enough zombies to make the effort worth their time.
The catapults had turned out to be rather simple affairs, using springs and other metal parts scavenged from a junk yard just three miles away. They were also relatively quiet, which would be important if they were to be fired without rousing zombie attention. Rex White was proving to be of far more value to their group than just shooting at zombies from a fire-station roof as he had worked at a landscaping company that could literally provide millions of stones for the catapults. He had taken charge of the teams assigned the task of gathering rocks and several dump-truck loads had already been delivered.
An open area behind the barn had become the training ground for teaching new and old soldiers how to
use medieval weaponry against creatures that could only be stopped by massive head trauma. All of the teachers and trainees had at least some combat experience against the zombies, and they had learned what did and didn’t work well against the monsters. Everyone wanted a halberd and mace, but after that each soldier seemed to have their own opinion on what was the best backup weapon to carry into battle. Axes and swords were heavy-duty killers, but were prone to becoming stuck in bone and flesh when adrenaline fueled blows cut right through skulls and into shoulders. Zach’s success with the sledge hammer had been noticed by many, but only a few had the strength and stamina needed to use the weapon in a sustained fight. Everyone agreed that a short sword or long dagger had to be part of each soldier’s arsenal since more than one person had escaped a zombie pile by using the blades.
All of the fighting men and women were armored to a great degree, but Jack had to chuckle at the lack of uniformity among the soldiers. A number of younger fighters were using football helmets with the facemasks removed and tough plastic visors attached. This form of head gear required a thick leather neck guard to protect the back of the neck, but they also fit tighter than many of the motorcycle helmets available in the armory. Everyone wore Kevlar-laced leather pants stuck tightly into knee high, snake-proof boots. Each soldier was also covered with heavy shirts made of the same material as the pants, which in combat would be covered with leather jackets. Racing and fish-cleaning gloves heavily laced with Kevlar completed the armor, with some of the troops wearing studded leather collars if they felt that their necks were vulnerable under their favored helmet.
A month ago they would have looked silly in Jack’s back yard, but he knew that in the new world they were deadly killing machines. Like the knights of old they could be destroyed by sheer weight of numbers if they lost their footing, but in single combat they couldn’t be killed by any zombie Jack had yet encountered. These modern knights had also proven that when standing shoulder-to-shoulder they could repel five to ten times their number. Now, they would learn what happened when a force one hundred times greater than theirs attacked them in a fortress. Jack fervently hoped that his soldiers were up to the task. He figured that, as in the battles at the safe-houses, there would be losses that couldn’t be prevented. All things considered, Jack was honored to fight beside these men and women determined to survive in a world that had literally turned into a horror film.