by TW Brown
“How did that happen?” Nelson asked, only moderately curious. In reality, he was trying to get a feel for this man.
“We found a real posh house, yeah? And so Miller decides to shimmy up a tree and enter from upstairs, saying that if there are zombies inside, they will probably be downstairs. He gets up and has one leg over when this lady zed crashed through the french doors and scares the crap out of Miller. Seriously, the man messed his trousers. Anyway, he landed badly and his leg broke ugly. We been trying to figure out how to set it, but anytime somebody even touches him, he screams and threatens to kill them.”
By now, the rest of the group had come up and stood just a few feet behind this man. A few still had their weapons drawn, but they were also the ones looking around for any approaching zombies that might have been drawn to the scene. Plus, the female zombie in the truck was slapping and actually trying to bite through the glass.
“Well, I can’t make any promises, but we are securing Micklefield…at least Old Mick. We still got room, and I imagine that if you spoke to our vicar and our constable, they would be happy to bring you and your people in. We even have two real doctors.” Nelson was not entirely sure that he should be making such an offer, but if he wanted to be a good guy in this hell, then he figured he was doing the right thing.
“Maybe you could bring your doc to where we are staying?” the man asked.
“Yeah, that is probably not going to happen. We don’t let the doc wander around outside the containment. Worth his weight in gold, he is.” Nelson jumped as Melena and the other women emerged from behind the brick entry wall. “We will be more than happy to see your man, but it happens in Mick or not at all.”
“Oh, my God,” Caron gasped, shoving her way past the others and running to the truck. She climbed up on the step on the driver’s side and put a hand to the glass. The zombie turned to her and pressed its face to where the hand was and gnawed impotently. “It’s Shadiyah,” Caron managed around the tears that were welling in her eyes.
“Bloody hell,” Nelson edged around the strangers and came to the truck. “Let her out.”
“What!” came from almost everybody gathered.
“I don’t mean to point out something obvious,” the man Nelson had been speaking to said as he came up to the truck, “but she can’t do any harm locked in there.”
“Is that how you would want people to act if it was you?” Caron snarled as she spun on the man so fast that he stumbled back a few feet and actually went for his weapon.
“Pardon me,” the man replied with a cool tone that edged on anger, “but if I become one of those bloody biters, I’ll be dead and it won’t matter.”
“So you are okay with wandering the earth as one of them?” Caron jumped down to the street, hiking a thumb over her shoulder at Shadiyah’s zombie.
“Sorry,” the man said, shrugging his shoulder. “Dead is dead and I won’t know the difference. Never understood the whole emotional deal that people seem to have when a loved one turns.” The man was silent for a moment as if he were considering something, then he continued. “I lost my Carol early on. She came home with a bite on her arm. Two days later, she gave up the ghost. The thing that sat up in that bed was not her. I know this because I tried to talk to her, show her pictures of her cat. She loved that bloody thing more than me. And you know what I saw in her eyes?” He paused, his gaze sweeping Nelson and Caron. “Nothing…that’s what. Not a bloody thing. That wasn’t my girl, that was just a thing…a monster.”
“So you just left her?” Caron asked.
“Shut the door and went looking for a safe place when the BBC News told us to seek shelter. That was a terrible idea. So many people that had been bitten by those things and then they turned and the shelter was tits up. I met up with a few blokes and we were doing okay for a couple of days until one of ‘em says he knows a place, yeah? So we follow and he leads us to this little group of flats. The short of it was that he was leading us back to his home so he could end his wife and kids. The bloody prick didn’t even bother to tell us that the kids were both inside. The little ones are tricky…they hide. One of ‘em damn near got me when it came out from the kitchen just as I was going in. I was the only one to get out. Lost the rest just because some idiot wanted to end the suffering or some such nonsense. They ain’t suffering…they’re dead.”
Caron looked up at Shadiyah. She turned back to the man. “I’m sorry about what happened to you, but I know she would not want to be one of those things. She wouldn’t want to hurt anybody.”
Caron walked up to the truck and opened the door. The zombie version of Shadiyah tumbled out gracelessly and landed on her face with a wet splat. Raising its head, the zombie opened its mouth and groaned, low and guttural. Before it could recover, Caron moved in with her knife and plunged it into the back of the woman’s head.
“I am sorry,” she whispered as she rose, leaving the knife jutting from the back of the mess of dark hair.
“So,” Melena stepped up, taking Caron by the hand and then facing the group of strangers, “will you be joining us?”
“Give us a minute,” the man said. He motioned his people to join him across the street.
Nelson brought his own group in close. Caron kept glancing over her shoulder at Shadiyah’s corpse. At last, she whispered, “Can we bury her before we go?”
“I don’t see why not,” Nelson answered after seeing the nods from the others. “As long as we’re not being chased by another mob of zombies, I think we can take the time. In fact, why don’t you find a place while we wait?”
“Actually, I already know where.” She pointed to a house just up the street. A few evergreen shrubs were planted in the space between two driveways. A row of solar-powered lights were placed around the edges.
“So,” the man stepped away from his group, gave one final look over his shoulder as if he wanted one more confirmation in the form of the nodding heads he received, “I think we are going to decline. We have a nice little group, and we don’t plan on staying here. We are going to see about heading to the coast and maybe finding a little island.”
“Not a bad plan,” Nelson admitted. “We wish you luck. And I think there is plenty here for everybody, so can we agree that both of our groups can scavenge here?”
“Seems proper,” the man replied with a nod. “We’ll stick to this side of the street and leave that side to you. That will keep us from stumbling over each other.”
“Agreed.” With that, Nelson and his group went to a house and began loading up their packs.
After doing a walkthrough of a dozen homes, it was decided that they would need to arrange a constant rotation of groups to start emptying the place out. Before they returned home, they found a shovel and buried Shadiyah. By the time they were ready to head back, the shadows were growing long. The solar powered lights winked on and lit up the one shrub that they had replaced in the center of where they had buried the body.
“Poor girl,” Caron whispered as she knelt beside the grave, “you just weren’t meant for this world. I hope you have peace now.”
***
Simon knelt beside the mound of dirt marked with a small shrub and laid some flowers that Melena had picked during the walk to Shadiyah’s grave site. It had taken him almost two months to regain his health to the point where he could join the teams that were doing a fine job of emptying out the neighborhood of Cedar Ridge.
The other group had moved on after only three days when the man who had fallen from the balcony finally died from an infection that festered in his injury. Their forays for supplies had hardly made a dent in the hundreds of homes that waited to be emptied.
One of the large carts rumbled past, four people hitched to it almost like horses. It had been decided that just making these runs with packs would be useless. If they were going to try and build a good supply base, they needed to be able to move things in large quantities…without the noise generated by a motor vehicle.
“Simon?
” Dawn called as she jogged up.
“Yeah?” The man stood and wiped the lone tear that had welled up in his eye.
“Nelson says there is a large mob of zombies coming. We need to get the team ready and see if this works.”
“How big?”
“At least a thousand.”
“Tell him to send them.”
Dawn turned and jogged away. Simon headed over to the large building and arrived just as the roll-up doors were opening. Melena was waiting for him, but she was hopping back and forth with excitement.
“This is either going to be the most amazing thing ever, or it will end very poorly,” the woman said by way of greeting.
Simon stepped into the large, wide open bay and shook his head as he watched six people in some serious protective gear as they climbed into the assorted racecars. He had to admit, while certainly a very unorthodox idea, he was excited to see it put into action.
One by one, the cars turned over, their engines coming to life with amazing roars and growls. The vehicles started out of the huge garage and then made a right and then hooked left onto Aberford Road.
Simon made his way up the ladder that led to the roof of the huge building. From there, he could look out at the stretch of wide open fields to the west. Sure enough, making its way across one such field was what had to be at least a thousand of the walking dead. They were all spread out, but the main body was moving in his general direction.
With a scream of high-performance engines, six of the racecars that were housed in the garage of this massive building tore up the road. There was a long moment where Simon was afraid that the whole plan was a bust. Maybe the engines whined at such a high frequency that the zombies did not detect them. Hell, what did anybody really know about the walking dead other than they ate people?
Then, there was a ripple in the massive horde as they began to pause and then re-orient on this new stimulus. It was working!
“Son of a bitch,” Nelson exclaimed, slapping Simon so hard on the back that the man nearly collapsed from coughing.
While he was able to make the journey to see this event, he was still far from fully recovered, and that slap to the back sent a shockwave of pain through his body. He dropped to his knees, hacking and coughing, but trying to cover his mouth and keep it quiet; the last thing he wanted to do was be a catalyst for bringing the zombies back to them.
“Let’s get you back to Micklefield,” Caron urged, slipping his arm around her shoulders and guiding him away from the roof’s edge. “You’ve seen what you needed to see.”
As they made their way back home, Simon could not help but cast one more glance at a small and unremarkable mound of dirt with a single shrub in the middle. For a brief second or two, his mind raced with all the possible ways that he could have done things differently and saved Shadiyah.
By the time he was back home and slipping in between the sheets of his bed, he had come to terms with things. He could not save everybody. That was a lesson that he would need to keep in the forefront of his mind for the rest of his life. The facts were that this was a new world, and the old rules no longer applied. While he would not actively do anything to “cull the herd” when it came to the living, he would accept that some people would slip through his fingers.
When he drifted off to sleep, it was a peaceful slumber. Not a single nightmare came to plague him. He would remember that sleep for a long time. Yes, there would be other nights where he would sleep and not wake up with horrible visions still fresh in his mind, but this was the first time since Miranda’s death.
For the next few months, they used those screaming racecars to lure away any of the larger mobs of zombies that were spotted by the scouting pickets. They eventually stopped when one of the roving patrols returned with horrifying news.
While they had managed to keep the zombies from their own front steps, they had never considered that they might be sending them to somebody else. The scouting team that returned with the news guessed that the community had maybe numbered around fifty or so individuals. They had staked out a massive farm in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, they had underestimated or simply not considered what a large number of the walking dead could do; they had nothing more than the barbed wire fence as their protection and it had failed miserably against the press of a thousand bodies that don’t apparently feel pain.
***
The days passed and the slow, tedious task of creating a five foot wide, eight foot deep trench along the border of Old Micklefield continued along with a fence structure that tilted out over the trench at an angle that made it terribly difficult for the living to breach. Towers were built every fifty yards and each was equipped with a heavy bell as well as a series of flags that were all given a meaning that the entire community was drilled on until everybody had them committed to memory.
By the time the summer was in full effect, the scavenging runs were called off. Teams were having to venture farther and farther out with the returns diminishing and the risks increasing. The dead were still a massive problem; in addition, there were hundreds if not thousands of corpses strewn about and rotting. That was creating a cesspool of disease not to mention all the vermin it attracted.
One of the most horrific finds was a pack of dogs that had somehow all turned. The hypothesis was that they simply began to starve and had no choice but to turn to the dead and the undead for their source of food. The first team that encountered the zombie dogs lost seven of their nine-person team. The dogs, while in zombie form, still operated on a sort of pack instinct and managed to trap the team in a dilapidated house by herding them to what the survivors insisted was a pre-determined destination.
If the walking dead, zombie dogs, and the threat of deadly disease were not bad enough, there seemed to be a disproportionate number of human survivors that took advantage of the chaos and loss of any sort of society structure to prey on their fellow men and women. It was Mrs. Raye who finally proposed the edict that women be removed from the scavenging teams indefinitely. Simon was surprised that the measure barely passed. He certainly understood the women who wanted to contribute, but there was a real threat to their safety on the other side of their protective barricades.
And then there was the problem of immunity. Eventually, Simon made it known to everybody that he had been bitten and survived. He and Caron had stood before the entire population at a town gathering and made the announcement. It was immediately suggested that he offer up blood or whatever Dr. Kincaide or Dr. Asan might require if it meant a possible cure or even an inoculation. Simon agreed to blood and a number of tests, but after several weeks of painful visits and nothing to show for it, both doctors stated that there was simply no way to do the sort of research they needed without power.
Slowly, more survivors began to drift in and seek refuge in the tiny village of Micklefield. By the time summer began to give over to fall, plans were being made to reclaim New Micklefield and re-annex it with Old Micklefield. Many came in with horrific tales of the living and the dead.
The day that hit the community the hardest was when a handful of survivors from London arrived and told of how the city was a total loss. While it had certainly been speculated, it was another thing entirely to get confirmation.
That night, everybody gathered in the small village green and lit candles while observing a moment of silence. It was that day that most of the citizens of Micklefield accepted that this was going to be their new reality. Any hopes of help or the restoration of their country was gone.
It was that realization that was blamed for the rash of suicides which followed over the next several days. Yet, those deaths were quickly mourned and then moved on from as survivors came in singles, pairs, and even a group of twenty-seven. That group was greeted with the most excitement as they brought in nine children between the ages of six and eleven. Annie was even given the task of showing the shell-shocked children around and helping them ease into everyday life.
As autumn gave w
ay to winter, a new realization came. It was almost impossible to stay warm. No matter what was done, everybody suffered from a constant feeling of cold, wet misery. It was toughest on the children and the few elderly that had managed to make it to this point. Of the three hundred and forty-three people that were part of the community as of Christmas morning, sixty-two would be dead from flu or just plain exposure by the time the first buds of spring appeared.
Over half that survived suffered varying degrees of frostbite, and many people were minus a finger or a few toes. Dr. Asan and Dr. Kincaide were teaching a handful of the citizens basic medicine as well how to amputate frostbitten or gangrenous digits. The problem came when they ran out of the finite supply of anesthesia and pain medication.
However, the bigger problem came in how poorly the various garden starts that they had tried to save for the upcoming planting season fared. Simon felt more than just a little guilty in his sense of relief over their casualties. They would have had no way to feed the number of people who were part of the community prior to that Christmas.
With travel once again something that could be accomplished without having to add weather to the concerns of zombies and human raiders, teams were sent with greenhouse construction as a priority. Additionally, a dozen large domed fire pits were constructed with a crude series of ductworks that would hopefully provide warmth the following winter.
By the time the gardens were planted in the fields, it became clear that the flood of survivors they experienced the previous year was a thing of the past. However, there were occasional arrivals of people who were simply “passing through” or actually just searching the countryside, clinging to the desperate hope that they might find a lost loved one. Most brought an abundance of bad news including a sect that was hunting the immune with a zealousness that was likened to the era of the witch trials in colonial Salem.
However, not everything was bleak. As fear lessened and the closeness of the community kindled such superfluous things as romance, Simon and Dr. Wamil Asan were soon a cause for celebration as well as a source of discovery.