by Eddie Patin
Walking up to the door with stiff legs, Arthur saw the shadow of a man standing in the frosty-glass, lit up from behind by the morning light.
Samson meowed behind him, and Arthur looked back to see the cat standing, stretch, and trot along to keep up. He was probably hungry. It occurred to Arthur that he hadn’t seen the cat since the day the lights went out...
Unlocking the deadbolt, Arthur cracked the door to look outside, and saw his neighbor, Gill, standing on his stoop, dressed like a special forces badass, smoking a cigarette, and holding an AR-15 with a suppressor attached to the end of the barrel.
Arthur sighed.
So that’s what that sound was. Arthur was no stranger to guns. He had his two, and practiced with them plenty, but he had never actually heard a weapon fired suppressed before. Not outside of YouTube, at least...
“Gill,” he said, opening the door. His neighbor immediately eyed the shotgun in Arthur’s other hand, but didn’t respond negatively.
“Howdy, neighbor,” Gill said, drawing his thin face into a smile. The cigarette almost fell, but stuck fast to his lips. His long hair was drawn back into a ponytail. He was wearing a tac vest stuffed with several rifle mags and a pistol in a sideways Kydex holster on his chest.
“Haven’t seen you in a while,” Arthur groaned.
“Been busy. You look like shit. I haven’t seen your family lately...”
“Yeah,” Arthur said, leaning against the wall. He ran his free hand over his face. With his skin cold and numb, his face felt weird to his fingers, and his fingers felt weird to his face. “They’re gone. Missing. I’ve been looking for them, but I haven’t found them yet.”
Gill clucked his tongue and looked down for an instant. “That’s rough, man. That’s rough. What are you gonna do?”
“Well, I’ve got to go back out there. I was gonna do that this morning.”
Arthur’s neighbor looked over to the front room windows outside. Arthur’s gaze followed, and he gasped when he saw the shattered glass glinting in the morning sun, spread out all over his rocks. The interior door and other barricades he fastened to the window frame was cracked and splintered in areas, and he could distinctly see the marks of fingernails running down against the woodgrain...
“Holy shit,” Gill said. “Looks like you boarded up just in the nick of time, eh?”
“You got that right.”
They stood quietly for a moment. Arthur heard shuffling and moans from around the front of the house. A bird sung from up in a tree.
“Listen,” Gill said, looking at Arthur again. “Why don’t you come on by and have some coffee, huh? Warm up a little bit before you head out?”
“You have coffee?” Arthur asked.
As freezing as he was, surviving in a house with no heat or electricity and low on resources, coffee sounded like a Godsend the moment the word fell from Gill’s lips.
“Sure,” he replied. “I’m kinda prepared, you know?”
“Yeah, sure,” Arthur said. “Let me change real quick? Feed the cat?”
“Okay.”
“Wanna come in?”
Gill nodded and followed Arthur inside.
Going to the kitchen first, Arthur grabbed the container of cat food and poured it heartedly into Samson’s bowl, giving the cat way more than he needed. Samson was after him in a second, swirling around his legs, then darting in to eat the moment the food hit his bowl. Then, after taking a long drink of water from the jugs on the kitchen table, Arthur went upstairs and changed into some fresh clothes. He grabbed the remainder of the box of buckshot from the nightstand, and went back downstairs where his neighbor was waiting.
Throwing the box of shells into his backpack and slinging the bag over his shoulder, he headed to the door, shotgun still in hand.
“Alright,” Arthur said, and they stepped outside.
Halfway across Arthur’s yard to his neighbor’s house, he and Gill both reacted as a couple of zombies emerged from around the front of the garage, snarling and making wet, nasty sounds as the filthy creatures took slow and stiff steps in their direction.
Arthur raised his shotgun, flicking the safety off and putting the bead over the nearest zombie’s face.
“Nah,” Gill said, shaking his head and tentatively putting a hand out to lower Arthur’s muzzle. “Save your hearing.”
Arthur lowered his gun and watched as Gill snapped up his AR, looked down the sights, and put a round into each of the zombies’ foreheads. Ca-chunk, ca-chunk. They dropped like rocks.
“Good idea.”
Gill guided Arthur to the gate by their property line that led into his neighbor’s back yard. Arthur saw several other monsters standing around and moving slowly in the street nearby, spread throughout the neighborhood, but Gill didn’t pay them any mind, so neither did he. As the two men walked through the grass past Gill’s garage, Arthur took a closer look at the heavy metal shudders that covered up the windows on that side of the house.
Very secure.
His neighbor’s six-foot fence looked just like his on the outside, and the gate was just as uninteresting, but as they approached closer, Arthur was surprised to see a heavy metal latch that had a combination lock of some kind attached, with little, black plastic buttons for each number. Gill approached, and dramatically showed his combination as he spoke and pressed the numbers.
“Four, seven, two ... okay?”
Arthur nodded as Gill opened the latch and swung the gate open just enough for them to get inside. As Arthur stepped into the back yard, he saw that the entire fence was reinforced with some kind of metal bands from the inside.
“Holy crap, Gill! Your house is crazy.”
“Heh,” the man replied with a wry smile. “Not so crazy now, huh?”
Gill’s backyard was just as interesting. It was mostly empty of furniture and trees, and had what looked like an urban garden—two large beds of dark dirt were visible under see-through fabric sheets, shored up with wooden walls. Arthur didn’t see any crops.
As if reading his mind, Gill spoke up. “It’s just early April still,” he said, looking at the garden. “I normally don’t start planting for the new season until the beginning of May. Bad timing for the Apocalypse, huh?”
Arthur saw something seemingly uncharacteristic of his neighbor sitting near the concrete pad close to the house: a large, children’s sandbox, shaped like a brilliant green plastic turtle! It was open, and as Arthur scrutinized it, he scowled, approaching to look deeper inside...
The sandbox, inside its friendly exterior, was a pit. It might have been ... ten feet deep! Under the childlike plastic turtle shell, there were walls made of wood going all the way down, where the floor at the bottom was sand...
“What the hell is that?” Arthur asked.
“For the sand bags,” Gill replied. “It’s a really, really deep sand box!”
“Fuckin A...” Arthur said, bending to look over the edge. “Sand bags?”
“Mmm hmm,” Gill replied, then pulled out his keyring to open the back door that led into his garage. “Shall we?”
Arthur followed his neighbor into the dark carport, and when the man pulled out a little plastic LED lantern, the white light shining from it suddenly illuminated the Ford Bronco sitting still in the darkness!
“You have light!”
“Sure,” Gill said. “The EMP killed most of everything, but I had some lights and vehicle parts and stuff stored in a Faraday Cage, so I have some things that still work.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll show you. Let’s get some coffee.”
Gill unlocked the door leading into the house, and Arthur followed him in the dark, their path lit by the LED light his neighbor was carrying in one hand. With all of those steel shutters covering the windows and doors (and garage!), the house was as dark as a cave. But maybe, if the shudders blocked the light from outside coming in, it would allow Gill to have light inside without letting the whole neighborhood know about it, too.
Without letting the zombies know about it...
They made their way to Gill’s kitchen, where the man set his AR gently onto the table, then produced a mug from a cabinet. He picked up a big, green thermos, and poured Arthur a cup of black coffee.
The smell of it made Arthur close his eyes and sigh. He took a sip, and immediately felt better.
“Good, huh?”
“Oh yeah,” Arthur said, feeling the warmth come back into his face and fingers.
When he looked up from the cup, he noticed that the walls in the front of Gill’s house—all along the outside walls of his living room, entry room, as far as he could see—were stacked high with small, white sandbags.
“So what’s the plan?” Gill said.
“What’s with all the sandbags?” Arthur asked. There must have been hundreds of them!
“Like I said, I’ve been busy...”
“So,” Arthur said, “when things went to shit, you just put up your defenses, went in the backyard, and started making sandbags?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” Gill said. “Among other things.”
“Wow.”
“I saw you help Delores’s man across the street yesterday,” Gill said.
Arthur felt a splash of mixed feelings inside at that. His face felt a little hot. He remembered getting pretty close to that fight—when he tried to knock the zombie off of that caretaker guy, he could have been attacked himself...
Of course, he could have just stayed inside and let the man die...
“You could have helped, Gill!” Arthur said. “You could have like ... sniped the monsters from your bedroom or something—fuck...”
Maybe if Gill did get involved, he could have shot the creatures before the man was bitten.
Arthur remembered the zombie girl in the Neighborhood Market uniform.
She wasn’t always a zombie...
Did the bite cause infection, just like in the movies?
Gill scoffed. “Yeah, right,” he said. “And I would have put a target on my back for all of the sheep in the neighborhood, too!”
“You’d rather they get killed and the neighborhood gets full of zombies?”
“Arthur,” he replied, half-patronizing. “That’s gonna happen anyway. You know that. It wasn’t just you that got attacked last night. Lots of people got wasted. I saw the zeds coming up from the main road and spreading out. I watched them break through doors and windows, and heard them slaughter lots of people. Crazy stuff...”
Arthur took a hearty sip of coffee, then glared at his neighbor. “What the hell, man?!”
“And you know what?” Gill said. “A lot of those people saw you rescue that guy—who’s probably a zombie now, by the way—and when they decide they need a shotgun, where do you think they’ll go? In a situation like this, there are the have’s ... and the have-not’s. Once things get tough, even these nice people on our circle will turn into gangs of raiders and shit, and start hunting down the have’s...”
Arthur stared at the half-empty cup of coffee, then looked back up at Gill’s cold eyes, lit up by the LED light.
“Fuck man,” he said. “It’s just all fucked up...”
“Buddy, I’ve been preparing for something like this for a long time,” Gill said. “I never thought it would come down to a freaking zombie apocalypse, but I at least expected the globalists to launch an attack on our electrical grid and take down our infrastructure. Collapse our whole society by taking out our power and emergency services. The EMP came first. Then the zombies came—they’re extra.”
“What do you know about EMP’s?”
“A lot,” Gill said. “That was definitely an EMP that hit Colorado Springs. How far did you go out looking for your wife and kids?”
“Dublin.”
Gill smirked. “Yeah, so, sounds like total collapse to me.”
“And my phone is dead, all of my flashlights, my truck—even my fucking watch.”
“Yep. EMP.”
“I know the term, but I don’t know much about electronics. Still, I didn’t think stuff that wasn’t plugged into electricity would get fried like that. I wouldn’t have thought it worked like that...”
“Well, I’ve never actually been through one like this before,” Gill said. “People in the EMP prep world have speculated this and that, but now we’re seeing for ourselves, huh? All of the little stuff is dead, too.”
“How’d you get this light to work?” Arthur asked, looking at the LED that lit up their faces.
“It was in my Faraday Cage.”
“What’s that?”
“Come on,” Gill said. “I’ll show you...”
5 - Tommy and Jody Shelton
Flagstaff, AZ
The gym was filled with the constant sound of murmuring, occasional raised voices, whimpers, and the cries of children.
Tommy looked up from his bowl of oatmeal at his sister.
Jody was methodically stabbing scrambled eggs with a plastic fork, loading up the shiny, black tines with as many yellow chunks as she could, then, the little girl delivered the huge bite into her tiny mouth, open wide. She pulled the fork out from between her lips, chewed the eggs, and met his eyes with hers, smiling.
He smiled back at her, then dug into another spoonful of creamy, warm oats.
The night went well—okay for not being able to sleep at home, anyway. Tommy spent a long time crying when Jody was finally asleep, thinking about Mom and Dad and about being alone now. Him and Jody. But when it was late and as dark as a cave and people all around where turning off all of their lanterns, the boy eventually settled in and slept against his sister, holding her tightly through the night as she squirmed with bad dreams.
When they woke up, the entire camp was stirring with people moving around in pajamas and seeking places to wash themselves with the water still in the pipes. The air smelled like propane vapors and breakfast foods cooking over camp stoves.
The family closest to them offered Tommy and Jody each a small bowl of oatmeal and some scrambled eggs.
“Howdy, kids,” a police officer said, walking by with loud boots on the gym floor. “How are you guys doing?”
Tommy looked up at the man from his cross-legged comfort on their blanket.
“Good,” he said, working on a bite and covering his mouth with his hand.
“Don’t talk with food in your mouth,” his mom’s voice echoed into his mind.
Jody smiled up at the man in blue with chipmunk cheeks and her long hair cascading down her little shoulders, and gave the officer a thumbs-up.
“Very good,” he said. “Carry on.”
The policeman walked on, and Tommy watched him go. It wasn’t the same man that Dad was talking to at their door yesterday. There were a few cops here. Tommy had seen that guy somewhere—Dad’s friend, but he didn’t see him now. Terry, he remembered. That’s what Dad called him. The cop named Terry knew his dad...
“Don’t call them cops, son”, he suddenly remembered his father saying. “Call them officers. ‘Cops’ is disrespectful.”
As the two children sat and ate breakfast, Tommy looked out across the sea of people, sleeping bags, luggage, and nylon tents. He was surprised that some people went to the trouble of setting up actual tents inside the gym, but he understood. Maybe they didn’t want other people to see them sleeping or changing their clothes...
Later, after returning the dishes and utensils to the family next to them, Tommy and Jody put on their jackets and backpacks and wandered through the haphazard aisles of refugees. The boy didn’t feel like sitting around all day, and wanted to see if he recognized anybody.
They walked slowly by, sometimes holding hands, and they both dealt with many varied looks from the people trying to keep themselves busy and organizing and reorganizing whatever belongings they took with them. Many folks smiled and said hello cheerfully, and Tommy was sure that they did because of Jody, who smiled and looked cute and beamed at everyone.
“Tommy! Jody!” a
lady’s voice the boy recognized exclaimed from up ahead.
A woman ran up, and Tommy quickly recognized that it was Zack’s mother—Mrs. Jackson. He gasped, and felt tears suddenly rimming around his eyes as he remembered the scene from yesterday in the street when Mom and Dad were killed. His friend from school, Zack, was killed as well, along with the boy’s father...
I guess his mom got away after all, Tommy thought.
The black woman ran up to them, her clothes and hair disheveled, her face a twisted mask of stress and worry. Her eyes were wide and full of terror. She hugged the boy fiercely, then, hugged his sister.
“You’re alive!” the woman exclaimed. Tommy watched the tears roll down her cheeks as well. She grasped him again, and he braced himself to resist another aggressive hug.
“We got away,” Tommy replied, the breaking in his voice surprising him. “We got away under the street.”
“Oh, good for you kids!” she replied. “Listen—you haven’t seen Zack, have you?”
Tommy felt a wrecking ball slam into his guts! Did she not know? The boy remembered hearing his friend die, screaming continuously for a long time, in a much higher pitch than he thought possible—like a little girl! He could remember the sound of the heavy thumps on the concrete; the ripping sound of the monster’s claws digging through asphalt and flesh and bone...
“We um ... I don’t ... I...”
“I think they killed him,” Mrs. Jackson replied, then sobbed into her hands.
“You didn’t ... see?” Tommy asked.
Her eyes darted up to glare at him from her hands, red and swollen and full of tears. “Of course!” she snapped. “I tried to help them—I tried! I didn’t just ... run away!”
Tommy gasped and instinctively pulled Jody close to him. His little sister’s bright green eyes were open wide.
“I don’t think...” he started, then choked. “I don’t think Zack got away...”
Zack’s mother burst into sobs again, reaching out and pulling Tommy and his sister into a fierce hug. The smell of her perfume filled his nostrils. “I know,” she cried. “I know! They killed my baby!”