“Um….I have mild hearing loss in both ears why?”
“Long story.”
Henry comes bursting into the room with a crazed look on his face, his hair looks like he combed it with a broken chainsaw. He isn’t wearing a shirt and he is razor thin, I can count his ribs from where I am standing, he is holding an old school cassette player that must have been scrounged on some run or another and the headphones are dangling from his hands.
“Jake!” He shouts as he comes running up to me, a guard decides he doesn’t trust the crazy look on his face and steps in his way.
The guard is huge and Henry pretty much just bounces off of him as he runs full tilt boogie into him. He falls on his ass and just sits there for a moment catching his breath.
“You don’t understand, I know how to beat them! I know how we can kill them all!” He tells me urgently.
“Don’t just stand there, help the man up.” Joyce tells the guard calmly.
Chapter Ten
The headphones give me an idea and I sent a runner to tell Matt to have Winston round up all personal music devices with headphones and issue them to critical personnel to ward off anymore Singer zombie attacks. I also instruct them to have Winston meet us in my quarters as soon as he has accomplished that.
Joyce tosses Henry one of my shirts and after he puts it on, we all sit down at the folding camp table that passes for our kitchen table. The kid is wound up tight, so I dip into my personal stash and pour all three of us a generous shot of some rot gut whiskey
“Ok kid, slowly and calmly now, lay it out for us.”
He gulped his whiskey and took a deep breath, the shirt was huge on him making him look even younger than he probably was. Joyce smiled at him encouragingly and he actually blushed a little before speaking.
“I was in my room, I live on the top floor and I was looking out the window when that weird ass singing zombie showed up. When it started singing, I could feel myself start to blank out so I cranked up the volume on my head phones and that seemed to break the trance. That’s when bodies started falling past my damn window.” His voice is shaky with a hint of tears in it, Joyce starts to reach for his hand but I shake my head at her. If she touches him he might just fall apart and I need him pulled together.
“Continue.” I tell him firmly without a hint of sympathy in my voice. He saw bodies fall by his window, I had been on the damn rooftop. Some of those guards were my friends so if I don’t have the luxury of falling apart, neither does he.
“I went to the door and opened it and saw people like sleep walking past me. I tried to stop my neighbor, but he is like three times my size and walked right over me, pushing me out of the way. Everyone was walking downstairs and I figured they were trying to leave. I think the new zombie is another mutation and the song has a hypnotic effect. It is a brilliant adaptation, make your prey come to you.” His voice was getting a little stronger now, moving into lecture mode.
“That’s when it occurred to me, think about it for a minute. The adult zombies seem to hunt by sound right? The Screamer zombies get louder and louder until they explode right? And the Singer zombies attract prey by sound right?” He is nodding his head in time to his questions.
Joyce makes the leap before I do, not surprising, there is a very keen mind behind her pretty eyes.
“So, maybe we can hurt them with sound?” She asks eagerly.
“Exactly, we can rig up whatever speakers we can scrounge and go for maximum decibel level possible. If we can find the point that their no doubt sensitive hearing can’t handle, we might be able to kill them all.” He leans back in his chair and crosses his thin arms.
The idea sends me reeling, we have all been in survival mode for so long, that the idea of taking the fight to the zombies is a foreign one. Sound as a damn weapon, could it really be that simple. I need to have Winston get on the ham radio and relay all this new information to the other enclaves. This mess is bound to spread, despite Whiskey Dave’s attempt at quarantine and everyone deserves to know how to fight the new threats we have been facing.
“Ok Henry, I am going to hook you up with Winston, our gadget guy, do you know him?” I ask the kid.
“Yes sir.”
“Until I tell you different this doesn’t leave this room. Until we have a plan in place and until we see that plan work we don’t get people’s hopes up. It has been a rough several days and I don’t want to give these people hope and then have it snatched away.” I tell him staring him right in the eye to impress on him how serious I am about this.
He gulps, swallows nervously and then nods.
“You will have to tell them something about it tonight Jake, the people will be in a panic. The doors have been breached and we lost people to two new kind of zombie all in one day.” Joyce tells me gently.
She is of course right.
Doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Big Al was brilliant at reassuring the masses and rallying the troops through the power of public speaking, me, I have hated standing in front of people and talking since debate class was mandatory back in high school. I will do it, because it needs to be done, but after all is said is done, I am afraid the main take away the crowd will have from my speech will be one harsh fact.
I am not Big Al.
Chapter Eleven
We all gather in the only room big enough to hold meetings in, the dining hall. It is a sad fact as I look out over the crowd that there are less of us now. All told, we lost a dozen people last night. I stand facing the crowd with the council seated in a row of chairs behind me, they are only here to add the weight of their approval to my words. The speech is entirely up to me.
Not everyone is here of course, we have guards at the main door and snipers still hold their positions on the roof. All of them now play low level music into headphones that they can immediately crank up if a Singer is spotted. Batteries will be a priority on the next supply run.
I look out over the crowd and I know most of them by name, a few are newcomers we rescued from one bad situation or another out there in the outside world. Old hands or newbies everyone here is a Narwhal now.
Couldn’t even tell you how often I stood behind Big Al as he addressed this same crowd. He always seemed to know what they needed him to say, even if the news was bad. The guy was a natural leader and he did his best to groom me for this role. Any failures are my weight to carry,, not his.
“Hello brothers and sisters. I would like to start with a moment of silence for those that we lost last night.” I tell them as a bow my own head.
Every single one of them bows their own head, and more than a few of them are crying as they do so.
We are all Narwhals, in this new twisted fucked up world we are all family and we protect and mourn our own.
“It has been a difficult time for all of us, we have lost people to these strange new threats that are cropping up. But, we will meet these challenges like we have met all the others, together. Together we will work to survive everything the world throws at us, because we are the fucking Narwhals.” I tell them letting an edge come into my voice.
“Fuck yeah!” Katrin yells out from the back of the room, I make eye contact with her and she gives me a slow nod. Her face is bruised from me punching her lights out, but she knows that she would be dead had I not.
She has been a little shy and weird around me since last night, but I have been ignoring it, keeping our conversations all business. We will eventually have to talk about what happened, but there is far too much on our plates right now to deal with whatever is going through her head.
“For now we all need to keep on keeping on. Everyone needs to do their job and play their part in keeping this place safe. Please know that we have some plans that we are working on that we can’t share just yet, please know that we are working to deal with everything that is coming at us. Stay strong Narwhals, stay diligent and know that we are doing everything we can to keep us all safe. Go do your jobs people, let us do
ours.”
They all get up and move out to do just what I said, their jobs. This is the cornerstone of our little world. Everyone has a job to do, no job is more important than any other, our lives all depend on all of us doing our jobs. We all work together to keep one another alive and kicking. They might grumble but they will do what they are supposed to.
And so will I.
Winston and Henry fall in behind me as I walk out of the room and together we walk down a few flights of stairs down to my geek guy’s workshop. They talk tech possibilities behind me and they may as well be speaking in Outer Mongolian.
I was never a gadget guy.
Winston’s workshop is a study in chaos theory, it looks to me like random piles of broken devices and gear, but I know because I have seen him do it, that he can instantly put his hands on anything he needs. The ham radio that is our link to the outside world sits on a desk in one corner of the room. He has kept the thing working through scrounged parts and sheer determination.
“Gentlemen, I will leave you to it. Keep me posted on your progress. I am leaving a couple of runners outside, if you need anything send them for it. Give us some good news guys, we sure as hell could use some.” I tell them, but they are already absorbed into what they are doing and don’t respond as I leave.
Snipers have already taken out Screamers and Singers from a safe distance, a half dozen or so already today. I am half tempted to send out another supply run to hit that store again, but it seems like tempting fate. I will wait to see what Winston and Henry come up with first.
Matt meets me coming down a flight of stairs, he looks like crap, but he is on the job and that is all I can ask of the guy. He has had to look friends and relatives of the people he was forced to kill in the face all day and that sucks about as much as you would suppose.
“You wanted to see me?”
“Yeah, what do you know about this Henry kid? He hasn’t really crossed my radar before and he has some interesting ideas, anything you can tell me?” I can tell he is relieved that the question isn’t about how he feels about what happened last night.
I don’t have to ask him that question, I know damn well how he feels about what happened last night.
“He was rescued from a nasty group of bikers, several months back, by one of our teams. They were keeping him and a few women as slaves, it wasn’t pretty Jake. All of them were half starved and had been tortured and abused badly. Our team didn’t feel any of the bikers needed to be sucking down valuable air anymore, so they did them all on the spot. Two of the women died getting back here, one died on the docs table. Henry was the only one who survived.” There is more than a little anger in his voice as he tells me the tale, when things went to shit, it was bad enough trying to survive the zombies, but an almost worst threat was the dregs of society who decided that without the threat of arrest and consequences they could do whatever they wanted to whoever they wanted.
Fucking animals, worse than the damn zombies really. No tears shed for the team’s decision to kill them all on the spot.
“Kid has cheerfully done any shit job he has been asked to and does it to the best of his ability. He is very educated and very bright, he worked with the doc for a while but he was wound a little tight for holding people down during amputations and bullet removal. Doc said he wasn’t good around people in pain, maybe because of all he had been put through. We found other things for him to do.”
This conversation reminds me that we still need to replace the doctor we lost, no small task. We were very lucky to have somebody with his training, while he was with us, he saved a lot of lives. His reward to his service to us, was a brutal messy death.
That sucks.
But like most things these days, it is what it is.
He reads my mind, I swear the guy actually can sometimes.
“I left a file on your bed, woman named Viv, she is an ex-Army medic. I was going to have her start helping the doc and learning from him before, before what happened, happened. She doesn’t have his experience, but she is probably the best we have right now.” He tells me with a tired shrug and then he walks off to do whatever the hell I interrupted him doing.
I am lost in thought as I keep on walking to my next damn thing to deal with and as I round the corner of the corridor leading back to the main door, Father Mike steps out of a doorway and comes at me with a knife.
He slashes at me wildly and the idiot actually manages to cut me on my shoulder before I take the damn knife away from him and knock his old ass all the way out.
Blood is flowing freely down my arm as I lean against the wall to catch my breath.
Guess it is time to give the new doctor candidate a working interview.
Chapter Twelve
Security hauls Father Mike off, I have his crazy ass confined to quarters for the moment until I figure out what the hell to do with him. Big Al invited him to join the council because he figured it would settle him down a little. It worked for a while, but apparently he has been keeping the crazy simmering on a back burner and today it just boiled over. I walk into the infirmary holding a blood soaked rag to my shoulder, shaking my head ruefully at the fact that the lunatic who tried to gut me with a hunting knife, is actually the least of my damn problems right now.
I sent a runner ahead so the woman is waiting for me when I come in. She is tall, at least six feet with an athletic trim build. Her hair is dark and cropped very short. Her arms are toned and covered with tattoos, including a United States Marine Corps logo. She is wearing a faded Seattle Mariners T shirt and torn black jeans that have seen better days.
“Sit down and let me take a look.” She says curtly, gesturing towards the makeshift examination table.
“Going to need a few stiches.” I tell her as I sit down on the edge of the table and pull the bloody rag off.
“Good guess sunshine. Who did you piss off?” She asks as she begins, to none too gently, clean the wound with some disinfectant.
Shit stings like crazy.
“Cut myself shaving.” I tell her in a dead pan voice.
“Right, none of my business I suppose. My name is Viv, by the way, and you are Jake, our new fearless leader.” She chuckles as she starts to stitch the cut up, moving like she has a clue what she is doing.
“Matt tells me that you’re ex-army.”
She gives me a look that would likely scare the snot out of somebody not as tough and fearless as myself.
Ok, it scared me a little.
“Then I will have to kick his ass next time we spar, because as he full well knows, I am a former Marine.” She tells me giving the last stitch a tug that I personally feel was harder than necessary.
“I stand corrected. Ok, former Marine Viv, are you willing to take on the role of our new doctor?” I ask her pretty sure I already know the answer.
“Your shoulder is patched up, so I guess I already have. I looked this infirmary over, your old doc kept it in tip top shape and there are even some medical books I can refer to if needed.” She says as she begins to wrap gauze around the wound.
“Ok consider yourself reassigned, move your gear into the infirmary, it is your new home. No more going on runs, you are too valuable now.” I tell her firmly in a voice that I hope does not invite debate.
She nods and starts to clean up tossing the bloody rag and antiseptic wipes in the garbage and putting the supplies she didn’t use away.
“Watch out for signs of infection, we still have some antibiotics if you end up needing them. Take it as easy as you can on that shoulder for a couple days and be more careful shaving from now on.” She tells me with the hint of a smirk in her voice.
“Will do Doc, thanks, “ I say as I stand up. Time to go find a clean not blood soaked torn shirt and get on with the rest of my day. Hopefully a day that starts out with a stabbing is bound to get better.
She waves me off and goes back to what she is doing. I leave feeling good about filling the doctor vacancy and sure that she and I are
going to get along just fine.
I feel a little sorry for Matt next time they spar though.
Viv looks like she knows how to kick a little ass.
Joyce is in our quarters when I come in and sucks in her breath a little when she sees me come in all bloodied up and sporting a bandage on my shoulder.
“I am ok, Father Mike the crazy old fuck, came at me with a knife.” I tell her as I pull the messed up shirt off and toss it in the trash. She comes and helps me put on another shirt, swearing under her breath.
The woman swears like a truck driver, I think she actually knows more curse words than I do and has way more imagination in putting them together.
“He is confined to quarters, honestly Joyce, he is the least of our worries right now. We will sort out what to do with him later.” I tell her, holding up a hand to stave off the tirade.
She kisses me and it goes on long enough for me to consider a little strenuous activity, risking tearing out the stiches I just got, but a knock at the door interrupts that pleasant line of thought.
I answer the door and a runner hands me a folded piece of paper and then scampers off on her next chore.
“What fresh hell is this?” I wonder out loud.
I scan the message quickly and hand the note to Joyce.
She starts swearing again.
“The adult zombies have now been spotted at three more enclaves, they are behaving just like ours. The other enclaves have lost people to the Screamers and Singers. Blue House has fallen and everyone there is now a zombie.” Joyce sums up the bad news for us.
Blue House is to the north of us, they were about half the size of our enclave and pretty much kept to themselves. They were never on the radio and didn’t visit other houses. Still they were people and at least potential allies and now they are all zombies and therefore a threat to us.
I need to light a fire under Henry and Winston.
If they do indeed have some tricks up their sleeves, we need them sooner rather than later. As bad as things have been we have been lucky so far and avoided worst case scenarios, but we are running out of luck and time.
Zombie Extinction Event (Book 2): Hush Page 4