I grabbed the carbine (Ruth Ann felt comfortable that I was no longer a danger to myself or her). She confirmed the path to Ryan’s 4x4 was clear as far as she could see. I handed Ryan the revolver for his own defense. He confirmed the weapon’s load, something I still would not have thought of doing myself. I was getting the sense that the kid had more smarts about surviving outside the protection of a bunker like ours than either Ruth Ann or me.
He and I loped out to the southwest side of his parent’s garage. He readied his car keys and the revolver. He turned the corner to the front of his house with the revolver raised. Even before taking a step he fired twice. I stepped around and saw that he had dispatched two rotting undead.
“This is the fuck that saw me go up the ladder and started all the banging,” he whispered. He pointed the revolver at the smaller of the cadavers. It had bloody rotten nubs instead of hands. Whether it lost its hands when it was initially infected or wore them down banging and clawing to get Ryan and who knows who else before that we will never know.
I stepped back to where Ruth Ann could see us and signed her thumbs up to let her know we were OK. We saw that the report of Ryan’s shots perked up a half dozen undead beyond the Boetche’s house and an equal number beyond my house. We would be driving away from the first group but towards the second. As I got into the car with Ryan I heard Ruth Ann’s hunting rifle begin a one sided conversation.
We arrived at our deck. Ryan vacated the driver’s seat taking the rope we had left at the base of the deck’s stairs. I got into the driver’s seat. I caught myself reaching to adjust the mirrors. I laughed.
While Ryan wound rope around both of the outer deck legs and made the loops fast with some kind of knot, I backed Ryan’s car up to be in line with the centerline of the deck. Ryan attached the rope to his trailer hitch and tapped the side of the car twice. I put the car in low gear and took up the slack slowly.
The deck came away from the house easily. Ruth Ann shouted that a creature was coming around the south side of our house, along the path we had just driven. Ryan readied his revolver as the ghoul appeared. By its clothing, it was a former firefighter. Ryan dispatched him easily. After we were done with the deck I read his shoulder patch and was sad to see he was from our own local department. Would I have been less sad if it were from someone else’s town?
Ruth Ann continued to take out approaching zombies. Her rate of fire began to ratchet upwards. I knew she would be taking careful aim and pacing herself. The increased rate of fire did not bode well. I continued to drag the deck, which had now collapsed, away from the house. Ryan walked along side. He reached into the car and extracted my carbine. He raised it to his shoulder and fired across the car parallel to the windshield. The kid was good with weapons and executed the undead woman with easy grace. He placed the weapon back in the car then unhooked the rope from the trailer hitch. He jumped in and I drove us the short distance to the front of my garage.
I had thought about positioning the collapsing deck over the water well’s head. I was very worried about damage to the water pump. I decided not to use the collapsed deck as a shield for the pump housing as the oncoming dead might force the deck against the wellhead doing even more damage. Besides, I had a different idea about how to protect the wellhead.
Before going outside I had detached the garage door from its lift chain and undid its hasps. Ryan hopped out of the car and easily rolled the door upwards. I pulled his 4x4 into our garage alongside our station wagon. He stepped inside the garage and let the door down. We left the door unhitched from its lift chain and slid the door’s hasps into place making it impossible to lift under power or manually.
With hand signals he helped me back his car up to the left half of the garage door. I made soft contact with the door and then gave it just a little more pressure. I shut off the 4x4, engaged the parking break then we repeated the same process with my car.
Both of our must-do jobs were done. Ryan and I joined Ruth Ann on the roof. I got some more practice with the carbine and Ryan demonstrated he needed no practice with the hunting rifle.
We weren’t supposed to worry about our front and back doors. The ghouls wouldn’t actively be trying to break down these doors if they didn’t know we were inside. Frank told us the dead would not be able to bring enough bodies to bear on a surface as small as a single door without being motivated.
Still, the front door at least continued to worry me. If the creatures succeeded in breaking down the back door they would enter the garage. They would have to break down another heavy door to gain access to us. If they got through the front door on the other hand, we’d instantly lose two floors of the house. We would be either trapped on the roof or trapped in the basement.
I fetched a fancy webcam out of an office drawer. It was designed to be a baby monitor so it had sound and two rings of IR LEDs for night vision built in. I ran an extension cord from a hot socket to near the front door. I powered up the webcam and placed it on the floor with a view of the front entryway. A few moments later we had an HD view of the inside of the front door.
In the garage, Ryan helped me rig an ordinary cheapo USB webcam up to a Raspberry Pi. We positioned this to give us a view of anything coming towards the inner door. I wished the neighbor who thought I was nuts for putting RJ45 network jacks in my garage was here to see me make use of them. Sure, it took a zombie apocalypse to need it, but still...
After we were done Ruth Ann asked “Doug, what’s the point of a camera watching the front door? It’s not going to slow them down if they make it in.”
“They’re not supposed to be motivated enough to try to bust the door down. But if they do, we’ll have some advance warning.” In reality, I was only trying to keep busy to hide my nervousness about the oncoming horde.
Ruth Ann put me in my place with her reply, “You’ll have really great shots of them coming in if you’re wrong.”
We made other needed preparations around the house, working until noon. I switched on the AM radio for the day’s update. We listened together as we ate lunch. The thinning operation had gone well.
They estimated ten percent of the Twin Cities horde had been put down or so severely maimed as to be immobile. It was difficult for me to comprehend that conventional weapons killed 200,000 formerly human beings in one night.
In my imagination I could see so many bodies pressed into the Red Cedar River as to actually block it. The dead coming up from behind wouldn’t need the I-94 Bridge – they could walk over the bodies of their comrades. Later, I asked Frank about this and he said only “Yeah, that’s about right.”
The mega-horde, Chicago B, was near Janesville Wisconsin. If it turned north, it was possible that Madison, the Berkeley of the Midwest and ground zero of this whole catastrophe would suffer the additional ignominy of being trampled under the weight of four million FIPs.
After passing through us, the Twin Cities horde would be hammered by the military along the Chippewa River just as Chicago B would be hit along the Rock River.
It struck me how much the dead’s behavior was that of a flock of birds or herd of beasts. I wondered if they could be steered. We learned that analysts used the same observation and asked the same question. They developed techniques giving a limited ability to steer or even split hordes and we would play a part in it.
There was no opportunity to steer the Twin Cities horde now though. They were too close and there was not a terrain feature between them and us that could be used as a wedge. We’d be in the middle of the TC horde shortly.
The dead wandering around our development already appeared to be agitated. At first we thought they’d converge on our house due to the noise we were just making. After watching the cameras for a few minutes it became clear we were not the dead’s focus. Could they somehow know that the horde was coming? Probably not because we soon saw a wave of wildlife hustling through our neighborhood heading away from approaching horde. The deer, turkeys and other assorted critters that were
racing eastward, excited the dead.
Around three thirty, the three of us bundled up and went up to the roof to watch for the arrival of the Twin Cities horde. We kept low over the wall or out of sight completely using the drainage ports in the parapet walls. As we looked west signs of the horde were immediately apparent.
Less than a mile west, beyond 20th street, the woods surrounding the little Elk Creek seemed to shake. Elk Creek wasn’t wide, deep or swift enough to present an obstacle to the horde. It might even have been frozen over, I wasn’t about to check.
Dark figures emerged from the tree line. We could not see I-94 to our south from our roof but we could see the smaller and closer US-12. It was boiling with shapes.
The first ghouls through the woods were in sorry shape, even for undead. Through our binoculars I saw tattered burnt clothing on badly disfigured and charred bodies. Even as far away as they were the noise they made was terrible to hear. It was a nonstop drone of low frequency growls punctuated by higher frequency unintelligible screaming. Blind pure unthinking rage filtered across the distance between us.
As the slow moving train wreck came closer I could discern many faces completely denuded of skin. I saw ghastly skulls with bared eyeballs and teeth. Some had remnants of arms hanging uselessly at their sides. All showed evidence of burns that would have felled any living human. These ghouls had literally walked through fire and come out the other side but I doubted they would appear on any self-help infomercials anytime soon.
A seemingly endless stream of dead left the tree line heading towards us. The open space dwindled moment by moment. We were held transfixed. Like people on a beach hoping the incoming tide would change its mind and turn around, we were helpless.
The leading edge of the horde disappeared behind the trees lining 20th Street. Soon after, the trees began to shake. We saw younger trees go down as the leading edge plowed over the berm and down into our own neighborhood beyond the Boetche’s house.
From in front of the unstoppable wave fast motion caught our attention. A figure ran hard towards Flynn’s. The quickly moving figure could not be one the dead. He moved far too fast and too “naturally” be to one of them. In a flash, he disappeared behind what would be to him the front of Flynn’s house. He must have gained entry because he did not come out the back.
Suddenly, from the very sliding door we had used to make our own entry, glass shattered and fell. The man, already bloody, got one foot onto the deck before arms, too many to count, grabbed at the man and pulled him back into the house. We could not hear the man’s last screams over the noise of the horde. The dead were streaming past the Boetche’s and exploded out of the back of the Flynn’s. So many dead flowed onto the Flynn’s deck that they knocked themselves over the railings and down the steps. In a crash, the Flynn’s deck failed completely. Dead continued to stream out of the hole that had been the sliding door only to drop on their fellows below.
The sound was deafening now. The horde was here. At the foot of my house. In a moment, we were surrounded. I had a memory of some Western I had seen as a child where a cowboy and his leading lady were surrounded by a stampede of cattle. The cowboy in his impossibly white hat calmly turned to his woman and told her not to be afraid. Ruth Ann and I now sat knees to our chests with our backs to the parapet wall. I turned to her and was more afraid than at any time in my life. I couldn’t tell her not to be afraid. I couldn’t get a sound to come out.
It was time to go inside.
We crept down from the roof level to our second story. The reinforced concrete walls shook. The second floor’s windows backed by blankets did nothing to lessen the skull-splitting din from outside. Ryan made his way towards a front-facing window. Ruth Ann stopped him.
“I want to see them,” Ryan shouted.
“We can see them well enough on the cameras,” she replied and pulled him away from the windows.
Actually, we could see them too well on the cameras. They were up high but had a direct view. With no intervening wall to give the impression of separation, the camera views were even more visceral than being on the roof. Seeing all eight views at once made it brutally clear how surrounded we truly were. As far as the cameras could see we were in a crush of grinding death.
There was a steady current of dead impacting our front and garage doors. From downstairs came the sound of thudding against the front door synchronized with the images we watched on screen. I was comforted by the thuds as they weren’t purposeful pounding. Sometimes a particularly loud bang travelled up the stairs but we could see that this corresponded to a knee or head that bounced backwards and staggered on.
I had hoped that the density of the dead would actually work for us, and it was. Individuals didn’t have much time to become aroused by something particular about the house before they were bumped and shoved from behind by more dead. As long as we remained hidden and the doors held, we would probably survive.
However, I did have a significant and justified concern for our water well. If we were to lose our pump, we would be without water and therefore in an indefensible fortress. No refuge no matter how secure can provide safety for more than a few days without water. A house call from the plumbers would likely be a very long wait.
The well rose above ground in a small knee-high structure about 15 yards from the house. The dead were banging into the wellhead even now. As bad as it was outside, we had to go back upstairs to implement my plan to protect the well enclosure.
“We can’t risk damage to the well,” I said to mutual agreement. “I want to make an obstacle in front of the well that will cause them to flow around it.”
“What are you going to use to do that?” said Ruth Ann.
“Them. He wants to use them,” Ryan caught on immediately. Ruth Ann looked confused.
“I want to drop some of them with the bow just “upstream” of the well. I think if we can drop enough of them in the right spot, the rest will just flow around.”
“Even if they climb over the well it would be better than constantly kicking it. Enough kicking and that thing will come apart,” said Ryan. “I could use the crossbow. I always wanted to use a crossbow.”
In the few hours he’d been out of the garage Ryan alternately annoyed, puzzled, scared and impressed me. This was all in a day’s Xbox for him.
Ruth Ann agreed with the concept but expressed concern about drawing attention to ourselves and our sanctuary.
Safeguarding our water supply was worth the risk. “They won’t be able to process why the zombie in front of them suddenly fell over. Let’s try some shots and see what happens. If we draw any attention we’ll figure out something else.”
I had no “something else.” It was either this plan or nothing.
We had about two hours of daylight left. I considered passing out foam earplugs but figured it would only make it harder for us to hear each other while doing little about the sound of the horde. The sound of the horde permeated our bodies. We would hear it no matter what we stuck in our ears. I handed Ryan a dozen crossbow bolts and the crossbow making his day. Ruth Ann took as many arrows as she should carry along with her recurve bow. I took a freshly charged laptop with which to monitor the cameras.
As bad as the noise was the affront to our ears was nothing compared to the insult hurled against our noses. Mixed with an overwhelming rotting smell was the odor of charred flesh. The stench was unbearable.
We crept low to the northeastward facing wall. I had drawn pictures downstairs of how I hoped to layout bodies in an arc around and over the wellhead.
Ruth Ann and Ryan loaded their weapons. They would fire our first salvo together and then drop down behind the shelter of the parapet wall. Each of us exchanged a nod with the others. Both shooters got up only as high as needed to clear the wall, aimed and fired. Even standing next to them, I heard nothing from either weapon.
Nevertheless I tugged on both their jackets. We would watch the results on camera and not risk any more time above the wal
l than necessary. It was impossible to tell what the missiles had hit. There was a disturbance in the flow near the wellhead with creatures falling over each other.
There was no reaction that would indicate they were aware that they had been attacked or where the attack had come from. Ruth Ann and Ryan repeated the process again, taking a little more time to aim. This time I saw the missiles reach their terminus in the skulls of two walkers. They went down immediately adding to the turbulence near the wellhead.
A few yards behind some heads were turning up and to their right towards the origin of the streaks they must have seen. Seeing nothing some returned their gaze to what passed for straight ahead depending upon their disfigurement. A few continued looking in our direction. In a stroke of good fortune, the ghouls who lingered looking up at us tripped right over the creatures we had just shot.
Shoot, hide, observe.
We repeated this over and over again until a mound of three dozen bodies protected the wellhead. The dead flowed around and over the mound like water around a big rock.
We got off the roof as soon as our task was done.
The noise was driving us nuts. We could choose to not look at the cameras but we could not avoid the noise while on the second floor. We collected our weapons, some tech and blankets and headed to the first floor. On the way past the kitchen table I checked on the tactical radio, it was still transmitting.
The solid walls of the first floor vibrated just as much as those of the second. The small non-operating strip windows kept out more of the sound. With earplugs, it might have been almost livable on this level. The immediacy of the thudding against the front door, though, made staying on the first floor impossible. Every bang or scrap against the front door reminded me, at least, how little a separation there was between the horde outside and the three of us in here.
Get Off My L@wn - A Zombie Novel Page 10