To our surprise and delight, there was the tent, sitting in its travel bag along with a box that had one of those picnic tents, a pavilion thing with the screened walls. There were camping stoves, lanterns, sleeping bags, volleyball nets, hammocks, and everything else you could think of to go on a small expedition to the Amazon jungle. Or, to move to the roof of the Safeway. I loved these people, whoever they were. We grabbed two of the backpacks off their hooks on the wall and started packing them with all the camping gear we’d need. First-aid kits still stocked, tarps, ponchos, fire starter kits, water purification tubes, solar thermal blankets. We read the names of every item we found aloud so that each of us would know what we’d found here in case we decided we needed to come back. With two backpacks loaded down with stuff and carrying the tent between us, we headed back to the roof of the Safeway. I was feeling better about life in general. We retraced our steps, moving slower. Along the way I had an idea about the ladder to the roof that I ran past her.
We got to the roof, which was no easy task. Climbing a ladder isn’t easy with seventy pounds on your back. Thunder cracked and rumbled in the distance as we dumped everything on the ground and tried to figure out how to set up the tent. Light rain, more drizzle than anything, filled the air. It wasn’t even a drizzle really, just sort of a wet mist.
We finally got the Coleman Weathermaster six-man tent up and used cinder blocks to anchor it to the roof. We rested for an hour, ate, and then I went searching for the supplies I needed to secure that ladder. I knew I could have found most of it inside the Safeway, but there was no way in hell I was going in there alone. Besides, I could find everything I needed inside Tommy and John’s place, and unless someone went in after we left, the place was clear.
The string was still in place across the door and the tape was still secure on the doorframe when I got there. The sun was setting by now and I didn’t want to take long. I grabbed a decorative gargoyle with eyes that lit up when you walked by from the bookshelf. The two key fobs from their key baskets near the back door, some of the wires from the back of the stereo, a string of Christmas lights from a downstairs closet, jumper cables from the trunk of Tommy’s car, and a few other items.
Back at the Safeway roof, I started using what little I remembered of my high school electronics classes and started stripping live wires. From the roof, I ran jumpers to the top of the ladder and rigged a breaker between the building’s electrical system and the jumpers. Using the key fobs, I could turn the electricity to the ladder on or off and the lights from the gargoyle’s eyes would let us know if it was hot or not. The gargoyle sat near the ladder on the roof. In the morning I’d rig the Christmas lights up so we could tell from the ground whether the ladder was electrified. Anyone who tried to climb that ladder while it was hot would get electrocuted. Now I felt safe up here on the roof.
While I worked by the light of a flashlight held in my mouth, she spent time making our tent a home. When I got done with the ladder she had two canvas folding camp chairs set up and was sipping a bottle of water. Darkness had fallen and with the clouds in the sky you couldn’t see any stars. The streetlamps still came on and each one had a large iridescent halo around it, while the rest of the world looked like we were looking at it through a layer of gauze.
ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 10
ZWD: Dec. 10.
Two doors down they have a fireplace and skillet and fresh ranch dressing. Again we eat like kings tonight. They were bow hunters. Bonus! I got an idea.
The first night in the tent on the roof of the Safeway was great. I hadn’t slept that well in a long time, not even in the library. I know I slept deep and hard because I woke up with a sore throat, the kind you get from snoring in a deep sleep. The air outside was crisp and from the roof the fog made the rest of the world look almost mystical. You couldn’t see the street below, it was so thick. Just streetlamps with their misty halos and treetops popping up out of the foggy soup that covered the ground. The houses and buildings looked unreal—giant geometric blocks scattered along unseen paths in an orderly manner. We were in an alien world.
It was still early and the sun hadn’t come up fully yet. I believed that when it got higher in the sky it would burn off most of this fog and ruin the illusion. I looked around while walking the edges of the building. I’d forgotten my work from yesterday and when my eyes came across the two red glowing dots staring at me through the thin mist on the roof, I jumped a little. I’d forgotten that I put the gargoyle there to protect us during the night. Now it only reminded me of the things I had to do today. First and most important, come up with a rooftop toilet. The list just got longer.
We went back over to Tommy and John’s to gather some stuff and to use their fabulous bathroom, then back to the roof to rig up the Christmas lights so we could tell if the stairs were hot while we were gone.
Later today we were going to cross I-630 up Main Street and visit the hardware store just on the other side. I was sure they’d have a multi-meter tool somewhere in there. I was betting that a lot of survivors hadn’t gone through the store and said, “You know, when I’m surviving the zombie apocalypse, I always grab a multi-meter TS300 to get me through.” No, there should be a meter there still.
The fog had thinned a lot by the time I finished with the lights and we walked around to the front of the store we called home. The corner where I’d burned Tommy and John’s bodies was still smoldering. Smoke streamed off the pile and disappeared in the fog. She took the Ice Pike and shoved it into the pile, poking around for a moment till she found their skulls, and pulled them out. I didn’t know what kind of grim ritual she was going to do now so I just watched. I had to admit I was worried she was going to go a little Marlon Brando on me from Apocalypse Now, grabbing those skulls. But she wrapped them in a cloth and we went back to the guys’ house. She stuck them in the dishwasher and started it, and then we left. I didn’t ask her what she had in mind; we just left the washer running and went to the hardware store.
The hardware store is just a few blocks up the street from the Safeway. I didn’t think it would be too much trouble getting the meter and whatever else we might need. Since I hacked into the Safeway’s power supply, I thought some power tools would come in handy. We crossed I-630 on the Main Street Bridge, and the fog was so thick, you couldn’t even see the tops of the eighteen-wheelers down there. Everything was quiet, a very spooky kind of quiet.
The hardware store is just across the bridge scattered around in several buildings that make up the whole. The main store that holds all the normal handyman merchandise is this squat tan building with a red roof that sits against the sidewalk and stretches back to the next building thirty yards away.
The building itself was locked down still. The glass entrance doors had metal shutters pulled down over them and the padlocks that opened them were recessed in metal stanchions so you couldn’t hit them with a hammer and bust them. None of the outside fire doors had locks you could hit or pick. They were all metal doors, so there was no kicking them in. No windows, no skylights that I remember on the inside. We weren’t getting in. I was disappointed, but after the streak of good luck we’d had I should have known it couldn’t last.
Across the Main Street Bridge, over I-630. The fog was thinning and you could see the other side easily. Below, still a thick soup of fog. We’d stopped to look down at it when we heard someone yell, “Try to get down to the Escalade.” We tried to pick out where it was coming from. There were places where the fog swirled several times as if something were moving very fast in short spurts.
“No, no, no. Go back!” came another voice.
“Where is one?” yet a third.
“Who stops their car at an angle on the highway?”
“I hear them, stay quiet!”
“Where are they?” came the frantic voices from the soup below.
The swirls darted up and down the highway track below. We listened in silence, not offering any help. We couldn’t if we wanted
to. We couldn’t see them to direct them away from danger and we weren’t going to guide them up here. We knew what their plan had been. They were going to follow I-630 till it split a few miles down the way and turned into I-40, then work their way out of town. That’s what every abandoned car’s owner had in mind. Only these guys were doing it on foot. I guess they were seeking shelter in cars as they went. They stood a chance in hell of making it and that was about the only chance they had.
We turned to go back to my kingdom when we heard someone scream down there. We both paused a moment and listened intently. I hoped we’d hear a fight and they’d all get free, but instead we heard someone say, “It’s Chris, they got him. Run, run, run!” My heart went out to Chris, whoever he was.
Before we started looking for a toilet system, plywood, food, and clearing houses—our normal to-do list, with all the other things on it we had to do—we went back to Tommy and John’s house, where she took the skulls out of the dishwasher. The ash and sinew were gone. They weren’t bone-white like you see on television or in museums, but they were clean. She pulled a magic marker from a kitchen drawer and wrote their names on their foreheads. On the right side she wrote their birthdates and on the left the date this zombie mess started, 10-22, since we didn’t know when they died. We carried the skulls over to Broadway and the Mount Holly Cemetery, placing them in the doorway of a mausoleum. The mausoleum was a big structure near the back of the cemetery, just off the road. We’d crossed a little fence about knee-high to get to it. Above the door in garnet block letters was the name SMITH. The gems were darkened with age. How appropriate that the name should be so generic. Across from the doorway was an obelisk that had a marble angel perched on top, its wings spread wide, arms stretched out. In its right hand there was a scepter of God and it looked down at our skulls with a moss-covered green face. The moss trailed down from the eyes like green tears. The inscription on the obelisk was unreadable with the exception of a few words that said, “I will give you rest.” I didn’t take much comfort in that. “Ready?” I asked the angel.
She wiped the tears from her eyes, and then nodded and we headed back for the ornate fence we crawled over to get in. As I was about to drop to the street I heard a rustling in the bushes somewhere in the graveyard. Looking up I saw a quick glimpse of a child running over the crest of a ravine and disappearing behind a monument. He couldn’t have been more than nine or ten. He was moving so fast he was gone before I could even point him out.
We moved from Mount Holly Cemetery west on Daisy Bates. We weren’t really talking, each lost in our own thoughts. I was thinking about the kid and wondering if it was the same one from the base house earlier. We’d gone a block when I remembered all the things we had to do today, so we turned up Arch. We stopped in front of this saltbox two-story house with a porch that stretched across the front. It sat at the end of the street on the corner of the block. An old green Chevy truck sat parked in front of the garage in the back and from Arch there was a side door that led into the house, probably the kitchen. Air conditioning window units stuck out of windows all over the house. We decided we’d start with it today and moved to the shed.
The shed had a lock on it and I was about to break it with the two-pound sledge when we heard the pump action of a shotgun being loaded. When we turned to see where it was coming from, this voice from the back porch of the house said, “You got no business here. Go on with yourselves before I kill you.” All we could see was a the barrel coming out of the shadows resting in the palm of an old, wrinkled black hand that faded into the shadows of the porch. The voice was steady and calm, just like the barrel that was pointing at me. I didn’t want to make either one of them angry.
“Hi, how you doing?” I offered.
“I’m fine. Now go before I kill you.” The barrel moved up a little and I could tell he was shouldering the shotgun, ready to fire.
“Sorry, we didn’t know anyone lived here.”
“Well, we do,” he barked.
“It’s hard to tell what houses are empty, you know, there’s no sign saying someone lives here.”
“Now you know. Now get the hell on before I lose my Christian mind!”
We moved to the street and like the eyes of Jesus following you across a room, the barrel of his shotgun followed us. I thought I could vaguely see someone else standing on the porch with him in the shadows, both hands raised like he was training a pistol on us. Later she said that there were at least four people on that porch with guns, but I didn’t see them. I tried to make friends as we moved slowly to the street. In hindsight, I can see I could have chosen better words.
“You said we.”
“What?”
“You said, ‘well, WE do.’ When I said we didn’t know anyone lived here. So your family lives with you?”
I was almost to the street when he fired, maybe ten steps away. The shot hit about a foot away from my feet. I almost shit myself.
“WE DO LIVE HERE!” he barked at me with emphasis and he patted the stock of the shotgun that was pointed at me. The gun rose and leveled again. “Now GO before WE kill YOU!” he emphasized again. We stepped into the street and lowered our hands, but still kept them visible. We trotted down Arch Street to the fourteen-hundreds block and stopped about midway down. It’s kind of hard to tell just when you’re out of someone’s personal space in a situation like that. Just how far do you go before you’re no longer a threat to the person with the gun pointed at you? I guess some people didn’t get the word that I was the king now.
We walked three blocks before we remembered what we were supposed to be doing and started looking for a house to clear. There was this little gingerbread house that caught her eye, so we chose to clear it. This time we went up to the door and knocked before we started doing anything foolish. Nobody answered, so we moved around the back to see if there were any signs of entry. The windows were sort of high, so I bent down and she crawled on my back to look into one that had the curtains drawn open to let in light. While she was trying to look in I looked over to the house next door and saw from my low vantage point that hanging on the wall, in proud display, were three bows on a gun rack and a trophy buck mounted on the wall above it.
We quickly moved to the other house and started investigating. A light was on in the room, a little desk lamp sitting next to a leather chair. The room, she said, was filled with hunting stuff. There was a gun safe and trophies, hunting magazines, and books. Whoever lived here was an avid outdoor enthusiast. The light had me a little concerned and I have to admit I was questioning my morals as I ran around to the front door. I didn’t know what I was going to do if I didn’t get those bows.
I rang the doorbell and waited a little bit, and then I knocked and waited. Then I pounded and waited. I thought I heard something move inside, so I pounded again. Then I ran along the side of the house, banging on any window I could reach. These old houses in the Quapaw are built up high and you can’t just stand there and look into a window. Often they have a bush, usually with thorns, planted under the windows. But on the side of the house where the driveway was, there were no plants and I could stand on my toes to reach the windows, so I did and I banged on the glass. At the back door I opened the aluminum screen door and banged on the inner back door. I took a moment to listen. When I heard nothing, I pulled out a cold chisel and the two-pound sledge. I placed the chisel at the base of the doorknob.
“What are you doing?” she whispered. I’d made a lot of noise and it was bound to attract something or someone. I don’t know why she whispered.
“I don’t want to get shot at again,” I said in a normal voice and brought the hammer down. The lock broke. I’d switched out the chisel with the screwdriver and worked the mechanisms in the door till it swung open. Taking a moment, I switched things out till I had the machete in hand. Then I moved into the house. She was behind me with the Ice Pike ready. We went down a small dark hall that intersected with two rooms, one on either side. The one to my right was the
trophy room and it was empty. The closet door was open and I could tell there was nothing in it. To the left was the kitchen. We did a quick sweep of it and moved through the house. I loved the stairs in this place. They started at the front door and swept up the wall with a banister that looked like children should be sliding down it at Christmastime. No murder spot there.
At the top of the stairs, there was a door to the right that was closed. I tried it only to find it was locked. I dug out the hammer and brought it down. The door swung open to a master bedroom. The bed was to one side, out of sight except for the footboard. There was a big picture window opposite the door with a chair in front of it. Standing next to the chair was a short man with a crossbow pistol in his hand.
I say man; he was dead. He was the most decomposed we’d seen. He stood there with a blue shirt pressed and department-store crisp. Dress slacks with double pleats and socked feet. In his head was a bolt from the crossbow pistol. Unlike all the others we had seen, his eyes didn’t look that silver white milky dead we were used to. He held out his arms. Not up to grab us but wide, with the palms up, the pistol hanging from his index finger. It was as if he were pleading with me to finish him. I had the machete ready to bring down on his head when he moaned. I looked into his eyes again. Whoever he was, he was still in there and I knew what had happened to him.
He’d tried to kill himself and missed. The bolt sticking out of his skull had killed him, but not quickly enough. He’d probably sat in that chair, slowly turning into a zombie for weeks. And there was just enough of him left to plead with me to finish what he couldn’t.
ZWD: King of an Empty City Page 8