It’s not easy trying to catch your breath and not make any noise so you can listen for sounds of other things, but somehow we managed to do that. Once she was satisfied we were safe for now she sat down on the stairs. “What the hell were you thinking?” she demanded.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I replied weakly. I was getting feeling in my right leg again and the needles were fading, but the headache was building. My shoulder and back felt ten times larger than the rest of my body.
“OH my GOD! Blood!” she exclaimed. My eyes popped open and I just stared up through the shaft of the stairwell.
“Where?” I asked in alarm.
“From your head. Were you bitten?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure?” she asked as she squatted down beside me and started looking at my head. Once she was certain it was only a cut from the hose she started roughly checking my body over for bites. Pleased or frustrated that there were none, honestly at that moment I wasn’t sure, she looked closer at my head.
“You have to sit up.”
“Do I have to?” I mumbled.
“Yes, I think you have a concussion. You have to stay awake.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know. We have to get to the library now so I can find out.”
I tried to sit up, but couldn’t move. I felt tired and weak. Something thumped at the door and in the little window, and from my vantage point on the floor I could see the door was blocked with zombies. “I think coming in here was a bad idea now.”
“We didn’t have much choice.”
“So, what do you think, Sundance?” I asked her as I looked at a zombie licking the window in the door. She turned and looked at the stairwell, then bit her lip in thought.
“First, we have to get you out of sight.” She knelt down beside me, helping me sit up, and went over my head like a mom looking for ticks on a child. She didn’t have to, but I think she pressed way too hard on the cut on my head. Then she pulled my bandana from my back pocket and tied it around my head. I didn’t think that my head could hurt worse than it already did, but when she tightened the bandana . . . I can’t really explain that shaft of pain except to say that it was so tight, my heartbeat throbbed in my ears.
“We’ve got to get you stitches. Now get up. We have to get you out of sight.”
“Not without my shovel.” My folding Marine shovel had become my zombie killing comfort food, if you will. I felt comfortable with it in my hands like you feel comfortable in a favorite pair of jeans. It wasn’t natural having my hands empty, and I wasn’t leaving without it.
“What?” she exclaimed in confusion.
“You have your Ice Pike, I have Harold.”
“Who’s Harold?”
“My shovel.”
“You named your shovel Harold?”
“You know mythology. All the great weapons have names, like Excalibur.”
“You named your mighty zombie-killing shovel of death Harold?”
“I’m working on it, nothing’s set in stone.”
“Maybe your head. We really need to get you stitched up. I think you’re delusional. Get up the stairs and I’ll get the mighty ‘Harold’ for you in a minute.” She did that quotation fingers thing when she called it Harold. I still believe that all great weapons need a name, and Harold is a great weapon.
We went up the stairs and stopped on the landing at the next garage level. After looking out the door to that floor, she eased it open and looked around while I sat there on the first set of steps. My ears still throbbed. I leaned my face next to the concrete wall and it felt so good against my skin. I heard her mutter “Son of a bitch” in an amused tone.
“What?”
“Get up and take a look.”
I struggled to my feet feeling dizzy like I could throw up at any moment. When I joined her just outside the door she pointed and there, not fifty yards away, was another door with a big red glowing exit sign above it. Through the window you could see the sun shining and the street beyond that. It was that simple, all we had to do to escape the zombie horde below us was to walk fifty yards and go out a door, and we were clear. It couldn’t be that easy.
“Start walking, I’ll go get the ‘Mighty Harold.’ When I get back you either better be at that door or ready to run because they’ll probably be on our tails.”
I pulled the machete from the sheath in my belt loop and started moving to the door. When I was a little over halfway she went back into the stairwell to grab my shovel and whirled. In a burst of speed she was running to catch up to me. We got to the exit unmolested. We had to kick the door open because it was stuck, but other than that it was easy. We went down a flight of steps to street level and were making our way down Fourth Street like it was any fine Sunday afternoon in winter. We traveled another block past more parking decks and lots. That’s what Fourth Street is downtown, mostly, parking for the high-rises. At Center Street, we turned north again to go to the library. We both thought there was a gift shop or drug store somewhere nearby, but we couldn’t remember where it was. We had to stop several times so I could rest my head and fight back the urge to vomit. The last thing I wanted was more pain from vomit strain added to my already miserable head.
We turned on Second Street to go east; it would be a straight shot to the library. We stopped and she checked the gash on the back of my head. She took the bandana off and snapped off icicles that had formed on the hood of a car and wrapped them in the bloody bandana, then tied it again too tightly to my head. I have to admit it made the pain ease up a lot, and every time a droplet of icy blood trickled down the back of my neck past my collar I woke up more and more. We had to stop again at Second and Main so I could vomit. She broke chunks of ice from the bumper of a car and held them to my cheeks. The cold felt good, it felt really good.
A few blocks later we found ourselves at the back of the library facing that little fenced-in garden where I watched the family of three saunter out of the fog. Because of the winter quiet and not having all the normal sounds of a lazy city moving around, sounds traveled pretty clearly around the downtown area, and we could hear something near the library. I rested under a tree on the corner while she scouted ahead. I watched her as she went along the side of the library to the front. She wasn’t next to the building but on the far side of the street near the off-ramp of the interstate. When she got close enough to the building where she could see the front entrance she backed away slowly and then trotted back to me.
“There’s something like fifty zombies at the front door.”
“Joy,” I said. “Alright, we know they’re attracted to bright shiny things like fire.” I stood up and we made our way down Cumberland to President Clinton Avenue, where all the restaurants and bars are one block over. We moved up the street till we were even with the road that turns into the library’s main entrance. Along the way we passed some trash dumpsters and I dug around inside till I found an old spray can of paint. At the road to the library I smashed a window out of the nearest car and pulled one of the many lighters I carry out of my pocket and set the seats of the sedan on fire. I placed the spray can in the seat so it would be in the heart of the fire.
We didn’t wait around for the zombies to notice or try to make noise to get their attention, because if we were attracting the ones from the library’s front door we were attracting them from anywhere nearby, and I didn’t want that again today, so we just let it burn. When the spray can blew up it would take care of that. We moved off around the block to a point near the front door of the old Sticky Fingers Bar and Grill and watched. It didn’t take long for the can to blow and like one being, they all turned and walked over to the burning car. We crossed the distance and at the front door she pulled out the key we’d taken earlier from the library and unlocked it. Once in we relocked it and went to the second set of doors, doing the same thing. A quick tour of the ground floor told us that all our security measures were still in p
lace. The tape was still on all the exit doors, with the exception of the one we went out of on our last visit, and we were certain no zombies came in that way.
ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 13
ZWD: Dec. 12.
Library, in and out. Right, like it would be that easy.
The first thing I did was plop down on a couch in the children’s section and rest. She disappeared upstairs and came back a little while later with a first-aid kit and a needlework kit. We went into the bathroom, where I stripped down to my bare chest, and we washed the cut on the back of my head. Then she took scissors and clipped the hair away from the cut. “Keep your head down,” she said and left the bathroom. I did and watched the little droplets of blood-filled water that trickled from my ears down my cheeks and dropped into the sink. I pushed out the thought that this cut was going to somehow turn me into a zombie. I wasn’t bitten; this came from the five-pound brass nozzle of a fire hose. I had a concussion and I kept telling myself that they make you delusional.
She returned with a book in her hand and gave it to me. “Shove this into your mouth and bend over the sink.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Close that cut, you need stitches.”
Reluctantly, I bent back over the sink with the book firmly in my mouth; she poured alcohol onto the wound. White-hot burning fire filled my vision. I bit into the book and screamed. My hands grabbed hold of the sides of the vanity pedestal that held the sink till my knuckles went white. I stomped one foot repeatedly into the ground. Somewhere around the third breath everything went from white to black.
I woke up on the floor of the bathroom, shirt off, my forehead resting on my arms. I heard a snick and saw the scissors get tossed to the ground next to my face. She was sitting on my back. “That should do it,” she said as she stood up and stepped over me to the sink to wash her hands. I just lay there. When she finished washing she leaned against the bathroom wall and slid down it to the floor. She had a medical book in her hand and was thumbing through the index as she landed on the floor.
“Was it bad?”
“Six stitches. I used a chevron stitch so you’ll have a pretty scar under all that hair.”
“Can I sleep now?”
“Not yet.” She turned her attention back to the book. In a few moments she said, “Let’s go to one of the couches upstairs. Once we get there you can sleep. But I’m going to have to wake you up every couple of hours and ask you questions to make certain you're ok.”
It took me a while to get off the floor. I was so tired I just wanted to lie there and sleep. Walking was a lot of fun too. I felt like I was in a funhouse walking on one of those floors that keeps shifting. We finally made it upstairs and I collapsed on the couch. I had no dreams.
A few hours later she woke me up and started asking me questions. She made me sit up and talk to her. I was pissed off. After a few minutes, I got to lie back down and sleep. This went on for hours. Finally around dawn she stopped waking me and I slept uninterrupted till noon.
ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 14
ZWD: Dec. 13.
Caught a car on fire and watched them come. Like snipers we shot dozens from the roof.
She spent the time I was sleeping photocopying medical books and looking at first aid. What woke me up was the absence of noise. I went to the bathroom and washed up before going to look for her. I stopped at the front window and looked out at the parking lot below. There were a few zombies around, but most of them were gathered around the now smoldering husk of a car I’d set on fire the day before.
I found her downstairs practicing with the bows. She’d set up a shooting range down one of the book aisles using a stanchion as a target. I joined in and we spent probably three hours shooting arrows and backing up down the aisles of books, getting more and more accurate. I had to stop and read the books she’d pulled about archery to get an idea of how the mechanics of aiming worked, but once I had it in my mind, I understood what I was doing wrong and I think I quickly corrected it. I’m no Robin Hood, but at least my shots were hitting the target now.
After three hours of shooting, we took a break to pursue our personal interests. I took a nap. My head was still throbbing and I didn’t feel like doing much else. When I woke up a few hours later, she was curled up beside me with her head resting on my arm. We lay like that for a while and said nothing, just watched the light fade from the windows. At dusk, we got up and readied ourselves again to go out into the world, this time with arrows and bows ready.
We were going to try my new skills. With a scented aerosol can that was used to mask odors in the bathrooms, we made our way again out the side door near I-630. We didn’t want to attract a lot of zombies like we had on President Clinton Avenue, so we retraced our steps till we got to Fourth and Broadway again. I couldn’t help it, I had to see what was going on with the fire truck, but we weren’t going to get that close to it again. I climbed one of the trees that sparsely lined Broadway to get a better view. From the extra height I could still see the hoses thrashing about, and I thought the number of zombies around it was growing. They were tightly packed in a circle around it watching the water spray out. The water itself was striking them in groups and knocking them down, but they were just getting back up and watching like they were in a trance. Every now and then the five-pound brass nozzle would pop down on one of their heads and that one would drop like a rock. I never saw one of them get back up after that. Right before I dropped to the ground I saw one of the nozzles swing wide and crack one of them in the head from the side. It tore his head off. I’d accidentally invented a zombie-killing machine. We don’t go to them, they come to us! I hated losing all that water, though.
From there we backtracked to Main Street and started for home. There was an empty lot where some building used to be and caddy-corner from there was a parking lot. One of the television stations was there, so I thought this was as good a place as any. It had one feature I liked; the parking lot was fenced in with a six-foot decorative iron fence that had pointy spikes on top. It wasn’t chain link. In the parking lot we broke open a window on a car and lit the seat on fire, then threw the scented aerosol can in the seat and climbed partway up a fire escape on one of the buildings, where we waited with bows ready.
It didn’t take long for them to show up. As soon as the can exploded, four zombies came from the alley. We took aim and ping, caught them in the heads. It was short work killing them, and I have to say I was rather proud of myself. But that was up close; I needed to go for distance, so we gathered the arrows and climbed further up the fire escape. This gave us some extra yards and zombies, as far as we knew, can’t climb ladders. On the first landing I waited for more to show up while she climbed to the roof to look for an escape should we need one.
In a few minutes two more came and I was able to drop them in four shots. One arrow went into the car, one into the fat one’s shoulder, and the other two into their heads. I wasn’t great, but I understood what I was doing and I was getting better. I couldn’t get the arrow out of the car. As I tried pulling it with my foot propped against the fender and yanking, she yelled from the roof.
“We got more than we want coming this way.” She was climbing down the escape. When she got to me I had most of our gear gathered up and was ready to run. She pointed to the dumpsters that sat in the alley and said, “Let's hide and when they come into the gate we’ll shut it and trap them in.”
So we hid behind the dumpster and waited. It didn’t take long for about fifteen zombies to stagger into the lot to see what was going on. She ran from her hiding spot and pushed the gate shut, and together we pushed a car that was parked on the street in front of the gate, blocking them in. As an afterthought, I went into the dumpster and found a few empty bottles. We took the radiator hose from the parked car and I siphoned some gas, making a Molotov cocktail, and I threw it, hitting one of the zombies in the chest. Actually, I kind of doused him when I tossed him the bottle, saying,
“Catch.” Zombies can’t catch. His chest burst into flame and naturally all the other zombies left the burning car to go look at him. We didn’t wait around to watch for fear that more would show up.
ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 15
ZWD: Dec. 13.
Bacon, popcorn, and beer. Yogurt, ice cream, and B-B-Q.
A few minutes later found us blocks away. Her mood was sullen, so I tried to cheer her up or distract her and asked, “Do you think there are vampires?”
“There are no vampires. At least I hope not, we have enough things trying to eat us now. I liked it better when we were the top of the food chain.” Her flat answer told me I needed to change the subject fast.
“Food, you know what I miss? Bacon. And popcorn, popcorn with beer.”
“Yogurt.”
“Ice cream.”
“That cheesecake they used to make at that bakery on Main Street.”
“B-B-Q,” I said with my stomach growling.
“The best of all, a peanut buster parfait layered in fudge and caramel and topped with real marshmallow cream topping.”
We stopped walking down Main Street and moved to a car parked on the side of the road like it was a normal business day. She rummaged around in her pockets and pulled out some canned carrots. I pulled out the ring of keys I kept for all the places we went into often, like the library and the base house. On that ring, I kept a G.I. P38 can opener.
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