ZWD: King of an Empty City

by Thomas Kroepfl

  It’s a handy little piece of equipment to have if you’re hiking, fighting a war, or living through a zombie apocalypse. Soldiers used them in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam to open canned and bottled goods. It didn’t take up as much room as a conventional can opener. I got this one from my dad in Scouts one year before a big jamboree. He called it a John Wayne. I don’t know if the guys in Desert Storm and Desert Freedom or Afghanistan used them.

  We ate the carrots quietly and greedily from the can. They weren’t as good as fresh carrots, but it was food. As we sat on the car hood I started thinking about the raised garden we were going to have to build and where to get the wood to do it, since we couldn’t just run to the lumber store and pick up a bunch. That was when it hit me; I’d use planks from decking. People all around here had built decks. There were plenty of long straight boards within walking distance of the Safeway and scattered throughout the sheds in the neighborhood were boxes of nails. The Page family garage had two or three boxes that I saw. This was really going to be a doable project now.

  As I kept thinking of the things we’d need to do this—like crowbars and hammers—she got up and tossed the empty can over her shoulder, then walked around to the back of the car and squatted down between it and the one behind it. I could hear her peeing. When she finished she stepped into the street and was staring at the building across from us. Slowly she started walking over there, with a distant kind of gaze in her eyes. I became alarmed and pulled out Harold and slid off the hood of the car. She stopped at the curb on the far side of the street, still looking at the building. I walked over to her side, looking up and down the streets for any sudden dangers that might appear.

  The building itself was one of those department stores that were empty. They were going to bring something back and put it in there, some specialty store with maybe loft apartments up above. But now it stood empty. A reflective film had been placed on the glass showing you everything that was across the street.

  “What is it?” I asked her as I glanced around. She stepped up the curb and over to the glass front of the store. At first I thought she saw something inside the store so I turned and was trying my best to see through the reflective film.

  “Do I really look like that now?” she asked.

  I glanced over at her. “You look fine.” As soon as I said it I realized what she was talking about; she was looking at her reflection in the glass. I looked from her to the glass and saw what she was talking about too. I turned and looked at myself in the glass. I could see a change in my body. I was thinner, almost gaunt, leaner, chiseled thinner; even under all this clothing I could tell I was more muscular now than I was months ago when this madness started. Where I had chubby cheeks I now had cheekbones. Where I’d been chunky I was lean. Where I used to walk with my body slumped forward I was straighter, taller. I guess starving and hunting for your food for months will do that to you, and for some reason we’d gotten into the habit of running just about everywhere.

  Her hair had been pulled back into braids to stay out of her face so she could see or fight. She’d lost her apple cheeks too and now had cheekbones like a model. Her features were more angular. I have to say she looked healthier than she did months ago, although I knew she was as hungry as I was. With all the running and climbing we did her dancer's body had come back to her, but dressed as she was with her hiking boots and wool socks, jeans with leggings under them and her coat with scarf wrapped around her neck, and all the other crap we carried like guerilla soldiers, she looked like some street urchin from a Dickens story. We both did, except Dickens never wrote about zombie survivors.

  I have to say I didn’t object to the way we looked. I think it was the healthiest we’d been in years. But the truth was, food was running out and we were going to look gaunt, skeletal even. Making the raised garden was going to be a major priority when we got back. That and clearing the neighborhood of zombies, and making barricades so no more could get in. And there were those guys in the truck we were going to have to deal with, and I knew there were people still in their homes we had to convince to come out and help us. The list of priorities seemed to just get bigger and bigger every time I thought about it, and I was thinking about it a lot more. I took one last long look at myself in the reflection of the glass and told myself I now had to man up to these tasks because if I didn’t do them, then the man I was becoming without food wouldn’t be able to. The time was now.

  “You're as beautiful as you have ever been,” I offered. “You're more beautiful now than you were ten years ago. You’re the most beautiful woman in the world.” I turned to face her and looking her in the eyes I said it again. “You’re the most beautiful girl in the world.” Then I stepped next to her and kissed her. When we separated I was holding one of her hands. I squeezed it and nodded. She nodded back. It was an unspoken affirmation of many things; it satisfied us. She went back to the car to gather her things and I glanced one last time at my reflection. I pulled the bandana I had around my neck up over my mouth like I was an old western bank robber and joined her in the middle of the street. She looked at the bandana and rearranged her scarf to cover her mouth in the same manner, and together we took off jogging down the street. Again with the jogging.

  As we crossed the Main Street Bridge over I-630 we slowed to a walk. I wanted to study the bridge’s ramps. See if I could come up with a way to stop wandering zombies from coming up them. Cars seemed like the natural barricade of choice. Maybe I could hot-wire them and park them across the ramp’s path.

  She had to stop by the cemetery to see if anything had changed. A quick trip over there showed no new skulls were added to the stack, but someone did leave a small figure. It looked like a superhero I didn’t know. It was encased in some kind of high-tech armor and it was holding a plastic flower taken from a nearby grave in one blue hand.

  When we got back to the Safeway, the light was almost completely gone. I took some comfort seeing the Christmas lights still shining, but realized that they just pointed to the ladder, saying someone is up here check them out. I decided to switch out the string of lights with the gargoyle, let him look down on evil. I ran the string of lights to the door of our tent and clipped them to the side where the flap when opened rested on a square of Velcro. Then I started looking through the books and papers for the hot-wiring information. Once I found it I settled in for the night with another can of carrots.

  Later that night while she slept, I went down to the ground. Looking up at the gargoyle’s red eyes peering over the edge of the building, I was satisfied that she was safe sleeping in the tent. I crept into the Safeway with a flashlight. I didn’t have to go in very far to find what I was looking for. Just over to the smoker’s cage. It had long been broken into and there wasn’t much left to the supplies they felt so compelled to lock up. Not that the Plexiglas cover on the cigarette case was much protection. I can’t explain it, but for some reason I wanted a cigar. I think it might have been just a craving for caffeine. I hadn’t had a soda in forever and I think I just needed something like that, but all I found was Swisher Sweets Peach flavor. But since I wasn’t a big smoker anyway the peach flavor was probably a good thing.

  I went to one of the cars we’d found earlier where someone had left the window cracked enough to just reach in and unlock the door. It was a rusted-out La Baron in the parking lot. Someone used to smoke a lot in here; either that or they just loved air fresheners; there were ten of them hanging from the rearview, pine, cherry, ocean, etc. I even found a book of matches in the seat and lit up.

  Like I said, I’m not a smoker, but the nicotine did help my headache. Throughout the day the fog that had been hanging around for days had been thinning out to the point that now there was just a thin mist hanging in the air and making halos around all the lights. You could see for blocks and it all looked like something out of an old black and white film noir as the streets glistened with a reflective sheen of moisture.

  I was enjoying the calm and quiet, liste
ning to the sounds of the world and trying not to get sick. A smoker can probably finish a little cigar like this in fifteen minutes or drag it out to thirty. But I think in my entire life I’d smoked five cigars, and one of them was in high school years and years ago. The peach flavor didn’t help much either. I tried to imagine that I was Clint Eastwood in one of his westerns and looked at the world through narrowed eyes, mainly because the smoke was making my eyes water. I gritted my teeth as I held the cigar in my mouth. The thing was making my tongue burn. And with each puff I grew greener around the gills. I have to admit it was making my headache go away, but it wasn’t doing the rest of me any good. I finally had to put it out.

  I rolled down the window to get some air and made sure the side mirror was set so that I could see anything coming up behind me. I tried to take slow, deep breaths, trying to clear my head and settle my stomach. Snow started to fall in big fluffy flakes. I watched with a sense of delight as they floated down and disappeared on the ground. I started to get out of the car and sit on the hood to watch this spectacle when I heard a strange sound and then saw movement a block down the street.

  ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 16

  ZWD: Dec. 14.

  A stick tapped on an empty can will draw zombies. Drag it on the ground behind you and the noise makes them come. A running start with a shovel takes the head right off. Found out burning them brings more.

  Three figures were moving in bursts down the street. Darting from one shadow to the next under the streetlamps. They were clad in dark clothing and looked to be children, probably no older than nine and no younger than six. They were moving with the practiced efficiency of children who were used to sneaking around in the dark. Further down the street, two figures were boldly moving my way. They had something with them that was making the noise that I was hearing, but it wasn’t till they were across the street at the post office parking lot that I saw what it was.

  I was sitting in the La Baron at the edge of the Safeway facing up Main Street from the south end of the lot, looking out between two of the trees that lined the parking lot, and they were moving towards me. They were across the street with sticks tied to their belts and empty cans attached to the ends of the sticks. These two looked to be older, perhaps fourteen, and they each carried long tubular things that were almost twice as long as they were tall. These things looked like some sort of guns, but nothing I’d ever seen before. On their backs were what looked like a set of thick antennas bunched together.

  The three little ones darted across the street and crouched down under cover of a few of the cars. I was straining my neck to see what was happening across the lot. Up on the roof I could see her standing just short of the ledge, wrapped in a dark blanket to keep hidden; the cans’ noise must have woken her up. She had a bow in hand and ready to draw back and shoot. The two older boys marched east on Seventeenth Street, then turned into the parking lot and marched across the front of the store. One row short of me they turned again and started back to Main Street. Once there, they circled around the lot again in the same manner. While they were moving up Main again one of the three cried out, ‘Hi-Oh.” And the two turned to see what was going on. One of the three was pointing to the storefront. Turning, I saw a zombie stagger out from the missing front door. The two marched with very determined steps to the zombie and leveled their long tubes at the thing. Then there was a WHOOMP sound from one of the tubes and the zombie fell over dead with a stake stuck out of the back of his head.

  These two were shooting potato cannons! Another cry from the three and we all turned to look at him. He was pointing at the U.S. Drug Store building across Seventeenth from the Safeway. Two more zombies were coming to our parking lot. The boy who fired pulled one of those thick antennas from the pack on his back and reloaded. I could see they were using broom handles cut in half and sharpened for projectiles. He started pumping a lever on the potato cannon as they moved to meet the zombies coming from the U.S. Drug Store. WHOOMP, WHOOMP, two more zombies fell. Then the “Hi-Oh” cry from the three and we saw another one coming from the Safeway door. I had no idea we had so many around us, or under us, for that matter. It was a little disconcerting to think about. The two boys with the potato cannons quickly met this one and WHOOMP, it was dead.

  I couldn’t see her up on the roof anymore, she’d moved back out of sight. The two boys took their cans and kicked backwards with their feet to make them rattle more while they stood at the door. Every now and then they’d stop and listen. Then kick again. I found that I was straining my ears to hear any noise coming from inside. Not that I could from my spot in the far corner of the lot. Finally one of them waved and the three younger boys moved into the building with glow sticks in hand. They cracked them and were shaking vigorously as they disappeared into the darkness of the store. One of the boys with a potato cannon stood in the doorway and kept watch for any sign of danger from within while the other one scanned the parking lot. He stopped long enough to pull out a cigarette. For a second his eyes rested on the La Baron and he studied it for a long moment. I didn’t move.

  After a few minutes, the three came scrambling out of the building and they all gathered in the center of the lot three rows over from me. The cans were untied from the belts and stuffed into the backpacks with the stakes and they all started to move off across Main and the post office parking lot. When they’d crossed the street, it finally occurred to me that I should say something to them. I opened the door of the La Baron and stood up. The smoker wheeled and leveled the cannon at me. If it had enough force to drive a stake through a human skull up close, from a distance it could still probably hurt me. I raised my hands in peace. They had all stopped and were looking in my direction. Nobody moved for a long moment. Then the smoker raised a fist and gave me the heavy metal devil horns sign as he spun and they all took off at a run across the post office parking lot and disappeared west down Seventeenth Street.

  I waited a few minutes, then grabbed my cigars from the seat and went back to the roof of the Safeway. She was standing at the corner next to Seventeenth Street with a pair of binoculars looking in the direction the kids went.

  “I think they turned on Center,” she said. We talked about the encounter and I explained the potato cannons to her. We’d built one in high school but we used compressed air cans to power it. These kids were pumping air into them somehow. However it was, they were pressurizing the guns and it was pretty ingenious. With nothing more to do, we went to bed.

  The next morning I was up before dawn. I stoked a little fire in the hibachi grill and found frozen burritos. I wanted waffles. Big round Belgian waffles with fruit and a gallon of syrup on them. My mind was going in circles for about an hour and I realized I was saying goodbye to the past again as a sense of melancholy fell on me like the snow on the ground. I thought about cartoons I’d never see again and sitting in bars with friends drinking beer or standing in line for the next big movie at midnight or yelling at the television when the NBA playoffs were on.

  I grabbed the papers on hot-wiring a car and settled into a lawn chair, warming myself over the hibachi, and reviewed the process again. As I was reading, it occurred to me that most of the skills we were using to survive were skills that would have gotten us locked up in the old world. Breaking and entering, hot-wiring, lock-picking, hunting on public lands, murder; although with a zombie I don’t think you can call it murder. That list just kept getting longer and today it was a normal way of life. I read through the hot-wiring a few times to make sure I had it down pat.

  She stirred in the tent; I knew it was going to be a few minutes till she came out. I took the binoculars and went to the corner of the building looking down Seventeenth Street to see if I could see any sign of the kids from the night before. With the fog, there was little luck. The smell of burning garbage made its way through the damp air. I remembered that smell from my grandmother’s house in Colorado. I always kind of liked that sweet, acrid odor and today it made me feel safer, comfo
rted that there were still people living in a house doing normal things instead of on a roof in a tent trying to figure out how to survive through winter. I wondered what the Mongols did in their yurts.

  I looked back at the tent and imagined it covered in carpets. Through our damp winters, they would probably mold and cause the tent to mold if they were covering the outside. But we could make it more comfortable on the inside by putting a few down on the floor like the Arabs of the desert. I made a mental note of that and to get the living room rug from Tommy and John’s house. It was big enough to cover most of the tent floor. One last breath of the garbage-filled air and I went to the hibachi and took off the burritos. The tortillas had busted open and the contents had spilled out a little, but for the most part they were good, not frozen.

  “You want a burrito?” I asked her, sticking my head into the tent.

  “We have burritos?”

  “Mm, pretty good if you don’t mind burnt tortilla,” I said with a mouthful.

  “Sure, I’ll take two. Try not to burn the tortilla, please.”

  “Can’t. You have to burn the tortilla to unthaw the insides.” In response she just frowned at me.

  Something had made a noise below us at the doors of the Safeway and I grabbed the bow and notched an arrow. Creeping to the edge of the building, I looked down to see two dogs with one of the softball-sized tennis balls they sold in the store. They were biting and pushing it around, running into the garbage that had spilled out over time as looters had visited the store. I watched the dogs bounce and jump around in the snow then stop and sniff something on the ground. I had lain down on the ledge of the building watching them. Suddenly they stopped and turned to the south, looking down Main Street. The hairs on one of their backs rose up and they both started growling.