ZWD: King of an Empty City

by Thomas Kroepfl

  A few minutes later, we were dressed and armed, headed for the Page house to pick up the guns and the truck. We’d stop by the church and see if there was any response to the note on the way back. I knew we were dropping off the skulls at Mount Holly Cemetery, and then we were looking for another deck or fence. There was a pretty new six-foot privacy fence on Chester I’d noticed last time we were down that way and I thought we could take it apart in a few hours, dump the wood into the truck, and get back before dark. It was going to be a miserable day taking apart a fence in the icy snow. I don’t like these kinds of days; they stay dark all the time like it’s twilight. The sleet doesn’t help. You just bundle up and try to make the best of it. I was wearing two pairs of socks and boots. My feet were still cold. The coveralls were supposed to be waterproof, but they weren’t damp-proof, and the cold damp was seeping in despite the heat I generated as we walked. Our heads were down and our shoulders set against the wind. The Page house was blocks away, almost a mile from the Safeway. I was thinking about the power outage and fire. It would probably be a good idea to keep a fire going from now on, just in case this happened again, so we’d have light. A few more carpets and we’d be warm enough in the tent. That thing was surprisingly sturdy against the cold and with the added carpets it was almost toasty. I would have liked it if we were in a house, but we didn’t have control of our world yet, so for now it was the tent on the roof.

  Here’s the thing about fires. To make a fire you need several things: a way to start it, and there are several methods; we had lighters galore and if they ever ran out I had a magnesium stick to start a fire. Those are wonderful when you don’t have lighters. You need kindling; that would be the firewood or anything that burns. In high school we’d burn tree stumps or tires to make bonfires, sometimes scraps from construction sites. Gathering that stuff was easy and living in an old part of town, we had plenty available. You need tinder. That’s the hard part; for that you need paper, wood shavings, dried moss, or anything that’s thin, dry, and flammable. Camping, you must carry your own tinder with you so you know it is always dry and ready to use . Here in town there were books everywhere. Hell, one copy of Moby-Dick should get us through the winter, perhaps the next one too. But the best tinder of all is dryer lint, and that you can just pull out of the vents of houses at the dryer exhaust. We’d need plastic bags to store it in, but that was no problem.

  Speaking of problems, I’ve noticed that problems can be very big till you come up with a solution. I was worried about the power going out till I started thinking about how to keep a fire going. I’d done this before with Dylan and Stager; I could do it again. Securing the ladder to the roof would be another problem I’d have to work on a little later. Without electricity charging through it, we were vulnerable up there and I didn’t want to start standing watches just to keep us safe.

  At the Page house, I could tell that someone had snooped around the place but not entered. There were tracks in the snow that weren’t ours and someone had tried to pry open one of the windows with little success. A window to the garage where all the gardening stuff was kept had been wiped clean and there was still the oily impression of a chilled face pressed against the glass. We got inside and after a quick check found everything as we left it. The den with all the hunting trophies for Cody hid the gun safe in the closet. She fished out the combination and worked the dial, then punched in the code. Mr. Page wanted to make certain his guns were safely put away with this safe. I’d seen them for sale in gun stores. A hulking, big green chest with decals of swirled lines that gave it the look of an old combination safe.

  Inside was an armory. Stuffed in everywhere, on top of each other, in layers, were guns, rifles, assault rifles, shotguns, small pistols, and a few weapons that looked so deadly I had no idea what the hell they were used for. And there in the back tucked neatly away was a Barrett M107 .50 caliber sniper rifle with an engagement distance of 1500 to 2000 yards of accuracy. And it had the Leupold 4.5x14 Vari-X scope. Mr. Page, you naughty boy, these were illegal for civilians to have now. I’d read about them in magazines, but to see one, hold one, oh yes!

  There were two drawers inside at the bottom of the safe, and they were filled with boxes and boxes of shells, cartridges, and rounds. Each neatly stacked and lined up. The .38 bullets were all on top of each other right next to the 9mm boxes, next to the 12-gauge shells.

  A quick look at these boxes told me things I hadn’t understood about Mr. Page and his family before and the M107 just confirmed it. He was a survivalist. His ammo box contained the most common and easily found rounds for someone who was looking to survive for a long time. His kids and family with all the archery skills were getting ready to live off the land, hunting small game and staying quiet. The obscenely well-stocked camping supplies, they were ready to travel and live off the land for a while. I guess someone got bitten and that threw his contingency plan for a loop. But then again, I guess he, like most of them, was preparing for a worldwide economic collapse, not a zombie contagion. He probably had a shelter stocked floor to ceiling somewhere outside of town. That would be a nice place to find.

  To one side of the closet were a few big black duffel bags that could hold several guns and a bunch of ammo. That’s what we stuffed the guns into. He had some nice scopes on some of his rifles; hell, he had some nice rifles. I couldn’t wait to check them out when we had the time. We pulled out all the 9mm and .22 caliber rifles as well as a few pistols of the same caliber, thinking it would be easier to follow Page’s lead on this. We left the house with eight rifles and six pistols all stuffed into one bag. In the other we stuffed everything that matched them from the drawers. I also grabbed this space-age looking thing that later I found to be a Barrett M82 sniper rifle, so I grabbed the box and clips of .50 caliber rounds. We didn’t need it and it really wasn’t practical to have such a high-powered specialty rifle, but it looked neat as hell and I wanted it.

  We lugged all this out to the garage after closing the safe and locking the house and threw them into the back seat of the truck. I’d started it up and was letting the cab get warm while she went to the bathroom before we left.

  We drove over to the church to see if anyone had gotten our message. I stopped just in front of the door and she hopped out to look at the notebook hanging by a string that we had tied to the glass door entrance.

  Shaking her head as she was getting back in the truck, she said, “There were footprints going up to the door that weren’t ours, but nothing was written there.” I turned the truck around in the lot and was headed for the street when a boy stepped from behind the bushes and stood there. From his coat he pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Judging from his size, he couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old. We quickly looked around for the other children but didn’t see them. I left the truck running but got out and walked over to him. Still looking around, I didn’t see anyone else. She got out of the truck and stopped beside me.

  “You wanted to talk,” he said, gesturing to the notebook hanging from the church door.

  “Actually, that was meant for the black truck.” His eyes widened as I said it.

  “The black trucks don’t talk, they take people,” he replied with a glint of fear in his eyes. He glanced around as all three of us stopped for a moment and listened for the sound of its engine.

  “I was hoping that I could arrange a meeting with them and maybe work out a truce.”

  “They won’t go for it.” he offered.

  “Where are the rest of your guys?” she asked.

  “What are you talking about? It’s just me.”

  “I saw you with four other kids the other night at the Safeway,” I said, realizing that if she said anything more they’d know where we lived. “Where are the rest of them?”

  “It’s just me.”

  “Bullshit!” I shouted and then yelled to the sky, “Come on out, we know you’re around here somewhere and we need to talk to all of you. This is important and involves all of y
ou.” A moment later, from different bushes and trees, six kids appeared from the surrounding foliage of the parking lot. The two tallest kids had the potato cannon rifles in hand. Two other kids had similar-looking pistols. All of them wore hoodies under their jackets with the hoods pulled up over their heads, hiding most of their features. They formed a semicircle around us. The two oldest pulled their hoods back so their faces could be seen. They were all trying their best to look like tough men.

  “What’s so important that it concerns the S.O.L.?” said one of the kids holding the potato cannon rifles. I recognized him as the kid who threw up the heavy metal sign in the post office parking lot.

  “The S.O.L?” she asked.

  “Sons of Lemmy,” he offered, pointing a finger at everyone in the group. “As in Lemmy of Motörhead.”

  “Nice. You the leader?” I asked.

  “No, that’s Eddie,” he said, and pointed to the thirteen-year-old we’d been talking to. Eddie might have been their leader but they came out of hiding pretty quickly after two adults told them to. My guess was that even with Eddie’s leadership they were starving for some form of adult guidance. I didn’t plan on taking them in and feeding them, and I kind of got the feeling they were proud that the S.O.L. had survived this long without any adults, but if nothing else, I could perhaps recruit them on occasion in doing different things like clearing houses.

  “Where are you kids staying?” she asked.

  Eddie replied, “Nowhere, everywhere. We move around a lot.”

  “Kind of like you two,” said the kid with the potato cannon rifle.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Donny.”

  “And you?” She pointed at the other rifleman. He was a good-looking black kid with lean features and dreads wrapped up in a bandana. Joseph, he said, and they called out one by one their names. The youngest one was only five. We told them our names and I decided to talk to them like they were adults. After all, they’d been surviving on their own for a while; they deserved that much respect from me.

  “Eddie, what do you know about the black truck?”

  “They took Joseph and Stanley’s parents.” Stanley was seven or eight years old. A pasty-faced kid who looked like he had at one time been a little chunky, but he wasn’t now. His clothes were tight in places and in others they hung off him like he was wearing hand-me-downs. Stanley wouldn’t talk about what happened, but through Joseph, Eddie, and Donny, who were willing to talk the most, we learned that the black truck had been taking all the people they could get and driving off. These kids didn’t know where. And like we already knew, sometimes they just killed folks for no reason. They did use live bait to attract zombies and lure them off south of Roosevelt someplace. But south of Roosevelt was, from what they said, very dangerous, with people shooting you whether you were alive or dead. They’d tried several times to scavenge food over there, but one of their group had been killed. He was five years old.

  West of Chester Street, which was one of the streets we’d chosen to mark the edge of our kingdom, the S.O.L. said was mostly deserted, filled with empty houses till you got to Summit Street, then there were a few people living there on west but they’d never gone further west than that. Joseph still had family that lived over there somewhere. They named off some blocks I didn’t know, which they said were as dangerous or worse than south of Roosevelt.

  One of the kids asked us what it was like living on the roof of the Safeway and if we had beds up there. At that point it was little use denying that we did—it was obvious from what they’d told us that they knew more about what was going on in this city than we did. She told him it was cold. We asked where they lived again. They’d been a few blocks down from us living in the Trinity Episcopal Church, a massive complex of buildings all interconnected that took up an entire city block and was open on only one side. With some strategic planning, the place could be blocked off on its many entrances and turned into a kind of fort, or as they were using it, a place to stay and escape through one of the many connecting building and exits. When we asked if there were more kids there, they wouldn’t answer, so we knew there were, but how many we could only guess.

  I told them about the boundaries we’d chosen and my plan to secure it from zombies and asked if they knew of other people living within the kingdom. They were proud to tell of over two dozen houses that had people in them. They bragged about how they scavenged food and brought it to some of them. The S.O.L. prided themselves on being the providers for the adults who were too afraid to get out of their houses.

  “Do you have a symbol?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Donny. “A symbol?”

  “An S.O.L. symbol. Like graffiti, you know, like taggers leave.”

  “Yeah, we got something, why?”

  “We need a way that doesn’t look too obvious to tell what houses have people in them and what houses don’t. If you tag those houses with people in them, then we’d know who’s ‘friendly’ and who’s not. But to any outsider it would look like graffiti,” I explained. The idea made sense to them and Eddie ordered one of the kids to start spreading the word that that was what they were going to do.

  I described the house where we had the shotgun pointed at us and asked if they knew who those people were. The S.O.L. knew them but didn’t interact with them. I asked the S.O.L. if I could get their help with doing some stuff, mainly clearing the empty houses. I was kind of surprised when they agreed. But it did make sense to clear a house and know that you didn’t have to come back into it worrying about getting bitten.

  “Why did you put the skulls in Mount Holly?” one of the kids asked her.

  “The dead need respect.”

  “But you don’t put all of them in there. Like you didn’t put Mr. Tony’s in there.”

  “I don’t know who he is.”

  “He’s the handyman on the bicycle.”

  We looked to Eddie and Donny for answers. Joseph spoke up. “He was bitten in the early days of all this. They may not have known him.”

  “I knew who he was by sight, but I haven’t seen him as a zombie.”

  “So if you know them, you stack them in the cemetery?” the kid asked her.

  “It helps. I’d like to put their name with them so they can be remembered, I think that’s only right.”

  “But if you don’t know their name?” He was trying to get somewhere with all this, I could tell that.

  “At some point those that we don’t know will be placed there, I’m sure, but right now they’re just zombies unless I know them.”

  “So if I knew them they could go there, like Mr. Tony?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  The kid looked pleased with himself as he looked around at the others. “What was so special about Mr. Tony?” she asked him.

  “Nothing, I just knew him,” he said. Then looking up at Joseph he said, “See, we can put them in there.” The kid had empathy for the dead, at least.

  I asked the S.O.L. if in two days they could meet me at the Chester Street Bridge crossing I-630 by the bus stop. I wanted them to give us security while I hot-wired cars and moved them into place on the ramps. I told them with their help we could get that one, Broadway, State, and Chester closed off very quickly. Then we wouldn’t need to worry about zombies drifting up from there to mess with us.

  “What about the rest of this territory you outlined?” asked Eddie.

  “One problem at a time,” I said. “I have a lot to do if we’re going to live in any kind of peace. Any help I can get from you guys is greatly appreciated.” I purposefully left them out of the plans. I needed them to come to me of their own choosing. If I started saying things like “we” and “us” and ordering them around like I was the boss, they’d run from me. And I desperately needed them more than they needed me, but I don’t think they knew that. So as long as I could show them some respect and ask for their help, I thought they’d go along with me.

  It wasn’t long till we d
ecided to break up and meet at the bus stop off the Chester Street Bridge in two days. I next drove to the house where grandpa tried to shoot us. I parked the truck at the other end of the block and out of habit I locked it. Then, unarmed with the exception of Harold and her bow, we walked up to the front door and knocked. Then we stepped back to the sidewalk leading up to the door and waited.

  It wasn’t long till the curtains parted and a face looked out. I could hear Dylan’s voice in my head singing, “Fox say I don’t runnnn…” The door cracked open and a gruff, menacing voice said, “You better get the hell on if you want to live. We got nothing for you here.”

  “Actually you do. I, we, need your help.”

  “We ain’t got no food.”

  “We’re not asking for food. We just need help. You can see we aren’t really a threat to you; can you come out so we can talk without shouting? I don’t want to attract zombies or anyone else.”

  “The black truck.”

  “The black truck, exactly.” It took a moment and some discussion inside the house, but a young guy, maybe in his thirties, came out with a pistol in his hand. He was nervous and his eyes kept darting around. We stepped up to meet him, and I dropped Harold to the ground.

  “Try anything and I’ll blow your ass to hell.”

  “And you're just going to leave the pistol hand down by your side? You should probably be pointing that at one of us if you think we’re a threat.” He nodded his head, then stuffed it into his pocket.

  “What’ch you want?” he demanded in a country thug accent.

  “We need help moving cars.” I explained how the zombies that were trapped in the I-630 canal could wander up from there and how there were a lot of them, and if a herd of them came up those ramps it was going to be trouble for everyone. I told him about how we’d closed off two of the bridges by moving cars to block the ramps. “And we can’t do it alone. I know there’s more than one person in this house, probably five or six. We only need two people to drive the cars I hot-wire into place on the ramps to block them off. Two hours tops, then we don’t have to worry about zombies on the north side coming into the neighborhood.” He’d listened carefully as I told him all this and occasionally he’d nod. He was looking at the ground when I finished.