ZWD: King of an Empty City

by Thomas Kroepfl

  “What about the black truck?” he asked.

  “I’m trying to come up with a truce for them. A way for them to leave us alone.”

  “Like paying them. Shit,” he murmured.

  “I’m still working on it. One problem at a time. Help me close off the north side of the neighborhood.”

  He looked around the neighborhood for a moment, then at me. “You really think you can stop them?”

  “I have a last-resort plan, but I don’t want to use it unless I have to. We just want to get back to a civilized world or something close to it, and for that I need your help. I need everyone’s help.”

  “My pistol isn’t even loaded,” he chuckled after a long pause, his country thug accent gone. “We didn’t want to risk you taking the gun and being able to use it. Granddad’s idea. I like your plan; it makes a lot of sense. Granddad might not go for it.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the house.

  “How do you plan to protect us as we move the cars?”

  I told him about the kids.

  “We’ve seen them moving around,” he said. I told him in two days I wanted to meet at the bridge on Chester next to Philander Smith College and start there, working our way back this way. He suggested that we use some of the cars from PSC to block the bridge. I asked him about zombies on campus.

  “I was a student there when the outbreak started. A lot of people are in their dorm rooms, but the majority of the student body went into the cafeteria and locked themselves in. I don’t think we have that much to worry about. I’ve been on campus since then and I didn’t see that many. If those kids, the S.O.L., are that good, then we shouldn’t have anything to worry about.”

  We agreed to meet in two days at the bus stop just off Chester and would decide what to do from there. I was feeling good as we headed back to the truck. We drove to the corner of Gaines and Daisy Gatson Bates Drive, a corner of the Mount Holly Cemetery, and parked, then crawled across the fence. At the stack of skulls a few more had been added with photographs taped to them of who they were. Some photos had several people in them and a face was circled. Some skulls had been cleaned like she’d cleaned them; some had been placed there still decomposing, rubber gloves on the ground showing where the placer had discarded them, afraid that if you touched the dead you’d turn. There were probably twenty skulls stacked up or lining the mausoleum door, the stone angel still looking on. We placed the skulls of the three hunters among the rest and she made sure their IDs were displayed securely in their open mouths so anyone could see them and they didn’t fall out.

  After that we drove back to the Safeway and unloaded the guns onto the roof. I spent an hour or so matching guns and ammunition just to make certain that we had ammo for each gun, and to put into my mind just how much we had. She took a great interest in examining the sniper rifles. She really liked the Barrett M107 .50 caliber sniper rifle, and who wouldn’t, it was magnificent. Its scope was stronger than the binoculars we were using. She loaded the clip and snapped it into the rifle, then stuffed it back into its bag and looked at another rifle carefully and returned it to the bag. Finally with the pistols she selected one she liked and stuffed it into her own backpack along with a box of ammo. I’d picked out a Desert Eagle 9mm pistol and stuffed it into my pack, hoping I’d never need to pull it out. Gunfire attracts zombies. Happy with our work for the day I forgot what we’d set out to do, so we had to lounge around the roof till dark.

  I knew it was still early in the evening, but with the fog so thick still in the air it looked like it was about midnight. As the freezing rain started again I stoked the fires on the hibachi, trying to keep as much heat as possible before it went out. A few bricks of coal helped it go a lot longer. We munched on beef jerky and canned apricots.

  After dinner I started lightly drumming on the ice chest I was sitting on.

  “What are you doing?” she asked me with a smile. Her smile lights up the world in the worst of weather. Without telling her, I started singing. I’m no singer but I have to say I sounded pretty damn good that night. It was an old Simon and Garfunkel tune we use to sing in collage. This was a good moment, happy, like it was years ago sitting around a bonfire.

  “Li la li... li la la la li la li.”

  ZWD: King of an Empty City Chapter 20

  ZWD: Dec. 17.

  CANNED ARTICHOKE HEARTS! Who in hell eats canned artichoke hearts? I hate scavenging for food. Oh, blessed cheeseburger, I miss you!

  Despite the dark gray foggy sky we woke to, I was feeling very good about things. We had help now; we were going to get a lot more done than we ever had before. And there was protection in numbers. I decided to take the day off. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt rested and my body wasn’t in pain. Every muscle, every joint, my fingers, my back, my head, all those aches and little pains were starting to build up on me, so I decided I was going to take it easy. No taking apart decks, no clearing houses, and as far as I could get away with it, no nothing. I wished I had a television with a game on just so I could relax and ignore it.

  Tomorrow, we’d meet with Shaun and the S.O.L and finish those bridges. But right now the only thing I really wanted to do was finish a can of peaches. She wanted to go “shopping” for a few things, so I’d be tagging along for that. There were some feminine things she needed so we were going to be breaking into some homes and rummaging through some bathrooms. The houses she had in mind were more likely than most to have what she was looking for, she said, because they were either homes of teenage girls or known lesbians, so she was hoping this would be a quick trip. I didn’t understand the significance of why either of those two groups living in a house was important to her search, but she said the likelihood of them having what she needed over, say, a house occupied by the elderly was far better than just picking a house at random.

  It wasn’t till we actually started walking to one of these houses that I realized I was going to be clearing a house or two today. We didn’t take the truck because we didn’t want to attract attention to ourselves, and besides, walking was safer. There were more ways to get away and more places to hide and it was quieter. It was just safer. We left the guns on the roof and carried our trusty old hand weapons. The Ice Pike and Harold, along with the usual assortment of knives and clubs. I didn’t really think we’d need them, so I left the hammers at home. I was carrying light.

  The first place we headed was just a few blocks off Broadway. I was kind of surprised to see, painted in silver, a very stylized S.O.L. on the side of the house. If you weren’t really paying attention, you wouldn’t realize what it was. So, the S.O.L. were already in action. Since we now knew this house was occupied, we decided we’d just go up and knock.

  A few moments later, the curtains cracked open and then someone came to the door and opened it. Through the metal security door we got a very cautious “Can I help you?” We introduced ourselves to the shadowy figure and she told the woman what she was looking for, then explained that we’d seen the graffiti and knew this house was occupied because the S.O.L. had marked the house. After mentioning them, we were asked inside.

  The S.O.L. had been over early that morning and told her what they were doing and about us and some of our plans for making the neighborhood safer. Sitting there on her sofa, we explained the rest of the plans to her as she offered us hot tea to drink. It was the best hot tea I’d ever had. She offered her help. She wouldn’t be able to drive any of the cars tomorrow, but any of the other stuff she said to let her know. I was about to ask her some questions to get to know her better when they decided to go to the bathroom and see what they could find for my girl and her shopping list. I just sat there in the dimly-lit living room looking at all the things there.

  I stood and started looking at the pictures that covered the walls and several shelves in the living room. They were all of family or groups of friends. Mostly, there were four women in the pictures. At a grouping on the fireplace mantle, there were four individual frames hand-decorated w
ith jewels or acorn caps or something that made each frame unique. On the bedazzled jeweled frame that held the face of our host was a Popsicle stick placard decorated just the same, but with the hand-painted name “Ashley” on it in letters that had a dot at the end of each letter’s appendage. Next to her was Pamela with her nature-covered frame, then Sandra, whose frame was covered in office supplies, paper clips, erasers, and things like that. And lastly, there was Jillian, whose face was reddened like she’d been in the sun for ages. Her frame was covered in little barbells and bicycles. I guess she was a fitness freak. The three other women were close in age and kind of looked like Ashley, so I guessed that they were all sisters. Other pictures had each woman in a group photo surrounded by kids, mostly girls. There were a couple of large photos of all the women and all the kids gathered at a picnic down at one of the Big Dam Bridge pavilions on a sunny day. There were literally hundreds of photos of a group of girls who looked like they were their own soccer team. There were so many of them. They were at slumber parties, in prom gowns, Halloween costumes—you name it. Four girls dominated Ashley’s photos—probably her daughters.

  On a small side table next to the fireplace sat a lone photo of a man in uniform, Air Force. He was smiling big and you expected his teeth to gleam and sparkle, he was so handsome. It was a simple frame, black with a high lacquer finish. Behind it and to the side in a triangular case was a folded flag. In front of it knelt a statue of an angel facing the frame and in a dozen little frames around the front of it were more pictures of this guy. Holding Ashley, laughing and surrounded by kids in a lake, wearing a sombrero at a table filled with Mexican food. All the girls looked like him. Under the picture frame of him and the kneeling angel statue was what looked like one of those official letters you get from the military when your service person dies in action. I didn’t read it out of respect. There was also a letter written by the four girls, signed by each one, which expressed their love for their daddy. Judging from the other photos in the room, he must have died during the Desert Storm conflict because there were photos of these little girls as they all grew up.

  I heard the girls laughing in the back and if felt good to hear her laugh like that. It was different than the laugh she shared with me; it was a laugh that women share with each other, a comfortable laugh that said things I could never understand. I was glad that she was able to connect to this woman Ashley. She hadn’t had any women to talk to for a long time. She needed girl time.

  “I’m going to step out back and smoke,” I shouted down the hall. Before I could get to the sliding glass door that led to a deck, Ashley came running down the hall saying, “Wait, the door is booby-trapped.” She did some things to the door that released the tension on a string I hadn’t seen before, and then she undid the latch and slid the door open.

  “Wow, what would have happened if you hadn’t stopped me?” I asked, following the string with my eyes. She pointed to a small hole in the drop-down ceiling just above the glass door.

  “There’s a pistol up there and if you’d gone out that door without releasing this string it would have blown your head off,” she said.

  “Where did you learn to do that?”

  “I didn’t. A neighbor rigged it for me.”

  “That’s a good neighbor. We could use him. Still around?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, sorry. Hey, you guys talk, I’ll be out here.” And I stepped out onto the snow-covered deck, fishing another Swisher Sweet Peach flavored cigar out of my coat. I pulled out one of the dozens of lighters I carry in my pockets and lit up. After only a moment, I heard them laughing again and talking rapidly to each other in that way women do.

  The backyard had a jungle gym set up in one corner and an aboveground pool with a wooden deck walkway surrounding the edges in the other corner. There was some kind of garden pathway covered with plants that lead to the pool’s steps, but under the ice and snow you couldn’t tell what it looked like. Soccer goals were stacked in the back of the yard next to a shed that had a rock-climbing wall built onto it.

  I sat out there on the deck’s railing smoking that god-awful cigar and wondered why I kept doing this to myself. I knew they needed more time without me, so I started walking around the yard, then drifted out to the front of the house and looked at the street. There, I noticed the light of the streetlamps, although it was by my reckoning nearly noon. The city was so quiet; it still amazed me even after all this time.

  I walked down one side of the street to the corner, looking at each house. The S.O.L. was on every house, but something didn’t seem right about it on some of them. I went across the street to look more closely at one of those that didn’t seem right. It was painted in the same manner, with the same paint, and by the same hand, as far as I could tell, but it looked wrong. Then it hit me; it said S.L.O instead of S.O.L. They’d changed the letters. It still looked like graffiti and if you weren’t paying attention, you’d never notice the subtle differences. These kids were smart, thinkers. I liked them more and more.

  I moved around this house to see where they’d gotten in or how they knew this house was empty. Who knew, perhaps I’d find something useful. In the back was an air conditioner unit someone had stripped open for the copper. Like they still needed that in this day and age. The window that sat above it was half broken out and shoved open so I climbed in and looked around.

  My first thought was, were there zombies in the house? Someone had been in here before me, so someone might have been bitten and could still be in here. There could be two in here. This was the first time I’d cleared a house without her and I was a little nervous, but I kept telling myself I was an experienced zombie killer and I could do this.

  The first thing I encountered was a raccoon that had taken up housekeeping in the closet of the room I came in. The floor was covered in raccoon fecal matter, yuck. I thought about killing the coon, but decided to live and let live. So as he stood there chittering his anger about me being in his house, I slid against the wall to the door and stepped out, closing it behind me. Later I’d find a chair and prop it against the door to keep him from getting out and messing up any more of the house. After all, my hope was to get these houses filled with people and have a community again.

  The house itself had been ransacked; my guess was that the S.O.L. had been in here and out of just pure kid behavior they’d trashed the place. But when you looked past all the vandalism, the inside of the house was really a piece of crap. Poor up-keeping, crappy wall paneling, crappy molding. It was probably a rental house. There were window units and floor heaters on rollers in almost every room. The biggest surprise came in the master bedroom. A big sheet of plywood lay across the bed and on top of that rested bottles, cartons, and glass containers. The room stank of a chemical mix. The master bathroom was even worse. The bathtub was filled with what looked like a still with a burner under a pot and tubes running here and there. The tub itself was stained brown. The counter space was covered with the same bottles as outside. The fumes from the still made me sick, and I vomited. A meth lab. Even here in this nice little neighborhood there was a meth lab. It never stops amazing me the depths some people will go to just to make a buck. How is your dollar treating you now? The more I was here, the more I wanted to burn this place to the ground.

  I paid little attention to the pictures that were in the living room since the first one I looked at was a frame with a stock photo of a couple laughing on the beach. That same photo could be found in every frame like this in every store in America. These people were keeping up appearances. A couple of the photos had the same thing in them. I moved on.

  The kitchen had a similar cooking still set up on the counter and a big burn mark on the wall and up the cabinets. Most of the cabinets were open, revealing empty shelves. In the back corner of one cabinet next to the fridge sat a can, so I pulled it out. Canned artichoke hearts. Who the fuck eats canned artichoke hearts? Why would you eat canned artichoke hearts? I could see why it was left on
the shelf and everything else was taken. Still, I stuffed it into my jacket pocket. Food wasn’t so plentiful that we could be picky. But God, how I missed a cheeseburger. I hated this fucking world. I hated scavenging for food. Oh, blessed cheeseburger, I miss you.

  The front door had a steel-enforced sheet of metal bolted to the inside and a drop bar so you couldn’t kick it in easily. After opening it I went outside and realized just how foul the air had been in there. That raccoon was probably a raging meth-head from the fumes alone. Rabid and fucked up. I guess my life wasn’t so bad in comparison. I pulled the door shut and using one of the knives on my belt, I carved a big “X” into the wooden exterior. This house would definitely be burnt down when the time came.

  On the sidewalk, I sat against the small retaining wall that lined the street. Most of the houses on this side were up a little from street level, with raised yards. Once my head cleared, I noticed just how clean the air really was. No car fumes, no factory exhaust. Who knows how long we’d been breathing really pure, clean air. I was really enjoying it. I decided then that I wasn’t going to smoke any more cigars.

  The sky, as dark as it was, held thin clouds. Every time the lightning discharged it made the clouds look like dark marble with glowing white streaks in it. I heard thunder close by and the wind was just starting to pick up.