ZWD: King of an Empty City

by Thomas Kroepfl

  They went through the body’s belongings and took whatever they thought was useful, then disappeared into the alley. Eddie said they’d be close and out of sight. Their job was to stop any threats before they became a threat. Great, we had our own SEAL Team 6 Zombie Squad.

  Once my girl went over everything with Donny on where she wanted security, he dispatched the remaining eight kids. Four took up positions around the Chester Street Bridge and started eliminating threats while we went onto the Philander Smith campus to hot-wire cars. After using Harold to break out the window of an Elektra, I popped the steering column and stripped the wires. Once it was going, Andrew drove it to where we agreed the first set of cars should go on the far side of Chester.

  Chester has a unique set of ramps. Those on the north side come up and go down to I-630 off a one-way on Eighth Street. There’s also a service road that feeds traffic to the bridge. Andrew blocked off the service road, then came back for the next car. By then, I’d started another one and Shaun was driving it to the far side down ramp that lead to I-630. That was going to be the hardest one to close because it was a long, gradual ramp with no hard curves or steep spots to clog. We’d already picked what was probably the best high spot and he drove the nose of his car to it, then got out and made his way back for his next car. Andrew parked his next car nose to bumper behind it and they kept this up till there was a wall of cars stretching from the hedges of the MEMS shrub line to the retaining wall of the on-ramp for the Chester Street exit on the north side. The next few cars we placed across the north side of the bridge, parked side by side, forming a thick, low wall across the bridge till there was only a small gap on the side where a car couldn’t be parked. They closed off that gap with a car parked on this side of the opening, and then we started on closing off the south side of the bridge.

  Chester, the State Street Bridge, bridge after bridge, ramp after ramp, we worked all day, one car after another. I taught Eddie how to hot-wire cars and we worked faster. As fast as Shaun and Andrew could get back, we had another one ready for them. The steep ramps took more cars and better planning on the placement, but Shaun and Andrew were working that out pretty well from what we could tell. I kept getting laughing reports that the cars were just sliding into place over the icy sheet that was forming on the roads and bridges. There were a few times while this was going on that from the Philander Smith College parking lot, we heard the whoomp of potato cannon guns being fired. The S.O.L. snipers taking their shots started attracting the attention of the zombies in the I-630 canal, so the snipers had to stop shooting and start teaming up to kill those that came too close. When dozens more zombies started pressing against the barricades we’d built, and I’ll give the kids credit for this, they marched across the bridge to the north side and paraded around, occasionally shooting from the bridge into the mob below and drawing their attention to the north side before they disappeared and snuck back over the bridge to our side. They kept the zombies distracted.

  The two kids from the SEAL Team 6 Zombie Squad came back to report that we might be able to cut our time in half if we grabbed some of the eighteen-wheeler tractor trailers from the moving company and used them to close off the rest of the bridges.

  “There are fourteen tractor-trailers parked over there and we just cleared the area of any obstacles,” said Steve, with military confidence. So we hot-wired a truck and they all loaded up in the back while I drove us over to the moving company. We drove the truck into the gate, crashing it to the ground. And they were right; there were a lot of trucks there for moving.

  Shaun had never driven an eighteen-wheeler before and Andrew had only driven the smaller U-Haul trucks. Luckily, there were nine of them. Andrew gave Shaun some quick lessons on how to drive the smaller trucks while I showed Eddie how to hot-wire these bigger trucks, and soon we had them all going.

  Now we had to work in reverse, we had to block off the south side of the bridges and then finish the north. Two trucks placed crossways on Broadway’s off-ramp took care of that. When it got to the big trucks that we were going to use to block off the bridge itself, we used a combination of eighteen-wheelers and cars to cover the space under them so no zombies could get the idea of crawling under the trailers to get across. I had to drive the eighteen-wheelers because nobody else would, or if they wanted to, their feet couldn’t touch the pedals. I never got out of first gear, and I think I burnt out the parking brake in one of them. I know something stank and smoked as I drove it. But we got the four trailers and another six cars blocking the Broadway Street Bridge with little trouble.

  It was getting late in the day and we still had the Center Street Bridge to block off, it and its long, straight off-ramp. I wished we had more tractor-trailers to use, but we’d parked the last one on Broadway. We also had to find more cars to use. The Philander Smith campus was too far away so we were going to have to look locally for something. The SEAL Team 6 Zombie Squad started out scouting again while we took a break from working. I was saying just how fortunate it was that we hadn’t seen any zombies other than those on the Chester Street Bridge when one of the kids piped up and said he’d killed one at the State Street Bridge on the north side. Another kid said he’d killed two at the Metropolitan Branch Bank on the north side of Broadway. Each of the eight kids who were guarding us as we moved cars and trucks had killed one or more zombies in the course of protecting us. Seriously, these kids should have been playing soccer, not killing zombies. The SEAL Team 6 Zombie Squad came back and said that there were two school buses and a bunch of cars in the parking lot behind the Taco Bell and McDonalds on Broadway. “If we drove them south on Spring Street, we could get them to the bridge, then cut back on the service road and get them to the Center Street Bridge. Piece of cake,” he offered.

  “Easy peasy,” assured his companion.

  We drove the truck over there and I didn’t like the openness of this situation. What we were looking at was a large parking lot that serviced several businesses surrounding it on four sides. I imagined that moving the cars would be easy for Shaun and Andrew, at least they’d driven the other cars into place with little trouble. What worried me were the buses. Growing up in Colorado, I rode to school on buses in snows that were feet thick and I knew that the best drivers with the right equipment had hell getting those buses to where they were supposed to go on the best of days. Here in Arkansas with a little sleet that would have made our bus drivers in Colorado laugh, the whole state would shut down in a panic. Experienced bus drivers would sweat as they took these behemoths out on the streets. How were Shaun and Andrew going to handle two buses in a freezing rain on icy streets, if the damned things would even start?

  Eddie and I would start the cars and Shaun with Andrew would drive them into place as planned. But with our supply of cars so far away from the destination, I was worried about safety. How were we going to cover the bridge and this lot with the few kids we had? Where was that other group of kids who went to the alarm house? How were Shaun and Andrew going to get back here safely to pick up the next batch of cars? Turns out that the plan was the same as it was at the last location, the only differences being that the kids were going to circle around us to cover more ground. I still had a bad feeling about this and actually wished we’d brought some of the guns. I knew Andrew had that shotgun with him, but one shot and we were going to be swarmed. I didn’t like this at all.

  I’d just started the first car and was letting the motor warm up when two kids came marching down Ninth Street. They had a bundle draped over their shoulders like two baggage carriers in some old Tarzan movie. They put the bundles down and uncovered their heads. “You guys aren’t where you said you’d be,” said the kid in front to Eddie. He blushed as she talked to him. She was a kid about Eddie’s age and a few inches taller than him. Her blond hair poked out from under her knit hat and the freckles that covered her face were even more pronounced against her white skin in this cold.

  “You’re late,” he replied. “We’ve been
busy. Did you get the thing working?” he asked.

  “Some assembly required, but it works beautifully,” she said with a lot of pride.

  “See if you can’t get it up high someplace, like on one of the buildings, and cover this lot,” he told her, and you could tell he was trying to look like the big man in charge. It was cute, really it was. While they tried not to make googly eyes at each other, Donny, in a disgusted huff, ordered the SEAL Team 6 Zombie Squad guys to find a way up on a roof. Before they even moved, one of them said that the garage across the street from the lot had a ladder in the back and they could help get it set up there.

  Finally I had to ask, “What is this thing that has you guys so excited?”

  The other kid, I’m guessing that he was Jr. since nobody introduced him to us, patted the big bundle that was tied in bed sheets to the two long PVC pipes with his gloved hands and said, “We have a cannon.” And it was; later I got to see the thing up close. Its barrel was made up of the two long PVC pipe poles they used to carry the thing with and a series of other tubes and pipes twisted into some semblance of a box and connected to the metal cylinder of two propane bottles housed in the pipe box. Those bottles had tubes coming off them to bicycle pump cylinders that were pumped to pressurize the propane tanks. It looked like it would never work, but it did. It could shoot anything that fit into its barrel over three hundred yards with deadly force. The killing field Bobby was covering was at best seventy-five yards long. And talk about deadly. They had a supply of two-foot long cuts of rebar that they were using for ammunition.

  I’d gotten another truck running, a diesel truck with an extended cab. We sat there in the cab till the cannon was set up on top of the garage, which took twenty minutes. Probably all that rebar that they were hauling, I’m sure that took time to get up on the roof. I’d turned the truck around so I could see them give the all-clear sign and get the broken window away from the incoming freezing rain. When Bobby waved at us from the roof, we poured out of the truck and started working on cars again. We left the truck running and it was decided that each of us would take a turn in the warmish cab as the day got darker and the temperature dropped.

  My girl was to follow Shaun and Andrew to the Center Street Bridge and drive them back. She had one of the SEAL Team 6 Zombie Squad kids with her as a lookout. With him and his potato cannon rifle, her with her skills at killing zombies, and Andrew’s Mossberg shotgun, and all the other kids who were watching the bridge, I wasn’t too worried about them getting into trouble. Compared to a zombie army, they were superior. It was my ass I was worried about. Eddie and I worked fast through the cars and had eight of them running when her truck came back carrying everyone.

  Shortly after that, everything went to crap. Here’s what happened: my girl, Shaun, and Andrew headed off to park the next set of cars when we heard from the McDonalds the distinctive whoomp sound of a potato cannon rifle. A little after that there were three more shots fired and the other kids who were our perimeter watch went running across the parking lot in that direction. Eddie walked over there to see what was going on, since we had enough cars started. Standing there in the freezing rain I listened to the sounds of a battle going on as kids started yelling instructions to each other, then Eddie yelled, “Fall back, fall back!” I didn’t hear the sound of their feet crunching the snow and icy streets. I couldn’t hear it over the sounds of the engines running, primarily the diesel engine of the truck we’d been keeping warm in.

  In a dead city where sound attracts zombies, we broke the first rule of survival. We made noise. We made a lot of noise. Those car engines caught the attention of every zombie that had gathered down there by the fire truck to watch the hoses flail around. I’m sure they all heard the diesel and came to see what the noise was. The last I looked, there were a lot of zombies gathered around that fire truck. The stupid ones stepped up to the edge of the circle and were killed by the nozzles of the hoses as they waved about, but there were plenty to take their places. In an attempt to cut down the noise, I started turning off cars and the truck to make it as quiet as possible.

  There wasn’t enough room for us to fit into a car or the diesel truck without someone getting in the back, and that wasn’t safe, so I ran over to one of the buses and started hot-wiring it. I had a brilliant idea once the bus got started. Why not give the zombies another cat toy to play with? I left the bus running and went to the second one and started hot-wiring it. As luck would have it, this bus decided to be stubborn and not start when I wanted it to. Eddie hit the door of the bus and said, “We got to go. There are hundreds of them and they’re coming this way.”

  “See what you can do here,” I said and started to the back of the bus. I was looking for the fire extinguisher. Don’t ask me what I was going to do with it, I have no idea, but it seemed like something we were going to need at the time.

  “Why don’t we just take the other bus? You have it running already.”

  “We need to leave them something to play with when we leave so they stay!”

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure. Just get it started,” I said as I came back to the front of the bus, not finding the extinguisher. I ran over to the other bus and looked there for one. They didn’t have one either. The kids were constantly firing till they ran out of things to fire. They were fighting hand-to-hand now in twos, but there were just too many zombies for them, and they were hungry. I yelled for them to forget the fight and just run. Eddie got the bus running. I turned to Bobby on the roof of the garage and held out my hands, asking why s he wasn’t shooting. I could see Bobby and Jr. up there working frantically on the cannon. If nothing else, I’d make a stand and give the kids a chance to escape. I took one of the lighters from my pocket and lit the seat of one of the cars we’d hot-wired on fire, then stepped over away from it so if it exploded I wouldn’t get caught in the direct explosion.

  With Harold in hand I waited as the kids ran past me and got onto the bus Eddie had started. As the last kid ran past I realized that none of them could drive. My head pounded in frustration. As I was turning to tell them to just get the hell out of there on foot, I heard the rumble of my girl’s truck returning. She drove onto the lot and it didn’t take her long to assess the situation and know it was desperate. With Andrew hanging out the window, she sped past me and towards the crowd of zombies. Andrew’s shotgun fired twice quickly. The SEAL Team 6 kid fired his gun into the crowd and Shaun was shooting his pistol from the bed of the truck. With the truck she wiped out the first line of zombies that were coming and gave us probably twenty more feet of space. She drove back to the buses and everyone got out of the truck. I came running back to the bus with the kids.

  “Shaun, Andrew,“ she shouted orders. “Get on the empty bus and park it across that bridge. We can get more cars later. After you park it, disappear, we’ll catch up to you at your house to make certain you’re ok.” With a nod they were on the bus. Donny had taken the ammo, cuts of one-inch wooden dowel rods, from the SEAL Team 6 kid and passed them out to the kids still with potato rifles, and they formed a line. They had two shots each and shot them like a British square. Two lines of three shooters the first line fired, then the second line. It was very impressive and it brought down six zombies out of a hundred. It also kept kids off the bus. I couldn’t leave with them not on it.

  “Get on the damned bus!” I shouted out the window.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked Andrew, because their bus hadn’t moved yet.

  “We don’t know how to drive no bus!” bellowed Andrew back to her. “He was going to show us, before all this mess.”

  “Do you know how to drive a stick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Find first and go!” She went over to her truck and drove it in a circle till she had it pointing at the approaching zombies, then slid out of the seat and put it into drive. The truck slowly headed for the mob. When it got to them it plowed over some of them and a few turned to follow it as it
kept going till it stopped after crashing into the dumpsters behind McDonalds.

  The gears of Shaun’s bus ground loudly in protest as he found a gear and started moving. He tried to turn the bus, but the icy parking lot had other ideas. He slid sideways before he caught any traction from the tires. The engine sounded like he was driving in second or third gear; he wasn’t going to get any traction that way. I finally got the kids on the other bus, and not a moment too soon. Zombies started swarming around us as soon as she closed the doors. We had nothing to shoot, so the kids were closing all the windows they could.

  From the roof of the garage we heard a loud whoomp and a two-foot rebar spike tore into the zombies along the right side of our bus. The spike went through about six of them. Only eighty to go.

  Shaun was having hell trying to drive the bus in the wrong gear and on ice, but he did manage to get it turned around and he was heading out past us when it slid and slammed into the side of our bus, crushing a dozen zombies between the two buses. I had to back up to get us unstuck. He wasn’t going to do anything to take it out of gear for fear he wouldn’t get it back in gear again. So while I backed up, he just held in his clutch so it idled.

  Another loud whoomp and a two-foot-long rebar spike drove through the zombies that were standing in front of Shaun’s bus and straight into the engine block, killing it dead.

  I’d just pulled clear of them and now I had to go back. I drove the bus in a circle, dragging zombies after us, and stopped with our doors facing each other, with perhaps a foot-wide gap between the two. My girl, Donny, and one of the SEAL Team 6 kids were at the door with machetes, pipes, and long daggers, ready to stab any zombie that tried to get in or grab any of us. Shaun was afraid to open his bus doors, so from the window next to the door Andrew fired his shotgun at the zombies that were bunched up in front of my bus, piling up dead bodies. After the fourth one, Andrew said, “You better go on and move. I’m about out of shells and baby got to get me across there.” Finally, Shaun opened the door and bridged the gap as Andrew fired the last rounds from the pistol and my three stabbed and poked at everything outside. Andrew crossed over in short order and we got the doors to our bus closed. The problem was we were now swarmed on all sides and I couldn’t move. Fortunately, the car whose seat I’d set on fire chose to explode at that moment, and the zombies that were pressed en masse against the front of the bus spread out to look at the explosion. It was just enough room that I could now move the bus. So I did and plowed over every single one of them in the way. Pissed off, I went like a bull in a china shop and drove over as many of them as I could before I drove off the lot and headed for the bridge.