ZWD: King of an Empty City

by Thomas Kroepfl

  “Are we going to make it?” he asked.

  “You're damned right we will.”

  Outside, there was a thin mist and large flakes of snow were peppering down, covering the already frozen ground. Before going to the house, we went to the tent on top of the Safeway.

  At the back of the building where the ladder was we climbed the stairs that led to the ladder. On the platform, I pulled the key fob out of my pocket and pointed to the gargoyle with the glowing red eyes that indicated that the building’s electrical power was still coursing through the ladder. If anyone touched it, they were going to get electrocuted to death. A quick click of the button and the gargoyle’s eyes dimmed to darkness.

  “Never touch that ladder if the eyes are glowing red,” I told Jr. as we started to climb the ladder.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because I want you to live.”

  “What if I climbed it with rubber boots and rubber gloves? You know, insulated?”

  His question disturbed me a little because I’d never thought of anyone climbing it while insulated before. Given that it was winter, there was a chance someone could climb it in insulated clothing. I needed to come up with a second line of defense. At the top of the ladder, I turned to Jr. and asked, “Do you really want to take the chance of getting electrocuted, knowing that ladder has a gazillion volts running through it?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t climb the ladder when the eyes are glowing.”

  Jr. looked around the rooftop at our home with a scrunched-up face. You could tell he didn’t like the accommodations. “You really live up here?”

  Mimicking his flat monosyllabic response to my earlier questions, I gave him a flat, “Yep.” He didn’t catch my joke. From the heavy rain and wind, the tent had a few stakes that had become loose and I took a moment to re-secure the corners. Other than that, the tent was in pretty good condition. Inside, we went to the gun bag and I pulled out one of the two sniper rifles we’d gotten from the Page family’s gun safe. They had two, one was a Barrett M107 .50 caliber sniper rifle, and the other was a Barrett M82 sniper rifle. Thanks to Dylan and Stager I knew a little something about these rifles. The M107 had a much greater range than the M82, and with its scope it had a very long and accurate kill zone. Great for rooftops. The M82 had a shorter barrel, but not by much, and it was lighter, but not by much. It also had a shorter range, but not by much. Its greatest advantage was that it was designed for hit-and-run sniping. You didn’t need to have a stand that spread out several feet to steady your shot. The shooter could shoot and run to another location with minimal trouble from the gun. I pulled out the M82 and did a quick operational check, then attached its scope and loaded it and stuffed more rounds into my pocket. Alone, I could, from a well-selected place, hold off a small army for a day just like Simo Häyhä.

  Simo was a Finnish patriot who, when the Russians invaded his country in 1939, using only a Mosin-Nagant M28/30 rifle and a 9mm submachine gun, managed to kill seven hundred Russian Red Army soldiers in one hundred days. There are five hundred and five confirmed kills to his name without the machine gun. He was so dangerous that he became Russia’s public enemy number one. Because of him, the Red Army only captured 22,000 square miles of Finland before leaving. He credited his success to well-chosen hiding places and camouflage. My enemy was zombies and they weren’t as dangerous as the Red Army, but my M82 had a silencer, and if what Jr. said was true, that there were over thirty zombies at the alarm house, then we could either take all day to kill them in hand-to-hand combat, or one person could do a little target practice from a safe place and take them out. Personally, I was getting tired of zombies.

  When Jr. first saw all the guns in the gun bags, he let out a low “wow.” When he saw me pull out the M82, that “wow” was almost a whisper. I couldn’t help but smile and pretend that I was a G.I. Joe expert in weapons in front of him. I did know guns, but nothing too far beyond the normal range of a gun enthusiast, which I was. I slid the M82 into a neoprene soft case and we headed back down the ladder.

  “Can I shoot it?” he asked a block later.

  “We’ll see.” The snow was coming down in big flakes and making each footstep sound a little louder as the snow built up. This was going to make traveling difficult soon. The loud crunching of snow under your feet meant that you had to stay out of sight longer and move in bursts, or you had to move with the speed of a turtle crossing an alligator-infested road. Nothing could see you moving too fast. It had been years ago when I used to practice moving like that in the Colorado mountains hunting in the winter. I don’t know that I could do it now. I was getting tired of winter too.

  We were on Nineteenth Street headed towards Louisiana, where we’d cut over to Twentieth Street, when we heard a loud crunching behind us somewhere on Main Street. It was a car driving slowly down the street. We ran up a driveway that led to a big Victorian house on a hill overlooking Main Street. We crossed the yard and crouched down in the bushes that lined the far end and faced the post office’s parking lot. We were thirty feet from the road but could still see it. It wasn’t the black truck, but a silver Chrysler 300. The back window was busted out and a black plastic bag was taped over it. “They stole that car” was the first thought that crossed my mind and I got a little mad, but then I had to chastise myself as I remembered the Pages’ F-150 I was driving around on occasion. Through the window, I recognized the driver as one of the guys who rode in the black truck. The driver was that big black guy who’d been standing in the back of the truck the day they were dragging the body behind them and luring the herd of zombies through the city streets. Out of all the guys I’d seen around the truck, this guy with his rough features, big bushy beard, and a grin that looked purely evil scared me the most. Even more than the guy with the spiky hair and soul patch on his chin who was calling me out and hunting us down a few days ago. There was someone in the passenger's seat, but I couldn’t see who it was. In a few moments, they drove by and turned down the street next to the Safeway and disappeared down Seventeenth.

  Jr. and I cut across the back of the yard and hopped fences to the back neighbors’ houses till we got to Louisiana. From there, we zigzagged our way down streets and alleys till we got to the alarm house. Along the way, I was thinking about the silver car. This told me two things about the black truck: one, they were going from one place to another for a reason, so they had two locations. And two, naturally they had more than one vehicle, but they were lazy, they didn’t like to get out of the comfort of their cars till they had to. We were on foot most of the time and had the option of going many directions at once. They had to stick to the streets, pathways they were used to before all this mess started. After that, my mind got stuck on the evaluation of what I knew so I just worried about getting us to the alarm house. If they were prowling around the neighborhoods, then we were all in trouble, especially if we were gathered in a large group.

  As we came around the row of hedges along the front side of the alarm house, their numbers startled me. There were a least thirty zombies gathered around the front of the place and about as many dead bodies on the ground among them. When we backed up behind the hedges and crept across the street, with all the noise we were making from the crunching snow I was surprised they didn’t hear us. But we made it past the house and crossed back over to the house next door where my girl, Bobby, Donny, and Eddie were waiting with a dozen more kids. I went back to the master bedroom. Most of them were at the window. They were gathered looking out at the slowly increasing herd.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. Steve, one of the SEAL TEAM 6 kids who’d gotten Bobby and Jr. off the roof of the garage the other day, spoke up.

  “They’ve been gathering since the other day. All night they’ve been coming and stopping. Just staring at this house. It’s freaky.”

  “No shit.”

  “When the others were trying to clear away the bodies of those we killed at first, more just kept showing up and sta
ring at the house.”

  “Has anybody tried to get close to them and see what’s going on?”

  “We’ve been able to walk up behind them and just bash their brains in. The ones in back drop like a rock and the ones in front hardly move. After a few hours of this, we thought someone else might need take a look at it.”

  Sure enough, as Steve was reporting, another zombie walked up and stopped not twenty feet from the open window of our house and stood there staring at the alarm house. She couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. She was wearing an Arkansas Razorback hat and a purple knit sweater covered in dried leaves and mud. Her face was starting to look a little drawn and tight, like the skin was shrinking. Her expression was a little distressed, as if she were hearing something she didn’t want to hear, and from where she stood in the yard, I could see her eyes. Unlike the fully glazed white eyes with little gray dots where the pupils used to be that I’d come face to face with way too often lately, hers were sunken, sallow, shriveled.

  I propped my elbows on the open windowsill and stared at her for a long while. The changes in the eyes were important, but I didn’t know why. My girl came up to me and pressed her body against my back. The heat from her felt good. She wrapped her arms around my shoulders and kissed my earlobe, then whispered, “What are you thinking?”

  “Too much,” I whispered.

  “Jr. says you guys had company.”

  “Yep,” I mimicked him again.

  The others had all moved into another room where they could talk a little more loudly and not attract attention to us through the open window. With everyone gone but her, I was starting to hear something. An annoying high-pitched whine. The zombie girl in the Razorback hat seemed to be irritated by the same noise. Every now and then she’d shake her head and frown as if she were trying to get the sound out of her head. Once, she turned to face us in the window and tilted her head to one side. Aside from the blood that had coagulated under her skin on the side of her face where she’d been lying for some time, the dried blood around her mouth, and the sunken eyes, she was a very attractive girl. As she looked our way, we froze, ready to spring into action and shut that window before she could get to us. But after a moment, she turned back to the house and frowned again.

  From our vantage point, we couldn’t see many of the faces of the other zombies that had gathered, so we moved to the back bedroom of the house and looked out that window. Bushes blocked our view. I went out the back door and crossed to the corner of the house facing the alarm house. From here, I could definitely hear the high-pitched squeal of something in the alarm house. It hurt my ears. Despite every instinct telling me not to, I moved closer to the front of the yard. I kept to the area under the eaves of the house where the snow hadn’t gathered so much. At a thin patch where overhead tree limbs kept the snow from piling up, I crossed the yard and pressed myself against the wall of the alarm house and slid along it till I was facing the yard from the front of the house. With thirty or more zombies facing me, you’d have thought I’d have been swarmed, luscious, juicy morsel that I am. They just stood there looking frustrated with scowls on their faces.

  From the window of the house next door, there were the barrels of three potato cannon rifles and the M82 pointed at the herd facing me. I slid down the wall of the building and squatted on the ground studying the faces, mainly the eyes. Over half of them had the same kind of sunken eyes as Razorback Girl. With my elbows on my knees and my face buried in my hands, I looked at them through my fingers for a long time. When my knees started to ache, I stood up and worked my way to the back door of the house we were in. I was greeted with, “What the HELL were you thinking?” from our Commander.

  “I know what’s going on here,” I replied. “Someone go get Ashley. Clear the kitchen table and find a razor blade or a very sharp knife. Eddie, do you have any of those hot-wiring tools on you?”

  “No, they’re back at the church.”

  “Ok, I can do without them. We need to get into that house again.” Looking around the group of kids that were gathered there, I didn’t see the one who went into the house with Ashley to shut off the alarm. “Donny, get the troops ready to do some killing and wait for me. Also, make a man-catcher and pull that Razorback girl out of the crowd.”

  “Got it,” Donny barked, then, “What’s a man-catcher?”

  “Get a long pole and put a rope with a noose on the end of it, you drop it over the head of the zombies, and from the other end you pull the noose tight.”

  Joseph, one of the kids we’d met on the first day when we met Donny and Eddie, spoke up. “I know what one is.” He then turned to Steve and motioned him to follow. Joseph was one of the SEAL TEAM 6 Zombie Squad guys.

  You know, that’s a lot to write each time, so I need to call them something else. Team 6, that’s what I’m going to call them. Although there were only three of them, they were older and stronger than the rest of the kids. I told everyone to be ready and meet back in an hour. Then Eddie and I went to the house next door. We went out the back door and crossed the yard slowly so we wouldn’t attract attention to ourselves from the gathering herd out front. Once we crossed the gap between the houses, we went quickly inside, where the whining sound was considerably louder. You’d think it would be easy to find the alarm with that sound, but the sound was bouncing off of everything, so we had to look in closets and every nook and cranny that might hold the box. The house had a wireless alarm system, which didn’t make it easier to find. Eddie eventually found the alarm in a space under the stairs. Ashley and the kid did exactly what I said and ripped the wires going to the box right out of it.

  Alarm systems, like any electronics no matter how new or sophisticated they may be, are still made up of some of the same basic components as they always have been. Transistors, resistors, a capacitor or two are all needed to make these things work. Opening the box to look at the guts of it, I saw what was making the whine right off the bat.

  These systems have a short-term battery backup system that kicks in when the power is lost. The idea is that the power will come back on within a few hours at best. The worst case is something happens to the grid and the power is out for days. Still, the batteries that supply the basic operations of the alarm’s brains are enough to keep it alive till power is restored. The older the system, the better these backups seemed to work, in my opinion. But when the house has been empty like this one had been for who knows how long, the power gets cut and batteries die a lot faster or something starts to go bad because of lack of maintenance, or as I’d thought in this case, all of the above. Eventually, something goes bad on the insides because it’s working too hard to keep things normal. When a capacitor works too hard and is about to burn out, it starts to whine. This box had an old axle capacitor sticking up in the back, a big blue thing with two wires sticking out of either end that went down to the circuit board. Someone at some time replaced an old solid-state capacitor with this behemoth and now it was going bad, the mark of a shabby installation of the system. This capacitor could, depending on the battery, whine for hours or days. To silence it all I had to do was cut one of the axles on either end.

  I was fishing a pair of nail clippers from my pocket when a better thought occurred to me. This alarm had a button battery that slipped into a slot at the bottom of the box. We were going to leave it alone till the battery ran out, and then we were going to replace that battery.

  Eddie and I went back next door where everyone was waiting and I briefly outlined my new plan. We were still going to capture Razorback Girl. We were going to let that capacitor whine till it went dead and we were going to use that whine to our advantage and make this house a zombie-killing training ground for these kids. A zombie-killing academy, if you will. The kids liked that idea but everyone wanted to know why we needed Razorback Girl, and I couldn’t answer that till Ashley got to the house.

  Fifteen minutes later, they brought her in. Once she was safely inside and Joseph returned with a man-
catcher, I had Donny send the kids outside and start the killing. The man-catcher was a long one-inch-wide PVC pipe that they’d slid a nylon rope through and tied a noose at the end with a slipknot. Joseph and Steve, along with two of the Team 6 kids, went out first. They were both about eighteen or nineteen years old. At my suggestion (actually, I said it would be nice if we could get a bag over her head), Joseph crept up on her and slid a big black plastic garbage bag over her head and shoulders, then Steve slipped the noose around her neck and they both dragged her gently to the far side of the yard and tied the other end of the rope that was sticking out of the PVC pipe to the bushes and left her there. She could move about six feet in an arc from where they tied her, but she couldn’t see to attack anyone.

  Once Razorback Girl was tied up, the kids went in for the kills. My girl, the Commander, had divided them into groups and sent them out. We needed as silent a form of communication as we could get, so she gave each team a number and in groups of three they attacked the zombies. They did this with no rush; it was done slowly and methodically. After each team went out, they came back in and she and Donny would suggest things they might have done better or differently. In rotation, they killed about thirty zombies and our lookouts said more were coming. We let them come.

  Once Ashley was in the house I told her that I wanted her to dissect Razorback Girl and tell me a few things about her medically. She flatly refused. I couldn’t blame her. I didn’t like touching those things either, but I had to know some stuff if my theory was to be proven true.

  “Ashley, I need to know if they’re going blind. If their eyes are drying out or whatever they do. I need to confirm my theory that they’re starting to decay, however slowly, but decay. I need to know if they’re hunting by sound now instead of sight, like I suspect. I don’t have the medical background to know these things, but you do.”

  “I wasn’t that kind of nurse.”

  “You have more medical background than any of us. We need what you know.”