ZWD: King of an Empty City

by Thomas Kroepfl

  On the eighth floor, our Commander stopped to wait on the stairs with Shaun and his uncle Andy and the less experienced kids. They had the silk man-catchers and would act as relief for us as we moved down to them. In the lobby Ashley waited with a small medical team in case anyone needed medical attention. Once the first team worked its way back down to the eighth floor they’d act as relief and the Commander’s team would take over and do all the dirty work to the ground floor.

  One of the best ideas we had didn’t work as well as it should have. The kids in their planning attached baby monitors to RC cars and drove them down the halls and into rooms to hear what was there. One or two monitors fell off the cars, but for the most part all you could really hear was the muffled sound of Lemmy singing “Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers” or “Whorehouse Blues.” By the time we dropped down to the fifteenth floor, we abandoned the RC cars and just started going room to room. Surprisingly, the halls were mostly empty. I think in all sixteen floors, we encountered four zombies in the halls. The rooms were another story, and none of us were prepared for some of the things we encountered there.

  We’d found a master maintenance key in the lobby office and so when we went onto a floor we’d set off the M-80 scent bombs, then kill any zombies in the halls. Once those were clear, with Motörhead waking the dead at full volume, a team of two went down the hall and unlocked all the doors. Once they returned to us, we went from room to room and opened the doors, then stepped back and waited for the zombies inside to come to us. If none came, we went into the room and cleared it. Once cleared, each room was spray-painted with the S.O.L. symbol and we moved on. We found a lot of dead people who thought they’d just ride out the zombie apocalypse in their rooms. A lot of dead bodies.

  The worst were groups. People huddled together but once one was bitten, they all eventually turned. We ran into that first group on the fourteenth floor. There was a group of five in this room and it looked like after the first one turned, they all quickly got bitten, but not before a fight. There was blood everywhere and you could see where the zombies starving for someone to eat started licking the blood from the floor. They staggered out into the hall one by one and we quickly killed them. We ran into that several times on the way down to the main floor, but that wasn’t the worst. The worst were the survivors.

  Yes, there were survivors, if you could call them that. The first one I ran across, Jr. and I went into a room and there on the bed was a body that looked like a skeleton with skin. You’ve seen those pictures of the Nazi Holocaust survivors. The body looked like that. Wide, staring eyes that didn’t really seem to see us as we walked into the room. Things in the room had been eaten; things like pillows, chair legs, paper, you name it; this person wasn’t prepared for the long haul. They barricaded themselves in the room and hoped for the best. But the best didn’t come soon enough, so they just starved up here in the safety of their room, too afraid to try to get out.

  We had too few resources, as it was, to care for ourselves. We didn’t have the means to nurse someone this far gone back to health. I ordered Jr. outside and pulled my pistol. I was looking at this sad being lying there starved, mind probably gone, and I forced myself to breathe slowly.

  As president some decisions are hard to make; some are impossible. I couldn’t look at anything else, so I never saw Jr. not leave the room. I took a step closer and this person turned its head to me. I have to say it because the person was so far gone that I had no idea what sex it was. It turned its head to me and the eyes focused for a moment. A smile played at the edges of its mouth as if it recognized that another person was in the room and not zombies come to eat it. Then it saw the gun and its expression changed. I stepped closer, almost within arm's reach, and aimed. Its arm feebly came up, palms open to me as if to say stop. From its lips I thought I heard the weakest whisper of the word “please” as I pulled the trigger. The arm fell and hung off the bed.

  The music stopped outside and the whole world was silent for a moment. I dropped my head in shame and tried to pray for forgiveness, but nothing would come to mind. Jr. stepped up to the bed and looked closely at the fresh blood that was pooling under its head on the pillow. He looked at me, then back at the body. From outside the kids rushed into the room to find out why I fired my gun. We were only supposed to use them in a time of extreme need. Steve asked if everything was ok. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to hold back tears. Jr. said, “Fucking zombies,” and put a hand on my arm before stepping outside the room with Steve.

  I quickly gathered myself and on their heels yelled, “Hey, language! Watch it.”

  I honestly don’t know if that was still a person in the sense that you or I are people, or if all humanity was gone. I’m certain zombies can‘t talk and I’m certain I heard “please” come from its mouth before I fired. I’d just killed another human being. I couldn’t help but feel an empty place in my spirit. Today, it would grow bigger because this person wasn’t the only one I’d have to kill out of mercy.

  The most disgusting sight we came upon was on the eleventh floor. The kids opened a door to a room and waited when nothing came out. They then looked in and their mixed cries of “Ooooo!” and “Holy crap!” drew everyone’s attention. They were all gathering at the doorway and stepping in then out with giggles and schoolboy shock. Whatever they were looking at was being treated like a circus sideshow freak. When I got to the room, I stepped past them all, and there in the middle of the room sat a woman named Maggie.

  I’d met her once. It was one evening while we were walking with Andy and Jill through the neighborhood. Andy was always curious about people and loved to meet new ones. We’d walked around the corner of Eighteenth Street and were about to head back down Arch, passing Paris Towers, when we met her. Maggie was an obese woman, probably well over three hundred pounds and pushing four hundred who was confined to a motorized wheelchair. One leg was propped up on a leg rest and was a darker shade of red than her jovial face. We’d all talked for a while as Andy asked her questions about herself. I remember she was a very nice woman.

  Now she was a zombie, stuck in a wheelchair and trapped in her room. A body lay at her feet, keeping her in one spot. The back of her chair pressed against the bed. It looked like it had died naturally, but just in case, I chastised the boys who had first opened the room and ordered them to take care of the body on the floor.

  Maggie wasn’t the happy-to-meet-you person we’d met on that late fall day last year. Now she was something else trapped in its own flesh. As the kids grabbed the body on the floor and dragged it out into the hall by its heels to dispatch it, Maggie tried to lift her arms and reach for them. The once doughy arms were now mounds of flesh dripping off bone. Maggie looked like a huge dollop of flesh someone had plopped into a wheelchair and added a face to. With the exception of the blood on her chin, she looked like a caricature of a human being. Loose flesh sagged off bony arms, draped over the arms and off the seat of the wheelchair. It pooled around her ankles. Her knees were bony protrusions that led down to mounds of flesh so heavy, she—No, not she, the zombie Maggie. This wasn’t Maggie anymore, I had to remember that. She was trapped in her own dead flesh. Had she known how, now she couldn’t even lift her hand to operate the joystick on her chair.

  “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie,” I said as I sat down on the bed next to her. “You said you were on a diet. You were losing weight. What happened to you?”

  She just stared at me through dead eyes and tried to get at me by tilting her head in my direction. A guttural growl came from her. I looked around her room from my seat on the bed. Somewhere there used to be grandchildren. Pictures and school grade art plastered the walls. On a dresser were several framed pictures of her family. I took the time to look closely at the photos and one drew my full attention. There was Maggie’s family on a camping trip. Maggie was a lot thinner in the picture, probably only two hundred and fifty pounds. There were three grandkids and a woman next to her as she sat in the wheelchair, all kneeling dow
n around her. Behind her stood a big, stocky man who looked just like Maggie, only younger. He had a flat-top haircut and a long, pointed red beard.

  I picked up the picture and turned to Maggie. “Is this your son, Maggie?” The zombie eyed the picture, then me, and said nothing as I’d expected. I started going through her things and found more pictures of him among her belongings. On the back of one of them, someone had written his name, Patrick. Patrick of the black truck. I felt like I’d found a goldmine. I stuffed the picture in my shirt pocket and picked up Harold. “Maggie, I’m so disappointed in your son. You’re a terrible mother.” I stepped next to her and brought Harold’s blade down on her head several times.

  On the tenth floor, we ran into another survivor. In the room there were several people, all dead, and one living person. If you could call the person alive, that is. Again, they’d been locked up in their own prison for too long. This person was in much better shape physically than the first one because they’d resorted to cannibalism. It looked like they’d tried to eat everything they could in the room before they decided to eat each other. There were eight bodies in different stages of decay, telling us they’d been at this for a long time. The last or freshest body wasn’t much more than a skeleton, not too different from the survivor. The survivor was a skeletal woman with hollow eyes who looked at our breaking into the room with wonder and fear. She’d been living in her own filth for who knows how long. The odor that assaulted us when we swung the door open was enough to make my stomach do flips. We followed our plan and stayed outside, waiting for whatever was inside to come out. She crawled out on her hands and one leg; the other was dragging behind her. She looked like a feral animal being released into the wild. From the ground, she looked at us as if we were going to attack her at any moment. In her hand was a kitchen knife held tightly, and she kept making grunting noises as if she’d forgotten how to speak.

  Joseph was with me in this room and he talked to her in a quiet, kind voice. His smooth black skin and sculpted beard made him look angelic, especially when he smiled. With his baking pan shield in hand, he squatted down beside her and said, “Miss, it’s alright, you’re safe now. Let go of the knife and come with us.” The woman grunted at him, then growled like a leery dog at the vet’s office. “No one is going to hurt you, miss, we’re here to help you,” he cooed to her. “Guys, make yourselves small,” he instructed us and we all squatted down to her level. She backed into the room a little more.

  “Miss, miss, do you have a name? My name is Joseph. I was named after my grandfather. What’s your name?”

  The woman gave him a snarled response and a whimper.

  “That’s ok, miss. I know you’ve been in here a long time. You’ve been away for a long time and nobody thought of you. Miss, we’re here now. We’re here to help you. To do that we need you to put down the knife and tell me your name.”

  Down the hall, kids were opening doors and killing whatever came out. The banging and sounds of struggle were fading as they were getting ready to go down to the next floor.

  It wasn’t till they’d finished and it became relatively quiet that she let go of the knife. I’ll give Joseph credit, he never took his eyes off her and he never stopped talking to her in that soothing voice. He told her how his grandfather was a preacher. He told how he was part of the youth ministry at his church. He told how the snow was cold and beautiful outside. He told how there was food, hot soup just waiting, if she’d only come out. And he kept asking her what her name was. When the S.O.L. had finished with this floor, out of curiosity, they started to gather around her door till I ordered them back to the stairwell to wait for me to take them to the ninth floor. We’d all made ourselves more comfortable and were sitting with our butts on the floor, trying to coax her into any form of trust. Joseph, me, and a kid named Marcus, who I ordered to stay near and keep a watch for any zombies that may not have completely died. He sat against the wall a few feet away from us down the hall.

  Because of the long delay of dealing with this woman, my girl sent up one of her troops to see what was taking so long. When the survivor saw the young girl who was sent to check on us, her demeanor changed. She seemed curious about the girl and crept closer to the door again.

  “That’s right, miss, we have girls too. Lots of little girls. Her name is Nancy and she’s fourteen. Do you have a little girl, miss?” Miss had crept halfway through the door, never taking her eyes off Nancy.

  “That’s right, miss, Nancy and all of us will take care of you, just come with us.” Joseph had started to stand when Miss darted towards him and bit him on the ankle. He fell back to the ground and on reflex kicked her in the head to get her off of him. The kick knocked Miss out. She lay there prone on the floor unmoving, not breathing. I checked her pulse. She was dead.

  Her bite at Joseph’s ankle never made it past the thick hiking boots he wore, but it shook him up badly. I was at a loss for words to comfort him, so I went the other direction and said, “Come on, we have a lot more floors to clear, we’ve wasted enough time here.” Joseph pulled out a gold cross from his collar and kissed it, then said a prayer over Miss’s body, kissed it again, and stuffed the cross back under his shirt. As he got up he laid a palm on her back and said quietly, “I’m sorry, Miss.”

  We moved on to the next floor in silence. The girl Nancy was shaken up by what she saw, and looking at the faces of all the kids in my command, you could tell they were tired and affected by all the zombies and the killings, accidental or otherwise. Earlier in the day, when we were still in the basement, I’d asked Donny to give me Jr. and another kid for a special project. It was a surprise I was planning for my girl later, after this mess in Paris Towers was over. Now, looking in their faces, I could see they all were going to need it more than I realized.

  The ninth floor was our stopping point before my girl, Shaun, and Andy took over and we acted as backup. The plan was that when we got to eight we’d show her group what we’d found to work well while both groups cleared the floor, and then we’d become support for them on the rest of the way down. I turned to the kid with the boom box and asked if he had “Born to Raise Hell” on that thing. He cued it up and we burst into the hallway with Lemmy singing.

  I’d challenged them to see if they could clear this floor in ten minutes, and they went in like a firestorm. We were probably more than halfway down the hall when these two little kids, Augie and Roland, opened the door to a room and waited for the zombie to come out. Augie and Roland were probably eight and both were smallish for their size. As planned, the zombie wandered out and this one must have been the biggest I’d ever seen. Determined, though, Augie and Roland sprang from the door’s edge as this six-foot-something zombie wandered out the door and they wrapped the silk catcher around him.

  Roland grabbed the zombie’s legs and tried to take him off-balance. Because of this guy’s height, they couldn’t get the upper part tied on the silk catcher, so when he fell over his arms were free and he started to crawl out. Augie jumped on his back and started stabbing him in the shoulders with little effect while Roland held on to his legs and tried to tie him in there better. They were losing control of this big guy.

  Steve was one door down from them and he’d just turned the doorknob to the room he was going to clear when he stopped to watch these two tackle the fallen giant. The door opened a fraction.

  He walked over to Augie and stepped on the zombie’s hand, crouched down over it, and brought a two-pound hand-held sledgehammer down on the giant’s head. It stopped moving instantly.

  “When you get one this big, call one of us over, Augie. It takes more than two people to take these big suckers out. Let me see that knife.”

  Augie handed him his knife and he examined it with care. “This will never do,” he said, holding the four-inch folding blade up. “You see, the blade is too short, for one,” he pointed out, “and see this connection here?” He pointed to the locking blade hinge. “This is a cheap blade.” He tossed the blade
aside and pulled a long medieval replica stiletto blade from a belt much like the one I wore. He held up the jeweled stiletto to Augie, his fingertips at the blade’s end so they both could see the entire blade. “This is what you need. It’s long enough to go through the skull and into the brain.” He flipped it in the air and caught it by the blade, then handed it to Augie. “Feel the weight? It has a good weight to it. You know you have it in your hand at all times. That’s good with your size. Now this blade is strong enough that you can press your body weight against it and drive it in, but it’s sharp, makes it do your work for you. It’s all yours, Augie.”

  He pointed to Roland. “Big man, take this and use it.” He picked up his two-pound sledge and handed it handle-first to Roland. “Grab that thing up there by the head, now hit him with it.” Roland brought the hammer down on the giant’s body. “Feel that, do it again just to make sure.” And he did. “Now grab it near the back of the handle. No, not at the end, up a little. Yes, like that. Now bring that sucker down on him.”

  Roland swung the hammer down and it landed with a definitive thump on the giant’s body. “There you go. You feel the difference?” Roland nodded with a look of amazement at the difference in the grip placement. “You keep that, man. Use it like Thor’s hammer. Use it on the knees to bring them down. Then you,” he said, turning back to Augie, “you take that blade and don’t be stabbing them in the body. That gets you nowhere. It’s the head. The head’s a hard thing, so you have to go for the soft spots. The eyes, the ears, or the temple are the best. And once you get it in there,” he explained, taking the knife back from Augie and driving it into the dead giant’s skull through the ear, “scramble it around a bit.” He wiggled the handle of the blade in the giant’s ear. “Fight on, brothers,” he said, pulling the blade out and handing it back to Augie.