by Joseph Xand
Around the prison, the outer perimeter fence had long since collapsed under the weight of the dead save for a few strands still standing on the south side. Early on, they fortified the inner fence with cars from the prison's lot. Recently, someone found a welding machine and strips of iron and began welding the strips to the fence posts, first vertically, then horizontally to connect the vertical strips. They must not have trusted the welds to the fence posts because they added bolts to strengthen the connection.
Then when the iron strips were in place, braces were added diagonally, one end welded to an upper part of the iron welded to the posts, and the other end buried in the ground. Once there was one brace per fence post, a brace was added to the span between the posts. Thad had no idea where they were getting all the iron. He imagined they were tearing apart the interiors of some of the buildings.
Thad looked over his shoulder at the partially demolished barn, then to the house at the canopy he'd built hastily over the northern side of it using cannibalized wood from the barn. He couldn't blame them.
But surely the people in the prison knew what Thad did, what they wouldn't need a bird's-eye view of the prison to see: the inner fence would fall. It wouldn't take years or even months. Days. Weeks, at best.
And when it did finally fail, the dead would storm the prison.
Thad thought about little else these days other than his own research and those prison walls. And just as he had thought for so long that he was wasting his time in search for a cure, that his failure was imminent, so, too, was the outcome in the valley below obvious and inevitable. The advances in his research had surprised him. But he knew no happy surprises awaited those inside the prison.
When those fences did fall and those inside were backed into a corner, Thad knew they'd be desperate, and desperate people were unpredictable. Thad had no idea what would happen next.
Thad thought about the first time he'd seen any of the people now residing in the prison—a pair of scouts sent ahead to see if the prison offered a viable place to wait out the apocalypse. He thought about when he looked down at them through his binoculars only to see them staring up at him with their own.
Did they see him? Thad wasn't sure. Could they see the house above them from where they were standing? Or the barn? Or even a piece of either?
Thad didn't think so. The trees were dense with leaves then and likely blocked out a lot. They never came up to investigate. But he couldn't be certain.
However, if they did see him or the house or the barn, then when the fences did fall, for any survivors, driving up the mountain to find shelter above might be a contingency plan.
He looked to his right at the rolled up sheets that were tied to nearby trees. They didn't flap in the wind anymore. He'd fixed that long ago. But he still hadn't gotten around to removing them from the side of the cliff completely. He needed to, but he knew it would upset Karen.
Still, the more dire the situation got for the people below, the more that pile of sheets ate at him, kept him up at night. If Karen ever came to the same conclusions as to the odds of survival for their neighbors in the valley below, she might unroll the sheets.
And God help them if she ever did.
More than once Thad considered taking the Mercedes (or his father's tractor or truck) down to the prison level and doing what the prison inhabitants should have done from the beginning: lead the dead away from the prison, even making several trips to do so. He was sure he could do it safely.
But he knew that if they weren't already aware of his presence atop the mountain, they would be then. They'd likely be grateful for what he'd done, but grateful and indebted were two different things. If their situation ever did become irreparably helpless—like if they ran out of food, for instance (another inevitability)—then they might still decide to knock Thad off his hill, debts be damned.
And he remembered well how they treated the prison's previous tenants.
Thad lifted his binoculars and looked past the prison, beyond the highway, to the waving fields of grass in the countryside, much of which had been trampled under by the dead. Thad could see at least a dozen more zombies on their way, drawn to the wailing of their fellow mourners. Soon they too would be among the others outside the prison, fighting to get in.
Lamenting.
But Thad couldn't spend all day considering the destiny of the people below. He had something important to do.
Thad walked towards the south end of the house, his stab stick in hand. He'd decided to take it along with him as a quieter alternative to his father's 9MM. As he walked, Karen watched him from a front window. She blew him a kiss, as she and her mother used to do, and he pretended to catch it and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he patted that pocket and smiled at her as he walked around the corner.
By the time he was near the graves, he was glad he'd brought the stab stick. Two corpses were pressed against the fence that led up the drive. One of them had been a woman, and a grossly obese one at that. She wore only the last remnants of a sheer nightgown. The other was a man whose eyes were missing for some reason. Thad quieted both of them quickly with jabs to the forehead, then let himself out the padlocked gate. He'd roll them over the side later.
Thad met another corpse as he walked up to the peak. It wasn't newly dead, so it wasn't running at him, but it was headed downhill and so gravity quickened its shuffle. Still, Thad handled it well enough and reached the top of the mountain with no further complications.
He trudged through tall grass, deciding it may be time to bring the mower up and trim some of this down. He walked slowly in case a zombie might be hiding among the scrub. When he got to the drive that led down the mountain, it, too, overgrown, he bypassed it. He climbed a small rise, using the stab stick to steady himself, and then was among the trees.
The forest wasn't dense and the traveling was easy. Soon the landscape sloped downward, but the pitch was slight and constant, and he rarely had to hold onto anything to keep from slipping.
It had been many years, close to three decades, since he'd walked these woods. As a child, these trees had been his refuge. He could remember hauling up whatever extra lumber his father didn't use after completing whatever project he'd been working on and building a rickety tree fort a more mature person wouldn't have climbed into for all the gold in the world. But back then Thad was a boy, imaginative and invincible, and if his fort shook or leaned, it only added to the fun.
Most of the time, Thad was alone. But every summer his partner in crime was another boy his age named Eddie Guyan. His parents owned a summer house about a thirty-minute hike down the mountain. When Eddie was around, the two boys were inseparable, and Eddie himself had nailed his share of scrap wood to the tree fort. Eddie's father even donated a window and door from an old shed to the cause.
If by some miracle the fort was still standing, Thad wouldn't find out on this trip. It would have been in the opposite direction from where he was heading.
Back then the Guyan summer house had been gifted to Eddie's parents by Eddie's grandfather on his father's side who had bought the land and built the house himself with money he made speculating oil in Texas. The grandfather, a robust Southern man with a deep drawl, accompanied the family every year on their summer retreat. Thad remembered him as a man with a strong Conservative bias and a not-so-veiled prejudice towards "Yankees" and "A-rabs". The elder Guyan wore straw cowboy hats, had a predilection to denim overalls, and claimed to be a distant relative to a silent-film star whose transition to talkies wasn't met with much success. Thad couldn't remember who.
But what Thad remembered most about Eddie's grandfather, who Eddie called G-Pa, was that he was a telegraph enthusiast. The old man stayed in a second-floor bedroom at the back of the house, and in it, he kept a telegraph key, a ham radio, and a teletype machine, all of which he used to communicate with fellow members of a telegraph club who called themselves the Hudson Valley Code Talkers.
The "code," of course, was Morse code, a
nd the talking was done by long and short taps of the knob on the telegraph key. It was fascinating to watch, at least for a boy of Thad's age, and, although Eddie's father didn't share G-Pa's enthusiasm for telegraphing, Eddie thought it was cool and learned Morse code himself. Sometimes Eddie would tell Thad about communiqués he'd had the night before—a conversation that would have taken all of five minutes over the phone took half the night via telegraph.
The last time they'd talked back in college, Eddie said he still toyed with the stuff. That was a few years after Eddie's G-Pa passed away. And according to Thaddeus, Sr., Eddie inherited the summer house when his own father died. That was ten years ago, and as far as Thad knew, Eddie still owned it when the infection broke.
Now Thad was hoping Eddie had shared his grandfather's spirit for the nostalgia of early communication well into adulthood. It was the Guyan summer home Thad was headed to, and it was the telegraph key that he hoped to find there.
The summer home was built in the classic Queen Anne style in that it looked like a hodgepodge of many different styles. The house lacked anything even resembling symmetry. The roof was steep-pitched with a prominent front-facing gable. There were several smaller gables of varying sizes and pitches facing in every other direction. There were also two turrets, each a different diameter and height, that looked like something out of Rapunzel. There were upper-story bedrooms that jutted beyond rooms on the lower floor, creating inadvertent porches. Then there was a proper porch, covered and screened-in, extending around two sides of the house.
Thad approached the house from the back, passing through, as he had a hundred times in his youth, an iron, arched trellis. This time he had to duck through, and not just because he was taller. Vines had overgrown the trellis, hanging down from the top as well as stretching from the sides.
The trellis opened into Mrs. Guyan's natural garden, which was now more natural than ever. Weeds, wild grasses, and more of the same vine had encroached on the tranquility Eddie's mother spent hours a day working to perfect. In a few places, the heads of winged, stone cherubs poked up among the dense brush.
The house itself had received a new coat of paint (or maybe several of them) since Thad had been here last, and there might have been a new room added to the north side, but other than that, the house appeared pretty much as Thad remembered it.
Thad knocked on the back door, then put his ear to it to see if he could decipher any shuffling from within. When he heard nothing, he knocked again, harder this time, then spied through the curtains of a nearby window to see if there was any activity. Still nothing.
His presence trumpeted but ignored, Thad let himself in. The back door wasn't locked, nor did he expect it to be. The door opened into a narrow hallway. Immediately to Thad's left was a mud room where he and Eddie had been required to leave their shoes and wash off any mud and grime before venturing any further into the house.
Today Thad left his shoes on and moved past the mud room without so much as a glance. Up the hall to the right was a case opening leading to the kitchen, and through the kitchen was a stairway that would take him to G-Pa's telegraph room.
Thad didn't head that direction straight away. Instead, he continued down the hall where dozens of different-sized picture frames hung on the wall. There had always been family photos on display here, but all of these were newer than thirty or so years old, so Thad had never seen them.
Thad had been told Eddie had gotten married over the years, and Thad might remember that there had been a baby. These pictures were of Eddie and a beautiful blonde, but Thad counted no less than three children, a girl and two boys. Some of the pictures were of the professional family portrait variety, everyone smiling in pressed, coordinated clothing. Most of the photos were candid shots—Eddie wearing glasses and a shit-eating grin while holding up a large bass in one hand and his other arm around one of his sons; his wife and daughter showing off Christmas gifts in front of a glowing tree, wrapping paper burying their legs; two boys standing together in matching baseball uniforms, both with baseball gloves on their hands and the oldest boy, a head taller than the other, with a bat slung over his shoulder; a beach shot of a little girl with a floatie on each arm presenting a seashell to the camera while in the background her father and brothers shaped a sand castle; the youngest boy seated next to his mother at a family gathering and holding a meatball on a fork, his cheeks stuffed and grinning.
The deeper Thad walked down the hall, the older the kids got, until at the end, the last picture (likely the latest) showed Eddie's oldest son with a blonde crew cut and looking over his shoulder, an X-box game controller in his hand. He might have been ten. Maybe twelve.
Thad wondered if the boy had gotten any older. If he were still alive today. Then he shook his head, cleared the muck, and set his sights on the task at hand.
Thad turned a corner, traipsed through the front living room, but stopped short when a gleam of light flashed through the curtains from the yard outside. He moved to the window and pulled aside one of the drapes. There was a carport out front (it hadn't been there thirty years ago) and parked in it was a truck with a full bed that was tarped over. Thad had seen the sun reflected off the bumper. One corner of the tarp was loose and flapping and underneath Thad could make out a large water-cooler jug and what looked like a case of Ramen noodles. Thad guessed the whole truck bed was someone's survival gear that, for some reason, never made it into the house.
Thad reached behind his back and quickly found the 9MM tucked in an outer pocket of his pack. He moved stealthily towards the staircase, but long before he got there, he smelled the stench of death. He was surprised he hadn't smelled it sooner. Perhaps he was getting used to it.
He looked up to the second floor and could see dozens of flies crisscrossing the air. Between two columns of the upper-floor banister, a gray hand hung limp. Still, Thad took the stairs slowly, his gun hoisted.
At the top of the stairs, a body lay on its back. The top of its head was gone, much of it staining the ceiling above. It was the left hand that hung past the stair rail. The right hand was flailed out the other direction, inches from a shotgun.
The body had been here at least a month by Thad's estimation, and it was well into its cycles of putrefaction. The skin was gray and waxen and hung loose, revealing impressions of bone. Maggots squirmed in every open hole—the mouth, eye sockets, the head wound, the decomposed and exploded abdomen. Despite the decomposition, Thad could tell this wasn't Eddie.
The body rested next to a closed bedroom door, what had been a guest room, if Thad remembered correctly. He stepped over the dead man and wrapped his palm around the doorknob. He leaned in close and, for the second time in less than ten minutes, put his ear to a door.
He heard…static.
It confused him at first, until he realized the static was actually the buzzing of thousands of flies. Maybe millions.
Instantly Thad pieced together a scenario. A man gathered what was needed to survive for a while and loaded it into the back of his truck. Then he gathered up his kids, wife, parents, whoever and brought them here to wait out the plague. Maybe he grew up around here. Maybe he mowed the lawns for extra money or delivered furniture. Maybe sometimes he and his old lady drove through, looking at the summer homes of the rich and saying maybe someday.
At any rate, when the infection began to spread, this man thought about the houses in the Catskills that were secluded and possibly empty and that offered the best chance of survival.
Maybe someone was already sick. Or maybe bitten, attacked on the way here. Either way, the truck was never even emptied. Despite all his planning and preparation, tragedy found them. And when all he'd been working to protect, all he cared about, died in spite of his best efforts, the man knew death was now the only blessing life could ever offer, and so hastened to it.
It was Thad's best guess. All he needed to do to confirm most of it was open the door and look inside.
Instead, he let go of the doorknob and st
epped away.
It was only a guess.
It would have to do.
Thad stepped carefully over the dead man and continued down the corridor. At the end of the hall was the south turret, which G-Pa had commandeered decades earlier as the headquarters of the local arm of the Hudson Valley Code Talkers. Thad held his breath and opened the door.
It was exactly as he remembered it, except dustier. Also, there were boxes and some covered furniture stuffed along the walls—apparently the Hudson Valley Code Talkers's headquarters had doubled as a storage room in recent years.
Otherwise, the telegraph key, the ham radio (used as a transceiver), and the teletype, as well as the power supply for all of them were where they had always been, sitting on top of an oak desk below the window, the rectangular desk an ill-fitting for the circular wall. Outside the window, two thick, black wires with a series of spreaders (what Eddie had referred to as "ladder line" all those years ago) angled from the side of the house and terminated at the center of a long-wire antenna planted in the side yard.
Thad had asked G-Pa the first time Thad had seen the old man toying with all the devices why he didn't simply have a microphone hooked up to the ham radio. Why not just talk to someone rather than wasting all that time tapping out messages?
G-Pa had seemed insulted. "The Hudson Valley Code Talkers don't need no damn microphone," he had said. Thad left it alone.
As he approached the telegraph key, Thad could see a problem immediately. The knob he would need to tap to send any message wasn't hanging in the air over the lower contact, or anvil, as Thad thought he remembered Eddie calling it. Instead, the knob rested inert on top of it. Thad tried to remember if it lifted when the transceiver was turned on, but he didn't think so. Upon closer inspection, the contact-gap adjustment screws appeared to be stripped.