by James Gurley
“Now, pull.”
The wire stretched taut but remained in place, secured by the steel posts embedded in the concrete. Hoisting the mattress over his shoulder, secured by a piece of twine, Levi began climbing the hose hand over hand, feet braced against the wall. He reached the top, slung the mattress over the wire, and signaled for Ax to follow him. The out-of-shape accountant struggled up the hose, eating away at their precious time. The searchlights flared as an emergency auxiliary circuit was thrown. They had very little time remaining. Levi considered leaving his companion behind, but the frightened Ax redoubled his efforts. With both of them on the top of the wall, protected from the sharp wire by the mattress, Levi pulled up the hose, dropped it over the outside wall, and slid down the other side.
The hard earth beneath his shoes renewed his strength. Years in the prison had dulled his senses. Now they were fully awake, revitalized. He took a deep breath. The air, free of the stench of other prisoners and death, filled his lungs with joy. He would not go back to prison.
Ax’s descent was ungainly, but he managed to reach the ground without falling to his death. Heading southeast, they passed the water tower he had gazed upon so many times. It had stood like a giant taunting his confinement. They soon reached the Florence Canal, the first of three they would have to ford to reach safety. The water was cold but only reached to his knees. As they waded across it, the first sirens began wailing behind them signaling their escape. They had no time to stop and rest.
They encountered the first zombies stumbling along the railroad tracks. The creatures were gaunt and slow moving. Until he saw them, Levi had no true idea of how bad the situation outside the prison walls was. The creatures were starving because human prey had become scarce. That meant either few living people remained in the area, or they were remaining indoors. That was bad for the survivors, but good for them. With few people watching, they could make good their escape. The zombies spotted the two humans and gave half-hearted chase, but their emaciated condition slowed them down. Levi easily outran them, but Ax struggled to keep up. Levi didn’t bother looking back. Ax either kept up or he died.
At the Central Arizona Project, the last and the largest of the three canals they would have to cross, Ax knelt on the ground catching his breath while Levi studied the current. The CAP was deeper than the other canals, and the water, fed by pumps, ran swiftly. The ribbon of concrete meandered from the Colorado River to points throughout the state, delivering water to farms, cities, and reservoirs. There was no way across except for the bridges at the roads, and they would be watched. They would have to swim. He took a deep breath and dove into the frigid water without hesitation. He didn’t know if his companion could swim, but such thoughts didn’t enter his mind. He was free, and he intended to remain so at any cost.
An hour later, wet, cold, and exhausted, they reached a mobile home on the outskirts of Florence. It appeared abandoned, but the pair approached carefully. Now was not the time to receive a load of buckshot in the face from an overly cautious homeowner. The door wasn’t locked. Inside, the trailer was empty of people with signs of being hastily abandoned. Stale, rotting food remained on the table. Drawers had been pulled out of counters and their contents dumped on the floor. Levi stripped off his wet prison uniform, toweled dry, and in the pile of discarded clothing on the bedroom floor found a pair of pants and a shirt that fit. There was no food in the cabinets, but he discovered a six-pack of hot beer beneath the sink. He popped a top and guzzled it down, his first taste of beer in three long years. It tasted like manna from heaven.
Ax walked into the small kitchen from the bedroom looking ridiculous in a too small ASU jersey and a pair of bright red exercise shorts. His pale legs almost glowed in the darkness of the trailer. “What’s next?” he asked.
Levi collapsed into a chair and finished his beer. “We wait until things die down, and then make our way to Tucson.”
“Why Tucson? I’m from Phoenix.”
Levi shook his head. For an accountant, Ax could be incredibly stupid. “And I’m from Yuma, and those will be the first places they look for us.” He picked up a straw Stetson sitting on the coffee table and tried it on. It fit. Soon, they would need food and transportation, but he knew the police would give up the chase quickly. They had bigger problems to deal with than a pair of escaped convicts. Once the commotion died down, they would find refuge in Tucson. A breakdown in society was an opportunity for men like him. With a few like-minded individuals, they could survive the apocalypse nicely, taking what they wanted, living like kings. He lay back in his chair, crossed his legs, closed his eyes, and dreamt of his future in the new world.
2
June 7, 2016 Split Rock Canyon, Galiuro Mountains near San Manuel, AZ –
Jake Blakely laced up his boots while the coffee brewed. The aroma of freshly ground French Roast filled the kitchen and drifted down the hallway, helping to clear his head almost as much as the coffee itself would. He didn’t often overindulge in alcohol – just a couple of beers or a glass of whiskey every now and then – but yesterday had been a special occasion, an anniversary of sorts. It had been exactly one year since the world, his world, had ended; a reason to celebrate or to commiserate, depending on one’s point of view. Others might argue the exact date, but for him, June 6, 2015 was the one he had red-lettered on his mental calendar. June 6, 1944 was D-Day, the invasion of Europe. June 6, 2015, exactly seventy-one years later, was his personal E-Day, the end of his world when almost everyone died. In comparison, a slight hangover headache didn’t seem much to complain about.
Boots laced, but the coffee not quite finished brewing, he walked to the window and gazed out over his domain. Split Rock Canyon was a narrow defile thrusting six-hundred yards into the rugged Galiuro Mountains north of Tucson, Arizona. His home, built of native stone and Ponderosa pine logs, rested on a ledge fifty feet above the canyon floor, accessible only by a set of fifty-five hand-hewn steps and a twelve-foot-long plank bridge spanning a narrow cleft in the cliff face. His view of the canyon was spectacular, one of the reasons he had chosen such a remote site for his home
A soft sigh escaped his lips, as he noticed two figures beyond the gate lumbering up the dirt trail. His day wasn’t starting out well. Even fifteen miles from San Manuel, zombies still managed to find him, roaming along the river from the local farms and ranches. He believed the creatures could smell living flesh, sought it out as a bat seeks cactus blossom pollen. He seemed to be the only living flesh in the area. Moving to the living room, he picked up his Browning X-Bolt rifle always kept handy beside the sofa, and stepped out onto the balcony.
He sighted his first target through the scope. The creature wore ragged jeans and t-shirt but had no shoes. Its bare feet were lacerated and bleeding. Its eyes, retaining none of the qualities of a living human, scanned the fence hungrily, like an animal. Carefully centering the crosshairs on the zombie’s forehead, he took a deep breath and slowly released it as he squeezed the trigger. Jake’s Law #1 – Aim high; shoot straight. The zombie collapsed before the echo of the shot reverberated from the canyon walls. The heavy .308 Winchester round took out the back of the creature’s head, spraying a fan of blood across the sand. He had learned from experience that head shots worked best. You could kill a zombie if you inflicted sufficient damage to vital organs, but a single round to the brain worked just fine and saved ammunition.
The second creature stared at its fallen companion with disinterest for just a moment, as if judging it as a possible source of food, and then returned its attention to the gate. As Jake sighted it in his scope, he was shocked to recognize the creature as one of the area ranchers, an old man named Caldwell. He had met Caldwell once or twice at the grocery store in Catalina when Caldwell had struck up a conversation. He had seemed a nice guy, but whatever the creature now was, it was no longer Caldwell. It joined the first zombie a few heartbeats later with Jake’s second well-placed shot. Shortly, he would transport the bodies to a nearby gully and
incinerate them, but not before breakfast and an aspirin for his mounting headache. He hated to face zombies, alive or dead, before his first cup of morning coffee. At the noise of the percolator gurgling, he set aside his rifle and strode across the room to the kitchen.
For twelve years, Jake had been a Pima County Deputy Sheriff, dealing mostly with search and rescue situations. On the side, he had operated an online website for hunters and survivalists – preppers. He had also sold and repaired guns at local guns shows and often acted as a guide for area hunters. It never made him rich, but it kept him in beans and beer and off the grid. Now, there was no law but his law, Jake’s Law. Gun shows were a thing of the past, and no one hunted for sport anymore. Those who had survived the apocalypse needed no advice on surviving, and those who hadn’t were beyond caring. Now, he killed zombies and tried to survive.
E-Day had come for Jake on June 6, 2015, at four p.m. Washington time when the President of the United States declared Martial Law and dispatched troops to control the growing civil unrest racking the country. It had been the last straw to an already distrustful populace. Armed militias fought the troops, local police fought the National Guard, and private citizens fought with one another. Cities burned and chaos ruled the land. No longer safe in the streets, people huddled in their homes and died of starvation. Now, one year later, only the undead walked the decaying streets of America.
After a breakfast of bacon, grits, and scrambled eggs, he washed the dishes and puttered around the house for a while in a futile attempt to postpone his grisly chore. Finally, he could put it off no longer. The longer the bodies lay in the sun, the riper they would become. He washed his face in the sink, combed his too-long brown hair, and took his morning dose of Actos. Lean and muscular, his Type 2 diabetes had taken him completely by surprise at the age of twenty-three. His body’s cells no longer properly utilized the insulin his pancreas produced. Left untreated, attacks of hypoglycemia left him weak and dizzy. The Actos, or Pioglitazone, a Thiazolidnedione drug, kept his diabetes under control but sometimes caused edema. Thus, he often had to take Torsemide, a diuretic, to reduce swelling. It was a vicious cycle.
His disease had cost him his Army career. As a weapons specialist for a recon squad in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Afghanistan, he had thought being tired and achy had just been part of the job, the cost of maintaining his country’s freedom, but one particularly severe dizzy spell had led to his diagnosis and subsequent discharge. It hadn’t been bad enough to prevent him from becoming a Pima County Deputy. It had taken the end of the world to end that career. Now, at thirty-two, he was just another survivor.
His small ranch was more than his bastion of freedom from the grid. It was his fortress. It was his little slice of heaven, a prepper’s dream. Those who had called him paranoid were now either dead or dying. However, he took no comfort from their misery. To him, it had simply been a matter of being prepared for any emergency. A plague of zombies had been very low on his list of catastrophes. Luckily for him, like thirty percent of the population, he was immune to the virus, but he wasn’t immune to zombies.
As he strode to the door, he strapped on his .45 and picked up his shotgun. His fingers lightly caressed the metal five-pointed star lying on the table, his great-grandfather’s Arizona Ranger badge. Its surface wore the patina of time, but bore a slightly shinier spot where a bullet had grazed it in 1886. He picked up the badge and clipped it to his shirt. He was no longer a deputy. There was no longer any law. He wore the badge as a reminder of Jake’s Law #5 – In a lawless land the biggest gun makes the law.
Grabbing a can of kerosene, he trudged down the path to the shed where he stored his ATV. After hooking up the small trailer to the Polaris Ranger, he drove down to the metal gate in the ten-foot-high stone wall which he had laboriously constructed across the canyon by hand. Working alone, it had been a gargantuan effort, but in hindsight, the fence had probably saved his life. He had since topped it with coils of razor wire. The canyon walls were too steep to easily climb and the terrain too rugged for casual hikers or unwanted visitors. He pressed the button on the remote and waited for the gate to roll open.
He disliked getting near zombies, dead or alive. Immune or not, he still hated taking unnecessary risks. His attention was so focused on the two corpses in front of him, so dreading his task that he failed to see a third zombie hidden within the early morning shadows of the wall. He stopped the ATV and had taken only two steps from it, when the zombie, an emaciated scarecrow, lurched toward him, the low growl erupting from its throat his only warning.
Jack’s Law #12 – Stay Focused. His wandering mind had almost cost him his life. He swung the barrel of the shotgun and fired from the hip as he fell backwards, taking no time to properly aim. From less than six feet away, the .36-inch diameter triple-ought buckshot pellets tore through the zombie’s torso like a scythe, ripping open his abdomen and sending him spinning to the ground. Severely damaged, it continued to reach for him with one outstretched hand, dragging its body behind it as it crawled toward him. Jake cursed himself for his stupidity and fired another round into the creature’s head. Brains and skull fragments splattered the ground, as the head disintegrated from the barrage of steel pellets.
He picked himself up, dusted off, and set about his distasteful task. The mask he wore over his mouth and nose helped reduce the stench, but even live zombies stank of rotting flesh as outer layers of flesh decayed and sloughed away. Dead ones smelled worse. Using latex gloves, he rolled the three corpses in plastic sheets and loaded them onto the trailer. On the dirt where the zombies lay, tiny black worms no larger than snips of sewing thread wriggled in pools of rapidly congealing blood, the Stagger’s culprit, the adult parasite. Jake suppressed a shudder of revulsion and splashed kerosene over the ground. He ignited it with a match and watched the tiny parasites shrivel and burn.
Satisfied he had killed them all, he drove two miles to a gully, and dumped the corpses over the edge. They rolled down the embankment to join the dozen or so skeletal remains of previous visitors. He poured a liberal amount of kerosene over them, lit a rolled up piece of newspaper, and dropped it into the gully. The flames spread quickly, engulfing the zombie corpses. He preferred to incinerate the corpses rather than risk scavengers eating them. He knew that heat killed the parasitic worms, but he didn’t know if it destroyed the encapsulated sporazoa through which the disease spread.
He backed away from the acrid cloud of thick, black smoke, but lingered for a while to assure total cremation. While he waited, he climbed atop a ridge and scanned the horizon toward San Manuel through his binoculars. The small city once had a population of 3500, evenly split between Hispanic and whites, but had been hemorrhaging people since the closing of the copper mine in 2003. He had shopped there, picked up his mail at the local post office, ate at the Subway and the Las Casas Restaurant, and drank a few beers at Michael’s Bar, but he had never considered himself a part of the town.
A loner by nature, the people of San Manuel were as foreign to him as the population of Mexico or India. He understood their language and their customs, but not their need to congregate in large numbers or their zeal of a lifetime’s pursuit of the almighty dollar simply to die at an early age, exhausted by life and slightly less poor than before. His solitary life didn’t appeal to many. Perhaps he was lacking an empathy gene or suffered from a lack of whatever chemical drove people to seek human companionship. Whatever its cause, it had made him fit to survive in the new world rising from the ashes of the old.
A pall of smoke rose over the town, as it had for the past two days. Some large building was burning, or maybe it was an out-of-control grass fire. With no firefighters remaining, a grass fire could rage for weeks. He had watched one burn the north slopes of the San Galiuros a few months earlier, covering almost three hundred acres. He was safe enough in his remote canyon, but the smoke had made breathing difficult. From the amount of smoke visible, perhaps the entire town was in flames. Briefly, he c
onsidered the possibility that the army had arrived and was burning bodies as he was doing, but the chances were remote. Last, he had heard, the U. S Army had disintegrated into a dozen regional armies trying to eradicate the zombie threat and restore order in confined areas, like Phoenix, Portland, Miami, Dallas, and Atlanta. His curiosity begged him to investigate, but his common sense told him to wait. Whatever the cause, he could do nothing about it. Jake’s Law #2 – Long noses often get lopped off.
By the time he returned to his ranch, the sun had topped seven-thousand-foot Basset Peak a dozen miles to the southeast. He thought he saw a brief glint of metal from the B-24 bomber that had crashed there in 1943, killing the entire crew, but it was probably just his imagination. Soon, the cool shadows would evaporate in the mounting heat, introducing the start of another smoldering day to his canyon.
He took his second cup of coffee of the morning on the balcony, dragging his favorite leather chair outside to sit in the sun. He pushed an errant lock of hair back under his University of Arizona baseball cap. Soon, he would have to use the clippers to chop it to a more manageable length. He shaved every other day more to retain the habit than a dislike of beards. Personal hygiene and grooming were often the first habits to disappear in a crisis situation. He refused to give in to such a slacker mentality. He had carefully prepared for an emergency, and he wasn’t going to let the small things ruin his plans.
His ranch reflected his careful planning. A shallow wash ran the length of the block fault uplift canyon from Split Rock Falls at the head of the canyon to the desert beyond. During the summer monsoon season and the winter rains, the wash ran brown with muddy water. He had built a dam across the head of the wash from native stone, creating a small retention pond for irrigation. Now, the pond and the wash were bone dry, but his one-hundred-fifteen-feet-deep drilled well tapped a small aquifer and supplied more water than he needed in the dry seasons for his garden. His crops – mostly beans, peas, okra, carrots, tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, and corn – thrived in the irrigated soil. Canned goods were growing scarcer and becoming more difficult to procure by scavenging. It was easier and healthier to grow fresh vegetables.