by Nick Cole
He searched through the heavy equipment for another hour, making a mental inventory of all the machines they might use. None of them had keys and many were locked by massive chains and padlocks anchored to the concrete. Holiday knew he’d need to go into the dark rental offices of the warehouse to find the keys.
Probably near the front door, near a rental desk of some sort, he reasoned.
He would need the guard’s keys to open the rental office.
Leaning against the back of the building, he found a thin pole about half his height. It had a triangular handle on one end and a “u” shape on the other. It was a tool of some sort, but it seemed far too flimsy for any kind of actual repair work.
It’ll have to do, thought Holiday, taking it and climbing back over the fence. The dead security guard within became even more agitated as Holiday approached the small rectangular shack. The door was on the far side, away from the entry drive. The guard was a shadow leaving smudgy blood and gore along the plastic windows like some very disturbed child’s finger painting. On the other side of the shack, Holiday noticed a piece of paper stuck to the door. It fluttered as a small night breeze came up out of the nearby woods and passed along the surface of the door to the shack.
Holiday cautiously approached and then snatched the paper from the door just as the guard flung himself weakly into it again with a heavy thump that caused him to fall to the floor of the shack. Holiday read the note.
“I didn’t have nothing to kill myself with. Gomes and Ramirez are inside the building. I locked ‘em in there. Gomes bit me hard. I want to see Rose again. If you got a gun please kill me. –Paul”
The moon was falling through billowing bluish clouds into the western night. Along distant hills Holiday could see long lines of waving grass illuminated in the pale moonlight. Buildings and trees, closer at hand, were now mere dark silhouettes.
The guard thumped at the window, leaning heavily into it this time.
I want to see Rose, again.
Holiday put one hand on the door latch, leaning away, ready to back up the instant it opened. The other hand held the tool above his head. He’d bring it down on the guard’s head the moment he... it, stumbled out.
Paul.
Paul.
Maybe that’s all it’ll take, thought Holiday and looked off toward the moonlit sky and nightscape one last time.
He saw shipping containers stacked up, almost three stories high, beyond the fence at the far end of the property. They were like building blocks, thought Holiday. Like a giant child’s building blocks left out after dark. And that’s when Holiday knew what they’d do for a wall. He dropped the u-shaped pole right there, climbed the fence and went to the back of the property. He climbed that fence and lowered himself to the other side after a brief scan of the massive yard below.
The place was full of shipping containers. They were smaller than the kind one might see on the back of a semi or a train. But they were made of metal. He heard a low gong when he tapped one. Lightly. Quietly. He walked between dark alleys of containers and out into the open. All around the yard he could see hundreds of containers stacked one atop another. Some stacks reached almost three stories, or at least well above the two story office that guarded the yard. There were three trucks, flatbeds that seemed made for hauling the cargo containers. Then he spotted two of the special forklifts.
After that, it was a matter of finding the employees’ handbook in one of the cabs of the trucks that explained how the whole operation worked.
The forklifts moved the containers. Diagrams showed how they could be positioned and stacked, interlocking with one another, and what to be concerned about when doing so. There was a list of clearly unsafe practices to be avoided.
The moon had disappeared behind the western horizon when he started reading how to load the containers onto the flatbeds. The flatbeds were much like tow trucks in that they had a winch and track system to drag the containers up and onto the bed of the truck for transport.
Later, as it turned dark without the moon’s ambient light, in the predawn cold, Holiday unlocked the cab of a truck and switched on a powerful Mag-Lite he’d found behind the seat. He tucked the handbook into his back pocket and selected a container that was stacked on top of another container. He started the electric forklift and moved it into position. The forks whined as he raised and toggled them into the ports beneath the container. When he was sure he had them aligned, he moved forward and was rewarded with an awful metal clang. One of the forks hadn’t been centered. He reversed, made a few adjustments to the forks and tried again. This time he got it. He locked the forks, almost forgetting to, and reversed away from the stack. The container followed, to Holiday’s amazement.
Once he had the container positioned, he tried to lower it onto the pavement with as little sound as possible, but it still made a dull, empty gong that seemed to echo throughout the yard as it settled onto the concrete pavement.
While I’m doing this, thought Holiday to himself, I’ll need someone to watch my back. I’ll be too busy with this operation to keep an eye out in case any of those things show up.
He got out and shined his Mag-Lite into the stacks of cargo containers. When he found nothing there, nothing moving toward him with a stumbling, wobbling, side to side gait, he went on to the second part of the operation. Pulling out the handbook once more, he read by the light of the flatbed’s interior cab how to load the container onto the flatbed. An hour later, he had the whole system roughly worked out and one container loaded and ready as the truck idled in the early morning dark.
Dawn was not far off.
Morning dew was beginning to condense on the windshield as Holiday turned up the heat in the cab to fight off the chill of the long night. He sat there for a few moments, facing the front gate, which wasn’t locked. A pole slotted into a hole in the cement held it in place. He expected to see them come out of the darkness and into the high beams, then throw themselves against the gate, reaching gray arms through the thin wooden slates at him.
What will you do then, he asked himself. Drag them back to Frank and the others?
I can run them over with this truck.
Really? Think about that, he told himself. Think about what that’s really like and if it’s as easy as it sounds when you don’t actually have to do it. However easy it sounds, I guarantee you, it won’t be that easy to do. Or to live with, for that matter.
We should keep one of the forklifts back at the Vineyards, he thought, preferring planning to the darkness of his imagination.
The “castle”, he joked to himself as the cab inside the flatbed began to grow warm. If Frank goes for this, it really will be a castle.
I don’t see how he couldn’t, Holiday told himself. It’s the answer to our biggest problem.
But it’s just an answer to one problem, he replied. Not the answer to all our problems.
Later, after the forklift was attached to the tow hook at the back of the flatbed, Holiday jogged to the gate, opened it and felt naked as he ran back to the safety of the cab inside the flatbed. He drove through the gate, heard Frank’s voice hectoring him that night in the garden and applied the brakes. There was a loud rumble as the forklift banged into the back of the flatbed.
Lock the gate, every time. That way you don’t get a surprise when you come back.
Taking the Mag-Lite in hand, visualizing how, exactly, he would smash in the head of anything that came at him out of the dark, checking the side mirrors once and then twice, he left the heated cab of the truck for the cold dark of morning.
He closed the gate and returned to the truck. The warm air from the heater instantly felt good. He locked the doors. The sky in the east was beginning to lighten. He sat there for a few more minutes.
There weren’t any zombies out on the lonely industrial road. But this area, Holiday had to remind himself, was generally deserted even back before the world hadn’t ended. There was a large corporate shipping warehouse across the street
and a nursery that spread out into the old marine base and the orange groves to the west. On the weekends, Holiday remembered from long walks he’d sometimes taken, there wasn’t anyone down here.
He thought of the guard in the shack.
The thing was probably some old guy, once. Wife died years ago.
Rose.
The job wasn’t just a job. The job was the friends he had there. Gomes and the other guy. They were probably everything to him. They thought of him as just the guard. But he thought of them as his friends. He must have gone to work even though the world was ending. Told himself he would guard the yard and the equipment and when it was all over they, his friends, his employers and the other coworkers in the rental yard, they’d all have something to come back to. And he’d have something to do until it was time to see Rose again. Holiday drove the truck out through the gate onto the street. He turned and drove back toward the Vineyards. Halfway up the block, he halted at the intersection where the small road led up to the equipment rental yard. He took the heavy Mag-Lite and left the cab of the truck. He walked up the road in the predawn darkness, the sky in the east a thin strip of red for just the few minutes it took him to reach the guard shack. Even the birds weren’t awake yet, Holiday thought to himself.
The thing within, the guard, Paul, Holiday had to remind himself, thumped listlessly against the plastic windows.
Holiday opened the door.
Paul came out. Stumbling, drooling, eyes vacant, gray fleshy hands turned to reaching claws. And Holiday struck him with the heavy Mag-Lite.
Once and true.
His arm like a machine that had been made for such killing work.
‘I want to see Rose again.’
He left the body there in the wet grass that surrounded the shack and walked back down the little road to the waiting, rumbling truck, the morning light turning everything golden now. Just once and ever so briefly, some early bird called out, testing its first song of the day. There was no reply.
The scent of sage was heavy in the cool air.
Chapter Six
The rest of the week fell into a rhythm. At first slow, and then in time, not as slow. By the end of the week they had the gaps between the buildings secured with the blocky metal storage containers wedged between the spaces. They stacked the cargo containers two high within the gaps between the buildings. At the front gate, they built a U-shaped courtyard wall three stories high using more of the containers. The ends of the “U” started at the entrance to the complex, and at the bottom of the “U”, they built a small gate by stacking two more cargo containers beyond the gate, close to each other while leaving enough space to stack two more on top, thus creating an arch. Once Holiday, with Candace watching from the roof of the storage yard with her binoculars and rifle, had shifted all the containers they’d need up to the Vineyards, they brought up the second forklift. They left one cargo container on the forks of the forklift and positioned it next to the gate. That cargo container and forklift would be left there as a door to be moved in and out of place each time they came and went. A gate of sorts.
At week’s end, the heat was still up in the day but fading toward nightfall. Everyone wondered how much longer summer would last among all the many other things they wondered about. The walls of the “castle” were complete. The sealed gaps in the walls between buildings reached just below the red terracotta-tiled roofs of the adjoined townhomes. At the front entrance, the “U” shaped gate towered over the tall palm-lined entrance. The containers were made of steel and very heavy, even when empty. Human strength wouldn’t be enough to shift them an inch.
“Next week some of us will work on the ramparts...” began Frank at the end of the day as they stacked their tools.
“What’s a rampart?” asked Dante.
“The top of the wall,” said Frank patiently. “We’ll make spaces up there for walkways with ladders and ropes so we can move around quickly.”
“Why?” asked Dante again, his voice matching the overwhelming fatigue they all felt.
“If those things come at us, we’ll want to get around on top of the walls and fight them off from up there. The easier it is for us to move around, the easier it’ll be to do that. Understand?”
Dante paused in his plodding march back toward his new townhome near the kiddy park. “Vaguely,” he said and waved his massive hand.
“Kinda like Helm’s Deep in Lord of the Rings,” said Skully, who’d come out to watch them and get some Ash-ordered exercise and sunlight.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Frank dismissively.
“It was a movie. A book before that. The Lord of the Rings. They fought these orcs from this castle called Helm’s Deep.”
“Oh,” said Frank not seeming to care and continued on toward his house.
Ritter stayed near the gate, near his townhome. Everyone had begun to call him the Gatekeeper as a kind of joke.
“Whatever, thas cool and all,” he’d said smoothly and lit a joint. He inhaled. His eyes fell to half-mast as the day ended. “We still swimming tonight?” he called out after them in the red glow of a fading afternoon.
“Yeah,” Frank called over his shoulder. “We gotta find some chlorine though, soon. I’ll check the maintenance room, there’s got to be some in there.”
“Sure thing,” said Ritter, watching them all go, leaning on the front door of his townhome. He waited until they’d all disappeared into the last of the day. He crushed out the joint, put it back in his cigarette case and closed the door to his townhome behind him. He went to his coat, draped over the glass table in the dining room, pulled out his cellphone and made sure it was set to SAT as he tried to contact the Tarragon server again.
The link wouldn’t activate.
“They weren’t kiddin’”, Ritter said to the quiet room.
He went upstairs, pulled out the briefcase from underneath the bed and tried three-number combinations again. First trying 007.
Nothing.
He thought about numbers and code combinations as he tried a few more and got nothing in return. No subtle click of the clasp that the expensive briefcases would make. What was within, remained locked within.
Ritter thought Candace might have some ideas about the combination but all his attempts to play the bad boy and get close had failed. He knew for sure that she liked bad boys. Had a weakness for them. She was the type that had them hidden in her past. But now that Frank was the head honcho, she’d fallen into her role as “right hand wo-man” Ritter would often say aloud in the hot stuffy little room of the townhome.
He slid the briefcase back under the bed.
He sat on the unmade bed. Took out the joint from the cigarette case and lit it again, lying back, watching the ceiling. Watching the fading day turn from red to blue. The walls were painted in some type of “gold”, he thought as his mind unfocused. “Goldengate Sunset or some such,” he mumbled. Some paint industry megacorporation had probably come up with the name using a team of geniuses just like the kids Ritter had beaten out in grad school. He thought about colors and paint names and marketing and hype and how all that didn’t really mean anything anymore. Hadn’t ever really meant anything. He thought about a jewelry store commercial that used to irritate him a lot. A Mother’s Day commercial. A beautiful young mom. Model up-and-comer dad. Newborn baby. Perfect house. She gets a diamond pendant for her first Mother’s Day.
Who has the money for that when you’re first starting out?, began Ritter as an exercise to ground himself in critical thinking, because that’s what he’d need to do to get in touch with the boys at Tarragon again. He added up the fictional lives of that fictional couple. House. Decorator. Hospital bill. Two leases on two BMW’s. No, make that a luxury SUV for the new baby. Gym memberships ‘cause lookin’ good don’t just happen after you had a baby.
“Blah, blah, blah,” whispered Ritter. “Boy ain’t got no money left for diamond pendants. They’ll be dead broke and payin’ interest alone in
side two years on everything. That’s when he’ll start cheatin’,” Ritter mused as his eyes closed for a few minutes.
Later, in the early twilight, they all met at the pool.
Even Skully.
He stepped gingerly into the shallow end of the pool, keeping his wound well above the waterline. Ash watched him like a mother hen. Dante had been the first in, bellowing at its coldness and splashing around. Holiday showed up later when Frank had the hotdogs going on a nearby grill. There were fresh jars from the store of mustard, relish and ketchup, and even some horseradish. Unopened jars. The buns were being lightly toasted with garlic butter. Frank even had a pan full of canned chili going in case anyone wanted chilidogs. No onions though. Those were already starting to go bad at the store.
They swam, everyone drinking except Holiday who’d heard each popped beer or bottle of wine disgorging into a glass. The soft glug glug echoing out across the pool. His mind turned and schemed about how he might just casually pick up a bottle for himself until finally he just let it all go and swam up and down the length of the pool, again and again. Later he even ate his chilidog near the side of the pool, his legs swirling the water and watching the swimming aquamarine shadows along the bottom of the pool.
Night fell deep and dark and soon they all returned to their townhomes, cleaning up as the lights of the pool shimmered less and less in the calming wake against its sides.
It had been a long week.
Longer weeks lay ahead.
So did the unknown.
No one really knew what actually lay ahead. It was easier to think about the defense of the castle and their day to day survival. Tomorrow more work, then food and play. Rinse and repeat.