by J. Rudolph
Joey then walked straight to the back of the complex and went behind the shed. “Hey y'all? Your meal ticket has been revoked. She is standing out front of the complex right now. Your enjoyment of our supplies is over.”
A pair of flashing green eyes on a dirty face appeared in the separation of wood chunks. “What? You kicked Alexus out? Remember when I said to you all that you gonna rue the day? That day is coming, and coming fast.” A fist struck the wood hard. “Remember now we know your security style and holes. You all better be hoping that wall is as strong as you think it is. Cause my money is on it being nowhere close. You'll recall the one way ticket to the, what was it you all were saying? The rainbow bridge? Yeah, that was what you all said when I killed that stupid looking, worthless dog. You never even knew I came in to feed the pest arsenic. Kills rats and ratty looking dogs. We are gonna be hitting you all when you don't even see it coming. Rue, motherfuckers. Rue.” He laughed a taunting laugh.
We heard the shuffling of belongings being gathered by several people and several empty cans of food were thrown over the wall. A voice called out, “Yo thanks for the eats.” I had never heard that voice before.
Trent looked through the crack and said that they had left.
And Rue We Will
He said that we would rue the day and that we would rue it soon. There was something about the look in those green eyes that put fear deep in my soul. He had always looked unhinged. That was something that every one of us felt since the first day he crossed our path. Those eyes through the separated boards told us that he was more than unhinged. He was dangerous and every one of us felt it.
Zombies are easy to deal with when it came time to deal with them. They had a one track mind that focused on eating. They couldn't apply strategic moves to their actions. Hell, they wouldn’t even notice a trench right in front of them. We had zombie management in the bag almost since day one. The only thing that had surprised us in zombie security, really, was how they could be very tenacious. They made the gate move when enough of them pushed on it, for example. We could deal with that. What were we going to do with the thinking type of threat?
I looked at Joey who was slowly taking in our complex wall. He looked at our buildings. He was studying every detail he could take in and I could see that he was not liking what he saw.
“We need a plan. We have to come up with something because I have no clue what their resources are. I don't know if they have a ton of guns or what. He is totally right, they have been watching us for months and with Alexus giving out all our details who knows what he has put together.”
I took a deep breath and started my suggestion on all this. “We need a safe place to put the kids if this comes to a fight. We....”
Tyreese cut me off. “No, Cali, we are not talking about this in the open. We got used to being able to and we need to get out of the habit like now.” I agreed. I felt kind of stupid for having started the talk like that. I had no idea if they were in earshot. Tyreese suggested we go to the school.
When we collected inside Tyreese said, “Alright Cali. You were saying something about the kids. Go on.”
“Yeah. Well what I was thinking was about building a safe zone. It needs to not have any resources in it other than whatever they would need for a day's survival. We need to reinforce it with anything we can find, secure the windows and stuff and create an extra lock on it. We should use the unit next to the school. Its farther away from the food and water units which will probably be a main hit point.” I took a breath offered another suggestion. “We should have Martha, Mercedes, and Jody manage the unit. They'll need the protection as well.”
Martha looked at me with indignation. “So you think that just cause we're old we need to be kept in a box? What if I didn't want to be stuck in a room with a bunch of kids like I was a child myself? What if I'd rather die on my feet shooting than playing the role of Anne Frank?”
“Is that what you want to do? Do you want to be out there with a gun killing people Martha? Cause that’s what we are probably going to have to be doing. Actual people. Not a wad of zombies. Are you ready for something like that?” Joey asked her, incredibly irritated with her. I was annoyed right along with him. Why did she always have to be so damned difficult all the time? If we said one thing she always argued to do the other.
“Frankly? Yes. I want to make a difference in this. I don’t want to play the nanny role, I want to take the bastards out. If it is a fight to the death I want to fight.” Martha said, clearly having made up her mind in this. I looked at her to try to discern whether or not she was seriously saying this. The lines on her face were set in absolute determination.
“Martha, if that’s what you want to do, whatever. That’s fine.” I said.
Joey started to pace. He looked like he was thinking hard about something. “Does anyone have a marker?”
Jody replied, “There is one in the bathroom. I used the mirrors as a dry erase board for the kids.”
He grinned at her. “Great minds think alike. That’s just what I want to do.” We went into the master bedroom where the vanity was. There was a large mirror over the sink where we could all see. Mercedes closed the blinds just in case they had eyes on us. Joey wiped off the previous writing, uncapped the marker, and started to draw four boxes in a pattern like the complex was arranged. He put letters in front of the boxes. F for food and W for water was drawn on the outside of one box, corresponding to the unit that held food and water. In front of the next he put a P for the paper goods. The next had a B for build and an M for medical and the last had an S for the school.
“As I’m sure you all figured out, this is a map of the complex and where the resources are. I like the idea of a safe zone for the kids, Cali, and agree that it would go best next to the school.” He wrote SZ in the space next to the school. “The idea of keeping the safe zone away from the food and water unit is a good one. Having it on the ground floor might be good as well in case we have to get them out of there. Mercedes? Jody? Do you guys object to having kid duty during this if it comes to a fight?” They both murmured their consent. “Good. It definitely puts my heart at ease knowing there are people to take care of the young ones.”
He drew a perimeter around the boxes and drew on a thick spot that was where the gate was. “This here bridge is the strongest point in the wall and that’s great, because we have one spot that they are not going to be coming through. All around the complex the trench comes right up to the wall except in the case of the back wall. We couldn't build it that way back there because of the wash, right?” Trent nodded his head. “That is a major weak zone, as evidenced by that being the camp out area for them. We will have to have eyes on this this wall. I want to reinforce the gap that they have been using. I had thought about putting the spike strips that we used on the front of the complex on the back but I think that since they have their capacities, unlike the zombies, that it would just serve as a ladder for them to climb up. I would give up my left arm for razor wire here but, well, that’s not going to happen.”
He put down the marker and sighed. “We need to have people on watch on both the exterior and interior of the complex. If we have one person on each side on a patio or window to keep an eye out then we should be covered. We need to assign people to be on watch.”
Martha volunteered to take the watch on the exterior of her building. Tyreese said that he would assign DaWayne to the exterior of my building while he took the exterior of food. Daniel, while he wasn't a council member, was still present since he had played a role in excommunicating (for lack of a better word) Alexus, was there to volunteer to take the back of the school. Trisha and I would be in medical. Something in all of our guts said that there were going to be injuries. Trent said that he would take our patio as a watch point, Joey would take his, Tanya would take hers. Tyreese decided to take Mercedes' patio.
Anna and Erin were the only remaining apprentices to not be assigned, though at 14 it was decided that Erin was too
young to take part in everything, leaving just Anna to assign. She was a hard one to place so we decided that we would ask her if she wanted to hide out with the kids or if she had an idea of a task that she wanted to take on. When we came to her after the meeting she brought up the very good point. Someone would need to run the bridge. We decided together that at the first sign of trouble she would come down from her apartment or from the safe zone and get to the car. The keys to the car lived under the drivers seat anyway so getting it started would be easy enough.
I used to be someone who took great comfort in having a plan. I just wasn't feeling it today. There could be no comfort in knowing you had to take on real people.
With tear filled eyes I asked an impossible question. “Guys? What if this all fails and we can't fight them off? What's our contingency plan?”
Joey looked me dead in the eye and said, “Our plan for if this fails is evacuation.”
Tyreese spouted, “How on earth do we evacuate right at 20 people?”
“The water truck.” Trent said simply.
Joey nodded his head. “I'll show a few people how to drive it. It isn't easy to learn but it's not impossible to either. This particular truck is an automatic so that will help. Turning it though will be a challenge for those who have never driven something so big before. The absolute beauty of this is, and I know Trent has a working idea on how to make this work as well, is that if push comes to shove and fuel becomes a problem we can make that thing be a bio-diesel truck.”
“I'm going to start setting up the trailer for people transport. We can put in a row of bench seats and some beds. We could use the bench seats as storage for food, water, and medical supplies. We can cut out some nice ventilation holes up top and in the middle that could be used as gun port holes as well. I know no one wants to leave really, we have a nice thing going on here but if we have to go we will be ready.”
“I think we should also have bug out bags on our backs if the fight happens. That way we all know the things that we wanted to evacuate with are right there.” Jody suggested.
“I think it would serve us well to get started on the projects. I think we have enough ideas going on right now to get us started up.” Tyreese said. We all agreed. Trent set Daniel on the job of the safe zone reinforcements and started figuring out the best layout on the trailer. Joey and Tyreese went off to investigate the security holes. I went off to the medical unit preparing for a potential mass casualty issue.
We took a break from setting things up to go ahead and arrange the backpack of things we had to take with us. Each one of us filled our bags with special little things. Mine had the box Drew made, to his great delight. Inside the box I put the turtle that Trent made me, all the wallet photos I had, a few marbles that I had for years. I slid my Kindle alongside the box, the hand crank charger that Trent made me, and a few clean pairs of underwear and socks. A friend had sent me several moleskine journals years ago that I had meant to fill with a story. I had started it so many times and had managed to fill a couple of the books, but then I stopped writing it. I would finish the story, I decided. If we made it out of all this craziness alive I would finish the story. I grabbed several pens and pencils to go in the bag. There were still so many more things I wanted to take. How would I fit all my scrapbooks that I had filled with baby pictures? Fitting my life into a backpack and knowing I needed to keep the pack light was so hard. My heart ached. I didn't want to accept the possibility that this was all over, living at home. Drew was sitting in his room having put several things into his bag, stalled out as well. His eyes looked over his room over and over. I sat down on his bed next to him. We didn't need to say a word, so we didn’t. We just sat there for a bit before I finally said that I had to get back down to medical. I asked him to come with me to help set things up.
We worked well into the night preparing for the attacks before we were all getting too tired to think. When we went to bed that night I was reminded of that first night waiting for the zombies to come. Just like before, every little creak reverberated through the darkness. We waited for them to come in the night. The only thing that came though was the morning.
People were on edge. Decreased sleep played on all of our nerves. Little arguments broke out over setting up the trailer when ways of doing things clashed, like where priorities were. Things like building gun port holes that were an important thing to Joey weren't as high on the list for Trent, who was trying to put together seats and the work area wasn't big enough for both of them to occupy. I argued with Jody about things that were important to fill up the bench seats with. Every argument ended in someone stomping off, cooling down, then making up. All those extra linens we collected when the zombies started were put in the trailer, making padded floor seating areas. We ran drills on getting the kids into the safe zone. We took our backpacks every time we walked out the door. For the week after we exiled Alexus we all waited for the shoe to drop and the fighting to begin. We worked like mad to get that trailer set up. The bench seats were a great idea. One segment was devoted to the cans of food, another for some water, and my favorite was the med cupboard. I had rummaged through medical and had gotten out just about one of every med we had. If we needed to run we were going to be well stocked, almost a rolling hospital. The lower bunk of one of the bunk beds opened up to store tools, the other more water. Things remained oddly peaceful. New Years came and went with unremarkable ceremony. Ryan Seacrest wasn't on the television pretending to be Dick Clark, no one lit off fireworks nor did any random firing of guns into the air sound like in the previous years. It was just another night in the post zombie world.
We worked into the second week, though with much less urgency. We stopped having the guys post guard in the outside units, downgrading it to two guys on watch at night on top of the roof. We all had gotten into the habit of the backpack thing, becoming as second nature as putting on our shoes. We were confident in the process of getting everyone into the safe zone. Still nothing happened.
On the third week we went back down to a single night guy. For a couple nights the guys slept uneasy knowing there was now only one visible person on watch but after a few nights of this it became just like before. We had come to the conclusion that the marauders were just displaying a false bravado. Bullies always talked big, after all. It was the middle of January, it was cold outside, nothing was going to happen. Even the zombies had gotten much slower when frost blanketed the ground.
We got comfortable. We were a slow bunch of learners.
The Night It Changed
Our family was sleeping soundlessly when the sound of a gunshot rang through the night, interrupting the first real sleep I had in a long time. Trent and I sat upright in the bed quickly, jolted awake. Pained cries came shortly after. My very first thought was that we had stopped using guns on the zombies a long time ago, preferring arrows made from sticks. Sticks were free. Sticks were everywhere. Sticks were silent. It was quickly followed by the thought of zombies don’t cry out. What on earth could possibly be making that sound? My stomach turned, my heart pounded, and I felt frozen for a moment. People, I answered myself, people make that sound. It took me a moment for my brain to get into gear. Who was crying like that? Did someone shoot their foot off in their sleep? I was reaching for any reason that didn't include an all out war had just started. The marauders were supposed to be all bark, no bite. I had kept rejecting the thought that it could be them. Denial was a sweet friend. It could make me move, I decided. As long as this was some stupid accident I could move. Trent was already zipping up his jeans on his way out the bedroom door when it finally occurred to me that I should be doing the same. I trotted down the hall where I passed Drew's room. Drew was sitting on his bed, eyes wide. “Mom what happened?” He was bathed in the light of the lantern that we left in his room, the florescent glow bathed his skin leaving a sickly pale glow, though with the degree of fear in his eyes, I wasn't convinced it was entirely lighting.
I took a deep breath and respo
nded, “Baby I don’t know. Stay here for now, we'll let you know. We'll be back, OK?” He nodded his head, scared to the bone. I knew how he felt. I continued on to the living room, tied up my sneakers and put on my pull over Disney sweat shirt. My last move as I walked out the door was to grab that silly backpack that I had been carrying for three weeks. It certainly didn't take long for that to become a habit.
I ran down the stairs to find out why someone was now screaming in pain. I saw Tyreese coming down the ladder with DaWayne, one arm wrapped around his son and the other on the ladder. DaWayne was bleeding heavily from a wound to his shoulder. I realized in that moment that the gunshot noise was someone shooting at DaWayne. The only reason for that was the marauder hit was finally here. DaWayne was struggling to come down the ladder using one hand even with his dad's help. Tyreese struggled to keep his balance against the weight of his football player sized kid. He kept encouraging him with each step.
“C'mon DaWayne. Play through the pain. Almost touchdown time.” Tyreese repeated this over and over, like a mantra that he himself was using to get the kid down the rungs. DaWayne had his teeth gritted together.
“We need to get him into medical NOW!” I yelled. Trent ran to them as I opened the door of the medical unit. Trent helped Tyreese get DaWayne in the door that was now unlocked. It had taken a little bit to figure out how to run that lock since my hands were shaking heavily by then. There was a crash against the cinder block wall coming from somewhere in the complex. The sound of cement shards rained on the parking lot asphalt. “Trent, the kids. We need to get them into the safe zone.” He ran out the door, took the butt of his gun and banged it on the metal railing against the stairs.