The Zed Files Trilogy (Book 1): The Hanging Tree

by David Andrew Wright

  Chapter 11: Take Some, Leave Some

  The pumpkin pie filling and groundhog stew get me up early. The bathroom is a simple farm outhouse over a pit. It’s even got the half-moon cut in the door. Hell, there’s even real toilet paper.

  The compound is quiet. Even the Zed outside the gate have given up their incessant howling. It’s like Christmas morning to be able to shit in peace.

  Another shower afterwards. Another crappy smoke. I slip back into the bath house and Karen is still sleeping. I’d go through her purse but she doesn’t have one.

  Actually, I wouldn’t go through her purse. You can’t unknow things. And I don’t want to know anything about her. I don’t want to hear about how fucked up her family was. Don’t care that her childhood was a disaster. I don’t want to hear the long horrible story of how she got here. We’ve all got that story. Looking back has nothing to do with what’s ahead. Ahead is like nothing that’s ever happened before.

  Or perhaps this is the mistake that I keep repeating.

  “Morning,” I tell her as she stretches into the waking world. The blanket slides down and she sits half naked in the cool, humid air. She looks good but what I really want is a nice shot of bourbon. I’d kill someone for a drink this morning. And a cigarette. I’m staring at her tits but thinking about how much I’d like a cigarette when she says, “You’ll have to wait till later for that. I’m not a morning person.”

  Claws scrape the door to the bath house and I get up and open it. Archie bounds into the room and dances in a circle, before jamming his nose into Karen’s panties on the floor. Karen snatches them away from Archie and mutters, “…are all the fucking same,” before sliding them on. Archie moves to sit beside me so that I can scratch his ears while Karen gets dressed. We both watch her with different appetites.

  “Archie,” someone calls from the main house. “Where are ya, buddy?” Archie moves to the door and I open it up to let him out. A Zed by the front gate starts the day’s caroling by letting out with a low moan. The other carolers join in.

  Chuck. Idiot. If he’d a kept quiet for a while, so would the monsters at the gate. He’s too stupid to hate, though.

  Karen brushes by me on her way out and hands me my cleaver. “In case you change your mind later”. The sheath for the cleaver is on my belt and I slide it home. Karen heads to the main house as Chuck and Bob are heading out. Her ass swings from side to side as she walks. She knows I’m watching. It’s a game now because she thinks I won’t do it.

  She ignores Chuck’s ‘good morning’ and stomps into the house. I duck back in and get my .45. Bob and Chuck are headed somewhere with a purpose.

  Kevin stands, leaning against the front porch post, banging his pipe against the railing as I re-emerge from the bath house. I give him the nod and we follow Bob and Chuck.

  As we catch up to them, they are arguing just over the edge of a big mound of dirt on the southwest corner of the compound. “Well, I didn’t know,” Chuck is explaining.

  “Just dump the water AWAY from the doors, Chuck. Unless you want to spend the morning bailing out the bunker with buckets.” The two of them are struggling to tip over another full rain barrel. The water splashes up and Chuck dances around in his loafers, trying to keep his feet dry.

  “Need a hand?” I ask them as I round the corner. I’ve got my hand on the butt of the .45 that rides tucked into my belt in the small of my back. Chuck spins around like a kid caught stealing candy. Bob doesn’t bat his one good eye.

  “We got it,” Bob grunts and tips over another barrel. There are 12 barrels and they are sitting on steel plates. The water pours out of the rain barrels and down into a ditch. Bob’s boots make a clanging hollow sound as he moves around on the steel.

  “We’ll show ya,” Chuck says with a big smile and points at the ground. “We were supposed to wait but… to heck with those guys. We’ll join up with you.”

  “Great,” I mutter without moving my lips.

  As the last rain barrel rolls away, Bob picks up a spud bar and slides the flat end into a slot in the metal plate. Prying down, he lifts the edge of the plate and Chuck sticks a wooden block under it. “Not the best design,” Bob says. “But I didn’t design it.”

  The plate is only about a quarter of an inch thick and the two of them easily stand it up and toss it aside. Beneath the plate are two metal cellar doors sitting at an angle. Bob removes a key from his necklace and inserts it into the lock of one of the doors and opens it up.

  “Gentlemen,” Bob says with the first smile I’ve seen on him, “let’s go shopping.”

  “There better be some goddamned chocolate in there,” Daisy says as she and Betty walk up. Tyler walks up behind where I am standing. He looks tired and pissed off.

  “Yeah. There’s chocolate,” Chuck says and nods quickly. “Chocolate, booze, cigarettes, guns. Everything.”

  “Good,” Daisy says. “If I blew you for nothing last night, I’m gonna cut your dick off.”

  I can hear Tyler grinding his teeth behind me. Karen joins us and we all move towards the opening.

  The cellar doors open to a set of steps only about ten feet long. At the base of the steps is a concrete pad that has been poured in front of two big metal shipping containers. The shipping containers, which are about eight feet wide, have been welded together. The doors are also welded shut except for the one on the end. Construction foam has been sprayed around the outside of the joined containers before they were buried. Bob picks up a flashlight from a rack by the door and starts winding up the hand crank on the side. The rest of us join him. It looks like a bass fishing tournament at an insane asylum.

  Bob quits winding and clicks his flashlight on. He flashes his light up above the door to show a plaster figure of Jesus on the Cross. Below the statue is a sign with the words, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away; and there was no more sea. Revelations 21:1.” He pans down to find the latch and throws open the door to the container. We all quit fishing and move into the bunker.

  Near the door are several cans of fuel and a gas generator. I nudge one of the cans with my toe and it is solid and full. The edges of the bunker have been lined with shelves and cabinets. A door in the middle leads to the other container. There are two gun racks with a wide assortment of shotguns, rifles, pistols and crossbows. One shelf is all liquor. One is all cigarettes. This is like the new bank system and the currency spends only once. I take a carton of Camel filters and stick it under my arm. I get a bottle of Wild Turkey while I’m at it. I’d buy a lottery ticket except I’ve already won.

  Canned goods line another shelf, freeze dried food, big jugs of oil, spices, multi-vitamins and first aid kits. A shelf of chainsaws and axes sits towards the bottom. Big barrels marked RICE and FLOUR sit in front of the shelves. It is Zed-Mart.

  I spot a light brown piece of plastic hanging over the edge of one of the top shelves. I nudge Tyler and point at it without saying a word. Tyler reaches up and pulls the package down. “Snickers.” He slides it into his rucksack and reaches up to feel for more packages.

  Chuck is babbling away. “This whole place belonged to Wayne. He was one of our congregation. Everybody always knew he was a little extreme and a little…I dunno… weird. But when all of this stuff started going sideways, he told us all that God had told him to build this bunker… kinda like Noah. So we all headed out here. But then we got two steps outside the church and that was it… Wayne got bit. Ray shot him dead as soon as the zombie jumped on him.”

  “Well,” Daisy says in a flat voice from the back corner, “was Wayne a fucking diabetic?”

  “Oh, no. Here…uh…” Chuck’s flashlight bounces around the walls of the container. Up and down, back and forth. It is probably close to illustrating the random path of the one lone neuron bouncing around in his head. “Here we go.” He holds a big orange bar up to his flashlight. “Baking chocolate.”

  I hear Betty laugh in the background. Even T
yler is smiling.

  Kevin has a Rambo knife and a bottle of tequila. Karen is picking through the medical kit and bottles of prescription medicine. Bob is quietly moving towards the door in the dark. The click of the hammer coming back on my .45 is very loud in the metal room and everyone stops moving. “A smart guy would get us down here and then lock us in until the cavalry arrived.”

  Bob jumps behind the door and tries to swing it shut. I guess he’s seen too many movies and thinks the metal will stop a .45 round. The gun is so loud that no really hears it. My ears are ringing and the smoke from the gunpowder hangs in the air. A blue spot flashes where the muzzle erupted in the dark of the container. I don’t see Bob crumple and fall or hear his body hit the cement, but the door slowly starts to creep back open under its own weight.

  No one says anything. All of the flashlights trained on Bob didn’t leave many questions. When he jumped for the door of the container, he jumped straight through Hell’s front door and I opened it for him. Or Heaven. Who the fuck knows.

  “Bob?” All of the lights in the room shine back to Chuck’s face. His mouth is open and his eyes are wide. He blinks once and then falls forward. Tyler is standing behind him and looks just as scared. The screwdriver handle juts out of Chuck’s head right at the base of his skull.

  “Goddamn it,” Kevin says and runs a finger in his ear.

  I safety the .45 and put it back in my belt. Chuck exhales a long slow final breath into the dark of the container. Tyler steps back from the body and looks at his hand. “I was just acting like I was going to do it and then I jumped when…” Chuck’s arm twitches slightly and his foot spasms against the floor knocking off one of his mud-covered loafers. A small pool of red is slowly leaking out below the screwdriver handle. The look in his wide open dead eyes doesn’t seem all that different from his normal expression.

  Good-bye Kitty.

  Betty and Daisy walk out quietly with armloads of booze and baking supplies. Daisy stops to take the bar of baking chocolate out of Chuck’s hand. The girls figured out how to take care of themselves long before rocks from outer space landed in the ocean.

  Tyler follows but doesn’t say a word. Karen walks to my side and stands there.

  “Can’t trust nobody, I guess,” Kevin says.

  Small rapid footsteps fall on the wooden planks leading down. Archie bounds in tail wagging but stops to smell Bob’s dead body. His tail goes motionless and he looks up at me. “He’s a good dog,” Kevin begins.

  “Poor little guy,” Karen starts.

  I pull the .45 out again and put the front sight on Archie’s head.

  “No, no, no, not yet…” Kevin shoves the tequila bottle between his legs to get fingers in both of his ears.

  Karen drops her flashlight and does the same. “What are you…”

  The gun rocks in my hand again. Archie drops down next to Bob.

  “Goddamn it,” Kevin says again.

  Karen leaves the bunker at a run taking the steps two at a time.

  “Hate to see a dog suffer,” I tell Kevin. A box filled with disposable lighters is sitting on the shelf next to me. I take one and slide it into my pocket. “He was a good boy.”

  I start to walk out of the bunker. Kevin doesn’t follow. “You come’n?” I ask and motion towards the cellar doors. Kevin looks slightly bewildered but shrugs it off and collects his wits and his fortune. “We’ll drag these guys out later. They’ll be easier to drag when they’ve gone stiff.”

  “Yeah,” Kevin says but it sounds more like a question. “Reckon so.”

  In the bath house, I sit at the little table and light up a cigarette. The smoke is like an old friend. The fire from the whiskey settles into my belly as the rain beats harder against the window. I wonder what the girls are baking, but I figure it’s easier if I stay out here for now. I think they all need to talk about me for a while. I look at the paw prints that are all over the dirty floor of the bath house. I nod to myself and take a deep drag. The smoke is filling and warm in my chest like the ghost of a feeling that might have once lived there.

  I always hate putting a dog down.

  Chapter 12: House Cleaning

  Daisy sits at the big table in the main house waving a piece of chocolate at those seated as she chews. “This… this is the best goddamned chocolate I’ve ever had in my entire fucking life.” It’s one of the Snickers bars that Tyler had. Chuck’s unsweetened baking chocolate is nowhere to be seen. Daisy’s eyes roam around the table but she won’t look at me. Or Tyler. She’s trying to do the tough girl act but she just looks scared. Circumstances have surpassed her ability to manipulate her reality and those rubbing up against it. Her black hair runs in matted clumps that lie somewhere between a Rastafarian and a burn victim. Betty sits next to her; the blonde version in equal disarray.

  Tyler is sitting off by himself trying to drink warm cheap whiskey. He’ll puke soon. Karen’s had a handful of muscle relaxants and a glass of red wine. She’s gone. Out cold on a couch in the back of the room.

  I stand in the doorway and light up another cigarette. Goddamn these things are good. “Their friends down at the end of the road aren’t going to be terribly happy with us when they get here,” I tell them all. “We should probably be giving that some thought.”

  I should leave. Pack up now and slip out without saying a word.

  “Yeah?” Kevin yawns. “Whadya reckon we oughta do?”

  “Lots of guns down there in that bunker. Wouldn’t hurt to get everybody better armed.” Kevin nods. There is no good reason for me to stay here. I stood outside for a long while before coming in. They’re all freaked out that I shot Bob. They’re not ready to kill yet. At least not kill living people. Except for Tyler I guess. And he’s just as liable to kill us all as he is the people down the road.

  “You figure we should just kill these guys when they pull up? Er maybe… I dunno… see if maybe…” Kevin lets the thought drift off into nothing.

  “Safety in numbers, yeah? That sort of thing?” I ask and take another drag. “How’s that work’n out for ya so far?” Kevin shrugs in reply. “Limited resources, high-stress, more men than women, under constant attack. Don’t sound like a setting conducive to group activities if you ask me.” I flick the butt of my cigarette out into the rainy night.

  “Yeah, fuck it. We’ll just kill’em,” Betty says with a shrug. She’s being sarcastic and shitty. But she’s also trying to talk herself into doing it. “Kill’em all. Why not?”

  “We might need numbers,” I tell them as I come in and sit down. It’s probably the only thing keeping me here. That and Sleeping Beauty. Her lack of need for me now is almost as attractive as my growing curiosity. I pour myself a short glass of Turkey. “I’ve heard they’re all heading inland, away from the coast. Like locusts. Once they turned everything around them, they started heading this way.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Betty asks. “Who else have you run into besides us?”

  “A few folks,” I tell her and take a sip of bourbon. A few less folks actually.

  She nods and looks at the ceiling. “Any of these people still alive after you met them?”

  I smile and light another cigarette. “Lots of people out there.”

  “Doesn’t answer my question.” She looks at the glass I’m holding and then the pocket on my shirt. I don’t think she’s necessarily afraid of me. She just wants to know if I plan on killing her.

  “They looked alright,” I tell her. All things considered.

  She searches my eyes to see if I’m telling the truth. “So,” I continue, “Providing those people knew what they were talking about, there might be a bunch of zombies headed this way. A tidal wave of undead Zed looking to infect, bite, kill, eat, maim, convert and end every human life in their path. So do we want more of us? Or less of us?”

  “Less,” Tyler says from the corner of the room. “We hang out here, let the wave go by, ride it out.” He slurs a little but it sounds forced. I look at the bottle.
It still looks full. They’re a very dramatic little bunch.

  “Well,” Kevin starts in his slow drawl, “Fore we do anything, I reckon we oughta do something with them fellers, take a closer look down there for stuff we might need, figure out what we’re gonna do. We probably ain’t got much time.” He gets up and takes Tyler’s bottle away from him. “Ain’t even lunch time, man.”

  Tyler gets up and walks quickly out of the house. He’s not stumbling but his stance is rigid and off balance. He bounces off the door frame on his way out and we all get up to follow him. All except Karen, who is still out cold.

  Down in the bunker, Bob has already started to bloat. So has Chuck. Archie’s eyes are still open. I’ve caught Bob cleanly through the rib cage with the .45 and as we roll him over to pull him up the steps, a wheezing gasp of air empties out of the hole in his ribs, filling the small room with the smell of blood and rot. “Jesus,” Kevin says. Daisy and Betty go back to the house.

  I look up at the statue of Jesus hanging over the container door. It never made sense to me. All-powerful God has to kill his own son to forgive the sins of his flawed creation. Seems like a lot of work for an all-powerful guy.

  Bob has a whole in his side like the little statue guy but he isn’t laid out like Jesus so much as he is, well, kind of in a diver’s pose. I grab his cold blue hands and start dragging him towards the steps. He’s tall but he’s thin and not too hard to move. Kevin grabs his feet and we wrestle him up to the rainy, muddy world above. We roll him down the embankment into a small puddle of rainwater and leave him there. The howling Zed outside the front gate sing at his funeral.

  Tyler watches us with little expression. Kevin walks up and slaps him on the back, “You kill it. You clean it. T’other one’s all yours.” Tyler heads down into the hole and Kevin and I follow him down. The door to the container hangs open and Chuck’s prone figure lies face down right where we left him.