by Jack Hamlyn
The fort, as I said, was essentially a box on stilts, looking kind of like a guard tower of the sort you see on Hogan’s Heroes or one of those old TV shows. It was about eight feet long and five wide, benches set along the walls which rose up to about belly level and then it was open on all four sides with a roof overhead.
Realistically, there were advantages to the fort.
We were safe from zombie incursions because, as Jimmy pointed out, they weren’t much for climbing. Being thirty feet off the ground made the climb real difficult even for a normal person, let alone one of them. Up there, we had control of the surrounding terrain and could drop anyone who dared to get too close.
The advantages were many, yes, but so were the disadvantages. Sooner or later, we had to come down from our roost. And if somebody wanted to take us out bad enough an RPG would easily do the trick.
The three of us waited there, leaning on the sides of the fort and watching the dead come. At first, it was dozens and then many dozens that became hundreds as they filled every open space down there—yards and alleys, streets and vacant lots. There were so many that some simply pushed right into houses or garages, seeking any opening they could find. There’s a dread feeling you get when the dead mass like that. It’s the same sort of feeling in your gut you get when you see swarms of flying ants take to the air in August. There’s just too many and it makes your skin crawl because it’s just damn unnatural. It’s not, of course, at least as far as ants go.
After a time, the sun started rising so we sat on the floor so our guests down there wouldn’t see us seeing them. We were exhausted, but we didn’t sleep. The sun was warm and baked the chill from the air. We were dirty, spattered with gore, cut and bruised and sore. We didn’t say a damn thing. We all just stared at the floor. Now and again, one of us would peek up over the walls and see how the zombies were making out. They were still there, but they were moving, slowly, slowly moving, guided somewhere by a force we would never understand.
The stench in the air was gaseous and sickening, a sickly-sweet stink of putrefaction that we didn’t even notice after awhile. The sun had heated things up and made the dead smell even worse. It had also activated clouds of late-season flies that found us up in the fort and crawled over our arms and faces. After a time, we didn’t even bother swatting them. I sat there next to Sabelia and smoked the cigarettes that Robin had given me. I had two of them and I smoked them one after the other, trying to chase the flies away but it really did no good.
The city was quiet out there and I couldn’t hear anymore fighting. There was nothing, just the slow shuffling of the zombies below.
After a time, an hour maybe, Jimmy nodded off and it was then that I started studying his left arm which he kept pressed to his belly. There was blood all over the sleeve of his shirt. It was drying now, dark and crusty. It was certainly possible he had cut his arm in any number of ways.
But I didn’t believe it.
And I didn’t think Sabelia did either, judging from the look she gave me.
Jimmy had been bitten.
DEATH MARCH
I must have drifted off.
I didn’t think it was even possible, but when you reach the point of absolute exhaustion the transition between being wide-eyed alert and dead to the world can take place in the blink of an eye. I woke up because Sabelia was shaking me. Not roughly, but just enough to rouse me. And I must have really been out because the sun was high in the sky and my back was stiff, my legs numb from being folded underneath me.
I heard rumbling and shouting voices, a gunshot now and again.
“What’s going on?”
“Ssshhh,” she said. “They’re everywhere.”
I poked my head up over the ledge and I saw that the zombies were gone, but they had been replaced by soldiers. From my vantage point up in the fort, I could see over the rooftops of the ranch houses that made up the neighborhood and what I was seeing was like something out of a slavery movie. Out in the street were people. Not just five or ten, but what looked like hundreds. Men and women all roped together like steer and being driven by ARM troopers with rifles. They were marching four abreast, throats encircled by ropes that tied them to each other and the people behind them. I watched the procession and it kept going and going and going.
“They must have the whole town out there,” I said to Sabelia. “They must have kicked the doors in on every house in town and taken them one by one.”
She nodded. “That’s what we came into last night. They must have been holding out against ARM, so ARM hit them hard last night, broke the backs of the defenders, and taken them all prisoner at first light.”
Their fate could have been any number of things.
Maybe they were being marched out to a place of execution or to a blood farm like the one Robin and I had been held prisoner in or to a slave labor camp. It was really hard to say. I didn’t really think they were going to be executed. If they were, why go to all the trouble of tying them up and marching them out when they could have been blown away in their houses?
I looked over at Jimmy.
He was still sleeping. He looked very old, very used-up. He was dirty like us, face streaked with grime. For a moment there, I thought he was dead but then I saw that he was still breathing. If he had been bitten—and I couldn’t say absolutely that he had been—then I wondered how advanced the germ was by that point. When Necrophage took hold of someone, it wasted very little time. Your immune system was overwhelmed within a matter of hours and then it was all downhill from there.
I looked over at Sabelia.
Her dark eyes were intense and shining. “I don’t know,” she whispered to me. “He might have it and he might not. We should see something pretty soon if he does.”
We were in a real mess, that was for sure.
All I really wanted was to get to the Silo in the Catskills that I’d heard so much about. I wanted to see my boy. Hell, I needed to see him, but it seemed the more I wanted that the farther away it became. It had been going on that way for well over a month by that point. The thing was, as much as I wanted to run up to the ‘kills, I knew I couldn’t. Whatever was going on with Jimmy had to be sorted out first and I had to find Tuck and the others. I just hoped to God they hadn’t been captured. If that was the case, I might never see any of them again.
Sabelia sighed. “If he does have it,” she said, meaning Jimmy, “then…well, we can’t let it happen, can we?”
There was compassion and sensitivity in her voice, but there was also something brutally practical behind her words. I knew very well what she meant. I had done it before when someone was infected. “If he has it, if he has it, I’ll do the right thing.”
She hung her head and I put an arm around her. What a sad state of affairs life was when you even had to be considering putting a bullet into the head of a guy who’d practically been a father to you.
Suddenly, Jimmy opened his eyes and looked at us. “I can hear you both yammering, you know. When I decide to eat your brains I’ll let you know.”
Sabelia and I just looked at each other. We were like two kids caught in the act. I didn’t know what to say, but she did.
“We’re worried about that wound in your arm,” she said.
“I got that much.”
“If you were bitten…” I started.
“If I was bitten, you were trying to hash out who gets to put me down like a rabid dog,” he said. “Well, for your damn information, I snagged my arm on some sheet metal. Pretty sure I ain’t gonna rise and chew on livers because of that.”
The relief was liberating.
“You’re sure?” I said.
“No, I’m making it up, bonehead.”
That got a chuckle from me. I wasn’t completely relaxed about the situation, but I was feeling better. Sabelia filled Jimmy in on what was going on out there. The three of us peeked over the ledge and we saw that the procession had thinned out considerably. Within about ten minutes, the last of them
were marched away and I saw fifteen or twenty soldiers followed by a LAV-25, its .50-cal machine gun aimed at the marchers.
In the distance, I heard a few more gunshots.
“That’s what happens if you try to escape, I’m guessing,” Jimmy said.
I was sure he was right. Wherever they were being marched to and for whatever reason, attendance was mandatory. ARM did not care much for those who turned down their RSVP.
Jimmy poked his head up again. “Give it another ten minutes, then we better get our asses out of here.”
“Then we’ll go find the others and split,” Sabelia said.
Neither Jimmy or I commented on that. She was being optimistic and we both knew it. The chances of them not getting rounded up or killed when they refused were very remote. Tuck was a survivor. So were the others. But there were still only five of them. Five fingers can make a fist that can give you a good slug but it’s still only one hand and ARM has dozens and dozens of them. The outlook was not good and I knew it.
Sabelia seemed to read our pessimism. “They may have slipped away last night, you know. Tuck might have gotten them out of there when he heard the APCs and soldiers. The house might have been hit by artillery or something. They may be outside town, waiting things out, waiting for ARM to leave so they can come back in and find us.”
“I can’t see Tuck leaving until he knew we were safe,” Jimmy said.
“Or dead,” I put in.
Sabelia gave us both hard looks. Here was a woman who’d been through the shit in her lifetime, but she never knuckled under or gave up because it wasn’t in her to do so. It was an admirable trait. She always set her mind on some distant point when things would be better and focused all her energy on getting there. She would accept nothing less.
“Well, I don’t have time to listen to you two pouting and giving up. I’m going to find them and I’m going right now. You can either come with me or stay here with your doom and gloom.”
She grabbed her rifle, her ammo bag, and opened the trapdoor, lowering the rope ladder. She didn’t even look at us as she climbed down. We followed, of course. Nothing could have stopped us from doing so. We followed her like moths drawn to the same burning flame.
DUSTED
We hadn’t made it twenty feet before something happened that was quite literally beyond our experience. There was a sort of popping noise that reminded me of a smoke grenade and, true to form, a cloud of yellow gas suddenly came blowing in our direction. We heard two more similar popping sounds and before we knew it, immense clouds of yellowish smoke had immersed us from all sides.
I heard Sabelia cry out and I saw Jimmy hit the ground, gasping.
My throat felt raw, my chest felt tight, and my head spun like I was on a merry-go-round. I tried to stay on my feet. I tried to grab Sabelia, but the vertigo got the best of me and the next thing I knew I was on my knees, then I face-planted right into the ground.
I could seem to think or concentrate and I doubted, at that moment, if someone had asked me my name I would have been able to tell them. Everything became very confused and unreal. My face felt flushed, my eyes watered, and when I tried to call out to Jimmy and Sabelia, my tongue felt like rubber. I couldn’t think and I definitely couldn’t speak.
The gas dissipated quickly enough, but the symptoms were ongoing.
Somebody had thrown non-lethal grenades at us and it had to be to weaken or subdue us, but it wasn’t like anything I’d ever experienced before. I’d been through gas training when I was in the Army, but this was not smoke, OC or CS. I had no idea what it was, only that it was extremely unpleasant. While I was engulfed in the cloud, it felt like millions of tiny insects were crawling over me. It was so extreme that I involuntarily began scratching myself. It was a weird, phobic sort of reaction.
Then it was gone and I tried to pick up my rifle, dropped it, tried to pick it up again and fumbled it. My muscles didn’t seem to want to obey my brain. My hands were useless. It was like trying to do fine, detailed work with oven mitts on. I tried to stand and I went back down again.
Jimmy was out cold, but muttering like somebody going through a bad nightmare.
Sabelia had a dopey grin on her face. She was staring at me with wide eyes that ran with tears. Her lips trembled. She kept trying to talk, but nothing made any sense. Either my brain couldn’t process what she was saying or she was unable to say what needed saying. We just sat there on our knees, staring at each other. She held a hand out to me and it trembled. She started giggling and I wanted to, too. This was all incredibly funny, but I wasn’t sure why.
I looked up and it seemed as if the sun had traveled across the sky a good distance since we climbed down out of the fort. Was that possible or was I just delirious? I finally got to my feet, knowing there was not only something wrong with me but all of us. Sabelia’s giggling was disturbing, but I wasn’t sure why.
I forced my feet to move and it felt like my boots were filled with cement. One, two, three steps. My muscles began to respond but my stride was drunken and uneven. I couldn’t have pissed a straight line let alone walked one. I guided myself along the side of a house until I could see the street where all the people had been marching. I saw several dead soldiers and more than a few civilians. There was a dog sprawled over the curb whose guts were hanging out. I had to look away because it seemed like its intestines were crawling.
Get it together, get it together, get it together, a voice kept repeating in my mind. You’ve been drugged. There was something in that smoke. It’s got you all fucked up. Get it together.
Something wet touched my arm.
I brushed it away with my finger. Plink, plink. More drops. I was scared for a moment because I thought for sure it would be blood. That the sky was about to open up like an artery…but it was merely boiling gray with clouds and the only thing falling was rain. More drops fell that became a gentle shower. It was cool and refreshing. It picked up in intensity until it was a real down pour. I was soaked to the skin in what seemed seconds. But it felt good, washing the dirt and grime from me. Rivers ran along the curbs. I could see lots of gleaming white bones out in the street.
I turned and went back.
Jimmy was still out, completely oblivious to it all. Sabelia was up, spinning around and around like a kid trying to make herself dizzy. She would whirl and whirl, then fall laughing to the ground and do it all over again. Everything was a mess. Nothing was making sense. We were acting erratically. There was danger, I knew. Danger in this town and everywhere else but I could not put a name to it much as I tried.
We had to do something.
But I honestly could not think of what that was.
Jimmy. Yes, Jimmy.
The rain was coming down in gray sheets and he was still laying there, his face spattered by mud as the earth seemed to go liquid around him. I went over there and grabbed him by the shoulders. I had to get him somewhere dry. That much was making sense. I dragged him over to the back porch of the nearest house. Sabelia came over and helped me, giggling like a little girl, happy and filled with life. It took some doing, but we got Jimmy up on the porch where it was dry.
I went inside the house and found myself in a kitchen.
Sabelia was standing behind me and I could hear the water dropping from her to the tile floor. Rain pattered against the windows. It sounded like a torrent coming from outside. Knowing I had to do something, but unsure what that might be, I started looking in drawers. I found silverware, cooking utensils, a drawer of odds and ends—everything from batteries to old cell phone chargers to castoff screwdrivers and rubber bands. There was a rolling pin in there. A novelty rolling pin about five inches long and made of finely polished wood.
I tried it on the countertop and it really rolled. I was fascinated by it. Sabelia couldn’t stop laughing and I began to wonder if the rolling pin was really that small or, somehow, I had grown really large. It makes no sense, but it did then. That’s when I saw something I hadn’t noticed: there was
writing on the rolling pin. Fine black script. BLUE ROOF CABINS, it read. TWIN MOUNTAIN CATSKILLS. And if you revolved the pin, it read in smaller script, WHEN MAMA’S IN THE KITCHEN YOU DON’T HEAR NO BITCHIN’. I started laughing myself. The rolling pin was just a kitschy tourist item as was what was written on it. Sort of thing that made you giggle at the time, then you threw it in a drawer or it ended up in a cupboard in the garage and one day twenty or thirty years later you pulled it out and said, Hey, Martha! Lookee what I found! You remember dis? Remember dat shop where dey sold da moose knuckles and porcupine jerky? Ho! Now dat was a hoot, weren’t it?
I had to stop laughing so I handed it off to Sabelia.
She gratefully took it and rolled it along the counter. I had things to do even if I couldn’t remember what they were. I had been scavenging things for so long by that point that it was ingrained in me. I looked in the dusty, abandoned fridge whose door was propped open with a clothespin. I searched around in the cupboards, but there was no food. Just dishes and spices and an old bag of red licorice that was hard as a brick. In another cupboard I found half a fifth of Jim Beam and I pulled off it and so did Sabelia.
I sat there staring at her as if there was something very important I needed to tell her, but it just wouldn’t come. Then she unbuttoned her wet fatigue shirt, tossing it to the floor and her eyes were huge and dark, simmering almost black, it seemed. I took her in my arms and kissed her and her tongue was burning hot in my mouth. I pulled my shirt off, desperate to feel my skin against hers and the touching was almost electric. Then I was squeezing the full cones of her breasts, the nipples brown and hard under my fingers. I put my mouth on them, sucking them into my mouth and licking them and she was moaning, saying things which I couldn’t seem to understand.
As I loved her breasts, I unbuttoned her pants and they were so wet I nearly had to peel her out of them. But I found the line of dark hair between her legs and followed it with my fingers until I found the hot wetness and worked two fingers into her. She unzipped me and fondled my cock which felt immensely swollen like it might burst. I worked her with my fingers until she came with a little cry and the entire time I could not take my eyes off the tattoos on her thighs—a four-leaf clover and a coiling serpent.