Matthew held his flashlight up into the doorway and peered inside. “Empty,” he said.
My heart dropped.
“No rotters. Just barrels.”
My heart leapt again.
“Brat!” I exclaimed, giving him a shove as I hurried in.
The building was huge. It almost looked even bigger on the inside. Its high windows let in a bit of light, but not enough to read by. There were barrels, tons and tons of full barrels, stacked to the ceiling on long shelves. We stared into the enormous room together, awed.
Matthew still didn’t know for sure, not yet, and I didn’t want to get his hopes up if this wasn’t what we’d been looking for. I ran to the nearest barrel and held my flashlight close to its long label, and saw what I wanted to see.
I started jumping up and down.
Matthew watched me curiously.
“Plan C is on!” I declared.
When he heard this and realized what it meant and finally believed it, Matthew yelled something incomprehensible, and then he jumped up and down, too. He hoisted me into the air and twirled me around, making a whooping noise.
We had known how to make vinegar, of course. It’s pretty easy to make vinegar by mistake, even. We couldn’t have made it in the quantities needed for Plan C, though; not with the equipment we had. What we found here was better than plain vinegar: concentrated barrels of ethanoic acid, intended for large-scale pickling operations. We could dilute it and it would still have the same effect on the rotters.
“Plan C is on!” Matthew agreed, returning me to my feet. “Let’s go find a truck.”
We walked to the far side of the building, and around the corner, there they were: trucks, lined in loading bays. We climbed up and looked into the trailer of the first big rig. It was filled with full barrels. One setback: its battery was dead. So was the next one. And the next.
“Go get Eric and Thom, and come back with two pickup trucks and fuel additives. We’re gonna jump her,” Matthew told me, patting the side of a truck.
“Hee! Are you turning into Eric?”
Matthew laughed and moved to check out the truck’s engine.
I rode the motorcycle back to camp and returned with his brothers, the two trucks, and the additives Matthew had requested.
When I showed Eric and Thom our bounty, they celebrated, then moved off to assist Matthew in hooking the two pickups to the 18-wheeler’s electrical system. I stood looking at the truckload of blue plastic containers for a few seconds longer, considering the implications of what Matthew had found. I finally hauled the back door of the truck closed and turned to see if they needed a hand. They didn’t. The 18-wheeler’s engine roared to life.
I felt like my heart was dancing as I walked around the front of the truck. I looked up through the driver’s window, and gave Matthew Squeezy Eyes.
“Head on back to camp,” Matthew told us. “I’ll get this to the paddock.”
“We’ll see you there after we drop off the vehicles.” I handed him some sweet and sour jerky before walking away.
“Thanks, Kit Chen,” he called after me. I smiled at his terrible joke. We never talked about my pushing food his way. I was relieved he’d gone along with it. I think he was relieved as well. He was almost back to his proper weight, and it clearly helped him function better. It improved his mood, too.
Matthew drove the first load of barrels to the paddock, and Plan C’s prep work commenced.
Work on Plan C was tedious. It required even more manual labor than we’d expected. It became a daily chore we all grew tired of quickly. Still, setting it up immediately seemed important. Making sure it was maintained after it was set up was more important still, but easier. We trudged on, making preparations.
Whenever I heard an 18-wheeler rumbling in the distance, it meant Eric and Matthew were on their way back from a warehouse haul. Thom and I would head to the paddock to help unload the barrels they brought and to make preparations for something that felt inevitable.
“Time to make the doughnuts,” Thom often said under his breath as we trudged out to meet up with his brothers.
“The sky is full of black and screaming/Then one more bird, and one more bird, then one last bird, and another… If you could only stop your heartbeat for one heartbeat…” Bill Callahan, “Too Many Birds”
Post Watch again for me. I peered into the darkness, wishing for night vision goggles and feeling grumpy we didn’t have them. Although my night vision is pretty good, I was uneasy. Something felt wrong. There was something in the air. A smell.
Up on the cliff’s edge, I rubbed my arms and turned slow circles.
Then I saw them, just barely. The first faintly glowing row of rows and rows of rotters, miles out, slowly flooding over the land in the general direction of our camp. They looked like rows from the cliff, anyway—they wouldn’t seem so orderly from the ground.
I didn’t sound the whistle. I didn’t want to draw them toward us faster. We never expected numbers like this. I raced down the hill to the lean-to. If we weren’t successful in clearing these rotters, the camp would be lost.
I shook the guys awake. “We have a problem, need Plan C,” I told them, and explained about the undead horde that would soon be at our doorstep. As the brothers outfitted themselves with weapons, I roused Jeff from his tent, explaining the situation as briefly as possible. I instructed him to take over Post Watch, and to be ready to get everyone out if danger loomed too close. The spray bottles of acid weren’t going to be enough for this.
Jeff’s eyes were wild with panic. When I gave him these instructions, he obeyed and silently prepared to go up the hill. Our tiny army set out to try and move the danger away. The brothers had rounded up the warrior crew and filled them in on the details of our task as we moved briskly from camp.
Our plan had emerged over a number of weeks. It could still work, despite the enormity of the swarm. We approached the seemingly endless crowd of rotters and began leading them toward the wide gates of the paddock. Layer after layer of rotters peeled from their charge toward camp, and started shuffling in our direction. Eventually they all followed.
We walked together, talking loudly, letting them get close enough to be tantalized but keeping them far enough away to have a cushion of distance. It reminded me of the Pied Piper, except we weren’t maliciously leading children to their doom. Or maybe we were. Guess it depends on one’s perspective.
I wondered how much of it Jeff could see, and whether he’d be able to keep himself together while we dealt with the mob.
We reached the paddock and entered through a large gateway into the gigantic pen.
The rotters followed, and followed, and followed. More of them kept flowing through into our trap. We approached the very far side of the paddock and hopped the fortified fence. Part of the warrior crew spread to those two far corners, and the rest of us crowded into waiting vans and raced back to the entrance to close the gates, and to begin to destroy the rotters that hadn’t made it into the enclosure.
The farmland of the paddock was dotted with center-point irrigation systems. They each consisted of a concrete pad with a middle tower, and an aluminum arm of truss braces extending from that point. The arms circled around the middle towers. The arm of each system was long, with ten support towers spaced 120 feet apart, holding sprinklers at a height of ten feet. They ran on vegetable oil (originally diesel), aside from the batteries for the remote system. We’d geared the systems to pivot faster than normal; we weren’t irrigating crops here.
Each system covered an acre. The only big problem we had with these was that they didn’t reach the corners of the enclosure. The ones at the farmer’s had end guns to make sure the corners of his land got sprayed, but not these systems.
Way back Before, the farmer’s cattle often roamed under his sprinklers. They enjoyed the water on their backs on hot afternoons. So this was “Plan C,” as in “Cattle.”
The paddock was full. We were lucky. Most of the rotters
fit. The warrior crew started putting down those that hadn’t been able to get into the paddock. I led a line of rotters along the edge of the fencing, trying to spread some of the danger away from the gate area. I left my small warrior group to deal with them, then checked in with Matthew.
“Almost time,” I told him, and we immediately heard a long, shrill blast from Eric’s whistle, from down near the gate.
Matthew said, “Let’s do this.” He punched some buttons on the remote we’d rigged, the central control panel woke up, and the paddock’s series of irrigation systems came alive. I heard the remote-start generators kicking in and the pumps switching on. Ethanoic acid rained down on the rotters in umbrella-shaped mists from the sprinklers. The air smelled of rotting flesh and sharp, sour acid.
The rotters became hugely agitated. They moved around faster, stumbling over each other, trampling each other. They started having trouble moving as their bones softened. They flailed, and whenever those floppy limbs collided with one of their newly-soft heads, another rotter de-animated for us. Eric had had the foresight to reinforce the fences long ago, just in case we succeeded in trapping large quantities of rotters in a way that caused them to struggle this wildly, and I silently thanked him for his carpentry skills and foresight. Thousands of rotters fell, never to rise again, again.
We waited until the sprayers had gone around on their pivots a few times, and then Matthew shut them down. We waited for the air to clear. We had to retreat from the paddock, giving it a wider berth. Our eyes stung. Some people got blisters. A few had to return to camp because of breathing issues.
Waiting pissed me off. I twirled my broom, eager to use it on those oddly mushable heads.
We heard Eric sound his whistle again, and we all spread to the corners of the paddock to put down rotters that the sprayers hadn’t reached (or that hadn’t been trampled or otherwise finished off by fellow rotters). We cleared the corners first, then went through the paddock until our deadstock was stock-still. It took all night and most of the next morning. Jeff sent in reinforcements and refreshments, and I appreciated him more than ever.
I surveyed the field when we were done. De-animated bodies had fallen onto each other in a muckle. Our beautiful paddock had become a mass grave. The land looked ruined, but the environment would mend quickly. That acid breaks down pretty fast. The rotters would break down fast, too. The equipment was probably damaged. We’d flush it out, repair anything that needed repairing, then replenish the acid supply. It didn’t matter right now. Plan C had worked. We’d be able to reset, to use it again, if another swarm happened upon us.
We grouped together once more.
“Go Team Us!” Thom and Matthew high-fived in celebration.
Someone handed out a package of diaper wipes and we cleaned blood from our limbs. We were all exhausted. It was time to go back, wash up, and get to bed. Camp was safe again.
We gathered our supplies and prepared to walk home, but Eric had something to tell the L2C. We let the other campers go on ahead to report to Jeff.
“An end is come, the end is come: it watcheth for thee; behold, it is come.” Bible, Ezekiel 7:6
The “Hand of God” dream loomed threateningly overhead. We were all waiting. Because of the time at the paddock. Because my Eric had been bitten.
This happened in the earlier hours, when he was working to finish off rotters at a corner of the paddock. I didn’t see it; I wasn’t at that corner. In fact, none of the others at that corner saw it happen, either. Everyone was so busy.
A lone rotter—just a small kid—strayed in to join the swarm. It straggled along after the others had been penned up, after those that didn’t fit in the paddock were put down. We were still outside the fence, waiting for the last of the fumes to dissipate and taking out any rotter close enough to reach.
The rotter staggered in, unnoticed, on the outside of the closed gates, at the corner where Eric was working. He didn’t know it was there until it latched onto his forearm. Eric didn’t stop, though. He killed the rotter, hopped the fence, and put some distance between him and the other people who were trying to protect our home. He kept working to keep us all safe. And then he’d been bitten more times.
When I first came to camp, I could see Rotter Eric behind Eric, because I still saw rotters in everyone then. As I grew connected to him, that faded away. I got so I thought it would never happen to him. The possible rotter in him had wandered off.
Part of me gave reprimands. I shouldn’t have gotten attached, not to anyone. Not ever. I tried to sort out whether the difficult healing times and the freeing, blissful times with Eric could balance out the scale against losing him to rotterdom. And I couldn’t tell, because thinking of losing him was so terrifying and painful.
We waited, hoping. The whites of his eyes were still white. He had blisters, but those could’ve been from when he entered the paddock early, before the wind picked up, before the fumes had time to fully clear. His bite marks were angry red, but with no sign of the green-black that tends to creep into rotter bites, signaling the beginning of the end. There was none of the teal pus, either. But he’d become so weak and so very tired that Thom and Matthew had needed to carry him back home.
If Eric didn’t make it, I’d probably blow east again. Back to the big city. To the fourth building and its 37th floor.
I watched Eric sleep fitfully beside me, mumbling and twitching. I couldn’t make out what he was trying to say. His forehead had a sheen of sweat on it. He had a fever now. It reminded me of Renee. Ever more worried, I called for Thom with a squeak of panic in my voice, even though there wasn’t anything he could do about it either. He came in and sat with us, and waited with me, and Eric slept on.
“Can I go with you?” Thom asked, his voice jolting me from my thoughts. “If he doesn’t…?” When I didn’t speak, Thom added, “37th, or however.”
“You may come with. Perhaps hold my hand?”
He nodded at this, and I wished he wanted something else for the time we’d spent together.
“But Matthew…” I said, and I couldn’t continue the sentence. I chomped down on the inside of my cheek, trying to control myself. Matthew was resilient, but he might not do so well losing all of us at once.
“He’d get by,” Thom told me. “There’d be a lot of hurting people on the losing end of his rage, but he’d manage somehow. He always does.”
He said it like he didn’t believe it either.
We watched Eric, and we tried to make him comfortable. We hooked him up to IV fluids and waited.
Eric slept on, twitching and mumbling and sweating. Thom opened Eric’s eyes, and the whites had a pink tinge. Right then, we were sure we were losing him, that he was losing the battle.
“Come back to me,” I said into Eric’s ear, my tears falling onto it. “I can’t lose you now.” I told him his words.
Angel’s Glow crept into Eric’s bites and lit them far brighter than mine ever burned.
Matthew arrived to sit in the corner, disappeared, reappeared to sit in the corner again. It felt like our lives were a movie on pause. This scene dragged on and we tried to keep the panic in our hearts locked away inside ourselves, no longer talking. As if talking about what weighed us down would somehow drag that weight down upon us faster.
Finally, the pause button was hit again, and we were unpaused. Just like that. Eric woke up. He woke up thirsty and hungry and determined to take a bath in the lake. Immediately. And he woke up with the whites of his eyes white again.
After Eric’s incident, I thought long and hard about it. Had my blood somehow protected him? The only time I could think of that he had been exposed to my blood (in a mucous membrane, or any other way a rotter could infect) was when he gave me the mark to claim me. All of the L2C had been exposed to each other’s blood, but I couldn’t think of a time Thom and Matthew (or Sam) had gotten any of mine in their mouths or eyes or a cut. I thought on this for some time, and decided to make it happen, to protect them.
/> The next morning, Matthew and I were working on an engine, and he got caught on a sharp bit of metal. A common occurrence. His arm had a five-inch cut on it. I determined he needed stitches.
“Ooh, more of the good stuff?” he asked when he saw me pull out the flask.
“Yup!”
I’d refilled it with more Grey Goose vodka, and placed it in his hands, which were doing the “gimme gimme” claw motion. This time he cheerfully cooperated when I retrieved the first-aid kit to stitch him up. By the time I got my supplies ready, he was already drunk as a boiled owl, jabbering merrily about how well fight training was going with Sam… and, at one point, about what a great show Property Ladder was. It was a simple matter to surreptitiously jab a needle into the purlicue of my right hand for a moment, remove it once it was dripping with my blood, and then use it to stitch my entertainingly chatty friend.
Thom and I were out scouting later that day. We secured and entered a house, and while we were there, Thom hit his head on a lead glass light fixture. It left an ancient-rune-shaped gouge on his forehead.
“This house was made for short people!” he excoriated the house’s long-absent architect.
“Just sit. I’ll check it out,” I told him, reaching into the pocket where I kept my jackknife.
He sat and submitted to an inspection. I discreetly cut my thumb, then checked out Thom’s gash, managing to get some of my blood into it. I pulled out the first-aid kit and tended to his wound. He just figured the blood on my finger had come from his injury.
With Sam, I simply asked if she wanted to be my “blood sister,” and we had a little ritual. It felt like an adolescent act, but it seemed appropriate somehow. It’s what Sammy needed. I didn’t tell her it was to try to keep her safe. I wanted her to know she was part of me now. She appeared happier afterward, like she didn’t feel so alone in the world.
Eric had something occupying his mind. He’d been distracted all day.
Survial Kit Series (Book 1): Survival Kit's Apocalypse Page 33