Necrophobia - 02

by Jack Hamlyn

  I was glad Sabelia or Diane weren’t there because they would have made me talk. After a time, I told him about Susan and Jilly. It came out of me in a flood and I told him everything there was to tell. He didn’t have much to say about it. What had happened to them was horrible and there was no point in dissecting any of that or over-analyzing it.

  It was bad, but it was over for them.

  That sounds callous and I know it…but what more can I say?

  What more can I possibly say?

  It had been several months since I had been to Yonkers and it had changed. Oh yes, it had changed very much. We came in from the east on Cross Country Parkway, cutting onto Sawmill and then Yonkers Ave, which took us right into Dunwoodie where my mother-in-law had lived and died on that terrible first day of The Awakening. What I saw was neighborhood after neighborhood that had been burned to the ground or reduced to blackened jumbles of timbers. Buildings had been bombed to rubble, collapsing out into the streets in ramparts of shattered brick and debris that were absolutely impassible. Much of Dunwoodie was so entirely devastated that after a time, I couldn’t even be sure exactly where we were and I knew that area like I knew the whole damn city: intimately.

  It was a mess. Just a mess.

  There were places where Yonkers Ave was so congested with smashed and abandoned cars that we had to cut onto side streets, which often were not much better. Devastation, everywhere devastation. I saw burned-out Hummers and APCs, facades of buildings scathed by machine gun fire, skeletons on the sidewalks and huge bomb craters in the streets. Telephone poles had been knocked down and trees fallen into the ruins of houses.

  And the dead, of course.

  Hell had come to earth and the dead were everywhere, stragglers walking through the wreckage, mobs in the streets and haunting avenues. We knocked a few groups aside and rolled right over them. Once there were so many that Jimmy stopped the Jeep and let Tuck come forward with his Stryker to thin the crowds with the grenade launcher and .50 cal.

  I remember at one point that I tried the Jeep’s radio, hoping to pick up a signal from somewhere, but all I got was static. Maybe I had some naïve hope that somebody had powered up a station with a generator. I don’t really know what I was expecting. Nothing, I suppose, but I felt that I had to try.

  “I’m glad you tried,” Jimmy said. “I’m real glad.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because, it means you still have hope, Steve, and that’s important. When we stop hoping, we’re finished. When we stop hoping, we’ll stop trying and then it’ll only be a matter of time. Next week, next month, next year, we still have to keep hoping. It’s all we have.”

  He was right and I knew it. If we didn’t hope, like he said, we wouldn’t try, and if we didn’t try, we wouldn’t keep fighting. We would hole up somewhere, stop going outside, begin to decay not only physically but mentally. I for one wasn’t about to let that happen. Even at that point, though I had been a city boy my whole life, I was thinking it might be a good idea to get out into the country, way out in the country. Maybe upstate or into the Catskills. Somewhere distant and desolate, where we could set about doing what we had done at Tuck’s farm—raise crops and get back to the earth. A place so far from the cities that ARM or any of the other ragtag militias wouldn’t even bother with. But I knew that essentially such an idea was against what we had originally decided to do which was to take back the cities and towns street by street, clean out the zombies and crazies and set about bringing some sort of civilized order back to the world. At least, our small corner of it.

  I wondered how the others would feel about it.

  Most would be okay with it, I thought. I knew Jimmy would be. But not Tuck. He wanted to wage war. All-out, total war.

  But what would we be fighting for?

  That was the question I asked myself as we searched around for somewhere to spend the night, somewhere big enough to not only hide us but the vehicles. Because realistically, when we made our raid on the ARM encampment, Yonkers looked as gutted as the Bronx. Was it worth risking life and limb to fight over a pile of rubble like rats defending a garbage heap? Wouldn’t our time be better spent doing something a little more constructive like finding a safe place where we could maybe relax a little and get off our war footing? Raise some food and give the kids the kind of safety and security they deserved? The very idea of fighting neighborhood to neighborhood had lost its appeal to me.

  I ran it all by Jimmy and he, as I knew he would, concurred.

  “Might be the best thing all around,” he said. “Set ourselves up. Start stockpiling. Once we’re ready, we can start fighting again. I’m guessing there’s other good, like-minded people out there looking for the same thing. Maybe we can find ‘em. Maybe we can set up some kind of community.”

  I planned to broach the subject with the others at the first opportunity.

  It was morning by the time we found what we needed: a truck garage with a large bay for the vehicles and some offices off to the side that had been emptied of furniture. They would do in a pinch for dormitories. After Tuck, Sabelia, and I had scoped it out, we opened the doors and got the Strykers and Jeep inside. Then we secured all the exits, rolled out our sleeping bags, and made some breakfast, brewed up some coffee.

  On and off throughout the day, we slept in shifts. That night we called forth a war council and discussed things. Other than Tuck, the others were more than happy to get somewhere safe, somewhere we could actually start living and defend as our own.

  Tuck relented finally. “Okay. All right. But we do this with the understanding that this isn’t over with. We’re still gonna need to scavenge from time to time and when we do that we’re going to need to fight. We can’t just turn our backs and let the zombies and ARM assholes take the world. It has to be taken back.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “But first, let’s recharge our batteries.”

  We discussed strategy and Tuck finally got around to admitting he had been kind of thinking along the same lines as me. He had a friend who had a place up in the Catskills near Doubletop Mountain. Bobby Hughes. Like Tuck himself, he was a Vietnam vet. An ex-paratrooper who’d come back from the war very disillusioned and joined up with the whole hippie back-to-earth movement, raising his own livestock and growing his own crops.

  “Bobby started out as a hippie farmer, and then became kind of a mountain man,” Tuck told us. “He got to the point where he and his wife and the others communing with them refused to use anything that had been manufactured by the evil corporate entities. His words, my friends, not mine. They even made their own clothes. I haven’t seen Bobby in five years, but he had about twenty people up there with him on a big spread near Catskills State Park. Nice set-up. Remote. Should do us just fine and Bobby would be glad to have us, that is…well, if…”

  “If he survived,” Sabelia said.

  “Yeah. But I got a feeling he did. If he didn’t, well, we still have a good place waiting for us. A real back-to-the-earth sort of farm. Real nineteenth-century.” Tuck looked over at Diane and winked. “He grew better stuff than me. Real good smoke.”

  Diane, an absolute advocate of pot culture, grinned. “Sounds like the sort of place I been looking for my whole life.”

  We were excited at the prospect, but there were practicalities that had to be sorted out before we got too carried away. One of them was fuel. We needed to gas up the Strykers for a ride like that and we needed to fill up our spare tanks. We had pretty much food, but we still needed more .50 cal ammo.

  “There’s always Marble Hill,” Sabelia said. “Though, I hate to be the one to point it out.”

  “I been thinking on that,” Tuck admitted. “The armory there.”

  It had occurred to me more than once, but I didn’t like the idea of going back into the city after what we’d been through in the Bronx. Marble Hill was located on the Harlem River at the far northern end of Manhattan. Although it was located, technically, in Manhattan, it was geographically
also in the Bronx. One of those places where your house is in Manhattan but your garage is in the Bronx. The Marble Hill National Guard Armory was home of the 1st Stryker Cavalry Brigade which I had been attached to in Iraq. I knew the armory well. I knew that the ammunition and ordinance was stored in an underground bunker. There was a very good chance that ARM or the other militias would not be able to locate it unless one of their members had spent time there as I had.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it this way. We take the Jeep as a scout vehicle and one Stryker for muscle. We get in and out as fast as we can.”

  We all agreed. While we were gone, the others would see to it that the other two Strykers got gassed-up and were ready for the drive to the Catskills. It was a plan. I thought it just might be successful.

  The next morning, just after first light, I climbed in the Jeep with Diane, Sabelia and Tuck took the Stryker. We loaded it with .50 cal ammo and recharged the grenade launchers, took two AT4 anti-tank weapons along. While we were gone, Jimmy would supervise the fueling and maintenance on the other Strykers.

  The four of us said a short good-bye and rolled out.

  If I had known what was going to happen, those good-byes would have been a lot longer.

  M2 Machine Gun

  Type: 50 Caliber

  Kill Range: 2000 yards

  Cyclic Rate: 450 rounds per minute

  URBAN WARFARE

  We cut down South Broadway in the Bronx making for West 228th and it didn’t take long before I got nervous. Real nervous. This was the same path we had taken to Kingsbridge Avenue when we’d freed the girls from the ARM encampment, which really wasn’t an encampment as such, truth be told, but a Catholic school complex that served the same purpose.

  Regardless, here we were again.

  The automotive graveyard.

  Just as before, it got real slow going once we crossed the Henry Hudson Parkway because it was just a sea of wrecked cars and buses and taxis and trucks. Avenues were packed tight with them. They were burned and blasted and bullet-ridden, overturned, and smashed into one another in daisy chains of crumpled steel. Someone had been through there and bulldozed a path, heaping cars on top of cars on top of cars. All that mangled metal rose up in ramparts to either side of us. We drove over shattered glass and scattered bones, packs of zombies coming out to greet us that we knocked out of the way and just kept rolling. Neighborhood after neighborhood, we saw the same things again and again: buildings knocked down, blocks of houses burned to blackened ruins, immense bomb craters in the streets, rubble rising in great hills and mounds. It looked like London after the blitz and I don’t think I’m exaggerating.

  We saw dozens of military vehicles that had burned down to skeletal frameworks, having taken direct hits from RPGs and air-to-ground missiles. Great battles had been fought in these streets toward the end. People had died in numbers. The Army and National Guard had engaged ARM and countless other militias in blood wars, leaving behind a cemetery of twisted metal and hundreds of scorched and blown apart corpses.

  The smell was only slightly less offensive than last time.

  Most of the bodies had decayed down to skeletons…those that hadn’t risen and walked away, that was.

  “Somehow,” Diane said, as I drove, “I never thought I’d be coming back here again. Man, I got a real bad feeling about this. Last night I had a really weird dream.”

  I didn’t sigh but I wanted to. Diane loved to talk about her dreams. To her they were more than dreams but visions, prophecies. She was into a lot of that New Age stuff so I guess it wasn’t that surprising. But right then, where we were and what we were doing and the terrible dangers on all fronts, I just didn’t want to hear about them.

  Not that I had a choice, mind you.

  She lit a cigarette. “Check this out. I was dreaming I was in the city and the dead were everywhere, more zombies than I had ever seen before. They were coming from every direction and I was running, running, running. Then it gets kind of weird and misty. I think I forgot most of it, but I do remember a few things. I remember that I was captured by some people and not just any people but some truly fucked-up types that were into some scary shit that my dream-self knew about but refused to even think about, you know? They held me prisoner or something and made me do things I didn’t want to do, but if I didn’t do them they’d kill me. Then there was like this epic battle and I saw a tower rising up, a really big tower and that’s where the real battle was.”

  “Sounds like a good one.”

  She laughed. “You’re so diplomatic, Steve. That’s what I like about you. You think things but you’ll never speak them. Okay. I give you a pass. Say what you’re thinking. I won’t be offended.”

  “I’m not thinking anything.”

  “Sure you are. You think I’m out of my skull, a real whack-job whose brain is burned out from too many joints. And, hey, you’re probably right, but that don’t mean I’m wrong and it don’t mean that what I dream don’t happen sooner or later because it always does.”

  What was I to say to that?

  My rational brain told me it was just bullshit, which I needed to ignore. On the other hand, well, my rational brain had really been through the mill. It had had its ass kicked up and down in these past few months and it was getting so it was willing to consider anything. Diane believed that prophetic dreaming ran in her family line. She had it. Her mother had. Ricki hadn’t had it, but she was an exception. The others did. I was agnostic in just about all things because I guess I thought it made life that much easier—you weren’t tied to any belief system, yet your mind was always open. I pretended as if I didn’t believe any of that dreaming shit, but maybe that was because it disturbed me. The idea of things like that scared the shit out of me. And I’m big enough to admit that.

  I knew that now that Diane had broached her dreaming again that she would not just drop it. We were about to descend into one of our debates on the subject. And we would have.

  But something happened.

  Somebody started taking potshots at us.

  Small caliber. Nothing to get too concerned about. Against the Stryker’s armor, they were less than mosquito bites. I wasn’t worried much about the Jeep either because Tuck had bolted steel panels over the body and windows. Only the windshield was exposed and it was bulletproof polycarbonate.

  Still…the rounds that peppered us off and on were not something I cared for. They clanged off the body armor of the Jeep and I just waited for one to take out a tire. The shooters were hiding in the rampart of wrecked cars. I’m not sure what their point was; there was no way in hell they could stop either vehicle. I figured they were probably just some militia or survivalist idiots with too much time on their hands.

  “Save your ammo,” I warned Tuck.

  “You think I’d waste the fifty on these wannabes?” he said. “You should be ashamed for such an insult to my character.”

  Diane laughed. “Sounds like he’s been reading books again.”

  “Like we don’t have enough problems.”

  The shooting went on-and-off for maybe ten minutes then we were clear of it.

  None of it seemed to bother Diane…then again, whatever did? She simply ignored it, espousing to me her latest theory on the collapse of western—and eastern—civilization. She was of the belief that even though the majority of the world’s population had died out, there were still a significant number of us around and without a food industry in place to meet the demands of our hunger certain unpleasant things would happen.

  “All the canned and freeze-dried food will probably run out in the next few years. I’m not sure what the shelf life of some of that stuff is, but it’s going to run out and that’s a fact.”

  “Agreed.”

  “A lot of us will return to the country to farm and hunt…but some of us won’t. I can see the cities in ten or twenty years, cannibal clans hunting humans.” She shook her head, dragged off her cigarette. “The human race has a history of cannibalis
m that stretches back at least half a million years. You ever heard of the Peking Man? Well, those fossils were of Homo erectus. And there was clear evidence of tribal practices like headhunting and cannibalism. It’s in our blood, man. And when we get hungry enough, we always revert to it.”

  “All the more reason for us to get up to the Catskills and learn to be mountain men…and women.”

  “I wonder what it tastes like.”

  “What?”

  “Human.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t find out.”

  About twenty minutes later—twenty minutes, in which we saw nothing but ruins and wreckage and circling carrion birds, I should add—we pulled onto West 228th and skirted Marble Hill. The neighborhood was in much better shape than most I’d seen. I saw no evidence of any fighting or burning. Yes, looting, but nothing much more than empty houses on overgrown lots, a few tree limbs down, broken windows and abandoned vehicles. I wondered if there were people watching us through dusty windowpanes. Being that we came rolling in with an armored Jeep and a Stryker, I didn’t blame them for not showing their faces. They probably thought we were another militia come to loot.

  The armory was easy enough to find being that I had been there dozens and dozens of times.

  There were still some olive-drab trucks and troop carriers in the parking lot. Their windshields were full of dust and dirt. They hadn’t been moved in a very long time. Things looked okay for the most part. I saw no evidence of ARM or any of those boys around.

  We rolled over to the main entrance.

  As soon as Diane and I stepped out, about a dozen zombies came out to greet us. I think they came around the far side of the building through the trees. Before we could even bring up our CAR-15s, Tuck directed the .50 cal on them and dropped them into a central writhing heap of carrion that brought a stench of green meat to the parking lot.