by Smith, S. L.
“The zombies really do most of the work for us,” Sara was explaining the modifications they had made to Fence Duty to Isherwood. “They press their ugly little faces so hard against the fences. We’ve even found a couple that have actually squeezed their heads through the bars.”
“That’ll probably start happening more and more as their skulls soften with rot.” Isherwood added.
Sara winced at the thought. “Gross.”
“Yeah, we’ll need to reinforce the fences for sure. If they get soft enough or if rain or body juices start acting like a lubricant, they’ll start squeezing through the fences like those old Play-Doh toys. They’re strong. They could even rip their torsos from their—”
“Okay, stop.” Sara said, laughing despite obvious discomfort. “That’s just – it’s grotesque.”
“Yeah, well. The memory will stick that way. You can never have too big or too many fences these days.” He stopped to watch his wife for a second. He admired how proficient she was with the long hunting knife. Despite being shorter than many of the zombies, she stabbed downward and overhanded. He watched as she squared up in front of an especially hairy zombie. The zombie was bald on top, but more than made up for this in facial and chest hair. The zombie was shirtless with a prodigious belly. The rigor mortis had apparently further softened the man’s belly fat. The zombie was pushing so hard against the bars that it was squeezing its belly into three sections. The skin had torn and fat was dripping down the wrought iron bars as a thick black ooze.
Sara brought her arm back and slammed it down through the temple of the thing’s bald head.
“Nice,” Isherwood said. “But you see what I mean about the Play-Doh spaghetti machine? The belly, huh?”
“Just – don’t.” She responded as she averted her gaze from the zombie’s belly as it slid down against the bars.
He laughed and grabbed her from behind. “I sure am glad to be back home.” He said nuzzling the space between her neck and shoulder.
“Don’t,” she said, trying to wriggle out from his grasp. “I’m sweaty and it stinks of zombie.”
“I really missed you, even though it was just a couple days.” He said and kissed her before letting her go.
“That’s sweet,” she said and batted her eyes at him.
After slamming her knife down into another zombie, a teenager wearing a high school sweatshirt and gym shorts, she turned back to Isherwood. “You have to leave again, don’t you?”
“Me?” He asked, somewhat dismayed. “No – I – well, just for the afternoon. Why?”
She shook her head, looking down and putting her hand subconsciously to her belly. “Just a feeling.”
“Oh no, those feelings of yours.”
“Don’t just dismiss it like that.” She said, turning back to the fence.
“I wasn’t!” He said as though hurt by the presumption. “I was trusting it and dreading what you might be … what’s coming.”
She smiled at that, though Isherwood couldn’t see because her back was turned. She grunted as she rammed her knife blade into another skull.
“Wait a sec.” Isherwood blurted out. “Did you just see that?”
“See what?” Sara said as began moving down the line. There was a large gap before the next zombie. It was a twenty, maybe thirty-foot section of fence that was tight against one of the buildings behind the neighboring Poydras building. Their section of the fence was basically the entire western side. It rarely had many visitors since it was the side farthest from the church building. Even Jerry’s tractor barely came out this far.
“That zombie you just skull-tapped … did you see him?”
“I saw that one of his eyes was gone, but that was about it.”
“Not just gone. It was an empty socket. Like it had a glass eye, right?”
“Yeah, but …”
“I think I … yeah.” Isherwood said, peering at the crumpled mound of corpse at foot of the fence. “You see that shirt?” He said, pointing. He knelt down and pulled at the thing’s shirt. It was a work shirt, white with blue lines. There was a nametag sewn onto the left breast pocket.
“Roger Workman?” Sara asked with a grunt of irony.
“’Monty’, but nice.”
“Well? I see your mind spinning about something. What is it?”
“This guy. I recognized him, sorta. He had a glass eye when I saw him last, but that probably went by the wayside pretty quick.” Isherwood was shifting the corpse around from inside the fence. He pulled up on its shoe. The other one shoe was missing and not much remained of that foot. “Look at this shoe or the other foot. Actually, no – don’t look at the other foot. See the tread? Almost completely worn through. Even parts of the sock have worn through.”
“Okay, so? I get it. He’s done a lot of walking.”
“Yeah, but not walking around here. He didn’t work here. He worked in Baton Rouge … at the mechanic’s shop downtown.”
“So what? He made it back home and was still in his work shirt when he got bit. Or, he was driving home and never made it.”
As she said it, Isherwood was pulling at the man’s belt. He rotated the corpse a bit, so he could reach into the man’s back pocket. He fished around for a second and eventually retrieved the man’s wallet.
“Where did he live?” Sara asked with dread.
“Gonzales. Pretty much the opposite direction from St. Maryville.”
“You’re saying he walked all the way here from downtown Baton Rouge? Why?”
“Pretty much. The attacks came hard and fast downtown. Pretty much ground zero. If you’re wearing a downtown work shirt, you probably died downtown. But a mechanic would have had a better chance of getting out, maybe hotwiring a vehicle, and then coming this way. It’s nothing definitive, but still weird that I’d recognize him. I don’t take coincidences like that lightly. It could explain why the waves of dead just keep coming.”
“The River Dead explain that, don’t they?”
“Only partly. The River Dead are always water-logged – flesh about to slough off – but not this guy. His flesh is even a little desiccated. It’s not a good sign. BR is pretty much – I mean, it must be – a boiling cauldron of dead. Hundreds of thousands. The Mississippi is a great barrier, but the bridges are intact. Must be. Probably, hopefully clogged up by now, but even a trickle could be bad.”
“We actually don’t see a lot of those soggy ones, come to think of it.”
“Their range is more limited than the dry ones, but that’s not a rule to live by.” He said, standing back up and exhaling heavily.
“Now what?”
“What?” Isherwood asked innocently.
“That sigh. I know that sigh. What’re you thinking now?”
He smirked and shook his head. “You know all my tells.”
“Yeah, so?”
“It’s just that … that we’ll probably need to seal off those bridges eventually.”
She tried not to, but couldn’t stop herself from crying. It was just a soft sob. Before he could move over to her and try to comfort her, she shook it off and wiped her eyes. “Yeah, okay. But not tonight.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: TRANSMISSIONS
Le’Marcus, Vanessa’s boy, was running up to them as they rounded the corner of the church office, heading back from fence duty. “What is it?” Isherwood asked.
Le’Marcus was spitting out words as fast as he could. He was out of breath and had apparently forgotten in his rush which section of the fence Isherwood had been assigned to. “Radio – message – two different ‘uns—”
“Whoa, slow down, man. Catch your breath. We can wait.” Isherwood and Sara fell into step behind the boy as he motioned for them to follow. They didn’t have far to go. They had already been rounding the corner of the church office. There had been a flower bed of mums and several stands of ferns and ornamental grasses between the sidewalk and the brick walls of the church office. The mums were looking pretty crispy, Sara had been thinking to herself befor
e Le’Marcus surprised them. They crossed the patio between the Adoration Chapel and the front doors of the office. They were made of thick plexi-glass, Isherwood observed as he passed through them. They might have served the survivors well, he thought, if not for all the building’s windows. He doubted they would last too long in a siege.
They turned into the long, horseshoe-shaped hallway which passed through the center of the entire length of the building. There were still plenty of spare rooms in the building. Vanessa and Le’Marcus’ room was one of the few occupied, or even being used. The radio room had been set up in the room next to Vanessa and Le’Marcus’ room. It had once served as Ms. Sandra’s office, Isherwood remembered. She had been the church secretary for longer than he had been alive. He hadn’t yet seen her wandering the streets of St. Maryville with the other “cut men,” as Lucy called them. He was glad for that. It was still so odd for him. Who would have thought, he would sometimes wonder, that I’d one day be stabbing screwdrivers and swords into the heads of so many people in this town. It made him question who the real monster was.
“Two messages, sir. Two of them!” Le’Marcus was still saying as he pushed Isherwood into the radio room.
“Vanessa?” He asked. “What’s going on?”
Le’Marcus’ mother turned to him from her equipment. The expression on her face was a relief to Isherwood. It was somewhat relaxed, but still lined with concentration. She watched the anxiety melt from Isherwood and Sara’s faces, and she smiled. “Oh, we had you worried? Nah, no. No emergencies. Well, first, Livonia has checked in a couple times. They wanted me to tell you, especially Mr. Tommy, how thankful they were for the food and ammo. They didn’t want to worry you but they have noticed an increase in zombies coming from the south since you all passed through.”
Isherwood winced. “I was afraid of that. Tell them to conserve their ammo and to clear out the zombies at their walls with their spears and knives. The gunfire will only draw more.”
“Sure, sure,” Vanessa was nodding. “They know to do that.”
“Thank God,” Sara said. She had noticeably tightened her grip on Isherwood’s arm, as they stood side by side in the doorway of the radio room. “I thought you were gonna say they were or were about to be in a bad way, and that would mean ol’ Ish would be off again.”
Vanessa was nodding with a look of compassion on her face. She pulled Le’Marcus to her unconsciously, despite his resistance to the gesture.
“You – I mean, Le’Marcus – said there were two messages, right?” Isherwood asked, growing impatient.
“Oh, right.” Vanessa was nodding. “There was. It was cutting in and out, you know.
“Right. Well, what’d’you make out?”
“Something – someone – out of Baton Rouge, some sort of group that just escaped the city. They just made it over the bridge.”
“The new bridge?” Isherwood asked. Locals called the two main bridges in Baton Rouge the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ bridges, meaning the Highway 190 and I-10 bridges, respectively.
“Nah, no. The old bridge. They’re coming this way!”
“Our way? Or Livonia way?” Sara asked. “Livonia seems like a straight shot for ‘em. They’d have to take Bueche Road to come our way. How would they know the side roads so well?”
“I know, but no – they’re coming our way.” Vanessa insisted.
Isherwood eyed her suspiciously. “You talked to ‘em?”
She looked down, suddenly distracted by the headset she was holding in her hands. “No, the reception was – nuh-uh. I think they probably heard, you know, our daily broadcasts, is all.”
“That’s fine, Vanessa. That’s fine. You did what we agreed on. That’s fine.”
“Well, how’d they sound?” Sara burst out. She was wrapping her arms around herself tightly. Isherwood could see her chin beginning to quiver. He rubbed her back in comfort.
“This is it, honey. The risk of civilization. We have to take it, but that doesn’t mean we have to trust it.” He paused, thinking. “We’ll send a small crew to Livonia, for now. But I’ll go out and intercept the newcomers. If they pass the sniff test, we’ll ask them to continue with us on to Livonia. If not, well. We’ll do what we’ve got to do. What we’ve got to do.”
EPILOGUE: WILSON
To any alive person that might be watching, the man’s little ruse was obvious. He was bedecked in a yellow, thick rubber pancho. His weapon protruded from his right sleeve, but otherwise his whole body was covered in bite resistant material. Even so, he wouldn’t have lasted any time on the interstate if he hadn’t been covered in zombie entrails and smears of rot.
He looked every bit the bad-ass, but underneath the pancho’s hood, his nostrils were quivering in agony. He was humming to himself to try and distract from the constant waves of heat and putrescence rising up from the concrete.
“Ahh! Seriously?” He complained to the interior of the pancho as gore exploded from a patch of entrails he had stumbled into. He was wearing tall white shrimping boots, so the splash of black ooze didn’t affect him much. Nevertheless, a folded square of a moist towelette emerged from inside the pancho and began dabbing away.
A couple zombies nudged him as they passed him by. A green algae-covered one hovered for a second, sniffing. The zombie had likely been buried in the swamp for a time before changing. If it weren’t for the layers of fetid scum covering what remained of its chewed-up body, it might have noticed the lemon-fresh scent of the towelette, but Wilson was lucky. As it was, the hoard of zombies kept moving around and past him, eastward long the interstate. Usually, the zombies just shambled about the interstate without a common purpose or direction, but just now, Wilson had noticed, something had them moving. He had first noticed the strange behavior several miles back.
He had been in Grand Coteau, a small hamlet north of Lafayette, when everything fell apart. He was pretty well accommodated back in Grand Coteau. He had fortified a wing of St. Charles College there, where, until very recently, he had been a seminarian. The college had been surrounded by a sturdy fence, which also enclosed nut and fruit orchards. It was even the spot of an old dairy. In times past, the Jesuits had risen early in the morning to milk the cows. It was how the college had supported itself. The dairy barn still stood and a herd of cattle was still leased to graze across the grounds. They were still grazing for all Wilson knew. The summer grass would be plentiful for a long time yet.
Nevertheless, he had left it all. He told himself that he preferred to live along the open road, but he knew that was a lie. He had become lonely very quickly, after burying the last of his friends. As much as they repulsed him with their runny noses and endless germs, he needed people. He needed them and so was in search of them.
He had been walking for days. Driving just wasn’t an option on the interstates north and east of Lafayette. Even if wrecks and abandoned vehicles hadn’t blocked most of the road, there were just too many zombies. The hardest part of walking alone had been cutting open the zombie that had loaned him the intestines. He had actually vomited into the corpse’s opened body cavity.
When he reached Interstate 10 north of Lafayette, he had looked west to Houston and East to Baton Rouge and New Orleans. In the end, he had chosen New Orleans. He was a Jesuit novice after all, and his province’s headquarters were just outside the French Quarter. He might as well head that way, though God only knew what sort of nightmare might be waiting for him in a city the size of New Orleans.
It had been easy enough going. There were plenty of gas stations along the way, where he could fill up on sealed packages and jars of food. There were also plenty of moist towelettes in these places to refill the little supply bag that he had slung under one arm. Nearly every other car he passed had at least one twenty-four pack of bottled water stacked inside. He often had a choice between Poland Springs or Ozarka or Kenwood Springs.
As he pushed farther east, the gas stations began to fall away before the vast Atchafalaya swamps and forests.
He at least was aware of this, having past this way before, though he had never paid much attention to the swamps before. They had been merely the green section of roadway between him and where he was going. Now, he was beginning to wonder if he hadn’t been short-sighted in his packing. He had snatched a roadmap at the last Exxon, but he had kept his pack light. He was banking on a neverending stream of gas stations to follow the roadway, but he was finding that the few exits off of I-10 in the Atchafalaya basin were undeveloped and sometimes led to asphalt roads that turned quickly to gravel roads.
He was passing alongside a Volvo station wagon. He let his fingers rub along the side of it as he passed, as he always did. It was one of the man’s many compulsive habits. He noticed, as he had a hundred times before in other cars forever parked on the interstate, that the driver of the Volvo was still banging around inside. It was a man – a father, by the look of it. Wilson turned away quickly when he saw the child seats in the back seat. He focused instead on the driver. He was still clutching a can of Campbell’s Chunky soup. Wilson could see that the can had been gnawed at. It looked like the man had been able to open the other scattered Campbell’s Chunky soup cans with his teeth, but not the last. As he passed, he saw that the man was missing most of his teeth and that the soup can was covered in dried blood as well as gnaw marks. The man was banging the soup can against the window as Wilson passed by. Wilson pitied the man, or what had once been a man. He thought the father, for all he had tried to do to save his family, deserved better than a purgatory of can banging.
But Wilson knew he had to keep moving. If he stopped, he knew, entrails or not, he would be swarmed. Even if he did dispatch the father soundlessly, he knew he would feel compelled to put the children out of their misery, as well. He knew this for certain, because he had been unable to stop himself from doing just that at the first dozen or so station wagons and minivans he had passed before even reaching Lafayette. He had even tried burying the first couple of families.