by Smith, S. L.
Despite all the wasted mental energy spent deliberating, his OCD took over in the end. It was always so. A line of cars stretching endlessly behind him bore the mark of the former seminarian.
His weapon was a steel-tipped pole that a crucifix had once screwed onto, the same one the altar servers had processed into and out of Mass holding. He had modified it slightly to fit its current use.
There were really only three motions required when he went about his business: stabbing a zombie at eye level, waist level, or on the ground. He had done each of these three motions now thousands of times, so his movements had grown very efficient. There was no wasted movement. Everything was streamlined for power and quickness. If it weren’t for the momentary sound of glass breaking, there would have been no sign at all that he had made what he called “the sign of peace.” Even the nearest zombies barely twitched in the direction of the car. Remarkably, the tempered glass of the window didn’t break into a million little pieces, but bore only the single hole. This was how Wilson preferred it. He hated leaving a mess.
*****
Wilson had been noticing the increasingly odd behavior of the increasingly dense groupings of zombies, the farther east he traveled on I-10. They were growing less and less aware of him. They barely noticed him at all since he was covered in zombie gore, but he could tell their collective attention was focusing elsewhere.
Fine, he thought, let’s get a little extra exercise. He flipped a switch in his mind, releasing his OCD from confinement. It felt like the long petals of a flower unfolding from the tiny calyx. He began methodically administering the “sign of peace.” He approached the zombies soundlessly from behind, and they were never the wiser. After a couple more miles, the zombie traffic became bumper to bumper. The highway was clogged with zombies. Wilson was mowing them down like lines of kernels on a cob of corn.
He guessed that he had “peaced” about a solid interstate mile of zombies before his arms stopped working. He fell back from the crowd of zombies and unslung a small package from within his pancho. It was a nylon parachute hammock. He looped the ropes through the openings of the interstate’s concrete side walls. He barely looked over the side before tossing his hammock over. The interstate stood about thirty feet above the water-level of the swamp. He had tied the ropes so that, once inside the body of the hammock, he could lower himself to a few feet below the bridge deck, completely invisible to any passing zombies.
When he had started his road trip, he tried sleeping in vehicles and then under them. He had lasted less than a minute trying to sleep under a vehicle. He had laid down first on his back staring up at the engine. He had tried turning over onto his belly and had nearly wedged himself permanently underneath a Toyota Camry. When his face was finally nose down on the asphalt, he became aware of the twin trickling rivulets of gore, meandering past either side of his face. He had left that place thirty minutes later, leaving behind a medium-sized pile of empty foil-lined moist towelette packages.
He acquired a hammock shortly thereafter. Slinging the hammock high up in trees was perilous, and not just because of the height. He had awakened many times in the early morning to find a crowd of frenzied zombies reaching up to his hammock, as if worshipping Wilson as some pagan idol. The first time this had happened, he was hammocked in a tree which stood alone in an open field. Luckily, it had been a live oak. He was able to climb down along one of its long branches before diving into the edge of the crowd of zombies. He had tucked and rolled like a champ, surprising himself that he didn’t break an ankle or femur.
Wilson settled down into his hammock for the night. He had removed his intestine-covered pancho before nestling into the hammock. He hung the pancho from a hook at the foot of the hammock and laid back holding his spear across his chest. Despite his exhaustion, he ate only a small dinner. His supplies were running dangerously low.
Mowing down all those zombies had been more exhausting than he realized. He slept late into the following morning. The shade underneath the interstate and the overhanging canopy of trees kept Wilson in the dark long after the dawn. He might have kept on sleeping, but for a sudden eruption of sound.
His eyes snapped open at the sound. He had almost forgotten what man-made noises sounded like. He sat bolt upright and was lucky he didn’t jump right out of his hammock. “What the –?” He shouted out loud, forgetting himself. It didn’t matter, though, because the sound began repeating. Neither the living nor the dead would notice him so long as that sound kept ringing out.
After a moment of panic, Wilson recognized the sound of the fog horn. He also noticed that it was blaring at irregular intervals. It was likely not some sort of automatic alarm, preset to go off on a, now outmoded, schedule, or even the death rattle of chemical plant about to explode.
The idea was slow to dawn on him. The sound, if not mechanical, must be manmade. Finally, he thought. Survivors!
He had heard other noises that he thought might’ve been survivors. It might have just been the phantom sounds of a lifetime spent among people. He had caught glimpses of other survivors, but they had all run from him. Some, he thought, had been children that had become feral, probably the result of extensive trauma. Wilson had studied psychology before entering the Jesuits, not that it was all that useful anymore. If it ever was, he thought.
Wilson scrambled out of the hammock and back over the side wall of the bridge. He leaned his spear against the concrete wall, as he gathered the nylon parachute material and the pancho still hanging at one end. The zombies at his back barely noticed him in their frenzied rush towards the fog horn. This was fortunate, since Wilson, too, took little heed of them, despite not wearing the guts.
He eventually did put the pancho back on, thankfully, because he was meticulous in refolding the hammock material. Wilson just couldn’t handle the material sticking out of the hammock’s tiny carrying bag. He was interrupted a half dozen times by zombies lurching towards him. When he had finally succeeded in returning the hammock to its pouch, there was a short wall of bodies surrounding him.
He had folded his OCD back up much like the hammock. His priority now was getting to the source of the sound as fast as possible, while drawing as little attention as possible. He drove himself into the increasingly tightly packed swarms of zombies, rubbing shoulders and everything else with the corpses. His fingers itched like poison ivy for some quality time with his moist towelettes.
He reached the center of the bridge over the Pilot Channel towards the end of the day. He was just in time to watch the fishing boat traveling upstream under the bridge. He called out to it, foolishly breaking cover smack in the middle of a swarm. His pancho did him little good, but it didn’t matter. The onrush of zombies was too strong, and Wilson found himself falling over the side of the bridge.
The Cajun Zombie Chronicles continue in Book Three …
The Kingdom Dead
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