“I’m a retriever.” I said proudly.
“What the hell is a retriever?” She asked. Confusion wrinkled her freckled brow.
We continued our walk and I explained to her what I did. Told her about the Hell Drivers, the bounty hunters and the wasteland wanderers. She acted intrigued by it all and her eyes grew wide when I told her how I lost the last joint on my pinky finger to Pascal.
“So, you fight zombies and bandits to get stuff that people want and they pay you in gold, but apparently you are brave or stupid enough that you could go get all the gold you wanted anyway since it’s just sitting around in the abandoned places. Is that what you are saying?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
“That’s about the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.” She laughed softly. It was light and carefree, all traces of her earlier emotional outburst forgotten.
“I enjoy the work. It’s rewarding, and a man needs something to do when he’s not gambling, so I retrieve.” I don’t know why I felt the need to defend myself to this girl. She did have a point, but I needed a purpose and working a nine to five behind the cargo container walls held no appeal to me.
“You think I could do it? Be a retriever or one of those bounty hunters?” She asked. Apparently, she didn’t find it as ludicrous as she made it sound. “Maybe, I’d make a better Hell Driver, took a lot of skill to drive around here during spring break.”
“Yeah, I think you could. Bounty hunter, definitely. The pet gator would be a nice gimmick.” I said, eying the nasty red eyed reptile that waddled along beside her on its leash. I told her about Nancy and her nurse persona and the modded ambulance. She grew excited over the idea of a kickass woman who hunted down the scum that roamed the badlands.
An old man on a golf cart pulled to a stop in front of us. He looked at me through his coke bottle thickness glasses. “You the guy from the power company? Lights been off for days now. Unacceptable I tell you, just unacceptable.”
I was standing there with enough weapons and ammo strapped to me to fight a small war and this elderly gentleman thought I was from the utility company. Madi nudged me with her elbow.
“Yes, sir. I’m all over it. Should have them back on anytime now, and we are sorry for any inconvenience. I’ve got everything I need right here.” I patted the stock of my M4.
“Very well, then.” He pushed the accelerator and puttered away. Madi choked back a laugh but couldn’t contain the snort that escaped.
We approached a man who was working on an electric golf cart. The golf bags sitting in the bed of the cart held an assortment of garden tools and one golf club. Hoes, pruning shears and shovels were all shoved down in them haphazardly.
“Zack McClelland, welcome to Haven.” He stuck out his hand and I shook it. His grip was strong, his hand thickly calloused, a working man’s hands. His accent was thick, pure Georgia or Alabama. “How the hell did you end up in our backyard?”
“He’s a retriever,” Madi said. “I’m going to check the watermelons and cantaloupes. If I have to eat one more orange, I’m gonna scream. I’ll leave him with you.”
Zack looked confused. “A what?”
“You can call me Rye. Long story, but I’ll be glad to give you the high points. Nice place you have here. Why only one club?” I pointed at the bag on the cart and changed the subject. I took a good look at the greens that had been converted into citrus groves and garden plots. Oranges, lemons, avocados and grapefruits weighed down the branches and the corn, beans and other vegetables looked healthy and vibrant.
He grinned and mimicked swinging the club, “It’s for whacking those damned iguanas, they’ll eat up the citrus groves if you don’t keep them in check. The powers that be would only let me convert the back nine holes to crop land. The old men still like to golf when it’s not too hot. Couple of them even threatened to sue me if you can believe that, when I started cutting the palm trees to reinforce the fences.”
“It’s impressive what you managed to do here. Most of the settlements out west use cargo containers as walls.” The fences and walls looked strong and the moat full of alligators was formidable to say the least. Scary as hell, but formidable.
“It’s an oasis in Hell. Lucky for us the houses are at the back of the golf course, far away from the road. The St. Johns is a good buffer between us and the majority of them, but there’s still plenty on this side of the river. The wall also helps keep the noise contained, but we still try to maintain silence when we’re outside. It’s relatively safe in here now, but it cost us too many good men and women to get the walls up and dig the moat. We’d never have gotten it done without the Navy Seabee’s that escaped Blount Island before it was overrun. The moat’s almost two and a half miles long and we had to fight for nearly every foot of it, not to mention the quarter mile of dredging outside the fences to reach the river to fill the damned thing. Each time we fired up one of the excavators, the undead were drawn in like flies to shit. Every last one of those young sailors was lost to fortify this place. We tried using the cars to lure them off, but every volunteer that went out ended up cut off and couldn’t get back. Jacksonville was home to almost a million people plus all the folks here for work or vacation. I think a few of the volunteer drivers tried to make a run for it and get back to wherever they came from, but there’s nowhere to go. Hell, I’ve considered it a few times myself. Find a boat and just sail away, but I’m needed here.”
“The alligators are a nice touch.” I said. “I spent a lot of time down here as a kid, I’ve never seen a red eyed gator with gray skin.”
“They are afflicted.” He said simply.
“You’ve gotta be shitting me. Zombie gators?”
“I shit you not. They aren’t undead but eating all the zombie flesh has done something to them. Made them meaner, more aggressive and they grow faster too. The undead are a ‘veritable smorgasbord for those toothy fellows’ to quote one of our esteemed members.” That sounded funny coming from someone with such a pronounced accent and I couldn’t help but laugh. I liked this guy, he’d managed to turn chicken shit into chicken salad, I understood why Madi looked up to him. I shook my head in disbelief, afflicted alligators, this new world never failed to come up with the shittiest surprises.
“The big lizards are better than any guard dog, just don’t go trying to pet them, or turn your back on them. The little ones are the worst, they eat constantly, anything that gets too close to the water, even each other if no animals or undead are nearby.” He continued, “It was Maid’s idea to attract them in and it was the right call, they’ve saved us from being overrun more than once. Of course, we didn’t know at the time what was happening to them, so we may have created a new problem for ourselves when the hatchlings reach maturity. Those little bastards sneak through the fence and play hell on anything that will fit in their mouth. They grow so fast, that one Madi is trying to train is only a couple of months old and it’s already a yard long. Best I can guess, is that something changed them at the cellular level, something they inherited from their hungry parents feasting on the undead.”
“I can see how that could be a problem in the future.” I said. He was right, the deck was stacked against their long-term survival. They were at the mercy of the wandering hordes, the hurricanes that frequently hit this area and the future generations of their primary defenses.
“Well, we’ll deal with it, same as everything else. Let’s talk about you, why are you here? Madi told me earlier that you came up the river by boat, loaded for bear.”
I told him about Lakota and the rebuild efforts. I gave him the bare bones version of why I was there. He listened without interrupting. When I was finished, he offered to help in exchange for me taking word back to Lakota about their situation. I agreed, without hesitation. These people were living on borrowed time. It would take something big to evac them. A cruise ship or a naval boat. Something that could sail out of Texas around the continent and pick them up. I filed it away for further contemplation. T
hese were good people who deserved a chance and if there was one thing I knew for sure, it was that President Meadows would move heaven and earth to help these folks. The crazy son of a bitch had driven a train into the heart of Atlanta in a rescue attempt to save his wife and son.
“Come on, I wanna show you something, see if y’all have encountered anything like it out west.” He turned and headed towards the maintenance sheds for the grounds keeping equipment.
22
Dead Man’s Hand
Haven
Jacksonville, FL
He led me around the back of the maintenance sheds situated under the shade of a cluster of massive live oak trees. Beneath one of them a young man sat on an old plastic bucket rocking slowly back and forth. A thick chain padlocked around his waist was anchored to the tree behind him. I saw that his right hand was missing from just above the wrist. The stump was wrapped in a dirt and blood-stained bandage. His eyes were vacant, and a thin line of drool ran from the corner of his mouth to the collar of his filthy shirt. When I got within a few feet of him the stench of body odor and rot turned my stomach. He paid no mind to us or the flies that buzzed around him. I watched in disgust as one crawled from its perch on his lip into his open mouth. I turned away when he closed his mouth and chewed.
“What happened to him?” I asked. I couldn’t believe that these people would let one of their members live like this after all the things I’d seen.
Zack just shook his head. “That’s Sean, well it used to be Sean. Ain’t real sure what to call him anymore, he don’t really respond to no one but Madi. Found his way here a few months ago, the first survivor we’d seen this thing kicked off, but he wasn’t nothing like what you see now. Watch yourself around him, he tries to bite anyone that gets too close, and he might not look it, but he’s fast.”
He paused and lit a cigarette. “He showed up half starved, covered in ticks and insect bites. Claimed he’s from somewhere in Missouri and was here on vacation when the shit hit the fan. Says he survived on his own all this time, but I never really bought that story. He talked and acted tough, but you could tell he was just a lost pup. I think he was with a group, and something happened to them, most likely his fault from the way the story changed from telling to telling. We didn’t ask a lot of questions, we were happy to have another able-bodied young man to help with the work. You’ve seen that a lot of the folks here are getting on up in age and ain’t got the stamina for the groves and gardens. There’s close to fifteen hundred souls in these walls, that’s a lot of people to feed. Three quarters of them are over the age of sixty-five. They do little to nothing to contribute to the work it takes to keep this place running. Most of them were millionaires before the outbreak. Bankers, lawyers, investment brokers, doctors, you know the type, good at making money but unaccustomed to physical labor.”
He took another drag, then flicked the butt away. “Gonna miss those things. Only got a couple packs left. Anyway, young Sean claimed to be a survivalist, some kinda hayseed Rambo. He did have a few good ideas for bolstering our defenses, but most of what he came up with was ridiculous. He got sweet on Madi and like young men often do, wanted to show off his prowess. They were down by the moat, and he was gonna show her why depending on the alligators as a defense was a bad idea and how a trained operative could easily breach our perimeter. According to her, he claimed that even though their bite was powerful, you could hold their mouths shut with two fingers. Apparently, Big Al, that’s the fifteen-footer you saw on the way in, missed that episode on Animal Planet and grabbed hold of him. Madi and a couple of the guards managed to get him free, but his hand was chewed up something fierce. Doc tried to help him, but that idiot refused treatment, said he could take care of it himself. He kept it bandaged so none of us could see it, claimed it was healing nicely. That was another lie, I smelled it when I walked by him a few days later. Smelled like raw hamburger that had been sitting out in the sun all day. Me and some of the others restrained him so Doc could take a proper look. It was infected and turning gangrenous, so Doc chopped it off. It should have healed up nicely and we’d have started calling him Lefty, but his condition kept deteriorating until he became this. The old man knows what he’s doing, he was a surgeon for thirty-four years, so it wasn’t something he didn’t do right. It’s almost like the rot got in his brain too.”
I let that sink in. The alligators here fed solely on the undead, but it was a known fact that the virus didn’t turn the animals. The undead didn’t pay animals any attention at all. I thought about the behavior I’d seen exhibited in the coyotes and other scavenger animals that fed on the zombies. It might not change them into zombie versions of themselves, but it did have some kind of effect on them, made them insatiable and vicious. Best I could figure was Sean not properly treating the wound led to some sort of weakened version of the virus taking hold in his body. He did look like a breathing version of the undead with his waxy skin, dark veins and dilated pupils. If he was capable of transmitting his condition to the other residents then he was extremely dangerous to keep around.
Zack continued, “Yeah, I know what you are thinking. We had that same thought too at first, but he’s not one of them and he hasn’t gotten any worse. We keep a close watch on him though. Some of the group wanted to put him down just to be on the safe side, but I’m no murderer. I told them I wouldn’t do it, and none of them was willing to either so we chained him up for our safety and his, just in case. Come dark, we’ll move him into a storage shed we converted for his use.”
“He could use a bath, he reeks.” I said, still not totally at ease with the situation. If this guy went full zombie, he would decimate this place in a matter of hours.
“We’ve tried, believe me. That stink won’t go away, it’s like it’s a part of him now, seeps from his pores, even though Doc claims physically he’s in excellent condition. Like I said, Madi is the only one he doesn’t growl at, but it’s not fair to put the burden of his care on her, so we do the best we can with the situation. He gets to where I think we can’t manage him, I’ll take him down to the water myself and let Big Al finish the job he started.”
I would need to share this news with the Lakota government when I got back. Animal encounters weren’t uncommon outside the walls, I’d had more than my share of them. Hell, Charlie Safari lost an eye to a bunch of crazed crows. It could be disastrous if some kind of mutated strain of the virus could be spread through the animal population. Pets and livestock could become infected and pass it on to us through close contact or ingestion of their flesh. The scientists in Lakota claimed that the virus targeted human DNA, that’s why the undead didn’t attack animals, but as far as I knew no one had considered what happened when the animals attacked the undead. Bo had taken on plenty of the undead and it didn’t seem to have any ill effects on him. I’d been bitten by a raccoon that was living off the undead trapped in a farmhouse and I was fine. I flipped through my memories of college biology. Herpetology wasn’t a big focus for me, but I did remember that reptiles had some very nasty bacteria living in their mouths. Even a bite from a nonpoisonous reptile could be fatal without proper treatment due to a bacterial infection. I also factored in what they’d told me about the new hatchlings. The thought of an army of zombie gators on my ass made me homesick for my cabin in the desert. We might have venomous snakes, Gila monsters and scorpions to contend with, but at least there were no fifteen-foot alligators roaming around.
23
Hole Card
Haven
Jacksonville, FL
We made sure to stand upwind of smelly Sean while we studied a map. The stench rolled off of him in waves that got worse the warmer the morning became. Zack lit up a cigarette while I explained what I had to do. Madi rejoined us and pulled Zack to the side. I tried, but couldn’t hear what was said, but their body language indicated it was a heated discussion. The pair walked back over to where I stood, trying to look aloof, like I hadn’t been trying to eavesdrop on their conversation.
/>
“The MEPS building is fifteen miles from here as the crow flies. I’d guess there’s probably two hundred thousand undead in the vicinity, maybe more. You’ll never make it on foot, I don’t care how good you are.” Zack paused. “You go out those walls, it’s a one-way trip, I can’t risk you leading those types of numbers back here. Nothing personal, that’s just how it is.”
“Understood,” I said. I didn’t want to bring trouble to this group’s door. I would figure something out one way or another. My original route would only have been two miles inland, dangerous, but still doable. Fifteen miles through zombies numbering in the hundreds of thousands was a whole other story.
“Madi has some ideas. I don’t think she slept at all last night. Woke me up and kept going on and on about you being our best shot of getting out of here. I don’t like it, but it could work. It comes with one more condition though.” His face told the story of a man wrestling with indecision.
“Name your price.” I said.
“You gotta take her with you. It’s the only way I’ll agree to this.” He proceeded to tell me her idea. I had to admit it was probably the only viable option open to me, even though the odds were shit.
Madi stood quietly to the side, excitement and worry evident on her face. I made my decision. The clock was ticking, and I was running out of time. “Pack your bags kid, you’re coming with me.”
Road to Riches: Deadline: Book 1 (Zombie Road) Page 17