By all rights, I should be dead today.
Just last night, I was way out ahead of the group when a zombie came
running up on my left, at the very edge of my peripheral vision.
That zombie isn't the reason I should be dead. I was half-expecting
it. I put a battle-ax in his cerebellum.
I guess part of the problem is living
in a world where I'm half-expecting to see a zombie at the edge of my
peripheral vision. Four-year colleges don't really prepare a guy to
live in a world where it's kind of normal to see a battle-ax. Or a
cerebellum. But even that wasn't the immediate problem.
The immediate problem was the zombie
that came limping up behind me. It was shaking like crazy, like they
usually do. Usually you hear that shaking any time a zombie brushes
up against something, but this time we were way out in the open, so
that second one, the slow one, almost snuck up on me. I put my boot
on the first one's chest, yanked my ax back out of his skull, flipped
the handle around in my hand, and stabbed out blindly behind me. The
top half of my ax blade sweeps back in a long, nasty point. It took
me a lot of nights with a fire and hammer to get it just right. I
went through a fair amount of scrap metal and a couple of ax heads,
too, but it was worth it to be able to protect my own back.
I was once again rewarded for that hard
work, rewarded with the sickly sound of rotten stomach splitting
open. I felt it through the ax handle more than I heard it, really.
That was enough to stop shaky, at least for a second. It was the
pain that stopped him. I don't know anyone who wasn't surprised to
learn that zombies feel pain. It always stops them. Personally, I
figure they're shocked to feel something other than the hunger,
something fresher, sharper.
We don't talk about it, and we try not
to think about it. I think for most of us, the pain makes it harder,
but this time, in this moment, it made things a whole lot easier,
because just for a moment shaky stopped cold. Eventually the hunger
won out, like it always does, and at that point, I heard more
sickening sounds as shaky started pulling himself further up my ax's
blade to get to me. Of course, while shaky had been stopped, I
hadn't been. I had been looking over my shoulder and pulling my
hatchet out of my belt with my right hand. As soon as shaky started
pushing forward, I let go of the ax in my left hand, I spun around,
and I brought the hatchet down as hard as I could onto the back of
shaky's skull.
Because he was falling forward, and
because of the awkward position shaky was in, with his two feet and
two hands plus the butt of my ax handle on the ground, but his head
hanging half-limp in the air, I didn't quite cut his head off with
the narrow blade of the hatchet. That's what I was trying to do. I
guess the easiest way to describe what I actually did is to say that
I turned shaky into the single most gruesome Pez dispenser in
recorded human history. Although it's a stretch to call this time
recorded, or historic, or human.
I could also give a more clinical
description of what happened, and use words like “fractured” and
“lacerated,” but I find that the dark humor helps at least a
little.
They do usually give themselves away by
their shaking, which of course is where their nickname, “shakies,”
comes from. For a while after they get sick, they're
not really shaky as much as they are jerky. They move too fast, too
urgently for the space they're in. At that stage, we call them “live
shakies.” If you lock a live shaky in a closet, he'll sprint two
steps to the far corner and then stop short. He won't hit his head
hard during the stop, but he might bloody up his nose pretty good.
Then he'll pick another corner and sprint toward that one, stopping
short just a hair late again. Leave one in a closet long enough, and
he'd come out with Michael Jackson's nose, but without a concussion.
I think. To be honest, I don't know if even a live shaky has enough
up there to concuss it, but I guess that's beside the point. Anyway,
that stage lasts a couple weeks, or maybe a month at the longest.
After that, they still try to move quickly, but they aren't strong
enough anymore, so they shake instead. Then they're not live shakies
anymore. They're just shakies.
Everyone, even those of us who are
still alive, has had plenty of run-ins with shakies at this point.
It's not like it happens to me because I'm reckless. Well, okay, I
am reckless. I'm almost always way out in front of the group, for
one thing. That hasn't been particularly good for my health, of
course. I lost two fingers on my right hand and most of the
structural integrity of my left knee, both to live shakies who
grabbed an extremity and twisted. There was also the time I came
around a corner and basically ran into three of them. I'd just
killed one and had my hands full with the other two when another guy
in our group came around the corner and shot one of them square in
the face, taking off most of my ear in the process. Of course, if he
hadn't done that, I might not be hearing anything at all now, so I
don't complain about it.
Plus there was that time with the
motorcycle. At first, a lot of us had vehicles, but we ditched them.
Engine noise is like a dinner bell to the shakies. I guess
snarling, semi-conscious fiends don't have the skills it takes to
keep a car running, so when someone else does, the shakies figure him
(or her) for food. But one time I came across this old Indian Chief
from back when World War II was still a current cultural reference.
One of its owners during a more recent historical period had restored
it, and souped it up for added power. The engine on that sucker made
enough noise to draw pretty much every shaky in a one-mile radius. I
used to be kind of a motorcycle guy before all this, so I decided to
take it for a spin. I took it down this little logging road, caning
it and carving my turns on the switchbacks, occasionally letting off
a little to let the shakies think they might get me before twisting
the throttle hard. A lot of them would jump off the switchbacks
above me, sometimes two or three turns above me, trying to be first
in line at the buffet. Of course, something that doesn't have enough
brains to not run in a closet has no chance of grasping the concept
of leading a target, so I was never in any danger from those guys.
They just saved me the trouble of breaking their necks for them.
The ones that made more trouble were
the ones who came up onto the road from below me, the ones coming from
the opposite direction who had been drawn into my path by the noise.
It got to where I couldn't let off the throttle at all for fear that
the sheer volume of shakies reaching out to grab me would slow me to
a stop. At that point, I knew I couldn't keep going much longer.
Every foot or leg or torso that got under my wheels could throw me
off balance bad enough to lose the bike. Finally, I came up on a
turn that I didn't see until too late. I didn't even try to brake.
Instead, I shifted up a gear, gunned the throttle, and got a solid
footing on my pegs. I saw a tree branch overhanging the edge of the
road and aimed for it. When I was about a pace and a half away from
the tree, I jumped and grabbed for the branch. Unlike the shakies, I
know just about everything there is to know about leading a target,
and that day, just about everything was just enough. Not enough to
keep me from turning my shoulders into a practical study in sports
medicine, but that's the price I pay to play the game I play.
Although I suppose it's a stretch to call this a game, or playing, or
a price I could afford.
Anyway, I grabbed that branch, and then
I climbed up a couple more branches, and then I swung my legs up over
branch number three. The motorcycle kept going over the edge of the
road, falling and then tumbling and then sliding down the hill. I
could still hear it running when it came to a stop–they don't make
'em like that anymore. Meanwhile, the shakies started climbing up
the tree, one by one. Hanging upside-down by my legs, I hacked at
their heads or their hands or whatever else they gave me to hack at.
Interesting fact: the shakies can
indeed bleed to death. It's not like in the movies. They'll bleed
and bleed, and their hearts will keep going until they're pumping
nothing but air. That final stage only lasts for about five or ten
seconds, though. After that, they drop like a shot. In general, of
course, it's a pretty bad idea to just wait around to see it happen,
but when you're a good fifteen feet in the air, and the only ones
left are missing their hands up to the elbow, there's no reason not
to watch their last pathetic attempts to climb a tree.
I suppose you could look away, if you
wanted, but I think the dark humor helps a little.
So yeah, I guess I'm reckless, but
that's not my problem, it's just my job. And the job isn't the
problem either. The problem is the reason I have the job.
I'm the only one of us left who can't
outrun a zombie. When we started out, I had a little of my speed
left from my days playing football, but mostly I had pathetic
thirty-year-old-man arthritis from playing football. Now, with the
knee thing and just the daily grind walking around all the time, what
was left before is pretty much gone at this point. One of the
decrepit shakies, sure, I'm faster than those, but if we get a live
one, I have no choice but to turn around and fight it. If we get
sixty of them, I'd still have to turn around. I'm the weak link.
The flat tire. The anchor. And I don't mean the superstar stud
runner who brings the baton to the finish line in the 4x100 relay. I
mean the thing that holds you back. And our group has a rule: no
weak links, no anchors.
It took us a long time to arrive at
that rule. Months, maybe years. I lost count. In the beginning, we
had kids with us, seven of them. Had, as in past tense. One of
them, Liz, is still with us, although she was almost fourteen at the
beginning and her mom almost made the Olympics in the 400 meter low
hurdles. Liz was never a weak link. Now she's barely a kid.
The other six, we lost one by one. After that, Emma (our official unofficial leader) made a rule that nobody's allowed to have more. There was a huge argument when it happened, and it has been an ongoing source of tension ever since. There were couples who were determined to repopulate. I think Emma's right, though, that the apocalypse is not an appropriate place to bring your children. For one thing, group morale goes in the toilet every time we lose a kid. For another thing, we didn't just lose seven kids. We lost them and a lot more good men and women determined to protect them.
The other six, we lost one by one. After that, Emma (our official unofficial leader) made a rule that nobody's allowed to have more. There was a huge argument when it happened, and it has been an ongoing source of tension ever since. There were couples who were determined to repopulate. I think Emma's right, though, that the apocalypse is not an appropriate place to bring your children. For one thing, group morale goes in the toilet every time we lose a kid. For another thing, we didn't just lose seven kids. We lost them and a lot more good men and women determined to protect them.
I almost ended up on that list.
This kid Chuck and his dad were off to the side of the group while
the rest of us were setting up camp when a live one comes barreling
out of the woods straight at them. It would have been the biggest
human being I'd ever seen in my life, if it had still been human. I
swear it was Shaquille O'Neal-sized. I was the first to react. I
knocked it off a ten-foot escarpment with a running forearm shiver.
It grabbed a handful of my shirt and pulled me over with it. I
landed on its chest and just kept hitting it as hard as I could,
until there was nothing showing on its face but cracked bone, and my
good zombie-punching gloves were red all over. I came out with a
couple of broken knuckles, plus half a dozen cracked ribs courtesy of
undead fists the size of cantaloupes, but if it had landed on top of
me...
By all rights, I should be dead today.
As I was climbing back up the little
cliff, I heard footsteps coming toward me. “It's me!” I called
out. I came over the lip of the embankment to the sight of three or
four dozen people putting away bows and shotguns. Chuck ran up to
hug my face and shoulders, which were the only things showing above
the edge of the cliff. Chuck's dad was right behind him, trying to
keep the little one away from the edge of the cliff. No sense
knocking the frying pan down just to have the kid jump in the fire.
“That was amazing!” He told me.
“That was amazing!” Chuck echoed.
“Seriously, how can I repay you?”
The father continued to gush. “There's no way I can repay you. If
you hadn't been there...”
“Just doing my job,” I assured him.
“When you went over with the shaky, I
thought you were dead for sure,” Emma said,
in a tone that might have been curiosity. “That one was a
monster.”
“Yeah,” I answered. “Well, so
am I.”
A week later, Chuck wandered off into
the woods while we were asleep. We never saw him again. Now there
are no more kids, or senior citizens, or walking wounded–aside from
me. There's no back of the pack. Now it's just me, and nobody's
here to protect me. I protect the rest. I clear the path. Because
there can be no weak links in my group, my role in the group is to
not be part of it. If there's a trap, I spring the trap. If I live,
that's less danger everyone else has to deal with. One of these
days, when they kill me, my job is to die loud.
I guess it's a lousy job. It's
definitely a dirty one. I don't think anybody wants it to be this
way, but this is the way it is. When I did that thing with the
motorcycle, I got back to camp about six and a half hours late. The
driving took time, and then there was the fighting, and then I had to
walk back slowly enough that my footsteps would be drowned out by the
sounds of moaning, writhing, dying shakies. When I did get back,
almost everyone was happy to see me. A few of them were really angry
at first, and then even happier, so I guess they were either worried,
or upset that I came back and then overacting to fit in with the mood
of the rest of the group. Emma was the angriest. She yelled at me
for a good fifteen or twenty minutes. I guess that's her job, being
leader. That's how I know she doesn't want to see me dead. It's
just that the same way she doesn't want me to die protecting someone
who isn't gonna make it, she doesn't want any of the rest to die
protecting me when they should be running to safety. I don't want
that either. It isn't fair. None of us like it, so we just don't
talk about it. Every day, I wake up knowing, and not needing to be
told, that I won't be part of the group that day.
At night, though, I am part of the
group again. I am still a part of all the really important parts of
group life: sitting around, playing cards to pass the time, singing
old songs (because they stopped recording music on account of the
event, the only kind of music there is now is old music), and trying
not to think about the fact that life suddenly turned into a B-movie
that didn't end after two hours like it was supposed to. Trying not
to think about how B-movies inevitably end for characters as slow and
ugly as me.
The fact is, they're too kind for their
own good. I'm entitled to a share of any canned, freeze-dried,
vacuum-sealed, or otherwise-preserved food we run across. Even
after several years, that happens more than you'd think. The shakies
are only interested in flesh, and almost all packaged food is edible
way past its expiration date. Thank God for preservatives. But I
turn it down, because they shouldn't be wasting food on a walking
deadman like me. Since I'm out ahead, I come across a lot of
mushrooms that haven't been stepped on and animals that haven't been
scared back into the woods by the larger group. Sometimes there are
berry bushes. I have plenty to eat from what I can pick and shoot.
I took a beautiful old recurve bow out of a hunting cabin near the
very beginning of this whole thing. These days, I get more and
better fresh meat than I ever did in my old life. The extinction of
humanity has been great for wildlife. I typically get about two deer
a week, out of the dozens I see. I share with the group, because
they're glad to have it, and because it would go bad before I could
eat all of it anyway.
Occasionally we run out of the
grocery-store stuff, and the whole group forages for food, the same
as I do. They eat a lot of dandelion roots during those times.
Trying to stay out ahead of the group on two bum legs and one knee
that's flat-out injured, I don't really have any time for digging,
but for their sake, I try not to step on dandelions. Someday, there
probably won't be any more of the processed food left to find, and
everyone will do a lot of foraging every day. Personally, I hope to
live long enough to see those days, but for everyone else's sake, I
hope they never come.
Sometimes, when someone else gets hurt
too bad to outrun the live ones, they send him (or her) up ahead with
me. That's the worst. I hate that. Emma has always told me I'm not
allowed to protect anyone else who gets sent ahead with me, but, I
mean, do you think I can help it? Most of these people are my
friends, and even the ones I don't like, we've been through a lot
together. A month or so back, I about damn near got my right arm
torn off by a shaky I didn't see coming, because I was keeping
another one off Chuck's dad. He didn't make it. Now I'm weak on the
right side. I have to hide it from Emma, or she'd really let me have
it. I do what I can, within reason, but sometimes there are just too
many...
Like I said, now it's just me.
By all rights I should be dead today.
A few of the youngest guys in the group
look up to me. I guess they see me as someone to be admired.
Anyway, they call me “mini-Frankenstein,” and they're always
telling stories about me, saying that I'll outlive all of us. If the
population of Earth was seven billion shakies, they say, it would
take seven billion and one to stop me. It can be fun to listen to,
and I'd like to think it's true, but I know better. I've just been
lucky so far.
I guess if we ever stopped to think
about it, we'd realize how unlikely it is for any of us to be alive.
For one thing, we ended up in the perfect location, up here in the
mountains, with lots of good places to hide. If my boss hadn't sent
me on a ski retreat, if instead he'd booked a luau somewhere in the
tropics, where the populations are higher, I'd be shaking and eating
people right now. Plus, disease doesn't spread so easily up at this
altitude. We pretty much get a nightly freeze, which kills viruses
and shakies. Now I'm imagining them out there freezing to death,
shivering. I guess they wouldn't really look any different from
regular shakies.
I told you the humor helps.
It would be bad back in that steamy
excuse for a hellhole known as Florida, where my wife and I used to
live. Where I tell myself my wife still lives. It wouldn't be quite
as bad, though, because of the old people. I figure that when an old
person turns, they never go through the jerky, frantic stage, and
skip right to the stumbling and shaking. But I don't know for sure.
I've never seen an old-person shaky.
So anyway, last night, a shaky snuck up
on me way out in the open. We don't spend much time way out in the
open, because even the regular shakies can surprise you there
sometimes, but we were pretty sure we were hot on the trail of our
best news all month. In the early afternoon, we came across a poster
of sorts. It was very plain, no pictures or anything. It just said:
If
you can read this, you are welcomed.
←
We
followed the arrow, and before too long, we came upon a similar
poster. This one had an arrow pointing right instead of left, and
below the arrow, someone had handwritten, “If you know your ABC's,
you will be welcome.” “ABC” and “welcome” had been
underlined, apparently by the same hand.
I
guess I'm not the only one who thinks humor helps.
Every
few intersections, we came upon a new sign, indicating a new turn.
One of them even had the same handwritten message as before. It was
just getting dark when I found a sign that pointed up a dirt driveway
that led back into the woods. I walked down the driveway. After a
few steps, I could see the silhouette of a house. Not just any
house, a big house. The kind of house that was the best out of a
very rich person's several summer homes.
Then
I saw another silhouette in the woods–a shaky, twitching and giving
himself away. I could easily have plugged it with an arrow, but I
decided that would be a bad idea. For starters, I didn't really want
to risk losing the arrow. Sure, I break the points on them all the
time when I shoot something and hit bone. Arrowheads I can replace.
I make them out of old tin cans. They fly like crap and they break a
lot easier than the nice ones I used to have, but at least they're
lethal. The shafts, on the other hand, I can't really replace. I
found a handful of really nice hunting arrows in the cabin with the
recurve. The shafts on them were well-made–strong and durable and
perfectly balanced. There were also some very nice arrowheads
screwed onto those shafts, but the last of those broke apart on some
shaky's skull a long, long time ago. I can put my shoddy-ass tin-can
heads on the shafts and still hit whatever I'm shooting at, but I
doubt I can make a shaft good enough to deliver the arrowheads I make
accurately. So if shaky took a while to die with my arrow in him, I
would be searching in the woods a good long time to get the arrow
back. Plus, there was the off chance that I might hit shaky without
killing him at all, and then later he could show up and surprise us
in our sleep, and then I would have failed to do my job properly out
of sheer laziness. That would be no good at all. I needed an
up-close kill.
I
took a couple steps into the woods, moving sideways, intending to get
behind shaky for an easy kill, but then I lost shaky behind a tree.
I could still hear it aimlessly brushing against leaves and branches,
but I couldn't tell which direction it had moved, which direction he
was moving. Risky as it was, I needed to get shaky to come to me. I
looked down, spotted a twig, and stepped on it. The aimless,
listless brushing sounds continued. No good. I took another step,
this one onto a stick with a bunch of twigs sticking out of it. That
was enough noise to get shaky's attention. The brushing became more
focused, more urgent, more consistent. Now I could get a direction
on it. I slipped behind a tree, reached up to the top of my
backpack, and grabbed the handle of my aluminum baseball bat. I
pulled it up and out as quietly as I could and got into a crouch.
For a second, I thought about what my position in the group, living
as human bait. That's what my life amounted to. What Emma had
demanded of me, what she still demanded of me, it wasn't fair. I let
my anger heat my grip on the bat from red-knuckle to white-knuckle.
When shaky finally came around the tree, I let loose a long, looping
swing. I heard a femur break. I felt a dull, hot, radiating pain in
my right shoulder. I saw shaky do three-quarters of a flip over my
bat and land face-up. It rolled over two times, then a third, coming
toward me. Now face-down on the ground, it looked up at me, and I
could see that it used to be a she. It pulled itself toward me with
its hands. I stomped down on its head, as hard as I could. I heard
a disgusting, crackling, crumpling sound. Shaky stopped crawling.
I
made my way toward the house, taking the single shaky as a good omen.
Even in safe places, a loner shows up every once in a while. A
place so inhospitable that even shakies stay away is not a place I
want to see. It didn't take me long to get to the front porch, but
when I climbed up to the front door, the smell made me hesitate. The
stench from inside was so strong that I could smell it a step away
from the door. We had been sleeping more or less outside for the
last month, so I thought that maybe I just wasn't used to the human
smell of lived-in places. That idea stopped making sense pretty
quickly when I stepped inside, looked around, and noticed some human
skeletons stacked haphazardly in the corner. I couldn't tell exactly
how many there were, but there was a pile.
I
turned around to leave, but just when I got out of the door, I saw
someone starting to climb the stairs onto the front porch. Someone
not shaking. Human. Ana. Someone from our group. I stood in the
doorway, blocking her.
“We're
not going in there tonight,” I told her.
“The
hell we're not,” she said. “It's late.”
“You
don't want to go in there,” I insisted. “Trust me, you don't
want to go in there.” But Ana was taller than me. She just leaned
over my shoulder and looked in for herself. Then she leaned back.
Her face turned white. She shook her head, and I shook mine in
answer. At that moment, Emma joined Anna on the porch. “You don't
wanna go in there,” I told her. “None of us are going to want to
go in there.”
“He's
not in the group,” Emma said to Ana. “He doesn't make the
decisions.” Ana, still white-faced, just looked Emma square in the
eye and shook her head. Emma raised an eyebrow. Ana shook her head
again. Emma tried to push past me to look, and tried to look around
me, but I was taller than her and pretty much as wide as the doorway.
I wasn't going anywhere.
Finally,
Ana found her words. “It's dead people,” she said. “Dead
people live here.”
“What
do you mean?” Emma asked.
“There's
a pile of skeletons in the corner,” Ana answered. “Nobody's
going to want to stay here.”
“At
this point, what the others might want is irrelevant,” Emma said.
“It's already dark. Too late to turn around and go anywhere else.”
“Are
you sure there's nowhere else?” I asked her. “It wouldn't have
to be anything great to be better than that,” I said jerking a
thumb back over my shoulder to indicate the macabre, haphazard décor.
“I
wish,” Emma answered, shaking her head.
I
cursed myself, cursed my vain insistence on outsmarting shaky, cursed
my greed at sacrificing crucial minutes to save an arrow-shaft,
cursed the anger that was satisfied little by all the cursing, and
much better by killing shakies up close and personal. If I'd just
put a broadhead in shaky's eye from fifty feet, something I practiced
doing every day, I would have reached the house sooner. Then I could
have run back to intercept Ana before we got here, told her the house
had burned to the ground, and found somewhere else to stay. Sure,
running meant I would have had to wake up an hour early just loosen
up my legs enough to walk in the morning, but I doubt the group would
think one of my arrows and an hour of my sleep are worth the anywhere
near the price they were about to be charged for them.
“It's
not your fault,” Emma said. “You did the smart thing. You made
the right tactical choice, because you assumed we were going to be
staying here. Unfortunately, you were right.”
“It
sure feels like my fault,” I told her.
With
that, I turned back into the house and reached into my pack for my
thin bedroll. I used the blankets to cover the pile of skeletons.
They couldn't quite do the job. I kicked the bones at the edge into
a more compact pile, doing my best not to think morbid thoughts about
it. I made a mental note to keep the side of the blankets facing
down now on the outside when I slept in them, at least until I made
some blankets out of deer hide to replace these ones. I made a
second mental note to do that soon.
I
barely finished my work and my mental notes before the bulk of the
group arrived. A few young men charged in the door and made straight
for the kitchen while Emma, Ana and I were still doing a sweep of the
house. There wasn't any food in there, but they did find some
alcohol. They invited me to drink with them, but I turned them down.
When even the oldest people you know are five years younger than
you, but they think they're ten years younger, they look fifteen
years younger and they feel twenty years younger, it's probably time
to stop partying.
The
boys didn't let it stop them, of course, and I didn't blame them. We
all live the kind of life that requires unwinding from. It can be
kind of amusing to watch them at it. We all have our old phones and
iPods with music on them from before the event, and we all guard them
with our lives. Ana even made a pedal charger for them. She's good
at that kind of thing. It's heavy enough that I have to carry it,
but it works. So when the guys have a party, they're usually passing
a bottle around, drinking from the same one, but they're all dancing
to different music. To me, it's kind of funny to watch. The parties
I remember worked the opposite way.
I'm
not a big fan of the music those guys listen to when they party.
They guard their players jealously, but they'll share half of their
headphones with you for a while. Not that they have to share long.
I get sick of that new (well, newer) stuff pretty fast. Of course,
the people who played the music I grew up with are all in the AARP
now. Or they would be, if they weren't zombies instead.
While
the guys were enjoying the kitchen, the rest of the group headed
upstairs to get some rest. The smell wasn't as bad up there. There
was still a smell, but it wasn't as bad where the group slept as it
was right next to the pile of skeletons. In fact, the whole night
turned out to be a lot better than I expected. Everyone was
disappointed to find that all those signs just led to an empty house,
but it wasn't from the same high to the same low that I feared. I
had gone from the primal feeling of accomplishment that comes from
killing a shaky all the way down to finding a mass grave without the
grave. They went from exhausted and hopeful to exhausted and holding
their noses. The guys in the kitchen went from exhausted and hopeful
to drunk, and as far as they were concerned, that wasn't even a step
down. It's fair to say I went to sleep feeling better about the
evening than I'd felt about it while I was still awake.
-------
I
awoke very suddenly this morning. It came so suddenly that it was
not as much morning as it was still night. The sound of something
pounding on a wood door woke me. It was coming from the basement. I
was sleeping in the front room. That's part of my job. Wherever
zombies are most likely to come into camp, I sleep closest to it.
When camp is some CEO's summer house, that's the front door. I
remembered that Ana had told me the night before that there was a
basement, and that there wasn't a whole lot in the basement but a
heavy wood door that was locked securely from the inside. I wasn't
sure who or what was doing the pounding, and I couldn't think of a
good reason why they would be pounding on that door, but I was pretty
sure they didn't have a check from Publisher's Clearinghouse. It
seemed like the kind of thing the rest of the group should know
about.
“Wake
up!” I shouted at the top of my lungs as I gathered my weapons.
“Weird noises downstairs! Gonna check it out!”
To
emphasize my message, I took the stairs to the basement in leaps,
five at a time, stomping both feet as I landed. I heard loud
popping, creaking and groaning sounds–but that was just from my
knees. The creaking and moaning of the wooden stairs was drowned out
by the hollow, bass-drum booming of my feet landing hard on the
stairs. When I got to the bottom, I noticed two new sounds. The
pounding on the door had changed. Now it was the sound of pounding
on a door that wasn't going to hold up for long. I also heard, very
faintly, the sounds of shaking feet on a dirt floor.
Having
a good idea of what was about to knock that door down, I decided to
speed up the inevitable. I kicked the door as hard as I could. It
slammed into whatever was on the other side with a dull thud and then
vibrated on its hinges, half-open. Now I could definitely hear
uneven, unsteady, disorganized footsteps. I grabbed the door with my
right hand and pulled it most of the way shut. My left hand went for
my recurve bow. I nocked two arrows, one to either side of my bow,
and fired. Then I fired two more, and another two more. I could
still hear feet in the dirt, but the sound was more distant now. I
opened the basement door all the way and stepped in.
The
sight that greeted me was like none I had seen before. There wasn't
actually a dirt floor in the room. It was a finished basement, with
a floor mostly covered in dirt. The dirt was from a hole toward the
back of the room. The hole was more or less round, probably deeper
than the average man is tall (it was definitely deeper than my
height) and almost twice that large in diameter. There was a big
crowd of shakies in the hole. A big crowd.
“So
that's what a million shakies looks like!” I shouted, relaying the
situation to Emma and the rest, hoping they heard.
“Worst
lottery ever,” I muttered under my breath.
At
that moment, a live one crawled out of a big, broken pipe entering
the back side of the hole. They must have crawled up that pipe and
broken up through the floor somehow. They must have killed the
people who had lived here before, the ones who had put up a sign.
Somehow, one of those people must have escaped and come back to seal
the basement before crawling away through the pipe, hoping to save
anyone who stumbled across the house. It had almost worked. I
wondered why that survivor hadn't then made his (or her) way through
town to take the posters down. My wondering was cut short when live
shaky climbed up out of the hole.
Enraged
that I might die for my anonymous predecessor’s laziness, I put my
bow down behind me and pull out my battle-ax. I let that anger
build. I'm not Luke Skywalker. I'm allowed to release my anger. I
release most of it into a feral swing of my ax. The long blade goes
straight through shaky, sort of cutting him in half and sort of
pulverizing him. Behind him, the hole is filling up even more. The
shakies are packed so tight inside that they're starting to climb on
top of one another. For the ones on top, the hole is only
waist-deep. They're struggling to climb up out. Two more live ones
pop out of the hole, and a pack of the regular ones stream out slowly
behind them.
“Who
wants a bite?” I ask them, blustering a battle cry at the top of
my lungs. “I'm not going anywhere!”
By
all rights, I should be dead today.
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