Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse (26 page)

“It’ll be getting toward dusk by the time we get up there, so keep your eyes open for any place looks like we can put up for the night.”

They came across a small farm that had been an equestrian training school an hour before sunset. Carter had knocked on the door of the farmhouse, rang the bell, and peered through the windows before deciding it was safe to break in, which only took pushing the door open: the owners had left without locking the place, figuring they’d never come back. Or, maybe they figured they might lose the keys in the time they’d be gone and wouldn’t want to have to break in. He didn’t know. He’d locked the door to his house before leaving. And he’d moved everything he thought would be worth stealing to the attic, figuring staples-focused looters wouldn’t waste time on opportunity theft if there was nothing he valued laying around.

He and the boy cleared all the rooms in the house one-by-one, he wanting to make sure there were no living or undead inside. Then they checked the stables, an auxiliary storage building and a car garage. They grabbed some hay and littered two stables with it, filled the feeding troughs and put the horses in for the night.

“Now, we can eat,” Carter said.

He rooted around the pantry at the bottom of a staircase connected to the kitchen, using a small flashlight to play across the shelves, which were stocked with canned and dry goods. Whoever had lived here left quickly to have abandoned so much food. But, then, everyone everywhere had either left quickly or been killed quickly. The news of the spread of the plague had gone from centering on the quarantine of Los Angeles the first month to the sudden appearance of it nearly everywhere a month or so later. After that, there was a national panic as everyone realized everywhere was unsafe and began to flee.

He had told his wife that no place was safe, so it was just as well they stayed put and waited it out. Neither of his sons thought that was a good idea, but he reckoned that was because they both had small children to look after. He had had a heated argument with his older son, Carl, when he had shown up on their doorstep to tell him they were there to take him and Jolene with them to his hunting camp outside the Mark Twain National Forest.

“Carl, it’s not anymore safe there than it is here,” he had said. “This plague is everywhere at the same time. Missouri’s no more safe than Oklahoma. You know that.”

“But Dad, it’s out in the sticks, far from populated areas, so there will at least be less of them,” Carl had said. “And food is going to get scarce. People are going to end up killing each other, too. It won’t be just the zombies.”

He had laughed at that. Zombies. “These aren’t the dead risen from the grave, son, they’re infected with something. Somebody will figure something out.”

“Maybe, but nobody’s gonna figure anything out soon. You and mom have to come with us, now,” Carl had said. “Peter’s already on the way. We have to leave now, though. When it hits Oke City and Tulsa, you won’t be able to go anywhere on the roads. It’ll be pandemonium just like LA and Chicago and New York. We can all wait it out together.”

He had shaken his head at that, the thought that he would abandon the family farm, now his after three generations. Not that he had ever farmed it. He and Jolene had a large garden behind the house, but the rest of the 500 acres he rented out. He owned a small auto repair shop in Hammon and his wife worked as a dental hygienist.

“Listen, son, I know you mean well, but your mother and I are gonna stay right here and wait this thing out. We’ve got everything we need in the house to survive for close enough to a year,” Carter had said. “Don’t try to change my mind about this; your mother and I have already talked it through, and we’re staying put.”

Carl’s shoulders had sagged and he stared at the ground. “Dad...”

“I understand you’ve got to do what you think is right by your family, so you do that. Meet Peter at the hunting camp, tell him we’re fine, and we’ll be here when the trouble has passed.”

His son had just nodded a few tiny head movements. “Okay, but will you at least do me one favor? Will you both at least keep your cell phones turned on and on your persons? Especially if you decide later to come? So we can keep in contact and know where you are?”

Carter had reached out and placed his hand on his son’s shoulder and smiled. “Carl, you’ll know where we are, because we’ll be here,” he had said, “but we’ll make sure we keep the phones on.”

But he had left the phone on the desk in his office at the shop when a horde of hundreds of undead had swarmed through Hammon late one morning a month earlier. He’d grabbed the Remington 870 he kept in the corner of the room and shot his way to his truck, and then had driven to the dental office where his wife worked, only to find it had been abandoned, the receptionist and a patient both eaten to death in the lobby.

He’d driven home to find an empty house. He tried calling Jolene on her cell, but all the calls rang through to voicemail. He’d spent several weeks holed up in the house, waiting for Jolene to come home. He had called Jolene’s phone every day and left voicemail. And then he saw the beginning of a zombie horde making its way down the road toward his house from the window of the master bedroom and realized everything was much worse than he had thought it had been, and he would probably never see Jolene ever again. He spent five minutes throwing supplies into a backpack, grabbed his Winchester rifle and 9 millimeter Smith & Wesson pistol, and raced out to his truck, driving off furiously in front of the zombie phalanx.

Away from Hammon.

Away from his wife’s dental office.

Away from the farm.

He was almost to Texas when he had realized he was driving in the wrong direction. He had made his way over to Interstate 44 and began the long drive north until traffic jams around Fort Sill had forced him out of his truck and on foot. He had made his way on side roads until coming across the boy in Chickasha.

Carter awoke to the sounds of several dirt bikes racing around in the early light of dawn. In the distance, the figures were shades of gray whirring up and down the main road adjoining the driveway. He was sure it was the same gang that had been inexplicably shadowing them for the past few days. Why?

He slipped his feet into his cowboy boots and went downstairs, surprised to find the boy already awake, eating a bowl of corn flakes with condensed milk from a can.

“They’re back.”

Carter nodded. “Any idea why they’re following you?”

The boy shook his head and ate a spoonful of cereal.

“When you’re done with breakfast, come out to the barn and help me finish saddling up the horses,” Carter said.

Outside the whine of the engines rose and fell over and over again. Carter wondered what the hell they were doing on the bikes just as much as he wondered why. He knew it was the boy they were after, but what could the boy mean to them? Why would several men be interested in a boy who was maybe eleven or thirteen years old? And then he shuddered at the realization.

“There’s no fucking way that can be the reason,” he muttered as he cinched the saddle straps under his horse.

The whining of the bikes was getting closer, and it was only then that Carter noticed something peculiar about the rise and fall of the noise. It was as if the they were riding up and down the road in short bursts, getting incrementally closer instead of just riding up on the farm. They knew he was armed and that he would shoot, so it made sense they were keeping their distance. But they had to know he knew they were coming. He grabbed a pair of binoculars from the saddle bags and climbed the ladder to the loft, pushing through the loft doors and scanning for the riders on the road. They were, indeed, riding somewhat slowly back and forth. What for?

He glanced down at the boy. Normal kid. He put the glasses back up to his face and scanned the road some more. His jaw dropped: the bikers were luring a horde of hundreds of zombies up the road, racing to and from the horde and acting as bait. He looked back down at the boy.

“Hey, I need you to run back into the house real quick and get a backpack I left on the kitchen table. It’s got food in it we’ll need for the next couple of days of travel,” Carter said, making his way down from the loft. “Hurry. We’ve got maybe five minutes left here before we have to start riding hard.”

The kid nodded and sprinted out of the barn. Carter took the kids messenger bag off the saddle horn and marveled at its weight. The kid had been carrying this for days across the state. He dropped it to the ground and zipped it open.

It was filled with gold jewelry of every type imaginable: rings, bracelets, necklaces. He lifted a handful of it and stared at it in disbelief. Diamond engagement rings and gold earrings slipped from his hand. He dropped the jewelry into the bag and shook his head. The desires of the old world hadn’t ended, not yet, not completely.

Outside, the whining of the dirt bikes grew closer.

The kid came back with the bag of food and stopped suddenly, his eyes flicking between the open bag on the floor near his horse and Carter. He dropped the food and his hand drifted to the pistol on his hip.

“That’s my bag. You had no right looking through it.”

“Son, you’ve done brought a hailstorm of a dilemma on us,” Carter said. “I’m not interested in this bag of yours, but I reckon the men on the bikes are. I could tell you fine, go on and do that. It’s yours and it’s a free country, and if you weren’t twelve or thirteen-years old and your parents were still around, things would be different. But they aren’t different, because here is where we are.

“I don’t know why you’re carrying this bag of gold with you, and, frankly, I don’t care. But the men out there that been following us do care. They think it’s worth something and they want it, and for reasons we’ll never know, they’re going to some extraordinary lengths to get it.

“But I’m going to tell you that this bag of yours is never going to be anything but a source of trouble. You need to leave it here.”

The kid stared at him for a moment and then dropped his eyes. “My Dad said gold is the money of all time. That if you had it, you would be okay in the future because you could always trade it for something.”

Carter nodded. “That was the old world, the one the zombies are destroying. Zombies don’t care about gold. You can’t eat it. It’s not useful for anything that isn’t jewelry. And there’s nobody who wants it.”

“They killed my parents to get it.”

“They’re still living in the past. Right now, a lot of people are still thinking the lifestyle we had will return, but it won’t,” Carter said. “This world is done. The rules have changed.”

The kid just stared at the ground.

“My Dad said to ...,” the kid said, suddenly sobbing, tears dripping from his eyes onto the dirt floor of the barn. “He said if I had this, it would save me in the future.”

The whirr of a dirt bike rolled close to the barn and then turned and circled the house before lowering to a putter as it made its way back to the main road. Carter had seen his own sons cry like this when they couldn’t understand why what they had done was wrong, confused by the differences in what their consciousnesses told them was what okay and the reality that the world didn’t work that way. As always, there was a compromise.

“Grab a handful and stuff it in your pocket, but leave the rest here,” Carter said. “But we’ve got to leave, now. If it’s ever worth anything again, what you can stuff in your pockets will be more than enough.”

The kid stuffed his pockets quickly while avoiding Carter’s gaze and then climbed onto his horse. Carter grabbed the bag and rode out the front door directly at the nearest  man on a motorcycle, held the bag high and tossed it to the ground. The zombies were only yards behind him, and the rider looked over his shoulder, nodded back at Carter, and zoomed away.

The zombies paused for a moment and one of them stepped out from the crowd, then another, and began looking around. They settled on Carter and the boy on their horses and the group began moving toward them. Carter surveyed the hundreds of undead shuffling toward him, the sun now fully up and heating the Oklahoma morning. It was going to be hot.

Carter looked over at the kid. “It’s going to work out just fine. One of the things you’ll learn about life is that everything always works out in the end. Maybe not to your favor, but everything ends. And then something else begins.”

He nodded toward the approaching horde. “Even this won’t stay like this forever. It’ll change, too, and maybe not to our advantage. Come on, let’s get movin’.”

The Only Way Out is Through

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - Day 1349

Rain is cold.

The rain poured from the evening sky, drenching Will. He tried not to shudder, not to move, not to make a sound. For a moment, he remembered the first girl who had ever taken him for an intentional walk in the rain. Susan. Sue. Brown hair, brown eyes, the rain smoothing her clothing against her body into an hourglass of perfect desire. She had liked walking in the rain. He remembered it was supposed to be romantic.

Rain is cold.

He huddled against the crumbling cinder block wall, his P-90 machine gun clutched to his body, listening. The rain drowned out the ambient noise. Will cocked an ear and listened harder, trying to make out the sounds of a rhythm, of a zombie on the prowl. But the rain did just as much for the undead as it did for him: masked movement. He turned his head and looked through the darkness, wondering about his next move. He saw nothing. But, still, the dead could be anywhere.