The Dark Knight (Apocalypse Weird 2) (4 page)

Waiting for him.

Let the dice fly.

He kept on walking past his house.  Toward the front
entrance.  The light in Ritter’s “Gatehouse” was still on.  Holiday snorted. 
“Gatehouse.”  Frank wants to be king of a castle.  Fine.

He dialed in the combination for the padlock at the gate,
heard it “click” gently in the dark, slipped through the gate, reached back in,
and snapped the lock closed again.  Checking it twice.  Making sure it was
locked. 

Then he spun the combination dial.

Let the dice fly.

And he was off, out onto the street and into the night.  Off
in the dark.

He wasn’t going to drink.

Outside the gate, standing under palms that lined the
entrance, Holiday watched as ground-lighting timed to some un-regarding
automated system that didn’t care if the world had ended or gone on, threw
shafts of golden light up into the high fronds above.  Holiday turned and
looked down the hill, following the road.  He was facing west.  The truth was,
he had no intention of drinking.  Holiday knew he needed to earn their trust
back.  Frank’s.  Ash’s.  Everyone’s.

Ash.

All that hot day, as they’d labored under Frank’s direction
to hammer sheets of plywood into place across the windows of the individual
townhomes that formed the outer wall of the “Castle”, he’d thought about her. 
Nailing crossbeams into place along the studs to back the wood from the
battening it might take some day when the dead and crazy came calling, he’d
thought about how to get back into the group.  How to get back to what they’d
almost had in the pool that night.  He and Ash. 

Hopefully that would never happen.  The dead showing up,
that is.  Hopefully the corpses had all followed the natural contours of the
land and wandered toward the coast.  A battering forest of fists at their
plywood-sealed windows and locked doors, and even the someday actual front gate
Frank promised them, should never happen.  Because if it did, where could they
run to next if the walls collapsed? 

Holiday tried to think of some way to seal the gaps between
the townhome clusters that made up the outer wall.  They’d all tried to think
of something that could be done to secure the gaping holes in their perimeter. 
If all the zombies back at the Green Front parking lot concentrated at any one
point along the flimsy wire mesh fence, then it was over for all of them. 
There’d be nothing they could do but run.

A run to nowhere as fast as they could for as long as they
could.  Which wasn’t forever.  Holiday remembered what it was like to be chased
by the dead through the night with no place to hide.  You could only run for so
long.  And you never knew what was ahead of you, except probably more of them. 
And the dead never seemed to tire of chasing.

“Build a cinderblock wall,” Candace had offered.

They’d discussed that.  But they’d need the wall to reach at
least two stories high.  The amount of cinderblocks they’d need, brick or
whatever they could get their hands on, was beyond what the Home Depot had in
stock.  The next building supply store was two cities away across dozens of
neighborhoods.  Neighborhoods most likely... infested with the dead. 

Was that the right word?  Infested?

Neighborhoods where each house could hide dozens of
once-humans turned to frenzied, almost unstoppable, killers.  Zombies.  That’s
what everyone was calling them.

Infected.

Each supply run farther and farther from what was known
might draw more, many more, zombies back to the Vineyards townhome complex. 
Back to where it was safe, for now.  Back to the one place that seemed safe in
the world and what was left of it.

A herd of dead.

Infected.

Like animals.

Even less than.

Dante was the next to try.  He’d suggested they dig a moat.

That plan was pretty good, initially.  Until they considered
the closeness of the slope that led down from the road above the Vineyards,
leading up to the intersection and its proximity to the “Eastern Wall” they
would start building next.  A good rain, which might happen if this was an El
Ni
ń
o year, no
one could remember if it was, and a hill that had been destabilized by a slit
trench would slide down and crash through their wall. 

An El Ni
ń
o
year was a year of almost torrential monsoon-like rains and flooding.  Before
the world had ended two weeks ago, those El Ni
ń
o
years had almost seemed like the end of the world as city services and news
crews raced to handle sliding hills, overflowing rivers and swamped roadways.

Frank thought it felt like it might actually be an El Ni
ń
o year.

“Plus,” added Ritter.  “They’ll just pile up in the ditch
and start climbing on top of each other.”  He paused.  Then, “they almost made
it up to the second story that way back at Green Front.”

But they hadn’t, Candace thought and didn’t say a word.

“So even if we do build a wall, what’s to keep ‘em from
doing that?” asked Dante.

“Us,” replied Frank.  “Once the walls are up, we’ll build
walkways so we can move along the walls quickly.  If we see them piling up in
any one location, we’ll use long poles or something to push ‘em off.”

Holiday spoke up.  “We could lure them farther down the wall
and spread them out by making noise and getting their attention.  They seem to
go for that.  We should get trumpets and horns.”

“Yeah, that’s good,” said Frank, lost in the problem,
forgetting the rule to ignore Holiday in front of everyone at all times.  When
Frank noticed the policy lapse he quickly changed the subject.  “Weapons. 
We’ll need to think about weapons because we can’t just push zombies off the
wall.  We’ll have to destroy them.  Right in the head.  Right now we’ve only
got one rifle with three bullets and three other guns without any ammo. 
Tonight, look through your places for anything.  Guns are obvious, but my guess
is we’ll need to make weapons that we can... y’know... jab... into their
heads.  Or smash ‘em with.  Something along those lines.”

Frank hadn’t mentioned the two pearl-handled silver .45s and
the matching silencers he’d used to clear out the Vineyards last time.  He was
down to a fully-loaded clip apiece for each pistol.  He’d kept an odd bullet
back.  It was in his shirt pocket.

The “just-in-case” bullet.

It was much later that Holiday, who’d been thinking about
how to solve the wall problem, remembered the pistol Ritter had pointed at him
back at the 7-11.  The snub-nosed .357 magnum.

Ritter hadn’t offered that to the community defense arsenal
either.

Later, when they’d finished the left half of the Western
Wall and were taking a short break, resting in the shade underneath the high
stucco wall and terracotta-tiled roofs, Ritter spoke up next about what to do
regarding the gaps in the walls. 

“Over in Afghanistan they use these large mesh and canvas
bags.  They fill ‘em up with rock.  If we could get something like that, a
container or something, maybe we could build a wall out of those?  We could
steal ourselves a dozer and load the bags, then stack ‘em up.”

No one said anything as they moved their tools and supplies
to the right side of the Western Wall, standing them up near the small wire
fence.  Now that they’d been talking about what had to be done, about the
intensity and the resolve they’d need to kill uncountable legions of piling
zombies, though no one spoke about the sheer numbers of the dead imagined, now
the flimsy prefab wire gate looked almost laughable in the orange afternoon
light.

Except no one laughed.

“We could find a pool store,” Dante tried again, breaking
the late afternoon silence.  The sky above was orange.  Haze hung low and
visibility didn’t even reach down to the coast, even when they’d stood on the
hot clay-tile rooftops trying to look down into the valley and the coastal
plain beyond.

“Why would we do that?” asked Frank.

“Well, you know those pools, the above ground ones?”

“Doughboys,” clarified Ritter who drank from a water bottle,
shirtless and dirty while absently exploring his belly button with a long
finger.

“Yeah,” replied Dante.  “Those.  We could fill one of those
up with rocks and make a wall I guess, or we could even use prefab hot tubs.  I
bet there’s a supply warehouse somewhere in those big box buildings between
Forest Lake and Bake.  Got to be.”

It wasn’t a bad idea.

It wasn’t a good one either and it seemed dead when Candace
spoke up as they walked back to their houses to clean up before dinner. “It
won’t work if we use Doughboys.  They’re too flimsy.  Put a bunch of rocks in
there and they’ll just break through the sides.”

“You been in a lotta doughboys, Candy?” asked Ritter.

Candace rolled her eyes at Ritter, then shook her head.

“No need to be touchy, girl.  Just wonderin’.  My Moms
couldn’t afford no Doughboy so anyone who could was just plain better than us,
that’s all,” said Ritter.

With that they’d parted ways, tired, sore, beat and hungry.

But Holiday continued to work the problem in his mind even
as they barbecued the tasty yellow chicken and onions down in front of Frank’s
townhome.

They could take a forklift from the Home Depot, thought
Holiday.  They could get one and haul stacks of wood and just drop the stacks,
already organized into neat rectangles, into the gaps between the townhome
clusters.  But that didn’t seem like it would make the sturdiest of walls.  In
his mind, Holiday saw the stacks of wood shifting under the pressure of a
herd... or a horde... or an army... “a massed attack” of zombies was the word
his mind found and he had no idea why, but a “massed attack” of zombies against
a specific location seemed like the correct term for the tactic.  They’d push
that kind of wall right over and then those stacks might fall inward, which
would be bad, and even worse if they were defending themselves from behind the
stacks.  Or fighting the zombies off from the top of the stacked wood piles. 
If they survived being crushed or maimed by the suddenly collapsing wall, it
wouldn’t be for long.  Those things would be across all that splintered and
jutting lumber in seconds, regardless if they impaled themselves along the way
toward their next meal.

Back in his own townhome, Holiday had sat in the big purple
chair for a long time as he returned to Dante’s moat idea.  It was the quickest
solution and all they’d need was a bulldozer from the heavy construction
equipment rental yard on the far side of the toll road, less than a mile way. 
They could probably have a nice trench around the entire complex in a few
days. 

But the more he thought about it, the more he realized
digging a trench was beyond their abilities.  No one had mentioned anything
about being able to drive construction equipment, much less grade a trench
without it collapsing in on them.  He had a vague memory of watching TV one
afternoon as a local news helicopter hovered over a construction site while the
words “Trench Collapse, Workers Trapped” scrolled across the bottom of the
screen.  That could happen.  And if it did, what could they do to get whoever
was buried inside their trench out?

He was tired but felt good from all the hard work and sweat
and trying to solve the problem of the gaps in the wall.  But there wasn’t any
idea that seemed to offer the perfect solution.

Later, when it was dark and he heard them all talking down
the street, the only sounds in the early evening as he stood on his patio, he
wanted to be among them.  And if he was truly honest with himself, drinking
wine with them.

Drinking.

He saw himself sitting next to Ash.  Holding her hand.

It wasn’t impossible.  It just wasn’t possible now.  If he
redeemed himself, then... maybe.

And that’s the real reason why you want to be the hero and
solve the wall problem.  You want her.

And he didn’t answer himself because it wasn’t a question. 
It was just the truth.  He was hungry, too, and that was when he walked down
the street and joined them near the glowing red ashy gray coals of the
barbecue.

Now, walking west in the silent night, down the hill toward
the construction equipment rental yard on the other side of the toll road
Holiday thought, yes, I want to be with her and nothing more.

Frank awoke at dawn.  He always did.  He was a morning
person.  He slipped on his satin and fur-trimmed bathrobe and went down to the
kitchen.  Ash was on the couch, holding a mug.

“I made coffee two hours ago.”

Frank said nothing.  Just poured some, tasted it, made a
face he couldn’t stop himself from making, shrugged and then drank again.

“Why are you up so early?” asked Frank.

“Kid couldn’t sleep.  I’m out of painkillers.  I gave him some
aspirin you had in the guest bathroom and it didn’t do much, but I told him it
was strong stuff and he eventually fell asleep.”

“Does that trick work?”

“Sometimes.  Depends on the patient.  Depends on how badly
they want to believe it’s all going to go away.  The pain, that is.”

“Hmmm,” muttered Frank and drank one more time, made the
face again then spit the coffee out and started to make a fresh pot once he’d
dashed the contents of his mug into the sink.  “Sorry,” he grumbled without
remorse.

“No problem.  Where I come from we don’t even get coffee.”

And Frank was going to ask where in the world you can’t get
coffee when he heard a light tapping at the door.

It was Holiday.

“Yeah?” said Frank.  It was neither warm nor polite.

Holiday expelled a lungful of air and began.  “I think I
found the solution to our wall problem. If you can meet me by the front gate in
a few, I think you’ll like what you see.”

Frank nodded and closed the door.  Then he made another pot
of coffee.  Later, after he’d showered and not shaved, wondering how long the
water and the power were going to last, and thinking the facial hair he’d
decided to let grow would make him look like that guy that used to sell beer as
a sort of Hemingway slash matador knock off, he dressed and passed Ash down in
the living room.  She’d already finished the rest of Frank’s new pot of coffee.

“I saved you one last round.” 

Frank picked up the mug.  It was lukewarm.  He milked it and
then tasted again.  He didn’t make a face.  But it wasn’t perfect, that was
clear.