ZOMBIES: "Chronicles of the Dead": A Zombie Novel (36 page)

"Thanks son, your mother needed that little bit of encouragement," I commented sarcastically, thinking my wife had already started to sound depressed, and we hadn't been out of the van five minutes yet.

The water tower was a little farther than it looked, and having to cut our way through several fences along the way did nothing to hasten our journey there. However, within three hours of abandoning the van, we found ourselves standing outside the chain link fence that surrounded the once distant water tower.

"I'll chop the lock off," Billy said anxiously.

Billy broke the lock off the gate, and we gained access to the ladder that was attached to the side of one of the tower's columns.

"You want me to climb all the way up there?" Gin asked, shaking her head no.

"No mom, you can stay down here and fend off all of the eaters that happen our way," Jacob said in his usual wise guy manner.

"I guarantee you'll be safer up there than you'll be down here honey, I'll follow you up the ladder, and catch you if you fall," I said, knowing that if she fell, she'd take me with her and probably kill us both.

By now, Billy was already one quarter of the way up the ladder, and softly yelled down to us.

"What are you waiting for; there are eaters just past those apple trees over there," he said, pointing to the east.

"Go Jacob, get up the ladder, we'll be right behind you," I insisted, urging Jacob to climb up the ladder.

"Come on honey, you're next," I said, as I now urged my wife to ascend the water tower's ladder, unaware that soon I would come to regret the guarantee of safety that I had made her.

Gin moved slowly toward the ladder, she knew that she had no choice but to climb to the narrow platform that encompassed the tank that comprised the tower.

"Just grab the rungs tight and don't look down, and keep moving, you'll be at the top before you know it," I suggested, hoping that would help ease her fear.

Gin began to climb, and as she did, I could hear her counting the rungs as she went. As scared as she was Gin managed to move steadily up the ladder and before long the four of us were standing on the three-foot wide platform one hundred feet in the air.

"I can see forever," Jacob said.

"Forever is a long time," Billy responded, trying to match Jacob's gift for sarcasm.

"I can't believe I made it," Gin said panting. "That's just as hard as it looked."

"Well, we're all up here now, so we need to start assessing the surrounding area, looking for cars, trucks, eaters, you know, the usual things we have to look for," I stated. "Let's spread out and see what's out there. Jacob, you take the south view, Billy, you take the west, I'll take the north, and Gin, you take the east. Once you get to your spot, you had better lie down. Remember, if we could see this water tower from a long way off, so can everyone else," I reminded them, as I quickly walked to the northern side of the tower, and began to question my idea of climbing up onto the tower.

Little did we know that even as I spoke the warning we were being watched. Not only by the zombies in the area, but also by humans as well.

The group of undead that Billy had spotted beyond some trees as he climbed up the ladder had seen us, and had joined with another bunch of the diseased cannibals that had been lingering out of sight under the canopy of those same fruit trees several hundred feet away.

The moans and groans of the ever-growing horde of zombies was attracting more of their kind, possibly through some kind of zombie communication, or maybe it was just the sound that was bringing them together.

Whether or not it was the noise of the group, or some remedial speech pattern that was consolidating the horde, the fact was, they knew where we were, and they were moving slowly toward the water tower.

Meanwhile, humans had also watched us ascend to the top of the ladder, and were assembling a formidable group of assaulters to investigate our presents on what they considered their property. Soon it would become all too clear; I had made a big mistake.

"See anything worth anything?" Jacob asked. "Because I sure don't!"

"Not much to report from here, except I can see a lot of houses scattered about, we might be able to commandeer a car at one of them," Billy answered.

"Honey, you better come and see this, this doesn't look too good!" Gin said, sounding quite alarmed.

I crawled over to her vantage point, where I saw a large group of zombies making their way up the grassy slope from the apple grove to the base of the water tower.

"That's not good," I said. "It's not as big of crowd as we saw on the river bank, or after we left that gas station, but it's still pretty big," I commented, thinking this was not a good situation for us to be in.

"We're trapped up here aren't we?" Gin complained, looking rather somber.

"Yes, it looks that way, this was a big mistake, climbing up here was a big damn mistake, I should have known better," I confessed, thinking to myself. "
How could I have been so stupid?
"

Billy and Jacob had heard us talking and crawled over by us.

"Can eaters climb ladders dad?" Jacob asked, glancing over the edge of the catwalk and looking down on the assembled zombie horde that was looking up at him.

"I don't know, but we're going to find out real soon," I answered, trying to think of some way out of the mess I had gotten us into.

The hungry horde gathered around at the foot of the tower, and several of the zombies groped at the ladder but had no luck figuring out how to climb up it.

However, wouldn't you just know it, there's one in every crowd. A young zombie, well, one that would have been young if he had lived long enough, who was dressed in a high school band uniform, clamped onto a rung as high as he could reach and pulled himself up, accidently putting one of his feet on the bottom rung.

Showing what seemed to be a glimmer of intellect, most likely just desperation to have us for lunch; the young flesh-ingesting maniac grasped the next rung up, and began his climb to the top.

Other zombies followed his lead, and before you could say "
Zombie Apocalypse
", the ladder was teeming with slobbering zombies ascending skyward.

As the young band member arrived at the pinnacle of the ladder with several flies orbiting his head, I pulled my tomahawk from my tactical vest once more, and with one vertical blow to the top of his head, I opened a three-inch gaping hole in his skull.

The zombie immediately toppled from the top of the ladder with its circling flies following close behind, flipping head over heels and slamming into five or six other zombies below him on his way down, taking them with him as he fell.

At the base of the tower the impatient horde that crowded together like sardines in a can grabbing at the rungs of the ladder, were bombarded by the bodies of the falling undead, leaving a pile of bloody twisted and mangled living corpses at the base of the water tower.

That horrific scene had no effect at all on the zombies that had not been hit by the plunging cadavers; they were driven by nothing more than hunger for our delectable tasting skin.

If anything, the pile of inhuman corpses served as a staircase at the base of the ladder, giving the determined zombies a ramp of mangled body parts that allowed them to gain access to the rungs of the ladder that were several feet higher off the ground.

One by one, more zombies climbed onto the ladder, and one by one, when they made it to our platform, our edged weapons indented their skulls, and one by one, they fell.

Occasionally one of the zombies was so intent on grabbing us, that when they reached the top, they would let go of the ladder and fall on their own.

And every once in a while, a swift boot heel to the face would aid their ten story vertical plunge to the ground without the help of my tomahawk.

"We're going to have to do this all night!" Gin announced. "This could get dicey in the dark!"

"I got us into this, and I'm going to get us out of it," I responded. "Remember the eaters that freaked out in the river when they fell into the water, and how they all crammed themselves together under the trees to avoid the rain? Let's see what happens to this bunch when they get wet."

I pulled a bottle of water from one of the backpacks and removed the cap, and as I sprinkled the water down the ladder, we watched the zombies go into their hydro-panic mode.

As they did on the river, their fear of the water caused them to forget about us, and their hunger for a moment, and flail their arms about in an attempt to avoid the liquid. As droplets of water sprinkled down on them, they dropped from the ladder like the flies that surrounded them (just another way of saying they dropped like flies), and quickly joined their twisted and squirming compadres at the base of the tower, thereby adding to the ever-growing pile of broken and disfigured corpses wallowing there.

"That works great dad," Jacob said, with a hint of hope in his voice.

"Yes honey that works great, but we only have a few bottles of water with us. Not enough to hold them off all night," Gin asserted.

"That's for sure, not nearly enough bottled water to keep them off the ladder all night long, but we do have plenty of un-bottled water," I reminded her, as I reached for my tomahawk again.

I took my tomahawk and swung it as hard as I could, piercing the skin of the water tank with the pointed end of the weapon. Upon withdrawing my tomahawk from the steel tank, a small stream of water squirted out over the ledge above the ladder and fell like rain drops over the climbing zombies.

Panic ensued once more, and one by one the remaining zombies released their grip on the ladder as they tried to escape the falling water.

The water cleared off the ladder and forced the crowd of zombies at the bottom that weren't part of the pile, to spread out in a circle around my somewhat man made waterfall.

"They're off of the ladder now, but we'll have to fight our way out if we climb down," Billy said, shaking his sickle in a threatening manner at two of the flies that still lingered near the top of the ladder.

"The water got'em off the ladder, but the situation is still grave," I said. "It seems we have two choices, we can stay up here over night and hope there's enough water in the tank to last until morning, which there probably is, and then fight our way through the eaters down there. Or, we can climb down now, fight our way out, and hope we can find some place reasonably safe to spend the night."

"We only have two or three hours at most before sundown, I don't want to be out in the open over night, that's way too dangerous," Gin said. "If we can't find some place to stay we might not make it."

"The flies might not be as active in the cool morning hours, and that will be one less thing that we have to contend with, plus we will be rested and have all day to find a vehicle if we stay up here over night, I said, stating reasons to choose one of our options.

As we weighed the pros and cons of spending the night on the tower, or making a break for it before sundown, our decision was made for us.

"Look!" Jacob yelled, as he pointed down at the zombies below.

While the zombies were preoccupied with avoiding the artificial rain that we had manufactured, and what they hoped would be their next meal (us on the water tower), the humans that had watched us climb to the top earlier were attacking the loitering horde.

"There's almost as many of them as there are eaters," Billy asserted gleefully.

"Don't get too lathered up, we could be out of the frying pan and into the fire, we don't know who these people are," I said cautiously.

"The eaters are almost all killed off," Jacob announced, as he watched the people on the ground slice their way through the remaining members of the zombie mob.

Just before the last zombies were dispatched, we heard.

"You on the tower, come down now!" said a man's voice through a bullhorn.

"They don't seem to be too worried about attracting eaters," Gin said. "What are we going to do?"

I looked directly into her eyes and said. "We don't have much of a choice, we have to do exactly as they say, you know they could have just shot us off this water tower."

Again, the man behind the bullhorn blasted his orders.

"You on the tower, come down now, and keep your hands away from your weapons."

"Billy, you go down first, Jacob next, I'll go third, and honey you come down last, that way if you fall I'll be under you to catch you," I said, again hoping that she wouldn't fall.

We proceeded down the ladder in the order that I had prescribed, and again Gin counted each rungs as she descended. At the bottom, a welcoming party of men and women armed to the hilt met us.

As we stumbled over the pile of dead and maimed zombies stacked at the base of the water tower, a stocky red haired man that was preoccupied with giving the others in his group orders, approached us.

"Climb over that mess, and be careful not to get bit, they're not all dead yet," he said, stomping the heel of his boot into the side of a snapping zombie's head. "Hand over your weapons and be quick about it, we don't have all day."